What Do You Consider the First Baseball Card(s)?

[benjulmag]

Originally Posted by darwinbulldog

Fair question, and I guess if we're in agreement that the game depicted in the card is in fact baseball, then I would consider that a baseball card. So then we just have to settle on a definition of baseball. That's harder, and rather more like defining which of our billions of ancestors should be considered the first human. Certainly there were games that shared some features with modern baseball hundreds of years ago, but we'll have to settle on the necessary features to decide if the Magnolia Club of 1844 was in fact playing baseball and not some ancestral species of ball game. Is it baseball if you don't use a 4 ball/3 strike count, if the pitching is underhanded, if the bases are not to be stepped and stood upon by the players? And how different can the size or material of the baseball itself be before it is not actually a baseball? And can a sport played with some ball other than a baseball still be considered baseball? For me the biggest sticking point is probably the use of posts instead of bags as bases.

There appear to be bases under the posts. If that is the case, the purpose of the posts likely is not be the bases but instead to insure that the bases stay in place.