Hi Chris and Leon -- very cool item. As for "base ball" as two words: based on our experience with tabletop baseball games and baseball advertising, we'd say "base ball" as two words was the overwhelmingly popular usage until about the turn of the (last) century (although you do occasionally see it as one word prior to that time), and still the favorite (but interchangeable as Leon suggests) into the early 1920s. A third variation, seen fairly often, is "base-ball," hyphenated, from roughly the 1880s up 'til around WWI. Sometime in the late 1920s "baseball" as one word gradually became the slightly more popular usage, but two words remained in fairly frequent if diminishing use through the 1930s. The single-word style seems to have become pretty much standard by about 1930, though, but you still find "base ball" even in the 1940s and, if rarely, into the 1950s. There are examples of the two-word usage from even as recently as the late '60s, but this is usually on cheap products imported from Japan and Hong Kong.
|