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Before the Ivy
The Cubs' Golden Age in Pre-Wrigley Chicago
By Laurent Pernot UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS
Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois
All rights reserved.
ISBN: 978-0-252-09665-5
CHAPTER 1
FROM LITTLE ENGLISH ACORN TO GIANT AMERICAN OAK
ON A COLD AND FOGGY LONDON DAY in March 1889, a group of American baseball stars played an exhibition game before Edward, Prince of Wales and future King of England, and hundreds of curious nobles and onlookers. The affair had been arranged by A. G. Spalding, perhaps the game's greatest early promoter, who painstakingly explained the game's subtleties to the prince. Though excited by the action on the field, the monarch concluded, "I consider Base Ball an excellent game, but Cricket a better one."
The goal of the exhibition, which marked the end of a world tour by Spalding and assorted stars, had been to give "the masses everywhere an opportunity to witness a pastime peculiarly American." The prince's statement, reported by several newspapers, was an affront made all the more stinging to Spalding in that he had dedicated himself to erasing baseball's British roots.
In his 1911 autobiography, Spalding would proclaim baseball to be "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."
To be sure, teams in the 1850s and '60s had stressed values like practice and teamwork over natural ability. But the above virtues were carefully chosen by Spalding as part of a well-orchestrated propaganda effort to rewrite the history of the sport as "of modern and purely American origin."
In 1907, Spalding and a group of baseball magnates had anointed themselves as a baseball historical commission and unanimously adopted the following:
First—That Base Ball had its origins in the United States; Second—That the first scheme for playing it, according to the best evidence obtainable to date, was devised by Abner Doubleday, at Cooperstown, New York, in 1839.
The evidence that was to be studied by the commission during its historical research burned, and the above conclusion was attained on the sole basis of recollections by an aging mining engineer, Abner Graves, who had been the schoolmate of Abner Doubleday. Thus Doubleday, who would go on to fire the first Union gun at Fort Sumter, was credited with the invention of baseball in a story of biblical proportions. According to Graves, schoolboy Doubleday broke up a game of marbles to lay down the rules of the game, draw the diamond, and christen it "baseball." Contradicting his own statement that a crude form of the game had been played for many years prior to 1839, Spalding capitalized on the dramatic ramifications of the Doubleday story:
Cricket is an Athletic Sociable, played in a conventional, decorous and English manner. Base Ball is an Athletic turmoil, played and applauded in an unconventional, enthusiastic and American manner. The founder of our National Game became a Major General in the United States Army! The sport had its baptism when our country was in the preliminary agonies of a fratricidal conflict.... It was the medium by which, in the days following the 'late unpleasantness,' a million warriors and their sons, from both belligerent sections, passed naturally, easily, gracefully, from a state of bitter battling to one of perfect peace.
Though the Doubleday story gained ground among the public—in major part because of the creationism advanced in Spalding's book—several of the game's early giants refused to go along with this myth-making, taking instead an evolutionist approach that led to England. Famed manager Branch Rickey pronounced that "the only thing Doubleday ever started was the Civil War."
Henry Chadwick, whom Spalding called the "Father of the Game" and who edited A. G.'s annual baseball guide, wrote several histories of the game more rooted in fact. While he also got caught up in descriptions of baseball as the great American sport, he did trace its birth to the British Isles. As early as 1868, Chadwick published The Game of Base Ball: How to Learn It, How to Play It, and How to Teach It. In it, the British-born Brooklynite recalled that in the 1830s, "my favorite field game was the old school-boy sport of Rounders. We used to dig a hole in the ground for the home position and place four stones in a circle, or nearly so, for the bases, and, choosing up sides, we went in for a lively time at what was the parent game of base ball." The game was played much like modern baseball, except that fielders had to hit the runner with the ball to record an out. A successful throw of the batted ball into the hole at home would retire the side. "Of course the game was merely a source of fun and exercise, but little skill being required to play it, any school boy being able to learn it in ten minutes. But from this little English acorn of Rounders has the giant American oak of base ball grown, and as much difference exists between the British school-boy sport and our American National game, as between the seedling and the full grown king of the forest."
Just like the Doubleday Genesis story, Chadwick's theory was short on real evidence. Though it did have the merit of keeping the Doubleday myth from taking too great a hold, it too has fallen by the wayside as evidence has grown of a more diffuse ancestry to the game. An 1823 letter in the New York Advocate referred to "base ball" being played in the city. A Hall of Fame historian documented the existence of a baseball team that challenged all comers in 1825. In 1833, six years before the date on which Spalding had Doubleday invent baseball, Town Ball, which Chadwick called the American equivalent of Rounders, was played in organized fashion in Philadelphia. Posts had replaced the rocks, and each player was assigned a specific position on the field. In New England, a similar game was referred to as the "Massachusetts game."
In later years, historian Robert Henderson confirmed the sport's evolutionary nature when he found images of ball-and-bat games in British and American children's books from the eighteenth century. As for the name of the game itself, it appears as "base-ball" in 1744's A Pretty Little Pocket Book, published in London. Jane Austen's 1817 Northanger Abbey also refers to the game. Not that England had a monopoly on bat-and-ball games, which have been recorded for hundreds of years in places as far-flung as Austria, Germany, and Libya. As William Ryczek has written, had Chadwick hailed from the other side of the English Channel, he might have insisted baseball was the direct descendant of the French game tecque. Cherokee Indians in the 1700s are even thought to have played a game called stickball.
Like baseball itself, the obsession with the sport's origins is typically American. The Founding Fathers are so ingrained in the national psyche, and this nation of immigrants is so obsessed with roots and geneses, that Americans have written countless volumes on the subject.
Historic uncertainties aside, two things are for sure: it is in America that baseball got formalized and flourished, and it is in New York, where young men played together as the Knickerbockers, that much of the game was formalized. Though there are records of earlier games by earlier teams in that same city, the Knickerbockers alone have an uninterrupted lineage to the game as we know it today. Although the game's "modern" form would not be fully in place until the turn of the twentieth century, it was this group of self-described gentlemen—merchants and dealers for the most part—who in 1845 wrote down the rules that would form the basis for the organized play of the sport as it spread across the nation. Though Alexander Cartwright would, like Doubleday before him, get elevated to the status of Father of the Game by many, research has established that the codification of the game was a group effort and that several of his teammates played an equal if not greater role. The men eliminated the requirement that fielders hit runners with the ball (allowing for harder balls to be used for batting) and adopted the diamond, setting the diagonal distance between the bases at forty-two paces. Rule changes would continue for some time. In 1845, the Knickerbockers challenged other athletes to play a game at the Elysian Fields in Hoboken, New Jersey—and lost 23 to 1. Three-out innings and foul lines were instituted, and the game was set at nine innings, in contrast to the "Massachusetts game," which required one hundred runs to win. The new rules came to be known as the "New York game," and that version of baseball eclipsed the others.
Better defined and easier to play and follow, the game grew in popularity, and within ten years more than twenty organized teams had been assembled in New York and New England. The Knickerbockers attempted to rule the sport and resisted the spread of the game to quarters they did not deem gentlemanly enough. In 1859, the stuffy New York group was the victim of a coup when the rest of the teams created the National Association of Base Ball Players, paving the way to more open governance. By 1860, the more progressive association had swelled to sixty teams, including clubs in St. Louis and Chicago.
CHAPTER 2
THE BASEBALL FRONTIER
IT IS UNCLEAR WHEN ORGANIZED BASEBALL was first played in Chicago, but there is evidence of games taking place by the mid-1850s. As early as 1851, the Lockport Telegraph reported on a contest between the Joliet Hunkidoris and the hometown Sleepers. A Niagara Base Ball Club was reported founded in July 1818 in Chicago. The earliest remaining mention of a baseball game in the city proper appears in the August 17, 1858 edition of the Daily Journal. The game between the Unions and the Excelsiors was played with the same rules in place in New York; the Chicago Baseball Club—made up of a handful of local teams—held a convention on July 21 of that year to adopt that set of rules. That same year, the Chicago Tribune reported the Unions lost to "Downer's Grove" [sic] at the Unions' own grounds at Harrison and Halsted. After the game, the players went to dinner and the theater in uniform.
Henry Chadwick's old baseball clippings contain an intriguing undated item that some have interpreted as the account of a game between staffers for Abraham Lincoln and Stephen Douglas. Clearly from Chicago, the item is headlined "The Political Base Ball Match" and refers to a game played in front of 1,200 spectators on the grounds of the Excelsior Base Ball Club at the corner of West lake and Ann streets. The teams in the box score are listed as "Douglas" and "Lincoln." At the bottom is the following text: "There's a victory in store where Douglas will make no 'runs.' He is a lame 'short stop' and has been 'caught out.'" The bottom of the article is damaged, but these words are preceded by "Never Mind, Lincoln"; but before the text resumes there is a gap seemingly stemming from sloppy cutting with scissors, and then what looks to be the word "says." It appears the words "Lincoln" and "says" were clipped diagonally, but one cannot be sure there were no other words in between them. This could be a Lincoln quote or, more likely, just newspaper humor or an all-out parody. The "Douglas" and 'Lincoln" could simply refer to supporters of the candidates. Either way, baseball fever and political passion seem to have come together in what could have been either the 1858 race for the Illinois U.S. Senate seat or the 1860 presidential campaign.
Beyond the written instructions on how to play the game, teams abided by a code of conduct that espoused middle-class and "respectable" working-class values. The Victorian concern for self-control and order would be reflected in the adoption of strict codes of conduct, punishing tardiness and profane language, and the appointment of umpires to make sure discipline prevailed on the diamond. Though they surely did not apply to all players, descriptions of baseball players as "gentlemen" who engaged in "fair play" and "genteel sportsmanship" became commonplace.
The advent of the Civil War put many clubs in dormancy, including Chicago's Excelsiors. Yet the war likely had a beneficial impact on the game. The U.S. Sanitary Commission listed baseball among the approved pastimes for Union troops, and a Confederate manual encouraged "manly play of ball" as part of soldiers' daily exercise routines. The many Union soldiers who took to the game, be it in Confederate prison camps or during breaks in the fighting—forty thousand Northern combatants attended a game on Christmas Day 1862—came home eager to spread the new baseball "mania." Guards and prisoners played or took in games together, and historian George Kirsch has argued the war's true baseball legacy was not to be found in the North but in the game's growth in the South, where it had been rare antebellum.
The game grew rapidly after the conflict: from sixty teams in five states in 1860, the National Association of Base Ball Players had grown to 202 clubs in seventeen states by 1866.
On August 17, 1865, the Chicago Daily Republican proclaimed:
The old Excelsior ball Club, which a few years was one of the institutions of our city, has been reorganized and hereafter will be willing to meet all comers. The club was organized in 1857 and for three years played regularly and became known as one of the best clubs in the west. After the breaking out of the War many of its members enlisted, and the club was thus broken up. With the return of peace the members have once more organized the old club, and now they practice regularly, twice a week on their new grounds on the corner of May and West Lake streets.... A game between two nines of the club was played yesterday afternoon, in which they showed that they have not forgotten the exercise of the club, while engaged in the use of the rifle.
In 1866, thirty-two clubs were competing in the area—where play included teams like the Chicago Actives and the Evanston Gazelles and, still, was dominated by the Excelsiors—enough for the Chicago Tribune to announce the arrival of the "Age of Baseball." Increasingly, teams of gentlemen who had only scheduled games against social equals began to incorporate into the lineup any player who could boost their chances of prevailing. Still, baseball in Chicago was played and hailed by businessmen, educators, journalists, and social reformers who sought good character and physical health, which was increasingly exhorted in the media. The body, when left to its own devices, became the "the casket of the mind," a preacher claimed.
Beginning in the late 1860s, magnates like Marshall Field and George Pullman began to sponsor internal leagues and company teams—made up of upper-level employees rather than unskilled laborers to promote exercise and morals among their staff and, in the process, get free advertising in the newspapers.
Several amateur teams evolved on the city's western edge. The Actives used a diamond at Lake and Ada and the Mutuals showcased their talents at Leavitt and Van Buren. The Libertys made their home at Madison and Western. The Excelsiors played downtown, while the Atlantics were the squad of the North Side (which ended at Division Street) and the Pastimes represented the South Side (the city ended at 12th Street). Other local entries included the Never-sweats and the Dreadnaughts. Only the Atlantics could boast of enclosed grounds in the city.
(Continues...)
Excerpted from Before the Ivy by Laurent Pernot. Copyright © 2015 Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois. Excerpted by permission of UNIVERSITY OF ILLINOIS PRESS.
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