Given that humanity has been playing bat-and-ball games, or least sticks ‘n’ skulls, going back to the first time we dropped from the trees, there is no real “time before baseball.” There is, however, a time before organized baseball, an effort to collect disparate clubs from throughout the land, confine them to a single league with uniform rules, and play an ordered season with the aim of crowning a champion… and make a little money on the side.

What we’ve seen in the World Series, a collision of far-flung teams from Milwaukee and St. Petersburg, is the culmination of an effort that began in 1871 with the first season run under the banner of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. That circuit contained teams with semi-familiar names like the Philadelphia Athletics, Boston Red Stockings, and Chicago White Stockings, as well as two different teams named “Forest Citys” (Rockford and Cleveland), and the Fort Wayne Kekiongas, named for a now-vanished civilization.

That last was intended as a joke, but in actuality “the Kekiongas” was an evocation of a vanished civilization: It referred to a major settlement of the Native American Miami tribe. It isn’t there anymore and the modern-day descendants of its residents now dwell in Oklahoma. Thus the ballclub was engaged in a bit of post-ethnic-cleansing appropriation, and aren’t you sorry you asked?

The 1871 season was a random number of games long, approximating 30 (the Kekiongas sputtered out after 19 games, which was appropriate). Although the original Athletics and Stockings of various hues were not directly related to the later American League teams that bore their names, they did represent the top three teams in the league, with the A’s taking the pennant with a 21-7 record. New York’s entry, the Mutuals, was disappointing, something that’s more consistent with our own experience. Boston had the best player in baseball, second baseman Ross Barnes. He hit .401 and scored a league-leading 66 runs in 31 games. He went on to win Association batting titles in 1872 and 1873, hitting .430 and .431 (respectively). When the Association was replaced by the National League in 1876, he joined the Cubs (as we now refer to the White Stockings) and won the new circuit’s batting title with a .429 average. He also led in on-base percentage (.462) and slugging percentage (.590), as well as in runs, hits, doubles, triples, and walks. He was 26 and his career was over.

No, he didn’t die, at least not then, but the NL damaged him and then the times themselves finished him. Barnes was a master of the foul-fair bunt, a technique in which the bunting batter put a great deal of spin on the (lightly tossed) ball, causing it to hit fair but then make a sharp turn and go foul, bounding away into Oakland Coliseum-like expanses of foul territory (read: the Great Plains). The batter could run from the Earth to the moon before fielders could recover the ball. The NL added the rule that says a ball must stay fair as far as third base, putting paid to that tactic.