In the days before radio, and television, and those horrible Facebook Live broadcasts, major league baseball was hard to follow from afar.
In 1893, the major league was just a dozen teams huddled together in big East Coast cities and extending only as far west as Chicago and St. Louis.
Minor league baseball filled in everywhere else.
This is important on this Mother’s Day only for this …
In the early 1890s, the California League offered “Ladies Day” free admission to female fans at every baseball game.
The San Francisco Call, 6/13/1891
Ladies Free!
Free admission for ladies at every game “is not known in any other baseball city in the country,” The San Francisco Call reported.
(“Not known in any other baseball city” is 19th-century code for “we haven’t invented Google yet, so how are we supposed to know?”)
Then this happened.
The California League was, in 1893, just these four teams: the Los Angeles Angels, the Oakland Colonels, the San Francisco Friscos, and the Stockton River Pirates who became the Sacramento Senators before the season was through.
Embed from Getty ImagesSan Francisco vs. Oakland, Haight Street Grounds, 1890
The Baseball Bloggess 