A Sam Payne Toast: The Diminutive Civil War Vet Who Became Phillies Groundskeeper and One of Their Biggest Personalities

This is one of just a few known images of Phillies groundskeeper Sam Payne, seen here in 1933. (Courtesy of the author)

 

It was barely 8 o’clock on a cool, crisp Boston morning in September 1915 when Sam Payne, the Phillies’ 68-year-old groundskeeper, began his stroll across Boston Common toward Tremont Street. He set about his mission, seemingly feeling no ill-effects from the 30 cigars he smoked the previous day in Brooklyn, or from the 22-hour train ride from Chicago (which contained a lot of pinochle and likely a lot of liquor), one day before that.1,2

For 50 years—since the waning days of the Civil War in which he fought as a teenager—Payne never forgot how he was robbed, or “touched for a $10 note” by a man in his first time ever in that city, on that very street to which he walked. Nor did he forget that man’s exact appearance. Upon arriving in Boston that September day in 1915, the first thing he did was correctly predict the Phillies’ first-ever pennant that afternoon. His second was to find the man using the interest on his money, and if he did, “there was going to be trouble.”3

It’s not known if Payne ever found the man who took his money, but the anecdote underscores the mess of traits that popularized the wily, mustachioed groundskeeper in both baseball circles and with the Philadelphia populace.4 He was eccentric, pugnacious, entertaining, kind, more than a bit vain and possessed an unwavering devotion to his craft and ball club. It was not a coincidence that on that 22-hour train ride, only three men were whisked outside at North Philadelphia Station for a brief interaction with the Phillies fans before continuing to New York: future Hall of Famer Grover Cleveland Alexander, soon-to-be-pennant-winning Manager Pat Moran, and Payne.5

He was, as The Morning Call phrased it in his obituary, “only slightly less famous than the right field wall” at the Baker Bowl.6 And that was, indeed, a famous wall.

Samuel F. Payne entered the world in August 1847, the same year as Thomas Edison and Jesse James, as the fourth child of William Rowland Payne, a shoemaker, and Mary Payne (née Furest).7 His parents were Philadelphians themselves; William was born in the city near the onset of the War of 1812, and Mary five years after its conclusion.8,9,10

A small-statured boy with light hair, blue eyes and a fair complexion, Payne was barely a teenager when Confederate forces fired upon Fort Sumter in 1861, triggering the Civil War. On Nov. 4, 1863, perhaps driven by the close-to-home Battle of Gettysburg that previous summer, the 16-year-old Payne, who stood just five feet tall, left his job as a baker and enlisted in the Union Navy. He held the rank of 2nd Cabin Boy, a position usually given to young enlistees to assist superiors with various tasks.11

For nearly two years, Private Payne “was stationed down along the Virginia and Carolina Capes, watching for blockade runners trying to slip exports through the Northern coast guard.”12

What he experienced is anybody’s guess. “We only have Sam’s word for what he did to those fellows here during that stirring period,” wrote the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Edgar Wolfe, who penned his stories under the pseudonym Jim Nasium.13

Payne was discharged in July 1865, three months after President Lincoln’s assassination, and began life outside the Navy that would ultimately lead him to the baseball diamond.14 In April 1873, he married a woman of Irish ancestry named Elizabeth Senior.15 By 1880, they were living on North 5th Street in Philadelphia, with Payne working as a carriage builder to support his wife and his young children, Mary and George.16

 

 

It is not exactly known when, how, or why the 40-year-old began his employment with the Philadelphia Phillies in 1887, then in only their sixth year of existence.17 In 1900, his official occupation in the census was still carriage builder.18 It’s possible, among other scenarios, that he worked in some sort of part-time capacity with the team or was employed off the books. But his role was almost certainly somehow related to the maintenance of the grounds, as just two years later the field at then-National League Park was entrusted solely to him and his many eccentricities.

The Paynes lived in an apartment in the upper-level clubhouse of the ballpark until 1918, before moving to the lower-level clubhouse. His wife was known to cook for the unmarried ball players, and “if the game was still in progress while she was preparing the meal, outfielders could usually tell what was on the menu as the smell drifted out the window.”19

Payne always seemed to be in the middle of the action, and bits and bobs of his peculiar doings appeared at random in newspaper coverage of the Phillies, often in jest. One day in the early 1920s, he solved the problem of mower-free lawn care by letting two ewes and a ram run around the outfield, which “for the penny-pinching Phillies saved the expense of hiring workers and buying equipment to keep the grass trimmed.” They remained until 1925 and were retired only after the ram attacked longtime Phillies executive Bill Shettsline.20

Payne, whose daughter was baptized on Halloween, also had a “hobby for black cats,” much to the dismay of the superstitious home club.21,22 At the onset of a particular series against the Braves in 1929, he set one loose in front of the visiting dugout to jinx the Phillies’ losing streak against their foe.23

He was also very particular about his baseballs, which he guarded “as if they were lumps of gold,” and would even go as far as to mark them with blue pencil so he knew which were his if anyone should take one.24

Stan Baumgartner, who pitched for the club from 1914–16 and 1921–22 before embarking on a sportswriting career, recalled in the Philadelphia Inquirer that the first time he ran onto the field to warm up with a new ball, Payne stopped him in his tracks.

“Just a minute son, you aren’t well enough acquainted around here to get a brand-new ball to play with. Wait until you’re dry behind the ears,” Payne told him, mentioning he had once said the same to Alexander and other veterans. “And see that little door back there. That is the way back to the clubhouse when you get knocked out. The hinges are well-greased, so you can sneak out quietly.”25

His abrasiveness was often couched in jest, which helped endear him to those around him. But he was also fiercely righteous and not one to shy away from physical altercation if he deemed it necessary. One time in 1927, the octogenarian witnessed an ironworker at the stadium assaulting a younger, smaller employee. According to Payne’s friend Stewart Boggs, Phillies head telegraph operator, Payne “did not like that.” With his gnarled knuckles—which, according to Boggs, were as such from his amateur bare-handed catching days—Payne “challenged the warlike bird, and gave him the trimming of his life.”26

The groundskeeper also left some room for more than a bit of vanity. He was beyond confident he was the best in the world at keeping a ball field in order.

Prior to the 1916 campaign, Payne was one of several head field chiefs who erred in laying out the pitching rubber to the specifications provided by National League Secretary John Heydler in the league’s annual diagram. Heydler’s instruction showed “60.5’”—intended to mean 60-and-a-half feet, the same distance it had been for two-plus decades. Some, like Payne, interpreted it as 60 feet, five inches. Payne apparently could not be convinced he should have put the mound back an inch and then doubled down by offering to “bet everything except his war record that he was right.”27

In February 1909, just a few years into his head role, Payne scoffed at the work of his Philadelphia Athletics’ counterpart Joe Schroeder in preparing the field at the newly built Shibe Park for play. He asserted, “[Connie] Mack can never win the pennant on grounds like Schroeder’s” and that it “looked like the green-eyed monster.”28

The A’s, for what it’s worth, went on to win three of the next five World Series, and Payne’s comments landed him in some hot water. The day after his public ridicule of Schroeder, a report in the Coatesville Record indicted a man named Trouleib would succeed Payne as groundskeeper that year and that Manager Billy Murray “would not discuss the matter.”29

Payne kept his gig, but clearly didn’t learn his lesson. Two decades later, just before 1929 Opening Day, he claimed he had “out-grassed” Athletics’ landscaper Bill McCalley, and called upon “three experts from leading seed stores” to settle the matter.30 There was never a public resolution on the superior seeding, and the A’s won the World Series that year, too, while the Phillies finished 27.5 games out of first place.

 

 

Yet Payne’s arrogance and idiosyncrasies were not only tolerated, they were celebrated. Part of that, no doubt, was his demeanor. The papers would not have published jokes at his expense (like a bad bounce being called a “Sam Payne base hit”), nor would he be “known by thousands of players and fans” if he was not, at heart, a good-natured fellow.31,32

But much of Payne’s popularity stemmed from the tremendous efforts he put forth on the field for the club. Ray Benge, who pitched for the Phillies during Payne’s later years, recalled to Philadelphia’s Old Ballparks author Rich Westcott that “the infield and outfield were fine,” despite well-documented and near universal condemnation of the park’s other amenities. Payne was, as Westcott wrote, part of a “proud line of groundskeepers who worked hard to maintain the field despite the club’s limited funds.”33

Beyond managing the playing grounds at Broad and Huntingdon streets, Payne was responsible for the upkeep of the playing surfaces at Phillies’ spring training. That was no easy task. From the time he was named head groundskeeper in 1902 until he readied the field in Winter Haven at 82 in 1930, Phillies spring training was held in 14 unique locations across six states plus the District of Columbia. If he also had a hand in setting up the camps from 1887–1901, add another four sites and two more states to the list.34

Some of these locations had previous infrastructure, like Rickwood Field in Birmingham, Alabama, where the Phillies trained in 1911. Some had none at all. Several weeks before Christmas in 1913, Payne made his first trip to Wilmington, North Carolina, “in order to lay out the diamond and give instructions as to the kind of soil to be used.”35 Coincidentally, the site was “ensconced in the shadow of Fort Fisher, where Sam Payne fought and bled for the glorious cause of the Union…before the massaging of baseball parks became a popular means of earning a livelihood.”36

Touring the site with officials, he determined a location for the diamond as a team of workers cleared away “trees, stumps and grass.”37 Payne returned at a later date to level the field, and then during spring training itself had to deal with the effects of a rare ice and snow storm when camp started, which the Philadelphia Inquirer’s Nasium joked may have been “reprisal for the conduct of the Phils’ groundskeeper during the Civil War.”38

At Leesburg, Florida, in 1922, the entire ballpark was constructed at zero cost by local businessmen, lawyers, doctors, grocerymen and “other public spirited citizens from a hayfield and forest in just seven weeks,” with cypress timber and sod hauled in from 16 miles away.39 At the center of it all was Payne, who was sent down in early February to teach the locals “how to construct a ballground that didn’t have a tin can for a roof and three rough and ready rocks for the bases.”40

Not surprisingly, the rigor of the spring work caught up with the aging Payne. In 1928, he suffered a heart attack in Winter Haven, Florida, that nearly killed him, though he was said to be “up and around again and completed his job” after resting a few days.41

A few years later, in the lead up to the 1932 season, it became too much, at least in the eye of Phillies’ management. Payne, who had long been the “dean of all groundskeepers” was “relieved of his duties” and retired.42 It was something Baumgartner said Payne did not vocally oppose, but that “one could see it in his actions” he was not happy.43

The Phillies had a history of taking care of Payne financially beyond his salary—the players gave him and trainer Mike Dee a pool of World Series share money in 1915—and that did not change in retirement.44 The club set him up with a pension that required absolutely nothing of him to collect.45 Yet Payne remained on hand at every game, usually in a box above the Phillies’ dugout, “puffing at one of his famous black cigars and offering advice to his successors.”46,47

In his older age, Payne moved into his son George’s Riverside, New Jersey, home.48 George had been one of Payne’s only close remaining family members for several decades, as two of Payne’s siblings who survived childhood, Emma and William, along with his daughter, Mary, all had died between 1903 and 1913, and his wife, Elizabeth, in 1917.49,50,51,52

On July 24, 1933, Payne himself could not outlast complications of a stroke he suffered some time before.53 At the time of his passing, he was one of the last living links in Phillies history between 1887, when he joined the club, and the 1930s, and perhaps the only constant with the team through all those years.

He began his career when the fledgling club, managed by pioneer Harry Wright, had just moved from its original home at Recreation Park into the grounds that would eventually come to be known as Baker Bowl. He witnessed firsthand the prowess of the Phillies clubs of the 1890s, stocked full of future Hall of Famers. He was, literally, along for the ride during the club’s first-ever pennant win, experiencing the elation of a Game 1 World Series victory on the field he prepared himself, and later the sorrow as the Phillies nine fell to the Red Sox. He slogged through the team’s doldrums of the 1920s as the game and world changed immensely around him, yet still brought a sense of juvenile enjoyment to the ballpark, as richly documented by local journalists of the era.

Just prior to his interment at Mount Moriah Cemetery in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, several obituaries were published for Payne by those writers, the most lengthy and personal by his old friend Baumgartner.54 He concluded his thoughts with the following, in the Philadelphia Inquirer:

“Good old Sam! When it is time for us to do our pitching in the new league, we hope Sam Payne is guarding the balls in the dugout.”55 

KENNY AYRES is a public relations professional who spent nearly a decade working in the Philadelphia Phillies’ baseball communications department. He contributed to various historical projects for the team, including the “Pioneers in Pinstripes” initiative to honor the lesser-known trailblazers of Phillies integration. Kenny has also contributed to the SABR BioProject and pens a blog called “Hidden in Haverford” for his local historical society. He lives in Havertown, Pennsylvania, with his wife, soon-to-be-three sons, goldendoodle and fish.

 

Notes

1. “Phillies, Beaning Braves, Capture National’s Flag,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 30, 1915, 10.

2. “Phillies Here for Just a Few Minutes,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 28, 1915, 12.

3. “Phillies, Beaning Braves, Capture National’s Flag.”

4. Stan Baumgartner, “Sam Payne, Groundkeeper for Phils for 30 Years, Dies,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 26, 1933, 13–14.

5. “Phillies Here for Just a Few Minutes.”

6. “Ol’ Sam Payne of Phillies Dies,” Morning Call (Pennsylvania), July 26, 1933, 13.

7. “1850 United States Federal Census,” Philadelphia North Mulberry Ward, United States Census Bureau, https://www.ancestry.com/imageviewer/collections/8054/images/4205378_00465?pId=5044385.

8. “William Rowland Payne,” Pennsylvania, US., Death Certificates, 1906–72, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/5164/records/601688515.

9. “William Rowland Payne,” Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Death Certificates Index, 1803–1915, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2535/records/1224064?ssrc=pt&tid=73029330&pid=30265450945.

10. “1860 United States Federal Census,” Philadelphia Ward 10 East District, United States Census Bureau, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7667/records/4514076.

11. “U.S., Naval Enlistment Rendezvous, 1855–1891,” https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/60368/records/209927?tid=73029330&pid=30265450944&ssrc=pt.

12. Baumgartner, 14.

13. Jim Nasium, “Sam Payne’s Historic Doings of War Days Bested by Weather Men in His Attack on Fort Fisher,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 28, 1914, 12.

14. “Samuel Payne,” Pennsylvania, US, Veterans Burial Cards, 1777–2012, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1967/records/1027263.

15. “Marriages, Grace Episcopal Church,” Pennsylvania and New Jersey, US , Church and Town Records, 1669–2013, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2451/records/2090008.

16. “1880 United States Federal Census,” Philadelphia 202, United States Census Bureau, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/6742/records/232470.

17. Baumgartner, 13.

18. “1900 United States Federal Census,” Philadelphia Ward 13, District 0222, United States Census Bureau, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/7602/records/47629118.

19. Rich Westcott, Philadelphia’s Old Ballparks (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996), 42–43.

20. Westcott, 46.

21. Baptisms, Pennsylvania and New Jersey, US, Church and Town Records, 1669–2013, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2451/records/2090239?tid=&pid=&queryId=023662b3-c6e1-4029-a49c-a24e618c30e4&_phsrc=dhj321&_phstart=successSource.

22. Baumgartner, 14.

23. Philly Busters,” Philadelphia Inquirer, May 30, 1929, 10.

24. Baumgartner, 14.

25. Baumgartner, 13–14.

26. “Jerry Donovan Still an Active Fan,” Morning Call, June 29, 1927, 18.

27. “Nearly Every Groundkeeper in the Country Has Erred in Laying Out His Diamond,” Pittsburgh Press, January 29, 1916, 20.

28. “Sport Gossip,” The Reveille (Montana), February 26, 1909, 3.

29. “Phillies Gather for Southern Training Trip,” Coatesville Record, February 27, 1909, 4.

30. James C. Isaminger, “Under the Spotlight,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 14, 1929, 52.

31. “Philly Bingles,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 1, 1931, 14.

32. “Sam Payne Dies at Riverside Home,” Evening Courier (New Jersey), July 26, 1933, 19.

33. Westcott, 46.

34. Philadelphia Phillies, 2025 Philadelphia Phillies Media Guide (Philadelphia, PA: Philadelphia Phillies, 2025), 459.

35. “Early Start for Phillies’ Groundkeeper Sam Payne,” Lansing State Journal, December 15, 1913, 5.

36. Nasium.

37. “Preparing for Phillies,” Wilmington Morning Star, December 4, 1913, 5.

38. Nasium.

39. Tampa Tribune, March 12, 1922, 23.

40. Gordon Mackay, “Leesburg Mayor Tips Phils Off to a Star,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 2, 1922, 17.

41. “Sam Payne Dies at Riverside Home” 19.

42. “Ol’ Sam Payne of Phillies Dies”

43. Baumgartner, 13.

44. “Losers in World’s Series Get Their Share of Cash,” The Journal Times (Wisconsin), October 14, 1915, 6.

45. Baumgartner, 13.

46. “Sam Payne Dies at Riverside Home” 19.

47. Baumgartner, 13.

48. Baumgartner, 13.

49. “Emma Elizabeth Washbourn,” Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, US, Death Certificates Index, 1803–1915, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/2535/records/1148283?ssrc=pt&tid=73029330&pid=30265450943.

50. “William Rowland Payne,” Pennsylvania, US, Death Certificates, 1906–72.

51. “Mary Elizabeth Payne,” Philadelphia, Pennsylvania, Death Certificates Index, 1803–1915, https://www.ancestry.com/family-tree/person/tree/83272366/person/42479785792/facts.

52. “Died,” Philadelphia Inquirer, February 27, 1917, 7.

53. “Sam Payne Dies at Riverside Home” 19.

54. “Samuel Payne,” Pennsylvania, US, Veterans Burial Cards, 1777–2012, https://www.ancestry.com/search/collections/1967/records/1027263.

55. Baumgartner, 14.