Baseball's Golden Era and Dark Age

He was the ideal baseball athlete. About six feet tall, and his anatomy was moved by an electric engine, guided by an eagle brain, that would see a point in the game and execute it with a lightning move that no one possessed but the late lamented Kelly. TED SULLIVAN, Humorous Stories of the Ball Field, 1903

In his long-ago heyday of the 1880s, everyone called him the "King of Baseball." And it was true: Michael Joseph Kelly was the most brilliant ball player of his era. Brighter stars have emerged over the past century and a half, from Babe Ruth to Willie Mays to Mike Trout, relegating Kelly's legend to the deeper recesses of baseball memory. But the lad could play the game with the best of them. And he knew how to put on a show.

Baseball bards still slap their knees about the day Kelly made a leaping, circus catch — both arms reaching high above the right-field fence — to steal a potential game-winning home run. "Three out," the umpire barked as a beaming Kelly emerged from the gloaming. "Game called because of darkness," the ump declared. Trotting back to the bench, the Celtic imp gave his teammates a sly grin as he opened his empty palms. "It went a mile over me head!"

King Kel's proud and erect bearing, charismatic good looks, and rascal charm found a perfect daily outlet on the "diamond field," which he turned into his personal stage. And as baseball fanatics would someday do for Babe Ruth, himself a peerless crowd pleaser, the public followed King Kelly's every move, especially on the base paths. Chants erupted from the grandstand the moment he rounded a base and made a beeline for the next bag: "Slide, Kelly, Slide!" the crowds yelled, creating one of the slang phrases of the era — it later became the title of a Tin Pan Alley ditty and a popular painting that hung on barroom walls.

As his antics multiplied, Kelly acquired a national following. His likeness appeared on posters and in early baseball cards. He was the game's — quite possibly the nation's — first matinee idol. Kelly liked to think of himself as Ernest Thayer's model for "Casey at the Bat"— not so, but some vaudeville houses featured orations of it by King Kel. "Babe Ruth's popularity is a small thing compared to the worship that America lavished upon the King," came the sober assessment of Byron Bancroft "Ban" Johnson, a sportswriter-turned-baseball entrepreneur who witnessed the play of both legends. "How the country adored Mike Kelly!"

A Boston bookseller entreated Kelly to write baseball's first autobiography. Play Ball was published in 1888, and in it, with a ghostwriter's help, the King gave voice to an idea that would become a cornerstone of baseball's future popularity: "If I could afford it, I would allow all the small boys, of high or low degree, to witness the ball games free of charge."

Young boys were the lifeblood of the game, Kelly declared. They followed the box scores every day, knew player histories and statistics, and talked baseball constantly to their fathers, mothers, sisters, and cousins. "They make veritable gods of their favorite players at home," which in turn brought people out to the ballpark. "The small boys are a tower of strength to the game of baseball."

Kelly's overt bow to childhood and adolescence was a novel sentiment that didn't conform to nineteenth-century social custom. American children in the first decades after the Civil War still worked from dawn to dusk on family farms or as menial laborers in factories and mills. In rural and urban settings alike, young people were expected to contribute to their families' income until they were old enough to head out on their own. Parents and school authorities were slow to accept the idea that childhood was a distinct period of human maturation, that boys and girls needed ways to develop their bodies and explore their fantasies — that they needed to play. Many adults frowned on child's play, viewing it as a form of idleness or, worse, a product of the "devil's workshop." Parents of this era had grown up in antebellum America, when a strict, puritanical strain of religious belief piled its moral weight on work and repentance. The notion that playing games might build Christian character was anathema to the inheritors of the Calvinist tradition in America. As one Unitarian minister was said to have recalled: "To play at cricket was a sin, in the eyes of the fathers, as much as to dance or to play on an ungodly instrument." King Kelly's assertion that professional baseball owed its success to a boyhood passion for the game was all but lost on this generation of adults.

Yet times were changing, thanks to a long period of peace and prosperity that followed the Civil War. The trends of industrialization, migration from countryside to city, rising incomes, and shrinking family sizes altered the relationships of adults to children, opening doors to new forms of childhood expression. In the last decades of the nineteenth century, notes historian David I. Macleod, progressive reformers put forward a variety of plans to promote child welfare.

Boys and girls in the 1880s and 1890s had more freedom than their parents had had at midcentury. While child labor laws to restrict the employment of kids in factories and mills were still decades away, more and more families were beginning to enjoy a middle-class lifestyle in which children not only could avoid work but also could lead sheltered and relatively carefree lives. They could be left in school during the day and allowed to roam on weekends and in the summer months. And as kids do when left to their own devices, they invented games to play and then played them endlessly.

Their favorites, featured in numerous books of games of this era, included black tom, red rover, the ever-popular tag, and also run, sheep, run. An 1883 publication, Games and Songs of American Children, listed "base-ball" as a rudimentary form of a game "that has become the 'national sport' of America." A book from 1887, The Tribune Book of Open-Air Sports, described the game of "rounders," a precursor to baseball, also called "sockey" in some sections of the country. Yet another book, In Door and Out (1882), spends a good deal of space on the game of "shinny," played with a "stout leather-covered ball ... and sticks, shaped like a Golf-stick, but not so heavy at the turn."

These free-form games and many others worked their way into playgrounds, streets, and open fields all over America, invented, improvised, and modified by kids. These games would spawn a national sports craze.

The first organized forms of baseball...