What Ever Happened to Baseball History?: Keynote Speech to the Sixteenth Annual NINE Spring Training Conference, March 14, 2009

Each baseball season brings new anniversaries and milestones, but events of this nature are only made meaningful by a shared reverence for the game’s past. It’s a history that is being constantly made and remade, while announcers and color commentators describe it—before, as, and after it happens. The 2008 season brought another bounty of reminders of baseball’s storied history. One of the game’s great shrines, Yankee Stadium, was shown out in style by a parade and All-Star Game, and the game paid homage to the centennial of its unofficial anthem, among many other milestones.

Yet these celebrations also reveal that baseball narrowly defines its own history and overlooks a great deal. The past two years have marked the 150th anniversaries of the founding of baseball’s first governing body, the National Association of Base Ball Players, and of the first game at which admission was charged. Did you miss baseball’s tribute to those two gigantic steps in transforming a regional variant into the national pastime? You weren’t alone. To be sure, both took place before 1900 and the advent of so-called “modern baseball,” but I consider that a vague and meaningless distinction. Americans haven’t lost interest in the Civil War because it predated “modern warfare,” so why does a sport steeped in history neglect an enormous part of its past?

I wish to propose an answer to that question that may surprise many of you. This gaping hole in baseball’s history was not just the result of benign neglect but of a deliberate overwriting of the real history with another. The result was that students of baseball history all too often asked the wrong questions and, accordingly, arrived at the wrong answers. The two men most responsible for this situation are both Hall of Famers—those men are Henry Chadwick and Albert Goodwill Spalding.

Of course, neither Chadwick nor Spalding was a historian. The problem, however, is that nobody else was writing baseball history while there were many eyewitnesses alive. The unfortunate result was that when baseball history did start to be written, all too often it was based upon something written by either Spalding or Chadwick. That is a problem, first of all, because Chadwick and Spalding were both participants and, as with any participant, their accounts assign themselves larger roles than they deserve. But there is a far more serious problem than that, because their versions of events represented an attractive narrative that was designed to sell a specific product. Spalding was the creator of the Spalding Guide and Chadwick was its longtime editor. The Spalding Guide is a valuable source of first-hand material, but all too often it is read as history when, in fact, it was an advertisement designed to sell two things: tickets to National League baseball games and the baseball equipment manufactured by Spalding’s sporting goods firm.

Spalding and Chadwick created such an attractive narrative that few saw them as salesmen for these products. Their writings came to be viewed as objective history, and this had enormous consequences. It is, I believe, largely because of these two men that we now have a view of the baseball world in which the National League is the center of the baseball universe and all other participants and all other leagues are of secondary importance. That is a distorted perspective, and it is such a serious distortion that it is not just an issue for people, like myself, who write about the history of early baseball—it is of great importance to anyone interested in the serious study of almost any aspect of baseball.

Implicit in the Chadwick-Spalding conception of baseball history is a hierarchical structure. At the top of that hierarchy was the National League, which reigned supreme until the American League came along in 1901. Beneath the National League was the American Association of the 1880s and the various minor leagues that cooperated with the National League. Below them were the leagues that didn’t cooperate...