The White Stockings’ Fleet-Footed Preacher: Billy Sunday vs. the Alcohol Machine

 

Mike “King” Kelly, Arlie Latham, Cap Anson, and Albert Spalding were among the most popular and respected players of nineteenth-century baseball. But despite the players’ successes on the field, the public often viewed them as part of a working-class culture frequently associated with saloons and rowdy behavior. A minister in 1889 referred to ballplayers as “men without character” who “would engage in no legitimate occupation.”1 Newspapers of the late nineteenth century stereotyped ballplayers as thus: “A gentleman of leisure six months of the year, who arose at 10am during the season, had a ‘snug’ breakfast, read the papers, smoked a Reina Victoria, napped before his 2 o’clock dinner, strolled to the ball park at about 3, where he took a little exercise for a couple of hours, and then returned for supper, smoked, went with girls to the theatre, and of course drew his salary.”2 Players would hold this reputation until the public began to view them differently. Chicago White Stockings outfielder William “Billy” Ashley Sunday would be different.

Billy Sunday left the game of baseball behind after the 1890 season and became America’s biggest temperance spokesman against the abuses of alcohol. His message helped propel him to become the country’s most influential evangelist in the first half of the twentieth century. Using his celebrity status as a ballplayer, Sunday would attract large crowds almost everywhere he went. His campaign against alcohol helped fuel a movement that would eventually lead to the passage of the National Prohibition Act in 1919. His success in this campaign can not only be attributed to how he managed an effective organization, but also to how he used the newspaper medium.

William Ashley Sunday’s battle against alcohol began when he was a child. Born in Ames, Iowa, in 1862, his father died during the Civil War. Sunday’s mother soon remarried. Her second husband was a drunkard who provided little support for the family and soon left. Sunday went to live with his grandfather on his farm where his hatred for alcohol increased. “My poor dear old Grandfather used to drink oh so much and abuse me and when sober he would feel so sad about it.”3 Years later in his autobiography, Sunday described how the experiences of his youth helped foster within him a life-long confrontation with alcohol which he often described as his personal “enemy.” Sunday even went so far to blame bootleggers for selling liquor to his Grandfather. “Grandfather used to have periodic spells of several months apart when he drank liquor, but never bought the liquor himself; he would get it from the bootleggers. You see, I began to hate booze in my youth, and as the years come and go my hatred for the cursed business and the bootlegger increases. It was the same back in those early days— the bootlegger was the scourge of society; and it takes two to make a bootlegger—the fellow who sells the stuff and the one who buys it.”4

Sunday’s professional baseball career started in 1883 when Adrian Constantine “Cap” Anson offered him a tryout with the Chicago White Stockings. Anson often spent his winters in Marshalltown, Iowa, where Sunday played baseball. Locals told Anson about a very fast young center fielder who always ran down fly balls. His aunt also tried to persuade Anson to give Sunday a tryout. The next spring, Anson telegrammed Sunday and invited him to a team tryout in Chicago. Anson met Sunday in the White Stockings locker room when he arrived, reportedly saying, “Billy, they tell me that you can run some. Fred Pfeffer is our crack runner. How about putting on a little race this morning?”5 According to Sunday, he beat Pfeffer in the race by fifteen feet. “You can imagine how the boys razzed Fred for letting a raw country boy beat him,” Billy wrote in his autobiography. “Winning that race opened the hearts of the players to me at once, and I’ll always be thankful to Cap for giving me that chance to show off to the best advantage.”6 Sunday signed a contract to play with the Chicago White Stockings for the 1883 season. His biggest weakness as a ballplayer, he would say, was hitting. His speed and fielding were the tools where he really shone on the playing field. “I could run a hundred yards in ten seconds, and was the first to circle the baseball diamond in fourteen seconds from a standing start, touching all bases,” Billy claimed.7

When Albert Spalding fined some of Sunday’s White Sox teammates for their rowdy behavior and excessive drinking, Sunday was not among them. He turned away from the rambunctious lifestyle of ballplayers, and during the 1886 season he became an avid Christian. Soon after his conversion to Christianity, Sunday joined a local church, began teaching, and frequently spoke at his local YMCA. Sunday’s conversion did not keep him from socializing with his teammates, as he explained: “I used to go to the saloons with the baseball players, and while they would drink highballs and gin fizzes and beer, I would take lemonade and sarsaparilla.”8

Sunday officially retired from professional baseball in 1890 to become a Christian evangelist. In 1907, he held a revival function in the town of Fairfield, Iowa. Preaching to a half-empty hall, Sunday decided to use his status as a former major leaguer to drum up interest in his evangelical message. Sunday organized the local businesses into two baseball teams and scheduled a game between them. Sunday arrived wearing a uniform from his days as a ballplayer and played a couple of innings for both teams. Iowa newspapers spread the story of Sunday’s antics.

In November of that same year in Muscatine, Iowa, large crowds gathered to hear Sunday’s message. Sunday started a petition drive for a referendum on local- option Prohibition after the sermon, and Muscatine soon went “dry.” The town of Ottumwa, Iowa, went “dry” after Sunday held a revival in the town a year later. Statewide Prohibition was not approved by Iowa until 1915, but Sunday’s efforts to help spread the message of the “evils of alcohol” helped spur public interest that influenced legislative action.9

 

 

On April 8, 1917, in New York City, Billy Sunday addressed the largest crowd of his career. Sunday reminded the crowd of his former career. “I noticed you are the same warm-hearted, enthusiastic bunch you used to be when you sat in the grandstand and bleachers when I played at the old Polo Grounds. It didn’t matter if a fellow was on the other side or not. If he made a good play he got the glad hand rather than the marble heart.” Sunday’s revival in New York City lasted until the end of June. During his time in New York, he made his first calls for National Prohibition, stating, “This whiskey business is a question for the government, not the states to battle, and you know it.”10

After years of fighting for it, Sunday witnessed the Eighteenth Amendment become law on January 17, 1920, prohibiting the manufacture, transportation, and sale of alcohol. Although the law would eventually be repealed in 1933, Sunday’s mission had been completed. According to Mark Lender, “While his precise impact is hard to judge, many [of his] contemporaries were convinced that the popular evangelist was of crucial importance in establishing public support for the passing of the Eighteenth Amendment.”11

Sunday’s biographer W.A. Firstenberger estimated that by 1915, Sunday had spoken to over forty million people on the dangers of alcohol. “For weeks at a time, as many as 50,000 people a day heard him preach on the evil of liquor. No one else commanded numbers like that—not entertainers, not even presidents.”12 Sunday’s ability to use his ball-playing fame to spur the press to drum up interest and to get his message across would not be lost on ballplayers who came after him.

Fast forward almost one hundred years and ballplayers are now using all kinds of media and technology to push their messages and defend themselves against those who might besmirch their reputations, in particular the phenomenon dubbed “social media” in which individuals can broadcast directly to a wide, public audience with no editorial curation or control. Social media platforms like Facebook and Twitter have revolutionized public access to athletes. Previously, the only way people could interact with their favorite players was at the stadium or through a special event that often cost considerable money. Social media changed the interaction between athletes and the public, as Jimmy Sanderson wrote in his 2011 book, It’s a Whole New Ballgame: How Social Media is Changing Sports: “One of the more dynamic outcomes produced by social media is the increased ability for fans to access athletes. Social media acts [sic] as a conduit that connects these two groups, serving as a communicative bridge that facilitates interaction opportunities.”13

Sanderson also argues that the way social media sites and apps have dramatically changed the way athletes, the public, and sports journalists interact with each other, has also empowered another “important shift in sports media reporting”—the rise of “tabloid” sites like Deadspin, drunkathlete.com, and TMZsports.com. These sites often featured dirt on the private lives of players to draw readers.

Josh Hamilton became one of baseball’s first players to have his alcohol and drug-related indiscretions broadcasted worldwide for all to see.14 Hamilton’s wife, Katie, suffered deeply from the embarrassing pictures posted online. She described receiving disturbing phone calls from people who could not imagine why she would stay with her husband after his embarrassing episode. She recalled people saying “I don’t know how you can get out of bed in the morning” and another who asked, “How can you go grocery shopping or show your face?”15

Have these tabloid websites returned ballplayers to the reputation of rowdyism and drunkenness? Social media allow fans personal access to their favorite players as never before. One could only imagine the influence Billy Sunday might have had if he had been able to log in to his own social media accounts to spread his message of temperance. 

DR. JOSEPH L. THOMPSON is a Faculty Lecturer with the Department of Management and Leadership at the C.T. Bauer Business School at the University of Houston. He has taught International Business and American History at the University of Houston since 2013. He joined SABR in 2010 and is currently the Larry Dierker SABR Chapter President. He is the co-author of “Mexican American Baseball in Houston and Southeast Texas” and “Houston Baseball: The Early Years.” He has contributed to different SABR publications including “We Are, We Can, We Will: The 1992 World Champion Toronto Blue Jays,” “Time for Expansion Baseball,” and “Dome Sweet Dome.” He is a US Air Force Desert Storm veteran and spends what little off time he has spending time with his family, playing with his two Yorkies, and playing baseball with his grandson.

 

Notes

1. Harold Seymour and Dorothy Seymour Mills, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 330, 331.

2. Seymour and Mills, Baseball: The Early Years, 330,331. John P Rossi, The National Game: Baseball and American Culture (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2000), 25-37. “The Baseball Season Near,” New York Tribune, February 21, 1892.

3. W.A. Firstenberger, In Rare Form: A Pictorial History of Baseball Evangelist Billy Sunday (Iowa City, lA: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 72. Wendy Knickerbocker, “The Baseball Evangelist throws out John Barleycorn: Billy Sunday and Prohibition,” in The Politics of Baseball: Essays on the Pastime and Power at Home and Abroad, edited by Ron Briley, Chapter 2 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2010).

4. Billy Sunday, Sawdust Trail: Billy Sunday in His Own Words (Iowa City, IA: University of Iowa Press, 2005), 67. Papers of Billy and Helen Sunday 1882-1974, Collection 61, Archives of the Billy Graham Center, Wheaton College, Wheaton, Illinois.

5. Billy Sunday, Sawdust Trail, 67.

6. Billy Sunday, Sawdust Trail, 71.

7. Billy Sunday, Sawdust Trail, 73.

8. Billy Sunday, Sawdust Trail, 77.

9. Billy Sunday, Sawdust Trail, 1-20.

10. Knickerbocker, “The Baseball Evangelist Throws Out John Barleycorn.”

11. Mark Edward Lender, Dictionary of American Temperance Biography: From Temperance Reform to Alcohol Research, the 1600s to the 1980s (Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 1984), 476. Knickerbocker, “The Baseball Evangelist throws out John Barleycorn.”

12. Firstenberger, In Rare Form, 72.

13. Jimmy Sanderson, It’s a Whole New Ballgame: How Social Media Is Changing Sports (New York, NY: Hampton Press, 2011), 69.

14. Sanderson, It’s a Whole New Ballgame, 21.

15. Josh Hamilton and Tim Keown, Beyond Belief Finding the Strength to Come Back (New York: Faith Words, 2010), 274.