January 20, 1871, Parker House, Boston — Ivers Whitney Adams had a specific plan and friends with the money to back it up—if he could secure their help. He was certainly the instigator behind Boston’s having a representative baseball team if there was to be an organized “league” in 1871. Adams called his Congress, State, and Washington Street merchant pals to the famed Parker House for a luncheon meeting on Friday, January 20, 1871. His special guests were Harry and George Wright, formerly the star brothers of the Cincinnati Red Stockings, whom Adams saw play in 1869 and 1870 in Boston as they traversed the country beating nearly all opponents.

Adams’s urgings and comments to his well-heeled friends were in the Boston Journal and Boston Daily Advertiser the next day, while other papers had shorter accounts. Even the New York Clipper printed Adams’s speech in its January 28 issue.1 He was simply asking them to contribute to a $15,000 stock-buying venture that would back his dream baseball team’s creation and foundation.

The local press printed a few names, those who were elected to front-office positions, but it was left to historian George V. Tuohey, 26 years later, to name everyone who got a Parker House invite in his iconic A History of the Boston Base Ball Club.2

In 1948 Harold Kaese’s book The Boston Braves, An Informal History was published as part of the famous G.P. Putnam and Sons baseball series. On page 5 he listed Adams’s wealth roster again, but not without error. He wrote that an F.G. Welsh became a stockholder. There was no such person, but on hand was Canton’s affable Frank George Webster, “The Dean of State Street.” The various newspapers, historian Tuohey, and finally sportswriter Kaese each mixed up an initial or two but a little research has easily corrected those minor glitches.

Though not quite all at the apex of their final wealth as 1871 began, it was an extremely impressive bunch that Adams, 33, had gathered.

John Adams Conkey (1839-1903) was an orphan by 1852. His father, John Q.A. Adams Conkey, was in the crockery business, but died in 1843; his mother, Martha Howe (Bird) Conkey, passed in 1851. The family physician, Dr. Henry E. Townsend, was Conkey’s guardian and sent him to the finest schools. As a young man Conkey clerked for Tuckerman-Townsend, noted tea merchants. Then he dealt in the China Trade for August Heard, later becoming a customs broker and forwarder, estate trustee, and bank notary. A talented thespian, he was a Newton Player and a member of the New England Historic Genealogical Society. Conkey was chosen as team vice president and became the Red Stockings’ second president in 1872, when Adams returned full-time to his businesses and outdoor sporting interests.

Harrison Gardner (1841-1899) served in the Civil War as a lieutenant in the 45th Massachusetts Regiment. Gardner worked at several prosperous firms before being named a partner of commercial merchants Smith, Hogg, and Gardner. Among his many club memberships around the city were those of the Longwood Club and the Boston Athletic Association. He was the Red Stockings’ first treasurer.

George Henry Burditt (1832-1877), was the fifth of six children of grocer William Burditt (and Eliza Welch) of Charlestown. His father died when George was five but he worked his way up into a comfortable life as a clerk, accountant, bookkeeper and by 1870, a real estate broker. He was not among the richest of the Parker House invitees, but was voted on to the Red Stockings Board of Directors that first season and was the club’s treasurer the second year. He remained a director for most of the Reds five-year existence. From the late 1860s Burditt lived in rural West Roxbury and later East Somerville where cancer took his life at age 35.

John Franklin Mills (1823-1876, born in Vermont) was the oldest of those at the lunch and maybe the most “strategic” invitee since he was the partner of Harvey D. Parker, who started the Parker House eatery/hotel. Mills worked for Parker as a waiter at a small restaurant at age 21, proved his considerable worth and ability, and when Parker opened the Parker House, Mills was the main operator. He continued in that job until just before his death.

Eben Dyer Jordan (1823-1895, born in Maine) was likely the wealthiest man at the table at that time. Despite growing up on a farm, he partnered with Benjamin L. Marsh to create the famed Jordan-Marsh retail store in the 1860s. In 1865 his store, woolen mills, and printing company were worth more than an unprecedented $27 million in annual revenues.3

Henry Lillie Pierce (1825-1896) was a member of the Massachusetts House of Representatives, a two-term US congressman in the 1870s, and was elected mayor of Boston in 1873 and 1878 before going into the insurance business. His first employment was with the Walter Baker & Co., a chocolate producer, which he took over by 1854 (when Baker died) and of which he was the sole proprietor the rest of his life. He was a trustee of the Museum of Fine Arts and had membership in several other clubs including the posh Algonquin Club. Among the dozens of causes he was involved in, one was to repeal the state and national law that prevented the enlistment of “colored soldiers” into the State militia or US Army.

Edward Augustus White (1825-1891) was in the clothing and real-estate businesses. He became an alderman and was on the Boston Common Council and Water Board, and became a fire department commissioner.

James Horatio Freeland (1827-1902) partnered early on with his brother C.W. Freeland in men’s clothing manufacturing in Worcester. He later shared ownership in three other companies, one supplying cloth goods for the Union Army in the Civil War. The Great Fire of 1872 burned Freeland out but soon he rebuilt in the form of the Continental Clothing House with Silas W. Loomis on Washington Street. He was a member of the Ancient and Honorable Society, the Central Club, Boston Art Club, and Commercial Club, among many fraternal groups.

Frank George Webster (1841-1930) was likely the richest of the group when claimed by death. As a young man he was a bookbinder, wallpaper clerk, and bank teller before his service in the Civil War. Postwar, he was in on the ground floor at the opening of Kidder, Peabody & Co. Eventually he became known as the “Dean of State Street,” where over the years he amassed his considerable fortune. Webster’s summer home at Squam Lake, New Hampshire, is on the National Register and he owned various Canadian preserves and clubs and was a member of the exclusive Union and Algonquin Clubs and The Country Club of Brookline.

Charles Hunt Porter (1843-1911) became the third president of the Red Stockings in 1873.4 Conkey, like Adams, went back to real business endeavors after one season of baseball activity. Colonel Porter, too, had fought in the Civil War (more than a dozen notable battles) and later became the first mayor of Quincy, Massachusetts, in 1889 when the town became a city. Prior to that he was also park commissioner and organized the Quincy Actives Base Ball team and played on it in the 1860s. During his entire life he was involved in politics in the “City of Presidents,” taking seats on the school board and fire department, and he formed the Quincy Water Co.

Nicholas Taylor Apollonio (1843-1911, born in Brooklyn, New York) was not listed as being at the Parker House but became the fourth Boston Red Stockings president (1874). His father was Italian immigrant Nicholas Alessandro Apollonio, a printer and City of Boston registrar for 40 years. With special permission, young Nick entered Boston English High School at age 11. He was an accountant and clerk by trade and directed operations for the Great Falls Manufacturing Co. for 35 years. Likely the first Italian to be connected with big-time baseball, he eventually became a Winchester resident and was involved with the Winchester Savings Bank, and always cared deeply about the town’s well-being. As Red Stockings president in 1876, Apollonio oversaw the transition from the chaotic National Association to the much more “organized” National League, but even more crucial to Boston fans, the sudden departure of the “Big Four” of Albert Spalding, Deacon White, Ross Barnes, and Cal McVey for Chicago in 1876. Arthur H. Soden joined the Red Stockings toward the close of that first NL season in 1876 and took over as president before the 1877 campaign began.

Richard “Dixie” Tourangeau was the creator/author of the “Play Ball!” wall calendar for Tide-Mark Press from 1981 to 2005, for which he wrote more than 250 player biographies. As the 21st century began he felt an urge to know more about 19th century teams and players. While becoming comfortable with them he was credited with finding the gravesites of Mort and Fraley Rogers for the Biographical Committee and confirming those of Dave Birdsall (cleaning his headstone) and John Dickson McBride (unmarked). Dixie, SABR 1981, lives a mile from both Fenway Park and where the South End Grounds and Huntington Avenue Grounds were located. While researching the Red Stockings creation he realized that in 1870, Ivers Whitney Adams lived a third of a mile from his house, in the Highlands, now the Mission Hill section of Boston. He has written for The National Pastime and biogs and game accounts for the SABR Braves Field and County Stadium books.

Sources

The sources for material on these men is largely gleaned from their obituaries, though some other sources have been consulted as well. The sources are listed here, alphabetically, by each man.

APOLLONIO: Winchester (Massachusetts) Star, April 7, 1911. See also Nemec, David, The Rank and File of 19th Century Major League Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 2012), 285.

BURDITT: Boston Globe, September 18, 1926.

CONKEY: The New-England Historical Genealogical Register, Vol. LIX. Memoirs, Section 1903 Deaths (supplement to April 1905), lxxi. (Boston: New England Historic Genealogical Society, 1905).

FREELAND: Supreme Council of the Ancient Accepted Scottish Rite, “In Memoriam, Illustrious Brother,” Proceedings of the Annual Session Held in Boston, June 26, 1903 (Boston: Massachusetts Council of Deliberation, 1903), 31-33.

GARDNER: The (Brookline, Massachusetts) Chronicle, February 18, 1899.

JORDAN: Boston Herald, November 16, 1895.

MILLS: Boston Globe, April 10, 1876, and Boston Daily Advertiser, April 10, 1876.

PIERCE: Boston Globe, December 18, 1896.

PORTER: Quincy (Massachusetts) Patriot, August 12, 1911, and Boston Globe, August 11, 1911.

WEBSTER: Boston Globe, January 23, 1930.

WHITE: Boston Evening Transcript, May 14, 1891.

Notes

1 New York Clipper, January 21, 1871: 338.

2 George V. Tuohey, A History of the Boston Base Ball Club (Boston: M.F. McQuinn & Co., 1897), Part III, 62.

3 It has been difficult to determine whether or not this referred to annual revenues or net worth, though mentions of the sum appear to suggest annual revenues, which would be truly astonishing.

4 In George V. Tuohey’s book, he begins Chapter V, “The Club’s Presidents,” by saying (his information came from J.C. Morse of the Boston Herald) that all five Red Stockings presidents were then alive and living in Boston. Tuohey via Morse writes that Charles H. Porter was the third president and held office for two seasons. Then Nicholas T. Apollonio became the fourth president for both 1875 and 1876. The years attributed to each man were incorrect. The New York Clipper of December 27, 1873, printed a letter from “President” Porter on the subject of professionalism in the Association. It was dated December 15 and appeared on the bottom of the sixth column of page 306. In the very next column, at the bottom, was a one-paragraph item, “Boston Baseball Association,” which gave the “recent vote” for officers for the Club. Apollonio was elected president and Porter became a director for the coming 1874 season. Sometime between December 16 and Christmas Eve the vote had taken place and Porter was no longer president.

Boston can now boast of possessing a first-class professional Base Ball Club,” declared the Boston Journal, “as all the efforts tending to establish an institution of this kind here culminated yesterday.”1 Professional baseball in Boston began on January 20, 1871, through the efforts of Ivers W. Adams, who had been working toward this achievement for at least a year. While baseball in Boston dated to 1854 with amateur games played on Boston Common,2 several factors kept the city as the only major urban area in the Northeast without a serious baseball team. For one, it took time for the New England Game version of baseball (which included a smaller diamond and consequent shorter distance from home plate to the pitcher’s mound, more players on the field, and outs being recorded by “soaking,” or plunking a runner with the ball) to give way to the more prevalent New York Game.3 Another factor was the lack of an adequate playing field, which was solved when the Union Grounds (later called the South End Grounds) were built in 1869 in Boston’s South End. But besides these, people with big pockets were needed to fund a professional team, and Adams was the one with connections to do so.

Adams was in attendance when the Cincinnati Red Stockings visited the Boston area in 1869-1870, and he began dreaming of a professional baseball club in Boston. He began having correspondence with George and Harry Wright. George Wright came to Boston to meet with Adams in November of 1870, once the Cincinnati team was officially disbanded. Now the door was open for Adams’s dream to come true.

Harry Wright had the influence to assemble a new team. Three players came with him from Cincinnati: his brother George, Charlie Gould, and Cal McVey. Harry Wright then brought Dave Birdsall from the Union Club of Morrisania, Harry Schafer from the Philadelphia Athletics, and Al Spalding, Ross Barnes, and Fred Cone from the Rockford, Illinois, team.

The Massachusetts Legislature incorporated the team with $15,000 capital, made possible by several prominent businessmen.4 Adams met these fellow Boston-area entrepreneurs at Boston’s Parker House, and in his remarks to them emphasized that these Wright brothers “were the only two men possessing the knowledge and the ability to manage and discipline a nine … and [in] whose honesty and integrity I could place implicit confidence.”5 Two hundred memberships in the club were sold, granting the purchasers free admission to games all season long as well as use of the clubhouse.6

The next step involved joining a league of professional teams, which had been on the horizon as the worlds of amateur and professional baseball were coming to a parting of the ways. The 1870 fall meeting of the National Association of Base Ball Players had been “a fiery affair marked by hot words between the two camps, and it ended with the amateurs staging a walkout,” wrote David Voigt.7 It was clear that baseball would be expanding from the world of fun and recreation to fun, recreation, and big business. Possessing the vision of a new professional league but little time to properly organize and hammer out specifics, these new pioneers quickly created a new league on March 17, 1871.

As the rain pattered on the roof, delegates from 10 teams met at the Collier’s Rooms Saloon at Broadway and 13th Street in New York City. Eight delegates reached for their billfolds and submitted the $10 fee to join the new league. The charter teams were the already established franchises of the Philadelphia Athletics, New York Mutuals, Washington Olympics, Troy (New York) Haymakers, Chicago White Stockings, Rockford (Illinois) Forest City, Cleveland Forest City, and one newcomer: the Boston Red Stockings. Two delegates were stingy with their money, so the Brooklyn Eckfords and Washington Nationals did not join. A few days later, a ninth club, the Fort Wayne (Indiana) Kekiongas, paid the fee and joined. So that they didn’t have to reinvent the wheel, the founders adopted the same constitution and bylaws from the existing National Association, “as far as the same did not conflict with the interests of professional clubs,” the New York Clipper reported. “‘The National Association of Professional Base Ball Players’ thereby sprang into existence,” the Clipper declared.8 The word professional was simply inserted into the league name they were familiar with, moving from the NABBP to the NAPBBP. “The formation of the new professional league,” wrote William Ryczek, “was accompanied by little fanfare. Ten men on a rainy night in a New York City saloon had set the course for professional sports in America, an imperfect beginning to be sure, but a beginning.”9

Harry Wright was responsible for all the scheduling of the Boston team since the NAPBBP did not have a set schedule. It was generally agreed upon that teams would play one another five times before the season ended on November 1, with three of the first five being counted as “championship” games. “This was an extremely time-consuming process, often requiring extensive negotiation. Fully 90 percent of Wright’s correspondence from 1871 to 1875 consisted of inquiries or responses to inquiries about possible games,” wrote Warren Goldstein.10

While today a famous baseball phrase is “Who’s on first?” the NAPBBP season of 1871 could have made a skit called, “Who’s in first?” The NAPBBP never set clear guidelines on how the standings would be structured: Would teams be ranked according to number of games won or by the number of series won? Because of the lack of clarity, you could pick up a newspaper on a given day and see a different team in first place than in the newspaper in the next town, and often the same newspaper was inconsistent from day to day. These issues were left to be sorted out at the end of the season. “This led to an early brand of parity,” wrote Ryczek, “as virtually any team could claim possession of first place by choosing the method which best suited their circumstances.”11

On April 6, 1871, Boston played an exhibition game against a picked nine, winning 41-10. It was the first professional baseball game played in Boston.

On April 8 Boston played the Lowell, Massachusetts, club. The Boston Journal noted that Boston was “improving in their play wonderfully, so much so as to make it not improbable that they will at the very outset rank as the foremost club in the country.”12

Boston’s first regular-season game was played on May 5 against the Washington Olympics in Washington, D.C. Washington had five former Cincinnati Red Stockings players to Boston’s four, and the game generated national interest. If not for a rainout, this game would have been the first official game in the National Association and in professional baseball, and justifiably so. Instead, the Fort Wayne Kekiongas, who would disband before the season was over, hosted the first official game.

On Monday, May 8, Boston faced the Brooklyn Atlantics in an exhibition game at Brooklyn’s Capitoline Grounds, the same location where Cincinnati’s winning streak had come to a sudden end the previous June. Despite the raw, chilly cold, 2,000 spectators turned out even though “no one expected the Brooklyn Nine to win the game.” The Brooklyn pitcher was wild, and the Boston strikers weren’t able to “punish” him because “it was rare that they could get a ball from him within any far reach of the bat.” The umpire stayed true to the rules of calling balls early on, however, “if he had followed the rules very closely and called balls in the order of delivery, the Bostonians would still be on their first inning.” Boston won 25-0.13

On May 9 Boston won 9-5 at Troy, despite losing George Wright to a leg injury. Wright and Fred Cone collided on a fly ball when Cone couldn’t hear Wright call for the ball because of the blare of a train whistle.14 Significant also is the Journal’s mention that the Boston club was “now quite as well known by the name ‘Red Stockings’ as by their original title. …”15

Boston returned home May 16, and played Troy in the first home opener in Boston professional baseball. Both “nines made their appearance on the field, and were greeted with hearty cheers by the large crowd of spectators in attendance, numbering some 2500,” the Journal wrote.16 But sloppy play ruined the Red Stockings’ inauguration of the Boston grounds, and the Post commented, “(W)e could have wished it were played elsewhere.”17 Boston lost, 29-14. On May 20 the Red Stockings got back on track and defeated the Philadelphia Athletics 11-8 before a crowd of 3,000. The next game, on May 24 against the Olympics, ended in a 4-4 tie, “not satisfactory to a large amount of spectators.”18 Only about 500 spectators came out for the next two games, against Rockford, as the Boston temperature hit the rare 90s at the end of May. The Boston bats were hot as well; they won 25-11 on May 29 and 11-10 on May 30.

“The financial success of the venture was in doubt for some time, but local pride in the team grew stronger, with each successive game,” wrote George Tuohey, a 19th-century sports historian, “and many of the contests, especially those with the Athletics of Philadelphia, attracted thousands of people.”19

Then the Red Stockings endured their longest losing streak of the season, three straight, albeit over the course of two weeks from June 2 to June 17. George Wright returned on June 17, but the Red Stockings “rather disappointed their friends, as it was thought they would make a better show with the Mutuals,” wrote the Journal of the 9-3 loss.20 They broke out of their slump in a big way on June 21, defeating Fort Wayne 21-0 on a shutout by Spalding, “one of the most remarkable games of record,” the Boston Advertiser opined.21 A 20-8 loss at Philadelphia put the Red Stockings’ record at 6-6 at the end of June, and they would spend July and August on the road.

The Red Stockings would be nearly unstoppable from then on, however, going 14-4 to finish the season and outscoring their opponents 249-159. The streak began as America celebrated its 95th year of independence. The “two branches of the old Red Stockings—the Boston club and the Olympic club of Washington,” met before a crowd near 5,000 on July 4.22 Boston won 7-3. In three straight victories over Rockford, Fort Wayne, and Cleveland, the Red Stockings pounded out an amazing 63 hits and 63 runs. Boston lost 15-11 on August 22 at the New York Mutuals, ending the road trip. They were 12-9 and 4½ games behind Philadelphia.

Fort Wayne played its final game on August 29, hobbled by player defections. The Kekiongas were a co-op club whose players shared gate receipts. Star pitcher Bobby Mathews and infielder Tom Carey, “the two in whom the most confidence had been placed, willfully broke their plighted word and became in the eyes of our citizens dishonored Messrs,” leaving for greener pastures. “The course adopted by these young men is very reprehensible,” a hometown newspaper said.23 The Brooklyn Eckfords replaced the Kekiongas so as not to disrupt the schedules of contending teams, although the Eckfords themselves would not have an official record in the standings.

Back in Boston, the Red Stockings found home cooking a delight, winning six straight games. A 31-10 thrashing of Cleveland on September 2 saw Boston score 23 runs in the last two innings. The game was halted after eight innings; because Cleveland “had not a ghost of a chance for winning, they requested that the contest end there.”24 The Red Stockings defeated Philadelphia 17-14 on September 9, moved to within 2½ games of first-place Chicago, and were suddenly gaining ground in the standings. They trailed by only one game after a victory on September 27 that gave them a record of 18-9. The only loss in September was in Chicago, the last game played at Lake Front Park before it was destroyed in the Great Chicago Fire. Boston lost 10-8 despite having two runners on in the ninth and Ross Barnes smashing two long foul balls with home-run distance.

After the tragic fire, Chicago played the remainder of its schedule on the road. Its players, who had lost everything in the fire, depended on donated uniforms from other teams and “not two of the nine were dressed alike, all their uniforms having been consumed in the fire. They presented a most extraordinary appearance from the parti-colored nature of their dress. All who could get white stockings did so, but they were not many. One man wore a Mutual shirt and Eckford hose; another an Atlantic shirt, Mutual pants, and Flyaway hose, and so on; each man being obliged to borrow a shirt from anyone who was willing to lend,” wrote the Chicago Tribune.25 Philadelphia defeated Chicago 4-1 on October 30 in Brooklyn before a scarce 500 fans. The Boston Herald reported that “it is generally believed that it sends the whip pennant to Philadelphia, though nothing is certain until several points are decided by the committee.”26

A fitting end to this thrown-together season was confusion about who actually won the pennant. The NAPBBP met in Philadelphia on November 3. James Kerns, president of the Philadelphia club, said “the rules governing the championship were faulty, and considerable doubt existed whether they were to be interpreted as meaning the most number of games won or series won,” reported the Clipper. “He suggested that the rules be changed so that each club would be obligated to play five games with every other contestant, and all games to count, the club winning the most and losing the least number of games be declared the champions.”27 Another issue was the number of exhibition games played, since teams saw the opportunity to draw crowds and played games which didn’t count in the standings. Sometimes patrons paying full price at the gate did not know the game was only an exhibition, “a circumstance not conducive to good public relations.”28 Sometimes the teams themselves didn’t agree on whether a completed game was official or not.

From that point forward, most wins were the governing factor, but in 1871 it was ruled that the team with the most series wins was the champion: Philadelphia, which had one more victory than Boston. The nine unfinished games of Fort Wayne were ruled as forfeited victories for their opponents. The league also decided that four victories by Rockford didn’t count and their victories went to their opponents (two of them to Philadelphia, because of an “illegal” player). Rockford had acquired Scott Hastings, a member of the New Orleans Lone Stars, who had played Rockford in an exhibition game before the season. Hastings liked Rockford so much that he decided to join the team. Other teams protested, citing the NAPBBP rule that a team could not “raid” players from another team during the season. The rule restricted a player from playing for a new club within 60 days of departure.

“The Boston Nine have just completed their first season, and it has been very successful,” wrote the Boston Traveler. “Though they did not secure the emblem of championship, they have shown themselves the real champions of 1871, having defeated the winners of the pennant three out of four legal games, and as they also, at the close of the season, show a better average than the Athletics, to whom a mere accident gave them the whip pennant.”29 Harry Wright sent an official letter on behalf of the NAPBBP on November 23 “declaring officially that the Athletics were the champions of the United States for 1872.”30 Unlike today, the championship year represented not the season in which the championship was one, but the following year in which the pennant flapped in the breeze to the pride of its fans.

At the December 7 meeting, the Boston Base Ball Association was incorporated. Adams was re-elected president of the club, but declined, so John A. Conkey was elected in his place. “If we have been instrumental in elevating the standard of our national pastime, to the accomplishment of which object we have turned our special attention, then we have cause for satisfaction,” Adams remarked “We look forward to the coming season with confidence.”31

With a year of experience under their belts, the new Red Stockings were now primed to dominate the NAPBBP, winning four straight pennants from 1872 to 1875. Their dominance actually led to the end of the league itself, and the more structured National League was formed in 1876.

BOB LeMOINE came up with the idea for this book while researching the beginnings of professional baseball in Boston, wondering “How did all of that come together?” He often daydreams about time traveling to the 19th Century too see early baseball games, horse and buggies, and meet the legendary stars. Actually, he’d just like to see a game for 25 cents. Bob works as a high school librarian and lives in Barrington, New Hampshire.

Notes

1 “The Boston Base Ball Club. A Permanent Organization Effected. All the Players Engaged,” Boston Journal, January 21, 1871.

2 Harold Kaese, The Boston Braves, 1871-1953 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 1954), 4; John Thorn, “Early Baseball in Boston, Part 2,” https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/2012/07/07/early-baseball-in-boston-part-2/. Accessed July 6, 2015.

3 Christopher Devine, Harry Wright: The Father of Professional Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co, 2003), 79 [Google E-book Edition].

4 George V. Tuohey, A History of the Boston Base Ball Club … A Concise and Accurate History of Base Ball From Its Inception (Boston: M.F. Quinn & Co., 1897), 61. [Google Books version].

5 Tuohey, 61.

6 “The New Boston Club,” New York Clipper, January 28, 1871: 338.

7 David C. Voigt, American Baseball: From Gentleman’s Sport to the Commissioner System (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 35.

8 “Base Ball. The Professionals in Council. A National Association Organized,” New York Clipper, March 25, 1871: 402.

9 William J. Ryczek, Blackguards and Red Stockings: A History of Baseball’s National Association, 1871-1875 (Wallingford, Connecticut: Colebrook Press, 1992), 14.

10 Warren Goldstein. Playing for Keeps: A History of Early Baseball (Ithaca, New York: Cornell University Press, 2009, 20th Anniversary Edition), 143. [Google E-Book Edition].

11 Ryczek, 55.

12 “Base Ball. The Boston-Lowell Match. The Former Victorious, Score, 40 to 1. Gossip,” Boston Journal, April 10, 1871.

13 “Base Ball,” Boston Journal, May 10, 1871: 4.

14 “Boston and Vicinity,” Boston Journal, May 11, 1871: 4.

15 “Boston and Vicinity,” Boston Journal, May 11, 1871: 4.

16 “Boston and Vicinity,” Boston Journal, May 11, 1871: 4. Actual attendance accounts in newspapers ranged from 2,500 to 8,000.

17 “Base Ball. Match Between the Boston Nine and the Haymakers, of Troy—the Boston Club Badly Beaten,” Boston Post, May 17, 1871: 3.

18 “Base Ball. The Boston-Olympic Match,” Boston Journal, May 25, 1871: 4.

19 Tuohey, 62.

20 “Base Ball: the Mutual-Red Stocking Match—Defeat of the Bostons by a score of 9 to 3,” Boston Journal, June 19, 1871: 1.

21 “Base Ball. The Visit of the Kekiongas—Their Defeat by the Boston Nine,” Boston Advertiser, June 22, 1871: 1.

22 “Base Ball. A Victory for the Boston Wing—Bostons Defeat the Olympics by 7 to 3,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, July 6, 1871: 5.

23 “Kekiongas,” Fort Wayne Sentinel, September 6, 1871: 4.

24 “Base Ball. Saturday’s Matches—Bad Defeat of the Clevelands by the Bostons,” Boston Journal, September 4, 1871: 4.

25 Chicago Tribune, November 3, 1871: 1.

26 “Base Ball,” Boston Herald, October 31, 1871: 2.

27 “Special Meeting of the Professional Association,” New York Clipper, November 11, 1871.

28 Ryczek, 57.

29 “Season Record of the Boston Nine,” Boston Traveler, November 16, 1871: 2.

30 “Base Ball,” Philadelphia Inquirer, November 27, 1871: 2.

31 “The Boston Club—Annual Meeting—Election of Officers,” Boston Journal, December 8, 1871: 1.

Harry Wright wasn’t a sore loser, but as captain of the Cincinnati Red Stockings, he’d been unaccustomed to losing. After his Red Stockings went through the 1869 season without losing a game, and finished the following year with just a handful of losses, Wright expected that the team he brought to Boston in 1871 would win the first National Association pennant. He’d taken the Red Stockings he believed to be the most reliable, and supplemented them with outstanding young talent like pitcher Al Spalding and second baseman Ross Barnes of Rockford.

The Red Stockings were not only talented; under Wright’s leadership they were perhaps the most respected team in the NA, and in early 1872 the New York Clipper stated, “Boston sets a good example for other teams with their gentlemanly conduct and honorable play.”1 Betting, one of the albatrosses of the NA, was not allowed on Boston’s Union Grounds, which meant that gamblers had to ply their business quietly and couldn’t openly abuse those players whose efforts were harmful to their investments.

Despite its talent and character, Boston hadn’t won the 1871 pennant, in part due to injuries to George Wright and others, but Harry was certain that, absent the misfortune that dogged his club the previous year, he would win in 1872. He therefore retained essentially the same players, adding only Fraley Rogers, a 22-year-old outfielder from Brooklyn, and Andy Leonard, one of the old Cincinnati Red Stockings who’d played in Washington the previous season.

The NA presented an unbalanced lineup in 1872, almost equally divided between stock clubs and cooperatives. The former paid its players a regular salary while those who played for co-ops received a share of the gate receipts. Nearly all players preferred a guaranteed salary and the most marketable signed with the stock clubs. For the most part, the co-ops were left with players who couldn’t win a spot on the stock clubs.

It’s hard to beat teams with players who weren’t good enough to make those teams, and the presence of such a large number of uncompetitive co-op nines wasn’t good for the NA. Harry Wright was to blame for the entry of at least one of the weak sisters. When Benjamin Douglas of the Middletown Mansfields wrote looking to schedule exhibition games, Wright suggested that Douglas pay the NA’s $10 admission fee, which would obligate all NA teams to reply in the affirmative to Douglas’s requests.

Ten dollars and a box of stationery do not make a major-league team, a fact that would become painfully apparent when the stock clubs met the co-ops on the diamond. At the Union Grounds in Brooklyn, the admission fee was 50 cents when stock teams were playing, but it cost just 25 cents to watch a game involving a co-op team. In mid-May, the New York Clipper noted that stock and co-op teams had played each other 18 times, and each time the stock club had won.2 Eventually the Clipper began publishing separate standings for each class, even though they were in the same league.

The Red Stockings had gotten off to a sluggish start in 1871, but in 1872 they left the gate like a lightning bolt, winning 22 of their first 23 games, a pace reminiscent of Wright’s old Cincinnati juggernaut. Boston ran roughshod over the co-ops, scoring 20 or more runs seven times in the 23-game span, each time against a co-op team. The only loss was to the Athletics of Philadelphia on May 4. By July 4, when Boston won its 22nd game, the Athletics were second (on a percentage basis) with a 13-3 mark.

On July 27 the Red Stockings (22-2) met the Athletics (14-5) in a game that, if Boston won, would give them a commanding lead. The Athletics shuffled their lineup, and the new combination won the game, 9-1, keeping the Philadelphia club in the race.

As the summer wore on, the NA’s weaker teams fell by the wayside, one by one. The Nationals of Washington played their final game on June 26, finishing with an unblemished 0-11 record. There was no official announcement of disbandment; the Nationals simply vanished and played no more. The Olympics, also of Washington, lasted just nine games, although they managed to win two of them.

The Haymakers of Troy, which had been one of the league’s better teams in 1871, and which had a 15-10 mark by late July 1872, ceased operations after a game with the Mansfields on July 23. The Troy stockholders, facing expenses of $500 per week, stopped paying the players, who took the field a couple of times on a cooperative basis before ending the career of the venerable organization. A number of the Troy players came from Brooklyn, and when the Haymakers folded, several of them went back to their home city to play for the Eckfords, a co-op that had difficulty putting fans through the gate and nine players on the field.

Cleveland had also fielded a respectable team in 1871. In 1872, they were able to beat the co-ops but not the stock clubs, and that shortcoming prevented them from drawing crowds large enough to pay salaries. After some poor performances in late May, the Forest City club aborted a road trip and returned home to Cleveland. After a lengthy hiatus, they took to the road again in late June. After a 20-1 loss to the Mutuals, Cleveland pitcher Rynie Wolters disappeared, forcing his teammates to take the field shorthanded. Remarkably, Wolters’ eight teammates managed to defeat the Eckfords, an indication of the ineptitude of the Brooklyn club. For a second time, the discouraged Cleveland players crept back to the shores of Lake Erie. In mid-August, with no money left in the treasury of the stock organization, the Forest Citys took the field against the Red Stockings under a cooperative format. Two one-sided losses marked the end of the Cleveland team.

The Mansfields, coming from little Middletown, Connecticut, managed to last until mid-August, when they folded with a 5-19 record, having lost their last 10 games. With their passing, the only co-op teams left in the field were the Atlantics and Eckfords, both of Brooklyn. On the date of the last Cleveland game, the NA’s survivors lined up as follows:

A quick perusal of the standings reveals a number of troubling aspects. First is the sharp divide between Troy and Cleveland, indicative of the uncompetitive nature of the 1872 NA. A second unsettling development is the fact that by mid-August five of the 11 teams—nearly half—were no longer in the field. Further, the paring of teams had not made the NA any more competitive. The six remaining clubs were divided in a rigid class structure: Boston and the Athletics were the aristocracy, Baltimore and the Mutuals represented the middle class, and the Atlantics and Eckfords stood at the bottom of the social ladder.

Finally, one notes the discrepancy in the number of games each team had played. Apart from the troubles of the disbanded clubs, first-place Boston had played 33 games while its closest pursuer, the Athletics, had played just 25. With no formal schedule, each team could dictate its pace, which was a problem throughout the life of the NA. Clubs canceled engagements if one of their players was injured or if a more lucrative opportunity arose. The disbandments created another problem, necessitating an increase in the number of games to be played in each series from five to nine. Many series remained unfinished at the end of the season, as the top teams played exhibitions against each other after they’d finished their quotas, rather than play championship games with the Atlantics and Eckfords, who drew poorly. A game between Baltimore and the Atlantics at Brooklyn’s Capitoline Grounds attracted only 100 fans and another between the Red Stockings and Atlantics just 200.

The Red Stockings had six games remaining with the Athletics in September and October, games that would determine the championship of the NA. In the first game, which took place on September 5, the first inning set the tone. The Athletics, batting first, loaded the bases with none out, but couldn’t score. The first five Red Stocking batters got hits, leading to three runs. Four more Boston runs in second began the rout that ended with a 16-4 win, leaving the Athletics 7½ games behind.

It looked as though the pennant race was over, for not only had the Athletics fallen further behind, they had played sloppily. At one point, Andy Leonard of Boston fell while running from third to home, but shortstop Denny Mack of the Athletics wasn’t paying attention and held the ball while Leonard scrambled to his feet and scored.

With nearly half its teams out of commission, two of the remaining clubs uncompetitive, and the pennant race decided, the NA faced a dilemma. There was no postseason competition to whet fan appetites, and the fact that only six teams remained active encouraged the playing of exhibitions after quotas were completed. Exhibition games were notoriously suspicious, with many fans believing they were decided based upon the gamblers’ wishes. Prior to the start of the season, the Red Stockings and Athletics had stated they would not play exhibition games against NA teams, a stand heartily supported by the Clipper. When the number of teams dwindled, however, the noble intentions of the Red Stockings and Athletics dissipated.

In order to stimulate interest, William Cammeyer, proprietor of the Union Grounds in Brooklyn, proposed a tournament at his facility and put up $4,000 in prize money. Cammeyer’s idea was not original, for in July a Philadelphia sporting gentleman had offered a similar amount if the top five teams in the NA would play one game against each other. His offer was not accepted, but the Red Stockings, Athletics, and Mutuals agreed to compete in Cammeyer’s tournament for a first prize of $1,800, a second prize of $1,200, and a third prize of $1,000.

The tournament began on October 8 and 9 with two exciting games. On the 8th, the Mutuals and Red Stockings played a 10-inning 7-7 tie that was called due to darkness and a disabling injury suffered by Boston catcher Dave Birdsall when he was hit by a foul tip. The following day, the Athletics beat the Mutuals 9-7 in 12 innings.

Despite the exciting baseball being played at the Union Grounds, the fans didn’t seem interested. Attendance was disappointing, and it looked as though Cammeyer might not recoup his investment. His prospects weren’t helped by the fact that Boston, which was not playing in the tournament on the 9th, played the Atlantics at the nearby Capitoline Grounds, siphoning a few potential spectators from Cammeyer.3

Under the tournament’s round-robin format, the Athletics and Red Stockings qualified to play for the championship, but the game ended in a 10-10 tie called due to darkness after 12 innings. Since Cammeyer was dissatisfied with the gate receipts, he continued to amend the format, allowing the Mutuals, who’d been eliminated, to re-enter the fray, and set up a second championship game. That contest was postponed due to rain and Boston, which had a number of injured players, declined to play further. After 10 days and nine games, there was no champion. It was rumored that the teams had agreed in advance that the Athletics and Red Stockings would get $1,500 each and the Mutuals would get $1,000. Despite the muddled results in New York, the same three teams went to Philadelphia to partake in a similar affair, which proved as unfulfilling as Cammeyer’s disappointing tourney.

With the pennant in hand, the Red Stockings fell off the torrid pace they’d maintained for most of the season, going 7-5-1 in their last 13 games. Still, they won the pennant handily.

Note: Although the NA based its standings on number of wins, the table above has been adapted to the modern standard of percentage of wins.

Boston’s success on the field was not accompanied by a happy pecuniary result. Harry Wright was one of the most financially astute managers in baseball, and he was as unaccustomed to losing money as he was to losing games, but the mismatched league, the unsuccessful tournament, and the fans’ skepticism over the integrity of the games led to a $5,000 deficit at the end of the year. With cash in short supply, the Red Stockings had been unable to pay its players in full when the team disbanded for the winter.

A catastrophic fire ravaged downtown Boston in October 1872, and in combination with the losses suffered by the Red Stockings, it was questionable whether Wright would be able to place a team on the field in 1873 to defend the NA title. He spent much of the winter attempting to convince his players that if they signed for the 1873 season, the club would pay the salary arrearage as well as salaries for 1873.

Perhaps it was Harry’s formidable rhetorical ability, or maybe it was the lack of viable alternatives, for there were only a few stable stock organizations, and none of the players wanted to take their chances with a cooperative nine. Whatever the reason, virtually all of the Red Stocking players agreed to play in 1873.

On December 11, 1872, more than 150 supporters of Boston baseball met in Brackett’s Hall and developed a plan to save the Red Stockings. A new organization, called the Boston Base Ball Club, was formed and the Boston Association, which had operated the team in 1872, was dissolved. The new entity took control of the team, raised money through the sale of stock, and assumed the debts of the Boston Association, including the unpaid salaries. There would be major-league baseball in Boston in 1873, and it would be winning baseball, for the 1872 club was the first of four consecutive championship teams.4

BILL RYCZEK has written a trilogy on 19th century baseball: Baseball’s First Inning, When Johnny Came Sliding Home, and Blackguards and Red Stockings. The latter is a history of the National Association that covers the period when the Boston Red Stockings dominated major-league baseball. He has also written on baseball and football during the 1960s, including books on the Yankees, the Mets, and the American Football League’s New York Titans. Bill is a finance professional who lives in Wallingford, Connecticut.

Notes

1 New York Clipper, March 9, 1872.

2 New York Clipper, May 18, 1872.

3 Remarkably, the Atlantics beat the first-place Red Stockings.

4 In its November 30, 1872, issue, the New York Clipper reported receipt of a letter from Thomas Hall of Boston stating that it was almost certain that the Red Stockings would take a trip to England during the summer of 1873. The supposition was correct but a year premature.

The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies are known for staging one of the most precipitous collapses in the history of major-league baseball, squandering a 6½-game lead with 12 games to play. Nearly a century earlier, another Philadelphia team, the White Stockings, also lost a seemingly insurmountable lead and gave the National Association flag to Harry Wright’s Red Stockings of Boston.

Boston had captured the pennant in 1872, and since the core of the team returned intact, the Red Stockings were favored to repeat in 1873. The White Stockings were a new organization, but in the 1870s, newly formed teams did not face the same obstacles as those encountered by 20th-century expansion clubs. With no reserve clause, the White Stockings were able to use their substantial capital to sign talented veterans, including a number of players induced to defect from the rival Athletics. The new club sent its $10 entry fee to Harry Wright, chairman of the Championship Committee, and prepared to battle for the pennant. Upon receiving the funds, Wright responded to Philadelphia president David Reid, “May the best club win is the wish of yours truly.”1

The White Stockings were an artistic and financial success from Opening Day. On June 11 they played the Athletics, and the rivalry, plus the presence of a number of former Athletics in the White Stockings nine, attracted a crowd of 8,000 to 10,000, yielding about $5,000 to the White Stockings treasury. For the season, the White Stockings won eight of nine games with the Athletics, and by mid-July they were 27-3 and in first place by a whopping 8½ games.

The Red Stockings were in second place with a 16-8 record, not bad but leaving them well in arrears of the new Philadelphia club. Boston had lost a game to the Atlantics, one of the league’s poorer teams, and another to the pathetic Resolutes of Elizabeth, New Jersey, who won just twice all season. On June 5 the Red Stockings lost to Philadelphia by the embarrassing score of 22-8. The 1872 champions looked awful in the field and on the bases, and Al Spalding pitched so poorly that Harry Wright took his place in the box. Harry was even worse, giving up eight runs in the ninth inning.

Boston usually started the season strongly, for Harry Wright had each player join the local YMCA and work out daily, but in 1873 they left the gate haltingly. George Wright, the Red Stockings’ best player, was suffering from rheumatism. Jim O’Rourke, who’d been a rookie the previous season with the Mansfields of Middletown, signed late and had taken some time to get in fighting trim. James White, who seemed to have an annual period of indecision regarding his desire to play professional baseball, likewise was dilatory in getting to Boston.

In mid-July, following a Red Stocking loss to the mediocre Mutuals of New York, the New York Clipper stated, “[I]t is evident that [Boston] will not be the champions this year. In fact, if they do not show improvement in September, they will hardly reach second place.”2

In the 1870s it was common for teams to take a hiatus from their schedule during the dog days of summer. Crowds were typically smaller during the heat of July and early August, as many people left the city for the cooler countryside, and NA teams frequently took extended tours. They played in towns and cities that rarely saw big-league ball, where people were more likely to endure a bit of sun and humidity for the rare opportunity to see major leaguers in action.

At the beginning of August, the Red Stockings embarked on a lengthy tour scheduled to take them to Allegheny, St. Louis, Keokuk, Chicago (where the White Stockings of that city were inactive following the great fire of 1871), Rockford, Detroit, Guelph, Toronto, Ottawa, and Ogdensburgh. In addition to giving Canadians an opportunity to fill the Boston coffers, the tour would allow the Red Stockings to benefit from the cooler Northern climate. The Philadelphia White Stockings, eschewing a tour, repaired to the resort town of Cape May, New Jersey, for rest and recuperation. Once they were fully rejuvenated, they expected to coast to the pennant in September.

In early June the White Stockings had released veteran infielder Bob Addy at his own request.3 Addy returned to his home in Rockford, Illinois, where he’d previously played with that city’s Forest City club. Harry Wright thought Addy could help the Red Stockings and wrote to him, “Telegraph you will join us in St. Louis, and we will go for them all, raising the standard of the mighty Reds higher and higher until we—just say you will come, that’s all.”4 Henry Chadwick and the Clipper may have given up on the Red Stockings season, but Harry had not. He had earlier written to Hicks Hayhurst, manager of the Athletics: “Let us get our and your second wind, then look out Philadelphias.”5

When the White Stockings returned from Cape May, they did not seem to be the same nine that left Philadelphia three weeks earlier. The team that had won 27 of its first 30 games before the break lost its first five afterward. Meanwhile, the Red Stockings came off the road red-hot, and closed the gap to 4½ games by September 15, when they faced the White Stockings in a key game at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Street Grounds.

On the day of the game, Philadelphia pitcher George Zettlein was reported to be feeling poorly. He might have been ill, he might have been hung over, or perhaps he was simply not in the mood to play. Whatever the cause, he pitched poorly, yielding 15 hits in a 7-5 Boston win. The Red Stockings were now just 3½ games behind with six weeks to play.

Since there was no fixed schedule in the NA, team managers could arrange their games in any order they chose, as long as they completed their quota. Harry Wright’s correspondence is filled with letters attempting to book games with other NA clubs, and in 1873 he seemed to encounter more difficulty than usual. The delays in booking worked to Boston’s advantage, for during the final six weeks, they had six games against the Nationals of Washington, who finished the season 8-31.

After beating the White Stockings, Boston defeated the Atlantics and Mutuals, while Philadelphia lost to the latter club. The defeat was harmful, but the manner in which it occurred was even more telling, for the White Stockings completely broke down. The Mutuals scored five unearned runs in the second inning on four Philadelphia errors. Zettlein was so ineffective that he was removed in midgame. Fergy Malone and Ned Cuthbert became embroiled in an argument when Malone suspected that Cuthbert was not giving his best effort. The flurry of errors, desperate position switches, and shouting matches on the field were indicative of a club in disarray. Still, the Clipper kept the faith. “Philadelphia will almost certainly win,” it reported, “unless they fall flat on their faces in the next four weeks.”6

That, however, is exactly what they did. Zettlein had done something to cause management to lose confidence in him, and he was replaced in some critical games by George Bechtel, whose later banishment by the National League indicates that he was probably not the most reliable player in the NA. Bechtel pitched against the Nationals on the first day of October and allowed the Washington club to jump out to a 14-2 lead. For a bad team like the Nationals, however, a 12-run margin was not a sure thing, and by the ninth inning, the lead had shrunk to 14-13, with Philadelphia’s Jim Devlin on second with the tying run. Unwisely trying for third on an infield grounder, Devlin was thrown out and the game was over. Despite 18 Philadelphia hits and 19 Washington errors, the White Stockings had lost, and dropped into a virtual tie with the Red Stockings.

The following day, Boston and Philadelphia met in the latter city in a game that would put the winner in first place. With the Red Stockings leading 7-5 in the fourth inning and two Bostonians on base, Al Spalding hit a fly ball to short center field. Center fielder Fred Treacey came in, Captain Jimmy Wood went out from second base, and the ball fell safely as the two men stood looking at each other. While the ball lay harmlessly on the grass, Treacey and Wood began screaming at each other while both Boston runners scored.

Later in the inning, Wood dropped a throw at second base and fired the ball to the ground in disgust, as another run crossed the plate. The next inning, Wood, apparently having lost confidence in some of his players, made a number of changes in the lineup. The final score was 18-7, and Boston, after a long run, was in first place. It was the Red Stockings’ 10th straight win.

Two days later, the White Stockings lost 5-4 to the Mutuals, as Devlin again ended the game by being thrown out after a poor baserunning decision. Devlin, like Bechtel, was later banned from the National League, although there is no evidence he was playing to lose in 1873. Treacey and Zettlein were also suspect characters who were later accused of crooked play, and in retrospect the sorry performance of the White Stockings in the latter stages of the 1873 season took on a somewhat sinister air.

Boston continued to win and finished the year with victories in 26 of its final 31 games. The White Stockings, after their 27-3 start, had finished 9-14. The final standings were as follows:

Note: Although the NA based its standings on number of wins, the table above has been adapted to the modern standard of percentage of wins.

When the games concluded, two controversies lingered. The first had become public knowledge in August, when a number of contracts, supposedly signed in secret, became public. After a two-year hiatus, the city of Chicago was ready to re-enter the Association under the management of Norman Gassette and a local businessman named William Hulbert. Chicago did everything in a big way, and what better way to re-emerge on the scene than with the best players from the NA’s top team. In August, that team was the Philadelphia White Stockings, and Gassette and Hulbert signed seven White Stocking players to 1874 Chicago contracts. Included among the seven were Zettlein, Wood, Treacy, Cuthbert, and Devlin, all of whom had played poorly, and in some cases suspiciously, in the latter stages of the 1873 season. There was a rule prohibiting players from signing for a subsequent year prior to the end of the current season, but NA rules, like latter-day records, were made to be broken. The New York Times, in late September, listed 43 players who had signed for the 1874 season, and all of the newspapers listed 1874 rosters long before the 1873 season had ended.7

While these major rules violations went unpunished, the second controversy, based on a minor alleged technical violation, kept the pennant from Boston until deep into the winter. As noted, when Bob Addy had been released by the White Stockings, he repaired to Rockford, where he played in a pickup game on July 4. The NA had a rule stipulating that a player could not play for a new team within 60 days of appearing in a game with another team. The intent was to prevent revolving from team to team, but no one seriously believed that the rule covered pickup games.

No one except the Philadelphia White Stockings, whose hands were far from clean and who should have been ashamed to claim the pennant after the way they had finished the season. The White Stockings asked that all 31 games in which Addy appeared for Boston be forfeited, which would give the pennant to Philadelphia.

The Championship Committee, which had the duty of officially awarding the title, consisted of Harry Wright and two Philadelphians, Hicks Hayhurst of the Athletics and Frank McBride of the White Stockings. Both Wright and McBride had a direct interest in the outcome, and Hayhurst was a rival of both. Parochialism was a continual thorn in the collective side of the NA, one that would contribute to its ultimate demise two years hence when the Philadelphians conspired to award shortstop Davy Force to the Athletics.

In January 1874 McBride said the Championship Committee could not award the title until the Judiciary Committee ruled on the legality of Addy’s participation in Boston games. Wright sent a number of letters to the members of the Judiciary Committee urging them to meet, but also wrote to Philadelphia president Reid, “Independent of any action you may see fit to charge the Judiciary Committee with, we consider ourselves justly and honorably entitled to the championship honors for 1873. Not from a single source other than the Philadelphia Club have we heard a doubt expressed as to the fairness of our title.”8

Although a prompt meeting would have disposed of the groundless charges, the Judiciary Committee dawdled and did not convene. Finally, Wright convinced Hayhurst, with whom he had a good relationship, to sign the resolution declaring Boston the champion, thus carrying the day by 2 to 1. Reid protested that Hayhurst had been coerced by Wright, but he had been defeated at his silly game, and Boston officially claimed the 1873 pennant of the National Association.

BILL RYCZEK has written a trilogy on 19th century baseball: Baseball’s First Inning, When Johnny Came Sliding Home, and Blackguards and Red Stockings. The latter is a history of the National Association that covers the period when the Boston Red Stockings dominated major-league baseball. He has also written on baseball and football during the 1960s, including books on the Yankees, the Mets, and the American Football League’s New York Titans. Bill is a finance professional who lives in Wallingford, Connecticut.

Notes

1 Wright Correspondence, Wright to Reid, April 4, 1873.

2 New York Clipper, July 26, 1873.

3 In his biography of Addy for the SABR BioProject, Peter Morris indicated that he believed the reason Addy asked for his release was to be present at the birth of his son, who was born, Morris believed, on August 1.

4 Wright Correspondence, Wright to Addy, date illegible.

5 Wright Correspondence, Wright to Hayhurst, June 23, 1873.

6 New York Clipper, September 27, 1873.

7 New York Times, September 21, 1873.

8 Wright Correspondence, Wright to Reid, February 12, 1874.

For the Boston Red Stockings, the 1874 campaign bore a great similarity to baseball’s strike season of 1981; each year’s pennant race was divided into two segments, separated by an interruption of roughly two months. In 1981, the players union, under the leadership of Marvin Miller, initiated a work stoppage, while in 1874 the Red Stockings and Philadelphia Athletics, under the leadership of Harry Wright, sailed across the Atlantic to bring the American game of baseball to England. Miller’s group had a better financial outcome, but the trip to Europe was a historic journey that was well worth the monetary loss.

Boston, winner of the previous two National Association championships, took the field with a lineup virtually unchanged from 1873. The only departing regular was right fielder Bob Addy, who had played such a controversial role in the 1873 pennant race. Addy’s replacement was Cal McVey, an original 1871 Red Stocking who spent the 1872 and 1873 seasons in Baltimore. McVey was a much better hitter than Addy, and in 1874 he led the team in batting average, runs, hits, and runs batted in.

A second addition to the team was 25-year-old outfielder George Hall, who arrived from the Canaries of Baltimore to spell Harry Wright in center field. Baltimore had a strong team in 1872 and 1873, but in 1874 the Canaries were reduced to cooperative status, which made it difficult for them to retain their players. Wright, 39, was in his last season as an active player (except for token appearances during the next few years) and was no longer able to play every game.

As always, there had been turnover during the offseason, and the NA would field just eight teams in 1874, the smallest number in its five-year life. The limited quantity, however, did not substantially improve the quality. Baltimore, as a co-op that couldn’t afford top talent, was in for a rough year. The Blues of Hartford were a new team with experienced but mediocre talent and would battle the Canaries to stay out of last place. The Atlantics had played poorly since joining the NA in 1872, and the Mutuals were almost as bad in 1873. The Philadelphia White Stockings’ roster had been eviscerated by the raid of Chicago, which was back in the major leagues for the first time in three years. It appeared that Boston’s primary challenge for the 1874 pennant would come from their old rivals, the Athletics.

At the end of the 1872 season, Boston had been in financial distress, but by the time the 1874 campaign got under way, the fiscal ship had been righted. Even after paying roughly $4,000 in 1872 expenses in 1873, the treasury, buoyed by stockholder contributions of $3,700, showed a surplus of $700. Despite two championship seasons, the payroll had been reduced from $16,700 in 1872 to $15,800 in 1874. With a cushion in the treasury and lower expenses, the financial outlook for 1874 was relatively bright, despite the pall cast by the financial panic of the previous September. Wright hoped that the European venture would provide an additional boost to the exchequer.

The start of the season was delayed by unseasonably cold weather, and Boston’s home opener, scheduled for April 25 against the Philadelphia White Stockings, was postponed when a spring storm dropped six inches of snow on the city. Although the skies cleared, the Union Grounds remained unplayable, and a second game against the White Stockings was called off, as was a match against Hartford scheduled for the 29th.

Finally, on May 2, the Red Stockings were able to open the season, and their 12-3 victory over the Mutuals was the first of 13 consecutive wins. Two losses in late May—shocking defeats at the hands of the Atlantics—were followed by five more victories to bring Boston’s record to 18-2, giving the Red Stockings a 6½-game lead over the second-place Athletics.

The Atlantics weren’t a great team, but they provided a few surprises in 1874. The most important addition to the Brooklyn club was 18-year-old pitcher Tommy Bond, who late in the season came within a single out of pitching the first no-hitter in major-league history. Harry Wright liked what he saw, and after Al Spalding left for Chicago, Bond pitched Boston to National League pennants in 1877 and 1878.

Despite their two wins, the Atlantics were not a threat to dislodge the Red Stockings from the top slot. Neither was Hartford, despite a strong start, nor Baltimore. Philadelphia had lost too many top players to contend, and the Chicago team those players joined was plagued by the same suspicious play that sank Philadelphia in 1873. The White Stockings had a disastrous road trip in early June that proved the undoing of the team.

In Philadelphia, Chicago dissipated a 6-1 lead and lost 15-6 to the other White Stockings, their collapse marked by a number of suspicious errors. Concerned about the integrity of their players, the White Stockings held some of them out of the lineup for a game against the Mutuals. The new lineup played far worse than the old, and Chicago sustained an ignominious 38-1 defeat, a debacle caused by numerous errors (the teams combined for 36) and 34 Mutual hits. Catcher Ferguson Malone, the former Philadelphia player now with Chicago, became disgusted with his pitcher’s erratic delivery, and after several wild pitches, he made only a perfunctory effort to chase the errant heaves. The margin of defeat was the largest ever for a professional team.

The Red Stockings continued to hold first place, but fell off their torrid early pace. George Wright missed a month with an injury variously described as a sprained ankle and an injured knee. Second baseman Ross Barnes was below par due to a bad hand. In early July Harry Wright took time out from the NA schedule to take his team on a tour that included a swing into Canada which, according to Wright’s reports, was a great financial success.1 On July 15, after their return from the north, Boston lost to the Athletics, 6-4, a defeat that cut their lead over the latter club to 4½ games. The contest was billed as the farewell game, for afterward the two teams embarked for Europe, and the Red Stockings did not play another championship game for nearly two months.

Current teams occasionally travel to Japan for regular-season games, complain about the 14- to 15-hour flight, and often play poorly upon their return. In 1874 travel was much more grueling, and it took the Red Stockings and Athletics 11 days to sail from Philadelphia to Liverpool. The return journey was plagued by four days of stormy weather and the death of a passenger (not one of the baseball entourage).2

Because of the heat, most clubs played a light schedule in August, and the absence of the NA’s two best teams created an additional problem. The six remaining clubs had to play each other far too frequently to sustain fan interest, and a crowd of more than a thousand spectators was rare. Philadelphia had the White Stockings, but Boston was without baseball for two months, so the Hartford and Philadelphia nines scheduled games there on August 12 and 13. Only 500 attended on the 12th, and the next day’s game was postponed by rain.

Finally, on September 10, the Red Stockings and Athletics, who had spent a month in England and Ireland playing baseball against each other, did the same thing on US soil. After an enthusiastic welcome in Philadelphia, Boston won 5-4 in a game marked by a controversial call of umpire Theodore Bomeisler that went in favor of the Red Stockings. After Bomeisler left the field under police protection, the two teams boarded the New York Express on the Albany Road and received a second rousing reception in Boston, where the Athletics reversed the result of the previous game and defeated the Red Stockings by a single run.

While the two top teams were away, the Mutuals had feasted on weak competition to lift themselves into the thick of the pennant race. After the games of September 10, the standings were as follows:

The Mutuals were the most unpredictable team in the NA, and certainly one of the most suspect. The club had been connected with Tammany Hall since its inception in the 1850s, and politicians like John Wildey and Alex Davidson had been active in management. The infamous William M. “Boss” Tweed was also involved with the club, and on at least one occasion helped it obtain funds from the City of New York. During the amateur era, many Mutual players were employed by the city’s coroner’s and street-cleaning departments.

Gamblers followed the Mutuals wherever they played, and in early August 1874 the club had been involved in a suspicious affair. Betting odds before a game with the White Stockings were puzzling, and when the Mutuals removed star pitcher Bobby Mathews with an alleged groin injury after one inning, those who had backed them believed the fix was in. Nothing was ever proven, and a doctor certified to Mathews’ disability, but there had been so many shady episodes involving the Mutuals that any unusual circumstance was grounds for suspicion.

The Mutuals had played horribly in 1873, and many were convinced that their poor performance was not accidental. In 1874, however, they were playing better than they’d played in several years. When the Red Stockings and Athletics left for England in mid-July, the Mutuals were just 17-16. While the two teams were away, they won 13 of 14 games to move within 5½ games of the Red Stockings with nearly two months of the season remaining.

The Mutuals and Red Stockings were scheduled to play each other on September 22 and 24, and by that time the New York nine had crept to within three games of the lead. In the first game, Harry Wright was the starting pitcher for the first time all season. Al Spalding had pitched the day before and lost and perhaps Harry, who was more conscious than most NA managers of his pitcher’s workload, wanted to spare him a few innings.

Harry turned over a 4-3 advantage to Spalding when the latter took over the pitching chores in the fifth, but Boston’s ace couldn’t hold the lead. The Mutuals scored three times in that inning, and although Boston rallied to tie the game, the Mutuals scored the winning run in the ninth inning on a sacrifice fly by Dick Higham—the same Dick Higham who later became the only major-league umpire ever banished for dishonesty. The lead was down to two games.

Two days later, the margin was reduced to a single game when the Mutuals beat Boston 8-5. The Mutuals had won 19 of 20 games, while Boston had lost five of seven since returning to the United States.

Nothing could rejuvenate a faltering team like three home games against the last-place Baltimore club and, as expected, the Red Stockings won all three. Boston, due to the interruption caused by the European tour, had played several fewer games than their pursuers. In order to complete their full quota of games (they would be the only NA team to do so), the Red Stockings had to endure a grueling October schedule. NA teams generally played no more than three or four games a week, but during the last 19 days of the 1874 season, Boston played 16 championship games.

As in 1873, much of Boston’s stretch run was scheduled to be played against the NA’s weaker teams, the same teams the Mutuals had feasted upon. At one point, 28 of New York’s 36 wins were at the expense of Chicago, Hartford, the Atlantics, and Baltimore. During the final month, they had to test their mettle against the top clubs. Of Boston’s final 26 games, 17 were against Hartford, Baltimore, and the Atlantics. The quality of the competition was reflected in the results. Following the second loss to the Mutuals, Harry Wright’s crew finished 20-5, while the Mutuals were just 8-6. Boston won its third consecutive pennant by a comfortable margin.

Good had triumphed over evil. The Mutuals and their Tammany backers had fallen to Boston in what the New York Clipper described as a “triumph of good training, discipline, and earnest, united efforts to win.”3 On November 6, to celebrate a third consecutive pennant, the Boston stockholders held a banquet for the players. After dinner, Albert Spalding stood up and proposed a toast “to the Boston Baseball Club—may we fly the pennant in 1876.”4 The Red Stockings would indeed fly the pennant that year, but Spalding would see it only when he visited Boston with his Chicago teammates.

Late in the 1874 season, there were rumors that Spalding planned to sign with the White Stockings for 1875. Teammate James White had supposedly turned down a Chicago offer of $2,000 per year. “Chicago has become the last city a professional wants to go to,” said the Clipper. “Players strive to get engagements in Boston, where they meet with considerate treatment.”5 A year later, however, White, Spalding, McVey, and Barnes decided to move to the city where the weather was cold, the press was critical, and the fans were demanding, but the money was right. They had one more year in Boston, and that year they would lead the Red Stockings to perhaps the most dominant season of any team in major-league history.

“In no other major league campaign did a team’s superiority show as it did in 1875.” — David Quentin Voigt1

In 1975 Cincinnati, dubbed “The Big Red Machine,” visited Boston in the World Series. It is doubtful anyone remarked “Well, it’s nothing like the ‘Big Red Machine’ Boston had in 1875.” Those 1875 days were long forgotten, but Boston did have a Big Red (Stocking) Machine that dominated baseball, going 71-8 with an .899 winning percentage, simply unheard of in the modern day.2 Very few ever mention such a feat, and some only consider the “modern” era of baseball from 1901 on.

The 1875 season saw unique attempts at expanding the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. To use the language of modern business, several startup companies tried and failed, and lack of management and structure created great gaps between the haves and the have-nots. The NAPBBP was baseball’s first experiment with a professional league, and it would die a slow death in 1875 while Boston dominated yet again. This was the end of an era.

This would be the final year for the Boston Red Stockings – Harry Wright would give up the name to Cincinnati when it re-entered professional baseball in 1876. Four core players of the team would leave for Chicago, as owner William Hulbert opened his wallet and Midwest charm for these Boston stars. But his action also included ending the National Association itself, which somehow survived a five-year run despite major organizational flaws. It was the end of player-dominated teams. Baseball was now organized under a group of business owners determined to escape the transient nature of the National Association. Baseball was moving into big business. Just around the corner was 1876 and the new National League that is still with us today.

The 1875 season saw six new clubs pay the user-friendly $10 fee and join the National Association, pushing the league total to 13 teams, with disastrous results. Three of the new clubs were located in the West; though ambitious, they proved to be financially unsustainable. Much of Boston’s success was due to the total lack of talent now entering the league. If the season were being replayed in a video montage, perhaps the best background music would be Queen’s “Another One Bites the Dust.” “Given the economic depression of the times and the obvious superiority of Boston, it was unrealistic for newcomers to hope for large crowds,” wrote historian David Quentin Voigt.3

The Philadelphia Centennial club was created on the assumption the City of Brotherly Love could support three clubs. That was not the case. The Centennials went 2-12 and were outscored 138-70. They did manage a huge upset of their city rival Athletics, which the Philadelphia Times called “one of those freaks that baseball is subject to.”4 They followed their surprising win with a 20-1 loss to the same team the next day. The final game of their short existence resulted in a 5-0 shutout loss to Albert Spalding and Boston on May 24 upon which the Times commented, “(H)ad they wished their heartiest to lose they could not have done worse.”5 About 100 devoted fans were there to see the grand finale, and the Times summed up that despite the franchise’s doing okay financially, “better to disband ere money was lost.”6

The breakup of the Centennials also led to a first in baseball history. Knowing the team would not be able to survive the season, the stockholders sold George Bechtel and Bill Craver to the Athletics for $1,500. This reportedly is the first known club-to-club player transaction in baseball history, “and the future possibilities of such a tactic captured the imagination of more mercenary promoters,” wrote Voigt.7

The only major-league club ever located in Iowa was the Keokuk Westerns, which had the distinction of a 1-12 record and a .180 team batting average. The White Stockings traveled to Keokuk to begin the season, made only $68 on the trip from the low gate attendance, and “will not pay another visit there for a long time,” the Chicago Tribune wrote.8 Boston made the trip to Iowa on June 10, won 6-4, and decided to forfeit their games on June 12 and 14 and head for Chicago “on account of their many games and their recent hard traveling,” the Boston Globe reported.9 Boston made more money playing in Chicago. Keokuk soon disbanded, and the hopes that professional baseball would spread west would have to wait.

The new Washington Nationals also struggled, batting .193 as a team, and were outscored 338-107, being shut out five times. Of the 338 runs the Nationals allowed, only 105 were earned, the result of 285 errors. Eight players had 20-plus errors for the season. Washington started the season 0-11; in five consecutive losses their opponents scored more than 20 runs (including 22-5 and 24-0 routs by Boston). They finished their miserable season 5-23, dropping out of the league after a July 4 game. It was reported that the club’s business manager made off with team funds and the players were left without two dimes to rub together over 1,000 miles from home.10 More likely, however, the players concocted the story themselves to solicit funds to pay their way home.11

That July 4 contest was also the final game for the St. Louis Reds, who played Boston only once, losing 10-5 on June 3 in St. Louis. Boston’s win on that date put them at 26-0, the last win in their season-opening undefeated streak dating back to April 19, while St. Louis fell to 2-8. The average age of the St. Louis players was just under 23, and the team batting average for the season was .199. They were outscored 161-60 with 150 errors making only 50 of those runs earned. They finished the season 4-15. Because of poor gate attendance, the club was given no invitations to travel east.

New Haven was Connecticut’s second attempt at fielding a professional baseball club. Boston defeated the Elm City club in the first two games of the season, 6-0 and 14-3. New Haven went on to lose its first 15 games, and a surprise win on July 2 against Boston only pulled the team’s record up to 3-24. New Haven’s final record of 7-40 caused less of a stir in the league than did players Henry Luff and Billy Geer, who were arrested for leaving hotels with more luggage than they had entered with.12 Extra luggage didn’t amount to better play on the field, however, as Luff and Geer had 50 and 49 errors respectively, on a club that committed 447, was outscored 397-170, and had a .218 team batting average.

The final new club to join in 1875 was the other St. Louis club, the Brown Stockings. They were the most respectable new club, going 39-29, good enough for fourth place, led by Lipman Pike’s .346 batting average and George Bradley’s 33 wins. While being outscored by Boston 77-35, the Brown Stockings did pull off two victories: 5-4 and 5-3 victories on June 5 (Boston’s first loss after 26 victories) and August 21. Those two victories accounted for 25 percent of Boston’s losses for the season. This St. Louis club would spend two seasons in the National League, and then disband in 1877.

Then there was the legendary Brooklyn Atlantics club, who were a shell of their former selves. Founded in 1855 and one of the founding clubs of the National Association of Base Ball Players, the club’s fate in 1875 was a sad ending to a storied franchise. This Atlantics team batted .195 as a team, with 432 errors contributing to 299 unearned runs. The team was outscored 438-132. Not surprisingly, Boston was undefeated against Brooklyn, going 6-0 and outscoring the Atlantics 74-22. Even using 35 players did not help the Brooklyn cause. The Atlantics won their second game on May 26 to go 2-11, but then lost their last 31 games to finish a horrendous 2-42.

The Philadelphia Athletics were the not-so-close second-place finishers to Boston. The Athletics were a formidable 53-20, led by four players in the starting lineup batting over .300 (Bill Craver, Davy Force, Ezra Sutton, and Dave Eggler) and one at .299 (George Hall). Twenty-three year-old Cap Anson batted .325 and pitcher Dick McBride won 44 games with a 2.33 ERA. Still, Philadelphia finished 15 games behind Boston.

Hartford finished a strong third (54-28) with a rare feature at the time of two strong starting pitchers, Candy Cummings (35-12, 1.60) and Tommy Bond (19-16, 1.43). The Philadelphia Whites (or Pearls) brought in a young pitcher who didn’t want his father to know he played baseball for a living, so he took the name Joe Josephs. Facing Chicago on July 28, the pitcher, whose real name was Joe Borden, threw a no-hitter, the first in professional baseball history, mostly disregarded by those who do not count the National Association as a “major league.”

Stories happening off the field are commonplace today, but not so much in the 1870s. Yet, two major off-the-field stories dominated the baseball world during the season.

While the 1874 season was still in progress, the Chicago White Stockings had signed infielder Davy Force to an 1875 contract dated September 18. When the 1874 season ended, the Philadelphia Athletics also signed Force to a contract, dated December 5. National Association rules forbade a player to sign a contract with a team while under contract with another, but newspapers frequently posted late in the season a “who’s who” of player changes for the coming season. Even though the Chicago signing was legally November 2 and not September18, the Association’s Judiciary Committee ruled that Force belonged to Chicago. However, politics were at play, and the committee was to give its report in the evening of the general session.

In the meantime, new officers for the National Association had been elected, and Charles Spering of the Athletics was voted in as president. Not surprising, Spering refused the committee’s report and attempted to persuade the delegates that Force belonged in Philadelphia. He then postponed the decision until the next morning. The next day was also when the newly elected members of the Judiciary Committee would meet. One of the newly elected members, from the Keokuk club, declined to accept the position, so Spering found it in the best interests of all to fill the position himself, placing three men from Philadelphia on the five-man committee. The ruling on Force was reversed. Chicago was, of course, irate, as was Harry Wright, over the injustice. Unruly crowds followed Force and the Athletics, and the Philadelphia fans countered. A June 28 extra-inning game at the Athletics saw Boston leave with a 10-10 tie and an unruly mob on the rain-drenched field.

Boston made only three personnel moves before the 1875 season. Outfielder Jack Manning, a member of the 1873 club, returned, and along with his glove he also threw 144 innings from the pitcher’s box, starting 18 games. Utilityman Frank Heifer spent his entire 11-game career with Boston and also pitched in relief. First baseman Jumbo Latham appeared in 16 games. Harry Wright also officially retired as a player in 1875, at the age of 40, although he did allow himself to play in one game a year in 1875, 1876, and 1877. Manning filled the role Wright had provided as relief help for Al Spalding, but still the workhorse threw 570⅔ innings, going 54-5 with a 1.59 ERA. The top 10 batting averages for the league included five by Red Stockings: Deacon White (.367), Ross Barnes (.364), Cal McVey (.355), George Wright (.333), and Andy Leonard (.321). The same “fab five” also led the league in hits and total bases.

The team scored 831 runs and allowed 343, with a team batting average of .321.

The 1875 Red Stockings were one of the first teams to play professional baseball below the Mason-Dixon Line. Playing the Washington Nationals on April 29 and May 1 before a hostile crowd in Richmond, Virginia, Boston won 22-5 and 24-0. On May 18 Boston (16-0) played at Hartford (12-0) in a battle of undefeated teams. A huge crowd that included Mark Twain packed the stadium and the entire city seemed to close in anticipation. Boston struggled for a 10-5 win, and Twain’s umbrella was stolen.

The second big off-the-field story of 1875 was the impending breakup of the Red Stockings, leaked to the press in July. Imagine the look on Harry Wright’s face at the restaurant in Taunton, Massachusetts, when he was given the news, recounted in the Boston Daily Advertiser on July 23. “While the Red Stockings were dining at Taunton, on Tuesday last, McVey said to Captain Harry that he had concluded not to play in Boston next year. Harry laughed, thinking it merely a jest, but his amusement was turned into surprise after dinner, when White told him, in answer to a question about playing here next season, that he had given his word to go to Chicago, and that Spalding, Barnes, and McVey had also bound themselves verbally to the same club. The managers of the Boston club were naturally astonished at this intelligence.”13

A Worcester (Massachusetts) Spy report showed that already in the 1870s biblical allusions were being used by New Englanders to describe their local baseball team. “Like Rachel weeping for her children, she refuses to be comforted because the famous baseball nine, the perennial champion, the city’s most cherished possession, has been captured by Chicago.”14 One could imagine a modern scenario of four Red Sox stars signing with the New York Yankees and the phone lines on Boston sports talk shows lit up with irate fans. Even in 1875, passion for the Hub team was strong. A Boston Globe reader named “Grand Stand” wrote a letter to the editor asking, “Why didn’t these men, when offered, ‘fancy prices,’ go to the managers of the Boston club and tell them, and then, if Boston could not pay these prices, they could accept the situations with good grace? Not one of them ever said a word, for if they had they could have had the same prices, if they were so disposed, and remained in the [sic] Boston. All of them owe their present position to Captain Harry Wright, he having brought them out of an obscure country village in Illinois, and this is the reward the ‘old man’ receives.”15

“The time is out of joint,” declared the Boston Daily Advertiser. “Tweed is escaping from the penalty of his crimes, there are bad crops in Europe, the democratic party is marching rapidly under its soft money flag, the monarchists are gaining victory in the French Assembly, – and now the famous Boston nine has been assaulted and captured by Chicago. There is probably no paragraph of news this week that has caused so much real vexation out of doors in Boston as this last. The pride of Boston in its base ball team has been something unique.”16

Despite the shocking news and the groans of the fans, the 1875 Boston Red Stockings never let the distractions get to them on the field, and despite the negativity launched at Spalding, he was still able to have winning streaks of 22 and 24 games during the season.

Even while contractually bound to leave for Chicago, Boston’s big four continued to dominate the 1875 season with the Red Stockings. Chicago owner William A. Hulbert had first approached Spalding and convinced the pitching ace that a boy from the Midwest would be better off pitching in the Midwest. “I would rather be a lamppost in Chicago than a millionaire in any other city,” Hulbert pitched to him.17

The New York Clipper bemoaned the breakup of the Red Stockings, who in its view represented class and integrity. “Having tried in vain for years to defeat the Boston Red Stockings on the field, it would appear as if an effort were to be made to break up the club altogether, as the only way of ever being able to get hold of the coveted pennant. Is there no law of fair dealing that suggests to club-managers that this violation of the spirit of an Association rule is discreditable?”18

There was talk at the winter convention in March 1876 of expelling the defecting Boston players from the league.19 Hulbert had an ax to grind with teams in the East over the Force case, and also thought the preponderance of gambling and other evils in the National Association meant the league itself should dissolve anyway. So before there was a chance his players could be banned, he and Spalding drafted the constitution for a new National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. Note the “clubs” instead of “players” in the organizational title, for this was not mere verbiage. The structure of professional baseball was changing. The National Association’s five-year run was a player-driven endeavor; now, power would be in the hands of the owners. Gone were the days of Harry Wright giving a player what he felt he deserved. Gone were the days of games played in small towns with mismatched schedules with umpires pulled off the street or a team bench. Harry Wright, sensing Hulbert’s business sense, went along with the new league, as did Hartford, the St. Louis Brown Stockings, and the New York Mutuals. The two new clubs came from the west: Cincinnati and Louisville. The National League was born, and a new chapter in baseball history had begun.

There was still one final game to play in 1875, however, and it was truly the end of an era.

At the South End Grounds on October 23, Boston and Chicago played an exhibition game at 3 P.M. with the four “defectors” wearing Chicago uniforms. “One of the largest crowds of the season,” according to the Boston Daily Advertiser, came to see Borden, still going by the name Josephs, pitch for Boston. Spalding refused to pitch against his former teammates, instead playing left field, “either not daring to set his reputation ‘on a cast and stand the hazard of the die,’ or for some other reason,” wrote the Springfield Republican.20 The crowd was not happy, “the game being deprived by it of about half its interest, and furthermore, it involved a breach of good faith on the part either of the Boston club managers with the public or of Spalding with the managers,” wrote the Daily Advertiser.21

McVey actually did the pitching and “surprised all his friends and was apparently as much at home in his new position as he was in his own place with the Bostons,” wrote the Boston Journal.22 Chicago players obviously felt they had something to prove, scoring four in the first inning, then three in the second, fourth, and fifth innings and one in the sixth for the 14-0 win. Yet, none of the runs against Borden were earned, all coming as a result of 23 Boston errors. “It was muffing from beginning to end,” the Advertiser wrote, and the fans “indulged in the despicable practice of ‘chinning’ and booing at the umpire for calling strikes on Boston batsmen.”23

The Boston Red Stockings era was over, as was that of the National Association. This was baseball’s first experiment with a professional league, and served as a “time between the times” of baseball history. Baseball was moving away from being a purely amateur sport, as more teams and players were turning professional. People worried that paying players would ruin the “purity” of the game. We are now 145 years and counting from the earliest days of professional baseball. The game has changed along with the ebb and flow of time. But these were professional baseball’s pioneers who, through their amazing successes and glaring mistakes, paved the way to the National League and a lasting structure for professional baseball.

Boston was not without a professional baseball team come 1876. Though outside our brief survey here, Harry Wright pulled together another team going by the name Red Caps (disgruntled Boston fans apparently still called them Red Stockings) in the new National League. The team included brother George and former National Association players Leonard, Manning, O’Rourke, and Schafer, adding Joe Borden and others to the mix, perhaps most notably Foghorn Bradley and Tim Murnane. The 1876 team finished in fourth place, but finished first in 1877 and 1878. In 1883 it became known as the Boston Beaneaters, and eventually the Boston Braves. It is the same franchise that today plays in Atlanta.

For the full story on the Boston National League club from its beginnings in 1871 until its move to Milwaukee in 1953, see Harold Kaese’s The Boston Braves 1871-1953. For an interest in the history of Braves Field in Boston and the great games played there from 1914 to 1953, see SABR’s Braves Field: Memorable Moments at Baseball’s Lost Diamond.

BOB LeMOINE came up with the idea for this book while researching the beginnings of professional baseball in Boston, wondering “How did all of that come together?” He often daydreams about time traveling to the 19th Century too see early baseball games, horse and buggies, and meet the legendary stars. Actually, he’d just like to see a game for 25 cents. Bob works as a high school librarian and lives in Barrington, New Hampshire.

Sources

In addition to sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted the following:

Batesel, Paul. Players and Teams of the National Association, 1871-1875 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012).

Nemec, David. The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth-Century Major League Baseball (New York: David I. Fine Books, 1997), 65-84.

Special thanks to SABR members Bill Nowlin and Dixie Tourangeau for suggestions on information to include in this article.

Notes

1 David Quentin Voigt. American Baseball: From Gentleman’s Sport to the Commissioner System (Norman, Oklahoma: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966), 51.

2 There were also three tie games, all played in Philadelphia.

3 Voigt, 50.

4 “Centennial Club Dissolved,” Philadelphia Times, May 27, 1875: 4.

5 “The Base Ball Field,” Philadelphia Times, May 25, 1875: 4.

6 “Centennial Club Dissolved.”

7 Voigt, 58.

8 Quoted in the Hartford Courant, May 19, 1875: 2.

9 “Base Ball. The Champions Defeat the Keokuks,” Boston Globe, June 11, 1875: 1.

10 “Base Ball,” Cincinnati Daily Gazette, July 7, 1875: 1.

11 William J. Ryczek, Blackguards and Red Stockings: A History of Baseball’s National Association, 1871-1875 (Wallingford, Connecticut: Colebrook Press, 1992), 194.

12 Ryczek, 195-196.

13 “The Boston Nine. Secession of Spalding, White, Barnes, and McVey – Their Engagement by the Chicago Club for 1876,” Boston Daily Advertiser, July 23, 1875: 1.

14 Worcester (Massachusetts) Spy, July 24, 1875, cited in Peter Levine, A.G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball: The Promise of American Sport (New York: Oxford University Press, 1985), 21.

15 “The Seceding Players – How They Came to Secede,” Boston Globe, July 28, 1875: 8.

16 “A Base Capture,” Boston Daily Advertiser, July 23, 1875: 2.

17 Voigt, 62.

18 “Breaking-Up the Boston Team,” New York Clipper, July 31, 1875: 139.

19 Harold Kaese, The Boston Braves, 1871-1953 (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 15.

20 “The New Reds Defeated By the Old,” Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, October 25, 1875: 8.

21 “Out-Door Sports. A Notable Game on the Boston Base Ball Grounds,” Boston Daily Advertiser, October 25, 1875: 1.

22 “Out Door Sports. Base Ball,” Boston Journal, October 25, 1875: 4.

23 “Out-Door Sports. A Notable Game on the Boston Base Ball Grounds.”

The finances of the Boston Club in the 1870s are uniquely well documented. Their annual financial statements were reported in the press, and some internal financial records survive in the Frederick Long papers in the Hall of Fame. Together they present a picture of baseball finances in the early professional era.

The Boston Base Ball Association was incorporated in 1871 as a joint stock company, offering 150 shares with a par value of $100 each.1 The joint stock company was a relatively new model for baseball clubs. The early clubs had been fraternal social clubs with dues-paying members who elected officers and a board of directors. The financial demands of forming a new professional club required more startup funding. A new club needed to rent a playing ground, make improvements to the ground, and recruit players, often paying advances on their salaries. These were substantial expenses that needed to be paid before the opening of the season brought in any revenue, hence the need to raise money through the sale of stock.

The Association leased the Union Base Ball Grounds, which came to be known as the South End Grounds and would be the club’s home field through 1887. The Union Grounds were first enclosed and used for baseball in 1869, and were so named because this was the result of a collective effort by several clubs. The new Boston Club took sole control of the grounds and improved the seating and added a roof.2

The Boston BBA’s capitalization of $15,000 was generous. In part this reflected that they were doing the preliminaries right: paying for the best players and first-class amenities. But even so, the entire $15,000 was not needed up front. They therefore did not collect payment on all 150 shares. This was a common practice in this era. The par value of the shares constituted a pledge by the shareholder to pay the full amount, but this was only called upon in case of need. The problem was that this need implied that the club was in poor financial condition, which did not inspire enthusiasm. The shareholders often regarded fulfilling this commitment to be throwing good money after bad. Only 78 of the 150 shares were paid. The remaining 72 shares reflected an asset of $7,200, but this was highly theoretical. This discrepancy would result in a peculiar, unique hybrid structure.3

The problem was that no one actually knew what the finances of a professional baseball club would be like. The business was too new. They could project their expenses, but not their revenue. How many spectators would pass through the gate? Their model was the Cincinnati Base Ball Club of 1869-1870. This turned out to be a poor model. The Cincinnati Club with its unbroken string of victories into June 1870 drew large crowds. A more routine effort—even by a very good club such as the Bostons—wasn’t the same. It is like looking at attendance in the late stages of a player’s extended batting streak, and assuming that this is normal.

The results were not good. Detailed numbers are not available until 1873, but it is known that the Boston Base Ball Association finished the 1872 season about $4,000 in debt. The holders of unpaid shares showed little interest in making good, and the holders of the active shares showed little interest in contributing further. There was serious discussion of shutting down the organization. This is especially remarkable in light of their having just won the pennant. They averted this fate by putting out a call for “all friends of the club and all persons interested in base ball” to attend the annual shareholders’ meeting. After the meeting was completed, an open meeting was held at which a committee was appointed “to report at a future meeting a plan or plans for assisting in paying off the debt of the Boston Base Ball Association for 1872, and also for raising a guaranty for carrying on the club next season.”4

The solution they arrived at was remarkable. A new organization was formed, the Boston Base Ball Club. It took over the Association’s debt, as well as ownership of the 72 unpaid shares of stock—not quite a majority, but a controlling interest unless the individual shareholders voted as a nearly unanimous bloc. The membership of the Club was open to anyone for a $15 initiation fee and $10 annual dues.5

Over a hundred people joined. (Accounts disagree on whether the exact number was 108 or 110.)6 What did they get for their membership fees? First was a season ticket. Season tickets typically cost about $15, so at $25 for the first year’s membership, they were paying a premium, but in subsequent years they were getting a discount. Membership also carried with it access to the club rooms, apparently provided by the Association. The amenities of the earlier rooms are not clear, but in 1875 new rooms were opened just above the cigar store and billiard room run by star shortstop George Wright. These comprised a “card-room, and parlor, all handsomely fitted up and admirably lighted and ventilated.”7 The Club in essence was a replication of the fraternal baseball club as it had existed in the early professional era. The members were not playing for personal recreation and exercise, as they had in the original amateur clubs. Rather, they were sponsors of a professional club, with personal access both on and off the field. One of the first club activities was the receipt of the championship pennant for the previous season.8 It is not too far wrong to regard it as a booster club for the Boston team.

What the Association got was both an immediate infusion of cash and a steady annual income. The Club’s annual membership dues went straight into the Association’s treasury. After the 1873 season this amounted to $2,730.9 This was about 10 percent of total annual revenue, and came during the offseason, when the Association’s cash flow was the tightest. In light of the reality that this was in exchange for nearly worthless stock, this wasn’t a bad deal. Potentially more important was the voting power the Club’s bloc of shares represented, but the Association’s officers largely remained in place. They won the pennant six years out of the seven-year span of 1872-1878. The Club was happy, and wisely left well enough alone.

We have financial statements for 1873 through 1875.10 The statement for 1873 is rudimentary, showing revenues of approximately $28,000 and expenses just $27,200. This seems to include both the funds from the Club and the retirement of the debt from the prior season. The Association went into 1874 with no debt and $767.93 in the bank.

The statement for 1874 is more detailed. It shows total assets of $31, 699.10 (including the $767.93 from the previous season) and expenses of $30,865.97, giving the bottom line number of $833.73 in the bank: a profit of $65.77 for the year.11 This year is given added interest by the trip the Boston team made with the Athletics of Philadelphia to England and Ireland in the hope of spreading the game, or at least earning a few dollars.

The 1874 revenue breaks down this way: home games 50 percent, away games 40 percent, the Europe trip 5 percent, and season tickets (i.e., Club dues) 5 percent. On the other side, the largest expense by far was player salaries, accounting for 58 percent of total expenses. Travel expenses were next, accounting for 22 percent (including both domestic and foreign travel). The Europe trip was a loss, costing $2,318.13 and bringing in but $1,660.69: a disappointment, but one they could absorb.

Revenues were up in 1875, to $37,767.06. Player salaries were modestly higher, at $20,685.00. In all, this was the club’s most financially successful year, with about $2,500 in profit.

Looking over the Bostons’ National Association years, their finances started out rocky. They nearly went under after the 1872 season and had to be bailed out. After that the numbers steadily improved. The club never produced massive profits—there was never any question of paying a dividend—but by the end of the NA period the treasury was slowly building up. The trends were in the right direction.

This didn’t last. The post-Civil War economic boom burst with the failure in September 1873 of the banking firm of Jay Cooke & Company. This resulted in the Depression of 1873-1879. The baseball economy was a lagging indicator, but by 1875 was showing stress. The formation of the National League in 1876 can be regarded as a reaction to this. The Bostons held up well through 1875, as their continued pennant victories sustained enthusiasm. The hard times finally caught up with them in 1876. Revenue dropped by 17 percent. They were able to cut expenses and end the season with money in the bank, but revenues continued to fall.12 This trend continued through the next several years, both for Boston and the rest of the League. This explains the rapid turnover in League franchises in these years, as well as the institution of the reserve system. The Bostons broke even in 1881 only with the help of $758 in donations. Not until 1882 did the club return to profitability.13

The booster Boston Base Ball Club dissolved after the 1876 season. The reason is not stated, but the team had just lost the pennant for the first time since 1871. A reasonable explanation is that a booster club is a lot more fun when it is supporting a winning team.14 Its shares were returned to the Association, which dissolved them. Ownership of the Association was thereafter divided among the remaining 78 shares. Why were they not sold instead? The likely explanation is that they had essentially zero value. The club was not paying dividends, and had no immediate prospect of doing so. Indeed, it was an open question whether shareholders could be held liable for the organization’s debt, giving shares a potentially negative value. At the same time, selling the shares would impose a liability on the Association, since shareholders at that time were entitled to season tickets. Better to sell the season tickets each year than to sell the share for a one-time payment. The next account listing voting shares comes from 1881. 77 of the 78 shares voted. The 72 Club shares were long gone and would never reappear.15

The Bostons have an air of inevitability to them. They were the best-run baseball club of the 1870s, both on the field and in the front office. They are the oldest baseball organization to field a team every year since 1871 to this day. They seem to be the Rock of Gibraltar of the early professional era. Yet they almost went under after the 1872 season, and only stumbled through the end of the decade. They could easily be remembered today by specialists in early baseball history as yet another of the innumerable clubs with but a fleeting existence.

Postscript

Baseball entered a boom phase in the 1880s. Albert Spalding, the Bostons’ star pitcher from 1871 to 1875, maintained ties with some of the Boston organization as he established himself in Chicago, first as a player and then the president of the club and as a sporting-goods manufacturer. In 1884 he engaged in a protracted correspondence with Frederick Long, the treasurer of the Boston Association, to discreetly buy up shares. This would be a clear conflict of interest today, but would not raise an eyebrow at that time. Shares for sale were hard to find, but by April Long had scrounged 12, at par value. Spalding’s reason for wanting this was straightforward: “I judge the Boston Club is making money, and a dividend might be paid one of these days.”16

Red Stockings finances—a minor observation

It now being over 140 years since the Boston Red Stockings played ball, and with it not having been public information to begin with, it’s not the easiest thing to determine the finances of the ballclub. Wondering about player salaries in these days long gone by, we reached out to Michael Haupert, co-chair of SABR’s Business of Baseball Committee and our leading researcher in this area.

The New York Times heralded the approaching start of the base-ball season in March 1871 by announcing that “the ball-fields of the metropolis will again become the scene of interesting contests—unless the weather should prove unusually inauspicious.”1 In Cleveland and Chicago, base-ball clubs and their fans also kept an impatient eye on the weather and waited for the ground to thaw and conditions to become favorable, as that all too important first game was a highly anticipated event. As reports from New York also noted, during 1863 the first game played occurred as early as March 14, and if the weather in 1871 cooperated, Brooklyn announced, a game would be played there on March 11.

But not so in Boston, where traditions ran deep and if Bostonians were to wait for the weather to cooperate, the delay could be longer than tolerated. Therefore, the first game of the season, for as long as base ball had been an essential part of life in New England, was celebrated with great fanfare on the first Thursday of April, despite what the season offered, whether in the form of rain, sleet, or even snow.

Before the calendar accumulated the holidays we celebrate today, there were only a few days during the year when Boston, along with the rest of New England, was afforded a day off from work to celebrate, commemorate a historical event, or let off some of the daily tension of simply living. One of those days was Thanksgiving, a day of celebration and commemoration, as well as a nod of respect to our forefathers, with lavish feasts and a joyful noise before Christmas joined the the calendar. In order to temper the urge toward too much celebrating and good tidings of joy, that Puritan streak in Boston’s heritage produced Fast Day, traditionally held on the first Thursday in April, a day for “fasting, humiliation and prayer”—words that appeared on the formal proclamations published annually by the governor of Massachusetts. The first recorded Fast Day in New England was 1623 at Plymouth, and the last proclamation for such a day in Massachusetts would be 1893.

Last Thursday was observed as a Fast Day, and also as a Day of Humiliation and Prayer, in Massachusetts. As evidence of public repentance, there were afternoon and evening performances in all the Boston theaters, mainly for the benefit of the suburban population. As further evidence, if any were needed, there were many base-ball matches. In order to get themselves into a serious frame of mind, many members of the General Court [the state legislature] made an excursion to Plymouth Rock. Of course, they ate no dinner, but strictly meditated upon the fasts (voluntary and involuntary) kept by the Pilgrim Fathers. There was a pleasant holiday, but no “humiliation” to speak of.2

At first in the early years, there was not much of a reason to do otherwise. Most citizens were used to occasional routine moments of fasting, humiliation, and prayer, but having a day devoted to just those virtues might have been easy to swallow back then. Or not. Times change, albeit gradually. Henry David Thoreau remembered Fast Day 1830 in an April 10,1856, diary entry: “Fast day—Some fields are dried sufficiently for games of ball—with which this season is commonly ushered in. I associate this day, when I can remember it, with games of base-ball played over behind the hills in the russet fields toward Sleepy Hollow where the snow was just melted and dried up.”

Already there was a hint of where Fast Day was heading. As Thanksgiving heralded the approaching winter, Fast Day waited with hope on the arrival of spring, despite lingering climatic evidence otherwise. Today, baseball fans eagerly await the first game of the season, and our ancestors were no different. Base ball in 1870s Massachusetts held the same thrill of anticipation, and despite unreliable weather, players and fans throughout New England were ready to get outside on Fast Day, April 6, 1871, to witness amateur games and for the first time the debut of a professional base-ball club in Boston. The team included immortals George and Harry Wright, Albert Goodwill Spalding, Calvin McVey, Harry Schafer, Sam Jackson, and Ross Barnes in a game played with a picked nine in the cold wind and on a soggy field with basepaths still slippery with ice and mud. George Wright introduced the trap ball with hints of the future infield fly rule brewing. With men on first and second, the batter hit a fly ball that Wright let pass through his hands, then picked it up and threw it to third in time for it to then be passed to second, to complete a double play. The runners, it was reported, were so mystified that they hardly knew what had happened, and the crowd perceived it as a trick on the part of Wright. Thrilling!

The Red Stockings’ debut wasn’t the only game on Fast Day 1871. Harvard met the Lowell Club on Jarvis Field, across the river in Cambridge, and the Unas Club of Charlestown played its opening game with the Tufts College nine at College Hill. The venerable old Excelsior Club of Boston visited Waltham’s Young America Club and defeated them. The score in six innings was 50-18. Games were played in Hartford, Providence, and in small towns in Vermont and Maine. Any village or town that could organize a game did so with enthusiasm, as if it were a ritual that could encourage the arrival of warmer weather.

Thursday, April 4, 1872, Fast Day, according to the governor’s proclamation, instilled hope in the hearts of the devotees of outdoor sports. The extreme cold weather of the previous month had left the still frozen ground less favorable for a base-ball game, but games were played nonetheless. Due to the uncertainty of the conditions and weather that might have discouraged even the most hardy New Yorker, the invitation extended to the New York players was canceled, and a picked nine made up of home-grown talent thought to be better able to withstand the less than optimum climate and field conditions was organized. The Lowell Club was again invited along with several players from Harvard and the Beacon Club of Boston, and their lineup also borrowed Birdsall and Cone of the Red Stockings. About 30 loads of gravel, sand, and sawdust were used in an attempt to put the field in at least passable order. Nevertheless, the field conditions were a challenge for the players. Annan of the Picked Nine, a shortstop from Harvard, “hit a ball to the right field close to the fence, which rightfielder Ryan went for and muffed, which was quite excusable, as he slipped in a mud patch, and when he arose the purity of his nether garments had departed.”3 The stalwart crowd of about 3,000 spectators in the grandstand was “graced by the presence of a considerable number of ladies.”4 The score: Red Stockings 32, Picked Nine 0. Fasting, humiliation, and prayer went on around Boston, but just as sure as it was Fast Day, games of base ball were played everywhere.

Fast Day 1873, “in accordance with annual custom, was observed as the opening day of the base-ball season and the Boston nine made their first appearance in public since they were rewarded for their last year’s exertions with the champion flag and streamer.”5 The first Thursday of April was never presumed to be auspicious for outdoor activities and watching a base-ball game was not expected to provide a comfortable atmosphere so early in the spring. The day before brought a drenching rain making the field damp and heavy with mud, though much better, reporters wrote, than the field of Fast Day 1872. Cloudy skies and a raw wind prevailed, but the conditions were not enough to discourage Boston cranks and nearly 2,500 of them turned out to watch the game and celebrate as the championship flag was hoisted over the grandstand. The picked nine of strong amateur players was captained by Cheever Goodwin, formerly of the Harvard College team. Those college boys from Cambridge had been fielding a team since 1863, and enjoyed baseball celebrity before the professionals had organized. Harvard College and the Lowell Club provided reasonably capable players who served the Boston Club well as worthy opponents on Fast Day.

A week before Fast Day 1875, the Boston Club inspected the field to see what repairs needed to be done. The game was set for Thursday, April 2, and a picked nine with players from the Beacon and Somerset amateur clubs provided the opposition. The ground was damp, the cold wind tested the fortitude of the cranks and players, and yet the crowd turned out despite the hardship, as if driven by deep-seated tradition or an inherent need to see a base-ball game, a harbinger of spring that was yet to arrive. Weather conditions did not affect the playing of the game that would naturally be played that day, but the first professional club to travel to Boston, the Philadelphias, would arrive on Saturday, April 25. The Bostons meanwhile would spend time as far south as Baltimore while waiting for warmer weather to arrive ahead of them on the home field.

Fast Day morning was pleasant and sunny, snow and rain at mid-day and the afternoon was leaden, cold and cheerless. The cold of the afternoon seriously interfered with the game of base ball and the aquatic sports, but the in-door amusements in the evening were well patronized.6

And yet they played on Thursday, April 8, 1875, a week later than traditional, as Easter was observed on March 28, just a few days before April 1, the first Thursday in April. Having two holidays in one week was too much to endure. The grounds were in poor condition and only 500 cranks braved the cold, but they were pleased with the outcome—a shutout by Albert Spalding, Boston 8, Picked Nine 0. The game featured the debut of Arthur Latham, who played “excellently well.”7 The picked-nine lineup was filled with future stars and local favorites. George Bradley of the Graftons would join the Boston National League team in 1876 and be nicknamed “Foghorn.” Tyng and Thatcher from Harvard and Briggs of the Beacon Club along with Apollonio, an outfielder from the Excelsiors, appeared on the field, adding interest to the opening game.

The appearance of “Apollonio” in the lineup of the picked-nine players adds a note of intrigue. Nicholas A. Apollonio, city registrar of Boston, had three sons—Nicholas T., Samuel, and Spencer—who were apparently smitten by the game of base ball. Which one was the player for the Excelsiors? Nicholas Taylor Apollonio is unlikely to be the candidate; he was president of the Red Stockings, and as such would likely have been recognized as a player-president—an unlikely though sporting gesture as the team’s executive. Samuel achieved prominence as a stationary engineer and was not known to be connected to any base-ball business. And then there was Spencer, the youngest of the three. A newspaper article in 1908 introduced Helen Apollonio as the daughter of Spencer Apollonio “who played with the Boston Nationals 30 years ago and is well-known in baseball circles.”8 Indeed, the headline on Helen’s impending nuptials heralded: “Newspaper Man Marries. James H. Holt Takes Daughter of Old Time Ball Player for Bride.” There was no mention of Helen’s prominence in Boston’s musical circles.

Beyond 1875, Fast Day continued to herald the opening of the base-ball season in Boston. Several Fast Day games were nearly impossible to play on account of snow—not just a dusting, but knee-deep. In 1877 snow covered the field and the air was uncomfortably damp. The 1880 game was a cold, uncomfortable affair, as was the game in 1882, and yet more than a thousand cranks turned out for the game. Snow canceled the game in 1884, but what finally put an end to the ancient day of fasting, humiliation, and prayer was the encroachment of modern times and the reality that a decreasing number of citizens were attending the church services and instead celebrated the harbingers of spring—light, warmth, and base ball.

At Easter, London gets almost a week of rest or pleasure. Now, in America we have not more holidays in a year than the Londoner gets in a week. At a pinch, if we put in Fast Day which the unregenerate will call “Farce Day,” we can lay claim to seven days in the year. Washington’s Birthday, Fast day, Memorial day, the Fourth of July, Labor day, Thanksgiving day and Christmas day. At least two of these are not general, so that they have only five days that are national property, or six at the outside, and those are distributed over the 52 weeks.But your Briton is more generous to himself. His springtime is earlier than ours, and just after the great change has set in the stalwart Englisher takes a week of it, as who should say: “I have labored in the darkness of winter; now let me take for the sunny fields, and the sparkling river.9

Debate over the abolishment of Fast Day began in earnest in 1893 when only a shadow of the original intent of the holiday remained. The governor “for years had been in effect the umpire in the national game, and when he set the date of Fast Day he said in effect: ‘Play ball!’”10 Debate in the Great and General Court began in 1893 with abolitionists battling the defenders of the old tradition. Neither side won that year and the battle continued into 1894, when the faction calling for abolishment won out. But this posed a problem: As the legislature soon found out, no one wanted to lose a holiday once that day had become a welcome day off from work. A replacement needed to be found and a new, practical reason for that day was required. Massachusetts was rid of Fast Day at last, but some other formal means of proclaiming the base-ball season had to be found. April 19, a day closer (cranks and players hoped) toward warmer weather, was a perfect replacement and fulfilled the proper requirement for historic value. The day commemorated the Battles of Lexington and Concord. The day also marked the shedding of first blood by the soldiers of Massachusetts as they changed trains in Baltimore on their way to defend Washington in 1861, and for good measure was also the day Governor Andros was overthrown and placed under house arrest by the Boston militia in 1689.

The newly proclaimed Patriots Day immediately adopted the activities held most dear by the adherents of Fast Day: field sports and, in particular, baseball. Patriots Day is still a popular holiday in Massachusetts for the dramatic re-enactment of the Battles of Lexington and Concord and the running of the Boston Marathon. The first game at Fenway Park in 1912 would have been played on April 19, if rain hadn’t forced postponement of that game to the next day. One constant still on the Red Sox schedule at that green cathedral, Fenway Park, is Patriots Day, with a game that starts at 11 o’clock in the morning, the hour, perhaps just coincidentally, when church services were held on Fast Day.

JOANNE HULBERT is co-chair of the Boston chapter, co-chair of SABR’s Baseball Arts committee, and is a collector of baseball poetry. She resides in Holliston, Massachusetts, and its venerable neighborhood, Mudville, where the early history of baseball bloomed and produced ball players of minor repute. Lest we forget, let us continue to dig deep into baseball’s glorious past.

Notes

1 “Base-Ball. Approaching Inauguration of the Season,” New York Times, March 1, 1871: 6.

2 New York Tribune, April 8, 1871: 4.

3 “Base Ball,” Boston Journal, April 5, 1872: 2.

4 “Base Ball,” Boston Journal, April 5, 1872: 2.

5 “Inauguration of the New Season,” Boston Herald, April 4, 1873: 4.

6 “Base Ball,” Boston Journal, April 9, 1875: 2.

7 “The Sporting Season Opened,” Boston Daily Advertiser, April 10, 1875: 1.

8 “Newspaper Man Marries,” Boston Herald, January 19, 1909:3.

9 “The Easy English,” Boston Herald, April 14, 1893: 3.

10 “The Unfortunate Career of a Small Petition,” Boston Journal, February 8, 1893: 9.