The Great Match Of Base Ball
by Jeffrey Kittel
In 1910, Alfred Spink published a book entitled The National Game. If not the first history of baseball, it was likely the first attempt to comprehensively chronicle the early days of what had become accepted by then as the American pastime. Spink wrote that he intended to create “a record which should be kept if only to tell of the splendid and honorable work of the pioneers of the game who laid the foundation for the great baseball edifice which to-day rears its head so proudly in all corners of the land.”i There were few men better qualified than Al Spink to write such a book.
Born in Quebec City in 1854, Spink developed a love of sports at a young age, especially cricket and boxing. When his family moved to Chicago after the Civil War, he and his older brother William transferred this general love of “Manliness and fair play”ii from the games of their Canadian youth to the new American game of baseball. The two helped form a baseball club called the Mutuals, named after the great New York club, and, according to his younger brother, William Spink was an especially fine ball player.
In 1873, the elder Spink, who had been working as a Western Union operator, moved to St. Louis and began a distinguished career as a newspaperman, eventually becoming the sports editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the first in a long line of great St. Louis baseball writers. Al soon followed his brother to the Mound City and, by 1875, he also was working as a sports reporter in St. Louis. The two brothers, using their position in the press, worked tirelessly to promote professional baseball in St. Louis and were ardent supporters of the 1875-1877 Brown Stockings, one of the first openly professional baseball clubs in the city.
After the Brown Stockings organization collapsed following the 1877 season, in no small part because of an exposé written by William Spink detailing attempts by some of the Brown Stockings' players to throw games, the brothers took a more active role in promoting the game in St. Louis. They helped form a new Brown Stocking club, which competed as a minor, independent, professional team, and, through their efforts, professional baseball survived in St. Louis during the period when the city lacked a major league club. In 1881, Al Spink helped form the Sportsman's Park and Club Association, which managed the Grand Avenue Base Ball Grounds, and served as the Brown Stockings' secretary under Chris Von der Ahe, as the club joined the newly formed American Association in 1882. Without the efforts of the Spink brothers, professional baseball may very well have died in St. Louis following the Brown Stockings' scandal and it was in no small part due to their work that St. Louis once again found itself with major league baseball in the early 1880s.
In 1885, as professional baseball was once again becoming enormously popular in St. Louis, William Spink passed away at the age of thirty-seven of what was described as “typo mania,”iii a form of typhus. A year later, his younger brother founded The Sporting News, a weekly newspaper devoted to sports. The new paper was eight pages long, sold for five cents a copy and, while it tried to be national in scope, had a great deal of copy about local sporting matters in St. Louis. The new enterprise would see many ups and downs over the next few years but Al Spink would live to see The Sporting News become the premier sporting publication in the United States and “the bible of baseball.” A few years after the paper was first published, Spink hired his younger brother, Charles, as business manager. The young Charles Spink quickly turned around the financially struggling newspaper and, by 1889, had greatly increased circulation. The successful growth of the paper, not coincidentally, paralleled the fantastic success of Von der Ahe's championship Browns.
While Charles guided the papers finances, Al Spink, with his connections in the baseball community that dated back more than twenty years, controlled the editorial content of The Sporting News. By the early 1890s, he had a falling out with his old friend Von der Ahe and used his paper as a vehicle to attack the German baseball magnate. For almost a decade, the paper took a vicious anti-Von der Ahe stance and never missed an opportunity to attack the Browns owner. While it appears that Spink was dissatisfied with the way Von der Ahe was running the club and the two were on different sides of the Great Players' Revolt of 1890, it's entirely possible that Spink took an anti-Von der Ahe editorial position simply in order to create controversy and sell more papers. Regardless of Spink's motivation, the paper's decade-long attack on Von der Ahe was influential in forming the modern, conventional perception of Chris Von der Ahe. In large part because of Al Spink, Chris Von der Ahe is remembered, if at all, as a buffoon and clown rather than as a brilliant, innovative baseball man.
By the mid-1890s, Spink had sold his shares of The Sporting News to his younger brother and used the funds to finance some of his other interests. While still employed at the paper, he opened a horse-racing track and wrote and produced a play, The Derby Winner. In 1899, after a falling-out with Charles, he left the paper that he had founded fifteen years earlier. While his career at The Sporting News was over, Spink continued to have an interest in both baseball and the newspaper business. He founded the St. Louis World, a daily newspaper, in 1900 and, after moving to Chicago in 1910, worked as a columnist for the Chicago Evening Post. He also wrote several sports-related books, including One Thousand Sports Stories and The National Game.
At the beginning of The National Game, Al Spink himself tells the story of how he came to write his great history of baseball. He wrote that, one day in 1907, he was walking along the street in St. Louis when he was approached by an acquaintance who asked him if Spink owned a history of baseball that the friend could read. Spink stated that he was not aware of such a book existing but that he would look into it. He then wrote a letter to Henry Chadwick, the father of baseball journalism, asking him if he knew of such a history. Chadwick wrote back, stating that a general history of baseball had yet to be written and that “If a history of the National Game is to be written, covering its life from the beginning up to the present period, it is up to you to write it.”iv With this charge from the great Chadwick, Spink went to work.
The National Game is both an extraordinary and a flawed work. Published in 1910, it is most likely the first attempt to ever write a general history of baseball. As such, it is filled with invaluable information concerning the early years of the game. It has sections that cover the history of the game in the major cities of the country as well as biographies of numerous players, managers, magnates and journalists of the 19th century game. Spink's work fills a major hole in our knowledge of 19th century baseball and, without it, a great deal of information about the early game would have been lost. But regardless of its merits, the book is riddled with errors of fact that have plagued baseball historians for over a century. One of these errors, which has been passed along by baseball historians even though it was corrected in the second edition of The National Game, concerns the origins of baseball in St. Louis.
Regarding the beginnings of baseball in his adopted hometown, Spink wrote:
To this day there is controversy on in St. Louis as to who it was that introduced baseball to these parts. As high an authority as Shepard Barclay, Esq., late judge of the Supreme Court of Missouri, gives the credit of that sort of thing to Jere Fruin, St. Louis veteran contractor and now the head of the Fruin-Colnon Construction Company of St. Louis.
“It was in the early fifties,” said Judge Barclay, recently, “that Mr. Fruin brought the game to St. Louis. I was a little fellow at the time and with other boys I played all sorts of games on a field located right where Lafayette Park is now. I remember while playing there one day Jere Fruin, a great tall boy came among us. He was a stranger who had come from somewhere in the East and on our field he laid out a diamond and showed us how to play the modern game of baseball. He built us a diamond much the same as the diamond in use to-day, and in fact, showed us just how to play the game. That was really the introduction of the game to St. Louis.”v
The “high authority” that Spink quoted was, indeed, one of the pioneer baseball players in St. Louis and one would well imagine that he was in a position to answer questions about the origins of the game in the city but his testimony was rife with errors. A prominent 19th century St. Louis lawyer and jurist, Shepard Barclay was born in St. Louis on November 3, 1847. His father, Britton Armstrong Hill was a lawyer from New York who came to St. Louis in 1841 and, in 1845, married Mary Shepard Hill, the daughter of Elihu Shepard, a noted St. Louis educator and one of the founders of the Missouri Historical Society. Their marriage does not appear to have been a happy one and the two divorced four years later. A few years later, Mary Shepard married another lawyer, David Robert Barclay, and her son took the last name of his stepfather. While the young man was known to his friends and family as Shepard Barclay, his legal name was actually Shepard Hill until he had it officially changed in 1868.
An intelligent and driven young man, Barclay graduated from St. Louis University in 1867. After obtaining his law degree from the University of Virginia in 1869, he traveled to Europe and continued his study of the law in Berlin, finally returning to St. Louis in 1872 and setting up his practice. In 1882, Barclay was elected judge of the circuit court in St. Louis and, six years later, was elected to the Missouri Supreme Court, the youngest man ever elected to the state's high court. In 1897, he was appointed as Chief Justice and served in that capacity for less than a year before resigning from the court and returning to practice law in St. Louis with the firm of Barclay, Fauntleroy, & Cullen. He actually returned to the bench in 1901, when he was appointed to the St. Louis court of appeals, a position he held until 1903.
While a jurist of some note, Barclay is also remembered as one of the pioneers of baseball in St. Louis. Enjoying athletics and the outdoors, he had a lifelong love of baseball and was still attending games in the 1920s. His earliest known connection with the game was as a player and officer with the Civil War-era Baltic Club. Barclay was described by William A. Kelsoe, a St. Louis sportswriter who had played amateur baseball in the city in the 1860s, as “a crack pitcher”vi who played for the St. Louis University baseball club in their games against rival Washington University. Barclay himself noted that “In 1867, the year of my graduation, we held the local college championship in base ball, after a great game with our leading rival in St. Louis.”vii There is also a record of Barclay playing with the Union Base Ball Club of St. Louis in 1868viii and Kelsoe also mentions that he had played with the Unions.ix
Barclay's membership in the Union Club is significant for a couple of reasons. First, the members of the Union Club were some of the wealthier and more significant men in St. Louis and Barclay's membership speaks to his family's status within St. Louis society. Second, and more importantly, the fact that Barclay played baseball with the Unions says volumes about his ability as a ballplayer. In the second half of the 1860s, the Union Club was one of the two best baseball clubs in St. Louis. In 1867, the Unions wrested the St. Louis city championship and, by extension, the championship of Missouri from the Empire Club, who had been the best club in the city since the beginning of the Civil War. The two clubs contested for the city and state championship throughout the second half of the 1860s and their rivalry represented the pinnacle of post-war amateur baseball in St. Louis. Shepard Barclay was a good enough baseball player to crack the starting nine of one of the two best baseball clubs in not just St. Louis but in the entire western United States. While some of the claims made in later decades about Barclay's prowess on the ball field may have been exaggerated or erroneous, there's no doubt that he was an outstanding baseball player.
As good a player as he was, however, Barclay's memory, like that of all men, was prone to error and his testimony about the origins of baseball in St. Louis is provably wrong. He stated that the game arrived in St. Louis in the early 1850s but, at that time, baseball had not spread much outside the New York area and it is highly unlikely that the New York game of baseball would have been played in St. Louis at that time. In fact, the first great baseball craze did not even begin in New York until the middle part of the decade and it was as a result of the growth of the popularity of baseball in New York in the mid 1850s that the game began to spread throughout the rest of the country. While bat and ball games were being played in St. Louis and the surrounding areas at the time, the specific bat and ball game played under the New York rules, the game we know as baseball, could not have been played in St. Louis in the early 1850s. The time frame that Barclay lays out is highly unlikely.
Barclay also mentions “a stranger,” who introduced the game to St. Louis boys. The man he claimed brought baseball to St. Louis was Jeremiah Fruin, a prominent St. Louis businessman. Fruin was born in the Glen of Aherlow, County Tipperary, Ireland in 1831 and his family immigrated to the United States two years later, settling in Brooklyn. His father, John Fruin, was involved in the construction business, working as a contractor with the city, and, when Jeremiah Fruin was sixteen, he joined his father in the building trade. Fruin came of age in Brooklyn as the first great baseball craze exploded in New York and the young man developed a love for the game which would last the rest of his life. While it's unknown when Fruin first took up the game, there's evidence that he played in the starting nine of the Charter Oaks Club of Brooklyn in 1859.x Throughout the 1850s, Jeremiah Fruin was working and playing baseball in Brooklyn and had yet to set foot in St. Louis. There is no possible way that he brought his knowledge of the game to St. Louis in the early 1850s and he stated as much to Al Spink. Clearly refuting Barclay's assertions, Fruin said “I have heard it said that I was the first to introduce baseball to St. Louis. But I make no such claim.”xi
While Fruin was not the father of St. Louis baseball, he was a significant figure in the early history of the game in the city and it's understandable how Barclay could have confused that significance fifty years after the fact. During the Civil War, Fruin served with the quartermaster corps and was transferred to St. Louis in 1861. Almost immediately after arriving in the city, he “quickly sought the headquarters of the Empire Club...joined the club, [and] showed that he was a master hand at the game...”xii Having learned the game in the great hotbed of baseball, Fruin was probably the best and most experienced baseball player in St. Louis and it wasn't long before he was elected field captain of the Empires' first nine and starring as their starting second baseman. As a result of Fruin's leadership and knowledge of the game, the Empires established themselves as the best baseball club in St. Louis during the war years and, in 1865, claimed the baseball “Championship of the West.”
While he may not have brought the game to the city, he helped to create a baseball power that would dominate the post-war amateur era in St. Louis. One can almost make the argument that Fruin did, indeed, bring the New York game to St. Louis in that, as a top player who learned the game in Brooklyn in the 1850s, Fruin brought a subtle knowledge of how the game was played on the field. He may not have been the first to bring the rules of the game to St. Louis but, as he stated, “I was perhaps the first to show the boys how to catch the ball easily rather than by fighting it, how to trap the ball, to make a double play and that sort of thing.”xiii
Barclay’s error of memory, while promulgated by future baseball historians, was noticed by a gentleman in New Jersey, soon after the publication of the first edition of The National Game. Merritt W. Griswold was given a copy of the book by a Brooklyn newspaper reporter and felt the need to write Al Spink a letter, setting the record straight:
To start at the commencement of the game in its first introduction into Missouri I would refer you to the files of "The Missouri Democrat" for the Winter of 1859 and 1860, where in you will find published "the rules of the game," also a diagram showing the field and the position of each player made from a rough sketch I gave to Mr. McKee and Fishback, the publishers, or to Mr. Houser, at that time their bookkeeper, cashier and confidential office man (and, by the way, a mighty fine young man).
At this same time I was organizing the first baseball club, "The Cyclone," which name was suggested by one of its members, Mr. Whitney, of the Boatman's Savings Bank…
The first match game played between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, (if not to the Pacific Coast), was between "The Cyclone" and "The Morning Stars" and was played in 1860, just back of the Old Fair Grounds in North St. Louis…
I could give you many incidents up to the breaking out of the civil war and the disbanding of "The Cyclone" by its members taking part on one side or the other.
Hoping you will excuse my intruding with these little facts in regard to early ball playing in St. Louis, I am
Yours Respectfully
Merritt W. Griswold.xiv
Griswold’s letter was published in the second edition of The National Game and it is one of the best, verifiable documents regarding the establishment of the game in St. Louis that has ever been published in a baseball history. While Spink may have published an erroneous account of the establishment of baseball in St. Louis in his first edition, by publishing the Griswold letter in the back of the second edition, he established a guidepost for future historians to follow that could lead them to the true story of the origins of baseball in St. Louis, the founding of the city’s first baseball club and the first baseball match ever played in St. Louis history.
Born in New York in 1835, Merritt Griswold grew up in the western part of that state, in Chautauqua County, and mentioned in his letter to Spink that his interest in baseball went back to his childhood school days, where he likely played an older variant of the game. By the time he was in his twenties, Griswold was living in Brooklyn and, like Jeremiah Fruin, was swept up in the great baseball craze of the mid 1850s. He stated that he was a member of the Putnam Club in 1857 and of the Hiawathas in 1858 and 1859xv and, while there is no evidence that he ever played with the Putnams, there does exist several box scores of games Griswold played with the Hiawathas in 1858.xvi
Moving to St. Louis in 1859, most likely seeking his fortune in the great western boomtown and living with members of his mother’s family, Griswold brought his love of baseball with him to the Mound City. Taking a job at the Missouri Glass Company, he met a kindred spirit in Edward Bredell, Jr., the son of the company’s owner who was also the company’s business manager. The two men, joined by a small group of friends, acquaintances and like-minded sportsmen, held a meeting at the company’s offices in the summer of 1859 and formed the Cyclone Base Ball Clubxvii, the first baseball club in St. Louis to play under the rules of the National Association of Base Ball Players, which had codified the rules of the New York game in 1857 and officially established baseball as a unique game, separate from other bat and ball variants that had been played in the United States.xviii While ball games had been played in St. Louis almost since the founding of the city in 1763 and specific baseball variants would remain popular through the Civil War era, the Cyclones were the first club in St. Louis to play what can be described as modern baseball.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1859, the Cyclone Club met at Lafayette Park, divided into two teams and played baseball among themselves. These club days, as they were called, were the primary focus of an antebellum, pioneer-era baseball club, when the goal of the members was recreation and fun rather than competition. Games between clubs, called match games, were rare and in the St. Louis of 1859, when there was only one club playing baseball under the National Association rules, a match game was impossible to schedule. So after successfully organizing the Cyclones, Griswold turned his attention to finding someone for his club to play.
The first thing he did, as mentioned in his letter to Spink, was to publish the rules of the game in the Missouri Democrat. Griswold wrote in his letter to the editor that:
In addition to the rules and regulations for playing base ball, as adopted by the “United States Convention of Base Ball Players,” I send you a diagram of the field, with the position of each man when engaged in a match. As you expressed yourself desirous of publishing the latest rules of our national game, I thought a diagram of the field would be quite necessary to those unaccustomed to play according to the rules. And I would further state that the United States Convention recognize no playing unless in strict conformity to those rules and regulations.xix
Below the letter, as Griswold stated, was a “Diagram of Field With Position of Men” and the rules of the game as codified by the National Association.
Griswold’s act of introducing the St. Louis public to the new game of baseball by publishing the rules in one of the local newspapers was a common tactic during the pioneer baseball era. One of the ways in which the game spread from its origins in New York to the rest of the country was through the use of the new medium of the daily penny newspaper. Between 1810 and 1835, the number of American newspapers tripled as advances in printing and papermaking technology allowed for the publication of a paper that almost anyone could afford to purchase. Merritt Griswold and other pioneer baseball men used this new communication system to spread their knowledge of a new game to a wider audience.xx
Not content with simply publishing information about the game in St. Louis newspapers, Griswold took a more active role in educating the citizens of his new home town about baseball. According to his letter to Spink, he discovered a group of men who met twice a week in Carr Park to play town ball. Griswold wrote that “after considerable urging and coaxing on my part they passed a resolution at one of their meetings that they would try the national rules for one morning if I would coach them, or more properly, teach them, which I consented to do…”xxi After an hour’s worth of instruction and play, the club, after some initial disgust with the new rules, had, according to Griswold, picked up the finer points of the game and asked him to came back on their next club day for further coaching.
The club that Griswold urged and coaxed into trying the new game was called the Morning Stars. Made up of a group of store clerks who lived and worked in the Carr Park neighborhood, the Morning Star Club was formed in 1858 and played a local, St. Louis variant of baseball.xxii After being introduced to the National Association rules, the club reorganized as the Morning Star Base Ball Club on June 4, 1860 with twenty-four members and never played their old game again.xxiii
Merritt Griswold had been in St. Louis for less than a year and, in that time, was instrumental in the establishment of two of the first baseball clubs in the city. Through his proselytizing efforts, he had laid the foundation of one of the country’s great baseball towns and set the stage for not only the first baseball match in St. Louis but also for what has been described, by two of the men who participated in it, as the first baseball game played west of the Mississippi River.xxiv
On July 9, 1860, a notice appeared in the Daily Missouri Republican, announcing the first match game in St. Louis baseball history. “The first regular game of base ball played in our city will come off between the members of the ‘Cyclone’ and ‘Morning Star’ Base Ball Clubs, on Monday, the 9th inst., at 4 o’clock, P.M. in the field immediately west of the Fair Grounds. The game, we understand, is to be played according to the rules of the National Convention of Ball Players. As the clerk of the weather has been consulted, everybody interested is anticipating a good afternoon’s sport. We rejoice to see the national game coming into such high favor with our young men.”xxv The Daily Bulletin also took notice of the game and stated that it “will undoubtedly be the greatest game ever played in this city.”xxvi
The “Fair Grounds” mentioned by the Missouri Republican as the location of the match was located in North St. Louis, at the corner of North Grand Boulevard and Natural Bridge Avenue. Beginning in 1856, it was the location of the annual Agricultural and Mechanical Fair, which was an important social and economic event in the city, until 1902. In 1908, these grounds became the site of a 132 acre, city-owned park that is still in existence today. Not only the site of the first baseball match in St. Louis history, the Fairgrounds was a popular place for baseball games throughout the pioneer, amateur era, at least until the creation of fenced-in, baseball-specific ballparks in the late 1860s.xxvii
Sadly, we do not have much detailed information about the game itself. No game account was published and, while several newspapers reported the playing of the match, they gave few details beyond the score. However, while little is known about this specific game, there is enough information about match games during this era that we can speak generally about what happened. A match game was a much more formal affair than the intramural, friendly club games that had been the extent of baseball activity in St. Louis prior to July 1860. The game usually involved an official, written challenge from one club to another, who had the option of accepting or declining the challenge. If accepted, the details of the match would be arranged by the field captains of the opposing clubs. Such matters as the date of the game, the place where the game would be played, the number of games to be played, and the specific rules under which the game would take place all had to be negotiated prior to the match taking place.xxviii These details were not always simple matters. Club members, before the days of professional baseball, all had jobs and finding a date when a club’s best players could all get together was not always easy. Also, finding a suitable piece of ground, before the advent of baseball parks, could prove difficult in an urban setting. And with the rules in flux during this era, which rules were used in a match could be a contentious issue.
The best account of the match that we have comes from the Daily Bulletin. Under the headline of “The Great Match of Base Ball,” the Bulletin noted that the match attracted “a large number of spectators, among whom were several ladies. A very great interest was manifested by all present, who expressed their delight at the many instances of fine play displayed by both clubs. The match resulted in the victory of the Morning Star by twenty-six runs…”xxix They gave the final score of the match as 50-24 and listed the players on each side. Playing on the Cyclones that day was Merritt Griswold pitching, Gamble catching, Maurice Alexander at first base, Fitch at second base, Edward Farrish at third, Peters at shortstop, Edward Bernoudy in leftfield, Alfred Bernoudy in centerfield and Edward Bredell in rightfield. Playing for the Morning Stars was Finney pitching, Robert Henry catching, Archibald Duff at first base, Case at second base, Wilson at third base, William Henry at shortstop, Rawson in leftfield, John Henry in centerfield and David Naylor in right field. The Bulletin also noted that the official scorers of the game were Jonathan Collier of the Cyclone Club and Joseph Franklin of the Morning Stars and that S.L. Putnam, “formerly of the Metropolitan Club, New York,” was the umpire.xxx
A match game, during this era, was as much a social occasion as an athletic contest and the festivities did not end once the last out of the game was recorded. Warren Goldstein, writing in A Early History of Baseball, noted that “a match game was followed by a meal hosted by the ‘home’ club, commonly at a local tavern, restaurant or hotel. The festivities, which included toasts, speeches, and songs, sometimes lasted well into the night.”xxxi Another tradition of the early game that Goldstein noted was the presentation of the winning club with the game ball used in the match. Once the match ended, the losing club would present the winners with the game ball, which would then be inscribed with date and score of the match and placed in a prominent position in the victor’s clubhouse. Often, a short speech by the captain of the losing club, praising the victors, would precede the presentation of the game ball which was then followed by a similar speech by the winning captain. The presentation of the game ball as a trophy was another example of the formal, social nature of the event as well as an example, during this era, of the predominance of sportsmanship and gentlemanly deportment.
These social traditions that surrounded match games and that were every bit as important, if not more so, than the game on the field developed around the early game as it evolved in New York in the 1850s and were brought to St. Louis, along with the rules of baseball, by men like Merritt Griswold and Jeremiah Fruin, who had learned the game and its social traditions in the hotbed of the game’s infancy. Given the significance of the Cyclone/Morning Star match, Griswold made certain that these proprieties were met. One must assume that it was Griswold, representing the Cyclone Club and aware of the rules surrounding match games, who had officially challenged his baseball pupils of the Morning Star Club. As the challenger, the Cyclone Club would have been responsible for the post-match festivities and, as the loser of the match, equally responsible for the presentation of the game ball to the victors.
Griswold noted, in his letter to Spink, that he had the game ball from the match “gilded in gold and lettered with the score of the game.”xxxii This trophy was presented to the Morning Star Club at a dinner held at the Planter’s House Hotel, which was located at Fourth and Pine and considered one of the finest hotels in the West. The extravagance of gilding the ball and holding a dinner at the finest hotel in St. Louis again shows the extent to which Griswold was following in the tradition of New York baseball etiquette, where the generosity of a club was seen as a notable extension of their sportsmanship.xxxiii One can imagine a multiple course dinner, served in the hotel’s main dinning room, whose menu included filet de boeuf, fried oysters, broiled grouse, wild duck and deserts of custard pudding and several different kinds of pies, as well as copious amounts of alcoholic refreshment.xxxiv Interspersed throughout the evening would have been the toasts, speeches and songs that Goldstein mentioned. There can be no doubt that it was a festive and successful evening.
Out of the Planter’s House dinner came the most important trophy of the St. Louis pioneer, amateur era. The gilded ball that was presented to the Morning Stars “was for years used as the championship trophy” among baseball clubs in the city, “it going from one club to the other.”xxxv The gilded trophy ball became something more than just a symbol of the success of the Morning Stars and the good sportsmanship of the Cyclones. Throughout the pioneer, amateur era, the ball was awarded to the club that won the St. Louis city championship. The club that held the gilded ball was recognized as not only the best club in the city but also the best club in the state of Missouri and, often, the champion baseball club of the West. Out of the traditions that were brought west, along with the game itself, the new baseball clubs of St. Louis created their own tradition, one which would come to symbolize baseball excellence in the American heartland. Throughout the pioneer, amateur era, St. Louis clubs would compete for the honor of holding the ball that was used in the first baseball game in St. Louis history.
What became of the treasured, gilded championship trophy ball is one of the great mysteries of St. Louis baseball history, although there are a few clues as to what happened to it. We know that the ball was given to the Morning Star Club in 1860 and then passed to the city champion throughout the pioneer era. From 1861 through 1874, St. Louis baseball was dominated by two clubs, the Empires and the Unions. During that period, the Empire Club won the St. Louis championship twelve times and the Union Club won it twice. From the outbreak of the Civil War through the 1866 season, the Empires were essentially unchallenged and won the championship easily. One must assume that the ball, during that era, was in their possession. The Union Club won the championship in 1867 and 1868 and would have been awarded the ball, if Griswold’s assertion that the trophy passed from club to club is correct. In 1869, the Empires regained the championship and held it throughout the remainder of the amateur era, facing strong challenges from the Unions and Red Stockings.
When openly professional baseball came to St. Louis in 1875, the focus of baseball in the city shifted from the pioneer amateurs to the clubs that were competing for the national championship. The amateur structure of city and state association clubs competing among themselves collapsed and the clubs that fought for the amateur championship of St. Louis and Missouri became an afterthought to the professional clubs that competed in the “big leagues.” When the Atlantics defeated the Empires for the city championship in 1876, it was not nearly as important to St. Louis baseball fans as the daily play of the Brown Stockings, who were engaged in a struggle for the 1876 National League pennant. If the Empire Club turned over the gilded ball to the Atlantics in 1876, the trophy that was presented was one that had lost most of its luster.
However, it’s unclear if the Empire Club gave up what must have been one of the cherished symbols of the club’s proud history and of an era that had quickly faded. Griswold, in his letter to Spink, wrote that, the last he had heard of it, the ball was in the hands of the Empires. In 1895, Edmund Tobias, a member of the Empire Club and the first chronicler of St. Louis baseball history, wrote of the possibility that Jermiah Fruin had the ball in his possession. Tobias, however, was uncertain about this and declared the idea that Fruin had the gilded ball a legend.xxxvi But two of the most important sources on St. Louis pioneer baseball, Griswold and Tobias, both point to the possibility that the ball remained in the hands of the Empire Club after the demise of the amateur era. Regardless of the specifics of what happened or who had it last, the great, gilded baseball had physically disappeared by the turn of the century. By the time the Cardinals were winning pennants in the 1920s, the ball and its significance had disappeared from living memory. It was confined, forgotten but living still, in the writings of two of the men who had competed for it.
However, as the Cyclones and Morning Star Clubs celebrated their Great Match of Base Ball at the Planter’s House Hotel in 1860, all of that was still in the future. That evening, as they ate, drank, sang and toasted each other, what they were really celebrating was the successful establishment of the New York game of baseball in St. Louis. Clubs would come and go. Hard-fought victories would be won. Devastating loses would be suffered. Generations of players, some legendary and many forgotten, would take up the game and play on the ball fields of the city. But, in the summer of 1860, the foundation of a great baseball city had been laid. As the clouds of war gathered and the nation was on the verge of tearing itself apart, baseball came to St. Louis and the city, as well as the game, would never be the same.
i Alfred Spink, The National Game p. 1.
ii Ibid, p. 344
iiiSt. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 1, 1885
iv Spink, The National Game, p. 1.
vIbid, p. 38
vi W.A. Kelsoe; A Newspaper Man's Motion-Picture of the City, p. 6.
vii Edward Mallinckrodt and Clarence Miller; Shepard Barclay, p. 17.
viii E.H. Tobias; The Sporting News; November 30, 1895
ix Kelose; p 6.
x Wright, Marshall; The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857-1870, pp. 36-37
xi Spink, The National Game, p. 360
xii Tobias; The Sporting News; October 26, 1895
xiii Spink, The National Game, p. 361
xiv Ibid; p. 406
xv Ibid; p. 406.
xvi Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 31, 1858; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 23, 1858.
xvii St. Louis Republic, April 21, 1895
xviii Ryczek, William; Baseball’s First Inning, p. 49
xix Missouri Democrat, April 26, 1860
xx Barber, Phil; A Brief History of Newspapers
xxi Spink, The National Game, p. 406
xxii St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 24, 1887
xxiiiSt. Louis Daily Bulletin, June 6, 1860
xxivSpink, The National Game, p. 406; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 24, 1887
xxv Daily Missouri Republican, July 9, 1860
xxvi St. Louis Daily Bulletin, July 9, 1860
xxvii Boudreau, Kate; Fairground Park: What History Remains
xxviii Goldstein, Warren; A History of Early Baseball; p. 17-18
xxix St. Louis Daily Bulletin, July 11, 1860
xxx Ibid
xxxi Goldstein, p. 18
xxxii Spink, p. 406
xxxiii Goldstein, p. 18
xxxiv Lossos, David; Early St. Louis Hotels
xxxv Spink, p. 406
xxxvi Tobias; The Sporting News, November 2, 1895
Born in Quebec City in 1854, Spink developed a love of sports at a young age, especially cricket and boxing. When his family moved to Chicago after the Civil War, he and his older brother William transferred this general love of “Manliness and fair play”ii from the games of their Canadian youth to the new American game of baseball. The two helped form a baseball club called the Mutuals, named after the great New York club, and, according to his younger brother, William Spink was an especially fine ball player.
In 1873, the elder Spink, who had been working as a Western Union operator, moved to St. Louis and began a distinguished career as a newspaperman, eventually becoming the sports editor of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat and the first in a long line of great St. Louis baseball writers. Al soon followed his brother to the Mound City and, by 1875, he also was working as a sports reporter in St. Louis. The two brothers, using their position in the press, worked tirelessly to promote professional baseball in St. Louis and were ardent supporters of the 1875-1877 Brown Stockings, one of the first openly professional baseball clubs in the city.
After the Brown Stockings organization collapsed following the 1877 season, in no small part because of an exposé written by William Spink detailing attempts by some of the Brown Stockings' players to throw games, the brothers took a more active role in promoting the game in St. Louis. They helped form a new Brown Stocking club, which competed as a minor, independent, professional team, and, through their efforts, professional baseball survived in St. Louis during the period when the city lacked a major league club. In 1881, Al Spink helped form the Sportsman's Park and Club Association, which managed the Grand Avenue Base Ball Grounds, and served as the Brown Stockings' secretary under Chris Von der Ahe, as the club joined the newly formed American Association in 1882. Without the efforts of the Spink brothers, professional baseball may very well have died in St. Louis following the Brown Stockings' scandal and it was in no small part due to their work that St. Louis once again found itself with major league baseball in the early 1880s.
In 1885, as professional baseball was once again becoming enormously popular in St. Louis, William Spink passed away at the age of thirty-seven of what was described as “typo mania,”iii a form of typhus. A year later, his younger brother founded The Sporting News, a weekly newspaper devoted to sports. The new paper was eight pages long, sold for five cents a copy and, while it tried to be national in scope, had a great deal of copy about local sporting matters in St. Louis. The new enterprise would see many ups and downs over the next few years but Al Spink would live to see The Sporting News become the premier sporting publication in the United States and “the bible of baseball.” A few years after the paper was first published, Spink hired his younger brother, Charles, as business manager. The young Charles Spink quickly turned around the financially struggling newspaper and, by 1889, had greatly increased circulation. The successful growth of the paper, not coincidentally, paralleled the fantastic success of Von der Ahe's championship Browns.
While Charles guided the papers finances, Al Spink, with his connections in the baseball community that dated back more than twenty years, controlled the editorial content of The Sporting News. By the early 1890s, he had a falling out with his old friend Von der Ahe and used his paper as a vehicle to attack the German baseball magnate. For almost a decade, the paper took a vicious anti-Von der Ahe stance and never missed an opportunity to attack the Browns owner. While it appears that Spink was dissatisfied with the way Von der Ahe was running the club and the two were on different sides of the Great Players' Revolt of 1890, it's entirely possible that Spink took an anti-Von der Ahe editorial position simply in order to create controversy and sell more papers. Regardless of Spink's motivation, the paper's decade-long attack on Von der Ahe was influential in forming the modern, conventional perception of Chris Von der Ahe. In large part because of Al Spink, Chris Von der Ahe is remembered, if at all, as a buffoon and clown rather than as a brilliant, innovative baseball man.
By the mid-1890s, Spink had sold his shares of The Sporting News to his younger brother and used the funds to finance some of his other interests. While still employed at the paper, he opened a horse-racing track and wrote and produced a play, The Derby Winner. In 1899, after a falling-out with Charles, he left the paper that he had founded fifteen years earlier. While his career at The Sporting News was over, Spink continued to have an interest in both baseball and the newspaper business. He founded the St. Louis World, a daily newspaper, in 1900 and, after moving to Chicago in 1910, worked as a columnist for the Chicago Evening Post. He also wrote several sports-related books, including One Thousand Sports Stories and The National Game.
At the beginning of The National Game, Al Spink himself tells the story of how he came to write his great history of baseball. He wrote that, one day in 1907, he was walking along the street in St. Louis when he was approached by an acquaintance who asked him if Spink owned a history of baseball that the friend could read. Spink stated that he was not aware of such a book existing but that he would look into it. He then wrote a letter to Henry Chadwick, the father of baseball journalism, asking him if he knew of such a history. Chadwick wrote back, stating that a general history of baseball had yet to be written and that “If a history of the National Game is to be written, covering its life from the beginning up to the present period, it is up to you to write it.”iv With this charge from the great Chadwick, Spink went to work.
The National Game is both an extraordinary and a flawed work. Published in 1910, it is most likely the first attempt to ever write a general history of baseball. As such, it is filled with invaluable information concerning the early years of the game. It has sections that cover the history of the game in the major cities of the country as well as biographies of numerous players, managers, magnates and journalists of the 19th century game. Spink's work fills a major hole in our knowledge of 19th century baseball and, without it, a great deal of information about the early game would have been lost. But regardless of its merits, the book is riddled with errors of fact that have plagued baseball historians for over a century. One of these errors, which has been passed along by baseball historians even though it was corrected in the second edition of The National Game, concerns the origins of baseball in St. Louis.
Regarding the beginnings of baseball in his adopted hometown, Spink wrote:
To this day there is controversy on in St. Louis as to who it was that introduced baseball to these parts. As high an authority as Shepard Barclay, Esq., late judge of the Supreme Court of Missouri, gives the credit of that sort of thing to Jere Fruin, St. Louis veteran contractor and now the head of the Fruin-Colnon Construction Company of St. Louis.
“It was in the early fifties,” said Judge Barclay, recently, “that Mr. Fruin brought the game to St. Louis. I was a little fellow at the time and with other boys I played all sorts of games on a field located right where Lafayette Park is now. I remember while playing there one day Jere Fruin, a great tall boy came among us. He was a stranger who had come from somewhere in the East and on our field he laid out a diamond and showed us how to play the modern game of baseball. He built us a diamond much the same as the diamond in use to-day, and in fact, showed us just how to play the game. That was really the introduction of the game to St. Louis.”v
The “high authority” that Spink quoted was, indeed, one of the pioneer baseball players in St. Louis and one would well imagine that he was in a position to answer questions about the origins of the game in the city but his testimony was rife with errors. A prominent 19th century St. Louis lawyer and jurist, Shepard Barclay was born in St. Louis on November 3, 1847. His father, Britton Armstrong Hill was a lawyer from New York who came to St. Louis in 1841 and, in 1845, married Mary Shepard Hill, the daughter of Elihu Shepard, a noted St. Louis educator and one of the founders of the Missouri Historical Society. Their marriage does not appear to have been a happy one and the two divorced four years later. A few years later, Mary Shepard married another lawyer, David Robert Barclay, and her son took the last name of his stepfather. While the young man was known to his friends and family as Shepard Barclay, his legal name was actually Shepard Hill until he had it officially changed in 1868.
An intelligent and driven young man, Barclay graduated from St. Louis University in 1867. After obtaining his law degree from the University of Virginia in 1869, he traveled to Europe and continued his study of the law in Berlin, finally returning to St. Louis in 1872 and setting up his practice. In 1882, Barclay was elected judge of the circuit court in St. Louis and, six years later, was elected to the Missouri Supreme Court, the youngest man ever elected to the state's high court. In 1897, he was appointed as Chief Justice and served in that capacity for less than a year before resigning from the court and returning to practice law in St. Louis with the firm of Barclay, Fauntleroy, & Cullen. He actually returned to the bench in 1901, when he was appointed to the St. Louis court of appeals, a position he held until 1903.
While a jurist of some note, Barclay is also remembered as one of the pioneers of baseball in St. Louis. Enjoying athletics and the outdoors, he had a lifelong love of baseball and was still attending games in the 1920s. His earliest known connection with the game was as a player and officer with the Civil War-era Baltic Club. Barclay was described by William A. Kelsoe, a St. Louis sportswriter who had played amateur baseball in the city in the 1860s, as “a crack pitcher”vi who played for the St. Louis University baseball club in their games against rival Washington University. Barclay himself noted that “In 1867, the year of my graduation, we held the local college championship in base ball, after a great game with our leading rival in St. Louis.”vii There is also a record of Barclay playing with the Union Base Ball Club of St. Louis in 1868viii and Kelsoe also mentions that he had played with the Unions.ix
Barclay's membership in the Union Club is significant for a couple of reasons. First, the members of the Union Club were some of the wealthier and more significant men in St. Louis and Barclay's membership speaks to his family's status within St. Louis society. Second, and more importantly, the fact that Barclay played baseball with the Unions says volumes about his ability as a ballplayer. In the second half of the 1860s, the Union Club was one of the two best baseball clubs in St. Louis. In 1867, the Unions wrested the St. Louis city championship and, by extension, the championship of Missouri from the Empire Club, who had been the best club in the city since the beginning of the Civil War. The two clubs contested for the city and state championship throughout the second half of the 1860s and their rivalry represented the pinnacle of post-war amateur baseball in St. Louis. Shepard Barclay was a good enough baseball player to crack the starting nine of one of the two best baseball clubs in not just St. Louis but in the entire western United States. While some of the claims made in later decades about Barclay's prowess on the ball field may have been exaggerated or erroneous, there's no doubt that he was an outstanding baseball player.
As good a player as he was, however, Barclay's memory, like that of all men, was prone to error and his testimony about the origins of baseball in St. Louis is provably wrong. He stated that the game arrived in St. Louis in the early 1850s but, at that time, baseball had not spread much outside the New York area and it is highly unlikely that the New York game of baseball would have been played in St. Louis at that time. In fact, the first great baseball craze did not even begin in New York until the middle part of the decade and it was as a result of the growth of the popularity of baseball in New York in the mid 1850s that the game began to spread throughout the rest of the country. While bat and ball games were being played in St. Louis and the surrounding areas at the time, the specific bat and ball game played under the New York rules, the game we know as baseball, could not have been played in St. Louis in the early 1850s. The time frame that Barclay lays out is highly unlikely.
Barclay also mentions “a stranger,” who introduced the game to St. Louis boys. The man he claimed brought baseball to St. Louis was Jeremiah Fruin, a prominent St. Louis businessman. Fruin was born in the Glen of Aherlow, County Tipperary, Ireland in 1831 and his family immigrated to the United States two years later, settling in Brooklyn. His father, John Fruin, was involved in the construction business, working as a contractor with the city, and, when Jeremiah Fruin was sixteen, he joined his father in the building trade. Fruin came of age in Brooklyn as the first great baseball craze exploded in New York and the young man developed a love for the game which would last the rest of his life. While it's unknown when Fruin first took up the game, there's evidence that he played in the starting nine of the Charter Oaks Club of Brooklyn in 1859.x Throughout the 1850s, Jeremiah Fruin was working and playing baseball in Brooklyn and had yet to set foot in St. Louis. There is no possible way that he brought his knowledge of the game to St. Louis in the early 1850s and he stated as much to Al Spink. Clearly refuting Barclay's assertions, Fruin said “I have heard it said that I was the first to introduce baseball to St. Louis. But I make no such claim.”xi
While Fruin was not the father of St. Louis baseball, he was a significant figure in the early history of the game in the city and it's understandable how Barclay could have confused that significance fifty years after the fact. During the Civil War, Fruin served with the quartermaster corps and was transferred to St. Louis in 1861. Almost immediately after arriving in the city, he “quickly sought the headquarters of the Empire Club...joined the club, [and] showed that he was a master hand at the game...”xii Having learned the game in the great hotbed of baseball, Fruin was probably the best and most experienced baseball player in St. Louis and it wasn't long before he was elected field captain of the Empires' first nine and starring as their starting second baseman. As a result of Fruin's leadership and knowledge of the game, the Empires established themselves as the best baseball club in St. Louis during the war years and, in 1865, claimed the baseball “Championship of the West.”
While he may not have brought the game to the city, he helped to create a baseball power that would dominate the post-war amateur era in St. Louis. One can almost make the argument that Fruin did, indeed, bring the New York game to St. Louis in that, as a top player who learned the game in Brooklyn in the 1850s, Fruin brought a subtle knowledge of how the game was played on the field. He may not have been the first to bring the rules of the game to St. Louis but, as he stated, “I was perhaps the first to show the boys how to catch the ball easily rather than by fighting it, how to trap the ball, to make a double play and that sort of thing.”xiii
Barclay’s error of memory, while promulgated by future baseball historians, was noticed by a gentleman in New Jersey, soon after the publication of the first edition of The National Game. Merritt W. Griswold was given a copy of the book by a Brooklyn newspaper reporter and felt the need to write Al Spink a letter, setting the record straight:
To start at the commencement of the game in its first introduction into Missouri I would refer you to the files of "The Missouri Democrat" for the Winter of 1859 and 1860, where in you will find published "the rules of the game," also a diagram showing the field and the position of each player made from a rough sketch I gave to Mr. McKee and Fishback, the publishers, or to Mr. Houser, at that time their bookkeeper, cashier and confidential office man (and, by the way, a mighty fine young man).
At this same time I was organizing the first baseball club, "The Cyclone," which name was suggested by one of its members, Mr. Whitney, of the Boatman's Savings Bank…
The first match game played between the Mississippi River and the Rocky Mountains, (if not to the Pacific Coast), was between "The Cyclone" and "The Morning Stars" and was played in 1860, just back of the Old Fair Grounds in North St. Louis…
I could give you many incidents up to the breaking out of the civil war and the disbanding of "The Cyclone" by its members taking part on one side or the other.
Hoping you will excuse my intruding with these little facts in regard to early ball playing in St. Louis, I am
Yours Respectfully
Merritt W. Griswold.xiv
Griswold’s letter was published in the second edition of The National Game and it is one of the best, verifiable documents regarding the establishment of the game in St. Louis that has ever been published in a baseball history. While Spink may have published an erroneous account of the establishment of baseball in St. Louis in his first edition, by publishing the Griswold letter in the back of the second edition, he established a guidepost for future historians to follow that could lead them to the true story of the origins of baseball in St. Louis, the founding of the city’s first baseball club and the first baseball match ever played in St. Louis history.
Born in New York in 1835, Merritt Griswold grew up in the western part of that state, in Chautauqua County, and mentioned in his letter to Spink that his interest in baseball went back to his childhood school days, where he likely played an older variant of the game. By the time he was in his twenties, Griswold was living in Brooklyn and, like Jeremiah Fruin, was swept up in the great baseball craze of the mid 1850s. He stated that he was a member of the Putnam Club in 1857 and of the Hiawathas in 1858 and 1859xv and, while there is no evidence that he ever played with the Putnams, there does exist several box scores of games Griswold played with the Hiawathas in 1858.xvi
Moving to St. Louis in 1859, most likely seeking his fortune in the great western boomtown and living with members of his mother’s family, Griswold brought his love of baseball with him to the Mound City. Taking a job at the Missouri Glass Company, he met a kindred spirit in Edward Bredell, Jr., the son of the company’s owner who was also the company’s business manager. The two men, joined by a small group of friends, acquaintances and like-minded sportsmen, held a meeting at the company’s offices in the summer of 1859 and formed the Cyclone Base Ball Clubxvii, the first baseball club in St. Louis to play under the rules of the National Association of Base Ball Players, which had codified the rules of the New York game in 1857 and officially established baseball as a unique game, separate from other bat and ball variants that had been played in the United States.xviii While ball games had been played in St. Louis almost since the founding of the city in 1763 and specific baseball variants would remain popular through the Civil War era, the Cyclones were the first club in St. Louis to play what can be described as modern baseball.
Throughout the summer and fall of 1859, the Cyclone Club met at Lafayette Park, divided into two teams and played baseball among themselves. These club days, as they were called, were the primary focus of an antebellum, pioneer-era baseball club, when the goal of the members was recreation and fun rather than competition. Games between clubs, called match games, were rare and in the St. Louis of 1859, when there was only one club playing baseball under the National Association rules, a match game was impossible to schedule. So after successfully organizing the Cyclones, Griswold turned his attention to finding someone for his club to play.
The first thing he did, as mentioned in his letter to Spink, was to publish the rules of the game in the Missouri Democrat. Griswold wrote in his letter to the editor that:
In addition to the rules and regulations for playing base ball, as adopted by the “United States Convention of Base Ball Players,” I send you a diagram of the field, with the position of each man when engaged in a match. As you expressed yourself desirous of publishing the latest rules of our national game, I thought a diagram of the field would be quite necessary to those unaccustomed to play according to the rules. And I would further state that the United States Convention recognize no playing unless in strict conformity to those rules and regulations.xix
Below the letter, as Griswold stated, was a “Diagram of Field With Position of Men” and the rules of the game as codified by the National Association.
Griswold’s act of introducing the St. Louis public to the new game of baseball by publishing the rules in one of the local newspapers was a common tactic during the pioneer baseball era. One of the ways in which the game spread from its origins in New York to the rest of the country was through the use of the new medium of the daily penny newspaper. Between 1810 and 1835, the number of American newspapers tripled as advances in printing and papermaking technology allowed for the publication of a paper that almost anyone could afford to purchase. Merritt Griswold and other pioneer baseball men used this new communication system to spread their knowledge of a new game to a wider audience.xx
Not content with simply publishing information about the game in St. Louis newspapers, Griswold took a more active role in educating the citizens of his new home town about baseball. According to his letter to Spink, he discovered a group of men who met twice a week in Carr Park to play town ball. Griswold wrote that “after considerable urging and coaxing on my part they passed a resolution at one of their meetings that they would try the national rules for one morning if I would coach them, or more properly, teach them, which I consented to do…”xxi After an hour’s worth of instruction and play, the club, after some initial disgust with the new rules, had, according to Griswold, picked up the finer points of the game and asked him to came back on their next club day for further coaching.
The club that Griswold urged and coaxed into trying the new game was called the Morning Stars. Made up of a group of store clerks who lived and worked in the Carr Park neighborhood, the Morning Star Club was formed in 1858 and played a local, St. Louis variant of baseball.xxii After being introduced to the National Association rules, the club reorganized as the Morning Star Base Ball Club on June 4, 1860 with twenty-four members and never played their old game again.xxiii
Merritt Griswold had been in St. Louis for less than a year and, in that time, was instrumental in the establishment of two of the first baseball clubs in the city. Through his proselytizing efforts, he had laid the foundation of one of the country’s great baseball towns and set the stage for not only the first baseball match in St. Louis but also for what has been described, by two of the men who participated in it, as the first baseball game played west of the Mississippi River.xxiv
On July 9, 1860, a notice appeared in the Daily Missouri Republican, announcing the first match game in St. Louis baseball history. “The first regular game of base ball played in our city will come off between the members of the ‘Cyclone’ and ‘Morning Star’ Base Ball Clubs, on Monday, the 9th inst., at 4 o’clock, P.M. in the field immediately west of the Fair Grounds. The game, we understand, is to be played according to the rules of the National Convention of Ball Players. As the clerk of the weather has been consulted, everybody interested is anticipating a good afternoon’s sport. We rejoice to see the national game coming into such high favor with our young men.”xxv The Daily Bulletin also took notice of the game and stated that it “will undoubtedly be the greatest game ever played in this city.”xxvi
The “Fair Grounds” mentioned by the Missouri Republican as the location of the match was located in North St. Louis, at the corner of North Grand Boulevard and Natural Bridge Avenue. Beginning in 1856, it was the location of the annual Agricultural and Mechanical Fair, which was an important social and economic event in the city, until 1902. In 1908, these grounds became the site of a 132 acre, city-owned park that is still in existence today. Not only the site of the first baseball match in St. Louis history, the Fairgrounds was a popular place for baseball games throughout the pioneer, amateur era, at least until the creation of fenced-in, baseball-specific ballparks in the late 1860s.xxvii
Sadly, we do not have much detailed information about the game itself. No game account was published and, while several newspapers reported the playing of the match, they gave few details beyond the score. However, while little is known about this specific game, there is enough information about match games during this era that we can speak generally about what happened. A match game was a much more formal affair than the intramural, friendly club games that had been the extent of baseball activity in St. Louis prior to July 1860. The game usually involved an official, written challenge from one club to another, who had the option of accepting or declining the challenge. If accepted, the details of the match would be arranged by the field captains of the opposing clubs. Such matters as the date of the game, the place where the game would be played, the number of games to be played, and the specific rules under which the game would take place all had to be negotiated prior to the match taking place.xxviii These details were not always simple matters. Club members, before the days of professional baseball, all had jobs and finding a date when a club’s best players could all get together was not always easy. Also, finding a suitable piece of ground, before the advent of baseball parks, could prove difficult in an urban setting. And with the rules in flux during this era, which rules were used in a match could be a contentious issue.
The best account of the match that we have comes from the Daily Bulletin. Under the headline of “The Great Match of Base Ball,” the Bulletin noted that the match attracted “a large number of spectators, among whom were several ladies. A very great interest was manifested by all present, who expressed their delight at the many instances of fine play displayed by both clubs. The match resulted in the victory of the Morning Star by twenty-six runs…”xxix They gave the final score of the match as 50-24 and listed the players on each side. Playing on the Cyclones that day was Merritt Griswold pitching, Gamble catching, Maurice Alexander at first base, Fitch at second base, Edward Farrish at third, Peters at shortstop, Edward Bernoudy in leftfield, Alfred Bernoudy in centerfield and Edward Bredell in rightfield. Playing for the Morning Stars was Finney pitching, Robert Henry catching, Archibald Duff at first base, Case at second base, Wilson at third base, William Henry at shortstop, Rawson in leftfield, John Henry in centerfield and David Naylor in right field. The Bulletin also noted that the official scorers of the game were Jonathan Collier of the Cyclone Club and Joseph Franklin of the Morning Stars and that S.L. Putnam, “formerly of the Metropolitan Club, New York,” was the umpire.xxx
A match game, during this era, was as much a social occasion as an athletic contest and the festivities did not end once the last out of the game was recorded. Warren Goldstein, writing in A Early History of Baseball, noted that “a match game was followed by a meal hosted by the ‘home’ club, commonly at a local tavern, restaurant or hotel. The festivities, which included toasts, speeches, and songs, sometimes lasted well into the night.”xxxi Another tradition of the early game that Goldstein noted was the presentation of the winning club with the game ball used in the match. Once the match ended, the losing club would present the winners with the game ball, which would then be inscribed with date and score of the match and placed in a prominent position in the victor’s clubhouse. Often, a short speech by the captain of the losing club, praising the victors, would precede the presentation of the game ball which was then followed by a similar speech by the winning captain. The presentation of the game ball as a trophy was another example of the formal, social nature of the event as well as an example, during this era, of the predominance of sportsmanship and gentlemanly deportment.
These social traditions that surrounded match games and that were every bit as important, if not more so, than the game on the field developed around the early game as it evolved in New York in the 1850s and were brought to St. Louis, along with the rules of baseball, by men like Merritt Griswold and Jeremiah Fruin, who had learned the game and its social traditions in the hotbed of the game’s infancy. Given the significance of the Cyclone/Morning Star match, Griswold made certain that these proprieties were met. One must assume that it was Griswold, representing the Cyclone Club and aware of the rules surrounding match games, who had officially challenged his baseball pupils of the Morning Star Club. As the challenger, the Cyclone Club would have been responsible for the post-match festivities and, as the loser of the match, equally responsible for the presentation of the game ball to the victors.
Griswold noted, in his letter to Spink, that he had the game ball from the match “gilded in gold and lettered with the score of the game.”xxxii This trophy was presented to the Morning Star Club at a dinner held at the Planter’s House Hotel, which was located at Fourth and Pine and considered one of the finest hotels in the West. The extravagance of gilding the ball and holding a dinner at the finest hotel in St. Louis again shows the extent to which Griswold was following in the tradition of New York baseball etiquette, where the generosity of a club was seen as a notable extension of their sportsmanship.xxxiii One can imagine a multiple course dinner, served in the hotel’s main dinning room, whose menu included filet de boeuf, fried oysters, broiled grouse, wild duck and deserts of custard pudding and several different kinds of pies, as well as copious amounts of alcoholic refreshment.xxxiv Interspersed throughout the evening would have been the toasts, speeches and songs that Goldstein mentioned. There can be no doubt that it was a festive and successful evening.
Out of the Planter’s House dinner came the most important trophy of the St. Louis pioneer, amateur era. The gilded ball that was presented to the Morning Stars “was for years used as the championship trophy” among baseball clubs in the city, “it going from one club to the other.”xxxv The gilded trophy ball became something more than just a symbol of the success of the Morning Stars and the good sportsmanship of the Cyclones. Throughout the pioneer, amateur era, the ball was awarded to the club that won the St. Louis city championship. The club that held the gilded ball was recognized as not only the best club in the city but also the best club in the state of Missouri and, often, the champion baseball club of the West. Out of the traditions that were brought west, along with the game itself, the new baseball clubs of St. Louis created their own tradition, one which would come to symbolize baseball excellence in the American heartland. Throughout the pioneer, amateur era, St. Louis clubs would compete for the honor of holding the ball that was used in the first baseball game in St. Louis history.
What became of the treasured, gilded championship trophy ball is one of the great mysteries of St. Louis baseball history, although there are a few clues as to what happened to it. We know that the ball was given to the Morning Star Club in 1860 and then passed to the city champion throughout the pioneer era. From 1861 through 1874, St. Louis baseball was dominated by two clubs, the Empires and the Unions. During that period, the Empire Club won the St. Louis championship twelve times and the Union Club won it twice. From the outbreak of the Civil War through the 1866 season, the Empires were essentially unchallenged and won the championship easily. One must assume that the ball, during that era, was in their possession. The Union Club won the championship in 1867 and 1868 and would have been awarded the ball, if Griswold’s assertion that the trophy passed from club to club is correct. In 1869, the Empires regained the championship and held it throughout the remainder of the amateur era, facing strong challenges from the Unions and Red Stockings.
When openly professional baseball came to St. Louis in 1875, the focus of baseball in the city shifted from the pioneer amateurs to the clubs that were competing for the national championship. The amateur structure of city and state association clubs competing among themselves collapsed and the clubs that fought for the amateur championship of St. Louis and Missouri became an afterthought to the professional clubs that competed in the “big leagues.” When the Atlantics defeated the Empires for the city championship in 1876, it was not nearly as important to St. Louis baseball fans as the daily play of the Brown Stockings, who were engaged in a struggle for the 1876 National League pennant. If the Empire Club turned over the gilded ball to the Atlantics in 1876, the trophy that was presented was one that had lost most of its luster.
However, it’s unclear if the Empire Club gave up what must have been one of the cherished symbols of the club’s proud history and of an era that had quickly faded. Griswold, in his letter to Spink, wrote that, the last he had heard of it, the ball was in the hands of the Empires. In 1895, Edmund Tobias, a member of the Empire Club and the first chronicler of St. Louis baseball history, wrote of the possibility that Jermiah Fruin had the ball in his possession. Tobias, however, was uncertain about this and declared the idea that Fruin had the gilded ball a legend.xxxvi But two of the most important sources on St. Louis pioneer baseball, Griswold and Tobias, both point to the possibility that the ball remained in the hands of the Empire Club after the demise of the amateur era. Regardless of the specifics of what happened or who had it last, the great, gilded baseball had physically disappeared by the turn of the century. By the time the Cardinals were winning pennants in the 1920s, the ball and its significance had disappeared from living memory. It was confined, forgotten but living still, in the writings of two of the men who had competed for it.
However, as the Cyclones and Morning Star Clubs celebrated their Great Match of Base Ball at the Planter’s House Hotel in 1860, all of that was still in the future. That evening, as they ate, drank, sang and toasted each other, what they were really celebrating was the successful establishment of the New York game of baseball in St. Louis. Clubs would come and go. Hard-fought victories would be won. Devastating loses would be suffered. Generations of players, some legendary and many forgotten, would take up the game and play on the ball fields of the city. But, in the summer of 1860, the foundation of a great baseball city had been laid. As the clouds of war gathered and the nation was on the verge of tearing itself apart, baseball came to St. Louis and the city, as well as the game, would never be the same.
i Alfred Spink, The National Game p. 1.
ii Ibid, p. 344
iiiSt. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 1, 1885
iv Spink, The National Game, p. 1.
vIbid, p. 38
vi W.A. Kelsoe; A Newspaper Man's Motion-Picture of the City, p. 6.
vii Edward Mallinckrodt and Clarence Miller; Shepard Barclay, p. 17.
viii E.H. Tobias; The Sporting News; November 30, 1895
ix Kelose; p 6.
x Wright, Marshall; The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857-1870, pp. 36-37
xi Spink, The National Game, p. 360
xii Tobias; The Sporting News; October 26, 1895
xiii Spink, The National Game, p. 361
xiv Ibid; p. 406
xv Ibid; p. 406.
xvi Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 31, 1858; Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 23, 1858.
xvii St. Louis Republic, April 21, 1895
xviii Ryczek, William; Baseball’s First Inning, p. 49
xix Missouri Democrat, April 26, 1860
xx Barber, Phil; A Brief History of Newspapers
xxi Spink, The National Game, p. 406
xxii St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 24, 1887
xxiiiSt. Louis Daily Bulletin, June 6, 1860
xxivSpink, The National Game, p. 406; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 24, 1887
xxv Daily Missouri Republican, July 9, 1860
xxvi St. Louis Daily Bulletin, July 9, 1860
xxvii Boudreau, Kate; Fairground Park: What History Remains
xxviii Goldstein, Warren; A History of Early Baseball; p. 17-18
xxix St. Louis Daily Bulletin, July 11, 1860
xxx Ibid
xxxi Goldstein, p. 18
xxxii Spink, p. 406
xxxiii Goldstein, p. 18
xxxiv Lossos, David; Early St. Louis Hotels
xxxv Spink, p. 406
xxxvi Tobias; The Sporting News, November 2, 1895
