Vintage Base Ball
Topeka Westerns play base ball according to 1860s rules, outfits and equipment
Story by Tom Averill | Photography by Nick Krug | From the summer 2023 edition of Topeka Magazine
Thus the attraction of the game in its earliest days [1840–1850] was first the novelty and exhilaration of play; second the opportunity for deskbound city clerks to expend surplus energy in a sylvan setting, freed from the tyranny of the clock; and third, to harmonize with an American golden age that was almost entirely legendary. —John Thorn, Baseball: Our Game.
Ben Coates has known baseball since his earliest days. At only four years old, he was playing the sport and listening to radio broadcasts of the Kansas City Royals. That was back in the 1970s, when the Royals were still a young franchise team, tickets were cheap, and Coates and his father could drive from Topeka to Kauffman Stadium on impromptu outings. Coates recalls grabbing a general admission ticket, settling into the orange bucket seats and rooting for John Mayberry and the other team legends of the ’70s and ’80s.
As he grew older, Coates remained a fan and continued to play baseball recreationally until some of his fellow players told him about base ball, the two-word, vintage version. They had encountered this sport while doing Civil War reenactments and invited Coates to watch an exhibition game featuring a team from Wichita. From that moment on, Coates was hooked.
“It was living history, and it was the sport that we loved—what wasn’t to like about that?” says Coates. “We watched them, saw the old bats and uniforms, and said, ‘Heck, yeah.’”
So, 10 years ago, Coates and a group of these Topekan ballplayers decided to set up a team and went on to join the Vintage Base Ball Association that played under variations of rules adopted in the 1860s. They called their squad the Westerns Base Ball Club of Topeka, taking the name from an actual 1870s team, one of the premier teams in the Midwest. Hale Ritchie, son of one of Topeka’s founders, John Ritchie, played short stop for the early Westerns and remained with the team until its last full season in 1881.
Ben “Big Train” Coates, Aaron “Pyrat” Staab, and Wes “Tiny” McDonough serve as co-captains for the 21st-century Westerns, a team with players ranging in age from 25 to 55. This season, the Westerns will play the other Kansas cities with a vintage team: Emporia, Wichita, and Hutchinson.
Vintage base ball has its own look. The players wear old-style knickerbocker pants without zippers, short-billed caps, and long-sleeve shirts in a style that the original Westerns might have worn.
“But the rub is we have no pictures of the Westerns,” says Coates. “None of the newspaper accounts that we have found and seen describe what the Westerns wore or their colors.”
So, the uniform is a best-guess approach, with a few modern innovations such as lighter cotton as opposed to the full wool that probably would have been worn in that era.
There is more certainty about the equipment. The baseballs are slightly softer and slightly bigger than modern ones and are one-seamed instead of two. Bats have a maximum diameter of 2 and 5/8” but can be of any length. Players sometimes make their own bats, balls and uniforms, but companies have stepped up to supply the 200-plus vintage teams across the country. The Westerns play at Lake Shawnee, across from the Ted Ensley Gardens, on a field with bases, first and third foul lines, and an outfield with no fences.
The Problem and Pride of History
Writing about early professional baseball from 1903 to 1930, John Thorn notes, “The national pastime became the great repository of national ideals, the symbol of all that was good in American life: fair play (sportsmanship); the rule of law (objective arbitration of disputes); equal opportunity (each side has its innings); the brotherhood of man (bleacher harmony); and more.”
But the problem with this notion, of course, is that ideals don’t always reflect reality. Historical reenactment groups and educational programs in the United States have long had to struggle with deciding how to represent a past that includes the legacies of segregation and discrimination.
Like many historical reenactment groups in the United States, the vintage base ball community is dominated by players who are White men, the same group that excluded women, Black players, and other people of color from playing in the sport for decades.
Recently, the Vintage Base Ball League Association has addressed this issue head-on at its national conference with presentations on how the sport can grow as a public event in public spaces which can “stress the historic game as a vehicle to extend … reach and engage broadly” rather than carrying along “all that white privilege baggage from the past into the 21st century.
In Topeka, Ben Coates says his team—which has included female players—focuses on “teaching the history of the game and how it was played” rather than any social context that limited it. When the Westerns have engaged in social situations, it has been to speak out against discrimination in the sport, such as writing a letter in support of a Black high school player in Iowa who was barraged with racist taunts and by fans from an opposing team in the summer of 2020.
And Coates likes to point out that for a team like the Westerns, social history is not an entirely uncomfortable subject—in fact it can be a matter of pride. Before the collapse of the racial-integration of the Reconstruction years, and in a relatively racially progressive city like Topeka of the 1860s and 1870s, there were several racially integrated teams as well as prominent Black teams.
The Westerns gave way to other teams such as the Topeka Base Ball Club, the Giants and the Goldsby’s Golden Giants, who fielded a mixed Black and White team and featured players such as Hall of Fame inductee Bud Fowler, known as the first Black professional baseball player. “A Black Hall of Fame legend was playing in Topeka in the 1870s and 1880s—we should all know and be proud of that,” Coates says. “That’s our history.”
Coates, who in his day job is senior sales/underwriting associate at KTWU, sees Westerns games as both play and education. He is an ambassador and teacher who loves explaining vintage ball and baseball history. “When the Westerns play in Topeka,” Coates says, “we call our weekend the Free State Base Ball Festival to remind people of the Kansas past.” Coates explains the basics of the game to spectators and is eager to answer questions. With his co-captains, he schedules games, checks equipment, and puts together a lineup. Between innings, they talk strategy. There is no cadre of coaches as in contemporary big league baseball. Coates says coaching happens through “chatter while on the field. Like remembering who pulls the ball, who is the slap hitter, the deep hitter. Base ball is always thinking about and being ready for the next play, and the chatter makes sure everyone is on the same team.”
Vintage base ball games use an old-fashioned one-seam ball
Vintage Base Ball Rules
Rules from 1860 make the game interesting. Ben Coates outlines some of the key rules of vintage ball that separate it from contemporary play.
No gloves.
One umpire. The sole umpire is behind home plate.
Strikes are given for swinging and missing, but there are no walks. The umpire can call a strike only if a batter seems to be delaying the game by not swinging at hittable pitches.
Once fair, always fair, so any ball touching fair territory is playable no matter where it goes foul.
Runners going for a single must stop on the first base bag, and not run beyond as they speed to beat the fielder’s throw. One-hop outs. If the ball, including a fly ball, is caught after one hop, the batter is out. With such an out, runners can advance without tagging the base. If the ball is caught directly, the runners need to tag, as in modern baseball.
Away games are part of being with the Westerns, too. “There’s usually a quick bonding with players from all over the country who are in love with vintage ball, who are kindred spirits,” Coates says. The experience is most often “gentlemanly, conversational, communal—a friendly competition.” Different teams use different rules, so teams meet beforehand to agree on which set to play by.If one team has a short roster, players from the other team will jump in to bring it to full strength. “The game itself is the most important thing. Teams don’t keep strict statistics,” Coates says, “but if someone has a great game, we’ll call them the MVP and dress them in red hose [stockings] for the next game. Baseball is a team game, but it also relies on individual accomplishment. When you’re pitching, or batting, or fielding, you’re alone in that. Yet what you do affects the team, and teams feed on individual prowess and accomplishments.”
After games, the Westerns indulge in parking-lot chats. Some teams will invite the other team to picnic or grill, and over the years they feel like they’re getting together with old friends.
For the road trips, Coates says, “You have to play through the weather. The Westerns once started a game at 65 degrees, but a cold front dropped the temperature into the 30s, with pea-sized hail—we call it the ‘Hail Game.’” In Menominee, Wisconsin, they played in five inches of snow. When asked if they wanted to continue these games, Coates says, “The answer is always the same: ‘We came to play base ball!’”
As another part of their travels, Coates wrote in an email, “Base ball players are just a goofy lot with weird superstitions who do silly stuff for fun and love of the game. The Westerns play a quick game of wiffle ball in every state we travel to or through and then mark that state on a bat. So far, we have played in Kansas, Missouri, Colorado, Oklahoma (in a casino parking lot), Texas, Nebraska, Iowa (in a truck stop parking lot), Illinois (restaurant parking lot after dinner), Minnesota (rest stop), Wisconsin, South Dakota and Montana (at a wedding reception).”
Team members also name each other. On the Westerns there is, or has been, “Pinto,” “Amarillo,” “Foghorn,” “Rook,” “Hammer,” and “Captain.” Ben “Big Train” Coates’ nickname honors Walter “The Big Train” Johnson. Born in Humboldt, Kansas, Johnson was in the first class inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1936, and one of only two Kansans who have made it into the Cooperstown elite. The other is Joe Tinker, from Muscotah, in Atchison County, of the famous “Tinker, to Evers, to Chance” Chicago Cubs double play combination that occurred 54 times between 1906 and 1910.
Walter Johnson pitched for the Washington Senators from 1907 to 1927, leading them to a World Series championship in 1924. His record of 110 shutouts over a 21-year career still stands. In Humboldt, Kansas, where Johnson was born, the field is named for him, and, according to the current “Big Train,” Ben Coates, “they love ball there. When the Westerns play in Humboldt—we go there every year—we warm up on the town square. Then a parade of antique cars and trucks arrives to take us to the field, where anywhere between 40 and 200 people will attend the vintage game.”
Coates remembers only two games when the camaraderie of vintage base ball did not hold true. At the Field of Dreams Ball Park in Dyersville, Iowa, where they play every season, he recalls, “One game was ugly, when a team from back East, who had just won the championship at a national tournament of A teams, was surprised that these ‘rubes’ from Topeka were so good. They were nasty, with a lot of trash talk. Aggressive, too,” he adds. “We were happy to leave that game behind us.”
For Coates and the Westerns, though, there is always the next game, always baseball to celebrate, history to discover, heroes to emulate, and new teammates to welcome to the roster.
“We are recovering from the Covid years and have had some players age out,” says Coates. “But I see the sport getting bigger. There are more teams growing in the West, in California, Arizona and Nevada. And if we get younger players to come out for a couple of practices, then often enough we can get them hooked.”
Jeff “Shotgun” Schell (left) and Jordan “Rook” Raney
Pioneer Base Ball
They gather not with bats but striker’s sticks
fashioned from wagon wheel spokes or ax handles,
shaved slender and round for best ball contact,
the ball of fish-eye core, Mother’s yarn, Father’s
shoe-tongue sewn tight with precious twine.
Any field is their field, easily paced, bases marked
by hat, shingle, crate bottom, each as temporary as
play for these young farmers caught stealing time
between milkings, feedings, mendings, tendings,
from those precious hours between dawn and dusk.
They pitch underhand but are not underhanded,
no catcher to give signs—no curve balls,
knuckle balls, sinkers, sliders, change ups.
The pitcher throws to encourage a striker
to move the ball toward play, toward base path
commotion, toward put outs or the reaching of home.
They play bare-handed just as they do everything
bare-handed, calloused, the stinging ball a pleasure.
They play until dusk renders the ball invisible.
They note runs, but score doesn’t matter. Everyone
wins. The land is changed, but only for moments.
When they leave, grass goes back to being grass.
Base lines settle into the baselines of water table,
rock, soil, seed, cloud, wind and sky. Home,
no longer one place, is everywhere again.
—Thomas Fox Averill
Go See the Westerns Base Ball Club of Topeka
All home games at Lake Shawnee Park, across from Ted Ensley gardens. Free entry. Bring a chair!
May 27–28 home vs Hutch and Colorado—Free State Tournament
June 24–25 at Victor, Colorado
July 1 at Wichita
July 22 vs Emporia
August 12 at Emporia
August 23 at Field of Dreams, Iowa
Tentative September 10 tentative home game vs St. Louis teams
September 16 at Hutchison
September 23 at Wichita
October 21 vs Hutchinson at Humboldt
