Authors: George Vecsey
“Some of the younger members of that club got together and formed the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, September 24, 1845,” Adams wrote later. (“Knickerbocker” was a familiar Dutch name in New York, previously named New Amsterdam.) “The players included merchants, lawyers, Union Bank clerks, insurance clerks and others who were at liberty after 3 o'clock in the afternoon. They went into it just for exercise and enjoyment, and I think they used to get a good deal more solid fun out of it than the players in the big games do nowadays,” Adams added.
The modern game was codified into recognizable form in New York City around 1845 by Alexander Cartwright, a bank teller and volunteer fireman. He is given credit for the rules that called for flat bases at uniform distances, three strikes per batter, and nine players in the field. The game also produced an umpire, who at first sat at a table along the third-base line, occasionally in tails and a tall black hat. He did not call balls or strikes or even outs on the base path but served more as a mediator for group decisions involving players and even fans.
Perhaps the first big recorded game in American history took place on June 19, 1846, when the Knickerbockers took a ferry across the Hudson River to a grassy picnic grove appropriately named the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey, where they lost to the New York Club, 23–1, with Cartwright serving as umpire.
After one game in 1858, the Knickerbockers posed for a rudimentary photograph, staring poker-faced at the newfangled camera, their bushy beards and muttonchop sideburns making them spiritual ancestors of the fightin' Oakland A's of the mid-1970s, with their retro facial hair.
Hoboken, the birthplace of another American institution, Francis Albert Sinatra, has lobbied to be considered the home place of baseball, but its urban grit and anonymous proximity to New York City make it a poor competitor with upstate Cooperstown for the
honor. In the minds of the American builders of baseball, the game needed the appeal of the woods and pastures, with the players retaining the posture of farmers and outdoorsmen. This image was more myth than reality; baseball was a city game.
Within a few miles and short ferry rides, the Knickerbockers could challenge teams like the Empires, Atlantics, Eagles, Putnams, Washingtons, Gothams, Eckfords, and Phantoms in Brooklyn, Manhattan, and New Jersey, whose rosters included men from the shops, factories, offices, and civil service of the metropolis. Some clubs were organized along ethnic lines, like soccer teams of future generations, but others represented trades or companies or neighborhoods.
Cartwright did not stick around to see how it turned out. In 1849, he heard of the Gold Rush in California and headed west, with bat and ball at reach. Cartwright is often called the Johnny Appleseed of baseball for the way he carried the sport on his westward peregrination. Cartwright deserves a great deal of credit, but he was not the only pioneer.
In 1857, Doc Adams, as the head of the Knickerbockers, may have invented a defensive position known to this day as shortstop, roaming into the open space beyond second and third bases to handle relays because the ball was too light to be thrown long distances. The winner was the team that was ahead after nine innings, rather than the first team to score twenty-one runs.
Perhaps the most brilliant rule was setting the bases ninety feet apart, most notably from home to first. How did the pioneers determine that ninety feet was exactly the proper test of a pitcher, batter, infielder, and first baseman? Could they foresee generations of what are called bang-bang plays at first base, with an umpire watching the runner's foot and listening to the smack of the ball in the glove at the same time? That perfect distance has survived from rudimentary shortstops like Doc Adams of the 1850s to disparate shortstops like squat Honus Wagner early in the next century to spindly Marty (Slats) Marion of the 1940s to acrobatic Ozzie Smith of the 1980s to solid Derek Jeter and Alex Rodriguez at the turn of another century. The fielders became bigger and faster with better
equipment; so did the batters racing down to first base. Unlike basketball, in which players seem to have outgrown the dimensions of the court and the basket, baseball players still succeed or fail by the same slender margins. In this way, the game remains unchanged.
Other aspects of 1850s baseball were bound to change. For a time, players were expected to remain amateur. In 1858, while Adams was active with the Knickerbockers, the players formed the National Association of Base Ball Players. They thought it was their game, although they would soon learn differently.
In that same year, an admission fee was charged for a baseball game for the first time, for an all-star game between players in New York and Brooklyn, then a separate city. Over 10,000 fans crowded into the Fashion Race Course in Queens, in what is now called Corona, not far from the current Shea Stadium. After expenses, the players donated the profits of $71.09 to help support the fire departments of the two cities, but businessmen could not help but notice that money could be made from baseball. Within the next decade, gates and turnstiles were installed and proprietors began charging a dime or a quarter to see crack touring teams like the Brooklyn Excelsiors of 1860, who traveled to Albany, Troy, Buffalo, Rochester, and Newburgh in upstate New York and on to Baltimore and Philadelphia.
By charging admission, baseball produced a higher level of competition. At first, the pitcher threw underhanded from forty-five feet, which was later moved back to the current sixty feet, six inches. The early pitchers were expected to merely lob the ball to the hitters, but the financial stakes prodded pitchers to try to blow the ball past the batter. It is reassuring to know that Roger Clemens heaves a fastball from exactly the same distance as Cy Young did— not just sixty feet but sixty feet, six inches. To speak of this distance is to recite the sacred prayer of an ancient religion, with centuries of begats.
The first gate attraction, on the order of Sandy Koufax or Fernando Valenzuela, two spiritual descendants, was James Creighton, born in 1841, who played for the Brooklyn Niagras. At seventeen, Creighton developed an underhanded hard-breaking “speedball”
with a “wrist snap” and “spin” that made him “the first professional star” in the judgment of Leonard Koppett, a sage of the following century.
Creighton was also a powerful hitter. In 1862, he swung so hard while hitting a home run that he caused a fatal internal injury, perhaps a ruptured bladder, and he died at his home days later, at the age of twenty-one. His early death, mourned in many neighboring states, made him the first popular baseball player to die at an early age. That morbid list now includes Ray Chapman, killed by a pitch in 1920, Yankee heroes like Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth along with Thurman Munson, the Yankee captain who crashed his jet plane in 1979, as well as Tony Conigliaro, whose life was shortened by a fastball to the head, and Roberto Clemente, who died in an airplane crash in 1972 while delivering goods to earthquake-stricken Nicaragua. Creighton had the dubious honor of being the first.
By the start of the Civil War, when there were already hundreds of teams in the Northeast, the game extended southward, played (separately) by white and black Southerners. Legend has it that Abraham Lincoln and his son Tad watched games behind the White House. Even in the middle of the war, baseball had its first professional free agent in A. J. Reach, who in 1864 was hired by the Philadelphia Athletics from the New York Eckfords. This was only the start of his financial prowess, for Reach established a sporting goods chain that bore his name.
In 1863, Ned Cuthbert of the Philadelphia Keystones stole a base and when ordered to return to first, he reminded the umpire that no rule prohibited him from taking off. Life promptly became tougher for catchers, who had not yet seen the wisdom of wearing glove, mask, and protective cup against increasingly hard-thrown pitches and foul tips.
The game boomed after the Civil War, supported by the relative prosperity and hopefulness of a postwar nation, particularly up North. With trains running, factories smoking, cities growing, there was space and time and money for green enclosures, for entertainment, and inevitably for sport. The Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1869 had exactly one player from the city they represented, with
eight other players imported and paid for their baseball skills while allegedly making hats, selling insurance, keeping books, and building pianos to live up to the vestigial amateur pretensions of the day.
The manager, Harry Wright, an English-born son of a famous cricketer, conducted regular practices, outfitted his players in uniforms, and installed diets as well as bans on tobacco and alcohol, in theory, anyway. The star of the team and its most expensive player was Harry's brother, George Wright, who signed on from New Jersey for $1,400. In 1869, the Red Stockings barnstormed around the country, as far away as California, playing all takers, winning 65 and tying 1, and on June 26, 1869, the Red Stockings were invited to the White House, where President Ulysses S. Grant praised what he called “the western Cinderella club.”
Cinderella did not thrive for long. The next season, the Red Stockings won 27 straight games but then lost to the Brooklyn Atlantics, which seemed to instantly ruin their aura. With attendance down, the first openly professional team in the United States did the truly professional thing: It relocated from Cincinnati to Boston.
In decades to come, many other cities, from Baltimore to Brooklyn, from Milwaukee to Montreal, would lose beloved teams, but Cincinnati was the first. Bottom-line economics had brought heartache and disillusionment to hometown fans. Modern baseball had arrived.
A
lbert Goodwill Spalding, more than any other man, is responsible for baseball being America's signature sport. He started off as a pitcher but became a businessman as well as an evangelist for the sport, determined to link baseball with the American character.
A complicated man, part crass, part visionary, Spalding was a doer and a seer, not unlike Ted Turner, the American sailor and television visionary, or Richard Branson, the British balloon pilot– businessman, one century later. He detected a spiritual side to baseball much the same way other nineteenth-century men saw a higher calling in peddling cereal or coal. His blend of American capitalism and American nationalism led to his claim that baseball gave “a growing boy self-poise, and self-reliance, confidence, inoffensive and entirely proper aggressiveness” as well as “general manliness.”
Spalding began his pitching career in Illinois, and was good enough to be hired by the Red Stockings when Harry Wright moved the team from Cincinnati to Boston. From 1871 through 1875, Spalding started 282 games and finished 262 in an era when pitchers were expected to finish their games. In turn, Spalding expected to be treated and paid as a professional rather than a quasi-amateur.
“I was neither ashamed of the game nor of my attachment to it,” he later wrote in his 1911 book,
America's National Game.
“Mr. Wright was there offering us… cash … to play on the Boston team.… Why, then, go before the public under the false pretense of being amateurs?”
The age of amateurs came to an end on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1871, with the formation of a new National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Nine teams joined up—the Boston Red Stockings, Chicago White Stockings, Philadelphia Athletics, New York Mutuals, Washington Olympics, Troy (New York) Haymakers,
Fort Wayne (Indiana) Kekiongas, Cleveland Forest Citys, and the Rockford (Illinois) Forest Citys. In the twenty-first century, some of these teams and cities have a decidedly minor league ring to them, but in their time they represented major metropolitan areas in the northeast quadrant of the United States, greater than war-torn Atlanta, which counted 21,789 residents in 1870, or Los Angeles, which counted 5,727, or Phoenix and Dallas, which counted no residents whatsoever.
With baseball still somewhat of a regional spectacle, Spalding became one of the most visible and popular players, but he was not satisfied with taking his turn as pitcher every couple of days. He had grander dreams. In the middle of the 1874 season, not yet twenty-four, Spalding arranged for the Boston and Philadelphia teams to barnstorm around England. Since the Boston manager, Harry Wright, and his brother, George, had grown up playing cricket, the two teams issued a challenge to play the English game as well as baseball. “We are not much in practice, but we are great in matches,” Spalding was said to have bragged.
The American players demonstrated their sport in Liverpool, Manchester, London, Sheffield, Boston, and Dublin, faring better at baseball than cricket. In order to even out the cricket match, the English let the Yanks use eighteen fielders while they used the normal number of eleven. Baseball mystified most of the British, as indeed it still does. During this tour, Spalding heard people talking not only about English roots of baseball but also an old French game of “thèque,” both sports akin to his.
Upon Spalding's return from England, he began a long and symbiotic relationship with a British-born journalist, Henry Chadwick, who had switched his enthusiasm from cricket to baseball after migrating to the United States. Writing in the rudimentary sports pages, Chadwick portrayed the players and also described the action in what was already the most noticeable American sport. He also fit into Spalding's mission to spread the gospel of baseball by having the players portrayed as role models for the emerging American society, in order to rid it of its leftover European identification.
Writing in
Beadle's Dime Baseball Player
, one of the early publications,
Chadwick said the trip “set to rest forever the much-debated question as to whether we [have] a national game or not,” while “demonstrating the character and habits of our American base ball professionals.” Chadwick loved to describe how Albert Goodwill Spalding personified the American character. While Spalding was still pitching in Boston circa 1874, Chadwick described him as “intelligent and gentlemanly,” a man who “both on and off the baseball field conducts himself in a manner well calculated to remove the public's bad impression as to professional ball tossers, created by swearing, gambling, specimens who form the black sheep of the flock.”