In 1880, Chris Von der Ahe and Al Spinks (co-founder of The Sporting News) joined up to reorganize the two main baseball clubs in St. Louis during the 1870s, the Red Stockings and the Brown Stockings. Their new club, the St. Louis Browns, would play games at the old home of the Brown Stockings, Grand Avenue Park, located near the saloon owned by Von der Ahe. His primary interest in the venture was to sell more beer to fans. The organization they formed, the Sportsman's Park and Club Association, renovated the park and renamed it Sportsman's Park. In 1881 the St. Louis Browns began playing exhibition games against other professional clubs, including a highly successful series of games against the Cincinnati Reds and the Philadelphia Athletics. Encouraged by the success of these games, Opie Caylor, the leading figure in the Reds, and Horace Phillips of Philadelphia, organized representatives from St. Louis (Von der Ahe), Cincinnati, Philadelphia, New York and several other cities for a meeting in Pittsburgh in November of 1881, and the American Association was formed. Charter franchises were placed in St. Louis, Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, Cincinnati, Philadelphia and Louisville. (The Brooklyn franchse ran into organizational difficulties and the membership was shifted to Baltimore prior to the 1882 season; Brooklyn was given a new franchise in the AA in 1884.)
The American Association lasted from its first season in 1882 throught the 1891 season. During this time it was commonly called the 'Beer and Whiskey' League after three of its founding tenants which differed significantly from the National League. It allowed the sale of beer at all games, it allowed games on Sunday, and it allowed franchises to set their own admission price for fans. This last tenant allowed teams to charge only a quarter for admission, whereas the National League had a 50 cent minimum in place. By the end of its existance, these tenants and other inovations from the American Association were adopted in the National League, and at the start of the twentieth century, half of the clubs in the National League could trace their origin to the American Association, including the St. Louis Cardinals. This was the impact of a league which otherwise has largely been overlooked in the history of baseball. (Witness the 1992 centennial celebration for the Cardinals, which in reality celebrated the shifting of the franchise from the AA to the NL, and not the founding of the franchise, which played its first game in the American Association in 1882.) An overview of the ten-year run of the American Association will be presented as a part of this series.
For more information on the American Association, I strongly recommend The Beer and Whiskey League by David Nemec, published in 1994. This book offers a season-by-season recount of the the American Association and major league baseball during the formative years from 1880 to the early 1890s, both on and off the field.
Part 2: The early years in the AA (1882-1884)