April 26, 1872: Mansfields of Middletown are ‘Chicagoed’ in National Association debut

The story of General Abner Doubleday inventing baseball as a young man in Cooperstown, New York, has long been recognized as apocryphal, a creation myth fashioned as proof that baseball is wholly American. Baseball historians agree that the sport was being played long before Doubleday purportedly came on the scene in 1839.

Another Union general who did play a part in a baseball origin story was General Joseph King Fenno Mansfield. The Connecticut native, mortally wounded at the Civil War Battle of Antietam, was the namesake of the Nutmeg State’s first professional nine, the Mansfields of Middletown. Hailing from the General’s hometown, the Mansfields were a decorated amateur team before turning pro in 1872 at the suggestion of another prominent New Englander, Boston Red Stockings manager Harry Wright. In their professional debut, a National Association match with the Haymakers of Troy on April 26, 1872, the Mansfields fell in historic fashion by a score of 10-0 but earned glowing praise from the fourth estate.

Organized during the Civil War by 16-year-old Ben Douglas Jr., the Mansfields started out as a factory team for workers at the Douglas Pump Factory, a business that his father owned. Young Ben changed the team’s name from the Douglas Club to the Mansfields in honor of the general, his great-uncle. After the war, the Mansfields evolved into Connecticut’s premier amateur club, winning the state championship in 1869 and 1870.1

Building on his club’s successes, Douglas arranged several matches in 1871 with professional clubs affiliated with the new National Association. The boys from Middletown proved unable to win any of those encounters, but in an Independence Day battle gave curveball maestro Candy Cummings and the Stars of Brooklyn all they could handle. The Mansfields lost 5-3 in what that the New York Clipper called “one of the best games ever played in the Nutmeg State.”2

As the Mansfields’ 1871 season drew to a close, reports circulated that the team was reorganizing “on a professional basis,” but the following February, club members voted to remain in the amateur ranks.3 They’d lost the 1871 Connecticut amateur championship to the Osceolas of Stratford in a series marked by accusations that Middletown had cheated both on the field and off, and they hoped to restore their honor by taking back the whip pennant.4 Reinforcing its stance as amateurs, a month later the club sent a pair of representatives to the National Association of Amateur Base Ball Players spring convention, where the club’s corresponding secretary accepted a position as second vice president.5 But in mid-April, the Mansfields reversed course and turned professional by joining the National Association.6

Why the about-face? It was the result of a dialogue between Douglas and Wright.7 When Douglas contacted Wright in March about scheduling games with Boston for the coming season, the “Father of Professional Baseball” balked. Claiming gate receipts from a Red Stockings August appearance in Middletown hadn’t lived up to promises made, he insisted on a sizable financial guarantee.8 That was something Douglas’s club certainly could not afford. After Douglas pressed Wright in vain for a reciprocal guarantee, the Boston manager pointed out that if the Mansfields joined the NA, “the professional clubs would have no choice but to play them.”9 Douglas posed that unexpected option to the team members, who agreed to “defy the odds and send [in] the $10 entry fee.”10 And so the seventh-largest city in Connecticut, with barely 11,000 residents, became home to the state’s first professional nine.11

Douglas engaged an impressive array of youngsters for the 1872 season. After the club’s August 1871 match with Boston, he had added infielder Eddie Booth, a veteran of several leading Brooklyn nines, and first baseman Tim Murnane, a promising 21-year-old from nearby Naugatuck to whom he’d also offered a job at a Middletown sewing machine shop.12 Catching longtime Mansfield pitcher Cy Bentley would be the team’s new self-appointed captain, 20-year-old John Clapp, formerly with the Clippers of Ilion (New York).13 From the Osceolas came the team’s new shortstop and change catcher, 21-year-old Bridgeport native and eventual Hall of Famer Jim O’Rourke.

For its first championship game, Middletown traveled to Troy, New York, to face the Haymakers. Founded in 1860, the club commonly known as the Trojans turned professional in 1869 and two years later was a charter member of the National Association. Led by its new captain, Jimmy Wood, Troy had a lineup remade from the one that had finished a lackluster 13-15 during the previous NA season. Its pitcher was veteran George Zettlein, who, along with Wood and several other new Trojans, was a former Chicago White Stockings player left without a team after the Great Fire of Chicago.14 Catching Zettlein was Doug Allison, backstop of the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, who was last with the Olympics of Washington.

Between 700 and a few thousand spectators handed over 25 cents to attend “the first [NA] championship game of the season” on Friday, April 26, held at Haymaker Grounds, just north of Troy, on what was probably a pleasant afternoon.15 Both sides took the field in neat, new uniforms”; the Mansfields’ white with a shield bib bearing a large Old English letter M, accented by blue stockings and a matching belt.16 James McDonald, Clapp’s former Clippers batterymate, umpired.17

Unable to master Bentley’s “swift and deceptive” pitches, the Trojans were held scoreless until the fourth inning.18 They pushed one run across in that frame and three in the fifth, on a three-run home run by Wood that plated Zettlein and fellow Chicago refugee Charlie Hodes. In the Mansfields’ half of that inning, Wood turned a “sharp trick” that took advantage of sloppy baserunning by O’Rourke after he’d reached first on a single.19 Troy first baseman Bub McAtee, in his second tour of duty with the club after two years with the White Stockings, noticed that the Middletown shortstop was slow to return to the base after a foul ball. When O’Rourke strayed as far as second base, Wood orchestrated his pickoff.

Troy registered four more runs in the sixth inning, and one each in the eighth and ninth innings, by means that were left unreported.

As was often true at that time, newspaper summaries of the game were devoted to assessments of each team’s effort and identification of the game’s most remarkable performances, with an emphasis on defense and little space devoted to play-by-play. Tabloids from each team’s base of operations gave defensive kudos to the other side’s backstop – the Troy Times deemed Middletown’s Clapp “careful and brilliant” and the Middletown Constitution called Troy’s Allison “splendid” for not allowing a single passed ball.20 Another Trojan lauded by the Constitution was shortstop Davy Force, whose unfortunate practice of signing contracts with multiple teams for the same season would help bring about the Association’s downfall.21

Unable to muster a single run, Mansfield fell by a score of 10-0, “Chicagoed” in the first shutout in Troy history, according to the Troy Times.22 Every Trojan batter recorded a hit, and all but one (right fielder Phonney Martin) scored. The Mansfields struggled to hit the ball out of the infield, and managed only six hits off Zettlein, “the ‘Charmer,’” 23 two each by Clapp and second baseman Booth, and one apiece by Murnane and left fielder Jim Tipper, who came to be much admired by Murnane, a future baseball columnist.24

Newspaper reports glowed with praise for both sides. An anonymous writer for the Troy Times gushed that “[b]oth nines fielded with extraordinary skill and care,” with an “absence of disputes … to which Trojans have heretofore been unaccustomed.”25 The New York World called the Mansfield nine “a strong one [that] will give some of the “cracks” (first-rate nines) a great deal of trouble before the season is over.”26

Glorying in having a local nine competing on the sport’s grandest stage, the Middletown Constitution observed, “[N]o one anticipated so fine a show from the Mansfield club as they made.”27 Those uplifting words seemed in order, as the game story in that then-weekly publication followed the latest chapter in a tale of evil, the notorious Lydia Sherman murder trial in nearby New Haven.28

Three more times during the 1872 season did the Mansfields come up against the Trojans, and each time they came away with a loss. After absorbing a second shutout on July 23, the Trojans folded, unable to meet their payroll obligations.29 Less than three weeks later, the 5-19 Mansfields did the same.30

Bowed but not broken, Douglas was instrumental in bringing top-flight professional baseball back to Connecticut after the demise of the Mansfields. Two years later, he persuaded a group of prospective investors to bankroll another entrant in the National Association, the Hartford Dark Blues, a club that later became a charter member of the National League.

Acknowledgments

The author is indebted to David Arcidiacono for providing both sources and extended passages from his published works. This article was fact-checked by Andrew Harner and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: George Zettlein, Baseball-Reference.com.

Sources

In addition to the Sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted David Arcidiacono’s Major League Baseball in Gilded Age Connecticut (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2010) and his SABR biography of Ben Douglas, summaries of National Association annual winter meetings as described in Baseball’s 19th Century “Winter” Meetings: 1857-1900 (Phoenix: SABR, 2018) and the Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org websites.

Notes

1 “Base Ball,” Troy Times, October 8, 1870: 3.

2 “Star vs. Mansfield,” New York Clipper, July 15, 1871: 116.

3 “Matters About Home,” Meriden (Connecticut) Republican, October 26, 1871: 2; “Mansfield Base Ball Club,” Middletown Constitution, February 28, 1872: 2.

4 For a detailed account of the accusations leveled by each side in the controversy, see David Arcidiacono, Major League Baseball in Gilded Age Connecticut (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2010), 52-54.

5 “The Amateur Convention,” New York Clipper, March 23, 1872: 405.

6 “Base Ball Notes,” Boston Herald, April 13, 1872: 2.

7 Harry Wright Correspondence with Ben Douglas, March 25, 1872, April 8, 1872, and April 19, 1872, Albert Spalding Collection, New York Public Library

8 Boston won that game, played on August 10, by a score of 23-9. Wright’s disappointment with the proceeds of Boston’s trip down to Middletown suggests that Douglas had promised the moon, as both the Boston Evening Transcript and the Hartford Courant reported that “quite a large attendance” was on hand for the match.  “Despatches in Brief,” Boston Evening Transcript, August 11, 1871: 4; “The Mansfields vs. the Bostons,” Hartford Courant, August 11, 1871: 3.

9 Major League Baseball in Gilded Age Connecticut, 56.

10 Major League Baseball in Gilded Age Connecticut, 57.

11 The 1870 US Census counted 11,126 residents in Middletown. “Population of Connecticut Towns 1830-1890,” Office of the Secretary of State of Connecticut, https://portal.ct.gov/sots/register-manual/section-vii/population-1830—1890, accessed January 6, 2025.

12 The appearance of Booth and Murnane in the championship series a few weeks later prompted the first charge of Mansfield cheating from the Osceolas, who claimed the pair were ineligible to play. See Major League Baseball in Gilded Age Connecticut, 52-54. Murnane’s last name was initially reported as “Murhan” by the Middletown Constitution in a mid-April story on the club’s roster for the 1872 season. “Mansfield Base Ball Club,” Middletown Constitution, April 17, 1872: 2.

13 According to Murnane, Clapp was “wearing a red belt with letters spelling ‘Captain’” when he first arrived at the Mansfields’ grounds. “Mr. Clapp certainly could not play without wearing that belt, and he could not very well wear that belt without being captain.” Tim Murnane, “Murnane’s Baseball Stories,” Boston Globe, January 24, 1915: 39.

14 After losing their ballpark and all their equipment to the fire, White Stockings officials had no choice but to disband and wait for sufficient financing in order to go on. For more details on the connection between the Chicago and Troy baseball teams of that era, see Jeff Laing, “The Windy City-Collar City Connection: The Curious Relationship of Chicago’s and Troy’s Professional Baseball Teams (1870-82), The National Pastime, Vol. 45 (2015), 14-17, https://sabr.org/journal/article/the-windy-city-collar-city-connection-the-curious-relationship-of-chicagos-and-troys-professional-baseball-teams-1870-82/.

15 “Base Ball,” Troy Times, April 25, 1872: 4. Haymaker Grounds was located in the town of Lansingburgh, which in 1901 was annexed by the city of Troy. The Troy Times estimated 700 to 800 spectators were in attendance, but the Brooklyn Times asserted that “[t]he game was witnessed by many thousands.” The Troy Times reported early morning temperatures but nothing for the afternoon on that date. According to the National Weather Service’s past weather database, 150 miles to the south in New York City’s Central Park, no precipitation was reported for the day, with a high temperature of 83 degrees reached, tops for that month. “A ‘Dolly Varden’ Game,” Troy Daily Times, April 27, 1872: 3; “The Haymakers in The Field – They Chicago the Mansfields,” Brooklyn Times, April 27, 1872: 4; “Weather Report,” Troy Times, April 27, 1872: 3; National Weather Service, “NOWData – NOAA Online Data,” weather.gov, https://www.weather.gov/wrh/Climate?wfo=okx, accessed January 6, 2025.

16 “Base Ball,” Middletown Constitution, May 1, 1872: 2; “1872 Mansfield, Middletown CT,” Threads of Our Game, https://www.threadsofourgame.com/1872-mansfield-middletown-ct/, accessed January 6, 2025.

17 See, for example “Clippers, of Ilion, N.Y.,” New York Clipper, August 19, 1871: 156.

18 “A ‘Dolly Varden’ Game.”

19 “A ‘Dolly Varden’ Game.”

20 “A ‘Dolly Varden’ Game”; “Base Ball.” In its article, the Troy Times dubbed the match “a ‘Dolly Varden’ game,” mimicking an oddball craze then sweeping the nation in which the name of a fictional character from a Charles Dickens novel was applied to almost anything of interest. For more on the Dolly Varden craze, see “A Brief History of the Dolly Varden Dress Craze,” A Frolic through Time: Period Dressmaking and the Occasional Side Trip, August 23, 2008, https://zipzipinkspot.blogspot.com/2008/08/brief-history-of-dolly-varden-dress.html.

21 For additional details on the contract dispute that came to be known as the Force Case, and how it’s outcome helped drive a disgruntled William Hulbert to set about creating the National League, see William J. Ryczek, “1875: The Force Case,” in Baseball’s 19th Century “Winter” Meetings: 1857-1900 (Phoenix: SABR, 2018), 126.

22 “A ‘Dolly Varden’ Game.” “Chicagoed” was a popular nineteenth-century euphemism for getting shut out. The author has traced what may have been the first use of the term to politics, specifically in reference to a delegate at Chicago’s 1860 Republican National Convention getting his pocketbook stolen. “‘Chicagoed,’” Millersburg (Ohio) Holmes County Farmer, May 24, 1860: 3. For more on the origin of the term, see Rich Bogovich and Mark Pestana, “July 23, 1870: The first ‘Chicago’ game,” https://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/july-23-1870-the-first-chicago-game/. Accessed March 2025.

23 “Base Ball.”

24 In marking Tipper’s death 23 years later, Murnane called Tipper one of the finest outfielders of his era. “He was a natural ball player, and made the easiest work of taking the most difficult drives. His one-handed catches, without gloves, never were equaled by a ball player in outfield work.” “The Late Tipper,” Sporting Life, May 4, 1895: 8.

25 “A ‘Dolly Varden’ Game.” 

26 “Troy vs. Mansfield,” New York World, April 27, 1872: 1.

27 “Base Ball.”

28 Covered in often gory detail by newspapers nationwide, the trial concluded on April 26 with Lydia Sherman’s conviction for poisoning her third husband to death. She later admitted to having fatally poisoned two previous spouses plus eight children, six of them her own. “Trial of Lydia Sherman,” New Haven Morning Journal and Courier, April 26, 1872: 2; Raymond Bendici, “The Derby Poisoner: The story of Lydia Sherman, a mass murderer,” New Haven Register, January 10, 2015, https://www.nhregister.com/connecticut/article/The-Derby-Poisoner-The-story-of-Lydia-Sherman-a-11358691.php.

29 “The Windy City-Collar City Connection.”

30 “Local Department,” Waterbury (Connecticut) American, August 16, 1872: 3.