This program is part of Village Preservation’s Semiquincentennial series of programs celebrating our Revolutionary Village. Revolutionary Village not only celebrates the founding of our country, but the exceptional role our neighborhoods played in its development and the realization of its ideals over the last 250 years and beyond.

February 2, 2026, marks the 150th anniversary of one of the most important dates in the development of “America’s Pastime” — baseball. On February 2, 1876, the National League, the oldest extant sports league anywhere in the world, was founded right here in Greenwich Village.  And that’s only the start of the story!  The League’s birthplace was already one of the most colorful hotels in New York City history, the site of the spectacular shooting of a legendary robber baron in broad daylight.  It would end with a crash—an awful collapse that gave birth to…CBGB!

Forget Cooperstown.  By 1876, the Village was already a hotbed of baseball, the place where the earliest known club play took place, where the game’s modern rules were codified, and where the very first sports league—anywhere, ever—was founded in 1871.  Five years later, though, the original National Association was coming apart at the seams, and baseball’s leading owners got together at what was then the largest hostelry in the nation, the Grand Central Hotel, later the Broadway Central, just north of Bleecker Street.  

The founding of the National League would lead to some of early baseball’s wildest days, including cutthroat competition, furious battles over race and labor issues, and finally a great strike that gave rise to a players’ league.  Some of the first Black professional baseball players, such as Fleetwood and W.W. Walker, fought the segregation of professional baseball by the 1880s. Wild as it was, the National League’s first years could barely match the grand hotel where it was founded—or its fatal collapse in 1973.

Join us for this exploration of this incredible slice of sporting and American history. Presented by baseball historian Kevin Baker.

Kevin Baker began his professional writing career at the age of 13, covering local schoolboy sports for the Gloucester Daily Times in Gloucester, Massachusetts. His mother taught him how to type, so he could keep the job.  

Baker is the author, most recently, of The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City. Its sequel, The New York Game: Baseball and the Golden Age, will be out from Knopf next spring.  He has written six novels, including the New York Times bestseller, Paradise Alley, and is the author or co-author of five histories, a graphic novel (words only!), and a Reggie Jackson memoir. He was a writer and researcher on the Ken Burns documentary, The U.S. and the Holocaust, and is a contributing editor at Harper’s Magazine. He is currently at work on a sequel to The New York Game and a political and cultural history of the United States between the world wars.  

He lives in Manhattan with his wife, playwright Ellen Abrams.