There’s something delightfully hardcore in the earliest key example of a professional baseball game played under protest.
In Game 2 of the 1885 World Series—before it was really the World Series, before there was even an American League, but still, in its early form, the World Series—down by one run in the sixth inning, Charles Comiskey’s St. Louis Browns felt that the umpire made an unfair call against them. So Comiskey threatened to simply pull his men off the field. They weren’t going to play, not like this, not under this ump making these calls. It worked. The call was reversed, and the game went on … until the ninth, which saw another bad call against the Browns.