The Hay Ball
Pushball, invented in the 1890s by Moses G. Crane of Newton, Massachusetts, was played with a ball six feet across. The Public Domain Review's piece on it draws on Spalding's Push Ball guide of 1903. I read the guide on the Internet Archive and put the two side by side. Most of it matches. Two sentences do not.
The goal, to scale
The rules in the guide: posts 18 feet high and 20 feet apart, a cross bar 7 feet up, a ball 6 feet across weighing 48 to 50 pounds. Push it under the bar for 5 points; lift or throw it over for 8. With a 6-foot ball and a 7-foot bar, "over" means getting the bottom of the ball above 7 feet, so its middle has to be at least 10 feet up. Hence the photographs of teams lifting it over their heads.
Sentence by sentence
What the hay ball actually was
For Thanksgiving Day, 27 November 1902, W. Carsey of Equitable Park in New York advertised a pushball match before he had a ball. The guide tells the rest. He sent a man to buy a bale of hay, because "a bale of hay struck Carsey as being about the size of a push ball, and that it certainly would be heavy enough". A nearby shoemaker sewed it into canvas, "not a perfect sphere, by any means". At six feet across it would not go through a door, so it spent the night on the field, and it rained. The teams then pushed what "struck them as weighing nearly 500 pounds", the match was called a draw after one half, and the guide notes that it "could hardly be considered a success from a spectacular point of view".
The guide gives no weight for it, dry or wet. The fifty pounds in the story belongs to the official ball the hay was standing in for.
What stands on what
| Text | Source |
|---|---|
| All guide quotations, the rules and goal sizes, the 1894 ball, Equitable Park | Push Ball: History and Description of the Game, with the Official Playing Rules (Spalding's Athletic Library, American Sports Publishing Co., 1903), Internet Archive item pushballhistoryd00newy; the 1907 edition (pushballhistoryd01newy) repeats the story word for word |
| The PDR's sentences | The Public Domain Review, "‘Plaything of the Gods’: Photographs of Pushball (early 1900s)" |
| The 10-foot centre for an 8-point goal | My arithmetic: 7-foot bar plus half of a 6-foot ball |
The guide is a Spalding publication, and Spalding sold the official ball. Its story about a promoter who made his own is not neutral either.