1889: The Year Baseball went International and New York City Became the Center of the World: Al Spalding's Tour and the First Subway Series

 On February 9, 1889 in front of a crowd of 1200 bemused bedouins, none of whom had any idea what the Hell they were watching--in the shadow of the Great Pyramid of Giza and beneath the gaze of the sphinx--the Chicago White Stockings and a team of professional all stars called the All Americans played a baseball game amidst the shifting sands of the Egyptian desert.

This was part of Albert G. Spalding’s World Tour of Baseball which had begun in October of the previous year and would stretch into April, nearly until opening day, of the 1889 professional baseball season.  The World Tour included stops in Australia, Hawaii where baseball was played before half-naked natives and their indigenous king, England where games were watched by an aging Queen Victoria, Ceylon modern day Sri Lanka in front of groups of Buddhist monks, and Italy where baseball games were played by American major leaguers before papal emissaries outside of the Vatican in the shadow of the Roman Colosseum.

Players pose in front of the Sphinx 1889

Albert G. Spalding was many things to many people during his remarkable lifetime.  Throughout the 1860’s and 1870’s Spalding was the best pitcher in baseball.  His fame as a player for the Chicago National League team named the White Stockings on account of their pale hosiery, spread far and wide across the nation.  Spalding would eventually serve as the team’s manager and by the 1880’s through a sporting goods empire that Spalding who was not only baseball’s best hurler, but also one of America’s best late 19th century businessmen, built himself from the ground up with a loan from his parents--would buy the team that he once played for and become the White Stocking’s principal owner and the most influential executive in baseball during the nineteenth century.

His brand name, Spalding Sporting Goods, endures to this very day--oddly enough for a company founded by a Hall of Fame baseball player--the Spalding name today is best known as the official brand of ball used by the National Basketball Association!

Albert G. Spalding was a friend to both Presidents of the United States and with gamblers and various other shady underworld characters, most of whom were connected with the all too prevalent betting world of 19th century professional baseball.  Many, by the time of his World Baseball Tour in 1888 considered Spalding to be an American sporting icon, but many others labelled him a crank and an eccentric crackpot for his New Age religious theories and for his involvement in seances and with the esoteric cult-like religion of theosophy.

Truthfully, Albert G. Spalding was all of these different things but more than anything else he was baseball’s first true ambassador and the first person in history who believed that America’s pastime could become a worldwide game.

In 1888, at a time before even the Olympic Games had been resurrected in their modern form (the first “modern” Olympics wouldn’t take place until 1896) and at a time when international sports competitions were barely in their infancy--Al Spalding took the great game of baseball around the world and it has stayed there ever since.

His Great Baseball World Tour began after the 1888 season and in total the Chicago White Stockings and All American all star team played fifty-four games across five continents.  It began in the United States and took the nation’s sport through the midwest and all the way to the Pacific coast before going to the ends of the earth.  

The Tour began in October 1888 and headed west from Chicago.  Initially, it was reported in the press as Spalding’s “Australian Baseball Tour”, but over the course of the offseason the trekking ballplayers would go worldwide.  

Jimmy Ryan, a Hall of Fame outfielder and native Chicagoan who played nearly twenty years for the White Stockings and who arguably may have been the best pure hitter who participated in Spalding’s Tour recorded of his team’s departure, “In order to further promote the interests of Base Ball a few gentlemen from Chicago undertook to establish the National Game of America upon foreign soil…we left Union Depot on an expedition known as the Spalding Australian Base Ball Tour…a crowd of people gathered to see our departure.”

Jimmy Ryan, who acted as a sort of player/correspondent during the Tour went on to say that as their train journeyed across America the players, “Were in the best of health and spirits and continued to celebrate into the wee hours of the morning.”

It was while on their way to the Land Down Under that the players were greeted in Hawaii with a lavish banquet and ball games were played beneath palm trees and active volcanoes.

The Tour was touted by Spalding and company as an unparalleled success and the players were greeted with a lavish dinner held in Manhattan at Delmonico’s restaurant upon their return.  The dinner party was attended by such luminaries as future President of the United States, and personal friend of Albert G. Spalding Theodore Roosevelt and by America’s most famous author at the time, Mark Twain.  

Spalding's Tour in the Rome

And though baseball would not become as popular worldwide as sports such as soccer or cricket or even arguably basketball or hockey until perhaps the twenty-first century, Mark Twain gushed of the Tour that it, “Carried the American name to the outermost ends of the earth and covered it with glory every time…”

And while Al Spalding, the Chicago White Stockings and others were bringing baseball and the “American Name” to the ends of the earth during the offseason, as the 1889 professional baseball season dawned that spring the center of the baseball universe was about to shift focus again and land firmly in the Big Apple.

If subways had been around in New York City in 1889 (the NYC subway system wouldn’t begin operation until 1904) then the year 1889 would have marked baseball’s first ever true Subway Series.

In 1889 New York City did truly become the center of the Baseball Universe and a rivalry, perhaps the greatest in sports, that has endured to this very day was born.

The game of baseball was born in and around New York City and its environs with the first known recorded modern baseball game, played by rules that would be at least recognizable to us and roughly analogous with today’s rules of baseball, having been played on cricket grounds in Hoboken, New Jersey, back in the year 1845.  By the start of the Civil War, baseball as we know it, was flourishing in the New York City area with ball clubs springing up across Manhattan, Brooklyn and in towns and cities in Westchester and New Jersey.

By the time the National League of Professional Baseball was formed in 1876, marking the advent of today’s Major League Baseball as we know it, professional barnstorming teams were already playing in leagues all across the northeast United States.

Some of the most heated rivalries between local clubs before the advent of the National League were those between teams from Manhattan and from Brooklyn.  In 1889, the year that we are most concerned with here, Brooklyn was still its own independent city wholly separate from New York City at large.  In fact, Brooklyn did not become a part of New York City, as we know it, until 1898 though professional baseball would endure there until the Dodgers moved from Brooklyn to Los Angeles prior to the 1958 season.

Anyway, back in the 1880’s for the first time in history, there were two valid and competitive professional baseball leagues.  Firstly, there was the National League of Professional Baseball, of which Al Spalding’s White Stockings were a part, and which had been established as previously mentioned in 1876.  The National League still endures to this day as part of Major League Baseball where because of the League’s longevity it has gained the moniker of the “Senior Circuit” among baseball fans.

In 1884 an upstart league called the American Association of Baseball was formed with St. Louis being its first franchise.  The American Association differed from the more staid and established National League in certain key aspects.  For one thing, the American Association allowed for games to be played on Sunday which was forbidden at National League parks, and for another thing, serving alcohol to fans was not only legal, but encouraged, at American Association ballparks.  Oddly enough though gambling, which at the time went hand in hand with baseball, was rampant and largely acceptable among fans, players and even umpires in both leagues!

Eventually, the two leagues would merge with the more successful American Association franchises being absorbed into the National League but that was all several years in the future.  By 1889 the American Association was drawing more fans and becoming more and more successful because of its free-wheeling, some would say immoral, style of play.  As Al Spalding and his players returned from their World Tour just prior to the start of the 1889 baseball season it’s not an exaggeration to say that the National League and the American Association were at war with one another.

It was decided that at the end of that year there would be an eleven game playoff between the champion of the National League and the Champion of the American Association called the World Championship of Baseball, the Championship of the United States or simply the World Series (writers and owners couldn’t agree on what name to use at the time) which would be held over the course of a two week span in the month of October.  Baseball historians today refer to this as the pre-modern World Series because the modern World Series, as we know it, dates to 1903 and the formation of the modern American League and a subsequent agreement between owners in the two leagues that formed Major League Baseball, but of course as if all of this wasn’t confusing enough, today’s modern American League is a completely separate baseball entity from the American Association of the 1880’s and 90’s.

Warming up before 1889 World Series

That year the winner of the National League was the New York Giants, a team that still exists today in the form of the San Francisco Giants and the Brookly Bridegrooms of the American Association, which at the time, didn’t have an official nickname, but had been dubbed the “Bridegrooms” in the press on account of the number of players on the team that were engaged to be married.  The following year, after the 1889 World Championship, the Brooklyn franchise would officially change its name to the Dodgers and interestingly enough, transfer from the American Association to the National League, where players and owners were able to earn more money.

During 1889, the players in both leagues were seeking to unionize and felt that their interests weren’t being represented by ownership.  The players union was  threatening to form a Third Professional Baseball League called the Players League which would have seen many of the best ball players leave both the National League and American Association prior to the start of the 1890 season. 

The Society for American Baseball Research in an article written by Peter Mancuso and published at www.sabr.org says that, “Throughout the 1889 World Series daily newspaper reports of the games frequently appeared side by side with the latest reports about the formation of the Players League which would soon spirit away nearly all National League and American Association players….even the biggest stars.”

Needless to say, a sort of pall of anxiety hung over the 1889 World Series, but despite not knowing what was in store for the future of baseball, the fans came out in droves with upwards of 15,000 spectators turning out for each game.  These were enormous crowds for baseball games because keep in mind, back then, all games had to be played in the middle of the day during the work week at a time when most of New York City’s citizens struggled on a day to day basis to simply pay rent and buy enough food to eat.  The 1889 World Series was played at the brand new home of the New York Giants called the Polo Grounds in Manhattan, a stadium that would endure until 1963 and become the first home of the New York Mets.

The Giants won the 1889 World Series against Brooklyn in 9 games, perhaps, ultimately sealing the fate of the American Association as an upstart league.  As it was, the reaction in the press and among fans to their championship was rather muted, as all eyes in the baseball world turned to the formation of the Players League.

Scorecard from 1889 World Series

In the end, no Players League would be formed and the National League and American Association would merge and form one even stronger professional baseball league.  Owners like Al Spalding would agree to many of the players' demands and offer higher contracts and greater proceeds to the most talented players from ticket sales and advertising.

The year 1889 could very well have spelled doom for Professional Baseball as we now know it, but instead in that one momentous year, Al Spalding and his World Tour make America’s Game a global sport that continues nearly one-hundred and forty years later to grow in international popularity.  And, in that very same momentous baseball year, the rivalry between the Giants and Dodgers was born and for the first time in history New York City became the center of the Baseball Universe.