Quote:
Originally Posted by Le Grande Orange
The National League, in contrast, had a fixed schedule; the earliest one published which I could find was for its second season in 1877. The schedule for the 1876 season does not seem to have been published anywhere, at least, I was never able to locate it. The 1876 NL schedule can largely be reconstructed from the as played schedule, with the exception of the late season games involving New York and Philadelphia, which decided not to make their road trips. Unlike in later years, newspaper mentions of future games is extremely sparse in this time period.
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The reason you can't find a schedule for the 1876 NL is because the league didn't have one. Instead, it pretty much left it to the teams to work out their own schedules, as had been the case with the NA. That, no doubt, is one of the reasons why the New York and Philadelphia clubs thought that they could forgo their final western road trip - after all, that's exactly what they would have done had they been in the NA. But they didn't reckon on Bill Hulbert, who was determined that the NL was not going to repeat the NA's mistakes. So NY and Philly were kicked out of the league and the NL took over the responsibility for drawing up the season schedules from then on.