Though the exchanging of these “silk badges” was commonplace for a decade after the Civil War, surprisingly little was written about the practice. In 1902, Clarence Deming, a former baseball player at Yale University from 1869 to 1872, recalled these ribbons and their special meaning as he reminisced about baseball’s bygone era:
One or two of the customs of the old game were unique. Such for instance was the habit of the better class of clubs of exchanging, just before each match, silk badges imprinted with the club name. The players wore these accumulated trophies pinned upon the breast, sometimes with startling color effects; and the baseball man was proud, indeed, who could pin on the outside of his deep strata of badges a ribbon from the mighty Atlantics, Mutuals, or Eckfords, attesting his worth for meeting giants, if not mastering them.
One-time Princeton University second baseman George Ward remembered the use of the ribbons while recounting the origin of the school’s colors:
[The class of 1869] approved the idea of orange for a class color; for in 1868, when we went to Yale to play our '69 class game, we carried along badges of orange ribbon with "'69 B.B.C." printed upon them. ... The 'orange and black' originated with the class of '69,—the color of the ribbon, orange; the word 'Princeton' printed thereon in black ink.
Silk ribbons were also created for non-baseball purposes during the mid-19th century, as political, theatrical and fraternal organizations often had colorful badges produced as giveaways. But, at the time, the ribbons were apparently most associated with ballplayers. In The Pine and the Palm Greeting, author N.J. Watkins tells of an amusing case of mistaken identity as a group of southern newspaperman headed north by train:
At Harrisburg, a number of the party having on their linen traveling caps and red ribbon badges, alighted to refresh themselves and were mistaken by sundry sports hanging about the platform, for a base-ball club, and were challenged for a match with the picked nine of that city. The challenge was accepted and preliminaries arranged, but before all of their champions could be notified, (for which purpose the aforesaid sports hurried away) the cars whistled and we were gone.
Very few of these baseball ribbons exist today, but a stunning collection of about 70 such silks resides at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Even more astounding is the provenance of these ribbons, as they came from the personal collection of one of the greatest players of baseball’s early amateur era: Hall of Famer George Wright. The majority of these ribbons date from Wright’s seasons with the National Club of Washington D.C. (1867), the Unions of Morrisania (1868) and the Cincinnati Red Stockings (1869 and 1870).