July 6, 1889: Columbus starts lefties at second base, third base, and shortstop in loss to St. Louis

Ever since the convention of running the bases counterclockwise was established, sometime between 1834, when informal rules originating from the English game of rounders specified clockwise, and 1857, when the opposite direction was formally codified,1 infield positions beyond first base have been the domain of the right-handed. Able to throw leftward without pirouetting, righties have an inherent advantage at those locations.

Given the preponderance of right-handed people then – as now – a counterclockwise circuit may have become the standard  for that reason alone.2 The preference for right-handed throwers at second base, third base, and shortstop has been strong for so long that no major-league team has had a lefty play more than 20 games at any of those positions since Russ Hall played 35 games at shortstop in 1898 for the National League’s St. Louis Browns.3

A decade earlier, however, it was commonplace to rely on left-handers at the three infield positions they now almost never occupy. There were 14 lefties in the 1880s who played more than 20 major-league games in a season at second, third, or shortstop; five of them topped 100 at least once.4

Left-handers made 3,269 appearances at second, third, or shortstop in the 1880s across the National League, American Association, and Union Association, roughly once in every 2½ games. Those numbers dwarf the 605 such appearances in 1890s major leagues (once every 15 games), 68 in the 1900s (once every 86 games), and even fewer in subsequent decades.5

In the decade that ushered in both the Brooklyn Bridge and electric Christmas lights, arguably no team was as reliant on left-handed infielders as the 1889 Columbus Buckeyes of the American Association. They used lefties at second base in 118 games, third base in 110 games, and shortstop in 27. A lefty manned one of those three positions in every game Columbus played, and during three games in early July, for the only time in major-league history, they manned all three.

New to the Association in 1889, the Buckeyes began the year with lefty Ralph “Spud” Johnson, a ­­­32-year-old left-hander in his first season with a major-league team, as their third baseman.6 When Johnson came down in June with a case of malaria that sidelined him for three weeks,7 portsider Lefty Marr, the Buckeyes’ everyday right fielder, tended the hot corner. Marr ­­­had been strictly an outfielder during a previous stint with the Association’s Cincinnatis in 1886 but had played roughly 20 games at third during a minor-league career marked by tragedy.8

Bill Greenwood, an upstanding  lefty signed out of the Western Association by Buckeyes manager Al Buckenberger, was the team’s everyday second baseman.9 Greenwood had played 86 games at second and 28 at shortstop the year before with the Association’s Baltimore Orioles, a team whose skipper, Billy Barnie, relied on lefty shortstops more often than any manager in major-league history.10 By late July, Columbus fans were “howling for [Greenwood’s] release,” but a few weeks later he was “playing great ball,” according to Buckenberger. “My life wouldn’t be safe this moment if I were to tell him to go,” admitted the Columbus manager.11

After splitting a July 4 doubleheader in Kansas City, the Buckeyes headed east to St. Louis, but their regular shortstop at that time, right-handed Henry Easterday, continued on to Philadelphia, called there by the death of his father.12 Easterday’s predecessor at shortstop, Henry Kappel (also a righty), had been sent home two weeks earlier,13 so for the Buckeyes’ three-game series in St. Louis on July 6-8, captain Dave Orr, or more likely Buckenberger, shifted Marr to shortstop and Johnson back to third.14 Lefties had occupied two of the Buckeyes’ three infield positions beyond first base in all but nine of their 62 previous games, but now they’d be manning all three.

Columbus began the day on Saturday, July 6, in seventh place with a 25-37-1 record. They’d played 17 of their last 18 games away from home, with another 10 to go before they’d be back home. The Buckeyes had lost six of seven to the reigning World Champion Browns, who sat in first place with a 43-21-1 record, seeking a fifth consecutive Association crown.  

Pitching for the home team at Sportsman’s Park was one of the three 21-year-olds in the Browns rotation, Elton, later known as “Ice Box,” Chamberlain. In his second year with St. Louis, Chamberlain was coming off a win over Brooklyn in which a two-umpire system was used, to positive reviews.15 Two umpires would also oversee this game: Honest John Gaffney behind the plate and Jack Kerins on the bases.16

Opposite Chamberlain was Mark Baldwin. Released by the NL Chicago White Stockings on Opening Day for his “raucous behavior” during Al Spalding’s World Tour of 1888-1889,17 Baldwin was snapped up by Buckenberger soon after. Possessed of a wicked fastball but inconsistent control, Baldwin was on his way to leading the Association in strikeouts (368), walks (274), and wild pitches (83), the latter still (as of 2024) a major-league single-season record.

Electing to bat first, the Browns opened the scoring in the top of the second. Cross-handed-hitting Yank Robinson reached first on a “hot grounder” that third baseman Johnson couldn’t handle, then went to third on a bloop single to right by Charlie Duffee.18 Duffee stole second and both runners advanced on Shorty Fuller’s sacrifice to Marr, the Buckeyes’ shortstop.19 A “cracking single to center” by catcher Jocko Milligan, the Browns’ top hitter in 1889 with a .366 batting average, gave St. Louis a 2-0 lead.20

St. Louis scored twice more in the third, with a rally that began when Columbus right fielder Bill George misjudged Arlie Latham’s fly ball. A two-way player who held an ignominious record,21 George was making his first appearance in the outfield for Columbus, having been signed days earlier after the NL New York Giants released him. After George’s gift, Latham swiped second. Baldwin walked “sprightly little” Tommy McCarthy,22 after which the pair advanced a base. The St. Louis Post Dispatch implied that the pair pulled off a double steal, but the Globe-Democrat credited only McCarthy with a theft. Regardless, both runners crossed the plate when, after fielding a grounder by Tip O’Neill, Greenwood “threw the ball in the seats back of first base.”23

Columbus got on the board in the fourth on a “scratch two-bagger” by Ed Daily, a pair of walks and a sacrifice fly by George, but saw the Browns push their lead right back to four in their next turn at bat. In that frame, playing manager Charlie Comiskey drove in McCarthy with a single.

With “his baffling proclivities nicely boxed up,” Chamberlain had little trouble with the light-hitting Buckeyes.24 He allowed only four hits in the game, three singles and Daily’s double, which one St. Louis newspaper called “a sort of a gift.”25 The Browns’ young hurler also had help from his defense. In the fifth, after Johnson hit a “beauty” to left-center, O’Neill, the left fielder, made a spectacular play that the Post-Dispatch waxed eloquently over. “With an eye like an eagle, and a gait like [recent American Cup champion racehorse] Spokane, [Tip] made a brilliant spurt in the direction in which the ball was coursing, and with one bound sprung into the air and choked its existence, shutting off two runs and making one of the grandest captures ever seen in St. Louis.”26

In the sixth, with the Browns up 5-1, Latham swung wildly for strike three on a pitch so high it hit the grandstand. After he was thrown out at first by the Columbus catcher,27 Latham took a tongue-lashing from Comiskey, punctuated by a $10 fine for “his funny work.”28

Chamberlain’s mates tacked on a run in the eighth on a home run to left by Milligan and two more in the ninth to give St. Louis an 8-1 victory. Accounts of the game make no mention of Columbus having three lefties in their infield. Published box scores suggest that Greenwood’s heave into the stands was the trio’s only error. The Columbus Dispatch, which typically covered hometown Buckeye games in detail, didn’t publish a Sunday edition in 1889 and so no local perspective survives on how Greenwood, Johnson, and Marr performed that day.

Columbus fared no better in the next two games, with the Browns winning 8-3 on July 7 and 14-0 on July 8. Across the three-game series, Columbus’s left-handed infielders committed six errors in 40 chances: two by Greenwood at second, one by Johnson at third, and three by Marr at shortstop, including one in game two that proved “costly.”29

Johnson returned to right field during the Buckeyes’ next series, in Cincinnati, never to play third base again as a major leaguer. Marr did well enough at shortstop to play another 24 games there by the season’s end. Moving 100 miles to the southwest, Marr became the Cincinnati Reds’ primary third baseman in 1890. Greenwood played out the season as the Buckeyes’ primary second baseman and continued in that role for the 1890 Rochester Broncos. The 538 games he played at second remain the major league record for a lefty. None of the three earned major-league playing time after the Association’s 1891 final season.

Author’s Note

Playing for a Little League coach who was willing to defy convention, the first position that I played as an 11-year-old southpaw was second base. The next was third.

Acknowledgments 

This article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Photo credit: Lefty Marr, Trading Card Database.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com, Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Almanac.com, and Stathead.com for pertinent information. In compiling game logs for the 1889 Columbus Buckeyes, he relied on box scores and game summaries published in the Columbus Dispatch, Kansas City Journal, Louisville Courier-Journal, Brooklyn Eagle, and St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

Notes   

1 Using a previously published description of rounders, a children’s book published in 1834, The Book of Sports, describes a game of “base, or goal ball” in which a player, after striking with his bat a ball tossed toward him, runs clockwise around “four stones or stakes” arrayed in a diamond pattern. The rules and regulations adopted by the National Association of Base Ball Players in 1857 were the first known to specify transiting the bases counterclockwise. Counterclockwise baserunning may have become the norm long before 1857. The earliest known image of grown men playing baseball, found on an engraved invitation to a ball hosted by the Magnolia Ball Club in 1844, clearly depicts a baserunner traveling counterclockwise from a first-base peg. Robin Carver, The Book of Sports (Boston: Lilly, Wait, Colman and Holden, 1834), 38; Jeffrey Kittel, “A Rule-by-Rule History Analysis of the Rules Adopted by the 1857 Convention of Base Ball Clubs (Draft),” Protoball, July 2013, https://protoball.org/images/6/63/1857-Rules.pdf; Richard Hershberger, “1857: The First Baseball Convention,” Baseball’s 19th Century Winter Meetings: 1857-1900 (Phoenix: SABR, 2018), 2; John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 60, 206b.

2 John Schwartz, “Baseball: The Counterclockwise Sport,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, 1978, accessed July 10, 2024.

3 The franchise became the Cardinals in 1900.

4 One of those, Hick Carpenter, played more than 100 games at third base for six consecutive seasons (1884-1889), as a member of Cincinnati’s American Association franchise.

5 Total number of appearances by left-handers at second base, third base, or shortstop by decade after 1909 are as follows. Based on fielding statistics reported at Baseball-Reference.com for the American, National, and Negro Leagues. As game statistics for Negro Leagues are incorporated there, totals for several decades may change.

6 Johnson was a Chicago semipro ballplayer in the late 1870s. The need to provide for a young wife and child led him to work for a Chicago insurance company while in his 20s. He signed his first professional contract with a Western League team close to his 30th birthday, in December 1886. Playing third for the Kansas City Blues in 1888, Johnson led the Western Association in hitting with a .342 average and finished in the top five in stolen bases. Peter Morris and John Thorn, “Ralph ‘Spud’ Johnson,” Our Game website, April 27, 2020, https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/ralph-spud-johnson-3167378e5ace.

7 Johnson was out of the lineup for six of the seven games Columbus played between April 28 and May 5, and all 14 they played between June 9 and 27, not counting the team’s forfeit to the Brooklyn Bridegrooms on June 24. “Keep Your Eye on the Baby,” Columbus Dispatch, April 26, 1889: 2; “Out in Von-der-Ahe-Ville,” Columbus Dispatch, May 7, 1889: 2; “Notes,” Columbus Dispatch, June 17, 1889: 2; “Sporting Notes,” Columbus Dispatch, June 26, 1889: 2.

8 While playing for the Southern Association Nashville Americans, a team for whom Marr played not only third but every other position on the diamond as well over a two-year span, Marr was involved in an on-field fatality. During an August 14, 1885, contest with Atlanta, Marr accidentally struck a baserunner in the stomach with his knee on a play at first base. The runner, Lewis Henke, was taken from the field and carried to his hotel, where he died the next day from a ruptured liver. Unable to bring himself to play again for days, Marr accompanied Henke’s body to Cincinnati for his funeral. “Mr. Henke’s Condition,” Atlanta Journal, August 15, 1885: 4; “Lewis Henke,” Baseball History Daily website, https://baseballhistorydaily.com/tag/charles-lefty-marr/, accessed June 9, 2024.

9 Before even setting foot on the diamond for the 1889 season, Greenwood had shown himself to be an honorable Buckeye. When Washington Nationals manager Ted Sullivan unsuccessfully tried to lure Spud Johnson away from Columbus after Johnson had agreed to terms with Buckenberger, Greenwood confronted Sullivan and publicly dressed him down for trying to “induce a ball player to violate his word of honor.” “After a Third Baseman,” Washington Evening Star, March 18, 1889: 8.

10 “Signing New Players in Philadelphia,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1889: 7; Larry DeFillipo, “August 26, 1891: John McGraw Beats Back Butterflies to Ignite Game-Winning Rally in Debut,” SABR Games Project, accessed June 21, 2024.

11 F.W. Arnold, “A Toledo Canard,” Sporting Life, June 19, 1889: 6.

12 Joe Pritchard, “The Columbus Club,” Sporting Life, July 17, 1889: 2.

13 Kappel’s banishment appears to have been a punishment for multiple offenses, including covering up for teammates “out on a [drinking] spree.” F.W. Arnold, “Buck in Peril,” Sporting Life, July 10, 1889: 2.

14 Captains were typically responsible for making out lineups for American Association teams, but various press accounts suggest that Buckenberger, rather than Orr, decided who pitched in games, and on occasion Buckenberger overrode Orr’s lineup choices. On that basis, it’s likely that Buckenberger took upon himself the decision of whom to replace Easterday with. See, for example F.W. Arnold, “A Denial,” Sporting Life, May 22, 1889: 2; “Games Played Thursday, Aug. 1,” Sporting Life, August 7, 1889: 3; and “Goldsmith Sends Orr to the Bench,” Cincinnati Enquirer, May 26, 1889: 2.

15 “Double Umpiring at St. Louis,” Cincinnati Enquirer, July 5, 1889: 6.

16 The American Association experimented with two-man umpiring crews on several occasions beginning in the 1888 season, but never adopted it as a standard. Peter Morris, A Game of Inches (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2006), 254.

17 Brian McKenna, “Mark Baldwin,” SABR Biography Project, accessed June 21, 2024. Along with Baldwin, Chicago released Tom Daly, Marty Sullivan, and Bob Pettit for what the Chicago Inter-Ocean called “bad habits.” In his statement to the press, White Stockings captain Cap Anson said, “I want to have a team of gentlemen, and would rather take eighth place with it than first with a gang of roughs. I can’t say that Mark Baldwin has such bad habits, but we can get better men.” “Anson and the Released Men,” Chicago Inter-Ocean, April 25, 1889: 2.

18 “Browns and Columbus,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 7, 1889: 11

19 New to major-league box scores in 1889, Fuller’s sacrifice may well have been a groundout. As SABR’s John Schwartz pointed out, between 1889 and 1893, batters were credited with sacrifice hits for advancing runners with bunts, groundouts, or fly balls. John Schwartz, “The Sacrifice Fly,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, 1981, accessed July 6, 2024.

20 “Browns and Columbus.”

21 George established a major-league record for most walks issued in a nine-inning game when he walked 16 Chicago White Stockings during the first game of a doubleheader on May 30, 1887. Equaled twice since, George’s mark remains the major-league record through the 2023 season. “Chicago Whips New-York,” New York Times, May 31, 1887: 2.

22 “They Won Hands Down,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 7, 1889: 16.

23 “They Won Hands Down.”

24 “They Won Hands Down.” Only the last-place Louisville Colonels would score fewer runs per game among Association teams in 1889.

25 “They Won Hands Down.”

26 “They Won Hands Down.”

27 The Columbus catcher who threw out Latham at first was identified as Jack O’Connor in the St. Louis Post-Dispatch game summary but Ned Bligh in the accompanying box score. The Post-Dispatch fumbled half of the St. Louis battery as well, listing Silver King as pitching for the Browns in their box score despite detailing Chamberlain’s stellar outing in the game story. “They Won Hands Down.”

28 “They Won Hands Down.”

29 “Downed by the Browns,” Columbus Dispatch, July 8, 1889: 2; “Fourteen to None,” Columbus Dispatch, July 9, 1889: 3.