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WALL TOWNSHIP — While Saturday at Allaire was slightly chilly, the Monmouth Furnace was getting warmed up for another season of 1864-rules “base ball” with its opening day against the Neshanock Base Ball Club of Flemington.
“It’s called ‘base ball.’ It’s two words, not ‘baseball;’ in 1864, it was base ball,” said Darryl O’Connell, director of development and operations at the Historic Village at Allaire, which serves as the home venue for the Furnace. The Furnace gets its name from the imposing blast furnace on the grounds of Allaire Village, which used to be used to smelt bog iron found at the bottom of the nearby bodies of water.
“It’s the history of the greatest American pastime — now,” she said. “They really did play base ball here; they actually would work out in the second level of the general store. That’s where they had their little gym, and they would train. It’s America’s favorite pastime, and it was very much a part of this whole area in Monmouth County.”
Russ “Scoop” McIver, captain of the Monmouth Furnace, said that, even though the style of ball the team plays is from 160 years ago, there is a distinct and zealous fandom of vintage base ball that survives to the present day.
“Whether you’re a sports fan, baseball fan, historian, the cool thing about this is the range of players; we have 20-year-olds, I’m going to be 60 on Monday — sometimes you run across some 70-year-olds,” he said, emphasizing the historical sport’s devoted fanbase. “We play by the real rules…You see the crowd? You don’t have this at, say, beer-league softball teams. Every game is like this.”
“We go to some really cool places,” said McIver. “We get to play here, we’ve played at Gettysburg, last year we played all the way in Upstate New York…Years ago we played on Governors Island…and the backdrop was Manhattan.”
Furnace player “Dapper” Dan Radel explained to The Coast Star some of the main differences between modern baseball and vintage “base ball” as they played it on Saturday. He started with a difference in the ball itself.
“The ball is a touch softer than you would have now,” he said. “They call it a ‘lemon peel,’ and when it gets wet on a day like today it’s not easy to catch at all.”
“On the ground, you can catch it on a bounce, and it’s an out. It’s a big difference,” said Dapper Dan of other ways it differs from the modern counterparts. “In these rules [also], if a guy hits the ball fair and it goes foul before the third base line, it’s a fair ball. We call runs ‘tallies;’ the outfield is not called the ‘outfield,’ it’s called the ‘garden;’ the pitcher is the hurler, and he’s throwing underhand…You can see the evolution of the game.”
For more on this story, read the next edition of The Coast Star—on newsstands Thursday or online in our e-Edition.
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