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THE Aston Villa players who return to pre-season training tomorrow are more likely to have sported baseball caps than brandished baseball bats during their summer break.

Yet the close season activities of some of their predecessors more than a century ago were not so much Premier League as Major League, according to a fascinating new history book.

‘What about the Villa? Forgotten figures from Britain’s pro baseball league of 1890’ is Joe Gray’s record of a unique achievement during the club’s late 19th century glory years, pictured right.

For, just three years before the claret and blues became the “greatest football club in the world”, Villa were the only ever winners of a professional national baseball league in England.

After embarking on the exhaustive task of chronicling the historic title win Gray, a Villa fan at heart and statistician by trade, has unearthed a forgotten chapter of Villa history.

Villa were in danger of dropping out of the First Division when American entrepreneur Albert Spalding took Major League baseball players on a world tour which stopped off in Britain.

Spalding, a sports equipment manufacturer who wanted to globalise baseball, formed a committee with English sport’s main movers and shakers, including Villa legend William McGregor.

Football, rugby, athletics and even lacrosse teams across the country were invited to join a professional league with the aim of keeping players fit during the summer months.

In the end a four-club competition was formed with Villa competing alongside Preston North End, Stoke City and Derby.

Back then Derby was the only baseball team not already affiliated to a football club – the soccer came later with Derby County FC also inheriting the purpose built Baseball Ground.



Villa’s nine-man team was made up of three specialist baseball players, imported from America, a cricketer and three former Villa footballers, Fred Dawson, Joey Simmonds and Arthur Brown.

The other two members were James Cowan a Scottish defender just starting out with the football club, and forward John Devey, who would become a baseball star and Villa’s most successful football captain.

“Devey’s first exposure as an Aston Villa player was actually on the baseball field, not on the football field, and this was a guy who went on to captain Aston Villa during the 1890s when they won five league titles and two FA Cups,’’ says Gray.

“He was the captain when they won the double in 1897. He was one of the all-time Aston Villa greats, who actually played baseball for them first.

‘‘It’s worth adding, on John Devey, he was a brilliant baseball player, who led the statistical categories at the end of the year, including being the league’s batting champion.”

Devey played a key part in helping Villa to the baseball title which they clinched in the penultimate match, but by then the end was already nigh for the one-season-wonder league.

The traditional British weather rained on the league’s parade with crowds at the Perry Barr ground shared with the football club fluctuating between 100 and 1,000 depending on the elements.

League organisers, including McGregor, who is believed to have made a loss, were forced to halve the 6d admission because it was deemed unfair to charge as much for a new sport as for football.

However, the ultimate death knell was the withdrawal of leaders Derby a month before the end following a dispute over whether they could continue to play an all-conquering America pitcher.

Derby’s departure led to the competition being mercilessly mocked in the Press, although Villa weren’t complaining after holding off a late challenge from Preston to lift the one and only title.

There have since been regional professional leagues in Britain and national amateur leagues, but Villa remain England’s only ever champions of a professional league with a nationwide reach.

Whether the football club’s subsequent resurgence to the pinnacle of was purely coincidental or not, Gray likes to think that the baseball team pitched in with an exclusive slice of sporting success. “I think the football club was actually in danger of dropping down a division, but three years after the baseball glory, they won the league and then the purple patch started,” added the author. “I think it’s pretty safe to say they were the greatest football club in the world in the 1890s, so it’s quite nice they were playing baseball right at the start of that decade. It must have helped a little bit with bonding players and fitness, and for bringing John Devey to the club.”

n What about the Villa? Forgotten figures from Britain’s pro baseball league of £18.90 is available to buy for £15.90 from the publisher’s website at www.fineleaf.co.uk