Everything about National Association As A Major League totally explained
Whether to cover the
National Association as a major league is a recurring and crucial matter of difference in historical work on
American baseball—that is, among historians, encyclopedists, database builders, and others who work on the facts of baseball history on the playing field.
NAPBBP
The
National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, or NAPBBP, or simply NA (standard and commonplace today), was the first
professional baseball organization, operating 1871-1875. Whether to cover it as a
major league is crucial mainly because the major leagues utterly dominate not only publication but thinking, talking, and writing about the history of the game on the field: the careers of players and field managers as participants, of clubs and even cities as competitors.
For example, it's routine to say that a man's "career began" when he first appeared in a major league game; he "retired" when he last appeared in a major league game; he "played baseball for two seasons" if he appeared in major league games during two calendar years —whether he played two games in emergencies, recruited from the fans in attendance, or two full seasons during a professional career of twenty years.
"NA"
The extreme abbreviation "NA" is common today, even in formal prose where it's used in parentheses to make a proper noun such as "Boston (NA)". As such it specifies one baseball club among all those with names that have the natural short form "Boston" (such as "Boston Base Ball Club, Incorporated").
The importance of and widespread familiarity with two-letter abbreviations for baseball leagues is related to the publication of encyclopedic works, in print for fifty years and on the web for ten years, whose main feature is historical playing records of baseball seasons. Leagues govern seasons, annual competitions with their own championships at stake, if nothing else. Leagues publish playing records for the participants in their league seasons. So league seasons have become the basic unit of baseball's historical record as it's widely disseminated; game records are retained by league offices or deposited in archives such as the
Baseball Hall of Fame collections, when not lost in fires. The playing records portion of a baseball reference work is full of entries for individual players that consist mainly of long lines of numbers prefixed by something like "Bos NA 1871", specifying one club in one league-season. All of the (candidate) major leagues in baseball have standardized two-letter abbreviations such as NA — namely, NA, NL, AA, UA, PL, AL, FL — whose crucial value is in this encyclopedic context.
To count or not to count
Some encyclopedias don't fully count any playing records in the limited sense that they don't publish any career totals or other sums of league-season records
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