By 1870 baseball was considered America’s “national game.” Baseball had spread from the Northeast to the Midwest, and the National Association of Base Ball Clubs (NAB) had grown to 300 amateur teams. In 1869 the Cincinnati Reds fielded an all-salaried team under player-manager Harry Wright. While the Reds did not return a profit, their undefeated record that season boosted professional baseball and ignited a smoldering dispute between amateurs and professionals, with the amateurs walking out of the 1870 NAB annual meeting. The professionals retaliated in March 1871 by forming the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NA), thus destroying the amateur association and starting major-league baseball.
The player-controlled NA, the first professional major league, suffered serious problems and lasted only from 1871 through 1875. Most clubs lost money, as attendance averaged under 3,000 a game. Players jumped contracts, showed poor discipline, and dealt with gamblers. The NA also lacked a fixed playing schedule. Teams played each rival five times, with dates arranged by correspondence.
However, with each team paying an entry fee of only $10, the outclassed teams frequently dropped out, thus disrupting the schedule. Conflicts arose over playing dates, ticket pricing, the division of gate receipts, and poor officiating by volunteer umpires. The NA lacked competitive balance, too, as evidenced by the Boston Red Stockings, who won four pennants in five years. Nevertheless, the NA popularized professional baseball. The Boston Red Stockings drew large crowds, with their attendance figures peaking at 70,000 in 1875. Boston manager Harry Wright’s innovations in equipment procurement, training of players, and park administration set standards for future promoters. Expanded newspaper coverage and annual guides, edited by Henry Chadwick, enhanced fan interest.
In 1876 Chicago promoter William Hulbert organized a new league controlled by club owners. The National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs (NL), limited to eight well-financed teams from cities with populations of at least 75,000, was organized along east-west lines. Hulbert barred liquor sales, gamblers, and Sunday games. Teams were ordered to play each rival 10 times or face expulsion, and a fixed playing schedule was introduced in 1877. Players faced strict disciplinary codes and were bound to teams by rigid contracts. Albert Spalding supplied the league’s balls and published its guidebook.
The NL struggled initially with low attendance and low player salaries. Philadelphia and New York were expelled after 1876 for failing to play their quota of games. In 1877 gamblers bribed four Louisville players to throw the NL pennant. The offending players were barred from the NL for life, and Milwaukee replaced the Louisville club. The NL also faced stiff competition from the rival International Association in 1877 and 1878, but the latter folded in 1879. To bind star players to a team, NL owners in 1879 inserted
A print showing the game of baseball, ca. 1890 (Library of Congress)
Reserve clauses (the right to rehire players for the following season) in their playing contracts, and in 1883 the NL owners solidified their control by extending the reserve clause to the contracts for all players.
Professional baseball prospered in the 1880s with improved NL attendance and profits. The rival American Association (AA), formed in 1882, featured 25-cent admission prices, optional liquor sales, and Sunday games. The upstart AA also raided the NL roster. The National Agreement of 1883 recognized the AA as a major league, but the AA had to agree to stop roster raids and accept the reserve clause. In 1884 the two major-league organizations crushed a new rival, the Union Association. Attendance at major-league games peaked at 2 million in 1889. Some clubs grossed $100,000, and playing schedules increased to 140 games. The NL competed in postseason championships with the AA and dominated them after 1886, with the St. Louis Browns, operated by promoter Chris Von der Ahe, winning four consecutive pennants. Von der Ahe increased attendance with sideshows, liquor sales, and Sunday games.
During the 1880s, baseball evolved further by extending the pitching distance to 50 feet, permitting overhand pitching, adopting a single strike zone, and establishing the four-ball/three-strike rule. The Sporting News and Sporting Life spread the popularity of baseball by reporting the diamond exploits of stars King Kelly, Cap Anson, and Dan Brouthers. In 1887 Chicago sold Kelly to Boston for a record $10,000.
Baseball, however, was troubled. Salaries averaged $2,000, with stars earning at least $5,000. Major - and minor-league clubs excluded black players by 1890. White major leaguers protested the reserve clause, harsh disciplinary rules, and a threatened salary cap. Disgruntled NL players in 1885 joined the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players (BP), led by John M. Ward, a star player and lawyer. The BP in 1887 sought recognition as a collectivebargaining agency, but the owners continued the reserve clause and salary cap. Ward persuaded the BP to field a rival Players League (PL) in 1890 and promised players fair shares of power and profits. But the bitter, costly PL war of 1890 ended major-league baseball’s brief golden age. The PL lured most star players and fielded eight well-stocked teams in seven NL cities. The PL outdrew the NL and AA, but financial losses savaged all three leagues. The NL forced the PL to sue for peace at the end of the season, allowing PL players to return to their former clubs without penalties. The AA battled with the NL over reassignment of players in 1891 and collapsed after the 1891 season. The NL emerged victorious, annexing four AA teams and buying out the others for $130,000.
From 1892 to 1899, the single, 12-team NL dominated major league baseball. Owners became business magnates, but they could not match the old dual leagues in attendance and profits. The Boston, Baltimore, and Brooklyn teams outclassed the others. The NL sought unsuccessfully to boost attendance by staging postseason Temple Cup matches, increasing playing schedules to 154 games, and trying split-season formats. In 1899 the owners dropped the four weakest teams and restored an eight-team format in 1900. Owners limited player salaries to $2,400 and adopted stricter disciplinary standards. The Baltimore Orioles and Cleveland Spiders boosted fan interest by using aggressive tactics like brawling, umpire-baiting, and bench-jockeying (taunting opponents from the bench). Defense improved with bigger gloves and better catcher’s equipment. In 1893 the pitching distance was increased to 60 feet, six inches. Hitters broke batting and home-run marks until pitchers adjusted. By 1900 scientific baseball prevailed, featuring bunting, stealing, hit and run, and sacrificing. Concession stands and Sunday games were standard. The eight-team NL reigned as the only major league, but it was soon challenged by the formation of the American League.
Further reading: David Nemec, The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1997); Benjamin G. Rader, Baseball: A History of America's Game (2d ed.) (Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 2002); Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Golden Age (New York: Oxford University Press, 1971); David Quentin Voigt, American Baseball: From Gentleman's Sport to the Commissioners System (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1966); Geoffrey Ward and Ken Burns, Baseball: An Illustrated History (New York: Knopf, 1994).
—David L. Porter
Bayard, Thomas Francis (1828-1898) lawyer, politician
Senator, diplomat, and secretary of state, Thomas F. Bayard was born to prominence in Wilmington, Delaware, on October 29, 1828. The son, grandson, and nephew of senators, he attended a preparatory school in Flushing, New York. Then, although his father and grandfather were college graduates, he went to work in mercantile houses in New York and Philadelphia before, at about 20 years of age, studying law in Wilmington. Admitted to the bar in 1851, he prospered and in 1856 married Louise Lee, with whom he had nine children. Coming from a border slave state, Bayard, who was a Peace Democrat, opposed secession. In 1869 he succeeded his father in the U. S. Senate.
That Bayard’s senatorial career, lasting until 1885, was not distinguished was not his fault. During those years the Republicans controlled the White House and the Senate except for two years, and Bayard led a largely unsuccessful opposition. He denounced Radical Reconstruction of the
South on grounds that it enhanced the power of the federal government in general and of the presidency in particular. He embraced the tenets of 19th-century liberals and denounced subsidies and protective tariffs, opposed inflation, and wanted the United States to return to the gold standard and, after it did in 1879, to remain there. He opposed militarism, worked for efficient government, and opposed the spoils system by supporting CiViL SERVICE REEORM.
A major leader of a party often in disarray, Bayard was supported for the Democratic presidential nomination in 1876, 1880, and 1884. But he was too reserved to be “magnetic,” and Delaware was a small one-party state. When Grover Cleveland, a Democrat, took office in 1885, he appointed Bayard secretary of state. His first task was to stave off the rush of Democrats, eager to represent the United States abroad, after being out of power for 24 years. The 1883 Pendleton Civil Service Reform Act did not include the foreign service under the merit system of competitive examinations, leaving Cleveland and Bayard free to appoint whomever they wished. They did their best to appoint effective representatives, sending to Berlin former senator George Hunt Pendleton (sponsor of the Civil Service Act), who had studied at Heidelberg and was fluent in German, and to Paris Robert M. McLane who had gone to school there and had diplomatic experience in China and Mexico. Bayard and Cleveland actually made fewer changes in consular offices than Republican James Abram Gareield had after succeeding fellow Republican Ruthereord B. Hayes.
Conscientious, courteous, and fair minded, Bayard was a natural diplomat, although success often evaded him while secretary of state. In the long run his ideas helped solve some long-standing difficulties. Several of the questions that occupied him involved Great Britain, because it handled the foreign affairs of its Canadian Dominion. The stickiest question was a perennial one over U. S. fishing rights in northeastern Canadian waters. Bayard was instrumental in the formation of a joint commission (1887-88) on which he and James Burrill Angell served. The compromise treaty it produced promised to solve an old problem and end bickering. Cleveland urged its ratification, but with 1888 being an election year, the Republican Senate rejected the treaty. Even so, the arrangements it proposed were adopted by both parties for two years.
A second problem with Canada, and therefore Britain, was the threatened annihilation of the great fur seal herd that used the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea as its breeding ground. The United States could protect the seals in its territorial waters, within three miles of the islands, but when the seals ventured out to sea, they were indiscriminately killed by Russian, Japanese, and especially Canadian sealers. In 1887, when American authorities seized six Canadian vessels engaged in pelagic (oceanic) sealing, a federal judge upheld that action with the untenable declaration that the Bering Sea was a mare clausum (closed sea). To avert trouble with Britain and to save the seals, Bayard seized the opportunity to invite seven nations, including Britain, Japan, and Russia, to cooperate with the United States and end pelagic sealing. All responded positively, but Britain later reneged because of Canada’s objections, and nothing more was done on Bayard’s watch. His ideas, however, influenced subsequent negotiations. Pelagic sealing was somewhat reduced by arbitration in 1893 and limited more effectively by a 1911 convention, agreed upon by the United States, Britain, Japan, and Russia.
In addition, the Canadians rejected Bayard’s efforts to fix precisely the boundary between Alaska and Canada, and his offer to help settle the disputed boundary between Venezuela and British Guiana (now Guyana). Bayard’s calm reaction to German, British, and U. S. rivalry that came to a head in Samoa, in 1887, laid the groundwork for a future solution. But in that same year, recognizing the strategic value of Hawaii, the United States acquired the right to build a naval base at Pearl Harbor, and Bayard aggressively defended American interests there by rejecting a British proposal for a joint British, German, and U. S. protectorate for the Hawaiian Islands.
When Cleveland was reelected in 1892, he appointed Bayard ambassador to Great Britain (a new rank more appropriate to a world power than the old rank of “minister”). Bayard’s main problem in that post was the Venezuela boundary dispute that he had hoped to resolve when secretary of state. The belligerent note of July 1895 that Secretary of State Richard Olney (with Cleveland’s approval) sent Britain, claiming that it was violating the Monroe Doctrine and urging that the border between British Guiana and Venezuela be arbitrated, was one that Bayard never would have written. Consequently, when he read the long (10,000-word) bombastic note to the British prime minister, he failed to emphasize Cleveland’s impatience and the necessity of a prompt response. When the British refused arbitration four months later, Cleveland was apoplectic, a war scare followed, and amid the popular attacks on Britain were denunciations of Bayard for his anglophilia. With neither Britain nor the United States wanting war, the calmness Bayard personified triumphed, and the boundary was arbitrated.
At the height of the boundary controversy Bayard infuriated Republicans, in particular, by reaffirming his liberal faith in free trade. In a widely publicized speech he attacked protectionism as “class legislation,” which created “inequality of fortune” and corrupted public life. In anger the House of Representatives censured him, proving his point that high-tariff devotees could sink to a low political level. At the close of Cleveland’s term Bayard retired. He died a year later, on September 28, 1898.
See also Bering Sea dispute.
Further reading: Lester B. Shippee, “Thomas Francis Bayard, Secretary of State, March 6, 1885, to March 4, 1889,” in Samuel Flagg Bemis, ed., The American Secretaries of State and Their Diplomacy (New York: Knopf, 1928), 8:45-106; Charles Callan Tansill, The Congressional Career of Thomas Francis Bayard, 1869-1885 (Washington, D. C.: Georgetown University Press, 1946); Charles Callan Tansill, The Foreign Policy of Thomas F. Bayard, 1885-1897 (New York: Fordham University Press, 1940).
World History
