William Madigan

To Washington Nationals fans, he was “Pony” for his youth and diminutive size. In his post-major-league playing days, he was “Kid.” To some in Washington’s first and second Irish-American community, he was “Tice,” from the Old English for “kid goat.” Everywhere else he was simply William J. Madigan. There’s no evidence that anyone ever called him Tony as his name appears at SABR and baseball reference.com; out-of-town newspapers that transcribed Pony as Tony appear to be the source of the error. Madigan made the major leagues in 1886 as a 17-year-old phenomenon, a hopeful midseason pickup for the otherwise hopeless first-year Washington Nationals, and retired from the professional ranks as a 20-year-old former major leaguer with a career won-lost record of 1-13.

William J. Madigan was born on July 18, 1868, in the District of Columbia’s predominantly middle-class Fourth Ward. He was one of nine children of Patrick, a shoemaker, and Bridget Madigan, immigrants from Ireland. Little is known of Madigan’s childhood or when he started playing baseball, but at a tender age he had developed into a pretty fair pitcher on the amateur sandlots of Washington. In 1885, playing for a “crack amateur team” known as the English Hills, Madigan, all of 16 years old at the start of the season, won 19 of his club’s 22 games.1 The following year, playing for the Merchants, D.C.’s leading amateur nine, the 17-year-old Madigan struck out 19 batters in one game and 23 in another.2 Despite such success against amateur batsmen, Madigan seemed an unlikely prospect as a major-league hurler – in addition to his youth, he stood just 5-feet-5 and weighed but 118 pounds.3

The Nationals, however, were floundering. Despite the presence of two-time NL batting champion and first-ever Triple Crown winner Paul Hines and a rookie catcher named Connie Mack, the team had managed to win only nine of its first 47 decisions, and was buried in last place, 28½ games behind the league-leading Detroit Wolverines. With little to lose, the bereft Nationals signed the homegrown Madigan to pitch.

The right-handed Madigan made his first start on July 10 against Boston at Washington’s Swampoodle Grounds. Although the Beaneaters took the game, 6-1, their captain, John Morrill, was impressed enough with Madigan’s pitching to remark that the Nationals would have had no trouble winning the game “had they been able to bat at all.”4 “His slow ball,” Morrill said of the youngster, “is different from any now pitched in the league, and all the teams will have difficulty batting it, at least until they get used to it.”5

The Washington Post reported that Madigan, “who made his first appearance yesterday, impressed … as a plucky one in the box and, as he expressed himself after the game, ‘I expected to be hit, but they could not scare me.’”6

Pluck wasn’t enough for Madigan, who pitched well in his second start, again at Washington, against New York on July 15, “completely puzzl[ing] the Gothamites”7 until the eighth inning, when the Giants scored three runs on five hits to win, 5-2.

The Philadelphia Quakers came to Washington on July 16 for a three-game stand against the Nationals. Relieving a sore-handed Bob Barr with three runs across and none out in the first, Madigan squandered a seven-run comeback by Washington in the sixth by giving up four in the seventh to lose, 9-8. Philadelphia found it easier going the next day, winning 8-1.

For the third and final game of the series, on July 19, Nationals manager Mike Scanlon pitched Madigan with two days’ rest. Washington, losers of its last 11 games and 26 of its last 29, was at the bottom of the league standings with a record of 9 wins and 44 losses. The fourth-place Quakers, by contrast, had won six in a row and 13 of their last 15 for an overall record of 34-20. To take on Madigan and the Nationals, Quakers manager Harry Wright chose hard-throwing 19-year-old rookie left-hander Ledell Titcomb (0-3).

The Nationals took the lead on hustle in the second inning when third baseman Hines and shortstop Davy Force singled on either side of a walk to second sacker Jimmy Knowles to load the bases, and successive sacrifices by catcher Barney Gilligan, center fielder Ed Crane (safe on an error by Titcomb), and Madigan pushed two runs across the plate.

Washington tallied an additional run in the third, but the Quakers put up single runs in the third, fourth, and sixth innings to tie the game, 3-3.

Hines opened the eighth inning for Washington with a single. A base hit by Knowles and a sacrifice by Force put runners on second and third, and Gilligan walked to load the bases. Crane followed with a single to left field, scoring Hines and Knowles. Madigan slapped a grounder between second and short for a single, his first major-league hit, scoring Gilligan. When left fielder George Wood fumbled recovering the ball, Crane scooted home for the fourth and final run of the inning.

Pitching now with a 7-3 lead, Madigan retired Wood and right fielder Ed Daily before Hines’s fumble of center fielder Jim Fogarty’s grounder and subsequent wild throw to first put Fogarty on base. Shortstop Arthur Irwin tripled over the head of Crane in center field, scoring Fogarty, then scored himself when Hines booted a grounder off the bat of third baseman Joe Mulvey. Mulvey was put out trying for second, ending the inning.

Both teams were retired scoreless in the ninth to clinch the 7-5 victory for Washington. One day after his 18th birthday, the Nationals’ Pony had his first major-league victory and driven in the game-winning run, and “the enthusiasm of the fifteen hundred people who saw the home club break a monotonous series of defeats was unbounded.”8

Madigan pitched his finest game in his next start, on July 23 in Boston, despite winding up on the losing end of a 3-2 score. “There was a general smile among the spectators of yesterday’s ball game when Scanlon’s feather-weight twirler stepped into the box. He is short in stature … and looks so slender that one could easily imagine that a hot ball would take him clean off his pins. His boyish face formed a strong contrast to those of the bronzed veterans he had the temerity to face. … But the big fellows went out one after the other. … [Madigan] throws a straight ball most of the time and has very few curves, or if he has, he did not use them yesterday. He has a slow drop that fooled the heavy men frequently. In fact, his effectiveness may be said to lie in his slowness, and it was not apparent that he relies much on speed.”9

The loss in Boston was the first in a string of 10 in a row for Madigan. In two more July starts, he was tagged for 22 hits in an 18-1 rout by the Giants and contributed five walks and a wild pitch to an 11-run, third-inning outburst in a 13-1 loss to the Wolverines. Madigan let victory slip away on August 7 when he allowed the St. Louis Maroons to tie the game on two runs in the ninth inning and win 6-5 in the 10th. Subsequent starts and losses by the scores 9-1, 8-1, and 8-0 made it clear that young Madigan had little left to offer even the lowly Nationals. His final start of the season, September 4 at Washington, resulted in a 20-hit, 13-6 loss to Chicago.

In a syndicated review of NL pitchers that originated in the New York World, Madigan was described as “the featherweight of the League corps of pitchers … earning his first laurels as a professional with the Capital City team, and [giving] evidence of making an excellent player when a year or so shall have added to his weight and strength. … Madigan’s work in the box is as yet very ungraceful and boyish, but practice is lending finish to his delivery. He will no doubt make a name for himself in the near future.”10

There was no future, however, for Madigan in the major leagues. His release by the Nationals was reported on September 16.11 Eleven days later, Madigan, “late of the Nationals,” was once again pitching for the amateur Merchant club of Washington.12

Despite his youth, Madigan never made it back to the big leagues. He closed out his major-league career on a 10-game losing streak, with a 1-13 won-lost record and an ERA of 4.87. He pitched in 14 games, starting 13 and completing 12, for 114⅔ innings (the most for a major-league pitcher whose career ended before he turned 1913), giving up 154 hits, walking 44 and striking out 29. Opposing batters raked him for a .313 batting average.14 In addition to his pitching, Madigan played three games in right field and batted .083 in 49 plate appearances. The Nationals finished the season deep in the cellar with a dismal record of 28 wins against 92 losses, 60 games behind the pennant-winning Chicago White Stockings.

Madigan signed with the Binghamton Crickets of the International League for 1887, starting and winning the season opener against Utica, 8-2. His pitching was only sporadically effective and after being “knocked silly”15 by Toronto, 15-2, on August 4, Madigan was released with a won-lost record of 6-12.16

Madigan started the 1888 season with the Kalamazoo Kazoos of the Tri-State League but pitched ineffectively and was released in June.17 In his final start for the Kazoos, Madigan was knocked out of the box in the eighth inning of a 19-2 rout at the hands of the last-place Jackson Jaxons.

Speaking to a Kalamazoo sportswriter, the frustrated 19-year-old placed the blame for his pitching woes on the league’s umpires. “Am I in trim? Well, I thought so, but you can’t do much with the Ohio umpires unless you put the ball square over the plate. My effective point is on the corner of the plate, and when I saw that they were all called balls, I pitched to the center of the plate, where they could hit me.”18

Madigan shows up later in 1888 and in 1889 pitching and playing right field for an amateur club, the Alerts, which featured his older brother Jack at second base and future major-league pitcher Harry Mace.19 After this, the thread gets lost on Madigan’s ballplaying days.

After leaving the ranks of professional ballplayers, Madigan clerked for a D.C. law firm,20 then operated a saloon, “popular among sports personalities, especially baseball players,”21 in Washington from 1890 to 1914. On June 3, 1896, he married Margaret “Maggie” Riordan at St. Aloysius Church in Washington,22 and a son, Francis Raymond, was born in October 1898. Maggie died in 1904 at the age of 31 or 32.23 Madigan never remarried.

July 20, 1912, was celebrated as Amateur Day at American League Park in Washington, with a parade of 39 old-time amateur nines and a “platoon” of former professionals that included Madigan and a few of his teammates, including Hines and Scanlon, from the 1886 Nationals. All were guests at the game that followed between the AL’s Washington Nationals and St. Louis Browns.24

In 1914 Madigan, “widely known in baseball circles in the Capital,”25 made a brief return to the game as a scout for the Federal League. Despite his “hopes to pick up several promising young players from colleges in this locality and from the sandlot brigade of the District,”26 no notable signings appear to be attributed to him.

Madigan was a salesman for the Pabst Brewing Company until 1920, when he began working for the US Government Printing Office.27 He retired in 1933 at the age of 65.28

After an illness of six weeks, Madigan died on December 4, 1954, at Providence Hospital in Washington. He was 86 years old. He is buried alongside his wife, Maggie, in Washington’s Mount Olivet Cemetery.29

Photo credit

William J. Madigan, Kalamazoo Daily Telegraph, February 25, 1888.

Notes

1 “Baseball Matters,” San Francisco Examiner, September 5, 1886: 1.

2 “Several Fairy Tales,” The Sporting News, July 19, 1886: 1.

3 “Base Ball,” New Orleans Times-Picayune, July 28, 1886: 2.

4 “Another Defeat for the Nationals – Sunday Games,” Evening Star (Washington DC), July 12, 1886: 1.

5 “Another Defeat for the Nationals – Sunday Games.”

6 David Nemec, Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, Volume 1: The Ballplayers Who Built the Game (Lincoln, Nebraska: Bison Books, 2011), 118.

7 “Nationals Defeated by the Giants,” New York Tribune, July 16, 1886: 2.

8 “Washington and Philadelphia,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 20, 1886: 3.

9 “Great Work in the Box,” Boston Globe, July 24, 1886: 5.

10 “Baseball Matters,” San Francisco Examiner, September 5, 1886: 1.

11 “Base Ball Notes,” Morning Call (Paterson, New Jersey), September 16, 1886: 8.

12 “Base Ball Notes,” News (Frederick, Maryland), September 22, 1886: 3.

13 Nemec, 118.

14 “Anson at the Top,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, September 25, 1886: 9.

15 “Newark No Longer Leads,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, August 5, 1887: 7.

16 Nemec, 118.

17 “Base Ball Briefs,” Wheeling (West Virginia) Daily Intelligencer, June 7, 1888: 4.

18 “Notes from the Diamond,” Wheeling Daily Intelligencer, May 5, 1888: 4.

19 Nemec, 118.

20 Nemec, 118.

21 “W.J. Madigan, 86, Ex-Baseball Player,” Evening Star, December 6, 1964: 14.

22 “Marriage Licenses,” Washington Morning Times, June 4, 1896: 6.

23 “Died,” Washington Evening Star, May 13, 1904: 5.

24 Alfred L. Stern, “Amateur Day Outlook Good,” Washington Post, July 19, 1912: 19.

25 “Tice Madigan, Fed Scout, Seeks to Sign Billy Martin,” Washington Times, April 29, 1914: 15.

26 “Tice Madigan, Fed Scout, Seeks to Sign Billy Martin.”

27 “Madigan, William J.,” Evening Star, December 6, 1954: 15.

28 “Madigan, William J.”

29 “Madigan, William J.”