John Hollison

John Hollison was a left-handed pitcher whose career in the major leagues lasted for only one game. On a warm August afternoon in 1892, the 22-year-old Hollison threw four innings in relief for the Chicago Colts (the team now known as the Cubs), allowing one hit and one run while striking out two. Despite this encouraging debut, the young man left the major leagues behind. Instead, he played semipro ball, went to medical school, and enjoyed a long career as a respected physician. Before he died in 1969 at the age of 99, he was the oldest living former major leaguer and the last surviving player from Cap Anson‘s tenure as Chicago manager.

John Henry Hollison, the second of three children, was born in Chicago on May 3, 1870. His father, Martin, was an immigrant from Norway who worked as a sailor and then as a laborer. His Swedish-born mother Mary was employed as a washerwoman.1 Their other children were daughter Augusta, four years older than John, and son Henry, four years younger.

John fell in love with baseball, and though he sometimes played the outfield, he excelled as a pitcher during his teenage years. His mastery of the curveball drew notice from the many amateur and semipro teams in Chicago. In 1892, Hollison, whose teammates called him “Swede” for his light complexion, landed a spot as the star pitcher of the Whitings, one of the top semipro teams in Chicago’s fast-paced City League. 

As an adult, Hollison weighed about 160 pounds and stood only 5-feet-8. Yet with the pitcher’s box only 50 feet from the plate (as it was before 1893), “no catcher could hold me,” he said years later. “I’d carry around a one-pound iron ball and the baseball would seem light as a feather when I threw it.”2 He also said that his curveball broke away from the batter, an early example of the screwball that Christy Mathewson popularized during the early 1900s. Hollison’s fine pitching for the Whitings drew the attention of the city’s National League club, the Chicago Colts.

The 1892 campaign, played under a split-season format for the first time in league history, was a lost cause for Cap Anson and his Colts. A nine-game losing streak in April dropped the Colts to the lower depths of the National League, but a 19-3 run in May boosted the club into contention for the first-half title. However, injuries brought the club back to earth, and a poor start to the second half buried the Colts in ninth place by early August, well out of the pennant race. On Saturday, August 13, the Cleveland Spiders came to Chicago’s South Side Park. Anson, the first baseman and manager of the club, decided to give his pitching staff a rest. He would put two local pitchers, Frank Griffith and Hollison, on the mound.

Griffith, a 19-year-old left-hander from Northwestern University, started the game for the Colts and immediately ran into trouble.3 He walked leadoff batter Cupid Childs, but despite this cardinal sin, he was nearly out of danger after he struck out Jesse Burkett and got George Davis to force Childs for the second out. However, Griffith then walked Ed McKean, and a wild pitch scored Davis with McKean advancing to third. Jake Virtue‘s single scored McKean to put Cleveland up, 2-0.

In the second inning, two walks and a single by Burkett brought home another run, and in the fourth a walk to Chief Zimmer and a home run by Childs gave the Spiders a 5-0 lead. During his four-inning stint, Griffith allowed five earned runs, three hits, and six walks.

It was then Hollison’s turn. The young left-hander acquitted himself well, retiring the Spiders in order in the fifth, sixth, and seventh innings while striking out two and allowing no walks. The only blemish on Hollison’s record came in the eighth inning when Cleveland’s Jimmy McAleer belted a line drive between the outfielders and sped around the bases for a home run. That was the only run, and the only hit, that Hollison allowed. However, he struck out in all three of his plate appearances. The Colts, who elected to bat first that day, scored twice in the eighth to avoid a shutout, but went out meekly in the ninth as the Spiders left the field with a 6-2 win.

Frank Griffith resurfaced in the major leagues, making six starts for the Cleveland club two years later. However, Hollison’s professional career was over. He was content to return to the Whitings and resume his career in semipro ball, while studying homeopathic medicine at Chicago’s Hering Medical College. He returned to South Side Park every now and then to pitch batting practice for Cap Anson and his men, earning $10 per session. He also lent himself out to other semipro and town teams for extra paydays; he served as an umpire a few times as well.

Apparently, the financial attractions of major league life held no appeal for John Hollison. As his son John Junior explained many years later, “The going rate for professional players then was $100 per month. Dad didn’t like to travel, either, though this was long before the era of airplanes.”4 Besides, the young pitcher was more interested in his studies—and he was, by this time, a family man. He married Mary Johnson, the 17-year-old daughter of Norwegian immigrants, in 1895. In addition to John Junior (born in 1896), they raised daughters Hazel (born in 1898) and Cherrill (born in 1901).

Hollison remained a top pitcher in Chicago’s semipro scene for another eight years, mostly with the Whitings and later with other clubs. One of his proudest moments came on September 13, 1896. The same team he had faced in a Colts uniform four years earlier, the National League’s Cleveland Spiders, came to Chicago to play the Whitings. The Spiders, led by manager Patsy Tebeau,  were heavily favored—but Hollison dominated the major leaguers with his curveballs, leading the Whitings to an 11-1 win. “Southpaw Hollison was responsible for the victory,” reported the Cleveland Plain Dealer. “He pitched a gilt edged game, and allowed the Clevelands only three hits off his delivery … Hollison had the Spiders completely at his mercy and for nine innings made laughing stock of Patsy’s braves.”5

Several of Cleveland’s stars—including Cupid Childs, Ed McKean, and Jesse Burkett—took that afternoon off (and were roundly criticized for doing so).6 Nonetheless, Hollison’s performance brought him much praise in the local papers. A month earlier on August 16, 1896, Hollison threw a two-hitter against Des Moines of the Western League, winning the game by an 11-1 score. Hollison kept the newspaper clippings of these two games for the rest of his life.

As a new century dawned, Hollison decided to concentrate on what proved to be his life’s work. In 1901 he completed his internship at Chicago Hospital, and in 1902 he graduated from Dunham Medical College (which had absorbed Hering Medical College the year before). He practiced homeopathic medicine in Chicago for more than 60 years, becoming a popular and distinguished figure with his white mustache and goatee.

During the 1910s, Hollison’s son followed in his father’s footsteps in two essential ways than one. John Junior, a right-handed pitcher, also excelled in the semipro ranks until arm trouble dashed his dreams of playing major league ball. The younger Hollison then studied homeopathic medicine, earning his degree and setting up his own successful practice.

John Hollison the elder never lost his love of baseball. As the years passed, he became a familiar figure at reunions and old-timers games. One of the first of these came during World War I in 1918, when the popular evangelist Billy Sunday—who had played for Anson’s club during the 1880s—organized an old-timers contest at Chicago’s Comiskey Park to raise money for war relief. Hollison, by then known as “Doc,” pitched in that game; other participants included several familiar stars of the 1880s and 1890s, such as Sunday, Fred Pfeffer, Jimmy Ryan, and Tony Mullane.

Two years later, at the first reunion of Chicago’s Old Time Baseball Association, Hollison, at age 50, pitched against the 61-year-old Mullane. This game was attended by Charles Comiskey, owner of the Chicago White Sox, and Hollison’s long-ago manager, Cap Anson.

Mary Hollison died in 1944, but the widowed ex-pitcher’s health remained solid well into old age. On June 26, 1948, at age 78, he pitched in a three-inning old-timers game at Wrigley Field in Chicago. Among the stars present were Jim Thorpe, the former New York Giant and Olympic gold medalist, and Rogers Hornsby, the Hall of Fame second baseman and seven-time batting champion. Hornsby had not yet been born when Hollison pitched in his only major league game.

Upon the death of former St. Louis Browns pitcher John Grimes in January 1964, “Doc” Hollison became the oldest living former major leaguer. He remained healthy and active into his nineties, continuing to treat his patients while living by himself in an apartment above his office on Fullerton Avenue. He had lived in the same building for more than 60 years. In 1966, two robbers invaded the 96-year-old’s home and tied him to his bed; the crooks were never caught, but the elderly doctor emerged unharmed. He finally retired from his medical practice soon afterward.

John Hollison, a living link to 19th-century baseball, turned 99 on May 3, 1969. His son John Junior told the Chicago Tribune, “Dad’s in excellent condition except for his eyes. He tunes in on the radio every day there’s a ball game in Chicago, Cubs or White Sox.”7 The old pitcher’s memory of his sole major league game proved faulty, however. He told interviewers that he left the game before it was finished, as he was supervising a team of newspaper boys and had to deliver the afternoon editions. However, the box scores in the nation’s newspapers the next day show that Hollison finished the contest.8

A little over three months later, on August 19, 1969, John Hollison died. He held the following distinctions:

• He had been the oldest living ex-major leaguer (Ralph Miller succeeded him);
• He was also the last man alive who had played for Cap Anson (the second to last was Bert Abbey);
• In addition, he was the last surviving pitcher from the pre-1893 distance (the second to last was John Grim, who pitched in one game in 1890).

Hollison was buried at Acacia Park Cemetery in Norridge, a suburb of Chicago.

Acknowledgments

This story was reviewed by Bill Lamb and Rory Costello and fact-checked by Joe Wancho.

Sources

Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 14, 1896.

Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1892; May 3, 1968; May 3, 1969.

United States federal census, 1880.

Notes

1 United States federal census, 1880. This census lists John Hollison as nine years old, not 10. Also, Hollison’s Social Security registration gives his birth date as May 3, 1871.

2 Ed Prell, “Lefty on Anson’s Team is 98 Today,” Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1968: 70.

3 The game account comes from “Anson’s Schoolboys”, Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1892: 5.

4 Ed Prell, “Oldest Ball Player’s Birthday,” Chicago Tribune, May 3, 1969: 77.

5 Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 14, 1896: 6.

6 The Cleveland Leader stated that “Burkett, McKean, and Childs had flatly refused to come and play, intimating that there was nothing in it for them.” Cleveland Leader, September 14, 1896: 3.

7 Prell, “Oldest Ball Player’s Birthday.”

8 The box score appeared in most major daily newspapers of the period, including the Chicago Tribune, August 14, 1892: 5, and also in The Sporting News, August 20, 1892: 5.