Baseball season is almost here again, and though my heart has been stolen by soccer the coming of a new season always fills me with nostalgia. One never forgets their first love.
For a sport that is deeply in love with its history, the telling of that story is still selective. So I'd like to take a minute and tell some of that story. The period from 1903 to 1953 was the most stable time Major League Baseball would ever know. For fifty years not one franchise would fold or relocate.
This period of prosperity was marked by the American League Baltimore franchise closing up shop and restarting life as MLB's most successful franchise: the New York Yankees. The story of how we got to the Bronx Bombers, Babe Ruth, Mickey Mantle, and the rest is less known. I won't be able to do it complete justice, and I won't be the first to try, but it's always fun to take a mental jog through the historical record.
The story of pre-1903 baseball is of individual clubs trying to decide upon the best way to organize. The National Association of Base Ball Players formed in 1857, at a convention of New York City clubs trying to agree on some rules. Mostly amateur, a Cincinnati franchise was the first to declare professionalism in 1869.
These were barnstorming clubs. They'd set their own schedules, and convene every once in awhile to discuss how things were going.
In 1871, the first professional league was formed: the National Association of Professional Baseball Players. Two franchises which were a part of the National Association are still around today. They were originally known as the Chicago White Stockings and the Boston Red Stockings (many teams were known simply by their sock color, a lone distinguishing mark). Today they are known as the Chicago Cubs and the Atlanta Braves.
There's a third team I'd like to introduce in setting up how we got to the New York Yankees. The New York Mutuals were the city's leading professional baseball franchise from 1857 to 1876, and their story sheds light on what it was like trying to make it in the big apple.
Perhaps the most significant detail of the Mutuals' story is that they never had a home stadium on the island of Manhattan. Their first decade was spent in Hoboken, New Jersey, playing on a very important ground in baseball history: Elysian Fields.
In 1846 the first ever organized baseball game between two clubs took place at Elysian Fields when the Knickerbocker club took on a New York Nine. Polo and Cricket were the more popular sports then, so finding suitable grounds for baseball sometimes proved difficult. New York clubs tend to play in Hoboken throughout baseball's least organized years.
By the time the 1871 season had rolled around, the New York Mutuals were the lone representative of NY in the National Association, playing games in Brooklyn. The following year Brooklyn would get its own representative in the NA which shared the Union Grounds, the first baseball ground to build fences and thus made capable of charging admission. The stadium was built in 1862 by the Mutuals' proprietor William Cammeyer, who inherited his father's leather business. In the off-season, the ground was converted into a skating rink.
In 1875 the National Association would crumble, but its teams would rebound and form the National League in its place. Unfortunately, the Mutuals were running out of money out in Brooklyn. Players were paid from profits in gate receipts, if there were any, and the balance sheet was especially dreary toward the end of a losing season. They failed to make an end of season western road trip in 1876, violating league rules, and were kicked out of the newly minted NL.
That left New York with a professional baseball void which would not be filled until 1880. That void, and the NL's swiftness to expel teams, would prove important in setting up a mighty competitor. The NL was kicking out teams for playing baseball on Sundays, for selling beer at their ballparks, and shamefully for players guilty of match fixing. In the coming years the St Louis Brown Stockings, Philadelphia Athletics, Cincinnati Reds, and Louisville Grays would all meet similar fates.
New York got back into professional baseball in 1880 when John B. Day and manager Jim Mutrie started the barnstorming New York Metropolitans. Day was a successful tobacco merchant. The Mets too started out in NJ and Brooklyn, but by the end of the year they were renting out a polo field in Manhattan. This ground became known as the Polo Grounds (subsequent stadiums retained the name, even when not built on former polo fields). The name is kind of famous in NY baseball history; Willie Mays caught a ball there.
In 1882, the American Association forms with the cities just mentioned and a handful more. They allowed liquor sales and Sunday baseball, and gave consideration to some talented players who the NL had blacklisted for various behavioral problems. Of course the first thing the AA did was contact the Mets, but their games against NL opponents were lucrative so they declined to join. The NL came calling as well, and it came to pass that at the end of 1882, Day had two franchise offers. He took them both.
To satisfy both requirements, the Mets were entered in the AA while two teams the NL had folded to make room for expansion to NYC and Philadelphia were combined and made into the New York NL franchise. They were nicknamed the Gothams, and eventually they became the Giants who play in San Francisco today.
The Giants and the Mets split the Polo Grounds. With the space large enough for two diamonds, occasionally games were played simultaneously with a curtain separating the two contests. So New York went from pro baseball being impossible on Manhattan to having two pro franchises overnight.
American Association baseball was cheaper to attend (25 cents to the NLs 50 cent tickets) and had lucrative beer sales, so competitive teams tended to have full coffers. Losing teams, however, had a harder time hacking it. In 1884 the Brooklyn Atlantics moved to the AA after spending their first year in a minor league circuit. Trolley tracks ran by their home of Washington Park, which earned their fans the nickname Trolley Dodgers, a name which stuck through to their move west to become the Los Angeles Dodgers.
The National League was older and more respected, so as the Giants established themselves it behooved Day to funnel the talent in that direction. Manager Mutrie was moved to the NL squad and Day started to look for a way out. He sold the team in 1885 to Staten Island amusement and railroad kingpin Erastus Wiman for $25,000. The Mets were moved out to the Staten Island ballpark Wiman owned, the St. George Grounds.
Between their competition with the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Dodgers, the New York Metropolitans struggled and eventually folded in 1887, three years before the National League and American Association would merge.
Not that everything was smooth sailing for the Gothams(Giants) from then out. In 1889 Manhattan extended its street grid, as what was once cheep outerlands were being settled. The plan for extending 111th street ran right through the original Polo Grounds. Progress would make the NL franchise nomads for the 1889 season, as ownership tried but was unable to purchase land from James J Coogan further uptown at 155th street.
Coogan, executing the will of William L. Lynch, was able to work out a lease deal with Day on June 22, 1889 for a portion of the site at a length of five years. Workers used salvaged materials from the old ballpark to hastily built a new park on the Coogan site, taking only three weeks to get it playable if unfinished.
1890 however was trouble for the NL. Unrest over the reserve clause and other player restrictions led to a player revolt. The Players League consisted of much of the NL's top talent, and they were able to rent ground on the northern end of that same site to build the stadium for their New York franchise. Brotherhood Park was built with only a ten foot alley separating the two ballparks.
The 1890 season ruined Day financially, but the Players League wasn't able to make it to a second season. Edward B. Talcott had signed a ten year lease when he built the ballpark for the PL squad, and as the NL Giants absorbed the PL assets it was Talcott's people who gained front office control. Day would eventually sell his majority share to Cornelius Van Cott.
After outlasting two territorial competitors, the 1883 NL expansion Giants and Phillies were joined in the 1890 merger by the aforementioned old as dirt Cubs and Braves franchises. They teamed up with the Association franchises today known as the Dodgers, Cardinals, Pirates, and Reds to form the Original Eight of the National League.
There were still untapped markets out there, so in 1901 the American League formed with teams in Detroit, Cleveland, Washington DC, and Baltimore as well as four teams in NL markets. The league was a growth out of the Western League, of which the Detroit Tigers were a founding member in 1894 (the only surviving franchise from that charter). However, Baltimore was new for the 1901 launch. They didn't do well.
After two seasons, the teams was bought, the roster was raided, ultimately having to be contracted by the league. A New York ownership group bought the franchise for $18,000 and did a rush job building a stadium on a hilltop in the Bronx up the road from the Giants. Swampland had to be reclaimed, and clubhouses hadn't been build yet, but the New York Hilltoppers had built a competing professional baseball ground in Manhattan not far from Coogan's Bluff.
Hilltop Park didn't last a decade. When the Giants, now owned by John T. Brush, had to rebuild the Polo Grounds after a fire in 1911, the now New York Yankees moved into the brand new stadium with them as tenants. In 1919 the Boston Red Sox (who took their name from the National League franchise which was now going by Boston Braves) needed cash in a hurry, and sold their star Babe Ruth to the Yankees who had not won a pennant up to that point.
Ruth changed everything. He broke the home run record three years in a row, and in 1921 he brought the Yankees their first pennant. That year and the next they would meet their landlords the Giants in the World Series and lose each time. However, the fame of Babe Ruth and the winning ways gave them enough capital to build the most famous stadium in baseball. In 1923, the house that Ruth built, Yankee Stadium would open.
From a team kicked out after running out of money, to a barnstorming franchise smart enough to try playing baseball in Manhattan, to trying to please two different leagues at the same time, to building on a poor site, to the most famous trade in baseball, to finally opening up Yankee Stadium in 1923.
The Yankees eventually became so good they chased the Giants and Dodgers out. Though the Braves, St. Louis Browns (now Baltimore Orioles), Senators (now Minnesota Twins) and Athletics had already started the movement train going, at the start of the 50s, New York franchises were once again changing baseball forever. Major League Baseball's first ever expansion took place after the Dodgers and Giants left, with an eye to balancing out the Los Angeles market (Angels) and replacing the NL hole in New York.
When it came time to name the new NL franchise, they chose a name from New York's baseball past. The Metropolitan Baseball Club was back. Of course, the chain of events those owners started in 1880 never really stopped.
Sources:
http://sabr.org/bioproj/park/8a2a9a1f
http://www.projectballpark.org/history/nl/polo2.html
http://flipflopflyin.com/flipflopflyball/info300-majorleaguehistory.png
http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/c281a493
http://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/july-24-1860-first-enclosed-ballpark
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