Extra Innings

He explained the rules of the game. Everyone agreed, except for one man.

“white and red baseball on brown soil at daytime” by Ben Hershey on Unsplash

One morning in the 1840s, a group of men stood on a dusty field. They were there for a singular purpose: to get out of their houses.

Usually, their pastimes on Saturday mornings were either going to a funeral, or shooting at each other. Often, these two events were related. But everyone had run out of bullets, and no one they knew had died that week.

Still, nobody wanted to go back home to their wives. Wives were always saying things like, “Can you please stop drinking?! It’ll kill your liver!” Everyone knew that alcohol helped livers, or at least that’s what Dr. Morgan always said.

Dr. Morgan got his medical degree after walking from one end of the hospital to the other the fastest. Yes, he was the authority, until one day he dropped dead, a bottle of whiskey beside him. But they couldn’t let the women know they might be right.

So here they were. Their leader was Alexander, a firefighter. Firefighting in the 1840s consisted of ringing a bell and sternly telling a fire that it had to be out, right now. It gave a man a lot of time to think, and on this day, he had a bright idea.

“Fellas,” he said, “I’ve thought of a game.”