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The Creation of the (English) Baseball League

It is often mistakenly believed that fully-sanctioned professional baseball in Britain began with the Baseball League in 1888. In fact, professionalism was legalized by the BA in 1885, although many teams were slow to admit to employing professionals, and it was an innovation that took time to spread. Unsurprisingly, Lancashire clubs were among the first to register paid players. During the summer of 1886 at least two dozen clubs were engaging some 339 professional baseballers; this figure rose to 47 clubs and 612 professionals by the end of the 1887 season. From Lancashire, professional baseball spread outward to contiguous counties, creating a network of competition encompassing Stoke and Burslem Port Vale in the Potteries; West Bromwich Albion, Aston Villa and the Small Heath Alliance in the Black Country and Birmingham; and across to Derby and Notts counties in the East Midlands. Early professionalism, it was noted, was a phenomenon “confined to the north-west (of England) and the midlands”. As a result, the mainly southern faction’s unyielding opposition to professionalism hampered the development of clubs in London and throughout the south into the 20th century.

The Baseball League was created essentially to address the administrative and financial difficulties that had arisen in the wake of professionalism. The most important of these was that professional clubs usually lacked a reliable and permanent schedule (aka a “fixture list”). Such clubs, now facing large bills for player wages in addition to other expenses, could no longer depend on a haphazard schedule of local cup games in which the opponents might be too weak to attract a crowd, or “friendly” matches where visiting clubs might arrive with something short of a full side—if they showed up at all. In a situation where fixtures were created and cancelled in a capricious way, order was needed.

That order came in the person of William MacGregor, an ex-pat Scot and a director of the Aston Villa Baseball and Football Clubs. MacGregor circulated a letter suggesting that “ten or twelve of the most prominent clubs in England combine to arrange home and away fixtures each season.” This was not an idea new to baseball—it had already existed for almost two decades in the US already, although MacGregor insisted that the County Championship contested in cricket provided him the inspiration for organizing.

Nevertheless, with the agreement of eleven clubs in addition to Aston Villa—six from Lancashire (Accrington, Bolton Wanderers, Blackburn Rovers, Burnley, Everton and Preston North End), three from Staffordshire (Stoke, West Bromwich Albion and Wolverhampton Wanderers), and one each from Warwickshire (Aston Villa), Nottinghamshire (Notts County) and Derbyshire (Derby County), the Baseball League was born.

It seems likely that not a few of the clubs were chosen less for their high quality of play than for their good facilities, location and potential to draw large crowds on a consistent basis. Only two of the original twelve clubs (Burnley and Derby County) had previously won the BA Cup, and a number of clubs left out were considered to have a better case for inclusion based on their quality of play than some of those chosen. Nevertheless, it was widely agreed that for the League to have the best chance to become an ongoing concern, a strong financial footing would be necessary to serve as a solid foundation for the prospect of permanent success.

And so, with the League established and the fixtures set, the 1888 season got underway.