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How Baseballers Sustain Their Wages During The Winter

The best baseballers in Britain have become a fully professional lot. No longer is it the case that a player breaks his back all week in the pits or the factory or even the comfortable office, then play baseball on Friday and Saturday afternoons to stoke his earnings. Nowadays, the professional baseballer will devote his entire time from practice in late March, through the season start in early May, and onto the end of the season in September— late September, if he is lucky enough to play for the First Division’s EOI Cup after league competition has terminated. Then, the player will return to honest work for the autumn and winter, awaiting the sweet kiss of spring to draw him out to the baseball pitch for another year for the pleasure of the sporting public.

But there is also a class of baseballer for whom the workaday world is simply no option. For him, only the pitch will suffice as a wage paying endeavour of any sort. And so it is this player who finds his alternative employ in those climes in which baseball can be played for pay during the League’s winter slumber, whilst keeping his skills sharp upon his return in March.

Already, we find players such as first baseman Alfred Smith of Nottingham Forest; third baseman Willie Buxton of Clapton Orient; pitcher Harry Hind of Burslem Port Vale; and right fielder Austin Henry making the month long journey to Australasia to play in the leagues of Sydney, Melbourne and Auckland where it is their summer to our winter, and all reports have them dominating their lesser local peers there.

Other leagues in the realm closer to home also draw serious British baseballers. Indian leagues in Bombay, Calcutta, Delhi and Madras attract dozens of baseballers both great and less than great, including pitcher Alfred Drew of Crewe Alexandra and the redoubtable right fielder Pat Hodgson of BPV. Leagues abound in the British West Indies as well, in Kingston and Georgetown and Nassau, as well as in Africa in Accra and Lagos and Johannesburg, all with a high quality of ball, and none paying too well, although well enough for many of the best of British baseballers— and several average players as well— to continue plying their trade on the pitch rather than find temporary winter labour in some unsavoury circumstances to pass the time in between seasonal competitions.

As to the inevitable question of whether baseballers indigenous to those colonial leagues play sufficiently well to find employment in the English Baseball League. One such player has done so with some success, that being Stoke’s Gerald Davies, the native African of nine seasons’ experience who himself has been returning to the pitches in Accra for winter baseball each year. He has been but an exception, and indeed at the young age of twenty eight his skills have been on the wane for several years, as if to confirm the native’s inferiority to the white man in the physical fitness and endurance needed to play baseball at the highest level well into a man's thirties. It seems unlikely we will see a repeat of this experiment, except among clubs so desperate for talent of any kind that they will accept such mediocrity from races clearly fit to deliver such.