More On The Possibility of Von Der Ahe Playing Baseball

I have two references in my notes of an incarnation of the Grand Avenue club prior to 1876. The first mentions a club by that name existing in 1872 and the other has the club playing a game in 1875 (and VdA did not play in that game). This is not the Grand Avenue club that was organized in March of 1876 by August Solari, with VdA on the board of directors, that would go on to great success over the next few years. There may be some relationship between the 1875 and 1876 clubs, as Joe Solari was a member of the 1875 team, but I have no real evidence of that.

Based on this information, I guess it's possible that Von der Ahe may have played for the Grand Avenues in the first half of the 1870s. I haven't had much luck in finding anything while searching the newspaper databases but that doesn't mean much and I still need to look through the Tobias material because I'm pretty sure he has box scores for the Grand Avenues from 1875. But I'm much more comfortable thinking about VdA playing on a lower level amateur club than I am with him playing for the 1876/7 Grand Avenues.