Hulbert died on April 10, 1882, just before the start of the regular season. A friend and Chicago lawyer named W. I. Culver who was “present at Mr. Hulbert’s bedside during the weary nights of his long and fated illness” noted that he bore his agony with characteristic fortitude. “Though impatient of suffering and of the restraint of his daily increasing weakness, he was bold and manly to the last; certain that his days were numbered, hopeless of cure, writhing in times in pain, he awaited the liberator death, with as much composure as he would have greeted a friend. He lived and died a man.” American Association officials seemed less tender toward his legacy. Within weeks of Hulbert’s death, McKnight ordered a halt to all exhibition games against League clubs, planning to hit his adversary where it hurt—in the purse.
The American Association’s twenty-five-cent price of admission proved immensely popular in 1882. Vastly bigger crowds turned out for its games than for the League’s with its fifty-cent tariff. Sunday baseball was also a hit. Von der Ahe’s Browns took part in the first major-league game ever played on a Sunday, on May 7, 1882. That game was played in Louisville, but as soon as the Browns were at home, they played Sunday after Sunday, drawing many people who never attended National League games, just as Von der Ahe had predicted. Immigrants, in particular, turned to baseball. It gave them a way to learn what America was all about: a quarter, carefully saved, could get them into the splendid spectacle of an American Association game, and they could even go on Sundays, the one day of the week they did not have to work. Inside the park, they could see in the grandstand well-dressed and well-fed people—people who were living the American life to which they aspired—and, on the field, tough, ambitious players who were not all that far above the working poor.
A less upscale, freely drinking crowd could be a mixed blessing, of course. Association crowds tended to be not only bigger than the League’s, but also rowdier and cruder. Returning from a Sunday game in Louisville in May, a dedicated St. Louis Browns rooter named John Cooney complained that “some 500 hoodlums” had positioned themselves behind home plate, where they “rent the air with blackguard words and hoots of disapprobation at every move made by the Browns.” Such obnoxious behavior, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat ventured, would never pass muster in classier League parks. “In the League cities the crowds attending the ball games are made to behave, and any blackguard conduct results in prompt ejectment from the ground. In the cities where the American Association is represented, notably Louisville and Cincinnati, the hoodlums appear to rule the roost.” That being the case, the paper suggested to supporters that “when they visit these two places they take along with them shot-guns as well as their ball clubs, and use the former when too hard pressed.”
Numbers on the backs of uniforms had not yet been invented, and to help spectators identify players the Association embarked on a novel scheme to dress each man differently based on the position he played. That was dropped early in the season when both the public and the players found the look more laughable than helpful. But even after that, the players in this raucous new league were lax about keeping their uniforms clean and in good repair—or even uniform. “The Alleghenys in the early part of the season were neat,” one critic noted, “but when last here one man in their nine wore brown instead of blue stockings, while some wore blue, some gray and some white caps. The regular uniform shirt was not worn by all the players, two or three coming out in tights.” Baltimore wore “trampish-looking suits,” while the St. Louis Browns were among the worst offenders: “Comisky [sic] has a weakness for wearing a cap different in color from that worn by his colleagues. First it was a gray that he wore, then a light blue; now he eschews caps altogether and comes out in a white turban. Sullivan seldom wears the same cap twice. Dorr very often wears a pair of breeches that look as though they were made to fit the Cardiff Giant,” a reference to the ten-foot-tall “petrified” nude man that had been dug up in 1869 in Cardiff, New York, and put on display by P. T. Barnum—a colossal hoax, naturally. “McGinnis’ failing is in always wearing a common undershirt instead of the regulation garment.” It all contributed to the fledgling league’s general air of seediness.
Meanwhile, on July 4, Louisville hosted balloon rides at Eclipse Park, but had to cancel them abruptly when the balloon caught fire during one ride before reaching the level of the press box above the grandstand. Tom Brown, an outfielder for the Baltimore club, later recalled the Association’s funhouse spirit. “Can you imagine the difference between a Philadelphia Sunday and a Sabbath day at gay Coney Island?” That was “about the difference” between baseball as it was played in the sober, proper National League and the loose, “rough-and-ready” American Association.
Outfits and safety concerns aside, the new league was reminding Americans why they so loved the game. Something about baseball captured the national spirit, its striving, impatient, rebellious nature superimposed over a love of pastoral beauty, justice, and order. Moreover, baseball seemed to epitomize the American interplay between communal effort and something more essential: brilliant individual achievement. The 1880s version was particularly fast-paced and action-packed. Batters did not drag out the time between pitches by incessantly stepping out of the box, taking extra swings, adjusting their uniforms, or scratching themselves; they stood ready to hit, while pitchers stood ready to throw. Since there was no broadcast advertising, there were no delays between innings. Games raced along, rarely lasting longer than two hours, and often taking no more than ninety minutes. Like America itself, baseball demanded initiative and guts, and the men playing it sometimes resorted to guile and even violence as well as skill to get the better of their fellow man.
In 1884, the Sporting Life listed examples of the “low trickery” professionals employed to hold and defend their advantage, such as “slyly cutting the ball to have it changed, tripping up base runners, willfully colliding with fielders to make them commit errors, hiding the ball, and other specially mean tricks of the kind characteristic of corner lot loafers in their ball games.” Mark Twain described the game as a perfect image of his America: “the very symbol, the outward and visible expression of the drive, and push, and rush and struggle of the raging, tearing, booming nineteenth century!”
Though the Association offered no real pennant race—the Cincinnati Reds finished eleven and a half games ahead of the second-place Philadelphia Athletics—paying customers poured into Association parks throughout the summer in numbers that dwarfed the turnout at games of the far superior National League, which featured a great championship fight. By the Cleveland Leader’s count, five of the Association’s six teams outdrew the National League’s mighty Chicago White Stockings—and Chicago had pulled in three times more people than any of the other seven League clubs. All that business meant that Association clubs were flush with cash as the 1882 season neared a close—and were thus in a strong position to steal the National League’s best players for 1883, putting that older league at dire risk.
In a panic, the Hulbert-less owners of the League’s clubs convened an emergency meeting on September 22, 1882, at Philadelphia’s Continental Hotel to figure out how to fight back. William G. Thompson, president of the Detroit Wolverines, set the tone with a speech he delivered in his room after dinner, drinks, and cigars. “You cannot afford to sneer at the American Association and call it the abortion of the League,” the mayor told his fellow owners. “The American Association clubs have all made money this season, and the aggregate population of the cities in which they play far exceeds that of the League cities. . . . No, gentlemen, you cannot afford to sneer at the Association. They are taking our players because they can afford to pay higher salaries.”
The League’s answer was to toss aside Hulbert’s stern principles—his refusal to cater to the big markets and his stubborn loyalty to his faithful franchises, no matter how small. It was time to face reality. The owners voted to chuck out Worcester and Troy, though the small-city franchises had broken no rules, and replace the
m with clubs in the two biggest markets: the Philadelphia Phillies and a new team that Mutrie and Day planned to create in New York. They also fought to recover players who had absconded to the Association, bribing them to return to the fold or threatening them with lifetime expulsion. By the time American Association executives held their own special meeting on October 23 in Columbus, Ohio, they were, in the words of the Cincinnati Enquirer’s O. P. Caylor, “worked up to a fever-heat, and they arrived here cocked and primed . . . to show the bullying League that from now out it was war to the knife.” Their major order of business that day was to expand by two teams, ushering in the Columbus Buckeyes and the famous New York Metropolitans, Day and Mutrie having decided to field a club in both leagues. That raised the total to eight clubs, the same as the National League.
Then, having proclaimed the Association’s parity with the League, the owners shoved a dagger into the heart of Hulbert’s blacklist. The executives passed a resolution proclaiming open season on the League’s proscribed players, with the exception of the four Louisville crooks. This was a declaration of unlimited war against the League, which had considered its blacklist a strong protection against crooked and unruly players, and a powerful weapon during contract negotiations. Chris Von der Ahe, his impetuous anger roused by his enemies’ tactics, told a reporter that he thought the action “was a splendid one. The League thought they could sit upon us, and take our players as they wished, even if we did expel them. Why can not we, who are on a paying basis, do the same?”
Both leagues, it was now clear, were advancing rapidly beyond the final outposts of negotiation and compromise. An ugly fight for players and patronage loomed, and it seemed possible—even likely—the war would rage until one of these two leagues was destroyed. Von der Ahe predicted it would be the National League. “I think that in 1884 Chicago, New York and Philadelphia will be the only surviving members of the League. Then they will have to come to us,” he said. Vengeance was decidedly in the air. “Next season it will be war to the knife,” McKnight vowed in an interview. “We will ask for no quarter.” As one war measure, McKnight banned lucrative postseason games with the National League during that autumn of 1882.
The Cincinnati Reds went ahead and played some anyway, using a lawyerly evasion to pretend they were not violating McKnight’s prohibition. In early October, the Reds formally discharged their players for the season. The players then reformed as an independent team for the month of October and boldly scheduled games against the League’s Cleveland, Chicago, and Providence clubs. McKnight was furious at this attempt to end-run his embargo. But Cincinnati played on. And, because it did, the champions of two major leagues clashed in October for the first time in baseball history.
Some have labeled the Cincinnati Reds-Chicago White Stockings games of October 1882 the original World Series. But they were considerably less than that: just a couple of exhibitions. Mike Kelly didn’t even bother to accompany his Chicago teammates to Cincinnati, “being at home singing lullabys and loving ditties to his new wife.” Still, the idea of a postseason faceoff between the league champions appealed to Americans from the start. Despite an admission charge of fifty cents, twice the regular-season rate, the first of the two games at Cincinnati’s Bank Street Grounds drew 2,700 Reds fanatics, a crowd full of more enthusiasm “than young America is with plum-pudding after the Christmas dinner.” The White Stockings were bigger, literally and figuratively, than the Reds—taller and more muscular, with three straight National League pennants under their belts. But the Cincinnati crowd—including “large numbers of our country cousins, their uncles and their sisters’ ‘fellers’” from rural Ohio and Kentucky—helped even things out, making it a point “to bubble forth in yells that must have awakened the sleeping heroes of the Revolution, if there were any within several leagues of the grounds.” Their shouts of “Ya-ha! Yi ki! Rip, rah,” drowned out blaring calliopes and the scream of locomotive whistles nearby.
The crowd had reason to shout. Reds pitcher Will White, the first major leaguer to wear spectacles, held the League champions to eight scattered hits, beating the heavily favored White Stockings, 4–0. One hillbilly from “across the river” in Kentucky summed it up succinctly: “them yar little fellers licking them big ‘uns.” An even bigger crowd of 3,500 turned out the following afternoon. This time, Chicago’s little Larry Corcoran silenced the mob and restored the natural order of baseball by mowing down them little fellers, 2–0, surrendering only three singles. Still, even one win by an Association nine against baseball’s best team put an exclamation point on a memorable debut season for the new league.
Even so, McKnight was furious when he learned that Cincinnati had betrayed him. Before Chicago came to town, he had issued a stern warning to Reds manager Pop Snyder: Play one more game against the National League, and “you and any of your players who participate . . . will be expelled.” Two weeks later, at the Association’s annual meeting, McKnight tried to make good on his promise. After hours of debate, two of the owners, the more radical McKnight and Von der Ahe, voted to summarily kick Cincinnati out. But the cooler moderates in the room, Lew Simmons of the Philadelphia Athletics and J. H. Pank of the Louisville Eclipse, opposed the measure, no doubt recalling that the Association owed its very existence to such heavy-handed decisions by the League to abandon good baseball cities. When the tie vote effectively blocked expulsion, the delegates agreed on a significantly less draconian punishment: a formal reprimand and a fine of $100. McKnight’s threatening telegram became the basis of a moldy legend that he interrupted baseball’s first World Series in midplay and forced its cancellation, as if a modern set of seven games had been under way. In fact, Chicago had never scheduled more than two.
As 1882 came to a close, the American Association was eight clubs strong, occupying some of America’s best baseball cities and benefiting from low ticket prices, crowd-pleasing beer sales, and Sunday ball. But the Association faced its own dangers. Incessant warfare with the older league threatened to destroy its profits. Gamblers continued to do big business at ballparks, threatening to corrupt the game. Owners had invested heavily to put a better brand of baseball on the field, and they had to wonder whether that would pay off in sufficiently bigger crowds or they had disastrously overspent. Could the owners somehow reach a peaceful accommodation, maximizing their profits instead of ruinously fighting? The coming season of 1883 could well determine whether baseball would make its comeback or turn back onto the path to oblivion.
3
THE MINSTREL STAR
IN THE 1880 CENSUS, PHILADELPHIA—WITH 847,170 PEOPLE TO New York’s 1.2 million—was America’s second biggest metropolis, a booming center of trade and manufacturing, one observer wrote, “with the inexhaustible coal and iron fields of Pennsylvania at its back.” Loaded with wealth, it offered all the amenities of a bustling city filled with proud and civic-minded people—hospitals, museums, libraries, markets, parks, theaters, a zoo, academies and colleges, churches, concert halls, busy wharfs, printing houses and newspapers, excellent waterworks and sewerage, 61 public drinking fountains, 2,000 miles of streets—of which 900 were paved—and 1,300 streetcars pulled by 8,000 horses (fare, five cents). No less than eight railroads provided transportation to the outside world. By the standards of nineteenth-century America, cleanliness was a local obsession: according to Philadelphia’s Board of Health, of 145,000 buildings in the city, 26,000 had water closets, or toilets, and many more had piped-in water. An “unbounded supply of fresh water and its universal use for bathing and cleansing purposes” helped give the city an excellent mortality rate. “The smallest and cheapest house has its bathroom, and the incessant washing of sidewalks and doorsteps is a grievance complained of by strangers who are trying to see the city on foot,” observed one writer. That such a modern, lively, cultured city would lack a top professional baseball team seemed unthinkable to Lew Simmons, a local baseball fanatic who had won national fame in another nineteenth-century entertainment fad, Negro minst
relsy.
Born on August 27, 1838, in New Castle, near the western border of Pennsylvania, Simmons had loved to show off and win applause from an early age. At some point he found he could get laughs by imitating the jokes and songs of the traveling minstrel troupes that rolled through the region. At the tender age of eleven, he made his way to Warren, Ohio, 30 miles west of his hometown, to perform in blackface, mimicking black dialect, singing comic tunes, and strumming his beloved banjo in a town hall lit by candles. Three years later, the boy ran away from home to join the circus. In those days, circuses welcomed young, cheap performers, including boys who could sing tunes and cavort as clowns. Simmons spent the rest of his life virtually on the road, most notably on the minstrel stage, crooning comic and sentimental tunes and performing as a “tambo”—a figure who made witty quips, often at the expense of the white master of ceremonies, punctuating his jokes with a shake of the tambourine.
The Summer of Beer and Whiskey Page 5
