Harmony descends on baseball: prophets and profits
The New York Gothams of 1883 featured four future Hall of Famers, from Troy ex-pats Connor, Welch, and Ewing to John M. Ward, just in from the Providence Grays.
New York, the nation’s largest city, had not been represented in MLB between 1877 and 1882 (even the New York Mutuals of the 1876 NL had played their home games in Brooklyn, at that time a separate municipality). Then, in a rush, both the NL and the rival American Association placed franchises on Manhattan Island for 1883, and the Brooklyn Bridge was erected on May 24 to join the two cities.
Interestingly, both clubs were owned by the same two men, John B. Day and James Mutrie, who for several seasons had operated a powerful and lucrative independent team, the Metropolitans. Most of their Mets simply transferred to the Association entry of the same name, which was managed by Mutrie. Day presided over the NL team — known as the Gothams and, later in the decade, the Giants; he fleshed out his roster largely with players from the defunct Troy club, notably Roger Connor, Buck Ewing, and Mickey Welch. A fourth Troy orphan, Tim Keefe, signed with the Mets.
With the decade-long economic depression over, and the surprising attendance figures of the Philadelphia club in the 1882 AA, it began to seem that baseball just might become a profitable spectator sport after all. A Northwestern League of professional clubs announced itself for 1883, featuring clubs in Illinois, Michigan, Ohio, and Indiana.
Trying to prevent contract jumping from one league with the reserve clause to another that was without it, new NL president Abraham G. Mills arranged for a Harmony Conference among the National League, American Association, and Northwestern League in New York on February 17, 1883. When the three leagues signed the Tripartite Agreement (later renamed the National Agreement), the effects were to expand each club’s reserve to 11 men, which at that time meant very nearly the entire roster; to establish minimum salaries for players thus reserved ($1,000 for the NL and AA as major leagues, $750 for the NWL as a minor league); and to respect each other’s contracts. (Troy’s Ewing, Welch, and Pete Gillespie had jumped from their disbanded NL club, which even in disarray still held their reserves, to the Cincinnati club in the AA, which under terms of the new Agreement had to relinquish them.)
Rival major leagues were not the only available path to playing or watching the game at a high level. The Interstate Association, a minor league formed in 1883, brought top-drawer baseball back to Brooklyn, at that point the nation’s third-largest city, with the pennant-winning Grays. In the following year they would join the Association and begin the big-league lineage that culminates in today’s Dodgers.
The Images:
An original Gothams patch (see team photo above) survives at the HOF, depicting the insignia of New York City.The Philadelphia Athletics went from the Association’s top gate attraction in 1882 to its champion in 1883.A torchlight parade greeted the Athletics upon their clinching the pennant by a single game over the Browns of St. Louis. A’s pitchers were the heroes, especially veteran Bobby Mathews and rookie “Jumpin’ Jack” Jones of Harvard and Yale, a late-season sensation.The St. Louis Browns took the race down to the season’s next-to-last day.The New York Clipper had competition from other sporting weeklies in the 1860s but emerged supreme in the 1870s as baseball increasingly occupied its pages. Here the cover of October 20, 1883 celebrates the NL champion Boston club, no longer led by the Wright brothers but still formidable. There was talk of a postseason series against the AA champion Athletics, but nothing came of it.A competing sports weekly — Sporting Life — emerged in 1883, led by editor Francis C. Richter. To a degree not seen since the Ball Players’ Chronicle and New England Base Ballist of the 1860s, it devoted itself almost entirely to baseball. Here Sporting Life celebrates the AA champion Athletics of Philadelphia, victors in 1883 and thus, in the parlance of the time, champions for 1884.Chicago’s new Lake Front Park; Harper’s Weekly, 1883. “Surmounting the grand stand is a row of eighteen private boxes, cozily draped with curtains to keep out wind and sun, and furnished with comfort able arm-chairs. By the use of the telephone and gong President [Albert Goodwill] Spalding can conduct all the preliminary details of the game without leaving his private box.”A ticket to a game at Brooklyn in the Interstate League of 1883, when the Grays dressed in polka-dot stockings and played on a site in Red Hook near the Gowanus Canal, at the first of three locations prior to the construction of Ebbets Field; each of these ball fields was named Washington Park.Standing strangely within the grounds of that 1883 park (though not visible here) was the 1696 Gowanus House, which General George Washington had used as his headquarters in the Battle of Long Island in 1776. The ball club’s proprietors gave the venerable landmark a new roof and made it into a ladies’ powder room.The Northwestern League, though a minor circuit, was deemed so significant that it was made a full participant in the National, or Tripartite, Agreement. The Toledo Blue Stockings of the league’s inaugural campaign were notable for their employ of Moses Fleetwood “Fleet” Walker, an African-American catcher (standing, center). Next year he and his brother Weldy would play for Toledo’s entry in the American Association.An absolute craze for burlesque-baseball acts and baseball-themed products characterized the boom of the 1880s. Novelty games were particularly prominent in Philadelphia; ethnic teams, “colored” male and female ball teams, Native-American nines, clubs of railroad-crippled workers, and so on. John Lang, a white barber from Philadelphia who had “temporarily deserted lather and razor” to organize pioneer black baseball clubs such as the Orion, found his true métier in New York with his Chinese teams.This ornate ball celebrates the East Brookfield nine of the Central Massachusetts League, where Connie Mack got his start. This ball was his.
