Category: Resolute

1868: The Empires Get Knocked Out Of The Tournament

6/29/2015

This new feature in the exhibition, which has caused such universal commendation and given rise to a spirited rivalry among our crack clubs, was inaugurated yesterday under flattering auspices. The committee appointed by the Association, consisting of Col. A.R. Easton, and Messrs. John Young, H.G. Smith, Walter Carr and W.B. Edgar, have spared no pains in arranging the preliminaries, and at 10 o'clock yesterday morning a large crowd were in attendance to witness the contest between the Aetna and Dirigo clubs. The game was intensely exciting, and resulted in the defeat of the Dirigio, by the following score: Aetna, 40; Dirigo, 29. J.H. Smith acted as Umpire.

In the afternoon the Empires and the Resolutes crossed swords. The game commenced promptly at two o'clock and lasted three hours. The Empires suffered defeat, the score standing 32 for the Resolutes against 27 for the ex-champions. Fred. Herring, of the Atlantic, officiated as Umpire. the matches for to-morrow are - forenoon, Olympic, of Carondelet, vs. Atlantic; afternoon, Union, Jr., vs. St. Louis.

On Wednesday afternoon the Excelsiors, of Chicago, will play a match with the Unions, of this city.

-Missouri Republican, October 6, 1868

Back to the 1868 season.

When I read this article, I was surprised to see that the Empires got knocked out of the tournament by the Resolutes. Maybe I shouldn't have been. Maybe the club didn't place much importance upon the game and was looking forward to the resumption of their championship series against the Unions. Maybe they didn't put their best nine on the field. Who knows?

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1868: The Tournament

6/19/2015

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The Base Ball Tournament during the week of the great exhibition is expected to be an interesting affair. Several good clubs from abroad have given assurances of their purpose to be here. The committee has arranged the order of the playing and have named the Dirigo vs. Etna to begin the games on the morning of the first day. On Monday evening, the Empires vs. Resolute; Tuesday, A.M., Olympic, of Carondelet, vs. Atlantic; Tuesday, P.M., Union, Jr., vs. St. Louis; Wednesday, A.M., the winning club of Monday A.M., vs. the winning club of Tuesday A.M.; Wednesday, P.M., Excelsior, of Chicago, vs. the Unions; Thursday, A.M., winning club of Wednesday, A.M., vs. winning club of Thursday, P.M. Thursday, P.M., winning club of Monday, P.M., vs winning club of Wednesday P.M.; Friday, the winning club of Thursday. The games will commence at 10 o'clock A.M. and 2 o'clock P.M., each day, and any club failing to appear at the time designated the club on the ground will be declared the winning club.

Col. A.R. Easton, Jno. Young, H.G. Smith, Walter Carr and W.B. Edgar were appointed by the Fair Association to arrange matters connected with the contests. It is to be regretted that the prizes offered were not published sooner. Had they been placed in the prize list of the Fair, there would have been many clubs from the East to engage in these games. It seems that only four or five days ago the news of the proposed tournament found its way to New York, for the papers of that city last Friday had a notice of them for the first time. It will be quite an interesting time for the clubs near St. Louis, and will afford a rare treat to many visitors of the Fair.

-Missouri Republican, October 2, 1868

I had to read that first paragraph a couple of times and still couldn't make sense out of the tournament schedule. It's transcribed exactly as it appeared in the Republican but the whole thing gets a bit confused when they start trying to explain the Thursday schedule. Not a big deal but let's just note that the paper probably messed things up.

The note about New York clubs playing in the tournament if they had gotten more notice is unrealistic and shows some ignorance of how these clubs scheduled games. They would have needed several weeks notice and certain assurances regarding the amount of money they would receive. Even with that, it's unlikely they would have made the long trip to St. Louis just to play a couple of games. The only reason the big Eastern clubs came to St. Louis during this era was because they were on long, multi-city tours that featured ten to twenty stops and twenty to forty games. They weren't coming to St. Louis just for a tournament. That's not the way things worked in 1868.

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1868: Baseball In St. Louis Was More Than Just The Unions And Empires

6/4/2015

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The game played last Sunday between the Resolute and St. Louis Base Ball Clubs, for a silver ball, offered by Mr. Solari, of St. Louis Base Ball Park, was won by the Resolutes. Score, 33 to 22.

August 22d, the Dirigo Junior Club and the Niagara Club played a match game, the score being as follows: Dirigo, 53; Niagara, 37.

The score between the Missouri, Jr., and the Etna, Jr., in a game played August 23d, stood as follows: Missouri, Jr., runs, 31; Etna, Jr., runs, 18.

The score between the Stonewall and Adventure Clubs was as follows: Stonewall, 76; Adventure, 3.

-Missouri Republican, August 25, 1868

It's great to find some information about baseball in St. Louis in 1868 that doesn't involve the Unions or the Empires. Baseball in the city at this time was more than just those two clubs or just the clubs that were members of the state association. I understand that those were the big clubs, they played the big games, drew the big crowds, and it was natural to focus coverage on them. But I love to find stuff about the smaller clubs because it gives us a fuller picture of what was happening in St. Louis during the period. The game was popular and there were clubs like the Stonewalls and the Adventures playing all of the time. Their games just generally weren't covered during this period and that's kind of a shame.

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1868: It's Hot in St. Louis in July

5/7/2015

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The Buckeye Club, of Cincinnati, plays the Union Club, of this city, a match game next Monday, July 27th. Quite an interesting game is anticipated.

-Missouri Republican, July 21, 1868

So I'm looking through the Republican for 1868 and just don't see much baseball activity during July. I wasn't sure if I'm missing it or if there really wasn't anything going on. I know that there was a tradition in early St. Louis baseball to not play during the hottest stretch of the summer and, being a native of the area, I completely agree with and understand the tradition. But just to be sure, I checked to see what E.H. Tobias had to say on the matter:

The month of July [in 1868] was an exceedingly hot one and ball play was at a discount. On July 16 the Empire Club defeated the Resolute in a score of 38 to 12 and on July 27 the Buckeye Club, of Cincinnati, came to St. Louis unheralded and met the Union Club...

-The Sporting News, November 30, 1895

So, shockingly, it was hot in St. Louis in July. That, to me, is a darn fine reason not to play baseball. And I'll have to go back and see if I can find anything on the Empire/Resolute match.

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St. Louis Baseball and the Civil War: The Resolutes Were A Bunch Of Cheaters

9/18/2014

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The match game of base ball, which was to come off on yesterday afternoon between the Hope and Resolute Clubs of this city, did not come off on account of a dispute arising between both Clubs - the latter Club having two players on their nine belonging to the Empire Club.

-Missouri Republican, September 27, 1864

And now we know even more about the Hope and Resolutes. The Resolutes were a bunch of cheaters and the two clubs probably didn't like each other much.

At first glance, the Resolutes attempt to use two members of the Empire Club in their nine doesn't appear to be that big of a deal. It wasn't uncommon for a club to use members of other clubs to fill out their nine for a match, if they were short players. The fact that the Hope protested this tells us a few things. First, the scheduled match was viewed by the clubs as something more than a friendly. There was something at stake in this match. It may have been simply pride or honor but it may also have been the season series.

Secondly, this tells us a great deal about the nature of baseball in St. Louis during the Civil War. The fact that there was a protest shows us that the game had developed beyond its social function and was seen as something more than physical exercise and fun. The game had developed a competitive function and the teams were playing to win. This is extremely important as it parallels the national evolution of the game Morris talked about in But Didn't We Have Fun? and Goldstein wrote about in A History of Early Baseball. This is more evidence to support the idea that St. Louis baseball, during the war, was dynamic and growing.

We see this kind of dispute, again and again, in the late 1860s and early 1870s, as teams are fighting for the championship under the auspices of the state amateur association and the association had to adjudicate the disputes. It's fascinating to see the same thing in 1864 when there was no official body to mediate between the clubs and enforce the rules of competition.

Sterling Price

While the war in the east had devolved into trench warfare and the seige of Petersburg by September of 1864, the war in Missouri, after a rather lengthy calm, had become, once again, rather dynamic. On September 19, 1864, Sterling Price invaded Missouri, with the goal of capturing St. Louis, and, by extension, the state for the Confederacy. It was, without a doubt, a desperate gamble and the last Confederate offensive west of the Mississippi.

On September 27, 1864, Price engaged Union forces at Pilot Knob. While a Confederate victory, the outnumbered Union forces held off Price's army long enough and bloodied them to such an extent that the idea of taking St. Louis became an impossibility. Price's secondary target was Jefferson City, the state capitol, but as he moved westward, he found the city too heavily guarded to take. While Price would continue to push westward, into Kansas, and engage Union troops through October, Pilot Knob really put an end to possibility of Price achieving any of his strategic goals.

The Battle of Pilot Knob

Also on September 27, Bloody Bill Anderson and his guerrilla forces road into Centralia, Missouri, stopped a train on the North Missouri Railroad, and captured twenty-three Union soldiers who were aboard the train. Anderson executed twenty-two of those soldiers, sparing only Sgt. Thomas Goodman, who Anderson took prisoner and planned to exchange for one of his men who had previously been captured by Union forces.

Bloody Bill Anderson

It should be noted, without excusing the actions of Anderson in Centralia, that Union forces had executed six of Anderson's men just four days earlier, after they had been captured following a skirmish near Rocheport. Executing prisoners is always a bad idea because it places your own men at risk, should they be captured. Sheridan and Mosby went through the same thing in the Shenandoah before coming to their senses and reaching an agreement about the treatment of prisoners of war.

Sometimes we romanticize the Civil War but it's important to remember that, like Sherman said, war IS hell. It's ugly, brutal, and violent. The worst aspects of human nature come to the surface, even among good men in a noble cause. War corrupts the human spirit and makes devils of us all.

On that pleasant note, we come to the end of 1864. Rather than put up a post summarizing the material from that year just yet, I'm going to push on and put up stuff from the beginning of the 1865 season. What I plan on doing is folding the 1865 stuff, through the Empire Club's anniversary game, into the 1864 summary and put up one page for 1864/1865. At that point this series is at an end and I'll try to put together some kind of broad overview of Civil War-era baseball in St. Louis. I will be pushing on into 1865 but nothing comprehensive; rather, I'll be covering the Empire Club's claim to the Championship to the West. So we have that to look forward to.

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St. Louis Baseball and the Civil War: Resolute

9/17/2014

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There was an interesting match of base ball Saturday afternoon, between the Hope and Resolute clubs, the former being successful. The total runs were: Hope 33; Resolute 21.

-Missouri Republican, August 30, 1864

This is the first reference I have to the Resolutes, a club that would exist and compete in St. Louis into the 1870s. They are one of my favorite St. Louis clubs because, in 1865, they held their baseball picnic in Illinois, less than a mile from my house. While people lived in the Granite City area beginning around 1830, the city itself wasn't founded until 1895 and the Resolute picnic is really the only 19th century baseball activity that I'm aware of in my hometown.

One of the things I've been thinking about is the names that these Civil War-era clubs choose to take. Union. Hope. Resolute. I think that says something about these men and what was important to them. Empire. Imperial. Enterprise. Liberty. These men were not all cut from the same political clothe and we could discuss the political leanings of the Empire and Union Clubs all day but I certainly have to believe that the times that they lived in had something to do with the names they choose for their clubs. It says something to name your baseball club the Unions in 1860. It says something to name your club Resolute in 1864. These names evoked very specific values and characteristics. There was post-war club in New Orleans named the Robert E. Lees and that name made a very specific political statement. But I'm really struck not so much by the Unions or the R.E. Lees but by clubs choosing to evoke hope and resoluteness in 1864. If our forebearers could summon such courage in the face of their difficulties than we can as well. Because, I believe, that it takes courage to be hopeful and resolute. Fear and cynicism is easy; hope is difficult. So let's be resolute in our hopefulness.

Here endeth the lesson.

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1868: The Empires Get Knocked Out Of The Tournament

1868: The Tournament

1868: Baseball In St. Louis Was More Than Just The Unions And Empires

1868: It's Hot in St. Louis in July

St. Louis Baseball and the Civil War: The Resolutes Were A Bunch Of Cheaters

St. Louis Baseball and the Civil War: Resolute

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