Guest Essays

In the course of creating these pages, we have received much correspondence. Occasionally, we receive a thoughtful piece of writing which doesn't quite belong on the park or club pages, but is highly informative and does deserve to be read. We'll add them here gradually for everyone to enjoy.

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Understanding Early Ball Clubs
by Richard Hershberger

Note: This was originally written in response to a query made on the 19th Century Base Ball mailing list of SABR, in which I made several naive assumptions about the organization of early base ball clubs, and the relationship of the various Atlantic Clubs. -- David

You have made two false assumptions. The lesser is that a co-op club would necessarily have a social function. This gets confusing because the traditional distinction is between a stock club and a co-op club. "Stock club" refers to how the legal entity was organized, while "co-op club" refers to how player wages were determined, so combining the two is a category error.

The original model of a baseball club was as a fraternal organization. Professionalism got grafted onto this, not entirely happily. Fraternal clubs fielding professional teams might pay the players salaries negotiated in advance, or operate them as co-ops, sharing gate receipts with the players. A stock club could in principle operate as a co-op, but I have never heard of this happening. The whole point of selling stock was to raise enough capital that they could pay salaries, and therefore get better players.

As the professional era progressed you start to see co-op teams with little or no club backing them, since at that point the fraternal club takes on more the role of a booster club to the team: nice, but not necessary.

This takes us to the second assumption: that those various examples of an Atlantic Club were connected to one another. The original Atlantics were a classic fraternal club, but that part of it gradually faded. I don't know the details or the exact timing, but by the time the 1875 National Association team collapsed the fraternal club was gone. Any later Atlantic Club had at most a tenuous connection with what had gone before, and a more likely interpretation was that it was recycling the traditional name for whatever prestige there was to be had. (You see the same thing today with the independent leagues, which often use names of old minor leagues.)

The Atlantic clubs you see in the late 1870s and early 1880s were various efforts by Billy Barnie. He organized a low-level, effectively semi-professional co-op team in the late 1870s that didn't accomplish much. He spent some time playing in California, but came back when baseball revived in New York and organized the 1881 Atlantics that played in the Eastern Championship Association. That was the club that almost but not quite joined the AA. Barnie finally ended up in Baltimore, and the club that eventually became the Dodgers began play in 1883. I don't know the story behind the later Atlantic clubs, but strongly suspect they were amateur or semi-pro teams simply using the traditional name.

The Greatest Dodgers
by Irvin Matus

Note: Our Dodger page originally referred to the 1953 team as "probably" the greatest Dodger club. Here, we were set straight.

In regard to: "The 1953 squad went 105-49 and was probably the greatest team ever fielded by the Brooklyn club," I'd say: no probablies about it, because no previous team was so overwhelming and, not only was it greatest edition of the Dodgers, it was the greatest offensive aggregation in the NL after the longball decade of the '20s and the juiced-ball season of 1930. In that year, 6 of the 8 NL teams hit over .300 and the BA of the entire league was .303; meanwhile the Braves, with a measly .393 slugging average, were the only team below .400. Four teams scored more than 900 runs, the Cards leading the pack (good pun, eh wot?) with 1,004 runs, and the Cubs led the league in slugging with a .481 average.

A caution here: my latest record book only goes through the '94 season and it's possible that the combination of juiced balls, juiced players, a strike zone wider than it was high, plus a number of pitchers without the stuff to pitching practice, may have altered things since 1995. But up to 1994, the '53 team's 955 runs were not only the most in the NL since 1930, it was also the only team in the league that scored more than 900 runs between 1931 and 1994. (Quite a number of AL teams did, all of which, but for two Red Sox teams, 1948 and '50, were in the '30s; 4 in 1936 alone.)

That age of bombast aside, the 1953 Brooks may claim superiority over teams in both leagues since 1920. In that year, they outscored their nearest competition, the Cards and Giants, both of which plated 768 runners -- 187 fewer than the Dodgers. The next largest distance is between the 1067 runs (the highest total ever) tallied by the Yanks and the 885 (182 fewer) scored by Cleveland in 1931. Perhaps still more remarkable is the Brooks superiority over the 1927 "Murderers Row" Yankees. That's the lineup that hit 158 homers, 36 percent of all in the AL (the other seven teams averaged 40 homers), while also leading the league in triples, batting average and slugging average. However, it outscored next best Detroit by 130 runs, 975 to 845. By percentages, the Dodgers outscored their closest competitors by 24.35 percent; the '31 Yanks theirs by 20.56; the '27 Yanks by 15.38.

No matter how you look at it, no other offensive aggregation in the long-ball era so dominated its rivals as did the 1953 Brooklyn Dodgers. (For the record, the all-time champs come from the dead-ball era: the 1913 Athletics outscored Cleveland by 161 runs, 794 to 633, 25.43 percent. more.)

The Bums' .474 SA in '53 is also the highest in the NL over that span and was tops in the majors between the .483 of the '36 Yanks and the .484 of Cleveland in the strike-shortened 1994 season (if that counts -- I asked a fellow fan if it does; without hesitation he said it doesn't, and I'm inclined to agree). As a matter of fact, it is fifth all time in the majors (6th, if you do count the '94 Indians).

A digression. My Shakespeare projects, especially the one on his English history plays, have affirmed, as one historian put it, "History makes its own ironies." Here's a beaut (as we old-time Brooklyn fellas would say). When the Yanks posted their .483 SA in '36, the 2nd place team was Cleveland with .461. When Cleveland had its .484 in '94, the 2nd place team was the Yanks with .462. Each pair of figures separated by 22 points. I wonder what the statistical odds of that are.

Back to our story. You may want to get your hands on a book that will fill in the years from 1995 to date, just to see how our Bums hold up. You see, their margin in SA -- .474 to the Cards .424, 50 points more -- is second all-time to the '27 Yanks, which had a .489 SA against the A's .414, 75 points. If an AL team tops the Dodgers margin, I'll grumble but live with it. If it's an NL team, "I'll have such revenges on them that all the world shall -- I will do such things -- what they are, yet I know not, but they shall be the terrors of the earth!" (King Lear, act 2, scene 4, lines 274-78. Forgive me, Will.) I got it! I'll get baseball to pass a law that their uniforms will have to look like the Houston Astros' in the 1970s. It will make them look like oversized, bloated candy corn! Anyone who has a shred of dignity, an ounce of self-respect, would rather get duded up as Ronald McDonald.

The '53 Yanks didn't come close to Brooks in hitting -- but the Achilles' Heel of the Dodgers was their pitching. The Yanks regularly led the AL in ERA and the '53 staff's 3.20 ERA was 90 points better than the Dodgers'. As a matter of fact, the Brooks outhit the Yanks and it showed up in their ERA, 4.50. But then, the Dodgers staff pitched to a 4.94, as they were outscored, 33-27. If the Bums won that Series that team might have been put right up there with the '27 Yanks. But, until your "probably," which sent me to my BB encyclopedias, I too did not recognize how far the '53 club's offense stood above all others for so many years.


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