According to David Stameshkin, “A baseball craze swept the state after the [Civil] war, and the college men often organized a ‘nine’ in the 1860s and 1870s to compete with the other teams from western Vermont. Intramural games between classes were not uncommon” (172).

In 1881, students organized a baseball team and played their first intercollegiate schedule, which was limited to two games that year. In 1884, Middlebury students formalized the College’s  intercollegiate baseball team and defeated the University of Vermont twice that year. In 1886, Middlebury joined the University of Vermont and Norwich University to form the short-lived Vermont Intercollegiate League.  In League play, Middlebury defeated Norwich but lost to UVM.  In subsequent years, Middlebury added Hamilton, Colgate, and Union Colleges to its list of rivals.  Middlebury’s 1894 team was especially strong, losing only one contest, and that to a visiting African-American team called the Cuban Giants. In addition to intercollegiate play, baseball was a focus of interclass rivalry in the late nineteenth century.  Baseball’s early popularity at Middlebury reflected national enthusiasm for the sport. Only as the turn of the twentieth century approached did football begin to eclipse baseball in popularity.   (Middlebury Kaleidescope, 1900, p. 156)

In the 1910s, the college’s first baseball diamond was built on Porter Field Road.  Prior to that time, baseball shared the athletic field west of Old Chapel Road with the football and track teams.

The following poem, published in the 1891 Kaleidescope, illustrates male students’ passion for baseball in the late nineteenth century: