July / August 2002 Vol. 34, no. 4

National Library Bats in Big League

Doug Fischer

This article first appeared in the Monday, June 10, 2002, edition of the Ottawa Citizen. Reprinted with permission.

In early April 1876, a group of seven or eight Ontario businessmen gathered over roast beef and later with cigars and whisky in Toronto’s Walker House Hotel to find a way to contain the growing lawlessness of their passion  -  baseball.

Just a few weeks earlier, the National League, forerunner of today’s major leagues, had been established in the United States, and the Canadians meeting that day, all of them baseball team owners, wanted an organization to rival the new American loop.

The threat to baseball from inflated salaries, team contraction and steroids was still more than a century away, but the game of the 1870s faced its own problems as it evolved from a rag-tag pursuit played for the love of it by local amateurs into an organized activity that hired mercenary professional players and involved cut-throat business rivalries.

The men meeting in Toronto knew that if their sport was to thrive, they needed order. So, by day’s end, the representatives of the London Tecumsehs, Hamilton Standards, Guelph Maple Leafs, Kingston St. Lawrence and Toronto Clippers had each handed over a $10 league entrance fee and agreed to play four games against each other that summer, the winner to claim Canadian baseball supremacy.

They elected Guelph brewer George Sleeman  -  great-grandfather of today’s brewery owner  -  as the league’s first president and called their new creation, despite its confinement to Ontario, the Canadian Association of Base Ball.

Earnestly taking notes in the room that day was William Bryce, a well-spoken, Scottish-born bookseller, news agent and sporting goods distributor from London. He had a small stake in the Tecumsehs, the finest ball team in the land, but his interest in the meeting was different than the others.

Now that Canada was getting its first pro league, Bryce believed the game’s participants and spectators needed an official guide. Within weeks, he had published Bryce’s Base Ball Guide of 1876, a handsome 75-page booklet he sold for a dime and is now considered the first significant publication on baseball in Canada.

Only two copies of the guide are known to have survived, and one has just been purchased by the National Library of Canada along with the only known copy of Bryce’s 1877 guide, the second and last edition of the book he’d hoped would become an annual publication.

Acquiring the guides was something of a coup for the Library, which paid $10,000 to an Ottawa book dealer who had bought them from a private, unnamed American collector.

"When you get a call with this kind of offer, you act quickly," says Michel Brisebois, the Library’s rare books curator. "You know you’re not going to see something like this again for a long time, if ever."

And, he notes, when books on subjects with passionate followers are auctioned publicly, the price can often skyrocket beyond the reach of institutions like the National Library.

"It’s scary to think where the price might have ended for these books," he says. "We were fortunate to get a private offer from a dealer with whom we do a lot of business."

The guides are an important addition to the Library’s collection of other early books on sports  -  mainly curling, lacrosse, cricket and hockey  -  but Mr. Brisebois is especially taken with the way they look, and their pristine condition.

Each of the four-by-seven-inch guides contains four pages of hand-coloured ads for caps, stockings, jerseys and belts. Given that probably somewhere around 500 copies of each book were printed, Mr. Brisebois figures Bryce likely hired teenagers and supplied them with stencils and paints to colour each page separately.

The first guide contains results of the Toronto founding meeting, the constitution and playing rules adopted that day, training hints for players, advice for team managers as well as records of teams from 1875 and a line score from "the best Canadian match" to that point in history, a 12-inning thriller played on July 15, 1875 in Kingston and won 3-2 by the home team over Guelph.

In some ways, the 1876 book is as much a moral code as an instruction guide. Consider this entry in its rules section: "The position of an umpire … is the most honoured one in the fraternity, and it requires, above all things, an upright man to occupy it, and also one fearless in his determination to decide disputed points with thorough impartiality. Such men are not to be found at command on all occasions …"

The second guide varies somewhat in content  -  although the ads and prices, $15 for a dozen imported bats, for instance, were largely identical  -  but is probably the more important of the two books.

In it, Bryce provides the first Canadian account of the constitution, team owners and rosters of the International Association, a 16-team league  -  made up of London, Guelph and 14 U.S. teams  -  formed during the winter of 1876-77 as a rival to the National League.

London was the new league’s first champions in 1877, and stocked with many American professionals including pitcher Fred Goldsmith, the self-acclaimed inventor of the curve ball, the Tecumsehs were considered one of the top three teams in all of baseball.

In fact, the Tecumsehs defeated the National League’s Chicago team, the White Stockings, in a mid-season match considered by some to be the first World Series. As a result, the Tecumsehs were invited to join the National League’s elite six-team fold but declined when the league refused to allow them to play exhibition games against their longtime rivals in Guelph.

As for why Bryce stopped publishing his guides after two years, history is unclear. Baseball historian William Humber surmises one reason might have been Bryce’s discouragement over newspaper criticism of the growing use of pro players.

More likely the decision was made for economic reasons  -  the Tecumsehs sagged badly the season after declining to join the NL, and interest in baseball waned for several years in London.