Horace Fogel

A manager remembered for trying to convert Christy Mathewson to a first baseman. A sportswriter considered “a loudmouthed front-runner with little-to-no credibility.”1 A team president banned from his league. Such is Horace Fogel’s place in baseball history, with much of this colorful reputation well deserved.2 Yet Fogel is also a tragic figure, led to heights by his ambition only to be doomed by schemes more powerful than his own. Fittingly, at the moment of Fogel’s downfall, his greatest foe, National League President Thomas Lynch, said: “I still consider him more sinned against than sinning.”3

Horace Solomon Fogel was born on March 2, 1861, in Macungie, Pennsylvania. His parents, Henry and Elizabeth, were Pennsylvania natives. The elder Fogel worked as a carpenter. Horace was the last of their four children. At a young age he went to work in the local iron ore mines, then studied telegraphy. After several moves within this profession, by 1880 he found himself in Philadelphia.4

In this new setting, Fogel moved into sportswriting, working first for the Press, then the Evening News. He served as secretary and official scorer for the American Association’s Athletics.5 In July 1887, upon the recommendation of Francis Richter, Fogel was hired by John Brush to manage his last-place National League Indianapolis squad.6

Managers often served more as all-purpose business administrators than in-game strategists in this era.7 Even so, upon his hiring, Fogel’s youth and inexperience “caused a broad grin among baseball men.”8 A lively summer followed. Jack Glasscock was stripped of his captaincy. Fines and suspensions greeted other players. Umpires were accused of “barefaced robbery.” The manager drank.9 But the Hoosiers’ fortunes did not improve. Fogel abruptly resigned in November.

He returned to Philadelphia and sportswriting: a short stint at Richter’s Sporting Life, and a longer stay as the Ledger’s sporting editor. But such roles could not contain his ambitions, which he soon trained on political office. In 1892, running as a Democrat, he narrowly lost a race for city council. In 1893 he unsuccessfully sought the “soft, easy and honorable position” of Philadelphia Naval Officer. In 1894 he launched a failed campaign for the state legislature.10

Falling short in these attempts, Fogel again turned his efforts to the sporting world. He lost an election for Secretary of the Pennsylvania State League in 1894, campaigned unsuccessfully for the Atlantic League’s presidency in 1896, and futilely promoted himself as a potential Phillies manager in 1898.11 Success, in small dollops, came at the end of the decade. In 1898 he assumed the presidency of the National Basketball League. In late 1899 he took the helm of the reorganized Atlantic League. But the primordial basketball league soon sought new leadership, and the cash-poor baseball league collapsed months into the 1900 campaign.12

Late in the 1901 season, four National League owners—John Brush (Cincinnati), Andrew Freedman (New York), Arthur Soden (Boston), and Frank Robison (St. Louis)—worked to establish a baseball trust.13 Their effort soon failed but, along the way, Fogel moved into their orbit. He knew Brush from his Indianapolis days. Fogel pitched his services to Soden, emphasizing his ability to recruit players. Soden passed, but recommended him to Freedman.14

The wealthy and powerful Freedman was focused on Tammany politics and Gotham achievements first, the Giants second. After Giants manager George Davis signed with the upstart American League in October 1901, the team drifted through the offseason with no one at the helm. Reports emerged that Freedman had signed Ned Hanlon as skipper.15 But on January 24, 1902, Fogel was instead announced as the twelfth Giants manager since Freedman took control of the franchise in 1895.

Giants baseball was a dismal brand, a baseball war was underway, and the 1902 season was looming. But Fogel threw himself into recruiting with bravado. He announced plans to steal Nap Lajoie from the Athletics, and threatened American League President Ban Johnson with a “war of reprisal” once Giants pitcher Dummy Taylor jumped to Cleveland.16 “This is frightful,” a Philadelphia scribe smiled, “but then Fogel always was a regular terror when he got started.”17 Despite the sound and fury, the new skipper added only untested collegians and cast-offs to the remnants of 1901’s last-place squad.

Fogel appointed one of these recruits, the combative veteran Jack Doyle, as the team’s captain. New York raced off to a fast start. After winning in Cincinnati on Friday, May 16, the Giants stood at 14-7. The next day, the Reds beat Mathewson, 6-1. Then, on Sunday, the Reds hammered the Giants, 15-1. After the blowout, Fogel unloaded his frustrations to a Cincinnati reporter, singling out his star pitcher in particular: “The last game that Mr. Mathewson pitched, he acted as though he did not care whether the ball was knocked over the fence or not, and I am not going to stand for such stunts as that.”18

The pitcher and manager publicly argued, the pitcher asking for his release. Doyle and the rest of the team closed ranks around Mathewson. The team continued to lose. Fogel re-assigned the captaincy to second baseman Heinie Smith. On June 11, with the team at 18-23, Freedman appointed Smith as the new manager. Fogel remained on staff as a scout.

Years later, Mathewson helped to create the lasting perception that Fogel had attempted to convert him to a first baseman.19 Yet Matty’s three games at first that season occurred during Smith’s managerial stint.20 William Koelsch, writing in Sporting Life, noted, “While the team was in Philadelphia, Road Agent Fogel put in [an] appearance and announced that hereafter Christy Mathewson must play in every game, and after talking over matters with Smith the big twirler was placed at first base.”21 Another New York scribe, Joe Vila, later claimed, “It was the genial Freedman who originated this brilliant idea and told Fogel to carry it out.”22 Vila’s take seems more plausible. Smith had no reason to listen to—and Matty may have rebelled against—unauthorized, unsolicited advice.

Soon it was reported that Fogel was recruiting for not just the Giants, but the entire National League. Two NL teams quickly rebuffed his services, while AL stars had “lots of fun jollying the chief scout.”23 Fogel, a Cincinnati scribe opined, had become “the baseballic joke of the year.”24 Finally, he settled his back pay with Freedman, returned to Philadelphia, and a role as the Evening Telegraph’s sporting editor.

Fogel shared a North Philadelphia home with his wife, Alice, and their only child, Harry. After completing his education, Harry also pursued a sportswriting career, working alongside his father at the Evening Telegraph. Philadelphia’s sportswriters were closely knit and, whatever battles Horace waged with the rest of the baseball world, he enjoyed warm relations with his local peers. Each offseason, the scribes held lavish dinners. Each Decoration Day, they placed wreaths on their late colleagues’ graves. In 1904, only 21 years old, Harry passed away, becoming a stop along this solemn procession.

The Sporting News contains Fogel’s best-preserved sportswriting. In late 1903 he succeeded Ernest Lanigan in authoring the paper’s weekly column on Philadelphia baseball. Initially, Fogel used the nom de plume “Veteran.” But references to himself abounded, becoming increasingly less veiled, before his pieces appeared under his own name in 1907.25

His unyielding ego and appetite for controversy plunged Fogel into constant scraps with fellow writers. After Detroit edged Philadelphia for the 1907 AL pennant, Fogel attributed their triumph to the “rowdy tactics and hoodlum methods” of Tigers manager Hughie Jennings, Silk O’Loughlin’s umpiring, and Washington manager Joe Cantillon’s fielding weak lineups versus the Tigers.26 A week later, Irving E. (Sy) Sanborn, who authored The Sporting News’ Chicago column, accused his colleague of homerism in questioning the sport’s integrity. “With Mr. Fogel,” Sanborn opined, “it apparently is only a question of the angle at which he looks at things.”27 The next week, Fogel wondered “what kind of dope Si Sanborn had smoked before he penned his letter,” and leapt into a lengthy defense.28 Their battle waged for weeks. Likely, Fogel pasted Sanborn’s columns into the “Ananias scrapbook” he kept of his enemies’ writings.29 When the Baseball Writers’ Association of America was established in 1908, Fogel was not invited to join.30

Fogel usually treated the Athletics with kid gloves. He admired the “shrewd, wide-awake” Connie Mack, who in turn ably handled the city’s often difficult sportswriters.31 But if any disruption appeared in Mack’s stable, successful team, Fogel ran with the story. Or helped manufacture one.

Arguably the greatest controversy to surround the Athletics in this era was the condition of Rube Waddell as the 1905 World Series approached. Mack adamantly insisted that his ace had developed a sore arm from rough-housing, then overnight exposure from an open window on a September 8 train ride back from Boston. Fogel, in his Sporting News column on September 2, was already playing with rumors that John McGraw’s “friends will help the Rube to celebrate the Athletics’ victory away off in some secluded spot where the fishing is good and he will have such a bully time as to forget all about a world series being played.”32 After Waddell went on the shelf, Fogel reported in the Evening Telegraph that there was nothing wrong with his left arm, leaving his readers to surmise that the pitcher had been “approached” by gamblers to “lay down.” Conveniently, “Veteran” recounted this reporting in his September 30 Sporting News missive.33

His interest in the Phillies was more personal. In early 1903, the squad was on the market. Fogel organized a group of Philadelphia buyers, with an understanding that he would be appointed the team’s president. But another syndicate, led by James Potter, and with Pittsburgh owner Barney Dreyfuss as a participant, instead grabbed the prize.34 For years afterwards, Fogel raged against “Dreyfuss’ officiousness and treachery” and the corrupting stain of “alien ownership.”35 Fogel initially supported the efforts of managers Hugh Duffy, then Billy Murray, to build contending teams. But he quickly turned upon both, regarding them as poorly funded and motivated from above. “What a vast difference it would mean in the collective strength and prestige of the old National League,” he sighed in 1908, “if the Philadelphia club were owned by competent baseball men, or a corporation with a competent executive at its head.”36

Fogel’s 1903 team of potential buyers had included State Senator Israel Durham and real estate wunderkind Felix Isman. In early 1909, Durham led another group of Philadelphians to purchase the Phillies from the Potter syndicate.37 Durham died on May 28. Weeks later, Isman bought an option on the late Durham’s stock, but lit a firestorm attempting to replace manager Murray with Mike Donlin, and backed away.38 Fogel remained on the sidelines through the chaos.

Meanwhile, Fogel’s old friend Brush (who had purchased the Giants from Freedman in 1903) and Cubs owner Charles Murphy sought to overthrow NL President John Heydler. In the league’s annual year-end meeting, Brush and Murphy believed Brooklyn’s Charlie Ebbets and St. Louis’s Stanley Robison would join them in supporting John Montgomery Ward to replace Heydler.39 But where could they find the deciding fifth vote?

The answer was in Philadelphia. On November 26, 1909, Fogel, as the franchise’s new president, announced the bombshell to the press. “The stock is owned solely by Philadelphians,” he insisted, “there is no Western syndicate concerned in the transaction.”40

Few swallowed the tale, suspecting that behind Fogel stood Murphy, and that behind Murphy stood Cincinnati newspaper magnate (and presidential brother) Charles Taft. The NL meeting commenced on December 15. Cincinnati President Garry Herrmann promptly grilled Fogel on who actually held the Philadelphia stock. Fogel again insisted it was native Philadelphians, and Herrmann could do nothing other than “temporarily” accept him as a legitimate magnate.41 Fogel joined Brush, Murphy, and Ebbets in voting for Ward. Robison defected, leaving the voting deadlocked. Former umpire Lynch was agreed upon as a compromise and unanimously elected.42

With peace at hand, the magnates ignored the Phillies’ suspected syndicate ownership as so much insignificant corruption, and Fogel turned towards the upcoming 1910 season. He summarily dismissed manager Murray, replacing him with catcher Red Dooin. After Taft purchased the National League Park, Fogel launched plans for more bleacher seats. The players were assigned new, green-trimmed uniforms. A Hippodrome company—essentially a three-ring circus—performed nightly at the park during the summer.

Yet, by late May, the Phillies were out of contention. Led by combative regulars like Dooin, Otto Knabe, Mickey Doolan, and Sherry Magee, the squad continuously battled umpires. By August, Murphy, Ebbets, Robison, and Fogel united on objecting to “incompetent and arrogant” officiating.43 The Phillies’ finances drifted into the red—with bills for the new uniforms unpaid, and the Hippodrome abandoned as a flop—before Murphy provided a financial lifeline.44 Philadelphia finished the campaign with a distant 78-75 fourth-place finish, and attracted under 300,000 fans—almost half of what the neighboring Athletics drew. Fogel claimed the umpiring of Bill Klem and Augie Moran cost the Phillies at least 15 games.45

“Horace yearns for publicity like an actress lady,” one of his critics observed, “and is generally sliding into print, feet first.”46 In particular, Fogel could rarely resist the temptation to publicly meddle with his manager. After the 1910 season, Dooin put together a deal with his Reds counterpart, Clark Griffith. Philadelphia would send Johnny Bates, Eddie Grant, George McQuillan and Lew Moren to Cincinnati for Fred Beebe, Hans Lobert, Dode Paskert, and Jack Rowen. With the trade apparently sealed, Herrmann began signing the new Reds to contracts. Fogel took to the press, disputing the trade’s legitimacy and arguing that it would “interfere with deals he had in contemplation of which Manager Dooin knew nothing.”47 But Fogel provided no evidence of any serious alternate deals, the actual Dooin-Griffith agreement was widely considered advantageous to Philadelphia, and Herrmann held his ground. Fogel retreated.

The Phillies started the 1911 season strongly. After beating St. Louis on Monday, July 10, they stood a half-game behind the first-place Cubs. But that afternoon, Sherry Magee assaulted umpire Bill Finneran. Some suggested a boozy seaside party Fogel had hosted for the team the Sunday before had contributed to Magee’s ill-temperament.48 The Sporting News editorialized that Fogel’s “oft-repeated statements … that the umpires are drunken crooks” motivated Magee to meet “what he conceives to be injustice with force.”49

Lynch suspended Magee for the remainder of the season. Fogel took the case to the NL’s Board of Directors.50 The Board met on August 1 and voted to leave the matter with Lynch, who threatened Fogel with a libel suit based on letters the Phillies’ leader had previously sent him.51 Lynch reinstated Magee several weeks later but, by then, key injuries had overcome the team. Although attendance increased to 416,000, Philadelphia again finished in a distant fourth place with a 79-73 record.

Hopes were high as the 1912 season launched, with a “universal belief that the Phillies would be the one team the Giants would have to reckon with” in the pennant chase.52 But Philadelphia almost immediately fell out of contention. Attendance plummeted. Fogel berated his players in print. Mostly he took out his frustrations on the umpires and Lynch, this time with fatal consequences.

The first volley in the renewed battle came from Murphy. On August 12, with the Giants arriving in Chicago for a key series, the Cubs’ owner charged that Cardinals player-manager Roger Bresnahan was providing New York with “undue assistance” by not playing “it right up to the hilt” against his former team.53 A week later, Fogel parroted these charges to reporters, adding that Bresnahan had fielded weak squads against the Giants in the closing weeks of the 1911 race.54 Then, after the visiting Giants took a double-header from the Phillies on September 6, Fogel loudly declared that the pennant race was “fixed” as he left the park. The next day he sent a letter to Lynch questioning the integrity of the league’s umpiring and the president himself.55 Finally, Fogel submitted a piece to the Chicago Evening Post on September 28, in which he suggested that Lynch was but a “figurehead president” and that his umpires favored the Giants—so as to land plum World Series assignments—to the extent that 21 games over the 1912 season had been gift-wrapped for McGraw.56

This proved the breaking point. Stating that “my chances of being re-elected president are better by having Fogel against me,” Lynch immediately prepared charges, to be considered by the league as a whole.57 With the sport’s integrity at stake, the other magnates stifled whatever animosity they had towards Lynch, and fell into line behind him. The fiction that Fogel owned the Phillies evaporated. Taft announced he was “tired of the ill-success of the club this year and the trouble Mr. Fogel has brought upon himself and the club by his incessant war upon President Lynch.”58 Sportswriters detailed how Taft had lent Fogel the money to buy the team in 1909, “taking [promissory] notes on the franchise as collateral.”59 Fogel, with foresight, had obtained from Taft “first chance at the club in case it was ever sold again.”60 With his head in the noose, he scrambled to put together a team of buyers. He was unsuccessful, and agreed to pay Taft an additional $15,000 to extend his option.61 Meanwhile, as his showdown with Lynch loomed, Fogel futilely sought to buy time, and issued defiant statements that he would prevail.

His day of reckoning came on November 26, 1912, in New York City. It was an anti-climactic affair. Fogel’s defense “was so puerile in most cases that the other club owners had to smile as they listened to his labored arguments.”62 Under cross-examination, Fogel admitted he believed neither the umpires, Lynch, nor anyone else in the National League was crooked. But his fate had been sealed by his previous accusations to the contrary. The next day, the magnates unanimously voted to disbar Fogel: “He is hereby forever excluded from further participation in the counsels of this league as a representative of the Philadelphia Ball Club, or of any club.” Prosecuting lawyer James Toole stated, “I think all the club owners are sincerely sorry for Fogel. If he had been willing to come out when he saw that he was in a bad hole and admit that he had done wrong, but had seen the error of his way, and was willing to make a proper and public retraction, I believe that a point would have been stretched in his favor.”63

Much of the sympathy surrounding Fogel’s downfall emanated from the belief that Fogel was not entirely to blame. W. S. Forman, the Chicago Evening Post’s sporting editor, claimed Murphy directed Fogel to write the incendiary September 28 letter, approved the finished effort, and then sent it to the Post. Concluded Forman, “The man who is morally responsible for that article and the charges it contained is Murphy himself.”64 But Murphy, on the stand, offered an unconvincing claim that he was scarcely aware of the letter.65

Sporting Life concluded that Fogel’s punishment “while severe, was inevitable and fitting, though regrettable in respect of the fact that he was made the ‘goat’ for a subtler offender, who … abandoned him to his fate.”66 The Sporting News went further, opining that Fogel “was marked for slaughter not by seven National League magnates sitting in council in the Waldorf, but by Charles P. Taft, who chose from his minions the one he could best afford to spare—or the one he could dismiss with the least amount of noise and annoyance. Had it not been so, votes from Chicago and Brooklyn would not have been cast for expulsion.”67 Cincinnati sportswriter Jack Ryder held the National League magnates responsible for tolerating the “four-flush” of syndicated baseball: “Though they were aware of the real ownership of the club from the start, they permitted the situation to continue until it led to an inevitable result.”68

Fogel failed to pay Taft the $15,000 to extend his option, so the latter directly negotiated with potential buyers in December.69 There was $50 left in the club’s treasury. As a new era in Phillies baseball began, Fogel continued to visit the club’s offices each day, “apparently unwilling to realize that he is out of baseball.”70

In March 1913, determined to attack the “baseball trust,” Fogel launched Baseball Weekly.71 The magazine petered out quickly. Soon afterward, Congressman Thomas Gallagher planned an investigation into Organized Baseball. Fogel eagerly hoped to testify. But the magnates helped to steer the effort into a bureaucratic death.72 That fall, as Federal League owners met to challenge the established major leagues, Fogel offered a scheme to plant a franchise in New York. But he was “openly ridiculed” and asked to leave.73 From that point forward, Fogel left behind his baseball ambitions. He free-lanced a few sports columns, worked in the silk business, and toiled at an auto accessories store.

In September 1920, as Black Sox confessions shattered baseball’s reputation, Fogel returned with tales of earlier corruption. In 1905, he maintained, Waddell had indeed been reached by gamblers, accepting an initial payment before confessing. In the famed 1908 NL pennant race, Fogel stated, several Phillies turned down bribes to throw a key series against the Giants. Organized Baseball, he suggested, had quickly buried both incidents.74 Dooin confirmed the 1908 incident.75 But no evidence ever appeared to support Fogel’s claims on Waddell being corrupted in 1905.

A stroke in 1922 forced him from public life. A final one came on December 15, 1928, in his Philadelphia home. Horace Fogel was survived by his wife, Alice. He was buried alongside his son, Harry, in Philadelphia’s Mount Peace Cemetery.76

Sources

In addition to the sources noted in this biography, the author also accessed Fogel’s file from the National Baseball Hall of Fame, and the following sites:

ancestry.com

chroniclingamerica.loc.gov/newspapers/

fultonhistory.com/fulton.html

genealogybank.com

newspapers.com

Notes