The World Series Trophy
Baseball in 25 Objects: Twenty-third in this year’s series
It’s October. The World Series looms. A season-ending trophy will be awarded to the champions, as has been the case since 1967, but the story of this prize is a circuitous one. It begins not with the current Commissioner’s Trophy, designed by Tiffany for the 2000 World Series, or even its predecessor, designed by the L.G. Balfour Company in 1967. The game’s first championship trophy goes back, back, back — as my interests often do — to baseball in the 19th century.
Tiffany redesigned not only the Commissioner’s Trophy but also those for the pennant winners: the William Harridge trophy for the American League and the Warren Giles trophy for the National. All three are airier — have a more modern feel — than their clunky predecessors. For this year’s World Series victors, gold-plated pennants on silver posts rise to two feet in height from a solid silver base, 11 inches in diameter; a silver baseball with 24-karat vermeil stitching is at the center.
Before 1967, neither the Commissioner nor the league presidents had awarded much of anything to the winning club beyond gate receipts, with the players sharing in those from the first four games (or, in the best-of-nine years, five) games, and a minimal sum for purchase of a stadium pennant. From the primal minutes of the National League, adopted February 2, 1876:
The emblem of the championship shall be a pennant (of the national colors), to cost not less than one hundred dollars ($100). It shall be inscribed with the motto, Champion Base Ball Club of the United States, with the name of the club and the year in which the title was won; and the champion club shall be entitled to fly the pennant until the close of the ensuing season.
The first such flag and “whip pennant” had been awarded to the Athletics of Philadelphia, champions of the first professional league, the National Association of 1871. Harry Wright proposed, in a note to Alex Davidson of the New York Mutuals:
My idea is this, a flag from 25 to 30 feet long by 12 to 15 feet wide, white ground, red or blue letters, with blue or red border, this shape: [here Wright’s sketched flag reads “Champion 1872,” with crossed bats to the left].
The Athletics elected to exhibit their championship flag in a Philadelphia saloon, drawing Wright’s rebuke. Later on, the leagues furnished the pennants rather than leave the design and display venue to the clubs.
Rings went to the winning players beginning in 1922; before then, championship pins and pendants and watch fobs had been handed out by the clubs or their backers, going all the way back to the first postseason series in 1884. But let’s get back to the trophies, not counting those commissioned by the teams themselves.
The first of these, lost long ago, was the spectacular Police Gazette Trophy for the National League champions of 1883. (The winners in the American Association would not get their own trophy until 1886, with a cup for the championship series between the league victors debuting in 1887; more about these below.) Recall that in 1883 the NL, only seven years old, had been on the verge of bankruptcy while shuttling franchises among such secondary cities as Hartford, Albany, Troy, Worcester, and Syracuse. In this year, however, the league added New York and Philadelphia in place of Troy and Worcester.
When Richard K. Fox had purchased The National Police Gazette in 1877, that publication had been a racy (“flash”) weekly since its founding in 1845. Fox built upon its established appeal by adding manly sports coverage and, in 1881, offering a belt to champion racewalkers and pugilists. No better advertising or self-promotion might have been imagined.
For 1883, as professional baseball seemed at last to have gained its footing as a national business as well as a sport, Fox offered “a base ball championship pennant valued at $500 and gold medals to the players making the best averages in pitching, catching, and for the most runs made.” (Cleveland Leader, March 24, 1883).
A month later, he added a trophy, of which no image survives. It was said to consist of
a pedestal about three feet high, on the top of which is a square, solid plate of silver [one inch high, with each side bearing the head of a fox … get it?] representing a baseball park, in the center of which is laid out the diamond, and a representation of a baseball match in full progress, with a dozen solid gold miniature players, all in their respective positions, representing the pitcher, catcher, batsman, umpire, 1d, 2d, and 3d basemen, left, centre, and right fielders, and a player running from 1st to 2d base. In the background the form of a flagstaff is a gold pole about one-half inch in diameter and from two to two and a half feet high. On the top of which is a solid gold ball, almost an inch and a half in diameter, from which gold cords are strung to either end of another gold cross-bar, which support the championship pennant.
The background of the pennant is light blue silk, with the following inscription worked in with gold thread wire: “Police Gazette Trophy, representing the regular League association baseball championship of America. Presented by R.K. Fox, proprietor and editor of the Police Gazette, 1883.”
More description follows, copiously, in the Daily Republican of Wilmington, Delaware of May 5, 1883 (ruby-colored velvet, slate-colored satin, etc.), with the concluding observation that, “The trophy is now on exhibition in the private office of Mr. Richard K. Fox, but will shortly be placed in one of the prominent store windows on Broadway.” I share this in such detail because the particulars, if not the very existence, of this championship trophy for baseball had been unknown.
No further mention of the Police Gazette Trophy and player medals is to be found, at least by me, except in a November advertisement for one of Fox’s other publications, the obscure and barely extant Fox’s Illustrated Week’s Doings, in which mention is made of the award to the Boston club, NL champions of 1883.
In 1886 Erastus Wiman commissioned a trophy for the American Association, in which his team, the New York Metropolitans, had been champions two years earlier. Bob Schaefer treats Wiman and his trophy with depth and breadth here: https://bit.ly/3F6JVUC.
Once thought to be lost, the Wiman Trophy may be viewed today in the trophy room of the Chicago White Sox at Comiskey Park II. When the American Association dissolved after the 1891 season, the St. Louis Browns, four-time pennant winners, were absorbed into the National League and owner Chris Von Der Ahe possessed the trophy. He willed the trophy to Browns manager and first baseman Charles Comiskey, who had gone on to own the Chicago White Sox when they joined the American League in 1900. This explains its current location.
Wiman commissioned the Gorham Silver Manufacturing Company to create the trophy. We do not know who created the Police Gazette Trophy but Tiffany was not yet a player in the baseball sphere. The Gale Jewelry Company had created pins worn by the Boston players in 1871, and perhaps the New York Clipper medals of some years before.
In 1887 the actress Hélène Dauvray (born Ida Louise Gibson), having returned from France where she burnished her acting skills, became enamored of baseball, in particular New York Giants shortstop John Montgomery Ward, whom she would marry, rather tempestuously. Her sister Clara, a wealthy widow who may have funded her Parisian lark, married Giants pitcher Tim Keefe; both marriages ended in divorce.
Miss Dauvray commissioned the Gorham Company to create a solid silver cup for the world champion club of 1887 — i.e, the winner of that year’s postseason series — and gold badges for the players. In this way she would promote herself in the manner prescribed by Fox and Wiman. Unlike the Police Gazette trophy but in the manner of Wiman’s, the winning club would take possession of the cup for the following year, then yield it to the next season’s victors. Permanent possession would be earned with three championships.
I have written at length about Hélène Dauvray and her cup, commencing here: https://bit.ly/3W2NCRc. Suffice it to say for now that after the 1893 campaign, Boston won the championship for a third time — despite there no longer being two leagues to compete for the prize. Thus claimed for all time, it was nonetheless lost. On June 19, 1894, Sporting Life noted: “The Temple cup is now on exhibition in a Fifth avenue store. It is certainly a massive trophy. It is to be hoped that it will not be lugged around as carelessly as the Dauvray cup. By the way, what has become of the latter?”
Next we come to The Hall Cup, currently on exhibit at the Baseball Hall of Fame. Around this trophy mystery circles, too. It was created in 1888 to imitate the success of Helen Dauvray’s initiative of the year before. A contemporary news account states that “it is offered by a New York man and becomes the property of the club winning the world series.” The Giants won that series against the Browns, so that will explain its survival, but who was this New York man named Hall? Not even the Hall of Fame appears to know.
It was donated by cigarette manufacturer Thomas Henry Hall, today celebrated among advanced collectors for his “Actors and Actresses” set (N342), issued to promote “Between the Acts & Bravo” brand cigarettes in 1879-1880. These were the first American cards to be inserted into cigarette packages. There are five types of cards in the series, differentiated by variations in the oval frame surrounding the card subject.
This ungainly urn was presented to the New York Giants on the evening of October 26, 1888 along with the Dauvray Cup, for they had clinched their World Series win over the Browns the day before. A handful of diehard St. Louis fans were treated to meaningless Games 9 and 10, but Giants shortstop John Ward went home after the decisive Game 8.
The supposition had been — and I had written as much — that the Hall Cup was intended for the NL champion, but no: its point of differentiation with the Dauvray Cup was that the World Series winner in 1888 got to keep the Hall Cup forevermore. In succeeding years there would be no Hall Cup, as its donor sank into dementia; his wife and children assumed his business interests.
In 1890 the players broke ranks with the owners to form their own league. After that year the National League owners succeeded in breaking the Players’ League and the American Association, too. An ungainly NL of 12 teams followed for the rest of the decade as attendance plummeted.
Pittsburgh’s president William Chase Temple suggested a championship series between the first- and second-place teams, and donated a prize. In 1894 the Temple Cup Series began; it lasted just four years. The players, who weren’t getting much money for competing, didn’t care for it. Neither did the fans: where 22,000 of them had attended a Temple Cup game in its first year, only 700 showed up for the dismal conclusion four years later.
Temple withdrew his cup after rumors emerged that the players were conspiring to extend the 1897 series to enhance their receipts. The NL limped along as a 12-team league in 1898–1899, then lopped off four clubs for 1900, prompting Ban Johnson to scoop up the discarded cities and players, rename his Western League as the American League, and do battle with the now truncated NL.
The National League paid little attention, instead creating another postseason series between its first- and second-place finishers. Because the latter were the Pittsburgh Pirates, no longer owned by Temple, the local paper, the Chronicle-Telegraph, sponsored the series and awarded a cup … to Brooklyn, as it turned out, which had finished the regular season on top anyhow.
The newspaper is long gone, and so is that series, not renewed for 1901–1902 despite the Pirates’ pennants. But the cup survives, on display in Cooperstown. And so does the American League, to this day a contestant for the World Series trophy, which in all its incarnations has testified to the need for competition.
