1872 Preview - Brooklyn Atlantics

The Atlantic club was one of the oldest top-level base ball teams, dating back to 1855. They finished as the first-place club of the National Association of Base Ball Players in 1857, 1858 and 1859. (At the time all of the teams in the Association were located in the New York area.) They finished as the champions several times in the 1860s, and were ultimately the club that defeated Harry Wright's mighty Cincinnati Red Stockings in 1870. So this is a club with a long base ball pedigree.

However, by the early 1870s there were trouble signs. The relative ease of travel by railroad and growing popularity of base ball meant that other, smaller cities were luring New York's best players away. It's not so much that Atlantic couldn't compete as that there were so many more clubs with which to compete. When Atlantic declined to join the new National Association in 1871, many top players - Zettlein, Ferguson, Start, and Pike among them - jumped to other teams. This 1872 club was an attempt to reestablish Atlantic as a leading club. This attempt would fail historically, because most of the star players were already gone.

P - Joe McDermott - He played a couple games for the Kekionga club in 1871, and historically he came to Brooklyn to pitch a handful of games for Eckford. The only difference in the simulation is which Brooklyn team he went to.
C - Tom Barlow - A promising young hitter. Historically, Barlow is known for being the first known base ball player to have a career-ending drug problem. His story, which was told in Ken Burns' documentary Baseball, was summarized in his letter to the Hartford papers:

"It was on the 10th of August, 1874, that there was a match game of baseball in Chicago between the White Stockings of that city and the Hartfords of Hartford, now of Brooklyn. I was catcher for the Hartfords, and [Cherokee] Fisher was pitching. He is a lightning pitcher, and very few could catch for him. On that occasion he delivered as wicked a ball as ever left his hands, and it went through my grasp like an express train, striking me with full force in the side. I fell insensible to the ground, but was quickly picked up, placed in a carriage, and driven to my hotel. The doctor who attended me gave a hypodermic injection of morphine, but I had rather died behind the bat [than] have had that first dose. My injury was only temporary, but from taking prescriptions of morphine during my illness, the habit grew on me, and I am now powerless in its grasp. My morphine pleasure has cost me eight dollars a day, at least. I was once catcher for the Mutuals, also for the Atlantics, but no one would think it to look at me now."

1B - Herman Dehlman - Dehlman, whose first top-level professional season was in 1872, was a light-hitting first baseman from Brooklyn for played for Atlantic and then for the St. Louis Brown Stockings through 1877. There's not a ton out there about his base ball career, which was relatively undistinguished. In the 1880s, he became the team manager for local teams in Allentown and Wilkes-Barre, PA, but contracted typhoid fever in 1885 and died at the age of 33.
2B - Jimmy Wood - He was a star (.346) for Chicago in 1871 in my simulation. Historically, he did indeed move back east after the Chicago Fire, but he played for Troy and Eckford rather than Atlantic. His joining of Atlantic would have been a major controversy since he was a star for their arch-rivals Eckford throughout the 1860s.
3B - Pete Donnelly - After being a pretty worthless player in 1871 with Kekionga (.171), he caught on with Atlantic and appears to have won the starting third base job. Historically, he was also pretty bad for Kekionga, and played for NA teams in Washington and Philadelphia in 1873-74.
SS - Tom Carey - He's the Don Draper of the National Association, as he was born J.J. Norton. He was a solid infielder throughout the 1870s. Historically, he played for Baltimore in 1872, but he didn't tend to stay in one city for more than a season or two, so this isn't totally out of character.
LF - Al Thake - Not much known about his life, but he became the first professional player to die of mid-season misadventure, as he was out fishing on September 1, 1872, when he fell into the water and drowned. New York accounts of the tragedy mention that it occurred near Fort Hamilton, which is close to the present-day Verrazano-Narrows Bridge. These accounts also mention he was fishing in "the stream," but that seems to have been the Hudson River, as Fort Hamilton is on the Brooklyn side of the river, and his body washed up a few days later on Staten Island. Perhaps it would be possible to do some Jimmy McNulty-style calculations to determine exactly where he died, but I'll leave that for someone else. In any event, I won't be killing him (or any other players) off in my simulation, so let's see what he can accomplish if he's given a real career.
CF - George Bird - He didn't do too much for Rockford in 1871, and historically he stopped playing professional ball when Illinois lost its teams in 1872. However, in this alternate-universe simulation, he did well enough to get picked up by Atlantic, and moved back east to the big city for the first time.
RF - Bill Barrett - Played a few games for Kekionga in 1871, but didn't do much. Historically, he was from Baltimore and returned to that area in 1872.

On the whole, Atlantic should be much as they were in reality: a team past its prime, just trying to maintain some semblance of top-level competition. They'll go as far as Wood, Carey and Barlow can take them.