Apostles of baseball
Baseball at the feet of the Sphinx? Chicago White Stockings circled the globe in a tour with the All-Americans.
On Feb. 9, 1889, the Chicago White Stockings played the All-America team on a diamond scratched into the sand at the feet of the Sphinx. The only spectators were Bedouin villagers and a few foreigners touring Egypt.
“Though only five innings were played on account of the lateness of the hour the game was hotly contested, each team being anxious to place a game unique in the annals of base-ball among its list of victories,” John Montgomery Ward wrote.
Ward, shortstop and captain for the All-America team, sent reports over cable to the Tribune of what had to be the longest road trip in baseball history.
From October 1888 to April 1889, the two teams toured the United States, Australia, Southeast Asia, the Middle East and Europe, traveling by train, ocean liner — and pack animals. Camels and donkeys bought them from a Cairo hotel to the game in Egypt that Chicago’s players lost 10 to 6.
“Riding on a rail must be a soft seat compared to being sawed in two on a camel’s back,” Ward observed in his Tribune correspondence.
The sand made the game challenging. Adrian C. “Cap” Anson, Chicago’s player-manager, lost his balance in the sand while leading off first base and was tagged out as he crawled back.
The World Tour of Baseball, as it was ballyhooed, was the brainchild of A.G. Spalding, president of the White Stockings, the team that would become the Chicago Cubs. A pitcher of note himself, Spalding owned a sporting goods company famed for developing the official baseball of the National League.
If more countries played baseball, Spalding reasoned, he’d sell more gloves, bats and balls. So he made his team missionaries of America’s national pastime. Its opponents were culled from the rosters of other National League teams.
To kick off their tour, the players paraded through the streets of Chicago, led by a brass band, following a farewell game on Oct. 20, 1888, at Chicago’s West Side Park. Spalding pitched a winning game that 1,500 fans might have savored if not for the weather. “A north wind swept over the grounds and drove most of the spectators to the bleaching boards on the north side of the grounds,” the Tribune reported.
Cognizant of winter’s approach in the Northern Hemisphere, Spalding scheduled baseball’s apostles to play games before the close of November in the Heartland and out West as they made their way toward the equator. They stopped in Hawaii but didn’t tarry there; they had to scratch two games because of local blue laws, which prohibited baseball on Sunday.
“I never knew before there was so much water and so little land,” Ward observed after their nearly monthlong voyage to Sydney, Australia. As they sailed into the harbor, the scene “brought first joy and then tears,” he wrote in a Dec. 16, 1888, dispatch that the Tribune published in late January 1889.
“The Stars and Stripes were everywhere interwoven with the English ‘jack,’ ” he wrote.
A baseball game played on Sydney’s cricket grounds got mixed reviews. Spectators didn’t like the advantage in baseball that a pitcher has over the batter.
“Still they were apparently much pleased, especially by the outfielding and quick return of the ball, by the base running and sliding, and especially when a runner was caught between bases,” Ward reported.
Moving on to Melbourne, the Americans drew thousands of spectators to two games. In a light moment, at the behest of a bet, a few of the players competed to see who could throw a cricket ball the farthest. Edward Crane, a pitcher for the All-America team, won with a throw of just over 128 yards, apparently breaking a record.
Spalding left Melbourne pleased with having made $15,000, as there were slimmer prospects of profits ahead in Sri Lanka.
After Sri Lanka and the game in Egypt, they proceeded to Italy. On their train ride to Naples, an outfielder for the White Stockings pulled a childish stunt. “A few miles out (Martin) Sullivan jokingly took away the guard’s trumpet, by sounding of which he signals the engineer when to start, and when we reached the station at Naples there was a platoon of policemen and a small division of the King’s army waiting to receive us,” Ward wrote in a dispatch dated Feb. 20.
The game similarly resembled slapstick comedy. The Chicagoans were losing 8 to 2 and eager to get it over. “And when, in the last half of the fifth, a foul struck a bystander in the face they took advantage of the excitement to draw the crowd upon the grounds, while (Cap) Anson was seen to pick up the home-plate and walk off the field.”
In the argument that followed, the All-Americans insisted they’d won, and “thus escaped the substitution of an empty honor — a forfeited game — for a wellearned victory.”
In Rome, Spalding was dismayed at being denied use of the Colosseum. But Ward gushed over the scene in the gardens of the Villa Borghese, where Chicago won 3to2.
“Never before in all my experience on the diamond have I seen as many distinguished persons among a crowd of baseball spectators as were in attendance here this afternoon,” he wrote. “The nobility was out in all its glory.”
In Paris, Crane, the cricket ball-throwing champion, pitched a two-hitter that beat the White Stockings 6 to 2 in front of 500 spectators. The French decided that baseball had descended from “Jehque,” an old Norman sport.
When the teams played in London, a new correspondent reported the White Stockings’ loss on March 13, though the Chicagoans defeated the All-Americans at two other games in the capital city. Ward appended a note that he was returning to the U.S. to check on a players union dispute.
The tour bounced around England, Scotland and Ireland. The teams boarded a steamship in late March to New York, and upon their arrival, crowds welcomed them as conquering heroes, with a brass band playing “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.”
During a civic banquet at the posh Delmonico’s restaurant, literary giant Mark Twain offered a toast: “I drink long life to the boys who plowed a new equator around the globe, stealing bases on their bellies.”
They were briefly received at the White House by President Benjamin Harrison. At a game in Washington, D.C., Chicago triumphed 18 to 6.
From there, the White Stockings played the All-Americans at various stops en route to Chicago, where a banquet at the Palmer House awaited them. Was their trip a success? Spalding quipped he’d lost $8 in Monaco. And the White Stockings were bested by the All-America team in 28 of 50 games, with three additional games ending in ties.
Chicagoans made their feelings known. They fought to get into the train station when the White Stockings arrived and scrambled to get out when Spalding’s entourage departed in 11 carriages, each drawn by four horses. Fireworks flashed as the players traveled past torch-carrying fans and Scottish pipers. Street toughs rubbed shoulders with smartly dressed men and women. Police officers desperately tried to control the crowd. A Tribune reporter observed:
“The ball-players bore themselves with the dignity becoming men who had shown the nobility of the effete monarchies that they could take the flies off anything, especially a bat.”