The League That Lasted: 1876 And the Founding of the National League of Profession Baseball Clubs

Rating:
Summary: As much fiction as history
Review: The founding of the National League is an important event in the history of American sports, and has not been definitively recounted. Neil Macdonald's "The League that Lasted" does not fill the gap. Macdonald has a story to tell: a dramatic tale of heroes and villains, with good triumphant in the end. Unfortunately he is more interested in this than he is in recounting history.

This shows first in the writing style, which is comically lurid. From page 52 we have this:

"The weather outside featured cold, ice-oriented wind that tore along New York street, scattering falling snow into a chos of swirling, twirling whiteness. Simply put, it was a blizzard."

This reads like an entry in the Bulwer-Lytton Fiction Contest. I could have picked any number of equally bad passages. So be prepared to wade through this prose.

Distracting as the writing is, the bigger problem is that the facts are made to fit the story, rather than the other way around. A passage which illustrates this is from pages 8 and 9, telling of the founding of the predecessor to the National League:

"The notorious Boss Tweed controlled the Mutual Baseball Club of New York, an amateur outfit originally organized by firemen in a New York fire company, who were dependent on Tweed for patronage and favors. Tweed easily made the Mutuals, who were not a quality team, a franchise holder when the National Association of Professional Base-Ball Players was formed in 1871."

The Mutuals are the arch-villains of Macdonald's tale because of their reputation (not unjustified, though probably exaggerated) for taking payoffs from gamblers to throw games. This passage certainly shows them in a bad light, as a mediocre team who only achieve prominence through political influence. It is also largely false.

The first sentence, about the connection to Boss Tweed, is true enough. It is probably overstating the situation to say that he controlled the team, but they definitely had ties with his Tammany Hall, the political machine controlling New York City politics for many years. But the Mutuals didn't need his help to gain entry into the National Association.

The assertion completely misinterprets the nature of the N.A. Most modern professional leagues in the United States are closed clubs. Applicants for membership must be approved by the existing members. The idea of using political connections to get in is plausible. The N.A. was a loose, open association formed to determine the national championship each year. Any professional team could join for $10: a nominal amount even in 1871. Membership simply meant that the club was competing for the championship and agreed (at least in principle) to play against the other competing teams. The idea that a team would need to exert political pressure to get in is absurd.

So too is the claim that the Mutuals "were not a quality team". In 1870 they had the fourth best win-loss record of any major team. They actually had the most victories, by virtue of an active schedule. In 1871 they came in fifth out of nine teams, with a record of 16-17. They weren't overpowering, but to insinuate that they were some sort of charity case is simply not true.

This is not an isolated lapse; it goes beyond mere sloppiness. It is making facts up to cast the villains of the piece in the worst light. But there are innumerable examples of random sloppiness as well. We are told (p. 10) that the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings had a record of 56-1. Actually they went 57-0. Their perfect season is the outstanding feat of the era. The difference between an almost perfect record and a perfect record is, to borrow from Mark Twain, the difference between the lightning bug and the lightning. On page 49 Macdonald perpetuates the old urban legend that the term "ace" pitcher comes from Asa Brainard. He gives a long description of the first National League game, on April 22: on page 92 he tells us that it rained all morning, while on page 95 he tells us that the Boston manager "chose rookie Bill Parks to play an arid-etched left field this day. The dry ground should augment Parks' speed." It rained all morning, yet left field was arid? Which was it? The book is heavily footnoted, but neither of these statements include citations. We are given no reason not to believe that Macdonald simply made up details to add color, but lost track of his fictionalizations. He recounts how prior to the season the owner of the Mutuals renamed them as a Brooklyn team, rather than a New York team, but (p. 84) "as far as research can ascertain, the press never put Brooklyn prior to Mutuals in its headlines or stories." He is right that the name never really caught on, but it took me literally less than three minutes on my own to find in the Brooklyn Daily Eagle of June 14, 1876, page 2, "...the first of a series of contests for the League pennant between the Chicago White Stockings and the Brooklyn Mutuals."

I could go on with many more examples, but the point is clear: This book is a hodgepodge of purple prose, sloppy research, and outright fiction. So why does it rate even two stars? Because there is actual research buried in there as well. I wouldn't trust it as a source in its own right, but the footnotes can be useful starting points for further investigation.

Rating:
Summary: Stunning story, great characters, well written.
Review: The story of the founding of the National League is fascinating. Macdonald writes well and brings the story to life as William Hulbert struggles to overcome many of the problems that afflict baseball today; greedy owners, spoiled players, gambling and drinking. Impeccable research supports the telling of the league's first year. I hope he will be able to write more in the baseball area, given his gift for writing, research and story-telling.