Albert Spalding

  • National Association pennant: 1872-1875
  • National League pennant: 1876

Albert Goodwill " A. G. " Spalding ( born September 2, 1850 in Byron, Illinois, † September 9, 1915 in San Diego, California ) was an American baseball player and manufacturer of sports equipment.

Life

Spalding, who had to leave high school in Rockford ( Illinois) without a high school degree, began as a teenager as a player of the popular new game baseball and soon became one of the first stars of the sport. He was known for his strong direct pitches, who won two hundred games as a big league pitcher first. First, he played with the Boston Red Stockings in the National Association, the first professional baseball league in the world, and led them to four consecutive league titles from 1871 to 1875. Thereafter he joined in 1876 as a player and manager of the Chicago White Stockings and won with this their first championship of the newly created National League.

After he had ended his active career in 1877 as a baseball player, he began his entrepreneurial career as the founder of AG Spalding & Bros. Co., the leading manufacturer of baseball articles. At the beginning he paid the National League funds that these used his game balls so that he could apply this as the official balls of the National League. In addition, published his company Spalding 's Official Baseball Guide, which has been appearing for a year, quickly sold compulsory reading of baseball fans.

1882 Spalding President of the Chicago White Stockings, the team said during his term of office lasting until 1891 three times in 1882, 1885 and 1886, won the league title in the National League. As a team owner he was a relentless advocate of the so-called "reserve clause ", which previously kept players to move between teams, as he had done it as a player. In addition, he was instrumental in the National League, the Player's League successfully smashed, which had developed out of the first players' union. Recently he financed his team between the seasons 1888 and 1889 world tour on the Chicago White Stockings played against mixed teams of leading leagues in Australia, Egypt, Italy, France, England and Ireland.

Even before the establishment of the office of baseball commissioner was Spalding 1907 to the most respected personalities of the sport and appointed an advisory panel, which dealt with the claim of Henry Chadwick, the "father of baseball ", made ​​that baseball from the English sports Cricket and Rounders would have arisen. Spalding wanted baseball as would " only American" seen, and in fact the advisory panel concluded that baseball was invented primarily by Abner Doubleday in 1839 in Cooperstown, the town in which the Baseball Hall of Fame founded a hundred years later been. In fact, baseball from cricket, what Spalding should have known, developed since 1874 with a tour of this undertook in England, where they both baseball and cricket played in cities such as Liverpool, London and Manchester.

In 1911 he wrote the book America's National Game, a story of the early years of baseball, which, however, his role represented exaggerated. After the founding of the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939, he was elected one of the first personalities in this.

The sporting goods company founded by was taken over in 2003 by the Russell Corporation, which in turn is part of Berkshire Hathaway.

His nephew was the American violin virtuoso and composer Albert Spalding.

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