Those extra players who were not in the starting lineup were expected to help out by working the gates in their street clothes, collecting tickets. Baseballs themselves were pricy items, and owners preferred to use only one per game, instead of the one-hundred-plus used today. They were as hard as modern baseballs, and the same size and weight, but had a rubber center rather than a cork one, which made them more difficult to drive for distance. (Even so, professional sluggers could knock them over the fence.) If fouled off into the crowd, or even out of the park, the balls had to be fetched and returned to the field. By the end of the game, as the sun set on parks without lights, the ball had become stained with dirt and tobacco juice, making it extremely difficult for a batter to see. Often, it was mushy; sometimes, the stitching—which was black rather than red, and sewed closer together than on today’s balls—would come loose.
Modern fans would find the early game different in other ways as well. For decades, foul balls caught on the bounce were outs. The National League eliminated the “foul-bound catch” in 1883, but the American Association retained this play until June 1885, making for mad dashes into foul territory by the fielders. Batters had an advantage under the rules in being able to choose either a “high” (between letters and belt) or “low” (between belt and knees) pitch zone when they came to the plate, and the umpire had to adjust. Foul balls were not yet strikes, and skilled hitters, such as Arlie Latham, could foul off pitch after pitch, tiring the hurler without losing ground in the pitch count. But there was no rule yet giving a batter his base if he was hit by a pitch—and competitive and hardhearted pitchers ruthlessly took advantage of that, driving batters off the plate and, not infrequently, stinging them with fastballs.
Making all this scarier was how close pitchers seemed. The pitcher’s mound had not yet been invented; pitchers worked in a level, rectangular, four-by-six-foot box with six-inch-square iron plates affixed to each corner, its front edge only fifty feet from home plate. Inside that box, pitchers could take a kind of run and hop to more swiftly propel the ball. Batters, wearing only cloth caps rather than today’s protective helmets, had little time to react.
It was a fast-paced and dangerous game, and Hulbert harbored no illusions about the character of the men who played it. In one letter, he voiced his disgust to a Worcester official about one particularly mercurial outfielder. “Lipman Pike has for many years been notorious as a shirk, fraud and brat,” Hulbert wrote. “He is a conspicuous example of the worthless, ungrateful, low-lived whelps that the League will do well to publicly throw overboard by means of a published black list.” Hulbert got his blacklist, then promptly denied ten men their livelihood in baseball, not only barring League clubs from hiring them, but prohibiting lucrative exhibition games against any club that did. That made it all but impossible for the banished men to find work. In a highly publicized “Address to Players,” Hulbert warned that the League was imposing “stricter accountability” on those inclined to drink to excess. Hereafter, he declared, the organization would not “permit or tolerate drunkenness or bummerism” by players. No longer could a ballplayer “disgrace his club and his avocation by scandalous and disreputable practices.”
Controlling these young men was only part of Hulbert’s agenda. At the core of his plan to set baseball on a road to economic salvation was a campaign to attract upper-middle-class customers and their families. Many such customers had given up on baseball in the 1870s, disgusted by the gamblers, boozers, thugs, and painted strumpets who had infiltrated ballparks. Hulbert hoped to lure back the middle class through a Puritan agenda of no Sunday ball, no beer sales, no gambling on the grounds, and a fifty-cent admission price, high enough to keep the riffraff out.
In 1880, the owners of the Cincinnati Reds had incurred Hulbert’s wrath by selling beer on their grounds and renting the park out for Sunday non-League games—something the organization depended on to make ends meet, given their bum players and the League’s high admission price. Like St. Louis, Cincinnati was loaded with German immigrants who had come to expect such civilized pleasures. The dispute came to a head at the League’s fall 1880 meeting, when Cincinnati Reds President W. H. Kennett refused to sign a pledge against beer and Sunday ball, pleading that his stockholders could not condone a pact that would be tantamount to financial suicide. “Beer and Sunday amusements have become a popular necessity,” O. P. Caylor of the Cincinnati Enquirer tried to explain to the puritanical owners back East. “We drink beer in Cincinnati as freely as you used to drink milk, and it is not a mark of disgrace either.” But two days after Kennett refused to sign the pledge, Hulbert and his fellow owners gave Cincinnati the boot, as they had New York and Philadelphia. Caylor found it hypocritical in the extreme. “We respectfully suggest, that while the League is in the missionary field, they turn their attention to Chicago and prohibit the admission to the Lake Street grounds of the great number of prostitutes who patronize the game up there.”
O. P. Caylor,
New York Clipper, October 29, 1881
(Library of Congress)
By the fall of 1881, it was clear that Hulbert’s stout leadership had forced owners and players into line. But his struggle had come at a great cost: Some of the best markets in baseball were now deprived of a presence in the League, and Hulbert had managed to drain a good deal of fun out of baseball in the process. To his dismay, ambitious men in cities that the League had abandoned decided to fight back.
On November 2, 1881, they gathered at Cincinnati’s plush Gibson House hotel to talk about forming a less repressive league of their own. The delegation was top-heavy with liquor interests—not only the beer-selling Chris Von der Ahe, but also J. H. Pank of Louisville’s mammoth Kentucky Malt Company and Cincinnati officials who represented brewer-investors. Von der Ahe’s passion and drive made an instant impression with the group. Harmer Denny McKnight, chief executive of Pittsburgh’s Allegheny Club, suggested that Von der Ahe run the meeting as chairman, but the German politely demurred, returning the compliment by nominating the more articulate McKnight to serve in that difficult and time-consuming role. Then they got down to business.
The delegates formed a new league called the American Association, quickly admitting the St. Louis Browns, Cincinnati Reds, Louisville Eclipse, Brooklyn Atlantics, and Pittsburgh Alleghenys as members. The Association owners voted to give visiting clubs a puny rate of $65 per game, rather than the League’s 40 percent of the gate. This had the effect of making it harder for the poorer Association clubs to sponge off the richer ones; each club had to stand on its own, making the bulk of its profits from its own home games. (The $65 guarantee was one reason a wary Brooklyn pulled out before the start of the 1882 season, ceding its place to the Baltimore club owned by Harry Vonderhorst, another brewer who wanted to push his beer at the games.) On such holidays as Decoration Day or the Fourth of July, however, when huge crowds tended to flock to the park, gate receipts would be divided evenly.
There was still a question of placing teams in America’s biggest cities, Philadelphia and New York. Two delegations from Philly had arrived; the Association gave the Athletics club the nod because it already had a ballpark lined up. New York proved thornier. The flamboyant manager of the independent New York Metropolitans, “Truthful Jim” Mutrie, was on hand, but seemingly more as an observer than participant—and, probably, as a double agent. (His nickname, needless to say, was ironic.) Mutrie and his partner, John Day, had made piles of money from the National League by pitting their Metropolitan Club against visiting League teams, and neither seemed terribly eager to put that revenue stream at risk. Indeed, Mutrie declined even to enter the meeting room, saying he wanted to learn the policies of the new league before committing his club to anything. And, immediately after the meeting, he caught a train to Chicago, where he sat down with Hulbert behind closed doors. He emerged only to announce that the Mets would not be joining the Association.
But, with or without New York, a new major league was born. Although the
Association patterned its constitution after the League’s, it prided itself on more “liberal” policies than its stodgy competitor. Reflecting the strong beliefs of Von der Ahe, Association ticket prices would be half the League’s, at twenty-five cents apiece, and Sunday baseball would be permitted. Surprisingly, given the predominance of liquor interests in the owners’ ranks, the Association initially barred the sale of hard liquor and beer at games. When Von der Ahe and officials from Cincinnati protested that the closing of their ballpark bars would cost each franchise $4,000 to $5,000 in pure profit for the season, their fellow owners rescinded the rule. Louisville initially declined to run a ballpark bar, but after “mushroom beer stands” sprang up just outside Eclipse Park in 1882, run by “two very smart citizens who will make a fortune if they live long enough,” according to one newspaper, the franchise reconsidered before the 1883 season.
All in all, this would be a league that catered to every class of spectator, from laborers to wealthy gentlemen, a league that would make it possible for a workingman to enjoy a beer at the ballpark with his wife or girlfriend on his one day of the week free from toil. The Association pointed away from Hulbert’s puritanism to the modern idea of enjoyment at the game. But critics were disgusted with this freewheeling operation and the liquor interests that backed it, dubbing it “the Beer and Whiskey Circuit.”
Although the new Association vowed to keep its hands off crooked and dishonest players blacklisted by the League, it flirted with the idea of signing those whose sins were a little less clear. One was Charley Jones, who could serve as a poster child for the League’s haughty treatment of players. A flamboyant, muscular slugger from North Carolina with a handsome waxed handlebar mustache, Jones quarreled with his club, the Boston Red Stockings, about late pay during the 1880 season. In those days, club officials were wary of hauling around too much cash on the road, since they did not want to become targets of hotel thieves or armed robbers. Thus, they typically held off giving players their full pay packets (which the men were due to receive twice a month) until they got back home. In the meantime, clubs advanced the players small sums to help them get by. The proud Jones, a bit of a prima donna, was unhappy with this arrangement. He flatly refused to play during one road trip until he was paid in full what Boston owed him, which had climbed to the then-significant sum of $378, when star players typically earned much less than $2,000 a year. Boston management, outraged at Jones’s gall, expelled him and, with Hulbert’s help, barred him from organized baseball for the rest of the year and the following season—even after a judge ordered Boston to pay Jones his back salary. The Cincinnati Reds, however, hoped to hire him for 1882, in violation of the League’s orders.
Hulbert instantly recognized the threat posed by the American Association—not only to the business interests of the National League but also to his own ability to keep an iron grip on players and owners. Soon after meeting with Mutrie, he sat down to write his letter of warning to McKnight. Hulbert might have had trouble communicating with the liquor interests who seemed so eager to stain baseball’s reputation, especially that fellow from St. Louis who seemed little more than a German bumpkin grocer. But McKnight, a college-educated bookkeeper who had founded an iron manufacturing company, struck Hulbert as a man of substance. He might listen to reason—or veiled threats.
“The sole purpose of the League (outside the business aspect) is to promote and elevate the game; make it worthy the patronage support and respect of the best class of people,” Hulbert explained to McKnight. “The League will never recognize an Association of clubs by fraternizing with it, or any club members of it, which prostitutes itself by becoming a sanctuary for the League’s disqualified players.” In other words, the Association could not count on any remunerative exhibition games against League clubs unless it gave up on the idea of grabbing people like Charley Jones. That player, Hulbert insisted, deserved no forgiveness. He had “deserted the club, refused to perform service, abstained himself from their team when it was on a trip.” Overlooking such behavior “would set a most pernicious example” that would surely haunt the Association. Hulbert further warned against selling liquor, pointing out that ticket sales improved at the Chicago grounds after it was banned in 1877. As for Sunday games, the big crowds on the Lord’s Day would merely drain attendance from weekday games. Finally, in defense of his own personality, he added, rather unpersuasively, “I am not the bulldozer I am painted.”
William Hulbert
(Transcendental Graphics/theruckerarchive.com;
reprinted with permission)
By then, Hulbert was fighting for more than his legacy; he was fighting for his life. Years of stress as a hard-driving Chicago business executive and leader of an endangered professional game, combined with a powerful appetite that was revealed in his stocky physique and double chin, had taken a severe toll on his heart. He was growing weaker from the ravages of cardiac disease. “More than a month, I have been ailing,” he confessed in a second letter to McKnight, ten days after the first. “My doctors have let me out a few hours in the middle of pleasant days, but active attention to business is positively interdicted.” The tension he felt over the American Association’s descent into booze, cheap prices, and Sunday baseball surely did not help any. Still, he mustered the strength to make one last impassioned plea in a tone approaching desperation. “You cannot afford to bid for the patronage of the degraded; if you are to be successful, you must secure recognition by the respectable. A Sunday playing club, that is at the same time accessory to beer hawking, is beyond doubt, a curse to any community. The youth of the land are everywhere crazy about base ball. You should not help build up an Assn of clubs that will permit such things.”
AT FIRST, IT APPEARED THE TWO CIRCUITS MIGHT LIVE IN HIGHLY profitable peace. Perhaps in response to Hulbert’s pleas, the Association’s Cincinnati Reds did back off from their plans to sign Charley Jones, leaving the National League’s precious blacklist intact. In April 1882, clubs from the rival leagues met in twenty-one crowd-pleasing exhibition games. The League won all twenty-one, settling rather decisively any debate over which circuit was better, but the contests nonetheless drew thousands of paying customers. One of the most notable attendees was Oscar Wilde, the flamboyant British poet, playwright, and all-around wag, who saw the League’s Cleveland club beat the Alleghenys during his much-publicized tour of America. “He admired the game very much,” one reporter noted, “but the uniforms were not quite to his aesthetic taste.”
The appearance of peace and goodwill was highly misleading, however. The already tense relationship between the two leagues had frayed to the point of snapping. Rumors circulated that National League owners had contributed to a secret war chest, to be used to bribe back any player who jumped to the American Association. Certainly, something turned around infielders Dasher Troy and Sam Wise, who, after signing perfectly valid contracts with the American Association, abruptly returned to the National League. “That men should be so devoid of all sense of honor as to ignore their own signatures, and thus bring certain disgrace upon themselves, seems beyond understanding,” O. P. Caylor sputtered in the Cincinnati Enquirer. Ballplayers had whined ad nauseam about the “tyrannical rules” of the League, but as soon as a new organization emerged, ready to advance their interests, they had promptly stabbed it in the back. “After these exhibitions of the mental weakness of professionals we have no hesitation in corroborating the oft-expressed opinion of President Hulbert of the League,” Caylor wrote. “It is to the effect that although there are white men among the players the majority are ignorant and uncontrollable men, who have not the least idea of honor; that they should be treated as such, and that in dealing with them there should be no mercy or leniency shown them. . . . People may talk all they please about the iron rules of the League, but they are not half so rigid as they ought to be.”
Hoping to preserve the peace between the leagues, McKnight pleaded with Hulbert to return Troy and Wise before it was too late.
Stubborn to the last, Hulbert declared in an interview that he saw no need to respect Association contracts, or even to recognize the Association’s existence: “I don’t care to go into the question of the League’s attitude toward the so-called American Association further than to say it is not likely the League will be awake nights bothering its head about how to protect a body in which it has no earthly interest, and which voluntarily assumed a position of hostility toward the League.” League teams, meanwhile, began trying to make off with the Association’s biggest stars. “I thank you kindly for your generous offer to [Pete] Browning,” Louisville Eclipse President J. H. Pank wrote in a sarcastic telegram to William G. Thompson, the mayor of Detroit and president of that city’s National League club. “It grieves me to say to you that he will play in Louisville next season. Perhaps you can get him the following season. In the meantime, you miserable reprobate, farewell.”
Hulbert raised another ruckus when he barred League teams from playing against the American Association’s Philadelphia Athletics. From now on, he ruled, League clubs would have to play all their Philadelphia exhibition games against the Phillies, an independent team that had sworn to respect League contracts and was being groomed for full membership. Athletics boosters had never forgotten that it was Hulbert who, five years earlier, banished their club from the League. The fact that he was yet again undermining the beloved Athletics was almost too much to bear for John P. Campbell, baseball editor of the Philadelphia Item. Hulbert’s “brains seems to have run to his paunch,” Campbell steamed. Since League clubs had cleared $9,000 playing exhibition games against the Athletics in 1881, Hulbert was apparently willing to damage his own teams for the sake of bearing a grudge. “We wish to be understood as declaring an open and unrelenting war on League practices as exemplified by Hurlbert [sic],” Campbell wrote, “and we hope to have the pleasure of writing at no distant day the obituary of a man who has done more to kill off the game in this country than any man living.” The young reporter may well have known that Hulbert wasn’t expected to live much longer. If so, his vindictiveness was a fair sample of the sentiment in the Association camp. “The League has tried to smother us and refused our friendship,” wrote McKnight. “They will find too late that we can stand it better than they.”
The Summer of Beer and Whiskey Page 4