A Comprehensive Guide on North American Baseball League

Baseball has long occupied a large place among North American sports.As early as the 1850s, sporting sheets began to argue that “base ball”was uniquely “America’s game,” and by the end of the 19^th century it was the most popular team sport in North America. Although millions of young men (and a few women) played amateur or semiprofessional baseball, the professional game soon became ascendant. In 1903 the National and American leagues signed an agreement establishing the present structure of the professional game. Beginning in 1905, each season (except 1994 due to a players’ strike) ended with a “World Series” between the championship teams of the two leagues. Baseball’s significance extends far beyond the playing field.Apart from sheer entertainment, references to baseball and the employment of baseball motifs abound in literature, music, painting, drama, politics, and religion, indeed in nearly every facet of American life. The game has given towns and cities, as well as occupational, ethnic, and racial groups, deeper emotional existences. Baseball’s heroes have reflected some of America’s most fundamental values. Finally, with its capacity for quantification and its slow, deliberate pace, both of which allow fans to collect and digest memories of the game’s past, baseball has possessed a special power to connect past and present.

History

Modern baseball evolved from informal bat and ball games, the roots of which can be traced to 17^th- and 18^th-century England. In the early 19^th century, boys played one or another of these games—called variously “old cat,” “one-old-cat,” “barn ball,” “town,” “rounders,” “base,” and even “base ball”—on empty lots, village greens, and cow pastures. During the 1840s and 1850s two styles of play, the Massachusetts (favored in New England and southern Ontario) and the New York games, competed for popularity. A major turning point in baseball’s evolution came in the 1850s, when New Yorkers, in particular clerks and artisans living in impersonal boardinghouses and experiencing profound changes in their lives and work, organized dozens of formal “base ball” clubs. Led by the Knickerbockers (formed in 1845), representatives of these clubs wrote and revised the rules of play, appointed game officials, scheduled matches, and in 1858 created the first national association.

Deriving its name from the four bases that form a diamond (the infield) around the pitcher’s box (later called the mound), teams in the New York game consisted of nine players who used a leather-covered ball and wooden bats. Teams remained at bat until three outs were made; then the team that had been in the field took a turn at bat.An inning consisted of one turn at bat for each team and nine innings constituted a game. Each time a batter or “striker” touched all of the bases without being put out a run scored. The team with the most runs after the completion of nine innings won.

New York’s central place in commerce and communications helped its form of baseball spread rapidly. Tours by the famed Excelsiors of Brooklyn to upstate New York and to Philadelphia and Baltimore in 1860 attracted attention across the continent to New York’s game. In 1863,New York area teams first contended for a self-proclaimed national championship, and, during the same year, the Young Canadians of Woodstock awarded themselves a silver ball for the first Canadian championship.The U.S.Civil War (1861–1865) brought together massive numbers of young men, which encouraged the sport’s growth; after the war veterans of both the Union and Confederate armies returned home enthusiasts of the game.

The early players comprised what contemporaries called a “fraternity,” a term that implied that the ballplayers were members of a single brotherhood regardless of differences in club membership, ethnicity, social class, or religion.The fraternity set itself apart from the urban masses by establishing a special body of customs and rituals and by donning colorful uniforms similar to the volunteer fire departments and militia units of the day. Off the diamond, the early players frequently gathered to eat, drink, wager, talk, and even dance.

League Formation

The early clubs initially neither charged gate fees nor paid their players, but commercialism quickly entered the sport. In 1858 fans paid 50 cents each to watch a three-game championship series between all-star teams from New York and Brooklyn, and in 1862 an ambitious Brooklynite,William H. Cammeyer, built an enclosed field and charged fans a fee to watch games there. The “enclosure movement,” as the drive to build fences around fields and charge an admission fee was called, introduced a new era of baseball history that heralded the beginning of professional baseball. To take advantage of gate fees, teams began to play more games, to embark upon long summer tours, to recruit athletes on the basis of playing skills rather than sociability, and even to pay outstanding players.

Professional baseball benefited from urban rivalries. The success in 1869 of Cincinnati’s Red Stockings in winning 54 games without a single defeat provoked envy in other cities. In both Canada and the United States, small businessmen, politicians, and civic boosters united to form joint-stock company baseball clubs. The clubs usually expired after a year or two, but out of the ruins of the old, new clubs frequently arose to replace them. From 1871 through the 1875 season, several of these professional clubs competed for a championship pennant sponsored by a loose confederation known as the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players.

Professional baseball entered another era in 1876 when William A. Hulbert (1832–1882), president of a Chicago club, and Albert Spaulding (1850–1915),player, manager, and soon-to-be sporting goods magnate, set about organizing a replacement for the National Association. Determined that the league would become the premier circuit of professional clubs representing only the larger cities, the National League prohibited clubs in cities with a population of less than 75,000 from joining, required any club wishing to join the circuit to have the approval of the existing clubs, and provided each team with a territorial monopoly. By banning Sunday games, prohibiting the sale of liquor at ball parks, and charging a 50-cent admission fee, the league also sought without complete success to obtain the patronage of the middle class.

In the 1880s professional baseball shared in the nation’s booming prosperity. No fewer than 18 leagues (including leagues with Canadian teams) appeared, although several expired after only a season or so. In 1882, the American Association, dubbed the “Beer Ball League” because brewery owners sat on the boards of directors of six of its clubs and it permitted beer to be sold at games, challenged the National League’s hegemony over big league baseball. Beginning in 1884 and ending in 1890, the National League champions met those of the American Association in a post-season “World Championship” series.

Professional baseball reflected the changing ethnic composition of both Canada and the United States.Perhaps upon discovery that recent immigrants had limited entrepreneurial opportunities in more respectable and less risky enterprises, a disproportionate number of Germans, German Jews, and later the Irish could be found among club owners.Likewise, an unusually large number of German and Irish names appeared on late 19^th-century player rosters, suggesting that these ethnic groups may have found in professional baseball a means of upward social mobility. During the first half of the 20^th century increasing numbers of old-stock players from the countryside and new ethnics from southern and eastern Europe, as well as a few Native Americans, entered the big league ranks. Opportunities for African Americans in professional baseball were another matter. Although blacks played amateur baseball from at least the 1860s on, as early as 1867 the National Association of Base Ball Players specifically excluded black clubs from membership, and the National League informally enforced a “color ban”against blacks from its founding in 1876.Yet a few blacks did play on racially integrated professional teams in other leagues; in 1884 Moses Fleetwood Walker and his brother Weldy played with Toledo in the American Association. In the late 1880s and in the 1890s, the era when racial segregation became the rule for much of the United States, white leagues ended racially integrated baseball.

In the 1880s conflicts between the National League franchise owners and the professional players escalated. They clashed in the first place over player drinking. The players resented restrictions on their personal behavior and the player reservation system that had been put into place in 1879. The reserve clause in contracts prevented players from offering their services to the highest bidders. The players also believed that they were not getting a fair share of baseball’s additional earnings. Player grievances climaxed in the formation of a separate Players League in 1890. With three big leagues competing for the loyalties of fans and the superior leadership offered by Albert Spaulding, the National League crushed the upstart league after only one season. In 1891, the American Association also collapsed, leaving only a 12-team National League as a major league circuit.

The National League drifted aimlessly through the 1890s, confronted with the absence of the popular World Championship Series, the lack of superior teams in the largest cities, and an economic depression. In earlier times, the league had deliberately cultivated an image of Victorian propriety, but in the 1890s it acquired a notorious reputation for brawling, both on the field and in the stands. In 1900, Byron Bancroft (Ban) Johnson (1863–1931), a former sportswriter and president of the Western League, mounted a challenge to the National League. Johnson renamed his loop the American League and began to raid National League teams for players.

In 1903, the leagues signed a pact agreeing to recognize each other’s reserved players and established a three-man commission to oversee all of professional baseball. The agreement protected the reserved rights of minor league teams to their players, but provided that at the conclusion of each season the majors could “draft” players from the franchises of the minors at set prices. Although the National Agreement of 1903 did not provide for a championship series, in 1905 the leagues agreed upon a mandatory postseason World Series.

The Golden Age

The first half of the 20^th century may have been baseball’s Golden Age. The game gained in acceptability among all social groups; in 1910 William Howard Taft established the tradition of the president of the United States opening each season by throwing out the first ball.“Take Me Out to the Ball Game,”written by vaudevillian Jack Norworth in 1908, soon became the game’s unofficial anthem. Between 1909 and 1923, the major league teams went on a stadium-building binge; great civic monuments of steel and concrete replaced shaky, wooden structures. Minor league baseball grew from 13 circuits in 1903 to 51 leagues in 1950. Baseball exploded in popularity at all levels. Twilight leagues and Sunday School leagues sprang up across the continent.Boys grew up reading baseball fiction, learning the rudiments of the game, and dreaming of one day becoming diamond heroes themselves. Newspapers carried detailed accounts of games, as well as stories about the game during the off season (Hot Stove League). Beginning in the 1920s, radio began to broadcast play-by-play descriptions of games. In the meantime the game experienced fundamental changes on the playing field. Long ago, pitchers had stopped gently tossing the ball to the hitters with a straight arm and underhanded; a gradual relaxation of the rules permitted overhanded pitching in 1884, and in 1887 the hitters lost the privilege of asking for a pitch above or below the waist. In 1893 the league adopted the modern pitching distance of 60 feet, 6 inches (18.44 meters). Offensive and defensive tactics slowly grew more sophisticated.

Beginning in the 1860s, infielders inched away from their respective bases and managers began to place their quickest man at shortstop. In the next decade, a few catchers donned masks and fielders put on gloves. At first, the skin-tight gloves (with the ends cut off to improve throwing) were used exclusively to protect the hands from the sting of the ball. In the 1890s with the extension of the pitching distance, teams turned more to bunting and the ingenious hit-and-run play. The first two decades of the 20^th century came to be known as the “deadball era,” or the “era of the pitcher.” The adoption of rules providing for counting the first two foul balls as strikes (National League in 1901 and American League in 1903), increasing the width of home plate from a 12-inch (30 centimeters) square to a five-sided figure 17 inches (43 centimeters) across in 1900, and allowing the application of spit to the ball by pitchers, along with the appearance of big, strongarmed pitchers and the conservative tactics of managers resulted in an age of extraordinarily low offensive output. Except for John “Honus”Wagner (1874–1955) and Ty Cobb (1886–1961), the major stars of the day were such pitchers as Cy Young (1867–1955), Christy Mathewson (1880–1925), and Walter Johnson (1887–1946). Long-time field managers John J. Mc-Graw (1873–1934) of the New York Giants and Connie Mack (1862–1956) of the Philadelphia Athletics also occupied much of baseball’s public limelight. For unknown reasons, the 1920s witnessed a sudden reversal in offensive production. Traditionally, the surge in hitting has been attributed to the introduction of a more resilient ball, using more balls per game, outlawing the spitball in 1920, and the growing popularity of “free swinging” by the hitters. Recent research emphasizes the importance of George Herman “Babe” Ruth (1895–1948). Led by the free-swinging Ruth, batting averages, scoring, and home runs soared.While repeatedly leading the league in home runs,Ruth himself became the game’s preeminent hero. With Ruth’s rise from lowly origins, his enthusiasm for the game, and his towering home runs, no other player in baseball history so won the awe and adoration of baseball fans. During the Golden Age, great dynasties,most in the larger cities, ruled major league play. From 1900 to 1969, when the leagues were divided into divisions, New York City franchises won 41 pennants. Beginning with Ruth’s arrival in New York, the Yankees became synonymous with success; they won 29 flags in 39 years. In general, franchises located in larger cities drew more fans and commanded larger revenues; they were thus better able to purchase superior players from other big league clubs or minor league franchises.Only the St.Louis Cardinals, led by their astute general manager Wesley “Branch”Rickey (1881–1965),who created a system of developing new talent through the ownership of minor league teams (the farm system), seriously contended with the Yankee dynasty.

Ruth’s Homeric feats during the 1920s helped to counter the negative effects of the Black Sox Scandal of 1919. Although a court acquitted eight Chicago White Sox players for fixing the 1919 World Series, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (1866–1944), the newly appointed commissioner of baseball, banished them from organized baseball for life. The scandal also sparked the 1921 reorganization of baseball. The new National Agreement gave sweeping powers to a single commissioner to suspend, fine,or banish any parties in baseball who had engaged in activities “detrimental to the best interests of the national game.”Although Landis (who served until 1944) rarely used his vast powers to discipline the team owners, he employed them widely against the players. In 1922, the U.S. Supreme Court further strengthened major league baseball by exempting it from federal antitrust laws in Federal Base Ball Club of Baltimore, Inc. v. National League of Professional B.B. Clubs and American League of Professional B.B. Clubs, 259 U.S. 200.

The Great Depression and World War II dealt powerful blows to professional baseball. During the economic crisis of the 1930s, the establishment of an annual All-Star game between the best players in the two leagues (beginning in 1933), the introduction of night baseball with electric lighting at Cincinnati in 1935, and the founding of the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York, in 1936, all failed to draw crowds to games. The big leagues even considered closing down during U.S. participation in World War II (1941–1945), but President Franklin D. Roosevelt, believing big league play would be good for morale, urged that baseball continue. With many of the best players drafted into the armed forces, the quality of play suffered. Fearful that major league baseball might be discontinued during World War II and aware of the popularity of women’s softball, Philip K.Wrigley (1894–1977), chewing gum magnate and owner of the Chicago Cubs, organized the All-American Girls Baseball League in 1943. While women had played versions of baseball and softball on college campuses and occasionally on barnstorming teams since the last quarter of the 19^th century, ball-playing by women experienced a sharp growth in popularity during the 1930s and 1940s. Stressing a combination of feminine beauty and masculine playing skills, the league initially prospered in mid-sized, midwestern cities. Reflecting the postwar trend toward at-home diversions and the return to a more restrictive conception of femininity, the league folded in 1954.

Race Relations

The war years also represented a turning point in baseball’s race relations. Excluded from white leagues since the 1880s and 1890s, African Americans carved out a separate baseball sphere. In the late 1880s the black barnstorming Cuban Giants (formed in 1885) booked some 150 games a season, but barnstorming reached its heyday in the first half of the 20^th century. Barnstorming black teams played other itinerant black teams, town teams scattered across North America and the Caribbean basin, and occasionally, during the off season, “all-star” big league white teams. While skill levels were high among the barnstormers, showmanship, which often entailed the employment of black stereotypes,was a fundamental part of the barnstorming game. The founding of the Negro National League in 1920 ushered in another era of professional black baseball, and teams frequently combined barnstorming with league play. League baseball reached the height of its popularity in the early 1940s. For more than two decades, Leroy “Satchel”Paige (1906–1982), a pitcher,was the star attraction of black baseball. Despite substantial opposition from fellow club owners, in 1945 Branch Rickey, the general manager of the Brooklyn Dodgers, signed Jackie Robinson (1919–1972), a multisport African American star at the University of California at Los Angeles and a player in the Negro National League, to a contract to play with the Dodgers’Montreal farm club in 1946.The next year, amidst great fanfare, Robinson joined the parent team. Given baseball’s distinction as the “national pastime”of the United States, the game’s racial integration had vast symbolic importance. If the racial wall of the national game could be breached, it seemed manifest to many that other barriers to blacks should be removed as well. Yet the entry of Robinson into the big leagues failed to herald the end of racial bigotry in baseball. Racial integration proceeded slowly; it was 12 years before the last big league club, the Boston Red Sox, finally employed a black player. Integration was uneven. In 1959 the National League had twice as many blacks as the American League. Finally, studies consistently found that blacks had to outperform whites to make team rosters and that blacks were commonly the victims of “stacking,”that is,more frequent relegation to “noncentral” playing positions such as the outfield or first base.

The Troubled Years

In the second half of the 20^th century, baseball entered more troubled times.After an initial resurgence of attendance in the late 1940s, crowds declined during the 1950s. The growth of sprawling independent suburbs and the appearance of television encouraged a larger trend away from inner-city and public forms of leisure to private, at-home diversions. Unlimited telecasts of big league games damaged minor league attendance and support for semiprofessional baseball. In the 1950s thousands of semipro teams folded and minor league baseball became a shell of its former self. The major leagues fared only somewhat better. Average game attendance remained below the 1948–1952 seasons until 1978, and even after that lagged behind the population growth of the metropolitan areas served by big league clubs. Baseball’s television ratings were also weak, falling to about half that of regular season professional football games. Ironically, the rapid growth of Little League baseball (founded in 1939 and composed of preadolescent boys) after World War II may have seriously damaged attendance at all other forms of baseball.

Big league baseball responded to the postwar woes in several ways.Reflecting changing population centers and the advantages of air travel, several franchises, led by the Boston Braves moving to Milwaukee in 1953, relocated, and the number of franchises expanded from two eight-team loops in 1960 (the same as it had been since 1903) to 28 teams in two leagues of six divisions by 1994. Big league baseball became a truly international sport when it planted franchises in Montreal (1969) and Toronto (1977); both Montreal and Toronto had fielded teams for 55 and 78 years, respectively, in the powerful International League. Frequently abetted by subsidies from local governments, baseball also entered a new stadium building era. Efforts to capitalize on media, especially television, were only partly successful. Large disparities in media revenues between small and large city franchises endangered the game’s financial stability.

The empowerment of the players added to the woes of the owners.With the appointment in 1966 of Marvin J. Miller as executive director of the Major League Baseball Players Association (which had been formed in 1956), the players won a series of victories over the owners. The right to salary arbitration (1972) and free agency (1976) triggered a cycle of escalating salaries; average annual salaries soared from $29,000 in 1970 to more than $1 million in 1992. Efforts by the owners to stem the effects of arbitration and free agency resulted in a seven-week strike in 1981 and a strike at the end of the 1994 season, closing down the World Series and delaying the start of the 1995 season.

The Divisional Era

Baseball in the divisional era (1969–present) witnessed the demise of team dynasties.During the 1980s, only 3 of 26 clubs failed to capture at least one divisional flag, and teams in smaller cities won just as many, indeed overall more, flags than the cities in the largest metropolitan areas. The major leagues implemented an amateur draft in 1965, which allowed franchises to draft (in reverse order of their standings in the previous season) the rights to unsigned amateur players, thus reducing the longstanding recruiting advantages of richer franchises. Also, women and men with vast financial resources became big league owners; they were less concerned than their more impoverished predecessors about earning profits from baseball. Finally, free agency—the right gained by veterans in 1976 to sign with any franchise—may have encouraged rather than discouraged competitive balance. A new style of play also characterized the divisional era.The hitting revolution of the 1920s had encouraged an emphasis on the home run; in the 1940s and 1950s, the stolen base nearly disappeared as the game featured slugging at the expense of finesse, but in the divisional era dazzling speed and specialized pitching joined sheer brawn.Aided by the expansion of new talent by including players of African and Hispanic descent, the stolen base returned to baseball. All earlier stolen base records fell. As managers turned increasingly to relief pitchers, the number of complete games hurled by one pitcher dropped from about seven in ten at the beginning of the century to about one in ten in the divisional era.

Baseball Perseveres

Although baseball in the second half of the 20^th century no longer occupied the dominant position among North American sports that it had once enjoyed, it persevered remarkably. The game seemed to fulfill needs to establish connections with the past. During the 1980s and 1990s, major and minor league attendance increased and an auxiliary culture of baseball memorabilia flourished. Baseball books, especially those of a historical nature, far outsold those on any other sport, and, in 1994, Ken Burns turned to baseball as the subject of the most monumental historical television documentary ever made.