Baseball

Sources

Early Professionalism. Since its beginnings in the 1830s, baseball had been played by loosely organized amateur clubs in the Northeast. In 1858 these teams organized the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP). In 1869 Harry Wright, a transplanted Englishman and former cricket player, organized the Cincinnati Red Stockings, the first publicly proclaimed professional baseball team. Wright, who earned $1,200 as a player and team captain, recruited many of the best amateur players, paying them salaries of $600 to $1,400. After completing the 1869 season with a record of 58 wins and 1 tie, in 1870 the Red Stockings lost several games and experienced great financial strain from the salaries of their top players. The team disbanded after 1870, and Wright took his best players to Boston and organized a new team. In 1871 professional teams formed the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP). The formation of the NAPBBP, following the demise of the NABBP in 1870, signaled the end of the influence of amateurism on baseball in the United States, as the NAPBBP set the rules of the game and established a selection process for a national champion. In 1871 the Philadelphia Athletics defeated the Chicago White Stockings for the NAPBBP pennant. The most dominant NAPBBP team was Harry Wright’s Bostonians, who posted a record of 227 wins and 60 losses and won four consecutive pennants from 1872 to 1875.

The Rise of the National League. In 1876 William A. Hulbert, president of the Chicago White Stockings, founded the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. With the National League (NL) Hulbert established a profitable organization and pioneered the business and bureaucratic structures that would characterize professional team sports into the twentieth century. The NL, which consisted of teams from Boston, Chicago, Cincinnati, Hartford, Louisville, Philadelphia, Saint Louis, and Indianapolis, maximized owner profits by restricting each city to only one team and limiting the owners’ ability to trade players freely through the “reserve clause.” Originally a “gentlemen’s agreement,” the reserve clause became a set rule in 1879. The reserve clause permitted team owners to reserve their five best players from trade negotiations with other teams. By the 1880s the owners applied the reserve clause to their entire rosters. Hulbert, who served as president of the NL until his death in 1882, ruled the league with an iron hand, throwing out teams that threatened the integrity of the league and the moral image of professional baseball. He expelled Philadelphia and New York from the league for refusing to complete their final road tours in 1876, and Saint Louis and Cincinnati in 1880 for selling beer and playing games on Sunday. The top team in the NL was Hulbert’s Chicago White Stockings, led by Albert Spalding and baseball’s first superstar player, Adrian “Cap” Anson.

NATIONAL LEAGUE PENNANT WINNERS

The Challenge of the American Association. Hulbert’s NL had such a monopoly on baseball by the early 1880s that the only way new teams could emerge was through the formation of rival leagues. In 1881 sportswriters Alfred H. Spink from Saint Louis and Oliver P. Caylor from Cincinnati organized the American Association of Base Ball Clubs (AA) to challenge the National League for the baseball dollar. The American Association, with teams in Baltimore, Cincinnati, Louisville, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Saint Louis, catered to the working class by charging a low admission price of twenty-five cents, playing games on Sunday (the only day off for most workers), and selling beer. In 1882, after the first year of play by the American Association, the National League recognized the threat to its baseball monopoly and quickly reestablished teams in New York and Philadelphia. More important, the National League worked out a truce, the National Agreement, with the American Association and the Northwestern League, a minor league that operated in Michigan, Ohio, and Illinois, to mutually recognize the reserve clause and territorial rights of each team. Internal problems, however, undermined the stability of the American Association. Brooklyn and Saint Louis not only battled for the American Association pennant but for administrative control of the league. After a Saint Louis representative became president of the American Association in 1890, Brooklyn and Cincinnati resigned from the Association and joined the National League. After a poorly attended 1891 season, the American Association disbanded, and four teams joined the National League.

Players Revolt. In the 1880s baseball players organized for increased salaries and reform of the reserve clause. Although the 1880s were a prosperous decade for major league baseball, team owners held salaries at the levels of the previous decade and, to further maximize their profits, imposed a salary cap. The salaries of baseball players averaged $1,750 annually, nearly three times the wages of typical industrial workers. However, unlike the industrial worker who could (in theory at least) freely market his skills, baseball players were bound to specific teams by the reserve clause, and were unable to freely sell their skills to the highest bidder. In response to the players’ demands for higher salaries and reserve-clause reform, John Montgomery Ward, a star player with the New York Giants and a law graduate of Columbia University, founded the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, the first baseball players’ union, in 1885. Within two years Ward presented the National League with a player contract, which the National League accepted, but without abandoning its salary structure. In 1889 the National League imposed a salary cap of $2,500, and angry players called for a strike, but Ward advised against it, presenting the league with the ultimatum that it abandon its salary cap or face competition from a brotherhood league in 1890. That year he formed the Players’ League (PL), with teams in seven of the cities with National League teams. Players and owners shared the wealth in the Players’ League. Despite limited success in luring some players away from the National League, including the entire Washington team, the Players’ League collapsed after the 1890 season, with the National League buying back many of its former stars. Moreover, the National League assured the failure of the Players’ League through threats and bribes to its financial backers.

SEGREGATED BASEBALL

During the late nineteenth century major league baseball became racially segregated. In 1867 the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), which governed amateur baseball, barred African Americans, maintaining that only whites could uphold baseball’s “gentlemanly character.” Owners of professional teams in pursuit of winning records, however, signed contracts with skilled African American players. While the first African American professional baseball player was John “Bud” Fowler in New Castle, Pennsylvania, in 1872, the first to play in the major league was Moses Fleetwood Walker, who joined Toledo of the International League in 1884. Unfortunately he and his brother Welday only played one season. Racial tensions hit baseball in 1887, when a white player for Syracuse (International League) refused to stand in the team picture with an African American teammate. Afterward International League owners decided to discontinue signing African Americans, but permitted existing players to remain on the teams. Also that year Adrian “Cap” Anson, manager of the Chicago White Stockings, refused to let his team play an exhibition game against Newark (International League) because its starting pitcher, George Stovey, was an African American. This event led major league owners to release their African American players and agree not to sign any more to contracts. African Americans formed their own professional baseball teams and leagues, with the first being the Cuban Giants in New York in 1885. The team chose the name Cuban Giants because they wanted the public to think they were Cuban rather than American. In 1887 the League of Colored Baseball Clubs organized, with teams in Boston, New York, Philadelphia, Washington, Pittsburgh, Norfolk, Cincinnati, Baltimore, and Louisville, The Cuban Giants defeated the Pittsburgh Keystones in the first Colored Championships of America in 1888.

Sources: Arthur R. Ashe Jr., A Hard Road to Glory: A History of the African-American Athlete, 1619-1918 (New York: Amistad Press, I 1988);

Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of America’s Game (Urbana &. j I Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992);

David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From the Gentleman’s Sport to the Commissioner System (University Park London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983).

National League Troubles. Despite the demise of both the Players’ League in 1890 and the American Association in 1891, the 1890s brought more troubles to the National League. As a result of buying out many of the players and teams of the Players’ League and the American Association, the National League accumulated great debts, which the league could not settle because of a national economic depression, poor attendance, public disillusionment with the game, and increased competition from other forms of public entertainment. Fans refused to attend games at home or on the road involving teams with poor records, such as Louisville and Saint Louis, which consistently occupied last place in the final standings. Even the New York Giants, the mainstay of the National League, failed to field a strong team in the 1890s. To increase fan interest and profitability, the team owners wrestled with the decision to reduce the number of teams or form two six-team divisions. In 1899 the league returned to an eight-team circuit comprising of Boston, Brooklyn, Chicago, Cincinnati, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and Saint Louis. Moreover, the NL navigated the troubled 1890s without a leader, as Albert Spalding, who led the league against the Players’ League in 1890, had retired as president of the Chicago White Stockings. Indeed the National League’s troubles would continue into the twentieth century, until a new agreement in 1903 created a stable league structure.

Sources

Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of America’s Game (Urbana & Chicago: University of Illinois Press, 1992);

Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960);

David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From the Gentleman’s Sport to the Commissioner System (University Park & London: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983).