Authors: George Vecsey
Spalding showed his mercenary side in 1876 when he and three teammates left Boston to join the Chicago White Stockings in the new National League. “Boston is in mourning,” said the
Worcester Spy.
“Like Rachel weeping for her children, she refuses to be comforted.” In one of the first great newspaper free agent lamentations, Boston was in mourning forty-four seasons before it would lose another star pitcher, named George Herman Ruth.
Ever the innovator, as manager in 1876 and 1877, Spalding formed a reserve team that played a lesser schedule of clubs around the Chicago area, a forerunner of the farm system that Branch Rickey would implement four decades later. The reserves proved unprofitable and the excess players were traded away, but Spalding had shown his tendency to think big. He showed the same entrepreneurial side by giving away copious supplies of free tickets to Chicago's aldermen, clerks, commissioners, police officers, and even mayors, who were delighted to receive them. In his own way, he was the Bill Veeck of his time, cooperating with the newspapers, even the ones who criticized him. He once told Harmony White of the
Chicago News
that “good liberal roasts in newspapers of wide circulation are much more effective than fulsome praise.” But unlike Veeck, who took pleasure in a cold beer on a Sunday afternoon, or any afternoon, Spalding held the line against Sunday games as well as selling alcohol in the ballpark.
Spalding would pitch only two more seasons because he had more important things to do—like getting rich. After seeing George and Harry Wright open a sporting goods store in New York, and
A. J. Reach manufacture baseballs and sell equipment in Philadelphia, Spalding realized there was money to be made from baseball. He concentrated on running the White Stockings while his younger brother, Walter, worked in the store, and A.G.'s mother sewed team names like “Indianapolis” across the fronts of the uniforms.
For a brief time, Chadwick criticized Spalding for jumping clubs, but by 1877 Chadwick was professing that Spalding “has sense enough to know that fair and manly play, and honorable and faithful service are at least as much the essentials of a professional ballplayer as skill in the field and at the bat.” In 1884, Chadwick became the editor and spokesman for Spalding's growing collection of baseball guides and publications.
Chadwick was far more than a dutiful praise-singer. With a flair for mathematics, he devised a system of recording every single play on a scorecard and then summing them up in a box score. To this day, no other sport has the variety of statistics that intrigue fans—wild pitches, stolen bases, errors. One of Chadwick's symbols was “K” for strikeout, on the theory that K was “the prominent letter of the word strike, as far as remembering the word was concerned.” When today's fans hang a series of K banners over the grandstand railing to denote a strikeout by the hometown fastballer, they have no idea the device comes from a historian born in Exeter, England, in 1824.
Spalding became a power in the National League, coming up with a reserve system that tied the five best players to every club and imposing a maximum salary of $2,000 per player nearly a century before American sports installed a salary cap. Under Spalding, the owners tightened their control to keep the next generation of players from exerting the free agency he had used to move from Boston to Chicago. Echoing Spalding, Chadwick praised the reserve rule, asserting that “the exorbitant demands” of players would “eventually bankrupt the strongest company in the professional arena.”
Having tightened management's grip on the labor pool in his own country, Spalding set out to peddle baseball elsewhere. Hearing about the 1888 centennial planned in Australia, he organized a barnstorming expedition that would take the American game
around the world. Twenty major league players signed up for the trip, along with a cricket coach, a manager, two assistants, several journalists, Spalding's mother, and a few other women, along with a balloonist and parachutist named Professor Bartholomew. With Spalding's very active cooperation, there were no black players, yet the great man was not against hiring a black mascot, Clarence Duval from Chicago, who wore the White Stockings' uniform for good luck and was paraded around in front of Asians, Australians, Africans, and Europeans with a leash around his neck, a wonderful advertisement for the American character, indeed.
After a sendoff from President Grover Cleveland at the White House, the entourage left Chicago on October 20, 1888, and traveled west to California. The players practiced cricket on an improvised pitch on board the ship, and played both sports in New Zealand and Australia, without gaining too many converts. Professor Bartholomew was the main attraction, drawing people onto the grounds, but he injured both legs in a hard landing in Ballarat and was put out of commission. The troop continued on to Colombo, Ceylon, having their photographs taken playing ball in the desert sand and sprawling over the Sphinx, in Egypt, and then moved on to Naples, Paris, London, Bristol, Birmingham, Glasgow, Manchester, Liverpool, Belfast, and Dublin.
Upon landing in New York in April of 1889, the entourage was honored at a nine-course banquet (one for every inning) at Del-monico's, attended by Theodore Roosevelt, the future president, and Mark Twain, by then an American celebrity. Twain set an early standard for bombast by calling baseball “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!”
The menu, not unusual for an age that had not discovered calories or self-restraint, included oysters, Ceylon cream of asparagus soup, red snapper, fillet of beef, braised capons, Roman punch, plovers, pudding, fruits, coffee, and cheese. There were also nine toasts, which surely softened up the American burghers for the sales pitch by Abraham G. Mills, a former president of the National League: baseball was “a purely American invention.” Upon these words, the
players and the guests began pounding on the tables, chanting, “No rounders! No rounders! No rounders!” The trip had formalized Spalding's role as Saint Goodwill the Evangelist. He was taking on not just cricket but all other alien forms of bat-and-ball games. From here on, baseball was to be treated as the American game.
Along with prosperity and expansion came corruption. In 1877, a gambling scandal broke in Louisville, causing four guilty players to be banned, effectively ruining that franchise. Other teams came and went—Providence, Indianapolis, Hartford, Milwaukee—but the industry continued to grow. With players increasingly tied to their team, the owners were able to consolidate the rules, build bigger stadiums, and attract more paying customers through set schedules of games every Tuesday, Thursday, and Saturday.
Modern fans tend to think postseason baseball began with the first World Series in 1903 but from 1882 to 1890, the National League and the American Association met for postseason play eight times, a huge step for public exposure and income. In 1885 and 1886, Chris Von der Ahe's St. Louis Browns met Spalding's White Stockings in a series labeled “the world's championship”—at least that part of the world including adjacent Illinois and Missouri.
The experimentation continued with balls ranging from spongy to rock-hard, often difficult to grip. The pitching was morphing from underhand to overhand. Bats were homemade, ranging from broom-handle thin to fence-post thick. Most infielders stood erect, more or less glued to the base to which they were assigned, at least until pioneers began discovering how much territory they could cover. Charles Comiskey, a handsome player from Chicago, was given credit as one of the early first basemen to play wide of the base, thereby increasing his defensive range. William Arthur (Candy) Cummings, a pitcher who won 124 games for four different teams in the old National Association of Professional Base Ball Players from 1872 through 1875, claimed to have invented the curveball after skipping clamshells on the water. Cummings and the curveball have since provided a cottage industry for scientists intent on proving that a curveball either does or does not exist. (Generations of failed hitters, trudging homeward with their bats
and their release papers, would venture the firm scientific conclusion that the ball does, indeed, curve.)
Other great players and characters emerged near the end of the nineteenth century, some of them dying young, often from drink or disease: Charles (Hoss) Radbourne, a right-hander who won 60 games in 1884, still the record for most victories in a season, but died at forty-four; Mike (King) Kelly, whose dashing ways on the base paths inspired the baseball chant “Slide, Kelly, slide,” received the first five-figure salary (exactly $10,000), but died at thirty-six; Ed Delahanty, a prolific batter and the oldest of five brothers who reached the major leagues, was thirty-five when he walked off the team's stalled train and fell off the bridge at Niagara Falls, Ontario; Wee Willie Keeler, a five-foot, four-and-a-half-inch, 140pound outfielder who dexterously slapped the ball into unoccupied corners and said his mission was to “hit 'em where they ain't”; and Billy Sunday, who stole 246 bases in five seasons but then became a prominent evangelist and gave up the game at twenty-seven.
Roger Connor remains the nineteenth-century star who was almost totally forgotten—a slugger from an age when home runs were considered oafish, wasteful, the ruin of a perfectly good rally. Six feet, three inches tall and weighing 220 pounds, the child of Irish immigrants, Connor was summoned down the Hudson River, soon joined by new teammates Buck Ewing and John Montgomery Ward, giving New York three future Hall of Famers at the top of its lineup. In 1885, the team brought in a new manager, Jim Mutrie, who referred to his stars as “my giants,” which soon led to the official nickname of that historic franchise.
A deft first baseman who stole 244 bases and hit 233 triples, Connor smashed one home run completely out of the old Polo Grounds in New York, upon which the wealthy box-seat patrons took up a collection and bought Connor a gold watch said to be worth $500. When Connor retired, nobody fussed over his total of 138 homers, clearly the most anybody had ever hit. He went back to Waterbury and bought the local minor league team, and later worked in the school system.
“The family old-timers said he was just a regular family man after
his playing days who often helped friends and family out of financial hardships,” a grand-nephew, Garrett Squires, recollected early in the twenty-first century. “So he had a good life from all accounts.”
Perhaps it was a good life but it was also uncelebrated. In 1921, when Babe Ruth was swatting home runs for the Yankees in the second version of the Polo Grounds, Roger Connor was living a couple of hours away in northern Connecticut. When the Babe hit his 138th home run and then his 139th, Connor was not invited to sit in a box seat of honor to graciously applaud the Babe, as is the custom today when records are broken. He was not mentioned at all. When Connor died in 1931, the obituary in the Waterbury paper played up his contribution to local baseball after he had left the major leagues but it did not note that Connor had once held the record for home runs before Babe Ruth. In 1976, a Waterbury sportswriter hectored the Veterans Committee to vote Roger Connor into the Baseball Hall of Fame. The plaque says Connor was the home run king of the nineteenth century.
The lack of attention paid to Connor was due to the low status of the home run rather than any obscurity of baseball itself. Although generally perceived as rough-hewn characters who would disrupt a hotel or restaurant with their rowdy arrival, many players in the last quadrant of the nineteenth century were celebrities, the subjects of songs, articles, and gossip. Having shed their amateur status, baseball players were regarded in the same class as laborers or tradesmen or music hall performers, with none of the college-boy aura that would later become attached to football or the country-club glamour associated with tennis and golf. In fact, a small percentage of baseball players were college men, like Ward, a lawyer out of Columbia University in New York.
The patronizing air from the stockbrokers and businessmen who bought box seats to the games is detected in the
New York Times
's coverage of the Delmonico's dinner in April of 1889. Cap Anson, the manager of the White Stockings, who had spent a year at Notre Dame University, was described as appearing “considerably embarrassed when he rose to his feet, but was also thankful that he had been permitted to assist in teaching the world what it most needed
to know.” In the eyes of the nameless reporter, Anson came off as a humble oaf, which may or may not have had any connection to his staunch opposition to blacks' participating in the major leagues. The
Times
then described how Ward “seemed glad of the opportunity given him to display his singularly correct knowledge of the English language,” with the reporter using the better vocabulary of this college man to contrast with the vast majority of the players. Baseball players are still regarded by the public as day laborers, generally of modest class and pedigree, partially because of the rising number of Hispanics in the game, coupled with resentment of high salaries and the strength of the union. When the players do not report for work, they are perceived as committing an injustice to the population, like gardeners and nannies not reporting for work. How can they do this to us?
The polysyllabic Ward became an organizer of the Players' Brotherhood, which led to the rebel Players League in 1890, in reaction to the $2,000 maximum salary and the reserve clause the owners were trying to force on the top players. Among his colleagues in the early Brotherhood were Comiskey, who was managing an upstart team in his hometown of Chicago, and Connie Mack, a lanky catcher from Massachusetts.
“The purpose of our Brotherhood was to protect the players,” Mack would say many years later, by which time he and Comiskey were widely depicted as penurious owners in Philadelphia and Chicago, respectively. Comiskey is identified by the 1919 gambling scandal among his resentful players while Mack is identified for twice dismantling his pennant-winning Athletics teams in order to raise cash, yet both started as union men and rebels. Spalding went after the Brotherhood with the help of his dutiful scribe, Chadwick, who claimed the Players League had financial backing from devious Wall Street sources, always a popular, if anonymous, scapegoat. The Players League folded after one year.