Harry Wright (1835-1895)

Source

First pro baseball player

Harry Wright was born in Sheffield, England. His father, a professional cricket player, moved his family to the United States after Harry’s birth. By the time he was twenty, Wright, following his father’s model, was playing for the Saint George Cricket Club in Hoboken, New Jersey, but he enjoyed playing baseball as well, and in 1858, he joined the Hoboken Knickerbockers baseball team, playing the outfield.

Played exclusively by amateurs until after the Civil War, baseball had a reputation as a gentleman’s sport, and it was very popular. Professional gamblers were quick to see betting opportunities, and they frequently arranged for skilled players in their employ to play for teams that attracted betting action. Amateur baseball was already becoming a money sport.

After the war Harry Wright, a jeweler by trade, traveled to Cincinnati with the intention of forming a professional cricket team. Baseball offered a better opportunity, and in 1868 he became the manager of the Red Stockings, one of two teams in the city. Wright decided to abandon the fiction of amateurism in the sport and announced in 1869 that he would pay his players. Wright paid himself $1,200 as manager and center fielder; he paid his brother George, the finest shortstop in the early era of the game, $1,400. Most regulars earned $800, and substitutes were paid $600. That year the Red Stockings won all of their sixty-six games but one, which ended in a tie when the opposing team quit. They traveled more than twelve thousand miles to play in their games, and they drew more than two hundred thousand spectators, who often paid 50 cents to see a game. The performance of the Red Stockings was a compelling argument for professionalism in the sport, and by 1871 there were enough teams to form the National Association of Baseball Clubs. But hometown fans in Cincinnati were unsupportive. The team folded in 1870, and Wright moved to Boston, where he spent the next eleven seasons. In Boston he won National Association pennants every year from 1872 to 1875, and in 1876 he organized the first tour of England by an American baseball team.

In 1881 Wright joined the Providence baseball team, and in 1883 he moved to Philadelphia, the team he managed until his retirement ten years later. Wright died in 1895, and he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1953. Among the accomplishments listed on his citation was the feat of hitting seven home runs in a game at Newport, Kentucky, in 1867.

Source

“Baseball’s First Pro,” in The 50 Great Pioneers of American Industry by the Editors of News Front Year (New York; Maplewood, N.J.; and Chicago: C S. Hammond, 1964), pp. 59-63.