Baseball / Cricket in the Reconstruction Era

Cricket Player in the 19th Century

Baseball Player in the 19th Century

During the Reconstruction Era (mid to late 19th century), there was a game of cricket played between two teams in 1879. The game was between a cricket team called Daft's All England Eleven and a baseball team of eighteen baseball players. The game was played at the Union Baseball grounds in Brooklyn, and apparently the team of cricket players defeated the team of baseball players very handily and won the match. The news article, from the New York Herald, describes when and where the match was played, as well as the details of the names of the players, how the match went, and how it ended. It goes on to say that ten of the cricket players will play the Providence baseball men that night (the night the newspaper was published) in a baseball game. This information leads the reader to believe that the sports were crossing over in an attempt to acquire more attraction to each sport. Baseball might not have been as popular as cricket at the time, so the baseball players might have been playing cricket teams in order to gain more awareness and support from the community, or simply because there weren't very many other baseball teams to play.