Monday, June 13, 2011

A Ballpark For First-Class Amateur Clubs

A new base-ball park will be erected for the amateur clubs. The park will be located at the corner of Russell and Missouri avenues, and be of the same dimensions as the professional parks. It will be erected and maintained by a corporation to be known as the St. Louis Amateur Sporting Association. First-class amateur clubs are requested to send their address to C. Kargus, 1619 South Broadway, or G.D. Nischwitz, corner Miller and South Broadway, so as to make arrangements for the season, and assist an enterprise that ought to be patronized by the amateur clubs of this city.
-St. Louis Globe-Democrat, January 20, 1884

2 comments:

ted yemm said...

I think this is a very interesting post. All of the newspaper accounts that I have run across after the game turned professional only cover professionals. I wondered what the amateurs were ding during this time.

Jeffrey Kittel said...

It was easily the most interesting piece of amateur news that I came across while looking at October 1883-January 1884 period. Like you mention, most of the focus was on the professionals but there was, of course, plenty of amateur baseball in StL during the period. If I remember correctly, I think The Sporting News had pretty good coverage of the StL amateur clubs when they started publishing in 1886 and the Globe would have a bit more amateur coverage as the game became more popular in StL.

It was the success of the major clubs that drove popularity and, as they did well in the mid to late 1880s, baseball of all varieties received more attention in the papers. This improved not only the coverage of the local amateurs but also that of the black clubs.