June 21, 1897: Two-way threat Fred Klobedanz leads Boston to 11-6 win over Brooklyn

After a 2-1 loss at Cincinnati May 29, Boston’s record dropped to 17-12, a good mark but one that left the team in fourth place, five games out of first. The defeat concluded a 17-game road trip after which the Beaneaters returned home for 16 games. Home cooking helped; the Bostonians’ big bats boomed as the Beaneaters scored 10 or more runs in eight of the games and swept the homestand. Boston had climbed to second place, just a game behind first-place Baltimore and returned to the road with a 16-game winning streak.

Boston had strong pitching to complement its mighty offensive attack. Three pitchers split 111 of the team’s 135 starts. Ace Kid Nichols led the way; he won 31 games in 1897, the sixth of the last seven seasons in which he won at least 30. Fred Klobedanz, at 26 only one year younger than Nichols but with much less big-league experience, would start for the Beaneaters to open the road trip.

Often called Kloby in the papers, Boston’s lone lefty on June 21 pitched his first game ever in Brooklyn against another southpaw, Harley Payne. Like Kloby, Payne had debuted in the National League in 1896 after a long apprenticeship in the minors. He pitched to John Grim, giving the Bridegrooms an excruciatingly named battery of Payne and Grim, an ominous pairing that foretold the outcome of the game for Brooklyn fanatics.

Neither pitcher showed much stuff in the early part of the game. With two outs in the first inning and Fred Tenney on first via a single, Hugh Duffy, Jack Stivetts, and Bobby Lowe all added singles to put the Beaneaters up 2-0. Great credit went to Stivetts for keeping the rally going. The team’s fourth starting pitcher, Stivetts also pitched in at first base, second base, and all three outfield slots. With future Hall of Famers Billy Hamilton, Duffy, and Jimmy Collins as teammates, Stivetts, albeit in only 61 games, had Boston’s best slash line in 1897 at .367/.417/.533.

His offensive prowess notwithstanding, Stivetts failed to impress a New York reporter, who characterized the 29-year-old as “an overgrown boy on the verge of long trousers,”1 a cutting comment perhaps best explained by his 6-foot-2 height.

Thanks to shoddy defense by some of Boston’s stars, Brooklyn came back quickly in the bottom of the first. Both Collins and Hamilton made throwing errors to give the Bridegrooms runners on the corners. John Anderson doubled home two runs; with two outs, Jim Canavan doubled to plate one more. Brooklyn led 3-2 after the first inning of play.

Unable to enjoy the pleasure of the lead, Payne suffered in the second frame. George Yeager singled. A great hitting pitcher who finished 1897 with .324/.363/.466 marks, Kloby doubled, and Yeager came around to tie the score. Augmenting the attack from the top of the order, Hamilton singled, Tenney bunted for a hit, and Herman Long’s single was muffed, and he wound up at third. Boston now led 6-3. Long scored on Duffy’s fly to right, upping the Beaneaters’ lead to 7-3.

Reprising his extra-base power, Kloby tripled in the third off Chauncey Fisher, who came on in relief for the Bridegrooms. Hamilton knocked in his hurler with a single, putting Boston up 8-3.

The Beaneaters added two more runs in the sixth on singles by Long and Duffy, and an error by center fielder Mike Griffin on “a fairly easy long, high drive,”2 one of Griffin’s 17 errors in 1897. Leading all NL outfielders in fielding percentage five times in his career and “often called the finest center fielder of his era,”3 Griffin committed more miscues in 1897 than he had since 1889.

Trailing 10-3, Brooklyn got back on the board in the bottom of the sixth. With a runner on, Grim singled, and Fisher hit the second and last triple of his five-year career to knock in two runs and pull the Bridegrooms to within 10-5. A Brooklyn wag found Fisher’s mop-up effort the most redeeming feature of the game from the losing perspective. “Although the visitors hit his slow delivery rather heavily at times, they were unable to score with the frequency that their hits called for, and it is quite possible that Fisher might have won the game” had he started it, commented the Brooklyn Daily Eagle.4 Fisher yielded four runs over his seven innings of work.

Brooklyn scored another run in the seventh to close to 10-6. Anderson singled, stole second, went to third on Yeager’s throwing error on the steal, and crossed the plate on Billy Shindle’s single. The team leader in RBIs with 105, the 36-year-old Shindle set a career high in this category in his second-to-last season. Shindle’s total placed him 10th in the NL. Boston, by contrast, had three players with more RBIs: Collins finished second in the NL with 132 (by far the most he would ever have), Duffy third with 129, and Lowe tied for ninth with 106.

Adding insurance, Boston got the final run of its 11-6 win in the ninth on back-to-back hits by batterymates Yeager (a single) and Kloby (a double). The latter not only won the game on the mound, but went 4-for-5 with three extra-base hits, moving beat writer Tim Murnane to swoon, “Klobedanz gave one of the finest exhibitions of batting I ever saw”5 in a milestone game. 

The Beaneaters’ 17th consecutive win, along with the New York Giants’ sweep of Baltimore in a doubleheader, vaulted Boston into first place for the first time all season, by a half-game margin.

The Boston Globe reported exuberantly, “The opinion prevails almost unanimously among league men that Boston will win the pennant this season.”6 Betting on the conventional wisdom would have paid off as Boston finished the 1897 season with a 93-39 record, two games up on 90-40 Baltimore.

Notes

1 “Base Ball Notes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 22, 1897: 4.

2 “Boston Takes the Lead,” New York Times, June 22, 1897. Taking a contrary view, the Brooklyn Daily Eagle scribe claimed, “It was a difficult ball to catch and Mike could have let it go as a hit without any fear of receiving any criticism.  And because he showed that nothing is so difficult but that it is worth trying for he receives a howl of disapproval.” “Base Ball Notes,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 22, 1897:  4.

3 Scott Fiesthumel, “Mike Griffin,” sabr.org/bioproj/person/45f87fcd (accessed November 15, 2017).

4 “Boston Takes the Lead,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, June 22, 1897: 4.

5 T.H. Murnane, “At the Top,” Boston Globe, June 22, 1897: 1.

6 “Baseball Notes,” Boston Globe, June 22, 1897: 4.