Early Baseball and the Rise of the National League (review)

Tom Melville. Early Baseball and the Rise of the National League. Jefferson NC: McFarland & Company, 2001. 176 pp. Paper, $24.95.

Who should be allowed to compete? What should they compete for? Who shall determine this? Citing these as the primary questions a society must resolve for its sporting culture, Tom Melville asserts that America first faced them with baseball. In this wonderfully fresh, analytical (as opposed to descriptive) survey of baseball's first three decades, Melville demonstrates that the sport developed in a far more complex fashion than previously assumed—and according to social values that sometimes conflicted with one another. He points out, for example, that while the milder Knickerbocker rules made the game attractive to urban males (especially in its elimination of "plugging" runners), the intense New York environment put a premium on expert play among the best teams, hence a "survival of the fittest" atmosphere with a corresponding emphasis on championship matches and recruitment of top players— activities in which the Knickerbockers themselves elected not to engage.

Had baseball evolved a few decades earlier and taken national form more gradually, Melville muses at the end of his study, it might have resembled cricket in England, "firmly rooted in a competitive obligation to locality." Or, conversely, had it begun to develop in the decades after the Civil War, it might have resembled football and basketball in being attached mainly to colleges or athletic clubs, less focused upon the principle of "the best against the best" and therefore more "organizationally stable and socially responsive."

But baseball was a product of its specific time and place, and Melville does a masterful job of delineating those values that characterized the young New York game, with its "naked drive to unconditional achievement" and its accelerated rise to "premature nationality." One result was a cultural paradox: communities could access the game's highest achievement level fairly quickly, but usually at the sacrifice—as in recruiting outside players—of a genuine expression of local achievement. In one brilliant chapter, Melville shows how this played out in Cincinnati, where a "trauma of professionalism" led to unparalleled diamond and commercial success on the part of its famous 1869-70 Red Stockings but also to frustration, failed expectations, and the premature disbanding of the club. Finding similar value conflicts in the ill-fated National Association, he argues that its most glaring weakness was the "failure to establish a sound and socially acceptable moral foundation for the professional system."

Perhaps the book's most impressive chapters are those dealing with the shift of power in baseball from the eastern seaboard to Chicago in the mid-1870s, the ascendancy of the new National League, and especially the tremendous influence of its founding president, former coal merchant William A. Hulbert. Melville vividly portrays Hulbert's jackhammer personality and his ruthless tactics in driving out weak teams and attacking rival organizations by stealing their top players or incorporating their best teams into the National League or both. While holding the opinion that "players as a class are worthless scalawags," Hulbert lauded his own White Stockings as a model of "discipline and management" and expected them, in Melville's words, to "extend their aggression to the very limits of competitive propriety." Their exemplary play and string of championships under Hulbert and Anson testified to the success of this approach.

Of greater long-range significance, Hulbert's dominating leadership enabled the structure of baseball to solidify itself against all threat of fragmentation from below. Melville concludes that shortly after Hulbert's death, with the National League-American Association accord in February1883, baseball had reached a "terminal stage" in its structural development. "No longer was there any danger that baseball's achievement center would be dissolved or drawn down into local or regional competitions," he writes, and no amount of moral opposition "could seriously deter social acceptance of 'the best...