The American Association dies, the National League reigns
All dressed up but no place to go: the champion Boston Reds of the 1891 American Association challenged their hometown rivals, the Boston Nationals, to a World Series, but to no avail. The pitchers were led by George Haddock (second from left at bottom), who went 34–11.
Victory in the war with the Players’ League in 1890 had left the National League weakened yet determined to eradicate its other rival, the American Association, which had established itself by charging half the admission price of NL games, playing ball on Sundays where local laws permitted, and tolerating the presence of saloons within ballpark grounds.
The champion Boston Reds of the AA received a great parade on October 1. Veteran Art Irwin was presented with a gold-headed cane by the players; catcher Morgan Murphy, who had caught 106 games, was presented with a fine diamond watch chain. The Reds then challenged the Boston Nationals to a World Series with the receipts one half to the players and one half to charity but Beaneaters owner Arthur Soden declined, thus killing the World Series and signaling the NL’s intentions for the offseason.
When the Association folded, the clamor for Sunday play — the only games most working fans could attend — increased. That clamor was fueled even more by the NL’s appropriation of the four AA franchises — in Washington, Louisville, Baltimore, and St. Louis. At their meetings between the 1891 and 1892 season, club owners finally agreed to drop the NL’s Sunday ban and allow play where law and custom dictated.
Also at those meetings, Pittsburgh Pirates owner William Chase Temple was the first to come up with the idea of the designated hitter, back in 1891. His proposal was for the DH to replace the pitcher in the batting order throughout the game. James W. Spalding, Albert’s brother, alternatively suggested that the pitcher’s spot in the order be skipped, so that only eight men would bat. This proposal may have been spurred by the game’s new rule of free substitution from the bench; formerly a player or pitcher exiting the game for reasons other than injury would have to swap positions with a man in the field. On June 7, 1892, Jack Doyle of Cleveland would become the game’s first pinch hitter, singling.
The NL actually voted on Temple’s proposal, declining to adopt it by the narrow margin of 7–5, reflecting the League’s new bloating to 12 teams. Monopoly had seemed like a good idea; unfortunately, there was no way to get around the absence of a rival league, and only an ineffectual way to mask the fact that many teams would, early on, find themselves consigned to the nether regions of the standings. For their first year of solitary play, 1892, the monopolists came up with the idea of a split season, engineered to create a championship match between first-half and second-half winners.
On July 12, 1892, the day before the NL concluded the first half of the only split season in its first century, Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr. died in Hawaii, not yet celebrated as the inventor of this pastime seemingly hell-bent on extinction. A year later, he would be followed in death by his unwitting rival, Abner Doubleday, likewise unaware of his baseball paternity.
In the 1892 postseason “Championship Series,” as it is dubbed today, first-half winner Boston defeated the Cleveland Spiders, second-half victors, by winning all five games played to a decision. A tie in the opening game may have been the highlight, as Boston’s Jack Stivetts and Cleveland’s Cy Young threw 11 innings of shutout ball before darkness set in.
Lefty Bill Daley pitched for three distinct Boston clubs in 1889–1891: National League, Players’ League, and American Association. He would bounce around in the minors after that, but the scorecard’s publisher, Harry M. Stevens, became famous in baseball for his efforts — “You can’t tell the players without a scorecard!” — as a concessionaire.Boston fielded a powerful team for the NL campaign of 1891, welcoming King Kelly and Billy Nash back from the Rebellion to join holdovers Kid Nichols, Herman Long, and John Clarkson.The Cleveland Spiders were in the middle of the pack in 1891 but became second-half champions in 1892, featuring future Hall of Famers Cy Young, Jesse Burkett, and George Davis (a fourth would be added for ’92, John Clarkson).The Giants of 1891 also had future Hall of Fame players sprinkled in their lineup, but most were on the way out (Tim Keefe, Mickey Welch, Buck Ewing, Jim O’Rourke). Still formidable, however, were slugger Roger Connor, and pitcher Amos Rusie, only 20 years old and the NL leader in strikeouts and walks; he more than anyone would precipitate the new pitching distance put in place for 1893.Here is 18-year-old John McGraw, who began the 1891 season with the Canaries of Cedar Rapids, Iowa. On August 26 of that year he made his big-league debut with the Baltimore Orioles (AA), covering second base in a game against Columbus. McGraw would become famous as a manager (“The Little Napoleon”) but he was a great third baseman, too, in 1897 attaining an on base average of .547 to go with a .391 batting average.William Chase Temple came up with the idea for a designated hitter after buying the Pittsburgh club in 1891. Temple sold his stock in 1893 but, as a parting gift to the NL, he donated a silver cup to reward the winner of a postseason playoff between the top two finishers. This cup was awarded to the Giants in 1894, the Spiders in 1895, and the Orioles in 1896 and 1897, at which point it was retired. Temple had come to believe that the players were conspiring to extend the Temple Cup series to enlarge their compensation.When the American Association packed up its tent after the 1891 season, the NL absorbed four of its franchises — St. Louis, Louisville, Baltimore, and Washington — and finished the decade as a twelve-team monopoly. The league’s competitive imbalance in these monopoly years of 1892 through 1899 produced first or second place finishes for only Boston, Baltimore, Cleveland, New York, and Pittsburgh. The Brooklyn club of 1892 featured veterans John Ward and Dan Brouthers and pitcher George Haddock, who won 29 games yet is not pictured above.Baltimore catcher Wilbert Robinson, like his teammate John McGraw, won his place in the Hall of Fame as a helmsman yet was a formidable player, too. On June 10, 1892 “Uncle Robby” hit safely seven times in seven trips to the plate against St. Louis, a feat equaled only twice in all the years since: by César Gutierrez in 1970 and Rennie Stennett five years later. Robby also knocked in 11 runs, a record unmatched until 1924 (Jim Bottomley, with 12).Action photography had become possible by the 1880s and plentiful by the early 1890s. This shot of Buck Ewing snaring a toss in midair was part of a two-page spread of baseball action that appeared in The Sporting News in 1892 and Leslie’s the following year.Alexander Joy Cartwright Jr. (1820–1892) was an organizer of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of the mid-1840s but like Abner Doubleday never claimed, in his long life, to have invented the game. This image was taken in Honolulu, where after heading west for the Gold Rush in 1849, he became a prominent figure.Charlie “Bumpus” Jones was an itinerant pitcher in 1892, sitting at home in Ohio after having two minor-league clubs fold under him. Picked up by Cincinnati to pitch the final game of the 1892 season, on October 15, he threw a no-hitter against Pittsburgh in his major-league debut, a unique feat. Ted Breitenstein had tossed a no-hitter in his first big-league start (in 1891) and so would Bobo Holloman (1953), but each had appeared in relief beforehand.Little recognized at the time, a new game was created in the United States — unlike baseball or football, though by a Canadian instructor at Springfield College in Massachusetts. The inventor was James Naismith, and here is his original 1891 basketball court.
