Baseball - A History of America's Game - Intro-Chapter Four
Baseball - A History of America's Game - Intro-Chapter Four
Baseball - A History of America's Game - Intro-Chapter Four
"It's our game," exclaimed poet Walt Whitman more than a century ago,
"that's the chief fact in connection with it: America's game." He went on to
explain that baseball "has the snap, go, fling of the American atmosphere-
belongs as much to our institutions, fits into them as significantly, as our
constitutions, laws: is just as important in the sum total of OUf historic
life." Perhaps Whitman exaggerated baseball's importance and congru-
ency with American life, but few would contend that the sport has been
merely a simple or occasional diversion. Indeed, if forced to make a choice,
most would side with Whitman. They would insist that baseball achieved
a special prominence and permanence in the United States that in some
respects makes its significance equivalent to that of business, politics,
religion, ethnicity, or race.
Until recently, those attempting to tell the story of how baseball be-
came so "important in the sum total of our historic life" focused almost
exclusively on the history of the game between the foul lines. That is,
rhey vividly-sometimes with nostalgia and often with more than a bit of
hyperbole-recounted the feats of the great players and the great teams.
In doing so they were not completely amiss. It would be foolish to ignore
the drama and the significance of what took place on the playing field,
of Harry Wright's Cincinnati Red Stockings, King Kelly, the Baltimore
Orioles of the I8905, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees,
Satchel Paige and Jackie Robinson, or Sammy Sosa, Mark McGwire, and
Barry Bonds.
...-------------------------
., ....."'"
2
INTRODUCTION
INTRODUCTION
3
But while recounting the exciting story of legendary players and teams
once put it, "the only game in town." Never before did the game occupy
I try to do more. I attempt to tell a broader story, one that identifiesthe
such a central place in American life. The entrepreneurs in charge of the
critical continuities and changes in the way the game was played and
representative nines in the larger cities established an entity that became
examines the creation and demise of team dynasties, the organizationof
known as organized baseball, which consisted of an elaborate hierarchy
baseball, the ethos of the game, and baseball's relationship to American
of major and minor professional leagues. They concocted an elaborate
society. This book might also be described as a history of baseball's culture
myth of the game's origins, erected great civic monuments in the form of
meaning the story of continuity and change in the game's rules, organiza- ballparks made of steel and concrete, and instituted an annual fall rite
tions, habits, customs, skills, and interactions with the larger society. known as the World Series. Led by Babe Ruth, the game propagated epic
The larger story of America's game begins in the 1840S with an exami- heroes whose dimensions of public involvement were equaled by few other
nation of a ball game anchored in the lives of young artisans and clerks, figures in American history, and Ruth's team, the New York Yankees,
They formed voluntary associations or clubs and described themselves became synonymous with success. In the front office, Branch Rickey, first
as members of a "base baJJ fraternity." This variety of basebaJJ has never of the St. Louis Cardinals and then of the Brooklyn Dodgers, not only
completely vanished; countless amateur and semiprofessional teamscon- brought to the baseball business a new rationality but also, with his role
tinued to playa version of it until the 1960s, and some of the rules and in breaking the "color ban" in 1946, contributed directly to a new era of
customs of the fraternity temain to this day. Even in the heyday of the American race relations.
fraternal era, however, a new basebaJJ culture emerged, one that was tied By midcenrury, there were other games in town. After 1950 America's
to the commercial opportunities presented by the sport. With commercial game confronted potent competition, not only from other professional
baseball in the 1860s and 1870S came professional players whose roles sports (especially football) but more importantly from a shift by Ameri-
resembled more the actors and actresses of the day than boys playing baJJ cans from public to private, at-home diversions. Attendance at all levels
on empty lots or a group of young shipbuilders gathering to play at their of baseball fell, minor league baseball became a shell of its former self,
clubhouses. and hundreds of semiprofessional and amateur teams folded. Professional
The growth of the professional game was inextricably linked with urban baseball responded to the crisis by planting additional major league teams
identities. Representative professional baseball teams exhibited a remark- in new population centers, building new stadiums, and trying to harness
able capacity for giving towns and cities deeper emotional identities; reams the new technological marvel of television. The empowerment of profes-
helped to define the particular character of an urban community, giving sional players in the last quarter of the twentieth century not only ended
citizens a sometimes glorious sense of place and sharply drawn collective their serflike relationship to the owners but also subtly altered the public's
memories. Baseball sometimes furnished a respite, albeit a short one, from perceptions of the athletes and the game. In the early twenty-first century,
grinding and unfulfilling work and from the social stresses and dislocations revelations of a massive drug scandal became a public relations nightmare
of urban life. At its best, baseball could even reduce antagonisms arising for major league baseball while, at the same time, the public response to
from class, religious, ethnic, and racial divisions. In a nation comprising a the crisis reflected the ambivalence of the American people.
multiplicity of ethnic, racial, and religious groups, one without a monarchy, An analysis of baseball's recent troubles, however, should not obscure the
an aristocracy, or a long, mystic past, the experience of playing, watching, game's continuing vitality and importance. Despite its limitations for con-
and talking about baseball games became one of the nation's great common veying the nuances of baseball, television has allowed many more people
denominators. In the perceptive words of British novelist Virginia Woolf, to see the game played at higher levels of excellence than ever before. In
it provided "a centre, a meeting place for the divers activities of a people the 1980s and early 1990S both big league and minor league attendance
whom a vast continent isolates [and] whom no tradition controls." No increased appreciably. In the late 1990S and early twenty-first century,
matter where you were, you pulled off the hit-and-run play, the double attendance at not only big league games, but also at college and minor
play, and the sacrifice bunt the same way in one town as in another. league games reached all-time highs. With baseball flourishing in the Carib-
In the first half of the twentieth century, baseball was, as Bill Veeck bean basin and Japan, baseball increasingly reflected the larger historical
4 INTRODUCTION
-
process of what scholars described as "globalization. Perhaps no signof
the game's durability has been more important than the soaring interest
in an alternative baseball culture represented in novels, poetry, nostalgic
movies, rotisserie basebaJl, "saberrnetrics," dozens of Web sites devoted
exclusively to the game, and the collection of baseball souvenirs. Now
college students can even take COurses in baseball history and literature.
In the opening decade of the twenty-first century, as in the past, base-
ball's grip on the American people rests to a large extent on its power to
evoke continuity. In the I850S, just as today, three strikes retired a hitter
and ninety feet separated the bases. Unique among American team games,
baseball presents itself to the fan in startling clarity; each player stands
alone on vast expanses of green, and the game's pace is slow enough to
permit the mind to collect sharply etched memories, each of which can
be analyzed repeatedly. Regardless of wars, economic catastrophes, natu-
ral disasters, or personal tragedies, t.he memories remain. In a world of
seething change and uncertainty, baseball continues to offer comfort and
reassurance; in this sense, it remains America's game.
q
I
The Fraternity
and Its Game
In 1858, three years before the first shots were fired in the nation's ter-
rible civil war, baseball excitement in the New York City area mounted
to a fever pitch. The occasion was a best-of-three-game series between
an all-star nine from Brooklyn and a team of New York City all-stars.
After lengthy, sometimes acrimonious negotiations, the teams selected as
the site for their series the Fashion Race Course, a popular Long Island
horse racing track that featured a magnificent new stone grandstand. To
get to the games, the fans crowded into carriages, omnibuses, and the
special trains of the Flushing Railroad. Admission cost fifty cents, a price
in those days equivalent to half a day's earnings for a common laborer.
Proceeds from the games went not to the players but to a fireman's fund
for widows and orphans. According to a press report, the spectators in-
cluded "a galaxy of youth and beauty in female form, who ... nerved
the players to their task." Perhaps feminine comeliness steeled the resolve
of the New Yorkers the most, for they won the first game, zz to 18. In
the second game the Brooklynites evened the series, winning 29 to 8, but
6 BASEBALL
THE FRATERNITY AND ITS GAME 7
then the New Yorkers tebounded to win the decisive third contest d for forming voluntary associations, As Thomas Altherr and David Block
. h ,an
h h arnprons
tee ip, 29 to 18.
have carefully documented, long before Abner Doubleday's alleged inven-
The all-stat series of 1858 was only one among many sparringspectacles tion of baseball at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839, men and boys in
that suddenly burst on the nation in the middle decades of the nineteenth the U.S. were playing a large variety of baseball-like games, During the
century. In the I840S and I8S0S, thousands of spectators gatheredat Revolutionary War, for example, the soldiers frequently relieved boredom
tracks in virtually every state in the Union to watch horse and footraces: by resorting to "playing ball" or "base." Early bat-and-ball games might
equal numbers thronged along the nation's harbor, lake, and riverbank; also be called "ball," "old cat," "barn ball," "town ball," "rounders,"
to observe boat races. Although a bare-knuckle prize fight rarelyattracted or even "base ball." Most of these games probably originated in England,
more than a few hundred fans (being illegal everywhere and oftensched- though we know that Native Americans played a variety of bat-and-ball
uled in remote places), literally tens of thousands heard oral accountsor games as well. While no written rules existed (or at least have survived)
read about them in the newspapers. Prior to 1845, only a few scattered for the earliest of these games, as early as 1767 an English children's book,
references exist of baseball games, but within fifteen years severalhundred A Little Pretty Pocket-Book, printed in London, contained engravings of
clubs had been formed, and more than ten thousand boys and youngmen scenes of boys playing games labeled as "stool-ball," "base-ball," and
played in club matches. "trap-ball. "
Two groups, each described by contemporaries as "fraternities,"were These early games required a ball, a stick with which ro hit the ball, and
of critical importance to the rise of organized sporrs in the r840s and one or more bases. The bases might be stones, articles of clothing, trees or
I 8 50S. One was known simply as the sporting fraternity, or "thefancy." shrubs, or stakes driven into the ground. The ball might be fabricated on
The fancy shared a love of sports, especially those games that provided the spot. One of the players might offer a woolen stocking to be unraveled
opportunities for drinking, wagering, and hearty male fellowship.Remain- and wound around a bullet or a cork. The cover might consist of stitched
ing mostly outside the mainstream of Victorian America, the sporting leather. No one probably worried about the distances between bases or the
fraternity offered antebellum men, in particular the younger, unmarried, number of players on each side. There was no umpire. The object of the
ethnic, working-class population, a sense of belonging and excitement, as game was to throw a ball so that it could be hit easily by the batsman.
well as a refuge from femininity, domesticity, and the demanding routines A decisive turning point in the emergence of the baseball fraternity came
of the new industrial economy. in 1842 and 1843 when a group of young clerks, storekeepers, professional
The other group, known as the ball-playing fraternity, came closer to men, brokers, and assorted "gentlemen" in New York City began playing
meeting Victorian standards of propriety, though the behavior of the ball a bat-and-ball game at the corner of 27th Street and Fourth Avenue in
players and their followers frequently made them also suspect to the guard- Manhattan. According to unverifiable baseball folklore, it was Alexander
ians of mid-nineteenth-century morality. The ball players organized volun- Joy Cartwright, a bank clerk and later a partner in a stationery shop, who
tary associations, or clubs, for the playing of baseball. Representatives of in I845 convinced the young men to form a club. They called their fledgling
the clubs wrote and revised the rules of play, appointed officials,scheduled organization the New York Knickerbocker Base Ball club, thereby identify-
matches, and in 1858 formed a national association, The hall-playing ing themselves with the hoary mystique of the area's original Dutch settlers.
fraterniry provided its informal membership with the direct excitement For a playing site, they rented a portion of the Elysian Fields in Hoboken,
of playing ball games and with the indirect benefits arising from male New Jersey, a "most picturesque and delightful" place surrounded by
camaraderie and exhibitions of manly physical skills. woods and with easy access to New York City via the Barclay Street ferry.
After a hard afternoon at play, the members regularly retreated to nearby
McCarty's Hotel bar, where they could regale one another with manly
talk and quench their thirst with spirituous drink. For a time, McCarty's
The baseball fraternity had its origins in the widespread popularity of may have also served as an informal clubhouse; at least it was there that
various sorts of bat-and-ball games and the special American penchant the Knickerbockers held their second annual meeting,
8 BASEBALL
Men got up in the wee hours of the morning to practice before going
to work; they spent their lunch hours playing catch; and after work, they
rushed to the ball fields for yet more play. "The streets in the vicinity of
our factories are now full at noon and evening of apprentices and others
engaged in the simpler games of ball," reported the Newark Daily Adver-
tiser in r860. Doubtless some young men sacrificed their future careers in
business or lost their jobs, all for the sake of the new game. Nothing, not
even the biting cold of winter or expressions of displeasure by employers,
seemed to chill their enthusiasm for baseball.
By the summer of r86r at least 200 junior and senior teams were playing
in Brooklyn, Queens, Manhattan, Westchester, and northern New Jersey.
These teams were of two sorts. One set of teams, usually composed of perry
merchants and clerks, organized social clubs such as the Knickerbockers.
Although they frequently had enough resources to rent a club room or a
clubhouse, they were nonetheless clearly less wealthy than the yachtsmen
of the era or the members of the athletic clubs that grew in popularity in
the r870s and r880s. The second kind of team arose from neighborhoods
and workplaces. Young men from a particular neighborhood or those
employed in a particular craft-shipwrights, butchers, firemen, post office
employees, printing trade workers, and harness makers, for example-
formed teams, some of which had no formal existence apart from the
playing field. Because the activities of the latter teams, unless they were
especially powerful, rarely appeared in the sporting sheets or the newspa-
pers of the day, and because they generated few if any surviving records,
we know far less about them than we do about the social clubs.
Even less information has survived about early African American base-
ball. Antebellum slavery in the South and low incomes among free blacks
in the North no doubt severely constricted the possibilities of forming
clubs. Nonetheless, after the Civil War, there is scattered evidence of blacks
organizing clubs in most of the larger cities. Apparently, the Pyrhians of
Philadelphia were the first all-black team. As early as r867, the Excelsiors
of Philadelphia and the Uniques of Brooklyn played a game hailed by the
press as the "colored championship of the United States." On their ar-
rival in Brooklyn, the Excelsiors, dressed in full uniform and headed by
THE FRATERNITY AND ITS GAME II
their colorful fife and drum corps, marched through the city's Streets to
the ballpark. A large crowd gathered for the contest. With the Excelsiors
ahead 42 to 37 after seven innings of play, the umpire called the game on
account of darkness. Led again by their fife and drum corps, the Excelsiors
and their supporters marched back to the East River, which they crossed
by ferry to New York City for their return trip by train to Philadelphia.
In the first recorded intercollegiate baseball contest, one played by the
rules of New England town ball rather than by those of New York, Am-
herst subdued Williams in r859 by a lopsided score of 73-32. Unlike
Williams, Amherst had trained carefully for the contest. According to a
Williams professor, Amherst took "the game from the region of sport and
carried it into the region of exact and laborious discipline." When the
Amherst students learned of the win, they rang the chapel bell, lit a huge
bonfire, and set off fireworks. The Monday following the game brought
equally exciting news to the Amherst students; they had also defeated
Williams at chess. Once more, "there was a universal ringing of bells,
and firing of cannons; and throats already hoarse shouted again amid the
general rejoicing." The Civil War temporarily set back the game on college
campuses, but in the war's wake college clubs formed in all parts of the
nation. It soon became the most widely played of all college Sports.
G G G
Despite the widespread enrhusiasm for baseball, not all men were equally
devoted to the new game. In the early days of its history, established or
would-be bankers, merchants, and industrialists had little use for baseball.
A few of them played within their own inner social circle or lent their
approval to the sport if it did not interfere with the work of their employ-
ees, but for the most part they saw ir as a waste of valuable time. "The
invariable question put to a young man applying for situations in New
York," reported the secretary of the Irvington, New Jersey, baseball club
in r867, "is, whether they are members of ball clubs. If they answer in
the affirmative, they are told that rheir services will not be needed." When
the wealthy engaged in or patronized sports, it was usually restricted to
such socially exclusive activities as yachting, horse racing, and (after the
Civil War) formal athletic clubs, polo, tennis, and golf. Because baseball
entailed modest costs to play, it was poorly suited for those who turned to
sports as a means of distinguishing themselves from the masses.
At the other end of rhe social spectrum, the casually employed, unskilled
I2 BASEBALL
____________ 4II1II
BASEBALL
Brooklyn, were almost as active on the dance 1100ras they had beenon the
playing field during the previous summer. They scheduled eight "invitation
hops" along with an annual ball.
Among the clubs, highly formal, even ritualized relationships belped
preserve the integrity of the early fraternity. The clubs carefully distin-
guished between "friendly games" or "social games," on the one hand,
and rnatches" or "match games," on the other. Arrangement of a match
II
game with another club's nine entailed a written chalJenge.If the chalJenge
was accepted, then the captains of the respective nines would agree on an
umpire and the press might be notified of the upcoming match. At the end
of the game, the losing captain would make a short speech congratulating
the winners and then present them with the game ball. The captain of the
winning team responded with a speech praising the losers. The game ball
was then inscribed with the date and score of the contest, wrapped in gold
foil, and usually retired to the winner's trophy case.
Throughout the r8 50Sand into the r860s, the host club provided visitors
with an elaborate evening meaJ. In r 858, for example, "the Excelsior Club
[of Brooklyn] was escorted to the Odd Fellows' Hall, Hoboken, by the
Knickerbocker Club, and entertained in a splendid style.... Dodworth's
Band was in attendance to enliven the scene." In the postgame gather-
ings, celebrations could become quite boisterous. A marked feature of the
festivities, according to a press report in 1858, was "the indulgence of a
prurient taste for indecent anecdotes and songs-a taste only to be grati-
fied at the expense of true dignity and self-respect." "Evidence of dawn's
appearance" occurred in Baltimore before the players finally calJed a hair
to a postgame eating and drinking binge in r860. Although the players
were advised to abstain from "spirituous liquors," they were told that "to
allay thirst and relieve exhaustion, lager-beer answers every reasonable
purpose." An extreme example of the effectiveness of postgame rituals in
promoting amity within the fraternity occurred in 1860. According to a
New York Clipper report, after having shared a keg of lager, the players
were unable to recall the score of a game that they had played earlier in
the day. Little wonder that the early basebalJ fraternity experienced dif-
ficulties in winning support among suspicious Victorians!
Nonetheless, the fraternity persisted in trying. As Porter's Spirit of the
Times, a weekly that was planted firmly in the fraternity's camp, put it in
r857, the ball player "must be sober and temperate. Patience, fortitude,
self-denial, order, obedience, and good-humor, with an unruffled temper,
are indispensable .... Such a game ... teaches a love of order, discipline,
THE FRATERNITY AND ITS GAME
and fair play." No one could have coined a more satisfactory list of Vic-
rorian virtues, all of which the game allegedly nurtured. Furthermore,
the defenders of the game insisted that, unlike other sports, only baseball
encouraged "manliness," or self-conrroi, the opposite of boyishness or
uninhibited behavior. For the sedentary clerks who had few opportunities
ro express their physicality in the workplace, the robustness of baseball
may have been particularly appealing. Consistent with the argument that
baseball was a manly game, widespread agitation arose within the frater-
nity in the r860s for requiring that the fielders catch the ball "on the fly"
rather than on the first bounce for a purour.
Play by boys, according to the Brooklyn Eagle, kept the youngsters
"out of a great deal of mischief .... [Baseball] keeps them from hang-
ing around [fire] engine houses, stables, and taverns." The game merited
"the endorsement of every clergyman in the country," concluded Henry
Chadwick, because it was a "remedy for the many evils resulting from the
immoral associations [that] boys and young men of our cities are apt ro
become connected with." Perhaps such arguments relieved the anxieties
of some, but they certainly failed ro still completely public suspicions of
the fraternity and its game.
G G G
In the I8 50S and I860s the "New York game," as the Knickerbockers' ver-
sion of the sport came to be known, completely displaced competing forms
of baseball. Part of the success of the New York game stemmed from its
rules. Both spectators and players preferred the use of foul lines, a unique
feature of the New York game that contained the play and allowed the
fans to get closer to the field. The "three outs to end an inning" rule of the
New York game permitted more offensive action than the "Massachusetts
game" of "one out, all our." Finally, by restricting the length of a game to
nine full innings (in 1857), the New York game usually ended within three
hours, whereas a contest played by Massachusetts rules (which required
the winning team to score a hundred runs) frequently failed to reach a
conclusion before nightfall. Cricker, for a time an effective competitor of
the New York game for popularity, was even slower; it sometimes took
two full days ro finish a match.
New York's pivotal position in the nation's commercial and communica-
tions network aided the city in achieving the triumph of its game. Visirors
to Gotham on business or pleasure observed the new game and sometimes
____________ 4
r6 BASEBALL
ing to baseball lore, a game berween two teams of New York volunteer
infantrymen at Hilton Head, South Carolina, attracted more than 40,000
soldiers. The attendance was probably exaggerated; without a grandstand
only a few thousand spectators could have seen much of the acrion. At
any rate, this exhibition of the New York game was said "to have lighted
the spark that caused" the postwar "baseball explosion." In the midst of
another game in Texas, the Confederates launched a surprise assault on
Union troops. Although the Northern soldiers repulsed the charge and
lost only their center fielder to the enemy, they also had the misfortune of
losing "the only baseball in Alexandria."
Veterans of both armies returned home after the war, bringing with
them the game that many had encountered for the first time in the camps.
Doubtless few Southerners saw the Sport as an antidote for their tradi-
tional "listlessness and love of indolent pleasures," as Northerner Henry
Chadwick did, but they did rake to the game's excitement. In the West,
antebellum Chicago had only four clubs, but by the second summer af-
ter the conflict had ended at least thirty-two clubs were playing in the
Windy City. Interest was sufficient in 1865 for the Chicago enthusiasts to
form rhe North Western Association of Base Ball Players, which included
clubs from as far away as St. Louis. By 1865 representation at the annual
convention of the NABBP had grown to include delegates from ninety-
one clubs located in ten states. Two years later the association elected its
first non-New Yorker, Arthur Pue Gorman from Washington, D.C., as
president and in 1868 held its first convention outside New York City (in
Philadelphia).
G I] G
Although baseba II in organized forms had existed only for two decades
or so, the basebalJ fraternity was able to make a convincing case by the
end of the Civil War that its game should be labeled as the national game.
The fraternity had a substantial affiliation in all the major cities of the
Northeast, with some representation in the cities of the Midwest and the
Far West, and was spreading rapidly into the smaller towns and cities
throughout the nation. No other organized American sport included so
many participants or attracted so many persons who avidly followed the
game as spectators. But at the very height of its apparent success, the fra-
ternity confronted forces that would soon threaten irs very existence.
2
A Commercial
Spectacle
In 1862, the same year that Alexander T. Stewart opened the nation's
first department store on Broadway and loth Street in Manhattan, an
enterprising Brooklynite, William H. Cammeyer, had a different idea for
improving his financial fortunes. Why not seize on the opportunities of-
fered by the city's baseball mania? By converting his ice-skating pond at
the corner of Lee Avenue and Rutledge Street into an enclosed field, he
could charge fans a fee to warch the games played there. Acting on this
thought, Cam meyer proceeded to drain his pond, fill it with dirt, level the
surface, and build a fence around the plot. To provide seating for some
1,500 spectators, Cammeyer nailed together long wooden benches. In one
corner of the field he built a "commodious" clubhouse for the teams, and
in another he erected a saloon to quench the thirst of fans. On opening
day, 15 May 1862, flags, including the American flag and the pennants
of local teams, hung loosely in the breeze, and a band played "The Star
G G G
Once a club scheduled its first match with another club, it set in motion the
process by which that club moved away from its fraternal origins. External
matches, on the whole, generated far greater excitement than intraclub
games. "It is weJJ known that where a lively, well contested and exciting
game is in progress," concluded the New York Clipper in 1860, "there
will ever be found crowds of interested spectators." The fans invariably
chose sides; their own identities then became emotionally linked to the suc-
cesses and failures of the teams for which they rooted. Byproviding urban
dwellers with richer identities, the teams helped satisfy deep yearnings for
belonging and rootedness in an exceptionally mobile society. Teams could
also give neighborhoods, ethnic and occupational groups, and cities new
and deeper emotional existences.
A COMMERCIAL SPECTACLE 21
other fielders "were at a loss to know whether the third base [was] occupied
or not." Gangs of boys were particularly aggravating. "The noisy and ill-
bred urchins ... intrude themselves among the spectators and annoy and
disturb everyone in the vicinity with bad language and rough conduct,"
reported a newspaper in a frequently repeated complaint of the day.
Baseball matches sometimes reflected fundamental ethnic and class
rivalries. A manifest instance occurred in 1860 when the Excelsiors, a
team that ranked "second to none in social standing" and was composed
of Protestant, old-stock American clerks and petty merchants, met the
Atlantics, a team composed mainly of Irish Catholic workingmen, in a
three-game series for the New York championship. The teams split the
first two games without incident, though more than ro,ooo spectators at-
tended each contest. In the final game, before a crowd estimated between
I 5 ,000 and 20,000, several close calls by the umpire triggered an outburst
by the Atlantics rooters. They hooted and jeered. No one could restrain
them, not even the Arlanrics players themselves or the hundred policemen
stationed at the game to keep order. Accompanied by a shrill chorus of
insults from the Atlantics fans, captain Joseph Leggett of the Excelsiors
pulled his players off the field. As the Excelsiors' team omnibus departed,
Atlanrics rooters pelted it with stones.
More was at stake in the game than simply winning or losing. Albert
Spalding, in a secondhand report, described the Arlantics fans as "utterly
uncontrollable ... thugs, gamblers, thieves, plug-uglies and rioters." The
cause of the disorder, according to the Clipper, was "the spirit of faction
... in which the foreign element [i.e., the Irish Americans] of our immense
metropolitan population, and their ... offspring, especially, delights to
indulge." To both the Protestant old-stock and the Irish Catholic ethnic
fans, the game had become a symbolic test of honor and supremacy. From
that day to the time when both clubs disbanded in I87I, the Atlanrics and
Excelsiors never again met on the field of play.
Capitulation to the excitement of a hard-fought game was not limited to
the spectators, or "kranks," as the more rabid of the fans came to be known.
As the game's popularity spread among the workingmen and ethnics, groups
not so encumbered by Victorian fears of unregulated passion, the players
more frequently succumbed to their tempers, disputed umpires' decisions,
and argued with their opponents or even their own teanunates. In another
game featuring the Atlantics-this time against Tammany Hall's New York
Mutuals in I863-the press reported that in the ninth inning "considerable
'chaffing' [took place] among the members of the two clubs." Both teams
A COMMERCIAL SPECTACLE
BASEBALL
G G G
Earning money from gate receipts was only one source of profit arising
from interclub baseball matches. Soon, gamblers were also exploiting
the pecuniary opportunities presented by the games. Although roundly
condemned by proper Victorians, gambling had been closely tied to such
antebellum spectacles as horse races, billiard matches, prize fights, and
pedestrian races. As early as r840 almost any coffeehouse, billiard parlor,
or saloon might harbor a gambling establishment. Many of the nineteenth-
century sporting spectacles arose from spirited arguments over the merits
of a horse, a prize fighter, or a runner. A wager and the scheduling of a
contest then ensued. Few experiences equaled the intensity of wagering;
for spectator, promoter, and athlete alike, winning a bet could be more
important than the thrill of winning the contest itself. In wagering, one
risked not only money but one's self-esteem as well. By choosing to bet
on a particular team, the bettor might be making a statement of ethnic or
occupational pride. Furthermore, wagering provided an opportunity to
display skills for men who increasingly found such opportunities denied
to them in their workplaces.
By the late 1860s, baseball offered the Victorian underworld rich op-
portunities to satisfy the widespread hunger for gambling. At some parks,
gamblers openly touted their odds. In California, just as a fielder was about
to catch a fly ball, the gamblers who had placed a bet on the side at bat
would fire their six-shooters. On a few occasions, bettors even mobbed
playing fields to prevent the completion of games in which they stood to
lose money. "So common has betting become at baseball matches," com-
plained a Harper's Weekly editor in r867, "that the most respectable clubs
in the country indulge in it to a highly culpable degree, and so common ...
the tricks by which games have been 'sold' for the benefit of the gamblers
that the most respectable participants have been suspected of baseness."
Although newspapers frequently hinted at fixes throughout the late
r860s, they probably exaggerated the extent of the practice. Every time
a favored team lost, fans were likely to suspect that the game was fixed.
Nonetheless, the common practice of scheduling three-game champion-
ship series tempted teams to split the first two games so they could profit
-----------------4 A COMMERCIAL SPECTACLE 25
from a third contest. There was one publicly disclosed admission of such
a fixed game. In 1865, Thomas B. Devyr, a pla yet for Tammany Hall's
New York Mutuals, testified that William Wansley, a teammate, had ap-
proached him and another teammate, Edward Duffy, with a proposal to
split $100 among them ro throw a game against the Brooklyn Excelsiors.
By winning the last two games of the three-game series, Wansley allegedly
assured Devyr, "we can lose this game without doing the Club any harm."
After disclosure of the fix at a hearing, the Mutuals promptly expelled all
three offenders, but later, hoping to strengthen their team, they forgave
their past transgressions, reinstating first Devyr in 1867, then Duffy in
1868, and finally Wansley in 1870.
By the rnid-r Ssos, widespread charges of fixes, gambling, drinking,
and general disorder seriously jeopardized the baseball fraternity's ef-
forts ro maintain Victorian respectability. Led by the evangelical Prot-
estant clergy, proper Victorians frequently identified the game with the
nineteenth-century underworld of commercial entertainment that included
saloons, vaudeville, variety shows, billiard halls, gambling emporiums, and
brothels. Like other commercial pastimes, baseball became a focal point of
controversy in several cities. The city political machines and their bosses,
who depended mainly on the support of the Catholic, ethnic, working-
class vote, usually sided with commercial baseball, whereas the well-to-do,
old-stock Protestants sided with the reformers who wanted to restrict or
abolish commercial amusements.
Indeed, the "politicians are commencing to curry favor with the frater-
nity of ballplayers, as a class of our 'fellow citizens' worthy of the attention
of 'our influential men,''' reported the Clipper as early as 1865. Politicians
helped organize and fund teams. The New York Mutuals, for example,
had been founded in 1857 by William Marcy Tweed, who was to become
the infamous boss of Tammany Hall. The club's 1871 board of directors
included city aldermen, state legislators, and local judges.
Recruiting club members exclusively for their playing talents represented
yet another threat to the survival of the early baseball fraternity. Just as the
1860 tours of the powerful Excelsiors of Brooklyn had been instrumental
in popularizing the New York game, the same club led the departure from
exclusive reliance on regular membership as a pool of talent. Between
1857 and 1860 the Excelsiors strengthened their first nine by recruiting
new members from the New York Cricket Club and the Star Club, a lead-
ing junior nine from Brooklyn. None of their new recruits was a more
important symbol of baseball's future than James Creighton, "the sport's
26 BASEBALL
first superstar." Creighton was not only the game's premier pitcher (he
threw what contemporaries called a "speed ball" and is alleged to have
invented the curve ball), but he was also baseball's first known compen-
sated player.
Although the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP)explic-
itly prohibited the employment of professional players, soon teams were
extending sub-rosa subsidies to players. As early as r863, the Brooklyn
Eagle reported that "ball matches have of late years got to be quite serious
affairs, and some have even intimated that ballplaying has becomequite a
money making business, many finding it to pay well to play well." In the
immediate postwar years professionalism became even more common; the
majority of the players on the Atlantics, Eckfords, and Muruals, the three
most powerful nines in the metropolitan New York area, apparently were
being paid to play.
Subsidies often took the form of a paying job that required little or no
actual work. Many of the Mutuals, for example, held patronage positions
with New York City's government. "The real birthplace of professional
baseball" in Washington, D.C., was said to be among clerks employed
in the United States Treasury Department. Comprising some of the best
recruits in rhe East, nearly all of the r867 Washington Nationals, the first
eastern club to tour west of the Alleghenies, held jobs with the federal
government. Adrian "Cap" Anson recalled that when he was a youth
in Iowa in the late 1860s, "it was generally the custom to import from
abroad some player who had made a name for himself ... and furnish him
with a business situation." An example was young Albert Spalding, who
in r867 accepted a posirion paying forty dollars a week with a Chicago
wholesale grocery "with the understanding that my store duties would
be nominal, a chance given to play ball frequently, without affecting my
salary to reduce it."
As the game became more commercialized, its ambience changed. "In-
stead of legitimate trials of skill between clubs," lamented the Philadelphia
Sunday Mercury in 1867, "we had conflicts in which animosities were
engendered, gambling was fostered, and from which arose the effort to
make ball-playing a regular business occupation." By the rmd-r Ssos the
postgame rituals of awarding rhe game ball to the winning team and of
the home club hosting the visitors to an evening feast had all but vanished.
The more skilled players increasingly cut their ties with their home clubs
and offered their services to the team that offered them the most gener-
ous subsidies. This practice was known as "revolving." Perhaps the most
A COMMERCIAL SPECTACLE
o 0 C:J
The history of the NABBP and its locally affiliated associations provides
additional illumination on baseball's transition from a fraternal game into
a commercial spectacle. Throughout its existence, the NABBP wrestled
with several issues that threatened the fraternity's existence. One of the
first of these was whether the association should have an open admissions
policy. Should it, for example, welcome the membership of junior clubs,
those composed of boys under the age of twenty-one? Exclusion of the
juniors was necessary, the opponents successfully argued, to preserve the
"manly" quality of the sport. Consistent with their effort to dissociate
their game from youngsters, the association in 1863 also adopted a rule
requiring that the ball be caught on the fly rather than on the first bounce
for a putout.
Likewise, the association excluded black clubs. Although white and
black clubs sometimes shared playing fields and on occasion played games
against one another, both the NABBP in its 1867 convention and the New
York state baseball association in 1870 flatly refused to admit black clubs.
"If colored clubs were admitted," concluded the NABBP's nominating
committee, resorting to the logic of a racist society, "there would be in all
probability some division of feeling, whereas, by excluding them no injury
could result to anyone."
To protect the fraternity from internal divisions-that is, in the words
of the NABBP, to cultivate "kindly feelings among the different members
of Base-Ball c1ubs"-the association tried to regulate player eligibility.
Permitting players to revolve from one club to another during the season
generated much ill-will within the fraternity and completely violated the
belief that the players ought to have emotional ties to their clubs. In a
vain effort to prevent revolving, the association in 1865 required that a
player be a member of a club for at least thirty days prior to playing in an
interclub game.
The use of professional players posed an equally serious problem for the
fraternity. Unlike the wealthier sportsmen of the era, the baseball clubs
rarely employed amateurism as a means of promoting social exclusivity.
One of the few exceptions may have been the Knickerbockers, who, despite
their pioneering role in baseball, had never been competitive in extramural
28 BASEBALL
competition. "The same standard still exists [twenty-one years after the
club's founding], no person can obtain admission in the club merely for
his capacity as a player," reported Charles A. Peverelly in 1866. "He must
also have the reputation of a gentleman." But neither the artisan nor the
ethnic communities developed a tradition of amateurism, let alone using
it to promote social exclusion. They had no objections in principle to play
for pay. Instead, their opposition to paying players sprang mainly from
the fact that it created two sharply different levels of skills within the
fraternity. Such a division tended to erode the equality that was essential
to the fraternity's existence.
In the end, the association was ineffective in forestalling the ascendancy
of commercial baseball. To begin with, the great majority of dubs belonged
to neither the NABBP nor a regional association. Secondly, the NABBP
itself had no real power; ultimately, it had to rely entirely on the voluntary
compliance of the member dubs. Finally, the associarion was rent by inter-
nal divisions. Even when paid players were first officially barred in 1859,
some members of the NABBP protested thar the ban discriminated against
ordinary workingmen and was likely to retard improvements in the quality
of play. By the late 1860s, critics of the rule pointed out that in practice
it had become a "dead letter"; frank recognition of professionalism, they
said, would eliminate the widespread hypocrisy of under-the-table pay-
ments to players. In I868, the association voted to recognize two classes
of players, one as professional and one as amateur, only to reverse itself
the following year.
The issue of professionalism finally brought about the demise of the as-
sociation in 1870. After a "spicy debate," two-thirds of the delegates to rhe
NABBP convention voted against a resolution that condemned "the custom
of publicly hiring men to play the game of base ball [as] reprehensible and
injurious to the best interests of the game." "Under the pressure of the
control of the professional managers," reported the Clipper, "the National
Association gave up the ghost, and after a reputable existence of ten years
and a decline in health during rhe last three, it adjourned sine die." In the
following year, the professionals formed their own National Association
of Professional Base Ball Players. In the same year, 1871, the opponents
of professionalism, led by the New York Knickerbockers, responded by
forming a new association that expressly tried to restore "the old status
of base-ball playing," extending an invitation of membership to all clubs
"which engage in the game for recreative exercise only, and not for gate
money, receipts, or for pecuniary benefit only." By the I870S, however, it
A COMMERCIAL SPECTACLE
was far too late to restore the original character of the game. In r874 the
new amateur association folded.
G G G
____________ d"IIIII
s
3
The First
Professional Teams
Nothing surprised baseball enthusiasts more in 1869 than the performance
of Cincinnati's Red Stockings. The nation's first publicly proclaimed all-
salaried team swept through the 1869 season without a loss and with
but one tie. The tie occurred when the Haymakers of Troy, New York,
angered-or perhaps feigning anger-by an umpire's decision, lefr the
field after five minutes of arguing. Some said that the Haymakers walked
off to protect the bets of those who had wagered on a Troy victory. Be
that as it may, more than 23,000 fans watched the Red Stockings invade
baseball's citadel, metropolitan New York, where they handily defeated
six foes considered up to that time the best in the game. The team then
traveled by train on to the nation's capital in Washington, D.C.) where
President Ulysses S. Grant welcomed the western "Cinderella" team and
complimented the members on their high standard of play.
On returning home, Cincinnatians gave the team a rousing welcome.
-------------------4 THE FIRST PROFEssrONAL TEAMS
The band escorted the team to the Gibson House hotel, where that
evening at a lavish banquet a local lumber company presented the players
with an icon of their success: a huge, specially turned bat that was eigh-
teen inches thick in the fattest part and sixteen feet long. "Glory, they've
advertised the city-advertised us, sir, and helped our business," exulted a
delighted Cincinnati businessman. In September, the Red Stockings crossed
the country on the newly completed transcontinental railroad and played
a series of games in California. Altogether, according to one estimate, they
traveled by rail, stage, and ship 11,877 miles, and more than 200,000 fans
watched their games.
The national attention bestowed on the Red Stockings in 1869 provoked
the envy of cities elsewhere. They soon formed their own representative
professional nines, thereby signaling the end of one era and the beginning
of another. Although hundreds of teams continued to playas amateur or
semiprofessional outfits, it was the joint-stock clubs fielding paid players
in the rapidly growing cities of the Midwest-or "the West," as the region
was called in those days-that determined the main directions of baseball's
history in the I870S and r880s.
___________________ A
-------------.
32 BASEBALL
____________ d'fIIIII
5
34 BASEBALL
the Capitoline Grounds in Brooklyn. During the 1870 campaign they lost
five more games. The exact reasons for the team's demise in Septemberare
unknown. In November, amidst much grumbling about the team's man-
agement, the club stockholders ousted Champion. It may have been that
the players were demanding too much in salaries. At any rate, the team's
financial prospects were too dim to attract additional investments. With
the dissolution of the famed team, Harry Wright took four of his players
with him to form the nucleus of a team that would represent Boston. The
others went to Washington, where they played for the Olympics club.
o G G
______________ rt"IIII
BASEBALL
Bitters bore the name of (and thereby advertised) a popular patent medicine
of the day, one that claimed to be "the Invalid's Friend & Hope." Asa T.
Soule, the concoctor of the drug and owner of the team, claimed that he
gave each of his players a teaspoonful of the nostrum before every game.
When the team lost, which it rarely did, he doubled the dosage.
Barnstorming black nines could be equally effective on the playing field.
Although the itinerant black teams did not teach the heyday of their popu-
lariry until the twentieth century, in the late I880s the powerful Cuban
Giants, formed in I885 by a group of ball-playing hotel waiters at the
Argyle, a famed resort on Long Island's South Shore, took on all comers.
The Giants eventually booked some I50 games a season, mostly against
white clubs. In I 887 they took a long western tour on which they played
major league clubs in Cincinnati and Indianapolis, as well as several minor
league teams. "The Cuban Giants ... have defeated the New Yorks, 4
games out of 5, and are now virtually champions of the world," reported
the Indianapolis Freedman in I 888. But "the St. Louis Browns, Detroits
and Chicagos, afflicted by Negro-phobia and unable to bear the odium
of being beaten by colored men, refused to accept their challenge."
Probably nothing about baseball shocked Victorian sensibilities more
than the barnstorming women's teams. There are scattered reports of
amateur women's nines in the fraternal era; for example, as early as 1866,
Vassar college students organized two clubs. In the I880s a few enter-
tainment entrepreneurs exploited the public fascination with the bizarre
by forming women's pro teams. One of the most notorious of these was
Harry H. Freeman's "buxom beauties," who "paraded the streets [of New
Orleans] in full uniform, and created an impression that base ball, played
by shapely ... girls, must be attractive." "The short-skirted ball tossers"
played poorly, continued a newspaper report in I885, but they "try and
play hard even if they do not succeed better than girls are expected to with
the national game. >l Given prevailing notions of Victorian womanhood,
Freeman had difficulties recruiting players. In I 886, New Orleans officials
arraigned Freeman "on the charge of being a dangerous and suspicious
character." He was accused of "inducing young girls to leave their homes
and parents to join his troupe of base ball players." In order to heist
Florence Harris, one of his recruits, out of the Crescent City undetected,
Freeman cut off her dark hair and had her don a blonde wig.
G G G
BASEBALL
Lake Front Stadium was better suited to meet the needs of spectators
than it was for playing baseball. The distances between home plate and
the outfield fences were the shortest in major league history, A fly ball of
only 196 feet in right field, 300 feet in center field, and a mere 180 feet in
left field could reach the outfield fence. Even against a baseball that was
quite soft by modern standards, these bandbox dimensions enabled Ed
Williams of the White Stockings to hit twenty-seven home runs in 1884,
a major league record that stood until Babe Ruth broke it in 1919. In
1884, alrhough no other club totaled more than fourteen homers, Chicago
boasted four players who hit more than twenty.
As with the theater, circuses, and other forms of commercial entertain-
ment, colorful pageantry was a conspicuous part of the early pro game.
Flags and pennants flew from outfield fences, and patriotic buntings of
red, whire, and blue frequently festooned the grandstands. During lulls
between innings, brass bands sometimes entertained fans. Vendors hawked
concessions and scorecards at all parks, but the lack of a public address
system or numbers on players' uniforms challenged the fan's ingenuity
in following the action. Because the playing facilities had no showers or
changing rooms for visitors, the players-in full uniform-usually rode
out to the parks ftom their hotels in open omnibuses drawn by horses,
sometimes bursting into the team's song on the way. Such a spectacle helped
lure customers to the game. This practice was not officially abandoned
until 1912, when the American League finally required all its teams to
provide dressing rooms. Apparently, however, cleanliness and the reduc-
tion of pungent odors were not major concerns of the day. A physician
warned managers against having their players take "dangerous and useless
showers," but he did advise them to require a weekly supervised bath.
Early professional ball games attracted motley crowds. The St. Louis
Post-Dispatch reported in 1883 that "a glance at the audience on any fine
day ar the ball park will reveal ... telegraph operators, printers who work
at night, rravelling men [salesmen] ... men of leisure men of capital,
bank clerks who get away at 3 P.M., real estate men barkeepers ...
hotel clerks, actors and employees of the theater, policemen and firemen
on their day off ... clerks and salesmen temporarily out of work ...
butchers [and] bakers." Clubs in several cities specifically arranged rheir
games for the convenience of white-collar workers. So that stockbrokers
and their associates could easily get to the park after the close of Chicago's
Board of Trade, the White Stockings set their starting time at 2:30 in the
afternoon; likewise, the 3:30 starting time of the New York Giants allowed
_______________ A
-- ------------------. BASEBALL
the Wall Street crowd ample time to get across town to the ball field. For
the convenience of government clerks, Washington's teams scheduled their
games at 4:30 in the afternoon.
Although young, white-collar workers were conspicuous at games, it is
far less certain how many blue-collar, ethnic workingmen attended games.
Steep ticket prices (a minimum of fifty cents to National League games dur-
ing the last quarter of the century), the cost of horse car or electric trolley
fare to the ballpark, the necessity of play during the daylight hours, and
the ban on Sunday games in most cities aJJ restricted potential attendance
by unskilled workingmen. A New York Times report of an r888 Memorial
Day game at the Polo Grounds noted the unusual enthusiasm of the men
and boys who normally were confined to "shops and factories during the
week days, and who [had] to content themselves for months with reading
accounts of games."
Nonetheless, newspapers frequently commented on the presence of the
Irish in Boston and New York and the Germans in Cincinnati and St.
Louis. Although the original Polo Grounds obtained its name from the polo
played there by publisher James Gordon Bennett and his wealthy friends,
that association faded when the area was converted into a baJJ field; by
the r880s, the bleachers had become known as "Burkeville," named after
the predominantly Irish fans who sat there. Several other fields had "Kerry
Patches," which also referred to sections occupied regularly by the Irish
kranks. Rather than coming from the factories or large-scale shops, these
ethnic fans probably came from the ranks of petty shopkeepers, skiJJed
workingmen, public officialdom, and other occupations less encumbered
by income constraints and with schedules sufficiently flexible to allow
attendance at weekday games.
Compared to men, women rarely patronized pro baseball. Despite the
fact that special ladies' days were scheduled and special sections of the
stands were reserved for women as early as the r8805, their attendance ap-
parently varied greatly according to time and place. For example, in 1875
the press reported that large numbers of women were attending games in
Hartford and Boston, but in that same year the presence of a single "lady
who seemed to take a great interest in the proceedings" of a game at the
Union Grounds in Brooklyn occasioned comment in a local newspaper.
A decade later, however, a report of a game between the top contenders
for the National League pennant at the Polo Grounds contained these
words: "The ladies are regular and numerous attendants at the grounds.
The hundreds of them who stood on the seats and screamed and waved
THE FIRST PROFESSrONAL TEAMS 4I
o o (]
During the I870S and I 880s the professional teams fully established their
ascendancy over all of baseball. The Cincinnati Red Stockings and dozens
of other clubs soon proved that full-time salaried players could nearly
always outperform those who held down other jobs during the playing
season. Seizing mainly on urban rivalries, an assortment of civic boosters,
small-time entrepreneurs, and politicians organized hundreds of profes-
sional and semiprofessional teams. Although adverse weather, poor play,
mismanagement, and the peculiar nature of the enterprise, among other
reasons, caused nearly all the teams to fail financially within only a year
or rwo of their founding, new nines soon filled their places. The next im-
portant stage in rhe history of the professional game was the formation
of leagues of the representative teams.
---------------.
4
The First
Professional Leagues
Armed with endorsements of four western clubs, William Ambrose Hul-
bert, president of the Chicago Base Ball Club, met on 2 February 1876
with representatives of six eastern clubs at the Central Hotel in Manhattan.
Nothing could deter Hulbert, not even the rain and the gale-force winds
that whipped through Manhattan's streets at seventy miles per hour. Ac-
cording to baseball lore, after all the delegates had entered his room, he
locked the door behind them and then, with a dramatic flourish, dropped
the key into IUspocket. Hulbert rhereby symbolically held the eastern men
captive until they agreed to his plan for the creation of a radically different
professional baseball league. They discussed and refined Hulbert's proposal
into the evening hours before finally signing a pact creating the National
League of Professional Base Ball Clubs (NL). Appropriately, given base-
ball's claim as the national pasrime, the fareful meering took place during
the nation's centennial year of 1876. Perhaps it should also be remembered
THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL LEAGUES 43
that the league began play in the same spring that chiefs Rain-in-tbe-Face,
Sitting Bull, and Crazy Horse annihilated General George A. Custer and
his troops near the Little Big Horn River in southern Montana.
The creation of the NL, along with more than a dozen other leagues
during the 1870S and 1880s, was an important step in the evolution of
professional baseball. Although professional baseball leagues only gradu-
ally evolved into the economic cartels familiar to fans today, baseball men
early on recognized that the formation of leagues could promote their
mutual interests. The first pro baseball league, the National Association
of Professional Base Ball Players (1871-75), had no grand plan for win-
ning public favor or maximizing the income of its member clubs. It was
merely a loose confederation designed to provide a system for naming a
national championship team. But its successor, Hulbert's National League,
aspired to become a circuit composed of only the premier clubs. It sharply
restricted the number of clubs that could join the league, took steps to
curb player freedom, and sought, not altogether successfully, to present
itself as a fortress of Victorian propriety.
G G G
Barnes, the league's perennial batting champion, and behind the plate was
the league's most admired superstar, Jim "Deacon" White. White picked
up his nickname because, unlike most of his fellow players, he regularly
attended church services, toted a Bible with him wherever he went, and
always behaved as "a gentleman in his professional and private life." In
the pitcher's box, Wright had big Albert Spalding, who at six feet and two
inches in height towered over his contemporaries and was the league's
most successful hurler. Spalding compiled a 207-56 won-lost record and
a .320 batting average while at Boston. "On receiving the ball," read a
contemporary account of Spalding's pitching style, "... he gazes at it
two or three minutes in a contemplative way, and then turns it around
once or twice to be sure that it is not an orange or coconut. Assured that
he has rhe genuine article ... and after a scowl at the short stop, and a
glance at horneplare, [he] finally delivers the ball with the precision of a
cannon shor."
Alrhough notions of the earlier fraternal era lingered on in Wright's
thinking, he approached the game in a far more businesslike manner than
did most of the orher men associated with the pro game. Whereas stock-
holders frequenrly placed more value on potential psychic and political
rewards than on profits, Wright depended on baseball for his livelihood.
"Base ball is now a business," he flatly explained in a letter to Nicholas
Young of the Washington Olympics. The pro clubs, he maintained, should
drop freewheeling practices that, while admittedly enhancing a sense of
equality and fraternity among the players, might impair a team's prospects
for success. Wright not only carefully managed such details as club sched-
uling and finances but, above all, firmly established his authority over the
players. Acting as a paternalistic patriarch, he even dictated their living
arrangements. In Bosron, "George [Wright]' Harry [Wright], and [Charles]
Gould live together," reported the Spirit of the Times in 1871, "and the
other seven 'boys' live next door in a private house, so they are all under
Harry's wing." No longer did the players rule their own destinies. At
least for the Bostons, a clear-cut employer-employee relationship existed
between the manager and his "boys. II
G G G
Although no fewer than fifteen new clubs were clamoring to get into the
National Association for the 1876 campaign and more than 3,000 fans
frequenrly attended the games of major foes, not all was well with the loop.
---------------. BASEBALL
Not only did it suffer from Boston's lopsided superiority on the playing
field, but for those who believed that pro baseball could achieve greater
success by mirroring Victorian America, the NA was little short of a di-
saster. Rather than serving as models of order and propriety, association
games too frequently erupted into incivility and anarchy. Ugly confronta-
tions and long delays in play regularly arose over the choice of umpires
and their decisions. As in the past, the NA, which required that the home
teams pay umpires $ 5 per game, foUowed the practice of having the borne
team pick an umpire from a list of names submitted by the visitors. Bur
with money now at stake and fraternal ties largely eroded, nothing kept
home teams from objecting to all the proposed arbiters. Accompanied by
growing crowd unrest, arguments over the choice of an umpire sometimes
held up starting the contests for an hour or more.
Agreement on an official for the game by no means terminated the pos-
sibility of controversy. Umpires held unenviable positions. They needed to
master a complex set of rapidly changing rules, they had to make countless
decisions during the course of a game, and given the size of the playing
field, a single umpire was sometimes in a poor position to make good
calls. Until the practice was prohibited in 1880, umpires still occasion-
ally consulted with nearby players or bystanders before rendering a final
decision on fly ball or base calls. Frequently confronted with vociferous
complaints about their rulings from players, managers, and fans (who as
likely as not had wagered on the contest), it was little wonder that umpires
sometimes lost their tempers or simply quit in the middle of games. Few
umpires, however, responded as forceful1y as Robert Ferguson. Angered
by the "growling" of Mutuals' catcher Robert Hicks, Ferguson, while
serving as umpire of a game between the Lord Baltimores and the Muru-
ais in 1873, grabbed a bat and broke the offender's arm in two places. He
thereby disabled Hicks "for the remainder of the game." At the game's
conclusion, a constable stepped forward to arrest Ferguson, but the injured
catcher refused to press charges.
Game fixing and gambling also plainly mocked Victorian values. Wager-
ing on games was common everywhere; both Brooklyn and Philadelphia
even allowed pool selling in their parks. The frequency of game fixing can-
not be precisely determined, but players on some teams, such as the Muru-
als of New York City, acquired a notorious reputation for their willingness
to take money from gamblers in exchange for playing poorly enough to
lose games. In the 1874 and 1875 seasons, newspapers repeatedly reported
instances of suspected game fixing by the Mutuals. Referring to an 1874
THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL LEAGUES 47
win by the White Stockings over the Mutuals, the Chicago Tribune declared
that "for the first time in the history of baseball in Chicago, the national
game has been disgraced by a palpable and unbelievable fraud." Accord-
ing to the Tribune, there was "ample reason to believe that at least four
[Mutua ls] players were hired to throw the game and had no intention of
winning at any stage." This and more than a dozen similar incidents, none
of which led to punitive action by the NA's judiciary committee, cast a
dark shadow of suspicion over the "squareness" of association games.
Nevertheless, neither Boston's dominance on the playing field, the be-
havior of ball players, nor the common practice of players revolving from
one club to another is sufficient in itself to explain the association's demise.
The National League coup of 1876 was mostly the work of a single in-
dividual, William Ambrose Hulbert. The burly Hulbert had no nostalgia
for the earlier fraternal game. As a successful Chicago coal merchant, an
active Republican, and a member of the city's prestigious Board of Trade,
he approached baseball solely from the perspective of a businessman,
politician, and civic booster. Hulbert loved Chicago. "I would rather be
a lamp-post in Chicago than a millionaire in any other city," he allegedly
said repeatedly. In the wake of Chicago's Great Fire of 1871, Hnlbert
saw in professional baseball an opportunity to promote the revival of his
beloved city.
For baseball to contribute to the Windy City's civic renewal, the team
had to perform well enough to engender pride in its accomplishments.
Therefore, Hulbert, as president of the White Stockings, set about recruit-
ing the best players he could find. He secretly and boldly defied the NA rule
against signing players from other clubs while the season was in progress.
In the midst of the r875 campaign he persuaded Albert Spalding to join
the White Stockings as a pitcher, captain, and manager for the upcoming
r876 season in exchange for a salary of $2,000 plus 25 percent of the
team's gate receipts. On receiving the news that Spalding and three other
Boston players had defected to Chicago, the Worcester Spy reported that
"Boston is in mourning. Like Rachel weeping for her children, she refuses
to be comforted because [her] famous baseball nine ... the city's most
cherished possession, has been captured by Chicago."
Hulbert's employment of Spalding was especially fortuitous. The char-
ismatic Spalding not only was a superb pitcher, but he also aided Hulbert
in convincing Boston stars Jim White, Cal McVey, and Roscoe Barnes,
along with Philadelphia's hero Adrian "Cap" Anson, to sign contracts with
Chicago. Fear that the eastern clubs might retaliate for these audacious
____________________
4
BASEBALL
player raids by expeUing rhe Chicago recruits and perhaps the club itself
from the NA was, according to Spalding, the inspiration for Hulbert',
conception of an entirely new league. "Spalding," Hulbert exclaimed, "I
have a new scheme. Let us anticipate the Eastern cusses and organize a
new association ... and then we'll see who wiU do the expelling."
Hulbert and his cohort concluded that pro basebaU could be stabilized
by forming a league restricted to the most powerful representative nines of
the larger cities. The National Association had allowed any club fielding
a pro team, regardless of whether it was located in a smalJ town or the
nation's largest city, to join and compete for the championship pennant.
The only requirement was that the aspiring club pay a $ro entry fee.
Thus, dozens of clubs from both the smaUer towns and the big cities had
regularly joined and shortly dropped out; several did not even complete
a single season of play. Under such unstable conditions, fans in the large
cities had special difficulties identifying a particular team as the city's
representative nine. That fifteen additional clubs were seeking admission
to the association for the r 876 season created a special sense of urgency
among those seeking to form a new circuit. If the "whole gang be Jet in, "
predicted the Chicago Tribune, half the clubs would fail to meet expenses.
The only solution, the Tribune concluded, was either to reform the NA or
form a new league organized as a "closed corporation." Hulbert adopted
essentially the latter idea.
Composed initially of teams located in Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati,
Hartford, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, and St. Louis, the National
League departed sharply from the practices of the NA. To offset some of
the disparities in the markets arising from differences in population among
the NL cities, the league provided that visiting teams would receive 50
percent of the base admission price to each game. (As higher-priced seats
were added to league baUparks, the share of total receipts going to visiting
teams fell.) A club wishing to join the new league had to obtain the ap-
proval of the existing clubs, only one club could represent each city, and
no club could be located in a city with a population of less than 75,000.
Each club enjoyed a territorial monopoly in another sense. When a team
from one league city, such as the Chicago White Stockings or the Bostons,
came to another league town, they could play no other pro club except the
NL team representing that city. The founders hoped that these strictures
would enable them to establish a premier circuit, one that would estab-
lish a clearly separate identity and a superior quality of play compared to
competing basebaU clubs or leagues.
Q
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4
BASEBALL
Both on and off the field of play, Chicago's baseball men orchestrated
the NL's early history. Off the diamond, there was the formidable duo of
William Hulbert and Albert Spalding, who had founded the NL and pur
together the 1876 "all-star" White Stockings team. Spalding pitched and
managed the White Stockings to the 1876 NL championship, but there-
after until his retirement in 1878 he played sparingly. In the meantime, he
charted the beginning of another important career. In February of 1876 the
Chicago Tribune announced that Spalding was opening a "large emporium
in Chicago, where he will sell all kinds of baseball goods and turn his place
into the headquarters for the Western Ball Clubs." He obrained the exclusive
right to furnish the official NL baseball and to publish Spalding' Officiol
Baseball Guide, an annual that included the league rules, records, articles,
and Spalding's views on the main issues confronting the game. Spalding later
expanded his business into both the manufacturing and retailing of sport-
ing goods, and it SOon became the largest such organization in the world.
While Spalding was launching himself as a sporting goods entreprenew;
Hulbert guided the NL through its perilous early years. An industrial
depression in the late I870S furnished the league with its first great chal-
lenge. With widespread unemployment and reduced incomes for many, the
amount of money available for leisure expenditures dropped drastically.
For the 1876 season probably none of the clubs save Chicago earned a
profit. Hoping to avoid further financial losses, both the Athletics of Phil a-
delphia and the Mutuals of New York decided to forgo their final western
road tours. Hulbert, who had been installed as the leagne president after
Morgan G. Bulkeley of Hartford had been chosen by lot as president the
first year, responded sternly. He obtained the expulsion of both clubs, thus
denying the NL access to the nation's two largest cities. Even the tears of
the Athletics' contrite president failed to reverse Hulbert's decision.
In 1881, when the Cincinnati club persisted in selling beer at its park
and playing Sunday games, Hulbert hounded them out of the league as
well. "We respectfully suggest, that while the league is in the missionary
field," responded Oliver P. Caylor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, " ... they
[also] turn their attention to Chicago and prohibit the admission to the
Lake Street grounds of the great number of prostitutes who patronize
the game up there." Caylor's red herring apparently availed nothing but
perhaps chuckles. Hulbert was determined that no club would successfully
chalJenge the league's authority.
THE FIRST PROFESSIONAL LEAGUES
and leagues. In r8n it organized the League Alliance. All pro clubs that
joined the alliance would have their territorial rights and player contracts
protected from one another as well as from the NL clubs. Conversely, clubs
that refused to join the alliance could have their rosters preyed upon freely
by other clubs. The NL also welcomed into its fold the stronger Interns-
tional Association clubs. Conveniently overlooking its requirement that
franchises could be located only in cities with 75,000 or more residents,
the NL took in clubs from three smaller cities: Syracuse and Troy, New
York, and Worcester, Massachusetts. Finally, the league ordered a halt
to all games with nonleague foes on league grounds, tbereby cutting off
lucrarive earnings by Outsiders in NL ballparks.
The high-handed methods by which the National League was under.
taking "to control the baseball fraternity" was "unreasonably absurd,'
declared A. B. Rankin, a leader of the International Association. "Are we
to submit to the caprice of a clique, or ring?" he asked rhetorically. Yet
the dream of resurrecting a loosely formed association rhar all pro base.
ball teams could freely join and through which they could compete with
one another for a championship pennant was rapidly fading. By the time
the International Association collapsed in r880, the NL's more binding
kind of cartel had demonstrated a capacity to withstand conflicts among
its members and challenges from both the players and teams outside the
league's fold.
In r882 Hulbert died, and Spalding assumed his mantle. At the age of
thirty-two, SpaJding became president of the White Stockings, a position
he held until r891, and though he did nor serve as league president (an
office of nominal authority after Hulberr's death), he was the most domi-
nant voice in league counsels, Ostensibly to convert foreigners to baseball
but no doubt to expand sales of his SPOrting goods as well, in r888-89
Spalding arranged a highly publicized worldwide tour that matched Ills
Chicago team against a team ofNL all-stars. Although the foreigners were
singularly unimpressed with the exhibitions of America's national game,
and although Spalding lost money on the venture, the exotic nature of
baseball games in far-off Australia, in the shadows of Egyptian pyramids,
in Rome's Colosseum, and on the leading cricket grounds of England
intrigued Americans at horne.
As Hulbert and Spalding directed the destinies of the NL off the field,
on the diamond no players were more important than Chicagoans Adrian
"Cap" (so named because of his captaincy of the team) Anson and Michael
"King" Kelly. They formed the nucleus of one of the most powerful teams
Q
in big league history; in the I880s the White Stockings won five pennants
in seven years. In that decade only Anson was left from the championship
squad of 1876, but the six-foot, two-inch, zoo-pound-plus first baseman,
"a veritable giant," as he was described by contemporaries, continued to
be one of the best players in the game, even until his retirement in r897.
He won four league batting crowns and in twenty-two seasons failed to hit
.300 only twice. Anson became the playing manager of the White Stockings
in r879, a position he retained until his retirement. The fans loved to hear
Anson, who had a booming voice, bellow out directions to the players or
epirhets aimed at the nmpire. One of Anson's recruits, lightning-fast but
weak-hitting William "Billy" Sunday, later achieved renown as one of the
nation's leading evangelists.
King Kelly competed with Anson for the adoration of Chicago kranks.
A colorful player both on and off the field, Kelly excelled at hitting and
base running. "Slide, Kelly, SLide!" later became a hit song. Apart from
baseball, Kelly loved horses and drinking. Tall, dark, and handsome, "as
Celtic as Mrs. Mnrphy's pig," he was one of the first of many players
who trod the boards of vaudeville; he starred in a skit titled "He Would
be an Acror, or The Ball Player's Revenge." Kelly inspired many legends,
most of which revolved around his opportunism and trickery. During one
game, as the sun began to set toward the end of the twelfth inning, Kelly
pulled one of his most startling stunts. With two out and the bases full,
Kelly, as the right fielder, leapt into the twilight trying to catch a mighty
drive that would win the game. As he came down, he held his glove high
in the air and jauntily jogged to the dugout. The umpire bellowed: "Out
number three! Game called on account of darkness!" "Nice catch, Kell,"
exclaimed his teammates. "Not at all, at all," Kelly responded. '''Twent
a mile above my head." In the days before players wore gloves, however,
Kelly was no iron mao. While catching in a game for Cincinnati in r879,
a Cal McVey pitch bruised his hand. Kelly refused to intercept any more
of McVey's "cannonball" pitches, so the Cincinnati manager brought in
a slower-throwing "change pitcher" who, according to a press report,
proceeded to "take his lumps" from the Providence club.
In r887 Spalding shocked the baseball world by selling Kelly to the
Boston team for the then-astronomical sum of $10,000. The Boston fans
promptly labeled him "the $10,000 Beauty," after a local actress who used
that title as a promotional gimmick. If anything, the Boston Irish loved
Kelly more than his followers in Chicago did. The fans even chipped in
their hard-won earnings to buy the King a pair of handsome gray horses
____________________ <"'111
54 BASEBALL
-
and a fancy gig so that he could ride out to the ballpark on Washingron
Street in proper style. Kelly added to tbe grandeur of the occasion br
wearing needle-pointed shoes and a taJi top hat.
GJ G G
"Beer Ball League," hooted the Chicago Tribune, a mouthpiece of the Na-
tional League, in I88!. The Tribune referred to the newly created American
Association of Base BaJi Clubs (AA). And it was true that brewery owners
sat on the boards of directors of six of the clubs in the new association. In
addition, the AA brazenly authorized the sale of beer at its games, permit.
ted play on Sundays (in cities where it was legal), and set a base admission
price of a mere twenty-five cents a game. By such measures, the AA sought
to tap into a large pool of potential baseball fans who had been abandoned
by the NL's ostentatious capitulation to Victorian standards of propriety.
Few ethnics or workingmen cared a whit for either temperance or a stria
Sabbath. Indeed, few occasions pleased them more than the opportuniry
to drink beer on a hot Sunday afternoon while watching a ball game.
The stage for the creation of the AA had been set by the return of
prosperity in the I880s. Industria! production again leapt forward, real
incomes rose, and from both the European and American countrysides
millions flocked into the nation's cities. Cut off from their traditional rural
and viJiage pastimes, the urban dweJlers sought excitement and communal
experiences in commercial recreation. They increasingly patronized the-
aters, circuses, dance halls, saloons, and commercial sports. Responding
to the growing spectator demand for basebaJl, the number of pro teams
and pro leagues proliferated. Not only did two new leagues-the American
Association (I882-9I) and the Union Association (I884)-chal1enge rhe
NL directly for major league status, but by the end of the decade seventeen
other pro leagues existed, scattered from Maine to California.
The initiative for the American Association came mainly from Alfred
H. Spink of St. Louis and Oliver P. Caylor of Cincinnati, two sportswrir-
ers whose cities had been squeezed out of the NL. Both cities had large
German ethnic constituencies that enjoyed beer drinking and Continental
Sundays. In St. Louis, Spink found an invaJuable ally in Christopher Von
der Abe, a thick-accented German immigrant. In the summer of I88I the
two men added Sunday baseball games and beer to the other attractions
of Von der Ahe's amusement park. Such a formula worked wonders, at-
tracting unusually large crowds. Among the teams that cashed in on the
Q
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4
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BASEBALL
The guns of warfare had hardly been silenced when a third contender
for big league status, the Union Association, entered the fray.Unlike many
of the men behind the AA, the Union Association's founder and financial
angel, Henry V. Lucas, a young St. Louis millionaire, was not motivated
by the financial opportunities to be derived from beer or Sunday games.
An ardent fan and apparently sympathetic to players' resentments arising
from their inabilities to offer their services to the highest bidder, Lucas (or
"Saint Lucas," as he was dubbed by an irreverent press) determined [Q build
a circuit without strictures on player freedom. Although Lucas's eight-team
loop attracted a few firsr-rars players from the NL and the AA, there were
simply not enough fans to support thirty-four big league teams. After Lu-
LQ
cas's fortune had been dissipated and "his combativeness destroyed," the
NL extended mercy to him and the players who had jumped to his Union
Association. At the close of the r884 season, the NL allowed the disloyal
players to return and provided Lucas with a franchise in St. Louis.
In the meantime, the predecessor of baseball's modern World Series
began to take shape. In the fall of I883 clubs from the two leagues played
fifty-eight exhibition games against one another, but the AA'sPhiladelphia
Athletics, after having lost seven of eight exhibition games to lesser NL
foes, prudently decided to cancel a postseason series with the NL cham-
pion Bostons. The next year the NL pennant-winning Providence team
won all three postseason games from the AA's flag-bearing New York
Metropolitans, but these games attracted negligible public attention. A
turning point came in 1885, when Von der Ahe's St. Louis Browns and
Spalding's Chicago White Stockings played a controversial posrseason
series. The Browns won the three games completed, but one game ended
in a tie because of darkness, and the umpire forfeited another game to
Chicago after St. Louis manager Charles Comiskey angrily protested an
umpire's call by taking his team off the field.
In I886 the teams confronted each other again in the first contest to
be billed as "the world's championship." A wager between Spalding and
Von der Ahe calling for the winner to receive all the gate receipts added
to the public excitement. The series started in Chicago, where the White
Stockings "Chicagoed" (shutouts in those days were called "Chicago"
games) the Browns 6-0, but the next day the St. Louisians reciprocated
the embarrassment by Chicagoing the Chicagoans n-o. Chicago took
the final game in the Windy City, but then disaster befell the proud White
Stockings. In St. Louis the Browns swept the remaining three games and
took the championship.
A jubilant Chris Von der Ahe ordered up champagne for his players.
Spalding, on the other hand, was furious. He refused even to pay the White
Stockings' train fare back home. He, along with his manager Cap Anson,
privately blamed the club's humiliating losses on the nightly drinking sprees
of the players. He sold the main offenders (including King Kelly) to other
clubs and the next spring shipped the team off to Hot Springs, Arkansas,
with instructions for Anson to work the liquor out of the players' systems.
The strategy apparently misfired, for Chicago failed even to win the NL
nag in I887.
No rules or formulas governed the conduct of these early series. One
league champion challenged, the other accepted, and then they agreed on
1"'1
BASEBALL
such details as the number of games, where they would be played, and
how the gate receipts would be divided. For instance, the series of 18S,
berween the Browns and the Detroits called for fifteengames to be played
in Sr. Louis, Detroit, Pittsburgh, Brooklyn, New York, Philadelphia,Wash-
ington, Boston, Baltimore, and Chicago. The series netted about $12,000
for each team. Although by 1886 the series had become a more or less
established fixture, it came to an end in r890 because soon thereafter the
AA and NL commenced another trade war. If the series proved nothing
else, it demonstrated the equality of AA teams on the playing field. The
powerful St. Louis Browns, managed by young Charles Comiskey, won
four consecutive pennants (1885-88) and a postseason championship from
the NL pennant winner in 1886.
The AA departed from the NL not only by aggressivelyand openly seek-
ing the patronage of ethnics and workingmen but by fieldingblack players
on one of its teams. Unofficial bans had prevented blacks from playing
in either the National Association or the National League, but as early
as 1872 a black player, John "Bud" Fowler, played on a white pro team
located in New Castle, Pennsylvania. For a dozen years he performed in
obscurity before surfacing again in 1884 on the roster of a club in Still-
water, Minnesota, in the Northwestern League. "The poor fellow's skin is
against him," reported Sporting Life at the end of the 1885 season. "With
his splendid abilities he would long ago have been on some good club had
his color been white instead of black. Those who know say there is no
better second baseman in the country." In the mid-I88os the color line
briefly relaxed. Along with Fowler, at leasr fifty-four other blacks played
on racially integrated professional teams between 1883 and 1898. Among
them were a pair of brothers, Moses and Welday Walker, who played in
1884 with Toledo of the AA. But the Walkers lasted only one campaign.
The season of 1887 was a turning point for race relations in hasehall.
During that summer, several events signaled a retreat from integration that
would end by the turn of the century in the total exclusion of blacks from
professional white baseball. The biggest blow came in the International
League, a top-flight minor league in which six of its ten teams fielded black
players. "How far will the mania for engaging colored players go!" queried
Sporting Life. InJuly, in the face of protests from some of the white players,
the league banned the admission of any more blacks into the circuit. Only
a few days later Cap Anson refused to allow his White Stockings ro take
the field against Newark, an International League team, in an exhibition
contest unless George Srovey, Newark's star black hurJer, was kept out of
Q
GJ G G
In the meantime, as the r880s closed, both the NL and AA faced new chal-
lenges. Internecine warfare threatened the A!'(s very existence. Although
Von dec Abe on several occasions lent financial aid to his less fortunate
fellow AA owners, he also embarked on a personal vendetta against the
Brooklyn Bridegrooms (so named because several of the players got mar-
ried, an unusual occurrence in an age when the overwhelming majority
of the players were bachelors). When the association chose a puppet of
Von der Ahe as president in r890, Brooklyn and Cincinnati angrily pulled
out of the AA and joined the NL. To accommodate the two new clubs,
the NL conveniently ignored the Tripartite Agreement that it had signed
in r882. But from the standpoint of the owners in both leagues, an even
more ominous shadow fell across baseball. In r890, the players launched
a formidable uprising of their own.
_____________ rt'III