Partial Success

I’ve been trying to decipher this item from a New York Public Library scrapbook:

The title on the NYPL website is “Grand base ball match for the championship, between the Exclusive and Atlantic Clubs, of Brooklyn…” and the date is given as 1900-1945. (It’s also listed as a photograph, but I feel pretty good about disagreeing with that categorizarion.)

First up, I can’t find (without an inordinate amount of effort that is off the table) “The New-York Rated News.” Maybe I’m reading the fuzziness wrong. Maybe it was just a minor newspaper or magazine. The hyphen strongly suggests that this is older than 1900, since “New-York” was used a fair amount in the eighteenth century and gradually faded away by 1880s or so.

The Brooklyn Atlantics are reasonably well known. They were a successful team in the 1850s and 60s, in the amateur era of baseball, and faded away after professional leagues took over. (There’s also a modern amateur team with that name and old-time uniforms.) They lost league affiliation in 1875 and were apparently disbanded around 1882. So if they were playing in a championship game, it was 1875 or earlier.

There is no Brooklyn team with the name “Exclusive” but there was a team called the Brooklyn Excelsiors that played in the 1850s and 60s, and had a sort-of a championship in 1860, with an overall record tied with the Atlantics.

The Atlantics played at two fields in Brooklyn, but neither was anywhere near Clinton Street. The Excelsiors played in the 1850s at Carroll Park, which is – amazingly frustratingly – one block from Clinton Street. As best as I can read that fuzzy caption, it seems like the championship game was being played at the Excelsior grounds, so I’m going to stop this madness by saying that I believe whomever wrote “Clinton Street” was slightly wrong.