The Town of Gorham, in cooperation with the Consulate General of Japan in Boston, is sponsoring an invitational youth baseball tournament at the Little Falls Recreation Area, which will take place beginning Saturday, Aug. 15, and continuing until Friday, Aug. 21.
The games of the double elimination event will be played at the Horace S. Wilson Field. The dual purposes of the tournament are to honor the ongoing baseball legacy of Horace S. Wilson, and to help strengthen cultural ties between the Town of Gorham and the people of Japan.
A number of Maine Little League District six teams are scheduled to compete, including teams from Gorham, Scarborough, Bonny Eagle, South Portland, Gray/New Gloucester, and Cumberland/North Yarmouth. Before the first game, there will be a ribbon-cutting ceremony in honor of Horace S. Wilson. It will include an official from the Japanese Consulate.
As an added bonus, on Sunday Aug. 23, all participating tournament players will be honored during the Portland Seadogs game at Hadlock Field, as part of the Seadogs’ Japan Day events. Local descendants of Wilson’s Gorham family are scheduled to take part, including Theo Balcomb, who will throw out the first pitch.
Horace S. Wilson (1843-1927) was a native of the White Rock section of Gorham and a Civil War veteran. He is widely credited with introducing the sport of baseball to the Japanese people in 1872, while he was teaching English at a government academy near Tokyo.
According to Wikipedia, around 1870 Wilson was hired by the Japanese government as an advisor on modernizing the Japanese educational system. He traveled to Tokyo, and became a professor at the Kaisei Academy, which later evolved into Tokyo Imperial University.
In 1872, Wilson decided to introduce baseball to the academy’s students, as a way of encouraging them to become more physically active. Wilson taught his students the rules, positional skills, and procedures of the game, as well as procuring some equipment. He is credited with organizing the first baseball game ever played by a team of Japanese players, which was a seven-inning game between a team of Japanese students and a team of foreign instructors.
Today, baseball is Japan’s most popular sport. Seven million Japanese people play baseball in some format, including players in many youth leagues, several minor leagues, and two major leagues. Wilson was posthumously elected to membership in the Japanese Baseball Hall of Fame by a special committee in 2003. His legacy is still honored in many ways by Japanese baseball fans and players.
Wilson returned to the United States in 1877. He spent the next fifty years residing in the San Francisco area, which is where he died in 1927. He served for a time as a San Francisco city supervisor.