How Professional Baseball Began: The National Association and the Early National League, 1871 to 1900
How baseball became a paid profession, from the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings and the 1871 National Association to the National League of 1876, its rivals and the 1900 contraction.
Professional baseball did not begin with a league. It began with a team that decided to stop pretending. In 1869 the Cincinnati Red Stockings openly paid every man on the roster, toured the country and went unbeaten through 1869 and into 1870, and within two years a group of clubs had formed the first professional league, the National Association. That league lasted five seasons, collapsed under its own disorder, and was replaced in 1876 by the National League, which is still playing today. Most of what a modern fan takes for granted, from a fixed schedule to the idea that a club can be expelled for breaking a rule, was worked out in the thirty years between the Red Stockings and 1900.
This article follows that story in order: the amateur game and the paid team, the Association and its dynasty in Boston, the National League's founding, the rival leagues that rose and failed, the rule changes that reshaped play, and the contraction of 1900 that cleared the way for the American League. It uses the historical record for the standings and league-wide figures, which reach back to 1871, and it says plainly where the early records are thin.
You will see a pattern repeat. Each league solved the problem that sank the one before it, and each created a new one. Reading the sequence is the quickest way to understand why modern baseball has the rules and institutions it has.
From amateurs to the first openly paid team
In the 1850s and 1860s the game was run by clubs of amateurs, gathered into an association that set the rules and held conventions. Winning mattered to the clubs, and clubs began to find ways to reward the best players: a job with a sponsor, a share of the gate, a quiet payment. Everyone knew it was happening, and for years nobody said so.
Cincinnati ended the pretense in 1869. The Red Stockings, managed by Harry Wright, paid their players openly and played a long schedule against clubs across the country. They are remembered for an unbeaten season in 1869 and a long winning streak that carried into 1870, when the Atlantics of Brooklyn finally beat them. The club disbanded after the 1870 season, but the model had been proven. Fans paid to watch good players, good players went where they were paid, and the old rule against professionals was already dead in all but name.
Wright did not leave the game. He took the idea to Boston, where he built the club that would dominate the next league, and his brother George, the shortstop of the Cincinnati team, went with him. The early history of the professional game is partly a story of a few men and a few cities rather than of an institution.
The National Association begins in 1871
The National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was organized in 1871. It was not a league in the modern sense. It was a loose membership of clubs that agreed to play for a championship pennant, each club paying a fee and each agreeing, in principle, to play a schedule against the others. In practice, clubs scheduled their own games, and nobody had the power to make them finish.
The first game came on May 4, 1871, when the Fort Wayne Kekiongas beat the Cleveland Forest Citys 2-0. Both clubs had a rough year. Fort Wayne finished 7-12 and Cleveland 10-19. In the historical count, nine teams played that first season, about 31 games each, and the pennant went to the Philadelphia Athletics at 21-7, ahead of Boston (20-10) and the Chicago White Stockings (19-9).
| Season | Pennant winner | Record | Teams in the historical count |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1871 | Philadelphia Athletics | 21-7 | 9 |
| 1872 | Boston Red Stockings | 39-8 | 11 |
| 1873 | Boston Red Stockings | 43-16 | 9 |
| 1874 | Boston Red Stockings | 52-18 | 8 |
| 1875 | Boston Red Stockings | 71-8 | 13 |
Notice how the number of teams jumps around, from nine to eleven to nine to eight to thirteen. That is the first sign of the problem. Clubs entered, failed and dropped out, sometimes in mid-season, and the schedule was whatever the clubs completed.
What the game looked like in the early 1870s
The league-wide numbers are the best evidence for how different the game was. In 1871, the historical record shows 10.47 runs per team per game, 0.19 home runs and just 0.69 strikeouts. By 1876 the figures were 5.90 runs, 0.08 home runs and 1.13 strikeouts. Compare that with later decades: in 1899 teams scored 5.25 runs a game and struck out about 2.09 times.
Several things explain the early scoring. Fielders mostly worked bare-handed, or nearly so, and the fields were rough, so errors were common and many runs were unearned. The pitcher threw underhand from a short distance and, by the rules, was supposed to deliver the ball where the batter wanted it, so pitching was a service more than a contest. Strikeouts were rare because batters could ask for a high or low pitch and had little reason to swing and miss. Home runs were few: the 1871 leaders hit four, and the 1876 leader hit five.
The hitting statistics of the period look strange to a modern eye for the same reasons. Ross Barnes collected 138 hits in 1876, the league lead, in a season of about 70 games, and the fair-foul hit, a ball struck so that it landed in fair territory and then rolled foul, was a skill that the rules were soon changed to remove. The pitching numbers look strange too. In 1876 George Bradley's earned run average was 1.23, and Al Spalding won 47 games. A modern pitcher would not recognize the workload. The Deadball Era was a later low-scoring period, though its low scores came from different causes than these.
Boston's dynasty and why the Association failed
Boston won the pennant in each of the last four Association seasons, and the margin grew: 39-8 in 1872, 43-16 in 1873, 52-18 in 1874 and 71-8 in 1875, a winning percentage near .899. Harry Wright managed the club and Al Spalding pitched it. Spalding won 19 games for the Association in 1871, 52 in 1874, and went on to a second career as a sporting goods manufacturer.
The same dominance hurt the league. When one club wins 71 of 79 games, the other clubs lose customers, and the 1875 season shows it. The Association had 13 teams that year, and the bottom of the table reads like a list of clubs that never really started: Keokuk at 1-12, the Philadelphia Centennials at 2-12, the St. Louis Red Stockings at 4-15, the Brooklyn Atlantics at 2-42. Teams without a hope of competing did not stay in business, and they left their schedules unfinished.
Four problems did the damage. There was no central authority with the power to enforce a schedule. Weak clubs could join cheaply and leave without penalty. Players jumped from club to club for higher pay in mid-season, which is called contract jumping. And gambling was a constant presence around games, which made it hard to be sure that games were honest. A league had to solve those problems or fail, and the Association failed.
William Hulbert and the founding of the National League
The solution came from a Chicago businessman. William Hulbert became president of the Chicago White Stockings and decided the clubs, not the players, had to hold the power. Before the 1876 season he signed a group of the Association's best players, including Spalding, Ross Barnes, Cal McVey and Deacon White from Boston and Cap Anson from Philadelphia. Then he proposed a new organization controlled by the owners.
The National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs was founded on February 2, 1876, in New York. The change in the name from "players" to "clubs" tells the story. The league's charter had three parts that mattered. Members were clubs, not individuals. Clubs had to complete their schedules, including road trips. And the league claimed the right to expel any member that did not. Rules against gambling were added, and the new league also banned Sunday games and the sale of liquor at its parks, a decision that would cause trouble within a few years.
The first season in 1876 had eight clubs and about 70 games each. Chicago won at 52-14, ahead of Hartford (47-21), St. Louis (45-19) and Boston (39-31). Cincinnati finished at 9-56. Spalding won 47 games for Chicago, Jim Devlin won the strikeout title with 122, and the league's earned run title went to George Bradley at 1.23.
Discipline, scandal and the reserve clause
The new league used its power at once. The New York Mutuals and Philadelphia Athletics refused to make their last western road trips in 1876, and both were expelled at the end of the year. That sent a message about what the league meant by finishing a schedule.
The first test of honesty came in 1877 at Louisville, where the Grays had fallen apart late in the season after a strong start. An investigation found that four players, including Jim Devlin and George Hall, had thrown games, and the league banned all four for life. The historical 1876 figures show both men near the top of the league that year, Devlin with 122 strikeouts and a 1.56 ERA and Hall with the home run lead at five, which is part of what made the story so bitter. It also established the principle that cheating meant permanent exclusion, a principle that would be tested many times later.
The league also found a way to control labor. In 1879, clubs began to reserve a small number of players for the next season, five per club at first. The reserve clause grew from that and came to bind a player to his club for years; its eventual erosion is the subject of how free agency works and where it came from. One player's career spans the whole period: Cap Anson, whom the historical record credits with 3,435 hits across the Association and the League, played from 1871 to 1897.
The American Association, the Union Association and the Players' League
The National League's rules created an opening, and rivals filled it. In 1882 the American Association began play, aimed at the working-class fan: it sold tickets for a quarter, sold beer and allowed Sunday games, and critics called it the "Beer and Whiskey League". Cincinnati, whose National League club had been expelled for violating the league's rules, won the Association's first pennant at 55-25 with a new Red Stockings team. The National League champion that year was Chicago at 55-29.
In 1884 the Union Association tried to break the monopoly of the other two, and it lasted a single season. In the historical count that year, 33 major-league teams played in three leagues, an illustration of how scattered the landscape was. The 1884 season also produced one of the first meetings of league champions to be called a world championship, between the National League's Providence Grays and the Association's New York Metropolitans, and Providence won. Old Hoss Radbourn won 60 games that year, according to the historical record, a total that some record books and sites still cite as 59. (For how that idea grew into the modern format, see how the MLB postseason works.)
The last challenge came in 1890, when most of the stars left to form the Players' League, a cooperative run by the players themselves and led by John Montgomery Ward. It lasted one season. With three leagues competing for the same customers, the National League's Pittsburgh club went 23-113. The Players' League's Boston Reds won its pennant at 81-48, but the league's backers could not afford another year.
How the game changed: pitching, balls and strikes
The game on the field changed as much as the business did. Pitchers moved from an underhand toss to overhand pitching, which the National League allowed in 1884, and the distance changed more than once. The most important change came in 1893, when the pitching distance was set at 60 feet 6 inches, the distance still used today. The effect was immediate. In the historical figures, teams scored 5.11 runs a game in 1892 and 6.57 in 1893, and home runs per team game rose from 0.23 to 0.29, while strikeouts fell from 3.25 to 2.13.
The count of balls for a walk dropped over the years to four, which was set in 1889. Foul bunts began to count as strikes in 1894. Gloves spread through the 1880s, catchers adopted masks and then chest protectors, and the position of the shortstop and the outfielders became more specialized. The batter's advantage after 1893 produced the high averages of the decade: in 1899 the National League batting champion, Ed Delahanty, hit .410.
The 1890s collapse and the 1900 contraction
By 1892 the National League was alone as a major league and had absorbed four clubs from the failed Association, growing to twelve teams. It was also running into the problems that come with a monopoly: no competition for players, weak clubs that could not draw, and owners who held more than one franchise.
The worst result came in Cleveland. The owners of the Spiders also owned the St. Louis club, and before 1899 they moved the best Cleveland players to St. Louis. The Spiders finished 20-134, the worst full-season record in the historical record, 84 games behind Brooklyn's 101-47 championship team. After 1899 the league dropped four clubs: Baltimore, Cleveland, Louisville and Washington. In 1900 the National League played with eight teams, and Brooklyn won the pennant at 82-54.
The contraction removed a set of clubs and left their cities without major-league baseball, and it left a hole that Ban Johnson's American League filled the next year. Cleveland got a team in the American League in 1901, the franchise now called the Guardians; the story is in the history of the Cleveland Guardians. The era that followed, with two leagues and a peace agreement in 1903, is the subject of the Deadball Era.
Common questions
Is the National Association a major league? The historical record counts it as one, and its standings are in the database from 1871, but opinions differ. Some record books start major-league history in 1876. The article treats the Association as a major league for the purpose of the data and notes the dispute.
Are the Red Stockings of 1869 the Reds of today? Not directly. The 1869 club disbanded after 1870. The Cincinnati team in today's National League descends from the American Association club that began play in the 1880s.
Why were so many early scores high? Fielders had little or no protection for their hands, the fields were rough, and many runs were unearned. The historical record shows 10.47 runs per team game in 1871.
Which early clubs survive today? The Chicago White Stockings of 1876 became the Cubs, and the Boston club of the National League became the Braves. Many others disappeared.
Why did the league ban Sunday games and beer? The founders wanted to attract respectable middle-class crowds. The rule helped open the market that the American Association used a few years later.
Where to go next
The next chapter is the Deadball Era, followed by the changes of the live-ball era. If you like the earliest clubs, the Giants franchise began as the New York Gothams in the 1880s and won titles more than a century later, as described in the Giants' even-year titles. For the Reds' modern peak, read the Big Red Machine. The topic page at /searchset/history-and-the-hall-of-fame/ collects more history, and the Hall of Fame's site is at baseballhall.org.