For better or worse, everyone had a favorite memory and an opinion of Bob Addy, even when their views seemed contradictory. Cap Anson famously described him as an “odd sort of genius” because, to the horror of the single-minded Anson, Addy “quit the game because he thought he could do better at something else.”4 Yet others found his passion for baseball unsurpassed. “Bob Addy is the modern wonder,” declared one sportswriter. “If base ball ever dies out, we believe Bob will want to die. His whole soul is wrapped up in the sport. To see him run in from the extreme field, and hear him beg for a high in-field ball, like a child begging for a bun, is amusing.”5 Cone agreed that Addy’s “temperament was such that he could never miss seeing a game.”6

On one point there was no dispute: that he was unforgettable. “Everybody remembers Bob Addy,” declared a Hartford Courant reporter in 1886 – twelve years after Addy had spent a mere six months playing ball in that city.7 More than three decades after Addy had played his last major league game, the nickname of rookie Shoeless Joe Jackson prompted a sportswriter to recall that “the famous second baseman, Bob Addy, did that very often, as he was much troubled with sore feet.”8

But it was not just his eccentricities and his wit that made Bob Addy so memorable. For one thing, he was one of the best players of his era in spite of being very late to take up baseball. In addition, he played the game with a spirit of reckless abandon that led teammate George Bird to call him “about the toughest fellow I ever saw. He would go after anything, any way, and his hands were broken and battered out of shape.”9 Finally, Bob Addy was the first Canadian major leaguer and, unlike many early Canadian-born players, he had actually grown up there.

When and where Bob Addy was born has long been a disputed issue, with most sources indicating that he was born in Rochester, New York, in 1845. Addy seems to have given this information out in his later years, but there is overwhelming evidence that he was actually born in Canada. He was living in Port Hope, Ontario, when the 1861 Canadian census was taken – his birthplace was listed as Upper Canada (Ontario), and his age was given as 19. Nine years later, he was living in Rockford with many of his baseball teammates and was reported to have been born in Canada around 1842. It was not until the 1880 census that he was first listed as being born in New York.

While the census data points to a Canadian birthplace, it is other evidence that clinches the matter. A. G. Spalding, who knew Addy from their days on the Forest City Club of Rockford, described Addy as “originally a Canadian cricketer.”10 Canada was also given as Addy’s birthplace in an 1874 book written by George Wright.11 Finally, when the Forest City Club stopped in Hamilton, Ontario, during an 1870 tour, the locals learned of his Canadian birth and Addy became “the object of special pride on the part of the Canucks, they claimed him from the start as one of them.” This made Addy the subject of kidding from his teammates and he finally declared: “I don’t care nothing for them, I tell you I don’t care nothing about ’em.’”12

Exactly when he was born remains unclear. Late in life he began claiming an 1845 year of birth, but the evidence suggests otherwise. His tombstone has 1838, which would be very intriguing if true, but the source of this information is not known. The 1860 and 1870 censuses suggest that he was born around 1842, and that seems most plausible.

Bob Addy reportedly “belonged to several cricket clubs in the Dominion,” but any details are lost to history.13 Nor is much known about his early years except that he was born shortly after his parents emigrated from Ireland and that his father, whose name appears to have been James, had died by 1857.

It becomes easier to follow Addy’s trail in 1861, when he appears in Port Hope on the Canadian census, already working in his lifelong profession as a tinsmith. Listed with him are his mother Ellen (age 44, born Ireland), his younger brother James (17, born Upper Canada, a saddler), and his older brother George (25, born Ireland, a clerk). George’s presence in Port Hope is a bit odd, since he had been listed in Ogle County, Illinois, on the 1860 U.S. census and got married in that county in February of 1861. So perhaps he was still in the process of relocating to the United States.

By 1866 George Addy was a well-established Ogle County produce dealer with two young children, and Bob had followed him there. Both brothers also started playing on the Clipper Base Ball Club of the nearby town of Rochelle. While the club itself had limited success, Bob Addy made the sort of indelible impression that he so often did. A. G. Spalding would later recall paying a fateful visit to Rochelle in June of 1866 with the Forest City Club of Rockford, during which “Robert Addy startled the players of the Forest Citys by a diving slide for second base. None of us had ever witnessed the play before, though it may have been in vogue. Certainly we were quite nonplussed.”14

On the basis of Spalding’s comments, Addy has often been credited with inventing the slide. It would be nice to report that this was true, but baseball innovations are rarely that clear-cut. Slides seem to have gradually evolved from accidental slips while trying to make a sudden stop at a base into deliberate evasive maneuvers. While a slide in 1866 would still have been a novelty, there is no way to definitively pinpoint the first intentional slide.15

What we can be sure of is that Addy’s play made a vivid impression the visiting players. “He showed wonderful ability as a ball player in this game,” recollected Spalding, “by practically playing the whole game, captain of the team, pitcher, catcher, and, in fact, took every position where the player had developed weakness by making an error.”16 Both his standout play and his tendency to try to cover the entire field would become recurring themes of the career of the “celebrated base ball character.”

Addy was soon offered a place on the Forest City Club and a job at a Rockford hardware store, both of which he accepted. It was a coup for the Forest Citys and the start of the club’s highly successful policy of recruiting players from the surrounding countryside.

The Forest City Club was still experimenting with lineups, and Addy played all four infield positions during the remainder of the 1866 season. He began a two-year stint as a club director in 1867, and it was during these years that the Forest Citys began using a regular lineup in which Addy played second base and batted leadoff. The new stability paid off on July 25, 1867, when the Forest Citys traveled to Chicago to face the Nationals of Washington, a seemingly invincible club that was making a historic tour of the South and Midwest. Spalding recalled that “we were all frightened nearly to death, with possibly the exception of Bob Addy, who kept up his nerve and courage by ‘joshing’ the National players as they came to bat with witticisms.”17 Addy also launched his reputation as a clutch performer by scoring four runs and turning a key double play as the Forest Citys pulled off a stunning 29-23 upset that put the club on the national map.18

The Forest Citys made a gradual transition from amateurism to professionalism over the next three years, a process that entailed the replacement of several starters. Only three players remained fixtures in the club’s lineup: Spalding, Addy, and a young protégé of Addy’s named Roscoe Barnes. Spalding and Barnes went on to become superstars in the first major league, the National Association (1871-1875). Addy is much less remembered today, in large part because his National Association statistics are not on a par with Spalding’s and Barnes’s gaudy numbers. But those who saw him play, especially during his years in Rockford, believed that he too was a star of the first magnitude.

George Wright wrote that Addy was “a thorough ball-player, and a most earnest worker; a splendid base runner, a good batter, and a lively fielder. He is a valuable member of any organization from the fact of his steady play having [a] tendency to infuse confidence into the minds of his fellow-players.”19 Anson recalled Addy as “a good, hard, hustling ballplayer, a good base runner and a hard hitter.”20 As late as 1876, he was still considered “one of the hardest working players and best run-getters in the country.”21

Such judgments do not mean much when they are not supported by the statistical record, and a superficial look at Addy’s National Association and National League statistics suggests that he was a run-of-the mill major leaguer. But such a conclusion can only be drawn by overlooking the key fact that by the time those leagues were formed, Bob Addy was already on the downside of his career – exactly how far past his prime he was again depends on the knotty issue of his correct age. While we have less extensive statistics from the 1869 and 1870 seasons, when Addy was in his prime, the available records show that he deserved to be regarded as one of the game’s best players.

In 1869 Addy averaged well over five hits per game, a figure that ranked him first among all the players on the more than 400 clubs that were members of the National Association of Base Ball Players.22 While the absence of at-bats make the comparison from club to club an imperfect one, he also easily topped a club that included Ross Barnes and many other future major leaguers in both hits per game and total bases.23 Barnes was only 19 that year, but the following year, it was again Addy who led the star-studded Forest City Club in batting, collecting 204 hits in 56 games.24

These two glorious seasons almost never happened. As the start of the 1869 season approached, Addy was talking seriously about heading west to “seek his fortune.”25 But in the end he decided to stay in Rockford for another summer, and he enjoyed a season that has to be ranked as the best of his career, since his five-plus hits per game were compiled while making the switch to the game’s most demanding defensive position.

Forest City catcher George King had chosen to retire after the 1868 season, so Addy moved behind the plate. Catchers wore no equipment except a rubber mouthpiece, making the position extraordinarily dangerous, and they also needed great dexterity to prevent passed balls. Working with a hard-throwing pitcher like Spalding was especially onerous, but Addy made a seamless transition to the new position. Even more impressively, when he saw Doug Allison of the “Red Stockings” of Cincinnati standing close to the plate to catch, he immediately made the same decision.26

The 1869 season is remembered as the undefeated season of the “Red Stockings” of Cincinnati, but it was also a memorable campaign for the Forest Citys. The Rockford club, although still ostensibly amateur, lost only four games all season – all of them to the openly professional Red Stockings. In one of those contests, the Forest Citys came within two outs of pulling off an upset that would have changed baseball history.      

The match was played in Cincinnati on July 24, and “Addy was the hero of the game in every way. Not only was he catching directly behind the bat, something he had done only at critical moments until two weeks before, but he allowed only two passed balls to [Cincinnati fill-in catcher Asa] Brainard’s five, scored four runs in five times at bat, one a home run, and continued the game after having been knocked flat by a foul in the sixth inning.”27 Addy’s insistence on remaining in the game after the gruesome injury led a Cincinnati paper to praise his “commendable pluck.”28

More than half a century after the fact, Addy’s brother-in-law Victor Wheeler still remembered the game vividly. “Bob was absolutely unafraid,” he recalled. “He would step into the fastest ball and it didn’t seem that anything could get away from those twisted fingers of his, strong as steel cables. Down in Cincinnati that day they carried him to the players’ tent on the grounds, with part of his teeth knocked loose, and sent for a doctor. Addy wouldn’t stay. He came back on the field and took up his place behind the batter. Then the game had to stop while Cincinnati stood up and cheered him for ten minutes.”29

Led by Addy’s heroics, the Forest Citys were clinging to a 14-12 lead as the game went to the bottom of the ninth inning. But after the first batter was retired, the Red Stockings mounted a three-run rally to preserve their undefeated season.

Bob Addy left Rockford at the conclusion of the 1869 season and announced that he would not be returning. But “the week before the election Bob was back again, swearing to locate permanently, and establishing himself in a tinning and jobbing shop opposite the court house.”30  He returned to second base in 1870 as the Forest Citys completed the transition to open professionalism. The club compiled a 42-13-1 record during a prolonged schedule that included Addy’s previously mentioned return to Canada and that climaxed with an October 15 victory over the Red Stockings. On one of the club’s few off-days, on August 13, Addy found time to get married in Rockford.

The winter following the 1870 season saw the birth of the National Association and the departure of three club stalwarts, as Spalding, Barnes, and Cone all chose to sign with Boston. The Forest Citys nonetheless decided to enter the new league, and Addy thus became the club’s longest-tenured member (with the exception of Al Barker, who played sparingly). A much younger lineup resulted, with Addy the grizzled veteran among a group of newcomers who included the nineteen-year-old Cap Anson.

Scott Hastings is now listed in record books as the manager of the 1871 Forest Citys, but there seems to be no basis for this designation. Most baseball clubs of the 1870s did not have anyone whose role resembles that of today’s manager, so listings of this sort are just an exercise in futility. Hiram Waldo, a Rockford bookseller, was the man who signed players and made player personnel decisions, while Addy was named the club’s captain and made in-game decisions.31

Addy got off to a sizzling start, pounding Asa Brainard, the former Red Stockings pitcher, for four hits in the club’s second National Association game and then collecting five hits two games later to lead the Forest Citys to a thrilling extra-inning come-from-behind victory over the Kekiongas of Fort Wayne. But then he cooled off, and so did his teammates. The season was not a success, but neither was it anywhere near as bad as the 4-21 record that appears in the record books – the club actually won eight of its 25 games but had to forfeit four wins when Hastings was ruled to have been ineligible.32

The Great Chicago Fire put a temporary halt to professional baseball in the region then known as the West and a permanent end to the brilliant career of the Forest City Club of Rockford. For a while, it appeared it would also mark the end of Bob Addy’s career, as the newlywed elected to remain in Rockford and pursue business.

He returned to the diamond in 1873 with the White Stockings of Philadelphia (one of two National Association entries from that city that year). His new club won seventeen of its first nineteen games to grab a commanding lead in the pennant race. But in early June, Addy requested and received his release. Despite his short stay in Philadelphia, he had made such a vivid impression that he was “he was presented with a magnificent gold watch by the directors of the club, and was tendered a dinner.”33

Business concerns were said to have been the reason for his return to Rockford, but a more personal matter may have been the determining factor. Bob and Ida Addy’s only son was a boy named George. Following in the family tradition, George would later give contradictory information about his date of birth, but it appears most likely that he was born on August 1, 1873.

Shortly after that date, following a two-month absence, Bob Addy signed to join Spalding and Barnes with Boston. The Red Stockings were nine games behind his old team at the time of the signing, but he provided a much-needed spark. He batted .355 in 31 games, and Boston won twenty-six of those games to cruise to the pennant. Tim Murnane later credited Addy with having “pulled the Bostons through for the championship by his fine work at right field and timely hitting and baserunning in 1873.”34

The hard-won pennant was jeopardized by claims that Addy was ineligible because of having played for a club in Rockford after leaving Philadelphia. But former Forest City Club officer A. N. Nicholds attested that Rockford had no club of any kind, and that Addy had merely taken part in a contest involving “little boys.” The controversy simmered down, and Boston was awarded the pennant.35

Addy spent the 1874 season in Hartford, his last year as a regular infielder. At season’s end, it was announced that he planned to organize a new professional club in Springfield, Massachusetts. But he was slow to sign players, prompting speculation that he would only enlist the services of a pitcher and catcher and would cover the rest of the field by himself.36  Eventually plans for the Springfield Club were abandoned, and Addy instead returned to the White Stockings of Philadelphia where, according to one rather far-fetched retrospective article, he pretty much ended up fulfilling the prediction that he would have to cover the entire field.

The roster of the White Stockings was strewn with talented players who had suspect reputations. According to this article, “in one game eight of the players were fixed to lose. The one true man was Bob Addy … It was thought by those who were engineering the ‘skin’ that it would not be necessary to buy Addy, and besides he had the reputation of being a square player.” Throughout the contest, Addy did “great work in the field and was striving to win, covering a wonderful amount of ground,” even while his teammates were conspiring to lose. Finally, at a pivotal moment Addy made a long run and saved the game by catching a ball that a teammate intended to let drop.     When the teammate realized what had happened, “his disgust was supreme, and in a tone of contempt and scorn he remarked: ‘Look here, Bob Addy, do you want to play the whole game?’”37

The story is at the very least exaggerated, and may be pure fabrication. Yet it is fascinating how well it captures two of the characteristics that were at the heart of Bob Addy’s reputation as a “celebrated base ball character”: his tendency to venture into the territory of teammates and his scrupulous honesty in an era when rumors of game-fixing were rampant. As Anson would say, “He was honest as the day is long.”38

After the 1875 season the National League was formed as a successor to the National Association. The main motive for this coup was that it legitimized Chicago’s William Hulbert’s signing of Boston’s four best players, the so-called “Big Four” of Spalding, Barnes, Jim “Deacon” White, and Cal McVey. From Rockford’s perspective, the development was most ironic: five years earlier, the National Association had been launched when Boston had signed Spalding and Barnes, and the two young men who had grown up in Rockford had led Boston to four straight pennants. So their return to Illinois seemed a case of turn-about being fair play.

The demise of the National Association left the fate of many players, including Addy, up in the air. It was at first reported that he would remain in Philadelphia with a club that would combine some of the most talented and unsavory players from a city swarming with men who embodied both traits. The New York Times reported with dark irony that the managers of the new club had “engaged such able and honorable players as Dick Higham, John Nelson, George Zettlein, Billy Craver, Treacy, Meyerle, Bob Addy, and Shafer. Mr. Bob Addy will officiate in the capacity of Captain. The one great advantage in having a nine of this kind is that they always play to win – perhaps. As an evidence of the high standing of this club, it is only necessary to state that at a recent election all the officers were required to subscribe an oath to the effect that they would not countenance the selling of a single game. Some people are curious to know why the imposing of such an oath was necessary.”39

But as the Chicago Tribune was quick to point out, the Times had done an “injustice to Addy in classing him with such a gang.”40  Like many of his teammates, Addy was owed money at the end of the 1875 season and was anxious to leave Philadelphia.41 Meanwhile, Spalding had been named captain of the new club in Chicago and Anson had been added to the club’s contingent of Forest City alumni. Spalding soon offered Addy a spot on the team and the two men who had already been teammates in Rockford and Boston were reunited for the third time.

Upon his arrival in the Windy City, Addy made his usual indelible impression and displaying the now-familiar traits. An account of the team’s home opener reported, “every man was where he belonged, from impassive White around to the agile Addy, and from the sure-handed Iowa infant [Anson] down through the grades of height to Capt. Bob Shorty, who teetered all over the infield as he thought there was occasion.”42

His wit also remained conspicuous. When a July exhibition game to raise funds for an orphanage was rained out, the Tribune observed that “the orphans were unlucky – in fact, to use the words of that venerable philosopher, Robert Addy, it was to have been expected that they would be unlucky, for if they hadn’t been unlucky they wouldn’t have been orphans at all.”43

Exactly how venerable Addy was by this time can only be estimated, but he was most likely nearing forty and now exclusively played the outfield. Nevertheless, he was as energetic as ever, and several game accounts describe slides like the one that had startled Spalding a decade earlier. According to one of these reports, “Addy opened the second inning and took his base on called balls. He at once stole second in his usual underground manner, and to the great detriment of his good clothes.”44

Chicago won 36 of its first 43 games to take a commanding lead in the race for the National League’s inaugural pennant. But Addy got off to a slow start at the plate and found himself sharing time in right field with Oscar Bielaski and Fred Andrus. His benching apparently was not Spalding’s decision; a Cincinnati Enquirer sportswriter maintained after the season that “a higher authority than Spalding laid Addy off the nine and put Bielaski in his place – Bielaski, whose batting shows him eighty per cent weaker than Addy, and five per cent weaker as a fielder.”45  

But the pennant race suddenly tightened up in August when the White Stockings were swept at St. Louis. Addy was reinstalled in right field and again showed his knack for clutch performances. He pounded out four hits in a crucial game against St. Louis and continued to swing a hot bat as Chicago maintained its lead.46

In September, with the pennant within sight, Boston came to town for a game that featured numerous players from the old Red Stockings-Forest City rivalry. Addy, Spalding, and Barnes all took the field for the home side, while the visitors included Andy Leonard and both Wright brothers. For good measure the umpire was Fred Cone, the third player who had left the Forest Citys after the 1870 season to play for Boston.

Boston jumped to a six-run lead, but Chicago roared back and finally pushed across two decisive runs in the ninth inning for a 12-10 win. According to a game account, “Addy and White carried off the honors very easily, both in fielding, batting, and run-getting. The former made five wonderful catches, those off [Jim] O’Rourke, [Jack] Manning, and [Harry] Schafer being as fine bits of play as ever were seen in any game. Addy’s base-running also drew out great applause.” The dramatic win allowed Chicago, in the words of the Tribune’s reporter, to reach “a step in the championship race which is next door to the absolute securing of the pennant.”47

The labyrinthine phraseology was necessary because of some disputed games, but there was now little doubt about the league’s first pennant-winner. Four days later, the last shred of doubt was eliminated when Chicago defeated Hartford. Once again, Addy was the hero in the clincher, making “a couple of extraordinary catches” in the ninth inning of the 7-6 nail-biter, one of which seemed “fairly impossible until taken.”48

Bob Addy had now played an important role for championship teams in both the National Association and National League, but his mid-season benching still rankled, and he was not interested in returning to Chicago.49 He instead signed with Cincinnati, prompting a reporter to offer this satirical warning to the fans of that city: “whatever happens on your ball-field the Hon. Bob will have part and lot in it; if a man is to be run out between third and home, Bob will show up and take a hand in it like as if he had been standing there all the while.”50

Upon his arrival in Cincinnati, Addy made the same kind of impression that he had made throughout his career. Before played his first league game with his new team, it was reported that “The Hon. Bob Addy seems to be a sort of demi-god in Cincinnati; if he stubs his toe the fact is recorded with due solemnity; if he tumbles down while fielding the ball, it is immediately telegraphed throughout the entire country, headed, ‘Sad disaster;’ and if he makes a base hit, the local reporters spoil their entire reserve of lead-pencils, in making a half-column note of it.”51 Alas, it was Cincinnati’s season that proved a sad disaster. After a 3-11 start, Addy took over as captain, only to see the team disband a few days later. Following a two-week hiatus, the team was reassembled, but the club finished with a dismal 15-42 record in a season that ended Addy’s major league career. In an odd twist, he also played a role in the end of Spalding’s pitching career – on June 5, Addy smashed a line drive that hit his old batterymate in the chest and literally knocked Spalding out of the box in what proved to be the final start of his illustrious major-league career.52

In November, Cincinnati announced that it was releasing Addy on the ground of drunkenness.53  But whether this was the real reason remains open to doubt. A Chicago sportswriter quipped that the charge, “sounds oddy,” and pointed out that “Bob, though never a reliable player, has always been considered an honest man.”54 More to the point, Addy had a two-year contract, and the allegation enabled parsimonious Cincinnati owner “Si” Keck to avoid paying him for its second year.55

“Philosopher Bob” returned to Chicago that winter and opened a skating rink on the corner of Madison and Ada streets. To drum up business, he even organized a game of baseball on ice.56  Addy’s new enterprise prompted one reporter to quip that “Bob stands up better on ice than he does on land.”57

But Addy soon gave up the skating rink business and finally did what he had so often talked of doing by heading out west, where he remained for the rest of his life. He brought along his young son George but not his wife Ida. She was still alive according to Bob’s listing the 1880 census, but otherwise she remains a mysterious figure. Her marriage record gives her name as Ida Belle Seeley, while her son’s marriage record says that it was Ida Enose, but she cannot be identified under either name. Nor is anything known about what became of her after Bob moved west.

Even after permanently settling in the West, Addy’s doings continued to be chronicled in the eastern press. In 1879 he was reported to be playing baseball in Salt Lake City for a team known as the Gentile Club.58  Seven years later, a claim that he had become a Mormon with twelve wives was widely reprinted.59 Other unfounded reports had him in Oregon and California.

The reality seems to have been more prosaic. By the time of the 1880 census, he was living in Evanston, Wyoming, and he was still there at the end of the decade. Around 1891, he moved to Pocatello, Idaho, where he opened a hardware store and, on the first day of 1892, was remarried to a much younger woman named Louise Emma Clark. The marriage produced one child, a daughter named Ellen Louise, who was born on December 1, 1897.

As we have seen, Bob Addy continued to be remembered with great fondness in baseball circles long after his retirement. His feelings toward the game are more difficult to ascertain, but it certainly appears that he retained his passion for baseball. As late as 1890 he was still playing for the town team in Evanston.60 His last known involvement with baseball came in 1899 when he took part in a “fat versus lean” game in Pocatello. Appropriately, the man who had been known for roaming the field at will started the contest with the “fat” side but ended it with the “leans.”61 One can imagine one of his fellow players exclaiming, “Look here, Bob Addy, do you want to play the whole game?”

Bob Addy died in Pocatello on April 9, 1910, after a severe attack of apoplexy.62  His widow passed away in 1929, and their daughter died in 1974. At least one grandson is still alive as of 2009. His son from his first marriage moved to Spokane, Washington, and then to Oregon, where he is believed to have died in 1957. His brother George was last heard from in 1900, when he was living in Philadelphia and made news by making a desperate trip to England. The purpose of the voyage was to prevent his youngest daughter Arlan, a soprano who was singing with the D’Oyly Carte Opera, from marrying Dr. Henryk Arctowski, the Polish explorer who had recently returned from heading the celebrated Antarctic Expedition. But after meeting Arctowski, George Addy dropped his opposition and gave his blessing to the wedding.63

This biography is included in “Boston’s First Nine: The 1871-75 Boston Red Stockings” (SABR, 2016), edited by Bob LeMoine and Bill Nowlin.

Sources

Coverage of the Forest City Club is usually based upon A. G. Spalding’s fascinating but unreliable America’s National Game: Historic Facts Concerning the Beginning, Evolution, Development, and Popularity of Base Ball, with Personal Reminiscences of Its Vicissitudes, Its Victories, and Its Votaries (1910) (reprint, Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1992). I have instead relied primarily on two sources: an extraordinary 44-part history of the club that was written by Horace E. Buker and published serially in the Rockford Republic in 1922 and a five-part series by John Molyneaux that appeared in Nuggets of History, a publication of the Rockford Historical Society (“The Sinnissippi Base Ball Club,” 43: 1 (March 2005); “The Forest City Base Ball Club: The Amateur Years,” 45: 1 (March 2007); “No Longer Amateurs: The Forest City Base Ball Club in 1868,” 46: 2 (June 2008); “‘We Can Beat the Spots Off the Best Club That Ever Lived’: The Forest City Base Ball Club in 1869,” 46: 3 (September 2008); “The Eastern Tour – The 1870 Season of the Forest City Baseball Club,” 47: 3 (September 2009)). Other sources that were of help included coverage of the 1896 Harry Wright Day celebrations in the Rockford Register-Gazette on April 13 and 14, 1896; the reminiscences of Fred Cone (“Baseball Thirty Years Ago,” Lima News, July 15, 1899) and Charles Page (E. C. Bruffey, “Bruffey Tells of Charles T. Page, Atlanta Constitution, August 10, 1919: A4; Atlanta Constitution, March 14, 1909); “Spalding’s Start,” Sporting Life, June 20, 1908, 16; Harriet Spalding, Reminiscences of Harriet I. Spalding (East Orange, New Jersey: PUBLISHER, 1910); Peter Levine, A. G. Spalding and the Rise of Baseball (New York: Oxford University Press, 1909); a history of baseball in Rockford written by James McKee that appeared in Sporting Life on April 9, 1884: 4; Harvey T. Woodruff, “Forest Citys a Noted Team,” Chicago Tribune, March 31, 1912: C2; Adrian C. Anson, A Ball Player’s Career (1900: reprint, Amereon), and William J. Ryczek’s When Johnny Came Sliding Home: The Post-Civil War Baseball Boom, 1865-1870 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1998). Joe Overfield’s profile of Addy in Nineteenth Century Stars, eds. Robert L. Tiemann and Mark Rucker, (Kansas City: Society for American Baseball Research, 1989) was also very valuable. Coverage of Addy’s time in the National Association and National League is mostly based on contemporaneous newspaper accounts and on William J. Ryczek’s Blackguards and Red Stockings: A History of Baseball’s National Association, 1871-1875 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1992). Specific sources are cited in the notes.    

Notes

Babe Ruth greets a Civil War veteran under the approving gaze of his mentor in life and baseball, Brother Matthias. (Erin Casey)

Shortly before he died, baseball superstar Babe Ruth publicly credited a man who was born on Cape Breton Island with making him the ballplayer and man he had become. He did it in writing. Not once, but twice. In his 1948 autobiography, the third and final telling of his life story, George Herman Ruth was effusive about Martin Leo Boutilier, a man who taught him at St. Mary’s Industrial Training School in Baltimore. “It was at St. Mary’s that I met and learned to love the greatest man I’ve ever known,” Ruth said of the teacher he knew as Brother Matthias. “He was the father I needed.”1 Ruth admitted he’d been a “bad kid,” listed as incorrigible, when he was sent to the reform school and orphanage just west of Baltimore at the age of 7.

On the same day Ruth died, his second tribute to Matthias appeared in an inspirational publication called Guideposts Magazine, founded by Christian preacher Norman Vincent Peale, author of the best-selling book The Power of Positive Thinking. In the Guideposts article attributed to Ruth, billed as his “last message,” he repeated that he had been “a bad kid,” and that Matthias had turned his life around and had introduced him to baseball. He called the 6-foot-6 Nova Scotian “the greatest man I have ever known.” Ruth said Matthias detected natural talent in the troubled boy, and taught him how to throw, catch, and hit properly. “I would watch him bug-eyed,” Ruth said of seeing his mentor drive a ball 350 feet with a bat in his right hand in the St. Mary’s schoolyard.2

Ironically, although Ruth himself credited Matthias with making him a ballplayer, the press acclaimed another Catholic brother for discovering and coaching the baseball phenom and getting him into professional baseball. And like many things in baseball, the true story was eclipsed by another that became embedded in the lore of the sport. Consequently, the story of the quiet Canadian, Brother Matthias, and his contribution to baseball history are not well known, and deserves to be shared.

Martin Leo Boutilier was born in 1872 in the coal-mining community of Lingan, near the tip of Cape Breton Island, not far from New Waterford, the eighth of 10 children born to Joseph Boutilier and Mary Ann Howley. Two of their sons had died as infants. Joseph Boutilier, variously listed as an engineer or machinist, maintained and repaired equipment in the mine at Lingan, and on seagoing vessels. Because of difficult economic conditions in the Maritimes, some other members of the Boutilier family had moved to Boston. As the mine in Lingan began to play out, Joseph began to explore employment options elsewhere because he had so many mouths to feed. He first tried Halifax, a bustling seaport of 68,000, but by the late 1870s a lingering recession limited prospects there, so he took his family farther south to Boston, a city of 362,839, late in 1880.3 The family settled in East Boston, not far from today’s Logan Airport, where many expatriate Canadians had taken up residence. Son Martin had just turned 9 years of age.

The Boutilier family settled into a city that was crazy about baseball. They may have been familiar with the game back in Lingan, but it’s doubtful they had much exposure to it in the hardscrabble mining community where spare time was rare. With seven boys ranging in age from 6 to 22, the family had nearly enough to field their own team in their new home. Residents of East Boston had been playing the game since as early as 1843, and immigrants considered it an important part of becoming American. The streets of working-class Boston were often filled with men and children playing games to the delight of spectators who cheered them on from front porches and windows. The Boston Red Stockings were charter members of the first professional baseball league, the National Association, founded in 1871; they placed second that first season and were league champions from 1872 to 1875. Boston was a strong franchise and became a founding member of the National League in 1876, capturing the pennant of the new league in 1877, 1878, and 1883. It was clear baseball had a firm grip on America’s fifth largest city.

Aside from their love of baseball in their adopted city, Martin and his older brother Thomas were more spiritually inclined than other members of their family. Thomas was attracted to the Brothers of Charity, a Belgium-based Catholic order that operated the House of the Guardian Angel, an orphanage and training school, in Boston. Thomas was sent for training at the Brothers of Charity in Montréal, but his inability to speak French proved to be an obstacle and he returned to Boston.4

Back home, Thomas connected with the Congregation of the Brothers of St. Francis Xavier (known as the Xaverians), another Belgium-based order that had its American headquarters in Louisville, Kentucky, and whose operating language was English. The Xaverians (pronounced za-VAIR-ians) focused their work on education and moral guidance for youth. They are laymen who take the same vows of obedience, poverty, and chastity as priests, but cannot conduct Mass or bestow sacramental privileges. Thomas Boutilier discovered that during his sojourn in Canada, younger brother Martin had become involved with the Xaverians in about 1890.

The Xaverians had begun operating a new school in East Boston where Martin likely first encountered them. By 1891, he signed an “agreement of membership” and became an apprentice with the order. By the time his training was completed four years later, he had been assigned the name Brother Matthias, as was the custom of the Xaverians. Thomas also joined the order and became Brother Amandus. During their training, the Boutilier brothers were sent to Xaverian-operated Catholic schools in Baltimore – Amandus to Mount St. Joseph College and Matthias to St. Mary’s Industrial Training School.5 The schools were not far from each other, but Mount St. Joseph was a more traditional high school with tuition and board and a focus on academics, while boys at St. Mary’s were often sent there by the courts, were known as “inmates” and were trained to work in the trades. St. Mary’s was a combination training school, orphanage, and detention facility for which permission was required to leave the premises.

Brother Matthias was better educated than his older brother and took up teaching at St. Mary’s, while Amandus performed administrative duties at Mount St. Joseph. Somewhere along the line in Xaverian paperwork, an “i” was dropped from the spelling of the Boutilier name to become Boutlier. Matthias, likely because of his size, became head disciplinarian at St. Mary’s, which sometimes housed as many as 800 boys. He could bring order to an unruly scene simply by showing up and quietly making his presence known. To his colleagues, he was known as Big Matt, but to the boys, he was known as The Boss. Matthias was also one of the baseball coaches at the school, which sometimes fielded 40 or more teams in a season. Baseball was king at St. Mary’s, which had two fields, one for the older boys and another for the younger ones. It was to St. Mary’s that a youngster would come, just as Matthias was settling into a life in the service of God. The boy changed the life of the big Xaverian who saw something special in him, trained him in the finer points of baseball, and helped him transform the game.

George Herman Ruth was born in Baltimore on February 6, 1895, in the Ridgely’s Delight neighborhood, immediately west of Camden Yards. He was the first child born to George and Katie Ruth, who had eight children, but only George Jr. and his sister Mary survived past infancy. George Sr. and his brother John operated a lightning-rod business established by their father, but in 1901 George left the business to operate a bar downtown on West Camden Street, and his family moved in above it. The premises were in a gritty working-class area, and young George soon found himself getting into trouble while his parents worked long hours in their saloon. Strains became evident in their marriage, aggravated by too much alcohol consumption. Meanwhile, George Jr. was becoming a street kid, tossing stolen eggs and tomatoes at the heavy vehicles on their way to and from the Baltimore docks. A lefty, young Ruth developed an accurate arm and also joined his pals in rudimentary games of baseball on the busy city streets. Sometimes Ruth and his fellow troublemakers were caught and whipped for their misdeeds by truck drivers, and they received beatings from shopkeepers, he recalled in a 1928 autobiography, ghost-written by sportswriter Ford Frick.6

In 1902 George Ruth, at the urging of a police officer friend, placed his 7-year-old son at St. Mary’s Industrial Training School, to which courts sent many youngsters in a bid to deter them from a life of crime. “I was listed as an incorrigible, and I guess I was,” Ruth admitted in his 1948 autobiography.7 Not long afterward, either in the classroom or on the ball field, the youngster met Matthias, the man who became a surrogate father of sorts. In the classroom, Matthias encouraged the young lefty to write with his right hand, in flowing script. On the ball field, Matthias noticed abundant raw talent and took extra time with the newcomer, drilling him in proper fielding and hitting techniques. Ruth became a catcher, but the school had no gloves suitable for lefties, so he was forced to catch with a glove on his left hand, then quickly flip off the glove and throw the ball with the same hand. It was cumbersome, but young Ruth became adept at it. And when he ridiculed a pitcher he was catching one day, coach Matthias made him take over the pitching duties himself. It was a fateful move that soon began attracting attention to the young hurler. Ruth played on school teams with older boys, winning the school championship in 1912. During his nearly 12 years at the school, Ruth off the field became a skilled shirt-maker in the school’s tailoring shop, which also made uniforms for the St. Mary’s baseball teams.

Baseball and young George Ruth were meant for each other. And Brother Matthias cultivated and channeled the raw talent of the loudmouthed, good-natured kid to whom he took a shine. One of Ruth’s pals, Fats Leisman, figured Ruth was a baseball prodigy who didn’t really need much direction. “My personal opinion is that the Babe was born to play ball,” Leisman later wrote.8 For his part, Ruth disagreed. He said this about his mentor and coach:

Brother Matthias had the right idea about training a baseball club. He made every boy on the team play every position in the game, including the bench. A kid might pitch a game one day and find himself behind the bat the next or perhaps out in the sun-field. You see Brother Matthias idea was to fit a boy to jump in in any emergency and make good. So whatever I have at the bat or on the mound or in the outfield or even on the bases, I owe directly to Brother Matthias.⁹

Ruth was in awe of Brother Matthias and copied many of his techniques. The big man swung with an uppercut at a time when level swings were in vogue to smash line drives during the Deadball Era. But Matthias could easily loft a ball over the outfield fence with his powerful swing. His young protégé developed his own long swing and powerful uppercut. Matthias, a big man, ran around the bases with surprisingly small steps and was rather pigeon-toed. There is no shortage of film showing Ruth scampering around the bases with similar footwork during his long career. The form of Matthias was unorthodox, but effective. By copying much of what he saw in Matthias, young Ruth went on to revolutionize the game of baseball, especially with his bat. “I think I was born as a hitter the first day I ever saw him hit a baseball,” the home-run king said of Matthias in his 1948 autobiography.10

Ruth’s baseball exploits, particularly the effectiveness of his pitching, began attracting attention in the Baltimore baseball community during his years at St. Mary’s. In his annual report for 1913, Brother Paul, the school superintendent, proudly reported: “One boy created a sensation by his excellent work.”11 He wasn’t talking about academics. The boy was Ruth; the “work” was baseball. A player at Mount St. Joseph, which fielded highly competitive teams, was among those who took note. He suggested to Brother Gilbert, his ball coach and an administrator at the school, that he see the young hurler for St. Mary’s. Gilbert did so, and was impressed with what he saw. Gilbert, an extrovert, unlike the retiring and rather shy Matthias, had many connections in the baseball community, and was friends with Jack Dunn, owner of the Baltimore Orioles of the Eastern and then International Leagues. Gilbert often alerted Dunn to local talent, and Dunn, a former major-league pitcher, was always on the lookout for young pitchers he could develop.

There are several versions of the story about how Dunn learned about Ruth, most involving a tip or introduction by Brother Gilbert. In his 1948 autobiography, Ruth said that during February of 1914, shortly after his 19th birthday, he was throwing a baseball around the still-frozen yard at St. Mary’s, when he was approached by Brothers Matthias, Gilbert, and Paul, and the Orioles owner. Gilbert introduced him to Dunn, who asked the startled Ruth if he’d like to sign with the Orioles.12 Dunn offered to become his legal guardian and pay him $600 for the 1914 season. Babe accepted.

Brother Gilbert had many friends among sportswriters, some of whom promulgated the story that Gilbert not only tipped Dunn to Ruth, but that he had also coached him. In a seven-part series in the Boston Globe published in 1923, in which Brother Matthias is barely mentioned, Gilbert’s credentials were described this way by the editors: “No other one man, except the Babe himself, knows more about his life than does Brother Gilbert.”13 Gilbert was soon enshrined by sportswriters as the discoverer of Ruth. For his part, the modest Matthias made no protest. He and his surrogate son knew the truth, and felt there was no need to upset Gilbert’s applecart. Gilbert, a popular after-dinner speaker, delivered more than 1,000 speeches in his lifetime, many of them discussing his time with Babe Ruth. When he died in 1947, Gilbert was working on his memoirs in which Ruth loomed large. At the time, sportswriters were still hailing him as the one responsible for The Babe.

George Herman Ruth Jr., now 19, was quickly dubbed “Babe” when he appeared at spring-training camp for the Orioles in Fayetteville, North Carolina. “Look at Dunnie and his new babe,” one of the older players said at one point, while another took pity on him when Dunn bawled him out for something, saying: “You’re just a Babe in the woods.”14 Another story was that Dunn was impressed with a home run Ruth belted at Fayetteville and reportedly said: “This baby will not get away from me.”15 The name stuck. To Matthias, however, he was always “George.”

Babe Ruth did well with the Orioles, but Jack Dunn faced unexpected competition in 1914 from the Baltimore Terrapins of the new Federal League, and was strapped for money. In July he sold his “baby” to the Boston Red Sox along with two other players. Babe would earn $650 a month in Boston, up from $500 in Baltimore. As a tailor, for which he’d been trained at St. Mary’s, he would have earned about $60 a month. Ruth was unhappy, however, at leaving Baltimore, his home, and Brothers Matthias, Paul, Gilbert, and others. Fortified with the acquisitions from Dunn in Baltimore, the Red Sox were making a run for the American League pennant; by August, however, the Philadelphia Athletics had an insurmountable lead, and Boston owner J.J. Lannin decided to send Ruth down to the Providence Grays of the International League for more playing time and experience. The Grays, purchased by the Canadian-born Lannin from the Detroit Tigers, were a sort of farm team for the Red Sox. Babe retained his Red Sox salary but was unhappy at the move, which he viewed as a demotion. He was in Providence for six weeks, helping the team to the International League pennant. Along the way, he belted his first home run in a professional game, on September 5 in Toronto against the Maple Leafs. Mythmakers insist the ball sailed over the bleachers at Maple Leaf Park on Hanlan’s Point island into Lake Ontario, but contemporaneous press accounts made no such claim of the ball getting wet that day.16

Babe returned to Boston and helped the Red Sox win three World Series in the next four years. In 1920 he was famously sold to the New York Yankees. There, he quit pitching so that he could wield his mighty bat in every game. He stayed in touch with Brother Matthias and St. Mary’s, and often brought fellow players with him when he returned to the school for visits. In 1919 a fire heavily damaged St. Mary’s, and Babe pitched in to help fundraising efforts, persuading the Yankees to let the St. Mary’s band accompany the team on a road trip, and to pass the hat to rebuild the school that Babe considered his real home.17 As his fame grew and he transformed the game with his home runs and made the Yankees a formidable powerhouse, Babe continued to stay in contact with Brother Matthias, and sent him tickets for some games. Babe’s late-night extracurricular activities with drink and the ladies often got Ruth into trouble with team brass, who occasionally called upon Matthias to counsel their star.

Matthias visited New York to see Babe play in 1922 or 1923, and was surprised when Ruth announced that he was buying Matthias a brand-new Cadillac as a thank-you for everything he had done.18 The big brother was astounded at Babe’s generosity. Because of his vow of poverty, Matthias had the luxury car registered in the name of St. Mary’s, which gave him exclusive use of it. Always the teacher, Matthias used it as an educational tool at times, showing the boys rudimentary auto mechanics. He also ferried around young passengers to various concerts and other events. One night during the summer of 1927, while returning home from an out-of-town event, the Cadillac stalled on some railway tracks and was demolished when struck by a train.19 Luckily, Matthias and the boys escaped unscathed. When Babe heard about the incident, he promptly bought Matthias another Cadillac.20

By 1926 Babe was constantly womanizing and had separated from his first wife, Helen. He considered divorce, but Matthias talked him out of it. Ruth recorded 47 home runs that year, bouncing back after a poor 1925 season, but his off-field activities produced grief for Yankees general manager Ed Barrow and on-field manager Miller Huggins. The team assigned a private eye to follow their star, whose late-night antics continued unabated. In June the Yankees made a road trip that included Chicago, a city whose delights Babe always sampled in large dollops. Team management called upon Brother Matthias to come to Chicago and speak to Ruth about their star’s behavior, hoping the Xaverian could yet again provide fatherly advice and modify Ruth’s behavior.

The city was hopping when the Yankees arrived in town. The 28th International Eucharistic Congress was being held for Catholics around the world, the first time the event had been held in the United States. The Yankees found an invitation for Matthias to attend the congress, and asked him to speak to Babe while both were in town. One evening Matthias came to the Prado Hotel, where the Yankees were staying, and occupied a chair in the hotel lobby from which he could watch the elevator. Ruth soon appeared, apparently ready for a wild night on the town, but he spotted Matthias and the two men greeted each other warmly. Matthias said he was in town for the religious congress and to see Ruth play the White Sox. He said he wanted to take his former pupil out to dinner and to chat. His plans for the night dashed, Ruth agreed and the pair stayed out until 11 p.m. as Matthias sternly advised Ruth to clean up his act because many people were concerned for him. He likely reminded the Babe that he had been encouraged to live a God-centered life as a young man at St. Mary’s, not a hedonistic lifestyle filled with women and booze. What kind of role model was George for young men like those still at St. Mary’s? Babe was letting down the boys at his old school who idolized him. The sobering talk left the prodigal son promising to do better. Ruth biographer Marshall Smelser called this a “turning point” in Ruth’s behavior. “Certainly he no longer after that time had the reputation for hell-raising that he had before.”21

It was in that second Cadillac that Matthias himself got into trouble. He was seen driving the big car while repeatedly visiting a much younger woman during 1931, and concerned neighbors reported him to the Catholic Archdiocese of Baltimore. Matthias was 58 at the time, the woman 23. He denied any improper relationship when his activities were investigated by church officials. Matthias could have been expelled from the Xaverians for violating his oath of chastity, leaving him penniless as he approached the age of 60. Instead, the church reprimanded him and transferred Matthias to a Xaverian-operated school in Danvers, Massachusetts, noting: “If Brother Matthias had been more amenable to discipline over a period of years, his scandalous actions might have been avoided.”22 He’d been head disciplinarian at St. Mary’s, yet his own conduct had fallen short of what was expected of him. In 1942 he celebrated 50 years with the Xaverian order while living in retirement at St. Joseph’s Juniorate in Peabody, Massachusetts. Two years later, Matthias was found dead in his room at the age of 70. He is buried at the Xaverian cemetery in Danvers. It is not known how much he was able to see his surrogate son after his move to Massachusetts.

In his only known interview with the press, the unheralded Matthias told a reporter in 1935 that Babe was one of a kind: “There never was a better boy at St. Mary’s School in Baltimore than ‘George.’ I was there 38 years and there were better ball players, but never a better boy.”23 The affection of the surrogate father was clear. And Babe returned the sentiments publicly in print shortly before his own death in 1948.

Sources

The author has also written a full book on Brother Matthias. See Brian Martin, The Man Who Made Babe Ruth: Brother Matthias of St. Mary’s School (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2020).

Notes

1 Babe Ruth, as told to Bob Considine, The Babe Ruth Story (New York: E.P. Dutton & Co., 1948), 13, 18.

2 Babe Ruth, “The Kids Can’t Take It if We Don’t Give It!,” Guideposts Magazine, October 1948: 1-2, 23-24, accessed February 10, 2018, http://baberuthcentral.com/remembering-the-babe-/babe-ruths-public-statement.

3 The move of the Boutilier family to Halifax was recorded by Cape Breton researcher Virginia MacDonald in the November 24, 2007, edition of the Cape Breton Post. Her grandfather was born in Lingan in 1871 and her father, Bernard, was a machinist/engineer. The 1881 Census of Canada recorded the Boutiliers as still living in Lingan. Descendants of the Cape Breton Boutiliers, Jean Mor and Francis McGillivary, confirmed to the author that the move to Halifax came about this time.

4 Brother Amandus Dossier CCFX, 6/03 #318, of the Xaverian Brothers, University of Notre Dame Archives, South Bend, Indiana.

5 Brother Matthias Dossier, CCFX 6/04 #329, of the Xaverian Brothers, University of Notre Dame Archives, South Bend, Indiana.

6 Babe Ruth, Babe Ruth’s Own Book of Baseball (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1928), 3-4.

7 Babe Ruth, to Considine, The Babe Ruth Story, 12.

8 Lou Leisman, I Was with Babe Ruth at St. Mary’s (Aberdeen, Maryland: self-published, 1956), 21.

9 Babe Ruth, Playing the Game: My Early Years in Baseball (Mineola, New York: Dover Publications, 2011), 6.

10 Babe Ruth, The Babe Ruth Story, 15.

11 Marshall Smelser, The Life That Ruth Built: A Biography (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1975), 31.

12 Babe Ruth, The Babe Ruth Story, 20.

13 Brother Gilbert, C.F.X., “Babe Ruth’s Great First Home Run – Brother Gilbert Discovers Him,” Boston Sunday Globe, October 14, 1928: 20.

14 Babe Ruth, The Babe Ruth Story, 25-26.

15 “Babe Ruth ‘A Natural’ Even as Oriole Rookie,” Baltimore Sun, August 17, 1948: 15.

16 Leonard Levin, “Baseball. Arrival of Ruth Turned Grays’ Skies to Blue/81 Years Ago, the Bambino Led Providence to the International League Pennant,” Providence Journal, August 14, 1995: B4. Levin quotes from Journal sportswriter Bill Perrin, who wrote about Ruth’s blast that sailed “over the right field fence.” No Toronto paper reported that the ball made it into the lake that day.

17 Babe Ruth, The Babe Ruth Story, 132.

18 Some reports say the year was 1925 or 1926, but an early 1924 report in the Baltimore Sun mentions Matthias taking St. Mary’s boys to a theatrical performance “in an automobile given the latter by ‘Babe’ Ruth, the baseball player.” Date of the article is March 17, 1924, “White House Talk Explained by Lang,” on page 4.

19 “Auto Presented by Babe Ruth to St. Mary’s Smashed by Train,” Baltimore Sun, August 17, 1927: 22.

20 Babe Ruth, The Babe Ruth Story, 107.

21 Smelser, 239.

22 Matthias Dossier, University of Notre Dame Archives.

23 Thomas Sheehan, “Brother Matthias Talks of ‘George,'” Boston Evening Transcript, February 28, 1935: 6.

For 22 years, the name Charles Bronfman was synonymous with major-league baseball in Montréal. As the son of immigrants who made their fortune in the whiskey trade, Charles made a name for himself in his own right. At the age of 37, he raised the funds required to obtain an expansion baseball franchise in the National League. The Expos under Charles’s stewardship put an entertaining product on the field in spite of the external forces of baseball economics and national unity politics. His baseball days behind him, he applied his values as a Canadian and as a Jew to improve the lives of others.

The saga of the Bronfmans originated in the town of Otaci, in the region of Bessarabia, in the Russian Empire. In 1880 Yechiel Bronfman married the former Mindel Elman.1 The Bronfmans were tobacconists, and although they grew quite wealthy, their affluence was no match for the prevailing anti-Semitism throughout the Russian Empire. A wave of pogroms ensued after the assassination of Czar Alexander II in 1881. The Bronfmans felt no choice but to flee, departing with their four children, servants, and personal rabbi for the New World in 1889.2 The youngest of the four, an infant named Samuel, grew to become the patriarch of the Bronfmans.

Yechiel settled his family first in Wapella, Saskatchewan, and then in Brandon, Manitoba. Mindel delivered four more children, and by 1903 the family had recovered enough of its wealth to purchase the Anglo-American Hotel.3 Prescient in his business acumen, young Samuel observed that the profits of the hotel were concentrated in the sale of alcoholic beverages. ‘Mr. Sam,’ as he would become known, soon entered the liquor trade. Meanwhile, in the United States, Congress on October 28, 1919, passed the Volstead Act, which prohibited the sale of alcoholic beverages. Mr. Sam saw an opportunity. He would sell whiskey to American entrepreneurs, but his doing so in Canada made his business perfectly legal. Mr. Sam founded the Distillers Corporation in Montréal in 1924.4 By 1928, he had accumulated enough capital to purchase Joseph Seagram & Sons.5 Mr. Sam had married the former Saidye Rosner in 1922; they had four children: Minda, Phyllis, Edgar, and the youngest, Charles Rosner Bronfman, on June 27, 1931.

The Bronfman family lived at 15 Belvedere Road in the Montréal suburb of Westmount.6 For his education, Charles attended Selwyn House in Montréal and Trinity College School in Port Hope, Ontario. Meanwhile, Mr. Sam’s empire continued to expand. According to Charles’s memoirs, by 1933, “the Company had 40 percent of the Canadian whisky market.”7 Mr. Sam was the president of the Canadian Jewish Congress from 1939 to 1962, and became an important benefactor to both McGill University and the Israel Museum. These lessons of philanthropy and community activism were not lost on young Charles and his siblings.

After attending McGill University, Charles went to work for Mr. Sam on March 12, 1951.8 He was appointed to run the Adams whisky label in 1954, and in 1958, “at the grand old age of 27,” he was made president of the House of Seagram.9 In 1961 he married the former Barbara Baerwald; they had two children, Stephen and Ellen.

During the 1950s and ’60s, the Seagram’s empire expanded its horizons beyond whiskey, entering both the real estate and oil markets. Meanwhile, Mayor Jean Drapeau was concocting his latest grand projet for the city of Montréal. During his 30-year tenure as mayor, Drapeau put Montréal on the world stage with Expo 67, Place des Arts, the Metro system, and the 1976 Summer Olympics. Now he was trying to convince Major League Baseball that Canada’s largest city should be awarded an expansion team.

Montréal had a storied baseball history as the top farm club for the Brooklyn Dodgers. Charles Bronfman was 15 years old when Jackie Robinson led the Montréal Royals to the Little World Series in 1946. As he told biographer Howard Green, “my mother [maintained] I was crazy about baseball as a kid. … [I]f she was implying that I played it, that’s not the case. I just followed it.”10 The expansion fee for a National League team was $10 million, and Charles offered to put up 10 percent with his own money. His wife, Barbara, questioned his decision to invest: “A million dollars and you just say yes?” “Well,” he replied, “it’s never going to happen anyway.”11

“But happen, it did,” in the words of Donald Sutherland.12 Montréal, along with San Diego, was awarded a National League expansion franchise on May 27, 1968. Much like Pierre Trudeau, a fellow Montréaler who was elected Prime Minister in 1968, Charles cited “reason over passion” for his investment in the baseball team. At a time of a burgeoning sovereigntist movement in Quebec in the wake of the Quiet Revolution,13 Charles envisioned a baseball team as a unifying force, not only in Quebec, but throughout Canada.

The other major investor, Jean-Louis Lévesque, did not share Charles’s enthusiasm, and withdrew from the project. Finding a place to play was another ordeal, as the Autostade, home of the football Alouettes, was rejected for baseball. Would the franchise be snapped up by a city like Milwaukee, Buffalo, or Dallas before even taking the field?

“I’d go to see Drapeau, and he would tell me everything was wonderful. And by the way, when I went to see Drapeau, I used to do this. I used to pinch myself and say ‘He’s a salesman, he’s a salesman, he’s a salesman. Don’t believe him; he’s a salesman.’ Then I used to see [Lucien] Saulnier, Drapeau’s assistant. And Saulnier had two words that were fabulous. They were ‘Definitely not.'”14

Montréal journalists Russ Taylor and Marcel Desjardins had shown National League President Warren Giles the layout of Jarry Park, a 3,000-seat facility in the north end of the city where home plate faced west, rather than east. Giles was confident that the stadium could be upgraded to meet National League standards by April 14, 1969. Charles eventually put together a consortium supported by Lorne Webster and Hugh Hallward to finance the requisite $10 million investment.15 Montréal was getting a team, named the Expos after the World’s Fair of 1967.

Appointed to oversee the operation were President John McHale, general manager Jim Fanning, and manager Gene Mauch. Fanning remembered the strategy the Expos undertook to build the inaugural roster: “We went for the players who had a name, who could still play, and who had trading value, or they had value, period.”16 The Houston Astros saw sufficient value in the Expos’ expansion draft to offer Rusty Staub in a trade for Donn Clendenon and Jesus Alou. Controversy ensued when Clendenon refused to report to manager Harry Walker in Houston. On the eve of the regular season, Commissioner Bowie Kuhn ruled that the trade stood, with the Expos offering Houston Jack Billingham and Skip Guinn as alternate compensation.

Charles remembered the afternoon of April 8, 1969, as Maureen Forrester sang ‘O Canada’ before the Expos’ first game versus the Mets at Shea Stadium: “I remember standing there with tears rolling down my cheeks as 40,000 Americans were standing at attention for our National Anthem. In hockey, yes, Canada was well known but in baseball[?] … suddenly, we were in the big leagues. Canada was in the big leagues, and I had helped make it happen.”17

The Expos defeated the Mets 11-10 on a trio of home runs, including one by Rusty Staub. ‘Le Grand Orange,’ as Staub was known, became as legendary in baseball during his three years with the Expos as Jean Béliveau was in hockey. Montréal also won the home opener, an 8-7 victory over the St. Louis Cardinals, with Mack Jones hitting the first major-league home run on Canadian soil.

“The best part of that game,” remembered Charles, “was having my mother and father with me. My dad had given me quite a ‘what-for’ about this whole procedure and then, when he knew that I had put up the money myself, became the biggest and best Expos’ fan in Canada,” adding that “he couldn’t understand why I wasn’t up until 2 in the morning listening to baseball games the way he was.”18 Two years after the opener at Jarry Park, in 1971, Mr. Sam died at the age of 82.

The 1969 Montréal Expos finished in last place, as expected, with a record of 52-110. However, they set an expansion record by attracting over 1.2 million fans to Jarry Park. According to Peter C. Newman, the Expos drew red ink in 1969 before turning a profit annually from 1970 through 1975.19 However, on the field, not once did they breach 79 wins or finish in the first division. It was a frustrating time for Charles as owner of the Expos.

To compound matters, Canada became embroiled in a global energy crisis; in Quebec, the impact was felt even more keenly, as the movement for national sovereignty was gaining momentum. In baseball, it was only a matter of time before the reserve clause would give way to unrestricted free agency for the players. It was amid this economic climate that on December 4, 1974, the Expos felt compelled to trade two of their star players, Ken Singleton and Mike Torrez, to the Baltimore Orioles: “Every club makes lots of little mistakes, but that was a biggie. In the development stage of this club, that set us back two or three years. The fact that in effect, we got nothing for those two fine players. We got Rich Coggins, who was sick, and Dave McNally, who quit. I think we sold Coggins’ contract to the Yankees for $100,000, so that’s what we got out of Singleton and Torrez.”20

As the last-place Expos prepared to move from ramshackle Jarry Park to futuristic Olympic Stadium in 1976, baseball finally ushered in a new system of free agency. Charles and the Expos courted Baltimore outfielder Reggie Jackson to play for his former manager Dick Williams in Montréal. George Steinbrenner, meanwhile, could offer Reggie the city of New York and a contending team. In 1977 Jackson was wearing pinstripes and playing in the World Series. He would not be the last blue-chip free agent to spurn an offer to play for the Expos. They also lost Don Sutton to the Houston Astros in 1980.21

The Expos knew they had to draw attendance of 1.7 million at the 59,500-seat Olympic Stadium simply to break even, or more than that in order to turn a profit.22 After failing to reach that figure in both 1977 and 1978, and with the franchise having yet to post a winning season, Charles seriously considered divesting himself of the Expos.23 Fellow board member Lorne Webster persuaded him to stay. It was a decision Charles would not regret, as la belle époque of the franchise was about to begin.

In the words of Canadian Broadcasting Corporation anchor Knowlton Nash, “after a decade of trying” the 1979 Expos were “considered to be one of the strongest clubs in the game.”24 Led by a collection of young homegrown players, including Gary Carter, Larry Parrish, Steve Rogers, Ellis Valentine, Warren Cromartie, and Andre Dawson, the Expos were complemented by veterans from other organizations like Tony Perez, Bill Lee, and Woodie Fryman. Carter, Parrish, and Rogers represented the Expos at the All-Star Game in Seattle on July 17. At the midway point of the season, the Expos stood 2½ games ahead of the Chicago Cubs with a record of 50-35, the best in the entire National League. “You know, when you’re winning, all of a sudden the world is I think a lot better place to be,” said Charles in a 1979 interview. “Last year, we had a disappointing result [of 76-86] with a pretty good team. You try to have a winning team for the good of the city that has other added benefits.”25

When the 1979 season concluded, the Expos posted a superlative record of 95-65, drawing over 2.1 million fans to Olympic Stadium. Although the team lost the divisional title to the Pittsburgh Pirates, the Expos had cemented themselves for one brief shining moment as Canada’s team. As was reported late in the season in one telegram from Ottawa, “no matter what happens, you’ve given baseball fans across the country a thrilling summer. Bravo.”26 The telegram was signed by Pierre Elliott Trudeau, whose late father Charles-Emile once owned the Montréal Royals.

The Expos and their first pennant race occurred at a time when national unity was at the forefront of the Canadian consciousness. On November 15, 1976, René Lévesque of the Parti Québécois won a majority government on a platform that included a referendum on sovereignty-association. Prior to the election, Charles was quoted in the Montréal Star as vowing “to get out if the PQ wins.”27 Three years later, he was asked to offer his remarks on any link between the success of the Expos and national unity: “This year, there is just a tremendous outflow of goodwill, and everybody is very happy. How that might translate itself politically, I wouldn’t have the vaguest idea. I would hope that it would translate itself obviously in a positive way but that’s not why we’re trying to have a winning team.”

Quebec held its referendum in 1980, with 59 percent of the province voting on May 20 to remain in Canada. Meanwhile, with Ron LeFlore added to the lineup, the Expos raced to another stellar season. Despite 81 days in first place, they lost the pennant once again during the final weekend, this time to the Philadelphia Phillies. The disappointment did not stop the Expos from being awarded a lucrative television broadcast deal. Starting in 1981, O’Keefe Ale agreed to sponsor Expos telecasts covering Canada from coast to coast for $35 million over five years.28

The broadcast deal proved to be a Pyrrhic victory for the Expos. After a grievance was filed by the Toronto Blue Jays, the Commissioner’s Office ruled that the television contract infringed upon the Blue Jays’ territorial rights. Expos telecasts would be blacked out in southern Ontario.29 John McHale mused that “when Montréal became a Quebec-only team, and no longer had the right to compete in Canada, that was a very telling blow to our financial picture.”30 This was the very antithesis to the philosophy behind Charles’s involvement with the Expos in the first place.

Notwithstanding the television contract, expectations for the 1981 Expos as baseball’s ‘Team of the ’80s’ were high. The team welcomed young players Tim Raines, Tim Wallach, and Jeff Reardon in the early months of the season. However, only two weeks after acquiring Reardon from the Mets, the Expos – and all 25 other teams – were shut down by a players strike on June 12. While the economic losses were significant, $500,000 in the first weekend alone, the positioning of the work stoppage actually helped the Expos in the standings.31 “We were third in our division when the strike happened,” Charles told biographer Howard Green. “Then on August 6, after a settlement was reached, the owners agreed to split the season. Playoff berths were guaranteed for the four teams who were leading their divisions …whichever teams had the best record in the second ‘half… also got playoff berths.”32

As the team leading the division when the strike began, the Phillies had already clinched a playoff spot. The Expos were leading the Cardinals by 1½ games on the morning of October 3. With the magic number reduced to one, the Expos trailed the Mets 3-2 as rookie Wallace Johnson rapped a triple to drive home two runs. That proved to be the margin of victory as the Expos clinched the division. “In our bar mitzvah year,” Charles exclaimed, “the Expos finally came of age.33

After defeating the Phillies in a five-game Division Series, Montréal went on to face the Dodgers in the League Championship Series. The series was tied, two wins apiece, on October 19, when Ray Burris faced Fernando Valenzuela at Olympic Stadium. Through eight innings, both teams were limited to one run. Jim Fanning, now the Expos’ manager, summoned Steve Rogers to pitch the ninth inning. With two away, Rogers threw a ball to Rick Monday that landed in the center-field bleachers. Charles remembered his reaction. “I wasn’t upset. John McHale looked like he was going to croak. I said, ‘John, why are you so upset?’ He said, ‘Charles, this doesn’t happen very often. And when it does happen and you don’t take advantage, it won’t happen again for a while.”34 History would support McHale’s clairvoyance, as the franchise did not return to the postseason for as long as it remained in Montréal.

More trouble was on the horizon for the Expos in 1982. Gary Carter, the reigning All-Star Game MVP and face of the franchise, who batted .438 in the NLCS against the Dodgers, was one year away from free agency. Rather than risk losing Carter at the end of the season, the Expos signed him to a contract extension prior to spring training. According to the Washington Post, the contract paid Carter $15 million over eight years.35 It was a deal Charles regretted from the moment he signed it: “We never won with Gary Carter, and when he was asking for two million dollars a season … [John] McHale and I were furious. Still, we held our noses and did the deal because we felt we had no choice.”36 While the Expos continued to set franchise attendance records in 1982 and 1983, outdrawing the Yankees both years, the large crowds were less than enthused by the third-place performances on the field. A fifth-place finish followed in 1984. Not reaping the desired return on investment on the Carter contract, the Expos traded him to the Mets on December 10, 1984. “When a team comes that close and doesn’t do it,” Charles reasoned, “eventually you have to break up the team.”37

The ‘Team of the ’80s’ was consistent if unspectacular for the latter half of the decade. In 1986, as Gary Carter won his World Series ring with the Mets and les Canadiens won yet another Stanley Cup, the Expos drew barely one million fans. Olympic Stadium, its roof finally installed in 1987, had not aged well. While the facility was originally estimated to have cost $124 million, the Canada Broadcasting Corporation reported that the actual cost was $1.5 billion.38 At a time when revenues were generated in increasingly weak Canadian dollars, escalating salaries were paid in US dollars.

The breaking point took place in 1989. In a stunning role reversal, the Expos traded three pitching prospects, Brian Holman, Gene Harris, and 6-foot-10 Randy Johnson, to the Seattle Mariners for Mark Langston. Initially, the deal was a success, as the left-hander helped to propel the Expos to the top of their division. In the final eight weeks of the season, Langsten’s impending free-agent status became a distraction as the Expos plummeted from first place to fourth. Finally, in late September, Charles suggested to club investor Hugh Hallward that they meet for dinner at an Italian restaurant instead of going to the game. When they sat down, Charles turned to Hugh and asked, “You know what this means, don’t you?”39 The Expos were for sale.

“I was very bitter,” Charles told Danny Gallagher. “I had a Plan A, a Plan B, and a Plan C. Plan A was to sell the team to someone who would [stay] in Montréal; Plan B was to sell to someone who would … keep the team in Montréal for five years; Plan C was to sell to the highest bidder anywhere.”40 On June 14, 1991, the National League announced that the Expos had been sold to a consortium led by former Seagram’s executive Claude Brochu for a reported $100 million.41

Charles Bronfman was now 60. Now married to his second wife, Andrea, he had reached an age when most people look toward retirement. Charles’s mind, however, was headed in a different direction: philanthropy. In 1991 his CRB Foundation pioneered the ‘Heritage Minutes,’ a series of 60-second films that illustrated pivotal moments in Canadian history. In 1994 Charles and Michael Steinhardt founded Birthright Israel, an educational organization that sponsored free trips to Israel for young Jewish adults. By the time Seagram’s had been sold to Vivendi in 2000, Charles and Andrea had relocated to New York. Since 2004, Charles has awarded an annual Charles Bronfman Prize to young humanitarians whose work, grounded in Jewish values, is of universal benefit. Tragedy struck the Bronfman family on January 23, 2006, when Andrea was fatally struck by a passing vehicle in New York.

Charles married Rita Mayo in 2012, and in subsequent years they divided their time among New York, Montréal, and Florida. He is the proud grandfather of six.42 On June 27, 2021, Charles celebrated his 90th birthday by watching a virtual performance of the ‘Concert in Denim.’ It was performed by Israel Philharmonic at the Charles Bronfman Auditorium in Tel Aviv. A member of the Order of Canada, he was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1984. In 1992 Charles was honored by the Blue Jays, who invited him to throw out the first pitch before Game Three of the World Series in Toronto. The Expos’ Opening Day hero, Mack Jones, was once described as “one man who has not forgotten his roots.”43 That same honor may also be bestowed upon the man who brought the Mayor of Jonesville to Montréal, Charles Rosner Bronfman.

Notes

1 Peter C. Newman, Bronfman Dynasty: The Rothschilds of the New World (Toronto: McLelland and Stewart Limited, 1978), 12.

2 Michael R. Marrus, Mr. Sam: The Life and Times of Samuel Bronfman (Toronto: Penguin Books Canada Limited, 1991), 24.

3 Newman, 70.

4 Marrus, 113.

5 Marrus, 130.

6 Charles Bronfman and Howard Green, Distilled: A Memoir of Family, Seagram, Baseball, and Philanthropy, (Toronto: Harper Collins Publishers Ltd., 2016), 4.

7 Bronfman, 4.

8 Bronfman, 52.

9 Bronfman, 59.

10 Bronfman, 19.

11 Bronfman, 76.

12 Brian Schecter, ed., Les Expos, Nos Amours, English edition (Montréal: TV Labatt, 1989).

13 Rene Durocher, “The Quiet Revolution (Révolution tranquille) was a time of rapid change experienced in Québec during the 1960s.” Canadian Encyclopedia article published online July 30, 2013.

14 Les Expos, Nos Amours.

15 Danny Gallagher and Bill Young, Remembering the Montréal Expos (Toronto: Scoop Press, 2005), 26.

16 Les Expos, Nos Amours.

17 Les Expos, Nos Amours.

18 Les Expos, Nos Amours.

19 Newman, 267.

20 Les Expos, Nos Amours.

21 Alain Usereau, The Expos in Their Prime (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2013), 104.

22 Newman, 268.

23 Gallagher, 27.

24 Mark Phillips, “Win Some, Lose Some,” on News Magazine (Toronto: The Canadian Broadcasting Corporation, June 1979).

25 “Win Some, Lose Some.”

26 Norm King, 7979; The Expos First Great Season (Toronto: Scoop Press, 2021), 189.

27 Jacques Doucet and Marc Robitaille, Il était une fois les Expos: Tome 1, les années 1969-1984 (Montréal: Editions Hurtubise Inc., 2009), 282.

28 Usereau, 109.

29 Brodie Snyder, The Year the Expos Finally Won Something (Toronto: Check Mark Books, 1981), 163.

30 Usereau, 109-110.

31 Snyder, 160.

32 Bronfman, 95.

33 Jeff Katz, Split Season: Fernandomania, the Bronx Zoo, and the Strike That Saved Baseball (New York: Thomas Dunne Books, 2015), 245.

34 Les Expos, Nos Amours.

35 Usereau, 153.

36 Bronfman, 97.

37 Les Expos, Nos Amours.

38 Bronfman, 92.

39 Bronfman, 101.

40 Gallagher, 28.

41 Jacques Doucet and Marc Robitaille, Il était une fois les Expos: Tome 2, les années 1985-2004, (Montréal: Editions Hurtubise Inc., 2011), 206.

42 Correspondence with Charles Bronfman, December 8, 2021.

43 Les Expos, Nos Amours.

A dapper Bob Brown surveys his domain from the wooden steps of Athletic Park. The 5′ 9″ Brown was a dandy of sorts, wearing vests until the 1950s, long after they had gone out of style. (David Eskenazi Collection)

Bob Brown figured more money was to be made in baseball as an owner than as a player. After leading the Aberdeen Black Cats to a pennant in 1907, the catcher-manager sought to leave the coastal sawmill town in Washington state by trying to purchase the baseball club in Vancouver, British Columbia. The Canadian city, a terminus for the transcontinental railroad, was booming as a port. Brown figured prospects were bright for success on the field and in the ledger book. When his offer was rejected by the Vancouver owners, he returned to Aberdeen and a year later bought a quarter-interest in the Spokane club for $1 on top of his $2,300 salary as manager.

Sales at the Spokane box office were brisk in 1909, as Brown led the team to 100 wins while a land boom in Idaho and the Alaska-Yukon-Panama Exposition in Seattle lured to the city in Eastern Washington many “excursionists with time on their hands and money in their pockets.”1 The club turned a $10,000 profit, a quarter of those dividends going to Brown. After failing to buy the club, he sold his quarter-share back to majority partner Joseph Cohn for $2,500. Flush with money, he tried again to purchase the struggling Vancouver club.

Brown realized the franchise was in trouble when the league had to pay the cost of the team’s return home from a series in Spokane. Creditors were pressing team owner A.R. Dickson, a grain merchant. Brown set up a secret offseason meeting with two of the club’s directors, renting a lavish suite at the old Hotel Vancouver, which he then had stocked with fine whiskey and a box of first-class cigars. He walked away with an option to buy after handing over a check for just $500. He later returned to the city with the league president in tow to complete the deal, which included 14 players and a three-year lease on Recreation Park.

“This is the first club I ever owned in my life,” Brown told a reporter as he boarded a train back to Seattle after buying the team, “and don’t you make any mistake about it, I am going to get a team that will be strictly in the running for the pennant.”2

The British Columbia port city had a population of 100,000, a fourfold increase over the past decade, and held great promise as a sports mecca. Brown was not the only aspiring sports tycoon with eyes on the city. The Patrick brothers – Lester and Frank – were soon to open a 10,000-seat hockey arena. “I liked this town first time I saw it,” Brown wrote in 1957. “Figured it had a real future, industrially, and in baseball, too.”3

Brown was not yet 34, a wiry, scrapping ballplayer who had spent time as a cowboy. He did not smile for photographs, preferring instead to glower. A Seattle newspaper once wrote in evaluating his baseball skills: “He can’t bat; he can’t field much; he is only an ordinary thrower – but he is a mighty good ballplayer. Bob is always in shape and he is always popping with pepper.”4 Unlike many in the sport, he was college-educated. As a manager, he was known for a hot temper. “Ball players weren’t made to be molly-coddled like prima donnas,” he said.5 He baited umpires. As an owner, he was a tough negotiator, pinching pennies on player salaries. He was also shrewd, as we have seen, parlaying $1 into a franchise ownership in just one year.

Brown kept baseball alive in Vancouver through the Spanish flu pandemic, the Depression, and both world wars, and on into the television era. As early as 1917, The Sporting News was hailing him in large type as “Vancouver’s Connie Mack.”6 As with Mack in Philadelphia, or John McGraw in New York, or Clark Griffith in Washington, DC, the summer game in Vancouver was entirely associated with Brown, who was known as Mr. Baseball. Only in the hockey world did the likes of Conn Smythe in Toronto or the Molson family in Montréal have so strong an association between a city and the owner of a franchise in a major sport.

Brown brought the great Babe Ruth to town, introduced night ball to Canada, and carved a ballpark out of forest with his bare hands (and the occasional stick of dynamite). That same Athletic Park would twice burn to the ground and twice be rebuilt. Brown played host to lacrosse, soccer, and football, though baseball always occupied the most dates. He built an adjacent gymnasium to add indoor sports to his calendar, and he formed the Vancouver Athletic Club to compete in various events. When professional baseball lapsed in the city, he nurtured a competitive semiprofessional city league. His Athletic Park junior clubbers, restricted to 1,200 members, who were known as the baseball kindergarten, were granted free entry to the park, turning children into lifelong patrons.

When the 1910 season opened, Brown was owner, manager, and starting shortstop of the Vancouver Beavers. The club finished second, and the report on the Northwestern League for Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide saw in Brown a budding tycoon. “Vancouver probably cleaned up the biggest roll on the season through the sales of pitcher Harry Gardner to Pittsburgh, third baseman (Dick) Breen to Cincinnati, (Cy) Swain to Washington and the drafting of another outfielder, (Bill) Brinker, by the Chicago White Sox,” Roscoe Fawcett reported. “Vancouver’s profits were close to $3,500, Spokane’s $1,500, Seattle’s $1,000 and Tacoma’s minus several hundred.”7

Despite a successful campaign, Brown suffered a nervous breakdown after the season and a brother escorted him to Long Beach, California, where a doctor helped his recuperation.8 For a tough guy, Brown spent a lot of time in the hospital. In fact, he would meet his second wife, a nurse, while recovering from an ailment.

Robert Paul Brown was born in Scranton, Pennsylvania, on July 5, 1876, the day after American centennial celebrations in his birthplace included picnics, parades fronted by colorful banners, and religious services held in churches bedecked with floral arrangements. The city was a mining and railroad center that attracted immigrants by the thousands, including his parents, the former Julia Ann Manley and Anthony Brown, who were from County Mayo, Ireland, which suffered dreadfully during the Great Famine. Robert was the ninth of 10 children born to the Roman Catholic family.

His father worked as a laborer in the anthracite coal mines at a time of declining wages and labor unrest. Scranton was roiled by a bloody general strike shortly after the boy’s first birthday, and the Browns relocated nearby to Dunmore before moving to Sherman, Iowa, north of the state capital in Des Moines. Anthony Brown’s occupation in Sherman was written in shorthand by an enumerator in 1880 as “working on RR sect,” or a worker on a section of a railroad, known as a gandy dancer. In time, the family settled for good in Blencoe, on the state’s western border with Nebraska, where Anthony Brown operated the only hotel in the community. On New Year’s Eve in 1890, when Bob Brown was 14, a dance was held in Blencoe. So many people from Monona County attended that the hotel turned away patrons, which proved a blessing, as the barn burned to the ground that night and 17 horses were killed. The cause of the fire was unknown, though arson was suspected. “It seems almost a miracle that the fire was confined to the one building,” the Sioux City Journal reported, “as the wind was blowing briskly toward buildings not over twenty feet distant.”9

In his youth, Brown traveled the dusty summer roads of Iowa, racing horses and playing town ball at dots on the map along the railroads. “I was a bit of a jockey, too, in those days,” Brown told a newspaper in 1930. “Guess I rode 1,000 races in the tank towns for my elder brother, who was the family horse fancier. They were ponies, you know, but they could step, and we used to race down the main street of most of the towns we made. Played baseball, too, from one town to another.”10

At 17, Brown entered St. Joseph’s College (now known as Loras College) at Dubuque. After two years, he continued his education at Notre Dame University in South Bend, Indiana, where he wore wing-collar shirts and a serious expression on his face. He also began parting his oiled hair in the middle, a country boy seeking to adopt a sophisticated appearance.

Each summer during his university schooling, Brown returned to Iowa to play summer ball and organize a local football team. On campus, he won letters in both baseball and football. Teammates called him “Red Robert” or “Red” Brown. He earned a reputation as a pugnacious and relentless halfback despite a smallish, 5-foot-9, 150-pound frame. (Military documents gave his height as 5-feet-6.) His playing coach, H.G. Hadden, stood eight inches taller and 90 pounds heavier. Training included boxing, wrestling, and cross-country runs, as well as scrimmages and lectures on tactics. “In those days we had three downs to make 5 yards, and if we’d find ourselves just a couple of feet short, the other backs used to pick me up and toss me right over the line,” Brown reminisced years later.11 He scored a touchdown in a 32-0 whipping of the College of Physicians and Surgeons, and scored two majors in an 18-0 defeat of the Chicago Cycling Club.

Fifty players attended the start of baseball training camp on February 1, 1896, trying to win a varsity spot for what would be the team’s third season. By mid-March, half had been cut, but Brown survived to win a spot in right field. In 1898 a bout of dizziness, including fainting spells, led him to seek recovery in the fresh air of Miles City, Montana. A decision to forgo tobacco seemed to repair his health. As a result, he never again smoked or pinched a wad between his cheek and gum.

After recuperating, Brown worked on the range before volunteering to fight in the Spanish-American War on May 13, 1898. The occupation he provided on enlistment papers was “cowboy.” Though he would later recall his eagerness to fight in Cuba, he spent most of the war as a private at a dusty camp in Georgia with Troop I, 3rd US Volunteer Cavalry. The Vancouver Sun’s archives once included a biographical form Brown filled in by hand in the spring of 1955. Under the entry for honors under military service, Brown wrote: “was returned on furlough to enlisted base Miles City Montana account typhoid malaria.”12 He was mustered out in September, returning to Indiana to finish his schooling at Notre Dame.

Football teammate Albert J. “Wild Bill” Galen, who had been born on a Montana ranch and would be a future state attorney general and Montana Supreme Court justice, found Brown a $125-a-month job with baseball’s Helena Senators, whose Montana State League rivals included the Anaconda Serpents, Butte Smoke Eaters, and Great Falls Indians. The Senators had only a dozen players: one for each fielding position and four pitchers. One of his teammates was Joe Tinker, an infielder of great promise. Brown was an outfielder and backup catcher, breaking every finger on both hands in the days when pitchers could legally throw spitballs, mudballs, and shineballs (daubed with polish from baseball shoes). The breaks were set with splints jury-rigged from a cigar box. When asked for distinguishing features on citizenship documents, he offered “crooked little finger on right hand,” bent, undoubtedly, by a baseball.

Baseball offered men an escape from lives of toil down on the farm, or down in the mine, or on the factory floor. These rough-hewn men did not easily give up a day job in the sunshine. “Salaries? Well, I won’t say we just played for the principle of the thing, but none of us fussed much about the money, there not being much to fuss with anyway,” Brown said in 1956. “A couple of hundred dollars per month was a pretty good average in those days, and $1.50 per day looked pretty good for eating money on the road.”13

Nor was the diamond a place for milquetoasts. Fights were not unknown, on or off the field. “I had a pretty reckless mouth,” Brown admitted, “and a hot temper.”14 The Helena club folded with the rest of the league after the season. When ex-league President W.M. Lucas started up a Pacific Northwest League on the coast, Brown and Tinker joined a Portland club known as the Webfooters. “Joe Tinker hit .322 that year, which was real good hitting then,” Brown said. “I managed .245, but I was never a hitter. Couldn’t hit much, but I guess I was never accused of lack of life. Had the reputation of being pretty rough out on the field.”15 Brown’s memory was faulty – Tinker hit .290 and Brown hit .215 – but his scouting report was otherwise accurate.

Brown knew that if he were to stay in baseball, he’d be better off trying to do so as a manager or owner. He lost a competition to become the playing manager at Portland to teammate Sammy Vigneux, so instead Brown helped form a team in Pendleton, Oregon, in an unaffiliated league. (His friend Tinker signed after the 1901 season with the Chicago Cubs before being immortalized by Franklin Pierce Adams in a bit of doggerel about the double-play combination “Tinker to Evers to Chance.”) Brown quit the Class-D Pendleton team at midseason to play for a new club at Helena, but the club would not complete its second full season. It was while he was with Pendleton that he made his first visit to Vancouver in 1902, when the city’s population was barely over 26,000.

In 1903 Brown moved to Aberdeen, where he became a partner in the Brown-Elmore Shoe Company. His name was associated with the store for more than a half-century, long after he sold his interest. In 1904 he played for and managed the Aberdeen Pippins of the Southwest Washington League, piloted the team in 1905, then became manager of the local Grays Harbor Lumbermen in the Northwestern League in 1906.

On October 11, 1905, Brown married Eula Agnes Jameson, who, at 19, was a decade younger than the groom. A well-regarded musician, she performed in amateur theatrics in Aberdeen, Washington. She was the daughter of an accountant who served as mayor of nearby Montesano. She renounced her Protestant faith to marry the baseball man in a Catholic ceremony. Their childless union ended in an uncontested divorce less than four years later on grounds of “incompatibility of temper.”16

As a playing manager, Brown led the Aberdeen Black Cats to a pennant in 1907, a season during which he had his share of playing time. “Manager ‘Red’ Brown, who is something of an all-round ball player, came in from the outfield to cover shortstop and when both his catchers were injured went behind the bat regularly and the team continued to win games,” The Sporting News reported.17 In the fall of 1908, the same newspaper covered Browns negotiations for an interest in the Spokane team. The headline read: “Aspires to be a magnate.”18 He signed a two-year contract to manage the Spokane Indians and bought, for $1, a quarter-interest in the club, which he parlayed just a year later into ownership of the Vancouver franchise.

For 1911, Brown concentrated on the front office, while Kitty Brashear led the club to a 103-win season and the Northwestern League pennant. Brown turned down a $35,000 offer for the club from a San Francisco syndicate. He had greater ambitions.

The Beavers played at Recreation Park, a small stadium at Homer and Smythe Streets on the downtown peninsula owned by the Canadian Pacific Railway and leased by city businessmen, to whom he paid rent. When he found out that the park was to be closed for more profitable use as warehousing, Brown bought the bleachers for $500. He covered the cost by forcing the local lacrosse team to share the proceeds of bleacher-ticket sales from their big series against the Eastern champions. Then he began felling trees and blasting stumps in the forest at a 400-by-500-foot site leased from the CPR for 25 years.19

The site on the south shore of False Creek overlooked an escarpment with train tracks below. A wooden grandstand was built around home plate, which was at the corner of West Fifth Avenue and Hemlock Street. Browns Athletic Park, which opened in 1913, was home to rugby, soccer, and lacrosse matches, as well as political and religious rallies. In 1941 it was the site of the first professional football game in British Columbia.

Most importantly, Athletic Park was the home of Vancouver baseball for 38 years. Several future major leaguers played in the wooden bandbox, among them spitballer Charlie Schmutz (whose name sounded like what he did to the ball) and Dutch Ruether, who later starred for the Cincinnati Reds in the infamous 1919 World Series. Even 47-year-old right-hander “Iron Man” Joe McGinnity took to the mound at the park on his way to closing out a Hall of Fame career.

Athletic Park helped put Vancouver on baseball’s map. Barnstorming teams of major-league all-stars would play games in the city, stopping on their way to exhibition series in Japan. One traveling troupe that played in a downpour in 1934 included Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, and four other future Hall of Famers. Gehrig played first base in galoshes while holding an umbrella in his throwing hand.

The ballpark lured such itinerant entertainers as the Bloomer Girls, the Chicago American Giants, and the House of David, a team sponsored by a religious sect whose members wore unshorn hair. Players took the field with beards down to their bellies. On July 3, 1931, a game billed as the first to be played at night in Canada and west of the Mississippi was played at the park. The light fixtures cost $8,000.

The local professional minor leagues faltered after the First World War, not to be revived until the late 1930s. Brown launched the semi-pro Senior City League at his park, with teams sponsored by a local clothier, a distiller, and a transport company. Arrows, Home Gas, Arnold & Quigley, and others had their devoted fans, as did the Asahi, a team of Japanese Canadians that won respect for their clever style of baseball.

Norm “Bananas” Trasolini, Billy Adshead, Johnny Nestman, and Coleman “Coley” Hall became Vancouver household names, as did pitcher Ernie Kershaw, a teacher known as “The Professor,” “The Master Mathematician,” and “The Slinging Schoolmaster.” Kershaw later pitched for the Vancouver Capilanos, who made their home at the ballpark, renamed Capilano Stadium, from 1939 until 1951, at which point they moved to a new ballpark of the same name in the lee of Little Mountain.

The old ballpark was knocked down to make way for an on-ramp for the Granville Street Bridge, a rich history literally overshadowed by concrete and blacktop. Brown had to twice rebuild his old wooden stadium, in 1926 and 1945. “His ball parks kept burning down on him,” sportswriter Clancy Loranger said.20 That he kept baseball on the entertainment calendar in a sometimes indifferent city was proof both of his tenacity and his penny-pinching. “He could squeeze a nickel as well as anybody,” recalled sports reporter Jim Kearney, “and he had to.”21

To put it simply, Bob Brown was cheap. He sort of obeyed a league dictate that the umpire be given a dozen balls at the start of each game. Brown’s daily supply included six fresh balls – and six scuffed balls. He encouraged street urchins to retrieve fouls that flew out of the park. The reward for their shagging? Free admission for what remained of the game.

Still, Brown could be a soft touch. In 1928 he bought a train ticket to Eastern Canada for a frail-looking schoolboy who wished to compete at the Olympic trials as a sprinter. It proved money well spent when Percy Williams later returned from Amsterdam with two Olympic Gold medals. Brown was 77 when he became president of the Western International League in 1953. His single year as boss is notable for his hiring of an up-and-coming umpire by the name of Emmett Ashford, who went on to become in 1966 the first African American to officiate in the major leagues.

Brown went into semiretirement at the end of the season, having spent more than a half-century in baseball. He returned to action to lobby for Vancouver as a new home for the Oakland Oaks. A Pacific Coast League franchise had long been his dream. During the Second World War, he had gone to Sacramento with satchels of cash to try to purchase the team. Instead, local interests managed to raise enough money to keep the club in California. Brown subsequently always referred to his failure as the great disappointment of his life.

The Oaks moved to Vancouver and became the Mounties for the 1956 season. Brown was made public-relations director for the inaugural season. He was also put in charge of a youth program. He insisted plenty of youngsters in British Columbia could make careers in professional baseball, even though the province had graduated only a handful of talents in the past. It would take many years before his prediction came true, and homegrown talents like Larry Walker, Jason Bay, and Jeff Francis put the province on baseball’s map.

Brown died on June 21, 1962, of ventricular fibrillation, an irregular heartbeat. He was survived by the former Sarah Jean Campion, a nurse whom he had married in 1933. He passed five days short of their 29th wedding anniversary. They had no children. He was buried at Ocean View Cemetery in Burnaby, just east of Vancouver.

The Vancouver Sun greeted his death with the headline: “City Loses Mr. Baseball.”22 The Province replied: “Local baseball will not forget Bob Brown.”23 The Mounties folded after the 1962 season, and pro baseball disappeared from Vancouver for two seasons, as though in mourning for the man they called Mr. Baseball.

For so important a sporting figure in Canada’s third-largest city, Brown and his legacy have been little celebrated. He was posthumously named an inaugural inductee into the British Columbia Sports Hall of Fame (1966), and he was named to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame at St. Marys, Ontario, in 1989. Among the few honors he received in his lifetime was being the first named to the Vancouver Baseball Hall of Fame in 1960. The hall consists of a plaque inside Nat Bailey Stadium, as the second Capilano Stadium was renamed in 1978. The Nat, as it is known, is named after the founder of the White Spot restaurant chain who owned the Mounties for several years. Bailey got his start as a restaurateur and baseball entrepreneur in the 1920s by flogging peanuts and hot dogs at Brown’s Athletic Park. He was called Caruso Nat for his singalong vendor’s pitch delivered in a high tenor: “A loaf of bread, a pound of meat, and all the mustard you can eat!”24

A street leading to the park is known as Clancy Loranger Way, a worthy tribute to the indefatigable baseball writer who chronicled the sport for decades. Before his death, Loranger promoted the idea of placing a plaque in honor of Brown in center field, like at Yankee Stadium. As of 2022 it remained just an idea. The city in which he spent more than a half-century promoting baseball has no permanent memorial to its greatest baseball citizen.

In 2008 the Vancouver Canadians minor-league team unveiled a new mascot, a 6-foot-8 plush character called Bob Brown Bear, who is popular with children. He is cuddly and huggable, two attributes not usually associated with his real-life namesake.

Notes

1 J. Newton Colver, “Took Spokane Money to Make Real Ball Town out of Vancouver,” Spokane (Washington) Spokesman-Review, July 29, 1912: 30.

2 “Five Spokane Players to Wear Vancouver uniform,” Vancouver Daily Province, January 15, 1910: 10.

3 Bob Brown, “A Little Bit High and Mighty at 25,” BC Magazine, The Province, July 6, 1957: 4.

4 “Personals,” Notre Dame Scholastic, May 21, 1910: 526.

5 Brown, “A Little Bit High and Mighty at 25.”

6 A.P. Garvey, “Not All the Macks Are in the Majors,” The Sporting News, March 8, 1917: 5.

7 Roscoe Fawcett, “Northwestern League,” Spalding’s Official Athletic Library Baseball Guide, March 1911 (New York: American Sports Publishing Co., 1911), 317.

8 “Bob Brown Suffers Nervous Breakdown in Vancouver,” Spokane Chronicle, December 31, 1910: 14.

9 “Barn Burned at Blencoe,” Sioux City (Iowa) Journal, January 2, 1891: 1.

10 Andy Lytle, “Baseball Days: Chapter II,” Vancouver Sun, March 6, 1930: 15.

11 John Mackie, “This Day in History: June 21, 1962,” Vancouver Sun, June 21, 2013: 2.

12 Tom Hawthorn, “‘I Was Never Accused of Lack of Life,'” in Mark Armour, ed., Rain Check: Baseball in the Pacific Northwest (Cleveland: SABR, 2006), 28.

13 Eric Whitehead, “Fanfare” [column], The Province, July 5, 1956:13.

14 Bob Brown, “It’s a Great Old Life, by Jingo!,” BC Magazine, The Province, June 29, 1957: 3.

15 Brown, “It’s a Great Old Life, by Jingo!”

16 “Mrs. Robert Brown Secures Divorce,” Tacoma Daily Ledger, February 7, 1909: 22.

17 Hawthorn.

18 “Aspires to Be a Magnate,” The Sporting News, October 29, 1908: 8.

19 “Brown Gets New Baseball Park,” Spokane Chronicle, June 13, 1912: 9.

20 Hawthorn.

21 Hawthorn.

22 Dick Beddoes, “City Loses Mr. Baseball,” Vancouver Sun, June 22, 1962: 21.

23 Clancy Loranger, “Local Baseball Will Not Forget Bob Brown,” The Province, June 23, 1962: 17.

24 “Bleacher Briefs,” Daily Province, June 13, 1925: 23.

Earl “Flat” Chase, ca. 1947-1954. (Archives and Special Collections, Leddy Library, University of Windsor)

Earl “Flat” Chase (1913 – 1954) was skilled as a batter, pitcher, catcher, and any field position he was asked to play. Chase was nicknamed Flat for his running style, and his skills on the field and charismatic athleticism earned him a reputation as one of the most exciting players to watch in Southwestern Ontario in the 1930s, ’40s, and ’50s. He is perhaps best known for outpitching Phil Marchildon in the 1934 Ontario Baseball Amateur Association championship series and thus helping his team, the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, defeat Penetanguishene. The Chatham Coloured All-Stars were the first Black team to win this provincial series.

Chase was born on August 16, 1913, in North Buxton, Ontario, a community founded in 1849 by and for Black settlers, many of whom were former slaves. Chase was one of nine children born to George Chase, a laborer, and Elva Gambril. His siblings were Arthur, Viola, Lloyd, Harold, Edith, Richard, Ileen, and Ione. Early in his life, Earl moved with his family to Windsor, Ontario, across the river from Detroit. The Chases lived in the McDougall Street corridor, the center of Windsor’s traditional Black neighborhood and business district. The Chases’ house was on Mercer Street, which was the eastern edge of Wigle Park, the geographic and social heart of the McDougall Street corridor. The park offered a range of social and recreational facilities, including a baseball diamond.

Chase spent most of his days playing baseball, honing his skills, watching and then competing against the many teams that visited from the Windsor-Essex and Chatham-Kent regions, as well as from Detroit. Chase’s eldest son, Earl Jr., reflected that his father “grew up in the park across the street.”1 The McDougall Street corridor was less than five miles from downtown Detroit, and the Windsor newspapers of the 1930s document a steady flow of regional Black baseball teams into Wigle Park.2 These teams included the Saginaw Michigan Colored Baseballers (1930), the Ecorse Colored Giants (1930 and 1936), the Hamtramck Colored Stars (1931), the Philadelphia Colored Giants (1931), the Wolverine Colored Stars (1933), Quinn’s Colored Stars of Detroit (1935 and 1939), and the Detroit Colored Stars (1936), among others. It has proved difficult to locate formal documentation about these teams, but it is highly probable that they were not part of formal leagues, but rather informally organized pickup teams with crossover players playing exhibition games against teams around the area.3

Around the age of 15, Chase started playing for church league teams in both Windsor and Detroit. While there appears to be no extant record of these games, it is safe to assume that in playing for church teams in Detroit, Chase was regularly playing with and against a wide range of Black baseball players, some of whom likely played on more formalized Negro Leagues teams in and around Detroit. It is also likely that playing with and against such teams in Detroit helped push the young Chase’s innate skills to the next level.

In 1933 the Windsor newspapers document Chase playing for the Windsor Stars, along with another future Chatham Coloured All-Star, Ferguson Jenkins Sr.4 It may have been through playing for the Stars at Wigle Park that Chase and Jenkins got to know Wilfred “Boomer” Harding and his brother Len Harding from Chatham.5 It’s not surprising that in 1933, when the All-Stars were looking for talent to round out their team for the Chatham City League playoffs, they sought out Chase.

A story in the August 24, 1933, Chatham Daily News describes how “Chase[,] a hurler from Windsor who has been working in the Riverside league,” had signed on to play with the All-Stars.6 The All-Stars would go on to win the Chatham City League’s Wanless Trophy that year, and Chase’s contributions on the mound were a large part of the team’s success. Describing the final game of the series, the Chatham Daily News writes, “It was simply a case of too much Chase, who worked on the mound in both games.”7 Chase would stay in Chatham for the rest of his life, playing for a number of teams in and around Chatham.

The All-Stars’ home field, Stirling Park, was not unlike Wigle Park in that it was located in the heart of Chatham’s predominantly Black neighborhood. Like the McDougall Street area, the East End has a long-standing tradition of baseball. Most of the Black teams prior to the 1930s were informal teams like the Chatham Giants from the 1920s, who played some league games but also pickup and exhibition games at church homecomings and other weekend events. In 1932 a group of young players from the East End formed a team that, with the assistance of Archie Stirling, a neighborhood business owner and local baseball advocate, would be formally recognized in 1933 as the Stars and later be known as the Chatham Coloured All-Stars. Most of the players grew up in the East End and lived within a few blocks of the ball diamond, and hundreds of residents would turn out to watch baseball on summer evenings and weekends.

The crowd who showed up for the All-Stars’ season opener on May 17, 1934, would have seen that Chase’s 1933 playoff performance was not a fluke but rather indicative of the career he would have in Chatham. Playing second base for the first four innings and then pitching the final three innings, Chase is listed in the box score as getting one run and one hit. In the second inning, Chase turned a 4-3 double play, “nipping what appeared to be a start of a rally in the bud.”8 Of his pitching, Chatham Daily News sportswriter Jack Calder commented, “Chase went to the mound in the last three frames and effectively checked any intentions the Duns might have had to fatten their batting averages by allowing only one hit.”9 This one article hints at why Chase would go on to become a Chatham legend: He was a formidable pitcher, fielder, and hitter.

As the 1934 season progressed, Chase showed Chatham fans just what kind of a powerhouse he would become, and the local newspaper recounted the details of his on-field skills. On June 12, Calder wrote:

“With Chase hurling three-hit ball over the abbreviated route, the Stars took advantage of seven errors made by the opposition and seven hits allowed by Belanger to win going away. Chase himself led in the hitting attack with two doubles and a single in four times at bat, while his battery mate, Washington, accounted for two of his team’s other hits. Belanger and Depew worked on the mound for the Braggs and turned in good games but the free-swinging bats of Chase and Washington led to their defeat.”¹⁰

In this game and the game on June 20, Chases contributions were as both an intimidating pitcher and a strong batter: “Chase worked the entire game [against] the Duns and allowed only seven hits while striking out ten. Wright and Thompson opposed him, the former being chased after two and two-thirds innings. Boomer Harding and Chase each accounted for three of the Stars’ safe blows.”11 It is difficult to ascertain precisely how many games Chase’s pitching won for the All-Stars since stats for ERA, wins, saves, and losses were not recorded. One thing that is certain, however, is that much of the success of the 1934 team was reliant upon Chase’s ability to pitch hard throughout the games, his unstoppable bat, and his competitive spirit.

Throughout the 1934 season, Chase would be described in phrases such as the “smoke-ball artist of the Chatham Nine”12 and “the speed ball demon.”13 By September of 1934, Jack Calder of the Chatham Daily News would call Chase the “mainstay of the All-Stars’ pitching staff” and “one of the hardest hitters in amateur ball.”14 Teammate Boomer Harding commented on Chase at the plate. He

“… could hit a ball low and he could hit it high … there’s no weak spot. He could hit the ball where it was pitched. If they thought, well, we’ll pitch him outside, he’d hit it hard, he’d hit it out of the park, in left field just as easy as in Stirling which was small. But he’d still hit it further out of the park than a right hand batter would hit it out. So he was strong in any field and he’d hit it like it was pitched.”¹⁵

Chase not only awed spectators with his skills, he was also entertaining to watch as this notice in the Chatham Daily News reveals: “Flat Chase does something of a rumba every time he goes to bat, not quite the same as Dick Porter’s classical toe dance. Chase’s little act should have been set to the music of Ferde Grofé’s ‘Grand Canyon Suite.’ It’s good but there’s something weird about it. But how Chase can leather that apple. He is the hardest hitter in amateur baseball in this part of the province. That’s covering some territory.”16 For the rest of his life and beyond, his skills as a player would be talked about with superlatives and awe.

On the field, the All-Stars were challenged by some strong opponents, and they became known for fast, exciting, and occasionally aggressive play. Boomer Harding’s son Blake offered this description of the team: “And when it got nasty, they were just as nasty and aggressive and tough as anybody else out there. And if you wanted to play to hurt one of them … they gave what they got.”17 Off the field, the team also met challenges. The farther the team got from Chatham, the more they encountered hostile crowds and difficulties finding restaurants and hotels that would serve and house them. In the 1934 final series in and against Penetanguishene, the team could not find accommodations in town and had to stay in a neighboring town. In Canada discrimination based on race was not as fully codified as it was in the United States, but it was still deeply pervasive.

Sometimes the All-Stars’ athleticism, skill, and exciting style of play would win over hostile crowds. Other times having a Black team beat the local team led to events that the players remembered in vivid detail for the rest of their lives. In 1980 Kingsley Terrell, longtime teammate of Chase, recalled how

“… there was never a place that we played baseball that we couldn’t go back and play again, except one place and that was in West Lorne. We beat West Lorne and they run us out, they run us out of the town. They had clubs, and hoes, and rakes, and everything else. We got everything all packed up before the game was over because we knew there was something going to happen anyways. So, we just got the game over. When that last man was out we all got in the cars and took off and we never went back. And we couldn’t go back to play ball there no more.”¹⁸

In 1984 fellow All-Star Ross Talbot shared his memories of West Lorne: “One time in West Lorne we caused a small riot. … Boomer was going home and knocked down their catcher and people snatched boards off the fence, but we came out of that all right.”19 “As for heckling,” Talbot reflected, “we just had to take it. … At that time we had to live with it.”20 In the same interview Talbot recalled playing in Strathroy: “They wrote on the sidewalks, ‘the n___s are coming’ and the ‘black clouds are moving in,'” Talbot said, a tear coming to his eye.21 “That was the worst thing we ever came across.” An interview with Ferguson Jenkins Sr. suggests that Chase specifically was targeted in some of the things written and drawn on the sidewalks.22 In their interviews with the Breaking the Colour Barrier project,23 however, Earl Chase Jr. and Horace Chase said their father never really talked about those memories. Instead, they said, his love for the game always won out over whatever threats or hostilities he encountered.24

Chase, Boomer and Len Harding, Guoy Ladd, and Kingsley Terrell formed a core group of players who stayed with the Chatham Coloured All-Stars until they disbanded in 1939. Chatham fielded a competitive team for the remainder of the 1930s but they never won another OBAA championship. The All-Stars made it to the OBAA finals in 1939 but withdrew when conflicts regarding payment of expenses and location of the final games could not be resolved. Although the print record is vague about these controversies, oral histories have suggested there were racial undertones to the unfair travel expectations put on the All-Stars, and the lack of proper compensation for expenses. When the 1940 baseball season began, World War II was underway and several All-Stars had enlisted to serve.

Chase remained in Chatham during the war. By this time, he and his wife, Julia (Black) Chase, whom he married in November 1934, had four children, Earl Jr., Horace, Marilyn, and Gladys. Chase worked for the City of Chatham’s sanitation department and eventually was hired in a supervisory role. Work and family were a priority for Chase, but so was baseball. As Horace Chase recalled, “most of the time my dad actually played ball, tell you the truth. His love of the game was phenomenal because that was his sport. In fact, when all four of us children was born he wasn’t there for the birth, he was playing ball. That’s how much he played.”25

The Chases were a baseball family, Horace commented: “We weren’t what you’d call a much outside baseball family. We liked our baseball.”26 Chase “didn’t get into soccer or hockey, golf or any of those things. I think because my dad was used to working, and times were tough. And like I say, having four young kids with mouths to feed. I think that was his only thing, was to play ball. Live to play ball, eat, sleep, and enjoy life.”27 The centrality of baseball is a recurrent theme in Chase’s sons’ descriptions of their father’s life.

As was the case when he lived in Windsor, Chase played baseball for a range of community and regional teams, playing whenever and wherever he could. In 1938 and 1939 Chase appears to have played with the London Majors, a predominantly White team in the Intercounty Baseball League, as well as with the Chatham Coloured All-Stars. In 1944 Chase was a key part of the London Majors’ winning the Canadian Sandlot Congress Championship. In 1943-1945, there are records of Chase playing for the Chatham Arcades, who won the OBA Intermediate Championship in 1944. In 1946 a number of former All-Stars reunited to play for the Taylor A-Cs. There were enough All-Stars on the team that the Chatham Daily News‘s sports page had a headline that said, “Chatham Coloured Stars Return Under New Name.”28

From 1947 until his death in 1954, he also played with the Chatham Shermans and Chatham Hadleys. Very little formal documentation from those leagues exists today but the Chase family scrapbook documents his career, with notes and mostly undated clippings. In the scrapbook, it suggests that Chases batting average ranged from .447 while playing for the Shermans in 1947 to .525 in the City League to .786 partway through an Industrial Baseball League season. My own calculations for all the games Chase played in 1934 have him batting .488 in 127 at-bats.29 No statistics were kept for his pitching.

In the absence of official statistics, much of what we know of Chase comes from newspapers and oral histories. One of the recurrent stories of Chase is that over the course of his career he would hold the record for hitting the longest home-run balls in Sarnia, Strathroy, Aylmer, Welland, Milton, and Chatham. Whether these are official records or not, those who saw Chase play are unwavering in their description of him as a fierce competitor. All-Stars scorekeeper Orville Wright commented, “Flat hit one in Chatham I don’t think they’ve found yet. It cleared the center field fence at Stirling Park, [it] went over the trees and a house on Park Street, cleared the road and the houses on the other side and landed in a back yard on Wellington Street.”30 In 1980, King Terrell described Chase’s skills in this way:

“He could run. He was a power hitter. He could hit home runs just about as easy as the rest of us could hit singles and doubles and triples. Because at Stirling Park it didn’t seem like it took him very much of a swing to get a double over [by] the right field fence, or a home run over the center field fence. He was a spray-hitter. That means that you can hit a ball in any park over the field.

Nine times out of ten if he hit a ball south, the ball would be going direct over right field because he was a power hitter. A spray-hitter means that you can spray a ball in the outfield. Because that’s when you don’t know where it’s going to go. He was one of those kinds of guys: you didn’t know where the ball was going to go. It’s the same as his pitching. Because lots of times, Donise would ask him for a fast ball and he’s liable to throw him a curve. And ask him for a curve and he’s liable to throw you a fast ball, which I know all about – his fast balls and his curves – because he darn near killed three of us in one night.”³¹

Virtually every retrospective of the All-Stars’ 1934 victory features commentary like that about the legend of Flat Chase.

With all the talk about Chase’s undeniable talent, the question is always whether he could have played major-league baseball. While we will never know if Chase thought he could have played in the major leagues, everyone who saw him play was convinced he could have had there not been a color barrier. Teammate Don Washington told the Chatham Daily News that “Chase should have been a big league pitcher”32 and King Terrell told an interviewer, “Flat Chase, he could’ve been in the big leagues. There was not a better second baseman around than he was. And he was a good pitcher. God-all knows that there was nobody around in the country that could hit a ball any better or any further than he could.”33 Archie Stirling – frequently referred to as Chatham’s Mr. Baseball – wrote in 1960: “Today if Flat Chase were as good as he was when he first came to Chatham, the Detroit team would pay him thirty thousand dollars to sign with them.”34 Whether Chase could have made it to the big leagues is, of course, conjecture. Nevertheless, it is imperative that we consider the impact of the color barrier on the careers, lives, and legacies of players like Earl “Flat” Chase, and on the ways in which Canadian baseball history is written.

Notes

1 “Interview With Earl Chase Jr. and Shyla Chase,” Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, http://cdigs.uwindsor.ca/BreakingColourBarrier/items/show/722; “Interview with Horace Chase,” Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, http://cdigs.uwindsor.ca/BreakingColourBarrier/items/show/725.

2 I am grateful for Linda Bunn’s research assistance in locating these notices in the Windsor-Essex County newspapers.

3 The mention of these teams in the Windsor papers might help further what is known about the rich and active Black baseball tradition in the Detroit area in the 1930s, and offer new avenues of inquiry into the ways in which the influence of Negro League baseball may have moved into Canada.

4 Ferguson Jenkins Sr.’s son is Hall of Famer Ferguson Jenkins Jr.

5 Box scores from the Windsor newspapers show the Hardings and other Chatham players competing at Wigle Park against each other.

6 “R.G. Funs and Stars Will Open Championship Series,” Chatham Daily News, August 24, 1933: 13.

7 “Stars Win Wanless Trophy in Two Straight Games,” Chatham Daily News, October 10, 1933: 8.

8 Jack Calder, “1934 Inaugural Indicates Real Battle for Honors,” Chatham Daily News, May 18, 1934: 11.

9 Calder, “1934 Inaugural Indicates Real Battle for Honors.”

10 Jack Calder, “Braggs Defeated in City Baseball Games Last Night,” Chatham Daily News, June 12, 1934: 11.

11 Jack Calder, “Duns Defeated in a Hard Fought Game Last Evening,” Chatham Daily News, June 21, 1934, section 2: 5.

12 Jack Calder, “Chase to Be on Hill for Chathamites,” Chatham Daily News, July 20, 1934: 11.

13 Jack Calder, “Sarnia Red Sox Beaten at Home in OBAA Contest,” Chatham Daily News, September 10, 1934: 8.

14 Jack Calder, “Stars Begin OBAA Playdowns Thursday,” Chatham Daily News, September 5, 1934: 11.

15 Dan Kelly, “Interview with Wilfred Boomer Harding,” Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, http://cdigs.uwindsor.ca/BreakingColourBarrier/items/show/719. Accessed July 15, 2021.

16 Jack Calder, “Stars Will Draw Them,” Chatham Daily News, September 12, 1934: 11.

17 “Interview With Blake and Pat Harding (Part 1),” Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, http://cdigs.uwindsor.ca/BreakingColourBarrier/items/show/716.

18 Interview with Kingsley Terrell by Wanda Milburn, Multicultural History Society of Ontario, August 6, 1980.

19 Bill Reddick, “From the Bullpen: Chatham Colored All-Stars,” Chatham Daily News, October 4, 1984: 9.

20 Reddick.

21 Reddick.

22 Interview with Ferguson Jenkins Sr. by Vivian Chavez and Wanda Milburn, Multicultural History Society of Ontario, October 3, 1980.

23 Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars is a website that tells the story of the Chatham Coloured All-Stars. It features oral histories with players’ families, newspaper clippings from the 1934 season, player biographies, and curricular resources for K-12 teachers. Breaking the Colour Barrier is a partnership between the Harding family, the University of Windsor’s Department of History, the Leddy Library’s Centre for Digital Scholarship, and the Chatham Sports Hall of Fame. It was generously funded by an Ontario Trillium Foundation grant in 2016-2017.

24 “Interview with Earl Chase Jr. and Shyla Chase.”

25 “Interview With Horace Chase,” Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, http://cdigs.uwindsor.ca/BreakingColourBarrier/items/show/725.

26 “Interview with Horace Chase.”

27 “Interview with Horace Chase.”

28 Doug Scurr, Chatham Daily News, June 12, 1946, np.

29 Elsewhere, Chase’s average has been listed as .525 for 1934 but the source for this figure isn’t clear. My calculations are based on every game for which I could find a box score in 1934, including exhibition games, various league games, and playoff games.

30 “Chatham’s First Champs Played the Game for Fun,” London Free Press, October 20, 1967, np.

31 Interview with Kingsley Terrell.

32 Bill Reddick, “’34 Champions Denied Opportunity in Pro Ball,” Chatham Daily News, October 10, 1984: 9.

33 Interview with Kingsley Terrell.

34 Archie Stirling, “A Brief History of Baseball,” in “Official Program: Chatham’s Victoria Day (1960), Breaking the Colour Barrier: Wilfred “Boomer” Harding & the Chatham Coloured All-Stars, http://cdigs.uwindsor.ca/BreakingColourBarrier/items/show/957.

Bob Emslie, National League umpire and newlywed in 1893. (Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum)

Robert Daniel Kean Emslie, the least-known famous umpire in baseball history, made his earthly debut on January 27, 1859, in Guelph, Ontario, the fourth son and seventh of eight children born to Alexander and Mary Graye,1 immigrants from Aberdeenshire, Scotland. (Emslie is a Scottish habitational surname meaning “woodland clearing.”) With his last breath on April 26, 1943, a lifelong love affair with baseball that began at age 6 as a batboy came to an end, and with it a career by any standard one of the most extraordinary in baseball history. He had spent 54 of his 84 years, the years 1882 through 1935, in professional baseball, six as a player and 49 as an umpire,2 46 in the major leagues, calling em for 35 seasons then serving 11 years as umpire supervisor. Solid in stature at 5-feet-11 and 180 pounds, Emslie was a gifted athlete, excelling in sports requiring very different skills: major-league baseball pitcher, international champion in trapshooting and curling, and late in life an accomplished golfer and bowler.

Bob was not to the manor born, his father a tailor, but he was raised in the hotbed of Canadian baseball, as a youth caught up in the diamond exploits of championship teams, first the Guelph Maple Leafs, then the Tecumsehs after moving to London in 1868.3 He started playing amateur ball in the outfield but, impressed by Fred Goldsmith’s “skew ball” (i.e. curveball), took to the box. In 1879 he began pitching for pay with the Harriston Brown Stockings, employed as head clerk of the leading hotel in town, and paid $1.50 to $1.75 a game.4 In 1881 he joined the St. Thomas Atlantics, and while he was barnstorming with the team through Eastern American states in 1882, his sharp breaking curveball so impressed the Camden Merritt of the Interstate Association that they tendered his first professional contract, $150 a month. When the Merritt folded in July 1883, Emslie reached the major leagues with Baltimore of the American Association. His devastating curveball portending a brilliant career, the right-hander in 1884 started and finished 50 games for the sixth-place Orioles, winning 17 of his first 21 games, and ending the season 32-17 with one tie. Posting a 2.75 ERA in 4551/3 innings, he struck out 264 while walking only 88. His major-league career ended abruptly the next year in August due to a shoulder injury, probably a SLAP tear,5 that began in 1884 and worsened while he was pitching in New Orleans during the winter of 1885. He later recalled, “I suddenly felt a stinging sensation in my shoulder. This thing went on for some time, until no matter what kind of a ball I threw, it gave me great pain, and then I knew my arm was dead.”6 Although that season’s 3-14 record and 4.71 ERA reduced his majorleague career record to a mediocre 44-44 and 3.19 ERA, 362 strikeouts against 165 walks evidenced his once-promising career.

Comeback efforts in the minors, with Toronto of the International League in 1886 and Savannah of the Southern Association in 1887, failed, but his baseball career inadvertently resumed on June 30, 1887, when he was summoned from the stands to call a game in Toronto after the scheduled umpire fell ill. Admitting “it was purely a matter of accident how I came to follow umpiring as a means of livelihood,”7 he umpired with the International League for the rest of that season and the next two, advancing in 1890 to the majors with the American Association. He began the 1891 season in the Western Association, then returned to the majors in August with the National League, where he remained for 45 years. By then a proven career umpire, in 1893 he married Helena Ward, with whom he had two children, Helen Elizabeth (“Kitty”) in 1895 and Robert John (“Jack”) in 1900.

Toiling during the three most contentious and difficult decades umpires ever faced, from the violent, umpiring-baiting 1890s through the Deadball Era, Emslie survived injury from thrown and batted balls, physical and verbal assaults from players and fans, and criticism in the press to become the respected, even revered, titular “dean of umpires.” He was the acknowledged master of the rule book, fellow arbiter Cy Rigler declaring that Emslie “knows more about the baseball rules than all the other National League umpires together.”8

Bob performed the common aspects of umpiring in an uncommon way, being respected by players and managers alike for his temperament, style in handling disputes, and ability to “run” the games in an efficient and orderly manner. Of his work in the turbulent 1890s, Jacob Morse of the Boston Herald asserted: “Undoubtedly he has got to be the best umpire who ever handled a game. Umpires there have been who have been as good in the mere minutiae of the game, but none to equal him when it comes to discipline, tact, personal habits, temperance, reliability and ability.”9 Christy Mathewson agreed, regarding Emslie as “one of the finest umpires that ever broke into the League,” “the sort of umpire who rules by the bond of good fellowship rather than by the voice of authority.”10 Reflecting upon his career, Emslie said: “I always got along very well with the players and I don’t think I ever had an enemy in the game.”11

Emslie understood that kicking was part of the game: “Of course it is inevitable that players will protest when a decision is given that seems to them erroneous. Umpires make mistakes the same as other people and it is only natural that there should be a protest if the player gets the small end of a decision, but I will put him out of the game just as soon as I feel that he is talking back too much or uses language which he should not use.”12 His first ejection came on July 21, 1892, the Browns’ Jack Crooks; his second came two years later when he tossed the New York Giants’ Jack Doyle and fined him $5 for “a series of foul names unfit for publication.”13 On May 19 at the Polo Grounds, he had the distinction of giving viciously vituperative John McGraw his first ejection as Giants manager for “raucously expressing his disagreement.”14 Being a former player, Emslie understood the competitive spirit, so typically each season he recorded the fewest fines and ejections on the staff. While the number of his ejections increased from 1901 to 1910, during his career Emslie tossed players far less frequently (once every 26 games) than did his National League contemporaries.15

Players so respected Emslie for his ability and integrity that they would come to his aid in time of need. In an 1899 game, when irate Brooklyn fans jumped onto the field and mobbed him after he had called Tom Daly out at home plate in a 2-1 loss to Boston, Daly and Bill Dahlen shielded him from the crowd with their bats.16 And in 1907, when fans at the Polo Grounds poured onto the field bent on assault, Giants pitcher Joe McGinnity ran from the dugout, and threw an arm around Bob, “occasionally warding off a stray wallop that some angry fan aimed at the umpires head” until police arrived to restore order.17

Team owners also appreciated his long and distinguished service. In recognition of his 25 years of service, the league in August 1916 honored him with “Emslie Day” in Brooklyn, the ceremonies replete with tributes and gifts, including from league President John Tener 25 double-eagle gold coins worth $20 each, and a diamond stickpin from his fellow umpires.18

He called his last game on September 28, 1924, leaving the field with numerous major-league umpiring records. At 65 years and 8 months the oldest ever to umpire a game, he had worked the most seasons, 35, and the most games, 4,231, and achieved numerous “firsts”: the first umpire to work four decades, to call 2,000, 3,000, and 4,000 games, to be given a celebratory “day,” and to be appointed staff supervisor. In 1935 he retired with three service milestones: 45 consecutive years with one league, 46 years in the majors, and 54 in professional baseball – all longer than anyone else in history. With Bill Klem, he still holds the record for the fastest game in baseball history, 51 minutes on September 28, 1919, and until 1969 he had worked the most no-hitters, eight, in the National League.

He had also achieved two personal distinctions: the first Canadian full-time major-league umpire, and the first and only major leaguer to wear a toupee during his career. It has been said that Emslie’s hair loss was due to the stress of umpiring during the tumultuous 1890s, but it actually began in 1885 in Baltimore, and was caused by genetics. Vanity was not the only reason for donning a toupee. It was commonplace for men in the late nineteenth century to regard hair loss as a sign of decreased manliness, and with masculinity accentuated among athletes, it was understandable for an authority figure like an umpire to cover baldness. Although never, as has often been claimed, being nicknamed Wig, he was extremely sensitive about baldness, brooking no references to his hairpiece. He took “a good deal” from Jack Doyle until Doyle suggested Emslie get “a hair restorer,” a comment that resulted in Doyle’s being escorted from the grounds by a policeman.19 And when John McGraw shouted in a voice loud enough to be heard by spectators that Emslie should get a box of hairpins to fasten his toupee, the umpire, embarrassed by and irate at “one of the most tragic, brutal cases of ‘show up’ he had ever experienced,” ejected the Giants manager for five days and hit him with a sizable fine.20

Unfortunately, Bob Emslie is most famously (or infamously) remembered for his role (or nonrole) in the game between the New York Giants and Chicago Cubs at the Polo Grounds on September 23, 1908, the so-called “Merkle Boner” game, unfairly criticized for failing to notice that the Giants’ Fred Merkle failed to reach second base after the apparent game-winning hit. Emslie, who said he “had to fall to the ground to keep [the batted] ball from hitting me,” had properly been looking to see if the batter-runner reached first base, as that concluded the play. Watching to see if Merkle touched second was the home-plate umpires duty, so Hank O’Day properly made the call that resulted in a tie game, replayed at the end of the season for the first time in major-league history.21

Because of the Merkle incident, John McGraw dubbed Emslie “Blind Bob.” Emslie, an accomplished trapshooter, took offense. Several stories circulated as to how he demonstrated his visual acuity to the Giants manager. One version is that he showed up one afternoon during a Giants practice with a rifle – not to shoot the Giants manager, but to demonstrate his eyesight. After placing a dime on the pitcher’s rubber, he retreated behind home plate, took aim, and sent the coin “spinning into the outfield.” Another version says he put the dime on a matchbox on second base. On another occasion, he reportedly challenged McGraw to a contest – shooting at apples set on second base. McGraw declined, sarcastically quipping “Maybe you can see apples, but you can’t see baseballs.”22

Statistically, Emslie is firmly entrenched in the major-league record book with career totals that will likely never be surpassed. He is tied for fourth in number of seasons, 35, with five who umpired on four-man crews,23 and 16th with Al Barlick in games umpired with 4,231, the most by an umpire working only on two-man crews, and the most by a former major-league player. He also ranks fourth in home-plate games worked, 2,356,24 remarkable inasmuch as he spent 15 years umpiring only the bases.

More indicative than statistics of Emslie’s prominence as an umpire are the views of contemporaries who had first-hand knowledge of his umpiring. Honus Wagner ranked Emslie and Bill Klem “the ideal umpires” during his 20-year Hall of Fame career, 1897-1917, regarding Emslie “the greatest of all the umpires on base decisions.”25 Hall of Fame umpire Bill McGowan agreed, calling Emslie “the greatest base umpire of all time,” and thought Bill Klem and Emslie “the best umpiring team the game ever knew – Klem at the plate, Emslie on the bases.”26 Hall of Fame umpire Billy Evans considered Emslie “one of the greatest umpires the game ever produced.”27 Sportswriters, too, thought him “one of the greatest umpires of all time.”28 The first edition of Who’s Who in Major League Baseball said of Emslie: “Whenever old-time fans get together and start chattering about diamond immortals you’ll hear them paying tribute to Bob Emslie, who was one of the greatest of them all in the days of Hurst, O’Loughlin, Sheridan, O’Day and Tommy Connolly.”29

Famous in his day, Bob Emslie faded into historical obscurity owing to the lone omission in his long and distinguished career: He never umpired a World Series. He had umpired three Temple Cup series, baseball’s postseason showcase games in the 1890s, but beginning in 1905, the onset of hyperopia (farsightedness) led to increasing criticism of his calling pitches, and from 1910 to the end of his career he essentially umpired only the bases.30 Glasses would have corrected the problem, but it then was an unspoken rule that umpires not don spectacles, as it would be taken as an indication of deficient eyesight; the eyeglass-ceiling for umpires was not broken until 1956.

Immediately upon Emslie’s death, sportswriters and ex-National League President John Heydler called for his enshrinement in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. Only players were then deemed eligible for election, but in 1946 the Hall announced its Honor Rolls of Baseball, recognizing the significant contributions to the game of those precluded from official induction. Bob Emslie was one of 11 umpires selected.31 Beginning with Bill Klem and Tommy Connolly in 1953, 10 umpires have been inducted into the Hall, Emslie’s career statistics equal to or greater than most.32

Interred next to his wife in Section 92 of the mausoleum in St. Thomas West Cemetery, Bob Emslie eventually, if posthumously, achieved baseball immortality, when he was elected in 1986 to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, and in 2004 to the Guelph Sports Hall of Fame as a player and umpire. And he is one of only three umpires for whom a baseball facility has been named.33 The lone survivor, Emslie Field in St. Thomas’s Pinafore Park, is a fitting living memorial to the achievements and contributions to baseball of Robert D. Emslie.

Notes

1 Graye, the traditional Scottish spelling, was subsequently rendered Gray.

2 In 1887 he both played his last game and umpired his first game.

3 David L. Bernard, “The Guelph Maple Leafs: A Cultural Indicator of Southern Ontario,” Ontario History, vol. 84, no. 3 (September 1992), 1-23; Brian Martin, The Tecumsehs of the International Association: Canada’s First Major League Baseball Champions (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2015).

4 New York Sun, July 28, 1918; New York Times, April 29, 1943.

5 SLAP (Superior Labrum Anterior and Posterior) tears, labral tears of the cartilage where the humerus bone joins the scapula shoulder blade to stabilize the shoulder joint, are common in forceful movements of the arm above shoulder level, such as overhand pitching.

6 The Sporting News, February 1, 1896.

7 Robert D. Emslie, “Ramblings of an Umpire,” Baseball Magazine (November, 1908): 18.

8 Boston Globe, August 17, 1920. See also the Wilmington Evening Journal, August 2, 1920, and Vancouver Sun, August 22, 1920.

9 Undated 1897 Boston Herald article, Robert Emslie Collection, Elgin County Museum, St. Thomas, Ontario; Baltimore Sun, October 2, 1897.

10 Christy Mathewson, Pitching in a Pinch (New York: Putnam’s, 1912), 175.

11 Unidentified newspaper article, Emslie Collection.

12 Emslie, “Ramblings,” 18.

13 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 22, 1892; Sporting Life, June 23, 1894.

14 New York Sun, May 20, 1903; Lou Hernández, Manager of Giants: The Tactics, Temper and True Record of John McGraw (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2018), 33.

15 Bill Klem 346, Cy Rigler 272, Jack Sheridan 264, Tommy Connolly 261, Hank O’Day 238, and Jim Johnstone 208. Indeed, Deadball Era umpires, including Emslie, constituted 10 of the 12 with the most ejections. David W. Smith, Table 5, https://www.retrosheet.org/Research/SmithD/EjectionsThroughTheYears.pdf.

16 Brooklyn Daily Eagle, Brooklyn Citizen, Brooklyn Daily Times, and Brooklyn Times Union; New York Times, New York Tribune, New York Sun, New York World; Boston Globe; September 8 and 9; The Sporting News, September 9; Sporting Life, September 16, 1899.

17 New York World, May 21-22; New York Times, Chicago Tribune, Boston Globe, and Washington Post, May 22, 1907.

18 New York Times and New York Tribune, August 10 and 13, 1916; Brooklyn Daily Eagle and Boston Globe, August 13, 1916.

19 Baltimore Sun, and Washington Evening Star, July 30, 1897.

20 New York Tribune, May 26; Syracuse Post-Standard, May 27, 1908; Allen Sangree, “As the Umpire Sees Them,” Collier’s, Volume 41 (September 19, 1908): 23; William Patten, and Joseph Walker McSpadden, eds., The Book of Baseball: The National Game from the Earliest Days (New York: P.F. Collier & Son, 1911), 110.

21 David W. Anderson, More Than Merkle: A History of the Best and Most Exciting Baseball Season in Human History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), New York Times, September 24-25; New York Tribune, Chicago Tribune, September 24 and 27; New York Tribune, October 3; New York Evening World, October 5; and Sporting Life, October 17, 1908. For various historians’ views on the game, see the special Merkle edition of the SABR Deadball Era Committee newsletter, “The Inside Game,” vol. 8, no. 4 (September 23, 2008), at https://sabr.org/research/deadball-era-research-committee-newsletters/.

22 Raymond Schuessler, “You Can’t Kill the Umpire,” The American Legion Magazine (April 1976): 26; James M. Kahn, The Umpire Story (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953), 39.

23 He trails Joe West, 44 seasons (through 2021), and Bill Klem and Bruce Froemming, 37 seasons.

24 Retrosheet’s 2,357 includes him at the plate on April 17, 1917, but the Cincinnati Enquirer on April 18 specifically reports him calling plays at first base.

25 Washington Evening Star, December 24, 1923; John B. Kennedy, “The Flying Dutchman,” Collier’s, vol. 85, no. 15 (April 12, 1930): 81.

26 The Sporting News and the Wilmington News Journal, March 17; Wilmington Morning News, April 13, 1954.

27 Boston Globe, March 6, 1915.

28 Buffalo Morning Express, January 11, 1914; Pittsburgh Gazette, January 28, 1924.

29 Harold “Speed” Johnson, comp., Who’s Who in Major League Baseball (Chicago: Buxton Publishing, 1933), 448-449.

30 From 1910 to 1924, he worked the plate only 11 times, thrice in 1913 and 1918, and none in eight of those seasons.

31 Five managers, 11 executives, 12 sportswriters, and 11 umpires were chosen. The other umpires selected were Bill Klem, Tommy Connolly, Bill Dinneen, Billy Evans, John Gaffney, Tim Hurst, “Honest John” Kelly, Francis “Silk” O’Loughlin, Tom Lynch, and Jack Sheridan.

32 His 35 seasons as a regular member of the staff is second only to Klem’s 37, and at least a decade longer than four other enshrinees. That he umpired more games than five members of the Hall is the more noteworthy as he worked fully half of his seasons, 1890-1908, as a single umpire, the others on two-man crews.

33 The baseball field at the University of Kansas was named after Ernie Quigley, National League umpire from 1913 through 1938, who also briefly served (1944-1950) as the school’s athletics director. John Ducey Park in Edmonton, Alberta, honors an Edmonton baseball executive who had previously umpired amateur and minor league ball between 1931 and 1945. Money has since trumped tradition, both facilities having been renamed in honor of financial donors.

Defeat did not rest lightly on the mind of Englehart. He particularly disliked losing to Guelph, whose George Sleeman was a successful brewer, promoter of his town, and fiercely competitive driving force behind the Maple Leafs, Canada’s championship team from 1869 to 1875. The rivalry that developed between London and Guelph was something to behold. London was a city of about 18,000, while Guelph was a town less than half that size. But games played between the two cities attracted as many as 10,000 spectators, many of whom joined their teams on excursion trains for what was then a four-hour journey between the communities. This was at a time when visits by either club to Toronto or Detroit resulted in lopsided wins against those far bigger cities.

London and Guelph sometimes defeated touring professional clubs from Chicago, Boston, and St. Louis. Southwestern Ontario was the hotbed for baseball in Canada throughout the 1870s, with games having been played in the region since at least the late 1830s. Major professional teams knew this, and regularly scheduled games in Guelph and London during road trips through neighboring New York and Michigan, knowing they would draw good crowds and play competitive teams.

Jake Englehart has an important place in Canadian baseball history, although his baseball exploits are less well known than his pivotal role in Canada’s fledgling petroleum industry and his founding of the oil giant Imperial Oil. He also played a big part in opening Northern Ontario to development in the early 1900s, his success where others had failed resulting in a grateful community named after him. His achievements were many in business, philanthropy, politics, and railroading. When he died in Toronto, his funeral attracted headlines and attendance by many members of Canada’s business and political elite. In the end, his important contribution to Canadian baseball was overshadowed by his many other accomplishments.

Englehart was born on November 2, 1847, in Cleveland, Ohio, one of three children of Joel and Hannah Englehart. Joel was a clothier, with the firm Deckand and Englehart. When Jake was about 13, his father relocated the family to New York City, where he pursued business opportunities. In time, the young Englehart became a salesman for clothiers Sonneborn, Dryfoos and Company, and eventually a partner of company principals Solomon Sonneborn, Abraham M. Dryfoos, and Leopold Beringer. The company switched from the manufacture of clothing to the “rectifying” of whiskey, a term used for the bottling of distilled spirits. By the time of the Civil War, America had developed a strong thirst for alcohol, and Englehart and his partners quickly changed their focus to profit from that trend.

Most whiskey rectifiers purchased spirits from a variety of distillers, then filtered and blended the spirits to produce their own distinct brands. Some, however, were after quick money by blending small amounts of whiskey with flavoring and neutral grain spirits to produce a watered-down beverage they called “blended whiskey.”1

Consumption of alcohol in the United States had grown at an astonishing rate during the 1800s. By 1860, consumption had increased by 20 percent from 1850 alone, and it remained high during the Civil War. One factor in the increase was the desire for temporary escape from the economic, social, and political woes that plagued the country; another was increasing immigration from foreign lands where drinking was widespread, such as Germany and the British Isles, especially Ireland.2

Whiskey was often used to dull the pain of wounded soldiers during the Civil War and to cleanse their wounds. The conflict also saw the destruction of some distilleries, so that prices began to skyrocket. A black market for whiskey boomed, and more than 1,000 whiskey distillers and rectifiers were operating by 1863. To fund the Civil War, President Abraham Lincoln introduced the Revenue Act of 1862, which created an income tax and excise taxes on luxury items, including liquor and tobacco. Alcohol was taxed at 20 cents for each “proof gallon,” which initially generated $3.2 million a year in revenue for Washington. The tax was raised to $2 a gallon, producing $30 million in tax revenue annually.

This led to rampant moonshining and the creation of the “Whiskey Ring,” a criminal operation that underreported actual production and used bribes and blackmail to influence federal agents and shopkeepers. To combat such tax avoidance, the government reduced the tax to 70 cents a gallon, but the practice continued.3 Evidence suggests that the firm for which Englehart worked also participated in the widespread movement to dodge taxes.

For years, alcohol had also been widely used in illuminating lamps, but that market had gone flat with the growing use of kerosene derived from oil discovered in Pennsylvania and Ontario. Englehart’s partners were intrigued by what they thought presented a new opportunity for them, and assigned the young man to look into it. After all, the process to create whiskey was similar to that used to produce kerosene: simply add heat to a liquid to produce a distillate of much greater value.

Solomon Sonneborn, one of Englehart’s partners, had family members who had put some money into Canada’s oilfield based at Petrolia, Ontario. The city of London, little more than 35 miles to the east of Petrolia, had become the refining center for Petrolia and nearby Oil Springs in Lambton County. It was to London that Englehart was sent.

Meanwhile, the illicit practices of whiskey rectifiers Sonneborn and Company were attracting unwanted attention. The R.G. Dun credit rating agency found that the firm was prospering, but that company principals were “shrewd, sharp and unreliable” and “somewhat notorious in the whiskey trade,” making more money than any similar operation. R.G. Dun went on: “They established themselves in Canada in 1869 and the move was regarded as the establishment of an asylum for the men who had hitherto been employed illicitly here, and for the investment of means which might otherwise [have] been pursued by the U.S. government.”4

Jacob Englehart had arrived in London in 1868 at the age of 20 to see what opportunities existed in the fledgling oil industry centered there. In effect, he became his company’s front man in a cross-border money-laundering scheme. He traveled from New York City, more than 600 miles away, with money Washington would have otherwise taxed, just as R.G. Dun suggested.

Oil had been discovered west of London in 1857, transforming the city into a refining center for the next two decades. When he arrived in London, Englehart was already an agent for Carbon Oil Works, the leading producer, refiner, and marketer for the oil patch. The firm had been organized by J.M. Williams, who had established the first commercially viable oil well at Oil Springs.

Englehart quickly teamed up with Isaac Waterman, another early refiner in London, and it was readily apparent that Englehart had money behind him. Soon afterward he established his own firm, Englehart & Company.5 By 1870, Carbon Oil, Waterman Brothers (Herman and Isaac Waterman), and Englehart & Company accounted among them for fully one-third of the production from Ontario’s oil patch. Englehart shipped kerosene to the Sonneborn firm in New York, making Sonneborn the fourth largest exporter of kerosene from that port.6

In 1872, however, Sonneborn sued Carbon Oil for a claimed outstanding debt of $100,000. Carbon Oil was in deep trouble, its “big still” having been destroyed in an explosion; the firm soon collapsed, and Englehart acquired its assets cheaply at auction. Not long afterward, the Sonneborn company filed for bankruptcy following the widespread economic collapse of 1873. Englehart emerged unscathed, however, and had become a major player in the Canadian oil industry, which was beginning to face new competition from cheaper and sweeter American crude from Pennsylvania.

Englehart, as did several other leaders of Canada’s early petroleum industry, including the Waterman brothers, boarded at the Tecumseh House Hotel during his time in London. The new hotel was named after Shawnee Indian Chief Tecumseh, who fought alongside British General Sir Isaac Brock against the Americans during the War of 1812. Tecumseh (pronounced tuh-KUM-see) fell in battle along the Thames River about 60 miles west of London in 1813. The hotel featured a large painting of Tecumseh in its lobby. The Tecumseh House had been a popular refuge for some Southern families and for Confederate spies and buyers during the Civil War; London profited handsomely by selling to both sides in the conflict.

Operators of the hotel were among the directors of the Tecumseh Base Ball Club, which held its meetings there. At some point, Englehart became a follower of the club, then a director and eventually president, tapping into his personal or corporate funds to help attract to London some of the best baseball talent from south of the border. Englehart may have been surprised at the popularity of the game, which had been played in London since at least 1855, as revealed by an entry in the first city directory.7

The following year, 1856, the May 1 edition of the London Free Press carried an advertisement saying that the London Base Ball Club would be holding its annual meeting the next day to elect officers and transact business. Afterward the newspaper reported that officers had been elected and that the club “intends to challenge any other Base Ball Club in the Province as soon as it gets into regular playing order.”8

Mention of an annual meeting and the apparent cockiness of the club suggest it was not new to the game. Later in 1856, the New York Clipper carried a report about a game London played in the village of Delaware, just west of the city, on September 12. London prevailed 34-33 in the two-inning game played under the rules of the day.9

Southwestern Ontario was developing into a hotbed of baseball activity at this time. The Hamilton Young Canadians (later renamed the Maple Leafs) had been playing since 1854, and not long afterward a team was fielded in Woodstock.10

By 1861, the Woodstock Young Canadians were a formidable nine, that year defeating Hamilton twice, and by 1864 becoming Canadian champions. They were awarded the Silver Ball trophy, for which funds had been raised in Woodstock. Hamilton, Woodstock, and Ingersoll traveled to Detroit to compete in an international tournament, and met with success. Hamilton finished second, and Ingersoll took top honors in a junior division, but Woodstock struggled because of an injury to its pitcher.11

By 1868 it was becoming apparent that perennial Canadian champion Woodstock was slipping, and rivals old and new were anxious to topple the team from its perch. The town of Guelph had become baseball crazy and was determined to wrest the Silver Ball from Woodstock. The Guelph mayor declared a civic holiday in July so Guelphites could take the train to Woodstock to watch the Maple Leafs challenge the reigning champions.

About 500 fans and a brass band journeyed west for the game, but were disappointed when Woodstock prevailed, 36-28. It wasn’t until 1869 at the Provincial Exhibition in London that Guelph took top honors and $150 in gold, downing Woodstock, Ingersoll, and London in a three-day tournament.12

It was a feather in the cap for the rapidly industrializing town of 5,900. Within a few years, brewer George Sleeman, who had operated and played on a ball team fielded by his Silver Creek Brewery, took control of the Maple Leafs and was determined to retain bragging rights as Canada’s top team, even if he had to dig into his deep pockets to hire Americans to stay on top. Guelph reigned as Canadian champions until dethroned by London in 1876.13

Under Sleeman, the club traveled widely in the United States as it gradually drifted into professionalism, much to the chagrin of its traditional competition in Southern Ontario. Proceeds from surplus funds at the end of the season had been distributed to Guelph players as early as 1870.14 At the time, sport was considered a gentlemanly and amateur pastime, so Guelph became the subject of criticism in other cities. By 1875 nearly the entire Maple Leaf roster was American and professional, which prompted the London Free Press to deride Sleeman’s men (to whom the hometown London Tecumsehs continued to lose) as “The Guelph Foreign Legion.”15

Englehart and Sleeman took their rivalry to a new level when the Tecumsehs and Maple Leafs became charter members of the International Association in 1877. The loop was established by baseball cities who felt excluded by the National League, which had been organized the previous season and tightly restricted its membership.

Recognizing the Canadian entries in its name, the International Association easily attracted some of the best baseball talent of the day. Englehart had begun signing up topflight American players a few years earlier in a bid to wrest the claim of baseball supremacy in Canada from Guelph. Originally, London mocked Sleeman’s fielding of a “foreign legion.” But unable to dislodge Guelph as Canadian champions, London directors took a page from Sleeman’s book and found the money (mainly in the deep pockets of Englehart) to lure north some of the best and brightest stars of the day. Among them were early curveball pitcher Fred Goldsmith, catcher Phil Powers, outfielder Joe Hornung, and others at the start of their careers. Team manager Harry Gorman traveled to Goldsmith’s home in New Haven, Connecticut, to persuade the promising young hurler to play for London. Gorman was armed with gold bars provided by Englehart as an inducement.

It worked; Goldsmith signed on for $100 a month.16 At the time, the average workingman earned about $300 a year and had to work long hours for 12 months to do so. London finally took the championship of Canada in 1876, after which Englehart and the Tecumseh club directors were eager for a new challenge in a new league that was determined to challenge the supremacy of the one-year-old National League.

Management first determined that the Association venture justified a new ballpark. The Tecumsehs had been playing on grounds long occupied by the British Army at Victoria Park, but had to relocate late each summer to make way for the annual Provincial Exhibition. Temporary stands erected had proved to be flimsy, and had collapsed at least once.

A piece of low-lying land was found across the Thames River from downtown, land where corn had been grown by First Nations people and where games, including baseball, had been played for years. The site was acquired by club supporter and downtown china merchant W.J Reid, and soon soil from road scrapings was used to help raise the elevation of the ground.

In short order, a 600-seat grandstand was erected for spectators and boxes created for directors, including Englehart. The first game was played on May 3, 1877, when the Tecumsehs defeated the city’s top amateur team, the Atlantics, 5-1. About $3,000 was spent to create the fine new ballpark, the Canadian Illustrated News reported a few months later.17 The first game attracted 1,000 fans and began the ballpark’s run as the world’s oldest baseball grounds, still serving London baseball and its fans to this day as Labatt Memorial Park.18

By 1877 there were 54 professional baseball clubs in operation in North America. The National League was coming off an inaugural season that had failed to meet expectations. Two of its eight teams, the cash-strapped Mutuals of New York and the Athletics of Philadelphia, were expelled for failing to complete their schedules. Only Chicago turned a profit during the year; it was estimated that the remaining teams lost a total of $17,300.19

The future of the sport as a business venture seemed shaky. The National League fielded only six teams for 1877: the Chicago White Stockings, Boston, Louisville Grays, St. Louis Brown Stockings, Cincinnati Red Stockings, and the Hartfords of Brooklyn. The league was not interested in adding teams as it struggled to make the game a viable proposition.

This led to complaints that it was an exclusive club consisting of Old Boys. For those complaining that the door was shut to them, the International Association was an attractive alternative. It appealed to smaller industrial cities during a time of rampant civic boosterism when anything seemed possible, and many of the baseball men were community leaders, including mayors and future mayors.

Of the more than 20 cities that affiliated with the International Association for the 1877 season, seven clubs agreed to pay an additional fee of $15 to vie for its inaugural pennant. Aside from London and Guelph, the other contending teams were the Pittsburgh Alleghenys; the Columbus Buckeyes; Lynn (Massachusetts) Live Oaks; Rochester, New York; and Manchester, New Hampshire. Sixteen other clubs joined the IA but opted against competing for the pennant.20

London’s first game against an International Association opponent came on May 5, 1877, when the Hartford Dark Blues appeared at Tecumseh Park. Fred Goldsmith puzzled the visitors with his curves for the first few innings until Hartford began to hit him freely. He was pulled after five innings, replaced by Foghorn Bradley, who had won 9 games and lost 10 during the previous season with Boston in the National League.

Hartford disappointed the Opening Day crowd by winning the game 6-2. The following day, the visitors won again, 8-4, capitalizing on 13 Tecumseh fielding errors. Next in town were the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, who featured hard-throwing right-hander Pud Galvin, a future Hall of Famer. London committed three of the game’s four errors, losing the official IA pennant-contesting game by a score of 2-0. On May 11 and 13 Rochester appeared at Tecumseh Park. Goldsmith’s favored catcher, Phil Powers, saw his first game action after his return from a broken finger, and things immediately improved. London managed its first win, 7-2, and the following day, before 2,000 fans, won again, 9-8, powered by a ninth-inning hit and aggressive baserunning by shortstop Ed Somerville.

On the May 24 holiday, a crowd estimated at from 6,000 to 8,000 saw an exciting game in which London came back from a 7-3 deficit with four runs in the ninth inning to tie the contest, although visiting Boston of the National League eventually prevailed 8-7 in 10 innings. In Guelph the same day, the Maple Leafs celebrated the Queen’s birthday by downing the Syracuse Stars 5-4 before a crowd of 2,000.

The Tecumsehs made London fans and director Jake Englehart happy after a rough start when Goldsmith settled down and worked effectively with catcher Powers. Goldsmith managed to lead London to more successes than failures. For a good part of the season, the Tecumsehs occupied second place in the new loop, behind Galvin and the Alleghenys. The traditional rivalry with Guelph suffered; only 1,500 fans turned out in London for a June 21 game against the Maple Leafs that London won, 5-2.

Things grew worse. By early July, rumors were circulating that the Maple Leafs were disbanding, and in August some of their professionals were indeed released as the team struggled to stay afloat. George Sleeman assured the International Association that his team would complete the season.

The fight for the loop’s inaugural pennant came down to games played at the beginning of October in London between the Tecumsehs and the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, who had not lost to London all season. On October 2, a Tuesday afternoon, Pittsburgh’s Galvin faced off against Goldsmith in a battle of two of the best pitchers of the day. A crowd of between 1,600 and 2,000 witnessed the championship game, attendance less than expected because of the weekday contest that was arranged on short notice. Goldsmith and his curves were effective, and behind him the Tecumsehs played errorless ball until the ninth inning, when several miscues allowed two Allegheny runs. But London prevailed, 5-2, for its first victory over Galvin and his mates, and consequent bragging rights as pennant winners.21

Guelph threw in the professional towel after the 1877 campaign, opting to play closer to home against Canadian opponents and American teams that passed through the area. After taking the IA pennant, London was invited to join the National League and seriously considered so doing, but after considering the potential costs of travel and other matters, directors declined.22

London hoped instead to continue its success in the International Association. In December it was revealed that the club had signed Ross Barnes, the heavy-hitting former member of the Chicago White Stockings. He had missed several games with Chicago due to injury, had clashed with manager Albert Goodwill Spalding about his pay, and was looking for a new opportunity. Englehart and his fellow directors promptly announced that Barnes would captain the 1878 Tecumsehs.23

The amount paid to induce Barnes to sign with London is not known, but doubtless it was significant, and showed that the club was willing to continue spending money for top talent.

For its 1878 season, the International Association featured a new team in Buffalo, led by former Allegheny star pitcher Pud Galvin. London was considered among the top teams at the beginning of the season, but its early schedule was an unfortunate one, as the Tecumsehs played on the road for four of the season’s first five weeks, making it difficult to build and maintain a fan base locally.

The consequent lack of home gate receipts also clobbered club finances. By July, crowds became light, amid grumbling about team performance and rumors of a fixed game or two. At a time when betting on games was heavy, any loss of trust in the home team hurt the gate. For his part, Englehart left the team after the disappointing 1878 season, citing the pressures of tending to his refining business.

Before he left, he and the directors released the high-priced American talent and finished the season with amateurs, ending London’s connection to the IA. Buffalo, riding the arm of Galvin, took the second pennant of the International Association. Without any Canadian teams for 1879, the league renamed itself the National Base-Ball Association and struggled on, expiring after the 1880 season.

London and Guelph reverted to amateur status, in 1880 joining a newly formed Canadian Association under President George Sleeman. Sleeman continued in baseball for several more years, as London and Guelph focused on competition with other Canadian cities, including Toronto, which was relatively late to topflight competition.

With the time spent on his growing business and his subsequent move to Petrolia, Jake Englehart had little more to do with baseball in London. He soon became one of the founders of Imperial Oil, and was preoccupied with fending off competition from American refiners. He was the company’s vice president and its largest shareholder. By 1893, Imperial had offices across Canada and was the country’s leading refiner.

In Petrolia, Englehart married Charlotte Eleanor Thompson, the daughter of a farmer from western Middlesex County. He was then 44 and a millionaire; she was 28. Englehart converted from Judaism to the Church of England and he and Charlotte, nicknamed “Minnie,” became benefactors of Christ Church in Petrolia. For his bride he built a fine new red-brick mansion, which they called Glenview, and added a nine-hole golf course beside it.

In Petrolia he became active in Conservative politics, and was a director of financial institutions there and in London. In 1908 Minnie died while pregnant at age 45. Glenview was given to the town of Petrolia for a much-needed hospital, and Englehart oversaw its conversion as he planned to move to Toronto, where his business interests had been pulling him for some time.

Upon his own death, Englehart left money for the addition of two wings and equipment for a maternity ward and for X-ray equipment. It was later estimated that he put $200,000 into the hospital and its grounds, aside from the house itself, which was valued at $50,000.24 The Charlotte Eleanor Englehart Hospital remains in Petrolia to this day, part of the Sarnia-based Bluewater Health Network.

In Toronto, Englehart remained active in Conservative politics. In 1905 the Conservative Party, led by James Whitney, swept into power. Englehart had helped elect friend and fellow Imperial Oil director W.J. Hanna to the Ontario legislature, and when Whitney was looking for someone to push a railway line into Northern Ontario, which the previous Liberal government had failed to do, Hanna recommended Englehart for the job.

Whitney was anxious to exploit the north’s riches in timber and newfound discoveries of silver and gold. Englehart was named chairman of the Temiskaming and Northern Ontario Railway Commission in 1906, and turned to his talents to opening up the north. His ability to get the job done saw a small railway community north of North Bay adopt his surname. This came after he had the railway help evacuate hundreds of people from the 1911 forest fire in Porcupine. He organized relief efforts and used his own funds to help refugees who fled with little more than the clothes on their backs. At the railway station in the small community which still bears his name, the railway chairman posted this sign: “No one need pass here hungry, J.L. Englehart.”25

When Jake Englehart died on April 6, 1921, at the age of 73, he had accomplished much as a leader of a ball team, a major refining company, an Anglican church, and a railway. He had many friends and admirers. His funeral in Toronto drew a large number of business and political leaders in Ontario, his adopted home. Many words of praise were heaped upon him for his philanthropy, business acumen, and political deeds. Virtually nothing was mentioned about his propelling the London Tecumsehs to the top of the baseball world of the 1870s, even in the newspapers back in London.

Upon his death, Englehart’s estate was valued at $3.5 million. It was distributed widely to his nieces and nephews, and to Charlotte’s family. Additional funds were allocated for the Petrolia hospital and to hospitals in Toronto. He set aside another $7,500 for Christ Church in Petrolia, to which he and Minnie had earlier donated a fine set of bells.26 Their support of the church is memorialized on a brass plaque inside the entrance to the sanctuary.

He was buried alongside wife Minnie in a fine marble vault at Hillside Cemetery just west of Petrolia. George Sleeman died in 1926 after becoming mayor of Guelph and incorporating the Guelph Street Railway, a venture far less successful than his Maple Leafs.

Englehart and Sleeman put London and Guelph on the baseball map at a time when the professional game was still struggling to survive in many places. Their determination to win and beat the other city led to one of the great rivalries in Canadian sport, decades before those between Toronto and Montreal in hockey, or Edmonton and Calgary in hockey and football.

Englehart, an American shrouded by some mystery in his early days in business, became a significant contributor, not just to baseball, but to Ontario and Canada. His contributions were many – and invariably successful. Perhaps some day his important role in early baseball in Canada will be acknowledged by his induction into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, where he would join his old rival George Sleeman.

Notes

1 Gary Regan and Mardee Haidin Regan, The Book of Bourbon and Other Fine American Whiskeys (London, England: Mixellany Books, 2009), 40-41.

2 Clay Risen, “How America Learned to Love Whiskey,” The Atlantic, December 6, 2013, accessed July 14, 2021, https://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2013/12/how-america-learned-to-love-whiskey/282110.

3 “The Whiskey Ring: The First Time Abraham Lincoln’s Republican Party Lost Credibility,” History Daily, accessed July 15, 2021, https://historydaily.org/whiskey-ring-facts-stories-trivia.

4 R.G. Dun Collection, New York City, Volume 348, 900, quoted in Hugh M. Grant, “The ‘Mysterious’ Jacob L. Englehart and the Early Ontario Petroleum Industry,” Ontario History LXXXV, No. 1 (March 1993), 68.

5 Monetary Times 5, August 14, 1871, 85; Monetary Times 5, May 3, 1872, 864; Monetary Times 6, October 18, 1872, 308; R.G. Dun Collection Canada, Volume 25, 246, as quoted in Grant, “The ‘Mysterious’ Jacob L. Englehart and the Early Ontario Petroleum Industry,” 69.

6 Hugh Grant and Henry Thille, “Tariffs, Strategy and Structure: Competition and Collusion in the Ontario Petroleum Industry, 1870-1880,” The Journal of Economic History 61, No. 2 (June 2001), 391.

7 George Railton, Railton’s Directory for the City of London, C.W., 1856-1857 (London, Canada West: George Railton, Notary Public, 1856), 25.

8 “London Base Ball Club,” advertisement, London Free Press, May 1, 1856; “London Ball Club,” London Free Press, May 5, 1856.

9 “Ball Play,” New York Clipper, September 27, 1856, 516. This game was played according to the rules of what is now referred to as the Canadian game. Teams were to consist of 11 men (although only nine were used in this game), and all of them were to be retired before the other team had its turn at bat. This helps explain why the game cited consisted of only two innings.

10 William Humber, Diamonds of the North: A Concise History of Baseball in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995), 23-24.

11 “The B.B. Match at Detroit,” London Free Press, August 23, 1867; Humber, 28.

12 David L. Bernard, “The Guelph Maple Leafs: A Cultural Indicator of Southern Ontario,” Ontario History, 84, No. 3 (September 1992), 214.

13 For details on Sleeman’s involvement with the Guelph team, see Martin Lacoste’s essay “George Sleeman and the Guelph Maple Leafs” in Our Game, Too: The Development of Canadian Baseball (SABR, 2022).

14 Alan Metcalfe, Canada Learns to Play: The Emergence of Organized Sport, 1807-1914 (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1987), 90, quoted in Bernard, 214.

15 “The Ball Field,” London Free Press, August 4, 1875.

16 Les Bronson, “History of Baseball in London,” a paper delivered by the newspaperman and historian to the London and Middlesex Historical Society, February 17, 1972, 19.

17 Canadian Illustrated News, July 14, 1877, quoted in Pat Morden, Putting Down Roots (St. Catharines, Ontario: Stonehouse Publications, 1988), 47.

18 For a complete history of Tecumseh/Labatt Park, see Robert K. Barney and Riley Nowokowski’s essay in Our Game, Too: The Development of Canadian Baseball.

19 David Nemec, The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1997), 98.

20 Brian Martin, The Tecumsehs of the International Association: Canada’s First Major League Baseball Champions (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2015), 118.

21 For a complete account of this game, and its significance, see Andrew North’s essay “The 1877 International Association Championship Game” in Our Game, Too: The Development of Canadian Baseball.

22 Martin, 149-152.

23 New York Mercury, quoted in “The Ball Field,” London Advertiser, December 17, 1877.

24 “Petrolia Mourns the Death of Great Benefactor,” Petrolia Advertiser-Topic, April 7, 1921.

25 Ian Sclanders, “The Amazing Jake Englehart,” Imperial Oil Review, September 8, 1955.

26 Notarial Copy of Letters Probate of Will of Jacob Lewis Englehart, late of the Town of Petrolia, deceased. Located in Lambton Room of Lambton County Public Library, Wyoming, Ontario.

William Henry “Hippo” Galloway, a multisport athlete, did not spend long in Organized Baseball. Statistically speaking, his career is a mere footnote in the history of the game. But his career is not a mere footnote; his story is worth telling. Hippo Galloway is believed to be the first Black Canadian to play Organized Baseball, possibly the first Black player in amateur hockey in Ontario, and the last Black player in Organized Baseball before Jackie Robinson broke the color barrier for good.1

The story of Hippo’s early life is confusing, starting with his parents. There is no record of who his father was. The name of his mother was Julia Sims.2 Sims was born in Ontario around 1860,3 and lived in Dunnville for at least two decades. By 1881, Sims was living at the residence of Harriett Galloway. It is not clear why Julia took up residence with Harriett. Documents explain that by the time she did, though, she had a two-year-old son named John.4 There is no record of his birth, and no record of him, or of Julia, after 1881.

Harriett Galloway had children of her own. Her eldest son, William David Galloway, was born in 1850 and lived in Dunnville right up until his death in 1930. William was the adoptive father of Hippo Galloway.5 As a child, Hippo lived in the United States, yet there is no record of Julia Sims crossing the border, and no record of her giving birth to another child.

Given that Harriett Galloway and Julia Sims were known to each other, it cannot be a coincidence that William adopted Hippo. But the circumstances surrounding the adoption are not known. As such, there is no definitive proof that it was William Henry Galloway, and not John Sims, that William adopted.

Whatever the case, William’s adopted son moved to Canada in 1888,6 and, going by the name Willie Galloway, enrolled at Dunnville Public School.7 The 1891 Canadian Census supports the possibility that Hippo is actually John Sims. For Dunnville, it lists a 12-year-old “Wm. Galloway,” born in Ontario.8 No other document supports this date. Every other government record suggests Hippo was born in the early 1880s, and it is clear that Hippo Galloway came to believe, or at least accept, that he was born on March 24, 1882, in Buffalo, New York.9 Whether Hippo was born in Ontario in 1879, or in Buffalo in 1882, he was Canadian.

In spite of all of the mysteries surrounding Hippo’s early years, one thing is clear: He was a notable athlete. Young Hippo “played all sports with mixed teams as a youth.”10 In 1897 local newspapers recognized him for his feats on the diamond. That year, he played outfield and third base with the highly successful amateur Dunnville B.B.C.

Dunnville, an independent club, filled its schedule playing amateur teams from neighboring towns. As one local reporter put it, Hippo “proved to be one of the shining stars of the Dunnvilles.”11 At season’s end, the Dunnville Chronicle declared the Dunnville B.B.C. “the champion amateurs of Canada,” noting that they “are all stars and their colored third baseman, ‘Hippo’ Galloway, is probably the most popular young fellow in Dunnville.”12

But baseball wasn’t his only talent. He also played lacrosse and was a skilled hockey player. Galloway spent the baseball offseason playing hockey with the Dunnville town team.

In 1898 Galloway graduated to baseball’s professional ranks. Professional baseball in Dunnville was still in its infancy. Dunnville’s professional team, like its amateur team, was independent. It played its games at Jubilee Park, which was built in 1897 by hotelier David Price. The team rostered only a few local players, including Galloway; the rest of the roster was rounded out by imported professionals.13

The Dunnville nine opened its season at Brantford. Galloway played the outfield and smacked a double. Dunnville walked away 5-3 winners.14 Dunnville next took the field for its home opener, and the team secured another victory. In the eighth, Galloway hit an RBI single, stole second, advanced to third on a hit, and scored on an outfield fly.15

As the season progressed, and Dunnville continued to pile up wins, Galloway established himself as its most notable position player. He deftly moved between center field, third base, and shortstop. Against Buffalo on May 20, he hit his first home run. Meanwhile, he threatened to steal any time he was on base. On June 24 he and his squad met their match. That day, the club traveled to Chatham and lost 1-0. The story of the game was actually the Chatham pitcher, future Hall of Famer Rube Waddell. Waddell held Dunnville hitless, striking out 17 batters. When asked what Waddell was throwing that baffled the Dunnville club so badly, Galloway replied, “Man, don’t ask me, only time I saw the ball was when the catcher was throwing it back!”16

Despite the fact that the team excelled on the field, about halfway through the season Dunnville found itself in financial peril. While ownership had done a good job of fielding a competitive team, the lack of local talent hurt them at the gate. Local papers explained that fans had stayed away “because more local players were not on the nine.”17

One by one, teams that Dunnville had competed against poached its players. At the end of June, Galloway and three of his Dunnville teammates left town to join the Woodstock Bains. On July 22 the Dunnville Chronicle printed an obituary for the ballclub, which had officially ceased operations.18

The Woodstock Bains were a semipro team that played in the independent three-team Brantford and Woodstock Baseball League. Galloway made his debut with the Bains on July 1, playing third base in both games of a doubleheader. Facing the Page Fence Giants, Woodstock lost both contests. Hippo’s defense was shaky, but he was quick to put those losses behind him. In the very next game, Galloway went 2-for-4 and stole three bases. A few games later, he went 3-for-5 with three putouts and three assists at third base. On July 23 he hit his first home run with the Bains, leading the team to a 7-3 victory.

The Bains were so dominant that they secured the league championship on August 13, with more than a month left on the schedule. A local cigar store displayed the team’s championship trophy in its window. The cup attracted such a crowd that the local police chief ordered the trophy removed. The shop owner refused, and the trophy remained on display for all to see.19

The Bains spent the rest of the summer playing out their league schedule and picking up exhibition games. On October 1 the Bains closed their season against Hays & Co., a rival Woodstock semipro team. The Hays lineup boasted future major leaguers Bunk Congalton and Alex “Dooney” Hardy, but it wasn’t enough. The Bains claimed the unofficial city championship with an easy 17-8 victory. Galloway went 1-for-5 in the contest, with two stolen bases and a run scored.20

After the baseball season, Galloway remained in Woodstock and played for the Woodstock entry in the newly formed Central Ontario Hockey Association, a subsidiary of the Ontario Hockey Association. He debuted in Hamilton on January 20, likely becoming the first Black player in the OHA.21

Another Black player, Charlie Lightfoot, played for Stratford in the Big Four Hockey League, another subsidiary of the OHA, in 1899, but it appears that he debuted after Galloway. In his first game, Galloway scored one goal in a losing effort. Not much else is known of his hockey exploits in 1899, and while Woodstock was considered “one of the fastest teams in Western Ontario,” Paris won the league.22

In April Galloway re-signed with the Bains. The team opened its season on May 6 against the Stratford Poets of the Canadian League. In 1899 the Canadian League was designated a Class-D League in Organized Baseball. In the opener, Galloway went 3-for-4 with two runs and two stolen bases, but also committed two errors that resulted in runs for the Poets. Stratford won, 8-6. Woodstock’s next game came against London’s Knox Club, with future Pittsburgh Pirates ironman George Gibson. Galloway went 2-for-4 in the 11-2 victory, as the “Bains were immeasurably superior to their opponents.”23

On June 9 the Bains played an exhibition game against the famed Cuban Giants, defeating them 11-5. Galloway went 3-for-5 with two runs scored. Accompanying news of Woodstock’s victory came an announcement that the Stratford Poets had resigned from the Canadian League, and that the Bains had agreed to fill the vacancy.24

On June 12 the Bains traveled to London to make their Canadian League debut. As reported by the Woodstock Daily Sentinel, “Very few had hopes for a victory” for the Bains. London was the fastest team in the league, and the defending pennant winners.25 Regardless of the matchup, the game became historically significant well before the battle ended.

When Galloway assumed his position at third base in the bottom of the first, he became the first Black Canadian to play in Organized Baseball. Galloway fielded a clean game, recording two putouts and an assist. He struck out in his first at-bat in the top of the second, but in the top of the fourth, he recorded his first Canadian League hit and Woodstock’s first run batted in when he “brought Busse in by a beautiful drive to the right garden.”26 That run made the score 6-1 in favor of London, which defeated Woodstock 8-3.

Woodstock’s luck was no better the next day, and the Cockneys defeated them 14-6. Galloway went 0-for-4 at the plate, but for the second game in a row he earned the crowd’s appreciation: “Galloway made a brilliant catch of a high hot liner by Mohler in the fourth inning that won applause.”27

Woodstock followed up its two defeats in London with two defeats in Chatham (future Hall of Famer Sam Crawford played left field for Chatham), and a loss to St. Thomas. The St. Thomas game was especially tough for Galloway. He made three errors and faced taunts from the crowd.28 The next day, the Woodstock Bains released him. Whether this action was influenced by his .150 batting average (3-for-20 in five games), or by claims that certain players on the Hamilton roster were unwilling to play against him29 is unclear.

What is clear is that Hippo Galloway was still in demand. News of his release included a reporter’s plea to keep him in Woodstock: “An effort should be made to keep ‘Hippo’ in town, as our hockey team need his services.”30

The pleas were answered. He signed with the Woodstock City Team (formerly Hays & Co.), despite offers from Dunnville and the Cuban Giants.31 Galloway made an immediate splash with the City Team. In his debut, he batted fourth, ahead of future major leaguer Ernie “Curly” Ross. Hippo played first base, and went 4-for-5, with two runs and four stolen bases in a lopsided 16-6 victory.

Galloway played out the season with the City Team. Local newspapers did not provide much coverage for the City Team, surely owing to a preference to cover Woodstock’s Canadian League team instead. Newspapers did provide coverage when the City Team squared off against the Bains. In three such games, Galloway showed off his versatility, playing first base, left field, shortstop, and center field. But the Bains were dominant and won every game.

After the baseball season, Hippo planned to lace up his skates again with Woodstock’s hockey team. However, there was a complication. The five games Galloway played with the professional Bains in June made him a professional, and thus ineligible to play in the Central Ontario Hockey Association. In December he applied to be reinstated,32 but the Canadian Amateur Athletic Union denied his request.33 Hippo appealed the decision, but his appeal was denied.34 Galloway was left with nowhere to play hockey in 1900.

In the spring of 1900, Galloway joined the Cuban X-Giants, an independent colored team. The team spent the summer playing games all over the United States and Canada. Galloway appears to have made his debut on May 14 against the Meriden Silverites of the Connecticut State League.

The Meriden lineup included five players who would eventually reach the major leagues, as well as Eugene Mack, the younger brother of baseball legend Connie Mack. Galloway went 3-for-5, but Meriden won, scoring a run in the bottom of the ninth to walk off an 11-10 winner.35

The X-Giants had a reputation for playing an aggressive style of baseball – well suited to his skills. He was a serviceable third baseman for the X-Giants, and a reliable singles and doubles hitter, with the occasional triple or home run. His speed allowed him to wreak havoc in multiple facets of the game. Galloway remained with the X-Giants until mid-August, but there is no record of him again until he resurfaced in January of 1902, working as a bellhop at the Genesee Hotel in Buffalo.36

It’s likely about this time that he met his future wife, Hamilton-born Gladys Dancey.37 Hippo and Gladys eventually married, but not before Hippo spent a few more summers traveling with the Cuban Giants. In August of 1903, the Giants matched up with the Mountain Athletic Club in Fleischmanns, New York, for a three-game series. MAC won the first game, 3-1. Hippo played second base and scored the Giants’ only run. The Giants won the second game, 6-3, and the outcome of the third game is not known.38

In 2020 the Mountain Athletic Club Grounds at Fleischmanns Park was added to the US National Register of Historic Places.39 In September, in a game in North Adams, Massachusetts, Galloway made headlines for showing his less serious side: “A play which is only seen in the funny sections of Sunday papers was made by Sattersfield and Galloway. The former is about four feet extreme height and the latter overtops him a couple of feet. Sattersfield set himself to catch a high pop fly off Mackey in the sixth and was in the very act of catching the ball when Galloway who had stolen up behind him interposed his hands and made the out. There was no make believe in Sattersfield’s disgust and astonishment.”40

Galloway went 3-for-6 and scored two runs, but the game ended tied 8-8. After the 1904 season, he returned to Woodstock and reported that the team had played 169 games, losing only 31 with four ties.41

In the offseason, Galloway returned to hockey. He joined the Wingham Club of the Northern Hockey League.42 He led Wingham to the league championship, winning a best-of-three series final over Harriston. The team celebrated its victory at the Hotel National with speeches and live music. Galloway was called forward, “read a well-worded address,” and was presented with a “handsome gold watch on behalf of the sports of Wingham.” Surprised by the gesture, Galloway “thanked those who had been so thoughtful in his welfare, stating that he had enjoyed his stay in town and would be back again in October.”43

He kept his word. In early October, he returned to Wingham after a summer of making headlines for his strong defensive play with the Cuban Giants. He took a job at the local foundry.44 In November, the Wingham hockey club held a concert as a preseason fundraiser. Galloway was just one of the acts, but performed multiple guitar solos. The benefit raised approximately $40.45

Once again Wingham defeated Harriston in the finals to claim the championship.46 That victory marked the end of Hippo Galloway’s hockey career. After one more summer playing with the Cuban Giants, his baseball career also came to an end.

In 1908 an Industrial Institute opened in Woodstock. Galloway was hired as a laborer.47 Hippo and Gladys lived in Woodstock with their young family until at least March of 1914.48 By 1921 they had moved to Hamilton, where he took a job as a machinist.49 From Hamilton, Hippo, Gladys, and their seven children relocated to Buffalo, New York, where he was employed as a tinsmith.50 He remained in Buffalo until he died on February 17, 1943, at the age of 60.51

On November 16, 2021, William “Hippo” Galloway was inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in recognition of having been the first Black Canadian to play in Organized Baseball.52

Notes

1 Gary Cieradkowski, The League of Outsider Baseball (New York: Touchstone, 2015), 178.

2 “World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942” digital image, The National Archives (https://www.ancestry.com,

accessed November 12, 2021), draft registration card for William H. Galloway, Birth Date: March 24, 1882; Serial Number U353.

3 1861 Canadian Census.

4 1881 Canadian Census.

5 “William D. Galloway,” Dunnville Chronicle, November 21, 1930: 3.

6 1911 Canadian Census.

7 “Dunnville Public School,” Dunnville Gazette, January 6, 1888: 1.

8 1891 Canadian Census.

9 “World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942”.

10 William Humber, Diamonds of the North: A Concise History of Baseball in Canada (Toronto: Oxford University Press, 1995), 144.

11 “Again Victorious,” Dunnville Gazette, August 13, 1897: 1.

12 “Another Victory,” Dunnville Gazette, September 3, 1897: 1.

13 Cheryl MacDonald, Grand Heritage: A History of Dunnville and the Townships of Canborough, Dunn, Moulton, Sherbrooke and South Cayuga (Altona, Manitoba: Friesen Printers, 1992), 403.

14 “Won One and Lost One,” Dunnville Chronicle, May 6, 1898: 1.

15 “Bains And 19th Centurys – Two More Scalps Taken by the Dunnville Baseball Braves,” Dunnville Chronicle, May 13, 1898: 1.

16 MacDonald, 404.

17 “Obituary,” Dunnville Chronicle, July 22, 1898: 1.

18 “Obituary.”

19 “Bains Have Won the Cup,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, August 15, 1898: 5.

20 “Bains Win the Town Championship by a Score of 17 Runs to 8,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, October 3, 1898: 5.

21 “An Unsatisfactory Ending,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, January 21, 1899: 1.

22 “Nationals Tie Woodstock,” Toronto Globe, March 17, 1899: 10.

23 “One Won, the Other Lost,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, May 15, 1899: 5.

24 “Bains Are in the Canadian at Last,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, June 10, 1899: 5.

25 “Bains Made Their Debut,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, June 13, 1899: 5

26 “Bains Made Their Debut.”

27 “Woodstock Lost One More,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, June 14, 1899: 5.

28 Humber, 144.

29 Humber, 144.

30 “Changes in the Bain Club,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, June 18, 1899: 5.

31 “Sporting Notes,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, June 23, 1899: 5.

32 “Athletics,” Ottawa Citizen, December 20, 1899: 6.

33 “Championships for Ottawa,” Toronto Globe, January 11, 1900: 10.

34 “Sporting Notes,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, January 31, 1900: 5.

35 “Meriden Defeats the Cuban Giants,” Meriden (Connecticut) Record-Journal, May 15, 1900: 2.

36 “‘Hippo’ with Cuban Giants,” Toronto Daily Star, January 10, 1902: 8.

37 1901 Canadian Census.

38 Collin Miller, “Cuban Giants Go to Bats with Mountain A.C. at Fleischmann’s – August 10-12, 1903,” Mountain Athletic Club Vintage Base Ball, accessed November 12, 2021, https://www.macvintagebaseball.org/post/cuban-giants_fleischmanns-mac-1903.

39 Max Lang, “Mountain Athletic Club at Fleischmanns Park Gains Historic Designation,” Oneonta (New York) Daily Star, accessed November 12, 2021, https://www.thedailystar.com/sports/local_sports/mountain-athletic-club-at-fleischmanns-park-gains-historic-designation/article_8da500f0-f098-5882-9ff4-dfb52c77d273.html?fbclid=IwAR1O61nXttgMg3h2dE-hSDT8Gdo8NZ-ZUf_5-GwaiTR0JdDnI9P_RcX4Dkc.

40 “Sensational Ball,” North Adams (Massachusetts) Transcript, September 21, 1903: 2.

41 “‘Hippo’ Galloway Home,” Toronto Daily Star, October 21, 1904: 10.

42 “Puckerings,” Toronto Globe, December 20, 1904: 9.

43 “Hockey Club Banquetted,” Wingham Advance, March 23, 1905: 1.

44 “Personals,” Wingham Advance, October 5, 1905: 1.

45 “Hockey Club Concert,” Wingham Advance, November 23, 1905: 1.

46 “Wingham Holds the Trophy,” Wingham Times, March 22, 1906: 1.

47 “College for Pupils of African Blood,” Woodstock Daily Sentinel-Review, May 26, 1908: 1.

48 “World War II Draft Registration Cards, 1942.”

49 1921 Canadian Census.

50 1925 New York State Census.

51 “Births,” digital image, The National Archives (https://www.ancestry.com, accessed November 12, 2021), Birth Registration for Ida Norene Galloway, Birth Date: March 26, 1914; Serial Number 044166.

52 Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, “William Hipple Galloway,” accessed November 12, 2021, https://baseballhalloffame.ca/hall-of-famer/william-hipple-galloway/.

In The National Game (1910), Al Spink wrote that there was “no speedier or brainier fielder and batsman” in the 1880s and he said that Irwin was the best scout employed by the New York Highlanders.1 Referencing Irwin’s time as a manager, writer Roy Kerr described him as “a skinny, bug-eyed Canadian with large, protruding ears and a healthy ego. He was an impeccable dresser, and fancied himself to be a savant in the art of ‘scientific baseball.’”2 Daniel Levitt has characterized Irwin as “one of the slimier men in baseball,”3 and pitcher Waite Hoyt said that he was “probably the most disgusting man [he] ever knew.”4 

Curiously, however, after it was reported in July 1921 that Irwin jumped off a passenger steamer to his death in the Atlantic Ocean, the discussion was not about differing opinions of Irwin’s character. Instead, people argued over the basic facts. One man said that Irwin was still alive, others suspected murder, and two complete strangers each claimed to be his wife.  

Arthur Albert Irwin was born in Toronto on Saint Valentine’s Day of 1858. His father, who was born in Ireland in 1833 and who was also named Arthur, worked as a blacksmith. His mother, Elizabeth, was a homemaker; census records inconsistently describe her as a native of Ireland or Canada. By 1870, the younger Arthur had six siblings, all but one being younger than him.

The Irwin family moved to Boston when Arthur was six. He grew up playing sandlot baseball in South Boston, where his friends included future major-leaguer Tommy McCarthy.5 Beginning in 1873 with the Aetna Club of Boston, Irwin spent several seasons as a shortstop in amateur baseball.6

On June 2, 1879, Irwin made his professional debut with the Worcester Worcesters of the minor-league National Association in an exhibition against the Chicago White Stockings. Worcester pitcher Lee Richmond also debuted that day, throwing a no-hitter in a rain-shortened seven-inning game. Irwin played third base for that first game before he moved to shortstop, and he made two stellar plays that day.7

Boosted by a 47-win season from Richmond, who also hit .369, the Worcester club played well enough to move into the National League for the 1880 season. This meant that Irwin and the other players received major-league promotions without changing teams. A highlight that year came on June 12, when Richmond pitched the first major-league perfect game and Irwin scored the game’s only run.8 In 85 games, Irwin registered a league-leading 345 assists.

Irwin missed much of the 1881 season owing to an early-season illness and a broken leg later in the year. The leg injury occurred while Irwin was running the bases, and local sports equipment salesman Martin “Flip” Flaherty was inserted into the game in his only major-league appearance.9

The Worcester club folded after an 18-66 season in 1882. Irwin moved on to the NL’s Providence Grays as a team captain. Gloves were only worn by catchers and first basemen at that time, but Irwin needed to play with two broken fingers one day in 1883. He fashioned a padded buckskin driving glove into a mitt and wore the glove even after his fingers healed. Monte Ward also started wearing the glove, and it was standard throughout the league by 1884. Sporting goods company Draper & Maynard produced a model based on “the Irwin glove” and they said that 90% of major leaguers wore its brand by the 1920s.10

The 1884 Grays won the precursor to the modern World Series – a best-of-three series against the AA champion New York Metropolitans. In 1885, the Grays folded after a fourth-place finish and Irwin was looking for a team again. He had not displayed his characteristic speed and defensive range since the 1881 leg injury. The introduction of overhand pitching in 1884 provided another challenge; already light-hitting, Irwin batted under .240 after that point in his career.11  

In 1886, Irwin signed with Philadelphia of the NL. For the next three years, Irwin played at least 100 games per year. He posted mediocre offensive numbers in Philadelphia, but he led NL shortstops in 1888 with a career-high 204 putouts.

The Philadelphia Inquirer reported on May 27, 1889, that the Phillies had been benching Irwin.12 He briefly returned to the field after an injury to Ed Delahanty, but his relationship with the team was irreparable after the initial benching. He was sold to the Washington Senators for $3,000 on June 8 and became a team captain.13 Within a month of Irwin’s arrival in Washington, he was named player-manager. It was Irwin’s first major-league managerial opportunity and he was the team’s fifth manager in only three years.14 His predecessor had started the season with a 13-38 record and Irwin fared marginally better, finishing 28-45 as manager for the last-place team.  

By this time, many players resented their controlling NL owners, and Irwin was becoming known as a key man in the players union called the Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players. He helped to organize the Players’ League and he purchased 12 shares of stock in the league’s Boston club.15 Irwin appeared in 96 games for the 1890 Boston Reds. The team won the PL championship, but that league folded, and the Boston Reds joined the AA with Irwin as manager for 1891.

More than a year removed from playing in the NL, Irwin got on the bad sides of NL owners. In an era of competition among baseball leagues, a document known as the National Agreement of 1883 restricted how major-league and minor-league teams could pursue players from other leagues. Before the 1891 season, AA teams began disregarding the agreement in the pursuit of NL players. NL executives believed that Irwin had encouraged AA teams to break the agreement.16

If that wasn’t enough to spark resentment, NL owners also felt that Irwin had convinced Cincinnati Reds owner Al Johnson to move his team from the NL to the AA. Though Johnson sold the team before the 1891 season started and the club returned to the NL without having played in the AA, Irwin’s reputation was damaged in baseball’s most powerful league.17

Irwin also struggled for the approval of Reds players. In the middle of 1891, when Reds infielder Hardy Richardson was injured and Paul Radford would not play on Sundays, Irwin signed his younger brother, John Irwin, despite John’s known fielding struggles. Teammates and local writers cried nepotism, but John struggled through 19 games over several weeks before the elder Irwin relented and dropped him from the team.18 Irwin could focus on managing, as he played in only six games, and the 1891 Boston Reds won the AA.

That fall, Irwin made headlines after alleging game fixing in the NL pennant race. Irwin said that Cap Anson of the Chicago Colts had agreed to play Irwin’s Reds in an AA-NL championship series if the teams won their leagues, but he said that the Giants had agreed to throw a late-season series to the Boston Beaneaters so that Boston could beat Chicago to the pennant. Irwin accused Buck Ewing of giving away the Giants’ signs. No one on either team commented on Irwin’s allegations.19 Once the Beaneaters and Reds won their leagues, Beaneaters manager Frank Selee refused to play a postseason series against the Reds.20

In 1892, Irwin returned to Washington to manage the Senators when Billy Barnie had a disagreement with team owners after the second game of the season. The NL was using a split-season format to determine who would make the league championship. Washington was 35-41 in the first half, earning seventh place, but fans disliked Irwin. When the team started poorly in the second half, he was fired.21   

Irwin began managing the Philadelphia Phillies in 1894. He had not played in the major leagues since 1891; he played in one game for the 1894 Phillies, his last major league playing appearance. He had big shoes to fill as a manager; baseball pioneer Harry Wright had just managed there for ten seasons. Wright had been successful with other teams, but his contract was not renewed in Philadelphia because he had not secured any first-place finishes.22 The team had led the league in hitting for in 1893 and again under Irwin in 1894 and 1895. The 1895 team brought in 474,971 fans, a 19^th century single-season record.23

Despite that apparent success, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported in September 1895 that Irwin was thinking about leaving. The Inquirer called Irwin “the clearest sighted and coolest headed manager in the business to-day.”24 In early October, Irwin said he would not return to Philadelphia. He was trying to purchase the Toronto club in the Eastern League.25

Irwin had a 149-110 record with the Phillies, but he had irked their personnel and their fans. He meddled in the team’s uniform decisions, resulting in unpopular red and black bars being placed on their leggings. Owner John Rogers criticized his lax handling of players, but even the players disliked Irwin, especially in comparison to his predecessor. On the field, Irwin introduced intricate strategy, but these tactics often confused his players.26  

Irwin had also served as the University of Pennsylvania baseball coach from 1893 to 1895.27 There Irwin coached future author Zane Grey. Grey’s first baseball book, The Short-Stop (1914), is dedicated in part to Irwin; his second baseball book, The Young Pitcher, included a character known as Worry Arthurs, a fictionalized version of Irwin.28 29

In the mid-1890s, Irwin became very active outside of baseball. He invented a miniature football scoreboard to reproduce games in faraway cities and he started the short-lived American League of Professional Football, the country’s first professional soccer league. He promoted boxing matches and organized roller hockey games and marathon bike races.30

Soon after leaving the Phillies, Irwin became manager of the New York Giants for 1896, working out a clause with owner Andrew Freedman to ensure that Irwin had complete control of the team.31 Early on, Irwin showed aptitude for identifying talent, but he may have had less authority than promised. He had scouted future star Nap Lajoie in the minor leagues, and he attempted to convince Freedman to pay $1,000 for Lajoie and another player, but Freedman refused.32

Irwin created a farm team in Jersey City and he did have enough authority to name his brother John the manager of those prospects.33 Irwin created a book of hand signs for his players to study on their own time.34 He was fired after a 36-53 start, a record that looks worse when compared to the team’s 28-14 finish under his successor, Bill Joyce.35

In 1897, Irwin became part-owner of the Toronto club in the Eastern League. During an 1898 dispute with the league’s players over the length of the season and the players’ compensation, Irwin was criticized by The Buffalo Enquirer for assuming “a know-it-all air which oftentimes gives his friends a very severe pain in the neck.”36

In 1898, Irwin raised some suspicions by trading away several Toronto players to the Washington Senators before being announced as Washington’s manager the next year.37 Irwin and Toronto’s co-owners hired future major-league executive Ed Barrow to manage that team for the 1900 season.38 After leaving Washington in 1900, Irwin never coached or managed in the major leagues again. He retained partial ownership in Toronto for at least a few more years.39

When the American League was being organized in January 1901, Ban Johnson and Connie Mack sought an AL site in Boston. Irwin owned a potential site known as Charles River Park. Mack visited Irwin’s home to discuss the use of the park. Irwin, who was sick with the flu, hesitated to lease the park to the AL.40 At the time, the AA was trying to revive itself as a major league and Irwin tentatively controlled the Boston AA team. Irwin said he might lease the park in exchange for a stake in the Boston AL club, but he hesitated to commit to anything. Mack tired of Irwin’s indecisiveness and approached Hugh Duffy, who suggested land off Huntington Avenue that could house a baseball park. The AL signed a lease at the Huntington Avenue Grounds on January 16.41 The NL and the Players’ Protective Association reached an agreement a month later that refused to recognize the AA as a major league.42

In 1902, Irwin returned as the Penn baseball coach and then had a short stint in the NL as an umpire.43 From 1903 to 1907, he was a minor-league manager for teams in Toronto, Rochester, Kansas City, and Altoona. He signed on as manager for the Washington club in the short-lived Union Professional League in 1908.44 Reports as early as that year refer to Irwin as a New York Highlanders scout.45 He was described as the team’s “chief scout” by 1909.46 He attempted to use binoculars to steal signs from New York’s opponents that year, but it did not take long for the opposition to stop the behavior by bringing it to the attention of the league.47

As a scout, Irwin was persistent. For example, in 1910, he heard about young minor-league pitcher Ray Caldwell in Pennsylvania. Arriving the day after Caldwell had pitched, Irwin stayed until Caldwell’s next appearance. Caldwell was knocked out of that game early, but Irwin liked Caldwell’s mechanics and followed the team for a few more days. Caldwell then threw a 14-inning shutout and Irwin signed him that day. The pitcher won 134 major-league games in 12 seasons, though his potential was somewhat stymied by a drinking problem.48

A 1912 Harper’s Weekly piece called Irwin “the dean of scouts.”49 After that season, the Highlanders made Irwin business manager.50 The next year, columnist Sam Crane wrote that Irwin was a good judge of talent, hampered only by managers who mishandled that talent.51 Highlanders manager Frank Chance disagreed; he resigned in 1914 after two seasons and said Irwin had failed to find him any quality players. President Johnson seemed to side with Irwin, calling the manager “the biggest individual failure in the history of the American League… Chance failed to develop even one man of class.”52

Irwin certainly thought outside the box in New York, establishing a spring training site on a cricket field in Bermuda in 1913.53 Irwin resigned when the team was sold after the 1914 season. He became part-owner and manager of the minor-league Lewiston Eagles in 1915.54 Three years later, he began a three-year stint managing the International League’s Rochester Hustlers. In 1921, he managed the Hartford Senators of the Eastern League. He caused Lou Gehrig to lose a year of collegiate eligibility after convincing the Columbia University star to play some games with Hartford.55

Irwin had gained a lot of weight after his playing days, but in 1921 he had digestive problems and dropped 60 pounds in two weeks. The illness forced him to stop coaching and he was hospitalized with stomach cancer that June. The next month, he boarded a steamer from New York to Boston. He told other passengers that he was going home to Boston to die, but he never made it there, and he is thought to have jumped overboard on July 16.56  

Things had gotten complicated when Irwin’s son Harold visited him in the hospital and learned of an unknown brother, Herbert, who had also visited. It turned out that Irwin had married Elizabeth in Boston in 1883, and they had Herbert and two other children. While coaching at Penn in the 1890s, Irwin met May. They moved to New York, lived as husband and wife, and had a son named Harold.57

It would be an exaggeration to say that Irwin lived an intricate double life. Rather than rushing between two families in separate cities, Irwin spent almost all his free time and money on May and Harold, visiting Boston so infrequently that no one in New York suspected another relationship. When he visited Boston, he often misspoke, referring to Herbert as Harold. Elizabeth’s family had long suspected that Irwin had another woman. Shortly before his death, Irwin sent Elizabeth $500 in revenues from his scoreboard enterprise, enclosing a note saying, “God bless you all.” Irwin indicated that he could not send more money because his bills had been very costly, but the destitute Elizabeth had been surprised even by the money he did send. Finances aside, Elizabeth said she was happy to know that Irwin had been en route to Boston to be with her in the end.58

Elizabeth was accepting of suicide as her husband’s cause of death, but the circumstances still inspired conspiracy theories. Some people wondered the possibility of murder, and one player said that he saw Irwin in Oklahoma after he was said to have died.59

Irwin was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame in 1989.

Author’s note

In addition to the sources listed below, the author consulted Irwin’s file at the Baseball Hall of Fame and U.S. census records from the 1850s to the 1870s, and he utilized statistics from Baseball-Reference.com.

Notes

1 Alfred Henry Spink, The National Game (St. Louis: National Game Publishing Company, 1910), 228.

2 Roy Kerr, Sliding Billy Hamilton: The Life and Times of Baseball’s First Great Leadoff Hitter (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2010), 93-94.

3 Daniel Levitt, Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees’ First Dynasty (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2008), 37-38.

4 Levitt, 37-38.

5 Donald Hubbard, The Heavenly Twins of Boston Baseball: A Dual Biography of Hugh Duffy and Tommy McCarthy (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008), 35.

6 George Tuohey, A History of the Boston Base Ball Club: A Concise and Accurate History of Base Ball from its Inception (Boston: M.F. Quinn & Co., 1897), 211-212.

7 John Husman, “Lee Richmond’s No-Hit Debut”, in Bill Felber, Mark Fimoff, Len Levin, & Peter Mancuso (eds.), Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games that Shaped the 19th Century (Phoenix: Society for American Baseball Research, 2013), 114.

8 David Nemec, The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball (Tuscaloosa: University of Alabama Press, 2006), 162.

9 Mike Passey, “Martin Flaherty,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/df77d4e0, accessed December 16, 2017.

10 Josh Leventhal, History of Baseball in 100 Objects (New York: Black Dog & Leventhal Publishers, 2015), 84.

11 David Nemec, Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, Volume 1: The Ballplayers Who Built the Game (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2011), 465.

12 “A Captain Will Win,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 27, 1889, 6.

13 “Captain Arthur Irwin Released,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 10, 1889, 6.

14 Norman Macht, Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007), 71.

15 Robert Ross, The Great Baseball Revolt: The Rise and Fall of the 1890 Players League (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2016).

16 “Base Ball Comment,” Philadelphia Inquirer, March 15, 1891, 3.

17 “Base Ball Comment.” 

18 Nemec, Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, Volume 1: The Ballplayers Who Built the Game, 411.

19 Nemec, Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, Volume 1: The Ballplayers Who Built the Game, 465.

20 Marty Appel., Slide, Kelly, Slide: The Wild Life and Times of Mike King Kelly (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1999), 164.

21 Brett Abrams, Capital Sporting Grounds: A History of Stadium and Ballpark Construction in Washington, Part 3 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2009), 35.

22 Christopher Devine, Harry Wright: The Father of Professional Base Ball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2003), 162.

23 Nemec, The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball, 697.

24 “Manager Arthur Irwin Contemplates Retiring from the Philadelphia Club,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 9, 1895, 5.

25 “Sporting Chat,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 8, 1895, 5.

26 Roy Kerr, Sliding Billy Hamilton: The Life and Times of Baseball’s First Great Leadoff Hitter, 93-94.

27 “Penn Baseball in the 19th Century: From Student Origins to University Administration,” Penn University Archives & Records Center, http://www.archives.upenn.edu/histy/features/sports/baseball/1800s/hist3.html.

28 Zane Grey, The Short-Stop (New York: Grosset & Dunlap, 1914).

29 Samuel Hughes, Penn In Ink: Pathfinders, Swashbucklers, Scribblers & Sages: Portraits from The Pennsylvania Gazette (Xlibris, 2006), 57.

30 Nemec, The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball, 697.

31 “A Running Review of Sporting News,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 28, 1895, 5.

32 Ronald T. Waldo, Characters from the Diamond: Wild Events, Crazy Antics, and Unique Tales from Early Baseball (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 47.

33 “Giants to Play Mets,” The Journal, April 10, 1896, 12.

34 Joshua Prager, The Echoing Green: The Untold Story of Bobby Thomson, Ralph Branca, and the Shot Heard Round the World (New York: Pantheon Books, 2006), 75.

35 Ronald Mayer, Christy Mathewson: A Game-by-Game Profile of a Legendary Pitcher (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008), 12-13.

36 “Manager Irwin Accuses President Franklin of Squaring Proper Authorities,” Buffalo Enquirer, May 16, 1898, 6.

37 Kevin Plummer, “Historicist: Playing the Field,” https://torontoist.com/2014/03/historicist-playing-the-field/, accessed December 16, 2017.

38 Daniel Levitt, Ed Barrow: The Bulldog Who Built the Yankees’ First Dynasty, 37.

39 Plummer, “Historicist: Playing the Field.”

40 Macht, Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball, 188-190.

41 Macht, 188-190.

42 “Baseball Rules Changed,” New York Times, February 28, 1901.

43 Ronald Waldo, Characters from the Diamond: Wild Events, Crazy Antics, and Unique Tales from Early Baseball (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2016), 64.

44 “Union League’s Local Officers,” Washington Evening Star, March 6, 1908, 15.

45 “New First Baseman for New Yorks,” New York Sun, October 2, 1908, 8.

46 “World Series Doomed?” Courier-Journal, January 3, 1909, 30.

47 “Sign Stealing an Ancient Art in Majors,” St. Petersburg Times, July 19, 1959, 3C.

48 Charles Faber and Richard Faber, Spitballers: The Last Legal Hurlers of the Wet One (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2006), 98-100.

49 Edward Lyell Fox, “The Baseball Scout,” Harper’s Weekly, July 27, 1912, 11.

50 “Arthur Irwin is Business Manager of Highlanders,” Hartford Courant, December 6, 1912, 18.

51 Sam Crane, “Yankees Scout is Valuable Asset,” El Paso Herald, November 18, 1913, 7.

52 Ed Bang, “Frank Chance Without Peer as a Failure,” Pittsburgh Press, November 28, 1914, 14.

53 “Yankees Will Have Hotel to Themselves,” Salt Lake Tribune, January 10, 1913, 9.

54 “Irwin in Lewiston,” Fitchburg Sentinel, February 18, 1915, 2.

55 James Lincoln Ray, “Lou Gehrig,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/ccdffd4c, accessed December 16, 2017.

56 “Irwin’s Double Life Bared by Suicide,” New York Times, July 21, 1921.

57 “Hid Double Life for 27 Years,” Gettysburg Times, July 22, 1921.

58 “Irwin’s Double Life Bared by Suicide,” New York Times, July 21, 1921.

59 Nemec, The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball, 697.

Joseph J. Lannin owned the Boston Red Sox for less than four full years, but in that short span, the team won two world championships in the back-to-back years 1915 and 1916.

A native of the Province of Quebec, he came to the United States at a very young age – the story says he was orphaned and walked all the way to Boston. He became a remarkably successful businessman. This Canadian from rural Quebec became the team owner responsible for bringing Babe Ruth to the Red Sox. Lannin departed life plunging from the ninth story of a hotel he owned in Brooklyn, New York.

Lannin was a dedicated baseball fan. When he first made a splash in the Boston newspapers, it was with his purchase of a significant share of the Red Sox, announced in the newspapers of December 1, 1913. He did at the time own a portion of Boston’s other major-league ballclub, the National League’s Boston Braves. He had tried to buy the Braves outright but that offer had been declined.1

John I. Taylor of the Red Sox had sold half of the club on September 15, 1911, to James McAleer, manager of the Washington Senators, and Robert McRoy, who was secretary to American League President Ban Johnson. It was, say Red Sox historians Glenn Stout and Richard A. Johnson, “no secret that McAleer was only the front man in the deal. Most of the money was Johnson’s.”2

For his part, Taylor became vice president but was not actively engaged in running the ballclub. His eyes were on real estate and he used the income from the sale to help fund his Fenway Realty Company, which purchased the land on which he built Fenway Park in time to open on April 20, 1912. That very year, the Red Sox won the World Series.

During 1913, however, there was competition brewing in the form of the Federal League – which did indeed “raid the rosters” of both established major leagues and fielded teams in both 1914 and 1915. As it became clear that the Federal League was becoming a reality, and a threat, Ban Johnson moved to bring in someone else – someone he perceived as more pliable, but someone who had money, too. He turned to Lannin and his Lannin Realty Company, which purchased the shares owned by McAleer and McRoy. The Boston Globe noted, “The change in ownership has the sanction of Pres. Johnson of the American League, who had a prominent part in the negotiations, which will be closed at an early date.”3

Lannin couldn’t own 50 percent of the Red Sox and retain a minority stake in the Braves. Braves owner James E. Gaffney declared, “Lannin will sell his stock in my club and will resign from the board of directors.” He said he was sorry to see Lannin leave, that he thought he was the “right man” to take over from McAleer et. al., adding that he “has plenty of money and is a baseball fan of the 33rd degree.”4

The Globe story added about Lannin, “Mr. Lannin is a large real estate owner in New York, as well as in this city. He owns Arborway Court, Jamaica Plain, and many large apartment houses in Greater Boston. Mr. Lannin is a baseball enthusiast.”5

At the time, Lannin was a resident of Hyde Park, New York. He had only become a member of the five-person board of directors of the National League ballclub in November.6 The Boston Herald characterized him as a “Boston man” in its headline on its front-page story about his buying into the Red Sox, but noted him as “of Boston and New York.” The forced sale of the Red Sox stock was said to be “the direct outcome of the ‘royal rooters’ episode of the world’s series of 1912.”7

The amount Lannin invested was reported as $220,000 for half of the shares of the Red Sox, acquiring those held by McAleer, McRoy, and Garland “Jake” Stahl. General Charles H. Taylor and his son John I. Taylor had sold the shares to McAleer et al. for $170,000 in the winter of 1911-12. The Red Sox beat the New York Giants to win the 1912 World Series and were said to have turned a profit of $400,000. However, management had blundered badly before Game Seven. The long-standing booster club, the Royal Rooters, paraded onto the field prepared to take the several hundred seats that had always been reserved for them, only to learn that “in a huge miscalculation, team treasurer Robert McRoy made the Rooters’ tickets available to the general public.”8 The Rooters pretty much boycotted the final game of the Series, leaving the park only half-full; with the Series tied at three wins each, attendance for the clinching game dropped from 32,694 to just 17,034. Boston Mayor John “Honey Fitz” Fitzgerald was an active Rooter and had gone with the group to the games in New York. He called for McRoy to be removed from his position.9

The Taylors wanted to buy back the shares they had previously sold and become 100 percent owners of the ballclub, but Ban Johnson steered the sale to Lannin.10