Green-Wood’s requiem to baseball’s beginnings
Just as Major League Baseball opened its parks to fans across the nation to start the 2018 season, Green-Wood Cemetery also opened its gates for its annual “Baseball Greats of Green-Wood” tour hosted by Brooklyn Baseball Historian Tom Gilbert.
Stopping at the gravesites of Henry Chadwick, the Father of baseball, Jim Creighton, baseball’s first star and Charlie Ebbets, the innovative Dodgers owner, Gilbert explained these pioneers’ early contributions to the game as we know it today.
According to Gilbert, as an alternative to cricket the game of “base ball” involving a bat, ball and bases was played with a lot of variations throughout an emerging America; first by children in the 1820s and then by adults during the 1840s.