National Association of Base Ball Players

The National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) was the first organization governing American baseball. The first convention of sixteen New York City area clubs in 1857 practically terminated the Knickerbocker era, when that club privately deliberated on the rules of the game. The last convention, with hundreds of members represented only via state associations, provoked the establishment of separate professional and amateur associations in 1871. The succeeding National Association of Professional Base Ball Players is considered the first professional sports league; through 1875 it governed professional baseball and practically set playing rules for all. Because the amateur successor never attracted many members and it convened only a few times, the NABBP is sometimes called "the amateur Association" in contrast to its professional successor.

Beside the playing rules and its own organization, the Association governed official scoring (reporting), "match" play, a championship, amateurism, and hippodroming or the integrity of the contest. It permitted professionalism only for the 1869 and 1870 seasons. In its December 1867 meeting, its rules committee voted unanimously to bar any club "composed of one or more colored persons", effecting the first known color line in baseball.

Prior to the Civil War, baseball competed for public interest with cricket and regional variants of baseball, notably town ball played in Philadelphia and the Massachusetts Game played in New England. In the 1860s, aided by the War, "New York" style baseball expanded into a national game and the NABBP, as its governing body, expanded into a true national organization, although most of the strongest clubs remained those based in New York City, Brooklyn and Philadelphia. By the end of 1865, almost 100 clubs were members of the organization. By 1867, it had over 400 members, including some clubs from as far away as San Francisco and Louisiana. Because of this growth, regional and state organizations began to assume a more prominent role in the governance of the sport. Baseball's exploding popularity, however, was not confined to the NABBP organization, whose core lay in the vicinity of New York City; there were thousands of organized baseball clubs nationwide by 1870, the majority of which were not Association members. For example, on the eve of the Civil War there were no fewer than seven baseball teams in distant New Orleans, none of which belonged to the NABBP; a tabulation by historian Richard Herschberger turned up over 900 baseball clubs by 1860, in which year the Association's membership stood at 60.

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