Gotham_ A History of New York City to 1898 - Edwin G. Burrows [585]
Slowly the game caught on. The Gothams (originally the Washingtonians) began play in the early 1850s at the St. George Cricket Club’s ground in Harlem. By 1854 the Eagles and Empires had taken the field, as had, across the river in South Brooklyn, the Excelsiors. Like the Knickerbockers, most of these clubs were comprised of middleclass men and were more fraternal organizations than competitive teams. Club members met off as well as on the field, with postgame collations at their favorite hotel or restaurant, and in the winter at suppers, promenades, skating parties, soirees, and an annual ball. Most games were intramural, with only an occasional match game, initiated by written challenge, the winner of which got to keep the game ball in its trophy case. The clubs insisted on decorum and gentlemanly behavior, emphasizing their self-control in contrast to working-class raucousness.
In the late fifties the game took off. By 1858 there were seventy-one clubs in Brooklyn and twenty-five in Manhattan; others on Long Island and New Jersey brought the metropolitan area total to 125.1858 saw the establishment of a National Association of Base Ball Players to refine rules, resolve disputes, and control the game’s development. The title may have seemed a bit grandiose, as the constituents were all local teams, but the wording was fair enough, for Brooklyn and New York City had between them become the acknowledged capital of the sport. For a time, the “New York” game was rivaled by “Philadelphia” and “Massachusetts” varieties. But all the leading sports journals—like Porter’s Spirit of the Times and the New York Clipper—were located here, and they gave tremendous nationwide coverage to epic contests played by “New York” rules; among these was the first intercity all-star match, in 1858, in which New York beat Brooklyn in a best-two-out-of-three series at the Fashion Course (to which tens of thousands paid admission, another first). With over a million readers devouring such stories, and sports papers issuing series on the history of the game, and baseball editor Henry Chadwick of the Brooklyn Daily Eagle devising a scoring system, the metropolitan version of the game soon became standard throughout the nation. In yet another indication of the city’s imperial outreach and cultural clout, its native sport had become the national pastime.
Even as it careened toward a more competitive, commercial format, baseball remained predominantly a middle-class affair. In the late fifties roughly a quarter of the players were businessmen and professionals. Half were clerks and small proprietors (occupationally based teams of schoolteachers, physicians, even clergymen had become popular). But the percentage of artisanal ballplayers had also risen rapidly. Skilled workers now constituted a quarter of the players in Manhattan and an even larger component in Brooklyn, though virtually no laborers had time for baseball. But if by 1860 baseball had become a sport that straddled cultural boundaries, it is a sign of the degree to which the game had been indelibly molded by its middle-class progenitors that newcomers like butchers and volunteer firemen, who leaned toward more rowdy pursuits, accepted the rules, conventions, and even the adherence to decorum laid down by their predecessors. The spread of baseball, some thought, was a triumph of the civilizing process.
The respectable classes had carved out a social and psychological location for themselves vis-à-vis the uppertens, by stressing their shared gentility while disavowing undesirable aristocratic elements. But in moving closer to the city’s elite they distanced themselves culturally as well as physically from the less respectable orders. They could play ball with artisans who accepted their standards of propriety but had only scorn for mechanics