1866 – The first game of the East Coast championship between the Brooklyn Atlantics and Philadelphia Athletics in Philadelphia, PA is a victim of its own success. Newspapers estimate that the crowd gathered around the baseball grounds numbers close to 40,000. The host ball club is ill-prepared to handle the huge crowd, which soon invades the playing field and forces the cancellation of the game. However, the fiasco does prove that there is a large potential market for top-level professional baseball.