A baseball history lesson dating back to 1890

Last week, in the midst of all the other turmoil, a basketball player suggested that he and his colleagues should henceforth ignore the NBA and simply form their own league. The idea didn’t seem to gain much traction.

It wasn’t a new idea. A baseball player named John Montgomery Ward made a similar suggestion 130 years ago and was met with overwhelming support. Most of the leading players of the day joined him in the creation of the Players League.

In 1890, Ward was the finest shortstop in the game and a key reason why his team, the New York Giants, had won the National League pennant in 1889 and then defeated the American Association champion Brooklyn Bridegrooms in a best-of-nine postseason series. He hadn’t always been a shortstop. Back in 1880 he’d even pitched a perfect game as a member of the Providence Grays.

But he had always been brainy. He had been admitted to Penn State at the tender age of 13 and subsequently expelled for stealing chickens. After he joined the Giants in 1883, he again pursued a college education, attending Columbia at night and during the offseason. He emerged with a law degree and quickly became

a legal thorn in the side to baseball’s owners.

At the time most of America’s largest cities were dominated by shady political machines. Baseball’s owners had discovered that as long as they kept the politicians happy they could get away with almost anything else. They badly mistreated the players, most of whom were under-educated farm boys.

The owners gleefully established the reserve clause — forcing every player to negotiate with only one club. They bought and sold players like cattle.

Ward felt these practices were unacceptable and organized the players into a “Brotherhood.” He didn’t want to use the word “union” in 1890, but that’s what the Brotherhood was.

At first the Brotherhood tried to challenge the owners in court, but discovered this to be a costly, drawnout process with uncertain results. The owners, uninhibited, increased their repressive tactics.

Ward then hatched his idea of a new league and found plenty of cooperation from players on other clubs.

They sought to create a league of their own — one

in which players would share in the gate receipts. They found sufficient financial backing to place teams in seven of the eight National League cities. They rounded out their circuit by putting their eighth team in Buffalo.

They didn’t target the other major league — the American Association — as they did the National League, probably because the NL was seen as the superior league. NL owners liked to sneer that the AA was the “two-bit league” since admission to AA games cost 25 cents. NL clubs charged their patrons twice that amount.

In fact, before the 1890 season the NL had invited the AA champion Bridegrooms to join the NL and the Brooklyn team had eagerly made the switch. The AA had then admitted a new Brooklyn team called the Gladiators. That gave Brooklyn three major league teams that year, including the Ward-Wonders, the PL team managed by Ward, himself.

It should be noted that Brooklyn, in 1890, was a separate city and not a borough of New York, as it was to become.

Brooklyn wasn’t the only city to field three teams. Philadelphia also had representatives in all three leagues and to add to the

confusion, the PL team called itself the Athletics, which was the name already being used by the AA club. The new Athletics signed a few players from the established Athletics, but mostly raided the NL Phillies and the AA Baltimore Orioles. The Orioles were sufficiently damaged by the raids that they initially declined to field a team in 1890.

All three Philadelphia teams managed to complete their seasons but that wasn’t the case in Brooklyn. The Bridegrooms were the class of the depleted NL and the Ward Wonders were contenders in the PL. The hastily organized Gladiators, however, were non-competitive and unable to draw customers. In late August, after compiling a 26-73 record they ceased operations. The AA quickly re-constituted the Orioles and arranged for them to play out the remainder of Brooklyn’s schedule.

New York had only two teams. but they played in each other’s back yards. Literally.

The NL’s Giants played their home games in a stadium in upper Manhattan called Polo Grounds III. The PL club, which also called itself the Giants, played in Polo Grounds IV. The two ball parks were separated only by an alley that was barely wide enough for a

single horse-drawn wagon.

On one August afternoon Giants outfielder Mike Tiernan ended a game with a walk-off homer that landed in the outfield of Polo Grounds IV, where the PL Giants were playing the Chicago Pirates. Fans in both ballparks stood and cheered Tiernan as he rounded the bases.

It wasn’t unusual that both teams would be playing home games at the same time. The PL schedule had been announced in March, after which the NL had revised its schedule to create as many conflicting dates as possible. They reasoned that there wouldn’t be enough paying customers to keep two teams afloat in every city and they were right.

There are no reliable attendance figures available (both leagues reported grossly exaggerated figures) but it’s clear few, if any, teams turned a profit in 1890. Since the PL owners were obligated to share gate receipts with the players, their ledgers were covered with red ink. Most of them did not want to play a second season. It soon became clear that the Players League had been an artistic success but a financial failure.

The Bridegrooms won the NL pennant and then faced the AA champion Louisville

Colonels in seven-game postseason series in late October. Each club won three games and one was tied before the series was abandoned.

The PL champion Boston Reds, anchored by future Hall of Famers Old Hoss Radbourn and Dan Brouthers, thought they were stronger than either of those clubs but were given no chance to prove it. None, that is, in 1890. The following year, after all the other PL franchises had gone out of business, the Reds joined the AA, and proceeded to win that league’s 1891 pennant. The Boston Beaneaters won the NL pennant but refused to play their neighbors in the postseason.

The Reds had to be satisfied with the distinction of having won consecutive pennants in different leagues, just as the Bridegrooms had done the year before. No other baseball teams have ever accomplished that feat.

The Players League left its impact on history. Two of its most enthusiastic participants were Chicago Pirates player-manager Charles Comiskey and Buffalo Bisons catcher Connie Mack.

Eleven years later both men played prominent roles in creating the American League which, like the Players League, lured talent away from established clubs. Comiskey and Mack both argued in 1901 that the players deserved better treatment than they were afforded in the National League. It was similar to the arguments that had been made to them in 1890.

Both subsequently became owners and quickly changed their tune.

Comiskey headed the Chicago White Sox and soon became infamous for mistreating players. He even charged them for laundering their uniforms and extracted that fee from every man’s paycheck.

Mack, along with Ben Shibe, formed the Philadelphia Athletics in the AL. He was too decent a man to do the things Comiskey did, but in 1914 he became enraged when some of his players asked for raises and threatened to join the new Federal League if they didn’t get them. He responded by breaking up a championship team and selling every player to another team that was willing to buy.

Apparently neither recognized the irony of his own behavior.

To state the obvious, they were both human.