Clipping:The state of the professional game
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| Date | Sunday, January 19, 1873 |
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| Text | The fact was plainly manifest to an ordinary observer of things that the close of the baseball season of 1872 left the status of professionalism at a lower point in the estimation of the general public than it had ever before reached, the proceedings which marked the closing month of the season’s campaign being such as to cast an odium upon professional clubs which it will require some time and considerable effort on the part of club managers and professional players to remove. What with the injurious influence of the pool-selling business, the violation of the rules of the game in regard to betting by players, the evil results of the prize money tourney games, and the bad effect of “exhibition” contests generally, a lack of public confidence in the integrity of professional playing was induced which has almost caused a general disgust with ball tossing among the reputable portion of the patrons of the game. We heard it asserted last summer that but for the patronage of the gambling and betting class of the sporting fraternity, professional baseball palying would die out. We deny this in toto; but if it were true, better that baseball playing should cease altogether than that it should be governed by such vile influences as have degraded so many excellent out-door sports and amusements of late years. That baseball matches, played by trained nines, under responsible club management, which insured earnest and honorable efforts to win in every game played, will attract large assemblages of spectators, there exists not the slightest doubt; but it is very plain, also, that contests played under circumstances which admit of influenced and surrounding such as characterized many of the prominent professional ball matches of 1872 will no longer be countenanced by the better class of the admirers of baseball. This fact professional club managers will have to bear in mind in making their arrangements for the baseball public for the coming season of 1873. If they desire to cater only for the “sports” of the country, then all they have to do is to get together nines composed of men available for all the tactics of the betting ring class, make due preparations for the pool-selling business, arrange a series of “exhibition” games for money purses, and the result will be just such scenes as characterized the late billiard-match for the championship, which marked mahy of the October contests of the baseball campaign of 1872. A reformation is needed in professional ball-playing, and as far as the interests of the professional fraternity are concerned, the very existence of professional playing now depends upon the prompt introduction of the required reforms. As we said before, the admirers of baseball at large are as ready and eager as ever to patronize thoroughly legitimate contests, and such matches will prove as pecuniarily remunerative as ever they have if it can only be shown that the contests engaged in really are bona fide efforts to win, and not cunningly devised arrangements to take in the crowd who invest in bets on each contest. It may be possible that every match game of ball of last season was played “on the square,” but how many of the patrons of the game are there who really believe such to be the case? Not one in a hundred. The first thing, therefore, which club managers have to do this year in making their preparations for the regular baseball campaign, is to remove all doubts in regard to the inegrity of the contests they propose to engage in this season; and to do this effectually they must remove the signs and appliances of fraud, and especially rid their grounds of that curse of all sports–pool selling. Let club managers make a note of these facts and act accordingly. |
| Source | New York Sunday Mercury |
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| Submitted by | Richard Hershberger |
| Origin | Initial Hershberger Clippings |
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