Last year, Wyandotte’s vintage baseball team, the Wyandotte Stars, lost in their annual Home Classic against the Detroit Early Risers. This year, though, the teams face off again at the same time, same place and same weekend, but Wyandotte Stars’ Zac Holdren is hoping the results will be a little bit different this year.
“We’re hoping to give them a little more friendly competitions and maybe Wyandotte will come out on top this year,” he said.
The Wyandotte Historical Museum is sponsoring the 18th annual Home Classic, which takes place at 1 p.m. on Aug. 23 at Memorial Park in Wyandotte. The event is free to attend and snacks will be available for purchase.
Wyandotte Stars is a vintage baseball team in Wyandotte. (Submitted / MediaNews Group)
The team plays practices at 6 p.m. every Wednesday at Memorial Park from April through the end of September, and Holdren said anyone is welcome to come out and practice the game with them.
Holdren is the acting field captain and baseball coordinator for the Wyandotte Stars, a team that played games as far back at 1867. In fact, there’s a journal entry and a scorecard from one of the team’s first games that sits in the Bacon Memorial District Library in Wyandotte.
Then, as the rules of baseball changed, the Wyandotte Stars kept theirs the same and continued to preserve history and play ball.
The Wyandotte Stars are hosting their Annual Home Classic game on Aug. 23.
Some of the main differences between regular baseball and vintage baseball include the throw (vintage is underhand), the lack of baseball gloves and the uniforms.
Because of the underhand throw and nature of vintage baseball, scores from games in the late 1800s and early 1900s were historically much higher than at a modern baseball game.
The uniforms are historically accurate to what baseball uniforms looked like in the late 1800s/early 1900s, Holdren said. The Wyandotte Historical Museum did a lot of research with the player’s uniforms. On the shield, the team has Y & •, which was used for the Wyandotte High School rowing team in the early 1900s, Holdren added.