Baseball Read Online Free PDF Page B

players in uniforms, and installed diets as well as bans on tobacco and alcohol, in theory, anyway. The star of the team and its most expensive player was Harry's brother, George Wright, who signed on from New Jersey for $1,400. In 1869, the Red Stockings barnstormed around the country, as far away as California, playing all takers, winning 65 and tying 1, and on June 26, 1869, the Red Stockings were invited to the White House, where President Ulysses S. Grant praised what he called “the western Cinderella club.”
    Cinderella did not thrive for long. The next season, the Red Stockings won 27 straight games but then lost to the Brooklyn Atlantics, which seemed to instantly ruin their aura. With attendance down, the first openly professional team in the United States did the truly professional thing: It relocated from Cincinnati to Boston.
    In decades to come, many other cities, from Baltimore to Brooklyn, from Milwaukee to Montreal, would lose beloved teams, but Cincinnati was the first. Bottom-line economics had brought heartache and disillusionment to hometown fans. Modern baseball had arrived.

III
THE FIRST ENTREPRENEUR
    A lbert Goodwill Spalding, more than any other man, is responsible for baseball being America's signature sport. He started off as a pitcher but became a businessman as well as an evangelist for the sport, determined to link baseball with the American character.
    A complicated man, part crass, part visionary, Spalding was a doer and a seer, not unlike Ted Turner, the American sailor and television visionary, or Richard Branson, the British balloon pilot– businessman, one century later. He detected a spiritual side to baseball much the same way other nineteenth-century men saw a higher calling in peddling cereal or coal. His blend of American capitalism and American nationalism led to his claim that baseball gave “a growing boy self-poise, and self-reliance, confidence, inoffensive and entirely proper aggressiveness” as well as “general manliness.”
    Spalding began his pitching career in Illinois, and was good enough to be hired by the Red Stockings when Harry Wright moved the team from Cincinnati to Boston. From 1871 through 1875, Spalding started 282 games and finished 262 in an era when pitchers were expected to finish their games. In turn, Spalding expected to be treated and paid as a professional rather than a quasi-amateur.
    “I was neither ashamed of the game nor of my attachment to it,” he later wrote in his 1911 book,
America's National Game.
“Mr. Wright was there offering us… cash … to play on the Boston team.… Why, then, go before the public under the false pretense of being amateurs?”
    The age of amateurs came to an end on St. Patrick's Day, March 17, 1871, with the formation of a new National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. Nine teams joined up—the Boston Red Stockings, Chicago White Stockings, Philadelphia Athletics, New York Mutuals, Washington Olympics, Troy (New York) Haymakers,Fort Wayne (Indiana) Kekiongas, Cleveland Forest Citys, and the Rockford (Illinois) Forest Citys. In the twenty-first century, some of these teams and cities have a decidedly minor league ring to them, but in their time they represented major metropolitan areas in the northeast quadrant of the United States, greater than war-torn Atlanta, which counted 21,789 residents in 1870, or Los Angeles, which counted 5,727, or Phoenix and Dallas, which counted no residents whatsoever.
    With baseball still somewhat of a regional spectacle, Spalding became one of the most visible and popular players, but he was not satisfied with taking his turn as pitcher every couple of days. He had grander dreams. In the middle of the 1874 season, not yet twenty-four, Spalding arranged for the Boston and Philadelphia teams to barnstorm around England. Since the Boston manager, Harry Wright, and his brother, George, had grown up playing cricket, the two teams issued a challenge to play the English game