COLD SPRING — The pitchers threw underhand and there wasn't a glove in sight, not even for the catcher.
Like a scene from the Kevin Costner movie “Field of Dreams,” baseball players appeared on a farm field July 4 and followed 1864 rules.
The year was 2009 and the location was Historic Cold Spring Village. Flemington Neshanock played the Elkton Eclipse.
Flemington Neshanock Baseball Club spokesman Brad “Brooklyn” Shaw said over 100 teams travel the country playing baseball with rules from the late 1800s. He said the teams play real games, which makes it different from events held by Civil War reenactors.
“If the Civil War people would do what we are doing, they would be using real bullets,” said Shaw. “We are playing a real game.”
The Neshanock ball club plays every weekend as distant as Boston and Washington, D.C. said Shaw, dressed in a period uniform.
In addition to no gloves and underhanded pitching from 45-feet from home plate, the 1864 rules allow any ball to be caught on a bounce or on the fly for an out.
“You are not allowed to overrun first base,” said Shaw. “Also, foul balls are not strikes.”
The umpire calls the game from the side of home plate rather than directly behind it.
“The umpire calls balls and strikes at his own discretion which means that not every pitch can count,” he said.
Do the players go home with bruised hands from the lack of a glove?
Shaw said the ball is a little softer than today's standards and the underhanded pitching slows it down a bit.
Stealing bases is permitted and the game at Cold Spring was loaded with steals, some successful, some not.
The old time rules have balks, although the pitcher can throw to first base without first stepping in that direction, said Shaw. Once a pitcher makes a motion towards home plate, he must deliver the ball to home plate or it goes down as a balk.
Games in the late 1800s were mostly played in farmers’ fields with the exception of some formal ball fields in Brooklyn where spectators paid an admission fee.
“The players were not supposed to make any money,” said Shaw. “When baseball started, it was strictly recreation, it was strictly to go out there and have a good time.”
Initially, games were among members of the same club but clubs began challenging each other, he said.
As competition heated up, clubs wanted the best players and they began to pay them not so much in cash but with a job in an organization or local government, said Shaw.
Players began being paid in 1869 with the creation of the Cincinnati Reds, he said.
Vintage baseball clubs began forming in the early 1980s on Long Island, N.Y. Many team members played in high school or college, but most are softball players who found old time baseball to be a better alternative.
A horse watched the game from its nearby pen although his primary interest seemed to be ice cream cones. At the end of the game, the players did not disappear into a cornfield as in “Field of Dreams,” but started their cars and headed for the Garden State Parkway.