The List : Class of 1878, 1/2 : Albert G Spalding

Albert Goodwill Spalding (1849-1915), Player
Eligible: 1878
Achievements: Led the National Association in pitcher wins each year of its existence, and the NL in wins his one year playing for Chicago's NL team. Accumulated 252-65 record and 60 WAR in just six full years. Also posted a 116 OPS+ as a regular hitter. Also a pioneering manager and executive with Chicago, and one of baseball's most successful sporting goods makers. Helped William Hulbert found the NL in 1876.

 His is the face of a Greek hero, his manner that of an Anglican Bishop, and he is the father of the greatest sport the world has ever known. 
                 - New York Times, 1899

Simply, there is nobody more deserving than Al Spalding to be this Hall's first player inductee. He was likely the best pitcher of the amateur era, and wasn't just the best pitcher of the National Association (1871-1875), he was the greatest pitcher in each season of NA play. He was the best pitcher in the nascent National League before retiring young to be a championship manager, legendary executive and owner, run perhaps the greatest sporting goods company in American history, and rewrite (for better or worse) baseball's creation myth. Al Spalding is a titan of baseball history.

Spalding's appearance on the baseball world stage is a fantastic piece of baseball history, and also tells a bit about the transition from the early game we discussed in the inductions of 1871-1877, to the modern, professional sport we have come to know and love.

The year was 1867. The sport had grown from the handful of diasporadic 1840s clubs to the inaugural meeting of the National Assotiation of Base Ball Players in February, 1858 to, in 1867, more than 400 clubs ranging from the backwoods of Maine in the north to New Orleans in the south and San Francisco in the west. The Association was more of a loose collection than any official league - schedules were poorly coordinated and while some of the better clubs could claim to be champions, no such structure existed. Two things were important, though - the rules were codified, meaning everybody was playing the same game (as opposed to the 1830s and 40s when the sport was very different in New York versus Boston or Pennsylvania), and the Association clung fiercely to the idea of amateurism - professionalism was strictly outlawed, though most historians agree that players were likely being compensated under the table as early as the early 1850s. Still, the idea was amateurism and sport, though that was all soon to change.

The 1867 National Club of Washington is a fine example of this. The 1866 iteration had been a fine club, going 10-5, but the subsequent year club president (and future US Senator) Arthur Pue Gorman gave up his spot as the club's star shortstop to pursue a developing trend in Association baseball: discreet professionalism. The difference was, Gorman did it better than any team before. Using his connections within government to find pretend public-sector jobs for his new recruits, he stole the star players from New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Rochester clubs, including perhaps the amateur-era's best player in shortstop George Wright from the Gotham club of New York. Wright's place of employment was listed as 238 Pennsylvania Ave, a vacant lot. Declaring themselves the NA's best club, Gorman's Nationals announced a July-long national tour taking on all comers. While they would prove themselves to be the best team in the NA for 1867, they would shape the course of baseball history and in the process uncover a legend.

 Accompanying Wright and his fantastic Nationals was legendary baseball writer Henry Chadwick, invited along as team scorekeeper but serving as chief booster by reporting the team's exploits in The Ball Player's Chronicle while on tour. Their achievements were not few: in preparation for the tour they hosted Washington's five best clubs (including four venerable NA members in the Olympic, Jefferson, Union, and Continental), beating all five including a 91-8 destruction of a Department of the Interior club. Note that high scoring was indicative of the time - remember that at this time pitchers pitched to the batter and there were no gloves or manicured fields making errors commonplace. Fresh off their hometown massacre, the Nationals traveled to Columbus, Ohio to beat the city champion Capitol club, 90-10.

They then traveled to Cincinnati to take on Harry Wright (George's older brother, lured out of a retirement of cricketing and coaching, a former Knickerbocker and perhaps the best player of his time) and the Red Stockings, undefeated for two years and widely recognized as the best team in baseball. Cincinnati had nothing for the Nationals and were crushed, 53-10. So humiliated were the Reds that Harry Wright was instructed by his club president to throw off the veneer of amateurism and pursue professional players. The Reds were baseball's first openly professional club in 1869. But as the summer of 1867 played out the Nationals continued their tour, destroying the Buckeyes and then the city champions of Indianapolis, Louisville, and St. Louis. In the last two games alone they scored 219 runs. Untouchable, the Nationals rolled into Chicago to wind up their tour against two of the country's best clubs, the Atlantics and the Excelsiors (both named for the original Brooklyn clubs).

Before the marquee games against the Excelsiors and Atlantics, the Nationals arranged for a warmup match after many weeks on the road. The Excelsiors suggested the Rockford Forest City club, a middling squad who had given the Excelsiors a game match earlier that season (the Excelsiors had won). The Nationals brought them in to Chicago only to be upset 29-23 at the hands of a visibly-shaken rookie pitcher from the local squad. The baseball world cried foul, claiming the fix had been in to even betting odds before the main matches. The cries grew louder when Washington beat the actual competition the following day by a combined score of 127-21. What the critics couldn't have known at the time was that the nervous 16-year-old pitching for Rockford was already perhaps the best pitcher alive.

Spalding, tall and third from the right, with the Forest Citys

Albert Goodwill Spalding was born in Byron, Illinois, in 1849. He never held a noteworthy job because he was one of baseball's first born professionals - at 14 he was playing in men's amateur leagues, captaining his own Pioneer team, and at 15 had been invited to join the Forest Citys, with whom he became famous in 1867. Shortly after that legendary performance against the Nationals he took a position as a clerk for the Chicago Exelsiors, with the understanding that he was being paid to play baseball, though when the team's financial backer collapsed under the weight of paying enough $40-per-week clerks to fill a baseball team, Spalding returned to Rockford and played 1868-70 with his old teammates, gaining acclaim as the Association's best pitcher, and perhaps its best player.

In 1871 baseball changed tack again. While teams had been turning pro for two years, a number of key clubs from the National Association of Base Ball Players threw off the veneer of amateurism, breaking off to form the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP), while the remaining clubs formed the NAA(amateur)BBP. The NAPBBP would be history's first professional organised baseball league.

One such professional club was the Boston Red Stockings, founded in 1870 by the wealthy president of a net-weaving company, Ivers Whitney Adams. The Red Stockings got their name when Harry Wright (former manager of that Cincinnati club) was enticed to Boston by Adams. Wright also brought along his brother George, still baseball's best player, as well as his former nemeses Spalding and Ross Barnes, baseball's best second baseman, from Forest City, as well as young stars Charlie Gould and Cal McVey.

Baseball is a man-maker.

The NA had no answer for Spalding and the Red Stockings. In five years of NA play (1871-75) Boston took the first four pennants and finished second in '75. Spalding, sporting a strong fastball and change (then called a 'dew-drop') was far and away the Association's best player, going 204-53, leading the league in wins every year, FIP twice, and IP twice. His 2.21 ERA over that span was good enough for a 131 ERA+, but he managed to throw 2346.2 innings in the five years, leading baseball in WAR as well. He was simultaneously one of baseball's best hitters, hitting .323 with a 121 OPS+. By wRC, only four players created more offensive value in the NA (two of them, Barnes and Wright, his teammates). Spalding completed most of his 264 starts, but manager Harry Wright liked to surprise opponents by pulling the hard-throwing Spalding and putting himself in the game to throw soft breaking pitches.

Spalding, top, with his teammates on the legendary Red Stockings

1874 was a very important year for Spalding. Not only did he win 52 games and score 80 runs, more importantly, he opened a sporting goods store in Chicago with his brother, Walter. This was the foundation for an incredibly successful franchise that would make balls for professional baseball until the 1970s, invent the modern bat, and serve as America's most successful sporting goods company for the next 100 years, but it was also Spalding's introduction to business management, and what he found, to his surprise, was that he liked it. He liked it more than baseball - and while he was easily the best baseball player in the world, he may have been a better businessman.

A born leader, Spalding had organized and led a semi-pro team as a boy, and opened a booming business at 23. While his contemporaries were notorious drinkers and gamblers, Spalding rarely drank and kept well clear of the shadowy characters of baseball, which enamored him to Harry Wright and later William Hulbert. Wright, though, would select Spalding to lead a World Baseball Tour in 1874. Spalding left for England in January, organzed supporters for his planned exhibition trip, organized the first ever game of baseball in England on February 27, returned in March in time to lead his Boston club to another Pennant, then took the Red Stockings and the volunteering Philadelphia Athletics back to England in July for a string of exhibitions all over the British Isles, as well as some cricket matches against British clubs. The tour was mostly a failure - Brits were largely uninterested in the game, and the tour lost money on turnouts lower than expected, with no impact left behind. They returned to Philadelphia on September 9.

The tour is a good example of two things, however. Spalding's organizational and business acumen, and his distaste for the English. The latter was not rare at the time - in the 1870s the Revolution was less than a century old, and the British had just supported the Confederacy in the Civil War. Still, Spalding considered the British effete and the game of cricket 'genteel' compared to the rigorous, manly, and American game of baseball. Harry Wright saw both of these traits in Spalding, and chose him to head his grand tour of England, but both would be immensely important as Spalding's life and career progressed.

Spalding had one last trick on the diamond, however. During the days of the NA frequently breaching contracts or changing teams was common among players, referred to as 'revolving,' and one such instance involving Philadelphia infielder Davy Force would change baseball forever. Following the 1874 season Force managed to sign contracts with both Philadelphia and (his current club) Chicago. A panel of NA officials decreed the Chicago contract, which Force had signed first, would be honored. When a new president of the Association was elected later that winter, one hailing from Philadelphia, he awarded Force to Philadelphia. Chicago president William Hulbert, incised, pulled his White Stockings from the Association and started a new league, the National League.

The NL, which commenced play in 1876, insisted on higher membership fees and that schedules be honored (it was common for NA teams to stop playing either when eliminated from contention or once their home schedules were finished, leaving other clubs holding the bag for lost ticket revenue), and imposed harsher rules on player conduct. Hulbert inserted himself as League President but maintained his White Stocking club (today's Cubs) and immediately set his eyes on a powerhouse. He appealed to Spalding's Illinois roots and brought him and Ross Barnes back to Chicago. He also managed to poach Deacon White from Boston and Cap Anson from Philadelphia. The quartet represented most of baseball's best players, and went 52-14 en route to the inaugural NL Pennant.

Spalding, who went 47-12 with a 1.75 ERA in 1876, didn't just come to Chicago for money, though. In order to get him to move Hulbert had to promise him the manager's seat and give him a minority share in the team, as well as letting him help organize the NL and recruit players for it. Already, Spalding was showing an increased interest in the operations side, and he confirmed this when he gave up pitching in 1877. With side-arming becoming allowed, Spalding felt he could no longer serve as the game's dominant pitcher, and ceded pitching duties to the mediocre George Bradley, inserting himself as the regular first baseman. While he was always regarded as a superb hitter, Spalding had a rough year, hitting a career-worst .256 and hanging up his cleats for good. He threw 11 innings in 1877, but the team was a lacklustre 26-33 as the Boston Red Stockings reassembled their juggernaut. Spalding stepped off the field for good, as player and as manager, to focus on his booming business and running the White Stockings as secretary and right-hand-man to Hulbert.

1889 edition of the Spalding's Base Ball Guide

Spalding also went into publishing in the late 1870s, publishing not just the first set of league rules for the NL, but also the wildly successful Spalding Guide, for which old friend Henry Chadwick served as editor. William Hulbert died in April, 1882, leaving Spalding as the principal owner and president of the White Stockings. He is credited with the first Spring Training, held in Hot Springs, Arkansas, in 1886. Between 1880 and 1886 the club won five more Pennants with Spalding running the club. Meanwhile Spalding lead the wars against the American Association, Players League, and the Union Association, various attempts to start a rival major league.

During the winter of 1888-89 Spalding took a group of the NL's best players on a worldwide tour, canvassing Australia, New Zealand, Egypt, Hawaii, Ceylon, Italy, and France, promoting the sport (and his sporting goods company) with exhibition games and returning to great fanfare in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.

Spalding shocked the baseball world when he retired as White Stockings president in 1891, mirroring his snap retirement as a player. The 1890s would be the story of AG Spalding Sporting Goods, as the firm opened stores and bought factories all over the United States. By 1893 Spalding had acquired most of his competition, and he became very wealthy as his company became a mainstay of the American sporting world to this day.

Later in his life Spalding withdrew from baseball. He sold his controlling stake in the White Stockings (by now the Chicago Orphans) in 1902, though in the first decade of the 1900s he became determined to prove that baseball was an American game (remember his irreverence toward the English), arguing with Chadwick, who believed (correctly) that it was based in English rounders. Spalding convened the 1908 Mills Commission and was respected enough that his influence proclaimed Abner Doubleday the father of baseball, and when Chadwick died, leaving his papers to Spalding, Spalding used the old writer's records to recreate baseball's past, releasing America's National Game in 1911, the first scholarly attempt at writing baseball's creation story.

Spalding became involved in the controversial Theosophic community in San Diego late in his life, dying far from the spotlight in 1915. Still, he is remembered as a titan of baseball history, and of American sport history. In 1880 the Boston Herald wrote: "Next to Abraham Lincoln and George Washington, the name AG Spalding is the most famous in American literature." In 1900 he was named as Commissioner of the USA's Olympic committee by President McKinley.

The best player of both the amateur era and the beginning of the professional era, one of the great baseball minds and executives in baseball history, an influential writer and publisher, and the founder of perhaps the most important sporting goods company in the game's long history, Spalding deserves to be on this list again and again, for many independent reasons. He would be on baseball's Mount Rushmore - he could be all four faces. Spalding impacted the game in so many different ways, in such influential ways, he truly is one of the most important people in baseball history.

The genius of our institutions is democratic - Base ball is a democratic game.