Tennis History | A. J. Reach Company, Tulip and Palmer Streets, Philadelphia — a rival tennis ball on the page facing the official league ball, 1900

Open the Reach guide for 1900 at page 146 and the left-hand page is selling tennis. A racket at nine dollars, a ball at five dollars the dozen, a net in two sizes, all three of them made or sold by a hardware house in St. Louis. Turn your eye across the gutter to page 147 and the right-hand page is selling a baseball, and it says that the ball is authorized and officially recognized by the National League.

The book those two pages sit in was published by the firm that made the baseball. Its title page gives the address as the corner of Tulip and Palmer Streets, Philadelphia.

This platform has already pinned, in Boston, a firm that printed the United States National Lawn Tennis Association's rules and made the only ball those rules allowed, and, in New York, the vote that threw an American ball out of the same sport in 1886. This entry is the third in that series and it is the one where the arrangement is visible from outside the sport, because A. J. Reach ran it in baseball, wrote down why, and let the tennis trade advertise in the gaps.

**The address, and when the firm arrived at it.**

The guides date their own move. The volume for 1890 carries the imprint A. J. Reach Co., No. 1113 Market Street, Philadelphia, and no mention of Tulip or Palmer anywhere in its machine-read text. The volume for 1894 gives, in the same position, Cor. Tulip and Palmer Streets, and every volume read here after it does the same: 1900, 1901, 1906, 1907, 1912, 1918, 1919, 1920 and 1921. The wording drifts while the address does not, from Cor. Tulip and Palmer Streets in the earlier volumes to Corner Tulip and Palmer Streets in the middle ones and Corner Tulip and Palmer Sts. in the last four, which is one of the ways you can tell that ten title pages were set ten times.

The books changed their own names over the same span. The 1890 volume is Reach's American Association Base Ball Guide. The 1900 and 1901 volumes are Reach's Official Base Ball Guide and carry the National League schedule. From 1918 the title is The Reach Official American League Base Ball Guide. A manufacturer's annual took the name of whichever league had taken its ball.

**Why a manufacturer explains a governing body to you.**

Before the title page of the guide for 1918 there is a statement headed THE STANDARD OF BASE BALLS, and under it, Patented August 31, 1909. It is signed at the foot: ALFRED J. REACH, President of the A. J. Reach Co. It opens by asking the question this whole series of entries is about.

"IT has been, and probably is still, with many unacquainted with the fine points of base ball a question why the governing major leagues should be so insistent upon a standard ball, as to even prescribe the use of such a ball in base ball law."

His answer is a history of disorder. In the formative period of the sport, he writes, balls of all kinds were used so long as they passably approached the specified size; they varied even within one make; some were too dead and others too lively; a ball could be batted out of shape in a few innings. Pitchers wanted the dead ball and batsmen the lively one, and the doctoring and substitution of balls became a scandal. The variation wrecked players' averages, caused injuries to throwing arms, and made games uneven.

Then the turn. The demand for a uniform ball, he says, was fully met by the evolution of the Reach ball, with the aid of patented mechanical inventions, into the perfect ball, without equal anywhere; and when that point was reached the magnates, in justice to themselves, their players and their patrons, simply were compelled to use it,

"because there must be a standard in everything in this world."

That is the argument for naming a manufacturer inside the laws of a game, made by the manufacturer, in the book he published about the league that named him. It is worth reading twice, because it is not a stupid argument. A game does need a standard ball, and the reasons he gives are the reasons this platform's New York entry records the tennis association giving when it took that power after its founding in 1881. What the statement does not contain is any acknowledgement that the man setting out the reasoning sold the object.

**Both quotations are from four typesettings, and here is what changed between them.**

The statement appears four times in the two bound volumes read here, in the guides for 1918, 1919, 1920 and 1921. The words of both quoted passages are the same in all four. The second passage is legible in full in three and readable through scan damage in the fourth.

The punctuation is not the same, and the change is not random. The volumes for 1918 and 1919 set the fine points of base ball a question, with no comma, and set standard ball, as to even prescribe, with one. The volumes for 1920 and 1921 do the reverse in both places: they add a comma after base ball and delete the one after standard ball. Two commas moved between the 1919 and 1920 settings and then stayed moved, which is a decision rather than a slip. One further difference is not safely a divergence at all: the 1920 setting reads the entire baseball world where the other three read base ball world, and a lost word-space is one of the commonest things a scan does.

Everything else that differs between the four is damage, and no two are damaged alike. The printed quotation marks around the word doctoring come out four different ways. The 1919 setting loses the edge of several lines. The 1921 setting breaks up in the middle of the sentence about the standard. That each scan is corrupted differently and none of them differently in a word is what rules out a machine reading having invented the passage.

What it does not rule out is the firm having been wrong about itself. All four settings were published by A. J. Reach Company, so this is the narrower of the two grounds this platform recognises for quotation, the same ground the Boston entry stands on: repeated typesetting by a single interested publisher.

**What the ball itself claimed, and how that differs from tennis.**

The second image here is the facing page, 147, and the printed matter on it is worth reading closely, because the headline and the engraving do not say the same thing.

The headline says the Reach American Association Ball is authorized and officially recognized by the National League. The engraving below it shows a ball in a pleated tissue nest lifting out of an opened box, and the band printed around the ball carries three more names: adopted by the Western League, American Association, and adopted by the Penna. State League. The box beside it is lettered A. J. Reach Co. and club uniforms of every description.

Four governing bodies on one object, then, and the tennis contrast is exact. The footnote in the tennis association's own rule book, quoted in this platform's Boston entry, said that the Wright and Ditson Championship ball was the only official ball to be used in all games played under those rules. Baseball's official ball was an endorsement a manufacturer collected from as many leagues as would give one. Tennis's official ball was an exclusive licence written into the laws. Tennis gave away more than baseball did, and it did so in the sport that would not let its players take a dollar.

**The tennis trade, in the gaps of a baseball book.**

Follow the word tennis through the volumes and you get the shape of the American sporting-goods market from the outside.

In the 1890 volume the machine-read text contains no occurrence of it at all.

In the 1894 volume it occurs twice, in an advertisement at the back placed by Edw. K. Tryon, Jr., & Co., of 10 and 12 N. Sixth St., Philadelphia. Tryon describes itself as the depot for A. J. Reach Co.'s trade-mark goods and the agent for Wright & Ditson tennis goods, and a second line in the same advertisement sets the division out plainly: A. J. Reach Co.'s base ball goods, Wright & Ditson's lawn tennis. One Philadelphia counter, two houses, divided by sport rather than by price.

In the 1900 and 1901 volumes the tennis page is the cover image of this entry, and it belongs to Simmons Hardware Company of St. Louis, which called itself the great sporting goods house of America. It offers three things: the Oriental Expert racket at nine dollars, the Inter-Collegiate net in two sizes, and the Harcourt ball at five dollars the dozen. The description of the ball ends with six words that are the reason this page is the cover.

"Same quality as W. & D. Championship."

A hardware company in Missouri, selling a tennis ball in a Philadelphia baseball annual, tells the buyer how good it is by naming a Boston firm's ball. It does not explain the reference, because it does not have to. The Wright and Ditson Championship ball had been the tennis association's regulation ball since 1887, which is the fact this platform's Boston entry documents from the association's own rule book, and by 1900 the name had become the unit everyone else's ball was priced against. That is what naming a supplier inside a sport's laws actually does, seen from the position of a competitor who was not named.

That sentence, too, comes from two settings. Simmons ran the same advertisement in the guide for 1900 at page 146 and in the guide for 1901 at page 222, and within the quoted six words the two settings agree exactly. Outside them they do not. The 1901 setting drops the net's descriptive paragraph and its illustration while keeping the net in the headline list, which is the advertiser shortening the copy rather than changing it; it sets a comma where 1900 sets a full stop after INTER-COLLEGIATE NET; and it resets the racket description from five short measures wrapped round an illustration to four long ones. The two settings also render one phrase in the racket copy differently: 1900 reads tournament strung with oriental cut and 1901 reads tournament strung with Oriental Gut. Gut is what a racket is strung with and cut is not, but both renderings are printed here and neither is adopted, because the letter in question is exactly the kind a scan gets wrong.

**And then Reach crossed over.**

The tennis count in these volumes stays at two or three until it does not. In the item carrying the guides for 1906 and 1907 it occurs twice, and the only tennis goods the firm offers under its own name there are racket covers, in three grades, at a dollar, seventy-five cents and fifty cents; the uniform bag beside them is advertised for base ball players, bicycle riders, tennis players and athletes generally. In the item carrying 1912 the word occurs once.

In the item carrying the guides for 1918 and 1919 it occurs fourteen times, and the firm is selling tennis rackets of its own: a Reach Paramount, a De Luxe Model No. 1, a De Luxe Model No. 4, with nets, poles, pulleys, marking tapes, guy ropes, centre straps and racket covers, and a thirty-day guarantee signed A. J. Reach Co., Philadelphia, Pa. There is a Paramount tennis ball too, marked Pat. Aug. 24, 1915, described as having a single seam of the same thickness as the wall of the ball and no interior plug, and its printed seal says it is approved by the U.S.N.L.T. Association. The item carrying 1920 and 1921 carries the same ball, six occurrences in all, with the year 1920 in the seal.

On 11 December 1920 the tennis association's executive committee approved a list of nine balls for the following season, and Reach Paramount is the second name on it. This platform's Boston entry sets that resolution out in full from the association's own guide for 1921; that volume was not re-opened for this entry and the list is taken from the published entry rather than re-read here.

So the Philadelphia firm reached the tennis association's approved list in the same decade that the list replaced the single official ball. It did not break a monopoly. It arrived after the association's own executive committee had turned that monopoly into a queue.

**What this entry does not claim.**

Nothing found here shows money moving in either direction between A. J. Reach Company and the United States National Lawn Tennis Association, or between the firm and any baseball league. This platform's Boston entry declares the same gap about a different firm and nothing here closes it or narrows it. An advertisement claiming approval is evidence that the claim was made in print, and it is not evidence of what was paid for it.

Nor does any volume read here contain a biography of its own publisher. Alfred J. Reach's name occurs in the 1918 and 1920 items only as the signature under the standard-ball statement, twice in each, and not at all in the volumes for 1890, 1894, 1900, 1901 or 1912. The annuals name him as a president and never as a player. What he did before he manufactured is not established from any source consulted for this entry, and no claim about it is made here.

**Amateur-era record.**

Everything above about lawn tennis belongs to a game closed to anyone who had been paid to play it, and sits on the same footing as the other pre-1968 material pinned on this platform. The point is the one the Boston and New York entries make and this one measures from outside: a firm could sell four leagues an official ball at once, print the argument for official balls over its president's signature, buy and sell advertising space against the tennis association's own regulation ball, and end up on that association's approved list. The players in the sport at the far end of that trade were the only people in it who could not be paid.

**Gaps this entry declares.**

The Library of Congress was unreachable throughout the session in which this entry was written, returning 429 on every catalogue and full-text endpoint and 403 on its item pages, so no newspaper account and no trademark registration was consulted. The trademark series holds five A. J. Reach registrations whose identifiers are recorded in this platform's working notes, and none of them was opened. No contemporary newspaper report of anything described above was read. The firm's own catalogues, as distinct from its annuals, were not located. Whether the Paramount ball's approval in December 1920 was contested inside the tennis association is not established. The guides for 1902 to 1905, 1908 to 1911 and 1913 to 1917 were not read, so the year the firm's own tennis line began cannot be fixed more closely than between the volume for 1912 and the volume for 1918.

**What stands on the corner now.**

The building on the corner in September 2026 is called Reach Lofts and is numbered 1701 Tulip Street. It is not the building the 1900 guide was published from. A published industrial-archaeology reference for the neighbourhood, consulted here in summary rather than read in the original, places the firm's original mill at 1709 to 1719 Tulip Street, built about 1883 and demolished about 1980, and dates the surviving building at 1701 to 1707 Tulip Street to about 1910; the City of Philadelphia's own property record for that parcel gives its year built as 1900. Those two datings are set down together and neither is adopted here. The same reference describes the works as occupying the block bounded by Tulip, Eyre, Memphis and Palmer Streets, which is why the radius below covers a block rather than a door.

**Coordinate.** 39.974883, -75.131183, precision radius 250 m. This is the corner of Tulip Street and East Palmer Street in Fishtown, Philadelphia, the address the firm printed on ten title pages read here. It was fixed from four sources, and they are not four of a kind. Two are interpolations: the Esri world geocoder, built on commercial road data, returns the Tulip and Palmer intersection at 39.974851, -75.131372, and the Census Bureau's TIGER geocoder returns 1701 Tulip Street at 39.974862, -75.131256. Two are records of a parcel rather than an estimate along a line: the City of Philadelphia's own property database returns the parcel at 1701-07 Tulip Street at 39.974903, -75.131048, and OpenStreetMap holds a drawn building footprint there, way 963718617, at 39.974918, -75.131054. The widest separation between any two of the four is 28.2 m and the pin is set at their mean. The two parcel records agree with each other to within 1.7 m and should not be counted as fully independent, since a mapper working from city data would produce exactly that. The radius is deliberately far wider than the spread, for the reason given above: the works covered a block, and the building that stood on it when the 1900 guide was printed is gone. A reverse lookup at the pin, run in September 2026, returns Reach Lofts, 1701 Tulip Street.

**Cover.** Page 146 of Reach's Official Base Ball Guide for 1900, published by A. J. Reach Co., corner of Tulip and Palmer Streets, Philadelphia; digitised by the Smithsonian Libraries and served by the Internet Archive, 2561 x 4159 px, out of copyright by age. Following the standing check on this platform, the printed matter in the frame was read and it is legible throughout. The page is a full-page advertisement headed To Tennis Players, with the line HERE ARE 3 WINNERS and the three products listed beneath it. At the left is an engraved racket with EXPERT lettered on the head, priced Each, $9.00. At the right is an engraved ball with Harcourt in script across it and a stitched seam drawn round it, which is what a tennis ball of the period looked like. Between them is the ball copy ending in the sentence quoted above. Below is an engraved view of a net on a court, with a racket and balls lying on the ground, trees and a building on the horizon, and the net band lettered INTERCOLEGIATE PAT. 36 FT. The foot of the page reads Sold by Simmons Hardware Company, inc., The Great Sporting Goods House of America. ST. LOUIS, MO., and the page number 146. The National League schedule printed on the other side of the same leaf shows faintly through the paper. This is an advertisement rather than a photograph, and the goods it shows were not made by the firm this entry is pinned to.

**Second image.** Page 147 of the same volume, the leaf immediately following, 2451 x 4062 px, same source and status. It is the page that faces the cover in the opening. At the top is a guarantee that the American Association Ball will last a full game, with the firm undertaking to replace any that show defects in material or workmanship, requiring defective balls to be returned for inspection, and refusing to make good any ball allowed to become wet. Below is the engraving described above: a ball in a pleated tissue nest rising from an opened box, the band round the ball reading adopted by the Western League, American Association and adopted by the Penna. State League, a small oval at the top of the ball reading Reach and trade mark, and the box lettered A. J. Reach Co. and club uniforms of every description. Beneath the engraving the page reads THE REACH AMERICAN ASSOCIATION BALL is authorized and officially recognized by the NATIONAL LEAGUE, No. 1, Each, $1.25, and Write for free illustrated catalogue. The price list on the following leaf shows through reversed.

**Sourcing note.** Three passages are quoted above. Two are from the standard-ball statement signed by Alfred J. Reach, on the evidence of four typesettings by one publisher in the guides for 1918, 1919, 1920 and 1921, with the punctuation divergences set out in full in the section above rather than hidden here. One is the six-word claim in the Simmons Hardware advertisement, on the evidence of two typesettings by the same publisher in the guides for 1900 and 1901, with its divergences also set out above. Both grounds are the narrower kind: a single interested publisher setting the same copy more than once, which rules out a machine reading and does not rule out the publisher being wrong. Everything else on this page is attributed paraphrase, including every imprint, every price, the Tryon and Reach advertisements, the guarantee, the printed wording on the ball and the box, and the 1921 approval resolution, each of which survives here in a single setting or in a summary read elsewhere. Where a printed wording is given above in capitals it describes what the page shows and is not offered as a quotation.

**Sources.** The Reach guides were read as machine-read text from the Internet Archive, in seven items covering the guides for 1890, 1894, 1900, 1901, 1906, 1907, 1912, 1918, 1919, 1920 and 1921. The identifiers are of the form reachofficialameYYYYphil and the trailing digits do not always track the year. The 1890 volume, for the Market Street imprint and for the absence of tennis: https://archive.org/download/reachofficialame1890phil/reachofficialame1890phil_djvu.txt . The 1894 volume, for the earliest Tulip and Palmer imprint among the volumes read here, and for the Tryon advertisement: https://archive.org/download/reachofficialame1894phil/reachofficialame1894phil_djvu.txt . The item carrying the guides for 1900 and 1901, for both settings of the Simmons advertisement, both facing ball pages and both imprints: https://archive.org/download/reachofficialame19001phil/reachofficialame19001phil_djvu.txt . The item carrying 1906 and 1907, for the racket covers and the uniform bag: https://archive.org/download/reachofficialame19061phil/reachofficialame19061phil_djvu.txt . The item carrying 1912: https://archive.org/download/reachofficialame19121phil/reachofficialame19121phil_djvu.txt . The item carrying 1918 and 1919, for two settings of the standard-ball statement, the Reach tennis rackets, the guarantee and the Paramount ball: https://archive.org/download/reachofficialame19181phil/reachofficialame19181phil_djvu.txt . The item carrying 1920 and 1921, for the other two settings of the statement and the 1920 Paramount seal: https://archive.org/download/reachofficialame1920phil/reachofficialame1920phil_djvu.txt . The cover and second image are pages 146 and 147 of the 1900 guide, served as https://archive.org/download/reachofficialame19001phil/page/n153.jpg and https://archive.org/download/reachofficialame19001phil/page/n154.jpg . The 1921 approval resolution is taken from this platform's entry for Wright and Ditson at 344 Washington Street, Boston, and not re-read here. The building history and the block boundaries are from Workshop of the World, the Philadelphia industrial-archaeology reference, at https://www.workshopoftheworld.com/fishtown/reach.html , read in summary; the Hexamer survey of 1893 and the Sanborn insurance surveys that page cites were not consulted. The parcel record is the City of Philadelphia's property database at https://phl.carto.com . All of the scanned volumes used here are damaged in places, and every reading above was taken from a legible passage except where the damage is described.