From its creation in 1871 to its crash five years later, the National Association had a rocky time as America’s first professional league. Franchises came and went with dizzying speed, often folding in midseason.
Schedules were not played out if a club slated to go on the road saw little prospect of gain. Drinking and gambling and game-fixing were rife. And the Boston Red Stockings of Al Spalding and the Wright brothers dominated play, going 71-8 in the last of their four straight championship seasons; their predictable and one-sided victories crushed the competition and at last, interest in the entire circuit.
But from the ashes of the National Association emerged the Red Stockings’ model of success and the entrepreneurial genius of Chicago’s William Hulbert. After raiding Boston to obtain four of the biggest stars in the game—Spalding, Ross Barnes, Deacon White, and Cal McVey—and lining up the services of the Philadelphia Athletics’ Adrian Anson, the White Stockings were ready to roll in the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, founded on February 2, 1876 in New York’s Grand Central Hotel.
The first five years of the NL were nearly as unsettled as the final years of the NA, with franchises appearing and then disappearing in such cities as Syracuse, Indianapolis, and Hartford while major cities like New York and Philadelphia were, after the league’s inaugural year, unrepresented. In 1878 the fledgling circuit was forced to cut back to six teams: Milwaukee, Indianapolis, Chicago, Providence, Cincinnati, and Boston. National League? National Game? It seemed Americans had plenty of appetite for playing the game, but not much for watching it.
Yet as the National League suffered with growing pains, it was introducing some elements that were critical to the explosion of interest that came with the 1880s. It created a professional (paid) umpiring crew; insisted that the league schedule be honored; banned pool selling and hard-liquor consumption in the stands; and created a system of management-owned teams as opposed to the player-run cooperatives that had largely characterized the NA. As the public’s renewed faith in the integrity of the game coincided with an upswing in the national economy, not only did the National League flourish; along came an interloper, the rival American Association, to offer patrons 25-cent baseball (NL admissions were 50 cents), Sunday games, and beer. With the public’s new appetite for the game seeming insatiable, a group of investors led by St. Louis’ Henry Lucas launched a third major league, the Union Association, for 1884.
With brash stars like Cap Anson, Tim Keefe, Dan Brouthers, and the larger-than-life King Kelly capturing the newspaper headlines and the nation’s imagination, the age of the baseball idol arrived. Before this decade, men like Jim Creighton, Joe Start, and George Wright had been admired in New York and New England, but now a baseball hero’s image could be mass-produced for nationwide sale, or licensed for advertising, or inspire odes and songs. Kelly inspired Slide, Kelly, Slide, its arcane references now largely forgotten but once the most popular song in the land:
Your running’s a disgrace!
Slide, Kelly, slide!
Stay there, hold your base!
If someone doesn’t steal ya,
And your batting doesn’t fail ya,
They’ll take you to Australia!
Slide, Kelly, slide!
And although Ernest Lawrence Thayer, always denied it, Kelly could well have been the model for “Casey at the Bat,” the immortal lyric ballad Thayer penned in 1888. (“Casey” was sometimes reprinted in the newspapers of the 1880s as “Kelly at the Bat,” changing the locale from Mudville to Beantown.)
Baseball was ascendant in the 1880s, and like the budding nation whose pastime it was, pretty cocksure of itself. In the same summer that “Casey” made his debut, Albert Spalding led a contingent of baseball players on a round the world tour, spreading the gospel of bat and ball to such places as Egypt, Italy, England, Hawaii, and the above-mentioned Australia. Baseball, America thought, was too grand a game to be merely a national pastime; it ought to be the international pastime.
At a New York banquet for Spalding’s returning “world tourists” in 1889, speaker Mark Twain declared, “Baseball is the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive and push and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century.” Spalding himself later wrote:
I claim that Base Ball owes its prestige as our
National Game to the fact that as no other form of sport it is the exponent of
American Courage, Confidence, Combativeness; American Dash, Discipline,
Determination; American Energy, Eagerness, Enthusiasm; American Pluck,
Persistency, Performance; American Spirit, Sagacity, Success; American Vim,
Vigor, Virility.
In fact baseball had become more than the mere reflection of our rising industrial and political power and its propensity for bluster and hokum: the national game was beginning to supply emblems for democracy, industry, and community that would change America and the world—not in the ways that Spalding’s Tourists may have envisioned, but indisputably for the better.