Frank Selee, Dynasty Builder

This article was originally published in SABR’s The National Pastime, Winter 1985 (Vol. 4, No. 2).

 

In the ten years from 1891 to 1900, only two National League managers won pennants: Ned Hanlon and Frank Gibson Selee. Hanlon is well remembered for leading the flamboyant, intimidating Baltimore Orioles to three flags (1894-96) and Brooklyn’s Superbas, bolstered by six Oriole transfers, to two (1899-1900). Modest, retiring Frank Selee—See-lee, like the mattress—scored his five with the intelligent Boston Beaneaters and is virtually forgotten.

Consider what baseball’s amnesia has obscured: Selee’s winning percentage of .598—achieved in twelve years at Boston and three and a half with the Chicago Cubs—is the fourth highest in managerial history. Twelve of his players are in the Hall of Fame, and five or six others have Cooperstown credentials. His 1892 and 1898 Beaneater teams were the first to win more than 100 games in one National League season. His 1894 powerhouse, although finishing third, still holds the single-season record of 1,222 runs scored, and was the only club between 1884 and 1920 to hit more than 100 home runs (103) in a season.

Actually, the Beaneaters were better known for finesse than muscle. Selee’s particular talents as a manager were, first, a brilliant sense of players’ potentials and, second, a masterful insight into baseball’s strategic possibilities.

It was said of him that he could “tell a ballplayer in his street clothes.” Yet this sixth sense was more than a judgment of athletic skill: It was an uncanny ability to divine the position best suited to the man. Although Arthur Soden, the autocratic boss of the Beaneaters, reputedly thwarted many of Selee’s deals, Frank repeatedly succeeded in acquiring promising minor leaguers and unappreciated National Leaguers, as well as in positional shifts.

This acumen was reflected on the field, where the Beaneaters were known and admired for playing “inside baseball,” for “outthinking” the opposition, for being the “most perfectly drilled scientific team” of its day. While Boston’s stolen-base statistics are unimpressive, Selee was an early advocate of overall team speed as an offensive and defensive weapon. He is credited with developing—through Fred Tenney and Herman Long—the 3-6-3 double play, and he encouraged “headwork and signals” on the field to shift players according to the pitch and to coordinate base coverages. John Montgomery Ward, one of the game’s standard-bearers and pundits, praised the Beaneaters extravagantly in Spalding’s 1894 Guide for their clever and effective use of the run-and-hit play: The runner’s bluff to see who covers second, his signal as to the pitch he will run on, and a punched hit into the hole left by the covering infielder. “I have made a study ofthe play of this team,” Ward wrote, “and I find that they have won many games by scoring nearly twice as many runs as they made hits.”

“The success of the Boston team,” Sporting Life explained in 1893, “is due, more than any other thing, to … a manager who is a thorough base ball general … who knows what should be done and how to do it, and is able to impress his advice upon the men under his control.”

Given the evolution of playing and scoring rules since Selee’s time, plus the changing fashions in press reporting, it is difficult to interpret such accolades in contemporary terms. What is readily apparent, and what establishes Selee’s place among baseball’s great managers, is his architectural brilliance in fashioning the 1890-1901 Beaneaters and 1902-05 Cubs.

Selee was born in 1859, the son of a Methodist-Episcopal clergyman, and raised in Melrose, Massachusetts, where he was a member of the town’s Alpha baseball club. In 1884 he left a job with the Waltham Watch Co. to organize an entry in the Massachusetts State Baseball Association. “I was without any practical experience as a manager or player,” he wrote in a retrospective article many years later. But he raised $1,000 to provide a playing field with fence and grandstand, appeared in a few box scores as center fielder, and quickly asserted his natural talent for managing.

The Waltham team was short lived. Manager Selee and some of his players joined the league’s Lawrence franchise to finish out the season.

In 1885, with the league reorganized as the Eastern New England Baseball Association, he managed Haverhill to second place, but in mid-1886 he was released.

What he called “my real start in baseball” came in 1887, when he won his first pennant as manager of the Oshkosh (Wisconsin) team of the Northwestern League. Trailing league-leading Milwaukee by fourteen games on July 4, Oshkosh stormed back to win the pennant on the final day of the season, led by outfielders Dummy Hoy and Tommy McCarthy and pitcher Tom Lovett, future big-league stars. The following year, with the league renamed the Western Association (on its way to becoming Ban Johnson’s American League), Selee shifted to Omaha and, after a fourth-place finish, won another pennant in 1889.

He came to Boston from Omaha, bringing with him his star pitcher, Charles “Kid” Nichols, eventually a 360-game winner. He also persuaded Boston to part with $700 for a promising Western League second baseman, Bobby “Link” Lowe, of Milwaukee.

Selee started with a Beaneater team riddled by ten defections to the new Boston entry in the Players League. The entire infield and outfield Were gone, including the redoubtable Dan Brouthers and King Kelly, and three pitchers—two of no account, but the other, Old Hoss Radbourn.

The splendid john Clarkson and his batterymate, the veteran Charlie Bennett, stayed loyal. Scrambling, Selee went to the American Association for three infielders. From Baltimore he got Tommy Tucker, notable for playing first base with a fingerless mitt, and journeyman third sacker Chippy McGarr; from Kansas City for a then-whopping $6,300 he got “Germany” Long, one of the preeminent players of the century, who would be a fixture at shortstop for twelve years. At second he used utility man Pop Smith rather than Bobby Lowe, whose time would come. From other National League clubs he picked up pitcher Charlie Getzien, onetime Detroit whiz; Marty Sullivan, an Indianapolis outfielder; and partway into the season the veteran outfielder Paul Hines, from Pittsburgh. One of his better bargains was Steve Brodie, from Hamilton, Ontario (International League), who became the regular right fielder.

Over the season the Beaneaters made a respectable fight of it, holding second place as late as August. A September slump, however, dropped them to fifth with a 76-57 record. Embarrassingly, the Players League pennant was won by the Boston defectors.

In 1891 the Players League had collapsed and better players were available. Two of the prodigals, second baseman Joe Quinn and third baseman Billy Nash, returned. With Tucker and Long they gave the Beaneaters a first-class infield. King Kelly, a shadow of his former self, returned to catch a final twenty-four games for Boston; Bennett was beginning to fade, too, particularly at the plate. Thereafter, Selee was always on the lookout for competent catchers. Bobby Lowe broke into the lineup as left fielder, Steve Brodie moved to center, and Harry Stovey, a hard-hitting star in the American Association, became the right fielder when his old A.A. team, Philadelphia, failed to reserve him after the Brotherhood disbanded.

A Cambridge lad, Joe Kelley, played twelve games in the outfield and batted .244 before being passed along to Pittsburgh in the deal that brought righthander Harry Staley to Boston to replace the worn-out Getzien. These were the first games in a seventeen-year career that would lead young Joe to the Hall of Fame (principally by way of the legendary Orioles), but there is no evidence that Selee misjudged Kelley’s talent; at the time he needed another pitcher more than he needed an undeveloped outfielder. Staley, despite a reputation for “lushing,” won 20 games. These, plus Clarkson’s 33, Nichols’ 30, and Getzien’s 4, were enough to win a first National League pennant for Frank Selee by 3 1/2 games over Chicago.

Kelley is one example among many of how Selee cast his net outward from the Hub. In a day of rather more haphazard scouting (although of more geographically concentrated player pools), he was acutely aware of promising players throughout New England. Of the 118 men who played for him in Boston, nearly 30 percent were from Massachusetts, and 38 percent were from New England.

Between seasons the ten-year-old American Association expired and four ofits teams were absorbed into the National League. Selee was home in Melrose, attending Elks meetings and running a haberdashery with Sid Farrar, the former Phillie first baseman and father of the glorious Geraldine. But he never lost sight of baseball opportunities, and in the reshuffling of players for 1892 Selee drew three aces. From the Boston Reds, Association successors to the Players League team, he plucked outfielder Hugh Duffy. From St. Louis he got pitcher Happy Jack Stivetts and outfielder Tommy McCarthy whom Selee had piloted at Oshkosh. Duffy and McCarthy, close personal friends, quickly became known as “the Heavenly Twins” for their superlative play afield and at bat, while Happy Jack won 132 games in the next six years, including the first no-hitter ever thrown by a Boston pitcher.

Lowe complemented the Twins in the outfield. Brodie and Stovey were released. The infield was unchanged. Stivetts won 35 games, a nice bit of timing inasmuch as a sore arm had brought John Clarkson’s distinguished Boston career to an end (he held on for another season and a half with Cleveland). In the National League’s one and only split season, the Beaneaters won 102 games—the most ever to that time—and took the pennant by eight and a half games over Cleveland.

In 1893 the Beaneaters marched to their third straight pennant. The major change in the team was the evolution of Bobby Lowe into an infielder. Joe Quinn was traded to St. Louis for Cliff Carroll, who took Lowe’s outfield spot so that Bobby could replace Quinn.

The glory years for the Orioles now intervened. The Beaneaters, with largely the same personnel that had won so handily in ’93, faltered and sank to third, to fifth (tie), and to fourth. It was hard to say what went wrong. In 1894 Hugh Duffy led the league in average (the incredible .438), homers (18), and RBIs (145). Lowe became the first major-leaguer to hit four home runs in one game. Five regulars had more than 100 runs batted in. Kid Nichols won 32 games—the fourth of seven straight 30-or-over years. And Boston broke in a rookie lefthanded catcher named Fred Tenney, whose glory lay ahead. Yet not only Baltimore, but the Giants, finished ahead of Boston.

By 1897 the Beaneaters were back on top of the heap with a .705 winning percentage, highest in their history, and in 1898, with their second 100-victory season, they won the fifth pennant for Frank Selee in a span of eight years. It is instructive to compare the lineups of 1893 and 1897 to see how the manager restored the team’s viability:

 

1893 lineup		1897 LINEUP
Tommy Tucker	1B	Fred Tenney
Bobby Lowe	2B	Bobby Lowe
Billy Nash	3B	Jimmy Collins
Herman Long	SS	Herman Long
Cliff Carroll	RF	Chick Stahl
Hugh Duffy	CF	Billy Hamilton
Tommy McCarthy	LF	Hugh Duffy
Charlie Bennett	CF	Marty Bergen
Charlie Ganzel	C/UT	Charlie Ganzel
Kid Nichols	P	Kid Nichols
Jack Stivetts	P	Jack Stivetts
Harry Staley	P	Fred Klobedanz
Hank Gastright	P	Ted Lewis

 

Carroll was first to go. In 1894 he was replaced by Jimmy Bannon, an Amesbury boy nicknamed “Foxy Grandpa,” who was a bleacher favorite after his purchase from St. Louis. McCarthy went next. Thirty-one in 1895 and coming to the end of his lovely career, he was injured late in the season and replaced by Tenney. Jimmy Collins, acquired from Buffalo (Eastern League) as an outfielder, played a few games on Bannon’s turf, played them badly, and was virtually hooted off the team by the foxy one’s partisans. Selee loaned Collins (a common practice then) to Louisville, a constant tailender since its entry from the American Association. There, in the obscurity of twelfth place, the future Hall of Farner learned to be a third baseman.

This was not lost on Frank Selee. Before the 1896 season began, he had traded Boston’s long-time favorite Billy Nash to Philadelphia for Sliding Billy Hamilton and recalled Collins to Boston. He dealt McCarthy to Brooklyn, perhaps with a pang, but Tommy was heavenly no longer. And for $1,000 and a utility infielder of minimal skills he lifted Marty Bergen from Kansas City—the catcher he had been looking for since the loss of Bennett.

Nash had been team captain, a role of some authority, since returning from his Players League sabbatical, but he was past thirty, Collins was a fair bet to hold down third, and Sliding Billy, though thirty himself, had both the power and speed to more than make up for McCarthy’s departure.

As the season progressed, Selee also collected two fine pitchers: Ted Lewis, a righthander, as he graduated from Williams College, and Fred Klobedanz, a lefty from Fall River who had whetted Selee’s appetite by holding Boston to five hits in a spring exhibition. Both would have short careers, but both would be substantial winners in the pennant years.

Finally, Selee resolved Tenney’s role. Since signing on in 1894 he had been tried at catcher, but his throwing was erratic, and lefthanders were going out of style. Otherwise, he was an outfielder. Early in 1897, however, after three straight losses to Baltimore, Selee suddenly benched Tommy Tucker and pulled Tenney out of right field to play first. It was another marvelous, intuitive Selee move. Tenney was a natural: agile, graceful, surehanded. He played wide and deep, he stretched arms and legs to meet the throw and gain an inch on the runner, a novelty at the time that soon became the custom. The infield of Tenney, Lowe, Long, and Collins, although it played together only four years, was judged the nineteenth century’s best by all who saw it.

Icing on the cake was Chick Stahl, a first-rate outfielder and career .300 hitter, who was drafted from Buffalo in 1896 and available to take the spot vacated by Tenney.

Let it not be said that Selee was infallible. Two of his misjudgments, both committed in 1896, were whoppers. Ed Barrow recalled, half a century after the fact, that Selee had said he “wouldn’t give a dime for Wagner.” And the authoritative Fred Lieb reminisced that Selee had visited Fall River to inspect the young Nap Lajoie and was not sufficiently impressed by his .429 BA to make a bid.

Anyone who didn’t want Wagner for his hitting alone would have some explaining to do. For even in 1896, his second season in organized baseball, rumors had spread that Honus was a terror. One after another, National League managers bringing their teams in to New York to play the Giants found time to cross the river and watch Wagner perform for Barrow’s Paterson club of the Atlantic League.

Cousin Ed did not explain what determined Selee to spend his dime elsewhere. An off-duty pitcher scouting for the Phils reported Honus as too awkward to play major-league ball, and his ungainliness may indeed have been seen as a flaw. It is also fact that Wagner did not play the majority of his games at short until 1903. Before then he was a novice at every position. Even so, there was no missing that bat.

As for Lajoie, the story of his rejection has several versions, only one of which involves Selee. The others have a pitcher who was impressively battered by Lajoie urging Boston to grab him and being ignored. In fact, a number of scouts inexplicably ignored Nap in spite of his terrific hitting, so that the Phils, trading for a nothing outfielder, got him as a throw-in. As for Selee, with stars of the caliber of Tenney, Lowe, Hamilton, and Duffy at all the positions Lajoie played, he can perhaps be forgiven for taking Fred Klobedanz instead.

Selee’s final maneuver for Boston came in 1898, when, for another $1,000 and another utility infielder, he acquired from Syracuse (Eastern League) a remarkable righthander, Vic Willis, the Delaware Peach. In eight of his thirteen seasons the Peach had 20 or more victories and a career total of 248. As usual, it was a timely deal, Willis’s 24 wins coming as Happy Jack Stivetts reached the end of the trail.

Thereafter, Ned Hanlon, now in Brooklyn, took the 1899 and 1900 pennants, and Fred Clarke earned his first with Pittsburgh in 1901. Boston slid to second, to fourth, and finally to fifth with a .500 record.

Selee was cast adrift after twelve years, 1,004 victories, and a .607 winning percentage. Clark Griffith, by then manager of the Chicago White Sox, said, “That is a big mistake. Selee is one of the few great managers in the business.” He was promptly hired by the Chicago Cubs, who had not won a pennant since 1886 and had achieved the first division only four times in the dozen years Selee was at Boston. In 1901 they rested in sixth place, 37 games out.

For Selee it was the Boston experience of 1890 all over again. Of the twenty-five players on the 1901 Cub squad, only eight survived to start the 1902 season, and three of those were soon gone. One of these, a utility infielder—Selee’s favorite trade bait—went to Boston for the distinguished veteran Bobby Lowe. A few were sold for cash.

Most were simply released. Five jumped to the American League, all of them considerable players, especially the two snared by Connie Mack: outfielder Topsy Hartsel and pitcher Rube Waddell.

These actions left Selee with: two regulars, Frank Chance in right field and johnny Kling behind the plate; two pitchers, Jack Taylor, the team’s best, and so-so Jocko Menefee; and a rookie infielder, Germany Schaefer.

Where to start? Selee had left Boston with Jimmy Slagle in tow. The Beaneaters had acquired him from the Phils in 1901, his rookie year, and it is possible that despite 66 games in the Boston outfield management did not realize how good he was. He would grace the Chicago garden through 1908.

Frank Chance, who had been catching and outfielding for the Cubs since 1898, looked more like a first baseman to Selee, and turned out to be one. Like Tenney, he fit beautifully. By July Bobby Lowe was at second. Schaefer was stationed at third. Another rookie, Joe Tinker, drafted from Portland of the Northwest League during the winter, was transformed from third baseman to shortstop.

Late in the season there was an historic coming together. Bobby Lowe was hurt and Selee asked an eastern scout to grab an emergency replacement.The choice was a scrawny, lantern-jawed, ill-natured, hard-playing runt from Troy (N.Y. State League) named John Evers. He joined the club after Labor Day, presumably a shortstop, but Selee had a shortstop and needed Evers at second. On September 15 was executed the first Tinker to Evers to Chance double play.

For the outfield, Davy Jones—also known as “Kangaroo”—was bought from the St. Louis Americans; later on he would form a threesome with Ty Cobb and Sam Crawford at Detroit. John Dobbs, a stopgap, was purchased from Cincinnati.

Kling, already on deck, was an excellent catcher. Henceforth he would be catching more than 100 games a season.

Pitching was a problem. Selee got 22 wins from ace Jack Taylor and 12 from Menefee. Nine other pitchers came and went. One discovery worth keeping was Carl Lundgren, fresh from the University of Illinois. All told, thirty-eight men wore the Cub uniform in 1902. At the end of the season Chicago (68-69) had advanced one notch to fifth place.

In 1903 there were only two changes in the day-to-day lineup. Schaefer, who had hit .196, was released and Dobbs was sold to Brooklyn. A pair ofDetroiters took their places: “Doc” Casey, third base, and Dick Harley, right field. In a year Harley would be gone, but Casey would hold his position for the rest of Selee’s term in Chicago.

The pitching was much improved. Taylor won 21, Lundgren 10, Menefee 8, and two Selee surprises, Jake Weimer and Bob Wicker, won 21 and 19. “Tornado Jake” was a twenty-nine-year-old rookie from Kansas City in the Western League. Wicker came from the Cardinals in an even trade for pitcher Bob Rhoads. In three seasons he would win 49 games for the Cubs. (Rhoads did little for the Cards, but eventually became a winner for Cleveland.)

(Interestingly, within a few years Weimer and Wicker were involved in trades with Cincinnati which provided the final building blocks for Chicago’s soon-to-be champions. Shortly before the 1906 season, Weimer and third baseman Hans Lobert were exchanged for Harry Steinfeldt, the hot-corner man who solidified the Tinker-Evers-Chance infield. In June, Wicker and $2,000 were traded for the excellent Orvie Overall.)

As for 1903, the Cubs (82-56) leaped to third place. In December of that year Selee engineered perhaps the finest deal of his career: Jack Taylor and Larry McLean, a catcher who had played just one game for Chicago, were dispatched to St. Louis for the nonpareil Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown, the three-fingered one, and Jack O’Neill, a backup catcher of rather less talent than his young brother Steve. Actually, it took two years to prove what a steal it was. Steady Jack won 35 for the Cards, while Brown was scoring 33 for the Cubs. Thereafter, of course, Mordecai had six consecutive seasons of 20 or more victories as one of the superb righthanders ever.

Jack McCarthy, a Massachusetts boy, continued the game of Rotating Third Outfielder, replacing Harley. And Artie Hofman, lively “Circus Solly,” who could play all infield and outfield positions, came aboard through a simple cash deal with Pittsburgh. Finally, near season’s end, the Syracuse Stars were persuaded to part with their fleet outfielder, Wildfire Schulte.

All this talent combined to win 93 games (and lose 60) in 1904 and edged the Cubs into second place, though still 13 games behind the high-flying Giants.

In 1905 Selee made his final contribution to the future welfare of the Cubs, acquiring a strong-armed college-boy pitcher named Ed Reulbach. A star at Notre Dame, Big Ed also played summer ball under assumed names. At Sedalia, Missouri in 1901-03 he was “Lawson.” Pitching for Montpelier, Vermont in 1904 he was “Sheldon.” At times, scouts may have been excited to think there were three pitchers of Reulbach’s caliber waiting to be signed!

In the 1905 outfield, Billy Maloney took Davy Jones’s spot—as McCarthy had taken Harley’s and Harley had taken Dobbs’s. During the winter Maloney, McCarthy, “Doc” Casey, a pitcher, and $2,000 were shuffled off to Brooklyn for the long-sought perfect third outfielder: Jimmy Sheckard.

Selee was not there to pull it off. Never robust and frequently ailing, he was found in July to be gravely ill with tuberculosis. The Cubs had won 52 and lost 38 when he turned them over to Husk Chance and migrated to Denver, hoping there would be healing magic in the Rocky Mountains. He died there in July 1909, aged fifty, and his passing was mourned by the baseball world.

Not everyone was prepared to credit his accomplishments and, to be sure, Frank Selee had help. All teams are the achievement of many people. But for every player, newsman, or scout who had a bone to pick, there were many more who acknowledged his skills and counted themselves lucky that they had known him or played for him. His teams had won 1,299 games while losing 872. Eight of his Beaneaters are in the Hall of Fame. Duffy, Tommy McCarthy, Nichols, Hamilton, and Collins truly felt his influence. Clarkson and King Kelly were finishing careers earned without him, and Joe Kelley won his spurs elsewhere. Yet it can also be argued that Tenney, Lowe, Long, and Willis, who are not in the Hall, should be, and that Reulbach and Schulte should join Tinker, Evers, Chance, and Brown in the Chicago contingent.

After a third-place finish in 1905, the team Selee handed to Chance went 116-36 in 1906 to set a record never since approached. The Cubs also won pennants in 1907, 1908, and 1910 and were second in 1909. Their 570 victories against 258 defeats in that period gave them a phenomenal percentage of .688. It is impossible to know whether Frank Selee would have compiled the same record. All that can be said is that of the thirteen key players of 1905, eight still were regulars in 1910. The principal additions—Steinfeldt, Sheckard, Overall, and Jack Pfiester—arrived in 1906. Otherwise it was pretty much Selee’s bunch that built up Frank Chance as The Peerless Leader and took him to the Hall of Fame (in three years of managing in other big-league towns, Chance finished last once and seventh twice). Frank Selee has been forgotten, but his record is there for all to see. You could look it up.