Before They Were Cardinals: Major League Baseball in Nineteenth-Century St. Louis (review)

Jon David Cash opens this exhaustive study of Major League baseball in nineteenth-century St. Louis with an anecdote establishing the importance of baseball in St. Louis in the late 1800s. The anecdote describes the vice president of the United States, Thomas A. Hendricks, mistaking a raucous crowd of a quarter-million citizens milling about outside his hotel as an enthusiastic gesture welcoming Hendricks to St. Louis. Assuming the throng is there to see him, the vice president begins to address the crowd from his balcony. He is quickly shouted down by some of the crowd exclaiming that they had just seen Gleason. Confused, Hendricks inquires to someone in the crowd as to whom Gleason might be. He is quickly put in his place, learning that baseball is the only thing on the minds of those assembled and that Gleason is "just the best shortstop the Browns ever had." As Cash often demonstrates throughout his book, baseball often towered in importance over politics in late-nineteenth-century St. Louis.

This well-written book is broken chronologically into three parts describing specific events in the early development of baseball in St. Louis. Part 1, covering the years 1875-1877, documents the first rise of Major League baseball in St. Louis. In the early 1870s an economic rivalry between St. Louis and Chicago motivated the civic leaders of St. Louis to form a professional baseball team. In 1874 several prominent St. Louis businessmen formed the St. Louis Brown Stockings, the first professional baseball team based in St. Louis. The Brown Stockings, predecessors of the Cardinals, were successful both on and off the field and established St. Louis as a baseball town. However, due to a gambling scandal in 1877, the future of baseball in St. Louis became uncertain.

Part 2 of the book describes the resurrection and growth of Major League baseball in St. Louis over the years 1878-1886. This section of the book naturally centers on Chris Von der Ahe. Von der Ahe, a German immigrant to America, was an entrepreneurial saloon owner in St. Louis who first recognized the profitable relationship that could be developed between beer and baseball. Von der Ahe led a group who purchased and renovated what would become Sportsman's Park, and led the way for the resurgence of baseball in St. Louis. The Brown Stockings would soon become among the most successful baseball franchises in the United States.

Part 3 describes the transition from the first generation of Major League players over the period 1887-1891. Von der Ahe played a prominent role in this period as well, rallying for Sunday baseball in St. Louis, feuding with other owners, and generally exerting influence over the still changing game. However, because of his profligate ways and expedited by a disastrous fire at Sportsman's Park, Von der Ahe was forced out of baseball due to bankruptcy.

Cash's book, which originally was his doctoral dissertation, does at times read as an academic work. It not only documents the key players, owners, teams, and leagues in these early years of professional baseball but also delves into the impact of economics, civic pride, and society as they shaped professional baseball. This academic approach works in the book's favor for any reader unfamiliar with either the early years of baseball history or this transitional time in the history of the United States. A great deal of game action, as drawn from the press coverage of the time, is found throughout the book. Numerous pictures, box scores, and graphics supplement the text, which is supported by fifty-six pages of endnotes that not only cite sources but also expound on points made in the text. An extensive bibliography and index are also included.

Scattered throughout the book are descriptions of high-salaried players, wealthy owners, salary disputes, labor-management dysfunction, franchise moves, and a variety of scandals reminding...