A Brief History of the Walk

We’re barely a month out now from the release of WHY WE LOVE BASEBALL … and I thought it might be fun to count down to the big day with a few stories about baseball history. The focus, though, will be about how baseball history impacts the game today. You probably know that there’s history everywhere in the game, even in the language we use such as “clubhouse” and “pitcher.”

The pitcher is called that because in the early days of baseball, they really did pitch the ball, underhanded, like horseshoes. One of the very first rules of baseball — one of the 20 original Knickerbocker Rules adopted in 1845 — was “The ball must be pitched, not thrown, for the bat.”

This is a key thing to remember for today’s entry: A brief history of the walk.

In the beginning, there were no walks, because there were no called balls. The idea of called balls was repellent to early baseball people, because in those days the pitcher was supposed to be almost superfluous. The whole pitcher’s job was to start the action by throwing the ball “for the bat.” The battle was between the hitter and the fielders.

In the earliest days, the batter was entitled to ask for a specific pitch — that is to say the batter could hold the bat in a specific spot and say, “Put one right here, huh?” like what Shoeless Joe Jackson said to Kevin Costner in “Field of Dreams.” But this was a very slow process, so as the years went along, this process was streamlined and hitters were allowed only to ask for a low pitch (between the knees and waist) or a high pitch (between the waist and shoulder).

And you have to understand: Baseball at-bats could take FOREVER in those days. Pitchers did not like being told they had to give batters the perfect pitch. And hitters would wait for that pitch for as long as it took. According to perhaps the most remarkable baseball research ever done — Peter Morris’ epic, two-volume A Game of Inches,* — at-bats would routinely go 50 or 60 pitches and often more. Morris quotes William J. Ryczek’s research that in an 1860 game between the Atlantics and Excelsiors, pitchers Jim Creighton and Mattie O’Brien threw a combined 665 pitches in THE FIRST THREE INNINGS.

*We will be leaning heavily on Peter’s incredible work in this little series when looking back at the early days of baseball.

Something had to be done … but nobody quite knew what.