Eckford of Brooklyn - Name

Name

Today the Eckford club and its teams are commonly called "the Brooklyn Eckfords". The Eckfords, plural with definite article, was used by contemporary writers in prose, perhaps for the grammatical parallel to ordinary nouns used with plural verbs ("the visitors are staying downtown" or "the men are playing well"); perhaps by direct analogy to plurals formed from family names ("the Millers are coming to dinner"). "Brooklyn" in the team name is a later development, matching the later convention that a club or team should be named for a locale or region that it represents.

The Eckfords never represented Brooklyn. First, they did not survive to the era of exclusive territories, sometimes called "sports franchising", which the new National League instituted in 1876. Second, Brooklyn was populous enough to maintain several strong teams and support the construction of two enclosed ballparks during the amateur days when few players migrated to baseball jobs. Third, New York and Brooklyn had the early start, as the hotbeds where multiple clubs developed prior to cooperation. At the first convention, eight of 16 clubs were based in Brooklyn; three years later, it was 20 of 59. For all these reasons, When the NABBP permitted open professionalism in 1869, Eckford and Atlantic among dozens of Brooklyn members were both viable in following that route, and in 1872 they both joined the National Association league for its second season.

Eckford of Brooklyn may be another latterday coinage. Contemporary readers would probably understand it as an abbreviation for something like Eckford Base Ball Club, of Brooklyn in contrast to "Eckford" clubs in other cities. "Eckford" was not common as the root of a ballclub name — in contrast to "Athletic", "Atlantic", and "Mutual" — so there must have been little need to distinguish the Brooklyn rendition. (Wright (2000) mentions "Eckford" clubs in Albany 1864-1867, Syracuse 1870, and Newark 1870, as well as the distinctly named "Henry Eckford" club in New York 1860-1864. The other Eckfords were not prominent and did not travel so there must little occasion to qualify the "Eckford" name except locally.)