Following the collapse of the Browns Stockings at the end of the 1877 season, baseball in St. Louis was at a low point. National teams did not come to play games, and the fans were turned off by the gambling scandals. An attempt in 1878 by Augist Solari (owner of the Grand Avenue Grounds) and Al Spink to revive the Brown Stockings folded after the 1880 season. Professional baseball in St. Louis was a a cross roads between failure and success, with failure a distinct possibility. Jeffrey Kittel (This Game of Games) sets the stage in his post about Chris Von der Ahe:
"Professional baseball in St. Louis, going into the 1881 season, had been a miserable failure and there was no reason to believe that things were going to change. The best professional club in the city was losing money. The National League had no interest in placing a club in St. Louis. The baseball establishment of the city was demoralized. The popularity of the game in St. Louis was at an historical low. Things were bleak and the future was uncertain.
And into this bleak uncertainty came Chris Von der Ahe."
Chris Von der Ahe became involved in 1875 with the Grand Avenue Club, the top amatuer club in St. Louis by the late 1870s. By 1877 Von der Ahe was Vice-President of the club. Following the 1880 season, Chris Von der Ahe and Al Spink (co-founder of The Sporting News) joined up to organize the Sportsman's Park and Club Association, with Von der Ahe as the largest shareholder and president. The SPCA controlled the park, now called Sportsman's Park. Al and his brother William Spink (sporting editors at the Globe Democrat and Missouri Republican, respectively, at the time) were active in the management of the new club, yet another version of the St. Louis Brown Stockings, which would play games at the newly renovated Grand Avenue Park located across the street from the saloon owned by Von der Ahe.
In 1881 the St. Louis Brown Stockings began playing exhibition games against other professional clubs, including a highly successful series of games against the Cincinnati Reds and the Philadelphia Athletics. These games brought fans to the park and put St. Louis back into the national baseball scene from which they had dropped following the scandals of 1877. 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 October 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.) Von der Ahe controlled the park, but not the club, which led to some maneuvering by Von der Ahe to take control of the ball club. By the end of 1881, he controlled the park and team, and in 1882 major league baseball returned to St. Louis with the St. Louis Brown Stockings.
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)