Eckford of Brooklyn

Did You Know?

• The Eckford Base Ball Club was named for shipbuilder Henry Eckford, who designed many American warships used in the War of 1812 and operated from Brooklyn from the late 1790s until the early 1830s.
• Eckford was one of sixteen participants in the 1857 convention, all from modern New York City, which is considered the birthday of the National Association of Base Ball Players and made Eckford a charter member.

Name

The club and its teams are commonly called "the Brooklyn Eckfords" today. Contemporary writers often used "the Eckfords" (plural with definite article), possibly for grammatical parallelism with ordinary nouns or by analogy to family-name plurals. The addition of "Brooklyn" to the name is a later development, matching the convention that a team should be named for a locale it represents. The Eckfords never represented Brooklyn in the sense of exclusive territorial rights; that concept did not arise until the National League in 1876. Brooklyn had enough strong teams and enclosed ballparks during the amateur era that multiple clubs could coexist. At the first NABBP convention, eight of sixteen clubs were based in Brooklyn; three years later, twenty of fifty-nine were. When professionalism was permitted in 1869, both Eckford and Atlantic of Brooklyn were viable and joined the National Association in 1872. "Eckford of Brooklyn" may be a later coinage, likely an abbreviation for "Eckford Base Ball Club, of Brooklyn" to distinguish it from other Eckford clubs. The name "Eckford" was uncommon for ballclubs; Wright (2000) mentions Eckford clubs in Albany (1864–1867), Syracuse (1870), and Newark (1870), plus the distinctly named "Henry Eckford" club in New York (1860–1864), which formed from Eckford players who were from Manhattan. The other Eckfords were not prominent and did not travel, so there was little need to qualify the name except locally.

League era

Eckford skipped the winter 1871 meeting that created the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players and fielded no team for that league's first season. That year, they did play about thirty games against NA clubs, winning roughly half, including a few late-summer contests picked up after the Fort Wayne Kekiongas disbanded. In 1872, Eckford paid the ten-dollar fee and put together a squad, but it was disastrous: they lost all eleven games played through July 9, outscored 5 to 22 on average. Five of the league's eleven teams folded by late August, but Eckford hung on. They added seven players from Troy and Cleveland, including both pitchers and three other regulars, and returned August 9. The revamped club won three of eighteen games, with an average score of 5 to 9. Against old amateur rival Atlantic, they split four meetings, each winning two and scoring 37 runs total. Eckford went out of business after the season, while Atlantic strengthened its roster and moved into Union Grounds to share it with the Mutuals for the National Association's final three years.