Born in 1848 (give or take) in Charleston, South Carolina to Jacob (Job) Gardiner Bass and Ellen Rachel (Ruth) Garden, a preacher and his wife, John Elias Bass eventually moved with his family to Brooklyn where he learned the game as it was growing in his city after the Great War for Slavery.  (Bass served in that war as a non-commissioned member of the New York Cavalry.)

After playing with the Unions of Morrisania, Bass played shortstop for the Cleveland Forest City team in that first National Association season of 1871,  He would lead the Association in triples (10 – in just 22 games) and tied for the team league in homers with 3 (the league leader had four).  The next year he was with his hometown Brooklyn Atlantics but only for a couple of games while Jack McDonald ran afoul of the team leadership.  He played with amateur clubs for the next several years, but he got one last “major league” game as an emergency player for the Hartfords of Brooklyn against Louisville in 1877.  Tom York came up ill; Bass suited up and played in left field getting a hit in four tries and scoring a run.

Bass worked as a clerk but appeared to be active in some of the same events that his father was involved with – namely the church and military reunions – until he fell ill with tuberculosis.  He left Brooklyn for Denver in hopes of staving off the disease, but that failed and within weeks he had died there.  Depending on which source you believe, he was anywhere from 37 to 40 years old.  His FindaGrave site and Baseball-Reference.com page says he died on September 25, 1888 in Denver, but the obituary in the Brooklyn Eagle says he died on Monday, September 24, 1888.

Notes:

1860, 1870, 1880 US Census Records
“Base Ball,” Brooklyn Eagle, August 21, 1872: 2.
“Sporting Items,” Brooklyn Daily Times, August 21, 1877: 3.
“John Elias Bass,” Brooklyn Eagle, September 28, 1888: 1.