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Peekskill Museum Treasurer Bob Mayer retired from the banking industry in 2005. Since then, he has carefully researched the history of baseball in the Hudson Valley and the men who played it. When I retired I started looking into some items in my baseball collection and that kind of got me into this, Mayer said. Id take an old photograph and Id start researching the team or the players and sometimes a story comes out of it. Recently Mayer, who lives in nearby Putnam Valley, spent a Saturday morning entertaining a full house at the museum talking about the areas rich baseball history. According to Mayer, organized baseball in the area started in Orange County in 1856 with a team called The Newburghs. Poughkeepsie had a team in 1859. Vassar College even had a womens team, possibly the second in the entire country, in 1866 until it was decided that it was too unladylike. Mayer has traced much of the history from game balls stored at the Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The challenging team had to provide the baseball, Mayer said. There was only one baseball used for games, unlike today, and the winning team got to keep the baseball. What they would do is paint it and put down the date, the opponent and the score and put it on display in their clubhouse Mayer showed pictures of balls from teams with names including the Goshen Monitors, The Hudson Rivers of Newburgh, the Walkills of Middletown and the Monroe Baseball Club dating back to the 1860s. Baseball in Peekskill goes back to the mid-1860s. The Liberty Club was the first Peekskill Military Academy team in 1864. The first game Mayer has found records of pitted the Liberty Club against a team called the Continentals, with the Liberty winning 78-24. Remember, at the time, the pitchers role was to put the ball in there so the batter could hit it, nobody was trying to get anybody out here, Mayer said. It was a hitters game. In May of 1868, the Mohegan Club, another nearby military academy team, beat the Liberty 26-25. Four months later an unnamed club defeated the Union Baseball Club of Sing Sing. At the time, that was the village, not the prison, Mayer said. They didnt change their name officially until 1901 to differentiate products put together in the town from products put together at the prison. On July 6, 1870 the Westchesters of Peekskill and the Adelphi of Nyack, the earliest area black clubs Mayer has found, played in Haverstraw. The Westchesters were winning 47-9 when the game was called after three innings. On August 20, 1870 the powerhouse Troy Haymakers clobbered the Peekskill Dunderbergs (named for the nearby mountain) 81-1. In the early 1900s, Peekskill had teams fielded by a carpenters union, the Elks Club and the Hat Factory. There was also a fire department league as early as the 1890s. Peekskill joined the Hudson River League in 1888 but the league folded a month later. They would be part of the league again when it restarted in 1903. An outfielder on the team from Newburgh who went by the nickname Peekskill Pete Cregan went on play with the New York Giants and Cincinnati Reds. Peekskill is also erroneously featured in the 1992 WWII womens baseball film A League of Their Own, where Madonnas character is seen wearing a softball jersey with the name Peekskill Park. However, Mayer said the city never had such a team and that the movies writers should have done a little more research. They should have gone up the river 60 miles further and the jersey should have said Kingston Park on it, Mayer said.
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