Odd bits for your perusal
I love the disconnected baseball squibs once gathered in Sporting Life and The Sporting News and in the Sunday sporting columns needing a “fill.” This tradition extended to Jimmy Cannon and beyond. Well, nobody asked me, but …
According to the March 3, 1869 issue of The National Chronicle, successor title to The New England Base Ballist, page 35, a W.C. Croesbuck of Lansingburgh, who likely was connected with the famous Unions of Lansingburgh, New York (also known as the Troy Haymakers) requested guidance from the Internal Revenue Service in Washington, D.C. The question was whether baseball games for which admission was charged were subject to the same tax as other exhibitions staged for profit. Thomas Hartland, Deputy Commissioner of the IRS, replied that baseball games were not to be taxed “as shows or exhibitions contemplated by section 108 of the Internal revenue laws, nor does [the IRS] regard such clubs as liable to special tax under paragraph 39 or section 79.”
Even then, a half-century before the Supreme Court’s celebrated judgment of 1922, baseball was viewed as more a sport than a business.
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This notice appeared in a SABR Bulletin eons ago, and has since been superseded by fresh research:
The first “old-timers’ game” on record was played in September, 1869 [the National Chronicle failed to give the precise date] when a team comprised of the 1859 Excelsiors of Brooklyn played a match with the Excelsiors of 1869.
I subsequently found a citation of such a game between the Knickerbocker and Excelsior oldtimers for 1868 as well; this was termed a “veterans’ game.” But baseball’s preoccupation with days of yore goes back further still: in the November 14, 1857 issue of Porter’s Spirit of the Times there is a report of “the first regular match” of the “Knickerbocker Antiquarian Base Ball Club (who play the old style of the game).” The match was played ten days earlier at Newark, and “was watched by a large number of citizens, who manifested great interest in its progress.” A crude box score lists the surnames of the players, eleven per side.
This Newark club met annually into the 1870s to play a game that seems similar to the New England version, with no fair or foul territory and runners put out by soaking or stinging them with the ball when between bases.
Interestingly also, I came upon a reference to a game played at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken on September 27, 1875, in which the Knick “Vets” of 1850 played the “Youngs” of 1860. Doc Adams, who had long since removed to Ridgefield, Connecticut, returned for the occasion and played in the “grand veterans’ match,” followed by the Knicks’ traditional supper at Duke’s.
James Whyte Davis wrote this letter in advance of the game:
The twenty-fifth anniversary of my membership in the Knickerbocker Club will occur on Monday, 27th inst. I have invited all the old boys who played with me fifteen to twenty years ago, such as Debost, Anthony, Niebuhr, Dupignac, Ladd, Curry, Adams, Birney, Tucker, Stevens, Talman, Plunkett, Eager, Murray, and Bellone, and with our present old members, expect to have “a big time,” reviving the old associations and memories dear to all lovers of the game in the good old-fashioned Knickerbocker style.
The Clipper reported:
… “Poor Old Davis” had done everything in the way of providing a carpeted tent for ladies, and plenty of seats for guests, to complete the arrangements; How excited the old boy was, to be sure! Truly was he “a boy again.” Everything turned out so propitious that it quite delighted the old vet. By 3 P.M. there was a gathering of the old boys on the field, and some donned uniforms they had not worn for years. Others came wrapped up, to guard against “rheumaticks,” as Rip Van Winkle says. In fact, there was quite an assemblage of gray heads and gray beards. First came Dr. Adams, and then Dick Stevens; and who should come over but Curry and Talman — you should have seen the latter pitch — and Murray. Then, too, there was Tryon, the whilom handsome youth of the Fagles; also Thorne, the old Empire pitcher; and Johnny Grum of the Eckfords, the king of short-stops in his day; J. Seaver Page of the Actives, who used to excel at second base; with Dick Oliver, president of the more modern Excelsiors, a club now out of the remembrance of ball-tossers, we regret to say. ‘ It would take a column to give the names of the vets, present. By 4 P.M. all was ready for play. On one side were ranged the “old duffers” — as Davis irreverently called them — and on the other the vets, of more recent years, who were considered as “youngsters.” These roped in some good players, like the two Kirtlands, and of course had an advantage. A game of five innings was played, and then the younger players made up sides and finished the game. As we had no interest in the work of the latter, we give below only the score of the old men’s game.
Note that Umpire Chadwick arranged for a display of his innovation of a ten-man game, including a right shortstop.
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First recorded triple play: November 9, 1868, in game of picked nines of Brooklyn vs. New York, recorded by George Wright, playing third base, Charles Pabor (playing right field) and Martin Swandell, first base. This is the traditional citation, yet there is evidence that Jim Creighton initiated a much earlier triple play. This from Chadwick’s Base Ball Manual:
One of the most brilliant triple plays ever witnessed was in the match on the 22nd of July, 1860, between the Excelsiors of Brooklyn and their namesakes of Baltimore. Creighton had left the pitcher’s position, and was playing left field; the second and third bases were both occupied, and as the batsman struck the ball both ran for their bases, pausing somewhat to view the fate of the ball, which Creighton was after. By one of the handsomest backward single-handed catches ever made, Creighton took the ball on the fly and by a true and rapid throw passed the ball to Whiting, at third, who caught it and threw to Brainard, at second, before either of the base runners had time to return to their bases, thus putting three hands out “in a jiffy.”
But there was more yet in the ball, for Brainard hardly received it from Whiting before it was on its way to from his hands to Pearsall, at first, who caught it in his own steel-trap style, and made all the motions necessary to put out another hand if there were any “lying around loose.” The entire performance was so neatly and quietly done that it solicited a spontaneous outburst of applause from the vast assemblage of spectators.”
[NOTE: in reply to this post at Our Game, Richard Hershberger shares an even earlier triple play, cited in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of April 18, 1859.]
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In the 1876 DeWitt Guide, bench jockeying is called “chin music” — a term today reserved for high-and-tight pitching.
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If there is any doubt that the National League was not the only tough circuit in the late 1870s, note that in 1877 alone, when the NL had competition from the International association and the League Alliance, as well as many strong independent nines, the six National League teams lost 73 games to non-league clubs such as Indianapolis, Lowell, the Stars of Syracuse, and the Alleghenies of Pittburg.
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Did you know that until the newly founded American Association’s preseason meeting of March 13, 1882, two of the slated six teams were located in Camden and Atlantic City, both of New Jersey? They withdrew before the season opened, joining instead a new “American Alliance” modeled on the League Alliance of 1881 that contained the New York Mets and Philadelphia Athletics and included at various times Brooklyn, the Shamrock of Cincinnati, the Star of Covington, and Muldoon Centre of Cincinnati.
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Just as Christy Mathewson, Edd Roush, and Tom Seaver would later shuttle between contractual stints with New York and Cincinnati, in 1883 Buck Ewing and Mickey Welch, suddenly without a home when the Troy franchise collapsed, signed with the Cincinnati Reds of the American Association for the 1883 season. However, the great Harmony Conference of the National League, the Northwestern League and the American Association yielded a settlement by which these two (and fellow Trojan Pete Gillespie) were turned over to the newly formed New York Gothams. (John Reilly also signed with the Gothams, who let him return to his hometown of Cincinnati.)
In that same chaotic period, the American Association, which had expelled Jerry Denny and Hoss Radbourn, who had violated contracts signed with the St. Louis Browns in 1882, turned soft and relinquished them to Providence, for whom they had played in ’82 anyway.
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The Union Association of 1884, a rival major league, met on October 23, 1883, at which time it received applications for franchises from Lancaster, PA, Richmond, V, New York City (!), and my former hometown of Kingston, NY (!!). The last named team was known as the Leaders. These clubs became part of the Union Alliance, modeled on the League Alliance and American Alliance, which were major-league “reserve” sources and, as such, precursors of the farm system.
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Shutouts were rare before the 1870s; the first authenticated one was pitched by Jim Creighton on November 8, 1860. Indeed, they were so rare that there was no nationally recognized term for them. As late as 1868, in upstate New York a blank score was called “a blind”; in Connecticut it was a “white wash”; in Chicago a nine was “busted” when they were blanked; in New York City a shutout was a “skunk”; in Philadelphia it was a “goose egg.” As an observation on the last of these, the egg is an obvious symbol of the zero; the French for egg is l’oeuf; the term for zero in tennis is “love” — or egg.
Old Days in Baseball was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.