BISBEE — Warren Ballpark is the oldest ballpark in the United States. But it’s not even old enough to have seen the likes of what was on display on its grounds Saturday afternoon.

It’s hard to understand how different the game of “base ball” — written then as two words — was during the second half of the 19th Century compared to what modern fans know today. The Bisbee Bees and the Phoenix Senators played an afternoon doubleheader at the historic ballpark, the first game with 1860s rules and the second wtih 1880s rules, but they were playing a “gentleman’s game.”

The No. 1 rule: The umpire rules the show, and he will be addressed as “sir.”

“This is how it was done back then,” said Skip Moore, one of the umpires on Saturday. “It’s the way baseball and softball should be.”

Moore has been a certified umpire for the past 20 years, and a member of the Tombstone Vigilantes for the past 21 years.

“As an umpire, I don’t like arguing, and kids learn bad traits from it,” he said. “It’s our job to let them play within the confines of the rules and have fun. This (vintage) game allows them to do that.”

The fun and purity of it is also what keeps players on the vintage teams coming back every week to play a game with drastically different rules and equipment than most of them grew up with.

It was a time when the “hurler” never had too much gas on a pitch, and the “striker” was using a pretty heavy bat to hit a rather squishy ball. Foul balls were not counted as strikes, fielders’ gloves were much thinner, and forget about the infield fly rule.

When a runner crossed the plate, he was required to report to the tally master, raise his right hand, swearing he scored a run, and ring the cow bell, or he’d forfeit the run.

“We’re people who love baseball, playing how it was originally played,” said Jeremy “The Hammer” Gerber, who has been with the Bees for two years.

In the 1860s, a batter was out if a fielder caught a hit on one hop, giving fielders much of the game’s advantage and making for quick games. Twenty years later, that rule vanished, and hitters also had the advantage of a more solid ball to put into play, but the fielders’ gloves hadn’t evolved with more padding. The pitcher also switched from throwing underhand to overhand.

The vintage teams out of Phoenix are used to playing on softball fields, so legging out the 90-foot base lines was trying for a few of the players on Saturday, but Gerber said playing on the field where the original Bisbee Bees thrived in the late 1920s was a neat experience.

In the stands, several members of the Vigilantes, dressed in period garb, jeered players and umpires, and a few of them were “fined” 25 cents for their choice words.

Almost everyone in the crowd cheered for the “hometown” Bees. But one family, with the women dressed in skirts and hats and an older man dressed in a suit jacket with a bottle of bootleg whiskey in the pocket, was there for the Senators.

Nancy Busch, her husband Mahlon Busch and their daughter-in-law Shelby Busch were at the game to support Nancy’s son, Lance Busch, and grandson, Zalek Linker. The father-son duo was the battery for the day’s second game, with Zalek behind the plate and Lance on the mound.

“(Zalek) plays high school and travel ball,” Shelby said. “And my husband plays, but them getting to play together is rare, and vintage baseball allows that to happen.”

The family members decided the night before the game to dress up, and pulled it off well enough to give the Vigilantes a good clan to banter with. Nancy made a lot of noise with her cane — worn on the handle from years attending Raiders game with her daughter — which she knocked on the bleacher every time the Senators started to rally for a few runs.

The Bees didn’t give much of a showing in the first game, falling 6-1, but the team came back to win in the second game with the later rules 8-6.