July 11, 1892: A close victory for Beaneaters, but still a laugher

In 2013, eight Boston Red Sox players stopped shaving during the season as a show of team unity. “It’s a bonding element,” manager John Farrell said of his team, which was headed to a World Series title. “You have to have ways to have fun sometimes. It takes the focus off the daily grind.”1

More than a century earlier and long before the Red Sox, the Boston Beaneaters were a team that knew how to have fun. They too would win a championship, and they decided to “take the focus off the daily grind” and have a little fun one day in Chicago.

The first half of the 1892 season was drawing to a close in the experimental split-season format. Boston had already clinched the pennant for the first half and had little to play for on July 11 at Chicago. While a modern baseball team in a meaningless game could call up minor leaguers and see how they perform at the major-league level, in 1892 Boston simply performed. The performance was literally laughable, as the players wore beards and red noses, and dressed themselves in comedic costumes.

“During the morning,” wrote the Boston Post, “they cleared out several masquerade costume shops and appeared on the field in rigs that were a cross between a Salvation Army captain outfit and a penitentiary suit. Besides they had whiskers.”2 Actor Eddie Foy, a star in vaudeville theaters at the time, assisted the players with their makeup.3

The game itself was a pitchers’ duel between Boston’s Kid Nichols and Chicago’s Bill Hutchinson. But more focus was on the pageantry. Boston “appeared in impossible costumes,” wrote the Boston Journal. “[King] Kelly, [Hugh] Duffy, and [Tommy] McCarthy wearing false whiskers, and the entire team being clothed in some check suits of the loudest pattern.”4 The Chicago Daily Inter-Ocean said Boston was “attired in a species of base-ball make-up which strongly suggested a collection of penal servitude habits from the various penitentiaries of the country. The players’ faces were hidden behind hideous whiskers and preposterous mustachios, surmounted by caps of every conceivable shape and device.”5 A comment from the press box likened their uniforms to Coney Island bathing suits.

King Kelly, as he often did, got the first and the last laughs of the day. It was no surprise the comedic Kelly came up with the plan, but then he also doubled to center in the eighth, scoring McCarthy with the go-ahead run, and Boston won 3-2. Kelly even had the gall and the time to stop at first base on his way by and tell Chicago’s Cap Anson that the Illinois-Iowa League was looking for talent and he should “transfer his team into company of its own speed.”6

The Chicago Tribune found no humor in these antics, reporting that the Beaneaters “appeared in the roles of buffoons,” with “costumes being ridiculous and absurd.”7 Chicago fans were used to Kelly’s clowning and “it was not hard to pick out the author of this coarse and vulgar attempt at humor. Kelly, try as he may, can be nothing but coarse in anything he attempts of this kind. People who go to see baseball pay to see a game. When they want to see buffoons they go to a circus where clowns are paid to make fools of themselves for the public delectation.”8

The Boston Globe, however, was more complimentary to their team dressed as “antiques and horribles” with Kelly being “made up as an English dude.” 9

Kelly explained his scheme very simply. “Let us make up as old men and beat Anson’s Colts,” he suggested to the team, “and the boys all thought it a bright idea.”10

Notes

1 Peter Abraham, “Red Sox’ ‘Beard Bonding’ Symbolic of Attitude Adjustment,” Boston Globe, October 2, 2013. Retrieved February 1, 2017. bostonglobe.com/sports/2013/10/02/beards/BAQGj2IcEckzCq5Z0Piy3N/story.html.

2 “Neither Could Bat,” Boston Post, July 12, 1892: 3.

3 “In New Uniforms,” Boston Globe, July 12, 1892: 5.

4 “Boston, 3; Chicago 2,” Boston Journal, July 12, 1892: 3.

5 “Conquered by Kelly,” Daily Inter-Ocean (Chicago), July 12, 1892: 6.

6 Ibid.

7 “New Men Were Tried,” Chicago Tribune, July 12, 1892: 7.

8 Ibid.

9 “In New Uniforms.”

10 Ibid.