William Hulbert

William Ambrose Hulbert founded the National League on February 2, 1876, served as its president from 1877 until his death in 1882, expelled clubs and players who refused to honor contracts or complete schedules, banned four Louisville players for life after they threw the 1877 pennant race, and built the structural framework that professional baseball still follows nearly 150 years later. Albert Spalding called him "the man who saved the game." The Veterans Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1995, 113 years after he died.

Chicago

Hulbert was born on October 23, 1832, in Burlington Flats, New York, and moved to Chicago at age two. He grew up in the city during the decades when it transformed from a frontier trading post into the commercial capital of the Midwest, and the ambition of that place shaped his temperament. He enrolled at the Beloit Normal School in 1851, returned to Chicago, married into a grocer's family, and expanded the business into coal trading. He stood over six feet tall, weighed more than 200 pounds, and carried himself with the confidence of a man who expected to be obeyed.

Hulbert became a financial backer of the Chicago White Stockings of the National Association in 1871, rose to club officer in 1874, and became president of the club in 1875. The National Association was falling apart. Schedules went unfinished because clubs in weaker markets couldn't afford the travel. Contracts meant nothing because players jumped to the highest bidder mid-season. Gambling was open and occasionally decisive. The Davy Force contract-jumping case in 1874, where a player signed with two clubs and the Association couldn't resolve the dispute, convinced Hulbert that the sport needed a league run by club owners rather than players, with enforceable rules and geographic exclusivity.

Before he built the new league, Hulbert raided the old one. During the 1875 season, while the National Association was still playing, he signed Albert Spalding, Cap Anson, Cal McVey, Deacon White, and Ross Barnes away from rival clubs. Spalding was the best pitcher in the Association and the biggest prize. The signings violated the Association's rules, and Hulbert knew the eastern clubs would try to expel Chicago for tampering. He decided to destroy the Association before it could destroy him.

Hulbert's plan was to replace the player-run Association with a league controlled by club owners. He held a secret meeting with the western clubs in December 1875 to build his coalition, then invited the eastern representatives to a formal gathering in February. By the time the eastern clubs arrived, the new league's structure was already drafted and the western clubs were already committed.

The National League

On February 2, 1876, Hulbert gathered representatives from eight clubs at the Grand Central Hotel in New York City and presented his plan for a new league built on "square dealings, recognition of contracts, and business integrity." He proposed geographic exclusivity, population minimums for member cities, one team per city, and a prohibition on gambling and Sunday games. The owners agreed. Morgan Bulkeley became the first president, chosen essentially by drawing straws, but Hulbert ran the league from the start. When Bulkeley failed to attend the 1877 meeting, Hulbert took the presidency formally.

Hulbert governed with a willingness to punish that no previous baseball authority had shown. After the 1876 season, he expelled the New York Mutuals and the Philadelphia Athletics for failing to complete their road schedules. Both clubs had skipped their final western road trips to save money, and Hulbert threw them out despite the fact that losing two of the league's eight teams reduced the schedule and the revenue.

In 1877 four Louisville Grays players were implicated in throwing games for gamblers during the pennant race. Two confessed, a third was caught by telegram evidence, and the fourth refused to cooperate with the investigation. Hulbert banned all four for life. In 1880 he expelled the Cincinnati club for refusing to sign a pledge to stop selling beer at games and playing on Sundays. Each expulsion cost the league members and money, but Hulbert believed that integrity was worth more than a full schedule, and the league survived because he was right.

Hulbert also established the reserve rule in 1879, which allowed each club to reserve five players who could not be signed by rivals. The rule bound players to their clubs and controlled salaries for the next century, surviving legal challenges until arbitrator Peter Seitz struck it down in 1975. Hulbert centralized scheduling authority within the league office and hired professional umpires to replace the local volunteers who had worked National Association games. He oversaw construction of Lakefront Park in Chicago in 1878, giving the White Stockings a permanent home. The structures he created, geographic exclusivity, contractual enforcement, centralized authority, and the reserve system, defined professional baseball for generations.

The Hall of Fame elected Morgan Bulkeley in 1937 as the National League's first president, a largely ceremonial appointment that lasted one year. Hulbert, who built the league and ran it for five years, waited 58 more years for his own recognition. A letter-writing campaign by an Illinois third-grader, Jim Hulbert, his great-great-nephew, in 1965 helped revive his case, and the Veterans Committee finally voted him in alongside Vic Willis in 1995.

Graceland Cemetery

Hulbert died of a heart attack on April 10, 1882, in Chicago, at 49, two weeks before the American Association played its first game. He never saw the rival league that his policies on beer and Sunday games helped create. "I would rather be a lamppost in Chicago than a millionaire in any other city," he once said. He is buried at Graceland Cemetery in Chicago under a grave marker shaped like a baseball, with the names of the National League's 1882 member cities engraved around the base. The league he founded has operated continuously since February 2, 1876, the oldest professional sports league in North America.