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THE PHILADELHPIA PATRIOTS EXIT THE APBL – REPLACED BY THE NEL’S PHILADELPHIA TIGERS

During the offseason meetings after the end of the 1897 season, the Philadelphia Patriots became the second team to leave the APBL – the first being the Manhattan Orangemen in 1880. This happened due to numerous factors.

First, while Patriots were never particularly successful on the field they had become particularly bad over the last five years. This was their record over 27 seasons in the APBL:





Overall, their combined NBBO & APBL won-loss record as of the end of play in 1897 was 1283-1615, good for a measly .443 winning percentage. Their record over the past five seasons was 239-421. That’s a .362 win percentage, and their performance over that timespan resulted in four last-place finishes in the Metropolitan Conference while never being less than 32 games out of first place at the end of the season. The Patriots were consistently that poor even though they’d employed some of the best players in the sport over the years:

• Two time Hurler of the Year, five-time champ, and 300-game winner Charles Wilkerson spent the first six years of his career there.
• Five-time Team of the Year member and 1893 league MVP Lindsey Christensen had spent his whole career (12 years) with the team.
• Marcus Burkhart earned three Team of the Year nods during a decade in Philadelphia.
• The team employed ten-time Batsman of the Year Konrad Jensen in 1877 & ’78, finishing 3rd and 5th in the then ten-team league during his two seasons there.
• Catcher Carl Lowe earned three TotY nominations in five years (1778-82) after signing out of an indy league, then left as soon as he hit Free Agency.
• The Pats had career 300-game winner Leland Thurston (315 W, 92.0 WAR) for three years in his early 30s, but couldn’t keep him.
• They let Alex Silver leave via Free Agency after the minimum four years, and he proceeded to win 225 games & two HotY awards with the Knickerbockers.

In spite of employing such talent, their highest finish in the standings, even after the split into two conferences, had been third place. Even then, The Patriots only accomplished that three times in 27 years, and only twice were fewer than ten games out of first to end the season. Their entire history can be summarized with front offices that either didn’t know the quality of the talent they had or couldn’t surround the talent they knew they had with suitable players.

The team had become so bad in recent years that a common joke among the fanbase was that Patriots home games were exciting because you could go watch the opposing batters put on a show.

Another issue was money. Starting in 1883 the team was in the red fourteen out of fifteen years with the sole exception being 1896, when the team turned a modest profit while losing two thirds of their games. In four or five of those years the team suffered five-figure losses, which at the time would have been large enough to have to borrow money to pay the bills. While other teams in the APBL, and especially the M.C., didn’t mind having a team they knew they could reliably beat, what those teams’ front offices did mind was having to regularly loan money to another team so it could fulfill its basic obligations.

The third issue: there was another team in Philadelphia that could easily replace the Patriots if worst came to worst. While the third APBL team in Pennsylvania, the Pittsburgh Industrials, long had the same two issues the Patriots have had, there was an extremely successful semi-professional club based in the city: the Northeastern League's Philadelphia Tigers.





The Philadelphia Tigers joined the NBBO in 1871 as the baseball arm of the Philadelphia Tigers Social Club (NOTE: name taken from here), where apparently “cultured gentlemen” went to smoke cigars and discuss whatever it was such people liked to talk about. Whatever the social club was doing to back its baseball club worked, because after just three seasons the Tigers won the Tucker-Wheaton Cup. From there they were fairly successful until the NBBO split into three leagues, and after becoming a founding member of the Northeastern League they were consistently excellent:





Their NEL record altogether: 574-399 (.629), five Northeastern Division titles in eight years, and twice winners of the Adams Trophy. The team was well run, typically offsetting losses over one or two years by running profits over the next year or two. Also, their home venue of Broad Street Baseball Park could sit over 10,000, so the Tigers already had an APBL-ready venue.

What this meant was that in early October the owners of the APBL’s other fifteen clubs secretly asked the Tigers organization if they’d be willing to jump to professional baseball, waited for an affirmative response, and then at the Offseason Meetings told the Patriots to take a hike due to both poor performance and financial mismanagement. Not surprisingly, the Patriots took the Tigers’ place in the Northeastern League.

To shed salaries, prevent mutinies, and fund their future, the Patriots sold their best players. Lindsey Christenson went to Brooklyn for $5,000, 1894 TotY member Joseph Singer went to Boston for $4,150, and quality young first baseman Arthur Rousey (3.8 WAR in 1897) went to the Athletics for $3,500. The team was so talent-poor that much of the rest of the squad would fit in as quality players in the NEL without looking too good for the league.

For the Philadelphia Tigers, they had taken the final step in their evolution. Whereas they were once the side concern of a high-class gentlemen’s organization in the 1850s and 60s, they were now playing their baseball at the sport’s highest level.