Before the onset of professional baseball, there existed a myriad of teams and players going back to the 1840s. The early years centered around an organization known as the National Association of Base Ball Players. This group, the antecedents of which date to 1857, governed the world of baseball until the formation of the first all-professional league in 1871. This book is the definitive statistical reference to that organization, from its humble beginnings through its explosive growth after the Civil War, culminating with its coast-to-coast inclusion of several hundred amateur and professional clubs. Relying for the most part on primary sources, the author has included introductory essays for each year, complete team statistics, every game score, and individual batting and pitching statistics for all players.

This book completes the series of histories of the clubs and players responsible for making baseball the national pastime that began with Base Ball Pioneers, 1850-1870 (McFarland 2011). Forty clubs and hundreds of pioneer players from the first hotbeds of New York City, Philadelphia, New Jersey, and Massachusetts are profiled by leading experts on baseball's early years. The subjects include legendary clubs such as the Knickerbockers of New York, the Eckfords and Atlantics of Brooklyn, the Athletics of Philadelphia, and Harvard's first baseball clubs, and fabled players like Jim Creighton, Dickey Pearce, and Daniel Adams, but space is also given to less well remembered clubs such as the Champion Club of Jersey City and the Cummaquids of Barnstable, Massachusetts. What united all of these founders of the game was that their love of baseball during its earliest years helped to make it the national pastime.

This reference work is in two parts. The first is a biographical dictionary of the 325 men who played in the National Association between 1871 and 1875, with their playing record, together with what we know of their other baseball experience and their lives beyond baseball. The book also contains a dictionary of the 25 clubs who participated in the league, showing their history, their management, their uniforms and logos, their home grounds, and their performance in the league. About 150 player photographs are included and each club entry has two or three supporting images (18 are historical maps). Bibliography and index.

Founded in 1869, the Chicago Cubs are a charter member of the National League and the last remaining of the eight original league clubs still playing in the city in which the franchise started. Drawing on newspaper articles, books and archival records, the author chronicles the team's early years. He describes the club's planning stages of 1868; covers the decades when the ballplayers were variously called White Stockings, Colts, and Orphans; and relates how a sportswriter first referred to the young players as Cubs in the March 27, 1902, issue of the Chicago Daily News. Reprinted selections from firsthand accounts provide a colorful narrative of baseball in 19th-century America, as well as a documentary history of the Chicago team and its members before they were the Cubs.

Every spring, thousands of ball players across the country step back to the nineteenth century to play vintage base ball using the equipment, uniforms, rules, and customs of the game's early years. A unique combination of athletic contest, living history, and outdoor theatre, vintage base ball transports players and spectators alike to that fascinating and innocent time when athletes gathered on the diamond for recreation, exercise, and pure enjoyment. This lore-laden how-to provides all the information needed to play this entertaining, educational, and fast-growing game and to present it properly to the public, covering everything from historically accurate equipment and etiquette to the rules of play and game-day preparations.