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PHILADELPHIA CITYWIDE LEAGUE GAINS RECOGNITION
CITY’S BASEBALL SCENE HAS RAPIDLY EXPANDED THANKS TO CHAMPIONSHIP TEAMS

PHILADELPHIA (Mar. 12-16, 1873) – Since the development of the sport of baseball began in earnest at the start of the second half of the 19th Century, the city of Philadelphia has been known as the “Epicenter of American Cricket”. By the time Doc Adams wrote “The Laws of Base Ball” in December of 1856 and the National Base Ball Organization began play the next spring, the United States’ second-largest city (Population: 674,022 at the 1870 Census; 2/3 of New York City) had roughly two dozen formal cricket clubs and scores of enthusiastic players. Ironically, it was the United States’ first capitol city that had taken the biggest liking the #1 sporting pastime of its former colonial master.

Cricket was popular enough with Pennsylvania’s coastal elite that one player gave this glowing review to a New York newspaper reporter in 1859:

“Look at the cricketers in their loose fitting, comfortable uniforms, their faces beaming with good humour and ruddy health, engendered by exercise. Note the eager anxiety of the fielders, their mortification at an overthrow, or a chance for a catch not taken advantage of; see the high ascending ball, and hear the joyous shout of the triumph, as some unfortunate batsman gets permission to retire to the tent, and if you do not leave the ground impressed with the beauty and the utility of the game, why then you were not cut out for a cricketer.”

For supporters, cricket was a gentlemanly sport that required concentration and technique in order to last long enough to play out a test on an expertly manicured field that could run for days on end. Conversely, baseball was seen as a simplistic game for children and young adults that could be played over the course of an afternoon across any open space with grass.

The above would explain why, even though it had half the population of New York City & Brooklyn combined, originally Philadelphia only had two teams in the NBBO compared to NYC & Brooklyn’s sixteen. It was metropolitan New York where baseball developed, and Philadelphia where cricket remained the ball sport of choice.

For much of the first decade of the NBBO, the two Philadelphian entries were markedly mediocre. American BC won 40+ out of seventy games for the first time in 1866, the competition’s tenth season, while putting up the worst record in NBBO history at 16-54 in 1858. Philadelphian brethren Quaker State BC fared slightly better, winning 40+ games twice and finishing second in the Coastal Championship in 1862. However, by the end of the decade they’d been an under-500 team five times in seven seasons.

Starting in the second half of the 1860’s the baseball in Philadelphia finally began to move on an upward trajectory. In 1868, American finished off five consecutive seasons of increasing Win Totals and Run Differentials:

• 1864: 31-39 (-58 RD)
• 1865: 39-31 (+14 RD)
• 1866: 40-30 (+96 RD)
• 1867: 43-27 (+104 RD)
• 1868: 48-22 (+139 RD)

In the process they won the Coastal Championship for the first time, beating three-time defending champions Shamrock by three games and becoming Philadelphia’s first entry into the Tucker-Wheaton Cup. American hovered around .500 for the next two seasons but still earned an invitation to be one of the inaugural twelve members of the APBL. After a fourth-place finish in the Metropolitan Conference in the APBL’s inaugural season, American went all the way to a Founders’ Cup title victory over St. John’s in Season Two, finishing a slow but steady rise to the top of the sport.

It took a couple of extra years, but Quaker State’s fortunes finally took a resounding turn toward the positive. In 1870 they were passed over for a spot in the APBL but went 41-29, finishing third in the Coastal with a five-win improvement over the previous season. They then responded to the professional snub by having the best season in NBBO history in 1871: an all-time best 58-12 record, an all-time best +290 Run Differential, and they capped it off by winning the final Round Robin version of the Tucker-Wheaton Cup with one game to spare. Quaker St. was again the best team in the NBBO in 1872 – a 54-16 record with a +227 RD – but were stunned in the NEL Championship Series when Portland came from 2-0 behind to beat them in Philadelphia in Game Five.

The Philadelphian teams’ rapidly improving fortunes in baseball’s two major competitions led to rapidly increasing interest in the sport within the city. Clubs that were informal quickly began to become more organized in the latter half of the 1860’s, and some of the city’s older cricket clubs added baseball teams to their ranks.

After American’s Founders’ Cup triumph over St. John’s brought the city its second championship in two years and it’s first top-tier triumph, serious talk began of putting together an organized competition involving most of the formal baseball clubs in the city, similar to New York City & Brooklyn.

As baseball’s 1873 Spring Executive Committee Meetings began, Philadelphia had sent representatives from sixteen clubs to continue a process that began the previous autumn with a series of telegrams and continued over the winter with sporadic in-person talks. The city and its clubs wanted some kind of formal recognition by the larger baseball landscape, and the Executive Committee was very receptive.

The only problem: sixteen clubs couldn’t be added to the NBBO without throwing off the balance of the competition, as there would be 24 teams across three regions in the New York League and 40 across five in the Northeastern League. So, what could a standalone Philadelphia competition be considered as with regard to the two others in existence?

The American Professional Baseball League was classified as a “Professional Baseball Competition (PRO)” and the National Base Ball Organization was classified as a “Regional Baseball Competition (REG)”, so the logic went that Philadelphia could have an intra-city league classified as a “City Baseball Competition (CITY)”, which could conceivably open up other major metropolitan areas to be recognized with competitions of their own.

And thus, on the final day of the Spring Meetings the leaders of the sport of baseball welcomed into existence the Philadelphia City Baseball League (PCBL), the first citywide competition recognized by committee that oversaw the sport.