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The Rise of Gate-Money Baseball

As with other sports in England at the time, there was a significant rift between two key factions: one mainly in the north and midlands which wanted to capitalize on the increasing popularity of baseball by creating a professional league of the highest competence; and another mainly in the south which favored maintaining baseball as a purely amateur exercise contested strictly for the love of the game.

What there was little dispute about was that, due to in large part to the substantially increased leisure time and real wages afforded to the working- and middle-classes during the prior four decades, thousands of people could be persuaded to pay a reasonable fee to watch the very best baseballers in action on a regular basis, particularly with the advent of the Saturday half-holiday granted to skilled tradesmen. The fact that the major beneficiaries of this prosperity centered among the textile and engineering workers, as well as those in shipbuilding, transport and mining, helps explains the early game’s dominance in Lancashire and West Midlands, as well as its late adoption in Liverpool, which was dominated by a casual non-unionized workforce; and by the northeast, where the Saturday half-holiday was not introduced until the mid-1880s.

Whatever the particular appeal of baseball was, there was no doubt there were large number of people willing to pay money to watch it. Gate-money sport had already been well-established in cricket and athletics, and was emerging in horse-racing and both association and rugby football. While crowd estimates can be culled only from newspapers of the time and thus are notoriously unreliable, it is generally accepted that gates increased from the 500-1,000 range for baseball cup matches in the 1870s to over 10,000 for championship cup matches in the mid-1880s, with the largest attendances to be found in Scotland and the north of England.

Notwithstanding the perceived “threat” to the “integrity and purity” of the game being seen by some observers, who lamented that games should be conducted “for the honour of victory alone without any ulterior thought as to how much the ‘gate’ is worth”, the emergence of gate-money baseball did create a demand and a need for clubs to secure the very best players possible, since the ardor of even the most enthusiastic supporter wanes when the club fields a poor product that loses frequently. A poor start to the 1884 season led Athletic News to advise Blackburn Rovers to strengthen their squad lest they “not only lose a lot of engagements, but [also find] a considerable falling off of receipts.” In addition to the need to field the best players, there were also the dual problems of finding similarly-matched competition against which to fairly contest games, and of games canceled at the last minute by clubs made up of less-than-fully-committed players.

This quickly-growing set of problems, coupled with insinuations by the sporting press and aggrieved opponents that the best industrial clubs of the north were already using “play for pay” baseballers anyway, led to a strong and sudden push after the 1887 season to create a league that would ensure both the highest level of competition available, and the stability to maintain a stable schedule of matches throughout an entire spring and summer. Most importantly, it was decided in the very first stages of planning that this league would allow baseballers to be paid for playing for the clubs.