Clipping:A condemnation of professional ball players
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| Date | Sunday, March 31, 1872 |
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| Text | There has grown up within the past two or three years a class of men who make their livelihood wholly by playing baseball matches. The professional player, aside from his private character, is not precisely a majestic object. It may not be incumbent upon any man to lead a life of really productive industry, but it certainly seems as though one might find some other occupation than hiring oneself to win matches for the Black Stockings and Whites, Blue Stockings and Gray, who claim to be exponents of the national game. Evidently the professional player himself sympathizes with this view, for except when compelled to play during the summer season, he keeps himself modestly out of sight in those quiet retreats connected with bars, and not free from a suspicion of rat-pits, where the sporting men of the metropolis meet for social improvement and unpremeditated pugilism. Not to put too fine a point upon it, the professional player, though doubtless occasionally an honest, inoffensive fellow, is usually a worthless, dissipated gladiator, not much above the professional pugilist in morality and respectability. Not only does the employment of these men in match games render the result simply a question of money, for the club which can afford to hire the best players is of course the winner, but it opens the way to dishonest and fraudulent practices. The professional player can, if he chooses, insure the defeat of the side on which he plays. It is only necessary for the gambler who has large sums at stake to buy him in order to make certain of winning his bets. That this is frequently done any one who reads the report of the quarrels which usually follow an important match game will find abundant reason to believe. The professional player thus makes the game an instrument in the hands of gamblers, and so brings it into deserved disrepute. If those who really enjoy baseball as a sport desire to retain for it the interest of the respectable classes, they must sternly set their faces against the professional player. In every point of view he is an eminently undesirable person, and he ought to be peremptorily and completely suppressed. Let our young men meet and play baseball if they choose. They will thus improve physical well-being without detriment to their morals. To employ professional players to perspire in public for the benefit of gamblers is, however, a benefit to no one, and furnishes to dyspeptic moralists a strong argument against any form of muscular Christianity. New York Sunday Mercury March 31, 1872 [quoting, and subsequently disagreeing with, an unnamed daily paper] |
| Source | New York Sunday Mercury |
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| Submitted by | Richard Hershberger |
| Origin | Initial Hershberger Clippings |
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