Baseball has been the national pastime in the United States since the middle of the 1800s. Each period has had a unique flavor, and it is sometimes useful to read about a period from the perspective of the time in which it took place. The following comes from "Spalding's Baseball Guide and Official League Book for 1889," written in that same year; the language has not been edited to reflect modern expressions or word usage.
THE JOINT RULES COMMITTEE AND THEIR WORK.
The work accomplished by the Joint Rules Committee of the National League and the @American Association at their meeting in New @York in November, 1888, ranks with the best on record in the revision of the playing rules of the game, and the successful results achieved in improving the code were largely due to the marked efficiency evinced by the chairman of the Committee, Mr. @Chas. H. @Byrne, the president of the @Brooklyn Club, who was indefatigable in doing the large amount of revisory work which was thrown upon the committee. In the face of a very noisy and sensational demand for radical changes in the rules governing the game, the committee, as a whole, manifested a wise conservatism in several respects, which cannot help but be of material assistance in advancing the welfare of the game at large. In the first place, by reducing the powers of the attack nearer to an equality with those of the defense -- which result was accomplished when they reduced the number of called balls from five to four -- they not only adopted a rule which will moderate the dangerous speed in delivering the ball to the bat, but they thereby afforded the batsman an additional chance for more effective work at the bat. This latter point, too, has been aided by reducing the number of outs the batsman has hitherto been unfairly subjected to.
