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BALL SPORTS

Baseball, Basketball, Bowling, Football, Golf, Tennis & Other Sports Played With a Ball

This volume of the Sports She Wrote series features more than 100 articles written by women and 100 illustrations of games played with a ball. Women seldom engaged in ball games until the 19th century. The favorite ball sports that vastly expanded women’s participation in the 1890s were golf, basketball and tennis.

There were only a handful of golf courses in the country in 1890; by 1900 there were several hundred. The sport required large tracts of land, usually on private club grounds, and was primarily reserved for those wealthy enough to afford the equipment and course fees. Women were among the earliest devotees on the links. Ten articles in this volume describe the state of golf, the layout of courses, early tournaments, the implements used, and the clothing women wore. More than half a century before the Ladies Professional Golf Association was formed in 1950, the first U. S. Women’s Amateur Championship was inaugurated in 1895.

Many more articles about golf written by women can be found in two other volumes of the Sports She Wrote series. One of the most avid and prolific golf writers was the columnist with the penname “Diana,” (Mary J. Lagen), who wrote the “Athletic Woman” column in the Philadelphia Inquirer from 1898 to 1901. The volume Diana- Ball Sports, contains more than 100 articles on her favorite sport, including in-depth coverage of early tournaments and players. The volume presenting the works of Adelia Brainerd, who penned the “Outdoor Woman” column in Harper’s Bazar from 1894 to 1899, includes more than 40 articles about golf.

The most popular ball game women played was basketball and is represented in this volume with 49 articles spanning from 1894 to 1900. The sport was invented in 1891 and women began playing in earnest the following year. By the end of the decade there were hundreds of women’s teams coast to coast in high schools, colleges and athletic organizations. The first intercollegiate women’s sporting event was a basketball game between Stanford and the University of California, held April 4, 1896, as described by six women writers. The event was widely publicized and inspired women’s collegiate sports rivalries.

In many venues men were barred from watching women play basketball, including the Stanford-Cal matchup. This was in part due to the bloomer-style uniforms and the inhibited nature of Victorian women’s sensibilities. This exclusion created a lurid interest by men who were barred out, leading them to assume that there was something naughty or provocative about the game. But in many other regions men were admitted as spectators and it was widely acknowledged that the players were solely engaged in energetic competition and the audiences need not be segregated.

This volume includes 13 articles about basketball in the State of Louisiana, featuring one of the most important pioneers of women’s sports, Clara Gregory Baer of Newcomb College, and articles by Mary Lamb.

Ten articles describe the early years of lawn tennis, the first truly athletic ball game women played. The Wimbledon Tennis Tournament began in 1877 and the national tournament in the United States was inaugurated seven years later. Both championships have been held annually ever since.

Cumbersome Victorian fashions were a limiting factor in many sports, presenting barriers to freedom of movement. Tennis dresses and golf gowns were commonly featured in women’s fashion publications. Articles focused on the symbiotic relationship between golf, tennis and the dress reform movement can be found in the volume entitled What to Wear. Golf contributed to the elimination of the corset among society women as they were unable to swing a club freely in whalebones and restrictive shapewear. Many sportswear styles extended beyond the playing fields as women appreciated the comfort and freedom of athletic togs. The most enduring fashion item that transcended tennis was an item in nearly everyone’s footwear collection today—tennis shoes.

Seven articles describe women playing baseball, although the number of players was small. Softball was invented in the 19th century, but articles written by women could not be confirmed. Articles about major league baseball are the primary subject in two volumes of the Sports She Wrote series: Ella Black, the Pittsburgh baseball correspondent of The Sporting Life during the “Brotherhood League” season in 1890; and Helen Dauvray, the actress and baseball fanatic who inaugurated post-season championships in 1887 and was the most influential woman in baseball history.

Football reports are presented chronologically, beginning with four articles on Association football (soccer) from England and Canada in 1895, followed by nine articles about American football written by eight women authors.

The sports with the greatest number of pages in this volume are, in order: basketball, tennis, golf, football/soccer, field hockey, bowling, cricket and baseball. Articles on billiards, cricket, croquet, handball and roller polo are among the sports still actively played. More obscure sports in this collection include ball stand, battle ball, pass ball, pin hockey, rounders and tip and run.

The Sports She Wrote series is limited to articles provably written by women, therefore many articles about women’s sports lacking bylines, as most sports reports were, are not included in this volume. A more complete collection of women’s basketball, golf and tennis articles will be published in future volumes of The Lost Century of Sports Collection, which includes hundreds of articles from across the nation.

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HELEN DAUVRAY

The Actress Who Loved Baseball

Helen Dauvray (1859-1923) was an actress, not a sportswriter. She authored very few articles. Nearly all of the reports in this volume are written about her rather than by her. But she was unquestionably the most influential woman in baseball history and her instrumental role in the formation of modern baseball merits her inclusion in the Sports She Wrote collection.

Helen’s words were quoted in newspapers nationwide, her actions spawned the creation of post-season championships, and her personal life, including her tumultuous marriage to future Hall of Famer John Montgomery Ward, was avidly followed by millions of readers. Among her acquaintances was the great baseball authority Henry Chadwick, the first sportswriter inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, known as the “Father of Baseball,” who raved about Helen’s knowledge of the game and said that she would have been an excellent sportswriter.

Many baseball fans have heard of the Dauvray Cup as the first world’s championship trophy in baseball, but only short snippets of primary sources regarding her career and influence on the sport have been published. This volume endeavors to fill that gap with 340 articles from her time as a child star until her death.

Helen was born Nellie Gibson and at the age of five made her first appearance on the theatrical stage in San Francisco in the role of Eva in Uncle Tom’s Cabin. By the age of seven she was singing and dancing on stage, known as “Little Nell, the California Diamond.” Fourteen articles describe this period of her life from 1866 to 1874. Her passage from child star to stage actress is described in several articles throughout the text.

The primarily articles span from 1887 to 1891. The most hectic and publicized year of her life was 1887, which was when Helen became a baseball fanatic. In March of that year, she was menaced by a stalker. In May she had a contract dispute with one of the actors in her theatrical company, her ex-husband was ordered to pay a fine after promising to marry one woman before marrying Helen instead, her Mexican Hairless dog was a star of the Westminster Dog Show at Madison Square Garden, and she announced the donation of baseball’s Dauvray Cup. In September Helen was hospitalized for nervous prostration and underwent “thermo-cautery” surgery, which entailed burning of her spine. In October Ward and Dauvray were married. The next day her brother, who lived with her, was accused of sexual misconduct with her maid. The complaint against him was later withdrawn amid attacks on the maid’s reputation.

Major league baseball was also at a turning point in 1887, both in rules changes on the field and in social impact. For the first time the two leagues agreed to play by the same set of rules. For the 1887 season only, batters were permitted four strikes rather than three. Prior to 1887 batters could request either high or low pitches (above or below the waist). The new rule expanded the strike zone to include both the high and low areas, extending from the knee to the shoulder. The fourth strike was added to compensate the batters for the enlarged strike zone. The number of balls (pitches outside the strike zone) for a walk was lowered from six to five, forcing pitchers to throw more hittable pitches, and bases on balls were counted as hits in a player’s batting average. Pitchers were required to begin their delivery with their back foot on the back line of the pitcher’s box, fifty-five and a half feet from home plate. In 1893 the pitching distance was moved to its present 60 feet 6 inches and the pitcher’s box was replaced with the pitching rubber. Groundskeepers built pitcher’s mounds that were unregulated until 1903 when the maximum height was set at 15 inches.

As a result league batting averages skyrocketed 25 points and strikeouts fell by one-third. The batter-pitcher rules changed the following season, returning to three strikes, and the number of balls outside the strike zone was reduced to four in 1889. The most enduring change of 1887 occurred in July when the color line was officially drawn, barring men of color from competing in major league baseball. This restriction remained in effect for sixty years.

There were two major leagues at the time—the National League and the American Association. The two pennant winners played a poorly organized post-season series from 1884 to 1890, twice ending in a draw. The third (Brotherhood) League was excluded from the 1890 matchup. The 1891 season saw a war between the NL and AA scrambling for players from the defunct PL, finally consolidating into a single league in 1892 (the NL). In 1887 Helen’s baseball passion inspired her to sponsor the Dauvray Cup  trophy for the champions and individual medallions for the players. In 1893, the trophy was permanently awarded to the Boston Beaneaters, who won the pennant three years in a row. (The Beaneaters franchise, also known as the Boston Braves, moved to Milwaukee in 1952, then relocated in 1966 to become the Atlanta Braves.)

It was a surprise to everyone when Helen married the most famous baseball player of the day. A graduate of Columbia Law School, Ward was a founder and the driving force of the first sports players union, the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players  in 1885. In 1887 he penned a manifesto about players’ rights, “Are Baseball Players Chattel?” (printed in the Appendix) challenging the infamous Reserve Clause, which bound players for their entire careers to the team that initially signed them.

Ward was a great ballplayer. He pitched the second perfect game in major league baseball history (five days after John Lee Richmond pitched the first one and 84 years before the next one in the National League). He pitched the longest complete-game shutout in history, 18 innings, and remains the only player to amass both 2,000 hits as a batter and 100 wins as a pitcher in his career.

Helen Dauvray and John Ward built the first marital bridge between sports business and show business. In addition to being a popular actress, she owned a theatrical production company. At the same time her baseball star husband was experiencing contract labor disputes with his team owners, so was Helen with one of the star actors over his binding contract. The ironic symmetry of their power struggles is detailed in several articles. One of the articles she wrote set off a firestorm in which she compared actors and ballplayers and their respective salaries. Coincidentally, athletes and actors were both called “players.”

Such a high-profile marriage between an actress and a sports superstar ran a typical course repeated through generations. The press intruded on their personal lives, speculated on friction between them, and contributed to the ultimate demise of their relationship. At the heart of their dispute was John Ward’s insistence that his wife abandon her stage career to be his full-time wife. Initially she agreed but Helen was a popular star who loved performing on stage and soon returned to the footlights. This doomed their marriage, and they divorced in 1893.

A pivotal event affecting both baseball and the Dauvray-Ward relationship was an around-the-world tour by a team of baseball stars in 1889. Many of the sport’s biggest names, including John Ward, Albert Spalding, Charles Comiskey, and other future Hall-of-Famers, played exhibition games as they traveled across the country to the West Coast, then sailed to Hawaii, Australia, Egypt (where they posed for photographs perched on the Sphinx), France (where they played in the shadow of the unfinished Eiffel Tower), and England (where they played against the best cricketers in the world). During the tour, John Ward planted the seeds for the breakaway Players League among his teammates. Helen Dauvray initially planned to travel with the team, but personal and professional conflicts arose, and the press fanned the flames of marital discord.

The articles describe it all in dramatic detail. Readers seeking more information about John Ward and the “Brotherhood League,” which became a major league for one season in 1890, are referred to the Sports She Wrote volume featuring the writing of Ella Black, who was the Pittsburgh correspondent of The Sporting Life in 1890.

Several articles mention Helen as fundamental to the formation of the Brotherhood League, and also blame her for its demise. At the root was gossip that Helen was peeved by a snub from Albert Spalding’s wife. Whatever the truth of the matter, Helen Dauvray was the woman at the center of major league baseball during its most formative years and the echoes of her impact continue to be felt today in post-season league championships, team trophies, individual awards, and the player unions that now dominate all professional sports.

As a springboard to understanding major league baseball and John Ward’s impact on baseball at the time he was married to Helen Dauvray, three related Appendices have been added to this volume, all written by men but pertaining to the overarching subject of both Helen Dauvray and Ella Black. A fourth appendix regarding the institution of the color line is included for reference, which does not mention Helen Dauvray or John Ward, but cannot be overlooked in the broader context of baseball of the era. The color line remained intact until broken by Jackie Robinson in 1947.

This volume includes 17 photographs of Helen from childhood to retirement, 28 illustrations that accompanied the newspaper articles, and three photographs of the Dauvray Cup from the Gorham Manufacturing Company which went out of business in 1986. The Dauvray Cup has not been seen in more than a century and its current whereabouts are unknown.

Helen Dauvray (Nellie Gibson) was born February 14, 1859, in San Francisco, and died December 6, 1923, in Washington, D. C., at the age of 64. She is buried at Arlington National Cemetery beside her third husband, U. S. Navy Admiral Albert G. Winterhalter, whom she married in 1896. With multiple overlapping simultaneous storylines organizing them thematically and tracking them chronologically in this collection can be confusing. To assist the reader, a set of icons have been inserted into the article headings indicating the topic at hand. In many cases multiple icons are used as the articles delve into various aspects of Helen’s life.

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ELLA BLACK

The First Woman Baseball Correspondent

Ella Black was the Pittsburgh baseball correspondent for The Sporting Life weekly newspaper from March to November 1890. Other than her byline her life is a mystery. There seems to be no known biographical information about her beyond the articles published in this volume.

Some skeptics speculated that she was actually a man writing under a woman’s name, claiming her knowledge and interest in the game were beyond a woman’s capabilities. Many of the challenges to her gender were generated by fellow correspondents in other cities and are included in this compilation.

These rumors were debunked by Henry Chadwick, the most respected baseball writer of the era and the first sportswriter inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame, who met with Ella and vouched for her in print. His confirmation is considered conclusive, as he would have had every incentive to unmask her as a charlatan. She also met with several players and team executives.

The 1890 baseball season may have been the most pivotal and influential in American sports history. In an attempt to control their own careers, many of the best players in the two major leagues formed their own league, called the Players’ League, colloquially known as the Brotherhood League.

The Sporting Life

The Sporting Life was a popular national weekly newspaper published in Philadelphia. In 1890 it boasted the largest circulation of any sports newspaper in the United States with over 40,000 subscribers, and covered baseball, boxing, horse racing, trap shooting and other sports.  It was published in its original form from 1883 to 1917, and was briefly reprised from 1922 to 1924.

The format of The Sporting Life featured weekly reports submitted by regular correspondents located in major league cities around the country. The rival sportswriters commonly took swipes at each other and mocked their outrageous predictions—not unlike hundreds of television, radio and podcast debate shows and countless social media forums today.

As the sole woman correspondent, Ella Black was not immune from such attacks. The Sporting Life was interspersed with condescending comments about her which are included in this collection within boxes on relevant pages and referenced in the Table of Contents. Her primary literary nemesis was Cincinnati’s Ren Mulford who wrote for The Sporting Life from 1888 to 1917. Mulford is remembered for popularizing the use of the word “fan.”

One of the most common criticisms targeted Ella’s gender. She often self-deprecatingly admitted her uniqueness, but never shied away from her opinions, inserting the passive-aggressive caveat, “I know I am only a woman…” echoing a comment made about her by a National League executive.

Ella brought a feminine perspective to sports gossip, which would be considered inside talk familiar to modern sports reporting, gleaned by sitting in the stands among players’ wives and other female fans, and by lingering unnoticed by baseball executives who never suspected she was eavesdropping. She disclosed which players were favorites of the ladies and revealed their off-field proclivities.

Ella Black wrote on May 10, 1890: “Everyone seems to think that all a woman knows how to do is to work around her home, talk dress and fashion. I do not advocate woman’s rights in the same way as Dr. Mary Walker and others of her stamp, but still I think they have just as much brain and can do most things quite as good as the men. I only hope some day, unless The Sporting Life should remove me from its staff, to be able to force some of the brilliant (?) masculine members of humanity, who have seen fit to ridicule the idea of a woman writing base ball, to admit that I am competent to do it.”

The Three Major Leagues

In the parlance of the day, the “League” referred to the National League, the same one that exists today, founded in 1876, controlled by wealthy team owners. In 1890 there were eight National League teams.

The “Association” referred to the American Association, a major league that existed for ten seasons from 1882 to 1891. It was decimated by defections to the Players’ League. Several American Association teams transferred into the National League, including the Cincinnati Reds; the St. Louis Browns (now the Cardinals); the Brooklyn Bridegrooms (dubbed the Dodgers in 1895, now the Los Angeles Dodgers); and the Pittsburgh Alleghenys (now the “Pirates”). In 1890 there were nine American Association teams.

Franchise owners in the 8-team Players’ League shared profits with their players, who retained more control over their own careers than in the other two leagues. The PL only existed for one season, 1890, during which Ella Black contributed the articles in this volume, and she reveals some of the forces at play that led to its collapse.

Eighty of the 116 players who had been on National League rosters in 1889 bolted to the Players’ League in 1890. The NL refused to share its ballparks so the PL was forced to construct costly new stadiums which, adding insult to injury, were inherited and used by NL clubs for ensuing decades, including the famous Polo Grounds where the Giants and Willie Mays later played.

The two rival teams in Ella Black’s city were the National League Alleghenys and the Players’ League Burghers, although Ella never referred to the latter by their nickname. (The spelling of “Pittsburg” or “Pittsburgh” varied for several years, even among competing newspapers in the city, until 1911 when the “h” was officially appended. Ella spelled it “Pittsburg.”)

Both Pittsburgh teams fared poorly in 1890, with the Brotherhood team finishing in sixth place with a 60-68 won-lost record, while the National League Alleghenys were dead last, posting one of the worst seasons in baseball history, winning only 23 and losing 113 games. Attendance was so bad at home they played 97 of those games on the road and lost 88 of them.

The Baseball Brotherhood

The popularity of the Players’ League was evident from opening day in 1890 in New York, when the pennant-winning Giants of the National League hoisted their 1889 championship banner yet drew only 4,600 fans to the game, of which 2,000 were free tickets, while the new Players’ League team in New York drew more than 12,000 fans with no free tickets. Working class fans supported the Brotherhood, which adopted the slogan “We Are the People.”

In Ella’s home city, the best players of the National League’s 1889 Alleghenys bolted to the Brotherhood Pittsburgh Burghers for the 1890 season. When the upstart league folded the players returned to their old team in 1891, which also raided a prized second-baseman from the Philadelphia Athletics—and is why some wags began referring to the team as the “Pirates,” a nickname officially adopted in 1912.

The Brotherhood was the first time talent flexed its muscle against the entrenched business interests that ruled baseball. A direct line can be drawn from the advancements of the Players’ League to increased salaries, player unions, eventual abolishment of the reserve clause (which bound players to the team that initially signed them for their entire careers), and free agency. A more detailed accounting of the Players’ League and its historical ramifications is outlined in many sources and is beyond the scope of this book.

Beating the Brotherhood

The National League challenged the Players’ League by deliberately scheduling games in the same cities on the same days, thereby dividing the attendance. Ella confronts this issue in several of her articles, arguing that cities like Pittsburgh could support two professional clubs if the teams would avoid conflicting schedules.

During the 1890 season the Players’ League team in Pittsburgh outdrew the cellar-dwelling National League team by more than 100,00 fans, and the New York PL team outdrew its NL rival by 87,500. This proved the underlying Players’ League’s premise, that fans attended games to see the players, not the teams. The Brotherhood won that battle but lost the war.

Albert Spalding led the senior circuit on its divide-and-conquer strategy, targeting and buying-out owners of Players’ League teams in the weakest financial situations. This spooked other financial backers who were intimidated by the National League’s deep pockets and the new league quickly collapsed after the first domino fell.

The Players’ League officially disbanded in January 1891. The renegade players filtered back to their former teams and submitted to the working conditions imposed upon them. The American Association never recovered and after 1891 the National League became the sole major league until 1900 when the minor Western League became the modern major American League.

The Reserve Clause

The Reserve Clause contractually bound players for their entire careers to the team that signed them, including the right to trade, sell or release them at the team’s sole discretion. In salary disputes a player’s only negotiating leverage was to refuse to play, unless he was traded or given an unconditional release.

Many professional baseball players initially welcomed the reserve clause when it was first introduced in the 1870s. Most players were on single-year contracts and the reserve clause gave them some assurance of continued employment on a team. But over time the clause was used to limit the salaries and movement options of the best players who could be traded against their will and paid according to the owners’ whims.

The owners colluded to keep salaries low and in 1889 instituted the Brush Classification Plan, in which players were graded from A to E, according to not only their on-field performance levels but also their off-field reputations, and were paid accordingly. Most of the NL owners were businessmen, not baseball men, so the classification and salary restrictions hurt the game and undervalued the players. Players were even forced to launder their own uniforms and pay for game tickets for their wives out of their own pockets. These working conditions led to the players’ revolt.

The Brotherhood league was defeated but the core idea of organizing and empowering players lived on and decades later would produce formidable modern player unions, increased salaries, improved working conditions, control over their own careers, and free agency. The Reserve Clause remained in effect until a collective bargaining agreement eliminated it in 1975, after Curt Flood of the St. Louis Cardinals challenged it in court in 1969.

Unions

The 1880s was an active era of labor union organization in America with localized and nationwide strikes by workers in steel factories, railroads, and other industries. Among their demands were an eight-hour workday, safer working conditions, and elimination of child labor. In this climate, John Montgomery Ward became a union organizer. In 1885 the 25-year-old star shortstop (and former pitcher) for the New York Giants, a graduate of Columbia Law School, formed the first sports labor union, the National Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, one year before the American Federation of Labor united various craft labor unions.

The Brotherhood’s financial backers were well-intentioned but weak-kneed. They ultimately betrayed the players. The investors in the Players’ League were dissatisfied with their profits and colluded with the National League owners behind the players’ backs to consolidate ownership of the clubs. More profit could be made by a monopoly of owners than by profit-sharing with players.

The Baseball Sisterhood

Ella Black was one of three women whose names appeared in newspaper articles about baseball in 1890. She briefly mentions fellow baseball writer Irene Meredith in the closing of her articles dated May 24 and November 1. Ella also alludes to her on March 26 as “a Cincinnati lady, who writes for a local paper,” and June 28 as “the only other feminine base ball writer than myself.”

In addition to The Sporting Life, three articles mentioning Irene Meredith are inserted in chronological order: (1) February 16, 1890, Cincinnati Enquirer; (2) March 22, 1890, Evansville Journal, Indiana; (3) December 11, 1892, The Nebraska State Journal. Irene Meredith is also mentioned in a column in The Sporting Life on March 12, 1890.

Ella Black’s story dovetails with the most influential woman in baseball history, actress Helen Dauvray, who sponsored the first post-season baseball tournament between league champions, sixteen years before the modern World Series began in 1903. Dauvray was married to the primary force behind the formation of the Players’ League, future Hall of Famer John Montgomery Ward, and 1890 was the year of their highly-publicized marital discord. While Helen was not a sportswriter, she was an oft-quoted subject of many articles and her high-profile relationship with the founder of the Players’ League is explored in a separate volume of the Sports She Wrote series.

Ella mentions Helen Dauvray twice: March 19 as rumored to be the inspiration for the Players’ League; and on April 26 an anecdote about Helen taking care of Ella when she became ill on a railroad sleeping car they were both riding in, and lamenting the marital problems between Helen and John Ward being aired in the public press. Henry Chadwick refers to Helen Dauvray in the April 5 and June 28 issues, commenting that she is knowledgeable about baseball and is a talented writer.

Name Dropping

Ella Black mentions many players and executives who may not be familiar to modern readers. The following is a thumbnail sketch of some of the most prominently named in her articles and the number of references. Additional background about these men can be found online and in print.

She writes about three future Hall of Fame players on Pittsburgh’s Brotherhood team:

• Pitcher Pud Galvin, who held almost all career pitching records before  Cy Young (most wins, starts, complete games, innings pitched, first to reach 300 wins) and in 1889 openly used an injectable performance-enhancing  drug, a testosterone substance derived from animal testicles. [24x]
• Jake Beckley, first baseman, lifetime batting average of .309, a mere 70 hits shy of 3,000 for his career (the second highest total for any player when he retired in 1907), cited as his reason for leaving the National League and joining the Players’ League: “I’m only in this game for the money anyway.” [48x]
• Ned Hanlon, manager, a former player noted for his ability to steal bases, a category for which records were not kept until his final six seasons as a full-time player in which he averaged 55 per season. He was a major league manager for nineteen seasons. [106x]

She references several future Hall of Famers from other teams:

• Albert Spalding, former pitcher and manager, team owner, founder of the sporting goods company that bears his name, and co-founder of the National League with William Hulbert. Spalding also led the commission that investigated the origin of the sport which erroneously created the Abner Doubleday myth. [12x]
• John Montgomery Ward, Players’ League founder and president, was the second pitcher to throw a perfect game (five days after the first perfect game, and the last one in the National League for the next 84 years), the only player with both 100 wins as a pitcher and 2,000 hits as a batter. His identity was so tied to the Players’ League that his team in 1890 was known as the Brooklyn Ward’s Wonders and finished in second place behind Boston. [54x]
• Cap Anson, first baseman for the Chicago White Stockings (now the Chicago Cubs), boasts a .334 lifetime batting average, considered the first player to reach 3,000 hits, although the actual number is in dispute because for part of his career bases on balls were counted as hits. He became an innovative manager. His legacy is forever tarnished by his significant role in drawing the racial color line in baseball. [36x]
• Charles Comiskey, pitcher and first-baseman (instituted playing off the bag to cover more ground) and future owner of the Chicago White Sox for thirty years, was player-manager of the Chicago Pirates franchise of the Players’ League in 1890. [23x]
• Buck Ewing was a solid lifetime .300 hitter and outstanding defensive catcher, who played all nine positions in his 17-year career. In 1890 he was the player-manager of the New York Giants of the Players’ League. [28x]
• Amos Rusie had the best fastball in the league, led all three major leagues in strikeouts in 1890 with 341, fifty more than any other pitcher, and is considered the catalyst for moving the pitching distance back five feet to its present 60½ feet in 1893. [12x]
• Mike “King” Kelly was the player-manager for the Boston Reds, winners of the Players’ League championship in 1890. From 1880 to 1886 his Chicago White Stockings team won the pennant five times. The following year team owner Albert Spalding sold him to the Boston Beaneaters for $10,000, after which Kelly became known as the “$10,000 beauty.” He was a lifetime .300 hitter as a catcher and outfielder, known for his expert baserunning, stealing 84 bases in 1887. Kelley was a colorful personality, one of the first to popularize signing autographs for fans, wrote the first autobiography by a baseball player in 1888, and became a comedic vaudeville stage performer, subject of the 1889 song and 1927 movie “Slide, Kelly, Slide.” [19x]

Other noteworthy players in Ella’s articles:

• Guy Hecker pitched the second no-hitter in American Association history one week after Tony Mullane threw the first one in 1882. He held the WHIP (walks and hits per inning pitched) record until the year 2000, and was the best hitting pitcher of the 19th century, once clubbing three home runs in a single game. In 1884 he led the league in wins, strikeouts and earned run average, and two years later won the batting title with a .341 average. Hecker was the player-manager of the Pittsburgh Alleghenys in 1890 and retired from baseball at the end of the season. [55x]
• Fred Dunlap played second base for Pittsburgh’s National League franchise and was the highest paid player in major league baseball from 1884 to 1889. After team president Nimick (see below) cut his annual salary in 1890 from $6,000 to $3,500, he performed miserably, was released from the team 17 games into the season, joined the PL’s New York Giants but only played in one game before retiring for the season. Eight games into the 1891 season he suffered a career-ending injury. [28x]
• Tony Mullane, one of the winningest pitchers not in the Hall of Fame, was a handsome favorite of female fans, nicknamed “The Apollo of the Box.” (At that time pitchers threw from a rectangular box rather than a circular mound. The box was 4 feet wide and 5½ feet long. The front line of the box was only 50 feet from home plate but that was the maximum follow-through stride length, not the actual pitching distance. The pitcher was required to place his back foot on the back line of the box, which was 55½ feet from home plate, measured to the center of plate; after 1893 the distance was moved back five feet, measured to the rear point of the plate. There was no elevated pitcher’s mound or rubber slab to use for purchase.) [16x]
• Billy Sunday was an athletic speedy outfielder for the Alleghenys in 1890, a likeable fan favorite. He was offered a higher salary by the rival Player’s League but felt morally obligated to adhere to the reserve clause of the National League and resigned from the Brotherhood union. As a reward he was named team captain of one of the losingest teams in baseball history. In the early 1900s Billy Sunday gained fame as the most influential Christian evangelist in the country. [20x]
• Jack Glasscock was the best fielding shortstop of the 1880s and National League batting champion in 1890 for John Day’s New York Giants. He retired with more than 2,000 career hits. Ella disapproved of his cursing and arguing with umpires. [18x]
• Tim Murnane was a player from 1872 to 1884, but by the time Ella was writing for The Sporting Life he was a well-known baseball writer for the Boston Globe where he remained for more than 30 years. He exchanged correspondence with Ella (and also with Helen Dauvray) through The Sporting Life in 1890. [11x]

Ella also mentions executives worth identifying:

• Director J. Palmer O’Neill, a businessman and executive of the Pittsburgh Players’ League franchise. [84x]
• William Albert Nimick, part owner of the National League Pittsburgh franchise from 1885 to 1891, intended to bury the crosstown Brotherhood team by scheduling conflicting dates for home games, on the assumption that fans would be loyal to the National League team. He was mistaken about their loyalty, as the team was historically bad and attendance sagged so woefully the team was forced to play most of its games on the road. [43x]
• John Tener, a pitcher and outfielder on the Pittsburg Players’ League team and served as Secretary of the League under John Ward. After his playing days he was elected to the United States Congress in 1909, became the Governor of Pennsylvania in 1911, and then returned to baseball as President of the National League from 1915 to 1918. [28x]
• Charles Byrne, an original founder of the franchise that became the Brooklyn (now Los Angeles) Dodgers, whose team left the American Association after winning the pennant in 1889, to join the National League where it won the pennant in 1890. [17x]
• John B. Day, the kingpin of major league baseball in New York in the 1880s, owned both the New York Metropolitans of the American Association, who won the pennant in 1884, and the New York Giants of the National League, champions in 1888 and 1889. John Ward was his star player on the Giants and the entire roster defected to the Players’ League. Day took a financial loss from which he never recovered and sold the team in 1893. [22x]
• Chris von der Ahe, owner of American Association’s St. Louis Browns franchise (now the Cardinals), winners of the Association’s pennant from 1885 to 1888, managed by Charles Comiskey. The team transferred to the National League in 1892 after the American Association folded. [19x]

• John T. Brush, a Civil War veteran, owned three different National League teams between 1887 and 1912: Indiana Hoosiers (1887-89), Cincinnati Reds (1891-1902), and New York Giants (1902-1912). In 1890 he owned stock in the Giants before buying the Reds in 1891. Brush was largely responsible for many players defecting to the Players’ League after he formulated the controversial “Brush Classification Plan” with salary caps (decreasing in $250 increments from top Class A at $2,500 to lowest Class E at $1,500 for each letter grade). [6x]

Henry Chadwick

The previously-mentioned sportswriter and historian Henry Chadwick’s name appears 29 times in this collection. If anyone deserves to be called the “Father of Baseball” it is Chadwick. Born in 1824, he edited the first baseball guide sold to the public, invented the box score, instituted the abbreviation “K” for strikeouts, numbered the defensive field positions 1 through 9, and created statistics such as batting average for hitters and earned run average for pitchers. He feuded with Albert Spalding over the origin of the sport, rightly claiming it derived from the old English game of rounders (which Chadwick played as a child in England), contrary to Spalding’s insistence that the game was of purely American origin invented by Abner Doubleday (who never made such a claim during his lifetime). Most relevant to this volume, as mentioned earlier, he met with Ella Black in person and publicly asserted that she was indeed a woman who possessed a remarkable knowledge of baseball.

The Color Line

The color-line was drawn in major league baseball in 1887. Ella doesn’t specifically mention it, only referring to race in her article May 3, mentioning (Moses Fleetwood) Walker who played for the Toledo Blue Stockings in 1884 (his brother Weldy was also a major leaguer). Another brief mention of race (not by Ella) is July 5 in a column noting that “when a foul goes over the fence, betting becomes lively as to whether a white or colored boy gets the ball. Big odds are given in favor of the black boy.”

Style Guide

The articles in this volume are transcribed from publicly available sources scanned and posted online. In several articles a limited number of words or lines are illegible due to folds, tears, and other deterioration due to their age. These segments are notated in italics within brackets, e.g.: [one word illegible].

Misspellings of names have been corrected where known, e.g., inconsistent spelling of correct “O’Neill” replaces incorrect “O’Neil”; “Daley” replaces “Daily.” Words that had yet to be conjoined, e.g., baseball (base ball), anyone (any one), newcomer (new comer), today (to-day), and inconsistent capitalizations have been retained in their original form.

Text in bold font in the body of the articles is intended for quick reference guides and potential points of interest for modern readers and was not printed in bold font in the original articles.

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