When Baseball Went White: Reconstruction, Reconciliation, and Dreams of a National Pastime

3. Philadelphia: Baseball’s Boomtown

42 Chapter3 Philadelphia Baseball’s Boomtown Philadelphia’s baseball community dwarfed those of Washington dc and Richmond. Philadelphia had more ballplayers than its mid-Atlantic neighbors and, by all indications, better ones. The Philadelphia Athletic , Bachelor, Keystone, Olympic, Quaker City, and West Philadelphia Base Ball Clubs were the most prominent of the hundreds of clubs that organized and played in Philadelphia during the 1860s and ’70s. The New York Clipper touted the Philadelphia Athletic Base Ball Club as among the very top baseball organizations in the country, equal to the Atlantic Club of Brooklyn, the Mutuals of New York City, and the Red Stocking Club of Cincinnati.1 In terms of black baseball, the Philadelphia Pythians, led by Octavius Catto, enjoyed considerable success as well. The Pythians hosted visiting clubs and traveled north into New York for games and south to Baltimore and Washington dc. The club won 90 percent of its contests. The Philadelphia Sunday Mercury , a paper that sprinkled racial slurs throughout its pages regularly, and the Philadelphia Press provided regular coverage of the city’s black baseball clubs. Generally speaking, the city’s white baseball community , led by the powerful Athletics, allowed black clubs to use many of the area’s best fields. Relations between white and black clubs were mostly amicable and open, if far from balanced. Thus, when Philadelphia’s North American commemorated fifty years of baseball in the city in 1907, there was much to celebrate. The city had a unique position in the baseball world. The Philadelphia baseball community had recovered quickly from the Civil War. In fact, Philadelphia teams began engaging in interstate matches again as early as 1863. To celebrate this baseball past, the North American published a philadelphia: baseball’s boomtown 43 lengthy article on Philadelphia baseball written by Al Reach, a former Philadelphia Athletic and, by the beginning of the twentieth century, a sporting-goods tycoon. In the article the former second baseman made sure to mention that the players of his day had been equal or superior to those playing at the beginning of the twentieth century. “Men hit as hard, caught as well and threw as accurately and strongly thirty years ago as they do today,” Reach assured readers.2 Reach also looked back winsomely on the “wonderful elasticity” and “matchless possibilities” of baseball during the Reconstruction B A I M L J D K C GH E F Camden, New Jersey 3. Philadelphia’s baseball landscape. A. Athletic base ball grounds (1865–1870), B. Athletic base ball grounds (1871–1877), C. Pythian meeting rooms, D. Octavius Catto’s residence, E. Al Reach’s base ball store, F. Keystone base ball grounds, G. Banneker Institute, H. Location of 1871 election riots, I. Orion base ball grounds, J. City hall, K. Liberty Hall, L. Commonwealth base ball grounds, M. W. Philadelphia base ball grounds, shaded area: highest black population. Genealogy of Philadelphia County Subdivisions, 2nd ed. (Philadelphia: Department of Records, 1966), 72. 44 The war’s over, 1865–67 era. In noting these characteristics, Reach boasted about baseball’s malleability and recalled how the game had vacillated between different rules and customs in its earliest years. On the seemingly simple issue of balls and strikes alone, for example, Reach had witnessed several significant changes. “First three balls gave a man his base, then we got it up to seven, only to reduce it gradually to four. One season we played four strikes; another year a player was credited with a hit every time he got a base on balls; we abolished the base for a hit with pitched ball then returned to it; we made a rule imposing a strike for a man on every unsuccessful attempt to bunt, and finally reached the foul-strike rule, the most important of all modern baseball legislation.”3 Although Reach’s concept of “elasticity” has some historical merit, Philadelphia baseball, and indeed baseball in New York, Boston, and Chicago as well, did not evidence this elasticity for long when it came to racial matters. Rather, during the Reconstruction era, white clubs rapidly separated themselves from black ones. Philadelphia’s baseball milieu, especially regarding black participation, became increasingly less fluid and elastic.4 The Leading Men Both the Athletics and the Pythians won the majority of their games and were “champions” in the haphazard, pre–National League sense of the designation.5 But Philadelphia’s baseball community clearly revolved around...