1 янв 1876 г. - Baseball's National League founded

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Before the 1860s, the only distinctively American game was Native American lacrosse, and the most popular team sport among European Americans was cricket. After the Civil War, however, team sports became a fundamental part of American manhood, none more successfully than baseball. Deriving from cricket, the game’s formal rules had begun to develop in New York in the 1840s and 1850s; its popularity spread in military camps during the Civil War. Afterward, the idea that baseball “received its baptism in the bloody days of our Nation’s direst danger,” as one promoter put it, became part of the game’s mythology.

Until the 1870s, most amateur players were clerks and white-collar workers who had leisure time to play and income to buy their own uniforms. Businessmen frowned on baseball and other sports as a waste of time, especially for working-class men. But late-nineteenth-century employers came to see baseball, like other athletic pursuits, as a benefit for workers. It provided fresh air and exercise, kept men out of saloons, and promoted discipline and teamwork. Players on company-sponsored teams, wearing uniforms emblazoned with their employers’ names, began to compete on paid work time. Baseball thus set a pattern for how other American sports developed. Begun among independent craftsmen, it was taken up by elite men anxious to prove their strength and fitness. Well-to-do Americans then decided the sport could benefit the working class.

Big-time professional baseball arose with the launching of the National League in 1876. The league quickly built more than a dozen teams in large cities, from the Brooklyn Trolley Dodgers to the Cleveland Spiders. Team owners were, in their own right, profit-minded entrepreneurs who shaped the sport to please consumers. Wooden grandstands soon gave way to concrete and steel stadiums. By 1900, boys traded lithographed cards of their favorite players and the baseball cap came into fashion. In 1903, the Boston Americans defeated the Pittsburgh Pirates in the first World Series. American men could now adopt a new consumer identity — not as athletes, but as fans.

This shows the 1902 front cover of Tip Top Weekly, one of many magazines and dime novels for young readers, celebrated sports and adventure. The cover story by Burt L. Standish (a pseudonym for Gilbert Patten) featured the hero Frank Merriwell, a talented player of football, basketball, baseball, and track who eventually became a star student and athlete at Yale. Merriwell also solved crimes and mysteries while embodying clean living and honorable behavior.
Frank Merriwell’s Chums

Tip Top Weekly, one of many magazines and dime novels for young readers, celebrated sports and adventure. This 1902 cover story by Burt L. Standish (a pseudonymn for Gilbert Patten) featured the hero Frank Merriwell, a talented player of football, basketball, baseball, and track who eventually became a star student and athlete at Yale. Merriwell also solved crimes and mysteries while embodying clean living and honorable behavior. His exploits eventually became the basis for a comic strip, radio shows, and films.

Negro Leagues: Professional baseball teams formed for and by black players after the 1890s, when the regular national leagues excluded African American players. Enduring until after World War II, the leagues enabled black men to showcase athletic ability and race pride, but working conditions and wages were poor.

Baseball stadiums, like first-class rail cars, were sites of racial negotiation and conflict. In the 1880s and 1890s, major league managers hired a few African American players. As late as 1901, the Baltimore Orioles succeeded in signing Charlie Grant, a light-skinned black player from Cincinnati, by renaming him Charlie Tokohoma and claiming he was Cherokee. But as this subterfuge suggested, black players were increasingly barred. A Toledo team received a threatening note before one game in Richmond, Virginia: if their “negro catcher” played, he would be lynched. Toledo put a substitute on the field, and at the end of the season the club terminated the black player’s contract.

Shut out of white leagues, players and fans turned to all-black professional teams, where black men could showcase athletic ability and race pride. Louisiana’s top team, the New Orleans Pinchbacks, pointedly named themselves after the state’s African American Reconstruction governor. By the early 1900s, such teams organized into separate Negro leagues. Though players suffered from erratic pay and rundown ball fields, the leagues thrived until the desegregation of baseball after World War II. In an era of stark discrimination, they celebrated black manhood and talent. “I liked the way their uniform fit, the way they wore their cap,” wrote an admiring fan of the Newark Eagles. “They showed a style in almost everything they did.”

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