‘Big, Bow-Legged And Domineering’: Frank Shaughnessy In Ottawa

A true Ottawa baseball legend, Frank Shaughnessy’s impact on the Senators is undeniable. (Courtesy of Honora Shaughnessy)

 

In a multisport career that spanned more than half a century, he was a player, a coach, a manager, an owner, and an executive. And with four pennants in four years at the helm of the Canadian League Senators, “the big, bowlegged and domineering pilot of the Ottawas”1 was almost certainly the preeminent character in local baseball history, and perhaps even, as long-time Montreal sportswriter Tim Burke asserted, “one of the most extraordinary figures in the history of sport.”2

NOTRE DAME

Francis Joseph Shaughnessy was born in 1883 in Amboy, Illinois, the seventh child of parents from Limerick, Ireland. His father, Patrick, emigrated to Canada as a boy. But after an unsuccessful attempt at farming near Montreal, Patrick, now 25, moved to the United States and spent the next 35 years with the Illinois Central Railroad. Two of his sons, William and John, also worked for the Illinois Central. Youngest son Frank was determined not to.

Smart, ambitious, and perpetually in motion, Shaughnessy worked in a pharmacy while attending high school. “I got up at six to open the drug store at seven, then ran three or four miles to school,” he recalled. “At noon I hurried back to the store to give the boss time for lunch, got my lunch at home about two blocks away, and dashed back to school. When school let out, I ran again to be at the store by 4 P.M. I got a half-hour off for supper, and, at 10 P.M., I could walk home. It’s no wonder I always could run fast—I had to!”3

Young Frank could also hit a baseball, and it earned him a partial scholarship to study pharmacy at Indiana’s Notre Dame College, then little more than “a farm, and the nuns made our meals and washed our clothes.”4 “Shag,” as he was called, also excelled at track, and especially at football.5 In 1904, his final season at Notre Dame, he captained the Fighting Irish.6

“It seems like I can’t remember a time when I wasn’t working hard,” he said in later years. “While at Notre Dame, I also ran the campus newspaper, a confectionery concession and was the correspondent for several Chicago newspapers.”7

Using the nom de guerre “Shannon” to protect his collegiate athletic eligibility, Shag spent his summers playing professional baseball in outposts like Sioux City, Iowa, and Cairo, Illinois. In the spring of 1904 he finished his pharmacy degree and immediately began working toward another in law. But neither potions nor motions held much appeal for the restless Shaughnessy—“Indoors irks this man,” as Maclean’s magazine once said.8 So in the fall of 1904, right after football season, he signed with the Washington Senators of the American League.

NO FIXED ADDRESS

Shaughnessy’s 1905 season was a crash course in the vicissitudes of Deadball-Era baseball. On April 17, a week and a half past his 22nd birthday, the lanky, copper-haired outfielder had his first sip of big-league coffee, playing right field for the Senators in a game against the Highlanders of New York. He went 0-for-3, with a hit-by-pitch.

“It wasn’t easy in those days, believe me,” Shaughnessy said. “Regulars would actually chase a rookie with a bat if he attempted to take a turn hitting. A regular held his job until somebody drove him out, and every youngster was regarded as a menace.”9

Shag got into another game four days later and hit a bases-loaded triple off future Hall of Famer Jack Chesbro. But the game—and Shag’s first major-league hit—were washed out before becoming official. The very next day Washington shipped him out, to the Montgomery Senators of the Southern Association.

Shaughnessy hated Alabama—the heat, the mosquitoes, the very real prospect of contracting yellow fever. He dropped 20 pounds, played poorly, and after seven games he was released, whereupon he packed his glove and spikes and headed north to Pennsylvania to play for Coatesville of the “outlaw”10 Tri-State League. After a few games there he ventured even further north, to join the Montpelier-Barre Intercities, a.k.a. Hyphens, of the even more outlaw Northern League,11 a colorful but financially shaky circuit operating in Vermont and northern New York.

It was already Shag’s fourth club of the year, and it was only June. Life had become a blur of steam trains, cheap hotels, and precarious employment. His halcyon days as big man on campus were long behind him. Now the only constant was the nagging worry that the next paycheck might not clear, that one’s current club—or even the whole league it was part of—might not survive the season, that the opportunities to forge a career in the snakes-and-ladders, musical-chairs world of Deadball Era baseball might simply dry up.

HELLO KITTY

The Northern turned out to be the most eventful stop on Shaughnessy’s baseball odyssey. It was during this time he attended some sort of Roman Catholic function in Ogdensburg, New York, where he was introduced to a young woman named Katherine Quinn, called Kitty, the convent-educated daughter of an Ottawa hotelier, Michael Quinn.12

That brief encounter might go a long way to explaining Shaughnessy’s decision to sign a $140-a-month contract to play for Ottawa, an expansion franchise in the re-jigged Northern League,13 in 1906. Once again the quality of play was surprisingly fast.14 Shag acquitted himself well, finishing with a .297 batting average and a league-leading five homers. He also proved a fan favorite. “Shaughnessy is the idol of the small boy and incidentally the ladies also,” said the Ottawa Journal. “His appearance at bat is always the signal for an outburst of applause and kindly advice to slam it over the fence again or to murder the umpire when he calls a strike.”15

Despite its blaze of talent the cross-border Northern League proved no more durable than its 1905 iteration. The Ottawa club folded on August 20, and Shaughnessy and several others had to sue to try to collect their final pay.

While the league withered around him, Frank’s romance with Kitty blossomed. But with several weeks of summer left and a few more dollars to be had, he reluctantly hopped a train back to Indiana, where he joined the South Bend Greens of the Class-B Central League. There he was said to have hit “the ball like a fiend,”16 batting .333 in 18 games.

That fall—it was still an era of distinct sporting seasons—Shaughnessy launched a second career, coaching football at Clemson Agricultural College in South Carolina. The following summer he played left field for the San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League. Frank and Kitty exchanged a lot of letters in those years.

In 1908 Shag returned to Washington to join the D.C. entry in a wannabe third major circuit, the Union League. Sportswriters soon branded it the Onion League, “because it was cheap and smelled bad.”17 The loop lasted two months before landing on baseball’s compost heap. Shaughnessy though landed on his feet—Connie Mack immediately signed him to play for his Philadelphia Athletics in the American League.

This time Shag’s big-league dream lasted all of two weeks. “I thought I had a good chance with the A’s,” he recalled years later. “I was hitting .32118 after eight games and feeling pretty proud of myself. Then one cold day in Chicago, I had to make a hard throw to the plate and something snapped in my arm. I couldn’t throw overhanded for a year….”19

Mack promptly shipped Shag and his wounded wing off to Reading, Pennsylvania, of the Class-B Tri-State League, in exchange for a player to be named later. The player turned out to be a young third baseman named Frank “Home Run” Baker, who went on to a Hall of Fame career. “That was a pretty good deal for the Athletics, I would say,” said Shag, adding, in faux self-deprecating style, “I guess I wasn’t much of a player.”20

That fall 25-year-old Frank Shaughnessy, vagabond baseball player and football coach, married 20-year-old Kitty Quinn at St. Brigid’s, the English-language Roman Catholic church serving Ottawa’s Lower Town.

KLAN COUNTRY

In 1909 Shaughnessy bought his release from Reading so that he could take a job playing for—and, for the first time in his baseball career, managing—the Roanoke Tigers, a.k.a. Highlanders, of the Class-C Virginia League. At 26 he was reportedly the youngest manager in Organized Baseball. It was an auspicious debut. Shag batted .285 with a league-leading five home runs and guided his team to the pennant. In a cliff-hanger of a finish—which would become something of a Shaughnessy managerial trademark—the Tigers nipped the Norfolk Tars by half a game and .003 percentage points.

Roanoke was also an opportunity for the indefatigable Shaughnessy to try his hand at a number of business sidelines. He bought into a couple of cigar stores, a garage, and one of the first automobile dealerships in the country.21 He also found time to pass the Virginia bar exam and hang out a shingle, although, according to legendary Montreal sportswriter Dink Carroll, Shag lacked the patience to build up a practice.

On the surface Roanoke appeared a good fit for the Shaughnessys, and the prospect of putting down roots must have seemed appealing, especially with the arrival of their first two boys. (The brood would eventually number nine—eight boys and one girl.) But Kitty missed her family in Ottawa, and, equally, as a devout Roman Catholic, never felt entirely comfortable in the Protestant South. The anti-Catholic KKK was between waves of terror at this time, but Virginia was still the heart of Klan country.

A CAPITAL IDEA

So Shag began to formulate a plan, one that would accommodate both his wife’s desire to raise a family in a more hospitable environment and his own to assert some measure of control over a chronically precarious baseball career. After the 1911 season the Shaughnessys packed their bags, bundled up their babies, and boarded a northbound train, destination Ottawa.

Despite the failure of the Northern League, Shaughnessy had long felt the city was ripe for baseball. “Well, this always looked like one good ball town to me, and I am surprised you haven’t entered some league before this,” he said during a 1910 visit.22 He decided he would be the one to remedy that.

Shag had been keeping an eye on the fortunes of the Canadian League, a Class-D loop operating in Western Ontario, with teams in London, Hamilton, Brantford, St. Thomas, Guelph, and Berlin.23 The Canadian had just completed a moderately successful first season, and Shag was confident an Ottawa team could make a go of it in such company. He sought out a couple of prospective partners—Tommy Gorman, the 25-year-old Olympic lacrosse gold medalist turned “sporting editor” of the Ottawa Citizen, and Malcolm Brice, 36, sporting editor of the Ottawa Free Press—to put together a franchise bid. Publicity for the venture was not going to be a problem.

Nor was money. A good chunk of the financial backing for the team came from Frank Ahearn,24 son of wealthy inventor and entrepreneur Thomas “Electricity” Ahearn, known as “the Edison of Canada.” The senior Ahearn was the principal owner of the Ottawa Electric Railway Company—game-day transportation would not be an issue either.

RAILROADED

In December 1911 the Canadian League awarded a franchise to the Ottawa Baseball Club, dubbed the Senators, and Shaughnessy spent the winter preparing for his club’s inaugural season. But then came the revelation that Shag was something of a baseball bigamist, having previously signed a contract to play for and manage the Fort Wayne Railroaders of the Class-B Central League. He might have gambled on Fort Wayne owner Claude H. Varnell not standing in the way of his new Ottawa venture, but Varnell made it abundantly clear he had no intention of divorcing his two-timing manager. “Shaughnessey [sic] will manage the Fort Wayne team unless he dies or gives up baseball,” he announced.25 Shag reluctantly said goodbye to his family in Ottawa and left for Indiana.

Shaughnessy was determined to make the best of his exile in Indiana by adroitly managing both sides of his divided loyalties. Without kiboshing Fort Wayne’s chances in the Central, he funneled a handful of surplus Railroaders north to round out the Ottawa roster. Without this injection of talent, it’s safe to say the Senators would not have challenged for the Canadian League pennant in their first year.

Shag’s juggling act worked out pretty well for both teams. The Senators cruised to the Canadian League title, nine games ahead of second-place Brantford Red Sox. The Railroaders, a last-place club as late as July 1, eventually clipped the Youngstown Steelmen by 2½ games for the Central League flag. Shag batted .304 and stole 34 bases.

When it was all over, Kitty back in Ottawa received this terse telegram from Indiana: “Ft Wayne won the pennant. Had a hard battle we play Cleveland Wednesday at Ft Wayne expect to get home Friday phone Brice about pennant. Frank.”26 The two-timing Shaughnessy had somehow parlayed his divided loyalties into two pennants in two countries in a single season.

After the season he touched down in Ottawa just long enough to pack his whistle and report to McGill University in Montreal, where he became the first professional coach at a Canadian school. “I worked hard because I liked it,” he said, “and if I needed a better reason, I had a big family and had something of a grocery bill every week.”27 It was a move that led to his third sporting championship of the year – a Yates Cup28 win for his Redmen over the University of Toronto. Shag went on to coach McGill football for 19 seasons, during which time he helped define and refine the Canadian game. 29

ICEMAN

Now Shaughnessy needed something to bridge the icy gap between football and baseball seasons. He accepted a job to coach and manage Frank Ahearn’s Ottawa Stewartons senior amateur hockey club in the Interprovincial Union. “I told them I didn’t know anything about the game and, in fact, hadn’t even seen hockey, aside from kids playing in the neighborhood rinks,” said Shaughnessy. “They insisted I knew how to handle men and organize sports, and that’s what they were interested in….”30 It was here, unsurprisingly, that Shag’s string of sporting championships came to an abrupt end.

The experience, however, launched a third career for Shaughnessy. The following winter he debuted as “business manager”31 of the other Ottawa Senators, those of the National Hockey Association (NHA), the forerunner of the NHL.32 That spring Shag came close to adding the Stanley Cup to his rapidly expanding championship résumé, but the NHA-champion Senators dropped the final to the Pacific Coast Hockey League Vancouver Millionaires.

A BRAND NEW SUIT

Shaughnessy might have continued his cross-border juggling act in 1913. He actually liked Fort Wayne, and he really liked the idea of owning a club in one league while pulling in a salary in another. But Kitty wanted him home, and this time owner Varnell agreed to his release.33

On Thursday, May 16, much of the federal government shut down at 1 P.M. so civil servants could get out to the ballpark in time to witness Frank Shaughnessy’s long-awaited playing debut as a Senator. A Sparks Street tailor, A.J. Curry, announced he would present a new $30 suit to the first Senator to hit a home run at Lansdowne Park. It seemed like a pretty generous offer, until you consider the Ottawas had failed to hit a single homer at home during their first season. Said one writer: “Any man to get credit for a four play wallop at the local ball yard (has) to sock the ball a quarter of a mile, more or less, and complete the circuit at a Ty Cobb clip”34—which is exactly what Shaughnessy did in his first game back in his adopted city since the demise of the old Northern League in 1906.

As Shag stepped to the plate in the fourth inning, the game was halted as a local MP presented him with a floral horseshoe wishing the team “Good Luck 1913.” After the interruption the pumped-up skipper drove the first pitch he saw over the head of the Brantford right fielder. The ball bounded up a slope and skipped toward the cattle barns near the Rideau Canal. Shag scored standing up. He finished the day with the Senators’ first-ever home-field homer, a single, a double, and a brand-new suit.

Shaughnessy’s debut was a harbinger of what was to come in his three seasons as the star center fielder and fiery field boss of the perennial champion Senators. Wherever he went, whatever he did, whatever he said, the spotlight was always on Shag, with his out-sized physical presence35 and his perceived Simon Legree management style—“more like McGraw’s than Mack’s,” as one baseball writer put it.36 He was said to hand his men a raise one minute and a “blue envelope” (i.e., a pink slip) the next.37

“Shaughnessy’s methods are unpopular at times with the fans and with his players,” the London Advertiser conceded in the aftermath of Ottawa’s third straight pennant in 1914, “but he gets results….”38 The respect was sometimes grudging but it was always genuine. “All credit must be given to Shag,” said the rival London Free Press, “for he not only drives his players, never overlooks an opening, but he makes mediocre performers live wires.” 39

“The continued success of this shrewd Irishman smashes all idea of luck,” said another baseball writer, as the Senators captured a fourth-straight flag, in 1915. “That commodity might land him a winner once, but when success is spoiled on success there is something in the man himself above ordinary.”40

The Senators’ victory in 1915 gave Shaughnessy a hand in six pennants in three leagues in only seven years of managing.

Now, after finally experiencing some years of stability, Shag’s baseball future—and the future of the Senators—remained uncertain. The War in Europe had upended everything. Rumors swirled all fall and winter. When the Canadian League failed to take the field for the 1916 season, for Shaughnessy it was back to the uncertainties of life as a minor-league gun-for-hire. He was forced to accept a last-minute offer to manage the Warren (Pennsylvania) Warriors of the Class-D Interstate League.

With a population distracted by preparations for the war in Europe and by an actual war with Mexico, attendance in the Interstate was down by half. On August 3 Warren, some $800 in debt and owing players two weeks’ salary, became the second of three Interstate clubs to fold in less than a month. The Wellsville Reporter speculated that Shaughnessy would return to Canada to raise a company of athletes to fight in the war. Instead Shag signed with the first-place Bradford Drillers, but as a player only. A few weeks later he moved over to the also-ran Wellsville Rainmakers, as player and manager. In an unsettled, no-fixed-address sort of season, Shag recorded a .301 batting average and stole 19 bases in 76 games. But for the first time since 1912, he failed to win a pennant.

SIBERIA

For Shaughnessy fall meant football. But with collegiate ball on hold for the year due to the War, the autumn of 1916 found him coaching the 207th Battalion team to the championship of the military’s Overseas Football League. He also continued as business manager of the hockey Senators, even swinging a deal to pry future Hockey Hall of Famer Cy Denneny away from Toronto. But in November Shaughnessy, now 33 and the father of four boys, decided to enlist. It was what most of the Ottawa athletic community had already done. “Before the current call is exhausted … the Capital will be without ninety per cent of its leading athletes, and unless the war ends shortly, it will be difficult for the various local clubs to carry on successfully,” said the Citizen.”41

On his Officer’s Declaration form Shaughnessy gave his profession as “attorney and athletic director.”42 His medical sheet lists him at 6-feet-1½ inches and 195 pounds, with “excellent physical development.”43 Said the Citizen: “Frank has worn baseball and football togs for so many years that he had no difficulty in adapting himself to the King’s uniform.”44

At first, Shaughnessy’s military career wasn’t much different from his civilian one. He coached and played baseball, coached football and even coached hockey. (“… Frank’s advice is invariably brief, but to the point, viz: ‘Get the goals and then lay back on the defense.’”45) But Shaughnessy’s real value to the military was his wide web of contacts in the sporting world. After all, who better to beat the Hun than an army of elite athletes?

Shag was placed in charge of Ottawa recruiting for the 207th Battalion, and in typical Shag style soon out-recruited his fellow recruiters. “In his short-term as re-inforcing officer, Lieut. Shaughnessy established a record for recruiting as he secured over a hundred men.”46

Shag spent the early summer of 1918 in familiar surroundings. His battery was quartered at Lansdowne Park, a fairly short walk from his home on Powell Ave. in Ottawa’s Glebe neighborhood. Summer evenings his men played baseball.

In September Shaughnessy transferred to the Ammunition Column, 35th Battery, Canadian Expeditionary Force (Siberia). The big show in Europe had only a few weeks left to run, but Canada was still involved in—and in command of—a confused and half-hearted Allied campaign to support the White Russian Army against the Bolsheviks in Russia’s Far East. Shag had experienced any number of baseball Siberias, but never before the real thing. And now, at the peak of the Spanish flu pandemic, he found himself in New Westminster, British Columbia, preparing to embark on a slow boat to Vladivostok.

On November 28, 17 days after the war ended on the Western Front, Shag and his mates sailed from Vancouver on the “remount ship” S.S. War Charger. They carried a load of 16- and 18-pound artillery shells and some 500-600 horses. “I think they picked me because I was as big as a horse,” Shag said.47 The Charger wallowed 500 miles in 23 days until, in danger of running out of coal, it was ordered to turn back. “The funniest thing that happened to me was that I was sentenced to Siberia—and never got there,” said Shag.48 On January 21, 1919, Lieut. Frank Shaughnessy left the army by “reason of General Demobilization”49 and returned home to Ottawa.

A BRISK NORTH WIND

Shaughnessy resumed his McGill position, which had expanded to include responsibility for all outdoor sports. But, as always, he needed a baseball gig to see him through the summer. Shag pursued a number of leads, including the possible formation of a new all-Canadian circuit, featuring Ottawa and Montreal, along with the Canadian entries from the Michigan-Ontario League. “If the new league is formed, I will take either the Montreal or Ottawa franchises, or at least will take a financial interest in them. . . ,” he said. “There is no doubt in my mind that an all-Canadian league would be a howling success.”50 But there were serious doubts in other minds, and the league Shag envisioned failed to get off the ground.

Reluctantly Shag accepted an offer to play for and manage the Hamilton Tigers of the Class-B Michigan-Ontario League. Now 36 and returning after a two-season layoff, he nonetheless put up one of the best offensive seasons, batting .313 with a .412 on-base percentage in 109 games. His Tigers, featuring several former Senators, finished a close second, behind the Saginaw Aces.

Shaughnessy appeared to be wearying of his baseball life. “Managing a baseball team is far from being what it may seem to the average fan in the bleachers,” he told the Citizen. “The player who has nothing to do but play his position each game, and whose worries end with the game each day, has an easy time; but the manager has just as many worries off the field as on. I will make a desperate effort to win the pennant this year, but win or lose I am not going to attempt to fill the role of manager any more.”51

And yet in 1920 he returned to Hamilton. His team again finished second, this time 14½ games behind the runaway London Tecumsehs. But it was the same old fiery Frank. In late May he was arrested for getting into a fight in game in Flint. His offensive production, however, declined dramatically—a .262 batting average with 16 stolen bases in 93 games. It was his swan song as a regular or semi-regular player.52

BYE-BYE BYTOWN

During the 1920-21 offseason Shaughnessy teamed with Canadian baseball legend Knotty Lee in another attempt to bring high-level baseball back to either Ottawa or Montreal. But in the end the Shaughnessy-Lee duo failed to make a business case for either city. In 1921, after a decade in Ottawa, the Shaughnessys decamped with their seven boys to Montreal, with the half-baked idea of Frank selling insurance to supplement his McGill income. The Shaughnessy era in Ottawa was over.

But, as The Sporting News noted, “every time Shag decided to ‘settle down,’ baseball sounded a recall.”53 And so at midseason in 1921 Shaughnessy took over as manager of the chronically second-division Syracuse Stars of the International League. The Syracuse gig marked the beginning of a 40-year relationship with the International. By 1936 he was president of the league, and for the next 24 years he served as a passionate defender of the interests of minor-league baseball. Said the New York Times: “He’s as big as all outdoors and as hearty as a brisk north wind.”54

His “Shaughnessy playoff system”55 is often credited with saving minor-league ball during the Depression. In 1946 he presided over the re-integration of the International League. Said Shag of Jackie Robinson: “He’s the best player in minor league ball. He’s also the smartest.”56

Kitty Shaughnessy, whose homesickness led to the creation of the Ottawa Senators, died in 1958 in Montreal, a week after the Shaughnessy’s 50th wedding anniversary. Shag finally retired at the age of 77, in 1960. He died on May 15, 1969, at the age of 86. He was among the first inductees to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame, in 1983.

“I remember him as kind and big and gruff,” his granddaughter Honora Shaughnessy recounted. “He would always have a TV and one or two portable radios going at the same time, listening to various games. I remember my father always called him ‘Sir.’”57

Long-time SABR member DAVID McDONALD is a writer, filmmaker and broadcaster with a particular interest in Ottawa baseball history. He has contributed to a number of SABR publications, including Our Game Too, Boston’s First Nine: The 1871-75 Boston Red Stockings, and The Babe, as well as The Baseball Research Journal, The National Pastime, and SABR’s Bio Project. Other baseball writings have appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, the Globe and Mail, and the Canadian anthology All I Dreamed About Was Baseball. He has also presented papers on left-handed catcher Jack Humphries and on communications guru Marshall McLuhan at the Canadian Baseball History Conference.

 

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

This profile is based on a similar version by the same author that appeared in the 2022 SABR book Our Game, Too: Influential Figures and Milestones in Canadian Baseball. 

For a deeper dive into Frank Shaughnessy’s career, please refer to Charlie Bevis’s BioProject profile on the SABR website.

 

NOTES

1 “Shag” Deserves Credit,” Hamilton Herald, August 29, 1914: 9.

2 Tim Burke, “Shaughnessy Clan Full of Rich History,” Montreal Gazette, June 15, 1982: B-5.

3 Joe King and Cy Kritzer, “Diamond Ace, Gridiron Star and Executive,” The Sporting News, December 14, 1960: 10.

4 “The Man Has Better Things to Do Than Talk About Himself,” unattributed 1968 newspaper clipping. Courtesy Honora Shaughnessy.

5 After two previous Shaughnessys who attended Notre Dame, both nicknamed “Shag.”

6 Shaughnessy was the starting right end on the undefeated 1903 team that outscored its opponents 291-0 over nine games.

7 David Pietrusza, Minor Miracles: The Legend and Lure of Minor League Baseball (Lanham, Maryland: Taylor Trade Publishing, 1995), 119.

8 Frederick Edwards, “Old-Fashioned Father,” Maclean’s, October 1, 1934: 15.

9 King and Kritzer, 16.

10 An “outlaw,” or independent, league is one that is not part of the National Agreement and therefore beyond the jurisdiction of Organized Baseball.

11 Officially, the Northern New York League. Not to be confused with the Northern League operating in the same period in Manitoba, Minnesota, and North Dakota.

12 Quinn was the proprietor of Revere House, 475-479 Sussex Drive, Ottawa, until selling out in 1912.

13 Officially the Northern Independent League in 1906.

14 Rival Rutland, for example, boasted future Hall of Fame second baseman Eddie Collins and right-hander Dick Rudolph, a 26-game winner for the Boston Braves in 1914.

15 “Notes of Sport,” Ottawa Journal, July 13, 1906: 2.

16 “Greens Take One of the Doubleheader,” Wheeling News Register, September 2, 1906: 6.

17 Jerry Kuntz, Baseball Fiends and Flying Machines: The Many Lives and Outrageous Times of George and Alfred Lawson (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland Publishing, 2009), 126.

18 It was actually .310 — on a team with a .223 batting average.

19 Pietrusza, 120.

20 Pietrusza, 120.

21 The dealership sold – or at least attempted to sell – the Virginian, a short-lived make built in Richmond.

22 “‘Home Run’ Shaughnessy Pays Ottawa a Visit,” unattributed 1910 newspaper clipping. Courtesy Honora Shaughnessy.

23 Re-named Kitchener in the midst of World War I.

24 Ahearn became part-owner of the hockey Senators, 1920-1934. He was selected to the Hockey Hall of Fame as a builder in 1962.

25 “News Notes,” Sporting Life, February 24, 1912: 15.

26 Telegram from Frank to Kitty Shaughnessy, September 2, 1912. Courtesy Honora Shaughnessy.

27 Joe King and Cy Kritzer, “Shag, as a Farm Manager, Polished Rickey’s Kid Stars,” The Sporting News, December 14, 1960: 26.

28 The oldest active football trophy in North America, first awarded in 1898.

29 “It was largely through his campaigning that the Canadian game adopted the forward pass, 12-man teams and the direct snap from center. …” (Marven Moss, “Frank ‘Shag’ Shaughnessy Is Still Rolling in High Gear Despite His Age, Leading Battle for Minor Clubs,” Sherbrooke Daily Record, January 11, 1958: 8.) “He is credited with having more to do with changing Canadian football, by introduction of American football tactics, than any other man.” (King and Kritzer, “Diamond Ace, Gridiron Star and Executive.”)

30 King and Kritzer, “Diamond Ace, Gridiron Star and Executive.”

31 Equivalent to today’s general manager position in hockey.

32 The Senators joined the NHL when it began play in 1917-18.

33 Hardly an act of charity, it cost Shaughnessy $750.

34 “Ottawa and Brantford Teams Open Local Season Month from Today,” Ottawa Citizen, April 24, 1913: 8.

35 Shaughnessy is usually listed at 6-foot-1 1/2, 185 lbs.

36 “Shaughnessy May Become Big League Manager,” Ottawa Citizen, August 12, 1915: 8.

37 “Shag” Deserves Credit,” Hamilton Herald, August 29, 1914: 9.

38 Bert Perry, “Looks Like Fourth Straight Pennant for Ottawa Club,” London Advertiser, August 4, 1915: 8.

39 Bill Rhodes, London Free Press, undated 1915 clipping. Courtesy Honora Shaughnessy.

40 Unattributed clipping from summer 1915. Courtesy Honora Shaughnessy.

41 “Many More Ottawa Athletes Called in First Draft under New Military Service Law,” Ottawa Citizen, May 6, 1918: 8.

42 Officers’ Declaration Paper, Canadian Over-Seas Expeditionary Force, December 22, 1916.

43 Medical History Sheet, February 17, 1917.

44 “Shag in New Role,” Ottawa Citizen, December 21, 1916: 8.

45 “Shag in New Role.”

46 “Ottawa Athletes to Kingston School,” Ottawa Citizen, January 15, 1917: 8.

47 John Kieran, “Under Two Flags,” New York Times, January 23, 1941: 27.

48 Kieran, “Under Two Flags.”

49 Canadian Expeditionary Force Certificate of Service, March 4, 1920.

50 “Shaughnessy Is Planning for New Baseball League,” Ottawa Citizen, August 4, 1919: 8.

51 “Shaughnessy Is Planning for New Baseball League.”

52 Shag’s last professional at bat came at age 41, with an unsuccessful pinch-hit appearance for the Shaughnessy-managed Syracuse Stars, of the International League.

53 King and Kritzer, “Shag, as a Farm Manager, Polished Rickey’s Kid Stars,” The Sporting News, December 14, 1960: 26.

54 Kieran, “Under Two Flags.”

55 A format for determining the champion of a one-division sports league, in which the top four teams in the standings battle it out in post-season competition.

56 Sam Blackman, Tim Bourret, and Dabo Swinney, If These Walls Could Talk: Stories from the Clemson Tigers Sideline, Locker Room, and Press Box (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2016), 56.

57 Honora Shaughnessy, telephone interview with author, August 6, 2002.