Tombstone Nine
The Tombstone Nine, based in Tombstone, Arizona, played town ball in the Arizona Territory from 1882 into the 1890s, and on May 10, 1890, the Tombstone Epitaph announced that the club had won the territorial championship by taking every game of a series against Tucson. Tombstone never had a nickname in the modern sense. Like most clubs of the period it was simply the Tombstone nine, which is how the Epitaph reported it and how this design carries it.
Baseball reached the silver camp fast. Tucson's club sent Tombstone a challenge in February 1881, and a club from the Vizina mine was playing by the Fourth of July that year. In January 1882 Percy Thompson organized two local nines, the True Blues and the Nuggets, and the True Blues took the first recorded game 29 to 26, according to historian Lori Underhill in the Journal of Arizona History. By March players were practicing daily on a lot at Third and Safford streets, and on April 26, 1882, a formal Tombstone Base Ball Club was organized.
The man behind it was Endicott Peabody, a 24-year-old Episcopal minister who arrived from Boston in January 1882, about two months after the gunfight near the O.K. Corral. The Epitaph welcomed him with the line that "when it comes to baseball, he's a daisy." He captained games, served as the association's treasurer, and personally leveled the playing field. Peabody left after six months, went home to found Groton School in 1884, and later counted a young Franklin Roosevelt among his students.
The diamond itself was built by Nellie Cashman, the Irish-born entrepreneur and philanthropist remembered as the Angel of Tombstone, on the infield of the Doling Driving Park racetrack half a mile north of town. Tombstone played there from 1882 until 1929, according to city historian Don Taylor. The best-documented early game came in December 1882 at Doling's park, when Tucson arrived with Mast, a professional pitcher imported from California. The umpire declared all bets off before the first pitch, Tucson won, and Tombstone captain P. Corpstein hit the day's only home run. The home nine settled the account in 1890.
In the 1800s and first half of the 1900s, teams existed in thousands of small towns across the United States, as Americans looked for recreational activities and entertainment in the era before TV. Tombstone's run from 1882 to 1929 predates professional baseball in Arizona entirely; the state's first pro circuit did not arrive until 1915.
