History | Baseball.com.au

Baseball was brought to Australia by American gold miners and played on the gold fields of Ballarat for fun on their rest days in the 1850s.

Cricketers Gaggin & Goldsmith tried to play baseball at Yarra Park, Melbourne in 1867, but AFL fans arriving for the adjacent AFL football disrupted the games.

The first series of full competitive games of baseball by Australians were played by members of the Surry Baseball Club on Moore Park and by members of the NSW Cricket Association on the adjacent Sydney Cricket Ground in June/July 1878.

In 1881, American residents formed a Union Baseball Club and a year later with Australians, formed a Sydney Baseball Club with U.S. Consul Gilderoy Wells Griffin forming a NSW Baseball Association in 1885.

Following the A.G. Spalding tour by the Chicago White Sox and All-America teams in 1888/9, Harry Simpson stayed in Australia, formed baseball clubs in Melbourne, Adelaide, Broken Hill, and eventually Sydney with competition games being played. Simpson also travelled to New Zealand to promote baseball. When he suddenly died in September 1891, after setting up the NSW Baseball League, it was a New Zealander, Tony Chuck, who took his place in Australia.

Australian Baseball Hall of Fame

In 2005, Baseball Australia launched the Australian Baseball Hall of Fame, which acknowledges players and managers who have achieved excellence either domestically or internationally.

Click HERE for full list of inductees.

Australian Major Leaguers

Australia has had 35 players play in Major League Baseball, dating back to Joe Quinn’s debut with the St. Louis Maroons on April 26, 1884.

Click HERE for full list of Australians who have gone on to play in the Major Leagues.

The Claxton Shield

When Norrie Claxton (1880-1951) donated a trophy to be awarded to the State winning the annual Australian Championships. Claxton, first president of the South Australian Baseball League, in 1913 originally intended the team which won the trophy for 3 successive years to become the permanent holder. After South Australia won the first 3 years of competition involving presentation of the trophy, all States agreed that it become a permanent competition trophy and named it the Claxton Shield Competition.

Click HERE for full list of Claxton Shield winners and competition history.

Australian Baseball Firsts

First Overseas Team in Australia

In the late 1880s, U.S. sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding brought his Chicago White Sox & All-America teams across the Pacific for exhibition games in Auckland, Sydney and Melbourne, continuing on via Colombo and Egypt to London.

First State Controlling Body

The ‘First NSW Controlling Body’ was formed in 1885 by Gilderoy Wells Griffin, a controversial U.S. Consul to the colony of NSW. This NSW Baseball Association, which initially consisted of just two clubs – the ‘Union’ and the ‘Sydney’ baseball clubs, most of whose members were American residents of Sydney. Only one other club appeared in 1886 – Nationals and the NSW Association only lasted one year. Ironically, despite some futile attempts by the NSW Cricket Association to reform the Sydney Club and the Baseball Association through the late 1880s, the next controlling body was Harry Simpson’s NSW Baseball League on his arrival in Sydney early in 1891. But, following Harry Simpson’s sudden death in September 1891, the NSW Baseball League came under the administration of Tony Chuck, a New Zealander, and continued with the first summer baseball competition won by West Sydney in a final in March 1892. A severe economic depression hit the colony of NSW in the 1890s, however, with widespread unemployment. The NSW Baseball League held a charity game for the unemployed in July 1892.

This was the last recorded baseball game played in Sydney despite attempts to reform clubs and the association, until the Redfern Council built Redfern Cricket Oval in 1896 and decided to play baseball, not football, in the winter, to protect their new turf cricket wicket. Given the task of promoting baseball, James Searle (ABF Hall of Fame Inductee) formed the Redfern Baseball Club in the winter of 1897, and after organising baseball clubs among Sydney’s cricketers during the 1897/8 summer, a ‘Metropolitan Baseball Association’ formed in May 1898 with eight district clubs. The Metropolitan Association changed its name to the NSW Baseball Association’ in 1900 and this controlling body is today’s NSW Baseball League.

A breakaway summer NSW National Baseball League appeared in 1913 after being refused affiliation within the NSWBA. Following much conflict and rival winter competitions through the war years, agreement was reached in 1919 for the NSWBA to run winter baseball and the National League to control summer baseball, and this arrangement continued until 1943.

In 1944, an ‘Allied Baseball Council’ took over from both bodies for a year, then from 1945 the NSW Baseball Union ran winter only baseball till 1973 when, having changed its name to the ‘NSW Baseball League’, it tried to adopt ‘summer only baseball’, which lead to a breakaway ‘Sydney Winter League’. The two bodies agreed to resolve their dispute and the SWBL re-affiliated, while continuing to run the winter competitions, which is still the situation today.

First National Controlling Body

The Australian Baseball Council was first established in 1913 when an Australian Baseball Council had been established and met in Melbourne.

Members included H.M. Adams, F.Laver, F.M. Russell (Victoria), M.A. Noble, E.A. Tyler, J.T. Pope (NSW), H.B. Dawkins, W. Chapman (South Australia). Due to conflict between North and South Tasmania there were no representatives for Tasmania.

The council became redundant and was again set up after disruption between Victoria and NSW over the selection of Australian teams chosen for the U.S. Fleet visit of 1925. It faced the same redundancy issue again till the first Claxton Shield in 1934, when delegates from each state began to meet during the annual interstate championships, the President of the championship venue state chairing the meeting and the delegates from each state appointing an ‘Honorary Secretary’. These annual meetings were the origins of today’s Australian Baseball Federation.

First Interstate Championship

1890: Victoria played South Australia on the East Melbourne Cricket Ground. South Australia won by two matches to one.

First Overseas Tour by an Australian Team

1897: When a team of players from Victoria and South Australia toured across the United States. Results of the Tour in U.S.:

Santa Cruz	at Santa Cruz	won 13-10
Santa Cruz	at Santa Cruz	won 12-7
Ogden	at Ogden	won 9-8
Denver	at Denver	won 18-7
C.H & B.R.Sub	at Brooklyn	won 11-8
Veterans	at Boston	won 27 -13
N. Attleboro	at N. Attleboro	won 12-11
W.N.V	at Weehawken	won 30-20
Olympic	at San Francisco	lost 9-20
Stockton	at Stockton	lost 7-12
Reliance	at San Francisco	lost 19-21
San Fac.	at San Francisco	lost 7-10
Santa Cruz	at Santa Cruz	lost 11-19
Omaha	at Omaha	lost 9-13
Illinois	at Chicago	lost 7-9
Dusvesne	at Pittsburgh	lost 7-9
Brockton	at Brockton	lost 6-18
Newton Centre	at Brockton	lost 6-14
Pawtucket	at Providence	lost 9-12
Orange AC	at Orange	lost 5-21
Atlantic	at Atlantic City	lost 0-15
Philadelphia	at Philadelphia	lost 3-9

The team also played a game in England. Australia struggled to win games, and the tour was a financial disaster with the team manager taking the gate receipts in London and disappearing back to Australia. It set the game back in Victoria and South Australia for several years, but with no NSW players in the team, the game in Sydney was not affected. Baseball in NSW became permanently established as a winter sport from 1898.

First Official Club Competition

1889: In Adelaide and Melbourne among clubs formed by Harry Simpson.

First Australia Championships

1910: In Hobart between NSW, Victoria and Tasmania, won by NSW. This series was followed by a similar one in Melbourne between Victoria, NSW, South Australia and Tasmania in August 1910, also won by NSW.

First Australian Schoolboys Interstate Series

1912: Between Victoria and NSW schoolboys as early fixtures to the men’s games in Melbourne during the Australian Championship. These were the first ever interstate games among schoolboys’ of any team sport in Australia.

The Proud Shield, donated by founders of Prouds Jewellers, William & Tom Proud, was first played in 1909 and is still played annually between high schools across NSW. It is Australia’s oldest school team sporting trophy.

First Games Against American Teams in Australia

Apart from social games between visiting American Minstrel singers in the 1880s and crews of visiting U.S. passenger vessels in the early 1900s, the first serious contests were in 1908 when the American ‘Great White Fleet’ visited Sydney and Melbourne and took the Harry Turner-designed J.C. Williamson Shield home by winning two of three games against an ‘Australian’ team, winning one of two in Sydney and the decider in Melbourne.

In 1914, the Chicago White Sox and New York Giants played several games against NSW in Sydney. An American fleet also visited Sydney in 1925, and in 1928, America’s Stanford University visited Sydney. Victoria beat Stanford in the first game, but Stanford then won all remaining games, including three so called ‘Tests’ against an ‘Australian’ team.

A total of 40,000 watched the games at Sydney’s Showground and Sports Ground. In 1929, the Multnomah Athletics visited Sydney, and a total of 15,000 saw the Americans win another three ‘Tests’, plus a ‘farewell’ game against ‘Australia’.

The popularity of baseball surged in Sydney after these visits and led to a ‘City Houses Baseball Association’ forming in Sydney, comprised of American-based companies such as Goodyear, Kelloggs, Peters Ice Cream, Westinghouse, plus local Australian companies such as Mick Simmons, Lustre Hosiery, International Harvester, Nestles, Rozelle Wood Products, Trailers, Vesta Batteries, Bradley Bros, Randle Engraving, Taubmans, Akubra, Australia Post, Richmond Brewery and others.

First Test Games in Australia

1928: When Stanford University (California, U.S.A.) managed and coached by New York Giants’ pitcher Harry Waters, visited NSW. Stanford twice defeated NSW and later played three ‘Test’ matches, two at the Sydney Showground and one in the Sydney Sports Ground, which drew a total of 40,000 spectators. Stanford won all three tests, 13-6, 2-1 (which went to 10 innings), and 7-0. In 1929, the Multnomah Athletic Club of Portland, Oregon, also visited NSW and played three ‘Tests’ against Australia, the second of which was on the Sydney Cricket Ground. 28,000 spectators saw Multnomah win all three tests 4-1, 10-4 and 10-4.

First Australia Women’s National Team

Women played baseball in Sydney from 1918 with several women’s associations during the 1920s & 30s and an interstate series between NSW, Victoria and Queensland in Sydney in 1934. Women’s baseball disappeared when women’s groups in Queensland in 1939 declared the game unsuitable for women, however, and softball became the women’s round bat game. Women’s baseball surged back into popularity in the 2000s with national championships resulting in an Australian Women’s Team playing in the inaugural ‘Women’s World Series’ in Toronto in 2001 and a ‘Women’s World Series’ in Melbourne in 2003.