Such a vision required a great deal of imagination. under the management of the exhausted Solari, Grand Avenue Park had deteriorated into a dump that, according to Al Spink, “contained a weather beaten grandstand and a lot of rotten benches.” A two-story building, part of which Solari evidently used as his home, stood in right field, fenced off from play, only 285 feet down the line. Von der Ahe persuaded Solari to drop the lease on the ballpark and then, to his old neighbor’s apparent surprise, forced him out of the building. Von der Ahe intended to rip down the stands and replace them with a fresh new wooden grandstand. He would build an upper deck and bleachers on the side, making the new park “the most commodious in the country.” That project would cost at least $2,500, a substantial investment, particularly at a time when baseball was considered close to death. Von der Ahe was undeterred. He cofounded a new organization to pick up the lease and run the grounds, the Sportsman’s Park and Club Association. Other men were involved, but Von der Ahe boldly bought up most of the stock, reportedly sinking his life’s savings of $1,800 into the scheme. That was a significant amount of money in an era when the average factory worker earned less than $500 a year.
Displaying a spirit of innovation well ahead of his time, Von der Ahe envisioned his new park as a multipurpose entertainment complex with “a cricket field . . . a base ball diamond, cinder paths for ‘sprinters,’ a hand ball court, bowling alleys and everything of that sort.” By one account, sportsmen who were passionately devoted to wing shooting contributed to the new facility, intending to hold weekly shooting events at the grounds under the auspices of the St. Louis Gun Club (which may help explain the new name of the Grand Avenue grounds, rechristened Sportsman’s Park). Von der Ahe also made plans to use Solari’s house as a beer garden, setting chairs and tables out in deep right field, literally in play.
But readmission to the National League—which the Browns’ backers thought was key to their financial hopes—went nowhere. “The owners of its clubs had no use for us,” Al Spink recalled. Gambling scandals had given St. Louis “a black eye in baseball circles the country over.” And, surely, years of poor attendance at St. Louis games, and Von der Ahe’s intention to sell oceans of beer, did not help, either. At that point, no one outside the immediate circle of investors seemed to have the slightest faith that Von der Ahe could turn it all around. But the National League’s snub was just as well, since Von der Ahe had a different vision.
The National League, with its fifty-cent tickets and ban on Sunday ball, marketed the game only to the rich, or at least the upper middle class—the lawyers, accountants, and businessmen who had the freedom to take a break late in the afternoon and go out to the ballpark. Von der Ahe had another idea: to welcome working men and fellow immigrants, those who toiled all week and could not break free from their jobs to attend a game. These men had only Sundays available for something like baseball. They could not easily afford the National League’s admission price of fifty cents, but they could come up with twenty-five cents for a ticket. With this insight, Von der Ahe made baseball a much more inclusive game; in a sense, he helped make it the American game.
It took guts—some thought reckless stupidity—to invest in baseball in 1880, particularly in St. Louis. “When [Von der Ahe] pulled out of the savings bank the most of his hard earnings and invested it in resurrecting the national game in St. Louis, he knew as much about baseball as a porker does about theology,” sportswriter Harry Weldon claimed. “Chris had no experience then but was plucky and game enough to risk the money in the venture when no one else would touch it with a pair of tongs.” That was a bit of an exaggeration, since Von der Ahe had been involved peripherally with the game for a number of years. But, however little or much he knew about baseball, the immigrant grocer knew this: to make a dollar in America, a man had to take a chance. “If it sells beer, I’m all for it,” he told his fellow baseball investors.
In the early spring of 1881, a group of players sat on the field in front of Von der Ahe’s splendid new grandstand, talking about the upcoming season. Although they were barely eking out a living, the players were solid professionals. Most of them either had major-league experience already or would someday. “It was agreed as we all sat there on the green sward that we would work together to build up the sport,” Al Spink recalled three decades later. “Each player promised to be prompt at each game, to do his level best at all times and to take for his pay just as small a percentage of the gate receipts as the general welfare of the park and its owners would allow.”
Lost in the golden glow of Spink’s memory was a bitter wrangle that led up to that serene gathering, a fight between the players and Von der Ahe over dividing up the proceeds. The new owner, determined to recoup his investment, announced plans to boost his share of the gate and slash the players’. That spurred threats of a walkout. The players’ leader, William Spink, received a cut of the gate for his efforts and had no interest in seeing it reduced. He insisted that the Browns would be better off abandoning the truculent Von der Ahe and his spiffy Sportsman’s Park and going off to play at the smaller, shabbier Compton Avenue Grounds. Had William swayed the players, he might well have left Von der Ahe with an expensive new ballpark and no team. But Von der Ahe shrewdly outflanked Spink, quashing the rebellion by offering two star players, Bill and Jack Gleason, an extra $100 each to stay with him. He also promised to use his political connections to secure them patronage jobs in the city’s fire department. In the end, Ned Cuthbert and other key players decided to remain, too, realizing it made little financial sense to abandon their big new ballpark. Frozen out after fighting to restore baseball’s popularity, William Spink felt betrayed by the mercenary Gleason brothers. He refused to speak a word to either of them until his death in 1885. “Had they remained with Spink, Von der Ahe would probably have never been heard of in connection with base ball,” noted one reporter. Chris’s gutsy move dramatically increased his power over baseball in St. Louis.
Among those who stayed with Von der Ahe was William’s own brother, Al. Despite the new park and a willingness of players and management to work together, the outlook still “seemed cold and bleak,” Al recalled, for one glaring reason: the Brown Stockings, who played in no organized league, could not easily find opponents. “It was up to me to fill the breach,” he said. Al proposed a clever idea to a fellow baseball writer, Oliver Perry Caylor of the Cincinnati Enquirer, in another heavily German, lager-loving city that had lost its slot in the National League. He urged Caylor to round up whatever professional players were still lurking in town, slap on them the nostalgic name of Cincinnati Reds, and bring them to St. Louis for a three-game, Saturday-through-Monday series in late May 1881. It proved a brilliant scheme. Thousands of people thronged Sportsman’s Park. “The names St. Louis Browns and Cincinnati Reds proved magic in so far as reawakening interest in the game in this city was concerned,” Spink recalled. At the end of the game, Von der Ahe, “happier, apparently, than any of the rest,” grasped Spink by the hand. “What a fine big crowd! But the game, Al, the game. How was it? Was it a pretty good game? You know I know nothing about it.”
Hoping to keep the crowds pouring in all summer, Spink arranged visits from the “prairie nines” operating in the Midwest, semipro clubs at best. Fortunately, they were willing to come “just for the fun of playing,” receiving nothing beyond expenses—railroad travel to St. Louis in cheap cars, a stay in a second-rate hotel, and a trip on the horsecars to and from the park. “There was of course no discipline, no order, no anything, each player coming and going as he pleased,” Spink remembered. One team, the Chicago Eckfords, arrived with only seven men, minus the two most important players—catcher and pitcher. Spink managed to salvage the game when, en route to the park, he spied two youngsters playing on a lot in North St. Louis and hauled them along—catcher Kid Baldwin and pitcher Henry Overbeck, both of whom later had professional careers, Baldwin in the major leagues.
As the city’s passion for baseball reignited, the Globe-Democrat
passed along a joke that was making the rounds: “Base Ball is old in the world, as is proven by the very first line in Genesis: ‘In the big inning,’ etc.” And Sunday after Sunday, spectators who had attended morning religious services drained kegs of Von der Ahe’s beer in the afternoon. “He took no interest in the game, but stood over his bartenders, watching the dimes and quarters that the crowd showered over the bar,” player Tom Brown recalled. “Hear dem shouding out dare,” Von der Ahe supposedly said, looking over the crowd. “Tree tousand tem fools and one vise man, and the vise man is me, me Chris Won der Ahe!”
By midsummer 1881, the wise man’s investment was paying off handsomely, to the astonishment of poor Solari, whose previous management of the same property “was not,” in the words of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, “an overpowering success.” Driven by jealousy, or perhaps a sense that the German had hoodwinked him, Solari became so resentful that he “resorted to some means of ruffling the feathers of the club at large and Von der Ahe in particular.” For starters, he challenged Von der Ahe’s liquor license. Solari lost that one, but he and other citizens, worried about bullets flying in a residential neighborhood, managed to persuade local authorities to revoke shooting privileges at the park. “As a final piece of spitework,” Solari erected a high fence in front of Von der Ahe’s house, obstructing the family’s view of the park. Not content with that, he had Von der Ahe arrested on charges, quickly dismissed, of making false affidavits about the park’s neighbors. Three months later, someone managed to get Von der Ahe hauled before the Second District Police Court for exhibiting “Base ball, cricket, etc., without [a] license.” The court continued the case until a later date. It never again made the papers. Perhaps Von der Ahe called on his political connections or paid a bribe to make the problem disappear. In any event, Solari’s harassment failed to slow him down. Von der Ahe was determined to make this venture work.
Professional clubs began to take note of the huge crowds Von der Ahe’s Browns were drawing on Sundays. No longer did St. Louis have to rely on seven-man teams for opponents. The outstanding Akrons of Ohio, as well as such famous unaffiliated eastern clubs as the Athletics of Philadelphia and the Atlantics of Brooklyn, were now interested in coming to get a share of Von der Ahe’s gate. When they arrived that fall, the turnout was so strong that Von der Ahe and his fellow independent baseball entrepreneurs reached the obvious conclusion: to hell with the National League. It was time to start their own major league. The old league’s response to these upstarts, it turned out, would be anything but pleasant.
2
THE BEER AND WHISKEY CIRCUIT
SITTING AT HIS DESK IN HIS WELL-APPOINTED HOME ON 1334 40TH Street in Chicago, National League President William A. Hulbert took his pen in hand to compose one of his famously blunt letters. Hulbert was fiercely proud of his reputation as the iron-willed leader who had rescued professional baseball—even if he had failed to make it terribly popular—and he intended to defend that legacy as long as he drew breath. He had always greeted the world as a no-nonsense man, strong and decisive, posing for his photograph with a firm demeanor and a scowl of skepticism. But on this cold, windy Tuesday of November 8, 1881, the portly forty-nine-year-old businessman was weakening. His chest hurt, he was short of breath, and he was getting seriously worried about what was happening to the game he loved. The nefarious characters who, six days earlier, had founded a new league, the American Association, rival to his six-year-old National League, seemed determined to ruin his life’s work. He hoped to speak reason to them. His eyes smoldering, he dipped his pen into the ink and started scratching out a letter to the American Association’s new president.
Hulbert was a shrewd, pugnacious man in the mold of his adopted city of Chicago, which, in his view, was the epicenter and epitome of can-do America. “I’d rather be a lamppost in Chicago,” he was fond of saying, “than a millionaire in any other city.” Born in Burlington Flats, Otsego County, New York—not far from Cooperstown—in 1832, he had come to Chicago as a child with his parents, who were among the earliest settlers of what was then a muddy frontier outpost. His father, a farmer named Eri Baker Hulbert, set off for Chicago a year ahead of his wife and child to take over a general store there in 1836. His initial trip, which by the time his son had reached adulthood would be a reasonably quick railroad journey, took Eri a miserable sixteen days. He traveled for twenty-four hours on the canal packet from Utica to Buffalo, endured a rough voyage to Detroit, and went the rest of the way “tramping on foot, with the mud up to [his] knees,” or riding in an old wagon with nothing to protect him from the elements. His son inherited his dogged persistence. Educated at Beloit College, William married the daughter of a grocer, took over her father’s business, and turned it into a thriving coal delivery operation. He became a prominent member of the Chicago Board of Trade, where he was known “as a clear-headed, farsighted, and successful operator.” At the same time, he rose to the presidency of the Chicago White Stockings baseball club and, from that perch, founded the National League and took over its presidency. As the de facto czar of professional baseball, he fought hard for the game’s integrity, insisting on strong management power over players—and his own authority over wayward owners.
As early as 1876, Hulbert taught his fellow owners that he was not to be trifled with. After the League’s very first season, he expelled both the New York Mutuals and the Philadelphia Athletics, even though the clubs represented the two biggest cities in America. They had failed to play out their full schedules, something he considered an unpardonable breach of the rules, despite the fact that there were extenuating circumstances. The Athletics’ owner confronted Hulbert in his hotel room during the League’s annual meeting that winter and tearfully pleaded for a second chance. “I beg of you not to expel us; we will enter into any bonds; we will do anything,” he said. Hulbert’s response was merciless: “No, we are going to expel you.” Although New York and Philadelphia were longtime baseball hotbeds, Hulbert believed that the credibility of the game and the reliability of the National League schedule came first.
Similarly, Hulbert refused to budge on his edict of lifetime expulsions for the four crooks from Louisville who had thrown the 1877 pennant. Many in baseball pleaded for clemency, noting that pitcher Jim Devlin, in particular, was destitute, had a family to feed, and had been treated badly by the Louisville club. The ill-educated Devlin, struggling to spell common words, was driven to write a pathetic letter to influential and kindhearted Boston manager Harry Wright, begging him for help: “I am living from hand to mouth all winter I have not got a Stich of Clothing or has my wife and child You Dont Know how I am Situated for I Know if you did you woed do Something for me I am honest Harry you need not Be Afraid the Louisville People have made me what I am to day a Beggar . . . I am Dumb Harry I dont Know how to go about it So I Trust you will answer this and do all you Can for me.”
Devlin later showed up at Hulbert’s office in a threadbare jacket on a cold winter day and literally got down on his knees to plead forgiveness. “I heard him entreat, not on his own account—he acknowledged himself unworthy of consideration—but for the sake of his wife and child. I beheld the agony of humiliation depicted on his features as he confessed his guilt and begged for mercy,” recalled Hulbert’s lieutenant, Albert G. Spalding. Hulbert trembled as he struggled to control his emotions, and he pulled fifty dollars from his wallet. “That’s what I think of you, personally,” Hulbert said, “but, damn you, Devlin, you are dishonest; you have sold a game, and I can’t trust you. Now go; and let me never see your face again; for your act will not be condoned so long as I live.”
In Hulbert’s view, the game could not afford excessive sympathy for players. He oversaw the imposition of the essential, if blatantly unfair, reserve clause—which bound players to their teams even after their contracts expired, effectively eliminating any opportunity for them to become free agents and sell their services to the highest bidder. Hulbert and his fellow owners contended that cl
ubs could not retain value if the players they nurtured could simply pick up and leave. Their argument held sway over major-league baseball for nearly a hundred years, and even now players in their first several seasons in the big leagues are tied to the reserve clause before they can become free agents.
The owners felt they needed strong controls because players tended to be hard-drinking, self-serving, sometimes dishonest young men who were out to make a buck any way they could, and not especially good at keeping their promises. These unruly men emerged from an America where there was far less opportunity for higher education than today, a land of harsh working conditions without much of a social safety net, other than niggling charity from religious institutions. Professional baseball offered at least a temporary escape from stifling, dangerous mines or factories or dreary hard labor on farms. Though not even remotely as wealthy as today’s multimillionaires, major-league players of the time were reasonably well off. They were paid two to three times what many of their fellow Americans earned toiling ten to twelve hours a day, six days a week.
Still, playing professional baseball was anything but an easy life. The sport was filled with agony and injury. It was played bare-handed—gloves for most of the fielders were not prevalent until the late 1880s—which meant pain and frequent broken fingers. Catchers did have some minimal protection. They wore gloves on both hands with the fingers sheared off so that they could grip the ball, wore chest protectors, and had primitive wire face masks (dubbed “bird cages”). But foul tips could smash through the wire of those masks or split catchers’ fingers, sometimes exposing bloody bone and sinew. And the lack of shin guards led to agonizing bruises and injuries. Owners, operating on small profit margins or losing money, only paid for twelve or thirteen men per team. Everyone was expected to work hard. When a man got injured, his pay often stopped—no play, no pay. Rules did not permit substitutions during games except in the event of injuries or illnesses so acute that the player clearly could not go on. (The umpire decided whether that was the case, often provoking bitter arguments with managers.) As a result, men played in pain, sometimes aggravating their injuries. Careers tended to be short.
The Summer of Beer and Whiskey Page 3