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Brooklyn's James Creighton became the first national baseball star and changed the game in the late 1850s and early 1860s with his dominant fast pitching, but he remains a mysterious figure. Using new research into Creighton's family and life, this paper examines the question of who Jim Creighton was as a person and finds that a fuller understanding of the man, his relationships, and his circumstances sheds new light both on his baseball career and on how amateur-era clubs like the Excelsiors and Atlantics developed playing talent in innovative ways. It analyzes the circumstantial case that Creighton was illegally paid under the table to play for the Excelsiors, considers when and how this was done, and finds a surprise or two in his genealogy.
There is something maddeningly elusive about James Creighton as a research subject. The more we learn about him, the more questions we seem to have.
We know that Creighton changed the game. In pre-Civil War baseball, pitchers were expected to toss the ball underhand to the batter and duck. 12-8 was a low-scoring game. After James Creighton things were different. His speed, movement, and control made pitching into a decisive weapon. Creighton and the generation of fast pitchers who emulated him drove the game's evolution from a high-scoring hitting contest into a battle over the strike zone. The strike zone we use today is essentially a response to his new style of pitching.
Atlantics star Pete O'Brien, who batted against him, described Creighton's pitching as something entirely new, a "low, swift delivery, the ball rising from the ground past the shoulder of the catcher."1 But what kind of pitching was it, exactly? How did he throw hard under the restrictive pitching rules of the time? Did he have a breaking pitch? In Creighton's day, baseball had a strict policy of amateurism, yet it was thought that he was paid under the table. Was he? Then there is his personal life. What was he really like? What about his family and upbringing? Our picture of Creighton the ballplayer is incomplete; James Creighton the human being is nearly invisible.
The historical significance of Creighton and his club, the Excelsiors, is clear enough. In 1860, after rising to the top of...