The Gordon Base Ball Club of Chicago and the Black Sporting Fraternity, 1884–1886

Abstract

On March 5, 1884, Sporting Life published this item: Gordon Base Ball Club of Chicago, one of the best organizations, proposes to capture the championship of the United States. W. C. Sutliffe is the manager. The players in this club receive from $35 to $50 per week. (1) The Gordon Base Ball Club, or of St. Louis, as sportswriters called them, offer another remarkable chapter to nineteenth-century baseball. The Gordons (1884-86) comprised talented ball tossers from independent professional aggregations: the Unknowns and the Garden Citys, both of Chicago, and the Black Stockings of St. Louis. The Gordons' professional tours followed a regional circuit previously traveled by the Black Stockings in 1883, and it is not improbable that former Black Stockings' players scheduled their new club's road itinerary. Like the Black Stockings, the Gordon Base Ball Club crossed bats with black and white clubs, professionals, semi-professionals and so-called amateurs. Leslie A. Heaphy's Black Baseball and Chicago correctly observes that little is known about late nineteenth-century teams or individual players in the Garden City--another name for Chicago--because sports coverage of nines tended to be sporadic. Heaphy explains: Most of these early teams had to rely on word of mouth advertising and the like since newspapers came and went rather quickly. There were twenty-six African American newspapers established in Chicago between 1878 and 1920 but few lasted. (2) When referring to the Gordon Base Ball Club of 1884, for example, Heaphy's assessment of local newspapers, both white (The Chicago Tribune, The Chicago Daily News, and Daily Inter-Ocean) and (The Conservator), appears correct. However, I will suggest here that evidence not be restricted to the Chicago press, and, as the evidence does illustrate, and white newspapers throughout the Midwest and South covered the Gordon Base Ball Club's exploits. What makes the Gordons special? Given the limited number of years the club existed, one might answer nothing at all. Regarding the Gordons, historians have not written much. Conversely, they have rediscovered the Cuban Giants, arguably one of baseball's most successful late nineteenth-century clubs. By comparison, time and neglect shrouds the Gordons' history. Research on baseball, in its infancy, is rather uneven. Late nineteenth-century editors and sportswriters found the Gordons wanting as well. Given the social status of the Chicago White Stockings of the National League, the Chicago Unions of the Union Association, the Chicago Amateur Base Ball Association, and independents, the Gordons competed for highly sought-after column space, but they received scant attention in the local sports pages. The club's unstable position seemed easy to ignore and its pretensions easy to rebuff. Simply claiming themselves colored champions of the United meant little, if anything, to Chicago baseball's elite. This nine deserves better. Historian Neil Harris is correct when he writes that it is so easy to get the postbellum Gilded Age (1873-1901) wrong, because getting it right requires so much research and concentration. (3) It's no one's fault, really. The Gordons weren't or aren't anyone's favorite team. That is, until now. I find the Gordon Base Ball Club's history rather complex and illuminating. It reads like a mystery novel, enigmatically woven into the sociocultural fabric of late nineteenth-century Chicago. The Gordons emerged in the postbellum Gilded Age, the period of economic ascendancy in the United States following the Civil War. While local sports coverage may have ignored their exploits, sportswriters across the country considered the nine good copy; they embodied Chicago's thriving sporting culture. The Gordons were contemporaries of other professional nines, including the St. Louis Black Stockings, Louisville Fall Citys, New Orleans Pickwicks, New Orleans Unions, and Chicago Unknowns. …