The First Philadelphia Athletics Base Ball Team

William J.Kovatch, Jr.

            The first Philadelphia Athletics baseball club, according to star second baseman Alfred J. Reach, had its roots in music.  A group of music lovers, calling themselves the Handel and Haydn Music Society met regularly along Philadelphia’s Spring Garden Street.  In addition to their penchant for singing, the members also had a joy for playing ball.

            In a meeting held in 1859, over which a coal merchant named John J. Heisler presided, the Philadelphia Athletic Ball Club was created.  Heisler became the club’s first treasurer and second baseman.  William Ernst was elected president.

            When the club was formed, the popular ball game in the Philadelphia area was called town ball.  The game involved a bowler lobbing a ball to a batsman or striker, who tried to hit the ball, and run around a set of bases.  The rules, however, were much looser than the game we know today as baseball.   A player could be thrown out by literally having the ball thrown at them.

            A new game, however, had become popular in the New York and Brooklyn region, and was spreading.  Like town ball, the game involved a player trying to hit a ball with a bat.  But the rules, having been developed by Alexander Cartwright and a team calling themselves the Brooklyn Knickerbockers, were more formalized.  It was a game they called base ball.

            As the game’s popularity grew in New York, the clubs that were created to play the game formed an organization, called the National Association of Base Ball Players, to help organize matches, devise a championship system, and act as the steward of the rules.  In the Fall of 1859, for the first time, a team from Philadelphia attended the annual meeting of the association.  That team, which had changed its name to reflect its commitment to the new sport, was the Athletic Base Ball Club of Philadelphia.

            In the early 1860s, baseball was new to Philadelphia.  Teams that had long been established in the city to play town ball, such the Olympic Ball Club, which dated back to 1831, and the Philadelphia Keystones, switched to base ball.  The clubs from the Delaware Valley region mostly played each other.  Although on occasion, teams from Brooklyn and New York would make a trip down to Philadelphia to play the Philadelphia clubs in exhibition matches.  In those early years, when the New York teams came to visit, it became clear that the Philadelphia clubs still had much to learn about playing the game, as the New York teams had a tendency to win and by wide margins.

            Within the City of Brotherly Love, tense rivalries developed, particularly between the Athletics and the Olympics.  In 1861, the Olympics defeated the Athletics for the City Championship.  But 1862 saw the Athletics improve, and take the City Championship from the Olympics.  At times, it was known for brawls to erupt at matches between the two rival clubs.

            Meanwhile, a desire to improve and field the best team possible drove some clubs to begin paying men to play for their teams in secret.  The National Association had been founded on the principal the base ball would remain a gentlemen’s game, and that no player would be paid for their services on the field.  The Brooklyn Excelsiors, however, were rumored to have created a paid position in the administration of their team, where it was understood that the man hired would have no real duties, other than to play ball.  The first man believed to have been paid to play base ball was Jim Creighton, a pitcher for the Excelsiors.  It is also believed that the Excelsiors placed George Flanley, and brothers Asa and Henry Brainard on salary in the 1860 season.

            The desire to hire quality base ball players soon spread to Philadelphia.  The Athletics lured second baseman Alfred Reach from the Brooklyn Eckfords in 1865 with a salary, paid in secret, of $25 per week.  Reach was considered an innovator of his position, choosing to play off the bag and in shallow right field between first and second base when on defense. But the National Association still frowned upon professionalism.  In 1866, the association investigated the Athletics for paying players, including Reach and outfielder Lipman Emanuel “Lip” Pike for playing base ball.  Ultimately, the association took no action against either the club or the players.

            During the 1860s, the Athletics featured a number of talented amateur players.  Among their ranks were Nate Berkenstock, one of the founding members of the club.  Berkenstock played first base and outfield and was noted for his defensive prowess.  Another prominent player was John Dickson “Dick” McBride.  McBride was a noted cricket player, but switched to base ball, playing pitcher and shortstop for the Athletics.  McBride soon showed his talent for pitching, and was given credit for throwing an effective rise ball.

            By 1866, the Athletics became competitive with the New York area teams.  The National Association had developed a system to crown an annual national champion.  However, that system involved being invited to play a series of games over the season against the prior’s year’s champion.  The teams would play the same number of games at each other’s home field, and if necessary, a final game at a neutral location.  In 1866, the Athletics played a series with the prior year’s champion, the Brooklyn Atlantics.  The Philadelphia Bulletin and Harper’s Weekly both chronical one game on October 22, 1866 where the Athletics beat the Atlantics by a score of 31-12.  But the series was tied at two games apiece, and the Atlantics refused to play a fifth game, claiming injuries.  As a result, the Athletics were denied of their shot to win the championship from the Atlantics.  Although the 1867 and 1868 Athletics were viewed by many as fielding the best team in base ball, they were not given the privilege of being invited to play for the national championship.

            Around this time, the National Association recognized that base ball had become more of a profession.  In response, the association permitted teams to declare themselves professional.  The first team to do so was the Cincinnati Red Stockings, organized in 1869 by Harry Wright. The Athletics soon followed suit.

            In 1871, a group of professional teams banded together to address the inequities of the National Association of Base Ball Players.  Athletics President, James N. Kearn, a U.S. marshal, became the president a new organization, called the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players.  The new organization devised a system, open to all member clubs, to compete over the course of the season for a true national champion.

            The system involved each club scheduling a series of up to five games against every other club in the association.  Two games were to be played at each of the club’s home fields, and one game at a neutral location.  If one of the teams won three games, then there was no need to finish the series.  By the end of the season, the team with the most wins would win the right to fly a flag, a pennant, at their home field for the next season. That team would be the national champion.

            For the first time in its history, the Athletics were on equal footing as other teams in its quest to be crowned the champion.  The team took full advantage of that opportunity, and found themselves tied with the Boston Red Stockings with twenty wins apiece near the end of October.  The Athletics, however, had one more game to play.  They had split their series with the Chicago White Stockings at two games apiece.  By the end of October, Chicago itself had amassed nineteen wins on the season.  The teams met for the final game of the series on October 30, 1871 in Brooklyn.

            But the Athletics were decimated by injuries.  Reach, among others, was unable to play.  The team pressed into action Nate Berkenstock, who had played for the Athletics in an amateur capacity, to fill a void in the outfield.  Berkenstock’s superior defensive play helped pitcher Dick McBride keep the White Stockings to one run, as the Athletics won 4-1, capturing the first pennant from a fully professional league.  It was Berkenstock’s only professional game, and he is credited as being the earliest born professional base ball player.

            The Athletics had winning seasons from 1872 through 1875.  During those first five seasons as a professional team, Dick McBride won 149 games, and lost 74.  The Athletics added offensive power Cap Anson to their ranks in 1872, a steady defensive third baseman, Ezra Sutton, in 1873, and Candy Cummings, who was credited with inventing the curve ball, in 1874.  But the league was dominated by Harry Wright’s Boston Red Stockings, who won the pennant in each season after 1871.  Wright wanted to introduce his native country of England to baseball, and invited the second place Athletics to join his Red Stockings to tour the country for three weeks in 1874.  During that time, Cap Anson and Red Stockings pitcher Al Spalding, who knew each other from playing for the Rockford Forest Citys in 1871, developed a friendship that would last for decades and eventually lure Anson away from Philadelphia.

            In 1875, Chicago White Stockings President William Hubert flouted National Association rules, and began recruiting players from the Red Stockings and Athletics to play for Chicago in 1876.  After signing Al Spalding, Spalding convinced Hubert to target his friend, Cap Anson. Hubert reached an agreement with Anson and Ezra Sutton to play for the White Stockings in 1876.  Because this move was illegal under National Association rules, Hubert began pushing for the creation of a new league for 1876.

            The National Association certainly had its problems.  The league fell under the dominance of one team, the Boston Red Stockings.  Investors argued that the teams were more interested in winning a championship than endearing themselves to the public and creating a market for this new form of entertainment.  The National Association did not guarantee exclusivity of territory, which meant that three professional teams, the Athletics, the White Stockings and the Centennials, played in Philadelphia in 1875.  Moreover, rumors of the influence of gamblers doomed the National Association.

            After the 1875 season, the Saint Louis Brown Stockings, the New York Mutuals, the Hartford Dark Blues, the Boston Red Stockings and the Athletics of the National Association along with the Cincinnati Reds and the Louisville Grays, joined the White Stockings to form the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs.  The National League gave each of their teams exclusive territorial rights to their respective cities.

            Anson, motivated by his fiancee’s desire that he not leave Philadelphia, attempted to get out of his contract with the White Stockings, even offering a payment of $1,000.  Hubert refused, and Anson married his fiancée in the off-season before moving to Chicago.  Sutton, who had been promised a higher salary by the Athletics, stayed with Philadelphia for the inaugural season.

            In Philadelphia on April 22, 1876, the Athletics played the first game in National League history against the Boston Red Caps.  George Hall, a power hitter who had joined the Athletics in 1875, had two hits.  Sutton committed two errors on the game, the first of which led to Boston’s first run.  Boston defeated the Athletics 6 to 5.

            George Hall was the highlight of what otherwise was a dismal first season for the Athletics, leading the league with a .366 batting average, 51 runs and 5 home runs.  Hall became the first National League player to hit two home runs in one game when the athletics defeated Cincinnati on June 17, 1876. 

            By the end of the season, with the Athletics failing to draw fans because they were out of the hunt for the pennant, the team could not afford to make a road trip out west.  The New York Mutuals had also refused to make a road trip.  The league expelled both the Athletics and the Mutuals at the end of the season.  Out of money, and without a league to play in, the Athletics folded.

            In the span of less than a decade, the Athletics went from being the new kids on the block, to being the preeminent base ball team in Philadelphia.  The club broke the dominance of the New York area teams in the mid to late 1860s.  Then, after winning the first pennant in a fully professional league, the Athletics continued to field competitive teams for the life of the National Association.  But dismal play, and equally dismal box office receipts, doomed the Athletics in the inaugural season of the National League.  Nonetheless, the Athletics had become so synonymous with base ball in Philadelphia, that the name was used for Philadelphia’s entry first in the American Assocation in 1882, and then in the American League in 1901.

 

References

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