August 10, 1883: Myron Allen returns to Kingston, Gothams rally past his old club

Myron Allen’s league-play tenure with New York’s National League club lasted a single afternoon. On July 19, 1883, the 29-year-old Kingston, New York, native started for John B. Day’s Gothams at Cleveland and pitched a complete game in defeat, allowing eight hits and five runs, only one of them earned. He never played another league game for the club.1

But on August 10, three weeks after his sole NL outing as a Gotham, Allen came back up the Hudson Valley in New York’s uniform and pitched an exhibition against the nine he had left behind.

Allen had made his name with the Kingston Leaders, the club the Kingston Daily Leader began sponsoring in 1882.2 He pitched every game of their unbeaten first season, and by 1883 the club had outgrown the city’s open commons.3 In May the Leaders opened an enclosed ground on Daniel E. Donovan’s Washington Avenue tract, and in July they added a 700-seat grandstand in time for a run of professional visitors: the Inter-State Association’s Brooklyns, the Merritts of Camden, the NL’s New Yorks, and the American Association’s Metropolitans.4

New York’s NL club came to Kingston between league games. The Gothams had played at Philadelphia on August 9 and were due back at the Polo Grounds against the same club on August 11.5 They arrived the night before and were put up at the Eagle Hotel.6 Four of New York’s regulars did not appear in the box score: catcher Buck Ewing, center fielder-pitcher John Ward, third baseman Frank Hankinson, and right fielder Mike Dorgan. Ward was one of the club’s two regular pitchers; the other, Mickey Welch, who pitched in 52 games that season, played right field against Kingston. Roger Connor played first base, Pete Gillespie left, Ed Caskin shortstop, John Troy second, Tip O’Neill center, and Gracie Pierce third, with Allen in the pitcher’s box and John Humphries behind the plate.

Kingston countered with George A. Johnston in left, Dick Johnston (no known relation) at shortstop, John G. Van Etten at second, William Dugan catching, Sam D. Gibson at first, Christy Hassett at third, Barney Whittaker in right, John Forsyth in center, and Ed Dugan pitching to his brother.7

The crowd overflowed the grounds. The grandstand was packed, and spectators swarmed every open patch around it. A 1920 retrospective in a local newspaper recalled eight policemen struggling to keep an estimated crowd of 3,000 off the field.8

The Leader’s report, the only contemporary account of the game located, does not say how most of the runs were scored. New York batted first and scored twice, though the Leaders turned a double play, putting out one man at home and another at first. Kingston answered in the bottom of the inning when Dick Johnston came home from third to make it 2–1.

Each club scored once in the second. The third inning for New York produced nothing, George Johnston making a splendid catch in left. Kingston then took the lead: Dick Johnston drove a ball hard to right, brought George Johnston home ahead of him, and came around himself for the second home run made on the grounds. Kingston led 4–3 after three innings and 6–4 after four. The fifth produced a goose egg for both sides.9

For Kingston, Dick Johnston kept his club in the game. He was 20 years old, and he worked as a printer for the Kingston Daily Freeman, the Leader’s competitor, when he was not playing shortstop for the Leader’s ballclub. He went 3-for-5 with a triple and the home run and scored three of Kingston’s seven runs.10

For five innings, there was little to distinguish New York’s NL professionals from Kingston’s local newspaper nine. The Leader reported that the New York players grew visibly tense as they found themselves trailing, and that Kingston had done itself infinite credit against “one of the best known professional nines of the country.”11

The turn came in the fifth, though it did not reach the scoreboard until the sixth. Roger Connor, who would finish the season batting .357, second in the National League, struck Ed Dugan on the arm with a batted ball. For a time it was feared Dugan was finished for the day. He resumed his position to loud applause but pitched on in severe pain, and the Leader noticed what followed: Only after the accident did New York make any headway against his delivery. The visitors scored three in the sixth for a 7–6 lead, and three more in the seventh, when Tip O’Neill, a 23-year-old rookie who would win AA batting titles with St. Louis in 1887 and 1888, hit a ball that fell into the marsh beyond the field for a home run, to lead 10–6. Four more runs in the eighth made it 14–6.12

Allen went the distance that day. He held Kingston scoreless from the fifth inning through the eighth, and the Leader, whose reporters had watched him pitch every game of Kingston’s undefeated 1882 season, judged that he had improved since leaving town. Dick Johnston tripled in the ninth and came home for the final run. New York won 14–7 in 2 hours and 35 minutes.13

The final score hid how close the first five innings had been. New York—which came in sixth in the eight-team NL in 1883, 16 games behind first-place Boston—finished with 10 hits to Kingston’s nine and each club drew one base on balls, with a smattering of errors on both sides.14

The Leaders’ bid to join the professional ranks went nowhere. Their October 1883 application to the new Union Association failed,15 and by the following spring Allen was managing Richmond’s Eastern League club, with the Dugans and Dick Johnston in tow.16 Johnston reached Boston in 1885, and a quarter century later Boston writers were still comparing his outfield play with Tris Speaker’s.17 Allen got one more National League game, with Boston in 1886, had his best season with the AA’s Cleveland Blues in 1887, and finished with Kansas City in 1888.18

He came home for good after that. Allen worked as a janitor and then as caretaker of the Kingston post office, where he was still working when he died on March 8, 1924, at 69. He was buried in an unmarked grave in Rhinebeck Cemetery.19 Four days later the Daily Freeman printed “Allen in His Palmy Days,” a remembrance from the post office staff signed by William C. DeWitt. DeWitt recalled Allen “hurling the sphere at opposing batsmen on the Donovan field” and asked who could fail to recollect “the big game between the Kingston Leaders and the Giants, with Allen pitching against his old comrades and Roger Connor at first base.” Sam Gibson, who had played first base for Kingston that afternoon, described the game for him. “Allen pitched a marvelous game,” Gibson remembered.20

By then the ballpark was gone, its ground absorbed by later development.21 What remained was the memory Gibson and DeWitt preserved: an afternoon when Allen came home in the other uniform and his old Kingston teammates led a National League club through five innings.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball Reference and Retrosheet for pertinent information. The account above rests on the contemporary report and box score in the Kingston Daily Leader of August 11, 1883, supplemented by two Kingston retrospectives: the Daily Freeman’s “3,000 People Saw Ball Game” of August 10, 1920, and William C. DeWitt’s “Allen in His Palmy Days” of March 12, 1924, which quotes the Leaders’ first baseman, Sam Gibson. Both retrospectives differ from the contemporary account in particulars; where they conflict, the 1883 report is followed.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Kevin Larkin and copy edited by Mike Eisenbath.

Photo credit: Myron Allen, Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 “Cleveland Beats New York,” New York Times, July 20, 1883: 3. Allen was born in Kingston on March 22, 1854. His line was eight innings, eight hits, five runs, one earned, three bases on balls, and no strikeouts; he batted 0-for-4. The complete game ran eight innings because Cleveland, batting last, did not need its ninth.

2 N.W. Ayer & Son, American Newspaper Annual (Philadelphia: N.W. Ayer & Son, 1884); “Ulster County: Glasco,” Kingston Weekly Leader, October 12, 1881: 1.

3 “The Leaders Victorious,” Kingston Daily Leader, June 26, 1882: 4; “Leaders vs. Chronicles,” Kingston Daily Leader, July 12, 1882: 4; “The National Game,” Kingston Daily Leader, July 7, 1882: 4; New Paltz (New York) Times, October 4, 1882: 4; John Thorn, “When Baseball Was Big in Kingston,” Thorn Pricks, May 25, 2006, http://thornpricks.blogspot.com/2006/05/when-baseball-was-big-in-kingston.html; Peter Roberts, “Kingston’s Boys of Summer: The Leaders Baseball Team of the 1880s,” Friends of Historic Kingston, September 2021, https://docs.google.com/document/d/1dZ8cbAiCjWPCNXJVitU1Es8OTbW69DwkBJ2wyB2J5sQ/edit?usp=sharing; “Base Ball Notes,” Kingston Daily Leader, July 25, 1882: 4. Roberts credits Allen with pitching every game. Thorn gives the season as 12 games; the Times item counts 11.

4 “The First Game of the Season,” Kingston Daily Leader, May 25, 1883: 5; “Leaders Against Mullens,” Kingston Daily Leader, May 29, 1883: 5; “Grand Stand for Leader Ball Grounds” and “Great Games Ahead,” Kingston Daily Leader, July 10, 1883: 5; Thorn, “When Baseball Was Big in Kingston.” The Merritts disbanded on July 21, three days before their scheduled date in Kingston. Larry Gerlach, “The Camden Merritt, New Jersey’s Premier Nineteenth-Century Baseball Team,” New Jersey Studies: An Interdisciplinary Journal 9, no. 2 (Summer 2023): 35–57, https://doi.org/10.14713/njs.v9i2.326.

5 The Gothams played at Philadelphia on August 9 and at the Polo Grounds against Philadelphia on August 11; the Kingston exhibition fell on the open date between them. New York had played 68 league games to that point.

6 “3,000 People Saw Ball Game,” Kingston Daily Freeman, August 10, 1920: 6. The 1920 retrospective names James Mutrie as the visiting club’s manager. Mutrie managed Day’s American Association Metropolitans in 1883 and did not take charge of the National League club until 1885; the Gothams were managed by John Clapp. The 1920 account appears to conflate Day’s two clubs, and the detail is not followed here.

7 “A Brilliant and Interesting Game,” Kingston Daily Leader, August 11, 1883: 6; “3,000 People Saw Ball Game.” The 1883 box score names the New York players by surname only. The 1920 retrospective differs from it in several particulars, among them the length of Allen’s time in the box and the catcher’s name; the contemporary record is followed here. Sam Gibson recalled in 1924 that New York “brought Mickey Welch along to back Myron up, if necessary.” William C. DeWitt, “Allen in His Palmy Days,” Kingston Daily Freeman, March 12, 1924: 12. Humphries’s son, the poet Rolfe Humphries, mentioned his father in “Polo Grounds,” New Yorker, August 22, 1942: 22.

8 The 1883 report describes the crowd as immense and the grandstand as packed without giving a figure, and the grandstand’s stated capacity was 700; the 1920 retrospective puts attendance at 3,000, which appears high against the seating and the later descriptions of the grounds. “A Brilliant and Interesting Game”; “Grand Stand for Leader Ball Grounds”; “3,000 People Saw Ball Game.”

9 “A Brilliant and Interesting Game.” The first home run on the grounds had been hit earlier that season by an outfielder named Cramer of the Newarks. Kingston Daily Leader, July 19, 1883: 6. O’Neill’s in the seventh, listed among the home runs in the same box score, was the third.

10 “A Brilliant and Interesting Game.” Johnston appears in the box score as R.F. Johnston, matching Richard Frederick Johnston, born in Kingston on April 6, 1863, and a printer by trade, who debuted for the Richmond Virginians of the American Association on August 12, 1884. Roberts, “Kingston’s Boys of Summer”; Thorn, “When Baseball Was Big in Kingston,” for Johnston’s work as a printer for the Freeman; John Thorn, “Dick Johnston—July 12, 1889,” Our Game (MLB.com blog), September 29, 2025, https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/dick-johnston-july-12-1889-33d6d083b7ed.

11 “A Brilliant and Interesting Game.”

12 “A Brilliant and Interesting Game.” The 1920 retrospective places the injury in the sixth inning and states that Dugan left the game, with Christy Hassett going into the box; Sam Gibson, recalling the game for DeWitt in 1924, likewise recalled a substitute pitcher, placed the injury in the eighth, and gave a final score of 13–5. DeWitt, “Allen in His Palmy Days.” The 1883 account has Dugan resuming his position and pitching on in pain, and the 1883 box score lists him as the pitcher; the contemporary record is followed here. Hassett’s eight assists at third, the highest figure in the Kingston line, is the box score’s one point of support for the later versions.

13 “A Brilliant and Interesting Game.” H.E. McKenzie scored the game.

14 “A Brilliant and Interesting Game.”

15 “Union Baseball Association: Important Meeting Held in Philadelphia Yesterday,” Washington Post, October 21, 1883: 1; “A Meeting of the New Union Association,” Philadelphia Times, October 21, 1883: 1.

16 Bruce Allardice, “Richmond Virginias Team Ownership History,” SABR Team Ownership History Project, February 2019, https://sabr.org/bioproj/topic/richmond-virginias-team-ownership-history/; Thorn, “When Baseball Was Big in Kingston.”

17 Allardice, “Richmond Virginias Team Ownership History”; Thorn, “Dick Johnston—July 12, 1889.” Thorn quotes the Boston Globe of March 1910 comparing Johnston’s outfield play with Tris Speaker’s.

18 Roberts gives Allen a .329 average with 26 stolen bases for Cleveland in 1887. That average reflects the 1887 rule that counted bases on balls as hits and at-bats: Allen’s 128 hits and 36 walks in 463 at-bats yield .329 under that rule and .276 under modern scoring, which Retrosheet and Baseball Reference apply and which is followed here. Roberts, “Kingston’s Boys of Summer.”

19 DeWitt, “Allen in His Palmy Days”; Roberts, “Kingston’s Boys of Summer,” for the burial.

20 DeWitt, “Allen in His Palmy Days.”

21 “Death on Sunday of Daniel E. Donovan,” Kingston Daily Freeman, October 10, 1910: 8.