The Fans Really Got Fired Up for State Baseball Championship in 1860

When the Oakland Athletics and the San Francisco Giants square off to settle the baseball championship of California Saturday, it will have been 129 years since the state’s first baseball title was decided.

On Sept. 20, 1860, at the State Fairgrounds in Sacramento, the San Francisco Eagles met the Sacramento Red Rovers for the state’s championship trophy, the Silver Ball.

According to Fred W. Lange in his 1938 book, “The History of Baseball in California and the Pacific Coast League,” that was California’s first big game.

The Eagles won, 31-17.

They scored a lot of runs in those days, split-fingered fastballs being quite a few decades down the road. And another important difference between the World Series games to be held in the Bay Area and those of baseball’s early years in California was that in the old days, you didn’t have to check your guns at the gate.

It was considered good clean fun then to fire your six-shooter into the air just as a batter was getting ready to swing.

William Shepard, an 1860s third baseman in San Francisco, described the baseball environment there in his memoirs, a rich source for Lange’s book.

“Baseball was loosely organized, gambling was ever present, particularly when the Eagles played the Pacifics,” Shepard wrote. “Gamblers would place bets on teams . . . and fire a fusillade from their six-shooters just as a fielder was about to make a play.”

It is believed that organized baseball’s first year in California was 1859. The state’s first taste of big league baseball was in 1869, and it wasn’t pleasant.

The sport was brought to San Francisco in 1858 by a newcomer from Boston, Martin F. Cosgriff. He had bats and balls, and showed the locals how to play.

The next year, according to Lange, a group of “tradesmen and mechanics,” led by John M. Fisher, founded the first team on the Pacific Coast, the San Francisco Eagles. On Washington’s Birthday in 1860, the Eagles found someone to play--a new team from Sacramento, the Red Rovers.

The first game ended in a 33-33 tie, but the Eagles declared themselves winners by default when the Red Rovers stalked off the field angrily, citing “unfair pitching” by the Eagles.

In 1861, the Eagles brought in two ringers from the east, two brothers from the professional New York Knickerbockers, William and James Shephard. With their encouragement, a second San Francisco team, the Pacifics, was formed.

There was little baseball during the Civil War, but in 1866 baseball people held a convention in Sacramento and formed a California State Convention of Baseball Players. A constitution and rule book were published, and a league was formed. The convention also resulted in the construction of the first enclosed ball park in California, at 25th and Folsom Streets in San Francisco.

The new league had its ups and downs but in time proved to be the forerunner of the California League, which later became the Pacific Coast League, which later gave way to major league baseball in 1958.

In 1867, the Eagles played a new team in Oakland, the Wide Awakes. Final score: Eagles 37, Wide Awakes 3.

By now, Eagle partisans were getting cocky. They figured their guys were ready for anybody. So an invitation was sent eastward, to the nationally famed Cincinnati Red Stockings, winners of more than 50 games in a row. And in what must have been one of the first cross-country trips by a sports team, the Red Stockings came to San Francisco on the new transcontinental railroad.

Here it gets sort of ugly. In the first game, the Red Stockings beat the Eagles, 35-4. They played again the next day, and the Red Stockings won, 58-4. Two days later, it was the Pacifics’ turn to lose to Cincinnati, 66-4. Finally, the California League put together an all-star team, but the Red Stockings beat that group twice, 46-14 and 50-6.

Possibly, the Red Stockings had louder revolvers.