1825! Baseball ⚾️ Hamden 🗞️ and a Page in History

[00:00:00] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: The spirit of baseball is alive and well in Delaware County and Ulster County and across all of the land. Hello everyone, this is Captain Drewski of the Polecats featuring the Hamden 9, a vintage base ball club hailing from Hamden, New York.

[00:00:18] Brett Barry: According to the Delaware County Vintage Base Ball Association, "vintage base ball" [two words] is a loose term for amateur base ball played by the various rules, customs, and equipment of the 1800s. Men and women play with wooden bats, no gloves, and period-accurate attire. This is not our first story on vintage base ball in the Catskills. Back in 2021, we joined Collin "Stumpy" Miller of Mountain Athletic Club for spring training with the Bovina Dairymen and Delhi Baseball Club in Bovina, New York. We'll link to that one in the show notes. This time around we got a call from Andy "Drewski" Landsman, captain of a new iteration known as the Hamden 9 or, colloquially, as the Delhi Polecats. We'll hear how that team took shape, plus Drewski's astonishing claim that this summer marks the 200th anniversary of the first mention in print of any organized game of baseball right here in the Catskills. On July 13, 1825, nine residents of the newly established town of Hamden challenged an equal number of players from any town in Delaware County to play the game of baseball. Two centuries later, in July of 2025, vintage baseball is on deck as part of Hamden's own bicentennial celebration. Drewski makes the pitch right after this...

[00:02:03] Campbell Brown: Kaatscast is sponsored by The Mountain Eagle, covering Delaware, Greene, and Schoharie counties, including brands for local regions like The Windham Weekly, Schoharie News, and The Catskills Chronicle. For more information, call (518) 763-6854 or email mountaineaglenews@gmail.com. This episode is supported by Hanford Mills Museum. Explore the power of the past as knowledgeable staff guide you through the mill with demonstrations of the waterwheel, sawmill, and woodworking machines. For more information about scheduling a tour or about their 2025 events, visit hanfordmills.org.

[00:02:40] Brett Barry: We recently welcomed vintage baseball captain Drewski Landsman to our studio to field some questions about baseball's early appearance in an 1825 Catskills newspaper, but first we wanted to know about his own vintage team, the Delhi Polecats.

[00:02:59] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: We started in 2021. The pandemic was not great for most things, but it was kind of a boon for vintage baseball and the Catskills. Prior to that year, there had been three teams for vintage baseball in Delaware County. First was the Roxbury 9, who sadly are not in operation anymore. You'll still see some guys come out in their Roxbury uniform and play with some of the other teams on certain days, but in 2020 there were two teams going, the Bovina Dairymen and the Fleischmanns M.A.C., or the Mountain Athletic Club, another team that has a direct tie to a 19th-century name. Julius Fleischmann funded this team called the Mountain Athletic Club in the late 1800s, and both the Dairymen and the M.A.C. have been going since around 2006/7/8. They had a pause after a flood about 10 years ago, but were going strong prior to the pandemic, and in 2020 there were, like, hundreds of people coming to these games because there wasn't all that much to do and this was an outdoor activity, and one of the captains of the Dairymen, a friend, or should I say a "frenemy" [my good friend Nick Franson, the captain of the Dairymen], but he told me they were full up and I wouldn't be able to join, but he said, "Look, you know, keep an eye out. We might be starting a third team," and a gentleman by the name of Ben Cairns, who grew up in Delhi and was on the Dairymen for a couple of years, the honor was foisted upon him to go and start a third Delaware County team, so in 2021 we began simply as the Delhi Vintage Base Ball Club. We didn't have a set home field as of yet. We played some games at the Delaware County Historical Museum. We played some games at the Legion Field, and we started playing a few games at the Historic Crawford Field in Hamden, New York. Since then we've been leaning more and more into our Hamden heritage. This is the first year we're really being known as the Hamden 9, but it's a very special year in Hamden. It's the bicentennial for the town, and it's also the bicentennial of the game in print, as we see it listing players' names as well as any sum of money associated with the game, that being the sum of $1 per game posted in an article in 1825.

[00:05:08] Brett Barry: So we'll get back to that in just a moment, but to talk a little bit more about your team, it has this other name, "Delhi Polecats." What's that all about?

[00:05:17] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: So, right, so first year we were just the Delhi Vintage Base Ball Club then because we started playing in Hamden, we were looking for a moniker. We chose Polecats to honor Hamden, so in the 1900s [20th century] there was a town ball team, like a hardball team with gloves, the same game you see played today, but they were called the Hamden Polecats, so we thought to sort of bridge the gap between Delhi and Hamden, we'd still be called Delhi, but lean into the Polecat name. We welcome people from all over, but especially both those towns and more and more, so we found that because our real home field is in Hamden and this being the 200th year, we're leaning even further into that heritage, and so we call ourselves "Polecats featuring the Hamden 9," but most towns had their own base ball clubs and were just called the town name "Base Ball Club." The Polecat name comes from the 20th century. That was not a name used in the 1800s. This idea of vintage base ball, this idea of playing base ball by the rules of the 1800s without gloves, with a ball that's a little bit softer that you can catch on a bounce. It's both foreign and familiar, so people who come to see this, they know they're seeing base ball, but it's, it's not exactly what they're used to, and I think by inning three it becomes pretty clear, and you get sort of what's different about it, and for us it takes the place of softball, you know, it's a rec league, it's a little bit renaissance fair for jocks—I've heard it called, you know, we are dressing period appropriate. We encourage fans to do that as well if they so wish, but it's, you know, it's a good time. It's a way to bond with people you wouldn't normally share a field with.

[00:06:51] Brett Barry: So baseball, the history of baseball, comes with a lot of dates attached to it, and, well, according to AI-powered Google search, it looks like the first organized game took place in Hoboken in 1846. Would you dispute that?

[00:07:07] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: Well, of course, yeah, that's part of why I'm here. That has been long recognized. The Elysian Fields game, as it was known, the story goes that the city was, well, it was undergoing the throes of the Industrial Revolution. The air was terrible in Manhattan. The gentlemen of New York City would literally take a ferry across to Hoboken and play on those fields. There's a figure amongst that group known as Doc Adams that a lot of people in the vintage base ball community today are trying to get into the Hall of Fame. He's known for inventing the idea of the shortstop, helping to codify how bats are shaped and baseballs are made, and stuff like that, but he was known for also hitting balls at the Elysian Fields into the Hudson River, and this is a big deal because, you know, balls were hard, pretty hard to come by back then.

[00:07:51] Brett Barry: Where would you place that date for the first organized baseball game?

[00:07:55] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: Me?

[00:07:56] Brett Barry: Mm-hmm.

[00:07:56] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: Oh, 1825 [July], shortly after the famous notice was placed in the Delaware Gazette, I would surmise that there were organized games that took place even before 1825 [being that from our claim where we're the first time you see actual players' names listed in print], there's a little bit more organization happening, and so shortly after July 12, 1825, when this article was brought to the Gazette and then printed, presumably nine other guys from somewhere else in Delaware County showed up in Hamden and played at the home of Edward B. Chace, which is why we call our annual event The Edward B. Chace Base Ball Challenge.

[00:08:36] Brett Barry: How did you discover this?

[00:08:38] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: So this has been a known thing in Hamden for a couple of decades, not in the vintage style, but there has been a yearly game going on in Hamden for at least 30 years now. My co-captain... his name is Jason Pardee, his father, Jack, is the captain of one of these teams that's been playing since the nineties against Mac Crawford, so it's known as "The Jack-Mac Game," the old-timers' game. They play modern baseball with metal bats and gloves, but they've been honoring that challenge from 1825 with a yearly game at Crawford Field since at least the 1990s. This year, as part of the bicentennial celebration, there will be some vintage games, but there will also be the old-timers' game, the Hamden old-timers' game at, I believe, two o'clock on July 12th of this year, so it's literally 200 years to the day that the original article was printed.

[00:09:28] Brett Barry: And that challenge, was that an attempt to bring publicity to the town, this new town of Hamden?

[00:09:36] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: In 1825, Hamden had been founded in the spring of that year mostly from the neighboring towns of Delhi and Walton, and so, I think, yes, exactly, to sort of put Hamden on the map to state their claim, they printed this notice saying, "We'll take nine players from any other town in the county, or if nine players from one town cannot be founded, you can make up nine players from several towns," so they're basically saying, "We know we're really good at this game. We want to invite you to come see us in our new town and play us for the sum of a dollar per player or per game, but a dollar back then was about 30-some-odd dollars today, so nothing to sneeze at."

[00:10:12] Brett Barry: Yeah, so let me read this. This is published in the July 13th 1825 edition of the Delaware Gazette, page three, and it says, "A CHALLENGE. The undersigned, all residents of the new town of Hamden, with the exception of Asa C. Howland," who was ostracized for some reason--it says here he was recently removed into Delhi, so I guess that disqualified him-- "challenge an equal number of persons of any town in the County of Delaware, to meet them at any time at the house of Edward B. Chace, in said town to play the game of BASS-BALL [spelled "BASS-BALL"], for the sum of one dollar each per game," which is about $32 today. "If no town can be found that will produce the required number, they have no objection to play against any selection that could be made from the several towns in the county. Signed, Eli Bagley, Edward B. Chace, Harry P. Chace, Ira Peak, Walter C. Peak, H.B. Goodrich, R.F. Thurber, Asa C. Howland, M.L. Bostwick. Hamden, July 12, 1825." What do you know about these guys?

[00:11:24] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: So some of them are well recorded because they are the first town clerk, the first constable; one of the Chace brothers was a tavern keeper, probably the most respected person in town, the one serving the ales. They're all recorded in the early days of Hamden. I think the question about Asa is, was he originally part of Hamden, then moved back to Delhi, or maybe they changed the lines, but clearly he's still part of the team. He's listed there. The thing to note, which is kind of interesting, is that the idea of nine players on a team had not been set in stone and would not be set for another decade or two, I don't, I think maybe by that Elysian Fields game we talked about in the 1840s, nine became the convention, so it's kind of coincidental that we have nine players listed here—helps our cause as—as staking Hamden as the home of baseball and print. We're still looking to find out if the opposing players' names were recorded anywhere.

[00:12:14] Brett Barry: Do you know what the results of that game were?

[00:12:16] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: We do not.

[00:12:17] Brett Barry: Okay, there was no follow-up article.

[00:12:20] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: No, you'll see the same article printed the next week, so we can assume that the game did not happen within the first week. I would assume that it did happen by the end of August. You know, things moved pretty slow back then. My idea also with the [BASS] spelling, so first off, "BASE BALL" was two words as a convention until probably the 1880s or 1890s. It became one word over time, as we know today, obviously, it's just one word. But it was "B-A-S-E space B-A-L-L." In this article, it was printed "BASS," and a lot of people will say "BASS-BALL." I think maybe the person that was writing this down was maybe a musician, and so when he heard Edward B. Chace or whoever came to deliver the message say "BASS-BALL," he wrote "BASS" [bass]. That's really, you know, a minor dispute. You'll hear locals say "the bass-ball challenge" sometimes. You know, Hamden's not a place that's looking for a ton of hoopla, not most years anyway. I've heard that from the current town clerk, but this year is the 200th anniversary. I think we're inviting people to come see what all—what Hamden's all about this July 12th and 13th. There'll be a town parade on the morning of the 12th that the Hamden 9 and some other baseball players of vintage caliber will be part of, and there'll be eight different teams from all over New York State as well as one from Connecticut joining us at both Crawford Field, where we normally play, and we're also gonna put in two—two fields across Route 10 down the way—we're gonna call them the Chace Brothers Flats in honor of Harry P. and Edward B., but vintage base ball's been taken off in Delaware County. The Dairymen over at Creamery Field have been hosting something called the Cowtown Scramble every October now for a few years, and it's been attracting teams from further away. There was a team from Maine that came to visit last year. There's been a team from Maryland up. The Dairymen have done a great job of spreading the word, as have the M.A.C., both, you know, with really deep historic ties. We've only been around—this is our fifth year in existence. The year after we started, both the Saugerties, now called Brickmakers, and the Kingston Guards started in 2022, and they've done a really great job of getting some historically vintage uniforms and being the drum for the cause. You know, it's nice to have people not super, super far away. There's about an hour's drive between our two areas, but we welcome the Brickmakers and Guards as often as we can up to Crawford Field.

[00:14:38] Brett Barry: So is this another challenge? Are you challenging these teams for this bicentennial event, and are you charging them a dollar to participate?

[00:14:46] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: Today, we charge nothing. We charge nothing to anybody. The admission's always free for all fans. For my players, I ask for commitment for time only. I mean, time is such a premium these days, as we know. One of the things I love about this endeavor is just—it's a way to connect with each other and to be off of my phone, to be off of any kind of screen, and just engage in something real. We have a foot in the past and a foot in the future. We do try to get the word out on social media. It's tough these days to cut through the noise.

[00:15:15] Brett Barry: What makes your team special?

[00:15:17] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: Aside from the 200th year, I think what's special about the Polecats, the Hamden 9—we kind of have an underdog spirit, you know, as the team that kind of spun off from these two established [other] teams in the county, we're not expected to win, usually. We eke out some here and there. We've gotten a lot better over our first four years. The Dairymen especially have become known as sort of the team to beat, but it's really about having a good time and connecting with each other, connecting with the history of the sport, and something special about the Catskills too, sometimes we go and play in one of the home fields for, say, the Brooklyn Atlantics or the New York Mutuals, and they'll play in historic villages within places where, as soon as you walk away from the field, you're back in the modern day, and, you know, a lot of our fields are really set in a rural, rustic, you know, environment, so it brings an extra element of vintage to the sport.

[00:16:10] Brett Barry: Yeah, what can you tell me about the town of Hamden and its own celebration?

[00:16:15] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: So they've got a 5K run coming. There is a covered bridge in Hamden, which is truly picturesque. About a mile long is the main street, which is part of Route 10. It's halfway between Delhi and Walton. It's a great spot. You know, at any time of year you'll find something fun going on there, but I think this year especially you'll see much more than they're used to in Hamden, and I appreciate that they've gotten a bicentennial community together. You know, it's a beautiful day for Hamden for sure.

[00:16:46] Brett Barry: You know, you've mentioned all these teams. It seems like the Catskills are kind of a hotbed for vintage base ball. Is that true, or is it just—is this happening everywhere?

[00:16:53] Andy "Drewski" Landsman: There are a couple hundred teams across the country. I think COVID really helped us for this particular thing. I think, as we all know, the Catskills have sort of experienced some sort of, I don't wanna say a boom economy, but a lot more people are living up here full time since 2020, and I think that's helped the cause. Some people might totally disagree with me, some people on my own team might disagree with me, and that's fine. You know, not everybody sees eye to eye up here. I've always seen the Catskills as sort of a microcosm of what's going on around the country. I, myself, am a hybrid creature. I was very lucky to grow up in both the city and the country, and I've felt more at home in Delaware County than I ever have since living there, and still I feel like an outsider too, but the truth is the Catskills are so vast, you know, what happens in the Hudson Valley and in Saugerties and Kingston doesn't necessarily trickle over Belleayre Mountain. We're over there in the quote, unquote, Great Western Catskills. It's so beautiful up here, and it's so majestic to be able to go to something like this and feel the history—see a fun sport. It's a fun thing to do, and we welcome everybody. I think it's really something you gotta experience for yourself, whether you're in Saugerties and Kingston or out in the west, or if you're closer to the city, find a vintage base ball game this year—go check it out. You might be pleasantly surprised. You might find yourself hooked, and we're open to anyone—men and women, boys and girls, all ages. The sport needs players and needs enthusiasts. Most years we have a couple dates at Hamden. This year we're doing the full weekend in Hamden—all our other dates are away dates, so we'll be in Saugerties on June 1st. We're playing at the Meredith Dairy Fest the following weekend, we'll go down to Kingston, we're actually playing at the Aerodrome against the Guards [third week of June], and we'll be at Bovina and Fleischmanns later in July. We're trying to get down to Long Island for a Doc Adams festival, we mentioned that historical figure, in early August, and then we kind of take a break. August is a tough time to corral the Polecats, but we'll be back around for the Cowtown Scramble in October.

[00:19:00] Brett Barry: Check out our show notes for links to the Polecats Vintage Base Ball Club and to Hamden Bicentennial events and information. More at hamden1825.org. Kaatscast is a production of Silver Hollow Audio with a complete episode archive at kaatscast.com, where you can sign up for our newsletter, buy a Kaatscast T-shirt, or leave us a voice message. Speaking of which, here's some listener feedback that came through about our recent episode on bobcats and bird flu with scientists from Cornell University.

[00:19:38] [Kaatscast Listener]: That was probably the best podcast that you've done, and it was definitely my favorite. The information that they provided was fascinating. The questions that you asked were great questions. They had answers to all the questions, even if their answers were, well, we're studying that, but we don't, we're not really sure. A++++: Amazing podcast, really, really good! Loved it! Highly recommend! Will probably make sure that my kids listen to it. I already sent it to a buddy of mine who's a hunter/trapper/has a bobcat on his own trail cam at his own house—really good stuff, well done!

[00:20:25] Brett Barry: If you've got some feedback for the show, we'd love to hear it, especially the effusive variety. Just go to kaatscast.com/voicemail and start recording. I'm Brett Barry. Thanks for listening, and we'll catch you next time.

[00:20:49] [vintage base ball practice]: "Andrews ... home!"

Transcribed by Jerome Kazlauskas