by John Shiffert
In 1866, Charles Peverelly wrote the first comprehensive study of sports in America, The Book of American Pastimes. In it, he claimed that baseball had already “become beyond question the leading feature of the out-door sports of the United States . . . in short, the pastime suits the people, and the people suit the pastime.” Peverelly, however, was behind the times because baseball already was well on its way to becoming far more than a pastime. Baseball was becoming a business for its management and a profession for its players, as well as a game. Although this transition took place on the national stage during the latter part of the 19th-century, many of its seminal moments and events had Pennsylvania connections.
Well before the 1860s, baseball was more than a kids’ game. When two groups of young men banded together in 1831 to form the first true organized ball club, the Olympic Town Ball Club of Philadelphia, they started the movement of the game from a pastime to an organized sport. The very existence of an association organized for the purpose of playing this pastime was a significant step. The second quarter of the 19th-century was a time of social and economic dislocation as Pennsylvania’s market economy matured and its urban centers grew. Philadelphians reacted to these changes like people throughout the nation—among other things, they formed and joined clubs. Be it a fraternal lodge, a benefit association, a political club, a fire company, a gang, or an athletic association, the mid-19th-century populace found comfort and a new sense of belonging in these clubs. Many of these groups were devoted to playing and/or watching bat-and-ball games. By the early 1860s, these would become baseball clubs, and through sheer numbers it was inevitable that the level of play would improve to the point where better competition and its fellow traveler, profit motive, would follow.
By 1857 baseball clubs were springing up fast enough that a national organization, the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), was formed in New York. Although the Olympic was not the only ball club in the city by 1857, and the Reading Athletic Club would be organized to play baseball in November 1858, Pennsylvania would not be represented in the NABBP until 1861, by which time Philadelphia had at least a dozen organized clubs devoted to playing baseball, including the club that bore the name that would prove to be the state’s most successful and important throughout most of the 19th century—Athletic. By 1867, clubs were also established in Allegheny, Altoona, Brookville, Coatesville, Danville, East Liberty, Easton, Harrisburg, Hollidaysburg, Huntington, Kittanning, Johnstown, Meadville, Nazareth, Pittsburgh, Pottstown, Scranton, Tarentum, Titusville, Wilkes-Barre, Williamsport, and at least eight clubs in Reading. Although not all of these clubs were members of the NABBP, they did play NABBP teams, sometimes being thrashed by triple-digit scores. The reason for this gross competitive imbalance was that the clubs outside of Philadelphia were ostensibly amateur organizations, although some of them—notably in Pittsburgh, according to the 1890s trade paper the Sporting Life—may have paid a star player or two on the sly. Athletic, however, operated on an entirely different scale.
The gradual transition towards professionalism, which baseball historian David Quentin Voigt has labeled “creeping commercialism,” started in the early 1860s. The existence of the NABBP led to a heightened level of competition. It became no small matter of pride to be able to prove superiority on the diamond over a neighboring club. This competitive spirit grew to the point where, in 1860, James Creighton of Brooklyn became the first paid player in baseball history. With now-pricey stars increasing the clubs’ cost of playing the game, the concept of charging admission to what had previously been social contests became common by 1863. However, the sport really started down the road towards becoming a business in 1865 when, for the first time, a player was paid to change cities to play baseball. That player was Al Reach, and the club paying him to “jump” from Brooklyn to Philadelphia was Athletic, which offered Reach $25 a week in “expense money” to leave the Brooklyn Eckford club and commute back and forth from his home in Brooklyn to Philadelphia. This development marked a clear break with both Athletic’s past—the club was formed in 1860 by members of a Philadelphia singing club, the Handel and Haydn Society—and the concept that these clubs were playing just for the sake of the game. Within three years of Reach’s move the entire Athletic “first nine” would be made up of paid players. One year after that, in 1869, no less than a dozen clubs, including Athletic and Philadelphia’s Keystone Base Ball Club, would be publicly recognized as professional teams.
With the coming of salaried players and an increased level of financial and public interest in their teams, it was destined that a professional organization be formed. That happened in 1871 with the formation of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, better known as the National Association.Weaknesses in the association made it inevitable that a league of professional baseball clubs would be created, and so it was, in 1876: the National League (NL). From that point, baseball began a whirlwind of development that would be marked, some might say scarred, by the conflict that occurs in any industry when capital, as represented by ambitious captains of industry, employs laborers with marketable skills. However, the first professional baseball organization was one of players, not clubs, and represented the first of two ultimately unsuccessful 19th-century attempts by baseball’s laborers to create and run their own organization. The National Association had a strong Philadelphia component. Three different Philadelphia teams, including Athletic, played in the association. Meanwhile, outside the association in the 1870s, numerous teams with salaried players, notably the Reading Actives, flourished throughout the state.
However, the inmates ran the asylum in a most unbusinesslike manner. The sloppy ways of the association, including players breaking contracts and changing teams, rowdyism on the field and dissipation off of it, a gross competitive imbalance, a team entry fee of just $10, erratic scheduling, and failures to meet those schedules led to its downfall at the hands of the owner of the Chicago White Stocking franchise, a classic 19th-century robber baron named William Hulbert. Hulbert wanted to make “major league” baseball a business, run on business principles, by creating a labor/management arrangement, with the latter having the advantage. When the owners of seven other National Association teams, including the Athletics, quickly fell in line, baseball ceased being a hobby (at least at the top level), it became a business. The NL was organized as an association of teams that would, in the fashion of the classic 19th-century industrial trust, work cooperatively on matters like player salaries, rule-making, scheduling, and the enforcement of said rules.
The Athletics ran afoul of Hulbert’s rules, getting expelled after the 1876 season for failing to complete their schedule. However, Hulbert had an ulterior motive in this action. Prior to the 1876 season, his Chicago team had signed away Athletic’s best player, Adrian Anson, although Anson would later sign a contract with Athletic for 1877. Hulbert, knowing this, pushed hard for the expulsion of the Philadelphia team in a ruling the rest of the league thought draconian. Hulbert’s action knocked Pennsylvania professional baseball from the sport’s top echelon until the fall of 1881, when the monopolistic nature of the league moved Philadelphian Horace Phillips and Pittsburghers Dennis McKnight and Al Pratt to join with other excluded groups to form a competing organization, the American Association (AA), with teams in both Pennsylvania cities.
Although the Pittsburgh Alleghenies were that city’s first “major league” team, they were not the first attempt to place a Pittsburgh team in a professional league. That happened in 1876 when another team of Alleghenies began play, joining the professional International Association (IA) for the 1877 season. Not really what would now be called a “minor” league, the IA was just a professional league that wasn’t the National League. The first professional Alleghenies folded after the 1878 season, unable to compete with better-established independent clubs like the East Liberty Stars or the Olympics. Although the region’s late 19th-century growth (spurred by the steel industry) did provide a boost to baseball, the neighborhoods and workplaces tended to support neighborhood teams. The situation was different in Philadelphia, as during the 1870s Philadelphia industry established itself as a market for better-paid skilled and semiskilled laborers, who, having extra money, were more likely to spend it on professional sports than were their poorer counterparts in the mines and mills of central and western Pennsylvania.
Prior to the formation of the AA, Hulbert and his NL cronies solved the main problem the NL had failed to address—players changing teams between seasons. Starting in 1879, the NL allowed each team to “reserve” five players as its “property” from season-to-season, even though they were playing on one-year contracts. This restriction on labor’s rights was consistent with practices of the era that saw the rise of the first great labor organizations—the Order of the Knights of Labor and the American Federation of Labor—in response to just such inequities, as well as passage of the Sherman Antitrust Act. This “reserve clause,” as it would become known after it appeared in all player contracts, would by far be baseball’s biggest labor issue well into the latter part of the next century and would also spawn baseball’s first labor organization and set off a unique (since baseball would eventually be exempted from the antitrust act) labor/management conflict.
The first decade of this conflict saw a “National Agreement” of cooperation signed between the NL and the AA. This agreement eliminated competition for players’ services and helped give birth to a third major league, initially with Philadelphia and Altoona among its eight members, in 1884. The quick failure of this Union Association gave the upper hand back to management and helped give birth to the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, the game’s first union, under the direction of one of the most remarkable men in baseball history, Bellefonte, Pennsylvania, native and ColumbiaUniversityLawSchool graduate John Montgomery Ward. After getting kicked out of Pennsylvania State College for fighting in 1877, Ward became a 17-year-old professional baseball player as a pitcher with the Athletics. By 1885, he was a star shortstop in the NL and the leader of “The Brotherhood,” created to combat baseball’s ownership, which, in Ward’s words, treated labor as sanctioned slaves, with the reserve clause a throwback to the fugitive slave laws. Although Ward failed to overturn the reserve clause, he took his union out on strike and formed his own league, the Players’ League of 1890, which, following the model of many other labor movements of the period, adopted a socialistic structure. (Ward, perhaps unwisely, refused help from the Knights of Labor.) The Players League, which included Philadelphia and Pittsburgh teams, was a partnership between the players and their wealthy backers, wherein any individual club profits above $20,000 were to be divided equally among all eight teams and all team profits up to $20,000 would be split equally between the team’s backers and its players.
Alas, the owners of the Players League teams had more in common with capital than they had with labor, and the Players’ League failed after one season, thanks in part to Philadelphia owners Earl and George Wagner making an early sellout to the establishment. With competition gone again and the union movement at least temporarily broken, a new National Agreement between the NL and the AA was formed, an agreement that lasted less than a year, foundering in the aftermath of the NL’s Pittsburgh team signing Lou Bierbauer, who supposedly belonged to the AA’s Philadelphia team. Although Philadelphia proclaimed Pittsburgh to be a bunch of “Pirates” (and thus are they still named), Bierbauer stayed in Pittsburgh and the AA lost the resulting trade war, leaving the NL alone in a monopoly position from 1892 until 1901. However, it was an unevenly run, poorly competitive monopoly, and labor once again briefly returned to a position of power in 1901 when yet another league, the American League, stepped into the void to challenge (and eventually be co-opted by) the National League. Thus the battle between capital and labor continued in professional baseball into another century.
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Image: The Brooklyn Atlantics, below, and the Philadelphia Athletics, above. Harper’s Weekly, November 3, 1866.
