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1
 
BEFORE IT WAS ever a business it was a game.
 
It came out of the 1840s, when teams from New York first crossed the Hudson River to Elysian Fields, laid out a diamond, agreed upon the rules, and played a game they called “base,” later lengthened to “baseball.”
 
It grew in the 1850s and 1860s, but it remained a gentleman’s sport. Teams rode to their games in decorated carriages, singing their team songs. In country greens and city parks, thousands of young men played. It became too popular to remain amateur for long, in the young entrepreneurial nation.
 
In 1871, the first league was formed of teams who played for pay. It was called the National Association of Professional Baseball Players, and it was a slapdash thing. Over its five-year life, teams came and went with dizzying rapidity—twenty-five of them in all. So did players. The best ones, called “revolvers,” jumped around between teams for the best offer.
 
But if it wasn’t a stable business, it was well on its way to becoming the national pastime.
 
“Like everything else American it came with a rush,” wrote John Montgomery Ward, a star player of the day. “The game is suited to the national temperament. It requires strength, courage and skill; it is full of dash and excitement and though a most difficult game in which to excel, it is yet extremely simple in its first principles and easily understood by everyone.”
 
The changing landscape of the country had much to do with baseball’s hold on America. As people moved from rural farms into urban tenements during the emerging Industrial Revolution, the game kept a nation in touch with its roots. Baseball was played on vast swatches of green in the middle of dreary, gray cities. Baseball celebrated the rugged individual within a team game. It came to be called the National Pastime, not just because it was played and watched by so many people but because it so resembled the national character.
 
Albert Goodwill Spalding tried to export baseball to other countries. The owner of a team and of a sporting-goods empire, he saw vast worldwide sales of bats and balls. In 1888, he even sponsored a globe-trotting tour of exhibition games that visited Hawaii, Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, Italy, France, England, and Ireland. In one far-flung locale after another, America’s top players were watched with profound indifference. The game took root only in America.
 
Like the pioneering country still being settled, this game valued both brute strength and daring ingenuity. It also countenanced a certain amount of cheating. Baseball was beautiful but tough, a sport not unlike the Chicago of Nelson Algren: “… where the bulls and the foxes live well and the lambs wind up head-down from the hook.”
 
So too would baseball mirror the period’s epic struggles in commerce. Robber barons were coming to the fore and business was not polite. Disputes between labor and management were solved not by federal mediators but by Pinkerton thugs. Baseball would have its own early bare-knuckle fights for control of the game and business. Then the owners would seize it for a hundred years.
 
“n the same spring when Sitting Bull swept Custer at the Little Big Horn, the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs was created. The year was 1876, and the enterprise was better known as the National League. It ushered in a new way of doing business in baseball: a central office in New York and an aim to curb the chaos that afflicted the previous league.
 
By 1879, its eight teams had developed a compact. At season’s end, each would “reserve” five players, making them off-limits to any other team. The players were not told about this agreement. They’d simply discover that they couldn’t catch on with any but their own team.
 
Thus the “reserve clause” was born, and the original was only a modest version. When another “major league,” the American Association, began in the early 1880s, the compact was extended to them and the annual “reserve list” grew to eleven players. It was on its way to encompassing every player.
 
The first recorded owner’s wail over salaries came in 1881. “Professional baseball is on the wane,” declared Albert Spalding, owner of Chicago’s National League team. “Salaries must come down or the interest of the public must be increased in some way. If one or the other does not happen, bankruptcy stares every team in the face.”
 
The first recorded salary cap came in 1889. The owners set top pay at $2,500, with a tiered pay scale ranging downward from there. The lowest classified players would have to sweep up the ballpark or take tickets.
 
The Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, a union formed in 1885, rebelled against the pay scale and the cap. It formed the Players National League, to begin play in 1890.
 
“There was a time when the League [that is, the original National League] stood for integrity and fair dealing; today it stands for dollars and cents,” said John Montgomery Ward, the star player and union president. “Players have been bought, sold and exchanged as though they were sheep instead of American citizens.”
 
Noble words, but the Players League lasted just one season. When the American Association went out of business too, the National League had the majors all to itself. It would until the turn of the century.
 
Then a man named Byron Bancroft Johnson, who was running a minor league in the Midwest, decided to capitalize on National League players’ discontent with their $2,500 salary cap. He unleashed the owners in his Western League to sign the major-leaguers, and they attracted more than a hundred, including star second baseman Napoleon Lajoie. Then they moved the franchises into bigger cities and renamed themselves the American League.
 
They were soon outdrawing the National League. The new Boston Pilgrims, for instance, paid $4,000 to star third baseman Jimmy Collins to defect from the rival Boston Beaneaters. The Pilgrims picked up several other prominent National Leaguers, including Cy Young, from St. Louis. With the legendary pitcher winning thirty-three games, the new team attracted 527,000 fans in 1901, more than double the Beaneaters’ draw.
 
At a “peace meeting” in 1903, the two leagues agreed on an end to raiding, a common reserve system, and a single ruling National Commission. It would consist of the president of each league, plus a third member to be agreed upon by them.
 
Baseball boomed in the early 1900s. From 1901 to 1909, the combined leagues more than doubled their attendance to 7.2 million. That growth closely tracked the rise of urban America. In 1900, 40 percent of the country’s population lived in cities; by 1910, 46 percent. In 1920, it would reach 50 percent. Increasingly, the centerpiece of those cities was their major league ballparks. Filled by 30,000 and more cheering fans, they created a sense of community for the newcomers—whether from abroad or from the countryside. From 1909 to 1913 alone, six classics came on line: Philadelphia’s Shibe Park, Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field, Chicago’s Comiskey Park, Boston’s Fenway Park, and New York’s Polo Grounds and Ebbets Field.
 
These great houses brought people together, in an age when cities had been splintered by industrialization and immigration. They created heroes for the waves of new immigrants, whose hopes and identities were wrapped up in players like Honus Wagner (for the Germans), Stan Coveleski (for the Poles), and Ping Bodie, born Francesco Stephano Pezzolo (for the Italians). Earlier, when Irish immigrants dominated baseball, stars like Mike “King” Kelly performed the same function.
 
As baseball grew into a bigger commercial enterprise, money dominated headlines and the public consciousness. When pitcher Rube Marquard was a dud for the Giants, after being bought for a princely sum, he became known as “the eleven-thousand-dollar lemon.” A man named David Fultz, who had organized a new union called the Players Fraternity, spent much of his time disputing stories about overpaid players. Some of them didn’t even make $1,000, he pointed out.
 
Baseball’s growth and profitability ultimately drew backers for a new league in 1914. It was called the Federal League, and it was the best thing to happen to the players since the days of the “revolvers.” The average salary, $3,800 in 1913, rose to $7,300 in 1915. Stars used the rival league’s threat to ratchet up their pay. Ty Cobb nearly doubled his salary, to $20,000. Tris Speaker got an unheard-of two-year contract that totaled $36,000. The owner of the Philadelphia Athletics, Connie Mack, unwilling to meet such prices, sold off much of his pennant-winning 1914 team, including the famous “hundred-thousand-dollar infield” (for such was the sum his star infielders fetched).
 
The players finally had some leverage and the leagues grudgingly recognized the Players Fraternity. Fultz was able to win a few modest gains, like getting the teams to start paying for players’ uniforms and giving ten-year veterans the right to an unconditional release. (Players were previously in the position of Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown, a top pitcher for the Cubs for years, whom they sold to a minor league team when they had no more use for him.)
 
Yet the Federal League, for all its vigorous bidding, still could land only a handful of established players. The Federal owners sued the established leagues in 1915, charging they’d blocked the newcomers from the player market, restraining free trade and violating antitrust laws. They endeavored to get the case before a Chicago judge they thought would lend a sympathetic ear.