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I have no blog, no website, but I do have a project that will be coming to fruition in a little while. What I find fascinating about professional baseball in the 1870's, and to a considerable extent still in the '80's, is that it was a brand new enterprise, and they were just making things up as they went along. It's full of interesting experiments that didn't work out, and ideas that seem pretty obviously bad in retrospect but must have looked good at the time. Things like making a 16-year-old your regular pitcher.
Don't know if Boston was the richest club, but they were the best run. They had Harry Wright, the most competent and experienced manager around. A team like the Atlantics but was just a social club trying to run a business. The earliest clubs were just clubs of men who liked to play baseball for exercise, and some of them wound up going bigtime and fielding professional teams. The Atlantics were probably the strongest team in the 1860's but they fell behind in the '70's. They sat in a big market but probably had very little cash in reserve and a divided and contentious management -- sort of like an internet discussion board given full control of a team. By 1875 the club secretary, a man named Van Delft, seems to have pretty much run the club himself, as best I can tell.
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