A league is born, a league dies, as the game’s not so gay ’90s commence
King Kelly of the Boston National League club in the Goodwin & Co. Baseball Champions Premium Round Album; in 1890 he would play for Boston in the Players’ League.
The implementation in 1889 of the long dormant salary cap, the reliance upon the reserve clause to transfer the rights to star players — including the sale of John Ward to Washington for $12,500 (he refused to report), announced while he was on the ocean with A.G. Spalding’s World Tour! — made the formation of a Players’ League for 1890 a foregone conclusion. Particularly galling was the phenomenon of a club disbanding at season’s end yet, rather than releasing its players from further obligation, instead selling its player contracts, with their exclusive options for hire, to another club based on the survivability of the reserve.
The entrance of this rival league, which siphoned off nearly all the best players of the other two circuits, proved to be a disaster for big-league baseball. The National League fought back, offering incentives to players who would return. Cap Anson stayed in the old League, in part because he owned stock in the Chicago club. Ward joined the Brooklyn club in the Players’ League. Buck Ewing, Tim Keefe, and Roger Connor joined the New York rebel club. John Clarkson stayed with the league club in Boston but King Kelly left for the city’s PL entry.
Spalding tried to break the strike by offering Kelly, the most influential of all players and the biggest drawing card in the land, a $10,000 bonus and a blank check for three years’ salary if he would renounce his PL contract and return to the NL. But the King declined, winning Spalding’s grudging admiration by saying, “I can’t go back on the boys.”
Players’ League teams were said to have lost $340,000 in 1890, and the National League far more. Yet the more deeply wounded of the two survived, as Spalding played a brilliant game of bluff. Nearly wrecking his own league as well as Ward’s in a seemingly all-out war, somehow he convinced the capitalists behind the Players’ League that the National League owners could hold on indefinitely; in truth they could not, and several were already scrambling to cut separate deals to consolidate their clubs with those of the PL. Yet Ward was convinced until the end that the NL and PL would strike a truce between equals, with mutual respect for contracts, and that they would live to play a postseason championship series, perhaps in round robin with the American Association.
But poker was the model for American business, then as now. Spalding ultimately cut the players out of the negotiation, insisting that talks be conducted between the money men alone, counting on the greenhorn owners of the PL to break ranks. He demanded unconditional surrender, and they threw up the white flag.
The pennant winners of the NL and the AA (which had largely been spared from player raids by the PL) squared off in a World Series of so little interest that after Brooklyn tied the Series with Louisville at three games apiece before an intimate gathering of 300 in the late October cold, neither club felt motivated to play a deciding game. The Boston Players’ League champions, led by future Hall of Famers King Kelly, Dan Brouthers, and Hoss Radbourn, were certainly the best club in baseball, but for them there would be no postseason opponent.
For 1891 only the NL and AA would survive, and one year later the AA would be gone, too, as the senior circuit absorbed four teams from the junior, becoming an unwieldy twelve-team circuit for the remainder of the 1890s.
The formal name for what we call the Players’ League was “The Players’ National League.” Although the Guide was issued from Chicago, the heart of the PL was in New York, where the Brotherhood had been founded in 1885.Although Anson elected to stay with the NL, most of his stars — aging heroes like Pfeffer and Williamson, newcomers Ryan and Van Haltren — defected to the PL.Prior to the opening of the 1890 season, NL owners sued John Ward for violating the reserve clause in his contract. They further sought a temporary injunction against his playing for any club other than the Giants, but after considering the reserve clause and its implied perpetual contract, the court ruled: “the want of fairness and of mutuality, which are fatal to its enforcement in equity, are apparent, as will be seen when we consider to what extent under such circumstances each of the parties is bound.” Ward, the spiritual leader of the Players League, held stock in the New York and Brooklyn club and became of the latter, dubbed “Ward’s Wonders.”Buck Ewing was said to have played both sides brilliantly if shamelessly for personal gain. Ultimately he threw in with the rebels, having defeated the Giants in court. Judge William J. Wallace denied their request for injunctive relief, saying, “In a legal sense it [the baseball contract] is merely a contract to make a contract if the parties agree” but as a basis for damages or enforcement of specific performance it is “wholly nugatory.”Brotherhood Park (foreground) and League Park backed up against each other. Spalding scheduled the NL games to coincide with those of the PL, looking to drive the PL out of business. When the PL folded, the Giants took over Brotherhood Park, whose grandstand was nestled below Coogan’s Bluff, and renamed it as the Polo Grounds.Boston was the best constructed team in the Players’ League, led by Kelly (center), Radbourn (right of “Kel”) and Brouthers (top row, third from left). They captured the flag easily over Ward’s Wonders.Boston’s NL entry, led by veteran pitcher John Clarkson (third from right) and rookie star Kid Nichols (middle row, far left), finished in the middle of the pack as Brooklyn won the flag and met Louisville in what would be the last World Series of the century.Louisville, which had finished last in the 1889 AA pennant race with a record of 27–111, topped the weakened circuit of 1890 and 1891, led by manager Jack Chapman. By the end of 1891 the impending demise of the Association quenched all desire for a postseason match with the NL champion Bostons.Malachi Kittredge must have been a heck of a defensive catcher to earn such billing on this Chicago NL scorecard. As a rookie in 1890 he batted .201, following that with seasons of .209 and .179.This Brotherhood scorecard for New York’s 1890 rebels featured the official baseball manufactured by Tim Keefe & Buck Becannon, onetime teammates with the Metropolitans. Keefe and Ward, teammates on the 1889 NL Giants, married sisters: Helen Dauvray (née Gibson) and Clara Helm (née Gibson).Despite Nick Engel’s open sympathy for the PL, the doors of his Home Plate saloon — a favorite among the baseball set — remained open to players who had remained loyal to the old League. After the PL met its official demise on January 16, 1891, at a joint meeting of the NL and AA, Ward and other rebel leaders met at Nick’s, where they toasted each other and sang. Their NL adversaries Spalding and Anson were there as well, celebrating their victory. Hearing the singing from a back room, the victors joined the vanquished in the main room, where there was “conventional cordiality” and a “warm and dignified” debate about all that had transpired.The great Svengali of women’s baseball exhibitions was Sylvester F. Wilson (one of many names he went by, including W.S. Franklin as above). The Brooklyn Eagle called him “the abductor of girls on base ball pretexts.” Although he proclaimed that none of his players came from the stage and that his exhibitions were of the highest class and virtue, he had been arrested in New York for kidnapping a 16-year-old girl from her home in Binghamton. The Kansas City Star, commenting on the five-year sentence meted out to Wilson in 1891, wrote, “He has been arrested more than 100 times and for various crimes, and Secretary Jenkins of the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children says he has ruined more young girls than any man living.”As African Americans were eased out of integrated cubs after 1887, the Eastern Interstate League (formerly known as the Middle States League) offered an alternative in 1890, permitting an all-black club to enter: the Cuban Giants, who had won the flag in the MSL the year before. Renamed as the York (Pennsylvania) Colored Monarchs, they led the league until it disbanded in midsummer. Among the Monarch stars was second baseman Sol White, who batted .350.
