There Must Come a Change

The Philadelphia Pythians and the Fight for Baseball's Soul

Before Jackie Robinson, there were the Pythians.

In the summer of 1869, a team of young Black men took the field against white opponents in Philadelphia—the first recorded interracial baseball game in American history. They called themselves the Pythians, and their captain was Octavius Valentine Catto: scholar, athlete, Civil War veteran, and the most dangerous Black man in Philadelphia.

Catto and his teammates weren't just playing baseball. They were waging a campaign for equality, using athletic excellence to challenge the assumptions of a nation struggling to define itself after the Civil War. When organized baseball formally banned Black players in 1867, the Pythians applied anyway. When they were rejected, they kept playing—and kept winning.

There Must Come a Change tells the full story of this remarkable team: their undefeated 1868 season, their historic games against white opponents, and the tragic Election Day in 1871 when Catto was assassinated on the streets of Philadelphia while defending the right of Black men to vote.

Drawing on primary sources from the Historical Society of Pennsylvania and contemporary newspaper accounts, Jim Stovall brings to life a forgotten chapter of American history—one that connects the baseball diamond to the ballot box, and the struggles of Reconstruction to the long fight for civil rights that continues today.

This is the story of the men who challenged baseball's color line eight decades before Jackie Robinson—and paid the price for their courage.