Red Stockings and Athletics play baseball in England, at Prince’s Ground, Brompton; Harper’s Weekly, 1874
Boston’s continuing dominance of its National Association rivals — along with constant reports of player inebriation and “hippodroming” (dancing to the tune of gamblers) — contributed to flagging interest by patrons, especially those of the Western clubs. Harry Wright’s Red Stockings won easily in 1874 and in 1875 coasted to a final record of 71–8, winning their first 26 games and never losing at home all season long. Baseball in Chicago, which had been built up with such great expectations and expenditures, had been mothballed after the Great Fire of 1871; when the club returned to the NA in 1874 it would do so with a chip on its shoulder, though its results on the field were middling.
The NA was run not by club owners but by the players, some of whom received monthly salaries while others shared gate receipts. Fly-by-night clubs would pay their ten-dollar fee to join the league, invite the big clubs to visit for a hometown payday, and then decline to incur the expense of a reciprocal visit. Other clubs played so poorly that they could not draw at home or on the road (for example, the once-proud Atlantics finished the 1875 campaign at 2–42).
Henry Chadwick observed, “we hear old players talk of base-ball having become ‘played out,’ and of its not being as lively as it was ten years ago.” Even a bold midseason trip to England in 1874 by the Boston Red Stockings and the Philadelphia Athletics failed to ignite passions on either side of the Atlantic. What was needed was a bold new approach, and it would come from Chicago, culminating in the death of the National Association and the birth of the National League.
The Images
The opening of the 1874 baseball season was celebrated with some of the puns and gags that had been standard among baseball wags since the 1850s, plus a new “first inning” that was a real peril to the professional game.As a professional pugilist before becoming baseball’s first professional umpire, Billy McLean had no trouble standing up to players on the field or off, from 1872 to 1890.NA champs in 1871, the Athletics were no match for Boston after that, despite such stars as Dick McBride, Wes Fisler, Ezra Sutton, and Adrian “Baby” Anson.The Boston club of 1874 would ultimately lose its “Big Four” — across the top, left to right, Cal McVey, Al Spalding, Deacon White, Ross Barnes — to Chicago for 1876, as the Athletics would lose Anson. When word leaked in the summer of 1875 that Chicago had stripped Boston of its stars for the following season, a columnist for the Worcester Spy wrote of Boston’s loss: “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.”Once it became clear that the Red Stockings and the A’s would abandon regular season play in the NA for July and August to tour England, Henry Chadwick readied a book to explain baseball to its mother country. From the Illustrated London News: “As each of the four fielders nearest to the batsman had to act as a sort of wicket-keeper, it will easily be understood how important is first-rate fielding.”The American nines at Prince’s Cricket Ground, Brompton. Note that this cigar label crops the same image used above for Harper’s Weekly.A glorious image of the great rivals, the Red Stockings and Athletics, at Boston in 1875. Gotta love the rutted sod, the relaxed players, the signs for soda water and other refreshments … the stars posed casually: hand on hip, like Anson (standing, fourth from left), or leaning on a bat (George Hall, far left); capless Dick McBride (seated fourth from left), or cocked-cap hero George Wright, standing third from right).“Base Ball Players Practicing,” an 1875 study by Thomas Eakins. Wes Fisler bats and catcher John Clapp, of the blue-stockinged Athletics, await the delivery.After banning professionalism following the 1869 experiment, the National Association of Base Ball Players dealt with the presence of the new pro league by adding “Amateur” to its official name. By 1876 both National Associations would be dead.These “attitudes” were on a single photograph tipped into George Wright’s Book for 1875: Containing Record of the Boston Base Ball Club, with Scores of Base Ball and Cricket Trip to England, and Other Items of Interest, Also, My Base Ball Attitudes, in Twelve Different Styles, with an Explanation of Each.An incident that occurred in 1874 provided the spark that drove Chicago first to despair, and then to cunning. This was a time of rampant revolving, and the White Stockings were nervous that their diminutive shortstop, Davy Force, would desert them at season’s end, as he had left three other clubs in the previous three autumns. In September 1874, they signed him to a renewal contract for 1875; then they learned that, because the season was still in progress, NA rules rendered the contract invalid. Chicago signed Force to another contract in November, but the organization blundered by backdating the contract to September, thus voiding it once again. In December, the Athletics offered Force a contract, and he signed it. The NA Council, led by a Philadelphia official, upheld Force’s deal with the Athletics.On October 30, 1875, pitcher Al Spalding of Boston defeated his counterpart Tommy Bond of Hartford. Neither knew that this would be the last game played in the National Association.William Ambrose Hulbert, a director of the Chicago Club at its founding in 1870, was fond of telling people, “I’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago than a millionaire elsewhere.” Al Spalding, an Illinois lad, met with a distressed Hulbert in mid-1875, when Boston was yet again running away with the pennant race. Hulbert had come to believe that magnates in the Atlantic States were in control of the game and were manipulating things to the detriment of Chicago and all Western cities. Within a few months, Hulbert proceeded to give the Easterners, who had rustled his prize shortstop, a taste of their own medicine. He not only raided Boston for Spalding but also snatched Barnes, White, and McVey. From the hated Athletics Hulbert took another Western boy, Anson. Because his club’s contracts had been signed yet again in midseason, the NA Council could once more invalidate them and even expel Chicago for gross misconduct. Then, Hulbert came up with a truly big idea. “Spalding,” he said to his eventual ally in revolution, “I have a new scheme. Let us anticipate the Eastern cusses and organize a new association before the March [1876] meeting, and then see who does the expelling.”
