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Baseball in Tocqueville’s America (To 1870)

in 1831 a french bureaucrat named Alexis de Tocqueville arrived in the United States and became so intrigued with American society that he wrote about it in a two-volume book called Democracy in America. Tocqueville was impressed with the absence of great wealth and great poverty in the United States. This was very different from the European world Tocqueville knew, where a small group of individuals held a great deal of wealth while a large majority of the population suffered in abject poverty. Tocqueville was sensing America’s concept of equality. Not only did the Declaration of Independence state that “[a]ll men are created equal,” but, Tocque-ville realized, Americans believed that statement to be true, at least for white men. Because the young nation lacked a super-wealthy class to act as community patrons, Tocqueville recognized that average Americans had to form organizations to accomplish common goals. Key among the differences between America and Europe in the 1830s was the availability of land in the former, which allowed almost any white man to become a landowner and have a farm. When Tocqueville came to the United States, two-thirds of Americans lived on farms, while only 10 percent lived in cities or towns with more than twenty-five hundred people. But America was already changing. By the second and third decades of the nineteenth century, strings of factories sprang up along fast-running New England streams. First employing young women and later hiring male immigrants, these factories transformed America in less than a lifetime. Factory owners had to pay their workers in cash. The introduction of money into the American economy, known as the Market Revolution, transformed the US economy from one based on personal favors to one based on monetary exchanges. With the development of an internal market, a national economy replaced the dozens of local economies that had characterized the United States before the Market Revolution. And the nature of work changed, as the growing class of factory workers lacked the autonomy of farmers or shop owners and found themselves no longer in control of their time or of how they did their jobs. It was in the midst of this disappearing preindustrial environment that the game of baseball emerged and developed.

Although he is not well-known, few people contributed as much to the sport of baseball as Alexander Cartwright. He was born in New York City in 1820, just as America was beginning a significant economic and social transformation from a primarily rural to a manufacturing and commercial nation. As a boy, Cartwright loved to play the various ball games popular among children in New York in the 1820s and 1830s. When he was sixteen, he took his first job as a clerk for a Wall Street broker, a position that illustrated the growing importance of business in early nineteenth-century American society. Thrown out of work by a fire that destroyed the bank building where he worked—and perhaps influenced by the entrepreneurial spirit that seemed to be spreading across the country—Cartwright started a stationery and book store with his brother, Alfred, in the mid-1840s.

In addition to running a business, Cartwright, like many other young men in New York at the time, became active in a local volunteer fire company, but he never abandoned the game he played as a child. To relieve the periods of boredom between stressful bouts of firefighting, Cartwright encouraged fellow members of the Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company to pass the time playing baseball. In 1842 he organized his colleagues into the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York. Soon other “Base Ball clubs,” which had sprung up in Manhattan and Brooklyn in the 1840s and 1850s (and perhaps even earlier), began to model themselves after Cartwright’s team. Cartwright did not stay in New York long enough to see the impact of his game, however. Enticed by the Gold Rush, he left for California in 1849, and later settled in Hawaii, where he made a living shipping food to the miners. Cartwright died in Hawaii in 1892, the year before the United States annexed the island group into its empire. By the time he died, the United States had become the world’s leading industrial nation, and baseball had become its leading sport.

Alexander Cartwright, the founder of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, standardized the rules of “base ball” in 1845. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Cooperstown, N.Y.

Baseball is a product of the rural society that existed in America before the Market Revolution. Although baseball as we know it emerged in early nineteenth-century America, bat-and-ball games had been around for centuries. Ball sports originated as religious rites in ancient Egypt. Early Christians adopted ball games as ritualistic symbols of Easter and the Resurrection. In England, games with bats and balls were played at least two centuries before Abner Doubleday supposedly invented baseball. The same was true in America: William Bradford, the governor of Plymouth Colony, complained that on Christmas Day 1621, non-Puritans at Plymouth played stoolball, a game that used stools for bases.

Baseball descended from a British game called rounders, which was played by an unspecified number of players divided into equal teams. Also a forerunner of cricket, rounders featured four stones or posts, called goals, arranged in a diamond pattern. A player called a feeder or pecker tossed the ball toward a striker, who tried to hit it with a stick. If the striker hit the ball, he ran to as many goals as he could. The striker was out if he missed three swings, if he hit the ball behind him, if the ball was caught on the fly by a member of the other team, or if he was struck by a thrown ball as he circled the diamond. The other team came to bat after every player on the offensive team had been put out.

The rules for rounders were first published in an 1829 book by William Clarke called The Boy’s Own Book. Five years later, the same rules were published in The Book of Sport by Robert Carver. Instead of calling the game rounders, however, Carver called it “base or goal ball.” In 1835 his book was republished under the title The Boy’s and Girl’s Book of Sport. This time the book called the game “base ball.” Although the rules of the game are unknown before 1829, the term “base-ball” appeared at least eighty-five years earlier in a book written by John Newbury called A Pretty Little Pocket Book. Newbury’s book, which first appeared in London in 1744 and was republished in America several times between 1762 and 1787, contained an engraving of children playing “base-ball” along with a poetic description of the game.

Americans continued to use some variation of the term “base ball” after they declared their independence from Britain. In 1778 the journal of an American soldier at Valley Forge reported that he had played a game of “base.” A diary written by a student at Princeton in 1786 described a game of “baste ball” played on campus. In 1791 the town of Pittsfield, Massachusetts, adopted an ordinance banning “any Game called Wicket, Cricket, Baseball, Batball, Football, Cat, Fives, or any Game or Games with Balls within the Distance of Eight Yards from said Meeting House.” In 1823 a New York newspaper called the National Advocate printed a story referring to Saturday “base ball” games being played on the corner of Broadway and 8th Street in lower Manhattan.

In the early nineteenth century, several different games were played in North America that could be characterized as “base ball.” In New York, descendants of Dutch settlers continued to play stoolball. In New England, pairs of children often played barn ball, in which the defensive player first threw a ball against a wall, then the offensive player attempted to hit the ball on the rebound; if he made contact with the ball, he would run to the wall and back. The game of old cat could be modified to fit almost any number of players: from one-old-cat, which had two bases and one striker, to four-old-cat, which had four bases and four strikers. Keeping the number of bases at four but employing a single striker, or batter, produced the direct ancestor of baseball. Children in New England also played a game known as town ball or the Massachusetts game, which utilized four bases and one batter. In the Massachusetts game, the batter stood midway between home and first base. Farther south, a nearly identical game called the New York game developed; the only major difference between the two is that the New York game placed the batter near home.

Americans’ habit of forming organizations impressed Tocqueville, and that habit was certainly true in baseball. In the 1870s, New York political boss Thurlow Weed boasted in his autobiography that in 1825 the city of Rochester had a “base-ball club, numbering nearly fifty members” that “met every afternoon during the ball-playing season.” Alexander Cartwright’s Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, formed in 1842, was primarily a social club dedicated to playing baseball. In many ways, the Knickerbockers were similar to a modern country club: Membership, capped at forty, was limited to the social elite, including professional men, merchants, and white-collar workers. Club members gathered on Mondays and Thursdays, when they divided into teams and played baseball.

The rules of early baseball captured the values of preindustrial America. Early America had an abundance of land; baseball requires an expansive playing field. Before the Market Revolution, the sun, not the clock, marked the workday of farmers and craftsmen; baseball, alone among major American sports, is not governed by a clock. In Tocqueville’s time Americans took equality seriously; in baseball every player comes to bat and every player has an opportunity to score a run. In 1845 Cartwright codified the rules, which included the banning of the town ball practice of “soaking” or “plugging” a base runner by hitting him with a thrown ball to put him out. At first, the Knickerbockers played their games in a field on the corner of 27th Street and 4th Avenue in lower Manhattan, but as the Market Revolution transformed New York City, that playing site became unavailable. Across the Hudson River in Hoboken, New Jersey, Cartwright found a playing site used by other clubs called Elysian Fields, which was easily accessible to lower Manhattan by the Barclay Street ferry.

The Knickerbockers were not the only baseball club to form in Manhattan. Other baseball clubs organized in the 1840s and 1850s, usually around a single profession. Members of New York’s Mutual Fire Company, a rival of the Knickerbocker Fire Engine Company, organized the Mutual club. Members of New York’s police force formed the Manhattan club, while bartenders established the Phantom club. New York’s teachers created the Metropolitan Base Ball Club, a name that was revived by New York’s current National League entry. Because the growing city quickly gobbled up the few available expansive fields found on Manhattan, New York clubs often resorted to playing their games across the Hudson River in New Jersey or on fields in Long Island, including Brooklyn, which until 1898 was a separate city.

The first recorded baseball game between the Knickerbocker club and another club took place on June 19, 1846. The Knickerbockers’ opponent that day was an organization called the New York Base Ball Club, often called the New York Nine by modern historians. On that supposedly historic afternoon, New York defeated the Knickerbockers 23–1 in four innings. Some historians have erroneously referred to this event as the first baseball game, but it was not. The Knickerbockers had been playing baseball for more than three years; the New York club might have been playing even longer. The game played in Hoboken on June 19, 1846, was not even the first recorded baseball game. Eight months earlier, on October 23, 1845, the New York Morning News ran a newspaper account of a baseball game played the previous day between the New York Base Ball Club and the Brooklyn Base Ball Club. The New Yorkers, showing the same prowess they would display against the Knickerbockers eight months later, won the game by a score of 24–4.

Although the Knickerbockers dominated baseball in the 1840s and 1850s, they were by no means the only powerful baseball club in the New York area at the time. Other significant clubs based in Manhattan included the Mutual club, the Gotham club, the Eagle club, and the Empire club, while across the East River the Excelsior club, the Putnam club, the Eckford club, and the Atlantic club outshined the competition in Brooklyn. In 1858 Henry Chadwick, the pioneer sportswriter of the New York Clipper who invented the baseball box score, helped organize a three-game all-star series pitting the best players on clubs based in New York against the best players on clubs based in Brooklyn. The series was played on Long Island at the Fashion Race Course in Corona, which was then a village in Nassau County but today is a neighborhood in Queens near Citi Field. Railroads scheduled special trains, served by ferries from Manhattan, to carry fans to the racetrack. To cover the cost of renting the facility, attendees paid fifty cents admission to watch the games. The Fashion Race Course series proved to be a remarkable success, with up to ten thousand or more people attending the three-game series. The series also proved that fans were willing to pay to see quality baseball. The Fashion Race Course series could be considered baseball’s first “subway series,” except for the fact that it predated the construction of New York’s subway system by forty-six years.

Two important clubs from the amateur era, the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club and the Excelsior Base Ball Club, pose together in 1859. National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Cooperstown, N.Y.

Eighteen months earlier, in January 1857, the popularity of baseball in the New York metropolitan area necessitated a convention of New York–area clubs. More than a dozen teams sent delegates, who officially adopted the Knickerbocker rules for games played between them. In March 1858 the Knickerbocker, Gotham, Eagle, and Empire clubs called another convention. Confirming Tocqueville’s observation that America was a nation of joiners, the delegates at the March convention established the National Association of Base Ball Players, baseball’s first organized league. Other New York–area clubs responded to the call to join the association, and by 1859 almost fifty teams from New York and Brooklyn were members. The delegates also agreed that at the end of each season, the association would award a whip pennant to the newly crowned baseball champion.

Although baseball first developed and took hold in the New York area, it quickly spread beyond the metropolis. In the early 1850s, clubs were formed in New Jersey and upstate New York, and by the middle of the decade the game was being played as far west as Cleveland, Detroit, and Chicago. In the late 1850s and 1860s, former members of the Knickerbocker and Eagle clubs, who brought the game with them as they pursued their fortunes in the goldfields, formed clubs in California. Government clerks established the Potomac Base Ball Club of Washington, DC, in 1859. A year later an existing organization, the Olympic Town Ball Club of Philadelphia, abandoned the game it had been playing in favor of the Knickerbocker rules. In 1857, in what was perhaps the most ominous development for Boston-area fans until the Curse of the Bambino, the Tri-Mountain club forsook the Massachusetts game for the New York game. In time, the other Boston-area clubs would follow the Knickerbocker rules. By 1867, four hundred clubs, including teams as far away as California and Louisiana, were members of the National Association of Base Ball Players.

As baseball grew in popularity, pressure began to mount on high-profile clubs to win. The association required that all players on its member clubs be amateurs, but by the 1860s the more important clubs began to secretly enlist ringers on their teams. Opposing clubs originally lured players from other clubs with promises of jobs, gifts, or clandestine payment. Baseball’s first star, and perhaps its first professional, was Jim Creighton, the greatest pitcher of his time and the first pitcher to develop a fastball. In an era when pitchers were required to throw underhand, Creighton added speed to his delivery by flicking his wrist when he released the ball. Creighton pitched baseball’s first recorded shutout in 1860. He was also the greatest hitter of his time; he did not strike out at all in 1861. In 1862 Creighton reached base safely every time he came to bat. He jumped from the Star club of Brooklyn to the Excelsiors in 1860 when that team secretly offered to pay him. Sadly, Creighton was also the game’s first fatality. According to legend, he hit a home run in a game against the Union club of Morrisania in October 1861, but the power of his swing either aggravated a previous injury or ruptured an internal organ. He collapsed after crossing home plate and died four days later.

Although still officially banned by the association, the practice of clubs paying their star players soon became an open secret. In 1866 the Athletic club of Philadelphia was accused of paying three of its players. The critics were wrong. The Athletics were actually paying four players, the fourth being Al Reach, whom the A’s had lured from the Eckford club by secretly agreeing to pay him. To pay these stars, the more popular clubs began requiring fans to pay a fee to attend. In 1864 the prominent clubs in New York and Brooklyn were charging admission, with the winning club keeping the gate money. By 1868 the top seven or eight clubs in the association pulled in a total of $100,000.

The undefeated 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings, baseball’s first openly all-professional team. Standing (left to right): Cal McVey (RF), Charlie Gould (1B), Harry Wright (CF/MGR), George Wright (SS), Fred Waterman (3B). Seated (left to right): Andy Leonard (LF), Doug Allison (C), Asa Brainard (P), Charlie Sweasy (2B). National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum. Cooperstown, N.Y.

As winning baseball clubs brought fame to their host cities of the East, civic boosters in Cincinnati wanted to attract the same glory for their city. In 1867 they established the Cincinnati Base Ball Club, better known as the Red Stockings after the color of their leggings, and entered the team in the association. Civic morale took a beating, however, when the visiting National club of Washington, on a ten-game tour of the Midwest, pounded the Red Stockings by a score of 53–10. The loss to the Nationals was a blow to Cincinnati’s pride. Determined not to repeat the embarrassment, in 1868 the Red Stockings followed the lead of the top teams in the East and covertly paid four players. Chief among the ringers was Harry Wright, an English-born cricket player who had already proven his proficiency at baseball in stints with the Knickerbockers, the Gothams, and the two previous seasons in Cincinnati. Wright was secretly paid $1,200 to play center field and manage the team.

The 1868 Cincinnati season was so successful that when the association lifted its ban on professional players in 1869, the Red Stockings decided to put together a team composed exclusively of professionals. Led by Harry Wright and his younger brother George at shortstop, the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings fielded a team of ten professionals (nine starters and a backup) who were each paid between $600 and $1,200 for the season. Boasting some of the best players of the era, the Red Stockings toured the nation and, for a fee, took on all comers. Traveling from city to city, the Red Stockings operated like a circus or a vaudeville show—or, to use a more modern analogy, the Harlem Globetrotters basketball team—as spectators filled the stands to see whether a seemingly invincible team would lose. They never did. Against association foes, the Red Stockings finished the season with fifty-seven wins and one tie. The club also played more than seventy games against nonassociation teams, winning every one of them.

The unbeaten streak continued into the following season, as the Red Stockings won the first twenty-four games on the schedule. Finally, in June Cincinnati fell to the Atlantic club in Brooklyn by a score of 8–7 in an extra-inning affair that lasted eleven innings. Although the team would only lose five more games that year, the loss to the Atlantics marked the death knell of the club. No longer undefeated, their luster was gone. Facing mounting debt, the promoters of the club dissolved the Red Stockings following the 1870 season. The Red Stockings may not have achieved the financial success the team’s promoters wanted, but on the field, the club’s accomplishments were unparalleled. The Red Stocking’s influence was immediate. By 1871 every major baseball team in the country had adopted Cincinnati’s all-professional model.

Baseball during the amateur era reflected the America that Tocque-ville witnessed in the 1830s. Baseball’s need for an expansive playing field characterized the vast amount of land available in the United States in the early nineteenth century, and the game’s lack of a clock captured the rhythm of work in preindustrial America. Baseball, however, also embodied something else Tocqueville noticed about America in the 1830s: equality. Preindustrial America prided itself on being a democratic society in which people triumphed on their own merits. The same was true in baseball. Every player got a chance to bat, and therefore every player had an opportunity to score. Baseball, like Tocqueville’s America, also celebrated the individual: The batter stood alone as he faced a pitcher and eight other defensive players.

If baseball represented preindustrial America, football, a sport that emerged several decades later, represented industrial America. Football is played on a confined playing space—the gridiron. In contrast to baseball, football is governed by a clock. And, much like workers on an assembly line, football is a game of very specialized playing positions. Football lacks the element of equality found in baseball, as different squads play offense and defense, and not every player can score or even touch the ball.

Well into the twentieth century, however, Americans saw baseball as the sport that best represented their culture. In 1911, sporting goods magnate and former nineteenth-century baseball star Albert G. Spalding wrote a book called America’s National Game, in which he argued that baseball, like America, is democratic. Pointing out that Americans did not recognize arbitrary class distinctions, Spalding declared that the “son of a President of the United States would as soon play ball with Patsy Flannigan as with Lawrence Lionel Livingstone.” It did not matter that Flannigan may have been the son of an immigrant or the Livingstone family may have arrived in America on the Mayflower. All that mattered was whether “Patsy could put up the right article.”