October 3, 2024: 19th Century Baseball: The First Professionals

[200 years ago this week, “Father of Baseball” Henry Chadwick was born. So this week I’ll AmericanStudy Chadwick and other 19^th century baseball histories, leading up to a special weekend post on my new podcast on 19^th century baseball and much more!]

Four figures who together help us chart the evolution of professional baseball.

1)      Jim Creighton: I really don’t know that I can do justice to the genuinely legendary (in both positive and tragic senses) career of the first player to be paid to play baseball; you’ve really got to check out that hyperlinked Baseball Reference page, but before you do prepare yourself for the shocking and horrific (and entirely baseball-related) reason Creighton died before his 22^nd birthday. Obviously those specific details are quite unique to Creighton—but as that first superstar and thus first player to be paid, receiving some form of compensation (probably a percentage of the gate) from the Brooklyn Excelsiors after they recruited him away from his prior Brooklyn teams in 1859 (long before there were official professional leagues), Creighton nonetheless foreshadows this next stage in the sport’s evolution.

2)      Davy Force: In 1869, a decade after Creighton’s signing, the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) created a new professional category into which teams could opt if they wanted to pay some or all of their players. Led by the dominant Cincinnati Red Stockings, twelve clubs declared themselves professional for that season, and two years later the first fully professional league, also known as the NABBP, was created. But for the first few years multiple teams could sign the same player and then compete for his services, producing a hugely chaotic situation that must have been very confusing for spectators season to season (or even game to game). When shortstop Davy Force tried to play for the Chicago White Stockings but was forced to return to his prior club, the Philadelphia Athletics, because the league’s president was associated with them, league administrators decided more structure was needed. The result was the 1874 establishment of the National League, the first real forebear of the modern major leagues.  

3)      Moses Fleetwood Walker and Weldy Walker: Once again I’ll recommend that you check out that hyperlinked article, a wonderful piece on the lives and careers—before and after as well as during their time in professional baseball—of these two pioneering brothers who helped integrate baseball in the 1880s, some 60 years before Jackie Robinson (and faced the same horrific racial hate and threats of violence he did). The Walkers were eventually forced out of white major league baseball, although Moses would continue to play in both the minor leagues and the short-lived National Colored Base Ball League before his 1891 retirement. Those latter leagues reflect a central premise of my podcast: that the range of semi-pro and local leagues meant that late 19^th century baseball featured the possibility (and the reality, if a fraught and fragile one) of multi-racial teams far more than did much of 20^th century baseball. I’ll write about one of those teams in tomorrow’s post!

Last baseball history tomorrow,

Ben

PS. What do you think? Baseball or sports histories you’d highlight?