Eddie was born in Flatbush section of Brooklyn in 1903; any chance at a career in baseball appeared over after an accident during infancy left him with a serious spinal injury. The life of the handicapped youngster was further blighted when both of his parents died in the 1918 influenza epidemic.

In 1919 Bennett’s fortunes took a dramatic turn for the better when he attended a Yankees game at the Polo Grounds. Happy Felsch, center fielder of the visiting White Sox, noticed Eddie’s smile and, sharing the superstitions of many ballplayers of the era, told teammates that “a hunchback should be lucky for him.”1 When Felsch did indeed have a good day, he and Eddie Cicotte persuaded manager Kid Gleason to hire Eddie as a batboy and unofficial mascot.

It seems most likely that these events occurred during a July 30 doubleheader, if we are to believe later accounts that the White Sox lost the first game but then rebounded in the second game. But the details don’t match exactly and there is no contemporary documentation, so Bennett’s first appearance in a major-league dugout may well have taken place on a different date.

It’s equally unclear how long he remained with the White Sox. Sportswriter Westbrook Pegler reported in 1926 that the White Sox collected $200 for Bennett at the end of the 1919 Black Sox World Series.2 But SABR researchers Jack Kavanagh and Norman Macht have noted that he does not appear in any team photos or in photos of the World Series, and suggested that Bennett probably remained with the club for only a couple of 1919 regular-season series.3

After the White Sox lost that fall’s World Series, and Felsch and Cicotte were subsequently banned for life for their role in the resulting scandal, it seemed natural to assume that Eddie Bennett’s stint in baseball had ended almost before it had begun. Instead, Bennett began to frequent Ebbets Field in 1920, and one of the Brooklyn Robins players decided that he would be a good-luck charm.

The Robins won that year’s pennant and faced Cleveland in a best-of-nine World Series. The first three games were played at Ebbets Field, and the Robins pulled out two of them. But then the series moved to Cleveland for four games, and Eddie Bennett was left behind in Brooklyn. After the Indians won four straight games to capture the championship, fingers were pointed. Bennett, it was said, had been distraught over being left behind and had put a curse on the Robins, resulting in the team’s collapse.4

This version of events may have helped Bennett gain employment as the Yankees’ mascot and batboy in 1921. While mascots and batboys had been part of baseball since the 1880s, including such notable ones as Charles “Victory“ Faust, there had never been one quite like Eddie. He remained in that dual role for almost 12 years and saw the Yankees capture seven pennants and four World Series titles.

During that time, Bennett became perhaps the best-known batboy in baseball history. As Joseph Herzberg later wrote, he “was No. 1 man, the envy of the kids, who wondered why Eddie got paid for what they considered a rare and wondrous privilege, not only of seeing a ball game free every day but of sitting on the same bench and rubbing shoulders with Ruth, Gehrig … and all the rest of the mighty men of Yankee Stadium.”5

Yet although he was the envy of many, it was impossible to begrudge Bennett his good fortune. This was not only because of his handicap, but also because he immersed himself in his duties with such single-mindedness. Bennett, as Westbrook Pegler explained, “raised the job of bat boy from a summer pastime to a solemn and responsible business.”6

Perhaps it was precisely because Eddie Bennett had no thought of hogging the limelight that he became a minor celebrity in his own right. Westbook Pegler noted in 1932: “Eddie’s picture has shown in all the papers at one time or another in the last 13 years and stories have been written around and about him on many a rainy day.”7

In almost 12 years as Yankees batboy, during which he aged from a teenager to a man of nearly 30, he never showed any sign that he viewed his job with any less reverence than the young fans who envied him. He lived with evident joy and with his heart on his sleeve, just as they would have done in his place. And, as Pegler observed, he never for a moment lost sight of the reality that the players were the show, and that his was a supporting role: “There are about 100 bats to be kept straight and counted and watched in Eddie’s job, and of course he isn’t required to carry this cord of wood onto the field and off, but only to mind his business, keep out of gossip and arguments, and mind the clubs.”8

Eddie was always the first to shake the hand of a Yankees slugger after a home run and he became integral to the rituals of many players. Ace relief pitcher Wilcy Moore insisted that Bennett catch his first warm-up toss, and many of the players allowed nobody else to handle their bats, even after Eddie was given an assistant.

One of Bennett’s closest relationships was with Babe Ruth. According to Herzberg, “Ruth used to make laughs for early comers at the Stadium by having a game of catch with Eddie. They would start ten feet or so apart, tossing the ball to each other. Ruth then would throw it about a foot above the reach of the stumpy mascot. Eddie would dutifully chase the ball, and Ruth would heave it again just high enough to elude Eddie’s fingers. Eddie would jabber angrily at the Babe, who would stare back in wide-eyed innocence, only to throw the ball over Eddie’s head once more and keep throwing it over his head until Eddie was backed up against the screen behind home plate.”9

This seems cruel to modern sensibilities, but the affection between the two men was mutual and genuine. Bennett doted on the Babe and knelt alongside him in the on-deck circle before each at-bat. He never missed an opportunity to run an errand for Ruth, such as bringing the great slugger regular dollops of bicarbonate of soda.

Ruth seems to have been just as fond of Eddie Bennett. After first meeting his future wife, Claire, it was Bennett whom he entrusted to deliver an admiring note. One of the batboy’s most treasured possessions was a baseball that had been signed by Ruth, upon which Eddie had inscribed, “This was the last ball pitched in the 1921 World Series.”

They were, Westbrook Pegler noted, “the two orphans on the Yankee ball club who made the baseball bat their weapon in life and achieved a lot of glory, each in his own way”10 And as their rapport in the on-deck circle suggested, the two men also seemed to share a deeper bond: both retained a childlike ability to openly show their emotions. Many men wished to be Babe Ruth, but Bennett was one of the few who felt no self-consciousness about his admiration for the Babe. And perhaps Ruth saw Bennett and realized that, had fate treated him differently, he might well be in the batboy’s shoes.

Another kindred spirit was pitcher Urban Shocker. When Shocker returned to the Yankees in 1925, he was unable to sleep lying down because of a serious mitral valve disorder. But the pitcher was unwilling to let any of his teammates know about his condition, so he roomed on the road with Eddie Bennett. No doubt the two men felt a special bond as a result of their respective disabilities.

Shocker died in 1928 and the next year Bennett lost another valued compatriot with the passing of longtime Yankee skipper Miller Huggins. Bennett’s emotional attachment to the Yankees was nowhere better symbolized than by Huggins’ death. While few members of the team were grief-stricken by the passing of the crusty manager, Bennett wept unashamedly throughout the evening after learning the news.

Perhaps with the passing of two close associates, Eddie Bennett sensed that his glorious run was drawing to a close. On May 19, 1932, he was hit by a taxicab and suffered a broken leg. The injury healed slowly, and he had to watch the World Series on crutches. By the following spring it was clear that he would not recover fully, and so he relinquished the job that he had loved so dearly. Yankee owner Jacob Ruppert continued to support Bennett financially, but Eddie was unable to find anything to take the place of his beloved role at Yankee Stadium.

He began drinking heavily to ease the pain from his injuries and, after a three-week bout of especially heavy drinking, died of alcoholism in his rented room on January 16, 1935. He was surrounded by memories of his glory days: “[T]he walls were covered with autographed pictures of ballplayers. Piled everywhere were gloves, bats, score cards, clippings of stories of ball games. He had a drawer full of signed baseballs.”11 Two of the centerpieces were the Ruth baseball and a team photo of the 1928 world champions with Eddie front and center.

Eddie had no known relatives, so the Yankees paid for his funeral and his burial at St. John’s Cemetery in Queens. Ruth was still abroad on a tour that had begun in Japan and unable to attend, nor did any other ballplayers. But the entire Yankees office staff, including Paul Krichell, Mark Roth, George Perry, Gene McCann, and Charlie McManus, was on hand to pay final respects to the team’s loyal mascot and batboy.

The decades since Eddie Bennett’s passing have naturally dimmed memories of him, but there are those who still remember him and they do so with genuine fondness. Legendary investor Warren Buffett used three paragraphs of his 2002 annual report to stockholders to explain why Eddie Bennett was his “managerial model.” After recapping Bennett’s career, Buffett concluded, “What does this have to do with management? It’s simple – to be a winner, work with winners. In 1927, for example, Eddie received $700 for the one-eighth World Series share voted him by the legendary Yankee team of Ruth and Gehrig. This sum, which Eddie earned by working only four days (because New York swept the Series) was roughly equal to the full-year pay then earned by batboys who worked with regular associates.”12

The message, Buffett explained, was as simple and straightforward as the unassuming way in which Bennett went about his business: “Eddie understood that how he lugged bats was unimportant; what counted instead was hooking up with the cream of those on the playing field. I’ve learned from Eddie. At Berkshire [Hathaway], I regularly hand bats to many of the heaviest hitters in American business.”13

Westbrook Pegler may have given the best concise summary of Eddie Bennett’s appeal when he wrote: “Eddie Just Minds Bats and His Own Business.” Who better than Warren Buffett to grasp that this was Eddie Bennett’s essence and use it as a model for his own approach?

Photo credit

Eddie Bennett, Library of Congress.

Sources

Berkshire Hathaway Inc., 2002 Annual Report.

Creamer, Robert W., Babe (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1974).

“Funeral Services for Eddie Bennett,” New York Times, January 20, 1935, 32.

Herzberg, Joseph, “Eddie Bennett, 31, Passes in His Room From Alcoholism; His Luck Credited for Championships as Much as Ruth’s Hits; Envy of Boy Fans,” New York Herald Tribune, January 18, 1935.

Kavanagh, Jack, and Norman Macht, Uncle Robbie (Cleveland: SABR, 1999).

Pegler, Westbrook, “Nobody’s Business,” Chicago Tribune, February 28, 1932.

Pegler, Westbrook, “The Sporting Goods,” Chicago Tribune, January 10, 1926.

Schechter, Gabriel, Victory Faust (New York: Charles April, 2000).

Smelser, Marshall, The Life That Ruth Built (New York: Quadrangle, 1975)

Steinberg, Steve, personal communications.

Notes

The future White Sox hurler was born Joseph Louis Benz in New Alsace, Indiana, on January 21, 1886, the second of four children born to Michael Benz (d. 1941) and his wife, Mary, née Wilhelm (d. 1929).1 The Benz family was of German Catholic stock, Joe’s grandfather, also named Michael, having emigrated from the Grand Duchy of Baden in 1849. Upon arriving in New Alsace, Michael the patriarch established the meat-butchering business that would sustain the Benz clan for the next three generations. In 1892 Joe’s father and two uncles relocated to Batesville, Indiana, where they opened Benz Brothers, on-premise butchers and purveyors of livestock products. The enterprise quickly prospered, affording employment to many in the extended Benz family, including young Joe.2

A strapping youth – baseball references usually list him at 6-feet-1, 194 pounds – Benz began playing baseball for the Batesville Reserves and other local nines at about the age of 14. By 1904 Joe had switched from the outfield to the mound, overpowering area competition with a fastball that earned him the moniker Blitzen (German for lightning) Benz. He also developed a serviceable curve, a knuckler, and the pitch that would become his big-league meal ticket: a quick-breaking spitball.

The date of Benz’s entry into the professional ranks is difficult to pinpoint. One account has him signing a $125-a-month contract with a White Sox scout in 1908.3 Yet local newspapers are replete with accounts of Joe pitching for Batesville that season.4 Those same sources establish that he began the 1909 season with the Clarksburg (West Virginia) Bees of the Class D Pennsylvania-West Virginia League.5 But an early-season arm injury, the first of the throwing ailments that would plague Benz’s career, prompted his release. He returned home to recuperate and was soon in the outfield for the Batesville nine.6 Thereafter, dominant pitching performances, including a 9-0 no-hitter over Aurora on June 20 and a 20-inning, 20-strikeout complete game in a 1-1 tie against the Indianapolis TTs on July 11, 1909, demonstrated that Joe’s pitching arm was again sound, and revived professional interest in him. Benz resumed his pro career in Newark, Ohio, where he posted a 10-7 record for the Newks of the Class D Ohio State League. He also played 12 games in the outfield but managed only a .202 batting average.7 By late season 1909, Benz had been promoted to the Des Moines Boosters of the Class A Western League, where, in sparing work, he made a mark sufficient to gain a roster spot for the 1910 season.8

Benz began that season with Des Moines but pitched erratically in the early going. After an ineffective relief outing against Topeka, Boosters manager George Davis traced the problem to a flaw in Joe’s spitball grip that, if corrected would “make a valuable pitcher out of Benz.”9 But after several more lackluster appearances, Benz was sold to the Green Bay Bays of the Class C Wisconsin-Illinois League.10 He started strongly in Green Bay but had to be shut down with arm trouble shortly after pitching a July 19 doubleheader shutout against Racine, winning each contest 2-0 while fanning 19. A one-hit blanking of Fond du Lac in early September, however, signaled a late-season return to form.11 Notwithstanding the demotion to Green Bay, Des Moines retained interest in Benz, including him on the reserve list submitted to Western League offices at the close of the 1910 season.12 Pitching for a woeful last-place Boosters team in 1911, Benz managed a respectable 10-10 log in 33 games before his contract was purchased by the White Sox.13

Benz made his major-league debut on August 16, 1911, relieving Doc White in an 8-1 loss to Detroit and making a favorable first impression. Sportswriter I.E. Sanborn informed readers, “Benz looked remarkably like a pitcher during the three innings that he worked. He mixed a spitter with good speed and perfect control, and apparently was cool and confident.”14 Benz notched his first win three weeks later, pitching 8⅓ sterling innings against the St. Louis Browns, again in relief of White. By campaign’s end, Joe’s record stood at 3-2, with a 2.26 ERA in 12 games. But the late-inning unsteadiness that would dog him throughout his White Sox career was early in evidence. Manager Hugh Duffy went quick to the hook with Benz, allowing him to complete only one of his six starts. Still, Benz had forged a promising beginning in Chicago, his prospects enhanced by a solid relief outing during the annual postseason series against the hated Cubs.15

Another career-long Benz characteristic manifested itself the following spring: early arrival at training camp in midseason condition. In between workouts one day, Benz assisted fellow staff contender George Mogridge’s hotel pool rescue of floundering nonswimmer Rube Peters, another young White Sox hurler. Once Peters was safe, Joe supposedly turned to Mogridge and kidded, “Why did you pull him out? Don’t you know that he’s after our jobs?”16 Early in the regular season, Benz solidified his spot on the White Sox staff, hurling a five-hit shutout of Cleveland. Promptly elevated to the starting rotation by new manager Nixey Callahan, Benz pitched well but frequently in bad luck. His 13-17 record included seven one-run losses, often the result of poor play by White Sox infielders – perhaps an occupational hazard for a spitball pitcher.17 At season’s end, Callahan told Chicago sports scribes that Benz had been “a lot better pitcher than his record shows”18 and slotted him for a start against the Cubs in the upcoming city series. But Callahan’s faith in Benz went only so far; he permitted Benz to finish only six of 31 starts during the 1912 campaign.

Joe spent the offseason in Batesville working in the family shop, a matter that, once discovered by the Chicago sports press, earned Benz the enduring nickname Butcher Boy. Reporting to spring training early and in his customary fit condition, Benz got off to a good start in 1913. Early-season work included four strikeouts of Joe Jackson in a 13-3 win over Cleveland, and a three-hit shutout of New York. But in June arm trouble reappeared. A diagnosis of torn ligaments put Joe on the sidelines for several weeks and reduced his overall season stats to 7-10 in only 151 innings. Yet, some modest postseason consolation was afforded Benz by a three-hit, 11-inning shutout of the Cubs before 27,000 fans attending the City Series. This performance apparently spurred Joe to a last-minute decision to accompany his teammates on a world exhibition tour. Organized by White Sox owner Charles A. Comiskey and New York Giants manager John McGraw, the trip would emulate the storied 1887-1888 world tour of Al Spalding’s White Stockings and become a memorable part of Joe Benz’s life.

Residents of Batesville flocked to nearby Cincinnati to see their hero start the tour’s opening game. But alas, Joe was shelled, losing 11-2.19 Playing their way to the West Coast, the teams embarked from Seattle in November 1913, and within hours Joe and the rest of the company were below decks, suffering the effects of the rough seas that their voyage would often encounter on the Pacific. Those following the tour’s progress in Chicago newspapers were subsequently regaled with satiric dispatches by Ring Lardner and others, recounting the misadventures of “Sir Joseph Benz of Batesville Manor,” the bumpkin abroad who slept through stops at exotic ports of call, became seasick while riding a camel, and was mistaken by tourists for the Sphinx.20 The good-natured Benz took the caricatures in stride, and if his mind was somewhat distracted during the tour, it was not without cause. For just before the team’s ship departed Manila, Joe had cabled a proposal of marriage to sweetheart Alice Leddy back in Chicago. Alice promptly accepted, but the nuptials had to await completion of a five-continent trip highlighted by an audience with Pope Pius IX in Rome and a command game performance for King George V of Great Britain, who reportedly enjoyed the exhibition immensely.21 The tour arrived in New York on March 8, 1914, but Benz skipped homecoming festivities and headed straight for Chicago. Two days later, family, friends, and various White Sox teammates attended the wedding of Joe and Alice at Our Lady of Mercy Chapel of Corpus Christi Church. Immediately thereafter, the newlyweds departed for the White Sox training camp in Paso Robles, California.22 Meanwhile, St. Louis Church in Batesville accepted delivery of a magnificent organ donated to the parish by Joe upon his return from overseas.23

During that spring Benz rejected overtures from the upstart Federal League; he would remain a member of the White Sox his entire major-league career. Joe began the 1914 season strongly, posting a 1-0 victory over Cleveland in his first start. Some seven weeks later, on May 31, the Naps were the victims of Benz’s masterpiece, a 6-1 no-hitter. Joe kept it going in his next outing, holding the Senators hitless until Eddie Ainsmith was credited with a disputed ninth-inning single. Among those in attendance who thought that the hit should have been scored an error was American League President Ban Johnson, who had, but chose not to exercise, the authority to change the scorer’s ruling.24 Thus, Benz had to content himself with a one-hit, 1-0 decision over nemesis Walter Johnson, the pitching master whom Benz regularly volunteered to face but rarely beat.25

Benz was the workhorse of the 1914 White Sox staff, leading the team in appearances (48) and innings pitched (283⅓) while posting a 2.26 ERA. But poor support and habitual hard luck reduced Benz’s log to 15-19 for the sixth-place White Sox. Ill fortune followed Joe in the offseason, as well. He was stricken by a serious case of typhoid fever and did not fully recover until the next spring. Benz’s belated 1915 debut, a three-hit win over the Browns, was promising, but he was not his previous self. Used more cautiously, he posted a 15-11 record with a 2.11 ERA over 238⅓ innings as the White Sox surged into the first division.

By 1916 the respect that Joe had accumulated around the American League was reflected in a preseason column penned by Browns veteran Jimmy Austin, who placed Benz among the “Six Hardest Pitchers I Ever Faced.”26 But age and recurring arm trouble were beginning to take their toll. No longer a rotation mainstay, Benz was used in spots, with starts often reserved for the Athletics and Senators, Joe’s perennial patsies. By season’s close he had logged only 142 innings, going 9-5 with a career-low 2.03 earned-run average. Joe spent the winter in Chicago, where his new Buick quickly became a familiar sight on the city streets.27 He also attended organizing sessions of a new players union but was outspoken in opposition to strike talk.28 As the 1917 season approached, there was far more consequential strife on the horizon but Joe, like fellow White Sox hurler Eddie Cicotte, was already beyond World War I draft age. Used only sporadically that year, Benz closed a 7-3 season with a complete-game six-hit win over the Washington Senators. Joe was included on the postseason roster of the pennant-winning White Sox but saw no action in the 1917 World Series conquest of the Giants. His only appearance against New York came in a post-Series soldiers’ benefit game played on Long Island. Still, Joe reveled in being a member of the new baseball champions, a joy only heightened by the arrival of Joseph Louis Benz, Jr., born at home in Chicago on November 10, 1917.

Despite being set back by a severe winter cold that worsened into pneumonia, Benz maintained his practice of being an early arrival in training camp for the 1918 season. Hampered by a hand injury and ineffective in his initial outings, Joe startled his teammates by announcing that he was abandoning his now unreliable spitter.29 Second thoughts quickly set in and days later Benz threw a spitball-aided complete game at the Browns. The last highlight of Benz’s big- league career came in late July, when he whitewashed Johnson and the Senators, winning 1-0 without striking out a single batter in 13 innings. Benz finished the 1918 season at 8-8, with a 2.63 ERA in 154 innings.

With World War I shortening the season, Joe returned to an offseason job in a Chicago steel mill. And like a multitude of other idled MLB players, he hooked up with local semipro teams, pitching into the late fall. The following season, Benz broke camp with the White Sox but made only a single 1919 appearance, a two-inning relief stint. He was released by the Sox in mid-May after refusing assignment to Kansas City of the American Association.30 His final major-league mark was 77-75, with 17 shutouts and a lifetime 2.43 ERA in 1,359⅔ innings – a record Benz would always take justifiable pride in.

The end of his major-league career did not sever Benz’s connection to baseball. For the remainder of the year he pitched on weekends for various Chicago area semipro teams. In the meantime the White Sox, sparked by the play of soon-to-be-banished Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson, Buck Weaver, Lefty Williams, et al, captured the American League flag. While the games of the infamous 1919 World Series were in progress, Benz served as the featured attraction at the Auditorium Theater, where ticketless White Sox fans could follow game action on an electronic scoreboard.31 Thereafter, Benz spent several more summers pitching in the Chicago semipro ranks. The years after he hung up the glove entirely were largely happy ones, the arrival of daughter Rita in 1922 making the Benz family complete. Benz lived a modest but comfortable life, supporting the family as a tavern owner, stationary engineer, surveyor, and church custodian.

In January 1927 he was briefly back in the news, one of the many former White Sox players summoned to Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis’s inquiry into Swede Risberg’s claim that the White Sox had bribed the Tigers during the 1917 pennant chase. Benz branded the allegation “absolutely, a lie.”32 Ultimately, Landis came to the same conclusion, taking no action in the matter. 

During the 1930s Benz periodically suited up for old-timers’ games at Comiskey Park and during World War II was active in support of the war effort, once helping to sell $721,000 in War Bonds between games of a White Sox-Yankees doubleheader.33 Notoriety of a different sort attached to a 1939 court appearance during which his position as custodian of St. Killian’s Church obliged him to testify against a young man accused of theft from the poorbox. Although it had been 20 years since Benz had pitched for the Sox, Judge Joseph Hermes immediately recognized him and fondly reminisced about seeing Joe and his mates play – before dispatching the miscreant to jail for six months.34

For the remainder of his life, Joe operated a neighborhood tavern near Comiskey Park and was frequently in attendance at Chicago sports banquets, usually seated with old friends Red Faber and Ray Schalk. In January 1954 Benz was the guest of honor at the annual dinner of the Pitch and Hit Club, and the butt of genial gibes by featured speaker Lefty Gomez.35 In February 1957 Joe and old White Sox pals were together again at the yearly winter fete of the Chicago Old Timers, a local baseball organization of which Benz was a vice president. Two months later he was felled by a stroke. Benz died in Chicago on April 22, 1957. He was 71 and was survived by his wife, children, and brother Mike.36 A good pitcher and a kindly man, Joe Benz’s passing was noted sadly by the baseball world.37 He rests with family in Chicago’s Holy Sepulchre Cemetery.

Notes

Cicotte once estimated that 75 percent of the pitches he threw were knuckleballs. The rest of the time the right-hander relied on a fadeaway, slider, screwball, spitter, emery ball, shine ball, and a pitch he called the “sailor,” a rising fastball that “would sail much in the same manner of a flat stone thrown by a small boy.”2 Whether he was sailing or sinking the ball, shining it or darkening it, the 5-foot-9, 175-pound Cicotte had more pitches than a traveling salesman. “Perhaps no pitcher in the world has such a varied assortment of wares in his repertory as Cicotte,” The Sporting News observed in 1918. “He throws with effect practically every kind of ball known to pitching science.”3

But the most famous pitch Cicotte ever threw was the one that nailed Cincinnati Reds leadoff man Morrie Rath squarely in the back to lead off the 1919 World Series, a pitch that signaled to the gamblers that the fix was on. After confessing to his role in the scandal one year later, Cicotte was banned from the game for life, a punishment that perhaps denied the 209-game-winner a spot in the Hall of Fame.

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

Edgar Victor Cicotte (pronounced SEE-cot)4 was born on June 19, 1884, in Springwells, Michigan, a former township in the Detroit metropolitan area, into a family of French heritage. He was the son of Ambrose and Archangel (Drouillard) Cicotte. Eddie’s brother, Alva, was the grandfather of Al Cicotte, who pitched in the major leagues for five seasons from 1957 to 1962. By the time Eddie was 16 years old, his father had died, forcing his mother to support her large family as a dressmaker. Leaving school early, Eddie took up work as a boxmaker to help pay the family bills.

Cicotte began his baseball career, according to some sources, as early as 1903, playing semipro ball in the Upper Peninsula of Michigan. In 1904 he pitched for Calumet (Michigan) and Sault Ste. Marie (Ontario) in the Northern Copper League, posting a record of 38-4 with 11 shutouts.5 Based on that dominating performance, Cicotte earned a tryout with the Detroit Tigers in the spring of 1905. The Tigers determined that he wasn’t ready for the majors, and optioned him to Augusta (Georgia) of the South Atlantic League, where he compiled a record of 15 wins against 9 losses, and brawled with his young teammate Ty Cobb after a Cobb stunt cost Cicotte a shutout. As a joke Cobb had taken popcorn with him to his position in center field and as a result committed an error that led to a run.6 This incident notwithstanding, among his teammates Cicotte was known as an easygoing prankster who enjoyed a good laugh.

Near the end of the season Detroit brought Cicotte up and he made his major-league debut on September 3, 1905, allowing one run in relief and getting tagged with the loss in a 10-inning game. Two days later Cicotte earned his first major-league win, a complete-game victory over the Chicago White Sox. He finished the year 1-1 with a 3.50 ERA, but would not return to the major leagues for another three seasons.

Cicotte began 1906 with Indianapolis of the American Association, where he posted a 1-4 record in 72 innings before landing with Des Moines of the Western League. Cicotte blossomed with his new team, registering an 18-9 record. The following season he pitched for Lincoln, also of the Western League, going 21-14. Impressed by the young hurler’s arsenal of pitches, the Boston Red Sox purchased Cicotte’s contract for $2,500 at the end of the 1907 season.

During his five-year stint with the Red Sox, Cicotte lost nearly as many games as he won, and frequently found himself in trouble with Red Sox owner John I. Taylor, who accused the pitcher of underachieving. “He was suspended without pay so much of the time that it was like having no job,” the Chicago Tribune’s Sam Weller wrote of Cicotte’s Boston career.7 On a club that consistently failed to meet expectations, Cicotte often became the scapegoat, and in 1911 Taylor tried to secure waivers on his inconsistent pitcher, only to pull back when another team made a claim. “[Taylor] wouldn’t like the way I was working, or perhaps the opposition had made one or two hits,” Cicotte later charged. “Taylor never liked me; I never liked him, and it was seldom that I went through a game without having him comment upon it.”8

After Cicotte started the 1912 season with a 1-3 record and a 5.67 ERA in six starts, the Red Sox, though no longer owned by Taylor, had finally seen enough. On July 22 the team sold Cicotte’s contract to the Chicago White Sox, where the 28-year-old right-hander began to mature into one of the game’s best pitchers. With Boston, Cicotte had won 52 games and lost 46. Over the next 8½ seasons with the White Sox, he won 156 games against 101 losses.

The biggest reason for this improvement was Cicotte’s gradual mastery of his expansive pitching repertoire. As his command over his knuckleball improved, Cicotte’s walk rate dramatically decreased; from 1912 to 1920 he ranked among the league’s 10 best in fewest walks per nine innings seven times, leading the league in 1918 and 1919, when he walked 89 in 572⅔ innings.

Cicotte also fully exploited the era’s liberal regulations regarding the doctoring of the ball. In this area, his most infamous pitch was the shine ball, in which he rubbed one side of the ball against the pocket of his right trouser leg, which had been filled with talcum powder.

Flustered opponents protested to American League President Ban Johnson that the pitch should be outlawed, but Johnson ruled the pitch legal in 1917, and it would remain so until February 1920. Thanks to the knuckleball, the shine ball, the emery ball (ruled illegal by Johnson in early 1915), and other trick pitches, Cicotte struck out a fair number of batters, placing in the top 10 in strikeouts per nine innings three times, even though his fastball probably couldn’t break a plane of glass. Asked to explain his success, Cicotte chalked it up to “head work,” adding, “It involves an ability to adapt pitching to certain conditions when they arise and perhaps use altogether different methods in the very next inning.”9

In 1913 Cicotte enjoyed his first standout season in the major leagues, posting an 18-11 record to go along with a 1.58 ERA, second best in the American League. That offseason, Pittsburgh of the newly formed Federal League attempted to sign Cicotte, but White Sox owner Charles Comiskey was able to secure the pitcher’s loyalty through a three-year contract. In the first year of his contract, Eddie managed only an 11-16 record, although his 2.04 ERA was fifth best in the league. After a mediocre 13-12 campaign in 1915, Cicotte finally hit his stride in 1916, when he split time between the starting rotation and bullpen, posted a 1.78 ERA, won 15 out of 22 decisions, and had what today would be five saves. (The statistic hadn’t been invented yet.)

The following year, 1917, Cicotte moved back to the starting rotation and enjoyed the best season of his career, as the White Sox captured their first pennant in 11 seasons. Cicotte led the way, ranking first in the league in wins (28), ERA (1.53), and innings pitched (346⅔). Eddie also tossed seven shutouts, including a no-hitter against the St. Louis Browns on April 14, the first of six no-hitters pitched in the major leagues that season. In that year’s World Series, Cicotte contributed one win to Chicago’s six-game triumph over the New York Giants. He was, according to Grantland Rice, “the most feared pitcher of the series.”10

After Cicotte’s breakthrough season, Comiskey offered his star pitcher a $5,000 contract, with a $2,000 signing bonus, making him one of the highest compensated pitchers in baseball.11 But Cicotte failed to produce an encore suitable to his dominant 1917 campaign, as he wrenched his ankle in early May, and limped his way through the season to a mediocre 2.77 ERA and 19 losses, tied for the most in the league. It was not a performance to inspire Comiskey to hand out a raise, and when the 1919 season began, financial troubles were weighing heavily on Cicotte. According to the 1920 Census, Cicotte was the head of household for a family of 12, including his wife, Rose; their three children; his wife’s parents; Eddie’s brother and wife; and a brother-in-law and his wife and child. To make room for his large family, Cicotte took out a $4,000 mortgage on a Michigan farm.12

Cicotte regained his 1917 form, pitching the White Sox to their second pennant in three years. Once again, Eddie led the American League in victories (29) and innings pitched (306⅔, tied with Jim Shaw). His 29-7 record was good enough to lead the league in winning percentage (.806), and his 1.82 ERA ranked second. In early September, first baseman Chick Gandil and infielder Fred McMullin approached Cicotte about throwing the World Series. After thinking it over, Eddie agreed to the scheme, telling Gandil privately, “I would not do anything like that for less than $10,000.” Three days before the Series began, Cicotte demanded to have the money in hand before the team left for Cincinnati. That night, he found $10,000 under his pillow.13

Contrary to conventional wisdom, Cicotte’s abysmal performance in the 1919 World Series was not a complete surprise to informed observers. Throughout September, reports surfaced that the overworked Cicotte was suffering from a sore shoulder. Prior to the first game of the Series, Christy Mathewson noted, Cicotte “has had less than a week [actually two days] to rest up for his first start. … And that may not prove to be enough. If he blows up for a single inning it may cost the White Sox the championship, for I think the first battle is going to have a very strong bearing on the outcome, especially if the Reds win it.”14

With at least six of his other teammates in on the fix, Cicotte led the way in blowing the first game, surrendering seven hits and six runs in 3⅔ innings of work, and fueling Cincinnati’s winning rally by throwing slowly to second base on what should have been an inning-ending double-play ball. The performance was so bad that it generated renewed speculation that Cicotte was suffering from a “dead arm.”

For his second start, in Game Four, with the White Sox trailing two games to one, Eddie pitched more effectively, holding the Reds to just five hits and two unearned runs, both coming in the fifth inning on two Cicotte errors, including one inexplicable play in which he muffed an attempt to cut off a throw from the outfield, allowing the ball to go to the backstop and letting a Cincinnati runner – who had already stopped at third – score. The miscues were enough to ensure that the White Sox lost the game, 2-0. Afterward, Chicago manager Kid Gleason declared, “They shouldn’t have scored on Cicotte in 40 innings. … There wasn’t any occasion for Cicotte to intercept that throw. He did it to prevent [Larry] Kopf from going to second. But Kopf had no more intention of going to second than I have of jumping in the lake.”15

Though Eddie had received his $10,000 before the start of the Series, many of his fellow conspirators had not received the money promised them by the gamblers, so before Cicotte’s third start, in Game Seven of the best-of-nine Series, the players decided to play the game to win. Accordingly, Cicotte put forth his best effort of the Series, allowing just one run on seven hits in a 4-1 Chicago victory. Lefty Williams threw the following game, however, giving Cincinnati the world championship. In the wake of Chicago’s defeat, Mathewson publicly tossed aside rumors that the Series had been fixed, saying, “No pitcher could guarantee to toss a game. … Even if a pitcher should let the other side get two or three runs before he was yanked, he could not guarantee that the other side wouldn’t come up the next inning and make four or five. That wipes out any single pitcher and leaves the proposition of fixing on a club. This can’t be done.”16

Despite the persistent rumors that swirled around the club that offseason, Cicotte re-signed with Chicago for 1920, and put forth another excellent season, posting a 21-10 record with a 3.26 ERA. That summer Babe Ruth electrified the sport with his 54 home runs for the New York Yankees, but Cicotte grabbed a few headlines of his own after he stymied Ruth in several encounters. Asked to explain his success, the crafty Cicotte allowed that he mixed up his pitches and relied heavily on the spitball, because the pitch was “hard to hit for a long clout.”17

Before the season, the spitball and other doctored pitches, including Cicotte’s famous shine ball, had been banned from baseball. Although a number of established spitball pitchers were given a one-year exemption from the rule, Cicotte was not one of them.

On September 27, 1920, the Philadelphia North American ran a story in which Billy Maharg, one of the gamblers in on the Series fix the previous fall, testified to his role in the affair, and specifically named Cicotte as the man who initiated the plot. The next day, Eddie met with White Sox counsel Alfred Austrian and admitted to his role in the scandal. He also implicated seven of his teammates.18 Afterward, he went to the Cook County Courthouse and repeated his story for a grand jury charged with investigating corruption in baseball. The grand jury responded to Cicotte’s testimony by indicting all eight of the “Black Sox” players for throwing the 1919 World Series.

In front of the grand jury, Cicotte testified that he began to have second thoughts during the Series. After losing Game One, he was “sick all night” in the hotel and told roommate Happy Felsch, “Happy, it will never be done again.” He also said that he tried his best to win Game Four, claiming “I didn’t care whether I got shot out there the next minute. I was going to win the ball game and the series.” But he never offered to return the gamblers’ money. “I couldn’t very well do that,” he admitted.19

Though he and the other seven accused players were acquitted of conspiracy charges the following year, Eddie Cicotte’s major-league baseball career ended with his confession. For the next three years he played with several of his banned teammates for outlaw teams in Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, but by 1924 Cicotte had moved on with his life.20 He worked as a Michigan game warden and managed a service station before finding a job with the Ford Motor Company, where he remained until his retirement in 1944.

During the last 25 years of his life, Cicotte raised strawberries on a 5½-acre farm near Farmington, Michigan. In an interview with Detroit sportswriter Joe Falls in 1965 he said he lived his life quietly, answering letters from youngsters who sometimes asked about the scandal. He agreed that he had made mistakes, but insisted that he had tried to make up for it by living as clean a life as he could. “I admit I did wrong,” he said, “but I’ve paid for it the past 45 years.”21 Falls seemed to agree, noting that as he prepared to leave Cicotte’s home, he looked at Eddie’s socks. They were white.

Eddie Cicotte died on May 5, 1969, at Henry Ford Hospital in Detroit. His death certificate listed his occupation as baseball player, Chicago White Sox. He was buried in Park View Cemetery in Livonia, Michigan.

An updated version of this biography appeared in “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (SABR, 2015). This biography originally appeared in “Deadball Stars of the American League” (Potomac Books, 2006).

Sources

Asinof, Eliot, Eight Men Out (New York: Henry Holt and Company, 1987).

Falls, Joe, Interview with Eddie Cicotte. Detroit Free Press, December 4, 1965.

Lardner, Ring, Chicago Examiner. July 21, 1912.

MacFarlane, Paul, ed., Daguerreotypes. The Sporting News, 1981.

Stump, Al, Cobb (New York: Algonquin Books, 1996).

findagrave.com.

Obituary, The Sporting News. May 24, 1969.

Michigan Death Certificate.

Obituary, New York Times. May 9, 1969.

1880 Wayne County, Michigan, Federal Census.

1920 Wayne County, Michigan, Federal Census.

1930 Wayne County, Michigan, Federal Census.

ancestry.com.

The Sporting News, February 23, 1933, 8.

retrosheet.org.

Contract card, National Baseball Library, Hall of Fame.

Washington Post, August 24, 1906; August 24, 1907; March 8, 1908; April 15, 1917.

New York Times, April 15, 1917.

Sporting Life, February 21, 1914.

Kermisch, Al, “From a Researcher’s Notebook.” Baseball Research Journal #23 (Cleveland: SABR, 1994.)

Chicago Daily Tribune, August 27, 1906.

baseball-reference.com.

Notes

An Ivy League graduate, Collins was one of the smartest players of his day, and he knew it. Saddled with the nickname “Cocky” from early in his career, Collins drew the resentment of teammates for his self-confidence and good breeding that at times seemed as though it belonged more in a ballroom than a baseball clubhouse. Perhaps for this reason, contradiction and complexity became a recurring theme throughout his 25-year major-league career. He made his major-league debut under an alias and later served as captain of the most infamous team in baseball history, the 1919 Chicago White Sox. He won an award recognizing him as the most valuable player in the league, only to be sold off to another club in the subsequent offseason. Despite his upper-class origins and education, Collins abided by a litany of superstitions, although he insisted he was “not superstitious, just thought it unlucky not to get base hits.”1

Edward Trowbridge Collins was born on May 2, 1887, in Millerton, New York, the son of railroad freight agent John Rossman Collins and Mary Meade (Trowbridge) Collins. When Eddie was 8 months old, the Collins family moved to Tarrytown, New York, in the Hudson Valley 30 miles north of New York City. Young Collins registered at the Irving School in Tarrytown for the fourth grade in 1895. By legend, he played ball there that afternoon, and continued smashing hits for Irving through the spring of 1903, when he graduated from the prep school. That fall he entered Columbia University. Though a slight 135 pounds, the precocious 16-year-old quarterbacked the freshman football team and later one season on the varsity before the school dropped football entirely – “At that time,” Collins recalled, “I liked football better than I liked baseball”2 – and was the starting shortstop for the college nine.

Shortly after beginning his amateur athletic career at Columbia, Collins began picking up paying gigs on the side. In 1904 he pitched for the Tarrytown Terrors for $1 per game. He also performed for a Red Hook (New York) squad, drawing closer to $5 a contest. In the summer of 1906, Eddie played for a succession of semipro clubs – in Plattsburgh, Rutland, and Rockville – before his professional career was discovered, thus invalidating his senior year of eligibility at Columbia. The summer was not to be a total loss, however. While honeymooning, Andy Coakley, a pitcher with the Philadelphia Athletics, happened to see Collins playing for Rutland. Coakley sent word of the youngster to Connie Mack, who dispatched backup catcher Jimmy Byrnes to develop an in-depth scouting report.3 When Byrnes confirmed the pitcher’s observations, Mack signed Collins to a 1907 contract, but not before Collins obtained a written promise that Mack would not send him to the minor leagues without his consent. John McGraw, manager of the New York Giants, had been aware of the budding prospect but declined to offer him a trial.

At Connie Mack’s suggestion, Collins made his major-league debut under the alias of Eddie T. Sullivan on September 17, 1906, at Chicago’s South Side Park. “I put on a uniform that did not fit me too well,” he recalled later. “Gosh, I weighed about only 140 pounds. I was self-conscious among all those big fellows – men like [Rube] Waddell, whom I had read so much about.”4 He played that first game at shortstop behind the future Hall of Famer Waddell, who completely subdued Eddie in batting practice. Nonetheless, “Sullivan” managed to reach Chicago’s Big Ed Walsh for a bunt single in his first at-bat. Six fielding chances were executed flawlessly that day, though Eddie’s tenure at short was not to last.

Having played six games with the Athletics, Collins was back in class at Columbia shortly after the Mackmen completed their Western tour. On March 26, 1907, the day of Columbia’s opening game, Collins ran out to take the field at shortstop before being informed that the University Committee on Athletics at Columbia had ruled him ineligible for the 1907 season – not because of his time with the Athletics, which wasn’t revealed publicly until years later, but because he had been paid to play with semipro teams in Plattsburgh and Rockville. Still, Eddie’s game smarts earned him the unprecedented position of undergraduate assistant coach for the Lions’ 1907 squad. By this time, the baseball bug had a firm hold on Collins and the youngster postponed his plans for a legal career to rejoin the Athletics after graduation in 1907, appearing in 14 games for Philadelphia that summer.

Collins became a regular player in the majors in 1908. That first full season, he split time at five positions: shortstop, second base, and all three outfield spots, hitting .273 in 102 games. He converted to second base full-time in 1909, pushing Danny Murphy to right field, and from there his remarkable career took wing. It was no small coincidence that when Collins became the starting second baseman, the team also took off. Eddie played every game in 1909, hitting .347 as the club rose to second, chasing the pennant-winning Tigers to the wire. The young second sacker finished second in the circuit in hits, walks, steals, and batting average, and placed third in the league in runs, total bases, and slugging. He led all second basemen in putouts, assists, double plays, and fielding average.

In 1910 the club broke through, winning the first of four pennants in a five-year stretch by a convincing 14½ games. Eddie led the American League in steals, was third in hits and RBIs, and fourth in batting, while leading in most fielding categories. Philadelphia dusted the Cubs in five games to give Connie Mack his first World Series title. Collins was the star of the Series, batting .429 and hitting safely in each contest. His play in Game Two, when he had three hits, stole two bases, and made several outstanding defensive plays, confirmed his status as one of the American League’s top stars.5 A month after the championship was secured, Eddie married Mabel Doane, whose father was a close friend of Connie Mack’s; Mack himself had introduced them. Collins and Mack had a standing bet as to who would get married first, which Mack won by a week. The Collinses remained married for more than 30 years until Mabel’s death in 1943.

In 1911 the A’s, with the “$100,000 Infield” of Home Run Baker, Jack Barry, Collins, and Stuffy McInnis now intact, repeated as world champs, besting Detroit by 13½ games, and downing John McGraw’s Giants in six. After finishing fourth in hitting (.365) during the year and leading the league’s second basemen in putouts, Collins had a modest Series, batting .286 with three errors. Still, the A’s had successfully defended their championship and, Collins, just 24, had experienced little but success in his few years of prep, collegiate, and professional play.

Collins’s plainly evident self-confidence could rub people the wrong way. As educated and ostensibly sophisticated as he was, cockiness could lead to actions that in hindsight at least were not entirely smart. During the Athletics’ championship run, some of his teammates groused about Collins’s loyalties and priorities. Collins, like other baseball stars such as Ty Cobb and Christy Mathewson, was often commissioned by newspapers and magazines to write articles on the inner workings of the game. Some A’s players argued that other teams were able to correct the weaknesses Collins had pointed out in his articles, thereby hurting Philadelphia’s chances at winning the pennant. In 1912 Collins led the league in runs and posted a .348 average with 63 stolen bases, but the dissension in the clubhouse was at least in part attributable to the gifted second baseman, and the A’s finished out of first place. The anti-Collins faction in the A’s clubhouse was led by backup catcher Ira Thomas, whom Mack named his field captain in 1914 spring training.

The bright, confident, and successful Collins was given to a litany of less than “rational” practices and observances. At the plate he kept his gum on his hat button until two strikes, then would remove it and commence chewing. He loathed black cats, and would walk or drive out of his way to avoid crossing paths with one. If he saw a load of barrels, he believed he’d make one or two hits that day. Finding a hairpin meant a single, two hairpins a double. Scraps of paper littering the dugout steps drove him crazy. He would refrain from changing game socks during a winning streak, and as player-manager for the White Sox is said to have fired a clubhouse man for acting in violation of this practice. He believed it lucky to have someone spit on his hat before a game. Each winter Collins soaked his bats in oil, dried them out, and rubbed them down with a bone. This practice became the stuff of lore, as it has even been said that he buried his bats in cow dung piles to “keep ’em alive.” On the more practical side, he would wear heavier shoes as spring approached so that his feet would feel lighter when the season opened.

Known as a gentleman off the field, the brainy star gave grudging quarter at best between the foul lines. Hard-nosed play around the bag invited like responses and incurred the enmity of some. One such encounter in 1912 would have long-term consequences. An unflinching tag by Eddie broke the nose of Washington first baseman Chick Gandil. Chick’s teammate Clyde Milan witnessed the play and noted that “for the rest of his playing career, Gandil was out to get even. He went into the bag against Collins 200 times I guess, and always got the worst of it.”6

In 1913 the A’s returned to form, winning their third World Series, in five games over the Giants, as Collins hit .421, with five runs, three RBIs, and three steals. His standout autumn followed a regular campaign that featured 55 steals, 73 RBIs, and a robust .345 average. In 1914 the A’s repeated as American League champs, and Collins was honored as the Chalmers Award winner, given to the league’s most valuable player. Unfortunately, the bat that drove in 85 runs and registered a .344 clip was utterly absent in the Series. Philadelphia was stunned in four straight by the “Miracle Braves,” with Collins batting .214.

In the aftermath of the upset, his team’s harmony fractured by overtures from the Federal League, Connie Mack began to clean house in Philadelphia. On December 8, 1914, Collins was sold to the Chicago White Sox for a reported $50,000. As part of the deal, the White Sox agreed to pay Collins a salary of $15,000 per year, plus a signing bonus of $10,000.7 By 1919 his salary was still more than double that of any of his Chicago teammates.8

The White Sox had spent the first half of the 1910s languishing between fourth place and sixth place. Collins’s tenure in Chicago lasted 12 years. For all 12 seasons, he was a genuine star. For the last two-plus years, he was player-manager. During Collins’s first year in Chicago, the great Cleveland outfielder Joe Jackson joined the club via trade with 45 games remaining in the campaign. Though by skill they were peers, there was little evidence of friendship or social interaction between the two stars. The educated and savvy Collins may have intimidated his illiterate teammate.

A sub-.500 team in 1914, the White Sox steadily rose in the standings. The 1915 club finished third, besting the .600 mark with 93 wins. Collins was second in the league in batting, led in walks, was third in steals, and was fifth in total bases while leading second basemen in both assists and fielding average. In 1916 the White Sox chased the Red Sox all summer, finishing a mere two games back. Collins led the league’s second basemen in double plays and fielding average, while on the offensive side of the ledger he was second in triples, third in walks, and fourth in steals. In 1917 the White Sox won the pennant by a convincing nine games, with 100 wins for a .649 percentage. Though Collins’s average dipped to .289, he led second basemen in putouts, and was second in the circuit in steals and walks.

In that year’s fall classic, Collins enjoyed his third great World Series, with a .409 average, and scored the first run in the sixth and final game by outthinking the Giants defense. Though immortalized as the “Heinie Zimmerman boner,” it was actually catcher Bill Rariden, first baseman Walter Holke, and pitcher Rube Benton who were the real goats. In a rundown between third base and home plate, Rariden allowed Collins to slip past him, and Holke and Benton neglected to cover home. With a foot pursuit his only option, the lumbering Zimmerman failed to catch Collins as he slid across the plate with what proved to be the Series-winning run. “In a World’s Series game, when you see a base uncovered you run for it,” Collins later recalled. “Believe me, I didn’t waste any time on that play. … At least two, possibly three other men could have covered the plate on that play. Why they didn’t I’ll never know.”9

Like many other players, Collins’s 1918 campaign was cut short by US involvement in the Great War. On August 19, 1918, Collins joined the Marine Corps, missing the final 16 games of the season. His decision to enlist in the military was greeted with patriotic fanfare – unlike his teammates Joe Jackson, Lefty Williams, and Byrd Lynn, who were harshly criticized for taking war-essential jobs in the shipyards. Collins’s actual service wasn’t much different from theirs, consisting mainly of drills and guard duty at the Philadelphia Naval Yard, but he received a Good Conduct Medal and was honorably discharged on February 6, 1919, in time for spring training.

As the great White Sox team coalesced, it became ever more socially segmented. When Chick Gandil had arrived before the 1917 season, the calcification of some of these divisions was pretty much assured. There was resentment, right or wrong, of owner Comiskey’s penny-pinching ways, and Gandil’s pre-existing bitterness towards Collins helped to focus some of the discontent on the captain. Collins came to represent management, and his status as one of Commy’s favorites further poisoned the atmosphere. Of all the performers in this ill-fated cast, Collins was sharp enough to have sensed the malignant potential. Perhaps his privileged status, his seemingly unbroken record of personal success, and the team’s burgeoning success combined to help dull such sensitivity.

One might expect that if Collins were so aware and adept at the multidimensions of leadership, he might have sensed and tried to mitigate intrasquad tensions. The superficial machismo of clubhouse camaraderie should not have been too significant a hurdle for a well-bred, broadly experienced, established star. The distinct cliques among the 1919 White Sox might have been immutable, but few were better equipped than Collins to initiate the select one-to-one rapprochements that might have modulated such tensions.

The 1919 White Sox finished with a record of 88-52 for a .629 percentage, besting Cleveland by 3½ games. Collins hit .319 and drove in 80 runs while leading second basemen in putouts and finishing second in double plays. The 1919 White Sox were the greatest he ever saw because, in part, they won despite widening dissension: “(The club) was torn by discord and hatred during much of the ’19 season,” Collins later said. “From the moment I arrived at training camp from service, I could see that something was amiss. We may have had our troubles in other years, but in 1919 we were a club that pulled apart rather than together. There were frequent arguments and open hostility. All the things you think – and are taught to believe – are vital to the success of any athletic organization were missing from it, and yet it was the greatest collection of players ever assembled, I would say.”10

Over the years Collins was inconsistent when discussing what he knew about his teammates’ plot to throw World Series games, as well as when he knew it. After the scandal was first exposed in the fall of 1920, Collins was quoted in Collyer’s Eye, a small gamblers’ newspaper, as saying, “there wasn’t a single doubt in my mind” as early as the first inning of Game One that the games were being thrown. Collins added, “If the gamblers didn’t have (Buck) Weaver and (Eddie) Cicotte in their pocket then I don’t know a thing about baseball” – and that he told “all this” to owner Charles Comiskey (which Comiskey always denied).11 Years later, Collins changed his story considerably. “I was to be a witness to the greatest tragedy in baseball’s history – and I didn’t know it at the time,” he told Jim Leonard of The Sporting News in 1950.12

After the scandal gutted the club, Collins still starred. He was one of the few bright lights for the decimated White Sox in the early 1920s. He filled in as player-manager for 27 games during the 1924 season and assumed the role full-time for the 1925 and 1926 campaigns. The club finished fifth in each of his full years at the helm. Injuries cut into his playing time in both of these seasons. Deposed as White Sox manager on November 11, 1926, Collins was released as a player two days later. He signed with Philadelphia six weeks later, and emerged as a solid pinch-hitter in 1927. From 1928 through 1930 he mostly coached, finally playing his last game at age 43 on August 5, 1930.

Collins concluded his career with a .333 batting average, 1,821 runs scored, 3,315 hits, and 741 steals, figures that assured his induction into the Hall of Fame in 1939, as one of the original 13 players honored by the baseball writers upon the museum’s opening. Also in 1939, Eddie Collins Jr. made his debut with the Athletics, where he would spend three seasons as a light-hitting outfielder. Collins’s other son, the Rev. Paul Collins, officiated his father’s marriage to his second wife, Emily Jane Hall, in 1945.

Collins coached full-time for Philadelphia in 1931 and 1932 before joining the Boston Red Sox as vice president and general manager when fellow Irving schooler Tom Yawkey purchased the team in early 1933. Collins remained with the Red Sox for the rest of his life, and in one notable scouting trip to California signed two future Hall of Famers, Bobby Doerr and Ted Williams. But his most notable act as general manager may have been his failure to pursue and sign Jackie Robinson after Robinson and two other Negro League players tried out for the Red Sox. Facing pressure from local press and politicians, Collins and Yawkey had offered the sham tryout only reluctantly, and their failure to take Robinson and the other black prospects seriously resulted in the Red Sox becoming the last team to integrate instead of the first.

Due to deteriorating health, Collins turned over the general manager’s reins to Joe Cronin after the 1947 season but remained as vice president. A cerebral hemorrhage in August 1950 left Eddie partially paralyzed and visually impaired. Devoutly religious throughout his life, he succumbed to complications from cardiovascular disease on Easter Sunday evening, March 25, 1951, at age 63. He was buried in Linwood Cemetery in Weston, Massachusetts, and was survived by his wife and two sons.

An updated version of this biography appeared in “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (SABR, 2015). This biography originally appeared in “Deadball Stars of the American League” (Potomac Books, 2006).

Sources

Asinof, Eliot. Eight Men Out (New York: Henry Holt, 1988).

The Baseball Encyclopedia, Eighth Edition (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1990).

Bryant, Howard. Shut Out: A Story of Race and Baseball in Boston. (New York: Routledge, 2002).

Eddie Collins player file, National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, New York.

Huhn, Rick. Eddie Collins: A Baseball Biography (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2008).

Ritter, Lawrence. The Glory of Their Times (New York: Collier Books, 1971).

Verral, Charles S. The Mighty Men of Baseball (New York: Aladdin Books, 1955).

Notes

The names of baseball’s most famous lineups are familiar: Murderers’ Row, the Big Red Machine, the Black Sox. The people who make up those lineups are familiar, too: Ruth, Rose, Shoeless Joe.

However, even baseball’s most prominent teams include men more or less forgotten to history. Of the nine men in the starting lineup for the American League champion Chicago White Sox in Game One of the 1919 World Series, only one did not end up either banished from baseball for life or elected to the Hall of Fame. His name is Shano Collins.

John Francis Collins was born on December 4, 1885, in Charlestown, a Boston neighborhood with a heavy Irish-American population. The Collins family fit in with the profile of the neighborhood: All four of his grandparents were born in Ireland. Shano’s father, Joseph, was born in Rhode Island and his mother, Mary, was born in Massachusetts. Shano was the third of five children, along with Joseph, Mary, William, and Henry. Joseph Collins the elder provided for his family as a salesman, while Mary worked as a housekeeper.1

Shano’s connection to baseball began at a young age. He sold peanuts at Boston’s Walpole Street Grounds, home to the city’s National League club.2 Collins excelled as a semipro pitcher, then signed with Haverhill of the Class B New England League in 1907. He played one season at Haverhill,3 where he was a teammate of future Hall of Famer Sliding Billy Hamilton, then apparently dropped out of Organized Baseball for a year before he was purchased by Springfield of the Connecticut State League in 1909. There, his .322 batting average in 88 games caught the eyes of Lou Barbour and Bob Connery, former players with connections to Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey.4

An arm injury eventually forced Collins off the mound;5 he played mostly shortstop and second base in the minors before moving to the outfield and occasionally playing first base in the major leagues.

As for Collins’s nickname, most sources agree that “Shano” (sometimes spelled “Shauno” because it was pronounced that way) came about as a clubhouse corruption of Sean, the Gaelic equivalent of John and a nod to his Irish heritage.6

Collins made his major-league debut with the White Sox on April 21, 1910, a 4-1 loss to the Browns in St. Louis. That season the 24-year old played in 97 games for the White Sox, hitting .197 in 315 at-bats. Collins played about two-thirds of his games in the outfield and the balance at first base, where he substituted for Chick Gandil.

In 1911 the White Sox finished nine games better than in the previous season, tying Boston for fourth place in the American League. Collins improved marginally along with his team. Playing first base consistently in place of Gandil, who had been sold to Montreal of the Eastern League, Collins raised his batting average by 65 points to .262 and his slugging percentage over 100 points to .403. He hit a career-high four home runs, good for eighth in the league.

Throughout the decade, the 6-foot-tall, 185-pound Collins established himself as a solid if unspectacular major-league player. He was a strong defensive outfielder, possessing the versatility to play all three outfield positions as well as first base, and was a good teammate. Collins also showed hints of solid offensive production, placing third in the AL with 34 doubles in 1914 and fourth with 85 RBIs a year later.

Under first-year manager Pants Rowland, and with newly acquired stars like Shoeless Joe Jackson and Eddie Collins, the White Sox finished third in 1915. A second-place finish followed in 1916, and in 1917 Chicago captured the pennant with a 100-54 mark. In the team’s pennant clincher, on September 21 against Boston, Collins came through with the game-winning hit in Chicago’s 2-1 victory.

After platooning with Nemo Leibold throughout the regular season, Collins led off and played right field in all six games of the 1917 World Series against the New York Giants. He had a rough day in the White Sox’ 2-0 loss in Game Three, making two errors in right field and going 0-for-4 at the plate. Across the entire Series, Collins hit .286 and scored two runs. The White Sox downed the Giants in six games.

Two years later, the White Sox found themselves back in the World Series, this time against the Cincinnati Reds. To increase revenue, which had fallen off after World War I, the Series was a best-of-nine contest, which the Reds captured five games to three. Collins was the first batter of the Series, leading off Game One at Cincinnati’s Redland Field (later renamed Crosley Field), and played in four of the eight games, hitting .250 (4-for-16) with a double and two runs scored.

No evidence exists to suggest that Collins was a part of the plot to throw the World Series to the Reds or had any knowledge of the plot. Despite their talent, the White Sox were a fractured lot, with the gentlemanly, sophisticated crowd embodied by the Columbia University-educated Eddie Collins and the rough-and-tumble crowd led by first baseman Chick Gandil. Shano fit in more with the Eddie Collins crowd, and was never offered a role in the fixing of the World Series.

Collins spent most of the 1920 season at first base in place of Gandil, who abruptly retired from baseball before the season began. In that first year of the live-ball era, Collins put together one of his best offensive seasons, hitting over .300 for the only time in his career. The White Sox remained in the pennant race the entire season, right up until the 1919 conspirators were suspended during the season’s final week as the scandal came to light. Chicago finished two games behind pennant-winning Cleveland.

In March 1921 Collins was traded to his hometown Red Sox along with his platoon partner, Nemo Leibold, in exchange for Harry Hooper, the aging former star outfielder for Boston. The Red Sox of the early 1920s were a dreadful squad, and finished last in the American League in three of Collins’s five years with the team. The best record the Red Sox posted during that span was 75-79 in 1921, before Boston had finished selling off its best players to the New York Yankees.

Collins was a part of a scary moment in July 1921, when he was hit above the left ear and knocked unconscious by a pitch from Detroit’s Jim Middleton. The concerned crowd kept silent for several moments, memories of Ray Chapman’s fatal beaning a year earlier still fresh in their minds. Adding insult to the injury, the game was wiped out by rain in the fifth inning.7 Collins recovered and again showed his versatility, playing first base and all three outfield positions, and hitting .286 in 141 games.8

Collins remained with the Red Sox until 1925, when at the age of 39 he was released in June after having played in only two games. He signed with the Pittsfield (Massachusetts) Hillies of the Eastern League, played more than 100 games in the outfield and also took over as manager. For the next two seasons he was the player-manager of Des Moines of the Western League, and managed Pittsfield again in 1928 and ’29.9

In the winter of 1926-27, Collins was called to testify before Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis about allegations that the White Sox had paid the Detroit Tigers to throw a late-season series in 1917 when Chicago was fighting for a pennant.10 Numerous White Sox players, along with manager Pants Rowland, denied the allegation, which had been made by exiled Black Sox infielder Swede Risberg. Landis exonerated the White Sox, deciding that the money was not paid to the Tigers for throwing the series to Chicago, but for beating their top rivals, the Red Sox, later in the season.11

Collins began 1930 as manager of Nashua of the New England League, but when the league folded he moved back to Des Moines for the remainder of the season. Collins took Des Moines from last place to third place by the end of the season.12

In 1931 Collins returned to the major leagues as the manager of the Red Sox. Owner Bob Quinn had attempted to fill a managerial vacancy by hiring Joe McCarthy of the New York Yankees, but he was unable to lure McCarthy away from the Bronx. Quinn cited Collins’s success as a minor-league manager when he announced the hire. Quinn said, “I have not signed him for any year or term of years but have promised him the job as long as I live if he hustles and runs the club to my satisfaction. I am tired of engaging managers and have high hopes that I have solved this managerial problem for the remainder of my baseball career.”13

Unfortunately for Collins, this stability never materialized and he lasted just parts of two seasons as the Red Sox manager. He resigned in the middle of the 1932 season after compiling a record of 73-134. Under Collins and his successor, Marty McManus, the Red Sox went 43-111 in 1932.

Collins was called out of retirement briefly to manage Pittsfield again in 1942. But his career in uniform was otherwise over. He remained involved with baseball, scouting for the Detroit Tigers and participating in wartime exhibition games in the Boston area.14

Tragedy fell upon Collins and his family in the spring of 1945. His son, Marine Private Robert D. Collins, was killed in action on March 11 at Iwo Jima.15 Robert, who had played baseball in high school before attending Providence College and Yale, was 20 years old.16

On September 10, 1955, Collins died suddenly at his home in Newton, Massachusetts, at the age of 69. He was buried at St. Mary’s Cemetery in nearby Needham. He was survived by his wife, Elizabeth, three daughters, a son, four sisters, and a brother. One of his grandsons, Bob Gallagher, played for four seasons as an outfielder for the Red Sox, Mets, and Astros in the 1970s.

Acknowledgements

Special thanks to Michael Lynch and Bill Nowlin for their assistance.

Sources

In addition to the sources listed in the notes, the author also consulted Ancestry.com and Baseball-Reference.com.

Notes

1 1900 US Census.

2 Bill Nowlin, Red Sox Threads: Odds & Ends From Red Sox History (Burlington, Massachusetts: Rounder Books, 2008), 178-79.

3 “Shano Collins,” The Sporting News, September 21, 1955, 26.

4 Ernest J. Lanigan, “Shauno’ Collins Broke Into Pro Ball 22 Years Ago,” Hartford Courant, January 8, 1928.

5 “Collins Is Named Sox Manager, Does Not Sign Contract,” Lewiston (Maine) Daily Sun, December 2, 1930, 19.

6 Mike Shatzkin, ed., The Ballplayers (New York: Arbor House, 1990), 213.

7 Michael Lynch, Harry Frazee, Ban Johnson, and the Feud That Nearly Destroyed the American League (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008), 154.

8 Collins played in 464 games for the Red Sox in his career, and as of 2014 had the most career at-bats (1,599) for the Red Sox of any native Bostonian. Nowlin, Red Sox Threads.

9 “Shano Collins,” The Sporting News, September 21, 1955, 26; “Six Red Sox Rookies to Work With Hillies,” Boston Globe, April 7, 1929; “Hillies Drill at Fenway Park,” Boston Globe, April 9, 1929, 14.

10 Don Maxwell, “26 Deny Charges of ‘Thrown’ Games,” Chicago Tribune, January 6, 1927, 15.

11 “Landis Exonerates 21 Ball Players,” Chicago Tribune, January 12, 1927, 21.

12 “Collins Is Named Sox Manager.”

13 “Collins Is Named Sox Manager.”

14 “Shano Collins,” The Sporting News, September 21, 1955, 26.

15 The Sporting News, April 12, 1945, 15.

16 “Shauno Collins’ Son, Ex-Newton Athlete, Killed on Iwo Jima,” Boston Globe, April 6, 1945, 15.

During his long association with the game, Comiskey was at various points regarded as a labor radical, a visionary executive, and a domineering patriarch who lavished money on his ballpark and the press while at the same time being accused of underpaying his best players. Baseball, Comiskey once wrote, “is the only game that is complicated enough to be always interesting and yet simple enough to be always understood.”1 Ultimately, the same can be said of the Old Roman himself.

Charles Albert Comiskey was born in Chicago on August 15, 1859, at the corner of Union and Maxwell Streets, one of seven children of John Comiskey, an Irish immigrant, and his wife, Mary, a native New Yorker. John served at various times as county board clerk, assistant county treasurer, and representative on the Chicago City Council (including as its first president),2 a résumé that may have given young Charlie valuable experience in the ways of backdoor local politics, which he would later put to use in the halls of the American League’s offices.

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

It wasn’t long before Charlie discovered baseball, spending as much time as he could on the old Garden City grounds on the west side of Chicago, enjoying the fledgling game with his neighborhood friends. James T. Hart recalled just before the 1917 World Series how his boyhood pal was already the unspoken leader during their sandlot days in Chicago. He “… seldom went to school more than two months a year,” Hart recalled. “He was the captain of our team. He played all positions, and when any of us were sick, or our parents kept us at home to do the chores, Charlie was ready at a moment’s notice to serve as utility man.”3

Hart also remembered how difficult it was for the team to obtain bats and balls, often using the broken castoffs of older players. “When our team played we would compete on the proposition that the losing team would forfeit a bat. … (W)hen we … were threatened with a loss, Comiskey would start a row with the umpire or the opposing players and break up the game before we lost our bats. He was the foxiest kid in Chicago.”

From Father O’Neill’s Holy Family parochial school, through religious colleges in Chicago and Kansas, Comiskey never let his studies interfere with his principal outdoor recreation. He developed into a fairly skilled hurler, but the elder Comiskey objected to his son’s obsession with baseball, and quickly signed him up as an apprentice to a local plumber. Arguments ensued and in 1876, at the age of 17, Comiskey left home to play third base for an independent team in Milwaukee at $50 per month. His manager, Ted Sullivan, became a scout for Comiskey in later years.4

The following season, Comiskey moved on to pitch for Elgin, Illinois. A right-handed thrower and hitter who stood approximately 6 feet tall, Comiskey included in his repertoire a solid fastball and an assortment of curves. Elgin didn’t lose one of his starts all season, despite facing fairly tough competition from around the Chicago area.5 From there, Comiskey shifted to the Dubuque (Iowa) Red Stockings, where he was reunited with Sullivan. Once again a utilityman, he played first base, second base, and the outfield, and pitched. Possibly more importantly, Sullivan also employed Comiskey as a representative of his successful news agency, where Charlie’s 20 percent commission dwarfed his baseball salary. Comiskey stayed with Sullivan’s Dubuque club for four seasons,6 helping the team win the Northwest League pennant in 1879.

With future Hall of Famer Charles “Old Hoss” Radbourn and Laurie Reis on the same pitching staff, Comiskey turned full-time to first base, where, as legend has it, he revolutionized the position. According to most accounts, Comiskey did not “hug the bag,” as was the habit of contemporary first basemen; instead, Charlie positioned himself closer to second, enabling him to cut off grounders hit toward right field.7 He practiced with his pitchers in the morning, making sure they became adept at covering first base whenever he snagged a groundball. Some recent historians have claimed that this approach was already in practice well before Comiskey employed it with Dubuque.8 Even if he was not the first, the story is an early indication of Comiskey’s keen baseball instincts and his penchant for leadership.

The big leagues finally beckoned after an exhibition game in St. Louis in 1882, when Chris von der Ahe, owner of the St. Louis Browns of the new American Association, offered Comiskey a contract. Though Von der Ahe originally suggested that Comiskey not ask for too much money as part of his terms, Charlie found that by his second paycheck his salary was a lot higher than what he had signed for. Comiskey never forgot the gesture, and was said to be one of the old man’s benefactors when Von der Ahe lost his fortune later in life.9

When Von der Ahe and his manager, Comiskey’s old friend Ted Sullivan, had a dispute late in the 1883 season, the Browns owner chose Commy as his new skipper. Charlie responded by piloting his team to four straight American Association pennants, and won the world’s championship in 1886, beating Cap Anson’s Chicago White Stockings of the National League in six games. Although he carried a reputation as an excellent team leader and solid defensive player, Comiskey was not a great hitter. For his career he batted .264 with 28 home runs and 416 stolen bases. Perhaps his best season came in 1887, when he batted .335, scored 139 runs, drove in 103, and stole 117 bases. Far more typical, however, was his showing the previous year, when he batted .254 with 95 runs scored, 76 RBIs, and 41 stolen bases.

In 1890, in a bold move, Comiskey jumped to the Chicago club of the maverick Players League, only to return to the Browns at the end of the season when the PL disbanded and peace was declared. The first baseman’s desertion caused friction between him and Von der Ahe, however, and in 1892 Comiskey signed with the Cincinnati Reds of the National League, where he spent the next three seasons as the club’s manager. Though his annual salary was $7,500, his promised share of the club’s profits never materialized, as there were none to be had.10

Prior to the 1894 season, his last as an active major-league player, the 34-year-old Comiskey was advised by his doctors that he was “threatened with tuberculosis.”11 To aid his health, Comiskey headed for the warmer climes of the South, scouting for new players along the way. Reportedly it was on this trip that Commy hit upon the idea of a new league featuring clubs from the Western states. Upon his return Comiskey contacted Ban Johnson, the sports editor of the Cincinnati Commercial-Tribune, asking if he would be interested in helping to lead this new venture.

Johnson was already embroiled in a feud with Comiskey’s boss, John T. Brush, but Charlie’s well-honed powers of persuasion helped convince Brush to campaign for Johnson to become the first president of the new Western League. The plan worked, and Johnson took control, quickly transforming it into one of the best circuits in the country.

Comiskey, meanwhile, spent the 1894 season with Cincinnati, fulfilling his obligations to Brush. After the season, Comiskey purchased the new league’s Sioux City Cornhuskers and moved the team to St. Paul. There he built his first ballpark, at a cost of $12,000.12 After five seasons in Minnesota as both owner and manager, Comiskey was granted permission by the National League to relocate his franchise to Chicago, on the condition that he could not use the name “Chicago” for his relocated ballclub. Therefore, recalling perhaps his finest moments as a player, Comiskey decided on “White Sox,” honoring the team his Browns had beaten for the 1886 championship.13

Meanwhile, Johnson and Comiskey positioned the Western League to challenge the monopoly of the established NL. In October 1899 it changed its name to the American League. Before the 1901 season, with franchises now placed in Washington, Baltimore, Philadelphia, Boston, Cleveland, Detroit, Chicago, and Milwaukee, the circuit declared major-league status. Quickly gaining credibility with the public, the AL was heralded by The Sporting News as being devoid of the “… cowardly truckling, alien ownership, syndicalism … jealousies, arrogance … mercenary spirit, and disregard of public demands” that the National League had become infamous for.14 Comiskey and Johnson were making a favorable impression with baseball fans, and the NL knew it. The ugly war between the leagues, rife with player-jumping, franchise-shifting, and acrimony on both sides, finally concluded with the establishment of the National Agreement in 1903.

During the first years of the new century, Comiskey built his club into one of the best in the country. The White Sox captured the 1901 American League pennant behind the strong pitching of manager Clark Griffith and an offense powered by outfielders Fielder Jones and Dummy Hoy. After falling to seventh place in 1903, Comiskey’s White Sox gravitated toward the top of the standings again, with strong finishes in 1904 and 1905 and a second pennant in 1906. Led by pitchers Ed Walsh, Nick Altrock, Doc White, and Frank Owen, and the potent (despite its name) Hitless Wonders offense featuring Frank Isbell, George Davis, and Jones, now the club’s player-manager, the White Sox upset the crosstown Chicago Cubs, winners of a record 116 games, in the 1906 World Series.

Though the team did not win another pennant and World Series title for 11 years, Comiskey built his franchise into one of the most financially successful in the country. At the end of the century’s first decade, the White Sox showed a 10-year profit of $700,000, highest among recorded earnings during that time.15 He turned some of those profits into the World Tour, taken with the New York Giants after the 1913 season.

From the beginning of his tenure, Comiskey established a reputation as an owner passionately involved in the day-to-day affairs of his club. Comiskey was never afraid to express his opinions about the game from his private box. Reporters shared numerous stories of Comiskey railing at his team over bonehead plays or games tossed away. “Sitting next to him at a game, one is likely to be nudged in the ribs, or have his toes stepped on as Comiskey ‘pulls’ on a close play,” stated Baseball Magazine.16

Nor was Comiskey afraid to spend money on his team or his ballpark. By the time of its opening on July 1, 1910, the cost of Comiskey Park and its grounds totaled $750,000, a remarkable amount for the time. Additional seating in subsequent seasons raised the cost to over a million dollars. Commy was also the only owner at this time to own his entire club, the grounds, and all the equipment.17

And though he did everything he could to hold down his players’ salaries, Comiskey spent large sums of money putting together his second great team of the Deadball Era. In December 1914 he purchased second baseman Eddie Collins from the Philadelphia Athletics for a reported $50,000. Less than a year later, he acquired Cleveland Indians slugger Joe Jackson for three players and $31,500.

Throughout his reign, Comiskey polished his reputation as a benevolent monarch. Beginning in 1900, he handed out free grandstand tickets to 75,000 schoolboys each season. He constantly professed love for the fans and when it rained at his ballpark, the occupants of the bleachers were permitted to enter the higher-priced sheltered sections without extra charge. “Those bleacherites made this big new plant possible,” announced Comiskey. “The fellow who can pay only twenty-five cents to see a ball game always will be just as welcome at Comiskey Park as the box seat holder.”18

He later claimed to have given away a quarter of a million tickets to servicemen, and followed that by donating a reported 10 percent of his 1917 home gate receipts to the Red Cross, an amount totaling about $17,000.19 Comiskey regularly allowed the city of Chicago to use his park for special events, often free of charge. The owner’s benevolence also extended to the press, whom he regularly feted with roasts and free drinks.

Comiskey had no qualms when it came to spending money on his ballpark, his city, and his fans. But with his players, those stories are few and far between. Like almost every owner of the time, he held a hard line on player salaries, although recent research has revealed that the White Sox had one of the highest team payrolls in the majors. As historian Bob Hoie has written, the “depiction of Chicago players as woefully underpaid by a tightwad boss” does not stand up to scrutiny.20 Likewise the legend often repeated about Comiskey’s team being known as the “Black Sox” long before the scandal due to their dirty uniforms, a result of their owner’s efforts to cut down on laundry bills; though an amusing anecdote, no evidence has yet been found to confirm that this story is true. Another apocryphal tale has Comiskey benching his star pitcher Eddie Cicotte to keep him from winning his 30th game and collecting on a promised $10,000 bonus. In reality, Cicotte did have a chance to win No. 30 – and clinch the American League pennant – in late September 1919, but he didn’t pitch well and was pulled before the White Sox rallied to win the game.21

During the course of the Deadball Era, Comiskey’s amicable relationship with Ban Johnson disintegrated into open warfare. According to legend, the discord erupted in 1905, when Johnson sent Comiskey a load of fresh fish on the same day that he suspended outfielder Ducky Holmes for an altercation with an umpire the day before. Comiskey, who had already given his extra outfielder, Jimmy Callahan, the day off, was irate. “What does he want me to do?” he bellowed. “Put one of these bass out in the left field?”22 (Versions of this story abound: Some sources say the incident occurred in 1907, and involved Fielder Jones, not Holmes.) A further series of disagreements set the stage for 1919, when two scandals rocked the league and irrevocably split Comiskey and Johnson.

In July 1919 Boston pitcher Carl Mays abandoned the Red Sox and demanded a trade. Johnson ruled that the temperamental pitcher could not be traded until disciplinary action was taken, but Boston owner Harry Frazee ignored the edict and dealt Mays to the Yankees, only to see Johnson suspend Mays. The Yankee owners responded by securing an injunction allowing Mays to play.

League owners immediately took sides: Frazee, Yankee owners Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston, and Comiskey were labeled “The Insurrectionists,” while most of the remaining AL moguls sided with Johnson. Comiskey even pursued a proposal to have his club join the National League; that plan never got off the ground after an uneasy truce between the parties was brokered the following winter.23 

By then the Black Sox Scandal hung like a dark cloud over the sport. There is some evidence that Comiskey was aware of the plot to throw the World Series as early as Game One and did nothing to stop it.24 Johnson helped fuel these accusations, while Comiskey threw the burden of the scandal back on Johnson. “I blame Ban Johnson for allowing the Series to continue,” he announced. “If ever a league president blundered in a crisis, Ban did.”25

But Comiskey certainly knew of the fix after the Series ended. One of his players, Joe Jackson, reportedly tried to return his share of the payoff only to be turned away by team executive Harry Grabiner.26 As rumors of the fix spread throughout the sport, Comiskey responded by publicly offering $20,000 to anyone with knowledge of the fix. The announcement was no doubt a public-relations move, intended to make Comiskey appear nobly dedicated to uncovering the truth, no matter the cost. When St. Louis Browns infielder Joe Gedeon did come forward with information, Comiskey rebuffed him and never paid the reward.27

By the end of the 1920 season, details of the plot began to emerge, as several conspirators confessed to their involvement. Even though the eight accused Black Sox were ultimately acquitted of the conspiracy charges filed against them, the scandal devastated Comiskey’s franchise. The eight accused players were banned from the game for life, and after 1920 the White Sox never again finished in the first division during Comiskey’s lifetime.

Charles Comiskey died of heart complications at his lakeside estate in Eagle River, Wisconsin, on October 26, 1931, at the age of 72, and was buried in Calvary Catholic Cemetery in Evanston, Illinois. He was survived by a son. His wife, Nan Kelly, whom he had married in 1882, preceded him in death in 1922. The Comiskey family continued to control the White Sox until 1959, when they were bought out by a consortium led by Bill Veeck Jr.

An updated version of this biography appeared in “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (SABR, 2015). This biography originally appeared in “Deadball Stars of the American League” (Potomac Books, 2006).

Sources

For this biography, the author used a number of contemporary sources, especially those found in the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library.

Notes

David Charles Danforth was born in the small farming community of Granger, Texas, on March 7, 1890, the fifth of six children of Charles and Henrietta Danforth. His father, who studied medicine in St. Louis and New Orleans and got his medical degree at Tulane, died when Dave was only 2 years old.4 His mother and her parents were born in Germany, while his father and his parents were American-born.5 Neither Dave nor any of his three brothers had sons to carry on the family name.6

Dave was a pitcher from his early days. He explained why: He was the biggest kid in the neighborhood and simply told the others that he would pitch—or there would be no game.7 He pitched in high school and at Baylor University, which he attended for two years. His second year, 1910-1911 he had a perfect 10-0 mark—including a no-hitter—and led the school to the Texas Collegiate Championship.

Dave was a tall, slender southpaw (listed at 6 feet, 167 pounds) who had caught the eye of one of Connie Mack’s informal scouts, Hyman Pearlstone, a grocer and banker from Palestine, Texas. He promised Dave a $500 signing bonus if he joined the Athletics. Dave made the trip to Philadelphia and showed up at Shibe Park early on the morning of August 1, 1911. That afternoon, manager Connie Mack inserted Dave into the game in relief against the first-place Detroit Tigers.

Dave soon proved crucial to the A’s pennant march. The team’s starting pitchers were worn down and benefited greatly from backup from the Texas youngster. The following week, he relieved Chief Bender in the 14th inning on Monday, Eddie Plank on Tuesday, Jack Coombs on Wednesday, and Harry Krause on Friday. He finished the season with a 4-1 record, with 12 of his 14 appearances in relief. Sportswriter Fuzzy Woodruff saluted Mack for finding another youngster from “some wild and woolly and unknown region . . . Danforth, from nowhere, came to the Athletics at a crucial period in their race. He came when the old hurlers were under a terrific strain.”8 Mack declared that he had found another Waddell: “Never seen a kid who had more prospects of being a corker.”9

Danforth was not eligible for the World Series, but as was not unusual with Mack’s s sharing club, he was awarded a full winner’s share of $3,654.58, at the age of 21.

In May 1912, after Dave had appeared in just three games, Mack decided to farm him out. The A’s were loaded with young pitchers: Byron Houck and Herb Pennock debuted that month. (Stan Coveleski and Joe Bush would join the team later that season.) Mack wanted Dave to get plenty of work, so he sent the lefty to Jack Dunn’s Baltimore Orioles.10 Years later, Mack said he let Danforth go because he didn’t have a curve ball.11 Mack may have had an option to recall him, but in late August, when he acquired Jimmy Walsh and Eddie Murphy from the Orioles, he may have had to cut Dave loose.12

Danforth joined Rube Vickers and Bob Shawkey as the anchors of the 1912 O’s.13 The following year, he led the Orioles with 304 innings pitched and pushed his win total up from 12 to 16. At the same time, he was thinking long-term, about his life after baseball. In 1913, he decided to enter the University of Maryland Dental School. The choice of dentistry seems odd. As we shall later see, Dave had enormous hands, and they were anything but delicate. Sometimes the most difficult questions have rather simple answers, and Dave’s son-in-law provided this one. Growing up in Granger, Danforth said he knew only one adult who could take off to play ball during the day—the city’s dentist.14

Jack Dunn provided Dave with a private room for his studies at spring training in Fayetteville, North Carolina, and the dental school’s dean allowed Dave to miss many of his classes and get lecture notes from a classmate.

Danforth tossed a shutout on Opening Day 1914, and the O’s starter the next day—making his professional debut—also threw a shutout: George Herman Ruth. That season, Dunn’s Orioles were on the front line of a war with the upstart Federal League, whose Terrapins team quickly devastated the attendance and thus the financials of the Orioles. When the legendary New York Giants faced the Orioles in an exhibition game that April (Dave beat them, 2-1), they drew a tiny crowd, while the Terps had more than 20,000 fans across the street for their opening day. By mid-season, Dunn had to generate cash to stay afloat and started selling players, including Ruth to the Boston Red Sox. A month later, on August 8, he sold Danforth to the Louisville Colonels of the American Association for $3,000.15

Before Danforth joined his new team, he moved up his wedding date by a few weeks and married 19-year-old Margaret Oliphant, a Baltimore girl. Dave won six games for Louisville and took part in a spirited pennant race in which his Colonels fell just short of Milwaukee. He returned to his studies and became the manager of the University of Maryland baseball team. He also received permission to finish his school year and report late to the Colonels. He graduated that spring but was not present at graduation, at which Secretary of State William Jennings Bryan delivered the commencement address.16

In the meantime Danforth started slowly but soon took his game to another level. He began experimenting with different pitches. When he struck out 11 men in relief on August 6, the Louisville Courier was surprisingly forthright in its description of the home-team pitcher: “He kept scratching the ball and roughing the surface until the visitors kicked about it.”17 Dave’s most effective pitch was one for which he became famous, as the Father of the Shine Ball.

Danforth explained how he stumbled upon the pitch, with two slightly varying accounts. The dusty field in hot and dry Louisville was regularly sprayed with oil, to keep the dirt from swirling. But the oily ball was hard to grip. According to one version, Dave would rub the oily ball on his pant leg. Under the other story, he would put rosin on his pants leg and rub the ball on it.18 In both accounts, in attempting to remove the oil, he made one side of the ball smoother and darker; hence “the shine”. Danforth said he got the idea by watching a bootblack shine shoes with a rag. The result of the contrasting surfaces of the ball (smoother and rougher sides) was similar to many trick pitches: a ball with an unpredictable flight, one it was hard to make contact with.

Danforth became harder and harder to hit as the season went on. On August 31, he won the first game of a doubleheader in relief and then pitched a one-hitter in the second game. After striking out 15 men on September 8, he tossed a two-hit shutout and struck out 18 Kansas City batters four days later. In doing so, he broke Marty O’Toole’s American Association record of 17.19 Just three days after that, Dave beat St. Paul, 1-0 and struck out 15 Saints.20 The current American Association record of 20 was set by Maurice “Mickey” McDermott on May 24, 1949.21

Chicago White Sox secretary Harry Grabiner saw Danforth pitch that month, and on September 28, 1915, after Dave won 12 games for Louisville, the White Sox drafted him. Dave Danforth was coming back to the majors.

Often the inventor of something is not the one who maximizes its use, whether in baseball or another endeavor. Elmer Stricklett (career record of 35-51) was one of the pitchers credited with introducing the spitball in the majors, yet his teammate and disciple, Ed Walsh, rode it to fame. In Chicago, Danforth showed the shine ball to a journeyman pitcher by the name of Eddie Cicotte. Up until 1915, Eddie had a record of 91-81; after that 13-12 season, he fashioned a 105-55 mark and became one of the game’s best pitchers.

F. C. Lane, the editor of Baseball magazine, said that Lefty Williams, Cicotte’s teammate, told him that Dave did indeed teach the shine ball to Cicotte.22 During that 1916 spring training, Dave befriended another pitcher who would later ride the shine ball to fame: Hod Eller.23 Eller did not make the 1916 White Sox (he would spend the season in Moline), but would be one of the aces of the 1919 world champion Cincinnati Reds.

Dave’s reputation was preceding him, and he was reputed to throw many more trick pitches than just the shine ball. Years later he was frank in admitting he experimented with many pitches: “I will admit that in my time I have used every delivery that I have ever heard of. If I had known of any others, I should have used them.”24 Dave was also often quick to note, “I never pitched an illegal ball in my life. Sure I invented the shine ball and used it until the pitch was ruled out with other freak pitching in 1920. I have nothing to hide.”25

The Sporting News spoke of his “new-fangled mystery ball,” a fastball “that did everything but talk.”26 One newspaper said that Dave used his large and powerful fingers—with the help of a rough fingernail—to loosen the cover of the ball and throw a “wrinkle ball.”27 More revealing was a report in The Sporting News that said the Minneapolis Millers had solved the Danforth mystery. He rubbed the ball on his uniform until one side was “as smooth as a billiard ball.” With one side rougher than the other, the effect was the same as that of the emery ball.28 At the time, Dave was not forthcoming about anything. He denied any changes to his pitching and said he threw just as he had in 1911.29

Once Danforth was back in the majors, his critics did not wait long to pounce. After he beat Detroit on April 13, 1916, Tigers’ manager Hughie Jennings accused Dave of throwing the emery ball.30 Tigers’ star Ty Cobb would point an accusing finger at Dave for years. In a syndicated newspaper series on his career, Cobb said the pitcher would slit the ball with a razor, load it with paraffin (which was invisible), which he would later scrape away to raise the seams.31

Danforth also became known for a controversial pick-off move that many felt was a balk. He credited learning his move from an unnamed Cleveland lefty.32 Dave explained:

I noticed that he fooled the runners because he did not kick his leg in the air before he threw the ball to the first baseman. My routine was simple. I’d take a short step, face the batter at the plate with my arm cocked to throw to first base. My left knee would be bent so that I could quickly pivot on it. Then when the unsuspecting runner would take a lead off base, I’d throw the ball and snap my head back to see where it was going.33

Statistician Ernest Lanigan calculated that Danforth led the major leagues in pick-offs in 1916, with 15.34 Roger Bresnahan, who would observe Danforth for many years from the opposing dugout, felt the move was borderline—but legal. “His movement is queer and tricky . . . but I really don’t think it’s a balk movement.”35 Danforth’s move to first base remained contentious for the rest of his career, though it was overshadowed by protests of what he did to the ball.36

Danforth’s 1916 season was fairly ordinary. He appeared in 28 games, 20 of them in relief, with a 6-5 record and a 3.27 earned-run average. With all the controversy swirling around him, teammate Eddie Collins dubbed him “Dauntless Dave.” His White Sox were improving dramatically. After they won 70 games in 1914, new manager Clarence “Pants” Rowland led them to 93 wins in 1915 and 89 in 1916, when they fell just two games short of the pennant.

St. Louis sportswriter J. Roy Stockton wrote about Danforth’s growing fame as a trick pitcher (in what Stockton called the days of the “dodo balls”). Stockton noted that Dave was inquisitive—always warming up in the bullpen, trying out new pitches and perfecting them.37

The 1917 White Sox put it all together. With 100 wins, they won the pennant and beat the New York Giants in the World Series. One of the tools that Rowland employed was the relief pitcher, and Dave Danforth was his man. Dave appeared in 50 games (only 9 starts), 26 finishes, and 9 saves (as computed retroactively), all league-leading numbers.

Typical were a couple of August games. On August 9, Danforth relieved Joe Benz in the sixth and held Washington hitless in a 3-2 win. On August 2, he relieved Red Faber with a 3-1 lead, no outs and the bases loaded in the eighth. Dave snuffed out the rally with a couple of strikeouts and finished a 7-1 White Sox win. (Atypically, the career .160-hitting Danforth hit a bases-clearing triple.)

Also typical were a couple of August incidents. Cleveland manager Lee Fohl declared that if the White Sox won the pennant, they would do so by “unfair tactics,” referring to Danforth’s pitching.38 When Dave pitched six innings of one-run relief to nail down an 8-3 win over the Yankees, they accused him of tossing an emery ball.

The suspicions and charges went beyond Dave Danforth to the White Sox pitching staff as a whole. On August 31, Damon Runyon went public with what had been whispered for weeks. “There is a firm belief among many managers and players in the American League that the success of the White Sox pitchers has been due to trickery –to “monkeying” with the baseball . . . It has been quite openly charged for some time that Commy’s [White Sox owner Charles Comiskey] carvers have been using vaseline and other substances.” Runyon then went further, writing that some players have said that baseballs at White Sox home games were being tampered with. “They claim that a nail file is employed to lift just enough of the seam of the ball to give it a “sailor” [sic] effect when it is thrown.” While Runyon did not completely agree with the charges (they “may or may not be true,” he wrote), he certainly gave them a public platform.39

On August 14, in the second game of a doubleheader, the first pitch Danforth threw in relief hit Cleveland star outfielder Tris Speaker in the right temple and knocked him unconscious for a few minutes. The team doctor said that had the pitch hit an inch lower, “it might have been all up with Spoke.”40 The resultant concussion and blurred vision kept Speaker out of the next seven games. After the incident, he did not speak out against Dave for deliberately throwing a beanball (which he would do three years later when Carl Mays hit Ray Chapman). But Speaker spoke out against the “sailer,” saying that it was time to “call a halt before batting becomes a lost art.”41 He singled out two White Sox hurlers. “The game will go to the dogs unless a stop is put to the doctoring of the ball by [Eddie] Cicotte and Danforth. . . If the Sox win, that is what will give them the pennant.”42 Speaker’s manager was Lee Fohl, who showed a reporter a Danforth-thrown ball, one that had a waxy substance which raised the seams.43 Five years later, Fohl would become Dave’s manager in St. Louis.

The White Sox won four games from the Tigers—two doubleheaders on September 2 and 3, 1917—that would be the focus of a major controversy almost a decade later. Chicago entered the games with a 3 ½ game lead over Boston, which they would stretch to seven games two days later. In late 1926, banned Black Sox player Swede Risberg charged that the Tigers deliberately lost those games and that he helped gather the payoff money that most of the White Sox players —including men considered above reproach, such as Eddie Collins and Ray Schalk–contributed. (The Tigers committed nine errors in those games.) When confronted with the undeniable evidence that they did pay the money, the Chicago players said the money was paid to the Tigers as a token of thanks for their beating the Boston Red Sox three times later that month, September 19-20. Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis did not take any action against the White Sox, other than banning the paying of such “Thank You” money from that point forward.

However, the White Sox’s explanation seemed odd since they had a commanding lead of eight games over Boston on the morning of September 19. More interesting was the fact that only a handful of members of the White Sox did not contribute to the Detroit payoff pool: Manager Rowland, coach Kid Gleason, Eddie Murphy, and Dave Danforth.44 “I didn’t pay a dime toward a pool,” Danforth declared.45

Dave appeared in only one game of the 1917 World Series against the New York Giants. White Sox starters pitched complete games in the first three contests, two of which Chicago won. They were losing Game Four, 3-0, when Dave took over in the eighth inning. He gave up a single to Buck Herzog and a home run to Bennie Kauff. Heinie Zimmerman then tripled but was thrown out trying to steal home, and the Giants won, 5-0. The White Sox then won the fifth game, remembered for Zimmerman’s chase of Eddie Collins. Chicago used four pitchers—but not Dave. A complete-game win by the White Sox’ Red Faber in Game Six won the Series.

Spring training of 1918 was marked by controversy when the respected black trainer of the White Sox, William “Doc” Buckner, was released. The Chicago Defender, the city’s black paper, demanded to know the reason and wondered if Rowland really was running the team “or are some of those southern crackers on the team running it?”46 Chicago sportswriter I. E. Sanborn suggested Dave Danforth was involved. More than five years later, respected Detroit sportswriter H. G. Salsinger elaborated. That spring, Dave had “borrowed” Doc’s sharp scalpel to whittle a piece of wood. When Buckner called Dave down for taking his tool, wrote Salsinger, Dave went after Buckner with a baseball bat.47 Doc Buckner would return to the White Sox in 1920, after Dave had left the team.

Neither Dave nor the White Sox came close to replicating their season in 1918. Dave’s record went from 11-6 to 6-15, with only two saves and a jump of 0.78 in his earned run average. The Sox won less than half of their games and fell to sixth place. Dave did improve in one area: he showed more durability, completing five of the 11 games he started (only one of nine in 1917).

There had been humorous references to Dave and pitcher Lefty Williams as the “50/50 boys,” good half a game each.48 On May 15 and 16, 1918, they belied that moniker. First, Williams went the full 17 1/3 innings in a 1-0 loss to Washington’s Walter Johnson. The next day, Dave pitched 10 2/3 innings of relief in nailing down an extra-inning win. But some things were not changing. Washington manager Clark Griffith (a master of nicking the ball with his spikes when he had pitched three decades earlier) charged Dave with defacing the ball.49

America’s entry into the Great War in 1917 did not have a major impact on American society until the following year. The 1918 major-league season ended a month early as young men from all walks of life were being drafted and sent to Europe. It was not surprising that Dave was not drafted. Not only was he married, but he was supporting his widowed mother (who was living with his family) and his first child, Dorothy, who was born in 1917.

After the shortened 1918 season ended, Dave joined the Baltimore Dry Docks, a powerful semi-pro baseball team. Major leaguers Joe Judge, Wildfire Schulte, and Lefty Russell were also on the club, managed by Dave’s former 1912 Baltimore teammate, Sam Frock. They won 25 of 30 games, including tilts against Chief Bender’s team and independent clubs that had Stan Coveleski and Joe Bush pitching.50

While the White Sox bounced back in 1919, Danforth did not. Hampered by arm trouble, he won only one game, and his earned-run average ballooned to 7.78. On April 25, Dave was shelled by the Browns and didn’t survive the second inning. His July 12 performance epitomized the kind of season he had. He relieved Dickey Kerr in the third inning of a game against the Red Sox. The first pitch he threw was a ball that Babe Ruth knocked out of the park, his first Comiskey Park home run ever.51 Dave went on to give up eight more runs in the game.

On August 26 the White Sox traded him to Columbus of the American Association (which league he had pitched in from 1914 to 1916) in exchange for pitcher Roy Wilkinson.52 Dave brought an action against the White Sox for a World Series share to the National Commission and eventually did receive a one-quarter share.53 One is left to wonder what role, if any, he would have played in the Black Sox scandal.

Danforth refused to report to Columbus and instead went home and again joined the Baltimore Dry Docks.54 They played a best-of-seven series against the powerful Baltimore Orioles of the International League in September. The Orioles’ owner, Jack Dunn, could have prevented Dave from pitching in the Series, but said he wanted the Dry Docks to be at “best strength.”55 The shine ball was not barred either; there were no restrictions on pitches. Finally, Dave had to get permission from Columbus part-owner and general manager Joe Tinker to play in the series. Newspapers reported that Tinker gave it, “under duress.”

Dave led the Dry Docks to the series win with his three victories. He pitched 12.2 innings in the first three games and won the seventh game, 5-0, on one day’s rest, with 15 strikeouts. The Orioles grumbled about his unfair pitches, and one Baltimore paper called him “the Paraffin Kid.”56 The Dry Docks went on to win the national Shipyard Championship, a tourney in which Danforth tossed a 1-0 gem and Red Sox youngster Waite Hoyt pitched a key win.57

In 1920 Danforth joined Columbus, after Tinker persuaded Organized Baseball not to play the Dry Docks again. Both Tinker and manager Derby Day Bill Clymer expressed the belief that Dave had enough “stuff” to win without resorting to the spitter (which had been banned in the league in 1918) or the shine ball.58 Danforth fashioned a 13-12 record with 2.57 earned-run average; he led the league in strikeouts with 188. Once again, his season was not without controversy. In early July he was suspended for “loading up” with a spitter, and he was suspended again a couple of months later.59 When he returned from his suspension, Dave one-hit Milwaukee. In September, Louisville player-manager Joe McCarthy rushed the mound with bat in hand after Dave came close to hitting him twice.60

That fall Clymer moved to the Toledo franchise, and Pants Rowland took over as Columbus manager. He was a big booster of Dave’s. Back in 1919, he said the pitcher had got a raw deal, having been released so close to the World Series.61 The local paper bemoaned the pitching staff of the sixth-place Senators. Other than Danforth, it wrote, the staff “is worth about as much as a German mark in Canada.”62

While the Senators were a very bad team again in 1921—they won only 66 games—Danforth won 25 of them (tied for the league lead in wins). He also led the American Association in strikeouts with 204, earned run average with a 2.66 mark, and complete games, with 35.63 His spectacular season would propel him to the major leagues for the third time. Again, Dave’s work was marked by accusations; it was now that the Columbus Dispatch called him “the icicle of the swirling vortex.”64 Early in the season, his former manager Clymer, now with Toledo, accused Dave of throwing the emery ball and doctoring the ball with his fingernail.65 The “icicle” responded by beating Toledo three times in eight days, by scores of 2-1, 3-0, and 2-0.

St. Louis Browns business manager Bob Quinn had deep Columbus connections, having been born there and run the Senators’ team for a number of years (and managed it back in 1900). He watched Dave three-hit Louisville in the 1921 home opener. As the season developed, it became obvious that the Browns were an offensive powerhouse that was one good pitcher away from seriously contending for the American League pennant. After the season, Columbus manager Rowland began evaluating a number of offers for Dave.66 Somewhat unusual for a minor league club, Rowland was more interested in players than money. This was predicated in no small part on his fear that the major leagues would stop sending players to the minor leagues that had opted out of the draft.67

The Yankees offered $25,000 but could not deliver the players Columbus wanted.68 In mid-December, the Browns stunned the baseball world when they acquired Danforth in exchange for 11 men, in what one paper called “probably the most unique deal ever recorded in baseball.”69 Six men were named; two would be named in 1922, two more in 1923, and one in 1924. They included men with major league experience who were not on the Browns’ roster, men the Browns still had “strings” on.70

The deal generated enormous debate. White Sox manager Kid Gleason, who had dealt a struggling Dave away in 1919, declared, “Anybody who gambles on a left-hander ought to be put in an insane asylum. . . . The three most dangerous things in the world are a four-flush, an unloaded shotgun, and a left-handed pitcher.”71 Dave’s current manager, Pants Rowland, was far more supportive. He explained that Dave’s secret was all in his grip. He told Quinn, “I am not peddling you a lemon. Danforth will make you a pennant contender next year.”72

When Quinn and Browns manager Lee Fohl came under attack for giving up so many men for one, they replied with the “quality versus quantity” argument. “These players aren’t worth a nickel to us and Danforth may ‘make’ us,”73 said Quinn. Fohl went even further. “I have 11 more players who I will be willing to give for any other one pitcher who I believe will help my club.”74

Danforth threw a monkey wrench into the deal as spring training approached. He demanded 10 percent of the cash value of the players that Columbus had received before he would sign his contract. After a short period of time, after getting an ultimatum from his manager to report “or else,” he did sign and report.75 A newspaper in Mobile, Alabama, where the Browns were training, declared, “If he [Danforth] flashes, it means the flag.”76

Early in the season the Browns were in or around first place, a preview of a hard-fought pennant race with the Yankees that would continue all season long. Lee Fohl did not put Danforth in the regular rotation because his presence on the mound generated so much controversy and because Fohl himself became concerned that Dave was indeed doctoring the ball. Accusations dogged Dave from the start of the season. His nemesis, Ty Cobb, protested Danforth’s delivery in an early-season series and declared that he would expose Dave.77 During a mid-June complete-game win over the Yankees, New York repeatedly questioned the baseballs he threw. Umpire Billy Evans, behind home plate that day, felt that Dave had pitched a “clean-cut game.”78

Evans’s role in the Danforth controversy over the years is fascinating. The respected Hall of Fame umpire was one of the few arbiters of the game who felt Dave was not tampering with the ball. He was also the only umpire who occasionally spoke out on Dave’s behalf. When Danforth joined the White Sox, Evans had been fascinated by his “newfangled mystery ball.”79 Before the deal with Columbus, Evans had assured Bob Quinn that Dave’s delivery was clean.80 In early July 1922, Evans commented on Danforth’s “heart,” for having the fortitude to keep coming back in the face of constant accusations.81 In one of his columns, Evans listed all the things Dave had been accused of doing—from loading the seams to loosening the cover to roughening the ball with his fingernail—and then declared, “None of these things were ever proved.”82 His use of the “Dauntless Dave” moniker certainly seemed appropriate.

While the constant protestations may have been aggravating to Danforth, he also took some comfort in the fact that his reputation had batters so worked up that they may have diverted their focus from something more important: hitting the ball. Dave said that he modeled himself on the great lefthander, Eddie Plank. Plank fidgeted and delayed so much on the mound that he had opposing batters seeing red. “Get the batter nervous, and you have him down,” Dave told the St. Louis Times that spring.83

Matters finally came to a head on July 27, 1922. In the tenth inning of a tie game against the Yankees, Danforth threw a pitch that sailed in on Fred Hofmann. Dave was ejected by umpire Brick Owens for throwing a ball with loaded seams (though Dave had just entered the game). An automatic ten-game suspension followed. Business manager Quinn had already gone on the record back in May that he’d release Dave if the charges proved true.84 He and Lee Fohl were coming to the joint conclusion that the pitcher they had paid so dearly for was not “clean.”

The stories of just what Danforth did to the ball swirled around him, and they were all across the board. He was said to have a nail on his left thumb that was so sharp that he could slit the seams or so rough that he could make an abrasion on the ball. He was reputed to sleep with his pitching hand soaking in a tray of pickle brine, to make his skin as abrasive as emery paper and let him roughen up the ball. He was also accused of using his large and powerful hands to loosen the cover of the ball.85

In early August, the Browns put Dave on waivers, and not a single team claimed him. Veteran St. Louis sportswriter John Wray was moved to write, “Dave was either unanimously voted of little value, or a tacit agreement to ‘railroad’ him for the good of the game had taken effect.”86 The next day, the usually taciturn Danforth made a lengthy statement to the Post-Dispatch. He said that he had never loaded the seams of a ball or applied a foreign substance to it. He bemoaned the “continual nagging” by umpires because of “adverse publicity.” He admitted to rubbing the ball with his hands, but noted that was legal. If that was to be deemed illegal, “then I am guilty of illegal pitching and every other pitcher in baseball is equally guilty.”87

The Browns sent Dave to Tulsa of the Western League (with an option to recall him), a lower classification league than the one Columbus was in. Like the Browns, the Oilers were in a pennant race, and Danforth’s six victories helped them win the pennant. On August 26, he struck out 15 men, breaking Dan Tipple’s league record of 14, set earlier that year. On September 15, the Oilers won their 100th game as Dave three-hit Oklahoma City.88

The Oilers then met the Mobile Bears of the Southern Association for the Class A championship. In Game Four, a victory for Dave, more than 25 balls were removed from play, as Mobile protested. The Tulsa World said, “The fact that the ball was faulty does not mean that Danforth had made it so.”89 Dave also won Game Six with a shutout, and the championship belonged to Tulsa.

The St. Louis Browns were not as fortunate. They lost the pennant by just one game to the Yankees. Had Danforth stayed with them during the stretch run, they would have had a good chance to finish in first place. A couple of weeks after the season, the Browns recalled Danforth for 1923. Owner Phil Ball had overruled his management team; neither Quinn nor Fohl wanted Danforth back. Fohl told a reporter that Dave had been given more chances to go straight (or throw straight) than he deserved.90

A pall was cast over the Browns’ 1923 season when George Sisler was forced to sit out the year, with a serious eye injury. Danforth became a mainstay of the Browns’ pitching staff, along with Urban Shocker and Elam Vangilder. This would be the first of three seasons in which he would appear in an average of 39 games and toss more than 200 innings a year.

Controversy still shadowed Danforth. The season started with Ty Cobb again protesting his delivery on April 18, and a suspicious ball was forwarded to league President Ban Johnson.91 Still Dave persevered, and on April 29 he pitched one of his finest games in the major leagues. He dropped a 1-0 game to those same Tigers (Cobb was hitless), giving up the lone run in the ninth inning.

On August 1, in a game against the Athletics, with umpire George Moriarty calling balls and strikes, Danforth was ejected for throwing a ball with rough spots on it. His former teammate on the 1916 Chicago White Sox, Moriarty had been a teammate of Ty Cobb’s for many years. He and Dave had a long-running feud, the source of which remains unknown. Years later, Danforth said that he wished Moriarty had not tried to ride him so hard. “He calls me names and abuses me,” all the time. In one game, Danforth said, when Moriarty called him from the bullpen, he said, “Hurry up there, you cheating _____. You’ve never done anything in your life but cheat.”92

Yet it wasn’t just Moriarty who questioned Danforth’s pitches. When this latest controversy broke, St. Louis Times sports editor Sid Keener wrote, “I have talked with almost every umpire in the American League on the charge against Danforth. The report from them is unanimous—that Dave applies a foreign substance or otherwise tampers with the ball.”93

Danforth’s teammates rallied to his side. Outfielder Johnny Tobin said that Dave had a grip that was “out of this world.”94 Dave’s catcher, veteran Hank Severeid said, “A pitcher can’t fool his own catcher. And I am certain Dave has not employed illegal methods.”95 George Sisler, who would become Dave’s manager in 1924 and 1925, told Baseball magazine, “In all the time he has played with us, I have never known Dave Danforth to use any illegal delivery. . . . If he does things with a ball that other pitchers can’t do, that is no proof of illegal delivery. . . . Danforth is a high grade fellow in every way and he deserves the right to work at his profession without being molested.”96

Danforth’s teammates even put together a petition to send to league president Ban Johnson. But one person would not sign it; one man would not rally to Dave’s support: the team’s soft-spoken manager, Lee Fohl. Bob Quinn had already left the Browns, partly in frustration over working with owner Ball and partly for an opportunity to head the group that bought the Boston Red Sox from Harry Frazee. Fohl met with Sid Keener and showed him some balls that he said Dave had tampered with. All were new balls that had a rough spot of about two inches square. Keener went public with this evidence (including diagrams of the balls) a few weeks later.97

Keener weighed in on the controversy. “I know the character of Lee Fohl. He would give a friend the last dime he had in the world. . . . If Lee wouldn’t sign [the petition] there must be some black smoke in the air.”98 When the dust settled a few days later, Fohl had been fired by a furious owner. Phil Ball felt he had gone to great lengths and cost to secure Dave, only to be undercut by a manager who refused to use the talent he was provided.

While Danforth was serving his automatic ten-game suspension, Ban Johnson weighed in on the matter. A close confidant of Phil Ball, Johnson did not agree with Ball in this matter. Supporting Lee Fohl, Johnson said that Dave had a “mania” for doctoring the ball and was “incurable” as an illegal pitcher.99

On August 16, 1923, with both Ban Johnson and Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis in the stands, Dave returned to the mound. He was facing the league-leading Yankees in St. Louis. He understood that his career would end if he resorted to trick pitches. With Billy Evans behind the plate, Dave decided to remove any suspicions by constantly asking for a new baseball, whenever the ball became discolored or marked up in any way. An incredible 58 balls were put in play, and still Dave was effective. He threw a three-hitter, though the Yankees’ Herb Pennock was better yet, and the Yankees came out on top, 3-1.

Danforth lost the game, but he won over a lot of hearts on that day. Sid Keener saluted him, writing, “It was a game that only a steel heart and a concrete spine could have pitched. Considering all events in the case I have never seen its equal on the ball field.”100 It was this performance that prompted J. Roy Stockton to write the quote that introduces this biography. It was also the culmination of more than a year that Dave had been under the microscope, leading Baseball magazine’s F. C. Lane to declare, “His [Danforth’s] work on the pitching mound has been more carefully scrutinized and more universally criticized than that of any pitcher on record, not excepting the ill-omened [Carl] Mays.”101

The monthly magazine even weighed in with an editorial, wondering why the Danforth controversy could not be resolved:

“Danforth doesn’t mutter incantations over the baseball in the dark of the moon near a convenient graveyard with the accompaniment of bats’ wings and rabbits’ feet. What he does if anything, he does in the full view of lynx-eyed umpires and ballplayers and the ball itself that he handles is evidence pro or con. Why not clear up the Danforth mystery once and for all?”102

If only it were so easy . . .

Dave finished the 1923 season with the most wins (16), innings pitched (226 1/3), complete games (16), and strikeouts (96) in his major-league career. He did hit 12 batters and had a 3.94 earned-run average, slightly better than the league average of 3.98.103

In 1924, Danforth posted numbers close to those of ’23 in wins (15), innings pitched (219 2/3), and complete games (12), but his earned-run average rose to 4.51. An anomaly was that he gave up 16 home runs that year (one behind the league leader); he had never given up more than four in a season. The clamor over Danforth’s delivery subsided. After he beat the White Sox on May 30, Chicago sportswriter James Crusinberry wrote that Dave was “a real pitcher and always was one and the accusations against him were the bunk.”104 Subsided, but not disappeared. Player-managers Ty Cobb and Eddie Collins contacted Ban Johnson and requested that umpires watch Danforth closely. Johnson wrote to Browns player-manager George Sisler that if Dave was using his “sandpapered” hand on the ball, he should discontinue doing so at once.105 When Danforth shut out the Yankees on June 8—one of only two career shutouts—Miller Huggins complained that his thumb nail was loosening the cover and that he was throwing the spitter.106

When Dave three-hit the Tigers on July 6, he had to do it with Ty Cobb constantly heckling and accusing him of pitching illegally. At that point in the season, Danforth’s record stood at 10-4. He cooled off from then on, finishing at 15-12. On August 5 he and Urban Shocker swept a pair of games against Washington to draw the Browns within four games of first place, though fourth place was where they would finish the season.

Danforth’s final season in the major leagues was 1925. He held out and signed a contract for the same amount of money he got in 1925, $6,500.107 His record was a pedestrian 7-9, and he led the league in giving up home runs, with 19. On May 6 he gave up a home run to his nemesis, Ty Cobb, one of five Cobb hit in two consecutive games in St. Louis.

Approaching the age of 36, Danforth seemed to be near the end of his baseball life. Yet he was about to embark on another minor league career, one that would include remarkable team and personal achievements. After he left the Browns, a Sporting News columnist admired Dave’s courage and declared, “Whether he is a cheater or a wizard we are willing to admit Dave has won his point. More power to him.”108

Danforth came to the Milwaukee Brewers of the American Association in 1926, as part of a deal that sent Oscar Melillo to the Browns. Dave won 17 games and threw 273 innings in 43 games. In late May and early June, he helped fuel the Brewers 21-game winning streak, a new league record. Dave won the 10th and 20th games of that streak. Ironically, early in the year, the fans and press had been critical of owner Otto Borchert for making a six-figure annual profit and not putting enough money back into his club. The Milwaukee Sentinel had called him out for “pursuing a niggardly nickel-nursing policy.”109

Early in the 1927 season, after Danforth pitched poorly in a few games, the Brewers sold him to New Orleans. His 16-4 record and sparkling 2.24 earned run average helped lead the Pelicans to the Southern Association pennant. When he was hit hard in early June, the New Orleans Times-Picayune noted that if Dave had anything foreign on the ball, “the [Memphis] Chicks knocked it off.”110 That comment served as a reminder of something that Danforth would point out over the years, words that would also show up in many of his obituaries. “You never heard a squawk on my bad days.”111

Dave hit a groove as the summer began, with a couple of two-hitters and two four-hitters among his wins. He also had the best control of his career (only 28 walks in 181 innings). The Times-Picayune noted that he went 41 innings without giving up a walk.112 After he was tossed out of a game for supposedly rubbing dirt into the seams of a ball, Danforth said, “I have been hounded most of my baseball career by umpires who seemed to be seeking publicity at my expense.”113 His Pelicans manager, Larry Gilbert, said, “I never learned what he did—if he did anything. I know he wanted the batters to think so.”114

The Pelicans were swept in the Dixie Series by Wichita Falls of the Texas League, in four straight games. Dave pitched well but lost two of the games, as the Pelicans generated little offense.

In 1928, neither Danforth nor the Pelicans could replicate their 1927 performances. Dave fashioned a 10-11 record, and his earned-run average more than doubled to 4.71. Somewhat surprisingly, he was named to the league’s all-star team. The Pelicans finished in third place. In 1929 Dave bounced back (8-7, 3.39), but the 38-year-old missed three weeks in August with a strained back.

Danforth was sent to Dallas in December, 1929, in a trade for former major-league pitcher Whitey Glazner.115 The biggest controversy revolved around something other than Dave for a change: radio. Dallas fans were upset that the league banned broadcasts and boycotted early games. (Only 9,000 attended the home opener.) The owners finally relented and allowed broadcasts of road games.116 The other big event in Dallas was the signing of Grover Cleveland Alexander, after his major-league career had ended. Neither pitcher was effective: Alexander won only one game before being released, and Danforth won only two. Dave was released in early July, after which an unnamed teammate said Danforth kept his glove oiled, so it would accumulate dust that Dave would grind into the ball.117

At the age of 40, Dave managed to catch on with Buffalo of the International League, a higher (Double A) league than the Southern Association (A). He immediately found himself in the spotlight, quite literally. On July 3, he pitched the International League’s first night baseball game with permanent lighting (what were called “arc lights,” 24,000 watts of them), a month after the first such minor league game was played.118 Dave struck out ten but lost to Montreal, 5-4. He was accused of trick pitching and almost came to blows with Montreal manager Ed Holly. Years later, Danforth’s player-manager on the Bisons that year, Jimmy Cooney, said that Dave had a little black bag that he kept locked at all times.119

Danforth won 12 of 20 decisions for Buffalo in 1930, and none was bigger than the one in which he beat Rochester on September 20. He struck out 20 Rochester Red Wings, including their player-manager, Billy Southworth, four times.120 In doing so, Danforth set an International League record, breaking the record of 17 set by Lefty Grove of Baltimore and Leroy Herrmann of Reading. The current International League record of 22 was set by Bob Veale on August 10, 1962.121

Danforth started the 1931 season with the Bisons, but with a 3-6 record and 6.45 earned run average in 14 games, they sent him to Chattanooga of the Southern Association on July 15. When he tossed his second shutout in ten days, the Chattanooga paper featured “Dauntless Dave, the suspicious southpaw.”122 At the end of the season, after he won four of ten decisions, Chattanooga returned him to Buffalo.123

The 42-year-old pitcher had a young teammate by the name of Billy Werber. In 2001, the 93-year-old Werber immediately recalled Dave. He told the author, “Danforth, he was a lefty. A gentlemanly type . . . a quiet fellow. Never had a hell of a lot to say. . . . Dave didn’t have the disposition to do anything illegal with the ball.”124

Danforth was released in mid-May 1932, after a few ineffective outings, in which he was hit hard. He managed to hook up with Bill Clymer’s Scranton Miners of the New York-Penn League, a lower-tier (B) league. Clymer probably did a favor for Dave, whom he managed in Columbus (1920) and Buffalo in 1930. After appearing in only six games, Dave was released. His professional career was over.125

Dave drew on his degree of almost 20 years earlier and began to practice dentistry in his hometown of Baltimore. He would do so until 1960, when he turned 70. He had returned to the Baltimore College of Dental Surgery for postgraduate review back in 1927.126 Danforth also taught “operative dentistry” at the University of Maryland twice a week for a number of years. “I haven’t gotten as far in it [dentistry] as I did in baseball, nor does it appeal to me as baseball did.”127 Dave coached the Loyola College baseball team in 1937 and 1938.128 In 1939, he returned to Shibe Park for an old-timers’ game, in which the Athletics of 1910-1914 beat the A’s of 1929-1931.129 He also attended a Buffalo Bisons old-timers’ reunion game on August 21, 1964.130

Two days after the death of Joe Jackson, on December 7, 1951, Danforth wrote a condolence letter to the family of his former teammate. “He was underpaid and criticized and punished beyond reason. He was a fine man,” Dave wrote.131

Dave did not attend professional baseball games, despite receiving a lifetime pass from the Orioles.132 He enjoyed golf, fishing, and gardening. He suffered from Alzheimer’s disease the end of his life and died at the age of 80 on September 19, 1970 in Baltimore.

*****

Dave’s scientific approach to pitching was years ahead of his time. In a 1926 Baseball magazine article entitled “Why Pitching is in its Infancy,” he said, “Pitching twenty or thirty years from now will be much more complex than it is today. . . . No Major League club manager, scout, or anyone else, has any clear idea of just what the human hand can do with a baseball.” He noted that physics and math experts have not determined just what could be done with a baseball. The magazine wrote that Dave’s “enquiring mind” and “restless spirit of investigation” have led to his constant experimentation with pitches and deliveries.133

Danforth often said that there was no secret to his pitching, “just psychology and a good fast ball.” He went on to explain, “There’s no rule against rubbing a ball with your hands. Often I did it deliberately a long time for psychological effect.”134 But there was also Dave’s admission, “I will admit that in my time I have used every delivery that I ever heard of. If I had known of any others I should have used them.”135 Jim Bagby, Cleveland pitcher of the 1920s, said that he knew what Dave did—and said it was not illegal. “You see he had such a tremendous grip he could ruffle up that cover.”136

Danforth’s grandson, Rob Harmon, recalled that his grandfather was the strongest man he ever knew. He remembered Dave at the age of 70 lifting a tree stump out of the ground and shimmying up a tree during a storm. Rob remembered that when he was 11 or 12, Dave showed him how he could do something to a baseball. With his large and powerful hands, Dave gave the ball a jerk, or twist, to misshape it, stretch the cover, and raise the seams.137

If indeed Danforth simply used his own hands and grip (and not a rough fingernail or roughened skin to doctor the ball), would that have been illegal? Under Rule 14, Section 4, “Discolored or Damaged Balls” [Section 2, Rule 30] of the baseball rules, as stated in the 1921 Spalding Guide,

In the event of the ball being intentionally discolored by any player, either by rubbing it with the soil, or by applying rosin, paraffin, licorice, or any other foreign substance to it, or otherwise intentionally damaging or roughening the same with sand-paper or emery-paper or other substance, the umpire shall forthwith demand the return of that ball, and substitute for it another legal ball, and the offending player shall be debarred from further participating in the game. If, however, the umpire cannot determine the violator of this rule, and the ball is delivered to the bat by the pitcher, then the latter shall be at once removed from the game, and as an additional penalty shall be automatically suspended for a period of ten days.138

While an abrasive fingernail or skin probably falls under “other substance” mentioned above, what about powerful hands? Even if it does not, the end of this rule states that the pitcher is held responsible even if the umpire cannot determine who defaced the ball.

Longtime Hearst sportswriter G. Frank Menke wrote, “Danforth is a great pitcher and might have been one of baseball’s greatest . . . had he not been cursed with the suspicions of illegally tampering with the ball.”139 No one ever caught Dave; “they convicted him on suspicion.”140 Yet Danforth really brought on that suspicion, as part of his “mind games” with batters. And he put umpires in a difficult position. Sportswriter Fred Turbyville provided some perspective from the men in blue. He noted that umpires hated rows, and whenever Dave pitched, there were rows. “David was a crucifix for umpires.”141

New York sportswriter Tom Meany may have provided insight into Dave’s pitching style and approach. “It seemed that Danforth was not only a pitcher but a practical psychologist as well. Nobody ever saw the left hand which was supposed to be so ruinous to the surface of a baseball. . . . Batters who are always seeking to detect some sign of chicanery on a pitcher’s part sometimes become so engrossed in looking for illegal pitches that they forget to hit the legal ones.”142

Notes

The right-hander played his entire 20-year major-league career with the White Sox, one of the league’s strongest teams before the scandal and a perennial also-ran afterward. Faber won 254 games — a total that Ray Schalk, Faber’s longtime batterymate and friend, contended might have reached 300 had the team not been decimated after its misdeeds came to light in 1920.1

He learned the spitball, the pitch that brought him major-league success, in the minor leagues, after an arm injury jeopardized his career. “I never resorted to the spitter until I was obliged to,” Faber later said. “I nearly ruined my arm throwing curves.”2 Wetting the tips of the first two fingers on his right hand, Faber threw the spitter from a variety of arm angles, befuddling batters with the pitch’s late-breaking downward movement. “A batter cannot guess with Faber,” Goose Goslin remarked. “His only chance is to close the eyes and hope bat meets ball.”3 To get the consistency required to throw his spitter, Faber was known to chew a combination of slippery elm and tobacco, though he preferred the latter. “And I don’t chew [tobacco] because I like it, either,” explained Faber, a lifelong smoker. “In fact, I never chew except when I am pitching.”4

Urban Clarence Faber (some references incorrectly list his middle name as Charles) was born on his parents’ farm near Cascade, a tiny community in northeast Iowa, on September 6, 1888. The second of four children born to Nicholas and Margaret Grief Faber, he was of Luxembourg descent. German was the primary language spoken in the Faber home and at the Catholic elementary school the Faber children attended. In 1893 the family moved into Cascade, where Nicholas operated a tavern and then opened the Hotel Faber. With his real-estate holdings and successful hotel, Nicholas Faber became one of Cascade’s most affluent citizens. The Fabers could afford to send the children to out-of-town prep schools and colleges, and for several years before World War I they lived off of Nicholas’s investment income.5

The red-haired Faber apparently had a sporadic and unspectacular high-school baseball career. He attended prep academies associated with colleges in two Mississippi River communities — Sacred Heart, in Prairie du Chien, Wisconsin, and then St. Joseph’s in Dubuque, Iowa. In 1909, when he was 20 and studying at a Dubuque business school, he joined the college varsity of his prep alma mater, St. Joseph’s. The institution, now Loras College, has no record of Faber taking any college classes there; however, there is ample documentation of his dominance over college batters in 1909, when St. Joseph’s went undefeated in its half-dozen games.6 The highlight was Faber’s 22-strikeout performance against St. Ambrose College, which mustered only three hits.

Faber’s performance for St. Joseph’s and semipro clubs caught the attention of Clarence “Pants” Rowland, former owner of Dubuque’s minor-league team and an acquaintance of Chicago White Sox owner Charles Comiskey. (Rowland was between baseball jobs at the time, managing a hotel bar in Dubuque.) Rowland encouraged Faber to sign with the Dubuque Miners, who were struggling in the Class B Three-I (Illinois-Indiana-Iowa) League. Joining the team with two months left in the 1909 season, Faber went 7-6. In August 1910, during his first full season as a professional, Faber (18-19) threw a perfect game against Davenport; only one ball reached the outfield. The Pittsburgh Pirates bought his contract the next day.

Faber made the Pirates’ 1911 Opening Day roster, but manager Fred Clarke never used him and in mid-May sent him to Minneapolis of the American Association. Within days of his arrival in Minnesota, Faber entered a distance-throwing contest and injured his pitching arm. During his short stay in Minneapolis, Faber had a career-changing experience: Teammate Harry Peaster taught him the finer points of the spitball, which at the time was a legal pitch.7

Within weeks the sore-armed Faber was shipped to Pueblo of the Western League. The young Iowan worked on his spitter over the next 2½ seasons, first in Pueblo and then for two years with Des Moines of the Western League. In 1913, his second year in Des Moines, Faber solidified an “iron man” reputation, sometimes pitching on consecutive days and once, during an Iowa heat wave, pitching all 18 innings of a tie game ended by darkness. In the closing weeks of the 1913 season, White Sox owner Comiskey bought Faber’s contract for 1914.

Faber’s offseason was abbreviated. In October 1913, at the urging of Rowland, Comiskey belatedly added Faber to the White Sox roster for the around-the-world exhibition tour with the New York Giants. The rookie-to-be performed adequately on the domestic leg of the tour, but Comiskey planned to drop Faber from the squad before departure for Japan, Australia, the Mideast and Western Europe.8 However, Faber caught another break: Just hours before the teams embarked on their Pacific crossing, Giants pitcher Christy Mathewson, the most popular American athlete of the day, quit the tour because he feared becoming seasick on the journey. Comiskey and Giants manager John McGraw made an agreement: Faber was loaned to the Giants to take Mathewson’s place.9

Mathewson must have felt vindicated in his decision to remain stateside: A powerful storm nearly wrecked the teams’ ship as it crossed the Pacific, and all the passengers experienced bouts of seasickness. None suffered more than Matty’s replacement, Faber, who was too ill to leave the ship for a day or two after its arrival in Japan. Eventually, Faber took regular turns pitching against his future team. In the finale, in London, with King George V in attendance, Faber pitched tenaciously for 11 innings but took the loss. On the voyage back to the United States, McGraw tried to buy Faber’s contract. Comiskey refused.10

After a no-decision start and a handful of relief assignments, the 6-foot-2, 180-pound rookie forged into the national spotlight in June 1914. On June 1 Faber pitched 12⅓ innings in a 2-1 loss to Detroit. Six days later, he earned his first major-league victory with a three-hit shutout of the New York Yankees. Ten days after that, Faber came within three outs of no-hitting defending World Series champion Philadelphia; an infielder’s slow work on a bouncer allowed the only hit. He cooled off in the second half of the season — a sore elbow sidelined him for a month — and finished 10-9 with a 2.68 ERA.

Before the 1915 season, Comiskey surprised the baseball world by selecting Pants Rowland, who lacked any major-league playing or managing experience, as the White Sox manager. Faber responded to the new skipper, posting a 24-14 record with a 2.55 ERA. Though the spitball was a big part of his repertoire, Faber also relied on his fastball and curve. He said that just the awareness that he might unleash a spitter at any time was enough to keep most batters guessing.11 His forte was getting hitters to swing early in the count and beat the ball into the ground. That skill was best demonstrated on May 12, 1915, in Comiskey Park, when Faber required a record-low 67 pitches to defeat Washington.12 Faber pitched less in 1916 due to injury, but he improved to 17-9 with a 2.02 ERA for a team that lost the pennant by two games.

Faber’s competitive fire and pleasant personality made him popular with White Sox fans and management — though later in his career, as his losses due to teammates’ miscues mounted, he became crankier and a manager briefly benched him.

Comiskey, who owned a Wisconsin game preserve, named a moose after his young pitcher. In September 1916 the moose escaped; it startled a couple of local youths, one of whom happened to be carrying a rifle. When word of the incident reached the Chicago newspapers, headline writers had some fun. One headed an article, “Shoots Red Faber, Pride of Comiskey! Moose, not pitcher.”13

Faber was a battler. In a single at-bat, he decked Ty Cobb on three consecutive knockdown pitches. He also earned opponents’ respect. Babe Ruth, who once described Faber as “the nicest man in the world,”14 shook hands and posed for pictures with the spit-baller at Red Faber Day at Comiskey Park in 1929.

In 1917 Faber posted a career-best 1.92 ERA, winning 16 games for the White Sox en route to their first pennant in 11 seasons. In the World Series, against New York, Faber tied a Series record with three victories. He won Game Two, lost Game Four, won Game Five in relief, and then closed out the host Giants with a complete-game victory in Game Six. His pitching performance overshadowed his baserunning blunder in Game Two, when he tried to steal third while it was occupied by teammate Buck Weaver.

With World War I raging as the 1918 season opened, it appeared likely that major leaguers would be drafted into military service. As a 29-year-old bachelor, Faber was virtually certain to be conscripted. He won his first four decisions, enlisted in the Navy, and lost his farewell game. Though he told reporters that he wanted assignment to a submarine15 — apparently he forgot his seasickness during the world tour — Faber served his entire tour at Great Lakes Naval Base, near Chicago. A chief yeoman, he supervised recreation programs and pitched for the base team for the duration of the war.

Back in a baseball uniform for 1919, Faber (11-9) struggled with the flu — he was weak and underweight — and with arm and ankle injuries. After a layoff of several weeks, he struggled in his only appearance during the final month of the regular season and remained on the bench throughout the tainted 1919 World Series. White Sox catcher and fellow Hall of Famer Ray Schalk long contended that the Black Sox Scandal would have been impossible had Faber been healthy; the conspirators would not have had enough pitching to succeed.16

After the 1920 season, the 32-year-old Iowan married 22-year-old Milwaukee native Irene Margaret Walsh, of Chicago. They met by accident — literally. He was a bystander who came to her assistance after she was hurt in an auto collision. The couple had no children, and she experienced ongoing health problems that reportedly included dependency on painkillers. A Faber relative described their marriage as unhappy.17 There were whispers that she became romantically involved with White Sox outfielder Johnny Mostil, and that his 1927 suicide attempt occurred after Faber confronted him about the affair. (More likely Mostil became despondent when he learned that his longtime girlfriend had thrown him over for his teammate Bill Barrett, whom she subsequently married.) In any case, the Fabers remained married until March 1943, when Irene died of a cerebral hemorrhage at age 44.

The advent of the lively-ball era coincided with the best three-season stretch of Faber’s career (1920-22), when he went a combined 69-45 and led the league in ERA in 1921 and 1922. He was among the 17 “grandfathered” pitchers permitted to throw the otherwise banned spitball for the rest of his career. In 1921, when the White Sox were a shambles after the Black Sox indictments, Faber’s 25 wins (against 15 losses) represented 40 percent of all the team’s victories. He followed that with his third consecutive 20-win season (21-17). But after 1923, when he went 14-11, it was clear that Faber’s days of dominance were behind him; age, injury, and White Sox ineptitude took their toll. He suffered his first losing season (9-11) in 1924, when he got a late start after elbow surgery.

As early as the mid-1920s, sportswriters started predicting Faber’s retirement. But he remained generally effective, and kept returning, season after season. He explained his longevity by noting that the spitball exerted less stress on his arm.18 Faber showed occasional flashes of his old form. He registered his third and final career one-hitter in 1929.

In 1932 new manager Lew Fonseca took Faber out of the starting rotation, and his record tumbled to 2-11. By 1933, his 20th season in the majors, Faber (3-4) was the American League’s oldest player — he turned 45 that fall — and its last “legal” spit-baller. (A grandfathered National League spitballer, Burleigh Grimes, crossed over and pitched 18 innings for the 1934 Yankees.) In the postseason City Series against the Cubs, Faber got the Game Two start at the last minute. He responded with his best performance in years, a five-hit shutout. Though no one knew it at the time, it was Faber’s last appearance against major-league competition.

After a combined 5-15 record the previous two seasons, Faber was upset with his 1934 contract offer from the White Sox, who wanted to cut his pay by one-third, to $5,000. He secured his release and hoped to join another major-league team, but there were no takers. He closed his career with a 254-213 record.

In retirement Faber tried his hand at selling cars and real estate — his low level of success was attributed to his high level of honesty — before acquiring a bowling alley in suburban Chicago. Early in the 1946 season, Ted Lyons became the White Sox manager and hired Faber as pitching coach; they lasted three seasons.

In April 1947 the 58-year-old Faber married 29-year-old divorcee Frances Knudtzon. They became parents the next year with the arrival of their only child, Urban C. Faber, II, nicknamed Pepper. In the mid-1950s, the Cook County (Chicago) Highway Department hired Faber; he worked on a survey crew until he was nearly 80.19

In the late 1950s Pepper Faber’s Little League team, the Rebels, might have been the only Little League squad in the nation to have two ex-major leaguers as assistant coaches — Pepper’s father and Nick Etten, who had played first base for the Yankees, Phillies, and Athletics. Urban tossed batting practice and helped manager Ted Cushing wherever needed and without interfering. “If a first-base umpire is needed, Red takes the job,” columnist and neighbor Bill Gleason wrote, “and the opposing manager knows all decisions will be fair.”20 In 1963, when he was 14, Pepper Faber suffered a broken neck and nearly died in a swimming accident. Though he survived, health problems continue to dog Urban II.

Exactly 50 years after his rookie season, in 1964, Red Faber was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame. His acceptance speech lasted 100 words:

“Mr. Commissioner, ladies and gentlemen. It’s a great honor to me to be named to the Hall of Fame. It’s very hard for me to even imagine that I would ever be elected to it. But now that I am, and about to join all those celebrities that I used to know and play against and with, why, I hardly know what to say. I know there are all baseball fans here. They must be or they wouldn’t have come this far to see an event like this. And I’m happy to greet you all in our behalf. Thank you.”21

In retirement, Faber was among the founders of Baseball Anonymous, an organization created to help former ballplayers (and athletes from other sports) who were down on their luck. Growing to nearly 700 members (at $2 per year) in its first year, Baseball Anonymous performed many good deeds; most were handled quietly, but in 1958, when Faber was the group’s general chairman, Baseball Anonymous arranged a Comiskey Park ceremony to honor former White Sox pitching great Ed Walsh, who was 77 years old and struggling physically and financially.22 The group also staged benefits for other former players who had fallen upon hard times. Faber was a regular at Hot Stove League banquets and old-timer’s games in Chicago and Milwaukee.

Faber, who took up the habit of smoking at age 8, suffered two heart attacks within a two-year period in the mid-1960s. He experienced increasing heart and respiratory problems in later years. He died at home on September 25, 1976, at the age of 88. He was survived by his wife, Frances, who died in 1992, and their son. Red Faber’s grave marker in Chicago’s Acacia Park Cemetery cites his Navy service but makes no mention of his baseball glory.

An expanded version of this biography was published by Brian Cooper as “Red Faber: A Biography of the Hall of Fame Spitball Pitcher” (McFarland & Co., 2006). This version appeared in “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (SABR, 2015), edited by Jacob Pomrenke. 

Sources

Associated Press

Baseball Magazine

Cascade (Iowa) Pioneer

Chicago American

Chicago Tribune

Elfers, James E., The Tour to End All Tours (Lincoln, Nebraska: University of Nebraska Press, 2003)

Farrell, James T., My Baseball Diary (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company and The Copp Clark Company, Ltd., 1957. Board of Trustees, Southern Illinois University, 1998)

Iowa Historical Society

Lindberg, Richard C., The White Sox Encyclopedia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1997)

Loras College, Dubuque, Iowa

New York Times

Retrosheet.org

St. Louis Star

Society for American Baseball Research; various publications

Sporting Life

The Sporting News

Dubuque (Iowa) Telegraph Herald

United States National Archives

Washington Post

Notes

An unpretentious Milwaukee native, the “Pride of Teutonia Avenue” only left his hometown to play ball. Felsch, one of 12 children of German immigrants, rose to the pinnacle of the baseball world only to be consigned forever to the sport’s hell.

White Sox left fielder Shoeless Joe Jackson and third baseman George “Buck” Weaver have garnered the most attention of the “Eight Men Out,” becoming mythologized in books and movies. Happy Felsch was just a common Milwaukeean caught up in momentous events of the turbulent 1910s and ’20s. More than 40 years later, his account of those events would be the primary source for Eliot Asinof’s book Eight Men Out and the movie that molded present-day understanding of the fix.

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

Oscar Emil Felsch, who grew up to be arguably the best baseball player ever produced by Milwaukee’s north side, was born in 1891 in a German working-class neighborhood. His birth certificate does not exist because there are no Felsch family public-health records from that era.1 Many baseball historical resources list Felsch’s birth date as August 22, 1891, or unspecified dates in 1893 or 1894. However, his 1943 application for a Social Security number and his 1964 death certificate both state that he was born on April 7, 1891, to Berlin natives Charles and Marie Felsch (née Tietz or Tiegs).2 Charles was a north side carpenter.3

In the census of 1900, young Oscar was one of 10 living Felsch children and one of seven still residing in a mortgaged 26th Street frame house. He did not read or write in 1900 but eventually could after receiving a sixth-grade education. This lack of further formal education proved to haunt Felsch when he had to deal with shrewd baseball executives, underhanded gamblers, lawyers, and college-educated teammates.4 The teenage Oscar went to work as a $10-a-week factory laborer and shoe worker, giving all but 25 cents of his pay to his father.5

Felsch’s rise from the Milwaukee sandlots was due in no small part to his ballplaying dad and brothers. Reputed to be a first baseman of great ability, Charles had three more sons who played on area teams. As typical members of the aspiring working class, the boys hoped to develop their reputations in prominent local leagues in order to gain notice from pro scouts.6 Following the example of many other second-generation German children, the youthful Oscar turned away from individual sports like gymnastics and wrestling and gravitated toward the popular American team game of baseball. A member of the Turnverein (or Turners, a German gymnastics movement that emphasized physical education), the powerfully built wrestling champion eventually gave up grappling for baseball.

The broad-shouldered Felsch, listed at heights between 5-feet-9 and 5-feet-11 and weights of 160 to 190 pounds over his playing career, first appeared on the local baseball scene in 1911.7 Now employed as a shingler, the right-handed throwing and hitting shortstop-third baseman spent his spare time performing for Sisson and Sewell, a semipro club sponsored by a local clothing store. Their Sunday contests allowed Felsch to display his developing skills. The Milwaukee Sentinel noticed the budding star’s four hits and seven successful fielding chances on August 6, declaring, “Felch [sic] played a swell game at third.”8

In 1912 Oscar played with four semipro teams throughout Wisconsin. The star Sewell shortstop left in mid-June to sign with Manitowoc of the higher-level Lake Shore League, then later played with Grand Rapids (now Wisconsin Rapids). Felsch then manned third base behind pitcher Stoney McGlynn, a former St. Louis Cardinal and Milwaukee Brewer. Larger crowds in Lake Shore League towns like Racine and Sheboygan gave an athlete of Felsch’s caliber the opportunity for more lucrative paydays.9 By late August, the Grand Rapids team had disbanded and Felsch signed on with Stevens Point for the rest of the season.

Felsch’s easygoing nature and wonderful smile made the family nickname “Happy” a perfect fit. Newspapers adopted the sobriquet as early as 1912. At times he even preferred practices to games just for the sheer joy of hitting, fielding, and running.10 In 1913 Felsch continually appeared in the dailies as he advanced to minor-league ball with the Milwaukee Creams of the Class C Wisconsin-Illinois League. The youthful shortstop made a powerful first impression on Opening Day at Athletic Park (later called Borchert Field) as he went 5-for-5 with a grand slam in the first inning, drove in seven runs, and made two errors. The Creams defeated Appleton, 12-5, in the April 30 game, played immediately after the American Association Brewers contest.11

Felsch continued his impressive hitting, including a three-homer game in Oshkosh, and sensational but error-prone fielding during his abbreviated stay in his hometown. Meager crowds for this farm team of the higher-level Brewers forced the Creams to move on June 28 to Fond du Lac, where they became the Molls. There Felsch continued to spend time at both shortstop and his new position, right field.12

By early August, the Brewers called up their phenom. This allowed him to vault to Double-A, the top category of the minors, bypassing the B and A levels. Following are Felsch’s impressive Deadball Era statistics with the Cream/Molls, his first professional team: 18 home runs and 16 stolen bases with a .319 batting average in 357 at-bats. The promising youngster’s future was in the outfield as he committed only two errors in 34 games there (.971 fielding percentage) while booting the ball 36 times in 58 games (.868 fielding average) at shortstop.13

Felsch did not play often for the pennant-winning Brewers in 1913, as he needed polishing. He finished with a batting average of .183 with two home runs in only 26 games.14

In 1914 the muscular Felsch showcased his major-league potential both at the plate and in the outfield. He set home-run distance records in Milwaukee (over 500 feet at Athletic Park, by one account) and Kansas City, and led the American Association in round-trippers with 19. Felsch batted a potent .304 with 41 doubles, 11 triples, and 19 stolen bases for the repeat-champion Brewers. He demonstrated his outfield prowess with great range and a rifle arm.15

By early August the Brewers, an independent club, knew they owned a star fit to sell to the highest major-league bidder. The Senators, Cubs, White Sox, Giants, and Reds were scouting the left fielder. On August 8 the White Sox acquired Felsch for $12,000 plus an infielder and an outfielder from their organization. The Brewers were delighted that Chicago allowed their “fence breaker” to remain in Milwaukee for the duration of 1914. Felsch, declared the greatest Brewer ever by their business manager, Lou Nahin, then signed a two-year contract with Chicago at a salary of $2,500 per year.16

The 1915 season developed into an eventful one for the White Sox’ rookie center fielder. Not only did Felsch make his major-league debut on April 14 in St. Louis with a single and a stolen base, but he also got married.17

The 1915 White Sox started their steady ascent toward the top of the American League by rising from sixth place to third with a 93-61 record. This was due to the addition of energetic 33-year-old manager Clarence “Pants” Rowland and five new position players, including future Hall of Fame second baseman Eddie Collins, Shoeless Joe Jackson, and Felsch. The newcomer in center finished with a .248 batting average, three home runs, and 16 stolen bases in 121 games as a semi-regular. Felsch’s numbers could have been stronger except for a nagging leg injury he suffered early in the season.18

After the conclusion of the hotly contested Chicago City Series between the White Sox and Cubs, the handsome, square-jawed 24-year-old major leaguer returned to Milwaukee, where he married Marie Wagner, described on the marriage certificate as a 22-year-old north side homemaker, on October 27.19

Felsch spent what should have been his honeymoon getting his first experience with the judicial system. On October 29 the newlywed was asked to testify in pitcher Cy Slapnicka’s lawsuit against the Brewers for back pay. After the case was postponed until December, Felsch, Slapnicka, and the Philadelphia Phillies’ Fred Luderus, also from Milwaukee, embarked for Little Chute, Wisconsin, for a Sunday exhibition contest.20

The coming 1916 baseball season surely brought hope to Felsch and the White Sox. The promising club advanced to second place, overcoming a slow start to finish only two games behind the Red Sox. Charles Comiskey, the White Sox owner, was spending money to make money. Adding a pitcher of the caliber of Claude “Lefty” Williams to a staff that already included stars Eddie Cicotte, Red Faber, and Reb Russell helped the White Sox break their attendance record with 679,923 fans, 140,462 more than in 1915.21

Comiskey Park loyalists enjoyed watching Felsch belt seven home runs, out of a team total of 17. He led the Deadball Era White Sox and tied for third in the American League. Suddenly the sophomore from the sandlots of Milwaukee was in the upper echelon of AL hitters as he batted an even .300 and finished sixth in the league with a slugging average of .427. Under the tutelage of coach William “Kid” Gleason, the sure-handed Hap, an honorable mention member on Baseball Magazine’s AL All-America Baseball Club, topped all AL outfielders with a fielding percentage of .981.22

For Happy Felsch it would never get better than 1917. In only his fifth season of professional baseball, he had become a national hero, thanks to a remarkable regular season and an exceptional World Series. The White Sox center fielder was in a class with future Hall of Fame outfielders Tris Speaker and Ty Cobb thanks to his 1917 statistics: .308 batting average (fifth in American League); 102 RBIs (tied for second with Ty Cobb, first White Sox player ever with 100 RBIs); 440 putouts (first among AL outfielders); and six home runs (tied for fourth in AL).

Comiskey had picked up shortstop Swede Risberg and first baseman Chick Gandil to round out the starting lineup. Although both players were welcome additions on the diamond, they helped form divisive cliques in the clubhouse. Gandil also retained his connections to gamblers. Felsch fraternized with the boisterous, card-playing Risberg/Gandil group that was often in conflict with the higher-educated Ray Schalk/Eddie Collins faction. The seeds of discord that led to the 1919 scandal were sown.23

Climaxing this year of destiny was the 1917 World Series. Game One, played at Comiskey Park on Saturday, October 6, was decided by a “loud and vicious clout from the trusty bludgeon of Felsch.” “Milwaukee’s famous beef and brawn” hit a long home run to deep left field, giving the White Sox a 2-0 lead in a game they eventually won 2-1 over the New York Giants. The center fielder also made a sensational one-handed cutoff play of a Giant double, preventing a round-tripper.

Felsch, who drove his new Packard from Milwaukee to Chicago the day before, was rewarded with two $50 Liberty Bonds, including one from entertainer Al Jolson. He also accepted a new suit, hat, shoes, and other clothing articles from Chicago merchants. Milwaukeeans, thrilled over Felsch’s success, presented him with a baseball-shaped diamond stickpin before Game One and jokingly threatened to take it away if he did not hit a home run. Felsch proceeded to earn the pin and much adulation by slugging the only Sox homer in that fall classic. A thousand Milwaukee fans, including Felsch’s father and a brother, were at Comiskey Park that day. Back home, 20,000 more flocked to local electric scoreboards in theaters or to tickers and blackboards in restaurants and businesses. Fans were just as loud as if they were at the game and remained in a frenzy for 15 minutes after the home run.24

In Game Two, Chicago continued its winning ways as the “pride of the Cream city” contributed to the 7-2 victory with a hit-and-run single and several outstanding fielding plays. In Milwaukee, Felsch fans went wild again as 35-cent tickets to the electric-scoreboard venues were scalped for $1. That Sunday evening the White Sox and Giants left for New York, arriving on Monday afternoon. Game Three, scheduled for Tuesday at the Polo Grounds, was rained out. Off-the-field news included a flattering invitation for Felsch, Eddie Cicotte, and outfielder John Collins to appear in New York vaudeville. The three did not say whether they accepted.25

The Giants recovered to tie the Series at two games each with back-to-back shutouts of the hard-hitting White Sox. Comiskey Park hosted Game Five on Saturday, October 13. Chicago came back from a 5-2 deficit to win 8-5 with Felsch going 3-for-5. The teams traveled again to New York where, on Monday in Game Six, the White Sox captured the Series with a 4-2 victory.26

The White Sox were the toast of the Windy City as they returned to thousands of exultant fans, orators, and two big brass bands. The ballplayer that “made Milwaukee famous” was welcomed back with numerous parties, receptions, banquets, and dances throughout his proud hometown. Friends, local clubs, and city officials helped to arrange the celebrations that honored the man New York sportswriters believed made the difference in the Series, with both his bat and his glove. The smiling ballplayer enjoyed the attention, but insisted that he not speak in front of throngs of his clamoring fans.

In addition to his World Series check of $3,669 (almost matching his salary of $3,750), the popular star received presents including a gold watch, a set of silverware, and $100 worth of shares in American Aircraft. The papers glorified Felsch by claiming that he made $10,000 a year and accepted enough complimentary drinks to start his own brewery. After all the honors and gifts were bestowed upon Felsch, “the greatest citizen the north side has ever produced,” he left for the solitude of a three-week fishing and hunting trip in the northern woods.27

Major-league baseball, the White Sox, and Felsch experienced tough times in the intensified war year of 1918. The season was shortened so that baseball could comply with the “work or fight” edict of May 18. This decreed that any male between 21 and 31 years old in a nonessential job must enlist, secure a war-related job, or be reclassified with a lower draft number. Players who did not enlist hurried to take exempt jobs in shipyards, steel mills, war-production factories, and farms. Many of them, now subject to criticism as slackers, then played ball in industrial leagues.28

The defending champion White Sox got off to a rocky start as the train taking them to spring training derailed March 18 in Texas. No one was hurt. Then Felsch missed the beginning of camp because of a sudden illness. The season continued downhill as the White Sox lost many key players to the war effort. The club finished in sixth place with a 57-67 record before only 195,081 Comiskey Park customers. This was a significant decline from the 684,521 who watched the 100-54 pennant winners of 1917.29

The glory of 1917 must have seemed like a distant memory to Happy Felsch as he struggled both on and off the field in 1918. The star outfielder left the White Sox for 12 days in May as he visited a seriously injured brother in a Texas Army camp. Alarming his family and manager Rowland, the distraught Felsch remained incommunicado during the entire trip.30 The “mighty Happy” departed for good on July 1, leaving Rowland with a punchless, spiritless shell of a team. Surprising the defending champs with his sudden resignation, Felsch announced that he was taking a war-effort job at the Milwaukee Gas Company for $125 a month plus earnings from weekend semipro ball. This paled in comparison to the $3,750 contract he walked away from. In an effort to boost attendance, the Kosciuskos of the Lake Shore League quickly signed the former World Series star.31

Normally a modest man, Felsch kept quiet about the dispute until July 18. That day, the Milwaukee Sentinel reported the disgruntled star’s desire to return to the American League with any team other than the White Sox.32 The Sporting News reported that Felsch had left because of disputes with Comiskey over pay, abstinence from drinking, and the Texas journey, plus a personal conflict with Eddie Collins.33

“Milwaukee’s most famous diamond gladiator” was welcomed home by his many local admirers. The Koskys now played before packed houses both on the road as well as at Milwaukee’s South Side Park and Athletic Park. As expected, Felsch hit very well and showed his versatility by handling all three outfield positions, first base, and catcher. Not only did he remain a Kosky through early October but he also participated in several “All-Star” games in Milwaukee and Chicago. These contests included major leaguers Braggo Roth, Dickey Kerr, Jack Quinn, Fred Luderus, and others.34

After the 1918 season, Comiskey replaced manager Rowland with popular longtime White Sox coach Kid Gleason, stating that Pants had lost control of the team. Even though the war ended on November 11, heading off the expected shutdown of the 1919 season, 1918 had a profound impact on the White Sox. The club was torn by dissension over wage disparities and disputes between players who enlisted in the military versus those who took exempt war-effort jobs.35 Owners and the press resented athletes who avoided military service by working for companies with baseball teams. A disgusted Comiskey, alluding to Felsch, Joe Jackson, and Lefty Williams, went so far as to say, “There is no room on my club for players who wish to evade the army draft by entering the employ of ship owners.”36

Comiskey conveniently set aside his anger in order to rebuild his remarkable team. With Gleason serving as a capable conciliator, the White Sox promptly brought back stateside war workers Felsch, Jackson, and Williams. Felsch quickly regained his form in 1919, leading the American League with 32 outfield assists and 14 double plays.37 Four of the assists came on August 14, tying a major-league record. Accepting 12 chances on June 23 let the gifted ball hawk tie another American League record. His 14 double plays are still tied for the single-season record as of 2014.38

Felsch batted a solid .275 for the top run-producing team in the majors and slugged seven home runs, tying Jackson for the club lead. His 24 homers that decade were more than any other White Sox player hit.

Many of these statistics could have been more impressive had the owners not shortened the 1919 campaign. Anticipating lower attendance as the public recovered from the war, the baseball moguls cut the regular season from 154 to 140 games. In addition, American League rosters were reduced from 25 to 21, and salaries were depressed in anticipation of lower gate receipts. These concerns proved to be unfounded as war-weary fans flocked back to the national pastime. Attendance rose to 627,186 from 195,081 for the AL champion White Sox and to 6.5 million from 3 million in the majors. In an effort to recoup some revenue lost to the ill-advised shortened season, the owners extended the World Series between the Cincinnati Reds and the Sox from seven to nine games.39

Felsch’s banishment from Organized Baseball was a result of the 1919 fall classic, his second and last. Some of the White Sox, playing in an atmosphere poisoned by unchecked wagering and lower-than-market salaries, were eager to cash in. Owners and league executives generally ignored betting as they encouraged any interest in their sport. Baseball was revered as upright and patriotic. Charles Comiskey stated in an authorized 1919 biography, “To me baseball is as honorable as any other business. … It has to be or it could not last a season out. Crookedness and baseball do not mix.” At the very same time, his own players were mixing the two.40

In this era long before free agency, many players received wages far below their market value. Bound to their teams by the reserve clause, they could sign for what the owners offered or go home. Black Sox Felsch, Jackson, and fix organizer Gandil were rightly upset that their three salaries combined were less than the $15,000 made by college-educated Eddie Collins. The eight Black Sox averaged $4,300 in 1919.41 Certainly, Felsch’s $3,750 annual 1917-19 contracts (plus the potential for $5,000 in World Series pay) compared favorably with the average blue-collar pay range of $1,000 to $2,400, cited by Steven Reiss in his 1999 book, Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era.42

It is still unclear exactly how the Series was fixed and who the principals were. However, many of the favored White Sox did play poorly, whether it was because they took money from gamblers, feared retribution from gangsters, or endured an ordinary slump. Felsch himself was full of contradictions, both in his on-field performance as well as in interviews in later years.

At the plate Felsch produced only a .192 batting average with one extra-base hit, a double, in the eight-game Series loss.43 The hard hitter made satisfactory contact but was robbed several times by superb Cincinnati fielding. In hindsight, some sportswriters looked at his sudden inability to advance runners, as well as several questionable running and fielding misplays, as possible proof of Felsch’s involvement in a fix. After botching catches in Games Five and Six, the normally sure-handed center fielder was demoted to right field for Game Seven.44 The Milwaukee Sentinel believed that the hometown hero hit in bad luck and was just “outshone” by Cincinnati’s Edd Roush. The paper did not hint at a fix, but stated that the White Sox were down and lethargic. After Felsch hit his two-bagger, the Sentinel exclaimed, “Felsch was also on the job, much to everyone’s surprise, and walloped a double.”45

After dropping the World Series, the defeated Sox returned home with promised losers’ shares of $3,254 and without their normal triumphant attitude and the $5,207 winners’ portions, up to then the largest in baseball history. Comiskey, responding to what he called “nasty rumors,” even publicly offered a $20,000 reward to anyone with evidence of a fix, but added, “I believe my boys fought the battles of the recent World Series on the level, as they have always done.” Later he announced that he was withholding the losers’ shares from eight of his players “pending further investigations.” Despite his protestations of ignorance, Comiskey chose the correct eight.

The Sentinel sarcastically reported, “Felsch is back home and will amuse himself on the bowling alleys this winter. If he makes as many strikes as he did in the world’s series he ought to be good for a couple of 300-scores.”46

Rumors of a fix were flying even before the first game. Many sportswriters heard them, but they never appeared in print. The day after the Series ended, one of the most prominent writers, Hugh Fullerton, urged his readers to “forget the suspicious and evil-minded yarns that may be circulated.” However, he added, “There are seven men on the [White Sox] team who will not be there when the gong sounds next Spring. …” Later Fullerton wrote that he had been present when manager Gleason told Comiskey that the rumors were fact.47

The offseason proved disturbing for Happy Felsch. In November he and other Black Sox were the subjects of a private investigation. Comiskey hired detectives to check if his players were making suspiciously large purchases or lifestyle changes.48 Operative number 11 of Hunter’s Secret Service conducted the Felsch surveillance only to uncover contradictory information. After culling tips from many north side taverns, the investigator discovered that Felsch had recently moved from his father’s home on North 26th Street back to his in-laws’ neighborhood on Teutonia Avenue. While the slugger was on a duck-hunting trip, number 11 gained access to the Felsch apartment under the pretense of renting a furnished room. The eight-room, no-bath living quarters above a grocery were crowded as the Felsch family lived with Marie’s parents, sister, and the sister’s two small children. The private eye believed the neighborhood to be poor. He found Hap’s recent purchase of a new $1,800 Hupmobile — a solid automobile bought by those rising from the working class — inconsistent with living in a cramped $22-a-month apartment.49

After the secret investigation, Comiskey was left with no choice but to mail the $3,254 checks. He could find no evidence that anyone but Gandil went on a spending spree.50

Felsch then received an unexpectedly generous contract from the White Sox. Comiskey’s top assistant, Harry Grabiner, made a special trip to Teutonia Avenue in late 1919 to ink the center fielder to a 1920 contract that included a surprising $3,000 raise. Felsch, taken aback by Comiskey’s sudden largesse, signed even as Grabiner reminded him that he could not play with anyone but the White Sox. In addition, Grabiner mentioned the swirling scandal rumors and called for Felsch’s silence, both with the press and with American League inquisitors.51 It was apparent that Comiskey desired his stars back and was finally willing to invest in salaries commensurate with their talents in order to purchase their silence. Further investigations could result in ruinous player punishments.52

Felsch’s finest year on the diamond was to be his last. He established career highs of 14 home runs (first on the White Sox and fourth in the AL behind Babe Ruth’s unbelievable 54), 188 hits, 88 runs, 40 doubles, 15 triples, 115 RBIs, and a .338 batting average.53 Batters in 1920 enjoyed a livelier ball, the new requirement that umpires keep only fresh, unmarred spheres in play, and the outlawing of trick pitches (except for the grandfathered spitball pitchers).54 The 29-year-old, now in his prime, was considered one of the American League’s top players, pacing the circuit’s outfielders with 10 double plays.55

After the defending American League champs trained in Waco, Texas, they arrived at Milwaukee’s Athletic Park for several preseason exhibitions with the Brewers. Felsch, the hometown idol, responded to a rousing ovation from the 5,000 fans on April 10 with a 2-for-4 day.56 The White Sox proceeded to stay in the 1920 pennant race until the events of a turbulent September caused them to succumb to the Cleveland Indians.

September of 1920 proved to be the final month of Happy Felsch’s brilliant career. On the 7th a grand jury was impaneled in Chicago to investigate the possible fix of an August 31 Cubs-Phillies game. After the hearings began on September 22, the focus quickly shifted to the tainted 1919 World Series. On Monday, September 26, Felsch suited up for the last time in an 8-1 win over the Detroit Tigers. Two days later, Cicotte and Jackson, counseled by Comiskey’s attorney, confessed to the grand jury. Immediately after the indictments, Comiskey suspended the seven implicated players. The Sox were only a half-game behind the Indians.57

By now, the fix story was front-page national news. Reporter Harry Reutlinger of the Chicago Evening American was looking to secure his scandal facts first-hand from one of the players. He was advised to visit Felsch, who was uneducated but considered affable enough to talk. Armed with a bottle of scotch, Reutlinger quickly got Felsch, who was in a bathrobe soaking his swollen big toe, to open up.58 In a September 30, 1920, article, Felsch verified Cicotte’s confession:

“Well, the beans are all spilled and I think that I am through with baseball. I got my $5,000 and I suppose the others got theirs too. If you say anything about me, don’t make it appear that I’m trying to put up an alibi. I’m not. I’m as guilty as the rest of them. We were in it alike. I don’t know what I’m going to do now. … I’m going to hell, I guess. … I wish that I hadn’t gone into it. I guess we all do. … I never knew where my $5,000 came from. It was left in my locker at the clubhouse and there was always a good deal of mystery about the way it was dealt out. That was one of the reasons why we never knew who double crossed us on the split of the $100,000. It was to have been an even split. But we never got it. … But when they let me in on the idea too many men were involved. I didn’t like to be a squealer and I knew that if I stayed out of the deal and said nothing about it they would go ahead without me and I’d be that much money out without accomplishing anything. I’m not saying this to pass the buck to the others. I suppose that if I had refused to enter the plot and had stood my ground I might have stopped the whole deal. We all share the blame equally. I’m not saying that I double crossed the gamblers, but I had nothing to do with the loss of the world’s series. The breaks just came so that I was not given a chance to do anything toward throwing the game. The records show that I played a pretty good game. I know I missed one terrible fly but, you can believe me or not, I was trying to catch that ball. … I got $5,000. I could have got just about that much by being on the level if the Sox had won the series. And now I’m out of baseball — the only profession I know anything about, and a lot of gamblers have gotten rich. The joke seems to be on us.”59

Some historians view this acknowledgment of bad intentions as an attempt to placate shadowy gamblers.60 Felsch did admit to receiving the $5,000, but not to contributing to the Series loss.

Felsch’s last big-league campaign was much less gratifying than his statistics might indicate. He told Reutlinger, “It’s been hell for me” in dealing with his injured toe and the grand-jury investigation. In addition, the White Sox clubhouse was more divided than ever as some of the “Clean Sox” believed that the Black Sox were accepting money to throw 1920 regular-season games. Felsch denied this in the Evening American interview, but the adverse impact of gamblers on the White Sox could not be disputed.61

The indicted man the Milwaukee Sentinel considered “the best ball player ever produced in Milwaukee” was the object of considerable consternation from his loyal local fans. Some recalled that three days before the 1919 World Series, Felsch instructed his Milwaukee friends to bet on the White Sox. Even after losing three games to the Reds, he still advised his father-in-law to continue wagering on Chicago.62

As 1920 ended, Felsch, Swede Risberg, Buck Weaver, and utility infielder Fred McMullin hired an attorney, Thomas Nash, as they began their fight for reinstatement. Felsch returned to Wisconsin to fish and ponder his future.63 Meanwhile, the owners set the tone for baseball’s future by hiring their first commissioner, stern federal Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

Two strikingly different versions of justice were meted out to Happy Felsch and the Black Sox in 1921. Acquitted in court, the players were nevertheless banned forever from Organized Baseball by the newly omnipotent Landis.

Attorney Nash desired a speedy, open trial for his clients and asked Felsch to travel to Chicago on January 31 to file a $10,000 bond to guarantee his appearance.64 Arraignment took place on February 14; due to poorly worded indictments and missing evidence, the initial case was dismissed. At this point, just before spring training, Comiskey hoped to get his talented players back. However, Landis — in his endeavor to clean up baseball and rescue its public image — declared the eight players ineligible. The commissioner knew that his decisions to protect the game would not always favor an individual owner’s interest.65 The decimated 1921 Sox proceeded to finish a dismal seventh.

Through the work of American League President Ban Johnson, enough fresh evidence was secured to support new indictments. Jury trial proceedings began in Chicago on June 27. Judge Hugo Friend decreed that the players could only be convicted for conspiring to defraud the public and injuring the businesses of Comiskey and the American League because there was no law against fixing baseball games. This made the trial of little historical use in determining the truth.66

Felsch’s interview with Reutlinger was disallowed as evidence. Judge Friend said there was so little evidence against Felsch and Weaver that he doubted he could let a guilty jury verdict stand. The trial took place from July 18 to August 2 before packed galleries that supported the encouraged players as slandered heroes rather than wrongdoers.67 Even the accused Felsch appeared jovial as he surprisingly exclaimed, “Hope you win the pennant, boys!” to the Clean Sox clique visiting the courtroom.68 At the end of the trial, the state asked for five-year jail sentences and $2,000 fines. After less than three hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted the players as no state law prohibited throwing games. The Black Sox and the jurors celebrated together at a restaurant.69

The following day, August 3, the party ended as Judge Landis, in his relentless effort to redeem baseball’s credibility, gave this famous edict:

“Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in a conference with a bunch of crooked players and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.”70

The press portrayed the devastated Comiskey as a tragic victim and the Black Sox as aberrant, evil men who betrayed baseball’s purity. In reality, the fix was the culmination of many years of whitewashed baseball corruption.71 It can be claimed that Comiskey self-inflicted his enormous losses with his tight-fisted treatment of players.

Felsch, now 30, was a free and innocent man in the eyes of the law; however, he was forever exiled from the game he loved so much and played so well. Landis’s autocracy held a long reach as he threatened to blacklist anyone who competed with or against the Black Sox. The ban forced the former stars to go vast distances to play baseball.72

In attempts to make money in 1921, Felsch and the seven others formed barnstorming teams in Chicago, northern Indiana, and Wisconsin. Their efforts generally went for naught as ballpark operators and opposing teams were afraid of the consequences of any association with the contaminated Black Sox.73

Felsch endured the death of his father on July 28, adding more unwanted stress during the trial. The 68-year-old carpenter died at home from a cerebral hemorrhage.74 His son was allowed to return to Milwaukee for the funeral; however, Judge Friend demanded Happy’s appearance in court on Monday morning, August 1. Another defense attorney, Ray Cannon, successfully objected, stating that Felsch should be permitted to attend his father’s burial on Monday afternoon.75

Even though his professional career was prematurely over, the tenacious Felsch refused to give up on the diamond or in the legal system in 1922. With a new son, Oscar Ray, born in July, the north-sider set out with the “Ex-Major Leaguers.” This team, which booked nearly 20 games, could boast of athletes including attorney/pitcher Cannon (a former semipro teammate of Felsch) and Black Sox Weaver, Risberg, Cicotte, and Williams. Playing in mostly small towns, the club drew enthusiastic gatherings reaching 3,000 to witness the big-name stars.76

At the same time, Felsch and Risberg sued the White Sox for $100,000 each, declaring that they were ousted from baseball through a conspiracy. Felsch also sought $1,120 in back pay from 1920 and $1,500 for the remainder of a promised 1917 pennant bonus.77 In July Comiskey moved to dismiss the suits for lack of evidence and because of the players’ conspiracy to throw games. He claimed that he paid them in full up until the September 1920 suspensions and denied the 1917 bonus claim.78

The legal proceedings dragged into 1923, when Felsch sued for another $100,000 in damages. He claimed that his “name and reputation has been permanently impaired and destroyed” and that he had “been barred from playing base ball with any professional base ball team in any of the leagues of organized base ball of the United States.” Again, Comiskey requested dismissal of the suits. On June 16 Judge John Gregory dismissed the original $100,000 conspiracy complaint. After much judicial tussling, it was not until 1924 that the case finally went to trial.79

During the protracted battle over his baseball career, Felsch opened a grocery in 1923. Marie and Oscar lived on site for about a year as they attempted to proceed with the stark reality of their new lives.80

In 1924 Milwaukee’s most famous grocer became an accused perjurer and outlaw ballplayer. That January in Milwaukee, Joe Jackson’s suit against Comiskey commenced. Jackson accepted Ray Cannon’s offer of representation in an action similar to Felsch’s and Risberg’s. After turning down a White Sox settlement offer of $2,500, Cannon proceeded in this first Black Sox civil trial. He promised Jackson that Felsch and Risberg would “go the limit for you” in their testimony.81

The trial, well-publicized and heavily attended, provided three weeks of emotional drama. While on the witness stand, a nervous and flustered Felsch denied his signatures on, and knowledge of, his 1920 White Sox contract and related correspondence, mistakenly thinking he was protecting himself. Cannon was taken aback by Felsch’s naīveté, saying, “If it’s your signature, Happy, say so.” Even he could not rescue the ballplayer from perjury charges. “The pride of Milwaukee’s baseball history” was led away to jail in front of an impassive Comiskey and an astonished courtroom. Felsch, who normally “had been a magnet of friendship wherever he happened to move,” stoically looked straight ahead as he departed. Several hours of jail time ensued until friends posted $2,000 cash bond. The bewildered slugger, whose 16 signature denials abruptly suspended the trial, faced arraignment with a potential penalty of two years in a state prison. A handwriting expert confirmed that the 1920 inscriptions matched those that Felsch provided in court and said, “Felsch must be mistaken when he denies it.” Comiskey said he was sorry for his former star “for he was a great baseball player.”82

Judge Gregory called the perjury “malicious and vindictive.” Felsch said he misunderstood the questions and did not intend to perjure himself. The case went to the jury at the end of this tumultuous third week. While the jury was deliberating, Gregory sent Jackson to jail for perjury under $5,000 bond. Gregory overturned the verdict of $16,711 (most of his 1921 and 1922 pay) in favor of Jackson. The sudden, unexplained reappearance of the stolen 1920 confessions caused Gregory to say Jackson’s testimony of game-fixing innocence “reeks with perjury.” Eventually, Jackson, frustrated by his inability to clear his name, settled with Comiskey out of court for a fraction of the verdict, eliminating any appeals. The district attorney dropped the Jackson perjury charges due to insufficient evidence.83

Felsch discovered that playing ball — albeit an outlaw version in south-central Wisconsin — was more fitting and profitable than selling groceries. He was again enjoying what he did best with the Twin City (Sauk City and Prairie du Sac) Red Sox. This small-town club competed with black, Native American, House of David, and other Wisconsin teams unconcerned with the threat of blacklisting by Landis. In addition, Felsch played against fellow Black Sox Weaver (Reedsburg) and Risberg (Minnesota). Thanks to their slugger’s star power and .365 batting average, the 33-20 Red Sox drew crowds as large as 5,000.84

Felsch concluded his skirmishes with the legal system in 1925 and discovered more lucrative, yet distant, playing opportunities. In early February, his perjury case encountered delays, as the district attorney was reluctant to try it.85 Then Felsch’s civil suit against the Sox was settled out of court. This occurred only minutes before the trial was to have finally begun. All of his claims netted Felsch only $1,166 plus interest and costs for a total of about $1,500. The club, claiming that Comiskey was in poor health, did not want to endure another three-week ordeal.86 With criminal accusations hanging over his client’s head, Cannon must have been apprehensive about proceeding with another trial. On May 18 Felsch pleaded guilty to false-swearing, charges that were pending for more than 15 months. Judge Gregory dropped the perjury count and sentenced Felsch to one year of probation.87

Now the 33-year-old was free to play ball. In June he joined Risberg in Scobey, Montana.88 Thus began many years of semipro baseball for Felsch in Montana, Saskatchewan, and Manitoba. Out of the reach of Commissioner Landis, the two Black Sox played before crowded ballparks in Canada and North and South Dakota. Scobey fans adored Felsch for his prodigious home runs, willingness to perform at any position, and jocular personality.89 The pair were each paid a healthy $600 a month plus expenses as they guided their club to a 30-3 record in an environment of heavy gambling and drinking. They often endured opponents’ taunts — and responded with brawling — about their descent from the big leagues to a “cow pasture.”90

Felsch returned home to Teutonia Avenue for the winters.91 Montana baseball lured him back to Scobey for 1926. There he toiled in relative obscurity as the local newspapers gave the fallen star very little ink. In 1927 many small Montana towns, including Scobey, dropped semipro ball in favor of less expensive amateur teams consisting of local players.92

Felsch then elected to play for Regina, Saskatchewan. The opportunity to manage the Balmorals and receive greater publicity in a larger community was very appealing. Utilizing their star’s famed name in advertisements, “Hap Felsch’s Regina Balmorals” began the season on May 25. First baseman Felsch led the way with clutch doubles in the first two games. Competing against other independent semipros from Manitoba, Saskatchewan, Alberta, and North Dakota (including Risberg’s Lignite team), the “Felschmen” were most often victorious. Their manager frequently displayed his awesome home-run power and fielding flexibility (first and third base and pitcher).93

Back home, Felsch’s name was in the papers for a new litigious reason. Late in 1926 Risberg charged 20 ballplayers, including Felsch, with fixing games during the 1917 and 1919 seasons. These allegedly thrown games were intended to alter the final American League standings and the resulting first-, second-, and third-place money. After two days of contentious hearings, Judge Landis exonerated the accused in what some observers described as a quick and convenient whitewash.94

In the summer of 1928, the 37-year-old Felsch returned to Montana. Plentywood, Scobey’s rival, secured Felsch’s services as the semipros competed again in small Montana towns. The acclaimed center fielder joined Plentywood in mid-May for a preseason exhibition tour from Minneapolis back home.95 On Opening Day, May 27, the team lived up to its name, the Plentywood All-Stars, as they crushed Scobey, 20-4. In five at-bats, Felsch hit a double, two triples, and a home run.96 Plentywood played black, House of David, Canadian, Dakota, Minnesota, Iowa, and other eastern Montana clubs. The Sioux City Journal reported that Felsch was one of the greatest throwers ever after he unleashed a peg about 10 feet above the ground from center field into the catcher’s mitt. The one-hopper bounced directly over home plate as “Happy Felsch’s All-Stars” swept an August doubleheader.97

Felsch’s last itinerant years were 1929 and 1930 in Virden, Manitoba. This semipro club also performed against Canadian, Dakota, black, and House of David opponents. In an effort to win more games, Virden signed Felsch in early July, well into the 1929 season. The center fielder supplied power and his famous name to this wheat/railroad town with 1,500 residents.98 Once second baseman Swede Risberg joined the club, the local paper could not contain its glee, stating, “Hap Felsch and his merry men are just about the smoothest all-around combination that has invaded Wesley diamond for a long, long time. Hap has slowed some, but his gardening last night left nothing to be desired.”99 This popular team was closely identified with its star, acquiring the nicknames “Hap Felsch’s Virden All-Stars” and “the Felsch troupe.”100

In 1930 Felsch started out as a headliner with the American-Canadian Clown team. These barnstormers, with their star playing second base, competed against Virden on May 24. By June 6, the Manitoba town reacquired its ex-big leaguer. Felsch finished the 1930 season, his last on the road, with Virden. The potent club employed its center fielder’s name in its advertisements and his bat and glove in its many victories.101 One ad exclaimed, “See the great Hap Felsch spear the fast ones off the top of the fence.”102

In 1931 Felsch stayed out of the public eye. He was still listed in city directories as a ballplayer but his diamond career was essentially over.

A slower Felsch, now 40, returned for one last chance at baseball glory on the Milwaukee sandlots in 1932. Shortly after the Brewers prohibited Felsch’s “contaminated” presence at an all-star game at Borchert Field, Triangle Billiards, an amateur club, gained his services. The newspapers claimed that the team had secured Judge Landis’s permission before adding the former White Sox hero to their roster. Triangle drew much press and a capacity crowd of 15,000 on May 15 to see Felsch patrol center field. Fans exulted in the legend’s return as he exhibited his great skills and familiar gestures of pulling his nose and hat while squinting at the pitcher.

While on the Triangle bench, Felsch entertained several admiring children and smoked cigarettes, displaying his famous grin. One newspaper noted his quiet way, observing that maybe he was thinking that this was “a hell of a place” to be for so illustrious a ballplayer.103 Even though he was considerably past his prime, Felsch continued to play in the area for several more years, shifting to first base as his weight climbed to 200 pounds.104

The Felsch family moved around Milwaukee’s north side an extraordinary number of times in Happy’s post-baseball years. These were often efforts to obtain a new saloon location. During the Prohibition year of 1932, the family opened a new soft-drink parlor and lived at the site.105 In 1933 the family moved again and lived near their latest tavern as Prohibition ended. The business shifted north in 1936. By 1938, the family had again relocated their tavern and residence further northward.106

The notable former big leaguer did his best to remain cordial with his patrons. The Milwaukee Journal reported:

“In the mid-thirties Felsch’s tavern on W. Center St. became a gathering place for sand lot players and managers. Happy served free peanuts and kept the bowls on the bar full. The crunch of shells underfoot mingled with baseball talk that often lasted far into the night. Occasionally, a customer would try to draw Felsch into a comparison of the top players of the 1930s with those he had served with in the majors. Happy refused to comment. He seldom became angry when questioned — even about the Black Sox scandal — but found that silence was most effective in ending a distasteful subject.”107

The 1940s began with Oscar and Marie operating the Barn Grove Tavern. By 1943, Happy had left the saloon business, relocated closer to town, and worked as an assembler and watchman. The family moved again in 1947, only several blocks north of Borchert Field, the site of Felsch’s successes more than 30 years earlier.

By 1949, Happy had begun his final career as a crane operator. In 1952 he and Marie, parents of three and eventual grandparents of 11, ended their somewhat nomadic existence as they entered their final home on the second floor of a flat at 2460 N. 49th Street. At this location, Eight Men Out author Eliot Asinof and sportswriter Westbrook Pegler conducted their pivotal interviews with Felsch.

In 1962 Felsch, over 70 years old, retired as a crane operator for the George Meyer Company. His family adoringly remembered him as “always in a good mood.” Card playing, bowling, hunting, fishing, smoking, and coffee drinking were his favorite pastimes when he was not listening to the Milwaukee Braves on the radio.108

Judge Terence Evans recalled playing ball as a child in Garfield Park (now Rose Park) at Fifth and Burleigh. During this time in the late 1940s and early 1950s, Felsch would often observe Evans and his friends on the diamond. The children called him “Happy” and would converse with the local legend frequently. Evans did notice that Felsch, in poor physical condition, held one arm in a peculiar fashion, as if he had suffered a slight stroke.109

The north side’s finest ballplayer succumbed to a coronary blood clot due to arteriosclerosis on August 17, 1964, at Milwaukee’s St. Francis Hospital. The 73-year-old suffered from varicose veins and a leg abscess for years, but was not seriously ill until six months before his death. Diabetes, a liver ailment, and a pancreatic tumor also complicated his health.

Felsch was survived by his wife, son, and two daughters. The funeral was held on August 20 at the Franzen, Jung and Kaufmann Funeral Home, with entombment in “The Gardens of the Last Supper” at Wisconsin Memorial Park in the northwestern suburb of Brookfield.110

If not for the Black Sox Scandal, Happy Felsch might be remembered as one of the best all-around center fielders in baseball history. His superb skills induced reporters and managers of his era to compare him favorably with future Hall of Famers. Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack referred to Happy as “the greatest all around fielder in the country today, not barring Tris Speaker and Ty Cobb.”111 Cobb himself proclaimed, “Hap Felsch was a wonder.”112 None other than Babe Ruth ranked the pride of Milwaukee as the best center fielder of his era, asserting, “I would rate Hap Felsch of the old White Sox and Tris Speaker far superior to Cobb on the defense. Felsch was a greater ball hawk than Speaker, and what an arm he had!”113

Happy Felsch gave his side of the story in several interviews. Thanks to groundbreaking conversations with Felsch, writers including Asinof, Pegler, and Reutlinger were able to shed some light on the Black Sox Scandal. Most of the other fix participants were either too ashamed or fearful of gangster retribution to speak on the record. Major-league baseball preferred to keep the embarrassment of 1919 out of the public eye. Even in 1959, Commissioner Ford Frick persuaded a major television network to cancel a dramatization of the Black Sox scandal, stating that it would be bad for baseball and, therefore, bad for America.114

The amiable Felsch, however, did speak his piece in the last years of his life. Asinof was so appreciative of the center fielder’s openness that he dedicated his book, Bleeding Between the Lines, to the memory of Felsch.115 In this 1979 work, Asinof recounts his interview of Felsch for Eight Men Out, his 1963 chronicle of the scandal. The former minor leaguer first started his detailed research in 1960 when only four of the eight Black Sox were still alive. Cicotte, Gandil, and Risberg either refused or stonewalled Asinof’s inquiries.116 Felsch became his primary source.117

During his research, Asinof visited Milwaukee in an attempt to interview the ailing Felsch. Even after receiving repeated phone calls and a letter, the protective Marie continued to turn down the author. Asinof finally mustered enough courage to visit their home only after a man he met in a bar, who had been acquainted with Felsch, described him as a “real good guy” that everybody liked.

Marie relented when the polite yet persistent Asinof appeared at her door with a bottle of scotch to share with Happy, as Reutlinger did in 1920. She led him to the dark upstairs sitting room, asked for kindness in his questioning, and allowed the two men to spend the afternoon in conversation. Asinof detected hurt, guilt, and remorse in Felsch’s voice as he said, “I shoulda knew better. I just didn’t have the sense I was born with. It matters. It still matters.”118

With his heavily bandaged foot resting on an ottoman, the ruddy-faced Felsch opened up to Asinof. He was pleased to talk baseball and recounted his early days as Milwaukee’s baseball prodigy. The 70-year-old vividly recalled his underprivileged childhood, saying, “Seems like all I ever wanted was to hit a new ball with a new bat.”

Asinof described Felsch as a fine storyteller who was humble and amusing. He did express great contempt for the penny-pinching Comiskey and his fawning sportswriters. Regarding the scandal, he told Asinof, “It was a crazy time. I don’t know how it happened, but it did, all right.” He went on to say, “God damn, I was dumb, all right. Old Gandil was smart and the rest of us was dumb.” Felsch also recollected the times he was pressured by menacing gamblers into committing misplays in local leagues, the 1919 World Series, and the 1920 season.119

For his series of Black Sox articles in 1956, writer Westbrook Pegler also called on Felsch at his home, expecting to be refused. Instead, he was warmly received. After telling Pegler that an abscessed varicose vein near his right ankle kept him from sleeping more than four hours a night, Felsch recounted his careers as a tavern owner and crane operator. He explained how argumentative drinkers and a tire-slashing incident prompted the family to finally sell a business as public as a saloon. After quickly spending too much of the tavern’s proceeds, Happy told Pegler, “I gotta cut that out” and began the crane job. The former star went on to assert that Buck Weaver, who played very well in the 1919 Series, was unfairly banned. Felsch did not admit to any guilt and stated that his Series statistics were poor due to fine plays by the Reds.120

Asinof, in a 1999 interview, was convinced that Felsch was willing to talk more openly in the 1960s as his illnesses and impending death made him unafraid of vengeful gamblers. During the three-hour interview in the stale, dingy sickroom, Asinof found the uneducated retiree to be charming and articulate. Felsch actually wanted the author to stay longer as the conversation appeared to be liberating for him.121 Pegler and Reutlinger did not experience this advantageous passing of time. Felsch could finally be forthright about the disastrous influence gambling had upon the Black Sox, baseball, and his own life.

An updated version of this biography appears in “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (SABR, 2015), edited by Jacob Pomrenke.

Notes

File written by Adobe Photoshop¨ 5.2

Prior to his infamous involvement in the 1919 Black Sox Scandal, Chick Gandil was one of the most highly regarded first basemen in the American League, both for his play on the field and his solid work ethic. In 1916 a Cleveland newspaper described Gandil as “a most likeable player, and one of excellent habits.”1 From 1912 to 1915 the right-handed Gandil starred for the Washington Senators, leading the club in runs batted in three times and batting .293. In the field Gandil paced American League first sackers in fielding percentage four times and in assists three times.

He continued his strong work with the Chicago White Sox from 1917 to 1919, helping the club to two American League pennants before forever tarnishing his legacy by helping to fix the 1919 World Series. Yet Gandil may have been the only banished player who gained more than he lost from the fix. After the 1919 World Series, the first baseman retired from major-league baseball, reportedly taking $35,000 in cash with him.

Arnold Gandil was born on January 19, 1888, in St. Paul, Minnesota, the only child of Christian and Louise Bechel Gandil. After a brief stay in San Francisco in the early 1890s, the family moved to Seattle by the turn of the century and then to Southern California, where Gandil began playing baseball seriously as a teenager. By 1904, when he was 16 years old, Gandil dipped his toes in the amateur baseball ranks. That year he played for a team sponsored by the Los Angeles Herald newspaper, playing many different positions throughout the year.2

In 1906, Gandil left home to play semipro ball in Amarillo, Texas, before that team fell on hard times. He returned to California to make his debut in Organized Baseball that same year, playing two games with Los Angeles and Fresno of the Pacific Coast League.3 In 1907 he had another one-game tryout with Portland of the PCL but spent most of the season in Humboldt, Arizona, as the catcher for a semipro team sponsored by the local copper smelter. He frequently used the alias “Chick Arnold” during this time.4

• Learn more: Click here to view SABR’s Eight Myths Out project on common misconceptions about the Black Sox Scandal

The Humboldt club experienced financial problems, however, and Gandil moved on to a team in Cananea, Mexico, 40 miles from the US border. It was with Cananea that Gandil became a first baseman. In addition to his employment as a baseball player, Gandil worked as a boilermaker in the rugged copper mines. He also did a bit of professional boxing, reportedly receiving $150 per bout.5 The year before Gandil’s arrival, the mine in which he worked had been the site of one of history’s most famous labor battles, with the Mexican Army and Arizona Rangers bloodily suppressing a workers’ uprising at the behest of the American-owned mining company — an incident that many historians consider the first battle of the Mexican Revolution.6

Gandil spent the 1908 season with Shreveport (Louisiana) in the Texas League, batting a solid .269. Off the field, he wed Laurel Kelly, a 17-year-old Mississippi native who went by Faye.7 They had one daughter, Idella, and were married for 62 years.

After the season Chick was drafted by the St. Louis Browns, but failed to make the club the following year. The Browns ordered him back to Shreveport, but Gandil refused to report, instead joining the Fresno team in the outlaw California State League. Faced with being blacklisted by Organized Baseball, Gandil joined Sacramento of the Pacific Coast League for the 1909 season. He was soon arrested for absconding with $225 from the Fresno team coffers,8 but had good success in Sacramento, batting .282. Late in the year he was sold to the Chicago White Sox, but wasn’t required to report until the following season.

Gandil’s rookie season, 1910, was by far the worst of his career. As a part-time performer with the White Sox, he appeared in 77 games, hitting an anemic .193. Reportedly, he had trouble hitting major-league curveballs.9 In mid-September, he and infielder Charlie French were sold by the White Sox to Montreal of the Eastern League, a deal that caused Gandil’s first dispute with owner Charles Comiskey. Since the deal was made within 10 days of the end of the minor-league season, Gandil and French appealed to receive their full major-league pay for the season. But the National Commission ruled against them because they had refused to report to Montreal.10

Gandil spent the offseason back in Shreveport as a policeman11 and then reported to Montreal in the spring. He responded with a solid season, batting .304. In December 1911 Chicago Cubs owner Charles Murphy worked out a deal to acquire Gandil for $5,000 and two players, but two other National League teams blocked the transaction.12 So Gandil returned to Montreal.

Gandil got off to a solid start in 1912, batting .309 in 29 games, after which he was traded to the Washington Senators. This time, the big first sacker was ready for the major leagues, and in 117 games with Washington he hit .305 and led American League first basemen in fielding percentage.

Gandil was highly regarded by Washington. In 1914 Senators manager Clark Griffith wrote, “He proved to be ‘The Missing Link’ needed to round out my infield. We won seventeen straight games after he joined the club, which shows that we must have been strengthened a good bit somewhere. I class Gandil ahead of McInnes [sic] as he has a greater range in scooping up throws to the bag and is just as good a batsman.”13

Gandil continued to perform well with Washington both at bat and in the field. In 1913 he hit for a career-high average of .318. He was also tough and durable, averaging 143 games during his three full seasons with Washington, despite knee problems that haunted him throughout his career. When asked by a reporter after the 1912 season what his greatest asset was, he replied “plenty of grit.”14 He reportedly used the heaviest lumber in the American League, as his bats weighed between 53 and 56 ounces.

Gandil was sold to Cleveland before the 1916 season for a reported price of $7,500. One of the main reasons for the sale was supposedly the fact that Gandil was a chain smoker, occasionally lighting up between innings, which annoyed Griffith.15 In any event, the Indians also picked up Tris Speaker for that season, and things were looking bright in Cleveland. Although the Indians only climbed from seventh place to sixth, the team won 20 more games than the previous season, reaching the .500 mark. Gandil was unspectacular, batting only .259.

In February 1917 Gandil was sold to his original major-league team, the Chicago White Sox. A headline in the Chicago Tribune prophetically announced: “GET YOUR SEAT FOR ’17 SERIES! WHITE SOX PURCHASE GANDIL.” Manager Pants Rowland pushed White Sox owner Charles Comiskey to make the deal, and Tribune writer John Alcock described Gandil as “the ideal type of athlete — a fighter on the field, a player who never quits under the most discouraging circumstances, and so game that he is one of the most dangerous batters in the league when a hit means a ball game.”16

Gandil appeared in 149 games for the 1917 world champion White Sox, batting .273 with little power. He then hit .261 in the World Series win over the New York Giants, leading the team with five RBIs. Exempt from the draft because he had a wife and daughter, Gandil had a similar year in the war-shortened 1918 season, batting .271 in 114 games, as the White Sox slumped to sixth place.

After World War I ended, baseball owners, fearing a continued slump in attendance, cut back on costs wherever possible and shortened the season to 140 games. Gandil signed a contract for $666.67 per month, the same salary he had been making since 1914. But with the shortened schedule in place, his annual salary now worked out to $3,500 instead of $4,000.17

No one knows the full story of the Black Sox Scandal — few of the participants were willing to talk, and the whole plot was confused and poorly managed. But by all accounts Gandil, who claimed to be furious with Comiskey’s miserly ways, was one of the ringleaders. Most accounts agree that it was Gandil who approached gambler Sport Sullivan with the idea of fixing the Series, and that he also served as the players’ liaison with a second gambling syndicate that included Bill Burns (a former teammate of Gandil’s) and Abe Attell.18 Chick was also the go-between for all payments, and reportedly kept the lion’s share of the money. Though none of the other fixers took home more than $10,000 from the gamblers, Gandil reportedly pocketed $35,000 in payoffs.

It’s interesting to note that Gandil had a reasonably good Series. Although he hit only .233, that was the fourth best average among White Sox regulars. He was second on the team with five RBIs, and he had one game-winning hit. However, he made several suspicious plays in the field, and all but one of his seven hits came in games the fixers were trying to win, or in which they were already losing comfortably. Rumors of a Series fix began to circulate, with Gandil’s name prominently mentioned.

The next spring Gandil demanded a raise to $10,000 per year. When Comiskey balked, Gandil and his wife decided to remain in California. Flush with his financial windfall from the Series, Gandil announced his retirement from the majors, instead spending the season with outlaw teams in St. Anthony, Idaho, and Bakersfield, California.19 Thus Gandil was far away from the scene as investigations into the 1919 World Series began during the fall of 1920.

After the players’ acquittal on conspiracy charges in August 1921, Gandil said, “I guess that’ll learn Ban Johnson he can’t frame an honest bunch of ball players.”20 However, the players’ joy was short-lived, as Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis announced that the eight Black Sox were permanently expelled from baseball.

Gandil, who had retired from the major leagues anyway, continued to play baseball after his expulsion. A month after the trial he was in contact with Joe Gedeon, Swede Risberg, Joe Jackson, and Fred McMullin, attempting to put together a team in Southern California. In the mid-1920s Gandil played with Hal Chase, Buck Weaver, Lefty Williams, and other banished players in the Copper League, which had teams near the US-Mexico border in Arizona, New Mexico, and Texas.21

By the early 1930s Gandil and his wife had settled in Berkeley, California, where he worked mostly as a plumber.22 Around 1956, Gandil and his wife moved to Calistoga, in the Napa Valley. He had carbuncles, and the town’s mud baths and mineral springs aided his health.

To the end of his life, Gandil denied any role in fixing the 1919 World Series. In a 1956 Sports Illustrated article, he told writer Melvin Durslag that the players had planned to fix the Series, but abandoned the scheme when rumors began to circulate.23 In an interview with Dwight Chapin, published in the Los Angeles Times on August 14, 1969, Gandil again denied that he threw the Series, stating, “I’m going to my grave with a clear conscience.”

Chick Gandil died at the age of 82 in Calistoga on December 13, 1970, and was buried in St. Helena Cemetery in the nearby town of the same name. The cause of death was listed as cardiac failure. People in town had no idea of his fame, and his death reached the sports wires only due to the efforts of SABR founding member Tom Hufford.

An updated version of this biography appeared in “Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox” (SABR, 2015). This biography originally appeared in “Deadball Stars of the American League” (Potomac Books, 2006).

Sources

Cleveland Plain Dealer, June 1, 1919.

Ginsburg, Daniel, The Fix Is In (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1995).

The files of Tom Shea.

Letter to Joe Gedeon dated September 15, 1921.

Saturday Evening Post, April 30, 1938.

Arizona Daily Star (Tucson), December 16, 1990.

Notes