Montreal Royals Beginnings

When tasked with discussing the first game in the history of the Montréal Royals, one must decide which one of the club’s first games he or she believes to be the real one. The conventionally accepted description of the Royals as having been around from 1897 to 1917 and from 1928 to 1960, although not factually wrong, does not tell the whole story. Montréal was represented in the Eastern/International League by five different clubs in a 70-year span. Some were in for the long haul, while others spent so little time in Canada’s then largest city that most Montréalers didn’t even notice.

Before the beginning of the 1890 season, the International League (which was called alternatively a league or an association) considered Montréal as a possible landing spot for a franchise.1 The loop ended up playing with six clubs in Ontario, New York, and Michigan. However, one-third of the league’s franchises tried to keep from going belly-up by moving to Montréal in a three-week span during that season. In its June 3 edition, the Gazette of Montréal announced that the Buffalo team, unable to compete with the Buffalos that had just joined the upstart Players’ League, would now call the city home. They chose the Shamrock Club’s lacrosse grounds, located across the street from where the Montréal Forum would be built 3½ decades later, as their home field, and christened the new grounds on June 9.

The team comprised 13 players, including four pitchers and two catchers. They had not been performing in overwhelming fashion, but general manager Bacon spoke very highly of his troops’ off-the-field habits: “A sober, steady lot of fellows. Not a boozer among them.”2 Two thousand admirers of baseball, to use the vernacular of the day, attended the very first game of professional baseball played in Montréal, which also happened to be the first installment of the Toronto-Montréal baseball rivalry. The visitors took the day by a score of 11-10. The game was riddled with errors (eight for each club), as was common for baseball in those days.

Of more concern to those who cared about Montréal’s status in big-time baseball was a report out of Toronto saying that the club was in town “only as a feeler,”3 which Bacon denied. However, after a win attended by fewer than a thousand fans in the second game of the series, and then a loss (apparently caused entirely by poor officiating), the Gazette ran a headline that read: “They Lose and They Quit. Montréal Drops Another Game and Drops Out of Town.”4 The team called Grand Rapids, Michigan, home for what was left of the season.

Overall, it was a very challenging season for the International League, which would end up halting its operations in July. When the Hamilton club found itself on the verge of going under in late June, it was undeterred by the failed Montréal experiment of two weeks earlier. On June 23 Canada’s largest city had a baseball team again.

This second Montréal aggregation introduced itself to its new fans with a twin bill on Dominion Day. And as fate would have it, the new Montréal team faced the old one. Or at least, what was left of the old one. Grand Rapids had been significantly reinforced; only two of the men who had defended the Montréal colors in June took the field for them. Again, offenses (with a little help from the opposing defenses) ruled the day. The visitors took the morning game 17-10 and the locals earned a split with a 9-4 afternoon decision. Game one drew 800 fans, while game two was attended by somewhere between 600 and over 1,000, depending on which newspaper you choose to believe.5

Not even a week later, the team directors were convinced they could not turn a profit, and the latest Montréal club left, not to return. Reporters were not impressed with what the city had been subjected to. “If any one desired to disgust Montréalers with professional baseball they could not have picked out better means to that end than by sending two moribund crews of traveling fakirs to this city and parading them as ‘Montréal’s ball team.’ … Why should Montréal be called upon to father every insolvent aggregation of peripatetic ball-tossers that can find nowhere else willing to take them in?”6 The sentiment was that those clubs were beneath what the city deserved, and that was the reason fans did not flock to the park. The same newsman, who certainly did not feel any kind of municipal inferiority complex, opined that “the next team that comes along and desires to represent this city must first show some grounds upon which that honor should be extended to them.”7

No aggregation of peripatetic ball-tossers tried to earn the honor of representing Montréal for seven years. But when the city did reenter big-time baseball, everything happened at lightning speed. At 5 in the morning of July 16, 1897, fire broke out at the ballpark of the Eastern League’s Rochester club. And at 2 P.M., a dispatch from New York announced that the Rochesters were now the Montréals, and that the club would be playing at the Shamrock lacrosse grounds seven days later.8

A crowd of about 1,200 ventured to the ballpark despite the threat of rain, a threat that materialized during the fifth inning, causing a 17-minute stoppage in play. Fans were treated to a good game and responded enthusiastically. Work had been done on the playing surface, and men were hard at work building new grandstands as the game went on.9

For its first home game, the new Montréal club had drawn Wilkes-Barre, the only team that stood below it in the league standings. Despite that, the locals lost 11-10 even though “that did not count for so much after all, because everybody who saw the game was perfectly satisfied.”10 Reporters believed that this would not be merely a flirtation with professional baseball, as had been those two 1890 episodes, and that the club was there for the long run.

The Royals, as they were intermittently called on a suggestion made by the Wilkes-Barre Record a few days into their existence,11 enjoyed some success. They won an unexpected league title in 1898 under the stewardship of captain, manager, and first baseman Handsome Charley Dooley. However, after the 1902 season, Baltimore was dropped by the American League to make room for what would become the New York Yankees. The Eastern League jumped at the opportunity to add such a proven baseball city, and Montréal, which many of the league’s owners considered too distant from the loop’s other markets, found itself on the chopping block.12

The spring of 1903 brought no Opening Day at the ballpark. But a new iteration of the Royals was on its way. The Worcester, Massachusetts, Eastern League team was in dire straits, and in late July began representing Montréal. However, in one of those quirks of baseball calendars of the past, Montréalers had to wait almost a full month before they saw their team in action.

The team had a dismal record of 29 wins and 66 losses when it arrived at its new home port, a record that was, oddly enough, good for sixth place out of eight in the league standings. Newspapers almost guaranteed defeat for the August 21 home opener as the club faced second-place Jersey City, and the Montréal aggregation did not disappoint, so to speak. With 1,400 fans on hand on a Friday afternoon, the Royals were defeated 7-3.13 They lost their first four contests at what was now called the Montréal Baseball Grounds, stretching their total losing streak to 12; “there will probably be many more,” noted La Presse wryly.14

That prognosis proved true, not only for the 1903 season but for the remainder of that iteration of the club’s existence. Montréal finished in the league’s first division only once before being, once again, bumped out of the loop after the 1917 season.15 And this time, there was no club waiting to fall into Montréal’s lap. The city had to wait 11 years before making its way back into the upper echelons of professional baseball.

There was a different feel to the final first game in Royals history, played on May 5, 1928, compared with the previous ones. Montréal had grown a lot, both in area and in population since the beginning of baseball’s adventure in the city. The sport was a lot bigger deal than it had been in the past and this new club, the former Jersey City Skeeters team that had just been bought by a local group for $225,000, was playing in a real concrete and steel ballpark instead of a park outfitted with wooden stands, as had the old Royals.16

Delorimier Stadium, which the team would occupy until its demise, was filled almost to capacity as longtime New York Yankees hurler Bob Shawkey got the assignment for the Royals. Many among the 22,000 in attendance had received free passes to attend the game, but it was an impressive crowd nonetheless. The locals defeated Reading 7-4, and the comments from the press were overwhelmingly positive. The ballpark was a beautiful and comfortable construction, the sight lines were great, the huge Scoreboard (100 feet by 28) was remarkable. The outside of the ballpark was not finished, and the field, after days of uninterrupted rain that had postponed the grand opening, was in terrible shape. But nobody seemed to mind.17

This latest version of the club brought a level of stability and success the city had not seen before. It also cemented Montréal’s position as a viable market for professional baseball, so that when the Royals ceased operation after the 1960 season the door was left wide open for the arrival of Canada’s first major-league team in 1969.

Historian MARCEL DUGAS is a graduate of the University of Montréal. He’s been researching the Montréal Royals since 2012. In 2013 he live-tweeted the team’s 1946 season for the benefit of his followers across Canada, the United States, Latin America and elsewhere. In 2019 he published Jackie Robinson, Un été à Montréal (Jackie Robinson’s Summer in Montréal), a deep dive into the historic 1946 season.

 

Notes

1 “In the International, Montréal Replaces Buffalo in the Baseball Struggle,” Gazette, June 3, 1890: 8.

2 “All Ready for the Game To-Day,” Gazette, June 9, 1890: 8.

3 “All Ready for the Game To-Day.”

4 “They Lose and They Quit. Montréal Drops Another Game and Drops Out of Town,” Gazette, June 12, 1890: 6.

5 The Montréal Herald reported 600, the Gazette 1,000, and the Daily Witness over 1,000. July 2, 1890.

6 “The Second Orphan Asylum,” Gazette, July 5, 1890: 8.

7 “The Second Orphan Asylum.”

8 “Montréal Is in It. Will Begin the Eastern League Series Next Week,” Gazette, July 17, 1897: 5.

9 “Victoire des Wilkesbarre,” La Presse, July 24, 1897: 14.

10 “Good Opening Game. Montréal and Wilkesbarre Play Hot Baseball,” Gazette, July 24, 1897: 5.

11 “The Royals Defeated,” Wilkes-Barre Record, July 20, 1897: 3.

12 William Brown, Baseball’s Fabulous Montréal Royals (Montréal: Robert Davies Publishing, 1996), 13-14.

13 “The Skeeters Won. First Appearance Here of New Baseball Team,” Gazette, August 22, 1903: 6.

14 “Montréal Débute par une Défaite,” La Presse, August 22, 1903: 3.

15 Brown, 183.

16 Brown, 26-27.

17“Le Club Montréal Ouvre Sa Saison Locale par Deux Victoires. De Grandes Foules Voient Montréal Remporter Ses Deux Premières Victoires Locales,” La Patrie, May 7, 1928: 10.