April 30, 1887: Tip O’Neill homers twice and hits for the cycle as St. Louis Browns bash Cleveland Blues

The American Association was already two weeks into its 1887 schedule when the St. Louis Browns and Cleveland Blues met at St. Louis’s Sportsman’s Park on April 30. (In the National League, by contrast, the 1887 season had not begun until April 28.)

The two-time defending league champion Browns (6-3) – winners of the “World Series” against the NL champion Chicago White Stockings in 1886 – were tied with the Cincinnati Reds for second place in the early stages of the year. The Blues were newcomers to the AA, joining the league after Pittsburgh had jumped to the NL for 1887. With just one victory in nine games, Cleveland had only the winless New York Metropolitans beneath them in the eight-team standings.

The St. Louis and Cleveland teams were in the midst of a four-game series, and the Browns had bombarded the Blues in the first two contests, outscoring them 32-14.1 Game Three was set for Saturday afternoon, and “a fair audience”2 turned out to watch. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch warned its readers that the “game will be called at 4 p.m.”3 It turned out to be a big day for St. Louis’s top hitter, 26-year-old left fielder Tip O’Neill.

Described as “one of the most extraordinary Canadian batsmen in the history of baseball,”4 O’Neill was the offensive catalyst for the Browns’ 1885 and 1886 championship teams, batting .350 and .328 respectively. In 1886 he led the league with 107 runs batted in. Initially a pitcher – in 1883 for the New York Gothams (NL) and in 1884 for St. Louis – O’Neill developed arm troubles and was moved into the outfield, where he concentrated on batting. In the Browns’ first 24 games of the 1887 season, O’Neill smacked four or more hits in eight different games, twice hitting for the cycle.5 The first time came on April 30.

Right-hander Dave Foutz started for the home team. He was in his fourth major-league season, all with St. Louis, and was a big reason the Browns had captured the league pennant in the last two years. In 1886 Foutz had topped the American Association with 41 wins (tied with Pittsburgh’s Ed Morris), a .719 winning percentage, and a 2.11 earned-run average. He was also a good hitter; on days in which he did not pitch, he played either at first base or in the outfield.6

Mike Morrison, a 20-year-old rookie right-hander, made his fourth start of the season for Cleveland. He owned the Blues’ sole victory, having defeated Louisville in his last outing by allowing just four runs.7

Cleveland was first on the scoreboard. With one out in the bottom of the first, Ed McKean and Charlie Sweeney hit back-to-back singles to put runners at the corners. McKean scored on Fred Mann’s out.

The Browns started their hit parade in the second inning (after being retired in order in the first). Charlie Comiskey, serving as St. Louis’s manager and playing first base, lined a ball to left, with “the sphere hitting the top of the small fence on first bound, and bounding over the high fence”8 for a home run, tying the score.

Morrison then hit Curt Welch with a pitch. Welch stole second and scored on Foutz’s triple. After Bob Caruthers9 popped out to second baseman Cub Stricker, Lou Sylvester drew Morrison’s first walk of the day. On a steal attempt, Blues catcher Charlie Reipschlager threw wildly to second. As Foutz scored, Sylvester continued to third base and scored on Doc Bushong’s out. The Browns had scored four runs on two hits for a 4-1 lead.

Blues captain and center fielder Pete Hotaling singled in the Cleveland third, moved to second on McKean’s out, and scored on a single by Sweeney. But the Browns were soon back in the batter’s boxes. Bill Gleason doubled and O’Neill, who had been retired in the first, walked.10 Both moved up one base on Comiskey’s sacrifice and another base on Welch’s single to left. With O’Neill now at third, Morrison was called for a balk, and O’Neill scored to increase St. Louis’s lead to 6-2.

The Browns broke the game open in the fourth. Bushong singled, and an out later Gleason walked. O’Neill’s single to center loaded the bases. Comiskey lifted a pop fly to Stricker, who dropped it, and Bushong scored.

With Welch batting, Reipschlager committed his second error of the game when he tried to “catch Comiskey napping at first”11 but instead threw the ball away. Gleason scored and the other two Browns moved up a base. Welch singled up the middle, bringing both O’Neill and Comiskey home. Foutz reached on shortstop McKean’s error, and Caruthers walked to again load the bases. Caruthers bounced into an RBI force out and Welch scored the fifth run of the inning, making it 11-2.

If the game wasn’t out of reach after the fourth inning, it surely was after St. Louis batted in the fifth. Arlie Latham – who had led the American Association in runs scored in 1886 with 152 and finished second in steals with 60 – singled to center and then stole both second and third base. Gleason walked for the third time. Morrison’s wild pitch brought Latham home, and O’Neill launched a two-run home run,12 his first of the season.

Comiskey and Welch both reached on fielding errors by Blues third baseman Joseph Herr, and Foutz singled to right to load the sacks again. Caruthers’ triple cleared the bases, and he scored on a passed ball. Morrison retired the next two before Latham singled and stole second base.13 Gleason’s RBI single plated Latham, and then O’Neill’s double brought Gleason home.

It was O’Neill’s second extra-base hit of the inning, and he had already collected a single, double, and home run. St. Louis sent 13 batters to the plate in the fifth, tallying nine runs.

The Blues answered with McKean’s three-run homer in the bottom of the fifth, the first career home run for the 22-year-old rookie. The Browns, however, added eight more runs of their own in the sixth inning. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat simply described the action with, “The Browns kept up their slugging in the sixth, until tiring of the sport they did not try to make any more runs, merely trotting around the bases.”14

Part of St. Louis’s sixth-inning surge involved O’Neill belting his second home run of the game.15 The Cleveland Plain Dealer reported, “The game was long drawn out, and its monotony was only relieved by the Browns’ phenomenal slugging.”16

Despite the lopsided score of 28-5, the Blues did not give up, scoring twice in the seventh and four times in the eighth. It was now getting dark, and the game was called by umpire Ned Cuthbert after eight innings of play, “much to the relief of spectators and players.”17

The Browns were relentless in the batter’s box, scoring almost as many runs against Morrison as they had in the first two games of the series combined. Led by O’Neill (five hits – including two home runs – and a walk), Gleason (three hits and four bases on balls), and Latham (four hits), the St. Louis batters banged out 26 base hits.18

This offensive outburst was the most runs scored by St. Louis in 1887 and the first of seven games in which the Browns scored at least 20 runs, en route to winning their third consecutive pennant.19 The 1887 Browns finished their season with a winning percentage of .704. They defeated the Blues in 18 of their 19 contests (including 13 of 14 at Sportsman’s Park), outscoring Cleveland 215-98.20

O’Neill was credited with a triple in the box scores, so it must have taken place in either the seventh or eighth inning,21 making O’Neill the first player in Browns’ franchise history22 to hit for the cycle. One week later, on May 7, he accomplished the rare feat again, as the Browns defeated the Louisville Colonels, 12-7.23 Five cycles took place in National League or American Association games in 1887, the most in a major-league season to that point.24

O’Neill went on to become the second player in major-league history to capture the Triple Crown,25 leading the AA in batting average (.435),26 home runs (14), and runs batted in (123). His 1887 batting average remained the highest-ever by a major leaguer in a single season until Boston’s Hugh Duffy hit .440 in the NL in 1894.27

There have only been three occurrences of a batter hitting for the cycle in a game that was not at least nine innings long. O’Neill’s achievement in this game was the first. Three years later, on August 1, 1890, Brooklyn’s Oyster Burns hit for the cycle in an eight-inning affair (the second game of a doubleheader).28 Finally, Baltimore’s Austin Hays hit for the cycle in a six-inning, rain-shortened official game on June 22, 2022.

Acknowledgments

This article was fact-checked by Bill Marston and copy-edited by Len Levin.

The author sincerely thanks Terry Metter, subject department librarian at the Cleveland Public Library, for assisting with an article from the Cleveland Plain Dealer, which provided details of the game.

Sources  

In addition to the sources mentioned in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com, MLB.com, Retrosheet.org, and SABR.org. With no play-by-play available on Baseball-Reference.com or Retrosheet.org, the author based the game’s play-by-play on details found in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat, the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and The Sporting News.

Notes

1 St. Louis had won the two games by scores of 19-3 and 13-11. The Browns had scored 113 runs in the first 10 games of the season.

2 “Sporting,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 1, 1887: 10.

3 “Last Appearance of Cleveland,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 30, 1887: 12.

4 Steve Hatcher, “Tip O’Neill,” SABR Biography Project.

5 Hatcher.

6 In 1887 Foutz batted .357, which was second-best on the Browns (tied with Caruthers). He pitched in 40 games for St. Louis, but he also played 15 games at first and another 50 in right field. A freak line-drive injury to his pitching hand in a game against the Blues in August sidelined the ace for more than a month, but his 25 W’s in 1887 gave him 99 victories in the three-year span. Bill Lamb, “Dave Foutz,” SABR Baseball Biography Project.

7 In Cleveland’s first nine games (eight losses), the Blues pitchers had yielded 119 runs. Morrison turned out to be a workhorse for the 1887 Cleveland squad, starting 40 games and pitching 316⅔ innings, although he struggled with control. He combined 205 walks with 62 wild pitches in his rookie season. He also surrendered 13 home runs. (Three of those round-trippers came in this game.)

8 “Sporting.”

9 Caruthers was another dual threat for St. Louis. He pitched in 39 games and split time between first base (seven games) and the outfield (54 games) when not on the mound. He batted a career-high .357 in 1887.

10 The Browns went three-up, three-down in the first, so we must assume that O’Neill made an out.

11 “Sporting.”

12 The ball was sent “to the bulletin board” along the outfield wall. See “Sporting.”

13 Latham had three stolen bases in the fifth inning. Known as “The Freshest Man on Earth” (See Ralph Berger, “Arlie Latham,” SABR Baseball Biography Project), Latham stole 129 bases in 1887, which was second in the AA to Cincinnati’s Hugh Nicol. In 1888 Latham led the AA with 109 stolen bases. By the end of the 1887 season, Latham held the record for career swipes (189), and by 1896, he had 741. He played four games in 1909 for the New York Giants (at the age of 49!) and notched his 742nd career stolen base. As of the end of the 2023 season, Latham ranked seventh all-time in career stolen bases, with 742.

14 “Sporting.”

15 “Tip O’Neill Home Runs,” Baseball-Almanac.com, accessed November 29, 2023, https://www.baseball-almanac.com/players/home_run.php?p=oneiti01. Baseball-Almanac lists all of O’Neill’s home runs on this site. In this game, though, the Browns batted first, so both of O’Neill’s homers took place in the top of the fifth and sixth innings.

16 “Baseball,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 1, 1887: 2.

17 “Sporting.” The game lasted 2 hours and 40 minutes.

18 In 1887 bases on balls counted as hits. In addition to each player’s line score (which shows runs, base hits, putouts, assists, and errors), the St. Louis Globe-Democrat box score lists “bases on called balls” separately. The author subtracted the bases on balls from each player’s box score hits total to provide what are viewed today as “base hits.”

19 In 138 games, St. Louis scored 1,131 runs (8.2 runs per game), becoming the first major-league team to have more than 1,000 runners cross the plate. Although the 1906 Chicago Cubs won 76.3 percent of their games (116 out of 152), they scored just 704 runs. The Cubs scored an average of 4.5 runs per game, but their runs allowed averaged just 2.5 (a difference of 2.0 runs per game). The 1887 Browns allowed 761 runs (for an average of 5.5), so their scoring differential was 2.7 runs per game. From 1885 to 1886, the average number of games played by each team in the American Association jumped 18 games per team (from 111.25 to 139.25).

20 In the series finale (played on May 1), Cleveland scored 13 runs and lost, 14-13. The Browns had swept them. They lost their next three games to Cincinnati as well, giving them a 1-13 record after three weeks of play. Cleveland finished 1887 with a 39-92-2 record, last place in the AA.

21 As was often the case with nineteenth-century games, if the hit did not lead to a run, the details of the hit were not included in the newspaper accounts of the game, but it showed up in the box scores. O’Neill is credited with a triple in “Baseball,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, May 1, 1887: 2, and “Games of April 30,” The Sporting News, May 7, 1887: 4.

22 The American Association’s Browns became the National League’s St. Louis Browns in 1892, and then in 1900 the franchise became the NL’s St. Louis Cardinals.

23 This game was also at Sportsman’s Park. O’Neill was the second player to collect a single, double, triple, and home run in two different games, joining Cincinnati’s John Reilly (September 12, 1883, and September 19, 1883).

24 The five cycles in 1887 were accomplished by O’Neill (AA, April 30), the Pittsburgh Alleghenys’ Fred Carroll (NL, May 2), O’Neill (May 7), the New York Metropolitans’ Dave Orr (AA, August 10, his second career cycle) and the Cincinnati Reds’ Bid McPhee (AA, August 26). They collectively broke the former record of four cycles in a season, set in 1885 and equaled in 1886. In 1890 seven players hit for the cycle, setting a new record which was not broken until 1933, when eight players hit for the cycle. (In 2009, eight batters also hit for the cycle.)

25 In 1878 Providence Grays outfielder Paul Hines was the first ballplayer to lead the league in the Triple Crown categories in the same season, leading the National League with 4 home runs, 50 RBIs, and a .358 batting average in 62 games.

26 Even with his 50 bases on balls subtracted from his at-bats and hits, O’Neill still batted .435. More amazingly, he led the majors (all players in both the NL and AA) in runs scored (167), hits (225), doubles (52), on-base percentage (.490), slugging percentage (.691), and total bases (357). His 19 triples also paced the AA, meaning that he led all batters in just about every batting category.

27 According to Baseball-Reference.com in November 2023, Duffy’s mark ranked fifth-best all-time, after four Negro Leagues players (led by the New York Cubans’ Tetelo Vargas, who batted .471 in 1943 in 30 games).

28 The game was called after the Pittsburgh Alleghenys had batted in the top of the eighth.