1872.1

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Forest City Club Lists Player Duties, Role of Team Captain, Etc.

Salience	Peripheral
Tags	Base Ball StratagemsBase Ball Stratagems
Location
City/State/Country:	Cleveland, OH, United States
Modern Address
Game	Base BallBase Ball
Immediacy of Report	Contemporary
Age of Players	AdultAdult
Holiday
Notables
Text	"1.  THE CAPTAIN.  The captain of the club shall be elected by the board of directors and shall serve at their pleasure. . . . 3. No member of the club will be excused from practice or play unless upon a written certificate from Dr. N. B. Prentice . . .  6. No member of the club shall accept any gift of money to lose or assist in losing a game and violation of this rule and will subject the member to be expelled in disgrace. . . .  8.  . . . No member will be allowed to use the uniform of another player without the permission of the owner.
Sources	Cleveland Plain Dealer, 3/9/1872.
Warning
Comment	Richard Hershberger posted the following, 3/10/2022: 150 years ago in baseball: the Rules and Regulations adopted by the Forest City Club of Cleveland for its players. It rather jumps out that they felt it necessary to specify that players weren't allowed to throw games for money, with the penalty of being "expelled in disgrace." But the topic for today's sermon is the role of the captain. This touches on a persistent modern misunderstanding of the early professional era. Look at the list of the captain's responsibilities and this looks similar to the modern field manager. Look up the 1872 Forest City club and you will find two "managers" listed: Scott Hastings, going 6-14 and Deacon White going 0-2. (The team was, it turns out, not good, and won't last the season.) They actually were the captains. The "manager" in this era was a different role. The details varied, but the manager typically was in charge of the business side of things: supervised the gate on game day, made travel arrangements on the road, and so on. Sometimes the manager was in charge of hiring and firing players, making him more like the modern general manager. The captain always was a player. The manager usually was not, but there were a few exceptions such as Harry Wright. Here in 1872 not all teams had a full time manager, the officers running things directly. Later this summer when the Forest City team goes on a trip, a report identifies the "manager" for that trip, meaning the guy who will corral the players get them from city to city. Within a few years the job will have grown to a full time position, nearly always held by someone hired specifically for that job. The problem is that the modern listings of managers are a mess for the 19th century. We have this modern concept of what is a "manager"--Earl Weaver or Billy Martin and so on--and we try to impose this model on the past. So some researcher reads a report with the captain doing stuff we expect of a modern manager, and lists that guy as the manager. Or a researcher sees some other guy called the "manager" and lists him. This eventually got distilled down to a standard list, with the two roles jumbled together in an incoherent mess. The moral is that if we want to understand what was going on, we have to set aside modern understandings of how these things work. Edit with form to add a comment
Query	Do we know if there are interesting variants in other clubs' rules?  Edit with form to add a query
Source Image
External Number
Submitted by	Richard Hershberger
Submission Note	FB posting, 3/9/2022
Has Supplemental Text

1872.1 Forest City Club Lists Player Duties, Role of Team Captain, Etc."

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