Albert Goodwill Spalding was an American pitcher, manager, and executive in the early years of professional baseball and the co-founder of A.G. Spalding's sporting goods company. He was born and raised in Byron, Illinois.
He played major league baseball between 1871 and 1878. Spalding set a trend when he started wearing a baseball glove and eventually opened his sporting goods store.
After his retirement as a player, Spalding remained active with the Chicago White Stockings as president and part-owner. In the 1880s, he took players on the first world tour of baseball.
With William Hulbert, Spalding organized the National League. He later called for the commission that investigated the origins of baseball and credited Abner Doubleday with creating the game. He also wrote the first set of official baseball rules.
Baseball Career
Having played baseball throughout his youth, Spalding first played competitively with the Rockford Pioneers, a youth team that he joined in 1865.
After pitching his team to a 26–2 victory over a local men's amateur team (the Mercantiles), he was approached at the age of 15 by another squad, the Forest Citys, for whom he played for two years.
In the autumn of 1867, he accepted a $40 per week contract, nominally as a clerk, but really to play professionally for the Chicago Excelsiors, not an uncommon arrangement used to circumvent the rules of the time, which forbade the hiring of professional players.
Following the formation of baseball's first professional organization, the National Association of Professional BaseBall Players, in 1871, Spalding joined the Boston Red Stockings and was highly successful, winning 206 games as a pitcher and batting .323 as a hitter.
William Hulbert, the principal owner of the Chicago White Stockings, did not like the loose organization of the National Association and the gambling element that influenced it, so he decided to create a new organization, which he dubbed the National League of Baseball Clubs. To aid him in this venture, Hulbert enlisted the help of Spalding.
Hulbert convinced Spalding to sign a contract to play for the White Stockings in 1876. Spalding then coaxed teammates Deacon White, Ross Barnes, and Cal McVey, as well as Philadelphia Athletics players Cap Anson and Bob Addy, to sign with Chicago.
This was all done under complete secrecy during the playing season because players were all free agents in those days, and they did not want their current club, and especially the fans, to know they were leaving to play elsewhere the next year.
He was "the premier pitcher of the 1870s", leading the league in victories for each of his six full seasons as a professional.
In 1876, Spalding won 47 games as the prime pitcher for the White Stockings and led them to win the first-ever National League pennant by a wide margin.
In 1877, Spalding began to use a glove to protect his catching hand. People had used gloves previously, but they were not popular, and Spalding himself was skeptical of wearing one at first. However, once he began donning gloves, he influenced other players to do so.
Spalding retired from playing baseball in 1878 at the age of 27
He continued as president and part-owner of the White Stockings and a major influence on the National League. Spalding's .796 career winning percentage is the highest ever by a baseball pitcher, far exceeding the second-best .690.
Executive Career
In the months after signing for Chicago, Hulbert, and Spalding organized the National League by enlisting the 2 major teams in the East and the 4 other top teams in what was then considered to be the West, also known as the jungle.
Joining Chicago initially were the leading teams from Cincinnati, Louisville, and St. Louis. The owners of these Western clubs accompanied Hulbert and Spalding to New York, where they secretly met with owners from New York City, Philadelphia, Hartford, and Boston. Each signed the league's constitution, and the National League was officially born.
In 1886, with Spalding as President of the franchise, the Chicago White Stockings began holding spring training in Hot Springs, Arkansas, which subsequently has been called the "birthplace" of spring training baseball.
The location and the training concept were the brainchild of Spalding and his player/manager, Cap Anson, who saw that the city and the natural springs created positives for their players.
They first played in an area called the Hot Springs Baseball Grounds. Many other teams followed the concept and began training in Hot Springs and other locations.
In 1905, after Henry Chadwick wrote an article saying that baseball grew from the British sports of cricket and rounders, Spalding called for a commission to find out the real source of baseball.
The commission called for citizens who knew anything about the founding of baseball to send in letters. After three years of searching, on December 30, 1907, Spalding received a letter that declared baseball to be the invention of Abner Doubleday.
In 1874, while Spalding was playing and organizing the league, Spalding and his brother Walter began a sporting goods store in Chicago, which grew rapidly and expanded into a manufacturer and distributor of all kinds of sporting equipment.
Spalding published the first official rules guide for baseball. In it, he stated that only Spalding balls could be used. Spalding also founded the "Baseball Guide," which at the time was the most widely read baseball publication.
In 1888–1889, Spalding took a group of major league players around the world to promote baseball and Spalding sporting goods. This was the first-ever world baseball tour.
Playing across the western U.S., the tour made stops in Hawaii (although no game was played), New Zealand, Australia, Ceylon, Egypt, Italy, France, and England. The tour returned to grand receptions in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago.
The tour included future Hall of Famers Cap Anson and John Montgomery Ward.
While the players were on the tour, the National League instituted new rules regarding player pay that led to a revolt of players, led by Ward, who started the Players' League the following season.
In 1900, Spalding was appointed by President McKinley as the USA's Commissioner at that year's Summer Olympic Games.
Albert Goodwill Spalding died of a stroke on September 9, 1915.
He was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939.