Few question the notion that Americans originated the game of baseball and that they philanthropically taught the rest of the world how to play it. The argument also goes that they foisted their national pastime on hapless Canucks eager for warm weather recreation and in dire need of American models they could slavishly imitate.

Guelph-born Robert Emslie (1859- 1943) might well have become the greatest curveball pitcher of all time had not a sore arm forced him into retirement at age 26. The year before he left the game, 1884, Emslie had a 32-18 record. However, Emslie's professional career really took off in 1891 when he was made a big league umpire in the National League. By now a premanent resident of St. Thomas, Emslie "umped" for 32 consecutive years, a record at the time for the longest service as an umpire in professional baseball. [Photo, courtesy Don Cosens]

But the popular story of baseball’s invention in Cooperstown, New York, is a fraud of Paul Bunyan proportions! Baseball did not originate in pre-Civil war America but descended in a gradual, evolutionary manner from European games based on fertility rites celebrating spring’s return. It had received its latest interpretation in the English game of rounders or base-ball as it was known in the south east of England – a two-worded sport played by young children. Adults eventually abandoned the game when cricket emerged as the dominant, manly bat-and-ball game of the eighteenth century.

Old base-ball reached colonial Canada from England while other attributes of the early game filtered through American sources whose reinterpretations included New England townball. It was a variant of this game, with 11 a-side, that was played in Beachville, Ontario, on June 4, 1838, in, perhaps, the most detailed early account of baseball anywhere in the world.

Baseball's earliest star was Tip O'Neill (1858-1915). Had he been American-born and playing in the modern era, his name would be revered in much the same way DiMaggio, Mantle, and Mays generate hero worship today. He led the St. Louis Browns to four consecutive pennants in the 1880s. He is the only player ever to lead the major leagues in doubles, triples, and homers in the same year (1887). Of the eight players who battled over .400 in a single season, the seven who have been inducted into baseball's Hall of Fame are all American! This team photo shows Tip O'Neill, sitting firts row, second left, a member of the Actices Baseball team, 1879 Champions of Canada. [Photo, courtesy Woodstock Museum Collection/988.82.20.1.2]

It was hardly surprising that Americans, with greater population and financial resources, gave early baseball its major imprimatur, particularly in the mid 1840s after Alexander Cartwright’s development of the New York game eliminated the option of throwing the ball at a rival player to retire him on the base paths.

At every stage of the growth of the sport, however, Canadians acted as significant regional participants in the creation and popularization of the modern game of baseball.

In 1844, Thomas Haliburton’s famous novel celebrating the sayings and doings of Sam Slick of Slickville, recalled the carefree days in which young lads of Nova Scotia played “games at base in the fields.” At the same time in the isolated Selkirk settlement of future Manitoba the game of “bat” was played.

On the Pacific coast in 1849, before the Cariboo Gold Rush forever altered the future province of British Columbia, a young man, James Anderson, recalled games of rounders in Victoria. And before the 1837 Rebellions in both English and French Canada, games of primitive, though recognizable, baseball were being played not only in Ontario and la belle province but also in the maritime provinces.

Located on Hanlan's Point at the Western end of Toronto Island stood the baseball stadium where Babe Ruth hit his one and only home run as a professional ball player before becoming a major leaguer with the Boston Red Sox. An interesting piece of baseball trivia, the date was September 5, 1914. [Photo, courtesy Charles J. Humber Collection]

By 1867, Canadian teams competed on equal terms with American squads at tournaments. In the 1870s working men from Woodstock and Guelph made frequent forays into American baseball capitals. In 1877, one year after the first exclusively Canadian baseball league was formed, the Tecumsehs, a London, Ontario, based team, won the championship of the International Association. This league was the first serious rival of the National League. London’s team may have been predominately American but its management and support players recalled a time when Canadian amateurs were worthy opponents of American teams.

Sports fans love trivia. So - who replaced Babe Ruth in the outfield when the famous New York Yankee was traded in 1934 to the Boston Braves? It was George ("Twinletoes") Selkirk, a native of Huntsville, Ontario. He had quite an act to follow and filled that huge vacuum for nine years, winning five world championships with the "pinstripes" and compiling a .290 lifetime average. [Photo, courtesy Angelo Savelli]

By the 1880s, Canadian-born players were significant parts of the leading American professional squads and in 1884 an all-time record number of 28 Canadians played major league baseball in the northeastern United States. Among their numbers was Bob Emslie from St. Thomas, Ontario, who won 32 games as a pitcher for Baltimore in 1884 and went on to a 35-year career as a major league umpire.

One of the greatest players of the era was James Edward (“Tip”) O’Neill of the St. Louis Browns. O’Neill grew up in Woodstock, Ontario, near Beachville. Injury curtailed his pitching career but he became one of the dominant hitters in the American Association, a major league between 1882 and 1891. Of that league’s overall career leaders, he was second in batting average (.343) and slugging average (.489), third in home runs, fourth on total bases and hits, and eighth in runs scored. In 1887, he complied a sparkling .492 batting average with the St. Louis Browns and was baseball’s first ever triple crown winner that same year.

In the 1890s, a baseball team mascot at Woodstock, Ontario, prominently displayed the name of the clever sponsor! [Photo, courtesy Woodstock Museum Collection/X980.1.540]

Nearly 200 Canadians have played in the major leagues. Their ranks range from Mel Kerr who had one pinch-running assignment with the Cubs in 1925, to George (“Twinkletoes”) Selkirk who replaced Babe Ruth in the Yankees’ outfield in 1934 and stayed there for nine seasons raking up a lifetime .290 batting average, to pitcher Ferguson Jenkins, the only Canadian honoured in Baseball’s Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

Meanwhile Canadian towns and cities adopted minor league baseball affiliations. In 1913 a record 24 Canadian urban centres had teams in minor league baseball. Cape Breton had its own league in the late 1930s and Montreal’s triple A franchise, the Royals of the International League, was the first home in organized baseball for Jackie Robinson who broke the major league unwritten colour barrier one year later (1947) as a member of the Brooklyn Dodgers.

Canadians burst their buttons with pride to know that a team sport closely resembling the game of baseball as it is played today was in full swing in the southwestern Ontario town of Beachville one full year before a West Point cadet named Abner Doubleday claimed to have invented, in 1839, America's national pastime in Cooperstown, New York. In fact, Dr. Adam Ford, who was present as a fan for that historic game, reminisced in a Sporting Life article May 5, 1896, that the Beachville baseball game was played on George IV's birthday, June 4, 1838, and that the game as played in 1838 resembled the modern game as played nearly 50 years later in 1886. Dr. Ford recalled the game with this sketch of the 1838 playing field. Rather than Abner Doubleday inventing baseball, it would appear that baseball invented Mr. Doubleday! [Photo, courtesy Woodstock Museum Collection]

As well, Canadians influenced the future character of the game in many different settings. A Cape Breton-born priest, Brother Matthias, taught George Herman Ruth the fundamentals of hitting and pitching at a boys’ training school in Baltimore. Moreover, when (“Babe”) Ruth made his debut as a pitcher for the Boston Red Sox, July 11, 1914, the first batter he faced was St. Thomas, Ontario-born John Gladstone Graney whose hit was the first against the “Babe.” Graney went on to become, in 1932, the Cleveland Indians’ first radio broadcaster. Incidently, Babe Ruth’s first and only home run as a professional in organized baseball before he became a major leaguer, took place at Toronto’s Hanlan’s Point Grand Stand, September 5, 1914.

In 1969 the Montreal Expos entered the National League and they were joined in the majors by Toronto’s membership in the American League in 1977. They were not expected to win anything, it being the fate of expansion franchises to wander for years in the wilderness, but in 1992 the Toronto Blue Jays took the world Series title north of the border and followed with an even more spectacular conclusion the next year on the strength of Joe Carter’s 9th inning home run in the team’s homepark, the SkyDome. And when Larry Walker of the Colorado Rockies was voted the National League’s Most Valuable Player in 1997, it was the first time a Canadian had won this top award.

No matter that other countries have contributed more major league personnel, Canadians alone were involved in modern baseball’s beginning in America and remain important partners in its future evolution. When Roger Clemens signed with Toronto in 1996, an American diplomat accused the future Hall of Famer of treason. Canadians, however, suggested that their country was simply playing its historic role in the game’s always surprising evolution.

William Humber