1871 in Sports - Baseball

Baseball

National championship

  • National Association of Professional Base Ball Players champion – Philadelphia Athletics

Events

  • March — ten NABBP clubs found the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, the first professional sports league. (Today it is commonly considered the first major league and usually called simply the "National Association" or "NA".) Thirty-three clubs establish a parallel amateur NAABBP that withers away.
  • There are nine NA teams in the field and Athletic of Philadelphia wins the championship

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Famous quotes containing the word baseball:

    Compared to football, baseball is almost an Oriental game, minimizing individual stardom, requiring a wide range of aggressive and defensive skills, and filled with long periods of inaction and irresolution. It has no time limitations. Football, on the other hand, has immediate goals, resolution on every single play, and a lot of violence—itself a highlight. It has clearly distinguishable hierarchies: heroes and drones.
    Jerry Mander, U.S. advertising executive, author. Four Arguments for the Elimination of Television, ch. 15, Morrow (1978)

    I don’t like comparisons with football. Baseball is an entirely different game. You can watch a tight, well-played football game, but it isn’t exciting if half the stadium is empty. The violence on the field must bounce off a lot of people. But you can go to a ball park on a quiet Tuesday afternoon with only a few thousand people in the place and thoroughly enjoy a one-sided game. Baseball has an aesthetic, intellectual appeal found in no other team sport.
    Bowie Kuhn (b. 1926)

    One of the baseball-team owners approached me and said: “If you become baseball commissioner, you’re going to have to deal with 28 big egos,” and I said, “For me, that’s a 72% reduction.”
    George Mitchell (b. 1933)