Baseball
National championship
- National Association of Base Ball Players champion – Brooklyn Atlantics
Events
- The NABBP permits professional clubs at its December 1868 meeting. Openly there are twelve pro teams in the field.
- The original Cincinnati Red Stockings sign baseball's first all-professional team, ten men including player–manager Harry Wright on salary for eight months.
- Cincinnati tours from Boston to San Francisco and completes the season without defeat in at least 57 games. The entourage includes a local newspaper reporter. Continental tours do not fit the established method of determining a champion, which has limited credibility.
Read more about this topic: 1869 In Sports
Famous quotes containing the word baseball:
“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)
“Ethnic life in the United States has become a sort of contest like baseball in which the blacks are always the Chicago Cubs.”
—Ishmael Reed (b. 1938)
“Baseball is the religion that worships the obvious and gives thanks that things are exactly as they seem. Instead of celebrating mysteries, baseball rejoices in the absence of mysteries and trusts that, if we watch what is laid before our eyes, down to the last detail, we will cultivate the gift of seeing things as they really are.”
—Thomas Boswell, U.S. sports journalist. “The Church of Baseball,” Baseball: An Illustrated History, ed. Geoffrey C. Ward, Knopf (1994)