April 16, 1887: George Tebeau stakes a claim to being first major-league player to homer in his first at-bat

For more than a century, the correct answer to the baseball trivia question Who was the first player to hit a home run in his first major league at-bat? was Baltimore Orioles outfielder Mike Griffin. The title holder’s record-setting blast came in the top of the first inning of an April 16, 1887, American Association contest against the Philadelphia Athletics. But long after Griffin was dead and buried, “someone spotted that, on the same day no less [Cincinnati Reds rookie George] Tebeau had also done it.”1 And Tebeau’s maiden plate appearance homer against the Cleveland Blues not only came on the very same afternoon as the Griffin four-bagger. It was also hit in the same top of the first inning as the Griffin shot.

Trying to ascertain to whom the distinction of being first rightly belongs is hampered by the long passage of time and the unavailability of detailed inning-by-inning accounts of the two games in question. Particularly unhelpful is perfunctory reportage of the Orioles-Athletics match.2 It reduces reconstruction of first-inning game action and estimation of how long it took sixth-in-the-lineup-batter Griffin to reach the plate largely to guesswork. The same problems, but to a lesser degree, attend analysis of the home run hit by seventh-placed Reds batter Tebeau.

Another complication attends time-zone peculiarities. The Cleveland-Cincinnati game was advertised to start “at 3:30 P.M.”3 Because Cincinnati was then in the Central Time Zone,4 this ostensibly placed the game’s start time 30 minutes behind that of the Orioles-Athletics contest, scheduled to begin in Baltimore at 4:00 P.M. Eastern Standard Time.5 But like various other cities removed from the East Coast, Cincinnati did not accept the time regimes that had been imposed for the convenience of the railroads some four years earlier. In 1887 Cincinnati remained on its own city time, which was 22 minutes faster than CST.6 This effectively moved the scheduled start time of the Blues-Reds game to within eight minutes of that set for the game in Baltimore.7 Whether either contest started precisely on time is unknown, as are the number of minutes that elapsed before Griffin and Tebeau connected. Still, the probabilities seem to favor Griffin, if only by a slight margin. Now, on to the Tebeau homer.

Dank and chilly weather discomfited the 2,700 fans in attendance at the Cincinnati Base Ball Grounds (later League Park I) for the Reds’ April 16 season opener against the Cleveland Blues, a newly admitted member of the American Association. The starting pitcher for Cincinnati was an obvious choice: staff ace Tony Mullane. Matinee-idol handsome and prodigiously gifted athletically – a natural right-handed thrower, the “Apollo of the Box” occasionally served one up from the port side, apparently for his own amusement – Mullane had notched his fourth 30-plus-victory season in 1886. And his return to Cincinnati for the current season represented a departure from the norm for the well-traveled twirler, marking the first time that Mullane had ever started a new baseball campaign with the same team that he had finished the previous one with. In fact, Tony’s penchant for contract-breaking and club-jumping provided an interesting sidebar to the Cincinnati-Cleveland game, as it had served to usher his opposite number, Blues starter George Pechiney, into a major-league uniform.

Mullane spent the 1884 season with the American Association Toledo Blue Stockings, but had an agreement to return to the St. Louis Browns (his 1883 ballclub) for the ensuing campaign. His disregard of that obligation and his signing with the Cincinnati Reds instead prompted Browns club boss Chris Von der Ahe to institute disciplinary proceedings. The result was a season-long suspension that idled Mullane for the entire 1885 campaign. Mullane’s unavailability, in turn, necessitated Cincinnati auditioning hurling prospects throughout the season. When his chance came, George Pechiney, a Cincinnati factory worker who threw semipro ball on weekends, performed well, posting a 7-4 record and earning a spot in the Reds’ next-season plans. So in some sense, Pechiney owed his place on a major-league roster to the waywardness of Tony Mullane.

Restored to eligibility, Mullane (33-27 in 56 starts) and Pechiney (15-21 in 40 starts) formed the bulwark of the 1886 Cincinnati Reds pitching corps. During the offseason, however, Cincinnati consigned Pechiney and batterymate Pop Snyder to the Association’s fledgling Cleveland club. The 1887 season opener therefore matched the Blues pitcher against his inadvertent baseball benefactor.

Electing to bat first, the Reds wasted no time in mounting an attack against their erstwhile teammate. Shoddy Cleveland defense contributed to the Cincinnati cause. But Pechiney himself was the primary source of his own misfortune. As subsequently observed by The Sporting News, the Blues hurler “complained of a sore arm and was unable to get the ball over the plate. When he did, it was lined out by the Red Stockings.”8

Cleveland left fielder Fred Mann set the game’s tone by muffing leadoff batter Bid McPhee’s fly ball. Third baseman Ed McKean then chipped in an error on a Frank Fennelly grounder. Pechiney walked the next two Cincinnati batters, forcing in the first run. A sacrifice and three passed balls by Blues catcher Charlie Reipschlager thereafter kept Reds baserunners moving around the sacks. With two outs finally recorded, debutante center fielder George Tebeau stepped to the plate. A solidly built 5-foot-9 175-pounder resplendent in an immaculate ivory-colored uniform with crimson trim, Tebeau just looked like a ballplayer.9 And in his first major-league at-bat, he hit like one as well. A righty batter, Tebeau drilled a Pechiney offering on a line to deep left-center and then circled the bases for an inside-the-park home run that upped the first-inning Cincinnati advantage to 5-0.10

In the ensuing frames, the Reds continued to pummel Pechiney. The good-hitting Mullane helped the cause with a home run in the second. A walk to McPhee and a triple by Pop Corkhill plated another Cincinnati run that inning. A three-run homer by Fennelly in the sixth put the contest far beyond Cleveland reach. Meanwhile, Mullane eased through the Blues batting order, plagued more by his own lack of control (eight walks and a wild pitch) than by opposition hitters – apart from Cleveland second baseman Cub Stricker, who touched the Reds twirler for a late-game dinger. Echoing a hometown newspaper assessment, “the game was not brilliant.”11 But the 16-6 triumph nonetheless got the Cincinnati Reds’ season off to a successful start.

Never much more than a journeyman during his six-season major-league career, George Tebeau went on to become a force as a baseball executive, founding the premier minor-league American Association in 1902 and managing/owning any number of prominent non-major-league ballclubs through World War I. He died in February 1923 at age 61, a respected if not particularly loved figure in the game. Neither at the time of his death nor for decades thereafter, however, was Tebeau consider a major-league record-setter. Rather, the claim was staked for him by late-twentieth-century baseball detectives who discovered that when Mike Griffin hit a home run in his first major-league at-bat on April 16, 1887, George Tebeau had done exactly the same.

Sources

Reference sources consulted include Baseball-Reference.com, Retrosheet, and Lloyd Johnson and Miles Wolff, eds., The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball (Durham, North Carolina: Baseball America, Inc., 3d ed., 2007). The sources for the narrative detail provided are specified in the endnotes.

Notes

1 David Nemec, The Beer and Whisky League: The Illustrated History of the American Association – Baseball’s Renegade Major League (New York: Lyons & Burford, 1994), 129.

2 The writer is informed that first-inning detail was published in the Baltimore American but was unable to access same.

3 “Cincinnati Base Ball Park,” Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, April 16, 1887: 12 (advertisement).

4 Cincinnati was not shifted into the Eastern Time Zone until 1927.

5 “Base Ball … Baltimore Grounds,” Baltimore Sun, April 16, 1887 (advertisement).

6 According to essays recently published online. See e.g., “How Daylight Saving Time Arrived in Cincinnati,” https://www.tumblr.com/handeaux/140685032432/how-daylight-saving-time-arrived-in-cincinnati.

7 Baltimore has been in the Eastern Standard Time Zone since the original formulation of time zones in November 1883.

8 The Sporting News, April 23, 1887: 7.

9 Years later, veteran observer John B. Foster recalled George Tebeau as “almost perfectly built … standing erect as a West Pointer, proportioned like an Apollo. He was an athlete long to be remembered … and appeared on a ball field as if he had walked out of a tableau.” Foster, “Giving the Tebeaus Their Place in the Game’s Annals,” The Sporting News, February 15, 1923: 7.

10 Per the game account published in “Base Ball: Hated Cincinnati Slaughters Pitcher Pechiney,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, April 17, 1887: 6. A slightly different game account appeared in Sporting Life, April 27, 1887: 4.

11 “Baseball,” Cincinnati Evening Post, April 16, 1887: 4.