July 5, 1890: Toledo’s Bill Van Dyke hits for the cycle but Maumees lose to Syracuse Stars

The Syracuse Stars and Toledo Maumees both spent exactly one season in the major leagues – 1890. Manager Charlie Morton steered the Maumees1 – named after the river flowing into Toledo – to a 68-64 record, fourth-best in the American Association, while the Stars, guided by George Frazier, finished the season in seventh place with a record of 55-72.2

After the 1889 season, both the Brooklyn Bridegrooms and Cincinnati Reds defected from the eight-club American Association and joined the National League.3 Soon thereafter, the Baltimore Orioles and Kansas City Cowboys left as well. On January 6, 1890, Syracuse, Toledo, and Rochester became new AA additions, bringing the number of teams up to seven. (Eventually, another Brooklyn team, the Gladiators, was recruited, but when they folded in August 1890, the Orioles returned to the Association.)

Toledo played 68 games in Speranza Park, winning 40, losing 27, and tying one. The Maumees outscored their opponents 422-316 at home. On the road, though, Toledo had trouble scoring, winning just 28 of 66 games and tying another. The Stars had a similar away record (25-42), but they won only half, or 30, of their games at home.4 

Toledo hosted the Stars for a four-game series that began with a July 4 doubleheader. Coming into the series, Toledo had won three of its last four games, while the Stars had lost three of four. They had split a four-game series played about a month earlier in Syracuse. The teams entered the doubleheader in sixth (Toledo) and seventh (Syracuse) places in the American Association standings.

Syracuse swept the holiday doubleheader by scores of 4-3 and 7-5. Over 3,000 spectators showed up to watch two closely played contests. In the opener, Toledo’s four errors and some “foolish base running”5 prevented them from winning. In the second game, pitcher Fred Smith’s wildness allowed Syracuse to take an early lead. Toledo fought back and attempted a ninth-inning rally, but Syracuse held on.

The highlight of the second game was Toledo left fielder Bill Van Dyke’s batting and baserunning, according to one Syracuse newspaper.6 He had three hits and scored three runs in a losing cause for the Maumees.

Van Dyke broke into professional baseball as a 20-year-old in 1884, with Terre Haute in the Northwestern League. He played the next five seasons in the minors as well, ultimately moving to the International League’s Toledo Black Pirates in 1889, under manager Morton. When Morton agreed to manage the Maumees, Van Dyke joined him.

The third game of the Toledo-Syracuse series took place on July 5 and was characterized as a heavy-hitting affair. Van Dyke again proved to be the hitting star of the game, but the Stars rallied in the ninth inning for their third win over the Maumees in two days.

For Toledo on the 5th, 20-year-old rookie Ed O’Neil got the starting nod. This was his second big-league start, coming just two weeks after his major-league debut.7 Syracuse sent veteran left-hander Dan Casey to the mound, in his seventh season. He had played for the NL’s Philadelphia Phillies for four years but was released at the end of the 1889 season. Casey was a workhorse for the Stars, starting 42 games and notching 40 complete games in 1890, his final season in the majors.8

The home team batted first,9 and the first two innings passed without any scoring. In the bottom of the third, Casey singled, went to third on Tom O’Rourke’s single, and scored on a wild pitch by O’Neil.

Toledo evened the score in the top of the fourth, when Van Dyke homered. It was one of only two home runs he hit in 1890.

Syracuse answered with two runs in the bottom of the fourth. Grant Briggs doubled and scored on Barney McLaughlin’s triple. Casey followed with a fly ball scoring McLaughlin for a 3-1 advantage.

The Stars’ lead lasted only until the Maumees batted in the top of the fifth. Singles by George Tebeau and Ed Swartwood put runners at the corners. Swartwood stole second, and Frank Scheibeck launched a two-out double. Both runners scored, again tying the game, 3-3.

Each team tallied in the sixth. Tub Welch led off the top of the inning and was hit by a Casey pitch. One out later, Perry Werden tripled and Welch “crossed the rubber”10 with the Maumees’ fourth run of the game. O’Neil walked two batters in the bottom of the sixth, and Mox McQuery’s single once again gave the Stars the lead, 5-4.

Casey kept the Toledo batters off the scoreboard in the seventh, and Syracuse expanded its lead in the bottom of the inning. George Proeser started the rally with a double. Tim O’Rourke brought him home with a triple. Briggs hit a grounder to Van Dyke at third, and his wild throw to first baseman Werden allowed Tim O’Rourke to score and Briggs to move into scoring position. He scored on McLaughlin’s single. Syracuse had a 7-4 lead.

The teams traded big innings – and leads – in the eighth. Welch “started the music”11 in the Maumees’ eighth with a single into right field. Second baseman Cupid Childs muffed a grounder by Tebeau, and Toledo had men at second and third with two outs. Both scored on Swartwood’s single. Parson Nicholson also singled, and he and Swartwood crossed home plate on Van Dyke’s triple. Scheibeck reached and Charlie Sprague singled to drive home Van Dyke. Welch’s second hit of the inning brought Scheibeck home with the sixth run of the inning. Toledo now led 10-7.

Syracuse again took the lead in its turn at bat, and “O’Neil was fairly slaughtered as Casey had been in the first half of the inning.”12 Tom O’Rourke singled, stole second, and scored on Rasty Wright’s single. Proeser launched a triple to deep center and Wright scored. Childs singled, driving in Proeser, and tallied on Tim O’Rourke’s base hit, erasing Toledo’s lead and putting Syracuse ahead, 11-10.

The see-saw battle continued in the final frame. Werden and Swartwood each singled. With two outs, Van Dyke’s double produced two more runs, once again giving Toledo the lead. It was Van Dyke’s fourth hit of the game, and he had hit for the cycle. (Although the newspapers do not explicitly state when his single occurred, the Syracuse and Toledo box scores show that Van Dyke collected four hits, with one double, one triple, and one home run. The Toledo Bee gave minimal accounts of all four games in the series, reporting, “]T]here [was] no necessity for a further description of the game.”13)

In the bottom of the ninth, however, “the visitors went to bat one run behind with blood in their eye.”14 Tom O’Rourke singled and scored on Wright’s triple, the fifth triple of the game. Proeser’s single up the middle gave Syracuse a walk-off 13-12 victory, when “Rasty skated over the rubber.”15

According to the Syracuse Daily Standard, “The game was won by the home team in the eighth, but they lost it in the ninth.”16 The Stars won their fourth consecutive game and eighth in their last 11. The teams combined for 35 hits, with every player on both teams (except O’Neill) getting at least one hit. Syracuse completed the four-game sweep with a 6-5 win on July 6.

Bill Van Dyke became the only Maumees player to accomplish the rare feat of hitting for the cycle. He was in his rookie season in 1890 and played just seven total games in two other seasons in the majors – four games in 1892 for the St. Louis Browns and three games in 1893 for the Boston Beaneaters. He was not known as a slugger, as just 28 of his 134 career hits went for extra bases. His career slugging percentage was just .334.

A record seven batters hit for the cycle in 1890.17 Van Dyke’s feat was the second.

Author’s Note

Ford Frick, president of the National League, led the effort to establish a National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York,18 in 1939. Several festivities were planned, including bestowing the honor of the real-life player who inspired Ernest L. Thayer’s 1888 poem, “Casey at the Bat.” Pitcher Dan Casey, the Syracuse starter from decades earlier, was selected, as “baseball officials wished to honor as many forgotten heroes of the game as they could find.”19 The late Charles F. Faber, a longtime SABR member, wrote a biography of Dan Casey in which he included Casey’s own account of the poem-inspiring game: “I was a left-handed pitcher for the Phillies. We were playing the Giants in the old Philadelphia ballpark on August 21, 1887. Tim Keefe was pitching against me and he had a lot of stuff, but I was no slowpoke myself. It was the last of the ninth and New York was leading 4 to 3. Two men were out, and there were runners on second and third. A week before, I had busted up a game with a lucky homer and folks thought I could repeat.”20

Casey’s 1890 teammate was John Keefe (Tim’s cousin). The home run Casey hit a week before facing Tim Keefe was the only round-tripper of Casey’s major-league career. Alas, when he stepped up to bat with that 1887 game on the line, the mighty Dan Casey did indeed strike out.

Acknowledgments

Thanks to Gary Belleville, Kurt Blumenau, and John Fredland for their assistance. This article was fact-checked by Laura Peebles and copy-edited by Len Levin.

The author sincerely thanks Dan Smith, local history/genealogy librarian at the Onondaga County Public Library, for scans of three Syracuse daily newspapers covering the game, and Ann Hurley, local history & genealogy librarian at the Toledo Lucas County Public Library, for scans of the Toledo Bee.

Photo credit: Trading Card Database.

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 and Retrosheet.org, the author based the game’s play-by-play on details found in the Syracuse Daily Standard and the Syracuse Daily Journal.

Notes

1 The 1884 Toledo Blue Stockings also played for one season in the American Association.

2 Morton was a player-manager for both the 1884 Toledo Blue Stockings (American Association) and the 1885 Detroit Wolverines (National League), while Frazier’s only major-league experience was as skipper of the 1890 Syracuse Stars.

3 John Bauer, “1889-90 Winter Meetings: The Establishment Responds,” Base Ball’s 19th Century Winter Meetings: 1857-1900 (Phoenix: SABR, 2018), 271-280, accessed August 13, 2023, https://sabr.org/journal/article/1889-90-winter-meetings-the-establishment-responds/.

4 Unfortunately for the Maumees, their home record did not prevail, as Syracuse swept the four-game series played in Toledo.

5 “Lost Both,” Toledo Bee, July 5, 1890: 5.

6 “Fourth of July Games,” Syracuse Daily Journal, July 5, 1890: 1.

7 O’Neil started for Toledo on July 2 against the Philadelphia Athletics. (He took the loss in that game when Toledo forfeited to Philadelphia.) His ML debut was on June 20. O’Neil made just two appearances for the Maumees, and by September 1890 the Philadelphia native was pitching for the Athletics, where he made six more starts and appeared in four other games as a position player. In the time between playing for the two AA teams, O’Neil also pitched in 15 games for the Dallas Hams in the Texas League. O’Neil’s major-league career consisted of one season (1890) and eight starts. He lost all eight games.

8 Casey did continue to pitch, spending six more seasons in the minor leagues.

9 In many nineteentth-century games, the home team batted first. See Gary Belleville, “The Death and Rebirth of the Home Team Batting First,” Baseball Research Journal, Spring 2023, https://sabr.org/journal/article/the-death-and-rebirth-of-the-home-team-batting-first/.

10 “Sports of the Summer,” Syracuse Daily Standard, July 6, 1890: 1.

11 “Sports of the Summer.”

12 “Sports of the Summer.”

13 “Lost Another,” Toledo Bee, July 7, 1890: 3.

14 “Sports of the Summer.”

15 “Sports of the Summer.”

16 “Sports of the Summer.” 

17 This record was broken in 1933, when eight batters hit for the cycle. The batters are Van Dyke (Toledo Maumees, AA, July 5), Jumbo Davis (Brooklyn Gladiators, AA, July 18), Roger Connor (New York Giants, Players’ League, July 21), Oyster Burns (Brooklyn Bridegrooms, NL, August 1), John Reilly (Cincinnati Reds, NL, August 6), and Farmer Weaver (Louisville Colonels, AA, August 12). According to several sources, Mike Tiernan of the National League’s New York Giants is given credit for completing the cycle against the Cincinnati Reds on June 28, 1890, which would have been the second time in his career (see retrosheet.org, baseball-almanac.com, and mlb.com) and the first cycle of 1890. The Reds won the game 12-3, but a careful inspection of the newspapers shows that Tiernan was 2-for-4 in that contest with a single and home run (see box scores at (1) “Knocked Out of the Box,” Philadelphia Times, June 29, 1890: 2; (2) “The Reds Pounded Rusie’s Curves,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 29, 1890: 3; and (3) “Cincinnati 12, New York 3,” Boston Globe, June 29, 1890: 8). The Globe gives Tiernan credit for three base hits. Other box scores support the fact that Tiernan did not get four hits in this game against the Reds. Perhaps he did hit for the cycle a second time in his career. If so, it was not on June 28, 1890.

18 Charles F. Faber, “Dan Casey,” Baseball Biography Project.

19 Faber.

20 Faber.