Made In America - Bill Bryson [179]
Batters were at first also known as strikers, and after 1856 as batsmen. The catcher – sometimes called a catcher-out – stood up to fifty feet behind home plate and would remain cautiously out of range of foul tips until the development of the catcher’s mask in the 1890s. The umpire, a term first noted in a baseball context in 1856, also stood (or often sat) safely out of the way along the first base line. In those days the umpire’s judgement was trusted even less than now. Important matches also had a referee, whose job was simply to judge the umpire. (Umpire, incidentally, is one of those many words in which an initial n became attached, like a charged particle, to the preceding indefinite article. In Middle English, one was ‘a noumpere’, just as an apron was at first ‘a napron’.)
Uniforms were strikingly different, too. Cartwright’s Knickerbocker Club, for example, wore uniforms of white shirts, blue trousers and straw boaters, making them look more like the lounging aesthetes in Manet’s Déjeuner sur l’herbe than gutsy, knockabout athletes. In fact, they often were more like aesthetes than athletes. The early teams were intended as exclusive fraternal organizations for the upper crust, which is why to this day we call them clubs. Often the games were largely incidental to the social gathering afterwards. Then two things happened: competition between clubs grew more prickly and intense, and the game spread to the masses, where it became evident that manual labourers often enjoyed certain advantages in terms of strength and endurance over stockbrokers and junior executives. At first, working men played in their own leagues – working men’s matches on Boston Common often began at 5 a.m. so as not to interfere with the players’ working day – but before long the gentlemen’s teams began quietly recruiting them as paid ringers. Baseball began to lose its wholesome glow as words like hippodroming (throwing a game for a bribe) and revolving (jumping teams to secure better pay) entered the parlance of the game.
In 1859, when the National Association of Base Ball Players was formed (the national in the title was a trifle ambitious since all the clubs were from greater New York), it insisted on amateurism and gentlemanly behaviour. It got neither. As early as 1860, the Brooklyn Excelsiors were paying a salary to a fastball pitcher named Jim Creighton while the New York Mutuals were charging an admission often cents to their matches and dividing the takings among themselves. Fair play was not always on-hand either. At least one crucial game was decided when the owner of one team had his dog frighten off an outfielder chasing a fly ball.
By 1869 America had its first forthrightly professional team, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, who racked up a record of fifty-seven wins, no loses and one tie during the year, and played before crowds of as many as 15,000 people.29
As baseball became increasingly professional, various leagues and alliances formed – including one called, a trifle redundantly, the League Alliance. In 1877 the National Baseball League, the first true major league, was formed.30 The American League followed in 1901, though it had its roots in the old Western League. Among the early professional teams were the Philadelphia Athletics, Troy Haymakers, Brooklyn Atlantics, Detroit Wolverines, Washington Olympics, Hartford Dark Blues and Cleveland Spiders, who in 1899 earned the distinction of having the worst record ever notched up by a professional baseball team: 20-134. New York alone had the Mutuals, Highlanders, Harlems, Gothams, Putnams, and Eagles. Often the place name meant little. Hartford played the 1877 season in Brooklyn. Often, too, if a team was out of a pennant race (so called because the competition was at first literally for a pennant), it didn’t bother to make road trips towards the end of the season. Even when the opponent showed up, it wasn’t always worth the bother. For their