Base Ball Founders: the Clubs, Players and Cities of the Northeast That Established the Game by Peter Morris

Author:Peter Morris [Peter Morris, William J. Ryczek, Jan Finkel, Leonard Levin and Richard Malatzky]
Language: eng
Format: epub
Publisher: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Published: 2013-07-10T00:00:00+00:00

The Championship Seasons

The Eckford Club’s 1861 season opened in elegant fashion with the club’s second annual ball, held at the Odeon on January 20.19 In a ballroom that was “elegantly and profusely decorated with an abundance of bunting,” Frank Pidgeon “officiated ... in regular Parisian style” and the “dancing was kept up with great animation and spirit until ‘daylight did appear.’” An account in the New York Clipper declared the ball an “entire and perfect success” and expressed the “hope that the Club and their ‘troops of friends’ will long live to arrange and indulge in the joys of many similar festive occasions.”20

Alas, the Civil War commenced that spring and brought an end to such merriment. Like most clubs, the Eckfords played a fairly light schedule in 1861, finishing with an 8–4 record. They won more games than the 5–2 Atlantics but didn’t play them, and so had no chance to win the championship. Before the season, the Continental Club had commissioned a silver ball as emblem of the championship, “but the war breaking out, interfered with the arrangement, and the ball was left at the manufacturers, Messrs. Ball and Black, N.Y.” 21

The following year, the two clubs did meet in a best-of-three series that took place in a new and very different venue. The Eckford Club finally left the picturesque Manor House in the spring of 1862 and began playing at the newly opened Union Grounds, the first enclosed field designed for baseball.22 The enclosure made it possible to capitalize on the excitement generated by baseball by collecting admission fees for the first time, but there was still great resistance to the whole concept of paying to watch a baseball game. To alleviate these concerns, it was announced that the proceeds of the relatively modest ten-cent admission fee for the first Atlantics-Eckfords game were going to be donated to the Sanitary Commission, an organization established to care for wounded soldiers.

Even so, it was reported that more than half of the 3,000 to 4,000 attendees on July 11 watched from beyond the confines of the field as the Eckfords beat the Atlantics in dramatic fashion. Trailing 14–9 after five innings, the Eckfords scored 11 unanswered runs in the last four frames and pulled out a thrilling 20–14 victory. The spectators responded with so much enthusiasm that they had to be reminded afterward that “indecorous language ... is against the laws of the ground, and will not be permitted.”23

The series continued ten days later. The proceeds were again dedicated to the Sanitary Commission and attendance at the Union Grounds was approximately 6,000, almost equally divided between those within and outside the enclosure. It was hardly an unqualified success, but it did represent progress and it raised $104 for a worthy cause.24 The game itself, in a pattern reminiscent of the Atlantic-Excelsior series of 1860, saw the Atlantics overwhelm the Eckfords by the score of 39–5 to even the series. “[I]n all our experience,” wrote one journalist, “we never saw the out field of a match played in such an execrable manner as the Eckford’s was yesterday.

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