Allen was born on August 26, 1888, in Newbern, Alabama, the fourth of six sons born to Bryant Leon Allen and Harriett (Hattie) Saunders Allen. His father was a prominent planter, cattleman, and dairyman.1 Probably as a result, Frank was able to attend and pitch for Southwestern College (now Rhodes College) in Memphis, Tennessee. The 5-foot-9 left-hander broke into professional baseball in 1909 with the Mobile Sea Gulls of the fast Southern Association, compiling a 1-4 record in five appearances.2

Although Allen reported to spring training with the Sea Gulls in 1910, he was released before the season because of wildness and did not pitch professionally that year.3 He returned to Mobile in 1911 for another shot and made the club. In fact, he became a mainstay for the Sea Gulls, winning 14 games against 12 losses in 34 appearances.4 By June he was attracting the attention of major-league clubs and at the end of the season was sold to the Brooklyn Dodgers of the National League.

Allen stuck with the Dodgers out of spring training in 1912 and made his major-league debut in a start against the Boston Braves on April 24 in Brooklyn’s Washington Park. He was immediately roughed up for three runs in the top of the first and, although he pitched scoreless second and third innings, was removed by manager Bill Dahlen with one out in the fourth for Elmer Knetzer.5 In 3⅓ innings, Allen gave up five hits and three runs, walking three and with one strikeout in the 3-1 loss.

Given his shaky debut, Allen sat until May 18 when Dahlen sent him in to pitch against the Cubs in Chicago in the bottom of the sixth inning in a game the Dodgers were losing 4-2. He was even wilder this time out, walking five in 2⅔ innings while surrendering three hits and a run in a 5-4 loss. More memorable, however, was Allen’s first trip to the plate. Batting in the top of the eighth against Cubs starter Larry Cheney, Allen stroked a solo home run to close the score to 5-4.  It was one of two home runs Allen hit in his career.6

Allen did not see any more action until June 12, when he started a home game against the Pittsburgh Pirates. By now the Dodgers were mired in seventh place with a 14-28 record and Allen didn’t help the cause, losing 7-3. He did pitch eight innings and exhibited better control, walking only three while allowing 11 hits and six earned runs, but fell to 0-2 in his young career.

That performance earned Allen another start six days later in Brooklyn against the St. Louis Cardinals. He was plagued by poor defense and again by wildness and in five innings gave up three hits and five bases on balls. He was removed for pinch-hitter Hub Northen in the bottom of the fifth trailing 5-3. Northern immediately tied the game with a two-run single, letting Allen off the hook in a game the Dodgers won 9-6 behind the strong relief pitching of Nap Rucker.7

The erratic Allen had to wait unit July 12 for another chance on the mound but acquitted himself well, allowing one run in four relief innings in an 8-2 loss to the Pirates. That earned him more regular work and after a couple of solid outings led to his first big-league win, on July 23 against the Cubs in Chicago. He accomplished it in style, throwing a five-hit shutout in a 6-0 victory. Allen recorded his second win four days later in a complete-game 9-4 home win over the Cincinnati Reds. Only one of the runs was earned and the effort lowered his earned-run average to 2.65 as he evened his record at 2-2.

Allen achieved indifferent success for the rest of his rookie season and finished 3-9 with a 3.63 ERA in 109 innings for the Dodgers, who ended the season in seventh place, 46 games behind the pennant-winning Giants.8 He returned to the Dodgers in 1913 and became the team’s third starter behind Rucker and Pat Ragan. Although Brooklyn improved to sixth place, Allen was beguiled by a lack of run support the entire year. After a 2-1 loss on July 8 to the Cincinnati Reds, he fell to 1-10, even though his earned-run average was 2.55, very solid even in the Deadball Era. It didn’t get much better for Allen, who finished the year with an unsightly 4-18 record in 174⅔ innings, although his 2.83 ERA was below both his team’s and the league’s averages. He pitched 11 complete games among his 25 starts and appeared in relief in nine games.

Allen began the 1914 campaign saddled with a 7-27 major-league record and spent the season in and out of the rotation, as the Dodgers, under new manager Wilbert Robinson and buoyed by new pitchers Jeff Pfeffer, Raleigh Aitchison, and Ed Reulbach, improved to fifth place, winning 10 more games than in 1913. Allen won his first four starts, three on the road, before again descending somewhere between mediocrity and hard luck. He finished the season under .500 again, with an 8-14 record and a respectable 3.12 earned-run average in 171⅓ innings, which included 21 starts among his 36 appearances.

Of course, 1914 was the first year of the upstart Federal League, who were raiding the American and National Leagues of players at every opportunity. Allen was clearly listening to the new league’s overtures and in fact signed with the Pittsburgh Rebels within two days of the completion of Brooklyn’s season. Two days after that, on October 10, Allen took the mound for the Rebels in Pittsburgh against Buffalo in the last day of the Federal League season.9 He pitched seven innings and was the winning pitcher when the game was called because of rain with the Rebels on top, 8-4.

The Brooklyn press characterized Allen as “one of the biggest disappointments of the season” and speculated that his negotiations with the Federal League may have accounted “for some of his poor pitching while drawing salary from Ebbets.”10

Although Allen’s losing record prior to 1915 was somewhat deceiving, it is unlikely that the Rebels expected him to become their ace. He did just that, beginning with an 8-0 Opening Day shutout of the Kansas City Packers in Kansas City. After a no-decision, Allen ripped off five more wins in a row to start the season 6-0 and propel the Rebels into a first-place tie with the Chicago Whales.11

The fourth of those wins was his no-hitter on April 24 on the road against the St. Louis Terriers. Ironically, he almost didn’t survive the first inning due to wildness. He walked Al Bridwell with one out and then, after Bridwell stole second, walked center fielder Delos Drake to put two runners on. Allen then retired Babe Borton on a groundout but walked left fielder Ward Miller to load the bases. He had, in effect, walked the bases loaded, but escaped the self-made jam when he induced catcher Grover Hartley to hit a grounder that forced Drake at third and ended the inning. After that narrow escape, Allen settled down and retired 21 of the next 22 batters over the final eight innings.

He did have some help, especially from his outfielders. In the sixth inning Terriers outfielder Jack Tobin blasted a ball to deep right field, sending Jim Kelly racing back to the fence, where he stretched out his left hand and squeezed the ball in his glove.

The game remained scoreless for six innings as veteran St. Louis hurler Bob Groom was on his game as well. In the top of the seventh, however, Rebels first baseman Ed Konetchy led off by smashing a long clout over center fielder Drake’s head for a triple. Terriers catcher Hartley then attempted to pick Konetchy off third but the ball hit “the Big Bohemian,” as Konetchy was called, in the back and bounced away far enough for him to score.

The Rebels scratched out another run in the top of the ninth and the game entered the bottom of the ninth with Allen, now ahead 2-0, still not having allowed a hit. But drama yet remained. Tobin led off by tapping the ball in front of the plate and was just thrown out by Allen, or so umpire Spike Shannon ruled. Tobin and Terriers manager Fielder Jones vigorously argued the call, with Tobin “put out of the game for kicking.”12

Jones then sent Doc Crandall to pinch-hit for the light-hitting Bridwell, but Allen was having none of it and issued a largely intentional walk to Crandall with four wide pitches. That brought a serious of jeers from what remained of the 500 or so fans who originally passed through the turnstiles. After Harry Chapman entered as a pinch-runner, Drake, the next batter, lined a pitch over shortstop and for a split second it looked like the no-hitter was kaput. But center fielder Rebel Oakes raced in and made what looked like an impossible catch to preserve the gem.13

The final out was easier as Babe Borton grounded to shortstop Marty Berghammer, who stepped on second base for the force out to secure the no-hitter. But it seems that the only people who took notice of Allen’s feat were his teammates and those in the press box; the few fans in attendance failed to applaud or acknowledge what they had just witnessed.14 The win, which took an hour and 40 minutes to complete, not only brought Allen’s record to 4-0 for the year but dropped his earned run average to 1.16.

Allen won his next two starts before finally losing a game on May 14 to the Whales by a deceptive 6-0 score. He and Chicago starter George McConnell matched zeros until the top of the ninth, when an error and several misplays let the barn door open for all six runs.15 Allen continued as the ace of the Rebels staff as the team stayed in the thick of the Federal League pennant race. He won his 20th game against the Terriers on September 3 in a 3-1 complete-game victory, again besting Groom. The win extended first-place Pittsburgh’s lead to a game and a half over the Newark Peppers.

Allen won his 23rd game of the season on September 21, a 2-1 victory over the Buffalo Blues that kept the Rebels 2½ games in front. However, he faltered after that, losing his last two starts, 4-2 and 6-3, as the Rebels lost seven of their final 13 games to finish in third place, a half-game behind Chicago, which finished .001 ahead of St. Louis to win the Federal League pennant.16 Still Allen finished the season 23-12 with a 2.51 earned-run average in 283⅓ innings. He was second in the league in victories,17 tied for second with six shutouts, and fourth in complete games with 24.

The Federal League folded after the 1915 season, prompting a peace accord in which the American and National Leagues agreed to pay some compensation to Federal League owners and re-sign desired players who, like Allen, had jumped their contracts to play for the Feds.18 Allen was signed with the Rebels through 1916 for $5,500 but his contract was without the typical 10-day clause, which allowed a team to cut a player on only 10 days’ notice.19

Under the terms of the peace agreement, American and National League clubs had to bid for the service of Federal League players who had jumped their contracts and had to absorb any Federal League contractual obligations.20 On January 21, 1916, Rebels owner Ed Gwinner wrote Cincinnati Reds President Garry Herrmann to ask if he was interested in purchasing any of the players the Pittsburgh Feds had under contract, including Allen. About Allen, Gwinner wrote, “[T]his fellow was the best pitcher in the Federal League as his record will show … not only is he a fine pitcher but an easy man to handle which is a big asset. …” Herrmann, however, was not interested in any player who did not have the 10-day clause in his contract.21

Lacking any buyers, Gwinner eventually turned the remainder of his players under contract over to the defunct league for disposal. Allen was still in demand even with his contract, and on February 10 at the annual National League meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria Hotel in New York was purchased by the Boston Braves, along with Rebels teammate Knetzer.22

It may be that Allen battled injuries at the start of the 1916 season, because he did not make his first start until May 27 in what turned out to be a no-decision against the New York Giants. He was on the mound again on June 3 against the Chicago Cubs and threw a complete-game 3-2 win. Although he pitched sporadically for the Braves, he finished the year with an 8-2 record and an earned-run average of only 2.07 in 113 innings. Allen appeared in 19 games, 14 of which were starts, and tossed two shutouts among his seven complete games for the third-place Braves.

He was back with the Braves in 1917 but struggled to a 3-10 record for a team that fell to sixth place. He appeared in 29 games with 14 starts and two complete games. His 3.94 earned-run average was well above the league average of 2.70. Although he was only 29 years old, his big-league career was over; he finished with a lifetime record of 50 wins against 66 losses and a 2.93 earned-run average in 970⅓ innings. As it turned out, the only year that he won more than nine games was his memorable 1915 Federal League season. 

Allen officially announced his retirement from baseball in December, stating his intention to return to the family farm in Newbern, Alabama.23 That November he had married the former Janie Bradshaw Rogers. The couple would not have any children. In 1919 he became the inaugural athletic director and coach at Southern Military Academy in Greensboro, Alabama.24

In the early 1920s, Allen stayed involved in the game, serving as player-manager of the semipro Selma, Alabama club. In 1928 the 39-year-old Allen was persuaded to pitch for the Gadsden, Alabama, Eagles in the Class-D Georgia-Alabama League. He demonstrated that he still had something left, at least at that level, posting a 12-6 record along with a 2.46 earned-run average.

Allen died on July 30, 1933, of an apparent heart attack in Gainesville, Alabama, at the home of his father-in-law.25 He was only 44 years old. His widow, Jane Rogers Allen, lived to be 91 before passing away in 1985.

Notes

1 familysearch.org./ark:/61903/1:1:MKQL-Z7F.

2 The Southern Association was a Class-A league, then the highest minor-league classification.

3 “Major Clubs Hot After Frank Allen, Southpaw,” Montgomery (Alabama) Times, June 6, 1911: 8. 

4 Allen also batted .239 for the year, with 22 hits in 92 at-bats.

5 Knetzer went on to pitch scoreless baseball the rest of the way, allowing only a hit and a walk in 4⅔ innings. He would again be Allen’s teammate in 1914 and 1915 with the Pittsburgh Rebels of the Federal League.

6 Allen compiled a lifetime .135 batting average.

7 Allen had earlier sacrificed and doubled to drive in a run and bring his batting average to .400. He also made one of Brooklyn’s five errors.

8 Allen’s earned-run average was just about level with the team’s 3.64 and a little more than the league average of 3.39. 

9 Robert Peyton Wiggins, The Federal League of Base Ball Clubs, 1914-1915 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2009), 207; Daniel R. Levitt, The Battle That Forged Modern Baseball — the Federal League Challenge and Its Legacy (Lanham, Maryland: Ivan R. Dee, 2012), 165-66.

10 Column by Thomas S. Rich, The Sporting News, October 15, 1914: 2. Rice was a sportswriter for the Brooklyn Daily Eagle and was a correspondent for The Sporting News.

11 Pittsburgh’s record was only 12-8, meaning it had gone 6-8 in games not won by Allen. 

12 “Allen Blanks St. Louis Feds Without a Hit or Run,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, April 25, 1915: 18.

13 “Fed Fans See No Merit in Allen’s No Hit Contest,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 25, 1915: 31; Rich Westcott and Allen Lewis, No-Hitters: The 225 Games, 1893-1999 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2000), 81-82.

14 Ibid.; Kevin Larkin, “No Offense in Gateway No-No — Frank Allen Pitches a No-Hitter,” SABR Games Project.

15 Chicago Daily Tribune, May 15, 1915: 13; Wiggins, 208.

16 Wiggins, 269-75. 

17 George McConnell of the Chicago Whales led the league with a 24-10 record. It was the only year in his six-year major-league career that he won more than eight games. 

18 Levitt, 223-46; Marc Okkonen, The Federal League of 1914-1915 — Baseball’s Third Major League (Garrett Park, Maryland, 1989), 24-25; Wiggins, 284-290.

19 Wiggins, 293.

20 Levitt, 249; Wiggins, 288.

21 Levitt, 249; Wiggins, 293.

22 Wiggins, 294.

23 Unidentified clipping dated December 13, 1917, in the Frank Allen clippings file, National Baseball Library.

24 “Frank Allen at Greensboro,” Selma (Alabama) Times-Journal, August 25, 1919: 4.

25 Bill Lee, The Baseball Necrology (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2003), 9.

St. Louis Browns owner Phil Ball, second from left, meets with American League owners Frank Navin (Detroit Tigers, far left), Clark Griffith (Washington Senators, middle), Ben Shibe (Philadelphia A’s, second from right), and American League president Ban Johnson, far right, in Chicago, circa 1920. (Chicago History Museum, Chicago Daily News collection, SDN-062283)

Phil Ball was the owner of the St. Louis Terriers of the Federal League (1914-1915) and bought the American League’s St. Louis Browns in December 1915, as part of the settlement between Organized Baseball and the upstart league.1 In 1917 he said, “I’ll pay — well, I’ll go to the limit — to get a world’s series for St. Louis. … I’m just as interested in a ball game as the kids who hand their two bits over the windows for the bleacher seats.”2 He owned the Browns until his death in October 1933 but never won an AL pennant, though he came close in 1922. He was a fiery and gruff man, who, in the words of a St. Louis magazine writer, did “not affect a great softness of manner, unruffled evenness of temper or a slow and deliberate enunciation.”3 He was also the only club owner who challenged the authority of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and did so more than once.

Philip De Catesby Ball was born in Keokuk, Iowa, on October 22, 1864, to Charles Ball, a West Point graduate who fought in the Civil War, and Caroline (Paulison) Ball. His mother wanted to name him after a great-uncle and famous commodore in the US Navy, Thomas ap Catesby Jones.4 She did not care for “ap” and instead inserted “De” in her son’s name. Charles was an engineer who started an ice business in 1878, with refrigeration equipment that produced ice.5 The Ice and Cold Machine Company built ice plants in the South and Midwest, and Phil Ball did various jobs for his father’s company, from collecting bad debts to driving an ice wagon to overseeing the construction of ice plants. The family lived in Sherman, Texas, for a number of years when Phil was a teenager. Before joining his father’s company, Phil worked at many jobs, including surveying, railroad work, and hunting buffalo.6 For this reason, Arthur Mann wrote, “Ball was a gruff and growling Iowan of 56 [b.1864] who had been everywhere and done everything.”7

Historian Daniel Boorstin has written about the central role ice has played in “democratizing the national diet” and “homogenizing the regions and seasons.”8 Until refrigerators became common household appliances in the 1920s and 1930s, the icebox was the kitchen cold-storage unit, with blocks of ice supplied by ice plants. When Charles Ball retired to California (where he died in 1901), Phil bought his company for $20,000 and built it up.9 In a 1932 article in The Sporting News, Harry Brundidge reported that Ball had 156 ice plants, including the world’s largest, at Anheuser-Busch. “It has been said that I inherited my money from my father, but I never got a nickel from anybody,” Ball said.10 Although he was a civil and mechanical engineer, Ball had no technical-school training.

When Ball lived in New Orleans, he played amateur-league baseball, but his career ended when he was stabbed in a barroom brawl. Sportswriter Dan Daniel wrote, “Philip De Catesby Ball is a born scrapper. You have only to look at his determined jaw to discern that.”11

He married Harriett Heiskell of Indiana in 1885. They had three children and then moved to St. Louis in the 1890s. His son, James, was a supervising engineer for the Ice and Cold Machine Company. His younger daughter, Phillipa (Mrs. John Nulsen), died in 1918. His older daughter, Margaret, married an accomplished ice skater, William Cady, one of the founders of the St. Louis Skating Club. In 1916 a St. Louis building from the 1904 World’s Fair was converted to the St. Louis Winter Garden ice-skating rink, with the support of the Ball Ice Machine Company.12

The Federal League began as a Midwestern minor league in 1913, and a group of 14 St. Louis men, including Phil Ball and brewer Otto Stifel, each put up $1,000 for the city’s club. When the league decided to go national and challenge Organized Baseball in 1914, only Stifel and Ball remained as owners from what was known as the “Thousand Dollar Club.” Ball’s fellow oil executive Harry F. Sinclair (Ball had substantial oil investments), founder of Sinclair Oil, joined them as owner of the Browns. Sinclair soon moved on to become one of the major backers of the league as a whole.13

When the Federal League was taking on Organized Baseball in early 1914, Ball urged his fellow owners to invest the necessary capital. “We’ve got the opportunity of a lifetime, but some of you fellows seemed to think too much of your bankroll. Some of you fellows seem to be showing the ‘white feather’ [a sign of cowardice].”14 He told reporters later that year, “They [Organized Baseball] are going to get a financial and legal raking that they never dreamed of. … We are willing to match money and brains against anything organized ball may have to offer.”15 Ball had diversified interests beyond ice. He owned a 10,000-acre ranch and had investments in oil.

During the 1914 season the Terriers signed Cuban star Armando Marsans from the Cincinnati Reds. What Baseball Magazine called “the sensational Marsans case” played out in the courts.16 The Reds secured an injunction that kept Marsans on the sidelines for more than a year. Ball tried unsuccessfully to get the injunction lifted in Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis’s court. Historian Robert Wiggins wrote that as part of the Federal League settlement, Reds owner Garry Herrmann paid Ball $2,500 in damages for keeping Marsans from playing for the Browns.17

Ball was pursuing one of baseball’s biggest stars, pitcher Walter Johnson, for his Terriers after the 1914 season. When Johnson did not sign with the Terriers, Ball let the Federal League’s Chicago Whales sign him. In return Ball got the right to pursue pitcher Eddie Plank, whom he signed for 1915.18 When Johnson reneged on his contract with the Whales, Ball told the press, “If Johnson pitches for any team besides the Chicago Feds next season, it will be in Leavenworth, Kansas, and his identity will be hidden behind a number.”19

In 1914 Chicago pitching great Mordecai Brown was the Terriers’ manager.20 With the team mired in seventh place in August, Ball replaced Brown with more of a disciplinarian, Fielder Jones. The manager of the 1906 world champion Chicago White Sox Hitless Wonders, Jones was lured out of retirement with an interest in the club’s ownership and a hefty three-year guaranteed contract of $50,000.21 While Jones could not turn around the Terriers at the end of the season, he achieved success the following year. The 1915 Terriers (87-67, .565) fell just short of the Chicago Whales (86-66, .566). It was the closest pennant race in major-league baseball history.22

Under the settlement, two Federal League team owners, Charles Weeghman of Chicago and Phil Ball, were allowed to buy existing teams of the major leagues, the Cubs and the Cardinals, respectively. Ball was anxious to acquire an established team, even though he revealed he had lost $182,000 in his two seasons with the Terriers.23 But when Helene Britton, the owner of the Cardinals, decided not to sell (she resented the male owners trying to force out the game’s only female owner), the entire settlement with the Federal League was threatened.24

At this point, Robert Hedges decided to sell his American League club, the St. Louis Browns, to Ball.25 Hedges had facilitated the 1903 peace treaty between the American and National Leagues by returning Christy Mathewson to the New York Giants.26 “Maybe once again St. Louis will have to be the central figure in establishing peace in baseball,” he said.27 Hedges sold the Browns and Sportsman’s Park for what was variously reported as between $425,000 and $550,000.

The 1916 Browns (like the Cubs) had the benefit of drawing on players from two teams, the Terriers and the Browns. Ball made Jones the manager of the combined team and moved Branch Rickey, the Browns’ manager, into the front office. He could not fire Rickey because Hedges had given him a contract for 1916.28 The two men did not get along from the start. “So you’re the goddamned prohibitionist!” Ball reportedly said to Rickey when they first met.29 “Ball thought Rickey’s ideas too radical, and Rickey’s endless talk and large vocabulary made him uncomfortable,” wrote Murray Polner in his Rickey biography. “Rickey was, in turn, uncomfortable with Ball’s crudeness: he considered Ball uncouth and, in matters of baseball, virtually illiterate.”30

The 1916 Browns finished a disappointing fifth in the AL with a 79-75 record. But 1917 was much worse, with 97 losses against only 57 wins. Rickey was gone before the start of that season; he became the president of the St. Louis Cardinals early that year, after a citizens group bought the club from Helen Britton for $375,000.31 At first Ball supported Rickey’s move. But after consulting with American League President Ban Johnson, who did not want to lose the talented Rickey to the National League, Ball changed his mind. “Just tell those bastards you can’t go through with it,” he told Rickey, who replied, “Mr. Ball, whether or not I ever go with the Cardinals, I’ll never work another day for you.”32 The dispute headed to the courts and had an odd settlement: Rickey was enjoined from joining the Cardinals, but only for 24 hours.

In early September 1917, Ball was again in the center of a controversy — one that he created. He was so upset with a 13-6 loss to the White Sox on September 4 that he decreed he’d cut salaries $100 for every $1,000 he would lose. “If these ball players think they are getting away with something on me by ‘laying down,’ they are all wrong, all wrong.”33 Three of the club’s players, infielders Del Pratt and Doc Lavan, and outfielder Burt Shotton, took issue with Ball and refused to suit up. Ball had not mentioned names, but these three men were having poor seasons, in no small part because of injuries.

Pratt and Lavan sued Ball for libel for $50,000 each. Ball then backtracked and said, “I have been told they [some of his men] were laying down, but that I myself am not competent to judge of that.” The writer of the St. Louis magazine Reedy’s Mirror noted that Ball “has not the polished mien one finds in some successful business men, nor the insouciance noted in others. … He is not a man whose actions bespeak craft or design. He is just a plain whole-hearted individual, with the pugnacious tenacity of a leader.”34

Sportswriter Hugh Fullerton said that Ball should be eliminated from Organized Baseball. “The fans ought to get up a memorial to Johnny Lavan and Derrill Pratt for bringing suits against Ball,” he wrote. “For a man of the Ball type to accuse men of the moral and mental standing of Lavan and Pratt is a final blow to baseball in St. Louis.”35 Both men, along with Shotton, were traded before the 1918 season. Eventually Pratt and Lavan dropped their lawsuits after receiving $2,700 each.36

Fielder Jones was a stern taskmaster, and his abrasive style created dissension on the Browns. Yet in early 1918, Ball told the press that Jones had been too lenient. “No more Coddling — Iron Fist to Rule Browns Hereafter” was his message.37 Just a few months later, after a painful loss by his Browns, Jones suddenly resigned and walked away from baseball forever.38 When Ball got the news, he erupted. “So you want to quit? You haven’t an ounce of courage. Get out of my office. I wouldn’t take you back if you’d work for nothing.”39

Early in his ownership of the Browns, Ball made perhaps his best and worst baseball decisions. In 1917 he hired Bob Quinn, a decent man and sharp evaluator of baseball talent, to replace Branch Rickey as business manager. “There’s really nothing to the job. All you need is bunk and bluff,” Ball told him. Quinn replied, “I have never practiced bunk or bluff in my life.”40 What Quinn practiced was solid, uncanny team-building. Through trade and acquisition, he assembled a powerful club that came within one game of the 1922 AL pennant.

Fred Lieb said that Quinn once canceled a Browns home game because of damp weather; he thought Ball would make more money if the game was rescheduled. But Ball was furious. “Bob Quinn, let me tell you something. I worked myself to a frazzle at the office so I could see this game, and if you want to keep your job, don’t ever do anything like this to me again.”41 Yet Quinn was no “yes man” and insisted that Ball not interfere with baseball operations. He once even walked out for a few days when Ball pushed his meddling too far.

Ball made arguably his worst baseball decision in 1920. The St. Louis Cardinals were in a desperate financial state, and their ballpark, League Park, was decrepit. Their president, Sam Breadon, who was consolidating ownership of the club, repeatedly begged Ball to allow the Cardinals to play their home games at the Browns’ Sportsman’s Park. In 1918, when Ball turned him down, he suggested that Breadon sell to Kansas City sportsmen.42 Ball finally relented, even though he detested Branch Rickey, who by this point was the Cardinals manager. He felt sorry for Breadon and admired his fighting nature.

The Cardinals played their first home game in Sportsman’s Park on July 1, 1920. They sold their League Park property for $275,000: $200,000 to the school board (Beaumont High School operated on the land until 2014) and $75,000 to the transit company for a streetcar turnaround. “The deal gave us money to clean up our debts, and something to work with,” said Breadon. “Without it, we never could have made our early purchases of minor-league clubs.”43 Would the Cardinals have left St. Louis? It’s hard to say. Instead, now Rickey’s farm system would become a reality. The club had the money to start buying minor-league teams.

Ball became close friends with American League President Ban Johnson, even though they were “warring parties during 1914-1915.44 Fred Lieb noted, “Despite Ball’s truculence and quirks, he was intensely loyal.”45 When Ban lost power with the demise of the National Commission in 1920 and the rise of the commissioner system, Ball became a fierce opponent of Commissioner Landis. At one heated owners meeting in early 1920, Ball and Yankees owner Jacob Ruppert almost came to blows. When the owners voted to hire Landis later that year, Ball was the only one not to vote for the new commissioner (though he let Bob Quinn vote for the judge).

In the fall of 1924 Landis and Johnson came into open conflict, when Johnson recommended the cancellation of the World Series in the wake of the O’Connell-Dolan affair, a scandal involving attempts to throw ballgames. Landis demanded that Johnson be reprimanded; the owners responded with a resolution that humiliated Johnson. They felt they had to support Landis — or risk destroying fan confidence in the game’s integrity. Eugene Murdock, Johnson’s biographer, wrote, “It is unlikely that any group of subordinates had ever humiliated their superior officer so completely.” Ball refused to sign the document and said, “The biggest figure in the national game has been a victim of men whose gratitude has bowed to the dollar sign.”46

Late in his life, Johnson expressed what Ball meant to him. “I owe my life to Phil Ball. He stepped in and took charge of my case and refused to permit amputation of my leg.”47 NEA Service sportswriter William Braucher summed up their relationship: “Ball stood shoulder to shoulder with Johnson in every important battle the great old fighter had. Even the last battle that Johnson finally lost — for his life.”48

The dramatic 1922 AL pennant race generated a large profit of around $300,000 for Ball.49 He paid out bonuses of around $20,000 that year.50 A decade later, Ball said, “The Browns made money for me in 1922, not before, not since. As president I get no salary, and I run the club for the pure fun of it.”51 Sportswriter Dan Daniel said that Ball set aside $250,000 each winter to run the Browns in the coming season. “I’d give anything to win with the Browns,” said Ball. “Well, money is no object. Baseball is not only a hobby with me, it is a source of relaxation.”52

In 1923 Bob Quinn left the Browns to take over the presidency of the Boston Red Sox, after Harry Frazee sold the team. Quinn had also tired of pushing back against Ball’s interference. Ball felt the quiet manager of the Browns, Lee Fohl, was an ineffectual leader who had done a poor job of rallying his team after they lost two out of three games in a crucial September series against the New York Yankees.53 With Quinn gone, Fohl now had to deal directly with his team’s owner.

On July 27, 1922, controversial Browns pitcher Dave Danforth had been suspended by the league for throwing a ball whose seams were loaded with dirt or mud.54 Quinn and Fohl sent Danforth down to the club’s Tulsa farm club for the rest of the season. They did not want to bring him back in 1923, but Ball overruled them. On August 1, 1923, Danforth was again suspended, this time for throwing a doctored ball that had rough spots. When his teammates signed a petition to Ban Johnson, Fohl refused to do so. St. Louis Times sports editor Sid Keener wrote, “I know the character of Lee Fohl. … If Lee wouldn’t sign [the petition], there must be some black smoke in the air.”55

But Ball fired his manager a few days later and told reporters, “For the good of the game and the morale of the club, Lee Fohl is hereby relieved of his duties as manager.”56 When Fohl felt his integrity had been demeaned, Ban Johnson persuaded Ball to reword his statement: “For the good of the game as played by the Browns’ team …”

Just a month later, as the Browns left for their final East Coast swing, they suspended star pitcher Urban Shocker. He had already won his 20th game of the year on August 30, his fourth consecutive 20-win season. The temperamental spitball pitcher insisted on taking his wife along on the trip, but the club’s new business manager, Billy Friel, denied the request. Since Bob Quinn’s departure, Phil Ball was really making all the major decisions; Friel’s executive experience and reputation did not come close to that of the man he replaced.57 Syndicated columnist Westbrook Pegler wrote that Ball’s philosophy was, “Women in baseball are like gun play in a crowded street car.”58

Ball and Friel, with Ban Johnson’s full support, contended that this was the simple issue of an insubordinate employee not following team rules, as he had agreed to do in his contract. To Shocker, however, this was a violation of his personal liberty, and he took his case to Commissioner Landis, who was the ultimate arbiter. Landis was also an unpredictable “wild card” in the dispute. Even as a judge, he enjoyed defending the rights of the little guy in struggles with management. And Landis certainly did not want to uphold a position held by his nemesis, Ban Johnson.

Sportswriter Fred Lieb wrote, “There is a stick of dynamite in the Shocker case. It is fraught with danger.”59 Ball did not like to compromise when he felt he was right, and even more so in dealing with Shocker, whom he disliked. But should Landis declare Shocker a free agent, Johnson and the owners feared the reserve clause would come into challenge, opening the door to “a legal fight that might shake baseball to its foundation.”60

Johnson decided the risk of a Landis ruling was too great, fireworks that would have made “the Last Days of Pompeii look like a wet match” by comparison.61 He facilitated a settlement: He pulled Bob Quinn into a meeting with Shocker, in which Ball had allowed his friend Johnson to act on his behalf. Shocker signed a 1924 contract with a large salary increase, more than enough to cover the fine Ball had levied.62 He then withdrew his hearing with Commissioner Landis. Ball wanted to trade Shocker, but he had recently hired the club’s star first baseman, George Sisler, as player-manager, and Sisler wanted to keep the talented pitcher. A year later the Browns did trade Shocker, to the Yankees, after Sisler decided it was time for the unhappy pitcher to leave St. Louis.

The Browns did not come close to the pennant in the next few years. In early 1925 Phil Ball felt the brunt of St. Louis fans’ ire, when outfielder Baby Doll Jacobson was locked in a salary dispute. After fans booed the club’s owner in an early-season game, Ball called them “the sort of persons who throw pop bottles at umpires.”63

After the 1925 season Ball spent hundreds of thousands of dollars to remodel and expand Sportsman’s Park.64 After the Browns finished in third place in 1925, he felt they would compete for the 1926 pennant. How wrong he was: The 1926 Browns fell to a 62-92 record and seventh place. And his tenants, the National League’s Cardinals, won the World Series.65 Ball did not renew Sisler’s contract as manager and said, “The complete failure of the team this year is all the explanation that is necessary to make, I think.”66 He added a dig at the mild-mannered Sisler when he added, “The next manager of the team will be a rigid disciplinarian and a man able to command the enthusiasm of the players and their best efforts.”67

Under new manager Dan Howley, a successful minor-league skipper, the Browns again finished seventh. Westbrook Pegler wrote about Howley’s “peculiar job.” “Starting with nothing, it is his duty to prevent it from becoming less.”68 Ball, acting as his own business manager, decided to rebuild his team. “Our club is loaded up with players who have had long trials and have failed to come through. We also have several malcontents who do the club no good. All the dead and dying timber will be culled.”69

Ball was a brusque and impatient man; he always seemed to be in a hurry. Perhaps his restlessness led to his love of flying his own planes. It was not unusual for him to fly to meetings in Chicago and Detroit and return home the same day. He flew a Ryan monoplane, the same model as the one Charles Lindbergh flew across the Atlantic. Ball even bought the plant that built them.70 In 1928 he told a reporter that he saw a future in which baseball teams would travel by airplane.71

In 1929 Howley tired of his owner’s interference and told reporters Ball came into the clubhouse and humiliated him in front of the players. “It makes no difference where the club finishes. If we win the pennant, I’m through just the same. I’m quitting.”72 Ball replaced Howley with Browns coach (and former catcher) Bill Killefer.

In 1930 Ball had a legal showdown with Commissioner Landis. Fred Bennett was an outfielder Ball had shuttled between his minor-league farm teams for more than two years. Landis ruled that since the Browns did not bring Bennett to the major leagues, he was a free agent.73 Ball got a temporary injunction that allowed him to keep Bennett in the minors in 1930. A judge upheld Landis, giving Bennett his freedom.74 Ball planned to appeal, but he dropped it, he said, “at the request of the American League.” Landis had been fighting a rear-guard action against the farm system, which was called “chain-store baseball.” Early in 1933 the owners voted 16-0 to allow clubs to own farm teams. Ball introduced the measure.75

In July of 1933 Ball fired Killefer and replaced him with Rogers Hornsby. Ball earlier had told reporters, “I wish I had a fellow like Hornsby running this team. He’d make those fellows click their heels.”76 This would be Ball’s last major official act as the owner of the Browns. A couple months later he took ill while vacationing at his cabin in Battle Lake, Minnesota, and died of septicemia on his 69th birthday, October 22, 1933.

Phil Ball was not amused by the saying about St. Louis, “First in shoes, first in booze, last in the American League.”77 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reporter Ed Hughes wrote, “Ball was willing to lose fortunes in order to feel the glow of satisfaction in owning a champion club. … He had disclosed his intention to quit the game once his Browns had ‘come through.’ When they failed, he kept on spending and spending and fuming at his inability to produce the winning combination.” After the 1936 season, in which the Browns drew an average of only 1,260 fans a game, his executors sold the club to Don Barnes of the American Investment Company of St. Louis for $350,000.78

This biography originally appeared in “Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis: Home of the Browns and Cardinals at Grand and Dodier” (SABR, 2017), edited by Gregory H. Wolf.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Tom Bourke for providing genealogical and ice history information.

Notes

1 In 1913 the Federal League operated as a minor league based in the Midwest, a year before it challenged Organized Baseball and began raiding major-league teams of players. St. Louis brewer Otto Stifel and E.E. Steininger were Ball’s partners in the Terriers. At first, Stifel was the largest shareholder.

2 Sid Keener, St. Louis Times, September 10, 1917.

3 Reedy’s Mirror, December 18, 1914.

4 Dick Farrington, The Sporting News, October 26, 1933.

5 Ice and Refrigeration, Chicago, September 1901, Vol XXI, No. 3. It was a modified Carré machine that cost $12,000 and made five tons of ice a day. Frenchmen Ferdinand and Edmond Carré invented ice-making machinery in the 1850s.

6 “Famous Magnates of the Federal League,” Baseball Magazine, October 1915: 71-72.

7 Arthur Mann, Branch Rickey, American in Action (Boston: Houghton Mifflin, 1957), 84.

8 Daniel J. Boorstin, The Americans: The Democratic Experience (New York: Vintage, 1974), 327.

9 One source said that Phil paid the $20,000 for the patents. Bill Borst, Baseball Through a Knothole (St. Louis: Krank Press, 1980), 3.

10 Dick Farrington, The Sporting News, October 26, 1933. Ball said his father left what little money he had to a brother, a sister, and a third wife.

11 Dan Daniel, The Sporting News, February 11, 1932.

12 Susan Brownell, “Figure Skating in St. Louis — After 90 Years, ‘Meet Me in St. Louis,’” St. Louis Skating Club, stlouisskatingclub.org/index.php/history-by-susan-brownell. Also, email from Susan Brownell to Tom Bourke, September 9, 2016. The rink was demolished in 1964.

13 “Famous Magnates of the Federal League,” 66-74.

14 Robert Peyton Wiggins, The Federal League of Baseball Clubs (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2009), 53.

15 Washington Post, December 4, 1914.

16 Eric Enders, “Armando Marsans,” SABR BioProject, sabr.org/bioproject.

17 Wiggins, The Federal League of Baseball Clubs, 244.

18 Washington Post, December 4, 1914. The 39-year-old Plank posted a 21-11 record and a 2.08 earned-run average for the Terriers in 1915.

19 Henry W. Thomas, Walter Johnson: Baseball’s Big Train (Washington: Phenom Press, 1995), 137-138.

20 Brown had a 12-6 record with the Terriers.

21 Grantland Rice reported this salary figure in Collier’s magazine. David Larson, “Fielder Jones,” SABR BioProject, sabr.org/bioproject.

22 The closeness of the race was the result of the teams not playing the same number of games. Ironically, Mordecai Brown was a 17-game winner for the Whales.

23 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 18, 1916.

24 The Sporting News of January 6, 1916, had a photo of Britton with the headline, “Never Tell Her She Must.”

25 Steve Steinberg, “Robert Hedges,” SABR BioProject, sabr.org/bioproject.

26 Hedges had signed Mathewson to an ironclad contract in the summer of 1902.

27 Sid Keener, St. Louis Times, November 14, 1914.

28 Lee Lowenfish, Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 130.

29 Peter Golenbock, The Spirit of St. Louis: A History of the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns (New York: Avon, 2000), 75.

30 Murray Polner, Branch Rickey: A Biography (New York: Atheneum, 1982), 74.

31 Frederick G. Lieb, The St. Louis Cardinals (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1944), 60.

32 Golenbock, 76-77.

33 St. Louis Republic, September 5, 1917. “Laying down” suggested throwing games by not playing well.

34 Reedy’s Mirror, December 18, 1914.

35 Hugh Fullerton, New York American, September 17, 1917.

36 Capital Times (Madison, Wisconsin), May 8, 1918. Ball claimed he did not pay for any settlement. It is possible the American League paid the players to drop their suits. In 1919 Rickey brought Lavan and Shotton back to St. Louis, to the Cardinals.

37 This was the headline in The Sporting News, February 7, 1918.

38 Jones told Baseball Magazine (October 1915): 73, “I left the game [as player-manager of the White Sox in 1908] because I was tired of it. It is a great strain to manage a club day after day.” He had a heart condition that was not known at the time. He died of heart disease at the age of 62.

39 Frederick G. Lieb, The Baltimore Orioles (Carbondale, Illinois: SIU, 2001), 191 (reprint of 1955 Putnam edition).

40 Rory Costello, “Bob Quinn,” SABR BioProject, sabr.org/bioproject.

41 Lieb, The Baltimore Orioles, 190.

42 Chicago Tribune, November 13, 1918. The Cardinals paid the Browns an annual rent of $20,000.

43 Lieb, The St. Louis Cardinals, 78.

44 The two men had meetings during negotiations, and Ball was Johnson’s guest at Opening Day 1915 at Chicago’s Comiskey Park. Eugene Murdock, Ban Johnson: Czar of Baseball (Santa Barbara: Praeger, 1982), 115.

45 Lieb, The Baltimore Orioles, 191.

46 Murdock, Ban Johnson: Czar of Baseball, 211.

47 Huron (South Dakota) Evening Huronite, December 26, 1930.

48 Altoona (Pennsylvania) Mirror, April 28, 1931.

49 “Phil Ball,” UPI obituary, October 22 dateline, in Baseball Hall of Fame Library Phil Ball file.

50 Dick Farrington, The Sporting News, October 26, 1933.

51 Harry T. Brundige, The Sporting News, October 20, 1932.

52 Dan Daniel, The Sporting News, February 11, 1932.

53 The Yankees came into St. Louis on September 16 with a one-half game lead. They took two of three games before enormous crowds and left town with a 1½-game lead. The Browns then split six games against second-division clubs and ultimately fell one game short of the pennant.

54 Steve Steinberg, “Dave Danforth: Baseball’s Forrest Gump,” The National Pastime (Cleveland: SABR, 2002).

55 Sid Keener, St. Louis Times, August 3, 1922.

56 St. Louis Times, August 6, 1923.

57 Quinn had been the business manager of the Columbus Senators of the American Association for many years.

58 Westbrook Pegler, United News, February 7, 1924.

59 Fred Lieb, New York Evening Telegram, December 11, 1923.

60 The Sporting News, quoted in Steve Steinberg, “Urban Shocker: Free Agency in 1923,” The National Pastime (Cleveland: SABR, 2000).

61 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 26, 1923.

62 Johnson did not want to rescind the fine because he knew that Ball’s pride was involved. Quinn had maintained a good working relationship with Shocker.

63 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 19, 1925. Jacobson soon signed his 1925 contract.

64 Curt Smith, in Storied Stadiums (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2001), pegged the remodel cost at $500,000. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch said the figure was $600,000 (October 21, 1927).

65 The Browns drew only 283,986 fans and lost $75,000 in 1926; the Cardinals drew 660,428.

66 Washington Post, October 12, 1926.

67 Rick Huhn, George Sisler, Baseball’s Forgotten Great (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004), 210.

68 Westbrook Pegler, Chicago Tribune, March 25, 1928.

69 Chicago Tribune, July 27, 1927.

70 Washington Post, June 23, 1927; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 17, 1927; Fairfield (Texas) Recorder, June 18, 2015.

71 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 30, 1928.

72 Altoona (Pennsylvania) Mirror, July 26, 1929.

73 David Pietrusza, Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (South Bend: Diamond Communication, 1998), 349-352. In the complicated case, Bennett petitioned Landis for free agency since Ball wanted to keep him in the minors for a third year. The rules of Organized Baseball limited owners’ control to only two seasons.

74 Bennett hit .368 with 27 home runs for Wichita Falls of the Texas League in 1929. But he played in only 39 major-league games.

75 G. Edward White, Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself, 1903-1955 (Princeton, New Jersey: Princeton University Press, 1996), 291.

76 Dick Farrington, The Sporting News, October 26, 1933.

77 New York Herald Tribune, October 23, 1933.

78 Branch Rickey played a key role in bringing Barnes and the Ball estate together, for which he was paid $25,000. Sportsman’s Park was not part of the deal; Barnes negotiated the rent down from $35,000.

David Warren Davenport was born on February 20, 1890, in the small town of DeRidder, the parish seat of Beauregard, located in southwestern Louisiana, on the Texas border.1 His parents were Thomas Louis and Sarah (Hamilton) Davenport, who married around 1878 and welcomed 13 children into the world, nine of whom survived childbirth; Dave was the third oldest surviving child.2 (Brother Claude, born in 1898, forged an 11-year career in professional baseball, and appeared in one game with the New York Giants in 1920.) The Davenports were farmers and relocated around 1895 to DeWitt County, Texas, about 90 miles east of San Antonio, and farmed, especially cotton. Dave completed one year of high school and then dropped out to work the land and tend to his family’s crops.

A life toiling in the Texas heat must not have seemed too enticing for Davenport, who by the age of 19 was already full grown and weighed about 200 pounds. He claimed he took “French leave,” abandoning the abode without informing his folks, in 1909, to earn some money on large cotton plantations, and soon thereafter “ran into a ball club.”3 Nine months later he returned to his parents, who by that time were living on a farm near Runge, in nearby Karnes County. Davenport pitched for a local semipro club in Runge and in 1911 for the Victoria Rosebuds in the Class-D Southwest Texas League.4 After that team disbanded in August (and the league at the end of the season), Davenport signed with the San Antonio Bronchos of the Class-B Texas League in 1912, pitching in the latter part of the season.5 Back with Bronchos in 1913, the 23-year-old Davenport emerged as one of the circuit’s hardest throwers in his first full season of Organized Baseball. He posted a 15-16 slate for a sub-.500 ballclub (74-78), logged 270 innings and tied for the league lead in strikeouts with 204. In mid-August he was sold to the Cincinnati Reds for a reported $4,000.6

Davenport reported to skipper Buck Herzog at the Reds’ spring-training camp in Alexandria, in central Louisiana in 1914. Coming off a dismal seventh-place finish (64-89) and their worst winning percentage since 1901, the Reds were looking to shore up their pitching corps and were willing to take a chance on the elongated recruit twirler from the low minors, though little was expected from him. Davenport surprisingly landed a spot on the staff, and made his big-league debut on April 17 at Redland Field in the Queen City, hurling four innings of relief, yielding two hits and an unearned run to the Chicago Cubs. Eight days later, Davenport made his first start, also against the Cubs, at West Side Grounds, the dilapidated wooden ballpark that was located in what is now the University of Illinois-Chicago campus, on the near west side of the city. Davenport “hurled the sphere down from his great height at puzzling speeds and defiant angles,” gushed sportswriter Jack Ryder in the Cincinnati Enquirer, and “had the Cubs gasping for breath.”7 On May 30 Davenport blanked the Pittsburgh Pirates on six hits at Forbes Field. His future looked bright, but discontent was brewing on the squad. The Federal League, a third major league, with teams in eight cities, began operation in 1914; a bidding war with the NL and AL for players ensued, driving up salaries. On June 3 Armando Marsans, a speedy, Cuban-born up-and-coming-star who had received MVP votes in 1912 and 1913, informed club owner August Herrmann in a legally obtuse letter that he was giving his 10-day notice to leave the team; according to the Enquirer, Davenport submitted an exactly-worded letter to Herrmann, as well.8 Ryder reported that Marsans had been in contact with the St. Louis Terriers and had “persuaded” Davenport, “a green youngster, who did not know any better,” to join him in his strike.9 The club summarily suspended Marsans, but not Davenport. However, Davenport, supposed enticed by a $1,000 bonus and a two-year contract for $4,500 (much more than his $225-a-month salary with the Reds), jumped his contract, joining the Terriers 10 days after submitting his letter to Herrmann.10

The Terriers, piloted by pitcher Mordecai “Three-Finger” Brown, were an awful club, headed to the worst record (62-89) in the Federal League. Davenport was bombed in his first five appearances, posting a 7.07 ERA in 28 innings and losing two decisions. On July 12 he posted his first victory for the Terriers, tossing a four-hitter against the Kansas City Packers, at Handlan’s Park, one of three big-league parks in St. Louis, located at the intersection of Grand and Laclede Avenues, on what is now the campus of Saint Louis University. (The Browns played about 1.7 miles north at Sportsman’s Park; and the Cardinals a mile northwest of that ballpark at Robison Field.) Two games after Davenport blanked the Buffalo Buffeds on two hits in the Gateway City, Fielder Jones, who had led the Chicago White Sox to the World Series title in 1906, replaced Brown. Under Jones, Davenport’s workload exploded. Over the final six weeks of the season, he made 15 appearances, completing 9 of 12 starts, though he won just 5 of 13 decisions. For the season, he logged 269⅔ innings and fanned 164 (including a Federal League-most 5.9 batters per nine innings), despite a 10-15 slate. 

The Terriers conducted spring training in Havana in 1915. Skipper Jones “demands discipline,” promising to whip the team into shape after Brown’s lenient ways, wrote the St. Louis Star and Times. 11 The strength of the club was pitching, which was a far cry from the previous season when the staff owned the worst team ERA (3.59) in the Federal League. It featured Davenport; former New York Giants star Doc Crandall, a pioneering reliever and starter; and 284-game winner Steady Eddie Plank, formerly of the Philadelphia Athletics. The Terriers, however, got off to a slow start and were just .500 at the end of May before winning 12 straight games (June 12-23), the final nine on the road. Three of those victories were by Davenport, who won six consecutive starts in just 17 days, including two shutouts. “Fielder Jones is one of that rare species of boss who believes in working a pitcher as often as possible when he is going well,” opined the Star and Times.12 And Davenport proved to be Jones’s workhorse. On two days’ rest, Davenport started both games of a doubleheader on July 31 against the Buffeds in St. Louis. In the first he tossed a four-hit shutout; in the second game “he tossed even greater ball than he did in the opener,” gushed the St. Louis Post-Dispatch.13 He yielded just one hit, an eighth-inning double, leading to the only run of the game and was saddled with a tough-luck complete-game loss. The Terriers engaged the Pittsburgh Rebels and the Chicago Whales in an exciting pennant chase in September. Davenport began the month red-hot, tossing a career-best and Federal-League season-long 30 consecutive scoreless innings.14 Included were a five-hit and a two-hit shutout sandwiched around a sparkling no-hitter against Chicago in St. Louis on September 7. Davenport had the “Whales completely mystified,” opined sportswriter Sam Weller in the Chicago Tribune, “with his curves and deceptive fast one.”15 In a five-day stretch (September 22-26), Davenport tossed three straight complete-game victories, the first of which was his 20th win of the season, and the last pushing the Terriers into a tie for first place. The pennant came down to the last series of the season with the Packers. Davenport started two of those games, and was collared with tough-luck losses in each as the Terriers scored just one total run. The Terriers won the most games in the league, yet finished in second place (87-67), .001 behind the Whales (86-66).

The Terriers boasted three of the Federal League’s nine 20-game winners, including Crandall (21-15) and Plank (21-11). In an extraordinary season, Davenport (22-18) led the league in games pitched (55), starts (46), shutouts (10), innings (392⅔), strikeouts (229), and fewest hits per nine innings (6.90); and tied for fourth in ERA (2.20). His “first class pitching was directly responsible for the great showing of the Terriers,” argued Sporting Life.16 He tossed a no-hitter, lost a one-hitter, and fired two two-hitters and four three-hitters, leading the Star and Times to boast that he was “one of the greatest hurlers” in all of baseball.17

Given the moniker Long Dave by sportswriters, Davenport was the tallest player in the league.18 Weighing about 220 pounds, with brown hair and eyes, the suntanned Davenport evoked an imposing impression on the mound. “[He] has an arm like a steel rod and a hand that simply smothers the ball,” wrote the Star and Times, “and a physique that would enable him to pitch every other day in the season if necessary.”19 During spring training with the Terriers in Havana in 1915, Davenport’s size brought him unexpected notoriety from the local populace. Another 6-foot-6 dark-haired giant, heavyweight boxer Jess Willard was training there in preparation for his much-anticipated title fight with champion Jack Johnson on April 5. According to one report, locals constantly referred to Davenport as “Americano Willard.”20

Davenport relied primarily on two pitches, his heater and a curveball. “Only Walter Johnson has more speed,” opined sportswriter W.R. Hoefer in Baseball Magazine in 1917. “[W]hen the hop on his fast one is zipping just right, Davenport is almost unhittable.21 In the same publication William A. Phelon called Davenport “as classy a speed merchant [as] any manager could wish to gaze upon.”22

After two litigious seasons with the National and American Leagues, the Federal League folded after the 1915 season. According to the “Peace Agreement” signed with the NL and AL, the Federal League withdrew the antitrust law suit it had filed (and which Federal Judge and future Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Landis permitted to languish in hopes that the two sides would negotiate a settlement). All contract jumpers were immediately reinstated and the players from six of the eight teams were sold to the highest bidder. Owners of two Federal League clubs were permitted to purchase financially strapped teams: Phil Ball, majority owner of the Terriers, acquired the Browns from Robert Lee Hedges, while Whales owner Charles Weeghman purchased the Cubs; both Ball and Weeghman combined the rosters of their two teams.23 

Overnight, the moribund Browns franchise was infused with star pitching, including Davenport, Plank, and Bob Groom, who had logged almost 500 innings for the Terriers in two seasons. Fielder Jones replaced Branch Rickey in the dugout. Rickey was relegated to the role of business manager, but soon clashed with Ball and left the club.

The Browns were a perennial doormat who hadn’t had a winning season since 1908, but a pervasive mood of optimism wafted through spring training in Palestine, Texas. Jones whipped 17 Browns and 12 former Terriers players into shape for a 22-player roster. Sportswriter W.J. O’Connor gushed that it was the “most impressive looking lot of men, athletically speaking, that ever have represented a St. Louis ball club.”24 Davenport began the season by tossing a complete-game six-hitter to beat the Cleveland Indians, 4-2, at League Park on April 13. Over the next 2½ months, he notched only one more victory; the Star and Times labeled him a “hurling failure.”25 Firmly ensconced in seventh place (37-49), the Browns made an unlikely run back into contention, winning 14 straight games beginning on July 23, and 23 of 25 through August 12 to move to within 4½ games of the lead. A major reason for the club’s success, Davenport re-emerged as a dependable workman. Three days after hurling a six-hit complete game to beat the Philadelphia Athletics, 5-1 on July 26, Davenport pulled another ironman stunt — both on one day and in a series. “Dave Davenport’s Arm and Bat Win Two From Yanks” read the headline in the Post-Dispatch, as the “long leviathan, started and completed both games of a twin bill against the AL leaders in the oppressive St. Louis heat.26 He twirled a four-hitter to win the opener, 3-1, then a seven-hitter to complete the sweep, 3-2, in the second contest, in which he also rapped a two-run double. (Never a threat at the plate, Davenport batted .104 lifetime on 49 hits). Two days later Davenport relieved Earl Hamilton with the bases loaded in the ninth and extinguished the fire to preserve a 4-2 win over the Yankees. Then he made his third start in the six-game series against the visitors, throwing four-hit ball over eight strong innings in an eventual 3-2 Browns victory in 14 innings. Davenport won all six of his decisions in August, extending his winning streak to nine games. He made just three starts in September and lost his only decision as the Browns collapsed, wining just nine of 26 games in the month and eventually finishing in fifth place, but with a winning record (79-75). Davenport (12-11) led the majors with 59 appearances (of which 31 were starts) and ranked fifth in the AL in innings (290⅔).

Davenport’s dismal performance in September seemed to result from his excesses away from the diamond and the resulting clashes with Jones. The Post-Dispatch described Davenport as “temperamental” and local sportswriters made frequent references to his “condition” and “shape,” which were euphemisms for drinking.27 After the season there were reports that Jones was fed up with Davenport and had actively shopped him as trade bait. “Jones doesn’t fancy this chippie’s conduct off the field,” opined Browns beat writer W.J. O’Connor. “For the world now knows that Dauntless Dave behaves to suit himself.”28

Aside from whether Davenport drew Jones’s ire for breaking training rules, nobody doubted the big Texan’s toughness, which was never more evident than at the beginning of the 1917 season. In mid-February Davenport apparently accidentally shot himself at his home in Runge, Texas, after a hunting trip. According to the Post-Dispatch, a bullet from a high-powered rifle “entered under [Davenport’s] lower ribs on his left side and ranged upward, coming out below his collar bone. It then passed his jaw and gazed his eyebrow, but didn’t injure the eye.”29 Hospitalized in nearby Cuero, Davenport shrugged off the injury and announced that he would be ready when the season started. Despite missing all of spring training and apparently pitching only batting practice to get into shape,30 Davenport suited up on Opening Day, and started the Browns’ sixth game of the season, pitching four-hit ball over five innings and yielding two runs in a no-decision against the Indians in St. Louis. Davenport slowly worked himself into shape, but struggled, and his record was just 4-9 with a 4.25 ERA in July 9. He then hit his stride, emerging as the club’s best pitcher, and one of the AL’s most effective, for the remainder of the season.31 On July 16 Davenport “had his old rifle fire curve working in great shape,” quipped St. Louis sportswriter John E. Wray, paying homage to the pitcher’s injury, blanking the Athletics on two hits at Sportsman’s Park.32 In his next outing, he held he held the Senators hitless for eight frames, settling for a three-hitter.33 Beginning with his four-hit shutout of the Athletics at Shibe Park in the City of Brotherly Love on August 9, the Big Texan spun five consecutive route-going triumphs in just 14 days for an offensively challenged squad that scored the fewest runs in the AL. Davenport proved to be one of the few bright spots on a miserable seventh-place (57-97) club, notching 13 of the team’s 26 victories (all by complete game) from July 13 to September 26. Despite his gruesome preseason wound, Davenport remarkably led the AL in starts (39), completing 20 of them, and led the staff with 17 wins (he also lost 17) and 280⅔ innings (3.08 ERA).

At the Brownies’ 1918 spring-training camp in Shreveport, Louisiana, Davenport was touted as the staff’s ace. Once the season started, however, “Long Dave” struggled, losing six of his first seven decisions; through late June his ERA hovered well above 5.00. It was a different story over the last nine weeks of the season, when Davenport once again transformed into one of the league’s most effective hurlers, posting a 2.05 ERA from June 28 through September 2, when the season officially ended about a month early because of World War I. Davenport won only 10 games all season, but five of those came in a 15-day stretch on the road in August, twice winning his second game of a series pitching on one day of rest, and yielding just five earned runs in 47 innings (0.96 ERA). He commenced his most overpowering stretch on August 14 with an 11-inning victory over the Athletics, the fourth and last time he hurled at least 10 innings in a big-league game. After blanking the eventual World Series champion Red Sox, 1-0, on six hits at Fenway Park on August 22, Davenport “made the Yankees look and feel very small,” gushed the Post-Dispatch, holding them to four hits in another whitewashing, 2-0.”34

With World War I waging in Europe, Davenport had applied for a military draft exemption, citing his family. Around 1916 he had married Lillian Calloway, and together they had their first child, Howard (three more would follow, two daughters and another son).

One month into the 1918 season, Secretary of War Newton D. Baker enforced Provost Marshal General Enoch Crowder’s “work or fight” decree, and required that all men working in non-essential jobs must either apply to work in war-related industries or risk being drafted.35 Industrial leagues all over the country began recruiting players from Organized Baseball.  Davenport accepted a job at Bethlehem Steel Corporation’s massive Alameda Works Shipyard, near Oakland, California. He joined skipper Clarence Brooks’ plant team, which consisted of several big-leaguers including his Brownie teammates Joe Gedeon and Ernie Johnson, the White Sox’ Swede Risberg, as well as Ossie Vitt and Bob Jones of the Detroit Tigers.36

Davenport didn’t have far to travel to the Browns spring training site in San Antonio in 1919. A “superior brand of pitching,” cooed sportswriter Clarence P. Lloyd optimistically, “is expected to make a first division club out of the Browns this season.”37 Supposedly in the best shape of his life after playing ball in the Bay Area for much of the offseason, Davenport was described as “working harder than at any other time” and  “taking life a bit more seriously” (another euphemism for less drinking).38 In the annual preseason exhibition series with the St. Louis Cardinals in the Gateway City, Davenport tossed two complete-game victories, yielding only one earned run, and subsequently was chosen to start the season opener for the first time in his career. He was shelled for six hits and three runs by the White Sox at Sportsman’s Park, and the season soon careened out of control, as the Big Texan squabbled with skipper Jimmy Burke, who had taken over the club in mid-1918. Their conflict escalated on June 10 after Davenport yielded four late runs in a loss to the Athletics in Philadelphia that dropped his record to 1-6. Infuriated, Burke immediately sent the pitcher back to St. Louis for the final two weeks of the Eastern swing.39 Davenport rejoined the team, started sporadically and relieved, but didn’t fare any better, his record falling to 2-11. After pitching an inning of scoreless relief in the first game of a doubleheader against the Indians on September 1, Davenport did not show up at Sportsman’s Park the following day. According to reports from the Post-Dispatch and Star and Times, he arrived at the park during the late innings of the series finale with the Indians on September 3. Burke ordered his pitcher to wait in the clubhouse until after the game, at which time he informed him in writing that he had been suspended for the remainder of the season and fined $100.40 A heated verbal exchange developed and Davenport apparently threatened to hit his skipper, when business manager Bob Quinn entered the scene. The big Texan confronted Quinn, who ultimately called the police to have his player forcibly removed from the grounds. “[Davenport] had been drinking, it was plain to me,” Quinn told the press, and vowed that he was through with the team.41

Davenport’s ugly scene with Burke and Quinn not only marked the end of his big-league career, but also his playing days in Organized Baseball. His days of pitching were far from over, however. The Browns immediately attempted to unload their disgruntled hurler to the highest bidder, but found none interested until the Washington Senators took a chance shortly before spring training was set to commence in 1920.42 Unable come to terms with the pitcher, club owner Clark Griffith returned him to the Browns in March.43

In parts of six big-league seasons, Davenport posted a 73-83 slate and a 2.93 ERA in 1,537 innings, appeared in 259 games, and completed 96 of 186 starts, including 18 shutouts.

Still formally the property of the Browns, Davenport refused to report and was suspended by the National Commission, the governing body of Organized Baseball. For the next decade he was a pitcher for hire, “outlawing” in a number of independent leagues not part of the National Agreement, and in semipro leagues across the country.44 In 1920 he starred for Rexburg (Idaho) in the Snake River Yellowstone League.45 The following season, he set the outlaw Northern Utah League on fire, winning all seven of his starts, including a perfect game, and averaging 16 punchouts a game for the Ogden Gunners.46 In a remarkable yet odd decision, the league, pressured by owners of the other teams, decided to “fire” Davenport because he was too good for the circuit.47 A wildly popular player because of both his size and ability, Davenport subsequently played on teams in Colorado, Iowa, Nebraska, Pennsylvania, Wisconsin, and Wyoming as the decade progressed. By the end of 1921, Davenport expressed a desire to return to Organized Baseball. In May 1927 Commissioner Kenesaw Landis formally reinstated Davenport, then 36 years old.48 There were reports that the he would sign with the Milwaukee Brewers of the American Association, one notch below the majors, but skipper Jack Lelivelt apparently had second thoughts because of his reputation.49

By 1930 Davenport lived with his wife, Lillian, and their four children in Aransas Pass, in San Patricio County, about 30 miles west of Corpus Christi, in southeastern Texas. He was employed as a shipping clerk50 and later worked on various WPA projects.51 On October 16, 1954, Davenport died at the age of 64 in El Dorado, Arkansas, where he was employed as a cab driver. The cause of death was prostate cancer.52 He was buried at Arlington cemetery in El Dorado, and was survived by his wife and four children.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also accessed Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Reference.com, the SABR Minor Leagues Database, accessed online at Baseball-Reference.com, SABR.org, The Sporting News archive via Paper of Record, the player’s Hall of Fame file, and the online archives via Newspaper.com, and Ancestry.com.

Notes

1 The place of birth is from Davenport’s official Certificate of Death. Some sources give his place of birth as Alexandria, Louisiana, located in the geographic center of the state.

2 According to multiple US Census reports.

3 Dent McSkimming, “Dave Davenport Is an Expert at Cotton Picking,” St. Louis Star and Times, March 29, 1915: 29.

4 “What Former Rosebuds Are Doing,” Weekly Advocate (Victoria, Texas), September 7, 1912: 3.

5 “Three Runge Boys with Bronchos,” Houston Post, March 16, 1913: 19.

6 Associated Press, “Texas Man Goes Up,” Topeka (Kansas) State Journal, August 16, 1913: 8.

7 Jack Ryder, “Long Dave,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 26, 1914: 18.

8 Jack Ryder, “Marsans,” Cincinnati Enquirer, June 4, 1914: 6.

9 Ibid.

10 “Necrology,” The Sporting News, October 27, 1954: 24.

11 “Terrier Pilot and 8 Players Florida Bound,” St. Louis Star and Times, February 23, 1915: 11.

12 Fred Bendell, “Crandall Comes Back and Trims Newark, 3 to 2,” St. Louis Star and Times, June 17, 1915: 10.

13 “Davenport Twirls Double Bill; Loses One Hitter,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 1, 1915: 1S.

14 The Federal League record for scoreless innings was 33 by Buffalo’s Russ Ford in 1914.

15 Sam Weller, “No-Hits, No Runs Off Davenport,” Chicago Tribune, September 8, 1915: 11.

16 Willis E. Johnson, “The Terriers’ Toppers,” Sporting Life, December 11, 1915: 12.

17 “One of the Greatest Hurlers in Game Is Feds Pitcher,” St. Louis Star and Times, December 17, 1915: 13.

18 Hans Rasmussen, who logged two innings for the Chicago Whales was also 6-feet-6.

19 “One of the Greatest Hurlers in Game Is Feds Pitcher.”

20 “Robbers Relieve Terrier Player of Watch; Tobin May Play in Cuba,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 13, 1915: 8.

21 W.R. Hoefer, Baseball Magazine, February 1917, quoted in Bill James and Rob Neyer, The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (New York: Fireside, 2004), 179.

22 William A. Phelon, Baseball Magazine, January 1917, quoted in Bill James and Rob Neyer, The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers (New York: Fireside, 2004), 179.

23 For more on the end of the Federal League see Brendan Macgranachan, “Federal League, Part Three, Seamheads.com, March 28, 2008. seamheads.com/blog/2008/03/28/the-federal-league-part-three/; and Gary Hailey, “Anatomy of a Murder: The Federal League and the Courts,” The National Pastime 4 (1985): 62-73.

24 W.J. O’Connor, “Dave Davenport Is in Line; Only Four Absentees,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 1, 1916: 9.

25 “Too Much Faith in Groom Costs Jones Another,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 27, 1916: 6.

26 W.J. O’Connor, “Dave Davenport’s Arm and Bat Win Two From Yanks,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 30, 1916: 27.

27 W.J. O’Connor, “Jones’ Men Lose When Ump Misses Strike on Ness,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 18, 1916: 16.

28 W.J. O’Connor, “Deal for Shotton Is Now Unlikely,” Record Too Good,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, December 8, 1916: 20.

29 “Dave Davenport Not Dangerously Injured,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, February 15, 1917: 19.

30 “Dave Davenport Expects to Pitch Within Two Weeks,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 10, 1917: 13.

31 From July 13 to September 26, Davenport went 13-7, completed 15 of 22 starts, and posted a sparkling 2.21 ERA in 163 innings while with the Browns.

32 John E. Wray, “Sloan’s Queer Play to Be Probed with a Nut Pick,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 17, 1917: 17.

33 Clarence F. Lloyd, “Foster Breaks Up 0-Hit Game for Long Dave,” St. Louis Star and Times, July 21, 1917: 10.

34 “Browns Meet Yankees in Double Bill Today; Davenport Is Winner,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, August 27, 1918: 16.

35 Matt Kelly, “On Account of War,” National Baseball Hall of Fame. baseballhall.org/discover-more/stories/short-stops/1918-world-war-i-baseball.

36 “Winter Baseball Has Hurt Professionals,” Oakland Tribune, November 30, 1918: 8.

37 Clarence P. Lloyd, “Pitching Expected to Elevate Browns to First Division,” St. Louis Star and Times, January 25, 1919: 8.

38 “Josh Billings to Be Browns’ ‘First String’ Receiver,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 21, 1919: 26.

39 “Burke Says Davenport Is ‘Through” as Result of Row in Club House,” St. Louis Star and Times, September 4, 1919: 14.

40 “Police and Baseball Bat Quell Dave Davenport in Row at Browns’ Clubhouse,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 4, 1919: 4.

41 Ibid.

42 James M. Gould, “Heydler and Johnson May Name Woodruff for Commission Job,” St. Louis Star and Times, February 12, 1920: 20.

43 “Dave Davenport Turned Back to Brownies, Says Dispatch from Tampa,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 10, 1920: 126.

44 “Dave Davenport Wants to Rejoin American League,” St. Louis Star and Times, December 15, 1921: 21.

45 “Dave Davenport Has Remarkable Season,” Calgary (Alberta) Herald, October 1, 1920: 30.

46 “Davenport Hurls No Hit No Run Contest for Gunners,” Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, July 3, 1921: 10.

47 “Urban Faber Continues Form,” Waco (Texas) News-Tribune, July 18, 1921: 5. See also, “Keep Dave Is Cry of Fans,” and “B.B. Officers Defer Action,” both in Ogden (Utah) Standard-Examiner, July 8, 1921: 7.

48 “Landis Reinstates Davenport, Is Report,” St. Louis Star and Times, May 21, 1927: 12.

49 “Dave Davenport Not to Report to Brewer Club,” Journal-Times (Racine, Wisconsin), June 15, 1927: 19.

50 1930 US Census. Ancestry.com.

51 World War II Draft Registration Card. Ancestry.com.

52 Certificate of Death. Ancestry.com.

Del’s interest in baseball was greatly influenced by his father. William Drake owned a local semipro baseball team, the Findlay Sluggers, and Del was the team’s batboy. The outstanding black baseball player of the 1890s and early 1900s Grant “Home Run” Johnson, played on the Sluggers in 1893 and 1894. Bud Fowler, another noted early black baseball player and manager, also was a member of the 1894 Sluggers. Del and Grant Johnson became lifelong friends. Johnson, who worked as a porter on a Pullman car for many years after his playing days were over, would visit Del in Findlay when the train Johnson was working on stopped for a layover.3 A team photograph of the 1894 Sluggers has been on display at the National Baseball Hall of Fame since 1997, when it was the first item a visitor encountered as he entered the exhibit commemorating the 50th anniversary of the integration of major-league baseball. The photograph is historically significant because several of the team’s white players are in the photograph. In those days, it was a rarity for white ballplayers to be photographed with black teammates.

Del displayed excellent hand-eye coordination as a youth. The reverse side of a photograph taken of him in 1901 at age 14 bears the inscription “champion 14 year old trap-shot of Ohio.”4

Del developed a reputation as a baseball phenom at an early age. One newspaper article refers to a game Del played as a “ringer” for Findlay College when he was only 15 years old in 1902, in which he rapped out five doubles. A photo of the Findlay Elks Lodge baseball team in 1902 shows that he was several years younger than his teammates. There is no record of Del attending Findlay High School after his sophomore year. With the blessing of his father and grandfather, a dentist and physician, respectively, Del Drake ended his formal education after his sophomore year in high school in 1902 so that he could cast his lot as a professional baseball player.

Del’s first team was the semipro Findlay Independent team. Some would say his professional career got off to a somewhat rocky start. Playing baseball on the Sabbath was outlawed by local ordinance in many communities in those days. Such was the case in Findlay, where it was strictly enforced. Consequently, the Findlay team began playing its Sunday games in Arcadia, a village seven miles east of town. The Sunday games began affecting attendance at church services in Arcadia. The local clergy prevailed upon the mayor to do something about it.

On Sunday, June 21, 1903, Del and eight other players, along with William Drake, the team’s owner, were arrested, and criminal charges were filed against them in Mayor’s Court in Arcadia for playing ball on Sunday. Bond for those 10 was set by the mayor at $200, which was posted by Del’s father and grandfather. The front-page headline about the incident in the Morning Republican the next day proclaimed, “George Bailey Throws Constable Johnson Off Reeves Park Grounds.”5 Once tensions died down, the case was resolved on July 1 by the arrestees paying a fine of one cent each.6 Thus began Del Drake’s slow and frustrating climb up the ladder toward the major leagues.

Del was first drafted by Detroit in 1903. For several years during the first decade of the 1900s, he would stay in shape in the offseason by doing a lot of hunting in the fall on the farms and in the woods outside Findlay, and by working on a ranch in Arizona in the winter months.7 Newspaper articles about his baseball exploits referred to him as “Cowboy Del Drake” and “the Cowboy,” and had photos of him in full cowboy attire.8 During one of his stays in Arizona, he was tossed from a horse and broke his leg. One newspaper article claimed that the Tigers were ready to give Del a shot at making the parent club in 1908, but decided not to after the leg injury.

In 1904 Del played outfield for the Massillon, Ohio, team in the Ohio and Pennsylvania League. In 1905 he played for Massillon again until the club folded. He then played for the Niles, Ohio, team in the Protective Association until he suffered a broken leg, according to one newspaper account.9 In 1906 he played for Newark, Ohio, in the same league. He had a poor year in 1906, batting only .220 in 129 games, perhaps due to the broken leg. According to one newspaper article, Del and the manager of Newark did not get along.

A senseless tragedy had befallen his father in 1906. William Drake was in the prime of his life – 43 years old, a successful dentist, and in robust health. In March of that year, he presented himself for initiation into the Modern Woodmen of America, a fraternal order that was the predecessor of today’s large insurance company. The initiation rite required that his arms and legs be tied to his seat, similar to a pommel horse, which was secured to the inside of a large metal wheel. This wheel was rolled around the lodge while William Drake was astride the seat with his legs tied underneath it. In the process, William Drake’s back was broken, he became paralyzed and blind, and he never worked another day the rest of his life.10

In 1907 Del moved on to Marion (Ohio) in the Ohio and Pennsylvania League, where he returned to form, batting .301 in 139 games. He started the 1908 season with Newark, New Jersey, of the Eastern League, but finished the season with Johnstown (Pennsylvania) of the Tri-State League. He played in 47 games and batted .291 for Johnstown.

Drake played for the Wilkes-Barre Barons in the New York State League in 1909 and 1910. The Barons won the pennant both years, and Del was presented with a gold pocket watch commemorating the two championship seasons. He led the Barons in batting in 1909 with an average of .345 in 143 games.11

Del went again with the Tigers to spring training in San Antonio in 1910. While there, he hit 10 home runs for the Tigers, while Ty Cobb and Sam Crawford both held out for more money and stayed away. An article in the Detroit Free Press was headlined: “Del Drake’s Daily Home Run Puts the Texans Out of It.”12 Despite his fine showing, the Tigers farmed Del out to Wilkes-Barre again for the entire 1910 season.

In 1910 Del nearly matched his prowess at the plate for the previous season, batting .340 in 122 games. On September 4 he became ill with what was initially diagnosed as typhoid fever. He was taken to Mercy Hospital in Wilkes-Barre, where he was cared for by a nurse named Catherine Loftus.13 Catherine was smitten by the star center fielder for the Barons. However, she was disappointed to learn from a review of his chart that she was nearly two years older than Del. It was natural for her to think that the Barons outfielder would be far less interested in her if he knew that. So when Del began asking questions, she told him her birthdate was January 20, 1889. (The actual birthdate was January 20, 1885.)

After a 13-month courtship, Catherine and Del were married at Sacred Heart Church in Plains, Pennsylvania, on October 17, 1911. She lived the lie about her age the rest of her life, always claiming that the 1885 date on her birth certificate was a mistake. Del did not find out that he had married an older woman until he went to the Social Security office in January 1954 to apply for benefits for his wife, who by then was an invalid. The employee who assisted Del asked him why he had not come in four years earlier, when his wife turned 65. He was not at all happy that he had been fooled. He went straight to his son Bob’s law office and told him what he had discovered. Del was upset, while Bob just laughed. Del then went home and confronted Catherine about it, but she steadfastly insisted whenever she was asked that she was two years younger than Del.14

After two outstanding seasons in Wilkes-Barre, Del Drake’s dream of playing major-league baseball was finally realized with the Tigers. His first appearance in a major-league game was on April 30, 1911, against the Cleveland Indians. The Indians led 4-1 as the game headed to the bottom of the ninth inning. The Tigers mounted a ferocious rally that was chronicled in an article in the July 1912 issue of Everybody’s Magazine, a widely read journal of the day.15 Del entered the game in the ninth inning as a pinch-hitter and singled to left field, keeping the rally alive. The Tigers scored four runs and won, 5-4.

His first run batted in came in a 13-11 home loss to the Boston Red Sox on May 13. On May 14 and 16, in victories over the Red Sox, Del drove in one run in each game.

Except when he was stationed at first base, Del, a 24-year-old rookie who stood 5-feet-11 and was listed at 170 pounds, had the thrill of sharing the Tigers outfield with two future Hall of Famers, Ty Cobb and the leading slugger of the Deadball Era, Wahoo Sam Crawford. Del played left field in 76 games. The Tigers had won the American League pennant each year from 1907 to 1909, but that string was broken by the Philadelphia Athletics in 1910, when the A’s went 102-48 and finished 18 games ahead of the third-place Tigers. The Tigers started the 1911 season by winning 30 of their first 40 games. After their torrid start, their pitching failed them and they won only 59 of their last 114 games, finishing second, 13½ games behind the A’s.

Del’s first major-league home run was a solo homer on July 7 at Bennett Park against the visiting Washington Senators.

Another highlight for Del during the 1911 season was a triple play he started in a game against the White Sox on September 9. In the fourth inning, Marty Berghammer was on first base and Ping Bodie was on second with no outs. Lee Tannehill hit a line drive to left field and Del snagged it. Both runners took off at the crack of the bat, thinking the ball would not be caught. After making the catch, Del fired to Donie Bush at second base to double up Bodie, and Bush threw to Del Gainer at first to complete the triple play. This was the third triple play the Tigers had executed during the 1911 season.

Del, who was the only Tigers position player to throw left-handed and bat right-handed until Mark Carreon played with Detroit in 1992, platooned with veteran outfielder Davy Jones in 1911.16 His statistics for 1911 were respectable for a rookie. He played in 95 games, batted .279 in 315 at-bats, and had 88 hits, 9 doubles, 9 triples, one home run, and 36 RBIs. That season, Ty Cobb posted his highest batting average ever – .419 – and Sam Crawford batted .378. The Tigers also had minor leaguer Bobby Veach waiting in the wings.

The next season, Veach and others replaced Del as the platoon outfielder, with Veach batting .342 in 23 games, a nice start to a superb 14-year career, mostly for Detroit. Davy Jones also posted solid numbers in 1911 and 1912 for Detroit, batting .273 in 98 games in 1911, and .294 in 99 games in 1912.

Despite a respectable season in the Tigers’ outfield in 1911, the 1912 season found Del back in the minors, this time with Providence of the International League. He played in 122 games for Providence, collecting 139 hits, 21 doubles, 13 triples, 4 home runs, and 5 stolen bases, and batted .292. His salary was $2,500. His reported salary at Kansas City for 1912 and 1913 was $1,980.

Del was traded to Kansas City of the American Association late in the 1912 season and batted .343 for the Blues in 27 games. After his two great seasons in Wilkes-Barre in 1909 and 1910, a respectable rookie season in Detroit in 1911, and a solid 1912 season in Providence and Kansas City, Del was no doubt frustrated by the “one and done” treatment he had received from the Tigers. He played in 154 games for the Blues in 1913, but his batting average dipped to .267. Time was running out on his career. The reserve clause was his master. Prior to 1914, he could not escape it. Rather than stay in Kansas City for another season, he jumped to the Federal League for 1914.

Del played in 138 games for the eighth-place St. Louis Terriers in 1914. He played 70 games in left field, 35 in center, and 18 games at first base. He had 514 at-bats, 129 hits, 18 doubles, 8 triples, 3 home runs, and 42 runs batted in. His batting average was .251. In 1915 the Terriers improved to second place with a record of 87 wins and 67 losses, a half-game behind the Chicago Whales (88-66). Del played in 102 games in 1915, all but one in the outfield, with 343 at-bats, 91 hits, 23 doubles, 4 triples, one home run, 41 RBIs, and a batting average of .265.

After the collapse of the Federal League following the 1915 season, Del signed with Wilkes-Barre in 1916 for another return to the New York State League. He played in 118 games and batted .272. In 1917 he played for neighboring Scranton of the same league. On July 16, 1917, approaching age 30 with his glory days in Wilkes-Barre, Detroit, and St. Louis a fading memory, and the birth of his second child only a few weeks away, Del was released by Scranton. He was batting .281 at the time. He and Catherine stayed in the area until Bob was born the first week in September. They then headed back to Findlay for the next chapter in their lives.

During his baseball career, Del Drake did not become a wealthy man, but he had saved enough money so that when he returned to Findlay after his release by Scranton in 1917, he was able to pay cash for a new three-bedroom home at 552 West Lincoln Street. He and Catherine resided there for the rest of their lives.

On a visit to the Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown in 1997, the author obtained from Del’s file a partial listing of the salaries he earned during his career. The record indicates that he was paid $300 per month in 1910 by Wilkes-Barre. As a rookie for Detroit in 1911, he earned $1,800 for the season, about the same as he was paid by Wilkes-Barre. He had been drafted by the Tigers organization in 1903 and again in 1908, and had been its property for the better part of a decade. While in his early 20s, Del felt he deserved better treatment from the Tigers organization, and had written several letters to owner Frank Navin, National Commission Chairman August Herrmann, Dan Brouthers of the Giants, and other baseball executives seeking a release from the Tigers and an opportunity with another organization. He received courteous letters in reply, but the message was always the same: We can’t help you.

The 1918 Polk’s Findlay City Directory lists Del’s occupation as “ball player.” The information for the 1918 directory was compiled in 1917. By 1918, Del was employed by the Ohio Oil Company (subsequently Marathon Oil Company). Subsequent issues of the city directory list him as a clerk, later as a bookkeeper, and then as an accountant for Ohio Oil, despite the fact that he did not graduate from high school. However, industrial league baseball was popular in the nation in the post-World War I era, and Findlay was no exception. The Ohio Oil team in Findlay’s City League was a force to be reckoned with, and company officials were no doubt pleased to have a home-grown ex-major leaguer on their team. Not too long ago, a photograph in the Findlay Courier displayed the 1919-20 City League champions, the Ohio Oil team.17 A graying Del Drake, who was then in his early 30s, was a valued member of those championship teams. The author also has a similar photograph of the 1929 Ohio Oil team, which still featured Del Drake at the age of 42. The team photo shows sons Del Jr. and Bob as the batboys.

On October 15, 1926, Del went to the principal’s office at St. Michael School and asked that 11-year-old Del Jr. and 9-year-old Bob be taken out of class. As they left school and piled into the family car, the boys wanted to know where they were going. All Del told them was, “You’ll see.” They drove out of town toward Lima, about 30 miles away. The boys persisted with their question, but received the same answer every time: “You’ll see.” Once they arrived at Lima, they continued to a baseball diamond, Murphy’s Field. A large crowd was present. A line of baseball players extended from the pitcher’s mound to the outfield fence. Babe Ruth stood at home plate and took three swings at the offerings of each of the players, who were pitchers for area baseball teams. Some of the pitchers were able to blow a pitch or two by the Babe, but a lot of the pitches were hammered well beyond the outfield fence. The next day, several photos of the Babe with local personalities were published in a Lima paper. There was even a photo of Del wearing his old St. Louis Terriers warmup sweater, and a few words about him. Both Drake boys loved telling this story, and felt that seeing the Babe perform in person was the thrill of a lifetime.

Catherine Drake came from a poor Irish Catholic family of coal miners who settled in Plains, Pennsylvania, which is next to Wilkes-Barre. Hall of Famer Ed Walsh was also a native of Plains. Catherine’s aunt, Bridget Gillespie, married John Walsh, Ed’s brother. Catherine’s mother bore 10 children, but only five of them lived to adulthood. Catherine was the only girl among the five, and was the only child in the family who had attended school beyond the third grade. Her four brothers all quit school by the age of nine in order to work in the coal mines. Catherine not only graduated from high school, she continued her education and became a registered nurse. During World War II, despite suffering from diabetes, she spent many hours as a volunteer for the Red Cross, wrapping bandages to be sent overseas for the troops.18

As the Great Depression swallowed up the dreams of millions of Americans during the 1930s, Catherine Drake held on to hers. More than anything else, she wanted her three boys to go to college. Although Del had been employed by Ohio Oil for 15 years by the time Del Jr. graduated from high school in 1933, times were tough for almost everybody. The Drakes did not have the money to send their boys to college. Stu Holcomb, who closed out his long career in athletics as the general manager of the Chicago White Sox, was the athletic director at Findlay College in 1933. Findlay College at that time was down to approximately 400 students, but it did have a baseball team, something that Findlay High School did not have.

In order to fulfill his wife’s dream, Del made Stu Holcomb an offer. He would coach the Findlay College baseball team without pay while his two oldest sons were on the team, if the school would allow his three boys to attend school there tuition-free.19 Stu liked the idea, the president of the college agreed to the proposal, and Del’s bosses at Ohio Oil supported it as well.

Sons Del Jr. and Bob each played for the team during their four years in school. Findlay College was so financially strapped in those days that the members of the varsity baseball team had to provide their own uniforms. Del asked the Tigers to help out with some uniforms and equipment for his team. The Tigers responded by sending two full uniforms and several bats and balls. Del Drake Jr. in 1937 appears in the team photo in the Findlay College yearbook wearing a uniform that had been issued to Hall of Famer Al Simmons when he was traded to Detroit before the 1936 season. Bob Drake is pictured wearing the uniform of an unknown Tiger. Del’s 1939 team, which featured Bob as one of its best hitters, had a record of 14 wins and 3 losses, the highest winning percentage of any college in Ohio that year. Findlay defeated the University of Toledo, Bowling Green, and Kent State.

Del Drake was a third-generation member of his family to join the Benevolent and Protective Order of Elks. The Findlay lodge had been built with significant financial support from members of the Donnell family, which controlled the Ohio Oil Company for several decades. Company president O.D. Donnell one day assigned Del to ask each new male employee if he would be interested in joining the Elks.20 Del was only too happy to oblige. The results were predictable when he would suggest to a new hire that “O. D. thinks it would be a good idea if you joined the Elks.” In 1957, the Elks’ grand exalted ruler, Fred Bohn, presented Del Drake with an honorary life membership for his contribution to the Findlay Lodge by sponsoring more than 300 new members for initiation.21

After retiring from Ohio Oil Company in 1951, Del spent much of his time fulfilling the role of “Grandpa Drake.” Four of his nine grandchildren lived less than a mile away, and for the next 14 years, he was devoted to them. The author can honestly state that from the age of five in 1957 until Del’s last illness, he saw his grandfather nearly every day.

In 1957, after his old teammate on the 1911 Tigers, Sam Crawford, had finally been elected to the Hall of Fame, Del sent Crawford a letter of congratulations. Sam’s reply letter to Del was written in green ink, and the envelope which carried it was addressed simply to “Del Drake, Findlay, Ohio.” Although at the time Findlay had a population of nearly 30,000 people, the mailman had no trouble finding the old Tiger and delivering to him the letter from Wahoo Sam.

An article in Baseball Magazine in 1920 listed Del as having participated in 1,161 games in 11 minor-league seasons, with 1,236 hits and a .301 lifetime batting average.22 You will not find his bust in Cooperstown, nor will you find his name mentioned among the greats of the Detroit Tigers and the American League. But to his wife, his three children, and his nine grandchildren, he was a Hall of Famer in life. He was a devoted companion to Catherine in their nearly 54 years of marriage, and cared for her at home with compassion as she endured a severe illness the last 30 years of her life. It says something about Del Drake, and also of Ty Cobb, that in 1960, a year before Cobb died, he wrote to Del Drake and invited him to visit him in Georgia for some quail hunting. Ty Cobb and Del Drake were together in spring training several years between 1905 and 1911, but spent only one season (1911) together on the Tigers. They were born only a few months apart, and both had suffered the tragedy of losing a father at the age of 19. (Ty’s father lost his life; Del’s father lost the quality of his life.) Because of his wife’s illness, Del had to decline the invitation.

In March 1965, Catherine Drake fell at home and broke her hip. For the previous 30 years, diabetes had caused her immense suffering, eventually robbing her of nearly all of her mobility and eyesight. Del had frequently told his children, his friends, and his neighbors that when his wife died, he hoped to follow right behind her. In 1965 there were few nursing homes, and the ones that did exist were often places where a caring relative would not place a loved one.

Catherine Drake remained hospitalized from March 1965 until her death on October 2, 1965. Del was so upset by what he knew was her final illness that after the first couple of weeks of her hospitalization, he could not bring himself to visit her. Ten days before Catherine’s death, he called his son Bob and asked him to take him to the hospital to visit her. He was visibly shaken by what he saw, and asked to be taken home after only a short visit.

The next day he called Bob again and told him that he was not feeling well, and that he would like to go to the hospital. He was admitted. Over the next nine days, his condition declined rapidly, and he died on Sunday, October 3, 1965, only 26 hours after his wife of 54 years had died. It was the final day of the 1965 major-league season. He and Catherine were buried together in St. Michael’s Cemetery in Findlay.23

In his only season with the Tigers, Del Drake made a lasting mark on the game. Bill James maintains that the regular use by manager Hughie Jennings of Del against left-handed pitchers and of Davy Jones against right-handed pitchers in 1911 was the first documented case of platooning during the regular season in the major leagues.24

Del appears on his own baseball card, a T-207 “Tobacco Card” issued by Recruit Little Cigars.

During their stay in St. Louis with the Terriers, Del and Catherine were blessed by the birth of their first child, a son, Del D. Drake Jr. Two more children followed – both boys, Robert William Drake, born on September 5, 1917, in Wilkes-Barre, and William J. Drake, born January 10, 1920, in Findlay. Del Jr. was the best athlete of the bunch. He lettered in basketball and starred in baseball at Findlay College, graduating in 1937. Del Jr. taught and coached at Holy Angels High School in Piqua, Ohio, before enlisting in the Army in World War II. He was involved in Army Intelligence during and after the war. He then returned to his former position at Holy Angels, then left to become an FBI agent. He retired from the FBI after a 25-year career. He was a good-enough baseball player to be invited by the Boston Bees to spring training in 1938. However, he was plagued by flat feet, which could not stand the strain of a lengthy baseball season.

Del’s second son, Bob, started in the outfield on the 1939 Findlay College baseball team that went 14-3. He coached high-school basketball and baseball for two years after graduation in 1939, then enlisted in the Army Air Corps in September 1941. He was a highly-decorated pilot while serving in the Pacific Theater in World War II. He practiced law in Findlay for 58 years, retiring in 2006 at the age of 88.

Del’s youngest son, Bill, sustained a head injury in a fall as a young boy, and as a result did not participate in athletics. He, too, served in the Army in World War II. After the war, he continued to work for the Defense Department as a civilian employee, and retired after 30 years of service.

Del Drake was inducted into the Hancock County Sports Hall of Fame in 1988, and the Girard Sports Hall of Fame in 1999. In December 1999 he was selected by the Findlay Courier as one of the 100 greatest athletes in Hancock County during the twentieth century.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author relied upon Baseball-Reference.com.

The author of this article is a grandson of Delos Drake. Because of the family connection, he has often more informally referred to his relative by his first name. Much of the information used in writing this biography comes from family scrapbooks, which contained articles that were not identified by newspaper name or date.

Notes

1 “Drake Drafted by Detroit,” unidentified and undated newspaper, circa 1908.

2 “Dr. Drake Passes Over,” Morning Republican (Findlay, Ohio), August 7, 1911.

3 As told to the author by Del Drake Jr. and Bob Drake.

4 Family photograph in possession of the author.

5 “George Bailey Throws Constable Johnson Off Reeves Park Grounds,” Morning Republican, June 22, 1902: 1.

6 Official records from Mayor’s Court, Arcadia, Ohio.

7 “A Shining Example of Perseverance Is Drake,” unidentified newspaper, March 29, 1911.

8 “A Shining Example of Perseverance Is Drake”; Article, unidentified newspaper, circa 1910 from its content.

9 “A Shining Example of Perseverance Is Drake.”

10 Petition in Case No. 17127, Hancock County Common Pleas Court, Findlay, Ohio.

11 The official league average as reported by two printed sources is the .345 cited.

12 Joe S. Jackson, “Del Drake’s Daily Home Run Puts the Texans Out of It,” unidentified newspaper, 1910.

13 “Del Drake Weds Girl He Met in Mercy Hospital,” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, October 17, 1911.

14 As told to the author by Del Drake Jr. and Bob Drake.

15 Edward Lyell Fox, “Everybody’s Up,” Everybody’s Magazine, July 191: 3.

16 Tom Gage, “Bats Right Throws Left? Carreon’s Not the First,” Detroit News, May 31, 1992.

17 “Long Ago,” Courier (Findlay, Ohio), date unknown.

18 As told to the author by Del Drake Jr. and Bob Drake.

19 As told to the author by Del Drake Jr. and Bob Drake.

20 As told to the author by William Kirkwood Jr., past exalted ruler of Lodge No. 75 and past treasurer of Marathon Oil Company.

21 Findlay Lodge No. 75 files personally reviewed by the author, a past exalted ruler of the lodge.

22 J.C. Kofoed, “True Veterans of the Minor Circuits,” Baseball Magazine, October 1920.

23 The details in Section IX were told to the author by his father, Bob Drake, many times.

24 Bill James, The Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract (New York: Villard Books, 1985), 117.

Vernon Van Duke Duncan2 was born on January 6, 1890, in Clayton, North Carolina, to Alexander Romulus “A.R.” and Elizabeth “Bettie” Turner Duncan.3 Vern was the couple’s youngest of seven children. Both of his parents were in their 40s at the time of his arrival. Bettie died in 1898 at age 52, while A.R., who spent time as both a farmer and postmaster, died three years later aged 60, before Vern turned 12. From age 13 to 17, Duncan played for both the school and town teams in Clayton, where at 15 he was praised by a newspaper for doing “some star work” in left field.4 Memories of how the scorekeeper would announce the players stayed with him into adulthood: “Cable at the bat, Duncan on deck, and Ellis in the hold.”5 He remembered that runs were “kept by cutting notches in a stick or on the ground” and that his first uniform, bright red and heavily quilted to protect the skin when sliding, cost 85 cents. For away games they would travel to Raleigh, Smithfield, Selma, and Wendell (all within 15 miles of Clayton6). Departing at 8 A.M. via horse wagons or buggies, they often returned home at 9:30 P.M.7

In 1907, 17-year-old Vern transferred to Trinity Park, a prep school aligned with Trinity College (now Duke University) in Durham.8 The following spring he played second base on “the best team [Trinity Park] has ever had, and is well trained.”9 He would remain a keystoner until he became a professional. During the summer of 1908 he was a member of a semipro team in Wadesboro, North Carolina, playing for expenses and everything he “wanted to eat, drink, smoke, or wear.”10 He got off to a great start, collecting three hits in the first game of the season, an 11-3 win over Florence (South Carolina) on June 17.11 At the end of the season he received a watch and a gold fountain pen for his efforts.12 Apparently, being on the Wadesboro team had other benefits as he and three other teammates made the social pages in mid-August when they attended a “delightful porch and lawn party … in honor of … Miss Virginia Truesdel, of Kershaw, S.C … and the guests were loath to leave.”13

Duncan received professional offers to play in both the Tri-State (Class B) and South Atlantic Leagues (Class C) Leagues.14 He chose to attend the University of North Carolina, where he was the starting second baseman in the spring of 1909. A Wadesboro and UNC teammate, B.C. Stewart, said that Duncan and fellow Trinity Park alumnus and new Tar Heel W.P. Moore (catcher) were “among the best he ever saw.”15 In a March doubleheader against Amherst College, Duncan had five hits in six at-bats. The Daily Tar Heel noted that Duncan and his partner at shortstop (Winn) “pulled off two fast double plays and got everything that came their way.”16 After a great season with the Tar Heels, leading the team with a .350 batting average (35-for-100),17 he returned for the summer to the Wadesboro team and a Charlotte paper made note of his fielding prowess.18 Wadesboro went 28-13-1, outscored its opponents 207-75, and was crowned the unofficial amateur champion of the Carolinas.19

In 1910, during Duncan’s second season with the Tar Heels, he was offered contracts to play with the Hartford Senators (Connecticut State League, Class B) and the Wilmington Sailors (Eastern Carolina League, Class D). He declined both offers, hoping to play with the Raleigh Red Birds, a more local team (Eastern Carolina League), but the Redbirds manager, King Kelly,20 said that at age 20, he “was too young to try professional ball.”21 His UNC season complete, Duncan played for Rockingham (North Carolina) in the Pee Dee Association that summer.22 While at a hotel in Cheraw, South Carolina, he signed his first professional contract, with Columbia, South Carolina (Sally League, Class C).23

Duncan made his professional debut with the Columbia Gamecocks on July 25, 1910, against the Columbus (Georgia) Foxes with a two-hit effort in the leadoff position. Responding to Duncan’s query as to whether or not he should take some pitches, manager Bill Breitenstein replied, “Hit anything that looks good to you.”24 The first pitch must have looked good because he hit it to left-center for a double. Although he continued his hitting success25 in his second game, his fielding left much to be desired at second base and by the third game he was moved to right field for the remainder of the season. For his efforts, he collected a $250 bonus for hitting over .240. (He hit .275.)26 The Gamecocks, however, did not have a great season, finishing last in the league, playing at a .390 clip, 23½ games behind champion Columbus.

In 1911 Duncan returned to Columbia, now known as the Commies (short for Commissioners27), and led the team in batting (.317) and hits (158). The league played a split season with Columbia winning the second half and going on to lose to first-half champion Columbus in the playoffs, four games to two. That fall, American League teams Detroit and Cleveland both drafted him with the Tigers winning rights to sign him via “the draw.”28

In the spring of 1912, Detroit farmed Duncan out to Chattanooga (Southern Association, Class A). However, arm problems limited him to just a few games. He was soon sold to the Dallas Giants of the Texas League (Class B) where he would rejoin his manager from Columbia, Dred Cavender,29 who would be his biggest proponent for three seasons (1911-1913). When Cavender left Columbia and joined Dallas in late 1911, he advised owner Joe Gardner to sign Duncan.30

The hot Texas sun seemed to rejuvenate Duncan’s ailing arm. Vern was in the top four on the Giants in batting average (.268), doubles (18), hits (132), and triples (12, number one on the team).31 Early in the season the El Paso Herald noted “Duncan is showing good class and promises to be a star in the company.”32

During spring training in 1913, Dallas and Duncan faced the New York Giants and their vaunted pitcher Christy Mathewson. “I hit one of his famous fade-away balls and it almost got to the pitcher and the butt end of my bat went all the way to third base – broken bat.” 33 Duncan showed marked improvement that season, leading the Texas League in batting in early August (.328).34 The Houston Post noted that Duncan was a “remarkable fielder,” adding, “He is fast and covers a world of territory in his garden, and in addition is the possessor of an excellent wing. There is not another fielder of the Texas League this season who has had as successful a year as Van Duke Duncan.”35 Manager Cavender proclaimed, “You can quote me as saying that Duncan will go to the big leagues and stay. I believe there are [sic] no end to his ability. He has everything that goes to the making of a major leaguer.”36

Duncan went on to lead the junior Giants in batting average (.307), hits (169), doubles (28), triples (13), and slugging (.416). His performance, in fact, earned him a trip to the “bigs” late in the season when he was sold to the Philadelphia Phillies.37 Duncan was rewarded for his accomplishments in Dallas by being selected to the 1913 All-Texas League team.38

However, Duncan’s trip to Philadelphia was not a sure thing as Boston Braves manager George Stallings claimed in August that Dallas owner Jim Gardner had agreed to sell Duncan’s rights to the Boston club. He claimed he had posted a check in addition to making a public announcement of the deal. The next day, Stallings received a wire from Gardner stating that the Phillies had given him a better offer.39 The Braves protested, taking the matter to the National Baseball Commission, which ruled on September 1 in favor of Philadelphia.40 He joined the Phillies in Boston and then headed to St. Louis by train for the next series. However, delays made it an interesting train ride. The team’s train arrived late in Cleveland, missing its connection by two hours. Two cars were hooked up to an engine and baggage car and, as Duncan described it, they “lit a rag – the fastest I ever rode on a train,” arriving in Terre Haute, Indiana, in time to transfer to the St. Louis-bound train.41

On September 11 in Robison Field, St. Louis, Duncan made his major-league debut, pinch-hitting for Sherry Magee (hitting .317 at the time) and then was inserted into left field. Duncan hit into a force play when the Cardinals shortstop, Wese Callahan, made a nice play to force the runner at second.42 He then was thrown out attempting to steal second on a muddy field.43 On September 21, in Chicago’s West Side Grounds, Duncan pinch-hit for Grover Cleveland Alexander in the third inning, stroking a double to left field for his first major-league hit as the Phillies won, 8-7.44

Duncan had a two-hit game on September 27 against the visiting Boston Braves. He pinch-hit for pitcher George Chalmers in the fifth and remained in the game playing right field. He made his first career start against the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds in the last series of the season.45 Playing right field, he went 1-for-4 (single up the middle with the bases loaded) with a run batted in.46

After the season, Philadelphia sent Duncan to the Montreal Royals (International League, Double A) for more work. Meanwhile, the Federal League had formed and the Baltimore Terrapins made him a good offer. When he could not come to terms with Montreal on a contract, he, in his own words, “jumped to Baltimore.”47

Duncan had an inauspicious start in the Federal League in 1914, batting a mere .202 at the end of May. However, he found life in his bat and brought his average up to .259 by mid-July. He finished the season at .287, his high mark for the year.

Duncan had a “career week” June 5-11, going 14-for-25. The skein included a four-hit effort in Indianapolis and two three-hit games.

In a late-season game in Baltimore, the Terrapins led Kansas City 3-2 with one out in the eighth inning. Kansas City had a runner on first when Duke Kenworthy hit a long fly to the left field fence.48 As the Baltimore Sun described it,

Grand Duke Duncan saved the day for his comrade (pitcher King George Suggs) when he made one of the greatest catches seen on any ball field this year. It was a gloved-hand stab of a long clout just as the ball was about to hit the fence. Duke took the sphere in as gracefully as if he were picking cherries.49

Duncan led the Terps in plate appearances (667), runs scored (99), and sacrifice hits (28). He pounded out 20 doubles and 8 triples. His slash line (not that they were looking at them in 1914) was .287/.375/.363.

Duncan’s hot bat continued into 1915: He was batting .397 a month into the season, resulting in his receiving a new two-year contract from the Terrapins at a healthy increase in salary. He was still hitting .337 in mid-June and was given an offer by the Cincinnati Reds to jump back to the National League. But he did not want to walk out on his contract with Baltimore. His bat cooled down and he finished with a batting average of .268 (hitting .205 after August 25). For the season, Duncan led the team in games played (146), at-bats (531), hits (142), stolen bases (19), walks (54), and sacrifice hits (33). His slash line was .267/.337/.328. One of the Federal League team owners, Robert B. Ward of the Brooklyn Tip-Tops, died in October, an event that, in Duncan’s opinion, was partly responsible for the league’s demise.50 After the league folded, all players with Federal League contracts were told to return to the team previously holding their rights.51

Duncan was considered the property of Montreal, which sent him a contract for $150 per month, the same amount he made while playing for Columbia in 1910-11.52 Montreal also informed him that he would be sent to a lower league. Duncan requested that the club send him to the Raleigh Capitals (North Carolina State League, Class D), near his hometown, and in late April he was sent there for Harry Damrau.53

Duncan performed well back in his home state, leading the way with a .336 batting average on 115 hits (second on the team). Before the season was over the 26-year-old found a spot on the St. Paul Saints (Double-A American Association). The transition from Class D to Double-A baseball was initially a difficult one, but by season’s end Duncan’s average reached .280 in 27 games. He had shown St. Paul enough to have the club draft him from Raleigh for the following season.

In 1917 Duncan batted .276 in 137 games (19 doubles, 6 triples) for St. Paul, which remained his home through 1921 with a year off in 1918 during World War I. Duncan served at two Army bases in South Carolina, Camp Jackson (Columbia) and Camp Sevier (Greenville), with the 81st Division.54 He was able to play on the 156th Depot Brigade baseball team.55

The 1919 Saints won the American Association pennant and were considered to be a “richly talented, opportunistic team, more adept at preventing runs than scoring them. … [T]hey were the American Association’s most enigmatic champion, relying on stolen bases.” St. Paul led the league with 216 stolen bases (Duncan was second on the team with 29) and allowed the fewest runs (542).56 Duncan batted .279 with 28 doubles. One of his teammates was football Hall of Famer George Halas, future owner and coach of the Chicago Bears. An elaborate end-of-season banquet was held for the players at the St. Paul Athletic Club. Each player received a watch while the fans gave manager Mike Kelley a gift of $1,400 ($21,000 in 2019).57

St. Paul made a postseason trip to California to play the champion of the Pacific Coast League, Vernon (near Los Angeles), in a best-of-nine-games Junior World Series. En route to the West Coast, the team stopped in Lincoln, Denver, Salt Lake City, and Price, Utah to play games.58 Against Vernon, St. Paul lost 3-2 in the ninth and deciding game.59 The winning hit was made by Vernon’s Wheezer Dell in the bottom of the ninth when he hit a double over Duncan’s head in left field, after St. Paul manager Kelley moved Duncan to shallow left. After the game, actor Tom Kennedy, unhappy with the calls being made from behind the plate, approached umpire Jim “Bull Head” Murray and attacked him, landing the first punch on the head from behind. The umpire was subsequently awarded $500 in damages.60

After leaving Vernon, the Saints traveled to San Francisco and Oakland for a week of games. Duncan noted the beauty of the landscapes during the train ride back east to Minnesota, especially along the Columbia River.61

The St. Paul team of 1920 again finished in first place with 115 wins and is regarded as one of the all-time great minor-league teams (ranked number six by Bill Weiss and Marshall Wright in their 2001 listing of the top 100 minor-league teams of the twentieth century).62 In a later reminiscence, Duncan said, “In 1920 we had the best minor league team I ever saw at St. Paul. We won the pennant again, this time by 26 ball games and let up three weeks before the season closed.”63 The Saints were the only American Association team to lead the league in both triples and home runs,64 though Duncan’s contribution was minor in those categories, 6 and 2). His overall numbers improved over the previous season, however, as he hit .313, slugged .403, and had a .359 on-base percentage in 118 games. The Saints pitching staff was superb. Charley “Sea Lion” Hall led the way with a record of 27-8 and a league-leading 2.06 ERA. In addition, he hurled his third career no-hitter in August. Hall was supported by Howard Merritt (21 wins), Steamboat Williams (20 wins), and Fritz Coumbe (19 wins). The team sparkled in the field with a league-leading .967 fielding percentage. Its .301 team batting average was the best in the league since 1911.65 In the Junior World Series St. Paul played International League champion Baltimore and again came out on the losing end (five games to one).66

After the news of the Black Sox 1919 World Series scandal became public in 1920, Duncan commented, “We read of the White Sox-Cincinnati World’s Series scandal which put a damper on baseball and [it was] the worst scandal ever known in baseball circles. …”67

Although Duncan had another solid season in 1921 with the Saints, sporting a .304 average, the team did not fare as well. The Saints dropped to sixth place with an 80-87 record, 17½ games behind the first-place Louisville Colonels. Four former major leaguers joined the team (Tim Hendryx, Tom Sheehan, Nick Allen, and a former semipro opponent from 1909, Rube Benton), disrupting the club’s chemistry, according to Duncan, due to their “superior” attitude. He called it “one of [his] most unpleasant seasons in baseball.”68

In 1922 Duncan headed back to Raleigh, where he took the reins as player-manager of the Capitals (Class-C Piedmont League). He was with Raleigh through the end of his career, in 1927. Duncan batted a lofty .337 in that first season, tapering off to .286 with 22 doubles in 1923. A teammate that season, Carr Smith, batted .418 with a .759 slugging percentage, and totaled 77 extra-base hits (28 doubles, 25 triples, and 24 home runs). Smith would go on to play 10 games for the Washington Senators in 1923 and ’24. At the end of the 1923 season, Duncan was still owed $2,700 in salary plus additional expenses. He decided to buy the club in hopes of saving money, but eventually sold the club in 1926 to Jimmy Hamilton of the Nashville Volunteers (Southern Association).69 He commented that his plan to save money “backfired.”70

In 1924 Duncan ended his three-year run as manager and became a part-time player, hitting just .226. However, he was able to put the ball into play the following years, batting .313 in 1925 and .304 in 1926. In 1927, his final season in Organized Baseball, he played in just 19 games (.169).

Duncan took the reins of his alma mater, North Carolina, for one season in 1926, finishing with a record of 9-16.

Duncan met his future wife, Elizabeth Moore Gordon,71 while in Raleigh, in what he considered the highlight of his years with the club. They had two children, Gordon and Jane.

At the end of his career, Duncan tried out with the Richmond Colts of the Virginia League (Class B) but did not make the team. Eighteen years after his professional career started, he “laid my suit, shoes, and glove aside to follow other lines.”72

Whoosh … budap … snap … whoosh … budap … snap … [silence].

After his baseball career ended, Duncan became the postmaster in Clayton with Elizabeth working as a clerk in the post office. By 1940 he had become a salesman while Elizabeth was a teacher. He suffered a heart attack on May 29, 1954, and died three days later, on June 1, at the age of 64 in Daytona Beach, Florida.73 Elizabeth died in 1988.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted ancestry.com, baseball-reference.com, and retrosheet.org.

Notes

1 Vern Duncan, untitled document documenting his life in baseball, November 13, 1935, 1. Courtesy of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. (Hereafter cited as Life in Baseball).

2 Most sources cite his name as Vernon Van Duncan with Duke being a nickname. However, his Certificate of Death (Florida), June 1, 1954, shows his name as Van Duke Duncan, and a document from the Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum showing his salaries from 1910-1913 lists him as V.D. Duncan.

3 “Vernon Van Duke Duncan,” Ancestry.com, retrieved June 28, 2019.

4 “Raleigh Is Victor,” Raleigh News and Observer, June 23, 1905: 5.

5 (Life in Baseball, 1. Note that the baseball term “in the hole” was originally “in the hold,” probably of nautical heritage as was “on deck,” since the next place after being on deck on a ship would be in the hold (or below deck). Chris Landers, “Discover the Mysterious Origins of Some of Baseball’s Most Well-Known Terms,” Cut 4 at mlb.com, July 13, 2017, mlb.com/cut4/more-wacky-stories-behind-baseball-terms/c-218978328, retrieved November 19, 2018.

6 googlemaps.com, retrieved November 25, 2018.

7 Life in Baseball, 1.

8 In a 1908 news tidbit, Duncan’s name was listed as William D. Duncan in an announcement of his leaving for Trinity Park School in Durham. “Personals,” Raleigh Times, September 8, 1908: 6; “Baseball at Trinity College,” Greensboro Daily News, January 10, 1908: 3; “Duke University, “Trinity College of Arts & Sciences: Our History,” trinity.duke.edu/about/our-history, retrieved March 16, 2019.

9 “Trinity Park School Has a Strong Bunch,” Charlotte Observer, March 23, 1908: 3.

10 Life in Baseball, 1.

11 “A Fine Game Yesterday,” Messenger and Intelligencer (Wadesboro, North Carolina), June 18, 1908: 1.

12 Life in Baseball, 1.

13 “Miss Caraway Entertains in Honor of Miss Truesdale,” Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, August 13, 1908: 1.

14 “Manager Masten of University Hands Out Dope; Play Twins Easter Monday,” Winston-Salem Journal, December 23, 1908: 1.

15 Ibid.; “Wearers of the ‘N.C.,’” Messenger and Intelligencer, May 27, 1909: 4.

16 “We Get the Other One,” Daily Tar Heel, April 1, 1909: 1.

17 “Wearers of the ‘N.C.’”

18 “Wadesboro Takes Two from Union,” Charlotte Evening Chronicle, August 4, 1909: 2.

19 “Wadesboro Claims the Championship,” Charlotte Observer, September 2, 1909: 8.

20 “T209 Contentnea (Photo Series): Overview,”T209-Contenea.com, t209-contentnea.com/t209-contentnea-photo-series, retrieved November 25, 2018.

21 Life in Baseball, 1.

22 “Standing of Clubs,” Charlotte Observer, June 26, 1910: 8. The name Pee Dee comes from the Pee Dee River, which originates in central North Carolina and runs south to South Carolina. The four towns with Pee Dee teams (Jonesboro-Sanford, Laurinburg, Rockingham, and Waynesboro) are all near the river. Pee Dee comes from the name of the Pee Dee Indian tribe. “Pee Dee Indian Tribe,” peedeetribe.org peedeetribe.org/home.html, retrieved October 18, 2019.

23 Life in Baseball, 1.

24 “Luyster in Good Form,” Greenville (South Carolina) News, August 18, 1910: 2. The quote came from Life in Baseball.

25 1-for-2, according to Life in Baseball, but could not be confirmed.

26 Life in Baseball, 2.

27 Columbia Defeats Newberry,” Newberry (South Carolina) Weekly Herald, March 17, 1911: 5.

28 If two or more teams drafted a player, their names would be put into a hat, and the team whose name was drawn would be able to sign the player. Joe S. Jackson, “Sporting Facts and Fancies,” Washington Post, September 1, 1911: 8.

29 Cavender had succeeded Breitenstein.

30 “Play Ball,” Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, May 28, 1908: 1.

31 Life in Baseball, 2.

32 H.H. Shelton, “Swell Race Is Being Run in Tight Little Texas League,” El Paso Herald, May 4, 1912: 20.

33 Life in Baseball, 2. The game took place in Dallas on March 8, 1913, with New York coming out on top 7-0. “Giants Shut Out the Dallas Club by Score of 7-0,” Baltimore Sun, March 9, 1913: 13.

34 “The Texas League Race,” Houston Post, August 10, 1913: 19.

35 “Van Duke Duncan–The Texas League Leader,” Houston Post, August 17, 1913: 17.

36 “Play Ball,” Wadesboro Messenger and Intelligencer, May 28, 1908: 1.

37 Life in Baseball, 2.

38 “The Houston Post’s 1913 All-Texas Leaguers,” Houston Post, September 14, 1913: 17.

39 “Play Ball,” Messenger and Intelligencer, May 28, 1908: 1.

40 “Holds Dallas Sale Valid,” Austin American-Statesman, September 2, 1913: 3.

41 Life in Baseball, 2.

42 “St. Louis Might Demand Return of Traded Dog,” Altoona (Pennsylvania) Times, September 12, 1913: 8.

43 The author could not confirm the anecdote from Life in Baseball. However, the St. Louis Post-Dispatch had a forecast of thundershowers followed by fair weather, which would make the muddy conditions possible. “Thundershowers and Then Fair Weather,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 11, 1913: 1.

44 Life in Baseball, 2.

45 Of note, Duncan’s start was in game one of a doubleheader, one of five straight doubleheaders, the day prior’s included finishing a suspended game – for three games completed in a single day. In fact, the Phillies played a twin bill on 14 of the last 15 days they played (29 games played in 35 days). Reference for suspended game finished: “Phillies Get Two Victories in Shortened Games, but Giants Win Only Full Length One,” New York Sun, October 3, 1913: 8.

46 Life in Baseball, 2.

47 Life in Baseball, 3.

48 C. Starr Matthews, “Suggs and Duncan Star,” Baltimore Sun, September 17, 1914: 5.

49 Ibid.

50 Stephen V. Rice, “July 24, 1914: Brooklyn Tip-Tops Win on Carom Off Pitcher’s Leg,” SABR Games Projects, sabr.org/gamesproj/game/july-24-1914-brooklyn-tip-tops-win-carom-pitchers-leg, retrieved November 25, 2018.

51 Life in Baseball, 3.

52 Untitled V.D. Duncan salaries document.

53 C. Starr Matthews, “Orioles Will Open League Season Today,” Baltimore Sun, April 26, 1916: 10.

54 “Division Rapidly Getting Into Form,” Greenville News, July 6, 1918: 6.

55 “Remount Team Again Victors,” Greenville News, October 9, 1918: 6.

56 Rex D. Hamann, The Millers and the Saints: Baseball Championships of the Twin Cities Rivals, 1903-1955 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2014), 99.

57 Life in Baseball, 4. See also “Calculate the value of $1,400 in 2019,” Dollar Times, dollartimes.com/inflation/inflation.php?amount=1400&year=1919, retrieved January 12, 2019.

58 Life in Baseball, 3, 3-4.

59 “Triple-A Baseball Interleague Post-Season Play Results,” Triple A Baseball.com, tripleabaseball.com/PostSeasonOthers.jsp, retrieved November, 25, 2018.

60 “Hickey Is to Ban Vernon from Series,” Los Angeles Times, October 19, 1919: 8.

61 Life in Baseball, 4.

62 Hamann, 111. See also “About the Top 100 Teams,” milb.com, milb.com/milb/history/top_about.jsp, retrieved December 4, 2018.

63 Life in Baseball, 4. Statscrew.com shows the final difference between first-place St. Paul and second-place Louisville Colonels as 28½ games. “1920 American Association Standings,” statscrew.com, statscrew.com/minorbaseball/standings/l-AA2/y-1920, retrieved October 18, 2019.

64 Hamann, 111.

65 Hamann, 112.

66 Life in Baseball, 4.

67 Ibid.

68 Ibid.

69 “Duncan Signs to Coach Baseball,” Daily Tar Heel, February 23, 1926: 1, 3.

70 Life in Baseball, 4.

71 “Vernon Van Duke Duncan,” Ancestry.com, retrieved June 28, 2019. Ancestry.com lists Elizabeth’s last name as Gordan; however, her grave marker as seen in findagrave.com lists it as Gordon. images.findagrave.com/photos/2010/337/52418806_129145938515.jpg

72 Life in Baseball, 5. Duncan stated that it was 1927, Duncan stated that it was 1927 when he tried out for the Richmond team, but he also played for Raleigh that year, so it might have been 1928.

73 Duncan’s Certificate of Death (Florida), dated June 1, 1954, shows the cause of death as a “coronary occlusion with myocardial infarction” (blockage of the coronary arteries followed by a heart attack).

Ted Easterly was already 15 in the summer of 1900 when the story above came to pass, but his tale could serve as a template for an imp in Baltimore who, a few years later, would find himself on the same course. Even if Babe Ruth would surpass the briefly celebrated Easterly in every facet of the game, the two surely could have compared notes on hard-scrabble childhoods redeemed by eager promise on the sandlots, and subsequently becoming the colorful subjects of many a sportswriter’s correspondence.

Before he maligned Ruth, Ring Lardner’s fabled busher Jack Keefe bellyached about Easterly’s presence and prowess as a pinch-hitter on the Chicago White Sox of 1912 and 1913. Easterly, heretofore a catcher, was coming to prominence as an off-the-bench bat, leading the American League in pinch hits in 1912 with 13.

“I was going up there with a stick when Callahan calls me back and sends Easterly up,” Lardner has Keefe report in You Know Me, Al. “I don’t know what kind of managing you call that. I hit good on the training trip and he must of knew they had no chance to score off me in the innings they had left while they were liable to murder his other pitchers. I come back to the bench pretty hot and I says You’re making a mistake. He says if Comiskey had wanted you to manage this team he would of hired you. Then Easterly pops out and I says Now I guess you’re sorry you didn’t let me hit.”1

It might’ve gone well for Keefe that he didn’t make any such quips to Easterly. The truth about the catcher’s life was far rawer, stickier, and stranger than fiction.

“BAD DOWNEY BOY,” shouts the headline in the August 15, 1900, edition of the Los Angeles Times. “Theodore H. Easterly, a fifteen-year-old Downey boy who looks the fag end of a dilapidated youth, was committed to the Whittier reform school by Judge Trask yesterday, to remain during minority.

“Easterly is said to be a very bad little boy. Even his mother is compelled to say so, and the neighbors of the family willingly corroborate her. The boy has persistently refused to mind his parents, balks at going to school, and delights in running away from home.”

The final straw for young Easterly, the Times continued, was the theft of a dozen chickens, which he promptly sold to a hotel in Downey before absconding to Oxnard, where he was captured. Asked from the bench what he thought about spending his next years in the reformatory, Easterly, “a most nonchalant lad,” replied readily, “I don’t care.”2

Those words may just as well have been tattooed on Easterly’s heart if the next 30 years of his life and baseball career are any indication. Buffeted about by the usual uncertainties of a career in the early days of the organized game, Easterly also continued courting his share of trouble both on and off the diamond. Nevertheless, he was a doughty backstop and an adept hitter, tacking up an even-.300 career average in seven big-league seasons.

In 459 games behind the plate, Easterly threw out 427 attempted basestealers, good enough to place him 92nd on the all-time list — better than Hall of Famers Mike Piazza, Yogi Berra, and Mickey Cochrane, and joined in a tie by Thurman Munson. Still, his career was marked by doubters who thought his play uneven and his arm far too wild to be corralled.

News reports from Easterly’s first spring training with the Cleveland Naps document his troubles with footwork and using his body to block balls in the dirt. Even as late as 1912, when Easterly was a three-year American League veteran, sportswriters chided him for “wildness” in his throws and speculated that he was a lock to be sent to the minors.

Easterly was a favorite of the venerable Deacon McGuire, himself a former catcher and a coach and later manager of the Naps, who saw promise in the youngster’s bat. The youngster paid attention to McGuire’s homilies, making himself malleable to advice and the possibility of experiencing growth — perhaps for the first time in his young life.

“McGuire discovered that Easterly did not step out from the plate far enough on a ball to be wasted,” wrote Red Perkins in the Los Angeles Times. “He showed the youngster how and since that time Easterly has been doing the thing that used to be his weakness as though it were the most natural thing in the world.”3

Less natural for the young Easterly were the fashions of the day.

On the field, Easterly was noted for using a heavier-than-usual mitt. His Cleveland teammates attested to the stout glove in 1912: “Every man has taken his turn at trying to wield it in warming up, and each one has tossed it aside after taking half a dozen throws. ‘It weighs about a ton,’ said one of the squad. ‘When I use my own glove after handling that thing I’m light-handed, and can’t place my glove for five or ten minutes.’”4 He was also reported to swing the heftiest bat in the majors: “An average player can’t lift it up unless he’s feeling extra strong,” reported the Elyria (Ohio) Chronicle-Telegram.5

On the boulevard, Easterly cut a less impressive figure. Upon first arriving to play with the Angels in 1907, the reform-school graduate came dressed in what papers called a “peaceful valley dicer,” replete with a celluloid collar.

“Ted is believed to have accumulated it in Downey, Cal., which was the scene of his amateur activities,” read a report in the Laporte (Pennsylvania) Republican News Item headlined “Ted Easterly No Dude.” “Celluloid collars were considered quite recherche in Downey at that time. Comparatively few of them, however, survive at the present time.”6

Wild arm, heavy mitt, bat, or outmoded duds, Easterly did not seem to care.

Theodore Harrison Easterly was born on April 20, 1885 in Lincoln, Nebraska, son of Eugene J. Easterly, a carpenter, and Laura J. (Drescher) Easterly. Theodore’s paternal grandfather, Jacob Easterly, had also been a carpenter and a paternal great-grandfather, the Rev. Lawrence Easterly, had been a minister in the Church of the United Brethren and was descended from German settlers.7 Lawrence Easterly had started the Easterlys on a westerly track, leaving Cumberland County, Pennsylvania, for Ohio. Jacob Easterly settled in Iowa for a time and Eugene J. Easterly was born in territorial Nebraska around 1859. Eventually, all these Easterlys ended up in California and Jacob died in Los Angeles County in 1915, the same year of his grandson’s chicken theft.

After his remand to the Whittier State Reform School — where he was a “freshman” and up-and-coming pugilist and future World Series fixer Abe Attell was a “senior” — Ted did indeed find his outlet in baseball. Harry A. Williams, a sportswriter for the Los Angeles Times in the early twentieth century, laid claim to having discovered Easterly during one of the many games the reform school played against the neighboring Poets of Whittier College.

Williams said that after Easterly’s “graduation,” the catcher caught on with a series of semipro teams in San Diego and Pasadena for a few seasons — the Oil and Agricultural League, where Easterly undoubtedly encountered a young Walter Johnson for the first time — while the sportswriter tried in vain to get him a tryout with the PCL’s Los Angeles Angels, helmed by player-manager Frank “Pop” Dillon.8 The persistence paid off late in the 1907 season when Dillon found himself with both of his regular backstops nursing injuries.

Easterly played 11 games for the Angels in their PCL championship 1907 season, notching nine hits in 40 at bats and earning a return invitation for the 1908 season, in which the Angels would repeat as titleholders, their fourth championship in the league’s six-season history.

In 1908 Easterly missed out on the opportunity to join Frank Chance’s Chicago Cubs in the middle of their run to the World Series championship because Los Angeles asked too high a price for the 23-year-old catcher’s services. Easterly wound up hitting .309 with three home runs in 123 games with LA, the only .300 hitter in the league, but with too few plate appearances to qualify for the batting title.9 Behind the plate, he was gaining more confidence, too. In one game, he tied a PCL mark by notching seven assists.10

In August 1908 several major-league teams were vying for Easterly and he ultimately found himself drafted by Cleveland on September 1.11 The deal was anything but settled, however, according to reports in Los Angeles. After an initial accord with the Naps, the Cleveland management thought better of it and returned Easterly to the Angels. By late October Cleveland had curiously reclaimed the catcher and, wrote the Times, “even Easterly himself does not know to whom he belongs or where he will play next year.”12

But March of 1909 found the 5-foot-8, 165-pound Easterly in spring training with the Naps in Mobile, Alabama, and picking up some of the finer points of receiving from the punishing pitching staff Cleveland boasted, including Addie Joss, Cy Falkenberg, Heinie Berger, and a formidable new acquisition, Cy Young, who cited Easterly as his favorite catcher in his time with the Naps.13

Cleveland owner Charles Somers also took an early liking to the rookie.

“The first thing Charles Somers asked when he arrived [in Mobile for spring training] was, ‘Is Easterly going to catch today?’” Red Perkins wrote. “After he saw the new man he was all smiles and sunshine.”14

When camp broke, Easterly headed north with the Naps on an $1,800 contract, expected to assume at least a few strands of the starting-catcher mantle from 35-year-old Harry Bemis, Cleveland’s regular backstop since 1902, who was often hampered by injury.15 Splitting the duties with Easterly would be the veteran Nig Clarke. Clarke was a fair receiver and led the American League in caught-stealing percentage in 1908, but Easterly was expected to swing a more powerful bat.

Easterly saw his first action, as a pinch-hitter, in a game against the Detroit Tigers on April 17, 1909. His first start came three days later, catching Cy Young at Detroit on April 20, Easterly’s 24th birthday. Hitting fifth behind Cleveland player-manager Nap Lajoie, Easterly collected a single hit in five at-bats and a run scored as the Naps trounced the Tigers, 12-2. Ty Cobb swiped a base off the rookie receiver, but otherwise Young and his batterymate were masterful, allowing just three hits to the Detroit powerhouse on its way to a third consecutive American League pennant.

Easterly continued to split time with Clarke behind the dish, but was Young’s preferred catcher. The Naps’ season got off to a rough start and the team sat at 16-21 at the end of May, but a hot June and July helped push the team up in the ranks. Easterly played in 39 games and hit .279 with nine doubles and five triples in the two-month stretch. He clipped the .291 batting mark with a 2-for-2 performance that included a triple against Walter Johnson in a 3-0 win over the Washington Senators on July 12. A week later against the Boston Red Sox, he reached his midseason peak with a .295 average, going 2-for-4 in the second game of a doubleheader. In the first game he was behind the plate for Young when shortstop Neal Ball executed the modern era’s first unassisted triple play.

Easterly notched his first career homer off the Philadelphia Athletics’ Jack Coombs in a game at Shibe Park on September 27. His 10 triples were enough for a 10th-place tie in the American League.

In the receiving game, the young backstop gunned down 49 percent of would-be basestealers and allowed just nine passed balls in 637 innings. Easterly was singled out for having allowed Cobb and Eddie Collins just five thefts apiece, the lowest season totals for the era’s premier basestealers against the season’s regular backstops.16 Rewarding Easterly for a solid rookie campaign, Cleveland owner Somers gave the catcher a $300 a raise in 1910, pushing his salary to $2,100.17

The 1910 season was one of transitions and milestones for Easterly. After a slow start that saw him play in just 14 of the team’s first 37 games and hit just .256, Easterly again settled into the starting catching role and was hitting .314 at the close of June, when he was essentially the entirety of the Naps catching corps as Clarke was in the hospital with typhus and Bemis was laid up with an ankle injury.18 July saw Easterly’s average climb as high as .354, and he was hitting .333 when the Naps squared off against the Senators at Washington in the second game of a doubleheader on July 19.

That day, a 43-year-old Young, just 2-7 to start his 21st major-league season, was on the hill at Griffith Stadium. He was seeking, for the fourth time, his 500th career victory. This time his favorite Naps receiver, Easterly, would prove helpful in more ways than one, hitting a tying sacrifice fly in the ninth inning and, when Young couldn’t nail it down in the bottom half, getting a walk in the 11th that pushed in the go-ahead run.19

In mid-August of 1910 Easterly experienced a mild shakeup in his baseball life and a monumental one in his personal life. First, on August 18, after life exclusively as a catcher, Easterly was penciled into the Naps lineup in right field. Since mid-July his hitting had declined, as he hit just .218 in the 30 games leading up to his move to the outfield to drop his season average below .300 for the first time since the earliest days of the 1910 campaign. He’d see action behind the plate in just two more games and appeared to respond well to the move to right, hitting .315 over the last 31 games in which he appeared, to put his season average at .306, seventh-best mark in the league (but again not enough to qualify). To his right, in center, was another young player who it was hoped would “live up to advance notices”: Shoeless Joe Jackson.20

(The late diminishment of Easterly’s numbers may also have had another cause. On August 15 his wife of five years, Myrtle, left him, taking with her the couple’s young son, Albert Eugene. Easterly did not file for divorce until three years later, after which he charged that Myrtle was consorting with other men in the Los Angeles area.21

(The case was tried in Los Angeles in January 1914 but not finalized until August 6, 1915. On the testimony of Easterly’s parents, especially his mother, Laura, the court ruled that Myrtle Easterly had deserted her husband and was at fault in the separation. Custody of 8-year-old Albert was granted to Ted’s parents while the baseball season was in session.22)

Easterly was a rumored trade candidate for much of the 1910-1911 offseason. Calling him a “failure as a catcher,” the Dayton (Ohio) Herald said his case demonstrated “the chances for [a] player whose ability is confined solely to batting to stick in the majors (are) 50 times those of a player who is competent in every other department.”23 Within weeks of the season’s conclusion, Easterly’s name was floated, along with Jackson’s, as potential targets of Clark Griffith’s Cincinnati Reds.24

As spring training approached, however, the scribes around Cleveland began pushing purple-prosed optimism on Easterly and agreed that a Naps outfield of Jackson, Graney, and Easterly would be a formidable one.

The 1911 campaign began auspiciously for Easterly, if not for the Naps, as the squad’s new right fielder went 4-for-4 against Jack Powell and the St. Louis Browns in a 12-3 defeat. Cleveland got off to a 6-11 start, after which Deacon McGuire, who’d taken the managerial reins from Nap Lajoie the year before, resigned and gave way to Cleveland first baseman George Stovall, a popular replacement with the Naps.

Easterly — who got another raise in 1911, to $2,40025 — hit safely  in 17 of Cleveland’s first 21 games and was swatting .358 at the end of May, having played in 42 of the Naps’ 44 contests, starting 40 of them in right field. June, July, and August saw Easterly’s regular playing time greatly reduced by an injury to his throwing hand.26 He caught his first game of the season on June 15 against the Boston Red Sox, and caught the second game of a July 4 doubleheader against St. Louis. But during the high-summer months of the season while shelved from the outfield, Easterly was learning a new talent: pinch-hitting. Between June 8 and August 29 he came off the bench 21 times and collected nine hits, including a double, a triple, and — in a 2-1 loss to Washington on August 29 — a home run in the bottom of the ninth in an abortive comeback attempt.

By September Easterly was recovered enough, and the Naps’ catching ranks depleted enough, that Stovall sent the erstwhile right fielder back behind the plate. He caught 18 of Cleveland’s last 34 games but hit just .242 over the span, dropping his season average from .350 on August 30 to a still sterling .323. Stovall led the Naps to a third-place finish in the American League, Cleveland’s first winning record since 1908.

The outfielding experiment for Easterly was over almost as soon as it began. And while he played a passable right field for Stovall, Somers had his eye on Harry Davis to manage Cleveland in 1912. Davis was in the twilight of his career with the Connie Mack-managed Athletics, but 11 seasons with the Tall Tactician had not taught him much about skippering. One of his first moves was to trade the popular Stovall to the Browns, leaving the Naps without a seasoned first baseman. Davis then reinstalled Easterly behind the plate.

Again under the yoke of mask and pads, Easterly muddled through the season’s early going. He was hitting just .233 as May broke, but thereafter proceeded on an extended tear that saw him hit .313 with two homers and 16 RBIs over the next 54 games. The Naps’ fortunes did not follow Easterly’s, however. The team went 39-50 in that time, including a seven-game losing streak going into an August 7 tilt with the Red Sox. That morning, Easterly woke up to find himself the property of the Chicago White Sox.

Easterly arrived on the South Side August 8 and the Chicago Tribune reported that he was bought by Charles Comiskey to fulfill a utility need, but mostly for his steady nerves as a pinch-hitter.27 Easterly appeared in 30 games for the Sox to end 1912, entering 21 of them as a pinch-hitter. He notched five pinch-hits in 19 at-bats for Chicago, finishing with a season total of 13 pinch blows to lead the American League. His season average landed at .311, 10th best in the junior circuit, and the 14 double plays in which he took part as a catcher led the league.28 But the emergence of a 19-year-old rookie may have signaled that Easterly’s White Sox catching career was limited. Ray Schalk and Easterly both took the field for the first time as White Sox on August 11 against Philadelphia. Easterly pinch-hit for Eddie Cicotte in the bottom of the ninth, banging out an RBI single in a comeback effort that fell short. Schalk also picked up a knock in the rally to go 1-for-3. Over the next 17 years, he proved quite capable both at and behind the plate for Chicago, enough to be elected to the Hall of Fame in 1955. After 1912, Easterly would have just 60 more games to play in the American League before his career took another outlaw turn.

Eager to rid himself of Easterly after the 1913 season, Comiskey thought he had a way to do so. The White Sox had purchased the contract of outfielder Larry Chappell from the Milwaukee Brewers, champions of the American Association, for consideration including a player to be named later. At the end of 1913 Comiskey thought the 28-year-old Easterly could be that player. The Old Roman was quickly rebuffed.

“Catcher Ted Easterly, of the White Sox, is too old to canter with a bunch of pennant winners,” read a report in the Indianapolis News. “This in effect was what Manager [Pep] Clark, of the Brewers, wrote to owner Comiskey of the Sox, today, refusing to take Easterly as part payment in the deal by which Larry Chappell became a White hosed outfielder.”29 Reports also circulated that Easterly was bound for the PCL.

Sensing he wasn’t wanted and perhaps drawing on his old outlaw instincts, Easterly beat everyone to the punch. On January 12, 1914, in violation of the reserve clause, he signed a three-year contract to play for his old Naps manager, George Stovall, now helming the Kansas City Packers of the new Federal League.

The jump to the Federal League agreed with Easterly. He still didn’t quite measure up as a backstop, committing 24 errors and allowing 17 passed balls in 1914, both tops in the league. But he gunned down 45 percent of basestealers and caught 1,046 innings.

With the bat, Easterly was hitting .368 in mid-May. And even after a two-week slump, he was still safely above the .300 mark when, on June 16, he unleashed a true demonstration of his potential. Hosting the Baltimore Terrapins, Easterly went 4-for-5 with a double, then proceeded to gather a hit in each of the Packers’ next 20 contests. During the streak, he was 37-for-81 with four doubles, two triples, 22 RBIs, and just one strikeout.

The long season behind the plate eventually caught up with Easterly, but he still finished the season with a .335 average, third best in the Federal League, and legged out 12 triples. Despite the offensive output of Easterly and a 27-year-old rookie named Duke Kenworthy, who hit .317 with 15 homers, 40 doubles, 14 triples, and 91 RBIs, the Packers finished the inaugural Federal League season at just 67-84, sixth in the circuit.

In 1915, while owners and lawyers battled in court over the Federal’s future, the circuit gave their fans one of the most exciting seasons of the era as the Chicago Whales and St. Louis Terriers landed in a virtual tie for the league crown, with the Pittsburgh Rebels just a half-game back. Easterly and the Packers raised their record to 81-72 to finish fourth, just 5½ games behind Chicago, with the Newark Peppers nipping at Kansas City’s heels at six games back.

In his age 30 season, Easterly got off to a rousing start in 1915, hitting at a clip to rival his 1914 effort. He was hitting .340 on May 8 with a career-high three home runs when he came out of the lineup with an injury and played sparingly for the next three weeks. Picking back up in June, Easterly reached as high as .361 on June 19 before he experienced a gradual, then sudden collapse in August and September that left him at .270 for the season.

With the demise of the Federal League later in 1915, Easterly returned to Los Angeles, where he caught up with Los Angeles Times scribe Harry A. Williams. Williams said Easterly was unsure of what was to become of the last year remaining on his Packers contract, but didn’t expect much. The ballplayer was going to settle into an offseason in California, playing with some of the local winter teams to keep limber.30 By February Easterly was one of the more prominent Federal League jumpers who had not secured employment with an American or National League club, joining his former Cleveland teammates Stovall, Falkenberg, Grover Land, George Perring, and Gene Krapp among the jobless ballplayers.31

The first half of the 1916 season passed without a contract. Easterly was reportedly signed with the Oakland Oaks in late July, only to eventually end up with Salt Lake City, reporting for duty in early August.32 Though out of shape, Easterly was hitting .381 after a month’s time.33

By September, however, Easterly was on a five days’ release notice from Salt Lake and playing for the Merced Bears in the California League, with the expectation that he’d jump to the Angels.34 Easterly arrived in LA in time to take part in the latter stages of the Angels’ championship run, their first title since Easterly had departed the team in 1908. Los Angeles manager Frank Chance, who once thought the asking price for Easterly in 1908 to be too dear, now said at the end of the 1916 season that he intended to bring Easterly back to the Angels for the 1917 campaign.35

On April 8, 1917, two days after the US entry into World War I, Easterly was given his outright release.36 He entertained offers from Oakland and the Vernon Tigers, while also eyeing opportunities with teams in the Tri-Copper League and back with Merced. A month later, on May 9, Easterly was again in the headlines for non-baseball-related activities, being held in Bakersfield on a charge of writing a bad check.37 He spent most of June and July with Merced before being released in late August.38

The year 1918 opened with news of Easterly’s signing with yet another PCL franchise, the Sacramento Senators, whose manager, Bill Rodgers, saw hitting potential in Easterly, if not much glovework.39 The San Francisco Chronicle reported that Easterly approached Rodgers for the job and a soft-hearted Rodgers sought to reform Easterly, who was “in the black books of baseball men out this way.”40

Rodgers turned the care of Easterly over to Art Griggs, one of Easterly’s old teammates with Cleveland and a fellow former Federal Leaguer. Their reunion went well: “Art looked Easterly right in the eye and said: ‘Now, Bull, I know you can play good ball if you behave. The first time you stray off the path I am not going to fine you or report you or anything of that kind — I’m just going to MASH YOU.’” Easterly had a laugh at that and went into training “with all kinds of pepper.”41

Easterly played 78 games with the Solons, hitting at a .259 clip as Sacramento’s catcher. Before October was out, though, Easterly was playing with a team in Crockett, California, and the occasional shipyard team in the Bay Area.42 He hung on as a catcher at Crockett to help that squad to a championship in the Bay Counties Midwinter League in December.43

In early 1919, Easterly was hired as manager of the Northwest International League’s Victoria (British Columbia) Tyees in April but by September was back with the Crockett Sugarites to play first base.44

In 1920 Easterly had one last go at the professional ranks, playing with the Class-B Beaumont Exporters of the Texas League. The 35-year-old played in 54 games and hit .310 with two homers before being released on August 10 for what reports said was “the good of the game.”45 S.S. Greene of The Sporting News attempted to discover the cause of the release, but Beaumont management would not say and Easterly claimed he did not know what the reason was, either.46

From Texas, Easterly wound up in the Cuban League, playing for the Havana Almendares, managed by Mike González, until he was “dismissed from the team, whether under orders from higher up or not is not stated” and begging the question, “now where can Easterly play?”47

In 1922 he was set to once again play for his old pal George Stovall with Jacksonville in the Florida State League before Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis intervened and advised the League not to admit Easterly.48 The advent of Landis in the situation may indicate that Easterly’s trouble in Texas ran to gambling or game-fixing, though there remains no evidence of such villainy.

Easterly then landed a job as player-manager with the Lake City Terrors, a semipro team in Florida. At 37 and with a bad reputation, Easterly was the butt of jokes in local papers. The Palatka Daily News reported once that Easterly was held up before a game “due to the delay in arrival of a fresh consignment of monkey glands which the demon backstopper for the Terribles uses to engender pep and sprightliness.”49

Not much is known of Easterly after the conclusion of his baseball career and he seemed to want to keep it that way.

On February 22, 1925, tragedy struck for Easterly when his 18-year-old son, Albert, a sailor on the USS Idaho, drowned in a lagoon in Los Angeles’ Westlake Park. The younger Easterly was with two friends in a canoe on the lagoon when the boat capsized. The two friends dived again and again in the vicinity, but could not locate Albert.50 Easterly was not mentioned as Albert’s father.

As early as February 1921, Harry A. Williams was counting Easterly as among the once-familiar faces of the PCL and the major leagues who had gone missing.51 The 1930 Census found him living in Clearlake Highlands, California, with a new wife, Eva, and working as a laborer in roadwork.

In 1940 Easterly was living in the same house in Clearlake Highlands as he had been in 1930, still married to Eva, but now working in carpentry, the chosen trade of both his father and grandfather. He was diagnosed with bladder cancer and had an operation to remove a tumor in February of 1950, but the cancer recurred and Easterly died on July 6, 1951, at the age of 66.52 He is buried in Lower Lake, California.

Efforts at tracking Easterly down were made into the 1960s, when Lee Allen, historian at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, sent a letter to newspapers across the country asking for Easterly’s whereabouts. One such letter appeared in Lincoln, Nebraska, Easterly’s birthplace. The letter said the Hall of Fame was unaware if Easterly was still living and represented “a case as yet unsolved” in its efforts to locate about 10,000 players from 1871 onward.53 Allen’s inquiry must not have returned much. To date, Easterly’s player file with the Hall of Fame contains only his death certificate and his salary information from 1909 to 1913, with a note that he violated his reservation in 1914 to join the Kansas City Feds.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also consulted baseball-reference.com, retrosheet.org, findagrave.org, and the 1860, 1900, 1920, 1930, 1940 US censuses.

Notes

1 George W. Hilton, ed., The Annotated Baseball Stories of Ring W. Lardner, 1914-1919 (Stanford, California: Stanford University Press, 1995), 64-65.

2 “Bad Downey Boy,” Los Angeles Times, August 15, 1900: 10.

3 Red Perkins, “Gossip of the Diamond,” Los Angeles Times, March 25, 1909.

4 “Ted Easterly’s Glove,” Great Bend (Kansas) Tribune, June 18, 1912: 2.

5 “Scattering Notes of the Diamond,” Elyria (Ohio) Chronicle-Telegram, July 10, 1912: 6.

6 “Ted Easterly No Dude,” Laporte (Pennsylvania) Republican News Item, August 2, 1912: 6.

7 Linn County, Iowa Biographies, “George H. Easterly,” iagenweb.org/linn/bios/e.htm.

8 Harry A. Williams, “Local Players Star on Southern Clubs,” Los Angeles Times, September 17, 1915: 23.

9 Braven Dyer, “The Sports Parade,” Los Angeles Times, April 23, 1937: 41. Jack Slattery of the Oakland Oaks batted .331 but also would not have qualified for the batting title.

10 Bill O’Neal, The Pacific Coast League: 1903-1988 (Austin, Texas: Eakin Press, 1990), 12.

11 “Coast Championship,” Los Angeles Times, October 25, 1908: 5.

12 Ibid.

13 Dyer.

14 Perkins.

15 Player file, National Baseball Hall of Fame.

16 “Diamond Dust,” Wilkes-Barre (Pennsylvania) Evening News, January 26, 1910: 9.

17 Player file, National Baseball Hall of Fame.

18 “Naps’ Catcher in Poor Shape,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, June 24, 1910: 15.

19 Russell Schneider, The Cleveland Indians Encyclopedia, 3rd ed. (Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing, 2004), 423.

20 “Ex-State Leaguers on Next Year’s Naps,” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, September 9, 1910: 13.

21 “Ted Easterly Sues Wife for Divorce,” St. Louis Star and Times, November 14, 1913: 9.

22 “‘Ted’ Easterly Gets Decree of Divorce,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 10, 1915: 8.

23 “Hard Hitters Get a Lot of Chances to Stay in Majors,” Dayton (Ohio) Herald, March 31, 1911: 21.

24 “To Put Lid on Syndicate Baseball,” Wilkes-Barre Record, November 9, 1910: 16.

25 Player file, National Baseball Hall of Fame.

26 “Lively Stars of the Cleveland Club,” St. Louis Star and Times, August 20, 1911: 22.

27 “Ted Easterly Joins Sox,” Chicago Tribune, August 9, 1912: 11.

28 Once again, he did not have enough plate appearances to qualify for the batting title.

29 “Easterly Too Old,” Indianapolis News, October 8, 1913: 10.

30 Harry A. Williams, “Plenty of High-Class Guardians of First Base in This League,” Los Angeles Times, January 26, 1916: 26.

31 J. Ed Grillo, “Pertinent Comment,” Washington Evening Star, February 14, 1916: 14.

32 “Bees Open Series with Seals This Afternoon,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 1, 1916: 4.

33 “It’ll Be a Tough Series,” Salt Lake Telegram, August 29, 1916: 4.

34 “Wild Heaves and Such,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 10, 1916: 36.

35 “Seen Through the Sports Periscope,” Salt Lake Herald-Republican, October 19, 1916: 8.

36 “Lepan Regular Player for Angels,” San Bernardino County Sun, April 11, 1917: 5.

37 “Ted Easterly Held on Bad Check Charge,” Oakland Tribune, May 9, 1917: 10.

38 “Merced Club Releases Artie Benham and Ted Easterly,” Modesto Evening News, August 30, 1917: 5.

39 “Ted Easterly to Get Job With Sacramento,” San Francisco Chronicle, Jan. 28, 1918: 5.

40 Ed R. Hughes, “Rodgers Will Try to Reform Ted Easterly,” San Francisco Chronicle, March 17, 1918: 7.

41 Ibid.

42 Eddie Murphy, “‘Wiz’ Kremer Weakens in Eighth and Hanlons Drive Five Runs Over Rubber,” Oakland Tribune, October 21, 1918: 8.

43 “Benham or Pruitt to Pitch Opener at Crockett,” Oakland Tribune, December 22, 1918: 42.

44 “Ted Easterly Will Boss Victoria Club,” Oakland Tribune, April 5, 1919: 7; “Good Contests Promised by Young Players,” Oakland Tribune, September 12, 1919: 18.

45 “Diamond Notes,” Corsicana (Texas) Daily Sun, August 10, 1920: 6.

46 S.S. Greene, “Easterly’s Discharge,” The Sporting News, July 8, 1920: 3.

47 “Brief Sports,” Dayton Daily News, December 11, 1920: 10.

48 “Easterly Back in Game,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 13, 1922: 24; “Landis Caused Release,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 20, 1922: 50.

49 “Pals Make Clean Sweep of Series from Lake City,” Palatka (Florida) Daily News, May 25, 1922: 8.

50 “Navy Man Is Drowned in Local Park,” Los Angeles Times, February 23, 1925: 17.

51 Harry A. Williams, “Familiar Faces Missing,” Los Angeles Times, February 14, 1921: 7.

52 Player’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

53 Lee Allen, “Ted Easterly,” Lincoln Star, October 27, 1965: 4.

James Joseph “Jimmy” Esmond was born on October 8, 1889, in Albany, New York. Days earlier Thomas Edison showed the first motion picture. William McKinley was the 25th president of the United States and the first all-New York City World Series was about to debut with the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Bridegrooms.

From the cradle to the grave, Jimmy’s life was influenced by his love of baseball. He grew up in a bustling immigrant neighborhood near Washington Park in Albany, where kids played stickball in the streets. The arc of his baseball career may have been at its highest on the afternoon of April 21, 1912, when Esmond hit the first major-league home run at Crosley Field when he played for the Cincinnati Reds.1 For a brief period, Esmond joined the “outlaw” band of Federal League ballplayers who could have changed the structure of Organized Baseball.

When Esmond died at age 58 on June 26, 1948, he was buried at St. Agnes Cemetery in Menands, New York, near Troy, with six major-league players including Joe Evers (Giants), Bill Fagan (New York Metropolitans, Kansas City Cowboys), Matty Fitzgerald (New York Giants), Ed McDonald (Boston Braves/Chicago Cubs), Jack O’Brien (Washington Senators/Cleveland Blues/Boston Americans), and Mellie Wolfgang (Chicago White Sox).2

Esmond was always curious about his ancestral roots. If given the chance to write his own SABR biography, he might open with a story that newspapers ran about his quest to trace his family line back to nobility in England and Ireland. In 1912, at the height of Esmond’s career, baseball fans were surprised, and delighted by this news flash: “Jimmy Esmond, Cincinnati shortstop may be a real lord.”3

Jimmy’s parents were first-generation Americans, born to Irish immigrants who sailed to the United States from Queensland, Ireland, and Liverpool, England. His father, John, a strapping carpenter, was born in Pennsylvania. His mother, Helen, was born in New York. When the 1910 Census was recorded, Jimmy was listed as the second oldest child, with an older sister, Mary, and a younger brother Henry and sister Helen.

Located on the east end of the Erie Canal, the state capital of Albany thrived on the import and export of furs, meat, iron, and lumber at the turn of the century. Albany housed more saw mills than any other city in the country and was second to Boston as a major producer in book publishing. With a stout population of German, Dutch, and Irish settlers, Albany was also known as a mecca for beer, producing brews rebranded by F&M Schaefer Brewing Company.

Jimmy’s first address on record was 109 Lark Street, where his family rented a three-story brownstone. Built in 1892, the house, built with a signature window box, still stands on the hill overlooking the city. It sits among hipster art galleries and eateries, blocks away from Empire State Plaza, a group of state government buildings conceived by Governor Nelson Rockefeller in the 1960s. Lark Street set the scene for the 1987 film Ironweed, in which Jack Nicholson portrayed a washed-up baseball player who deserted his family around 1910, right around the time Esmond broke into professional baseball. Based on William Kennedy’s Pulitzer Prize-winning novel, Nicholson’s character gives viewers an intimate glimpse into Esmond’s  world, focusing on the immigrant community’s love of home, poverty, the chance for re-invention, and America’s love of baseball. 

Like the flower ironweed, known for its tough stem, and posture that never slouches in flooding or heat, Esmond was a solid student and a resilient athlete at Albany High School, where he played multiple sports. As a teen, he was a handsome sort, with intense blue eyes, wavy brown hair, and a fair, ruddy complexion. The natural shortstop stood 5-feet-11-inches tall, and threw and batted right-handed.

Though Esmond was extremely fast on his feet, it was his feisty spirit that inspired reporters to describe him as a guy filled with “pepper and anxiety.”

The edgy, impatient attitude became his trademark in professional baseball, in which Esmond played shortstop, second base, and third base during a transitional period in the major leagues from 1911 to 1915. Like many of the Irish-blooded ballplayers, he came up during the Deadball Era (1901-1919), when a single ball was often used in games until it literally unraveled. Deadball was characterized by low scoring and an emphasis on pitching techniques and defense. Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and Shoeless Joe Jackson were getting started during this period, when players wore uniforms with upturned collars and sleeves below the elbow, swung heavy wooden bats, and fielded balls with tiny gloves stitched together with scraps of rawhide. Fans were literally part of the Deadball games, gathering in foul territory and standing in the grass behind the outfielders, rooting for teams and yelling at players. Sometimes the rowdiest fans jumped into games, grabbing the balls and making plays, and from a distance there were always the gamblers.

Despite its downcast name, Deadball was an enterprising time when the first giant steel stadiums sprang up in big cities, and ballparks were connected to train lines and trolleys. Long before NFL football and NBA basketball became spectator sports, investors realized they could make millions off America’s most popular, most accessible spectator sport. Hard-scrabble players wanted a piece of the profits too, taking Organized Baseball down new roads that could have altered the structure of the game forever. 

During the Deadball years, the American League joined the National League as a top-level professional baseball circuit. At the peak of Esmond’s career, a third, renegade league emerged for only two seasons. The Federal League operated in 1914 and 1915, and Esmond played for two of the best Federal teams, the Indianapolis Hoosiers and the Newark Peppers.

Breaking into Baseball

Esmond got his start in professional ball in 1908 with the Gloversville-Johnstown/Elmira nine of the New York State League, a team manned by constituents from upstate New York. Thirty years later, the team would be reconstituted from 1938 to 1951 in the Canadian-American League.

After two seasons with Jersey City of the Eastern League, Esmond broke into the big leagues on April 20, 1911, with the Cincinnati Reds. Playing in 73 games, he batted .273 that season.4 It was the last year the team played in the grand stadium nicknamed the Palace of the Fans with hand-carved Corinthian columns, a covered grandstand, and private opera-style boxes with carriage parking like the luxury suites of today. Early on, Esmond was considered quite the prize for the team. “I consider I have in Jimmy Esmond the greatest young infielder in major league circles,” said Clark Griffith, the Reds manager.5  

On April 21, 1912, in his second season with the Reds, Esmond hit the first home run into the stands in the newly christened Crosley Field before 20,000 fans. On that hot Sunday afternoon, the hometown Reds rallied from a 5-1 deficit to defeat the Cubs, 10-6.6 By May, Esmond was a darling of the press, who credited him for playing a “dashing game,” and stepping in as the only “real” shortstop Cincinnati had since Tommy Corcoran.7 Just as the Cincinnati Enquirer called Esmond one of the “most consistent players” on the team, he was knocked out cold by two serious head-on collisions, and retired from a game.8

In September 1912 Esmond was plagued by chronic stomach issues. “His digestive apparatus balked like a mule on a gangplank on a Mississippi River steamer,” wrote a reporter who described Esmond as a nice, clean-cut youngster. Due to a somersaulting stomach he was demoted to the International League’s Montreal team.9

The embryo Federal League came together in early 1912 when Chicago baseball promoter John T. Powers set his sights on making a fortune with an outlaw league. A year earlier, Powers failed to launch the Columbian League, when his main investor pulled the plug before the first game was played. Powers’ plan for the Federal League was more structured, and he had deep pockets. Teams were planned in major cities including Chicago, Cleveland, and Pittsburgh. Financiers included wealthy merchants and industrialists, among them Oklahoma oil baron Harry Ford Sinclair, ice magnate Phil Ball, and George Ward, whose baking empire introduced Twinkies and Wonder Bread.  

Playing in the outlaw league allowed players to avoid the restrictions of the organized leagues’ reserve clause. The competition of another more lucrative league caused players’ salaries to skyrocket, demonstrating the bargaining potential of free agents for the first time.10 When James A. Gilmore took over the league in 1913, well-known players were jumping on board. Major leaguer Joe Tinker became the first to sign with the Chicago Whales, as a player-manager. Other prize recruits included Three Finger Brown, Solly Hoffman, Danny Murphy, Howie Camnitz, and Al Bridwell. 

Players like Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, and Walter Johnson got bonuses when the AL and NL worried that they would be picked off by the Federals. Joe Jackson was reportedly offered $25,000, more than four times his salary with Cleveland, to join the league. He wisely turned down the offer.

The League Opens in 1914

The 1914 Federal League season opened with teams in Brooklyn, Chicago, St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Baltimore, Kansas City, Buffalo, and Indianapolis, where parks had been built. The Chicago Whales opened the season in the park that would eventually be known as Wrigley Field — a ballpark that endures as the Federal League’s only lasting monument. 

Initially, Federal League attendance was comparable to that of the established AL and NL teams, and for a while, its teams received equal billing in Sporting Life and other major papers.

On February 18, 1914, it was announced that Jimmy Esmond signed with the Feds.11 Initially, the shortstop suspected that he might be sent to the Brooklyn team, and even called on as a manager. Instead, Esmond became one of the first players to sign with the Indianapolis Hoosiers. With limited major-league competition, his performance was impressive. That season he hit .295 and tied for the league lead with 15 triples. He got more playing time than most of his teammates. His hitting improved, and without serious injury, Esmond enjoyed what was described as his “most successful” year ever.12

In 1914 the Indianapolis Hoosiers won the championship, beating out the Chicago Feds by 1½ games.13 With the victory, team owner Harry Sinclair thought his players were good enough to compete with the Yankees and the Giants. With Sinclair’s nudging, the Hoosiers made history as the first team to ever relocate after winning a league title. Rebranded as the Peppers, they became the only major-league team to ever call New Jersey home.14 From the very beginning, it was an ill-fated move that sealed the Federal League’s destiny, haunting some players forever. The Peps were not only blocked from setting up shop in Manhattan, the Brooklyn Tip-Tops were not pleased about another Federal League team moving in on their overcrowded turf.

Esmond’s debut in Newark on Opening Day in 1915 was described by sportswriters as like a July 4 celebration with floral horseshoes and movie operators. According to the New York Times, everyone quit work when the 12 o’clock whistle blew, put on their spring spangles and headed to the ballpark where there were parades and Boy Scouts, Scotch bagpipers, drummers, and brass bands along with Elks and Eagles clubs setting the scene for a major-league extravaganza. There were caravans of tooting automobiles, and people carrying banners welcoming the Federal League to New Jersey.

“Newark and its surrounding hamlets were seized with a violent attack of baseball yesterday, accompanied by a high fever and laryngitis. The ailment can be directly traced to the opening of the Newark Federals at their new, roomy park in Harrison. The epidemic spread among nearly 25,000 Jersey folk who jammed the new park to see ‘Whoa Bill’ Phillip’s ‘Peps’ make their home debut against Otto Knabe’s Baltimore Terrapins,” the Times wrote.

The Times described Esmond as a ghost who made two serious errors during the 1 hour 54-minute game. The Terps won, 6-2.15

Esmond played well, and the Peps carried on, hanging onto first place into early May. But after 11 losses they fell into fourth place. To boost game attendance, the Federal League experimented with reduced ticket costs. Fans poured into games in Newark for 10-cent bleacher seats, 25 cents for pavilion seats and 50 cents for grandstand seats.16 The team rallied in August to recapture the top spot but it “faded down the stretch and ended up in fifth place in a razor-thin five-team pennant race.”17 The Chicago Whales finished in the top spot, with the Peps in Fifth place.

Though the Federal League had solid funding, and good prospects, all three leagues suffered from having too many teams in the same markets. Game attendance waned as legal tensions mounted. Jimmy Esmond played his last Federal League game on October 3, 1915.

That year the FL filed an antitrust lawsuit against the AL and NL. The case was heard in federal court in Chicago, presided over by Judge Kenesaw Landis, the future commissioner of baseball, who had hoped for a peaceful resolution. With war brewing in Europe and financial losses weighing down baseball, the Federal League sued its competitors.

The Federal League folded its tent by early 1916. Robert Wiggins, author of The Federal League of Baseball Clubs, The History of an Outlaw Major League, 1914-1915, describes the scene at the annual National League meeting at the Waldorf-Astoria on February 9, where the owners of the Boston Braves purchased Federal League players like Ed Konetchy for $12,000. That same day, team President Pat Powers transferred Jimmy Esmond of Newark back to the Cincinnati Reds.18

By the time the major leagues paid its obligations to the Federal League and legal fees were settled, baseball’s most costly war finally ended. Harry Sinclair fared well, turning a $2 million profit on his Peps in 1916, forming Sinclair Oil Company. In the 1920s Sinclair sank millions into horse racing and saw his horses win three Belmont Stakes and the Kentucky Derby. 

After the Federal League

On January 10, 1917, Esmond married 22-year-old Marion B. Hannan.19 The World War drew in hundreds of major-league players and future managers including Grover Alexander, Ty Cobb, Christy Mathewson, Branch Rickey, Larry MacPhail, and Casey Stengel. In the spring of 1917 Jimmy registered for the military draft at age 27.20

As war raged in Europe, Esmond remained stateside imagined that his baseball days were over.

Not so. At age 31, he came back with Syracuse of the Independent League in 1921. Esmond moved to the Eastern League and played a season each for Waterbury, Albany, and Pittsfield. The proud Irish shortstop played his last game in 1924.21

In 1942, at age 52, Esmond registered for the World War II draft. He was still fit, with the same height and weight, though his wavy auburn hair was gray. By 1943 he was working as a contractor and an income-tax examiner, living at 83 Rykman Avenue in Albany with his wife, who worked as a machine operator at a felt company.22 In 1945 he and Marion moved back into his childhood neighborhood near Washington Park to Idlewild Street.

It is not known if Esmond ever confirmed his royal ancestral heritage. At 58, he died in a hospital in Troy, New York, on June 26, 1958, from a cerebral edema several weeks after an operation.23 With modern research on concussions, one wonders if his hard-playing style and epic head-on collisions played a role in his demise. St. Agnes Catholic Cemetery returned the shortstop to the company of major-league players from immigrant families. Ironically, that cemetery with its winding paths and scenic vistas also sets the opening scene of the novel Ironweed, when the former ballplayer returns to Albany to make peace with his roots.

The Esmonds had two daughters, Mary (born 1918 — died unknown) and Shirley (born 1927 — died 2017). It is believed that Marion Esmond lived until 1971.24

Notes

1 “Crosley Field/Cincinnati Reds,” Ballpark Digest, February 13, 2010. ballparkdigest.com/201002132500/major-league-baseball/visits/crosley-field-cincinnati-reds-1.

2 Bill Lee, The Baseball Necrology: The Post-Baseball Lives and Deaths of More Than 7,600 Major League Players and Others (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2003), 486. 

3 “Jimmy Esmond a Lord,” Fort Scott (Kansas) Republican, August 11, 1912: 6. 

4 Ars Longa Store Art Cards Bio. Details pulled from the website arslongaartcards.com/.

“Jimmy Esmond Is Picked for Short, Griffith Thinks Former State Leader a Fixture in Fast Company,” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, July 20, 1911: 12.

6 Ballpark Digest, February 13, 2010.  Information pulled from the website   ballparkdigest.com/201002132500/major-league-baseball/visits/crosley-field-cincinnati-reds-1.

7 Long Branch (New Jersey) Daily Record, May 23, 1912: 7.

8 Cincinnati Enquirer, June 15, 1912: 8.

9 Buffalo Enquirer, September 16, 1912: 6.

10 Robert Peyton Wiggins, The Federal League of Baseball Clubs, The History of an Outlaw Major League, 1914-1915 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, Inc., 2009), 5-7.

11 Wilkes-Barre Record, February 18, 1914: 16.

12 Indianapolis News, October 2, 1914: 18. 

13 Cited from historicbaseball.com/federalleague.html.

14  Nick Acocella, “New Jersey’s Team: Baseball in Newark,” New Jersey Monthly, April 27, 2015. njmonthly.com/articles/jersey-living/jerseys-team-baseball-newark/.

15 “Baseball Fever Hits Newark Hard,” New York Times, April 17, 1915: 12. 

16 “Sinclair on 10-C Ball Says Talk of Cheapening Sport Is Silliest Kind of Rot, New Scale Brings More Fans,” Baltimore Sun, August 15, 1915: 24.

17 njsportsheroes.com/bbnewarkfederall.html.

18 Wiggins, 294.

19 New York State Marriage Index. 

20 1917-1918 US Military Draft Card.

21 Statscrew.com Minor League baseball. Information pulled from the website statscrew.com/minorbaseball/roster/t-mr13125/y-1912.

22 1943 City Directory, Albany, New York, 188. Also note 1945 City Directory, Albany New York, 190. 

23 Baseball Necrology, 121.

24 Death record, Marion B. Esmond, State of Maryland, 1971, Silver Spring, Maryland.

Joseph Ignatius Finneran was born on October 29, 1890, in East Orange, New Jersey. His father’s name is not known. The 1900 Census shows that Joseph was being raised by his mother, Mary Finneran. The youngest of five children, he had a sister, Mary, and three brothers, Charles, Bernard, and Christopher.

Finneran played baseball from an early age. He played in various industrial league teams in New Jersey before turning pro. He played for a semipro East Orange team in 1909. His obituary stated that in 1910 he “played for the Forest Hills [New Jersey] club where he became known as the ‘iron man.’”1 The obituary notes that Finneran once won a doubleheader for Forest Hills, pitching an 11-inning game against East Orange in the morning and a nine-inning game against the team in the afternoon.

He signed his first professional contract with the Class-C Norfolk Tars (Virginia League) in 1911. He finished the season with a 21-15 record to help the Tars finish in second place with a 67-54 record.

Finneran’s manager, Charlie Babb, brought Finneran to the attention of the Phillies organization. They kept their eye on him as he continued his success in Norfolk in 1912. He had an 18-15 record, the best on the Tars, when the Phillies called him up late in the season.

Finneran made his major-league deput on August 20, 1912, pitching two scoreless innings in relief in a 6-1 loss to the Chicago Cubs. Overall he pitched in 14 games for the Phillies, starting four of them. Finneran finished the season with a 0-2 record and a 2.53 ERA.

When the 1913 season began, the 5-foot-10, 169-pound Finneran joined the Class-B Lowell (Massachusetts) Grays. He pitched in 20 games and had a 14-2 record when the Phillies once again came calling. The team was in second place and looking to bolster its pitching staff. Finneran pitched three games in relief. He gave up 12 hits and 7 runs in five innings pitched in the waning days of the season.

When the Federal League expanded to eight teams and pronounced itself the third major league for the 1914 season, Finneran was recruited by the Brooklyn Tip-Tops. He made his first start on June 13 against the Kansas City Packers and went eight innings, losing 2-1.

Finneran failed to pitch with consistency throughout the season. He pitched a complete game, 11-2 victory against the Baltimore Terrapins on June 29. Both Baltimore runs were unearned, and the Brooklyn Eagle described Finneran as “invincible.”2

Finneran won his next three games. But he struggled in Pittsburgh where, the Eagle wrote, he “became nervous when the Pittsburg Feds evinced a faculty of touching up his delivery and thereby four bases were stolen during the game.”3

When Brooklyn returned home, the team held a “Finneran Day” in his honor. “The fans of East Orange, Newark and other way stations are to be there in large numbers and intend to give Joe some recognition of the regard in which they hold him,” the Eagle reported. “They realize that but for the Seton Haller, Jersey would not be on the map and will hand him a gold watch. Thus does Finneran class with President Wilson.”4 

By season’s end Finneran had started 23 games and completed 13 of them. Finneran he had a 12-11 record and a 3.18 ERA. His 12 victories were third best on the team behind Tom Seaton (25 victories) and Ed Lafitte (18).

Finneran stayed with the Tip-Tops in 1915. On a preseason trip through the South, he pitched well in a victory over a local team in Hazelhurst, Mississippi. Finneran “worked four innings [with] only one safe hit made off [his] delivery,” the Eagle reported.5

Nine days before the season began, the Eagle commented that “Finneran had a lot of trouble rounding into form this spring, but at the present time he is ready to do battle with anyone who says that he is out of condition.”6

Finneran continued to struggle with consistency throughout the  season. When in late August he won for just the third time, the Eagle wrote the he “outlasted two of St. Louis’ best moundmen and did all around better work than they.”7

Finneran finished the season with a 10-12 record with an improved ERA of 2.80. He started 24 games and had 12 complete games.

The Federal League folded at the end of the season and Finneran was not picked up by any major-league club. He eventually signed with the St. Paul Saints (Double-A American Association).

Finneran had two successful seasons with the Saints. In 1916 he had a 12-8 record in 28 games pitched. The next season he was 18-11, the best record of any pitcher on the squad. His ERA was 2.80.

Finneran’s success in St. Paul got the notice of major-league clubs and he started the 1918 season with the Detroit Tigers. He lost his first two starts and was released in mid-May. Finneran signed with the Yankees and made his debut with the New Yorkers on May 29, pitching 4⅓ innings to earn his first win of the season.

Finneran won three and lost six for the Yankees. His last game as a major leaguer came on September 1, 1918, when he threw three innings in relief as the Yankees lost to the Senators, 5-3. Finneran gave up four hits and no runs in his final appearance. He was released the next day.

Finneran joined the Kingsbridge Athletics, a semipro team playing at the Dyckman Oval in the far northern section of Manhattan. He pitched a complete-game victory for the Athletics on September 4, allowing two runs and scoring the winning run after getting a single.8

Although he had no offers from major-league clubs, Finneran was not willing to give up his baseball career. He moved west and was signed by the Vernon, California Tigers of the Double-A Pacific Coast League in 1919. In 28 appearances, Finneran had 14 wins and 4 losses with a 2.49 ERA as the Tigers won the PCL pennant.

In 1920 Finneran joined the Akron Buckeyes of the Double-A International League. He led the team with 20 wins, losing 11. Wanting to move closer to home, Finneran signed with the league’s Newark Bears for 1921. He pitched in 26 games and finished with a 10-9 record.

Then in his 30s, Finneran saw his playing days beginning to draw to a close. He moved out west again in 1922, signing with the Seattle Indians of the PCL. Finneran made just 16 appearances and ended the season with a 1-4 record. In 1923, his last season in Organized Baseball, he jumped back to the International League, signing with the Toledo Mud Hens. He appeared in 25 games and had a 3-7 record. He retired after the season. He was 156-119 in his 13 years in the majors and minors. He had a 3.30 ERA in his five years in the majors. Though he finished his with a winning record, his inconsistency prevented him from staying in the major leagues more than just a few years.

Moving back to East Orange, Finneran went to work for an undertaker, John Quinn, who taught him the mortuary business. Finneran started his own funeral business in 1929.

Finneran married Margaret Donlin after he retired from baseball. They had six children, John Jr., Anna, Josephine, Margaret, Kathleen, and Clare. He died from pneumonia on February 3, 1942, at St. Mary’s Hospital in Orange, and was buried in Gate of Heaven Catholic Cemetery in New Hanover, New Jersey.9

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also used Baseball-Reference.com for player, team, and season pages, and other pertinent material. FamilySearch.org was also used for some genealogical information.

Notes

1 “Former Brooklyn Pitcher,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, February 4, 1942: 13.

2 “Feds Batter Baltimore Pitchers,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 30, 1914: 20.

3 “Brooklyn Feds Home for a Long Stay, Brooklyn Daily Eagle, July 20, 1914: 6.

4 Ibid.

5 “BrookFeds Trim Merry Villagers,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, March 13, 1915: 16.

6 “Artie Hofman Holding Out Against Playing Second,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, April 5, 1915: 18.

7 “BrookFeds Take Two from St. Louis Team,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 22, 1915: 33.

8 “Publishers Win First But Lose 2nd in Double Header,” New York Clipper, September 4, 1918: 4.

9 Bill Lee, The Baseball Necrology: The Post-Baseball Lives and Deaths of More Than 7,600 Major League Players and Others (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishers, 2009), 129.

In 2011, 35 years after his death, his major-league career faced a renewed interest in his performance in the 1918 World Series.

Flack was born Conrad John Flach on February 5, 1890 in Belleville, Illinois, to Henry and Mary (Schmidt) Flach. (Belleville is across the Mississippi River from St. Louis.) He was the third of the couple’s four sons. Henry Flach was the custodian at the St. Clair County courthouse for 20 years.

Early in his 16-year professional baseball career, Flack’s name was spelled both Flach and Flack in newspaper accounts. Flack never corrected them and eventually Flack became the common usage.

The 5-foot-7, 150-pound Flack first gained attention for the Belleville Maroons of the semipro Illinois-Missouri Trolley League. He began his professional career in 1911, at the age of 21, when he signed with Tulsa of the Class-D Western Association. His first professional season was tumultuous.

The eight-team league opened its season in the first week of May. Two teams — Joplin and Springfield — disbanded on May 10. Two more teams — Coffeyville and Independence — folded on June 14. After Fort Smith and Tulsa withdrew on June 19, the league ceased operations.

Box scores for the league’s games were published sporadically in local newspapers and statistics and averages for the league are nonexistent. Box scores for 10 of Tulsa’s games showed Flack going 18-for-44. In one three-game stretch against Independence, he was 9-for-14 with three doubles and a triple.

Flack’s play was a highlight for Tulsa, which had a 20-25 record when it folded.

“Flack and Peters are regarded by fans as the stars of the Tulsa aggregate. Both are very fast,” a Coffeyville newspaper commented in May.1

Another reporter noted, “(Tulsa owner Tom) Hayden has one of the best fielders in the entire Western Association in the center garden. That fellow is Max Flack.”2

After the Tulsa season abruptly ended, Flack returned to Belleville. A month later, Hayden, who also owned the Burlington team in the Class-D Central Association, signed him to fill a roster spot after a Burlington outfielder suffered a serious knee injury.

Flack reported to Burlington and made his debut on July 10, going 1-for-3 and driving in the eventual winning run in Burlington’s 6-5 victory over visiting Kewanee. After the game Flack left the team.

“Max Flack of St. Louis disappeared from view sometime after the game on Monday in which he made his debut to Burlington fans,” a newspaper reported. “Flack played in Monday’s game with Kewanee and made an excellent impression on the fans. His sacrifice fly in the ninth inning bringing in the winning run. Why and when he left the city is unknown. It is presumed he returned to his home in St. Louis.”3

Flack resurfaced a month later. A newspaper wrote, “President Tom Hayden of the Burlington baseball club, in a communication to the Burlington Hawk-Eye which was published this morning, charges that President M.E. Justice of the Central Association erred in throwing out the game with Kewanee on July 10, on account of Max Flack in the Burlington line-up. Hayden says that Burlington was never notified of the protest nor was given an opportunity of submitting evidence to show that they were not over the player limit. Hayden says that he suspended Ross and on the same day signed Flack, thus retaining his number of players at 14.”4

On August 21, Flack rejoined the team after Hayden had sold two players to St. Joseph of the Western League. He finished the season with Burlington, which finished second with an 81-44 record, and hit .339 in 15 games.

In early January 1912, Burlington sold Flack’s contract to Peoria of the Three-I League. Flack spent the next two seasons with Peoria. In 1912, he batted .278 in 133 games as Peoria finished last in the eight-team league with a 56-80 record.

In his second season with Peoria, Flack blossomed into one of the league’s best players. He batted .352 with 26 doubles, 13 triples, and a league-high 42 stolen bases. Peoria again finished in last place, with a 56-84 record. Flack’s .352 average just missed winning the league batting title. Decatur’s Pat Flanagan edged Flack .3523 to .3520. Flack was named to the Three-I League all-star team.

“Flack is the best left gardener in the league, and his hitting and fielding has been a great help to the Distillers, in what games they have won,” wrote the Decatur Daily Herald in September.5

But there was more controversy for Flack. With two weeks left in the season, Peoria sold his to Indianapolis of the American Association. A sportswriter speculated that the sale was an effort to reap some revenue before a major-league team could grab Flack in the draft.6

Flack refused to report to Indianapolis. “While reported sold to the Indianapolis club, Max Flack says that he has yet to receive instructions as to when and where to report to the Indians,” a newspaper said. “He is therefore resting in Peoria awaiting further instructions. Flack and (Peoria president) Meidroth had several warm words together Thursday morning. Meidroth accusing the Distiller outfielder of being a ‘loafer’ and a ‘quitter.’ Flack did not like the accusations hurled at him a bit, and it is aid that blows were narrowly averted. It was after this rumpus that Meidroth cut $250 off the price originally demanded of Indianapolis for the player, and the deal it is said, was closed. Selling Flack for $1,250 is giving ball players away.”7

The deal was canceled. According to the Rock Island (Illinois) Argus, “Word was received here yesterday by President Meidroth that Max Flack would be unable to play again this season and that because of his poor condition Indianapolis had recalled all negotiations for his purchase at $1,250. According to a letter received from the offices of the Indianapolis club, Flack’s physician had ordered him to stay out of the game for the remainder of the season and the little gardener refused to report to Indianapolis. Indianapolis intimated they would like first chance to purchase Flack next spring should he return to the game in anything like the form he displayed during the 1913 playing season.”8

In late September, there was more news when it was announced that Flack had been drafted off the Peoria roster by the Detroit Tigers. The next day it was announced that Milwaukee of the American Association, had selected Flack in the Double-A draft.

“There is a controversy on regarding Max Flack, the Peoria outfielder, who was bought by Kelley a few days after the big league drafting season opened,” said the Indianapolis News. Owner (Frank) Navin, of the Detroit Tigers, drafted Flack, but he afterward agreed to cancel the draft and allow Flack to come to Indianapolis. Now Milwaukee comes forward with a claim for Flack under the drafting system, and it was allowed. Kelley will make it a fight to hold him.”9

That wasn’t the end of the of the discussion about where Flack would play in 1914. In February it was reported that he had signed a contract with Chicago of the Federal League. That drew a response from the Milwaukee franchise: “It is made known by the Milwaukee club officials that Max Flack the recruit secured from Peoria and reported as signed with the Federals agreed to terms with Milwaukee on January 15, a fact that presumably makes him ineligible to play with the Gilmore crowd.”10

In the end, Flack joined Chicago. Early reports from Chicago’s spring-training camp in Shreveport, Louisiana, praised Flack.

“Little Flack, a Three-I League recruit, has shown splendidly in fielding and is sure of being carried,” reported the Inter Ocean of Chicago.11

The Tribune said, “Indications also point to a battle for an outfield job here, because little Max Flack, the Three Eye league recruit, is doing too much to be a bench warmer. He showed Manager (Joe) Tinker something fancy today in a hook slide for second — so fancy that Tinker failed to tag him, though he had the ball in plenty of time.”12

When the Chi-Feds opened their season on April 16 at Kansas City, Flack was their starting left fielder and leadoff hitter.

In the final two weeks of the regular season, the Chi-Feds won seven of nine and on October 3 were in first place with a two-game lead over Indianapolis. Over the final five days of the regular season, the Chi-Feds went 2-3 while the Hoosiers won their final six games to pass Chicago. The Hoosiers finished 88-65-4, while the Chi-Feds were 87-67-3.

For the season, Flack hit .247 in 134 games with a team-high 37 stolen bases.

Before the 1915 season the club, which had officially become the Whales, signed two outfielders — Les Mann, who had played in the 1914 World Series with the Boston Braves, and Charlie Hanford, who had played for the Buffalo Federal League team in 1914. In mid-March, newspaper reports said that Whales manager Joe Tinker was considering a platoon system in 1915. The Tribune said, “The addition of Leslie Mann and Charlie Hanford, outfielders, has supplied the north siders with reserve strength to spare. With Mann and Hanford, both strong right-handed hitters, Tinker expects to use two sets of outfielders.”13

But Flack was in the lineup nearly every day in 1915. He batted .314 and led the team with 37 stolen bases, ranking fourth in the Federal League in both categories. He played in 141 games. Of the 138 games in which he appeared in the field, he spent time in left field in 61 games and time in right field in 81 games.

The Whales (86-66) and St. Louis Terriers (87-67) finished in a tie for first place, but the Whales’ winning percentage was .000854 better than the Terriers and they were named champions.

In December 1915 the Federal League, American League and National League reached a deal and the Federal League ceased operation. Whales owner Charles Weeghman bought a majority interest in the Chicago Cubs and he merged the Whales and Cubs franchises.

After appearing in four World Series in a five-year span between 1906 and 1910 and winning at least 88 games in 1911, 1912 and 1913, the Cubs were rebuilding in 1916. They were 78-76 in 1914 and fell to 73-80 in 1915.

In early March of 1916 as the Cubs prepared to open training camp, it was reported that Flack was the only regular not signed to a 1916 contract and that he was holding out. But Flack signed and was with the team at the start of spring training in Tampa, Florida. Late in training camp, Flack, expected to be the Cubs’ starting right fielder, was sidelined with a “bad cold, the only training setback the club has received. Flack can stand a layoff as well as any man on the team. His batting is good and he had already acquired his usual speed.”14

Flack was in the Cubs’ opening day lineup on April 12 (in Cincinnati) and would be a mainstay in the Cubs lineup for the next six seasons. The Cubs started the 1916 season strong, putting together a seven-game winning streak in late April. They were 15-13 on May 18 and still at .500 (36-36) on July 7. But the Cubs went 23-37 after August 1, to finish in fifth place with a 67-86 record. Flack batted .258 and had a team-high 24 stolen bases in 141 games. He led the NL with 39 sacrifices.

In 1917 he batted .248 in 131 games as the Cubs finished fifth with a 74-80 record.

In early 1918, after going 2-3 in their first five games, the Cubs won nine consecutive games to improve to 11-3. They didn’t let up. By early July, the Cubs were 50-20. They eventually won their first pennant since 1910 with an 84-45 record, finishing 10½ games ahead of the New York Giants.

Flack, who batted .257 in 123 games during the regular season, was 5-for-19 with four walks in the World Series against the Boston Red Sox, who won the Series in six games.

Game One provided a light-hearted moment. The Red Sox went into the Series concerned about Whales outfielder Leslie Mann, who hit .288 in 1918 and was known to crowd the plate when hitting. Boston’s pitchers were told to pitch him inside.

With Boston clinging to a 1-0 lead in the bottom of the fifth inning, Red Sox pitcher Babe Ruth remembered the strategy. With Flack at the plate and two outs, Ruth, thinking he was facing Mann, threw inside. Flack was nicked by the pitch and awarded first base. Ruth got the third out of the inning and returned to the dugout, expecting to be complimented. But none of his teammates mentioned it.

“‘Say, fellows,’ he finally blurted out in pride. ‘I guess I didn’t dust off that Leslie Mann that time! That stopped him!’”15

“For two days, the Chicago players were puzzled at the loud burst of laughter that came from the Red Sox dugout. Ruth had mistaken Max Flack for Leslie Mann and had dusted off the wrong man!”16

“That’s a mighty good joke on Babe Ruth,” said Flack when he heard about it, “but where do I come in. I took the sock on the neck.”17

The Red Sox won two of the three games in Chicago before the series switched to Boston for the final three games. In Game Four, Flack, who was 3-for-10 in the first three games, was 1-for-4 but was picked off twice — the only player in World Series history to be picked off twice in one game. After opening the game with a single, he was picked off first by Red Sox catcher Sam Agnew. In the third inning, he reached after hitting into a fielder’s choice. He advanced to second, where he was picked off by Ruth. The Red Sox won the game, 3-2.

In Game Five, won by the Cubs 3-0, Flack was 0-for-2 with two walks. In Boston’s Series-clinching 2-1 victory in Game Six, he was 1-for-3 with a stolen base.

Until 2009, getting hit by a Ruth pitch in Game One was what was most remembered about Flack’s 1918 World Series.

In The Original Curse: Did the Cubs Throw the 1918 World Series to Babe Ruth’s Red Sox and Incite the Black Sox Scandal? Sean Deveney wrote, “(Flack) was brought up as possibly being involved in throwing the 1918 World Series between the Cubs and the Red Sox. He made crucial errors and misplays throughout the series.”18

The subject drew renewed interest in early 2011, when the Chicago History Museum released testimony from the 1920 grand jury that had looked into corruption during the 1919 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the Cincinnati Reds. In his testimony to the grand jury, Eddie Cicotte, who admitted being paid to throw the Series to the Reds, testified that his Black Sox got the idea from the 1918 Cubs. Cicotte’s testimony “was frustratingly vague as he avoided providing any names or details or even whether he thought that the Cubs had indeed thrown the series. Cicotte charged that baseball didn’t want to investigate, happy to concentrate on the Black Sox scandal instead.”19

Deveney’s book questioned a series of gaffes by Flack in Game Four. In addition to his two baserunning miscues, a defensive lapse (playing too shallow with Ruth at the plate), and hitting into a routine groundout in the Cubs’ two-run eighth inning were also called into question. In Game Six, Flack, who led the NL in fielding percentage twice in his career, “dropped a routine two-out drive to right field in the third, allowing Boston to score its only two runs in a 2-1 victory.”20

“There isn’t anything inherently suspicious to me,” said Bill Lamb, a longtime member of the Society for American Baseball Research who serves on the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee. (He also was a New Jersey prosecutor for 33 years.) “I am aware people do bad things, but just because something is conceivable doesn’t make it so. Where’s the proof?”21

Flack recovered to hit .294 in 116 games for the Cubs in 1919. He had 6 home runs and 35 RBIs and walked 34 times. In 1920, he batted .302 with 4 home runs and 49 RBIs in 135 games, with a career-best .373 OBP.

The Cubs slipped to seventh place in 1921, going 64-89, but Flack enjoyed a solid season, hitting .301 with 6 home runs and 37 RBIs. He struck out just 15 times in a career-high 572 at-bats.

The Cubs started the 1922 season by winning 10 of their first 13 games. But they fell to 18-20 after a loss to the St. Louis Cardinals on May 29. The next day, Flack was traded.

In a holiday doubleheader in Chicago, the Cubs won the first game, 4-1, as Flack, playing right field, went 0-for-4 with an RBI. After the game, Flack was traded to the Cardinals for outfielder Cliff Heathcote, who had gone 0-for-3 for the Cardinals in the first game.

The players switched clubhouses, and in the second game, won by the Cubs, 3-1, Heathcote went 2-for-4 for the Cubs while Flack went 1-for-4 as the Cardinals’ leadoff hitter. Flack and Heathcote became the first two players in major-league history to play for two teams in the same day.

For the rest of the season, Flack, who hit .222 in 17 games with the Cubs before the trade, hit .292 in 66 games with the Cardinals.

In 1923 he hit .291 in 128 games with the Cardinals. In 1924, he played in a career-low 67 games, batting .263.

Flack’s final big-league season was 1925. He took a pay cut to remain with the Cardinals.

“When I went in to talk salary with (Cardinals general manager Branch) Rickey in 1925, Rickey told me I ought to go to the Pacific Coast League where I could play every day. I balked, because I didn’t want to go to the minors and my family lived in the St. Louis area. Anyway, after a lot of talking, I said to Rickey I’d take a cut if he’d let me stay. ‘That will be fine,’ said Rickey. He cut me $1,500.”22

Flack hit .249 in 79 games with the Cardinals in 1925. He spent the 1926 season with Syracuse of the International League, hitting .243 in 121 games.

For his 12-season big-league career, Flack batted .278 in 1,411 games. After retiring from baseball, he was the chief custodian at East St. Louis (Illinois) High School. He died on July 31, 1975, in Belleville at the age of 85. He was survived by his son, Raymond, and daughter, Maxine. His wife, Stella, had died in 1974.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also consulted Ancestry.com, Baseball-Reference.com, Findagrave.com, Newspapers.com, and Retrosheet.org.

Notes

1 “Realm of Sport,” Coffeyville (Kansas) Evening Star, May 10, 1911: 5.

2 “About the Tulsa Team,” Coffeyville Daily Journal, May 16, 1911: 3.

3 “Max Flax Has Skipped Town,” Daily Gate City (Keokuk, Iowa), July 12, 1911: 1. The quotation is as it appeared in the original publication.

4 “Hayden Starts a Controversy,” Daily Gate City, August 11, 1911: 3.

5 “All-Star III Players Named in Herald’s Selections for 1913,” Daily Herald (Decatur, Illinois), September 7, 1913: 7.

6 “Max Flack Sold to Indianapolis,” Davenport (Iowa) Daily Times, August 29, 1913: 15.

7 “Max Flack Is Peeved,” Davenport Daily Times, September 4, 1913: 11.

8 “Flack Deal Off; Player Is Hurt,” Rock Island (Illinois) Argus, September 15, 1913: 3.

9 “May Lose Flack,” Indianapolis News, September 24, 1913: 10.

10 “Sport Stories Briefly Told,” Decatur (Illinois) Daily Review, February 18, 1914: 5.

11 Roland Coffey, “Chifeds Are Ready for Pennant Race,” Inter Ocean (Chicago), March 29, 1914: 23.

12 Sam Weller, “Blokes to Play ‘Feds’ for Title,” Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1914: 11.

13 James Crusinberry, “Whales to Face Stovall’s Gang,” Chicago Tribune, March 14, 1915: Part 3, 1.

14 “Boxing — Sports of All Sorts — Baseball,” The Day Book (Chicago), April 5, 1916: 11.

15 Bozeman Bulger, “Ruth Was Twirler in Series of 1918,” Lincoln Journal Star, January 19, 1926: 10.

16 Ibid.

17 Ibid.

18 Roger Schlueter, “Answer Man: Did a Belleville Man Help the Cubs Throw the 1918 World Series?” Belleville News Democrat, March 6, 2015. bnd.com. Sean Deveney’s The Original Curse: Did the Cubs Throw the 1918 World Series to Babe Ruth’s Red Sox and Incite the Black Sox Scandal? was published by McGraw-Hill Education in 2009. The quotations are from Schlueter’s article and not Deveney’s book.

19 Schlueter.

20 Schlueter.

21 Schlueter.

22 “Obituaries,” The Sporting News, August 16, 1975: 46.

Grover Gilmore was a man with legends surrounding his life. Check out his few lines in Total Baseball and the Baseball Encyclopedia — you may pass by his name if you don’t look carefully, because there he is called Ernie Gilmore. When searching the newspaper articles about his career hardly ever is the name Ernie attached to him. He was always called Grover, and once the nickname Gilly was tried without sticking. The issue about his name brings up an amusing anecdote. He came into this world named Grover Cleveland Gilmore, certainly fitting since he was born during Grover Cleveland’s first term as the 22nd president. Although the name was not problematic for another ballplayer with the surname Alexander, little Grover Cleveland Gilmore, once he was able to weigh in on the decision his parents had made, protested the name he thought burdensome, requested that Cleveland be dropped and Ernest be added instead. And yet, around baseball he was always called Grover until the day he died.

Growing up in Chicago gave Grover unlimited opportunities to end up with a career playing baseball. One advantage early in life found him living next door to Jack Hendricks, a player with the New York Giants, Chicago Cubs, and Washington Nationals as well as a longtime major- and minor-league manager. His acquaintance with Hendricks would prove in the future to help advance his career. 

From a very early age, Grover loved baseball, and the game was all around him, but at first, he was not allowed a place on a team, as he was not considered good enough. Instead he was given peripheral jobs like waterboy and bided his time carrying equipment. At that time, Jack Hendricks was managing a Chicago semipro team called the West Ends; he saw the fire in Grover’s soul, and gave him his first opportunity to swing a bat instead of carrying them for others. As his teenage years moved along, Grover developed into a better ballplayer and he broke into a few local corner-lot clubs. With hard work and attention paid to the baseball education offered to him, in 1910 he signed with the West Ends for $10 a Sunday and $3 a Saturday. Hugh Duffy, then manager of the Chicago White Sox, noticed him and in 1911 Duffy gave him a chance to show what he could do. But jumping from the West End field to the big league was a leap Grover was not quite ready for. He traveled to spring training that year with Chicago, but what talent he was able to show did not win him a place on the team roster. Remembered more for a joke he played on Ping Bodie than for his batting and fielding prowess, Grover did not leave empty-handed — he was sent on to Denver, where, it was hoped, he’d receive more professional training.1

And there in Denver, his old neighbor, friend, and mentor Jack Hendricks was waiting for him. Hendricks had moved on from the Chicago semipro scene and was now the manager of the Denver Grizzlies. Like many minor-league players before and after him, Grover Gilmore got a chance to see more of America than he might have otherwise. From the Denver Grizzlies in 1911, he spent part of 1912 with the Buffalo Bisons and the San Francisco Seals, where his next moment of note on the baseball pages came at the expense of a watch fob on the same day that he lost his job in San Francisco and was ordered transferred back to the Buffalo Bisons of the International League. Gilmore’s prized possession was a diamond-centered watch with a fob given to him by President William Howard Taft and bearing a facsimile of Taft’s signature. The loss of that cherished object affected Gilmore more than the thought of reporting back to Buffalo. He determined that a pickpocket had robbed him while he traveled on a ferryboat in San Francisco harbor. The fob had been given to him at the end of the 1911 season at Denver after the team won the Western League pennant. The sad tale apparently softened the hardened heart of the thief, as a package containing the stolen fob was returned to his most recent address while Gilmore was preparing to travel on to Buffalo. Lucky that the fob was returned so promptly as it might have had a difficult time catching up with him if it had been much delayed, as Gimore was about to move on to Buffalo, plans changed. President McGill of the Denver club heard about Gilmore’s impending return to Buffalo and got busy at once, purchasing his contract out from under Buffalo as he needed a reliable outfielder to replace the injured Lester Channell. Gilmore would fit in perfectly, and he would be back with Jack Hendricks in Denver. His reputation as a solid ballplayer was reflected in the box scores with an average of .299 in 1911 and he improved in 1912 with an average of .319.2  In 1913 “Grover Gilmore monopolized the fence cracks for Denver, lamming the pellet straight to the left center field fence on one occasion and on another larruping a dandy double. He also had a single. The Speed Kid called upon all his sprinting ability, too, twice scoring from second on stingy hits.”3

And yet, there were many ballplayers around who were working the semipro teams with dreams as big as Gilmore’s about making it to a major-league team, and he figured out he had to do something more on his own to make that leap instead of waiting for the scouts to come around and discover him on one of his best days on the field.

Offseason, Grover Gilmore wore a different uniform. He worked for the post office in

Chicago, a job that afforded him the opportunity to disappear during the baseball season and then return to delivering mail offseason, keeping at least his legs in good physical shape. Rumors were also circulating around the baseball Hot Stove League that Gilmore was also a victim of Cupid and was about to get married. A solid government job and wedded bliss were seen as possible deterrents to pursuing a baseball career.4 But the speculators had it all wrong about Gilmore’s intentions. He married Eleanor Tiede on April 12, 1913, and the newspapers reported Grover Gilmore was even faster on his feet since getting married than he was before.5 

When the Federal League went “major” in 1914, Gilmore decided being an outlaw was not such a bad career decision for him. One afternoon he paid a visit to the office of Tom Gilmore, secretary of the Federal League, and brother of James Gilmore, president of the organization. Although he knew Tom somewhat, he had not yet met Jim. Grover was not a relative of the Federal Gilmores but he thought perhaps name recognition might be an advantage before he asked for anything. He appeared at the Federal League office dressed in his postman uniform and approached Tom:

            “Hello, Tom,” said Grover. “I want to get a job.”

            “Hello, Grover,” answered Tom. “Well, wait till Weeghman gets back to town and maybe he can place you in one of his restaurants.”

            “Aw, get away with that stuff,” says Grover. “I want a job playing ball with the Federal League.”

            “Well, that’s different,” says Tom with a smile as wide as his face.6 And so they started talking business, and as it was getting near time for the season to open, the Kansas City Packers just happened to be in need of a solid outfielder and a decent bat. In Denver, the Grizzlies were skeptical that Gilmore would sign with the Feds as he was asking for a three-year contract stating that he was still a civil service postal worker and that he would lose his government job in order to play baseball. He figured he needed a solid contract in order to make it worth his while.7 Gilmore right away sent off a letter to C.C. Madison, president of the Kansas City club and the two came to terms.8

Gilmore had notified McGill that he would not be at the training camp at Excelsior Springs, Missouri, and instead would report to Denver, as the post office would not allow an earlier release. And then the news hit Denver by surprise that Gilmore had signed with the Federals, and who could blame him? His reputation as a good fielder and a batting average in 1913 of .335 and a fielding average of .973 in 122 games9 made him an attractive catch, and Gilmore figured, this might be his only chance to hit the big leagues, despite the stigma he might acquire as an “outlaw.” Although Gilmore did not start with the Packers until after the season started, he got himself into shape and when he did join the team, he made good on his promise to become a dependable player. His greatest asset was speed, but he was also a hitter and he was out to prove he was a major-league-caliber baseball player.

The Kansas City Packers gave Grover Gilmore the opportunity to play major-league baseball, and he made good use of the time. He put up commendable stats, posting a .286 batting average with two home runs and 79 RBIs in 258 games, and he broke no records, except for one: In 1914 as a rookie, he struck out 108 times, a record he held until Ralph Kiner in 1946 struck out 109 times. Nevertheless, Gilmore was a solid enough player, fleet of foot and, with a .287 average in 1914 and .285 in 1915, a player with nothing to regret. The Federal League folded up its tents and was no more. The Kansas City Packers finished sixth in 1914, and fourth behind the Chicago Whales in 1915.

Grover Gilmore was not satisfied with ending his baseball career along with the Federal League. He wrote to James Gilmore, president of the now defunct league, asking him where he stood, and received the reply that Harry Sinclair of the Newark club held his contract and would dispose of the same as he saw fit.10 He also approached Jack Hendricks, then manager of the American Association Indianapolis Indians, and asked if there might be an opportunity there. George Stovall stated that Gilmore had greatly improved in 1915,11 but unfortunately, no major-league teams were interested in picking him up. Instead he waited anxiously in Chicago for a word from any baseball club that might show interest, and spent the offseason working as a department-store floor-walker.

The Sioux City (Iowa) Indians of the Western League signed Gilmore to the outfield, and he appeared in 130 games in 1916 with 538 at-bats and hit .340. He and Eleanor settled in Sioux City and he worked offseason as a traveling salesman for a meat-packing company. In 1917 he started the season with Sioux City and was then sent to the St. Joseph Drummers. In 1918 and early 1919, Grover Gilmore was still sending out inquiries about any possibilities for returning to baseball. In August 1919 the El Paso Herald-Post reported that Grover Gilmore wanted to return to St. Joseph although he did not intend to be a regular player but that “he just wanted to take a vacation from his business and he finds playing ball a treat when he doesn’t have to do it as a regular thing.”12

One son was born to Grover and Eleanor, on January 10, 1919. His name was Robert Humphrey Gilmore. Robert died on September 9, 1919. Two months later Grover Gilmore died of typhoid fever, on November 25, 1919, at the age of 31.

Notes

1 “Ernest Grover Gilmore the Speedy Right Fielder of the Packers,” Kansas City Star,  

  June 13, 1915: 12.   

2 Ibid.

3 “Ladies’ Smiles Make Cubs Win. Gilmore Lams Pill Hard,” Rocky Mountain News  

    (Denver), May 1, 1913: 12.

4 “Baseball Notes,” Rocky Mountain News, March 21, 1913: 8.

5 Harry Rapp, “Along Third Base Line,” Rocky Mountain News, May 1, 1913: 12.

6 “Ernest Grover Gilmore the Speedy Right Field of the Packers.”

7 “Outlaw League After Denver’s Three Heaviest Hitters,” Rocky Mountain News, March 29, 1914: 21.

8 Ibid.

9 “More Jumps to Feds,” Denver Post, March 23, 1914: 12; “Federals Add Another,” Norwich (Connecticut) Morning Bulletin, March 26, 1914: 4.

10 “Fed Players Out Hunting for Job,” Rock Island (Illinois) Argus, January 26, 1916: 11.

11 “Jones May Head Bears this Year,” Denver Post, January 31, 1916: 10.

12 El Paso-Herald Post, August 30, 1919: 15.