Play Ball! The First Game of Professional Baseball, 1871
On May 4, 1871, the Fort Wayne Kekiongas beat Cleveland 2-0 in the first game of the first all-professional baseball league — before a few hundred shivering fans.
The weather was threatening, the crowd was thin, and foul balls kept splashing into the river — where somebody had to fish them out so the game could go on with a single soggy ball. It was not an auspicious start. But on the afternoon of May 4, 1871, in Fort Wayne, Indiana, the first pitch of the first professional baseball league was thrown, and the modern game began.
Professional teams already existed — the famous Cincinnati Red Stockings had toured the country unbeaten in 1869 — but there had never been an all-professional league. That changed in March 1871, when club owners formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Opening Day was set for May 4, with two games scheduled. The Boston Red Stockings' game against Washington was rained out. So the honor of the first game fell to two long-shot clubs meeting in Fort Wayne: the hometown Kekiongas and the visiting Forest Citys of Cleveland.
The Kekionga Base Ball Grounds sat at Camp Allen, a former Civil War staging area across the St. Marys River from town. Even the home crowd didn't expect much — one local reporter admitted afterward that "our citizens had been of the opinion that our boys would be badly beaten." The threatening sky held attendance to somewhere between 200 and 500 souls. (The club's very name came from the Miami language: Kekionga means "blackberry patch.")
What those few hundred fans saw was a pitcher's duel. Fort Wayne's Bobby Mathews threw a complete-game shutout, and the game turned in the second inning, when catcher Bill Lennon scored on Joe McDermott's single — the first run, and the first run batted in, in professional league history. The final was Fort Wayne 2, Cleveland 0. The record book filled up fast that afternoon: Cleveland's Deacon White, a future Hall of Famer, led off the game with a double — the first hit; Mathews recorded the first strikeout; and somewhere in the box score sit the first stolen base, the first walk, and the first error.
The Kekiongas would last exactly one major-league season, finishing 13–18 before folding into baseball's footnotes. But the league they helped launch endured, evolving within five years into the National League — the oldest professional sports league in America still playing today.
Why it matters: every Opening Day, every World Series, every kid's first trip to the ballpark traces back to that damp Thursday in Fort Wayne. Great things don't need grand stages — sometimes they just need a field, a ball, and somebody willing to play through the weather.
Illustration: Currier & Ives, CC0 via the Metropolitan Museum of Art (via Wikimedia Commons). (An 1866 print of a championship baseball game at the Elysian Fields, Hoboken — the ballpark scene of the era.)
