A Tale of Two Sports
Haverford's Baseball-Cricket Wars
by Greg Kannerstein '63
While most colleges began to play baseball soon after the
Cincinnati Red Stockings' professional debut in 1869,
Haverford College saw a battle for supremacy between
baseball and cricket waged throughout the nineteenth and
early twentieth centuries. A strong cricket tradition, the
desire to focus on one sport and scorn for what baseball
represented prevented the diamond game's rise for decades.
Cricket's preeminence and hostility to baseball nearly
produced athletic civil war on campus between 1850 and 1920.
The rivalry was so intense at one point that, legend has it,
Haverford cricketers even sawed up the baseball bats.
Haverford's zeal for cricket came from its special hold on
Philadelphia, where it remained a major participant and
spectator sport through the 1890s, long after it withered in
other areas. Its match with the University of Pennsylvania
in 1864 was one of the first intercollegiate athletic events
in the U.S. The College still has the only varsity cricket
team in the country.
Baseball and cricket coexisted during Haverford's first
quarter-century, but in the late 1850s and early 1860s,
cricket fever seized the campus. Its rise may have been a
reaction to the "New York game" outstripping Philadelphia's
town-ball in baseball circles or it may have been an escape
from the war which troubled the pacifist campus. Four
cricket fields were used simultaneously and baseball was
relegated to winter months. One campus historian in 1860
sniffed, "Baseball had suffered the contaminating influences
of a later day...and was indulged in, at least when the
ground was not fit for cricket."
While cricket was king at Haverford, many colleges organized
baseball teams in the 1860s. Amherst and Williams played the
first intercollegiate baseball game in 1859, and soon teams
sprang up at Princeton, Yale, Harvard, Columbia, Brown,
Union, Bowdoin, Hamilton, Kenyon, Hobart, NYU and other
colleges. But at Haverford, the cricket victory over Penn
in 1864 sealed baseball's lesser status. A graduate wrote,
"How exultant we were when we won the game! We were
stronger, more athletic, more used to active outdoor life
than the University fellows." Haverford President Samuel
Gummere half-heartedly reproved students for missing
required evening Bible reading while the team hosted
defeated foes for dinner.
Baseball made a slight surge in popularity in 1867. In
October of that year, a baseball team from the Quaker
boarding school Westtown came to campus. "The score and the
excitement were equally tremendous, Haverford winning by 44-
43," penned a student scribe. The game provoked a student
essay which claimed that cricket's virtues of quiet and
patience were much more admirable at a Quaker college. A
baseball player had to get more excited ("especially if his
Betsy Jane is present") than some thought fit. The faculty
eventually said no to a game at Westtown, 15 miles away.
"Baseball was kept in its place," a sportswriter observed.
By that time, the faculty had taken over discipline from the
Board of Managers since students were indulging in riotous
behavior such as pillow fights. It canceled a major event,
the Junior Show, because hapless undergrads used "February"
rather than Quaker plain style "Second Month" on the
invitation. But even the faculty quailed before cricket. In
1872, it allowed the student body a "half-holiday" for
weekday afternoon cricket matches, a privilege devotees of
other sports fumed over.
Throughout the 1870s, cricket was inscribed in Haverfordian
hearts and minds. "For us cricket is...the national game,"
a student wrote. Students trooped to Germantown to watch a
famous match between "The Gentleman Eleven of England" and
the "American Twenty-Two." A new cricket ground was
dedicated in 1877 and in 1878 Haverford defeated Penn with
the founder of cricket at Haverford, William Carvill, then
84, on hand. The spectacle moved a Philadelphia reporter to
speculate that Penn-Haverford cricket would become a
"fashionable event," á la Derby's races, Thames crew
contests or Oxford-Cambridge cricket.
That note heralded a new theme the moral and social
superiority of cricket and the inferiority of baseball. An
alumnus said, "It has always pleased me to see Haverford
clinging to cricket for I have never learned to care much
for its too-popular rival base ball." Eminent Quaker
philosopher Rufus Jones, then a Haverford student, quoted a
"prominent Friend" as advising him "in awful seriousness in
an extra-ordinary rhythmic quaver that we must guard against
a great and growing evil which is extending over the length
of our land and has now reached the Allegheny mountainsI
mean base ball."
Class struggle was played out on the athletic field. "In
cricket we are thrown in with a gentlemanly class of
fellows. In baseball, we would be thrown in with a far
different class for it is a common saying that anybody can
play baseball and the result is that anybody does play." The
writer attributed this trend to professional baseball.
Drinking and gambling were associated with baseball, but
class and ethnic prejudice were involved. Half of
professional baseball players at that time were of Irish or
Irish-American origin. No Irish or German or other "ethnic"
names were yet found in the Haverford student catalogue.
Though baseball threatened all that was sacred to cricket,
Quakerism, Haverford and Philadelphia, the upstart game
would not die. The fall 1879 cricket season ended early, and
baseball sprang up. But even a 28-24 extra-inning victory
over arch-rival Swarthmore lacked the significance reserved
for cricket. "We accepted the challenge...for the fun of the
thing," said a student newspaper. Other sports were also
raising their ugly heads. "Lacrosse may have its benefits,
but we give it no welcome to Haverford, certainly not in
preference to cricket," the paper wrote. Students were
warned, "Every time a fellow student sees you with a tennis
racket or a baseball bat in your hand...you do the cricket
club irremediable harm."
Swarthmore College's student paper chided Haverford in 1881
for staying aloof from baseball: "Did a lack of success in
American college games suggest this decidedly British
sport?" Unamused Haverfordians accused the Hicksites of an
over-emphasis on sports like football. "Recently, merely as
a side issue, we picked our (baseball) team to play
Swarthmore and easily won both games."
Until 1884, cricket received strongest support from students
and graduates. The largely Quaker faculty and administration
worried about sports leading to frivolity or neglect of
studies. But in March 1884, the voice that was to guide
Haverford for the next 34 years was raised in favor of
athletics. Isaac Sharpless, president from 1887 to 1917,
pulled together disparate threads of educational thought and
historical influence into a framework which promoted
Haverford's advance into the forefront of America's small
liberal arts colleges and his philosophy still shapes
Haverford today. Sports were a pillar of Sharpless'
educational edifice. He was also a major cricket proponent.
Sharpless wrote, "In a few years a sound and active body, as
well as a sound and active mind, will be a requisite of
graduation in all good colleges. Colleges are to make useful
men. When the great battle comes...of life from thirty to
fifty, we do not find the good solider who can endure
hardness but the soft voluptuary who is carried away by
disease or accident." Games, in the British sense, were the
means to Sharpless' ends. "Truly a game is life in
miniature...We might thus adapt the old proverb, 'Let me
regulate the games of a school, I care not who hears the
lessons.' It is better for students to be playing on college
grounds than loafing about with canes and cigarettes."
Sharpless had no trouble choosing his weapon: "The noble
game of baseball, in itself perhaps the best game designed
for students in warm weather, has degenerated into a victim
of gamblers and a trysting-place for all kinds of
immorality. Foot-ball has (had to) set up rules against
rowdyism, which are inadequate against a spirit which public
opinion cannot control. Cricket alone seems to remain on the
high ground. Neither bowler or batsman has the other at his
mercy. There is little temptation to personal provocation
and good feeling usually persists in the hottest games."
Though Sharpless advocated cricket, all sports profited from
"Uncle Isaac's" enthusiasm for athletics. A notable baseball
victory was recorded in 1888, even though "Gallagher's big
bus" broke down en route to Swarthmore and the students had
to walk part of the way. A huge ash-heap in left field and
"primitive conditions" daunted Haverford's team which fell
behind by 20 runs, but then rallied and won in the ninth.
The players stayed at Swarthmore for dinner, paying 25 cents
each for stewed prunes, bread and milk. The baseball
revival of 1888 aroused calls on campus for baseball to
replace cricket completely and games between class teams and
against outside rivals became more numerous.
Sharpless' approach led to grumbling in Quaker provinces.
Friends' journals appealed to Haverford "to prohibit all
games with outside colleges" since gambling and drinking
were associated with college sports. Sharpless responded by
saying, "to maintain a college which shall uphold Quaker
morality and give the best intellectual opportunities is
worth more than all the college games." But he noted the
high moral fibre and values of Haverford students ensured
that "study time is not seriously impaired." While
reassuring doubters off-campus, Sharpless kept up pro-sports
pressure at Haverford. He told alumni, "We want new athletic
grounds. We propose to convert an unsightly swamp into a
fine ball field and to make a quarter-mile track. Our
students have already raised (money for the field) out of
their own pocketsthough I suppose it ultimately came out of
their fathers' pockets."
Counter-reaction to baseball was swift. An 1882 graduate
howled, "Baseball is identified with uproarious crowds,
extensive betting and the most childish sorts of
recrimination between umpires and players. Let boys and
ragtags play baseball but let the scholars and gentlemen of
Haverford have their ancient game." The alumni association
had more practical advice: "Don't forget that when the
unhappy date comes to leave College your chances of playing
baseball are nil. Cricket will give you immediate position
in (the prestigious local) clubs." Two prominent old grads
said, "The traditions of half a century must be reversed
before the pulse of the Alumni can be thrilled over the
records of a base ball match with Swarthmore."
The college paper remained true to cricket, quoting a
mythical freshman's "Mama": "Now dear, don't engage in
gambling or baseball or drinking." The arrival of a
professional cricket coach in 1887 led the paper to warn,
"The College is hardly large enough to play more than one
game with any success and with the coaching of our
professional, cricket can be that successful game."
As the anti-baseball bombardment intensified in 1889, the
team expanded its outside schedule. Haverford's first
baseball star, pitcher Edwin Haley '90, held neighbor Villa
Nova to six hits but the Augustinians won, 6-4. Haley then
hurled a 3-hit 11-3 defeat of Swarthmore. Even with the
teams totaling 14 errors, Haverford and Swarthmore ran off
seven innings in only 75 minutes. This was a strong
Haverford team. John Guss was an "ex-Brandywine
professional" and Henry Conard a "phenomenal pitcher." Even
cricket star Henry Baily, called "The Little Demon" for his
bowling, was recruited to play third.
By 1891, college baseball stories and box scores appeared in
leading papers. Haverford scheduled Lehigh, Swarthmore,
Pennsylvania Military and other colleges. The Haverford
student paper denied "the charges of the Philadelphia Press
that several ball players received salaries for playing."
Haverford split games with Swarthmore, and the usually
hostile Haverfordian bragged, "A victory over a college
larger than Haverford and in a game that is something of a
specialty at Swarthmore is not to be despised. But the
greatest victory was that which Haverford won in both games
a victory in gentlemanly conduct." Baseball seemed finally
poised to supplant cricket on the Haverford campus.
It didn't happen. Perhaps it was continued passion for
cricket in the Philadelphia area and the rise of influential
cricket clubs, such as Merion, Germantown, and Philadelphia.
Perhaps it was evolution of Philadelphia cricket into a game
for the leisure classes, not workers and artisans who had
dominated it in an earlier era. Cricket enthusiasm from
Sharpless and professional coaching by Arthur Woodcock
played a role. But the disappearance of baseball during the
1890s "The Golden Age" of Haverford cricket might have
owed most to two unusual undergraduates, John A. Lester and
J. Henry Scattergood, Class of 1896.
Ironically, the earliest mentions of Lester and Scattergood
concerned baseball feats as shortstop and catcher for the
freshman class baseball team in 1892-93. The scholar-
athletes arrived at Haverford through different routes. One
story claims Sharpless was vacationing in Yorkshire and a
likely lad carried his bags into his hotel. By the time
they'd gotten to the front door, Sharpless had ascertained
Lester's intellectual and athletic merit and offered him a
place at Haverford at the advanced age of 22. Scattergood,
only age 16 at matriculation, grew up in Philadelphia in a
family of countless Haverfordians and had excelled as a
baseball catcher.
Lester starred in seven sports at Haverford but his greatest
feats were in cricket. In his first year, he averaged "a
century" per batting appearance, an unheard-of performance.
He was also a fine slow bowler and took one wicket for every
eight runs allowed (comparable to an 0.25 ERA). Scattergood
converted his baseball skills into wicket-keeping and
developed as a batsman, launching a Ruthian clout out of the
field, across the street and over a house into a backyard in
a match in Camden.
In 1896, while Princeton, Yale, Brown and Penn were diamond
hotbeds and Wesleyan defeated Harvard in baseball, all
Haverford eyes were on cricket. The eleven won every match
but one. They traveled via boat to Fall River, MA, train to
Boston and horse cars to Harvard's field where they won a
156-155 thriller. The team then sailed for England in early
summer, where it remained six weeks, playing well against
the flower of English universities and public schools, and
royally entertaining everywhere. If there was any baseball
on campus that year, no one cared enough to report the
scores.
The glories of the English trip and the 1896 team's success
sealed baseball's doom and cricket ascendancy for two
decades. Trans-Atlantic cricket tours took place every four
years. Campus publications effervesced, "The year 1900 and
the word cricket have always seemed reciprocal," and
"Cricket is unquestionably the king of games at Haverford,"
and "Cricket and springtime are entirely co-existent at
Haverford."
Occasional baseball subversives were visible. Edward Dale
Freeman's yearbook biography read, "Freeman held that
cricket games went tame/Just give him baseball and the
'National Game.'" A 1900 graduate wrote later that Haverford
failed its students because "many a man of our day was a
misfit (in post-college life) because the College provided
no course in Baseball." The only record of anyone hurling a
baseball came in a track meet when William Supplee won the
baseball throw for distance with a remarkable 330 feet, four
inches in 1898.
In 1901-02, Haverford fielded four cricket teams, involving
54 students out of a student body of just over 100 and three
professors. Christy Morris '04 inherited the cricket mantle
of Lester and Scattergood and played on the 1900 English
cricket tour before matriculating. Luckily, no NCAA existed
to penalize this blatant violation of amateur eligibility
standards. Football, track, tennis and golf were played,
but little or no baseball. The lack of a baseball team was
emphasized when William Gibbon Lindsay arrived in 1905-06 to
earn a second bachelor's degree after graduating from
Guilford College where he'd been a baseball star. The North
Carolinian eventually went on in 1912 to play second base
for Napoleon Lajoie's Cleveland entry in the American League
after a distinguished minor league career. Unfortunately,
his athletic activities at Haverford had to be limited to
the bowling team and "pursuit of the fairer sex."
But Haverford could not remain sheltered forever from social
and athletic winds picking up force around the country. By
1908, cricket talent was diminished and financial problems
hit Haverford athletics. Students griped at being dunned
every couple of weeks for 25 cents to help this or that
team. Athletes resented using cheaper Ivory Soap instead of
rugged Life Buoy. The Haverfordian suggested a radical
means for ending budget blues: a baseball game with
Swarthmore. Cricket now seemed a millstone around
Haverford's neck: "In at least three cases (the lack of
baseball) has turned valuable men from Haverford into other
colleges." Eighteen days before graduation in 1909,
Haverford's varsity baseball team revived, even if it lost
to schoolboys from Westtown, 11-7.
The infection of baseball caused antibodies to form by 1909-
10. The College Weekly trumpeted cricket's cause. "Every
spring some freshmen agitate to get baseball instituted, but
by the time they become second or third year men most of
them are in line with Haverford's peculiar temperament and
support better cricket." Lester, Scattergood and other
cricket greats were brought back in spring, 1910, to tutor
the cricket XI for Haverford's fourth English tour. Even
though The College News boasted, "I had rather make a clean
cut to the ropes than knock all the home runs in history,"
Lester worried the cricketers weren't ready.
By 1911, even cricket's journalistic voice admitted there
"will probably be a baseball team in college this spring."
Several groups were playing and the faculty formed a team
studded with distinguished scholars, bowing only in the
final inning to the seniors, 7-6, on a disputed call at
first. While faculty and students were cavorting in good
fellowship on the diamond, racist malignancy attacked the
cricket corpus. A 1911 match with Howard was canceled when
it was learned that "not all (Howard's players) were West
Indians." Some black Americans showed up for the match.
"Some alumni felt rather strongly about the color-line" so
the match was dropped. Cricket, partly due to its own
internal failings, seemed beset on all sides.
The battle was joined. In 1912, the newspaper said a
baseball team would be "one of the most harmful things at
Haverford in a long time. (It would) sound the death-knell
of cricket, for which we are famous both in this country and
abroad and which we will be able to play long after we are
too old to properly curse a baseball umpire."
But loyalists were crumbling. By 1913, there were still four
cricket squads and no baseball varsity at Haverford but few
prep schools still played. Proponents asked Sharpless to
defend their sport, but even he seemed perfunctory. He
conceded that especially in length of games, "cricket fails
where baseball gains." By now, his major rationale for
cricket at Haverford was that fathers of current students
played it. He even called cricket "an elderly man's game."
Classes with several fine baseball players arrived in 1911
and 1912 and diamond talent included the flower of
Orthodox Quaker youth, bearing hallowed names of Stokes,
Shipley, Steere and Cary. Those students broke down
cricket's last defenses against baseball. The frosh of 1912-
13 beat everyone in sight including their sophomore campus
mates, 21-10. Captain James Emlen Shipley was a fine pitcher
and Isaac Steere ran down every fly ball and hit some home
runs. In their sophomore year, the stars from the Class of
1916 beat the new freshmen 12-5 and Lower Merion HS, 14-12.
Cricket sent a team to England in the summer of 1914,
despite the turmoil in Europe. They also conducted
guerrilla warfare on the home front, inducing the student
council to ban "batting, base running or knocking out flies"
on the campus lawns. The virus was isolated on two
designated fields some distance away.
Baseball, not to be deterred, went over the top in 1915. A
college team of unusual merit was formed. All the cricket
supporters could do was persuade members to call it the
"Haverford Baseball Club" rather than "Haverford College
Baseball Club." Paced by two remarkable pitchers, freshman
George Haines Buzby and sophomore Bob Gibson, the new team
rolled up a 5-2 record all this without a coach. Player-
manager Bill Hannum held out the olive branch to cricketers:
"(Ousting cricket) is not the purpose or intention of the
club."
The first editor of the Haverford News, cricketer Douglas
Cary Wendell '16 editorialized that "within the next six
years cricket will be a dead letter as a major sport at
Haverford due to lack of incoming material and lack of any
competition." A.G. Scattergood '88 traced the decline of
cricket to World War I's effect on England, lawn tennis,
golf, motoring and weekend parties.
Haverford baseball heroes were born daily. Hannum became
"Home Run Bill," college counterpart to Philadelphia A's
star Frank "Home Run" Baker. Tad Sangree '17 was a "savage
hitter" (.381), Chic Cary a fine lead-off man, and Don
Chandler '17 the "leading sticksmith" (.500 season BA).
Gibson homered against Penn Military and he and Buzby
combined for 17 strikeouts vs. the cadets. By the end of
1915, students felt "the time has come to provide a
professional coach (for baseball). A coach for next year
means better baseball and a better schedule."
April 10, 1916, will long live in Haverford baseball
history. New coach Douglas Adams '96 was on hand, and the
fine team of 1915 returned almost intact. But no one
expected what happened on that day. Haverfordians pinched
themselves to make sure the headlines were true: "Haverford
Blanks Penn, 2-0; University Saved from No-Hit Game in Final
Inning. College of Under 200 Gains Victory from Institution
of 6,000!" Buzby and Penn's star, Cross, matched seven
hitless innings before the Fords scored with a brilliant
display of "inside baseball" a single, a perfect hit-and-
run, a double steal, and a squeeze which produced two runs.
Buzby allowed a hit and a walk in the ninth, but retired the
final two Penn batters on ground balls.
The Haverford News rhapsodized, "Won't that open their
eyes?" The team went on to a 5-5 record against strong
opposition. On June 5, the Athletic Association approved
baseball as a "major sport" at Haverford and the first
varsity letters were awarded. Buzby and his mates had made
baseball a varsity sport at Haverford. World War I
interfered with the rise of baseball at Haverford, but
couldn't stop it. The first spring training trip was to
North Carolina in 1917, but the war forced cancellation of
1918 and 1919 seasons. George Buzby, who did so much to
establish baseball at Haverford, never served the captaincy
his teammates awarded him and died young. His name now
graces the baseball MVP trophy. Sixty-eight years passed
before Haverford beat Penn again, but in that time baseball
took firm root.
Prophecies that baseball would kill cricket proved false.
Sharpless retired in 1917, but presidential successors
William Wistar Comfort and Felix Morley, who had been
baseball players, supported cricket as well. The team went
to England in 1924 and consistently drew numerous
candidates. Most cricketers between 1930 and 1980 learned
the game at Haverford and though the sport seemed an
anachronism, the College's commitment did not waver.
By the mid-1980s, West Indian, Indian and Pakistani students
raised cricket's level of play to a standard Lester and
Scattergood would have admired. The 1989 XI toured England
and Scotland, preceded by a scouting report from
octogenarian veterans of the 1924 trip, Howard Comfort and
Murray Haines. Lester just missed his personal century,
dying at 98, but lived to see Haverford's cricket pavilion
dedicated in his honor in 1964. Philadelphia cricket as a
"gentleman's game" disappeared from the sports scene. But
more Philadelphians, immigrants from cricket-mad countries,
play now than ever did in Lester's time. Haverford
cricketers now bear names like Desai, Mehta, Poonen and
Sheth rather than Stokes, Scattergood and Morris but the
spirit is the same. Baseball still flourishes as well. In
1990, a 6'5" Haverford baseball pitcher, Chaon Garland,
received a $70,000 bonus as a third-round draft-choice of
the Oakland A's. Cricket and baseball now happily coexist at
Haverford, and the passions that provoked the
baseballcricket wars of 1870-1920 lie buried under the
green fields of the campus.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS--Writers George B. Kirsch and Jerrold
Caswell supplied valuable background. The late William
Ambler '45, long-time Director of Admission, provided
encouragement, anecdotes and quotations.