Jesse Burkett: Cleveland’s Forgotten Legend

The .400 club is a select company to which no new member has been admitted for more than half a century. Even the casual fan knows that Ted Williams was the last player to bat over .400. The year was 1941, and Williams, who refused to sit out a season ending doubleheader to protect his .400 average, went 6 for 8 that day and ended up at .406. Although arguably the greatest hitter in baseball history, the Red Sox legend would hit .400 only once. (“The Kid” did come close sixteen years later, at age thirty-nine, when he led the majors with a .388 average.)

Three players have hit .400 or better three times.

Tyrus Raymond Cobb—owner of the highest lifetime batting average (.366) and most batting titles (twelve in a thirteen-year span)—hit .420, .409, and .401 in 1911, 1912, and 1922, respectively.

Second to Ty Cobb in career average, at .358, is Rogers Hornsby, whose .400 years were 1922, 1924, and 1925. His .424 mark in 1924 surpasses all twentieth century batting averages by a player over a full season.

Add “Big Ed” Delahanty’ s name to the list. A Cleveland native and outfielder for the Phillies, he hit over .400 in 1894, 1895, and 1899.

Several other players came close to hitting .400 three times, and their names are not Napoleon LaJoie, Willie Keeler, Hugh Duffy, or Joe Jackson. Actually, only three members of the prestigious .400 club have batted .400 exactly twice: Sam Thompson, George Sisler, and Jesse Burkett, left fielder for the Cleveland Spiders in the 1890s.

Born in Wheeling, West Virginia, on December 4, 1868, to Granville and Eleanor Burkett, Jesse Burkett lived near the Ohio River in a neighborhood called Wheeling Island. A son of the laboring class (his father worked for the Wheeling and Belmont Bridge Company and later for the Wheeling Traction Company), Burkett played baseball until dark and often was late for supper. He also loved to swim in the Ohio River. His swimming prowess was to be tested profoundly at age twelve when a little girl fell out of a skiff into the muddy river. While several adults stood by and did nothing, young Burkett plunged into the water, crawled about the river bottom, found and brought the girl to the surface, and dragged her to the shore. Her heart was still beating, but attempts at artificial respiration failed, and she died right there. At eighty-three, Burkett’ s eyes would well with tears when he told this story to a reporter. The event haunted Jesse Burkett his entire life.

Wheeling’s competitive amateur and semipro leagues, which produced a number of major leaguers during this period, provided an opportunity for Jesse to prove his athletic talents as a hard-throwing pitcher and part-time outfielder. He showed enough promise at age eighteen to sign his first professional baseball contract as a pitcher for the Scranton team in the Central League in 1888. The Wheeling Daily Register on March 30 of that year wrote optimistically about the scrappy five-foot-eight-inch, 155-pounder: “Jesse Burkett leaves for Scranton with which club he has signed as a pitcher for the season. Jesse has several good curves and is an all-around good ball player. He will no doubt make a success on the diamond.” In his rookie season at Scranton, he won 14 games.2

The following year, Burkett advanced to Worcester of the Atlantic Association and enjoyed a spectacular season on and off the field. His 30-6 record (he hit .267) helped his team win the Atlantic Association Championship.3 Off the field, Burkett fell in love with and married a local girl, Ellen G. McGrath. Worcester would be his home for the rest of his life.

Jack Glasscock, a native of Wheeling and captain of the New York Giants, persuaded the National League team to purchase Burkett’ s contract in 1890. Surprisingly, Burkett showed them more promise as a hitter than as a pitcher. He hit .309 and knocked in 60 runs, but as a pitcher he posted a dismal 3-10 record and a 5.57 ERA. Overlooked by the Giants (who sold his contract to Cleveland after the season) was Burkett’s .461 slugging average. There Burkett ranked fifth in the league.

As a member of the Lincoln (Nebraska) team of the Western Association in 1891, Burkett was converted into an outfielder and now concentrated on hitting. This is when he “began to make my reputation,” he would tell an interviewer years later. Burkett’s .316 batting average (fourth best in the league), line-drive hitting to all fields, superb bunting, and aggressive baserunning impressed the Cleveland club, which added him (on August 15) to the late-season roster. For the next fourteen years Burkett would shine as one of baseball’s premier hitters.

Burkett arrived in Cleveland late in 1891 just as the Spiders had moved from their home at old National League Park (at East 39th Street and Payne Avenue) to new League Park (at East 66th and Lexington Avenue). Professional baseball’s most modern edifice (it was rebuilt for the 1910 season), it would showcase the sublime talents of the game’s immortals over the next fifty years. But during the 1890s the atmosphere at League Park, both on the field and in the stands, suggested the Roman Coliseum (or a British soccer stadium) more than a pastoral setting appropriate to the national pastime. “The tactics of the ’80s were aggressive,” as Bill James observed in his Historical Baseball Abstract; “the tactics of the ’90s were violent. The game of the ’80s was crude; the game of the ’90s was criminal. The baseball of the ’80s had ugly elements; the game of the ’90s was just ugly. ” The young left fielder’s natural combativeness fit perfectly, as the Spiders and their fans were notoriously rowdy.

Fighting and cursing were part of the game. Spiking other players, tripping baserunners or grabbing their belts or blocking their way as they rounded the bases, and shoving and spitting on umpires were also common. Unruly fans often bombarded umpires and opposing players with beer bottles, vegetables, eggs, and rocks. Jesse Burkett once refused to leave the field after being ejected from a game for cursing an umpire. Two policemen eventually escorted him from the grounds. On another occasion, Burkett and several other Spiders spent a night in jail. Their animated protests of an umpire’s decision to call a game due to darkness had incited the Louisville fans to riot and the Louisville police court to fine each player $200. Another time, the bellicose Burkett, after exchanging epithets with the manager of the Washington team, punched the skipper in the nose, drawing a $50 fine.

Noted for his surly disposition and caustic tongue, “the Crab,” as he was nicknamed, believed that it was the fight in him that made him a great player, recalling for a local paper in 1953 that “you got to be a battler. If you don’t, they’ll walk all over you. After you lick three or four of them, they don’t show up any more looking fora fight.” To succeed against brawnier athletes, the diminutive West Virginian was forced to be a scrapper.

Many students of baseball hold that the modern form of the game began in 1893, when the distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate was increased from 50 feet to 60 feet, 6 inches. In the course of two years, from 1892 to 1894, league batting averages rose from about .250 to over .300, and runs per game increased from 5 to 7. Another important rule change (adopted in 1894) prevented expert bunters such as Burkett and Willie Keeler from deliberately bunting pitches foul until they got one they liked. Bunting foul with two strikes now became an out. The Crab is considered by many to be the best bunter in history. He once bragged that he could hit .300 if he bunted every time up. At age seventy, after watching Red Sox players struggle to lay down bunts properly during a morning practice in Fenway Park, Burkett stepped into the batting cage. He ordered the pitcher to throw as hard as he could and proceeded to bunt the first pitch down the third-base line, to bunt the second pitch down the first base line, and to smash the third pitch over second base. Jesse Burkett’s amazing eyesight certainly contributed to his extraordinary skills at the plate. Even at eighty-four he could read without glasses. The only specs he ever wore were sunglasses on the field.

From the late summer of 1891 until traded to the Cardinals in 1899, Jesse Burkett was Cleveland’s best hitter. With his smoldering spirit, daring baserunning, slashing hitting style, bunting mastery, speed, and intelligence, he dominated the National League. The Crab owns too many individual team records to list, so behold these league-leading numbers. In 1895 Burkett batted .409 with 225 hits; in 1896, he hit .410 with 240 hits, 160 runs, and 317 total bases. In 1898 Burkett’s 213 hits ranked second in the league, close behind Willie Keeler’s 216. (A hitting machine, Burkett would accumulate more than 200 hits in six out of seven consecutive seasons, 1895-1901. He came up two hits short in 1897.)

The Cleveland Spiders boasted a formidable roster throughout Burkett’s time with them in the 1890s. Only the Boston Beaneaters and Baltimore Orioles won more games than the Spiders, but no team boasted more stars. Listen to this lineup: Cy Young, 511 career wins, Hall of Farner; Chief Zimmer, the finest defensive catcher in the game; second baseman Cupid Childs, a lifetime .306 hitter; Ed McKean, a slugging shortstop with better career statistics than Lou Boudreau; Patsy Tebeau, a notable player-manager; and, of course, Jesse Cail Burkett, another Cooperstown resident. In 1895, this formidable squad handed Cleveland the honor of a Temple Cup championship (in the equivalent of the World Series for a period in the 1890s) when it defeated the hated Orioles in the best-of-seven contest, four games to one. (The Crab performed brilliantly, igniting a first-game win with a clutch ninth-inning double and batting .450 for the series.) From 1892 to 1896, the Burkett-aided Spiders would participate in three world championship series. Through the end of the twentieth century, only two other major-league teams in Cleveland would capture the world championship, the Indians of 1920 and 1948.

Let me venture a quick word on the infamous 1899 Cleveland Spiders, who won 20 and lost 134, making it the worst team in baseball history. This club, dubbed “the Misfits” by the press, was an aberration. The owner, Frank DeHaas Robison, shipped all of his star players (including Burkett) to the St. Louis Browns (also of the National League), a rival team he now also owned, having bought them in 1899 after National League officials prevented his plan to sell the Spiders, whose home attendance Robison found too low. Burkett remained an excellent hitter in St. Louis, finishing that year at .396, a frustrating second to Delahanty’s .410 (and leaving him agonizingly close to joining Cobb, Hornsby, and Delahanty in the club of players who have hit .400 three times). The Crab did win his third batting championship, however, in 1901, when he hit for a .376 average. That summer he also led the league in hits—it was the seventh time he collected more than 200—as well as runs and total bases.

Burkett would play in St. Louis for the next three years, 1902 through 1904, but not for the same team. He signed on with the new American League team, also named the Browns (to invoke memories of the great St. Louis teams of the 1880s—by now the National League team, the former Browns, had changed their name to the Cardinals). Burkett spent 1905, his last season in the majors, close to his adopted home, Worcester, with Boston’s American League team, the future Red Sox. He was thirty-six and batting only .257 when Boston released him, ending his sixteen-year major-league career at a point when his lifetime batting average was .338, a remarkable figure that stands as a permanent testimony to his achievement.

Jesse Burkett couldn’t leave the game. He bought the Worcester club of the New England League and as player-manager led his team to four consecutive pennants, topping the league in hitting in 1906 with a .344 average. Burkett ran the team until 1915, when he managed in the Eastern League. He went on to coach at Holy Cross (1917-20) and to scout for John McGraw, the legendary manager of the New York Giants and a former rival. He returned to the big-league diamond in 1921 as a coach for McGraw. Still salty as ever, Burkett was not popular with his players. They refused to vote him a share of the World Series bonus when they won the championship.4 Burkett was back in Worcester in 1923 and would coach various teams, including Assumption College, until 1933, when he turned sixty-five.

On the field Burkett could be abrasive and short tempered, but from all accounts his disposition away from the ballyard was friendly. He was always generous when describing the talents of other ballplayers. “There were better players than me,” he acknowledged. One in particular commanded Burkett’s utmost respect: “Cobb could do anything around the plate—hit, bunt, drag the ball. He could field and throw.” On Honus Wagner: “He was quite a ballplayer, that boy. He had a good pair of hands on him.”5 Burkett made many more friends than enemies during his lifetime and counted the gentlemanly Connie Mack as his closest baseball colleague.

Burkett, who played baseball during its most roughhouse era, neither smoked nor chewed tobacco, as did so many of his contemporaries. (Heavy drinking was also widespread. Two of the most notorious drinkers of 1890s baseball—Patsy Tebeau and Lou Sockalexis—were teammates.) Drinking an occasional beer, eating vanilla ice cream, and consuming ten teaspoonfuls of sugar a day were his only vices. The Crab and the Georgia Peach displayed the same “will to win at all costs” on the field, but Burkett behaved with equanimity off the field. Unlike Cobb, he was a devoted husband and father. One of the country’s finest Little League organizations is named in his honor, befitting his reputation for kindness toward children.

During his playing days, the player who has become Cleveland’s forgotten legend enjoyed the respect and admiration of baseball fans everywhere. Jesse Burkett’s performance and personality made him impossible to ignore. Although through the Old-Timers Committee he was inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946, today only serious fans remember his name, let alone his accomplishments. As Jesse Burkett never forgot the young girl he attempted to rescue from the murky Ohio River during his childhood, let us not disregard his brilliant contribution to Cleveland’s baseball history.

 

SOURCES

Baseball-almanac.com.

Baseball-reference.com.

James, Bill. The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. New York: Villard, 1988.

“Jesse Burkett.” In Baseball’s First Stars, ed. Frederick Ivor-Campbell. Cleveland: Society for American Baseball Research, 1996.

Okrent, Daniel, and Harris Lewine, eds. The Ultimate Baseball Book. Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1981.

 

NOTES

1. The number of batting titles won by Cobb is disputable, as, according to Total Baseball and The ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia, the highest American League batting average in 1910 belongs to Nap Lajoie (at .384, with Cobb at .383), although both sources accede to MLB’s official recognition of Cobb as the batting champion that year.

2. The Historical Register, compiled by SABR members, 4th ed. (San Diego: Baseball Press Books, 1998). Some sources credit Burkett with as many as 27 wins in 1888.

3. The Historical Register. Some sources credit Burkett with as many as 39 wins in 1889.

4. He is said to have been voted out of his share again in 1922, when the Giants repeated. See Deadball Era Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research, Deadball Stars of the American League, ed. David Jones (Dulles, Va.: Potomac Books, 2006), 767.

5. Worcester Sunday Telegram, January 11, 1953.