Badger Spirit

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Early Years
Wisconsin students played their first intercollegiate baseball game on April 30, 1870, defeating a local team, 53-18. This was the era of no gloves or masks and pitchers delivering the ball where batters wanted it -- high, medium or low. The team won four of five games played and had mostly attorneys on the squad. It was not until the 1880s when players began to use gloves and pitchers threw overhand in an effort to get batters out. That was also when Wisconsin joined the Western College Base Ball League, winning championships 1884-1888 and in 1890 and 1892,  The 1891 team could also be credited with a league title because they lost to Northwestern when the manager used a pitcher with professional experience. Records show that Northwestern was not credited with any of its victories but Wisconsin was not officially awarded the title, either.

Big Ten baseball began when seven schools met in Chicago in January 1895 to form the Western Conference. Wisconsin was among the teams and UW president Charles Kendall Adams chaired the meeting which dealt mostly with cleaning up the violence in college football and establishing rules of eligibility for intercollegiate athletes who had to complete one year of study to become eligible and could not participate in professional athletics of any kind prior to graduation. Wisconsin finished last in its first Big Ten baseball season, then hired Phil King of Princeton to coach the football and baseball teams. The gridders stampeded through the rest of the league in the fall of 1896 and King led the baseball team to a third-place finish in 1897. By the end of the century, controversy over professionalism resulted in the baseball team being blackballed out of the Big Ten and disbanding after the 1899 season.

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