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I've often wondered how the bullpen became the "bullpen." I decided to look into it. A quick google search provided 2 common themes for the origin of the term bullpen. The first being it came from Bull Durham tobacco ads that were always placed near the area where pitchers warmed up. The second was from the long roped corridor at ballparks, such as Wrigley, where the fans were ushered through to the the outfield stands, next to the pitchers warming up. Hal Lebovitz, a baseball history expert and sports editor of the Cleveland Plain Dealer, went with the former, explaining the Bull Durham ads prominently featured a bull in the billboard space in the warmup pen. I went back and looked at newspapers from 1890 to the 1930s to see if I could find any references to the origin of the "bullpen." In the 1890 Atlanta Constitution, there was an article about the origin of baseball and it mentioned the old English game of rounders and games called two-old cat, three-old cat (in another article I found a four-old cat as well), townball and a game called bullpen (which another article I came across describes it as an early version of dodgeball.) It would seem that baseball rose out of the game of townball, which rose out of the game rounders. The writer complains that townball was a better game than the current, popular game of baseball. The 1925 Philadelphia Inquirer has the only article I could find that gives a different reason for the calling the pitchers' warmup area the bullpen. It says that nobody knows exactly why it's called the bullpen, but that it probably came to be after a great strike of the miners out West during which bull pens were built to house strike-breakers. All very interesting but no definitive answer to a question wondered by many throughout the years.
