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THE FIRST DECADE OF THE APBL, AND THE NBBO CONTINUES ON

As mentioned, the APBL succeeded in creating both a more competitive and higher level of baseball, with less than twenty games separating the ten teams in the standings after the final day of the inaugural season.

The highly competitive baseball kept up for the first eight seasons, as six of the league's ten teams won at least one title and two of the remaining four finished in the top three at least once. In only two of eight seasons did the champion finish 5+ games ahead of second place. In 1874 the title was decided via a one-game playoff. In 1876 the top four teams in the standings finished only three games apart from each other, with champion Brooklyn going 55-35 and 4th-place New York finishing 52-38.

The first eight champions of the APBL:

1871: Pennsylvania Quakers (55-35, 1 game ahead)
1872: Manhattan Orangemen (61-29, 7 games ahead)
1873: Boston Shamrocks (61-29, 3 games ahead)
1874: Boston Shamrocks (53-38, won via one-game playoff v. MNH)
1875: Buffalo Blues (60-30, 9 games ahead)
1876: Brooklyn Kings (55-35, 2 games ahead)
1877: New York Knickerbockers (56-34, 3 games ahead)
1878: New York Knickerbockers (64-26, 3 games ahead)

After 1878, the league had two issues: last-place teams were increasingly non-competitive and fanbases were opining that, while they most certainly enjoyed the professional standard of baseball they missed the playoff atmosphere that was present at the end of the best teams' seasons in the NBBO.

With that in mind, the APBL decided to split the league into two groups and have the top team from each group play for the newly-created "President's Cup" to crown the APBL champion. However, executives decided that six-team groups would work better than five-team groups, and they looked for two clubs to join the pro ranks.

On that front, the decisions were easy as there were two NBBO clubs clearly a cut above the rest. The Excelsior club, which had been turned away at the founding of the APBL and lost Konrad Jensen as a result, didn't respond by wilting but instead became rampant in the Brooklyn Championship. They won it in 1872, and then five straight times from 1874-78, also winning the Tucker-Wheaton Cup three times during that five-year span. Meanwhile, over in Boston the Massachusetts Bay club responded to the reconfigured Coastal Championship by finishing in the top three eight years in a row, winning it each season from 1875-78 while putting up nearly a .700 winning percentage during that time.

Choosing those two clubs meant more concentration of pro baseball in major markets, but given Excelsior's and Massachusetts Bay's success there weren't any other clubs to realistically consider.

Massachusetts Bay kept their core intact upon moving up to pro baseball, supplementing their roster with pro castoffs. On the other hand, Excelsior completed pro baseball's first trade, sending NBBO All-Star Zenos Diakogeorgiou and $4,000 - enough to sign two five-star players or four good enough to have a chance to make Team of the Year with a good season - to Philadelphia to bring back prodigal son Konrad Jensen.

The two new groups were composed as such:

Colonial Conference: Buffalo, Boston, Massachusetts Bay, New Jersey, Pittsburgh, Rochester
Metropolitan Conference: Brooklyn, Excelsior, Manhattan, New York, Pennsylvania, Philadelphia

The first two seasons of the new format brought some competitive balance back, with no team winning more than 2/3 of their games and no team losing more than 2/3. However, the result was the same both seasons as Brooklyn won the first two President's Cup trophies, first over Rochester in 1879 and then over Boston in 1880.

In the NBBO, the baseball ended up being largely dominated by two teams. While the Northeastern League had a mix of six clubs compete for the Tucker-Wheaton Cup during the 1870s, the New York League wound up being controlled by Excelsior and the New York Athletic club after three other clubs won the NYL title in the first three years of the decade. Excelsior won the NYL title and the cup in 1874, '75, and '78 before moving to the APBL, while NYAC won the NYL in 1877, '79, and '80 while winning the cup twice.

In 1879, as mentioned, the APBL offered Excelsior and Massachusetts Bay the chance to join the league, which both took immediately. The NBBO responded by adding two clubs from the regional ranks: the Marathon club of Brooklyn and the Scarlets of Salem, Massachusetts...





During the decade the NBBO ran into a problem: after telling players that those who went pro were banned from returning to their league, so many players were signing with agents in the hopes of full-time paydays that average NBBO teams found themselves having difficulty filling out their basic 20-man rosters.

So, in 1877 the NBBO converted from an amateur-only model to a semi-professional model and allowed APBL washouts to return. The roster issues that the NBBO was having almost immediately resolved themselves, and teams ended up not spending much more money than they previously were when they were paying players illicitly, since the best players in the sport were now dedicated pros and NBBO clubs no longer had to worry about pushing around bags filled with hundreds of dollars of cash under the tables to to secure player services.