A Pictorial Chronology of Baseball in the 19th Century: Part 5, 1876

The birth of the National League and with it Major League Baseball

The creation of the National League in 1876 was all about Chicago, who captured the flag in 1876 and thus became champions for 1877, in the terminology of the day; they would go on to finish fifth.

By the end of the National Association’s fifth season of play, its weaknesses had become evident: gambling, “hippodroming,” drunkenness, noncompetitive franchises, and a perceived bias against the western clubs. William Hulbert devised a plan ostensibly to cure those ills while providing cover for his having illegally lured stars from Boston to his Chicago White Stockings. After the 1875 season concluded, Al Spalding, one of Hulbert’s new recruits, said: “It is the intention of the larger clubs to make some rules about contesting for the championship, so that clubs that have no earthly chance to win will not be allowed to play with first-rate clubs…. The leading clubs are going to do something for their own protection, and thereby root out the small fry.”

Hulbert’s brilliant mix of propaganda, obfuscation, and bought-off news sources would supply his cohort Spalding with a lifelong lesson in bluff, bluster, and bravado. On February 2, 1876 representatives of eight former NA clubs met in New York to draw up a constitution for the proposed National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs. And yet, the birth of Major League Baseball, as we now date it, did not take place all on one day; it had commenced earlier, with considerable stealth. A flummoxed Henry Chadwick termed this revolutionary idea — which is the very genesis of all of today’s professional sports leagues — a “coup d’état,” and he was right.

Unsurprisingly, Hulbert’s Chicago lads broke Boston’s stranglehold on the championship, going 52–14 while scoring more than twice as many runs as they allowed. At season’s end, however, the New York Mutuals and Philadelphia Athletics, echoing a ruinous practice of the prior league, declined to play out their scheduled games out west. Hulbert felt he had no choice but to expel them, and thus the NL was left without a presence in the nation’s two largest cities for the next six years.

The Images:

The Grand Central Hotel at Broadway and West 3rd Street in New York City was where the NL was formed on February 2, 1876.

As Secretary Pro Tem — Nick Young would be named NL Secretary only later — Harry Wright took notes during the meeting of February 2.

Signature page of February 2 meeting. Note that each of the four eastern clubs was represented in person, while the four western clubs permitted Hulbert and Charles A. Fowle of Louisville to cast their proxies. Morgan Bulkeley of Hartford was named president because Hulbert wished to balance power in the new league, formed by those in the West over the previous months, with a figurehead from the East.

NL Constitution and Playing Rules, published by Al Reach’s sporting goods firm. He and Al Spalding would go separate ways for awhile after the Athletics were expelled from the NL in 1876, only to return as the leading franchise in a new circuit, the American Association, in 1882.

Spalding commenced a sporting-goods operation of his own for 1876, but his “new league ball,” advertised in 1876, did not become the official NL ball until the following year.

Boston’s odds against Chicago were deemed long in the Boston Globe of June 3, 1876. Note that Spalding, like all the Chicago players that year, wore a fez-like cap with a different color denoting each position in the field. This last-named innovation, supplied from the shelves of his sporting-goods house, made the players look from the grandstand like “a Dutch bed of tulips,” the Chicago Daily Tribune noted.

The White Stockings were led by the former Big Four of Boston — Spalding, Barnes, McVey, and White — plus a player purloined from the Athletics, Adrian Anson, soon to become the team’s captain and thus “Cap.”

Ross Barnes won the NL’s first batting championship with an average of .403 (in that lone season walks were counted as at bats); when computed by today’s standard, he batted .429.

A scorecard from a Boston-Chicago game of 1876 notes the colors of the White Stockings’ caps.

1876 Boston Base Ball Association season ticket, unpunched. Champs the previous four seasons, Boston finished in mid-pack, stripped of its stars by Chicago and losing George Wright to injury early on.

1876 Washburn & Moen Barb Fence Armor trade card featuring the Boston South End Grounds, rebuilt twice but home to the Boston NA and NL clubs on the same site from 1871 to 1914.

Hartford and St. Louis finished behind Chicago in the standings, ahead of Boston. The former was led by pitchers Candy Cummings (top right) and Tommy Bond (top left).

Starring for St. Louis was pitcher George “Grin” Bradley, who started every one of the team’s 64 games, completing all but one while going 45–19 with an amazing 16 shutouts.

Finishing fifth behind Boston was the Louisvilles, a weak-hitting club led by pitcher Jim Devlin, top center. In November 1876 he told a Chicago Tribune reporter he had not been paid his salary for two months: “I wanted to get home [Philadelphia] to see the show [the Centennial Exhibition], but I can’t walk fast enough to get there now, and see no other way to go.” Though Devlin begged the league office for his release so he could accept an offer from St. Louis, he found himself in Louisville again for a second campaign. In 1877 he would be expelled for taking bribes from gamblers.

Of further interest:

History Awakens: February 2, 1876 and the Founding of the National League

History Awakens: February 2, 1876 and the Founding of the National League, Part 2

Constitution and Playing Rules of the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs

At Home with Al Spalding

History Awakens: A Postscript