Agate Type: Adventures in Baseball Archeology

was the national association a major league?

Written by

Gary Ashwill

Was the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (1871-1875) a “major league”? Your answer, obviously, depends on what you mean by “major league,” and on how much importance you attach to the label.  People often interpret the conferral or denial of the major league label as a verdict on the league, its quality of play, and the admissibility of its playing records as measures of performance.  If the NA’s a major league, then its stats “count” for various purposes; if not, they don’t, which generally means that Ross Barnes or Deacon White or somebody is held not to be HOF-worthy.  Yet the NA’s quality of play is not what the debate was originally about.

The modern roots of this dispute lie in the decision of the Special Baseball Records Committee in 1968 to exclude the NA from the ranks of the major leagues due to its “erratic schedule and procedures,” while including as “major” such paragons of stability as the Union Association.

What was the context of this decision?  The Special Records Committee was convened by the commissioner to adjudicate problems and discrepancies that arose out of the effort to create The Baseball Encyclopedia.  What they were trying to decide was what should be included in the “official” record.  In the end, the NA could not be entirely ignored, because it was in fact the top level of professional baseball in its time.  But its numbers were segregated in their own section, and the players’ individual entries in the main section of the encyclopedia all started with the 1876 National League.

Look at the NA statistics in the early editions of the Big Mac.  There are no extra base hits, no batters’ walks, no pitchers’ walks or strikeouts.  Many, many blank spaces, in other words—a lack of detail that goes far, far beyond later gaps in caught stealing or batters’ strikeout data, for instance.  The statistical record on the NA was, in the late 1960s, just not up to the standard of the rest of major league history.

A number of the deficiencies commonly cited against the NA’s major status and held to taint its playing statistics—imbalanced schedules, the membership of second-tier clubs such as the Keokuk Westerns, the domination of the Boston Red Stockings—also characterize the putatively “major” Union Association, say, or the 1890 American Association.  Rather, I have a feeling that the sketchiness of the statistical record available for the league in 1968—a simple lack of numbers for many categories—was the key factor in getting it declared non-major.  It would have made the early players’ records look incomplete, even ugly; and it would have interfered with the calculation of career totals and averages.

That’s not really a problem anymore, of course.  But the dispute remains, partly because some people misinterpret the 1968 decision (and the institutional inertia that has allowed it to stand) as a verdict by knowledgeable authorities on the quality of play in the National Association when, I’d suggest, it was really about the completeness of information.  In other words, it was not about how the stats are unreliable measures of performance because of too many games against the Middletown Mansfields or whatever; it was about how the stats were (at that time) incomplete.

In the end, I completely agree with this post.  Whether or not you label the NA a major league really isn’t going to change the way people interested in the 1870s think about it.  Anyone analyzing the careers of early professional ballplayers will use NA data, regardless of MLB’s or the Elias Sports Bureau’s official dictates about its status.  The NA will remain what it was, no matter what labels we impose on it or which section of the encyclopedias we put it in.  And, with historical baseball data increasingly computerized and online, such editorial decisions are less and less relevant in any case.

UPDATE  11:55 a.m. Btw, it’s important to emphasize that the original 1969 Baseball Encyclopedia was a major event in both the baseball and publishing worlds as 1) the first trade book entirely typeset on a computer and 2)  the first attempt to reconcile and correct the whole major league record.  The “look” of the thing, and specifically the appearance of completeness, could not have been too far from anyone’s mind.

3 responses

  1. David Ball Avatar
    David Ball

    I’ve thought about the matter of the incomplete state of NA stats in the Big Mac myself, and I see it as a chicken and egg question. Was the incomplete statistical record an unacknowledged reason for excluding the NA from ML status? Or was the statistical record left incomplete by the people doing the work because, once the decision had been made to exclude it, there was no impetus to dig out those statistics?
    I don’t know the answer but am inclined to favor the second choice for this reason. The NA’s official records, I believe, had been lost in a warehouse fire long before, while those of the NL, AA and other later major leagues existed, but the record for all the early leagues were inaccurate and lacking particular statistical categories the editors wanted to include. So, it must have been more or less necessary to reconstitute the entire record from scratch for the early years of the NL and for the AA, UA and PL, just as though the official records had vanished as the NA’s had.
    That being the case, it wouldn’t have added that much to the workload to do the same thing for the comparatively few games played by the NA. It is certainly true that newspaper coverage for the early ’70’s was not as thorough as it was even ten years later, but I don’t think there was any reason why they couldn’t have done the work, as a SABR committee eventually did.
    Therefore, it appears the people working on the Big Mac could have completed the NA’s statistical record but didn’t because it had been decided to exclude the NA. That’s the view that seems more plausible to me, but it’s not based on any very detailed understanding of the practical obstacles faced in undertaking this great project.

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  2. Gary Ashwill Avatar
    Gary Ashwill

    Yeah, I wondered which came first, too. I have only a vague sense of the chronology of the ICI project & the decisions of the special records committee, but the statistical record certainly took a number of years to put together. The special committee seems to have issued its decisions in 1968, which seems fairly late in the process (the encyclopedia being published in 1969). This to me suggests that the committee’s decisions were made after the project was already close to completion, and they were essentially evaluating work that was already done (or not done, in the case of the NA).
    Anybody with better knowledge of the details should feel free to jump in…

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  3. David Ball Avatar
    David Ball

    What you had to say about the Big Mac’s pivotal role in publishing history was quite interesting, but I already knew about its importance to baseball research because I was alive and just about old enough to experience and appreciate it. With the fabulous research apparatus we all have at our fingertips now, it’s probably become difficult to understand what a huge leap forward the Big Mac represented. It was, as you say, the first attempt to create a complete and accurate record of major league statistics.
    I sense that the committee was motivated in many of its decisions by the desire to standardize scoring rules and related practices as much as possible, in order to allow people to draw valid comparisons all across the huge new database (to use a word few people knew then). They understood, of course, that there were serious normalization problems between eras, but they wanted to make cross-era comparison as valid to the extent possible. I think a number of their decisions, most notably the calculation of 1887 BA’s by the usual method instead of the peculiar one actually in vogue in 1887, can be understood in the light of that purpose.
    If I’m right in thinking this was their intention, it seems probable that the committee members’ sense of the institutional looseness of the NA, with teams playing widely different numbers of game both overall and against common opponents, that led them to believe the NA’s statistics could not be used for meaningful comparison as other league’s could. Throughout baseball history, almost every teams had always played more or less exactly the same number of games against each opponent (note this was before divisional play). That was not true of the NA, and it introduced a complication into any attempt to compare its stats to those of other leagues. In fact, you couldn’t even make comparisons between one NA team’s players and another’s. For that reason, I suspect, the NA was excluded from the main register.
    Now, one or two people who lack my trusting faith in human nature and perhaps know more about the process than I do, have told me that the real reason was the NL’s desire to be recognized as the first major league, coupled with the fact that the NL was represented on the committee while the NA of course was not. By any calculation, anyway, I think it’s safe to say that the committee’s decision was rooted in circumstances peculiar to the particular situation at the time. And whether the key consideration was completeness of information, the desire to promote standardization of records keeping or the NL’s institutional self-interest, the decision certainly was not a judgment on the NA’s quality of play.

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