Selling Baseball: How Superstars George Wright and Albert Spalding Impacted Sports in America

Baseball historian Jeffrey Orens delivers a compelling narrative that documents the importance of George Wright and Albert Spalding to the growth of baseball as players and entrepreneurs during the late nineteenth century. Using baseball publications from the time, local newspapers, and the writings of Wright and Spalding, Orens shows how the pair was essential in transforming the sport from an amateur game that pitted local nines against each other to professional leagues that had an international economic dimension.Baseball fans will love this book. Through relating the stories of the careers of Spalding, Wright, and Wright's older brother Harry, who factors into the narrative as much as the two men mentioned in the subtitle, readers will be treated to stories of baseball's early years. Baseball's popularity soared following the Civil War, due in part to its best player, shortstop George Wright, and its most capable player-manager, Harry Wright, dominating competition on the East Coast before venturing west to take on local clubs across the Midwest. In 1867, the Wright brothers’ elite Washington team unexpectedly lost 29–23 to an Illinois club led by pitcher Albert Spalding. This game, which featured Spalding pitching underhanded, Wright fielding without a glove, and all amateur players, marked the beginning of lifelong collaboration between the three men and a turning point when baseball began to modernize.Dramatic changes came to baseball in 1869, when the Wright brothers formed the Cincinnati Red Stockings—baseball's first professional team—and led it to an undefeated season. Spalding joined the Wright brothers in Boston in 1871 and helped form the National Association of Base Ball Players, a league intended to change the amateur game into a professional business. By 1876, as the playing days of the Wright brothers and Spalding neared an end, they helped form the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs, a move that separated management from labor (players), instituted the reserve clause in player contracts granting owners control over the players’ services, and prohibited Sunday games, all of which were measures aimed at boosting profitability, regardless of their effects on players and fans.Professionalization was not limited to the field. Much of the second half of the book focuses on the business dealings of Spalding and George Wright, as baseball executives and merchants. As ambassadors for baseball and builders of successful sporting goods businesses, their work highlighted familiar themes in Gilded Age history: growth, monopolization, global commerce, and labor concerns. In the same year the National League was formed, Spalding created his Spalding and Bros. sporting goods store, which ultimately made him more famous and wealthier than his baseball-playing career. Perhaps more important than the selling of balls and gloves, the publications that came out of this endeavor did much to bring the sport to the masses. Spalding's enterprise followed in the footsteps of George Wright, who in the late 1860s started a sporting goods store for personal profit and to increase baseball's popularity. Of particular interest is the international dimension, as the two men continually tried to spread the popularity of baseball overseas through tours and selling merchandise. They also did much to popularize European sports in America, especially cricket, tennis, and golf, through the sales of equipment and rule books.As good as the book is in narrating the story of nineteenth-century baseball, Orens could have done more to place the business exploits of Spalding and Wright in the context of the Gilded Age political economy. For example, Spalding's success at buying out his competition in the sporting goods business, including Wright, is only analyzed with a brief statement regarding the lax enforcement of the Sherman Antitrust Act at the time. Likewise, earlier in their careers, Wright successfully settled a drawn-out patent case against Spalding over the latter selling a catcher's mask for which Wright had exclusive rights. Few details are given about the case or the consequences for their relationship. The book also has a triumphalist feel to it, where the skill and determination of Spalding and the Wright brothers lead inevitably to baseball becoming America's pastime and a profitable business. The three men certainly deserve accolades for their contributions to growing baseball, but other people do as well. More importantly, what can be deemed progress for baseball came with discontents. Orens acknowledges that changes to the game, fueled in part by Spalding's efforts, affected players negatively, especially the reserve clause that tied players to the whims of a team owner and paternalistic rules restricting activities like drinking. Despite this recognition, Orens still treats Spalding tenderly for his role in crushing the 1890 Players’ League, an action which maintained the National League owners’ monopoly and paralleled the one he was creating in the sporting goods industry. The problems the Players’ League sought to solve, including allocation of revenue and the lack of autonomy resulting from the reserve clause, hampered baseball for the next century, contributing to the creation of the American League, the brief run of the Federal League, and eventually Curt Flood's famous lawsuit. All these elements are part of the late nineteenth-century game and its legacy that Spalding and the Wright brothers helped to create.Orens's well-researched and engaging book should be read by baseball fans and scholars of nineteenth-century sports. His narrative and analysis of Spalding's and the Wright brothers’ contributions to baseball offers a space for readers to consider the broader cultural implications of economic growth during the Gilded Age, and their importance for today.