St. Louis Baseball and the Civil War: 1862
Union troops at Benton Barracks
The second year of the Civil War coincided with the third baseball season in St. Louis. In a series of posts entitled "St. Louis Baseball and the Civil War," I've been going through the baseball coverage of the Missouri Republican during the war years and below, you will find all of the posts for 1862.
The 1862 season in St. Louis was a significant one because I believe that, during that year, we began to see the negative effects of the war on the growth and evolution of baseball in St. Louis. There appears to have been fewer clubs, fewer games played, fewer grounds in use, and a sharp decrease in coverage of the game in the Republican. While I think it's safe to say that the growth of the game we see in St. Louis between 1859 and 1861 had come to an end, there were some positive developments in 1862. That year we saw the first championship baseball series in St. Louis history, played between the Union and Empire Clubs. Also, there was an increase in the number of active junior clubs. With possibly up to 50,000 men from St. Louis engaged in the war, a new, younger generation of baseball players emerged in St. Louis. These young players, tempered by their war-time playing experiences, would take center stage during the great post-war baseball boom. But those boom years lay in the future and baseball in St. Louis was suffering from the effects of the war in 1862.
