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BASEBALL MOVES TOWARD THE 20TH CENTURY (PART II)

On top of the above, it was rumored that teams in the southern states of Texas and Louisiana were ready to form a professional league, as were teams on the Pacific Coast. It would probably only be a few years at most before independent leagues started there. Baseball was also thriving in larger markets in the Mountain West – Denver and Salt Lake City – but working out the travel logistics to make a league work in that area of the country would take more time. After all, steam trains could only go so fast, especially uphill through mountain ranges. The sport was spreading quickly, and it looked like the whole country was ready to take part.

It was also well-known that the leagues outside of the American Baseball Association were looking to expand as the population of the United States continued to grow. Markets that were previously too small for professional or semi-professional baseball would soon be able to host higher-tier teams. More teams could easily mean that longer schedules could come into existence, or even that existing leagues could split into separate competitions like the original National Base Ball Organization did in 1889-90.

Internationally, given that Ireland already had a competition and players born just across the Irish Sea played important roles in the early days of competitive baseball, it was surely a matter of when England, Scotland, & Wales began competitions of their own, and not if. The same could also be said of Germany, since the Midwest’s large slice of Germanic heritage quickly took to the young sport.

There were sure to be more changes to the game itself on the field. In the mid-1890s, now legendary Providence Pitching Coach Albert Tierney (NOTE: He’s the previously mentioned PC who had Teach Pitching and Handle Aging both around 190/200) responded to the 1893 change from the Pitching Box to the Pitching Rubber by experimenting with having team groundskeepers build a sloped mound for his hurlers to throw from. He figured that if one could gain momentum running downhill, maybe the same could happen with the speed of the ball when throwing downhill as well. Given the success of the Saints during the 1890s, other teams quickly followed suit. However, there was nothing in the rules of the game regarding such surfaces, so they could vary greatly from venue to venue and from game to game. It would probably be just a matter of time before a uniform Pitching Mound standard was agreed upon and another vestige of the 1850s game, pitching from flat ground, was done away with for good (NOTE: story in paragraph based on the history of the mound itself, found here).

As the calendar turned over to the year 1900, a changing of the guard was expected. The sport’s greatest ever batsman, Jacob Milburn, had moved to semi-pro ball at the age of 38 after deciding he had nothing left to prove as a pro after seventeen years of hitting .400. The sport’s greatest ever pitcher, Hans Ehle, was finally beginning to show signs of slowing down after turning 35 during the 1899 season. The core of the lineup for Providence’s seven cup wins – Leonard, Rankin, Snell, Williams, & Woodram – were now all 30 or older, as was staff ace Charles Carlyle. The sport’s most decorated catcher, Otto Christianson, was about to turn 35, and its second-best middle infielder, Thierry Moreau, was now on the other side of 30 as well.

The likeliest to take the leap up to superstardom in the new century was New York Athletics ace Homer Dabry, who was 23-14 with a 2.67 ERA and 8.3 WAR while pitching the entire season as a 19-year-old. There’s also Manhattan Knickerbockers right fielder Alan Gelmetti, who made the Team of the Year in the APBL as a rookie with a .347 average, league-leading .442 on-base percentage, and 7.3 offensive WAR. Alvin Kozlowski was third in the APBL in ERA for Philadelphia during his rookie season and was considered a five-star talent. The St. Louis Saints were led to the Lincoln Memorial Cup finals by rookie pitcher Joe Leyton, who was 25-10 during 1899. Detroit’s 21-year-old utility man Harold Borden finished second in the MWBA in batting as a rookie, hitting .375 after joining the team from Binghamton in the NEL. There were more ready to take the leap, but those were the most prominent examples.

After all the tea leaves had been read, it appeared the Twentieth Century held an exciting future in store for the sport of baseball, the men who played it, and the fans who watched it.