Albert Spalding

“ Genuine lovers of the sport, who admired the game for its real worth as an entertaining pastime and invigorating form of exercise, saw in the triumphs of the Reds the dawn of a new era in Base Ball; for they were forced, nolens volens, to recognize that professionalism had come to stay; that by it the game would be presented in its highest state of perfection; that amateurs, devoting the greater portion of their time to other pursuits, could not hope to compete with those whose business it was to play the game—and play it as a business. ”

“ In all the former battles for the life of our national sport the men who stood for the preservation of Base Ball in its integrity had won. Every form of abuse had been so completely eradicated that public confidence had been regained, the press of the country was united in its declaration that the game was clean; that gambling had been kicked out; that pool-selling had been kicked out; that drunkenness had been kicked out; and now I was determined that so far as I had the power to help the upright managers of the League, Freedman and Freedmanism should be kicked out. ”

“ Do you wonder that, during the evolution and development of our national game, the umpire problem has been so difficult of solution? Are you surprised, with such a requisition of heaven-born attributes, that now and then an umpire fails to measure quite up to the standard of perfection called for? Do you regard it as passing strange that, in the half-century of professional Base Ball, difficulty has been occasionally experienced in finding men equal to the requirements of this most exacting position? ”

“ A crooked umpire at a ball game is as offensive as a scoundrelly jurist on the bench. His power to beget disgust for the sport is even greater than that of the judge to bring the law into reproach. The umpire does not deal with unfamiliar, abstruse, legal technicalities, whose veiled meaning needs to be explained by the citations of other judges in other cases in other courts. He must hand down his decision instanter before an audience composed of hundreds who know Base Ball law as well as he—or who think they do. ”

“ Professionalism has not wrecked Base Ball—it has merely brought about a higher degree of skill in players by offering them an income which permits them to keep up, after they have become men, the sport in which they have excelled as boys. The professional is merely a grown boy, and, in the minds of a large number of his fellows, a very lucky boy at that. His profession is his sport a little glorified. He is the natural outcome of the boy's love for the game—ah, how that same boy loves it! ”

“ It was a game in which men famous on the diamond in the seventies and eighties took part, and by instinct their old cunning, dulled a bit by long lack of practice, came back to them for the afternoon, and they played the best Base Ball of which they were capable. For seven innings men with gray hair, men with little hair at all, men grown rotund and men grown thin, assumed the old Base Ball gait, laid for infield and outfield flies, and handled the willow at the bat as only men to the diamond born can. ”

“ To play Base Ball requires judgment, courage, presence of mind and the possession of much the same qualities as cricket. To see it played by experts will astonish those who only know it by written descriptions, for it is a fast game, full of change and excitement, and not in the least degree wearisome. To see the best players field, even, is a sight that ought to do a cricketer's heart good, the agility, dash and accuracy of timing and catching by the Americans being wonderful. ”

“ Every close decision has seemed to be against you. The game has ended with a score showing your nine to have the small figures. Everything has gone wrong. The attendance has been light. The crowd is glowering in disgust. You turn from the grounds, thinking to escape to your home, where you may forget the Base Ball business and its discouragements for just a little while. But, alas! Every man you meet is loaded with the same question. ”

“ It would be as impossible for a Briton, who had not breathed the air of this free land as a naturalized American citizen; for one who had no part or heritage in the hopes and achievements of our country, to play Base Ball, as it would for an American, free from the trammels of English traditions, customs, conventionalities, to play the national game of Great Britain. ”

“ As a 'national game,' Base Ball has no more than begun its conquest. One of the great, popular awakenings of this generation has been the 'outdoor movement,' in which the gospel of fresh air and wholesome exercise has been preached from every housetop. The public schools are teaching it, employers are promoting athletic clubs for their working people, and a million dollars is not considered an extravagant sum to invest in the equipment of a college athletic plant. The average American is so constructed that athletic endeavor bores him unless it is enlivened by the spirit of competition. ”

“ From the very outset of the contest the Nationals played the finest game of their tour, not only in pitching and batting, but especially in fielding, while the Excelsiors, after the first innings, which ended seven to nothing against them, "went up in the air," as the saying is, and came out of the fight the most demoralized set of ball players ever seen in Chicago. To be beaten at all was bad enough, but to be whipped by a score of 49 to 4 by a nine their Rockford rivals had beaten the day before, was galling in the extreme. ”

“ But, while they left us no records of 1-0 twenty-four innings games, let us ever hold in memory the stamp of respectability imparted to Base Ball by its earliest champions. Let us never forget that the men who first gave impetus to our national sport in the way of organization for that purpose were gentlemen "to the manor born," men of fine tastes, of high ability, of upright character. It was not until long after the days of the Knickerbockers that Base Ball was nearly ruined by the ascendancy of rowdies and gamblers. ”

“ The leading Base Ball club of Cincinnati, seeing the inevitable, unwilling to be bound by rules which nobody respected or obeyed, holding in utter contempt an organization that had failed to uphold the dignity and integrity of a game of which it was the nominal executive head, threw down the gauntlet of defiance to the National Association of Base Ball Players—not by a flaming pronunciamento, but by manly declaration that henceforth it would be known as a professional organization. ”

“ The genius of our institutions is democratic; Base Ball is a democratic game. The spirit of our national life is combative; Base Ball is a combative game. We are a cosmopolitan people, knowing no arbitrary class distinctions, acknowledging none. ”

“ Each mother's son of us is ready to shout himself hoarse in approbation of a square deal for himself, his "sisters, his cousins and his aunts." But how about this square deal for the Base Ball umpire? Is he different? Is he outside the pale for those to whom fair dealing is to be extended? We all know the nature of his duties. We know that he must give his decision with lightning-like rapidity. Is it a square deal to dub him "rotten" if he doesn't give our team the close decision every time? ”

“ Roosevelt, in his capacity as Commander-in-Chief of Army and Navy, used his official efforts upon frequent occasions to secure the playing of Base Ball at Army and Navy stations, by garrisons and crews, urging that it was the best available means of preserving the esprit de corps, and an excellent avenue for the administration of discipline. He has ever stood for Base Ball as the out-of-door game par excellence of the American people, and no wonder! For he is himself the very incarnation of all that goes to make a great ball player. ”

“ Base stealing, the gentle art of sprinting and 'hitting the dirt,' is the finest drawn and most closely calculated play in Base Ball, and the one that, above all others, reveals the mathematical exactitude of the national game. A player who can run eighty-five feet in three and one-third seconds from a flatfooted start, ought to reach second base exactly tied with the ball, nine times out of ten starts, if the play is perfectly made by the runner, pitcher, catcher and baseman. ”

“ I shall not here refer to the unlucky financiers whose enthusiasm for the game has led them into the backing of forlorn hopes in hopeless territory; nor shall I dwell upon the misfortunes of those who have gone to the wall by reason of inability to meet competition on the business side of the game. I shall undertake, however, to show that the Base Ball magnate who achieves what the world denominates success is up against a serious enterprise; that he must go "the pace that kills," that ownership of a great ball club in a populous and prosperous city involves man-killing experiences ”

“ And they knew that Casey wouldn't let that ball go by again.
The sneer is gone from Casey's lip; his teeth are clinched in hate;
He pounds with cruel violence his bat upon the plate.
And now the pitcher holds the ball, and now he lets it go.
And now the air is shattered by the force of Casey's blow.
Oh! somewhere in this favored land the sun is shining bright;
The band is playing somewhere, and somewhere hearts are light.
And somewhere men are laughing, and somewhere children shout ”

“ Everything must yield to the one consideration of inordinate greed. It will not be difficult to understand that any man who dominated such a faction as has here been described, while he might have a pleasing personality, would nevertheless be a standing menace to the perpetuity of the game.
I do not know how better to characterize the monstrous evil which at this time threatened the life of Base Ball than to denominate it "Freedmanism"; for Andrew Freedman, owner of the New York franchise, absolutely held sway over one-half the League interests and was the incarnation of selfishness supreme. ”

“ It is not easy to put one's hand upon a man who possesses any two of these several qualifications; and yet the efficient umpire must have them all.
The umpire must be intelligent. And by intelligence I do not mean that he must have education or culture. The best umpire in the National League would not shine as a scholar in a gathering of college professors. But he could outclass the entire faculty of any university in America in promptly and quickly deciding the fine points of a game of Base Ball, and that because he has the peculiar quality of intelligence required for his duties. ”

“ Our "Mugs" McGraw will do his best to play Base Ball and win,
And he'll wear some zephyr coaxers on his broad, determined chin;
And "Robby," too, will say "B'gosh" and chew a wisp of hay
To conceal his strong emotion when a liner gets away.
The Turnpike League will have a pennant made of green goods
⁠bright,
And each team will play to win it with all their strength and might,
So we'll see the game played this year as it was in years before
When the team from Podunk Centre comes to play in Baltimore. ”

“ The rules of the game will continne to shift one way and the other in the eternal duel between pitcher and batter, between attack and defense. For thirty years this effort at adjustment has been like the struggle between big guns and armor-plate. The science of pitching developed much faster than ability to hit the ball. Therefore the pitcher was handicapped in various ways, and the batter permitted to smite the missile freely until the tide swung the other way again. In recent years the 'slab-artist' has been given the advantage, and the complaint grows that there is not batting enough. ”

“ I believe in many of the arguments advanced in favor of the playing of League games on that day. I know it is the one day in the week when a great many of those who care for the game can have leisure, without too great loss, to witness the sport. I know it is a better way for the average American to pass Sunday afternoon than many others resorted to by the average American for entertainment on that day. I know that boys and men, by hundreds and thousands, who regularly patronize Sunday ball would be engaged in practices much more inimical to their wellbeing if no games were played on Sunday. ”

“ It is true that in London, and perhaps in Paris and Berlin, greater generosity has been shown to the citizens in leaving untouched certain fields for those who are fond of games which are popular in those cities, but in the matter of stands to accommodate patrons there is nothing which can equal such Base Ball palaces as have been built in Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland, Pittsburg and other cities, to say nothing of the improvement contemplated for New York, where both the American and the National Leagues will build on a grander scale than is in existence throughout the world of sport. ”

“ The game plays havoc with a boy's or man's emotions. In a day the player may well rise to the fine heights of victory and sink to the dark depths of black despair in a defeat. And it must be the one or the other. There is no midway station. The score is 5 to 3. You win or lose, and quickly learn that nothing is accomplished by trying to lay the blame, if defeat comes, upon the umpire or upon your fellow-players. Pleading a sore finger or strained muscle or tendon wins nothing for the vanquished player in his own mind or the minds of his associates. ”

“ Let such an Englishman stand at the batter's slab on an American ball field, facing the son of an American President in the pitcher's box, and while he was ruminating upon the propriety of hitting, in his "best form," a ball delivered by the hands of so august a personage, the President's boy would probably shoot three hot ones over the plate, and the Umpire's "Three strikes; you're out," would arouse our British cousin to a realization that we have a game too lively for any but Americans to play. ”

“ That makes it, in the truest sense, American. It is almost, if not exactly, the same game in all parts of the United States, and nowhere is it cursed by caste. Caste may not wreck a sport in countries where caste dominates the social life, but it would surely wreck Base Ball in this country. That's the finest thing about Base Ball. Its spectators, once they settle in their seats and glue their eyes upon the diamond, are absolutely equalized by their delight in what they see. ”

“ I am happy to say that there is a prospect of racing reform being extensively carried on with a view to materially curtailing the number of meetings, and when that desirable consummation has been reached I hope for an increased interest to be displayed in other field sports which (cricket and Base Ball included) have suffered from the general attention paid to the turf with its more exciting attraction in the shape of betting. Our great Winter game, as you are doubtless aware, is football, neither Rugby nor Association rules, but a game played under rules of Australian origin. ”

“ Thus it will be seen that Base Ball has its patriotic side—thanks to the soldiers and sailors of the Civil War—and this, together with its distinctive American character and spirit and its peculiar adaptability to the American temperament, have caused it to go on from year to year, gaining in power and popularity, until to-day it is the leading field sport of the world. ”

“ If he is apprehensive, pessimistic—and no trait is more entirely un-American—he will soon lose his place upon the team. The lad who is continually predicting a defeat will not last long in Base Ball. And the beauty of the thing is, that rarely will he let his faults go far enough to bar him from the game—his love of it is too instinctive and too real. Rather still he let the game correct the faults. And there you are. It's a man as well as a soul builder.
"The psychology of Base Ball? It is the psychology of success. ”

“ The game of Base Ball is American as to another peculiar feature. It is the only form of field sport known where spectators have an important part and actually participate in the game. Time was, and not long ago, when comparatively few understood the playing rules but the day has come when nearly every man and boy in the land is versed in all the intricacies of the pastime; thousands of young women have learned it well enough to keep score, and the number of matrons who know the difference between the short-stop and the back-stop is daily increasing. ”

“ It takes two and sometimes three days to complete a first-class Cricket match; but two hours of Base Ball is quite sufficient to exhaust both players and spectators. An Englishman is so constituted by nature that he can wait three days for the result of a Cricket match; while two hours is about as long as an American can wait for the close of a Base Ball game—or anything else, for that matter. The best Cricket team ever organized in America had its home in Philadelphia—and remained there. Cricket does not satisfy the red-hot blood of Young or Old America. ”

“ He knew nothing of the subtle science of handling men by strategy rather than by force. Could it have been possible to eliminate gambling by physical demonstrations, Robert Ferguson would have cleared the Base Ball atmosphere of one of its most unsanitary conditions at that time; and this was true of many other well meaning but inefficient leaders in those days of the game's early evolution. It was this fact that later on made it very clear that there must be a separation between the playing and business ends of the sport; that no man could be a success in both offices at the same time ”

“ All this I know, and yet I also know that it is of paramount importance that the laws of every city and state and country should be respected and upheld; that the youth of every community should be educated to honor and obey the laws. And so, whenever this problem presents itself for my decision, I first ask the question, "Is Sunday ball playing legal?" If it is, I say "Play Ball." If not, my answer is the same as that given to the petitioners at Honolulu. This rule obtained throughout our world tour. Wherever and whenever the law forbade, we played no games. ”