While many know of the Pottsville Maroons, the city's championship football team, many may not know about the county's baseball roots.
During an open forum Saturday night at the Historical Society of Schuylkill County in Pottsville, historian and author J. Stuart "Stu" Richards, Orwigsburg, local baseball historian Robert McDonald, a native of Pottsville's Bunker Hill section who now resides in Millersburg, and Wes Schwenk, Pottsville, a historical society volunteer, hosted an evening remembering the teams and players of the past, and the games they played.
The event began with a brief history of old-time baseball in the county.
Richards, who said he's most familiar with the 1870s to the 1890s, said that they looked through all the journals and chronicles of the Shenandoah newspaper trying to find when baseball started in Schuylkill County and found the county was a big cricket playing area from the 1840s to the 1860s.
The game is now played particularly in Australia, New Zealand, the Indian subcontinent, the West Indies, Southern Africa and England.
"Our first actual (baseball) game is in '65, but we don't know if it was (teams) from Schuylkill County or not," Richards said. "But the umpire was from Schuylkill Haven."
According to Richards, Pottsville's first baseball team formed in 1866, going only by the team name of Pottsville, and played the first game in the county, a matched game against Tremont, June 19, 1866.
The game was played at a field in the area of Schuylkill Haven now known as "The Island."
Playing nine innings, Pottsville won, 115-5.
"That was a heck of a baseball game, that's all I've got to say," Richards said. "It must have been like one of our Little League games with everybody stealing bases."
From that point on, there were no actual teams until about 1869 when teams began forming all over the county, including Port Carbon and Buck Run.
Telling about when the games were reported in the newspaper at this time, Richards said reporters didn't care much for statistics, such as hits or runs, but described the entire game, talking about who could pitch, catch or hit and how the fans reacted, which were called "cranks" at that time.
"The reporters, what I love from this era, if you stank, they wrote it up," he said. "He hit a splitter between short and third or he hit a gaper between second and first or a daisy cutter."
A daisy cutter is an old-fashioned term for a hard-hit ground ball, close enough to the grass to theoretically be able to lop the tops off any daisies that might be growing on the field.
Later, the men talked about the professional teams in Schuylkill County.
The Pottsville Anthracites came along in 1881 because the county wanted a major league baseball team, Richards said.
Playing from 1881 until 1884 when the team died out, they played the major league teams across the country in exhibition games.
"The Anthracites went on to play all these teams, I mean we beat the Brooklyn Atlantics, Pittsburgh Alleghenys, Cincinnati Reds and also got killed by the Philadelphia team twice, but they were friendly," he said. "They took them (Philadelphia) down to see a coal mine before they played."
After the team "died out," the county went back to local baseball playing.
With Pottsville in dire straights of getting a new major league baseball team, in 1893, the Pottsville Colts were eventually formed.
The team was in an interstate league that would be similar to a AAA baseball league today.
"That was the last big actual major league team that we had here in the county that did anything good," Richards said.
The county also had roughly 40 residents who have played professional baseball.
They include Christopher Fulmer, born in Tamaqua in 1858, who played catcher and outfielder for the Washington Nationals for one season and four seasons with Baltimore; Jake Daubert, born in Llewellyn in 1885, who's considered one of the greatest first basemen of all time, leading the National League in batting in 1913 and 1914 when he played for Brooklyn, and who was also captain of the World Champion Cincinnati Reds in 1919; and Lance Rautzhan, born in Pottsville in 1952, who played in the 1977 and 1978 World Series with the Los Angeles Dodgers.