The early days of baseball are generally considered a time of upheaval. Teams folding mid-season, leagues forming and disbursing, players jumping leagues. . . In one respect at least, however, the original National Association was the most stable ever. Every pitcher who stood 45 feet away from home plate in 1871 and pitched a ball (underhand)at a batter returned to some team in 1872 to pitch again. The one exception to this was Ed Pinkham who pitched 3 games in relief for the Chicago White Stockings in 1871, but on most days was their starting third baseman.

In his lone season, Pinkham led the league in base on balls with 18 over the course of 24 games played -- an unusual accomplishment at a time when a walk constituted nine balls. Second place, with a distant 13 walks, were Ross Barnes and Harry Wright, both of whom played in 7 more games that Pinkham. Now, getting to nine balls is hard enough, but what made it even harder was the uneven way that balls and strikes were called.

It is frequently cited as a problem with the game today that each umpire has his own strike zone. In 1871, it was up to each individual umpire to decide whether to call a ball or strike at all. This could result in the batter just waiting indefinitely to get a pitch to hit, and judging whether or not a batter had "a good eye" or "plate discipline" can probably best be judged by looking at the results when the batter finally swung. One rule was clear, however. A umpire in 1871 was prohibited from calling the first pitch either a ball or a strike. (Perhaps to give the batter a chance to see what the pitcher had.)Talk about slowing down the game!

Pinkham seemed to have success as both a pitcher and a hitter, played multiple positions, and was only 22 in 1871. The great fire of 1871 demolished the Union Base Ball Grounds (and most of the rest of Chicago), causing the team to play the last month of the season on the road. The team could not continue financially without a stadium, and folded before the 1872 season. But Pinkam wasn't waiting. He didn't accompany the team on its final road trip (leaving them a player short), and didn't catch on anywhere else.

The moral of Fort Wayne's lone season in professional sports was "Don't hire anyone from Baltimore." Unlike the Philadelphia Athletics, who's team was littered with homegrown talent, the Kekiongas imported most of their talent from the East Coast, and since Baltimore was a major baseball town that did not have a major league team, that was a sensible place to recruit. Before the season was over, however, many of their recruits had returned to their homes. Pete Donnelly and Ed Mincher convinced the team to give them advances on their salaries, and then skipped town. Bill Lennon and Frank Selman were kicked off the team because of public drunkenness. When Tom Carey and Bobby Mathews left the team in August (probably after not getting paid), Fort Wayne just gave up. Jim Foran had a solid season at first base, playing in every one of the team's games, but if that's what "professional" baseball was, I can see not going back.

Rockford was not the worst team in the NA. How, then, did they end up with only four wins? The answer is that they had to forfeit four of their wins due to the "60 day rule." The rule, set up with honorable intentions, was to prevent teams from stealing other teams players in the middle of the season. (That behavior was, of course, perfectly condoned in the winter.) The rule stated that a player could not play for two different teams in the same 60 day period. Therefore, if you wanted to sign another team's players, you'd have to sit him for two months before he could take the field. Rockford's catcher, Scott Hastings, had played spring baseball for a team in Louisiana, and left that team to join the new major league for Rockford. When the season ended, a protest was brought to the league, and all games (including four wins, two of which were against the Red Stockings) in the 60 day window that Scott Hastings played in were forfeited. And for what. At a time when catching was king and the outfielders were for extras, Gat Stires outhit Hastings .273 to .254. The Forest Citys would have been better off canning the catcher and keeping the extra four wins.

At first glance, the Rockford Forest Cities look like a symbol of everything that was wrong with early baseball. A pathetic .160 win percentage that would not be approached even by the '62 Mets or any incarnation of the Devil Rays.

But a closer look shows that Rockford was far from the worst team in the league. They may have just been the unluckiest. Their pythagorean won loss record was an at least semi-respectable 10-15, good enough to match the worst team of today. They scored two runs per game more than Fort Wayne, and gave up over a run per game less than Fort Wayne, but the Kekiogas finished 6 games ahead of them in the standings. George Bird would have been far and away the best outfielder for Fort Wayne. On the mighty Rockford team, however, he hung around the middle of the pack and played in only the 1871 season. As is usual for a regular on a team that only existed for one year, however, Bird ranks in the top 10 of all the team's major offensive categories. For more on Rockford's woes, see Gat Stires, right field.

Everyone knows the answer to the trivia question: Who was the first all-professional baseball team? The answer is the 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings. But looking at the standings for the first professional league, there's no Cincinnati on the list. Where were the Red Stockings? Well, one part of the answer isn't hard to figure out. Cincinnati disbanded after the 1870 season, and team leader Harry Wright took his brother George, his best players (Cal McVey and Charlie Gould), and his stockings, and went to Boston. He filled out Boston's roster by raiding Rockford's best players, including outfielder Fred Cone. The other starters for the original Red Stockings (Fred Waterman, Asa Brainard, Doug Allison, Charlie Sweasy, and Andy Leonard) caught on with the Washington Olympics, creating an immediate rivalry between the teams bookending Amtrak's Northeast Corridor. The original intention was for the season's opening game to take place between the Olympics and (Boston) Red Stockings, but it rained in D.C. allowing a less prestigious contest between Fort Wayne and Cleveland to take the spotlight.

One might wonder, though, would the famed, undefeated Cincinnati Red Stocking of 1869 walked away with the title if they had stayed together in 1871? In one sense, the question is purely hypothetical. In another, the answer is 'yes.' Wright reassembed more of his team in succeeding years after the Olympics disintegrated, and Boston did win championships with that lineup. In a more immediate sense, however, the answer is 'no.' On July 3, 1871, while Washington and Boston were both on western road trips, the teams put together an exhibition in Cincinnati with the rosters shuffled so the original Red Stockings team faced off against a team composed of the remaining Boston and Washington player. Everyone was present, except for George Wright, who was injured and replaced by journeyman Harry Deane. In the closest history has to offer of a game played between the Cincinnati Red Stockings and a professional National Association team, Fred Cone and the rest of the non-Cincinnatians won 15-13.

There's nothing more exciting than a close pennant race. Except maybe the pennant race in 1871 that was so close that not even the teams themselves knew who was winning. How can that be? Four reasons.

First, the season was set up with the idea that each team would play a best of five series over the course of the season against the other teams. No one bothered to determine, however, how a winner would be determined. The most games won? The most series won? If the most games won, only those games until a series was clinched, or all five games?

Second, the teams sometimes played more than five games against each other, with the agreement that some of them would be exhibitions. Sometimes an "exhibition" would be played before the five game series was finished. Sometimes, the winning team would claim a game counted, while the losing team claimed it was an exhibition.

Third, phantom teams. Although you only see nine teams in the standing, there were in fact eleven. The Brooklyn Eckfords "unofficially" took over for Fort Wayne when they dropped out of the league. It was agreed that their games wouldn't count in the standings, however. Also, the Washington Nationals tended to play series against the teams that came to Washington to play the Olympics. Both teams also made road trips to play the other teams. The difference between the Eckford, the Nationals, and the other nine? The $10 entry fee. The level of competition was comparable among the teams that didn't shell out the cash. Some newspapers included games against these opponents in the standings. Both the Ecks and the Nats were in the league in 1872 (with mixed success).

And fourth, games played under protest. Today, playing a game under protest is mostly a symbolic gesture. After the 1871 season, four wins by Rockford were disqualified. As two of them were against Philadelphia, the Athletics vaulted considerably in the standings.

None of these facts affected fourth outfielder Caleb Johnson and the Cleveland team except for the last. Rockford's four forfeits vaulted them into last place, and kept Cleveland out of the "official" cellar.

Gambling has always been a problem in baseball. The early New York Mutuals, for example, were under suspicion of throwing games every time they were upset by a team with a worse record. But Ed Duffy falls into a different category. In 1865, while playing for the then-amateur New York Mutuals, Ed Duffy accepted thirty dollars to throw a game. He and two teammates were caught, Duffy confessed, and he and his cohorts were expelled from baseball. This wasn't the maybe or Shoeless Joe or the probably of Pete Rose. Duffy confessed. A teammate was given $100 to throw the game, and the teammate subcontracted out part of the job by giving Duffy and another player $30 each to spread the errors around. And yet, by 1871 all was forgotten and Ed Duffy was back on the field (albeit not for New York anymore). Precedent, of course, only has as much value as you chose to ascribe to it. Nonetheless, it's good to know what the precedents are, even if you choose to ignore them. Ed Duffy is data point number one.

The fact that Duffy had a job in 1871 likely speaks to the lack of depth at shortstop, since Duffy was not even a good player. Shortstop was a bizarre position in 1871. They averaged an OPS of .705, which was pretty much the middle of the pack (4th highest positional average). But if you break out the starters, you see that it may have been the most offense-rich, but depth-poor position in the league. Starters posted a .751 OPS (second only to the third base starters at .789). The rest of the plate appearances by shortstops combined for an OPS of .542, the lowest of any group of non-starters, and lower even than the OPS of starting pitchers (.646). The gap of 209 points between the top nine and the rest were, not surprisingly, the largest gap in the league. This, despite the fact that Duffy's .523 OPS factored prominently into the starters numbers.

Smith had been playing with the Brooklyn Atlantics since he was 18. He, along with half the Brooklyn team (Mills, Start, Ferguson, and Pearce) joined the new professional league with the New York Mutuals. But a .264 didn't cut it in a league were the hot corner was second only second basemen in batting average. Especially when your fielding percentage is worse than any regular's except Levi Meyerle's (whose league leading 1200 OPS more than compensated.) Smith left the team early, apparently having suffered a mental breakdown -- the first of many that will strike major league ballplayers who play in New York.

The Deacon's cousin. The first of numerous examples that bloodlines don't mean much in baseball.

On June 22, Elmer ended his brief but unillustrious career out of position. The right fielder was serving as a back up catch when he ran into a wall chasing an errant throw and broke his arm. He would never play in a major league again.

Don't be fooled too much by Ham's 13 errors in 19 games in left. Rockford's home park, the Agricultural Society Fair Grounds, didn't exactly provide the true hops of, say, Wrigley Field. For one thing, there were trees in the outfield, which made the game play slightly more like pin-ball than base-ball. Second, the field wasn't exactly level. Third base was on a hill, and home plate was in a valley, which I would expect affected the sight lines in left at least a little. Not at risk of winning any gold gloves, but maybe not the worst of all time, either.

I don't know what it is about names of old-time ballplayers, but it's obvious (to me, at least), just from the sound of it that Harry Berthrong never played for the Tampa Bay Devil Rays. Sounds to me more like a descendent of Esau from a unpublished biblical Dickens novel. Berthrong's percentages were among the lowest for all of the league's starting outfielders from stock company teams.

In comparing players in 1871, I weighed batting average a lot more highly that I would comparing players playing 100 years later. A lot of that has to do with the relatively minor role that extra base hits played, (the league leaders had 18 walks, and 11 doubles, 10 triples, and 4 home runs, respectively). Tom Foley had 3 walks and 2 strikeouts in 18 games, which was not a bizarrely low number on either count. An Illinois local, Foley did not leave go to Troy with his teammates after the 1871 season.

OPS by Position

Position	OPS
3B	.741
C	.716
2B	.712
SS	.705
1B	.693
CF	.688
LF	.670
RF	.664
P	.652

This table is important to keep in mind when comparing positions, because looking at the numbers with modern eyes, one is tempted to expect more hitting from an outfielder than a catcher, for example. In fact, only two of the nine starting rightfielders in the NA (Gat Stire and Lip Pike) hit better than the average starting third baseman. Bill Kelly's 14 games in right did not help the cause.

Okay, so he only played in 12 games in his career, and in those 12 games had an OPS of 530 at a time when the average league OPS was 696, but he has to be cut a break, because his team, the Fort Wayne Kekiogas, folded after only 17 games in 1871, and his 3 extra base hits were better than any of the other outfielders on his team.

He managed 7 errors during his 12 games, but I don't know how much he can be blamed for that. I've heard that a lot of these old fields weren't in the best condition, and some of them had trees growing in the outfield. If you trip over a large root while running for a ball, is that an error? How about losing track of the ball in the foliage. I'd like to see some specific circumstances before I judge Mr. Armstrong too harshly.

Among all of 1871's one-year wonders, Kimball had the most at bats with 131. He also holds the record for lowest batting average in the league among batters who would have qualified for the batting title with a .191. And he didn't make up for it with power (24 of his 25 hits were singles) or with defense (lowest fielding percentage among all men who played more than one game at second: 29 errors in 17 games for a .743 fielding percentage.)

And yet despite the inclusion of Kimball's abominable stats, starting second basemen as a whole led the league in 1871 with a .315 batting average. Kimball's assistance (along with Ross Barnes' .401) show up in the standard deviation of .071, the largest for any position.

Kimball also holds the distinction of hitting into the first double play in major league history. After Deacon White led off the inaugural major league game with a double off Bobby Mathews, Kimball popped up to second baseman Tom Carey, who double up White.

In 1871, the Boston Red Stockings finished 2 games out of first place, and I blame Frank Barrows. His attrocious .151 batting average (13 hits in 86 at bats) is surpassed only by the fact that 10 of the hits were singles and he didn't walk once. No player in 1871 with anywhere near as many at bats finished with anywhere near as sorry an offensive record. The closest I found was Gene Kimball's .191 with only one double, but at least Gene had the decency to play second base for an eighth place team, not left for a contender.

Despite his preternatural "clutch hitting" (11 RBI from his 13 hits), it will be no suprise that Barrows did not return in 1872.

In 1871, Fort Wayne, despite coming in seventh place out of nine, was the worst team in the National Association, was the worst team in the league. Nothing gives better evidence of this fact than their outfield. Their four regulars: Bill Kelly, Bob Armstrong, Ed Mincher, and Pete Donnelly, were, as a group, the worst outfielders in the league. As a foursome, they batted .220, and this number was dragged down significantly by Donnelly, the worst of the worst, with his 7 for 34, .206 performance. It was therefore not the worst of all fates when Donnelly and Mincher went AWOL nine games into the season with an advance on their salaries.

People talk a lot about revenue disparities in the major leagues today, but even the problems of the Montreal Expos are nothing compared to the structural disadvantages a team like the Rockford Forest Cities faced in 1871. The majority of the "large market" teams were stock companies, which meant stock was sold before the season, and the proceeds were used to do things like pay players a salary. The smaller city teams -- Rockford and Fort Wayne specifically -- were not stock companies; they were co-ops.

This foray into sports socialism meant that players were not guaranteed anything except a share of the profits. In the thriving metropolis of Rockford, profits were hardly a sure thing, and as a result the Forest Cities best players, Al Spalding and Ross Barnes, left the team after 1870 to play for big money in Boston. To fill the gaps, Rockford poached Cherokee Fisher from the Troy Haymakers, and signed Pony Sager from Marshalltown, Iowa. Sager was hardly stars in the making, but Sager convinced the team to also sign his teammate from Marshalltown, Cap Anson, which should give Sager credit of at least a Hall of Famer, once removed.

Played four games at first base for Troy in 1871 and made five errors. He also played three games in right and made four errors. His defensive prowess was equaled only by his .212 batting average, consisting only of seven singles. Nonetheless, on August 9, he set a National Association record when he recorded 20 putouts in a single game at first base.

A word here is probably appropriate about park factors, though. Based on standard analyses looking at runs scored at home and on the road, the Chicago White Stockings had the most offense-friendly park in the league, and the New York Mutuals, the most "pitcher friendly" park. On this topic, I have one point, beyond the standard one that the sample size is woefully small, and that is besides "park factor," one also needs to consider "ball factor."

You see, in the early years, there was no standardized ball, and a number of manufacturers made varying degrees of "live" and "dead" balls over the years. Now here's the catch -- the visiting team generally supplied the ball. So, if your team favored the dead ball approach to hitting, you'd use the weak, soggy ball in all of your road games, and a mix of balls in your home games. That could make your park seem to favor hitters even if it didn't. Conversely, Troy was famous for using a "live ball" on the road, effectively bringing the mountain (a 19th Century Coors Field) to Muhammed. How does this analysis effect Ed Duffy, and his .212 batting average? Probably not at all. But, it's worth examining.

Troy appears to be a neutral park in 1871. Under my "ball effect" theory, it may in fact have been a hitter's park, but run scoring was depressed due to a live ball being used in road games and an "average" ball (the average of whatever balls the visiting teams brought) during home games. But how could we test that?

As further anecdotal evidence, Troy score 351 runs in 1871, the second most in the league (second to the league champion Athletics), while allowing 362, the most in the league. Possibly just the result of good hitting and poor pitching, but a point that makes the question more interesting.

The easiest way would be to see how Troy's pitchers ERA+ changed after leaving the Haymakers' Grounds. If Troy was in fact a stealth hitters park, ERA+ should increase when a pitcher is traded to another team. Unfortunately, our sample size here is practically non-existent. John McMullin pitched every one (249.0)of Troy's innings in 1871, but only 15 innings in 1872 and 8 innings in 1873 (for New York and Philadelphia respectively). His ERA+ did increase (from 76 in 1871 to 96 in 1872 and 152 in 1873), but we can't draw any conclusions from that single, insignificant data point.

Another approach is to look at the hitters. Eight Troy hitters had at least one at bat in 1871 for Troy and for another team in 1872. In total, there were 747 common at bats (using the lower number of at bats for each player). Our primary data points here are Mike McGeary, Bill Craver, Tom York, Lip Pike, and John McMullin (who, after his Troy pitching debacle, became the regular left fielder for New York). All five had at least 100 at bats in 1871 and 1872. Over 747 at bats, the eight men who left Troy had a combined OPS of .742 in 1871 against a league average of .704. Thus, as a group their OPS was 6.8% higher than the league's. Looking at the common 747 at bats in 1872, these 8 men put up an OPS of .657, which happens to be exactly the league OPS for the year.

Did the "ball factor" increase Troy's offensive performance by almost seven percent in 1871? There, not enough data to decide conclusively, but the evidence is at least persuasive, if not conclusive, that it did.

Who was Nathan Berkenstock? His name sounds like a fictional character in a children's story. His stat line raises even more interesting questions. He played only one game, on October 30, 1871 against the Chicago White Stockings in the last game of the season for the first league championship. The game took place in Brooklyn, and was the closest Chicago got to a home game since their stadium burnt down earlier in the season. Berkenstock debuted at the tender age of 40, making him the oldest player in major league baseball at the time, saving player-manager Harry Wright of the Boston Red Stockings from spending the whole season with the honor. He made three put-outs in right field, including making the final out of the game, but went zero for four at the plate, striking out three times. The Athletics won the game (and the Champtionship) 4-1, but does not explain why they didn't play either of the two right fielders (Huebel or Bechtel, ages 23 and 22) who brung 'em. Berkenstock was a retired amateur baseball player, so maybe they felt like they needed some "veteran presence" in the lineup.

Berkenstock is also one of the first known Jewish player to play Major League baseball.

One game, four at bats, one single. In the field, one chance, one error, for a fielding percentage of .000. Good thing he wasn't out there when Nate Berkenstock made the last out of the season, or the game could still be going on now!

Played one game in 1871 for the Troy Haymakers. Went 0-4 at the plate and made two errors in six chances at shortstop. When Chicago disbanded at the end of the 1871 season, many migrated to Troy, making bit players such as Abercrombie superfluous. Well, at least he ended the year at the top of the league alphabetically.

It's pretty much a zen koan how to categorize player who splits his one game between third base and the outfield. For advanced zen masters, consider than Norton did not field a ball in right (making it difficult to call him in any meaningful sense a "righfielder"), while his one chance at third base led to an error (which makes his (non)performance as a rightfielder significantly better than his (non)performance at third.) His lone plate appearance ended with a strikeout, which sounds suspiciously like the sound of one hand clapping.

Tom Pratt played a game for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1871, and following this extensive professional career served as an umpire in 1872. It's an interesting reflection on human nature that I have absolutely no problem with the concept of a player playing for one team in one year, and then playing equally hard against that team the next year. Players do that all the time. But it makes me uncomfortable to think that after playing for a team one year, a person would have to act impartially as an umpire the next. Why would I think an umpire would be biased toward his former team, while I wouldn't for a second think that a player would go easier when playing against his former team? Maybe it's just that impartiality is harder than bias, even when impartiality is your goal.

Of the 27 players whose sole major league experience can in 1871, 7 were primarily right fielders (7 1/2 if you could Frank Norton.) Right field in 1871 seems to have been treated as roughly equivalent to right field in little league, or, more specifically, right field in the Peter Paul and Mary song about little league entitled "Right Field". ("Playing right field can be lonely and dull/ Little Leagues never have lefties that pull.")

The stats, moreover, bear out the fact that right fielders bore particularly less of the brunt of the outfield work than they do today. A random, but not necessarily representative, study of the 1871 Cleveland Forest Cities and 2001 Cleveland Indians show, first, that right fielders then handled about 29% of the outfield putouts, compared to about 31% in 2001. Similar so far on the "lefties who pull" criterion. However, the Forest City outfielders made 4.24 put outs per game, compared to 6.27 for the Indians. So, while it's unclear why Cleveland didn't bury its scrubs in left field (about 27% of outfield put outs), generally speaking right field was a statistically fine place to hide the driftwood.