Loyola University Chicago Loyola eCommons Dissertations Theses and Dissertations 2013 The Game They All Played: Chicago Baseball, 1876-1906 Patrick Mallory Loyola University Chicago Follow this and additional works at: https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss Part of the History Commons Recommended Citation Mallory, Patrick, "The Game They All Played: Chicago Baseball, 1876-1906" (2013). Dissertations. 530. https://ecommons.luc.edu/luc_diss/530 This Dissertation is brought to you for free and open access by the Theses and Dissertations at Loyola eCommons. It has been accepted for inclusion in Dissertations by an authorized administrator of Loyola eCommons. For more information, please contact [email protected]. This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License. Copyright © 2013 Patrick Mallory LOYOLA UNIVERSITY CHICAGO THE GAME THEY ALL PLAYED: CHICAGO BASEBALL, 1876-1906 A DISSERTATION SUBMITTED TO THE FACULTY OF THE GRADUATE SCHOOL IN CANDIDACY FOR THE DEGREE OF DOCTOR OF PHILOSOPHY PROGRAM IN HISTORY BY PATRICK MALLORY CHICAGO, IL MAY 2013 Copyright by Patrick Mallory, 2013 All rights reserved. ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS When writing this dissertation I had the benefit of working with Ted Karamanski. Dr. Karamanski critiqued, rewrote sentences, paragraphs, chapters, and introduced ideas that made this work a more lucid document. In the end I could not have had a better advisor and editor who showed me that researching, writing, and theory could be much deeper than I originally designed. Lewis Erenberg and Susan Hirsch supported my ideas not only on the original committee when I proposed this subject but also before in the classroom and, in the case of Dr. Hirsch, in her office where she encouraged me to pursue this degree. At the end of this process a big thanks goes to Elizabeth Fratterigo and Patricia Mooney-Melvin who stepped in to read my dissertation, provide invaluable insight, and serve on my committee. I also need to thank Dr. Kenny Brown and Dr. Jeff Plaks from the University of Central Oklahoma who were the first people to teach me how to read, research, and write history. I cannot thank Cord Scott enough for the editor's eye, but more importantly for being the constant driver that kept me motivated when I thought I might fail. Cheers. My parents David and Sharon understood I could accomplish this long before a sentence hit the page. Words are unable to thank them. Most of all, I would like to thank my wife and children. Hattie and Livia put up with a dad that sometimes spent more time putting together a dissertation on a laptop than putting together puzzles and playing iii games. My wonderful wife Erin tolerated weird nights of writing, researching, and thinking, for an esoteric topic that she listened to for far too many years. Without her I could never have accomplished the coursework, exams, and writing of this document. iv TABLE OF CONTENTS ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS ............................................................................................... iii INTRODUCTION .............................................................................................................. 1 Methodology .................................................................................................................... 7 Existing Literature ........................................................................................................... 9 CHAPTER ONE: THE NATIONAL LEAGUE............................................................... 20 Before the National League ........................................................................................... 27 The National League Begins .......................................................................................... 36 The National League Takes Hold .................................................................................. 43 The Chicago Fan and the Park ....................................................................................... 59 CHAPTER TWO: AFRICAN-AMERICAN BASEBALL .............................................. 69 Nineteenth Century African-Americans in Chicago ...................................................... 72 Early Black Baseball Participation ................................................................................ 76 Professional Black Baseball Emerges ............................................................................ 83 Towards Black Baseball Stability .................................................................................. 91 Conclusion ..................................................................................................................... 99 CHAPTER THREE: INDOOR BASEBALL AND THE BIRTH OF SOFTBALL ...... 103 The Gentleman’s Game ............................................................................................... 109 The City’s Game .......................................................................................................... 116 The People’s Game ...................................................................................................... 124 Conclusion ................................................................................................................... 132 CHAPTER FOUR: THE AMATEUR AND SEMIPROFESSIONAL TEAMS ............ 135 The First Chicago Amateurs ........................................................................................ 142 The Employee Baseball Nine....................................................................................... 150 The Other Amateurs and the Rise of Semiprofessional Baseball ................................ 159 CHAPTER FIVE: YOUTH, HIGH SCHOOL AND COLLEGE BASEBALL ............. 175 Youth Baseball ............................................................................................................. 182 High School Baseball ................................................................................................... 198 The College Game ....................................................................................................... 206 CHAPTER SIX: THE AMERICAN LEAGUE .............................................................. 220 The Western League .................................................................................................... 226 The Birth of the American League and the Great Baseball War ................................. 234 The Stadiums ............................................................................................................... 246 CHAPTER SEVEN: THE 1906 WORLD SERIES ....................................................... 263 How the World Series Came to Chicago ..................................................................... 268 v The Series Begins ........................................................................................................ 277 The Games ................................................................................................................... 284 The Series Comes to a Close ....................................................................................... 294 BIBLIOGRAPHY ........................................................................................................... 299 VITA ............................................................................................................................... 312 vi INTRODUCTION At the close of the 1906 baseball season, the Chicago White Sox of the American League squared off against the Chicago Cubs of the National League in the third World Series in the history of Major League Baseball. That fall, the World Series had national importance, as professional baseball had grown to be an event that engrossed the country. The series took on another level of importance in Chicago, as it represented the culmination of the city's sporting culture from decades of strengthening the game in fledgling amateur clubs that emerged prior to the Civil War, the devastating fire that destroyed the first full attempt at professional sports, the birth of the most powerful baseball cartel in the National League during the 1870s, and the appearance of the first true challenger to the National League at the dawn of the twentieth century, the American League. The story of baseball's transition in Chicago included the working-class, countless ethnic groups, and black Chicagoans, as well as the dominant white middle- class population of the city. By 1906, baseball had become a cultural force like none other, as fans filled stadiums to watch the best professional players, high schools and colleges fielded teams, men played on baseball diamonds throughout city in amateur and semiprofessional games, and men and high school students banged a soft indoor baseball around halls and gyms throughout the city. No singular work has attempted to synthesize the complex role baseball played in the everyday lives of Chicagoans at the end of the nineteenth century and into the dawn of the twentieth, when baseball epitomized the new 1 2 modernism of industrial America. This study examines the collective development of the game of baseball in Chicago from 1876-1906, analyzing the growth of the top-flight professional organizations, the development of amateur and semiprofessional baseball, youth teams, high school and college nines, the rise of African-American baseball, and the zenith of the city's control and devotion to baseball, the 1906 World Series. By 1906, baseball occupied a space in the Progressive Era and the United