We are all aware that the pipe smoker belongs to a breed apart from other men. His pleasures are contemplation and relaxation; he does not rush, he is not nervous. His joys are the casual and meditative ones, those of the fireside, the easy chair, and the good book. The pipe stands as a symbol of this type of man, easily recognized by his even frame of mind, his unhurried approach to life’s problems.1

George Cushman, editor of Pipe Lovers magazine, wrote:

The observation is often made that pipe smokers are all of a certain temperament, that not just any man can be a pipe smoker…most of them are solid, steady, rather easy going people who have more than the average amount of patience.2

Does pipe smoking relate to baseball? “Solid, steady, easy going”—those might be true in some cases, but the images of Pete Rose, Ty Cobb, Billy Martin, Earl Weaver, or Roberto Clemente don’t conjure up those adjectives.

“I don’t want pipe smokers on my club,” quipped Joe McCarthy, the great Yankees manager.3 Marse Joe had an aversion to pipe smoking ballplayers. He believed pipe smokers were too complacent and self-satisfied. When asked by a reporter prior to the 1937 All-Star Game if he planned to mirror National League manager Bill Terry’s strategy, McCarthy snapped, “Let that pipe-smoker manage his team, and I’ll manage mine.”4 Stories about McCarthy and pipes abound. Lefty Gomez, a cigar and pipe smoker himself, recalled one about Yankees third baseman Red Rolfe. Red smoked a straight-stemmed pipe:

Joe had a fixation about guys smoking pipes. I roomed with Red Rolfe and Red loved his pipe. But he couldn’t smoke it in the lobby. McCarthy thought it had something to do with making a man complacent. It was the funniest thing in the world to see Rolfe sneaking a quick pipe in his room with me standing guard at his door.5

Although McCarthy later claimed that his negative comments about pipe smokers were said in jest (“I don’t care if a guy smokes a pipe, just as long as he plays up to his ability”),6 the press had a field day with him. Joe had to “look the other way” in some instances. Reporter Bob Broeg observed:

[Lou] Gehrig…whose pipe smoking Joe McCarthy tolerated because Mac was a smart manager who knew how to lead men, but also how and when to leave them alone when they buttered his bread.7

Pipe-smoking shortstop and former Philadelphia Phillies manager Art Fletcher served as a Yankees coach under Joe McCarthy. When asked by a writer to pose for a picture with his pipe, Fletcher refused, and explained to the reporter, “Not me…Don’t you realize by now that McCarthy doesn’t like a pipe smoker? [He] thinks a fellow is too self-satisfied [or] too complacent if he smokes a pipe.” Fletcher continued:

I shall never forget the time Joe caught Johnny Schulte (another Yankees coach) with a pipe. He laid him out—in a nice way, of course. And there was the time Lou Gehrig and other fellows brought out their briars. Joe couldn’t stand it because he thought the fellows looked too self-satisfied, or something.8

Dixie Walker started in the majors playing for McCarthy’s Yankees, and was 33 years old before he touched tobacco in any form. Shortly after taking up the pipe, while wearing the uniform of the Brooklyn Dodgers, Walker went on a 72 for 169 (.426 average) batting tear. Walker delivered a shot aimed at McCarthy when he said, “I don’t know whether I am a ball player or not, but I’m contented.”9

Eddie “The Brat” Stanky, a pipe smoker and the antithesis of complacency, who owned and smoked at least a dozen pipes, defended the practice. “Oh, a pipe smoke is a source of great solace and relaxation. It caresses you in victory, and it expands your thinking processes in defeat. I am afraid that McCarthy had the pipe all wrong.”10 Still, McCarthy’s influence was strong. When Chicago White Sox shortstop Chico Carrasquel began smoking a pipe in 1955, manager Marty Marion worried, “I hope it isn’t a sign of contentment.”11

A manager on the opposite end of the McCarthy spectrum was St. Louis Cardinals (1929-1933) and St. Louis Browns (1938) skipper Gabby Street. The former catcher, who played for five different teams during an eight-year major league career, was not only a great smoker of pipes, but he also had a collection of 70 pipes, which he displayed and proudly showed off visitors in his home.

There are big pipes and little pipes, odd-shaped pipes, straight and curved stems, engraved pipes, ancient pipes and pipes with the newest inventions and the latest fads, pipes that college boys are supposed to smoke and the kind on which grandpa likes to puff while wearing his soft slippers and reclining in his easy chair. The pipes are gifts. Some are inscribed and others carry symbols on the bowl. One is a long-grooved creation more than a foot in length, once owned by a lieutenant in General Custer’s troops—an officer who left the service just three days before the fatal massacre—and the pipe wound up in Gabby’s possession instead of Chief Sitting Bull’s. There is a bit of history or sentiment attached to each pipe in this collection and none will be smoked. Gabby has enough of the other kind to puff on for a lifetime.12

Two pipe-smoking infielders who played for Street’s 1938 St. Louis Browns were George McQuinn and Don Heffner. McQuinn began his career in the Yankees organization. But two things were against him. First, he was a first baseman during the early 1930s, a time in which Lou Gehrig pretty much took care of business at first base in the Bronx. Second, McQuinn was a pipe smoker, and he knew McCarthy wanted no part of pipe smokers. McQuinn was a kindly and good-natured soul who enjoyed the outdoors and a simple life. He was also very devoted to his pipe. The Sporting News reported:

[McQuinn] smokes an occasional cigar only to give the limited number of pipes a fellow can carry with him a chance to cool off and dry. If George had to choose between the first base job with the Yankees and his pipes, we honestly believe he would take the briar.13

This may be stretching things, but the point is clear. McQuinn was not a good fit for the Yankees or McCarthy. He went on to hit .276 for four different clubs with 135 home runs in a career that spanned 12 years. Interestingly, he finished his career with the New York Yankees in 1947 and 1948, but by then Bucky Harris had replaced McCarthy as Yankees’ manager.

Another pipe smoker who was traded from the Yankees to the Browns was Don Heffner. Much more competitive than McQuinn, Heffner’s major league career lasted 11 years. Unlike McQuinn, Heffner played for McCarthy’s Yankees (1934-1937), as well as Street’s 1938 St. Louis Browns team. Heffner never had a real shot with Joe McCarthy. Besides being a pipe smoker, Heffner had to compete with the likes of Tony Lazzeri. He appeared in only 161 games during his four-year stint. In 1938, playing for Street, Heffner appeared in 141 games.

In addition to Gabby Street, two other major leaguers smoked and collected pipes. Like many ballplayers, Hank Sauer enjoyed golf. But his hobby was pipe collecting. He kept one pipe in the club- house and he smoked every day before he put on his uniform.14 Former MVP and HOF great Joe “Ducky” Medwick was a huge fan of the pipe. He purchased many fine pipes from Henry Jost and Son, who owned and operated a tobacco store on Sixth Street in St. Louis. Players, if nothing else, are superstitious. Medwick recalled:

It’s a funny thing. But one day I came in here [Jost’s shop] and bought a pipe. That afternoon I hit a home run and, in fact, had a swell day all around. And after that, I noticed that every time I came back and bought a pipe, I’d have a wonderful day. Boy, the pipes that batting average cost me!15

Tobacconist Henry Jost said of Medwick, “One day after he hit one of those home runs, he came in and bought nine pipes for those other Cardinals.” To which Medwick replied:

Don’t get the idea that I am keeping the whole team in pipes….Quite a few of the Cardinals, including manager Frankie Frisch, are pipe smokers and I’ve bought a lot of ’em in here. Bob Weiland, the pitcher, is a great pipe fancier, but he goes in for antiques and that sort of thing. Fans, knowing my interest in pipes, sometimes send me antiques, but I’m not interested in ’em. I want pipes I can smoke.16

If one is to believe pipe tobacco advertisements, the clown prince of baseball, Al Schacht, was a long- time pipe smoker. Al is better known for his clowning antics in the third base coaching box than for his three-year major league pitching career with the Washington Senators. He mimicked third base coaches and entertained players and fans alike as he danced his way through exaggerated, imaginary bunt and hit- and-run signs.

Schacht may have not been the only one sending unique and unusual signals to batters. While managing in the Negro Leagues, Hall of Famer Rube Foster reportedly used his pipe in a number of different ways to communicate signs and signals to his players, and on occasion, as a weapon. Several different versions of Foster and his pipe permeate baseball lore. He may have smoked a meerschaum pipe,17 but whatever the material, Foster was an inveterate pipe smoker. Some claim he gave his players steal and bunt signs by altering the way he blew smoke from his pipe.18 Others say the smoke signals were decoys, and that Foster communicated the signals by holding his pipe at different angles,19 or by removing it from his mouth.20 He was also known to use his pipe as a means of discipline:

Foster brooked no disobedience to his orders. Earl M. Foster, Rube’s son, remembers one time Jelly Gardner was sent up to bunt and he tripled. He came back and sat down on the bench. The old man took the pipe that he smoked—he always had it—and he popped him right across the head. And he fined him and told him, as long as I’m paying you, you’ll do as I tell you to do.21

Cigarettes were not tolerated by Rube Foster. A player could not even hold one in his hand while sitting on the bench. However, pipes and cigars were permitted. It is difficult to separate fact from fiction, and perhaps we will never know the entire truth. No matter. The image of the great Rube Foster puffing smoke signals from a pipe, whether it is made of the aforementioned meerschaum or a badly chewed corn cob in the corner of the dugout, is an image to cherish forever. And, wherever the truth lies, Rube Foster deserves his place in the Baseball Hall of Fame and, if all is fair in the world, a spot in the Pipe Smoker’s Hall of Fame.23

A number of players, managers, team owners, and umpires enjoyed the pleasures of the pipe. Sparky Anderson frequently addressed reporters before and after games while puffing on his pipe. The cantankerous Billy Martin, not known for his patience, smoked a pipe. In fact, he starred in a number of television commercials and magazine ads extolling the virtues of Captain Black pipe tobacco. On the opposite end of the spectrum, Ted Williams, during his Washington Senators managerial days, took a page out of Joe McCarthy’s book. Williams had an aversion to pipe smokers and their “I’ve got it made” disposition. Fortunately for pipe-smoking pitcher Joe Coleman, he was traded from the Senators to the pipe-friendly Detroit Tigers under Billy Martin in 1970, where he proceeded to win 20 games.

Great pitchers such as Christy Mathewson and Cy Young were pipe smokers, as was fellow Hall of Famer Nap Lajoie. Young owned a number of pipes, including a heavy one and a stubby one. He often received pipes for birthday gifts, and on his 80th birthday celebration, he received a lifetime supply of Granger Rough Cut tobacco, his favorite brand. The Brooklyn Dodgers’ Clyde Sukeforth was an inveterate pipe smoker and an expert on pipe tobacco. He was able to identify any brand of fine-cut tobacco after only one puff. And Dodgers team captain Pee Wee Reese was often seen, “…after a game in Ebbets Field … sitting before his locker, placidly puffing on his old briar pipe, with a group of Dodgers around him.”24

No fewer than 14 of the 1936 Pittsburgh Pirates team, among them Big Poison Paul and Little Poison Lloyd Waner, smoked pipes. The great Al Simmons took up pipe smoking. Perhaps he was subtly persuaded; his prospective father-in-law ran a wholesale tobacco business. Pitcher Ray Moore was a tobacco farmer in Maryland in the off-season. Moore was a pipe smoker, and may have influenced his 1960 Washington Senators teammates, nearly all of whom took to pipe smoking. Cubs owner William Wrigley had more than chewing gum in his mouth. He also had a pipe protruding from his lips. Bill Benswanger, who owned the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1932-46, was rarely, if ever seen without his pipe. If the late Cleveland Indians general manager Phil Seghi held his pipe in his left hand, that meant “somebody’s going.” A trade was imminent, recalled Oakland’s Sal Bando.25

The legendary Babe Ruth was known for his off-the-field antics as well as his prowess on the field. After one of his all-night affairs, Ed Barrow caught Ruth in bed, under the covers, smoking a pipe at 6:00A.M. When questioned by Barrow about the pipe, the Babe replied, “It’s very relaxing.”26

Among the thousands of pre-smoked church-warden style clay pipes on display at Keens Steakhouse in New York City is pipe number 19499, formerly owned by Babe Ruth.

Who can forget pitcher turned author Jim Brosnan? The Professor was an intellectual who, off the field, wore a blazer and incessantly smoked a pipe. Eddie Grant, who played third base during 1905-15, was known for his Ivy League diplomas. Nicknamed “Harvard Eddie,” he could generally be found smoking a pipe and reading a book. Sadly, he is best remembered not for his appearance in the 1913 World Series, but as the most prominent major leaguer killed in combat in World War I.27

In the 1980 World Series, millions of people watched the Philadelphia Phillies defeat the Kansas City Royals in six games. These same fans took note of U. L. Washington and his ever-present toothpick. U. L.’s toothpicks raised a few eyebrows. Is it safe? What if he swallows it or stabs another player with it? Red Hoffman, columnist for the Lynn, Massachusetts, Daily Evening Item, posed the question: “Is a protruding toothpick legal?” He was told there were no rules about it, and therefore it was legal. What about lollipops or pipes? wondered Hoffman. Could a player come to bat with a pipe hanging from his lips? The answer came from Bob Grim, staff assistant to American League president Lee MacPhail. “It would be the umpire’s judgment,” was the response.28 Keep watching, fans. You may see your favorite player grab two very different pieces of lumber before emerging from the dugout and strolling to home plate. With white ash in hand, and a fine old briar protruding from his mouth, the batter sets. Here comes the pitch.

Acknowledgments

I wish to thank SABR member Peter Richardson for his assistance and help researching Rube Foster.

Notes

1. Weber, Carl. Weber’s Guide to Pipes and Pipe Smoking. New York: Cornerstone Library Publications, 1973, 7.

2. Cushman, George. “Blowing Smoke Rings with the Editor,” Pipe Lovers, Vol. 11, No. 2, 1947, 366.

3. The Sporting News, November 10, 1954, 16.

4. The Sporting News, July 11, 1956,7.

5. The Sporting News, March 16, 1963,11.

6. The Sporting News,January 28, 1978, 40.

7. The Sporting News, January 14, 1978,42.

8. The Sporting News, November 9, 1939,3.

9. The Sporting News, May 4, 1944,10.

10. The Sporting News, March 12, 1952,2.

11. The Sporting News, August 10, 1955,9.

12. The Sporting News, January 19, 1939,6.

13. The Sporting News, February 24, 1938,3.

14. The Sporting News, July 20, 1949,16.

15. The Sporting News, November 11, 1937, 3.

16. The Sporting News, November 11, 1937,3.

17. O’Neil, Buck. I Was Right on Time, New York: Fireside, 1997.

18. See McNary, Kyle. Ted “Double Duty” Radcliffe: 36 Years of Pitching and Catching in Baseball’s Negro Leagues, Minneapolis, MN: McNary, 1994, and Whitehead, Charles. A Man and His Diamonds: A Story of Andrew Rube Foster and His Famous American Giants, New York: Vantage, 1980.

19. Holway, John B. Black Ball Stars: Negro League Pioneers, Westport, CT: Mecklermedia, 1988.

20. Peterson, Robert. Only the Ball Was White, New York: McGraw-Hill, 1984.

21. Ibid., 111.

22. Hue Magazine, August 1957.

23. Located in Galveston, Indiana.

24. The Sporting News, October 15, 1952, 17.

25. The Sporting News, July 25, 1970, 14.

26. The Sporting News, June 2, 1954,3.

27. Simon, Tom, ed. Deadball Stars of the National League, The Society for American Baseball Research, Inc., 2004.

28. The Sporting News, November 29, 1980,6.

I was able to document individual batter strikeouts in 87 percent of the 1899 games. As a result, I feel comfortable in giving a basic projection of what the individual batter strikeout totals would be. The leaders on both the most and least sides as well as the entire 1899 National League roster are included in this research. The purpose of the research is to fill in the gaps in the baseball records as much as possible but also to give a good idea of which players were more or less “strikeout-prone.”

WHY NO BATTER STRIKEOUTS IN 1899?

From 1897 through 1909, there are no individual batter strikeouts officially documented. The Boston Globe had been documenting individual strikeouts for some years prior to 1897, but discontinued this practice prior to the 1897 season. To give some perspective about strikeouts during this period, Table A shows the strikeouts per game by year from 1893 through 1903. This 10-year period is somewhat arbitrarily picked, but it covers the era leading up to the adoption of the foul strike rule by both leagues. It also starts with the changed pitching distance that we have today.

Table B covers the same period and lists the rules that impacted the nature of the strikeout. Of course, there are other rules dealing with the ball and the plate that affected the nature of the strikeout (e.g., 1900—the introduction of the five-sided plate), but these rules directly deal with the nature of the strikeout. This adds additional perspective about the nature of the strikeout. One key change was the foul strike rule of 1901, which was adopted by the American League in 1903. This altered the strategy of some players (e.g., Willie Keeler) and, as can be seen below, dramatically affected the leagues. Further research of individual batter strikeouts during these transitional years will tell the true individual impact of that rule change.

WHY 1899? WHY BATTER STRIKEOUTS?

This research actually started as an analysis of the lineups and substitutions that the 1899 Cleveland Spiders used during their fateful season. I became interested in the Spiders many years ago and started documenting their lineup and those of the other 11 National League teams, as well as various team pitching statistics. In the course of this research, I noticed in Sporting Life that for Philadelphia home games, the individual batter strikeouts were documented. This led me to further research this then undocumented stat (in this era). Of course, my research of 1899 opened me up to many other interesting happenings of the season— John McGraw’s magical .391 season with 73 stolen bases and 140 walks, tragically interrupted by the sudden death of his first wife, Minnie, at age 22; Buck Freeman’s 25 homers; the 27 triples of rookie Jimmy Williams; and other highlights.

RESEARCH

I asked fellow SABR members for sources where I might find batter strikeouts. One person directed me to the New York Evening Telegram, since it had play-by-play documented for most of the Giant and Brooklyn games of the era. This turned out to be a great source. I started researching other cities’ local coverage through ProQuest Historical Newspapers and interlibrary loans of the other local newspapers’ microfilms. In addition, through Greg Rhodes and Chris Eckes of the Reds Hall of Fame Museum, I was able to review a Cincinnati score book which contained about the first month’s worth of Reds games.

From my initial lineup research, I already had the total number of batter strikeouts for each team in each game; I just needed to identify who made those strikeouts. I discovered that 11 of the 12 teams had documented individual batter strikeouts for at least their home games. Brooklyn, New York, Chicago, and St. Louis, to varying degrees, had away-game batter strikeouts as well. Cincinnati and Louisville had no local papers which identified individual batter strikeouts, though I was able to extract a few from the aforementioned Reds scorebook. With the exception of the New York Evening Telegram and the Reds score book, which had play-by-play coverage, I gathered the individual batter strikeouts from the box scores. I included all newspapers that had individual batter strikeouts documented for both the home and visiting teams.

In the New York Evening Telegram, being an evening paper, the game accounts were of that day’s game(s). As a result, there were cases where the play-by-play of the second game was not complete. There are also instances where the first game does not have play-byplay at all. Incomplete play-by-play also occurred in games that were played in the West (St. Louis, Chicago, Louisville, and Cincinnati). Incomplete games are documented in Appendix A. Of note, the Pittsburg Post had an end-of-year summary of individual batter strikeouts.

As noted above, most teams had the home individual batter strikeouts, while a couple had road game batter strikeouts; however, two cities had no such information, Cincinnati and Louisville. The Louisville and Cincinnati home games account for the vast majority of the missing batter strikeout games. All missing (or “no batter strikeout”) games are documented in Appendix B and account for 13% of all of the games played.

There were a few variances in the number of strikeouts documented in Sporting Life (as team totals) and the total number of individual strikeout totals. There were cases when back-to-back games between two teams varied by +1 in the first game and -1 in the second of the series—thus “correcting” each other. The number of variation occurrences only accounts for 6.3% of all documented games and are documented in Appendix C.

Regarding the discrepancy, a fair question is which should be considered more “accurate” as to what actually occurred, the summary team game total or the individual summation? In the case of this research and analysis, I deferred to the local coverage and individual strikeout totals. [Of course, there were multiple newspapers that may differ from the source I selected, but in many cases these papers were using the same summary source. However, in reading game summaries, I did find some strikeouts not documented in the detailed box scores.

DATA SUMMARY APPROACH

Since only Chicago had complete home and away individual batter strikeouts, I was unable to get a complete picture of the totals. For the other teams I was able to piece together their home game coverage with the other teams’ home coverage to tabulate a great deal of the individual strikeouts. I then projected the batter strikeouts for each player, based on the number of games that I had individual batter strikeouts for (including partial game stats) over the total number of games played. Projections are based on documented batter strikeouts per game (not at-bat).

A potential additional step to getting “more accurate” numbers would be to assess each of the remaining missing 13 percent of the games’ box scores and their listed team strikeout totals. I would then have to assign (ala integer programming) strikeouts to the team’s players based on the most probable strikeout victims (based on their frequency from the documented games). This would get us closer, but is still not exact.

SUMMARY OF RESULTS

The controversial Ducky Holmes of the Baltimore Orioles (see Freedman vs. Holmes, 1898), who had 51 documented strikeouts in 123 of his 138 games (89.1%), led the NL with a projected total of 57. There is a four-way tie in second place between the veteran shortstop Monte Cross, of Philadelphia; youngster and stolen base champ, Jimmy Sheckard; the leading rookie of the year candidate and triples leader, Jimmy Williams of the Pittsburgh Pirates; and second-year player Danny Green of the Chicago Orphans, all with projected totals of 50. Cross had 45 strikeouts documented in 138 of his 154 games (89.6%), Sheckard had 46 strikeouts documented in 135 of his 147 games (91.8%), Williams had 46 strikeouts documented in 142 of his 153 games (92.8%), and Green had 50 strikeouts in his completely documented 117 games.

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At the other end, Willie Keeler showed that he lived up to his documented reputation of making contact by having only two documented strikeouts in 134 of his 140 games (95.7%)—with a projected total of two strikeouts. Lave Cross started the season with the Spiders and once he showed he was useful was moved over to Robison’s parent club, the St. Louis Perfectos, had three documented strikeouts in 134 of his 141 games (95%), projecting out to only three strikeouts.

Keeler’s two strikeouts occurred on April 17 (Brooklyn’s second game of the season) at the hands of Boston’s rookie sensation, Vic Willis (in his major league debut) and May 6 (Brooklyn’s 19th game) against Boston’s Kid Nichols. After that, he did not strike out again for the remainder of the season. By contrast, Cross’s three strikeouts all occurred at the end of the season. His first strikeout occurred in the second game of a doubleheader on September 13 at the hands of Boston’s rookie Harvey Bailey, making his seventh major league appearance. His second strikeout was on September 17 by (Bill Carrick or Willie Garoni), and his final punchout was on October 4 by Pittsburgh’s Bill Hoffer.

Ironically, another player who had a reputation for getting on base and great bat control, rookie Roy Thomas, had a projected 47 strikeouts (42 documented, 134/150 games) to go with his 115 walks. Interestingly, three of the top seven in the “least” category were members of the Cleveland Spiders, with the aforementioned Cross, a partial fourth, and a fifth, in eighth place, “Schreck,” playing 40% of his season with them.

Not surprisingly, all players with the highest percentage of strikeouts per game were pitchers, with the exception of Frank Scheibeck, a late-season infield addition to Washington. The Spiders are again well represented with three of the top five. The highest everyday player was Chicago’s Danny Green with a percentage of 42.74.

OTHER STRIKEOUTS STATS

Bill Carrick, a pitcher for New York, and Danny Green of Chicago had the most games with two or more strikeouts with 10. Ducky Holmes of Baltimore with nine and Jack Powell of the St. Louis Perfectos were right behind with nine and eight respectively. Bid McPhee should be given special mention with his six multi-strikeout games, since only 63% of his games are documented.

In game one of a doubleheader on September 14, Jimmy Williams, who would lead the league with 27 triples, had four strikeouts against Doc McJames of the Brooklyn Superbas, the most in the National League. There were 24 occurrences of games with three strikeouts, with Chicago’s Danny Green and Washington’s Roy Evans having two such games—Evans, on September 12 against Cincinnati’s Jack Taylor,* and Heinie Peitz in Evans’ first game of the season, and later, on October 3, against Brooklyn’s Jay Hughes. Green’s three-strikeout games were against Cleveland’s Willie Sudhoff on May 8 and Pittsburgh’s Sam Leever and Jesse Tannehill on May 15. Interestingly, 16 of the 25 three or more strikeout games occurred after Labor Day, with recently signed players from the minor leagues (these leagues had finished their schedules) such as Roy Evans (from Providence), Sam Crawford (from Grand Rapids), Rube Waddell (from Grand Rapids), and Pop Dillon (from Buffalo) having joined the circuit.

One last note of interest deals with Washington’s slugger Buck Freeman. Freeman appears to have achieved the rare feat in 1899 of having more homers (25) than projected strikeouts (24), plus he also had more triples (25) too. He just missed having more stolen bases (21) as well. As Mel Allen might have said, “How about that!”

SUMMARY

With 87% of the 1899 National League games having individual batter strikeouts documented, I was able to get a very good vision of who the players were who were the most and least strikeout prone during the campaign. Though there was a little variance in documented totals and the individual counts as well as few partial games, I was able to get a good picture of the season. Totals into the other seasons, including 1898 and the pivotal 1901-03 seasons, remains for future research.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

I wish to acknowledge the following people for their assistance and referrals in this project—the interlibrary loan staff at the Plymouth (MI) District Library, John Zajc, Paul Wendt, Greg Rhodes, Chris Eckes, Fred Schuld, Mike Grahek, Pete Palmer, Pete Mancuso, and Denis Repp.

What makes Jeter’s accomplishment even more fantastic is that he was only the second player since 1900 to have two or fewer hitless games out of any 56 game stretch. Joe DiMaggio was the other, of course, when he had zero hitless games in that famous 56-game stretch in 1941.

In Baseball Research Journal #35, I wrote an article about players who were within a few hitless games of putting their name at the top of the hitting streak podium. And Jeter isn’t the only player who added his name in 2007 to the list of players who had just three or fewer hitless games out of 56. Ichiro Suzuki, long believed to be the active player with the best chance of beating DiMaggio’s record, had a hit in 53-out-of-56 games from May 7 through July 5.

Besides those two active players, my continued research into the subject yielded two more historical players who went hitless in just three out of 56 games. The first new addition to the list is Sam Rice, who had a hit in 53-out-of-56 over 1929 and 1930. The other player, who is a bit of a surprise, is Doc Cramer, who also took the collar just three times out of a 56-game stretch over 1932 and 1933.

Considering how many players have come within just a handful of games from matching DiMaggio’s 56game hitting streak, it may just be a matter of time before it is seriously challenged, although players in Doc Cramer’s era didn’t have quite the media pressure that a player chasing DiMaggio today would have.

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*****

The Gophers were formed in early 1907 by saloon owner Phil “Daddy” Reid, and his partner and childhood friend, John J. Hirschfield. A heavyset and confident-looking man, often pictured wearing a three-piece suit and a bowler hat, Reid was “one of the most influential and wealthy Negroes of the northwest,” renowned for being “of a cheerful disposition, always willing to do an act of kindness.”1

The pair enlisted Walter Ball, a product of the St. Paul sandlots and an outstanding blackball pitcher of the time, to organize and run the club. Ball drew most of the team’s original roster from Chicago, securing many players who had been released when Rube Foster took control of the Leland Giants. Ball himself rejoined the Giants in mid May, and the future for “both the managers and players, looked very shady” indeed. However, thanks to traveling secretary Irving Williams’ acumen in scheduling games and garnering publicity, and Reid’s “determination to succeed at all costs,” the Gophers were soon competing against the best town teams and semi-pro clubs in Minnesota, Iowa, Wisconsin, and the Dakotas, winning a reported 92 games, with only 15 losses and 2 ties—a remarkable .853 percentage.2

Led by pitchers Clarence “Dude” Lytle, Johnny Davis, and slugging catcher Jesse Schaeffer, the Gophers won 36 straight games at one point and in mid-September defeated the St. Paul Saints of the American Association two games to one, with one tie, to capture the “colored championship of the state.” Reid imported his good friend Rube Foster from Chicago to pitch the deciding game and the burly Texan, looking “as big as a fully matured hippopotamus,” allowed only five hits and struck out 10 Saint batters as the Gophers prevailed, 5-3. The season also proved to be a success financially, and as the St. Paul Dispatch rhapsodized, “The Gophers have been a great advertisement to the city of St. Paul this season.”3

Before the beginning of the 1908 campaign, Reid jettisoned a few of the previous year’s aging veterans and added a trio of great players to the team, second baseman Felix Wallace, pitcher “Big” Bill Gatewood, and catcher George “Rat” Johnson. Although hampered by injuries that reduced the team to a two-man rotation of Lytle and Gatewood for much of the year, the Gophers won over 95 games against only 28 losses and a tie.

Rube Foster returned to the Twin Cities to help out the Gophers during the last week of August and threw a 5-0 no-hitter against the Hibbing Colts, a tough squad from Minnesota’s Iron Range, composed entirely of ex-professional players.4

In September, the team dropped a barnstorming series to the Saints, but the Gophers’ main focus that summer was a turf war with a new black ball club in the Twin Cities, the Minneapolis Keystones, run by flamboyant bar owner Edward ”Kidd” Mitchell. The Keystones were a more rambunctious lot than the Gophers, and they slugged, fought, and argued their way to a reported 88-19-2 record, led by second baseman Topeka Jack Johnson, slugging third baseman William Binga, and hometown hero Bobby Marshall at first. After much posturing and haggling, the two squads agreed to meet in a five-game showdown series for a $500 side bet, stretched over late August and September. The Keystones, behind their ace, Charles “Slick” Jackson, won two out of the three first contests, but the Gophers rebounded to take the last two games and the series, with Lytle besting Jackson 6-0 in the finale at Nicollet Park in Minneapolis.5

*****

For the season of 1909, Reid and Williams were intent on fielding their best team yet, and before the season started Reid embarked with the Leland Giants on their spring training trip throughout the South, searching for players for his club. The Gophers, “composed of the fastest [“fast” meaning excellent in the parlance of the day] colored players in America,” returned four players from their 1908 roster.

The backstop was 13-year blackball vet George “Rat” (short for Rastus) Johnson, whom Hall of Fame Cubs manager Frank Chance once described as the greatest catcher in America. The 33-year-old native of Bellaire, Ohio, was a deadly clutch hitter and a heady receiver whose pegs down to second were “as regular as clockwork.” The “Rat,” or “Chappie” as he later became known, led the Renville All Stars to the Minnesota state championship in 1905 and spent several spring trainings around this time tutoring young pitchers for the St. Paul Saints and the Boston Nationals.6

Twenty-five-year-old Felix Wallace had no superior as a second baseman. The Gophers captain was a great hitter, crafty base runner, and “one of the brainiest and clever infielders ever produced in the Negro ranks.” Possessing tremendous range, Wallace would make most of his throws to first with a quick short-arm motion while standing in almost any position. Utility man William McMurray, a graduate of the St. Louis sandlots, was a versatile, hardworking player with an ability to lead. He was also a jovial sort, known for joshing with fans “and being ever ready with repartee.”7

Thirty-four-year-old Sherman Barton was a hard-hitting center fielder from Illinois with a cannon for an arm. The Indianapolis Freeman once noted, “When it comes to fielding and retiring runners, Bucky Barton of the St. Paul Gophers ranks with the big leaguers. They all fear him.”8 The new position players included diminutive yet sure-hitting shortstop Arthur McDougall, a former teammate of Wallace’s from the Paducah (Kentucky) Nationals, who possessed “an arm like a mule’s hind leg.” The incoming left fielder was Eugene “Gabbie” Milliner, perhaps the fastest man in all of baseball, renowned for his slicing line drives just inside the third base bag.9

The competition between the Gophers and Keystones had intensified during the off-season with quite a bit of player movement between the two teams. Left fielder Willis Jones, shortstop Frank Davis, and first baseman Haywood “Kissing Bug” Rose of the 1908 Gophers ventured east across the river to join the Mill City club, while the Keystone corner infielders, third baseman Bill Binga and first sacker Bobby Marshall, hooked up with Reid’s outfit.10

Binga, a seasoned vet of nearly 20 blackball campaigns, was truly a professional hitter and was racking up multiple-hit games well into his 40s. In the field he was limited in range, but he never forgot an opposing batter, or how and where he liked to hit. Although born in Milwaukee, Bobby Marshall grew up in the Twin Cities, and won seven letters for football, baseball, and track at the University of Minnesota from 1903 to 1907. His gridiron accomplishments were so spectacular that he was named to the College Football Hall of Fame in 1971. Marshall, who briefly tried out with the Gophers in 1907, before sticking with the Keystones in 1908, would spend the next 20 years playing professional baseball and football. He was a good base stealer, with some pop in his bat, and a long reach at first.

Vic Turosky, who played professional football against Marshall in Wisconsin, recalled a play where the 6-foot-1, 180-pounder, picked him up by an ankle, flung him into the air, and slammed him on his head. Turosky marveled, “That’s when I knew what real power was.”11

The all-new pitching staff consisted of Julius London, “the three fingered wonder,” formerly of the Texas League, Archie Pate; a young spit-baller out of Chicago; and Richard Garrison, who despite being only about five feet high, had “speed and curves to burn.” The Gophers had crisscrossed the Midwest in 1908, journeying over 5,000 miles by train, and they would repeat this trick in 1909. Due to some inconsistent pitching, the Gophers got off to a slow start, including a sweep at the hands of the Lacrosse team of the Wisconsin-Minnesota league to start the season. A Hibbing newspaper noted after the Gophers barely won an early season series from the Colts that “the Gophers are much weakened in the box this year.”12

The club suffered another setback in mid-May when Rat Johnson jumped the club to manage the Long Prairie team of central Minnesota. Things brightened considerably soon after with the arrival of a brother combination from Birmingham, Alabama, signed by Reid during his Southern excursion. Twenty-four-year-old Jim Taylor took over at third base while his older sibling Johnny inherited the struggling Pate’s turn in the rotation and won his first 14 decisions, sparking the club to a 30-7-1 mark during their five-week sojourn through the Dakotas, Wisconsin, and northern Minnesota.13

The second eldest of four legendary baseball-playing brothers, clean-living, hardworking, John Boyce Taylor was given the sobriquet “Steel Arm” in 1898 by a white reporter from the Charlotte Observer, who witnessed his blazing fastball mow down the Shaw University nine. Possessing a good assortment of curves to complement his heater, Taylor averaged between 30 and 40 starts a season during his six-year tenure with the Birmingham Giants, while losing fewer than 40 games in that span. During a 1908 game in San Antonio, with the bases loaded and nobody out in the bottom of the ninth, Steel Arm Johnny struck out the side to win a 1-0 duel against Cyclone Joe Williams.14

Jim Taylor carried a big bat, both literally and statistically, hitting no lower than .290, with a high of .340 in 1907, during five seasons with the Birmingham Giants. His fielding average at third base was “exceptionally high,” and on the base paths he was “inclined to create the impression of dogginess, but he is quicker than chain lightning in a pinch.”15

After a few rocky outings in June, Garrison was sent packing in favor of 28-year-old Kentuckian Johnny Davis, who had won over 25 games for the Gophers in 1907. The slightly built, bespectacled Davis was a “clever cross fire artist” known for possessing a “very tantalizing slow curve and fine control of a change of pace delivery.” While pitching for the Gophers in July 1907, Davis had no-hit La Crosse of the Wisconsin League, 2-0, and that fall while pitching for the Philadelphia Giants in Cuba, he won seven games while posting a 0.68 ERA.16

In late June it was announced that the Gophers and the Leland Giants would play a five-game series in St. Paul for “the world’s championship,” and that Daddy Reid “has already placed a large sized roll of coin on the outcome of the series.” During the previous three years the Lelands had crushed every team they had played, whether they be white, black, semipro, or from organized ball, including the Minneapolis Millers of the American Association, who dropped four out of five games to the Giants in September 1908. The eventual champs of the Chicago City League boasted an outstanding pitching staff of former Gophers Walter Ball, Bill Gatewood, and southpaw Charles “Pat” Dougherty, who had been poached from the West Baden (IN) Sprudels when Foster broke his leg against the Cuban Stars in mid-July. Ball would post a record of 12-1 in the city league that year, and the trio would dominate blackball for most of the next decade.17

Hall of Fame center fielder Preston “Pete” Hill anchored the Leland’s powerful lineup by hitting .311, with 15 doubles and 21 runs scored in 37 city league games that summer. Lending Hill a hand was first baseman Harry “Mike” Moore, who roughed up city league pitching by hitting .341, and Charles “Joe” Green, who responded with a .316 average after regular left fielder Bobby Winston fractured his ankle.18

The Gophers were also playing shorthanded. On the day before the Leland series was to begin, Arthur McDougall, hitting well over .300 at the time, was struck by a pitch during an 8-4 victory over the Keystones, knocking him out of the lineup for the rest of the year. Jim Taylor replaced McDougall at short, Binga returned to third, McMurray moved out to right field, and “Rat” Johnson came back from Long Prairie to temporarily help the Gophers out behind the plate.19

The series, specially scheduled to coincide with the national Black Elks convention being held in St. Paul, was played at the Saintly city’s Downtown Park. The “pillbox,” as the stadium was commonly known, was a wooden structure confined to a small city block. A high fence, topped by a 20-foot wire screen, surrounded the place and the grandstand and bleachers were located less than seven yards from the field of play. The park had virtually no foul territory, and the outfield dimensions were so small, 280 feet down the left-field line, and no more than 210 feet to right, that foul pops and triples were almost unheard of. Right fielders played only a few feet behind the second baseman, with their backs against the fence. Balls hit over the right and left field fences were ground-rule doubles, and only pitches knocked over a limited area in center field were counted as home runs.20

“A thousand or more colored fans and a good sprinkling of white ones” crammed into the tiny ballpark on Monday afternoon July 26, to watch Julius London oppose Bill Gatewood in the lid lifter. The afternoon crowd was treated to a three-hour donnybrook featuring several shifts in momentum as the hometown club pounded out 22 hits while the Giants came up with 14 safeties of their own. Jim Taylor paced the Gopher attack with four singles and a double, and McMurray, Barton, and Binga chipped in with three hits apiece. For the Lelands, right fielder Andrew “Jap” Payne doubled once, singled twice, stole two bases, and scored three times, while shortstop George Wright smashed two doubles, and Joe Green added three more hits to the cause.21

The Gophers jumped out to a quick 1-0 lead in the first before the Giants exploded for four runs in the fourth and added single runs in the fifth, sixth, and seventh, driving London from the hill in favor of Johnny Taylor. The Gophers, in turn, knocked out Gatewood with a three-run fourth inning and two runs each in the sixth and seventh frames before Walter Ball came on to stop the bleeding.22

Trailing 8-7, the Lelands came up with the equalizer in the top of the ninth and pushed another run across in the 11th for a 9-8 lead. It looked like another famous Giant victory, especially when Eugene Milliner grounded out to second to start the Gopher half of the 11th. However, in lightning succession, Binga singled, Johnson doubled, and Bobby Marshall drove the first pitch Ball threw his way over the cigar sign just to the left of the center field home run pole and into the lots across the street. And the crowd, according to the St. Paul Pioneer Press, went wild:

Can you hear the noise? It was thick and heavy and was plentifully interspersed with cries of “Hel-lup! Hel-lup! Hel-lup!” not by the losers but by the winners to show how badly their vanquished foes felt about it.23

Both clubs adjusted their lineups before the start of the second game on Tuesday.

The 40-year-old Binga, not the most nimble of third basemen, switched places with McMurray in right, while the Lelands replaced catcher Pete Booker, who had gone hitless in the opener, with Sam Strothers, who collected two hits before giving way to Booker midway through the contest. In contrast to the opener, neither team scored a run during the first six innings as Johnny Davis and the Giants’ lefty Pat Dougherty dueled before a good-sized crowd of 1,500. Davis was aided by some fine glove work by Felix Wallace, who recorded six putouts and five assists without error, and by three assists by the Gopher outfield. Dougherty was more dominant, striking out nine batters during a performance that “was as fine an exhibition of twirling as is seen, even in the big leagues.”24

In the top of the seventh, Davis faltered and the Lelands scored three times, thanks in part to errors by Davis and Bobby Marshall. The Giants pushed their advantage with three more runs in the eighth and finished their 13-hit onslaught with two more runs in the ninth. Andrew Payne was once again the catalyst for the Lelands with three hits, including another double. After a relatively quiet game one, Pete Hill collected a single, double, and stole a base while scoring two runs. The Gophers broke up Dougherty’s shutout in the bottom of the ninth, when Jim Taylor scored on the back end of a double steal, but it was too little, and much too late to prevent the Giants’ 8-1 victory.25

The temperature prior to the start of the following afternoon’s game was a steamy eighty-five degrees, which didn’t prevent 800 fans from turning out to witness the matchup of Johnny Taylor and Walter Ball, the pitchers of record from game one. The home team staked Steel Arm Johnny to an early lead when Captain Wallace doubled to lead off the bottom of the first, stole third, and scored on Sherman Barton’s two out single. Ball settled down after that and allowed only three more hits while striking out five Gopher batters over the next seven innings.26

Taylor was even better through the first eight frames, protecting his 1-0 lead by scattering four hits and striking out six batters with his unorthodox delivery. According to the Pioneer Press, the 29-yearold native son of Anderson, South Carolina,

would throw arms and legs about in bewildering fashion, suddenly knot up like a porcupine, and then just as suddenly his left foot would dangle and shake in the air at the astounded batter as the ball flew past him.27

As usual, the Gophers provided great support behind him. In the fifth inning, Milliner made a running catch of a Leland fly ball up against the left-field fence and his momentum carried him into the boards “with a thud that was heard in the grandstand.” As the left fielder lay stunned, an “enthusiastic youngster” raced onto the field and relieved him with a glass of cold water. An inning later, Jim Taylor made a sensational backhanded grab of a line drive at short, picking it off “within a foot from the ground while going at full speed.”28

The intense heat got to Rat Johnson in the fifth inning, and he was carried from the field suffering from sunstroke. He was reportedly quite ill, but was able to continue. Meanwhile, the Lelands resorted to a bit of subterfuge in the top of the eighth, when Ball was pinch-hit for by Gatewood, but illegally returned to pitch the bottom of the inning anyway.29

In the ninth, Taylor’s toe and arm finally tired, and he gave up successive singles to Hill, second baseman Nate Harris, and Payne. The fatigued pitcher recovered to get Booker, but then third sacker Dangerfield Talbert singled, and Wright slammed a two-out homer. During the onslaught “Taylor just stood in the box and blinked his eyes as if he was waiting for the rain to blow over.” Five runs crossed the plate, although according to one Gopher, if Taylor had stuck to his “toe stunt” the Giants rally would never have happened. The Lelands sent Dougherty in to pitch the bottom of the ninth, and he struck out two more batters while preserving their 5-1 win.30

Down two games to one, the Gophers were forced to revamp their line up once again when Rat Johnson left to fulfill his commitment with the Long Prairie team. Ironically, Johnson would leave Long Prairie in early August to finish the season with Leland’s Giants. Once again McMurray replaced Johnson behind the plate while Wallace moved to shortstop and James Taylor shifted over to third. James Smith, a friend of Walter Ball’s and a captain of the Gophers during their inaugural season of 1907, was enlisted to play second for the remainder of the series.31

The starters for the crucial fourth game on Thursday were a repeat of the opener, with London opposing Gatewood. Umpiring the game, as he had throughout the series, was Andrew Thompson of St. Paul, who had a history with Big Bill. A year earlier Gatewood had nearly precipitated a race riot in the nearby river town of Stillwater when he hurled his glove into “Honest Andy’s” face while arguing balls and strikes. Hundreds of spectators angrily rushed the field, but Thompson, a number of civic leaders, and two policemen armed with clubs restored order, while the “big bully” Gatewood was hustled off the grounds.32

There is no evidence that Thompson held a grudge, but the Gophers got off to another good start against their former teammate, collecting their only three hits of the game in the first inning. After Wallace led off the bottom of the frame with a single to left field, Gatewood retired Jim Taylor, but then McMurray launched a double to deep center and one out later Milliner smoked a drive to the same spot for a 2-0 Gopher lead. The speedy left fielder stretched his hit into a rare Downtown Park triple, but Binga couldn’t bring him home. The home club scored two more in the third without the benefit of a base hit. Wallace and Taylor opened the inning by reaching on errors, and both later scored on a wild pitch. Trailing 4-0, Gatewood proceeded to knuckle down and he did not permit the Gophers another base runner.33

Pete Hill walked in the fourth inning and scored the Lelands’ first run of the game, propelled by a single by Nate Harris and a Gopher error. Hill drew another walk in the sixth and scored on a double by Harris that cut the Gopher lead in half, to 4-2. London pitched into the seventh, when it appeared “that the Lelands were finding him,” and Johnny Davis came on to finish the inning with no further damage done. The ever-dangerous Hill scored his third run of the game in the eighth, thanks to the third Gopher error of the afternoon, combined with another single by Harris and a fly ball by Payne.34

During the previous three games, the Giants had scored eight runs in the ninth inning, but Davis, looking to reverse the trend, got Talbert to fly out to start the final frame. Milliner couldn’t hang on to Moore’s long fly, however, and Jim Taylor mishandled Wright’s grounder, moving the tying run into scoring position and the go-ahead run at first with only one out. But Johnny Davis could pitch in the pinches. He struck out Joe Green before inducing Gatewood to ground out to Wallace at short, saving the 4-3 triumph, and pulling the Gophers even in the series.35

In the finale on Friday, the Lelands started Pat Dougherty, while for the local nine Steel Arm Johnny, true to his name, took to the mound on only one day’s rest. Although he was not as dominant as had been in the early going on Wednesday, Taylor kept the Giants at bay for most of the contest, no thanks to his support. In the third inning, the usually dependable Wallace booted Joe Green’s grounder, and Pete Hill doubled, which coupled with an error by Jim Taylor brought the first run of the game home. The Lelands added an insurance run in the eighth when Jap Payne singled, stole second, and scored on Moore’s clutch two-out single.36

The Gophers could do little with Dougherty, who while striking out seven during the first seven innings “had the local sluggers tied in all sorts of knots.” Wallace walked to lead off the fourth and James Smith coaxed a free pass in the sixth, but neither runner advanced past second. When Milliner came to bat to lead off the bottom of the eighth, the Gophers were two runs down and hadn’t hit safely in 14 innings, stretching all the way back to the first inning the day before.37 Years later Rube Foster would tell his players that they only needed to get one base hit during a ballgame, but that it had to come at the right time. Perhaps he was thinking back to what now occurred at the Downtown Park. Milliner lashed a Dougherty pitch into deep center and raced around the bases for another improbable triple. Binga was up next and the reliable one delivered a base hit that cut the Giant lead to 2-1. Marshall came up with a chance to repeat his game one heroics, and he managed to loft a fly to the outfield, but this time it stayed in the park, where it was caught for the first out of the inning.38

Johnny Davis, said to be able to “break up any game, at any time, with his big stick” pinch-hit for Smith and promptly singled, and both he and Binga moved into scoring position after some sloppy fielding by the Lelands. Walter Ball was brought in to face John Taylor, but Steel Arm Johnny, not a good stick, nevertheless “hit the ball for another bingle” and Binga and Davis both scored. Wallace and Jim Taylor both flew out to end the inning, but it didn’t matter. Incredibly, the Gophers had scored three runs off two of the best pitchers of the era, with the two crucial blows being struck by pitchers.39

The Giants in the ninth “tried every trick known to black or white players,” including switching runners, batting out of turn, and intimidating the umpire. Gatewood pinch-hit for Green, singled, and stole second, but Taylor retired Dougherty, batting illegally for Ball, Pete Hill, and Harris to wrap up the Gophers’ championship. The Gophers had hit safely in only two innings of the last two games of the series and managed to win both of them.40

Leland and Foster took the loss about as well as could be expected, claiming that the five games were only “exhibition contests.” Foster ungraciously wrote, “No man who ever saw the Gophers play would think of classing them world’s colored champions, or would think the playing ability of the other teams was very weak.” He went on to snipe that “no doubt they need the advertising.” The pair also complained that the absence of Winston and Foster greatly affected the outcome of the series. James Smith countered that the Lelands had won the city league with the same lineup that faced the Gophers, that when Smith filled in for Arthur McDougall he was out of practice and that

I fielded all right, but did not hit, which McDougall would have done; therefore the Gophers were the team that was weak, and deserve all the credit they can get for being game and having the staying qualities.41

It would also seem that the frequency with which the Giants relieved their starters and their shenanigans in the late stages of games three and five belie their claims that they considered the contests merely exhibitions. The Gophers had the last word on the subject when they shut the Lelands out, 2-0, on August 24 in the black coal mining community of Buxton, Iowa.42

Following the Leland series, a banged-up Gopher squad beat the Keystones, 8-3, to sweep the city series, as the remarkable Wallace filled in admirably at pitcher and catcher after starting the game at third. The club proceeded to drop two games to Jimmy Callahan’s Logan Squares of the Chicago League before huge crowds in Fennimore, Wisconsin, before Jesse Schaeffer, the star of the 1907 squad, returned to play second base and the squad proceeded to go 284 on a tour of Iowa and southern Minnesota. On September 26 Johnny Taylor won his 37th game of the season (28th with the Gophers) by beating a minor league all-star team, 5-2, giving the St. Paul nine a reported final tally of 88 wins out of 116 games played.43

All fall and winter the owners of other teams such as the Brooklyn Royal Giants and Kansas City Giants also made title claims in the country’s leading black newspaper, the Indianapolis Freeman, but the fact remained that the Gophers beat the Lelands before anyone else did, and that they posted a .846 winning percentage against other black squads that year. Unfortunately for Daddy Reid, the most persuasive argument for the Gophers’ preeminence came from Frank Leland himself when he signed Felix Wallace, Bobby Marshall, and the Taylor brothers away from the Gophers in November, prompting Reid to dissolve his club.44

In an odd twist, James Smith, perhaps with the knowledge that Reid was going to pack it in, led a pick-up Gopher squad, that included Walter Ball and a few Keystones, for a couple of games in Chicago that October, while Wallace and Marshall were in the Lelands lineup for their epic showdown with the Chicago Cubs. Marshall committed two errors and was pulled during the first game of the series, but Wallace collected three hits, including two off Three Fingered Brown as the Cubs took three hotly contested games from the Giants.45

*****

In the spring of 1910, leaders in the Twin City black community convinced Reid to reform the Gophers despite the defection of most of the 1909 club to other teams. Bobby Marshall and Jim Taylor rejoined the club in early June, and along with Indiana spitballer Louis “Dicta” Johnson, and a battery from Pittsburgh by way of the Buxton (IA) Wonders, “Lefty” Pangburn and catcher Mule Armstrong, the team went on to win a reported 104 games out of 131 tries.46

In late July, Frank Leland’s Chicago Giants led by Steel Arm Johnny Taylor and two other former Gophers, “Rat” Johnson and Felix Wallace, returned to St. Paul looking to avenge their 1909 defeat. The Gophers and Louis Johnson nipped Steel Arm Johnny and his mates, 4-3, in the series opener before a Lexington Park crowd of 4,000, when Jim Taylor stole second with one out in the 10th inning and scored the winning run off two subsequent Leland throwing errors. The Giants, behind the pitching of Taylor, Walter Ball, and a 24-year-old Cyclone Joe Williams, easily captured the next four games, however, and swept another three-game set from the Gophers in early September in Preston, Minnesota.47

During the Giant series in July, Phil Reid married famed actress and singer Belle Davis, and left for a honeymoon in Europe, leaving the club in the hands of road secretary Irving Williams. The squad slumped badly after Reid’s departure, and most of the club, save for Johnny Davis and Bobby Marshall, jumped the financially sinking ship in mid-September. The team rebounded in early October, aided by the return of Eugene Milliner and a few Keystones including Hurley McNair, to finish the season on a high note by beating the scrappy semi-pro North St. Paul Thoens, 3-1, thanks to a 10-inning no-hit effort by Charles Jackson.48

The following spring, Bobby Marshall, with the financial backing of tavern owner Grover Shull and Saints magnate George Lennon, reorganized the team as the Twin City Gophers. Marshall’s squad, a mixture of well-traveled vets such as Binga, Johnny Davis, and center fielder/pitcher Bert Jones and promising youngsters such as Dicta Johnson and shortstop William Selden, won about as much as they lost, mostly while barnstorming through the Dakotas.49

Dude Lytle, Pangburn, and Armstrong gave the club a little boost when they rejoined the team in late June, and the Gophers managed to beat the fading Leland Giants in Chicago, but the season was pretty much a disaster on the field and at the gate. Bobby Marshall either quit or was forced out in early August, and the team, called the St. Paul Gophers once again, left Minnesota later that month for a series in Kansas City and St. Louis before calling it a day.50

The 1911 season also proved to be the last campaign for Kidd Mitchell’s Keystones, who had spent most of their final two years of existence playing south of Minnesota, including a stint in the 1910 Texas Negro League, representing San Antonio. In the end, the decline of the Gophers’ and Keystones’ play, combined with the high cost of travel and the lack of a substantial black fan base in the Twin Cities, led to their demise. Over the next 35 years there were a few half-baked attempts to revive the Gophers or to trade on their good name, but when Daddy Reid died in St. Paul of heart failure in October 1912, big-time black baseball in Minnesota was laid to rest with him.51

In October 1987 the Minnesota Twins, behind locally born and raised slugger Kent Hrbek, third baseman Gary “The Rat” Gaetti, and Hall of Fame center fielder Kirby Puckett would also win a championship before a raucous home field crowd. Over 75 years earlier, however, the St. Paul Gophers had brought it home first.

Notes

1. St. Paul Appeal, June 3, 1916; Twin City Star, October 26, 1912; St. Paul City Directory 1901, R.L. Polk, St. Paul, MN: Indianapolis Freeman, April 16, 1910.
2. Minneapolis Tribune, September 26, 1907, February 2, 1908; St. Paul Appeal, August 31, 1907.
3. St. Paul Dispatch, August 10, 1907; St. Paul Appeal, August 31, 1907. St. Paul Pioneer Press, September 24, 1907; St. Paul Daily News, September 24, 1907; Minneapolis Tribune, September 26, 1907.
4. Minneapolis Tribune, August 30, September 13, 1908; St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 29, 1908.
5. Minneapolis Tribune, April 3, 26, July 26, August 2, September 20, 21, October 4, 5,1908; St. Paul Pioneer Press, August 28, 31, September 16, 17, 20, 22, 23, 1908.
6. St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 5, 1909; St. Paul Dispatch, May 3, 1907; Long Prairie Leader, September 7, 1911.
7. Frank Leland, Frank Leland’s Chicago Giants Base Ball Club, (Chicago: Fraternal Printing, 1910), 16; Indianapolis Freeman, April 16, 1910; St. Paul Dispatch, May 30, 1908; Bemidji Daily Pioneer, June 28, 1909; New York Age, July 13, 1911.
8. 1880 United States Census, McLean County, IL; Twin City Star, July 21, 1910; Indianapolis Freeman, July 30, 1910.
9. Chicago Tribune, August, 24, October 1, 1905; Twin City Star, July 21, 1910; Indianapolis Freeman, August 6, 20, 1910; Young America Eagle, October 1, 1909.
10. Minneapolis Tribune, April 4, May 2, 1909; St. Paul Dispatch, May 15, 1909.
11. Minneapolis Tribune, July 29, 1913; Twin City Star, July 21, 1910; Steven R. Hoffbeck, ed. “Bobby Marshall, the Legendary First Baseman,” Swinging for the Fences, Steven R. Hoffbeck, ed. (St. Paul, Minnesota: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2005), 60-61; Richard Rainbolt, Gold Glory, (Wayzata, MN: Ralph Turtinen, 1972), 35-36; Leland, 17; St. Paul Pioneer Press, May 20, 1907; Denis J. Gullickson and Carl Hanson, Before They Were Packers, Blue Earth, WI: Trails Books, 2004), 165.
12. St. Paul Pioneer Press, May 27, 1909; St. Paul Dispatch, May 15, 1909; Sawyer County Herald (Ashland, WI), July 15, 1909; Minneapolis Tribune, August 30, 1908; La Crosse Daily Chronicle, May 11, 1909; Hibbing Tribune Daily, May 25, 1909.
13. Long Prairie Leader, May 11, 1909; St. Paul Pioneer Press, June 9, July 17, 1909; Leland, 13; Minneapolis Tribune, July 18, 1909.
14. Leland, 14-15; James Riley, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues (New York: Carroll & Graf Publishers, 2002), 768.
15. Leland, 13; Minot Daily Reporter, June 21, 1910.
16. 1910 United States Census, Ramsey County, MN; St. Paul Dispatch, June 6, 7, 1907; La Crosse Daily Chronicle, July 3, 1907; Gary Ashwill, “Philadelphia Giants in Cuba, 1907,” http://agatetype.typepad.com/agate_type/2006/07/index.html, June 10. 2006.
17. St. Paul Appeal, June 19, 1909; St. Paul Daily News, July 25, 1909; Minneapolis Tribune, September 26, 1908; Chicago Tribune, July 13, 26, 1909; Riley, 48.
18. Ashwill, “Mike Moore,” http://agatetype.typepad.com/agate_type/2006/07/index.html, June 6, 2006; Chicago Defender, September 15, 1917; Leland, 9, 17-18, 20.
19. Minneapolis Tribune, July 26, 1909; Indianapolis Freeman, December 11, 1909; Long Prairie Leader, July 30, 1909.
20. St. Paul Appeal, June 19, 1909; Before the Dome: Baseball In Minnesota When the Grass Was Real, David Anderson, ed. (MN: Nodin Press, 1993), 23; Larry Millett, Lost Twin Cities, (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 1992), 220-221; Stew Thornley, Baseball in Minnesota: The Definitive History, (St. Paul, MN: Minnesota Historical Society Press, 2006), 36.
21. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 27, 1909.
22. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 27, 1909.
23. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 27, 1909; Minneapolis Tribune, July 27, 1909.
24. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 27, 28, 1909.
25. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 28, 1909.
26. St. Paul Daily News, July 29, 1909; St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 29, 1909.
27. Leland, 14; St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 29, 1909.
28. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 29, 1909.
29. Long Prairie Leader, July 30, 1909; St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 29, 1909.
30. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 29, 1909.
31. Long Prairie Leader, July 30, August 10, 1909; Indianapolis Freeman, December 11, 1909.
32. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 30, 1909; Stillwater Daily Gazette, August 24, 1909.
33. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 30, 1909.
34. Ibid.
35. Ibid.
36. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 31, 1909.
37. Ibid.
38. Robert Peterson, Only the Ball Was White (New York; Oxford Univ. Press, 1992), 111; Paul Pioneer Press, July 31, 1909.
39. Twin City Star, July 21, 1910; St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 31, 1909.
40. St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 31, 1909.
41. Indianapolis Freeman, September 25, November 13, December 11, 1909.
42. St. Paul Appeal, September 18, 1909.
43. Indianapolis Freeman, August 14, 1909; Fennimore Times, August 18, 1909; St. Paul Pioneer Press, September 15, 27, 1909; Leland, 15.
44. Indianapolis Freeman, October 2, 9, 16, November, 20, 1909.
45. Chicago Tribune, October 4, 11, 19, 22, 23, 1909.
46. St. Paul Pioneer Press, April 10, October 3, 1910; Twin City Star, July 14, 1910; John Holway, Blackball Stars (New York: Carroll & Graf, 1992), 302.
47. Twin City Star, July 21, 1910; St. Paul Pioneer Press, July 25, 26, 27, 28, 29, 1910; Preston Times, September 21, 1910.
48. Twin City Star, June 2, 1910, October 26, 1912; St. Paul Pioneer Press, October 3, 1910.
49. Chicago Defender, April 15, 1911; Minneapolis Tribune, July 2, 1911.
50. Chicago Defender, August 5, 1911; Twin City Star, August 19, 1911; Kansas City Journal, August 18, 28, 29, 30, September 1, 2, 1911; St. Louis Republic, September 4, 5, 1911.
51. Indianapolis Freeman, June 18, 1910; Twin City Star, April 20, October 19, 26, 1912.

To determine who the top prospects were, I took Baseball America’s Top 100 prospect lists in 1990-1999. From that list I chose the top 10 prospects from each year and separated them into hitters and pitchers. Some prospects were on the list several times, but I only included them to the list once. After that, I determined the WARP (wins above replacement player) that they accumulated during their first six full seasons before free agency. WARP is a statistic created by Clay Davenport of Baseball Prospectus. As defined on their website, WARP is “the number of wins this player contributed, above what a replacement level hitter, fielder, and pitcher would have done, with adjustments only for within the season.”

While some may not agree with the baseline WARP uses, it is widely accessible for past players. From there I determined what the average WARP of the group of hitters and pitchers was and then broke the prospects into four subgroups. These four subgroups are bust, contributor (a back of the rotation starter or middle reliever for pitchers), everyday player (a middle of the rotation starter for pitchers), and star (an ace for pitchers). A bust was defined as a player who had 12 WARP or less (2 or less WARP per year). A contributor was defined as a player who had between 12 and 24 WARP (2 to 4 WARP per year). An everyday player was defined as a player who had between 24 and 36 WARP (4 to 6 WARP per year). A star was defined as a player who had 36 or more WARP per year (6 WARP or more per year).

RESULTS

Note: The full list of players included in this study and their value accumulated are included at the end of the paper.

These results show that teams have been getting a pretty decent return on hitting prospects. On average, the hitting prospects have given about 24 WARP, or the results of an everyday player. When that player can be controlled for a very cheap price, it gives great value to the team given the current open market. However, when we take a closer look, the chances of a team getting an everyday player is one out of three. They also have a higher chance of having their prospect become a bust than of getting a star player in return. A bust happens for one out of every five prospects while a team gets a star player in return for one out of every six hitting prospects. For every Vladimir Guerrero, there are even more Eric Anthonys.

While hitting prospects give at least a decent return, top pitching prospects have given a terrible return. Out of the 26 different pitchers to rate as a top 10 prospect, only one (Pedro Martinez) gave a star return in the first six years. Also, a team only gets a solid starting pitcher for about one out of every 10 pitching prospects. Maybe even worse, over half of the pitching prospects became busts. Given the high rate of failed pitching prospects, it could definitely be worth giving a top pitching prospect for an established player, even with the high price that pitchers cost on the open market.

Considering that evaluating prospects is a subjective process, I went further down the top 100 prospects list to see if I could find similar results. This time I examined prospects rated between 11th and 25th. I also noted if that prospect was later rated in the top 10. I also examined the same group of prospects without the ones that were later rated in the top 10.

Hitting prospects appear to have been properly evaluated. When prospects that were later rated in the top 10 are removed, the percentage of prospects that become busts increase for the lower rated group while the other three groups decrease. Interestingly, these same results do not occur for the pitching prospects. The inclusion of pitching prospects that were later rated in the top 10 actually decreases the overall production of the 11-25 pitching prospects. They also decrease the chances of producing an ace or middle of the rotation pitcher. However, the average WARP of the group still remains lower than the WARP of just the top 10 pitching prospects.

While we have now found the value top prospects give their teams, we have not yet factored in the lower compensation these players receive in their first six years. To see how much money these top prospects save their teams, we need to determine how much value a top prospect gives to its team and for how much money. Then we must determine how much it would cost to purchase that same value in free agency. The last part is the easiest part. In Baseball Prospectus 2006, it was determined that in the 2005 and 2006 off-season, one additional WARP cost a team $1.525 million. Salary data from 1989-2007 shows that the average salary inflation has been 10.87%. When we factor in that inflation, on average, one additional WARP will cost a team $1.69 million in the 2007 off-season.

We have also found the value that top prospects give to their teams, so all we have to do now is determine how much it cost the teams. The new MLB labor agreement states that the minimum salary in 2007 will be $380,000, in 2008 it will be $390,000, and in 2009 it will be $400,000. The sum of these three salaries will determine how much a six-year player first starting in the major leagues in 2007 will make in his first three years, assuming a team renews that player’s contract each year. The tricky part now is to find how much a player makes in years four through six. To do this I looked at every fourth-, fifth-, and sixth-year player in the major leagues and found their salary. All salary figures were used from Cot’s Baseball Contracts. I found that the average fourth-year salary was $2.13 million, fifth-year salary was $3 million, and sixthyear salary was $3.9 million. I then found the WARP of each fourth–sixth-year player and divided their salary by their WARP. The $/WARP for a fourth-year player was $.64 million/WARP, for a fifth-year player it was $.83 million/WARP, and for a sixth-year player it was $1.29 million/WARP. Remember, it cost $1.525 million for every additional WARP in the free agent market.

To find the average savings of each group, we can take the expected WARP of each group and multiply that by the cost of purchasing that WARP in the free agent market for the prospect’s first six years, adjusting the FA$/WARP cost for inflation. We also know how much the prospect will cost in his first three years, and we can also find how much he will cost in his fourth-sixth years by multiplying the arbitration$/WARP by the prospect’s expected WARP. We can then subtract the cost of purchasing the prospect’s WARP in the free agent market by the prospect’s expected cost in his first six years to determine the expected savings. Expected savings were then converted to net present value. Note that this assumes that there is steady inflation throughout baseball. This also assumes that each WARP is purchased at a fairly priced value. This also assumes that what a team purchases in WARP is what it gets. The following table below shows the expected savings of a top 10 hitting prospect.

Here is how to read the above table. The first row shows the average WARP each subcategory produces over six years. The next row shows the chances a prospect from each subcategory is produced. The following row shows how much a team saves in millions of dollars per year if they produce a player in that subcategory. I then multiplied the savings of the subcategory by the chance of the subcategory occurring to determine a weighted savings. I summed the weighted savings to produce an average total savings per year. After that, I divided the savings by 1.69 to see how much WARP/year a team could purchase with the total savings produced. I then multiplied the savings WARP/year by the six years a team is able to control a prospect and added the average WARP of the group to come up with a total break-even WARP.

The total break-even WARP is what a team can expect to gain in WARP from a prospect’s average performance plus the additional WARP that the team could buy with the money they save from keeping the prospect. Therefore, the total break-even WARP is what a team needs to receive in return and gain in production within six years for a trade to be beneficial, assuming that the WARP received is fairly priced. Anything above the break-even WARP is beneficial toward the team trading the prospect while anything below the break-even WARP is beneficial towards the team acquiring the prospect. It makes more sense to use the total breakeven WARP as the breakeven figure since prospect for prospect trades rarely happen. Here are the tables for the other three categories:

CONCLUSION

From these tables we can see that hitting prospects have a big edge in value compared to pitching prospects. In fact, the 11-25 hitting prospects have 40% more value that the top 10 pitching prospects. Top 10 hitting prospects easily provide the most value of any group. The value is high enough that it is unlikely a team could receive enough in return to trade a top hitting prospect. It also may seem that the pitching prospect break-even figures are rather low, especially when compared to the hitting prospects. However, they do show that it is wrong to trade away a top pitching prospect for a one-year or less rental, as it would be nearly impossible for one player to provide the value required in one year or less. Also, remember that these break-even numbers do not factor in if teams are “one player away” from making the playoffs. It may be beneficial for a team to deal away a top prospect if the player it receives in return is the difference between making the playoffs and sitting at home in October. A playoff appearance can be very valuable to a team in the additional revenue it produces, especially considering that anything can happen once a team makes the playoffs. As the saying goes, flags fly forever.

It appears that teams are making the right decision by hanging on to top hitting prospects. Trading a top hitting prospect demands a lot in return in order to ensure fair value in a trade. It also appears that teams are usually doing the right thing by not trading away top pitching prospects for a short-term acquisition. There could be value to be made if a team can acquire a more certain asset that it can control for over one year for a top pitching prospect, especially given the fact that even top pitching prospects are a bust over half the time. For example, if a team can acquire a player in his arbitration years, they would need less WARP in return since a player in arbitration makes less than he would on the open market. In the end, though, it looks like teams are making the right decision when it comes to holding on to top prospects.

Sources

“It’s frustrating. Your job is not to get in the way of a rally.” — Rich Donnelly, Dodgers third base coach after Game One of the 2006 NLDS

Most readers will remember what was perhaps the strangest play of the 2006 postseason and for Dodger fans that memory is not a happy one. With runners on first and second and nobody out in the top of the second inning, Dodgers rookie Russell Martin took an inside-out cut at a 2-1 fastball from the Mets’ John Maine and drove it deep to right field. Jeff Kent, the runner on second, apparently didn’t see the ball immediately and got an extremely poor jump while J. D. Drew at first base read that the ball was over the head of right fielder Shawn Green and began motoring for second. With Kent finally under way and Drew close on his heels, Green played the ball perfectly off the wall on one hop, relayed to Jose Valentin, who threw a one-hopper to Paul Lo Duca just in time to nip a diving Kent at the plate. In the meantime Drew had not slowed at all, and upon turning around a surprised Lo Duca was able to put down the tag as Drew also attempted a headfirst slide. The result was a double play which proved huge in a 6-5 Mets win.

After the game Dodgers third base coach Rich Donnelly noted that he didn’t want to send Kent but saw that with Drew close behind, he’d likely end up with two runners on third and at that point he was hoping for a botched throw. And for some reason, perhaps their proximity or his attention focused on the lead runner, Donnelly did not or was unable to give the stop sign to Drew.

Of course, most third base coaches most of the time aren’t put in such a difficult position by their runners. Instead, in addition to their job relaying signs to the batter, they are concerned with waving around one runner at a time. The question then from an analyst’s viewpoint is twofold. First, is the job of directing traffic on the bases quantifiable? In other words, can we create a metric that measures the success and failure of this component in a reasonable way? And second, if it is measurable, can some coaches be said to be more skilled at this half of their job than their peers? In this essay we’ll take a crack at answering both questions.

QUANTIFYING THE WAVE

In the summer of 2006, in a series of six articles published on the Baseball Prospectus website one of us (Dan Fox) endeavored to more formally quantify base running by developing a series of metrics measured in terms of runs. Those metrics are:

Equivalent Ground Advancement Runs (EqGAR). Measures the contribution of base runners above and beyond what would be expected in opportunities they have for advancing on outs made on the ground. For example, advancing from second to third on a groundout to shortstop or getting gunned down at home on a grounder to second.

Equivalent Air Advancement Runs (EqAAR). Measures the contribution of base runners above and beyond what would be expected in opportunities they have for advancing on fly-ball and line-drive outs. For example, scoring on sacrifice flies or advancing from first to second on a fly ball to left field. This metric is park adjusted.

Equivalent Stolen Base Runs (EqSBR). Measure the contribution of base runners in their stolen base attempts and pickoffs.

Equivalent Hit Advancement Runs (EqHAR). Measures the contribution of base runners above and beyond what would be expected in opportunities they have for advancing on singles and doubles. For example, moving from first to third on a single to left field or scoring from first on a double. This metric is park adjusted.

When totaled, these give us a fairly complete picture of the contribution made by a player on the bases beyond what would have been expected given their opportunities. And therein lies the rub. The methodology that underlies these metrics isn’t a simple totaling of the number of bases gained in these situations, but rather an application of changes in the expected number of runs across several axes including the base/out situation (the Run Expectancy matrix), handedness of the batter, and the position of the fielder who fielded the ball.

By calculating how often runners typically advance in a whole host of scenarios (for example, with a runner on second and nobody out, a runner will advance from second to third 43% of the time when the ball is fielded by the shortstop, but 97% of the time when handled by the second baseman) and translating those percentages to runs using the Run Expectancy matrix, we can credit or debit a runner for each and every opportunity they have on the bases.

Totaling the credit assigned to each opportunity (and not crediting the runner for advancing the minimum number of bases) for players allows us to assign a number of theoretical runs above and beyond what a typical player would have contributed given the same opportunities. Yes, theoretical since these metrics, being based on models like the RE matrix, don’t actually measure the precise number of runs contributed by a runner, but rather can be thought of as an accounting of the decisions made by runners and coaches that put their teams in more or less advantageous situations throughout the course of a season. That accounting is performed in terms of runs. As mentioned above, we then adjust for park effects where necessary. For example, the spacious Coors Field outfield allows for easier advancement than the smaller Fenway Park.

Already many of you can see where this is going. EqHAR, by measuring runner advancement on hits, may be an appropriate methodology to apply to third base coaches, since it measures an aspect of the game in which third base coaches are directly involved. Looking more closely, EqHAR is composed of three basic scenarios:

• Runner on first, second not occupied, and the batter singles.
• Runner on first, second not occupied, and the batter doubles.
• Runner on second, third not occupied, and the batter singles.

A third base coach may be active in each of these scenarios, but as will be obvious, it typically depends on where the ball is hit. When a batter singles or doubles with a runner on first base, the runner typically makes his own decision about whether to advance if the ball is hit to left field or within his field of view in center field. On the other hand, he’ll usually pick up his third base coach if the ball lands in right field. Likewise, when on second base a ball hit to the outfield typically results in the runner taking matters into his own hands only if the ball is hit to left, but relying on the coach if the ball is hit to center or right. By using these general rules as a guide, the analysis can be restricted in this sense to plays that fall only into these categories but also include scenarios when multiple base runners are on base.

• Runner on first and the batter singles and the ball is fielded by the right Other bases may be occupied.
• Runner on first and the batter doubles and the ball is fielded by the right Other bases may be occupied.
• Runner on second and the batter singles and the ball is fielded by the center or right fielder. Other bases may be occupied.

One might argue that these categories are either too restrictive or not restrictive enough, and we have sympathy with both arguments.

For example, with the runner on first on a single fielded by the center fielder, there are certainly occasions when the runner picks up the coach. Conversely, with a runner on second and the batter singling to left, there are definitely times when the runner knows the ball will be difficult to handle or is running with the pitch and so heads home without consulting the coach. This analysis will not include those events. And these events of course do not include runners attempting to advance on ground-ball and fly-ball outs, nor does it include runners attempting to stretch doubles into triples or triples into inside the park home runs. The thought was to error on the side of caution and include only those events where it seems the third base coach would be most likely to have influence.

Further, these scenarios will include times when runners run right through the stop sign given by their frantic coach only to get thrown out. Through no fault of his own, the coach will be still be debited for plays like these.

Surely this is far from a perfect system, but given the granularity of the play-by-play data available and absent video inspection of each play, this seems like a reasonable approach for a first pass at creating this kind of metric.

The primary advantage to using the methodology described above as opposed to simply counting the number of runners that were thrown out on each coach’s watch is that this system also gives appropriate credit when a runner advances successfully. The system also takes into consideration how difficult the advancement event was and gives more credit when a runner takes a base in a higher reward situation. While keeping runners from getting thrown out is clearly a major component of the job, knowing when to take risks based on the game situation is a secondary component and one that this metric captures.

Given the above caveats, we ran the EqHAR framework for third base coaches for 2006 with the following results.

(Click image to enlarge)

This table includes the number of hit advancement opportunities (Opp), the number of times runners were thrown out advancing (OA), the EqHAR for those opportunities, and a Rate statistic that is the ratio of EqHAR to the expected number of advancement runs given both the quantity and the quality of opportunities along the axes mentioned above. This is important, since you’ll notice that while Baltimore and Tom Trebelhorn had 296 opportunities, Tom Foley in Tampa Bay had just 163, and all other things being equal, more opportunities means a higher EqHAR.

It should be noted that the coach was assigned all plays for the 2006 season for his team since there is no easily accessible record of when a third base coach was not on the field for his team. For example, although Chris Speier took a several-day leave of absence beginning July 20 after being arrested for DUI earlier that week, the opportunities during that time are credited to Speier. Through this analysis the coaches were assigned opportunities based on their team’s media guides for the respective seasons.

So under this measure Dino Ebel of the Angels played a part in helping his runners to the tune of just over 10 additional theoretical runs (the second highest of any single season from 2000 through 2006) while Joey Cora was complicit in costing the White Sox the equivalent of almost eight runs. Intuitively, this range seems to be within the bounds of believability. Newly minted managers Ron Washington (-4.9) and Fredi Gonzalez (-3.3) don’t come out very well, although Manny Acta (+2.3) does.

But is this really a fair gauge of a third base coach’s influence? Keep in mind that failing to advance as frequently as the average runner in various situations, as well as getting thrown out, will both depress EqHAR, with the latter being much more costly than the former. Even so, it could be the case that Cora was saddled with extremely slow runners who didn’t advance as often as they should or runners who don’t take direction very well and run through his signs or even who simply don’t hustle. And Ebel may be blessed with a Chone Figgins, who regularly scoots home on singles and doubles and never gets caught (Figgins was not thrown out in 56 opportunities and recorded the highest individual EqHAR at 4.93 in 2006).

(Click image to enlarge)

Because this metric depends on the players a coach has to work with, an additional step is warranted that acknowledges that dependency. This step involves comparing the opportunities that coaches can be said to have some control over with ones that they do not. If a team is populated with poor base runners who have trouble advancing or regularly get thrown out in situations where the coach is a spectator, one might argue that those opportunities should serve as the baseline with which we judge the coach. Table 2 shows the results of this recalculation by including these “noncoach” opportunities. Table 2 includes a final column that is the ratio of the Rate for opportunities the coach has influence over to the Rate for the opportunities for which they do not.

Under this second measure Cora moves from 30th to 11th by virtue of his team racking up a very poor EqHAR of -7.5 and rate of 0.81 in opportunities that Cora had little or no influence over. When comparing the 0.81 rate in his coach-influenced opportunities to 0.86, Cora comes out at 1.05, thereby slightly outperforming his team.

In Table 2, Washington and Gonzalez both look a little better while Speier and Florida’s Bobby Meacham fall by virtue of their respective teams performing quite well in non-coach opportunities, at 1.24 for the Marlins and 1.22 for the Cubs. And what of the Angel’s Ebel, who came out on top in Table 1? He slides to 10th since the Angels recorded a very respectable 1.13 rate in non-coach opportunities, while Tom Foley of the Devil Rays takes the top spot since his team performed so poorly in other opportunities (-6.6, 0.80) and so well when he was likely involved (5.3, 1.15).

This metric can be expanded to encompass multiple seasons and therefore a larger view. Table 3 shows these metrics for each of the 74 third base coaches employed from the beginning of the 2000 season through 2006.

(Click images to enlarge)

Here Billy Hatcher takes the top spot through his work as the Devil Rays third base coach in 2000-2001. Although his rate statistics for the two seasons (1.01, 1.10) were certainly above average, his team in noncoach opportunities registered rates of just 0.75 and 0.82. Speier, as the third base coach for the Brewers in 2000, Diamondbacks in 2001, and the Cubs in 20052006 had 22 runners nabbed in 860 opportunities for an EqHAR of -4.7 and rate of 0.98, while otherwise his team was thrown out 15 times and had a rate of 1.22, pushing him to the bottom of the list.

From an absolute perspective Dave Sveum registered the lowest EqHAR at -20.9 during his time with the Red Sox in 2004-2005 and Brewers in 2006, while Gary Allenson with Milwaukee in 2001-2002 had the lowest absolute rate at 0.81. In both cases, however, the poor performance of their teams buoyed their ratings. Cardinals third base coach Jose Oquendo had the highest absolute EqHAR of 25.9 in his seven years with Tony LaRussa, while Ebel recorded the highest rate at 1.19 in his single season with the Angels. These absolute numbers indicate that over the course of seven seasons the range in terms of EqHAR is around 55 runs.

In answer to the first of the questions posed above, the act of waving runners around is quantifiable, albeit imperfectly, with the limitations already discussed. The quantification in the above analysis passes the test of reasonableness and takes the following form. Third base coaches in the absolute sense seem at most to be able to contribute to just over one additional win or one loss (Sveum with the 2005 Red Sox recorded an EqHAR of -12.6 and Jerry Narron with the Rangers in 2000 was at +10.9) in the course of a season, over what would be expected. Over the course of seven seasons that contribution grows to around two and half wins, indicating there is a large degree of variability in play. However, judging a coach by that absolute metric is not necessarily equitable since it doesn’t take into consideration the personnel the coach is working with. To correct for this, a ratio that uses a baseline can be calculated, and when that ratio is converted to runs, the range becomes -1.5 to +1.5 wins per season and -3 to +3 wins over the course of seven seasons.

PERSISTING THE WAVE

While we’ve answered the first question in the affirmative, does the difference we see between third base coaches in a single season indicate that there is a disparity in skill between these coaches?

The standard way performance analysts have approached a question like this is to run year-to-year comparisons in an effort to see if the effect being measured persists. As it turns out, roughly two-thirds of third base coaches remain in the role the following season, with a high of 24 being retained during the winter 2003-2004. Using the ratio calculated in the previous section, a correlation coefficient (denoted as r where a value of -1 indicates a perfectly negative linear correlation and a value of 1 indicates a perfectly linear one) can be calculated for each pair of seasons as shown in Table 4.

From an overall perspective those 124 pairs can be graphed as shown in Figure 1.

As you can see from the graph in Figure 1, the data doesn’t trend in any direction and in fact the correlation coefficient across all pairs of years is just .04. A value so close to zero is evidence that there is in fact no correlation. In other words, knowing a third base coach’s ratio in one season gives you no information about what his ratio will be in the next. Further, the data is almost perfectly normally distributed, which is additional evidence that there is little or no skill component evident in the data. This can then be interpreted as meaning that there is no discernable third base coaching skill that carries over from year to year and that therefore the answer to our second question is no.

There may be several reasons for this negative result. Reminiscent of the ongoing debate over clutch hitting, the skill this metric is trying to measure may be much more subtle than the metric can deliver. Instead of a coach being “responsible” for up to +1.5 wins per season, his actual contribution to those wins may be a fractional part of that value and hence the variability component in the numbers we use for correlation swamps the skill component to a large degree. So there may indeed be a skill involved in waving runners around, but that skill is for all intents and purposes unimportant in the big scheme of things. The obvious dependence on his personnel would seem to support this.

Additionally, perhaps the metric is poorly designed and may not capture the skill at all though it exists. It could even be the case that there really is no skill involved in holding and sending runners (or if you prefer, there is no skill difference between coaches at the major league level) and the differential results we see can be chalked up to a combination of personnel (try as we might to disentangle it or due to turnover of the roster) and simple luck driven by anything and everything from the opponents’ defense to the weather.

Our quest for knowledge about the game is just as often informed by studies that show no effect as those that confirm our intuition. As for the influence of third base coaches in determining when to send and when to hold runners, the most we can say from this study (assuming our metric is relevant) is that if there is a skill involved, it is hard to measure, and although the judgment exercised on the field can often make the difference in individual plays, it doesn’t manifest itself in the larger scale of seasons.

Sources

Schrodinger’s Bat: Hit the Ground Running: www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5298

Schrodinger’s Bat: An Air of Advancement: www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5346

Schrodinger’s Bat: Advancing in Context: www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5380

Schrodinger’s Bat: Using The House Advantage: www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5432

Schrodinger’s Bat: The Running Man: www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5495

Schrodinger’s Bat: The Whole, the Sum, and the Parts: www.baseballprospectus.com/article.php?articleid=5523

In this article we will examine the progression of the career and single-season games worked records. We will talk about some of the prominent umpires through major league history and how they fit into the sweep of history related to arbiters. Other aspects of the umpire world, including vacation substitutes and the size of crews, will be examined. All numbers quoted are valid through October 2, 2007. Let’s get started!

In the National Association, umpire assignments were haphazard at best. The home team chose the arbiter from a list submitted by the visiting squad. However, many times the selected official was merely someone in the crowd for that day’s ball game. Many NA umpires worked only one game in their careers. The situation gradually improved once the National League was formed. All career and single-season numbers in this article will ignore the National Association. William H. “Billy” McLean, a veteran National Association umpire, worked the first game in National League history on April 22, 1876, between the Boston Red Caps and the Athletics at Philadelphia’s Jefferson Street Grounds. McLean would umpire 345 contests in the National League and American Association through August 22, 1890. Charles Daniels worked the most games in the initial season of the senior circuit with 45. However, McLean claimed the career record for most games umpired in the majors in 1878, lost it to George H. “Foghorn” Bradley three years later and reclaimed it in 1884.

Table 1 (see below) shows the progression of the career record for games umpired. A number of other men held the record in the 19th century until Thomas J. “Tom” Lynch, who made his debut on April 20, 1888, became the first arbiter to work 1,000 games on September 7, 1896, in the first game of a doubleheader at Worcester. After Lynch retired as an umpire, he worked in the National League office for a time and was the league president from 1910 through 1913. John Heydler, who umpired 83 games in the 1890s, also served as NL president.

Robert D. “Bob” Emslie, an American Association player in the 1880s, began umpiring in the Association in 1890. He started the 1891 season in the Western Association, but after the league disbanded, he joined the National League staff, working his first game there on August 19, 1891. Emslie passed Lynch’s career record in 1900 and became the first arbiter to work 2,000 games on July 11, 1905, when he worked the first game of a series between the Chicago Cubs and the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. Emslie reached the 3,000 games umpired mark on July 1, 1913, and then worked his 4,000th game on July 14, 1920. Both milestone games were played in Chicago. After the 1922 season, the native of Guelph, Ontario, was named the chief of the National League umpiring staff. In 1923 and 1924, Emslie worked a few games, bringing his career total to 4,228. Bob Emslie held the career record for 27 years until passed by an Englishman who never played baseball.

Thomas H. “Tommy” Connolly, who was born in Manchester, England, on December 31, 1870, moved with his family to Natick, Massachusetts, while still a young man. National League umpire Timothy C. “Tim” Hurst helped Connolly secure his first professional umpiring job in the New England League in 1894, and after four years in that circuit, the National League hired Connolly in 1898. He worked over 300 games in the senior circuit through mid-May 1900 but was out most of the rest of the season. Connolly was hired by the American League for its first season and worked the first game in league history, played in Chicago on April 24, 1901. Connolly worked 4,451 games in the American League by the time he retired after a game on July 31, 1932, the only game he umpired that season. He still holds the American League record for most years (32) and games umpired. Connolly passed Emslie’s major league career record on May 31, 1927, and finished with a major league total of 4,768 games when he retired. Connolly served as the American League’s umpire in chief from 1931 through 1953.

Rochester native William J. “Bill” Klem umpired his first National League game on April 14, 1905, on Opening Day in Cincinnati after three years in the minor leagues. “The Old Arbitrator” worked steadily until he retired after the 1940 season, rarely missing a game. In 1941, as the newly named chief of National League umpires, he worked 11 games on the base paths while the league experimented with a four-man crew. He finished with 5,368 games umpired in 37 seasons, both career records, and his game total is unlikely to be topped due to the way umpires are assigned in the 21st century. Klem remained the league’s umpire supervisor until his death in 1951. He and Tommy Connolly were elected to the Hall of Fame in 1953 as the first umpires so named.

The single-season record for most games umpired gradually increased from Charles Daniels’ 45 in 1876 but now has remained the same since 1962. Many of the same names held the season record as the career record in the first few years of the National League, as shown in Table 2. Stewart Decker was the first arbiter to work 100 games in one season when he umpired 102 contests in the 1883 National League. He worked back-to-back 100-game seasons with 111 in 1884 but saw his record fall to Bill McLean, who umpired 118 games in 1884. In just a few years, umpires pushed the record past a few milestones. John O. “Kick” Kelly was the first to top 130 games in a season with 134 in 1886 and Bob Emslie worked 148 in 1892. Both Ed Swartwood and James McDonald umpired 156 games in 1898 and Hank O’Day was the first to work a 160-game season when he umpired 161 contests in 1899.

Henry F. “Hank” O’Day, who played in the majors from 1884 through 1890, worked as a substitute arbiter seven times before he retired as an active player. Players frequently were employed as umpires when the assigned umpires were not available due to travel problems, illness or other issues. O’Day started working as a regular National League umpire in 1897 after two years in the Western League. He umpired in the senior circuit through the 1927 season with two years out to work another job. In 1912, O’Day managed the Cincinnati Reds and then returned to umpiring the following season. In 1914, he again took a managing job, this time with the Cubs in his native Chicago. At the start of the 1915 season, O’Day was out of baseball, but the National League rehired him during the season and he resumed umpiring on August 8 in Chicago. After umpiring his last game on October 2, 1927, O’Day finished with 3,986 major league contests. He then acted as an umpire scout for the National League through 1930.

One other longtime umpire also played and managed in the major leagues. George J. Moriarty played briefly in the National League for the Chicago Cubs in 1903 and 1904. He then played in the American League from 1906 through 1916. He became an umpire in the American League in 1917 and worked through the 1940 season except for 1927-28, when he managed the Tigers. Moriarty umpired 3,047 American League games in his career. No other person who played and managed in the majors umpired 1,000 major league games.

The single-season record inched up over the next 50 years until American League umpire Joe Paparella worked 169 games during the 154-game 1950 season. Paparella worked 31 doubleheaders that year, including five instances of double dips on consecutive days. For three days starting on September 25, Paparella worked doubleheaders as the season wound down. His partners also worked hard that season, with Cal Hubbard umpiring 167 games and Eddie Rommel umpiring 165. The 41-year-old Paparella was in his fifth season in the junior circuit and worked a more reasonable schedule before and after that incredible 1950 season. However, in 1962, Paparella broke his own season record by working an absurd total of 176 games. He umpired in 30 doubleheaders that summer, although none came on back-to-back days during the 162-game season. Two of Paparella’s partners worked record-breaking totals that year, as Hank Soar umpired 175 and John Rice 174 contests.

Three times since 1962 a crew has approached the number of games worked by the 1962 umpires. In 1969, Nestor Chylak, Jerry Neudecker, and Jake O’Donnell each umpired 170 games. Two years later, Russ Goetz worked 173 contests, while Neudecker and Dave Phillips each umpired 172 games. In 1975, Goetz, Bill Deegan, and George Maloney all worked 171 games. All these umpires worked for the American League. Only two National League arbiters have ever umpired 170 games in one season: Dusty Boggess and Stan Landes in 1962, who both worked exactly 170 contests.

After the 1999 labor problems between the umpires and Major League Baseball, MLB united the two league umpire staffs into one. Records for years of service and games umpired for each league through 1999 are listed in Tables 3 through 6. It is interesting to note that Bruce Froemming’s 29 years in the National League (1971-99) rank sixth all-time, but that is not his entire career, since he continued to work on the combined major league staff in 2000. Larry Barnett would have tied Tommy Connolly for most years worked in the American League were it not for the unification of the umpires in 2000. Joe Brinkman recorded seven years and Dave Phillips two years as part of the major league staff in the 21st century in addition to their time in the American League.

For major league service time (all leagues combined), Bill Klem and Bruce Froemming top the list. Table 7 shows most years in the majors as an umpire, while Table 8 shows total career games. Through 2007, Klem and Froemming are tied with 37 years apiece umpiring in the big leagues, and they are also the only arbiters with at least 5,000 games worked in the majors. There are 17 men who have umpired at least 4,000 contests and 74 with 3,000 games worked. Under the new contract between Major League Baseball and the umpires put in place after 1999, staff umpires now get four weeks’ vacation during the season. Three of these weeks are as a crew, while the fourth week is an individual vacation. The result of this is that Major League Baseball selects about 20 minor league umpires who fill in for staff arbiters who are on vacation, ill, or otherwise not available to work a game. In 2007, there are 17 four-man crews, which allows two crews to be off each week and still have the required number of crews to work all big league games.2 It is common for a crew to be working with one member of the crew absent and replaced by a minor league arbiter.

Another negotiated point in the contract is that the plate umpire in one game of a doubleheader usually only works that one game. A minor league umpire is assigned to the crew for the day and works first base in the first game and third base in the second, in both cases replacing the plate umpire from the other contest.

Since 2000, staff umpires work approximately 135 games in a season. Minor league umpires work a wide range of game totals while filling in for the absent arbiter. Some have worked a rather high total in some seasons. Dan Iassogna, now a member of the staff, umpired in 159 games during the 2000 season and 150 the next year. Lance Barksdale, also now a staff umpire, worked 156 games in 2001 and 151 the following year. Mike Vanvleet and Jim Wolf also worked at least 150 games in one season since 2000. Chris Guccione, who made his big league debut on April 15, 2000, has worked more than 150 in two seasons and at least 125 in six seasons. Guccione has umpired 992 major league games since his debut without being a member of the major league staff, more than any other minor league umpire.

Many former players have become umpires through the years. Of these arbiters, 14 worked at least 2,000 games in the majors. Leading the list (shown in Table 9) is Bob Emslie, who held the career games umpired record for 27 years. Bill Dinneen umpired more games than any other player who umpired his first game as an active player. Dinneen holds the distinction of having thrown a no-hitter while pitching and then calling one from behind the plate as an umpire. Tom Gorman, father of umpire Brian Gorman, worked 3,800 games as a big league umpire and was the last former player to umpire in the National League on September 4, 1977.

However, the real king of players who umpired is John “Jocko” Conlan. Jocko worked two American League games while still a player with the Chicago White Sox in 1935. He became a National League arbiter in 1941 and worked through 1965 for a major league total of 3,613 games. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1974 for meritorious service as an umpire. Other notable players who turned to umpiring later in life include Ralph A. “Babe” Pinelli, who was the plate umpire for Don Larsen’s perfect game in the 1956 World Series, Pinelli’s last game as an umpire. The last player-turnedumpire to work a major league game was William G. “Bill” Kunkel, whose son, Jeff, played in the majors. Kunkel umpired his last game on August 28, 1984.

Twenty-eight Hall of Famers have umpired at least one game in the big leagues. Some of the notables on the list include Cy Young, Chuck Klein, Frank Chance, and Willie Keeler. Table 10 contains the complete list.

The number of umpires working a game has increased through the years. For most of the 19th century, one person umpired each game. The Players League in 1890 employed two umpires for each game during its one season of existence. The National League used a two-man crew in 1898 and 1899 but reverted back to the single arbiter system in 1900. Both the National and American Leagues used two-man crews starting in 1909 and gradually moved to three-man crews in the mid-1920s, with some exceptions for more experienced umpires, who continued to work with just one partner. The integration to three-umpire crews was completed by the early 1930s. The four-umpire crew gradually became the norm in the early 1950s. The Senior Circuit used a five-man crew for at least part of the 1957, 1961 and 1968 seasons. In 1957, Ed Sudol made his debut on June 29 and worked as the fifth umpire for much of August and September. In both 1961 and 1968, the league prepared for the expansion that took place in 1962 and 1969 by training an extra arbiter.

As we move into the future, it is exciting to have statistics for games umpired. This data can be the start of many studies on umpiring and umpires.

DAVID VINCENT is the official scorer for Major League Baseball in Washington, DC.

Notes

1. There are eight games during the 1979 umpire strike for which we do not know the names of the substitute Assignments for the National Association are only partially compiled. Statistics and game logs for all umpires are available at www.retrosheet.org.
2. Since there are 30 major league teams, there can be no more than 15 sites with games on any given day.

TABLES

Click images to enlarge:

August 26, 1914, was an improbable day in a turbulent season in a city that had not experienced a pennant since 1888. The St. Louis Cardinals had surged toward the top of the National League and were playing for first place today. Twenty seven thousand fans had streamed into Robison Field, a ballpark with a seating capacity of not much more than 20,000. Thousands crammed into the aisles, and thousands more spilled onto the field, roped off in the outfield and even behind home plate.

The world seemed askew, providing an eerie backdrop for the national pastime. Europe was sinking into war, as the flames of conflict in the Balkans were engulfing the continent. In Rome, another group of cardinals had gathered, to select a new leader after the death of Pope Pius X a few days earlier. National League baseball was turned upside-down, with the perennially weak Cardinals of St. Louis and Braves of Boston challenging the New York Giants, winners of the past three National League pennants. The thrilling pennant race provided fans with relief from the bleak and unsettling news coming across the ocean.

“Woman’s presence at the games will have a civilizing effect.” – St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 9, 1911

Helene Britton was the first female owner of a major league sports team in America. The Cardinals had been owned by her father and uncle, Frank and Stanley Robison. Frank died in 1908, and her uncle— who never married—passed away in the spring of 1911. Her father had no sons, and thus did a woman enter that exclusive male bastion called organized ball. What’s more, she was later described as a “militant suffragette.” She brought an exciting new element into owners’ meetings, and not simply with her colorful attire. The press soon dubbed the attractive 32-year-old mother of two, “Lady Bee.”

Helene Britton was no stranger to baseball; she grew up in a baseball family. As a youngster, she played ball, learned to keep score, and even served as a mascot for the Cleveland Spiders, another team that her father and uncle owned.

Starting that spring of 1911, the new owner of the Cardinals built up Ladies’ Day before it was popular. She made a ban on booze at the ballpark permanent. She also experienced something her father and uncle had not known for more than a decade: a season that was a box office and financial success. The Cardinals flirted with first place for three months before fading to fifth. Attendance rose to 447,000 that year, more than 120,000 over the previous year and by far the most the team ever drew to that point.

HER SIGNATURE MOVE

The Cardinals returned to their losing ways in 1912, finishing in sixth place with a 63-90 record. Shortly after the season’s end, Lady Bee exercised the ultimate prerogative of ownership when she fired the team’s colorful and temperamental manager, Roger Bresnahan. He had difficulty accepting a female boss from the start and didn’t take kindly to her baseball suggestions, which increased as the losses piled up. At the same time, the all-too-familiar financial pressures returned to the Cardinals. Attendance plummeted almost 50% from 1911, and Britton had large legal bills from settling her uncle’s estate.

Lady Bee made the surprise choice of Cardinals second baseman Miller Huggins as the team’s new skipper. Perhaps it was not a total surprise, since she had vetoed a trade Bresnahan had put together earlier that year, one that would have sent Huggins to Cincinnati.

The disappointing 1912 season was followed by a disastrous one in 1913 (51-99). Huggins’ first season as a manager was almost his last. Rumors swirled about his imminent firing or resignation. The losses led to the almost inevitable dissension that simmers during a disappointing campaign. Somehow Huggins hung in there, and the Brittons (Helene and her husband, Schuyler) stuck with him.

HIS SIGNATURE MOVE

“I simply had to set my house in order, so as to get real cooperation. The change in the spirit and morale of the team was immediately noticeable.” – Miller Huggins, syndicated column, February 27, 1924

Miller Huggins was talking about his first big trade as manager, a multi-player deal that sent the Cardinals’ one bona fide star, first baseman Ed Konetchy, to Pittsburgh in December 1913. Most baseball observers felt that the Pirates had gotten the better of the deal. For the Cards’ skipper, it was a trade that had to be made—to establish himself as the team’s leader and to rid the squad of an imposing center of unrest. The unhappy Konetchy increasingly had felt that he, not Huggins, should be the skipper.

THE OTHER 1914 WAR

“The Feds are welcomed in St. Louis because the fans have grown tired of tail-end baseball.” – Sid Keener, St. Louis Times, March 31, 1914

Baseball in 1914 dawned with three teams in St. Louis: the Cardinals, the American League’s Browns, and the Terriers of the upstart Federal League. For the first time since the rise of the American League in 1901-1902, players had an alternative to playing for the team that controlled them for their entire career, under what was known as the “reserve clause.” The Federal League was actively raiding the established leagues for players, and salaries skyrocketed.

To make the Terriers more appealing to St. Louis fans, their cantankerous owner, Phil Ball, appointed legendary Chicago Cubs’ pitcher Mordecai “Three Finger” Brown as their player-manager. Ironically, Brown had been a St. Louis Cardinal in his rookie 1903 season. The Cards then traded him away. Brown went on to greatness, anchoring the pitching staff of the great Chicago Cubs of 1906 to 1910.

This was a grand time to be a ballplayer or a fan. Both had choices. Yet it was a devastating time to be an owner of an established club like the Cardinals. They began losing personnel and money. Sid Keener estimated season-to-date attendance figures in the May 9 St. Louis Times:

• Cardinals: 24,200 fans in 11 games
• Browns: 37,800 fans in 12 games
• Terriers: 55,900 fans in 16 games
  (inc. about 20,000 on opening day)

Keener noted that, if anything, he was erring on the high side. With the big salaries and low gate receipts, he concluded, “There’s a crash coming surely.”

Steal players, the Feds [the new league] did. The war hit home when two of the Cards’ starting outfielders, “Rebel” Oakes and Steve Evans, jumped to the new league for significantly higher salaries than they had before. The Cards’ third starting outfielder, Lee Magee, was tempted by a huge Federal League contract, but stayed put, at least for now. “I’m ready to play my entire career with the Cardinals…I’m a man of my word,” he told the St. Louis Times on March 23. (Magee did jump to the Feds the following year and was later banned from organized baseball for betting against his team and “fixing” games. The man who was once called “the coming Ty Cobb of the National League” never realized that potential.)

MORE LOSING WAYS

The St. Louis Browns had made serious runs at the American League pennant in 1902 and 1908, yet they too had many losing seasons. In the past five years (1909-1913), they had never finished higher than seventh place, averaging 100 losses a year. They had a new manager, the creative and college-bred Branch Rickey. Browns owner Robert Hedges had hired Rickey, the former University of Michigan baseball coach, as a scout and executive. Rickey was to help set up a farm system of minor league teams. When Browns manager George Stovall spat tobacco juice on an umpire during a 1913 dispute, he was relieved of his job, and Rickey took over as manager late that season. When war with the Federal League broke out, plans for the farm system were shelved.

AN INAUSPICIOUS START

The Cardinals had experienced 12 years of futility, posting only one winning season (75-74 in 1911) and finishing an average of more than 40 games out of first place. They had not recovered from the 1902 birth of the AL’s Browns, who had stocked their team by signing almost all of the Cards’ top players in 1901.

The Cards picked up in 1914 where they left off in 1913, losing 12 of their first 19 games. Local papers were full of stories that pitching great Christy Mathewson (Matty) would soon take over as manager of the Cardinals. All Miller Huggins could do was ignore the stories. All he could do was his job.

In early May, Huggins also had to deal with stories of a row with his top pitcher, Slim Sallee. He had won 50 games for the team since 1911. The slender, funloving southpaw, in his seventh year with St. Louis, had an up-and-down relationship with Huggins. In 1913, he won almost 40% of the Cards’ victories (19 of 51). In May 1914, the team gave him a $500 raise to cure his unhappiness.

And then…the Cardinals started winning. Huggins had spoken of “the perfection of teamwork” that he needed on a team with no stars. On May 19, the team reached .500 (15-15). They had a pitching triumvirate that was chalking up wins and turning heads.

First, there was Slim Sallee. After he hurled a shutout in late June, the Post-Dispatch was moved to write, “To watch Sallee when he’s right and ambitious is to see perfection in pitching.” Then there was young spitballer Bill Doak, who had entered the season with only two career wins. When he beat Grover Alexander and the Phillies on May 16, 1-0, the quiet hurler was quickly gaining recognition. He would complete a spectacular first full season, with a league-leading 1.72 earned run average and two wins over Mathewson. The third member of that rotation was Pol Perritt. Huggins had spent countless hours working with “Polly,” as he called one of his favorites.

The team would hardly miss pitcher Bob Harmon, who had earned 68 victories for the Cardinals from 1909 to 1913. He too went to Pittsburgh in the Konetchy deal. In the short span of one week at the end of June, the Cardinals hurled three shutouts, two by Doak and the 1-0 gem by Sallee over Harmon.

It was his position players whom Huggins had to juggle and where he really had to scramble. All season long, he explored combinations, switched men around, and nurtured talent. Besides the loss of two outfielders to the Feds, shortstop Arnold Hauser was gone, victim of a nervous breakdown. And if Doak and Perritt weren’t household names, what about Miller and Wilson?

“Jack Miller is the most valuable player in the National League today. He isn’t spectacular. But he’s a fighter; he’s hustling every inning of the game…He doesn’t crave the spotlight… just wants to win.” – Sid Keener, St. Louis Times August 1, 1914

The key man on the “no-name” Cardinals was an infielder by the name of John “Dots” Miller. He came to St. Louis in the Konetchy trade with Pittsburgh, where he was the double-play partner of the great Honus Wagner. Miller quickly became the anchor of the Cards’ infield and leader of the team, splitting his time between first base (91 games) and shortstop (60 games).

“Jack is as modest as a schoolgirl,” wrote The Sporting News on August 13, “…without ambition other than to win games.” Miller Huggins recognized Miller’s value when he made Dots the centerpiece of the trade. Three months into the season, on July 18, the Cards skipper pointedly told the St. Louis Times, “I wouldn’t trade Jack Miller for any player in baseball today.” He would hit .290 for St. Louis that year. The only other regulars to hit above .265 were catcher Ivey Wingo, at .300, and outfielder Lee Magee, at .284.

“THE CHIEF” OF TRIPLES

Owen Wilson was another player who came to St. Louis in the big trade. Known as “the Chief,” he helped plug the holes in the outfield. Best known for hitting 36 triples in 1912 (still by far the all-time single-season record), in 1914 he appeared in 154 games, hit 259, and covered a lot of ground in the field. Both Miller and Wilson knew something about winning. They were members of the 1909 World Champion Pittsburgh Pirates.

Manager Huggins had another steady infielder he could count on. The 36-year-old veteran would lead the league in walks for the fourth time and steal 32 bases in 1914. His name? Miller Huggins.

The Cardinals also had two talented young catchers. One was 23-year-old Ivey Wingo, in his third full season with the team. The other was a 20-year-old who led National League backstops in fielding percentage in his first full season, Frank “Pancho” Snyder. Another young National League catcher, Hank Severeid, would soon join the St. Louis Browns. All three would have long careers, and remarkably, each would catch more than 1,200 big-league games (1,233, 1,247, and 1,225 games, respectively; ages at the start of the 1914 season).

In early July, the Cardinals beat the powerful New York Giants three straight times, highlighted by Doak’s win over Matty and a Perritt shutout. The New Yorkers, National League champions the last three years (by an average margin of 10 games), saw their lead over the Chicago Cubs sliced to just 21⁄2 games. The Cardinals were in heady territory, third place, and only four games out.

The Boston Braves were dead last with a 30-41 mark, an improvement over their July 4 record of 2640. A few days later, after they twice beat St. Louis, Braves secretary Herman Nickerson made a puzzling statement to the Post-Dispatch. “We do not consider ourselves extremely out of the pennant hunt,” he said. On July 30, the Cardinals came to Boston. In a thrilling series, the Braves swept St. Louis four straight times, by the scores of 2-1, 2-0, 4-3, and 1-0. Much of the series was played in a steady rain, and the Cardinals lost twice in the ninth inning and once in the 10th. The Braves had moved above .500 (46-45) and were for real. They had gone 20-5 since July 4.

Still the Cardinals persisted. Despite a rash of injuries, they split a four-game set in New York’s Polo Grounds. On August 10, the Giants’ arrogant manager, John McGraw, proclaimed, “I have no doubt but that my club will win the pennant. I never had any particular fear of the Cardinals.”

The next day Bill Doak once again bested Christy Mathewson. The Braves kept winning. Through August 17 won 30 of their last 36 games, and Sid Keener wrote of their manager, “George Stallings is such a phenomenal leader because he gets every ounce of playing ability out of each man.” (St. Louis Times, August 18, 1914.)

Then, while the Giants were losing eight of nine games, St. Louis won seven of eight. When the Giants came to St. Louis on August 24, the Cardinals (as well as the Braves, who were due in St. Louis in a few days) had momentum in a crowded four-team pennant race. The showdown was at hand.

Just a few days earlier, the Federal League’s St. Louis Terriers were in the news with a major change. They had been floundering all year and, with the team mired in seventh place, Phil Ball replaced Mordecai Brown as manager with another legend, Fielder Jones. Jones had been the skipper of the “Hitless Wonders,” the 1906 World Champion Chicago White Sox. Jones had been away from managing for a few years and was lured back by a big challenge and even bigger contract (reported as $30,000 for three years). The Globe-Democrat had written of Brown, “He is too much of a good fellow to be a strict disciplinarian.” Baseball Magazine once described Jones as “cool, calm, calculating, mercilessly sarcastic.” Change indeed.

For two days heavy rains postponed the games, and that Cardinal momentum was slowed. New York’s weary pitching staff got some much needed rest. Finally, on August 26, the weather broke, and the Cards and Giants would play a doubleheader. That Wednesday morning, the standings of the top four National League teams looked like this:

United Railways was unprepared for the crowds. Streetcars were filled beyond capacity, and people waited for hours. Some gave up and returned home, while many walked to the ballpark. Two thousand automobiles ringed Robison Field. There had been talk of moving the game to the Browns’ Sportsman’s Park, but Lady Bee quashed that idea: “The bleacher boys have always been our friends, and we cannot go back on ’em now. Robison Field has the largest bleacher capacity of any ball yard in the business.” (The Republic, St. Louis, August 27, 1914.)

St. Louis had not seen a baseball crowd like this since a 1909 Spring Series game (Cards vs. Browns) and an early September 1908 game, when Wild Bill Donovan and the Tigers beat Rube Waddell and the Browns. The Browns had crept to within a half game of the Tigers and first place the day before.

Today Spittin’ Bill Doak took to the mound for the Cardinals, against Rube Marquard, who had 73 wins for the Giants the past three seasons. Miller Huggins led off the game with a walk and scored all the way from second base on a wild pitch. The ball rolled into the overflow crowd standing behind home plate. Under the ground rules for the game, Huggins was able to take the extra base. That run was all the Cards could get and would need, as they held on for the 1-0 victory.

Game two was a showdown between control artist Sallee and the mighty Mathewson. The fans swarmed onto the field during the warm-ups, and Matty had to throw over the children on the diamond. Early in the game, an enormous roar went up when an announcement was made: the Chicago Cubs had just beaten the Boston Braves, also by the score of 1-0.

The Cardinals were now in a virtual three-way tie for first place. The standings at that point in time:

What seemed like a dream in pre-season and unthinkable in early May was now a real possibility: a pennant for St. Louis.

The Giants, losers of nine of their last 10 games, were reeling. Their great pitcher Christy Mathewson then responded with one of his greatest games, a two-hit shutout in which he averaged seven pitches per inning. The Giants broke open a tight game with two runs in the eighth and went on to beat St. Louis, 4-0. The Republic gushed the next day, comparing Matty’s performance to “exquisite chiseling or priceless oil on canvass.” Offering a different perspective, the New York Times noted that Giants manager John McGraw “read the riot act to his faltering men” after game one of the doubleheader.

The very next day, August 27, the Cardinals opened a four-game series with the onrushing Braves. The wet weather returned to St. Louis, and the late innings of the first game were played in a downpour. The Cards pulled out a dramatic win in the 10th inning, to pull ahead of the Braves and within one game of the Giants.

On August 29, St. Louis dropped a doubleheader to Boston, 4-0 and 6-4. The Cardinals let the second game slip away, leading 4-2 after seven innings. What hurt almost as much as the loss was that the Braves won that game with three, seldom-used pitchers— Otto Hess, Dick Crutcher, and Paul Strand. Once again the Braves seemed to have the Cards’ number, having now beaten the Cardinals 12 of 18 times.

That was the beginning of seven straight losses for the Cardinals. On Friday, September 4, they were six games out of first place and no longer a factor in the pennant race. The team from Boston, which was becoming known as the Miracle Braves, simply blew past their competition. They won the National League pennant by 10½ games over the stunned New York Giants. St. Louis was just another 2 1⁄2 games back, in third place. The Braves went on to a shocking four-game sweep of the heavily favored Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series.

There was no pennant in St. Louis in 1914, yet the underdog Cardinals had caught the fancy of the baseball world, rising from their last-place National Legue finish in 1913. Most of all, they had captured the heart of St. Louis, bringing thrills to a city hungry for a winner. Miller Huggins and his team, with a limited budget and no big stars, had led that “perfection of teamwork” to remarkable heights.

STEVE STEINBERG is a baseball historian of the early 20th century. His book Baseball in St. Louis, 1900-1925 was published by Arcadia in summer 2004. He recently completed The Genius of Hug, a revealing book about Hall of Fame Cardinals and Yankees manager Miller Huggins. He lives in Seattle with his wife and three children.

Before entering upon my remarks, I would like to thank the Society for American Baseball Research for hosting this conference, the Cleveland Indians for sponsoring it, this year’s five Seymour Medal nominees for making it necessary (Yogi, can ya hear me?), and Dorothy Seymour Mills and her late husband, Dr. Harold Seymour, for inspiring it; their example encouraged so many of us to hunt for gold in baseball’s attic. Even those who may only have found brass came away with a better understanding of our game and, just maybe, the nation whose pastime it is. Geoffrey C. Ward, with whom I worked happily on Ken Burns’s 1994 documentary Baseball, said recently,

Working on the film and book taught me [that]… while most Americans care too little about their history, the baseball community is different. The real meaning of all those apparently impenetrable stats is that the past matters. Without them no player would know where he stood, no fan could measure his or her heroes against those who have gone before. That fact alone should endear the game to any historian.

That it had not, until Dr. Seymour’s 1956 dissertation at Cornell,1 is a fact that may seem puzzling to attendees of this conference. Because the academy still looks askance at baseball history as a merely descriptive exercise, despite a proliferation of theses and credit courses related to the game, we have an opportunity at this conference to ask the worthwhile question that forms our presentation theme: “How did we come to understand baseball history?”

This formulation is parallel but not identical with other questions that will concern us this afternoon: “What is baseball history good for?” “How has baseball history been practiced? And “How might it be better going forward?”

As to the first—“What is baseball history good for?”—some in the audience might reply with umbrage that history, like art, is for its own sake and must serve neither master nor cause; that while it offers tools for discovery, it is itself imperiled when held up to a standard of utility. This is a position with which I will agree…and disagree…if I may be permitted to make a perhaps old-fashioned distinction between History and The Past, the former being rooted in what happened, the latter in what some annalist thought might be useful to the game or even to the nation. So much of what today passes muster as history was created as propaganda or simple cheerleading, from the fibs of Henry Chadwick and Albert Spalding,2 to the pinning of Jim Creighton’s death on cricket rather than baseball, to the heart-rending tale of the Babe and little Johnny Sylvester. This is the sort of history that Henry Ford described in 1916 as bunk. What he actually said was even more incendiary: “History is more or less bunk. It’s tradition. We don’t want tradition. We want to live in the present, and the only history that is worth a tinker’s damn is the history that we make today.”3 George Santayana, take that!

Another description of The Past might be “what binds and sustains,” or mythology. History is what we at this gathering practice, but what we meet, out in the world, sometimes with astonishing rapidity, is this notion of The Past, in the form of that word heavy with nothing but trouble: heritage. At its best, acknowledging a common heritage allows us to form communities and maintain vital traditions, Henry Ford notwithstanding. At its worst, it abuses real history for chauvinistic gain. In a personal example, within hours of the May 2004 press conference in which I revealed that baseball was played by that name in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, in 1791, well-meaning but benighted locals were celebrating their city’s usurpation of Cooperstown as the game’s Garden of Eden.4 As David Lowenthal notes in Possessed by the Past, history

differs from heritage not, as people generally supposed, in telling the truth, but in trying to do so despite being aware that truth is a chameleon and its chroniclers fallible beings. The most crucial distinction is that truth in heritage commits us to some present creed [or need]; truth in history is a flawed effort to understand the past on its own terms.”5

In the hands of nearly all its practitioners today, baseball history is a moated activity, in which “what happened” is all that matters. Only occasionally will the drawbridge drop down to connect with not only “what it might be good for” but also with what it might mean in some larger analytical or social context. Finding Walter Johnson’s missing strikeout from 1913; revoking Roger Maris’s bogus RBI in 1961; getting Ty Cobb’s hit totals and batting average right once and for all—these are not means to an end but ends in themselves. I attest to having spent many years in such pursuits: getting things right simply because with effort one could, and because “cleaning up” seemed morally superior to “going along,” accepting what was wrong. Besides, it was fun to debunk the notion, held for generations, that the pitching distance had retreated ten and a half feet in 1893 when it had only moved back five. Or to deny that the width of home plate had been expanded from 12 inches to 17 inches when it became a pentagonal shape, or to affirm neither Abner Doubleday nor Alexander Cartwright had much if anything to do with inventing baseball. It was pleasant to accumulate and sort baseball facts, like some dotty lepidopterist, and it was sometimes useful to others if we published our research, no matter how trivial and disconnected it might be from larger themes in American life, from analysis, from interpretation.

Historian Kenneth Stampp, author of The Peculiar Institution: Slavery in the Ante-Bellum South (1956), once said of a colleague in an interview:

Carl [Bridenbaugh] was very sensitive about his brand of social history. It was rather old-fashioned social history. Somebody once called it pots-and-pans social history. He probably felt that emerging American intellectual history was in some way a negative commentary on his kind of history.6

By “pots and pans” Stampp explained,

he meant the kind of social history where you talk about things like baseball and recreation—it was not analytical social history.…It was descriptive… and I suppose some people thought that Bridenbaugh’s history was rather old-fashioned, some mod social historians. Every generation has [its new approach].7

Myth and mythmaking are far more useful to the public understanding than mere findings of fact. And from the perspective of the historian of ideas and attitudes, what a man believes to be true, or purports to be true (including willful lies) may reveal more about himself and his era than the truth itself. So in trying get the facts straight about what really happened in baseball (Cartwright, Doubleday, or who?) or to slow the rush to judgment (Pittsfield), baseball’s historians may feel that they are bailing against the tide with a teacup. Who cares about their pursuit of truth? Give us a simple story, the people cry.

However the history of baseball begins, the history of baseball history begins for most of us with Henry Chadwick. He recalled his first experience of playing baseball as taking some hard hits in the ribs in 18488—if true, his remark reveals that the Knickerbocker rules did not sweep aside all that had gone before—and he dated to 1856 his realization that this game might become to America what cricket was to England. Today most of us think of Father Chadwick cavorting at the Elysian Fields with the Knickerbockers, pausing only to invent the scoring system and the box score or to cluck about the pernicious influence of gamblers and rotters. But, as Will Rankin would point out in the first years of the next century, Chadwick had for decades, while elevating the game to the status of national metaphor, elevated himself as well, campaigning on a platform of le jeu c’est moi. He was not baseball’s first reporter—that distinction goes to the little-known William H. Bray, like Chadwick an Englishman who covered baseball and cricket for the Clipper from early 1854 to May 1858 (Chadwick succeeded him on both beats and never threw him a nod afterward). Isolated game accounts had been penned in 1853 by William Cauldwell of the Mercury and Frank Queen of the Clipper, who with William Trotter Porter of Spirit of the Times may be said to have been baseball’s pioneer promoters. Credit for the shorthand scoring system belongs not to Chadwick but to Michael J. Kelly of the Herald. The box score—beyond the recording of outs and runs—may be his invention as well, but cricket had supplied the model.

Chadwick had the good fortune to team up with Irwin P. Beadle and his Dime publication series, penning the Base-Ball Guide for 1860 on up to 1881. He also had the good fortune to outlive his contemporary sporting scribes. Today we call him a historian— along with Charles Peverelly, Jacob Morse, Al Spink, Francis Richter, and Tim Murnane—but in his own day he and they were journalists, sometimes given to gauzy reminiscences or club-supplied copy when deadlines neared and space yawned. These writers possess the advantage of having been witnesses to events that interest us today, but that ought not to accord their writing blanket credence. As Dixon Wecter wrote some 50 years ago:

A readable historian of his own times will be accepted as the foremost witness par excellence, generation after generation. But by way of compensation, the historian who arrives on the scene long afterwards enjoys advantages too. Though a million details, important and unimportant, will be lost for lack of recording or proper preservation, the disclosure of diaries and secret archives, the fitting together of broken pieces from the mosaic, the settling of controversial dust and cooling of old feuds, and the broad perspective down the avenues of time, all make it possible for him to know an era in its grand design better than most men who lived through it.10

Baseball’s tradition of mixing—and confusing— contemporary journalism with ex post facto history continued into the mid-20th century, with working-press types from Fred Lieb and Frank Menke to Tom Meany and Lee Allen working both sides of the street. In recent years we have labeled some outstanding baseball journalists and statisticians as historians—I won’t mention names so as not to give offense—but then again the term “baseball historian” is an odd one, a diminutive on the order of Billy Joel’s “real-estate novelist.” Even those who have made great contributions to the appreciation of baseball’s history—I think of Larry Ritter and Donald Honig—are not themselves historians of the game in its entirety, as Jules Tygiel or Charles Alexander or David Voigt or Ben Rader are. And then there are the “boutique baseball historians”—Milwaukee Brewers historian, Ty Cobb historian, and so on—who are what used to be called experts, or worse. At the dawn of the last century, baseball’s origins were already too old to be remembered, so stories were devised to rationalize what was otherwise baffling.

Baseball history then was in the hands of folklorists, not historians. Members of the Mills Commission, lacking the mundane primary documents that typically aid historians of everyday life in the reconstruction of events and the tenor of the times, looked to octogenarian reminiscences of events witnessed long ago if at all; the most celebrated of these implanted memories was, of course, that of Abner Graves. Thus was the history of baseball supplied with a starting point, a crucial requirement for being viewed seriously. (A similar sense of necessity led to the creation of baseball’s statistical record and its rapid and vertiginous climb to its current ascendancy.)

A century later we find ourselves still in the realm of eyewitnesses, as history is a term now accorded to events very recently transpired, and today’s scribes may accord more importance to documents. Baseball’s historians have largely—and thankfully— been unmoved by post-structuralist, post-Marxist, and post-Freudian siren songs, content to stay in the kitchen with the pots and pans of descriptive history, oblivious to the catcalls of political and intellectual historians. The respectable cousin of pots ’n’ pans, the “bottom up” (i.e., not “top down”) approach to history, based its claim to legitimacy, and in some measure hipness, on quantification and purported social relevance. Baseball-player studies certainly could be described as coming up from the bottom, but the continued emphasis was on story—what happened—and biography—by whom.

There is some evidence of late, however, that baseball history may finally run aground in this generation’s perfect storm of race, class, and gender, so perilous to frail, tentative, hopeful insight. Styles blow through the corridors of history no less than on Seventh Avenue; if we can wait it out, this too shall pass.

Where the American Studies movement has long provided a big tent to those who sought to describe American life as it was lived by those outside the political, military, and intellectual elites, it has also come under fire from the academy for its perceived lack of social relevance and scholarly rigor, if not outright triviality (I exclude statistically based studies, which get a pass on the rigor test but not when it comes to relevance). As Daniel Boorstin and Russel Nye, household gods of mine, demonstrated forty and fifty years ago,11 a fella could learn a thing or two about America through its media, its advertising, and its patterns of consumption. The perspectives of Larry Ritter and Dr. Seymour were similarly revelations to many of us in this room. And in other approaches to the game, in the 1970s Roger Angell, Bob Creamer, Roger Kahn, and Jim Bouton proved that baseball is the Trojan horse by which we come to understand ourselves. Knock on the door and say, “I’ve got history for you,” and that door does not budge. Offer baseball and the door swings open wide; once inside, a little history and useful knowledge may be imparted.

Baseball history is not so different from other forms, in the end. Solid research and command of the evidence underlie all of it. Dixon Wecter, not yet a household god but new in my experience and highly congenial in his approach—wrote:

“Industry minus art, accumulation lacking charm, data without digestion—such shortcomings explain this popular allergy against American history as written… . The re-creation of a dominant personality, or daily life of an era, or the power generated by its ideas, calls for exact knowledge fired by historical imagination… . If the author’s saturation in his subject is so real that he develops affections and dislikes, his writing is sure to be more warm and vigorous than if he strikes the attitude of a biologist dissecting a frog.12

My friend and protoball pioneer Larry McCray, with his taxonomic bent, likes to say that he is a tree person and I am a forest person, and sometimes we just cannot see the other, cannot grasp one another’s perspective. Wecter clearly believes that a first-rate historian must be a forest person—it is the leap of imagination that makes him a big leaguer—but he has to have a lot of little tree in him too (echoing another catcher there, Roy Campanella).

It seems to me that what is lacking in baseball history is its last five letters. Even more than in general American historical writing, because it is the toy shop of history departments (the baseball beat at a newspaper used to be called the toy department), baseball must be pushed by event, driven by character, and have a freight-train narrative drive. As with a novel, there must be a truth of fact and a truth of feeling, illuminated by sensibility. In short, we may not, in the name of accuracy, neglect the speculative and aesthetic possibilities in baseball history. Issuedriven baseball history is simply baseball history unread.

Rather than depersonalize the writing of history, we should fess up to its intrinsically subjective element—the historian—and make way for passion, for intimations of sentiment if not sentimentality—itself a lesser crime, it seems me now, than before the current age of irony. Tell us what it felt like to be alive then, in that distant age. Insert yourself and your tale of the hunt into the story. There may be no “I” in “team”—nor in “research,” nor in “SABR”—but there is one in “history”…and there ought to be one in the writing of it.

Sources

1. Seymour, Harold. The Rise of Major League Baseball to 1891. Ithica, NY: Cornell University, 1956, 659.
2. For more on this, see “Four Fathers of Baseball,” a speech the author delivered at the Smithsonian Institution on July 14, 2005, at http://thornpricks.blogspot.com/2005/07/four-fathers-of-baseball.html.
3. Interview in Chicago Tribune, May 25, 1916
4. For more on this subject, see the author’s “1791 and All That: Baseball and the Berkshires” in BASE Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, I, No. 1, Spring 2007, pp. 119-126.
5. Lowenthal, Possessed by the Past: The Heritage Crusade and the Spoils of History. New York: Free Press, 1996, 119.
6. “Historian of Slavery, the Civil War, and Reconstruction, University of California, Berkeley, 1946-1983: Kenneth Stampp,” with an Introduction by John G. Sproat. Interviews conducted by Ann Lage in 1996, p. 162. http://content.cdlib.org/xtf/view?docId=kt258001zq&doc.view=frames& chunk.id=d0e7572&toc.id=d0e7119&brand=oac
7. Ibid, p. 163.
8. From Henry Chadwick, The Game of Base Ball (New York: Munro, 1868), 9-10: “About twenty odd years ago [i.e., 1848] I used to frequently visit Hoboken with base ball parties, and, on these occasions, formed one of the contesting sides; and I remember getting some hard hits in the ribs, occasionally, from an accurately thrown ball. Some years afterwards the rule of throwing the ball at the player was superseded by that requiring it to be thrown to the base player, and this was the first step towards our now National game.”
9. Rankled by Rankin’s challenges to his recollection and veracity in several Sporting News articles in 1904-5, Chadwick wrote to his friend “Joe” (Vila?) in April 1907: “Reference will show you that I knew of base ball in the sixties when—according to ‘mine enemy’—I knew nothing about any game but Although in November 1848 I played as short stop in a field adjoining the old Knickerbocker grounds at Hoboken.” Per photocopy in the Giamatti Center “Origins” file.
10. Wecter, Dixon. “History and How to Write It,” American Heritage, Vol. 8, Issue 5, Aug. 1957, p. 87.
11. Among many notable works, I take pains to cite Daniel Boorstin’s The Image: A Guide to Pseudo-Events in America (originally published by Athenaeum Press in 1962 as The Image or What Happened to the American Dream) and Nye’s The Unembarrassed Muse: The Popular Arts in America (New York Dial Press, 1970).
12. Wecter, op. cit., pp. 25-26.

Well before the Great Migration of the early 20th century served as a catalyst for the formation of significant African American communities in Northern cities, giving rise to a lively black press, ads for games played by “colored” teams appeared in the mainstream dailies. Contests featuring the Cuban Giants, for example, were advertised in the New York Times as early as 1886. In plain, straight-forward language, one such ad reads, “BASEBALL. POLO GROUNDS TO-DAY. Colored Championship match. CUBAN GIANTS VS. GORHAMS, Game 4 P.M. Admission, 25 cents.”1

According to Sol White, black baseball’s first historian and its first hagiographer, “the ‘Cuban Giants’ were heralded everywhere as marvels of the baseball world. They were not looked upon by the public as freaks, but they were classed as men of talent.”2

White’s statement is belied, however subtly, by this ad’s placement in the newspaper. Appearing in small type at the bottom of a column of advertising under the heading “Amusements,” it is the sole baseball announcement among ads for “Imre Kiralfy’s latest, greatest, and supreme triumph, NERO; OR THE FALL OF ROME,” complete with 2,000 performers and a Terpsichorean corps of 1,000 on the very largest stage of all time, and “Pain’s ‘1666’ GREAT FIRE OF LONDON,” reenacted at Manhattan Beach on Coney Island. An ad in the same column for “THE BIGGEST SHOW ON EARTH! America’s Most Mighty Exhibition. BUFFALO BILL’S WILD WEST,” is even more telling.3 Capitalizing on the popular taste for reenactments evident here, Buffalo Bill’s Wild West show featured an Indian attack on the Deadwood Stage and a tableau vivant of Custer’s Last Stand, among other wonders.4

The “Colored Championship” match between the Cuban Giants and the Gorhams, taken in the context of its companions in the Amusements column, most particularly the Wild West show, may be seen in quite a different light. Just as Cody’s spectacular offered New Yorkers a glimpse into the exotic world of cowboys and indians, essentially creating the popular American notion of the West, the Cuban Giants’ appearance at the Polo Grounds presented spectators with the exotic spectacle of ballplayers of color engaged in an actual championship game. In fact, close scrutiny of the ad suggests that, contrary to White’s assertion, embedded in the name “Cuban Giants,” is the prospect of a freak show of sorts.

As if to offer an explanation, quoting a mention of the team in The Sporting Life, a writer for the New York Sun noted that the Cuban Giants were, in fact, “neither Giants nor Cubans, but thick-set and brawny colored men.”5 Certainly, baseball enthusiasts, of whom there was no shortage in New York, would have recognized the name Giants as referring to the regular tenants of the Polo Grounds, and the Cuban Giants as an African American club of some merit. This ad, however, appears neither on a sports page nor in the nascent sporting press. Baseball enthusiasts— cranks—are not its primary target. Proximity to the ad for Buffalo Bill Cody’s enterprise, not to mention those for the spectacles of Nero’s fiddling and London’s conflagration, seems to suggest that, for at least some of the Times’ overwhelmingly Caucasian readers, the Cuban Giants were, at best, exotic curiosities—thick set, brawny colored men. At worst, they were freaks.

One of the earliest forms of printed advertising is the trade card. Generally associated with tobacco and candy, baseball trade cards were also distributed as souvenirs to commemorate specific events. While trade cards featuring African American players and teams, produced prior to the desegregation of the major leagues, were certainly uncommon, they were not completely unknown. A rare example of such a card features the 1897 Fence Page Giants, an African American club formed by two players who, contrary to convention, had played in Organized Baseball with otherwise white or integrated teams, Bud Fowler and Grant “Home Run” Johnson, in conjunction with two white businessmen, to advertise the Page Woven Wire Fence Company of rural Adrian, Michigan, and Monarch Bicycles. The Page Fence Company, notes Jerry Malloy,

was not unfamiliar with inventive promotional techniques. As a permanent demonstration of the capacity of its product to contain livestock, the company maintained a park in town stocked with various animals corralled by its woven wire fencing. This menagerie was transported by rail to nearby country and state fairs with Page Fence cages, thus displaying the strength and versatility of the company’s line of goods.6

The team, dressed in their natty black uniforms emblazoned in large white letters with the words “Page Fence Giants,” are pictured on the front of the card, along with their white manager, identified as A. S. Parsons. Printed on the reverse side is an ad for the company, reading, “Play Ball! Play Ball! Make Fence!!! Whatever your hands find to do, do it with all your might.” Clearly, the language of the trade card, which would have been distributed to fans lured to games by the appearance of the luxurious private railway carriage in which the team traveled, as well as by the players themselves, who, after disembarking, paraded through town on their Monarch bicycles,7 equates ball playing with building fences.

According to Sol White, the notion that the team should be transported from town to town by a private train bearing the name Page Fence, affording the players the certainty of comfortable lodging in Jim Crow America, was the brainchild of Johnson and Fowler.8 As such, it served as a sort of protective enclosure for the players on the road. At the same time, it also served to keep them at a safe distance from the white people for whom they played, functioning as their own Page Fence. In this regard it bears a fairly close, though perhaps uncomfortable, resemblance to the fence separating the company’s traveling menagerie that traveled the same roads to the same towns as the team separated from fairgoers. Coupled with the private railway carriage, this trade card, and the very promotional nature of the team itself seem to suggest to white spectators that colored ballplayers, while entertaining to watch, are best kept at a comfortable distance, separated from spectators by a sturdy fence, be it real or implied.

With his Official Guide: The History of Colored Base Ball, Sol White did more than provide a window into a past populated by teams like the Page Fence and Cuban Giants; he also provided 14 pages of baseball-related advertising. The Guide’s ad copy differs substantially from newspaper advertising for the Cuban Giants and Page Fence’s promotional baseball machine, both of which targeted predominantly Caucasian consumers. That White’s Guide, originally published in 1907 on the cusp of the Great Migration, is aimed at African Americans is borne out in its advertising.

Some businesses, like John W. Connor’s Royal Cafe and Palm Gardens in Brooklyn, make it clear in their ads that they are black-owned. The Royal Café ad does so by specifying that the establishment serves as headquarters for the Royal Giants, owned and managed, not so coincidentally, by John W. Connor. On the facing page, Connor is pictured as a dignified, middle-aged African American with an avuncular smile.9 Even more direct is an ad for “The Roadside,” whose bewhiskered African American proprietor is pictured prominently, illustrating the minimalist copy, limited to the name and address of the establishment almost as if to say, “the only other thing you need to know about the Roadside is that it is black-owned.”10

A full-page ad for the Philadelphia Tribune, billed as “Our Only Colored Daily Paper,” also features a photograph of an African American man, city editor, G. Grant Williams. Not only does this ad target potential African American readers, using the pronoun “our” to denote a connection between the publisher, the editorial staff, and black baseball fans perusing White’s Guide, but also other businesses. With a small line of type at the bottom of the page, the Tribune lays claim to the role of “the best Medium for advertising when you want to reach the people.”11 And who are the people? They are members of the same community at which White’s Guide is aimed, baseball fans of color.

But not all the advertising in White’s Guide pitches black-owned businesses. One large ad sings the praises of promoters Schlichter and Strong, booking agents for the Philadelphia Giants, who call their outfit “the premier attraction among colored teams” whose “presence is eagerly looked for in all sections of the country.”12 That H. Walter Schlichter should advertise in White’s book is hardly a surprise, given that he is billed on the title page as the original editor. Nor is the presence of Nat Strong’s name unusual. Strong, a promoter based in New York, controlled booking in the majority of the area’s semi-professional baseball venues. In order to play lucrative Sunday games in the better semi-pro parks, it was necessary to deal with white booking agents like Strong.13 Even though some teams, like the Royal Giants, may have been black-owned, this ad is a reminder that African American baseball was still subject to white control, a factor which would provoke conflict and controversy at various times in its history.

The advertising in White’s Guide, even Schlichter and Strong’s ad promoting black baseball, exhibit a certain race pride, a pride that would continue to grow in African American communities in Northern cities fueled by the Great Migration. But to suggest that these ads signal a momentous advance for African Americans would be a gross overstatement. The status of African Americans, even the sophisticated Northern readers of the Philadelphia Tribune, as second-class citizens with limited possibilities, is indicated, however indirectly, in two other ads in White’s Guide. The “Headquarters for North Philadelphia Sports,” the Chauffeur’s Rest claims to be home to first-class pool parlors as well.14 While the ad suggests that its patrons are the upper crust of the sporting life—that is, boxing men, vaudevillians, gamblers, even pimps, and, presumably, sporting women15—the name says something else, that its high-class clientele are, in fact, tired chauffeurs.

Washington’s Manufactory, a dry goods emporium, advertises for sale its “High-grade Stationery, Finest Perfumes, and all kinds of Toilet Articles,” but judging by its prominent place in the ad and its type size, first and foremost among the products available at Washington’s Manufactory appear to be “Waiters Supplies.”16 Like the patrons of the Chauffeur’s Rest, Washington’s Manufactory’s target consumers are service workers, not business executives. The first-class sports that use high-grade stationery and the finest perfumes are, in reality, drivers and waiters.

As the ad in White’s Guide rightfully claims, the Philadelphia Tribune was an excellent medium to reach “the people,” especially the people who were African American residents of large cities such as its home, Philadelphia, as well as Pittsburgh, Chicago, New York, and Baltimore. Between 1900 and 1925, the percentage of the population identified as black in these cities increased as much as four-fold,17 leading to the proliferation of a whole series of race institutions, among them businesses like the saloons, hotels, and retail shops that advertised in White’s Guide, fraternal organizations, record labels, and, most notably, a lively black press, intended specifically for consumption by African Americans.18

By this time the Tribune, which commenced publication in 1884, was a major voice in the political, social, and economic life of African American Philadelphia.19 Along with the Tribune, weekly papers such as New York’s Amsterdam News and Age, the Chicago Defender, the Pittsburgh Courier, and the Baltimore Afro-American became mainstays of their communities. The rapidly expanding African American urban population also led to the growth of black baseball aimed, specifically, at a black audience. According to Lawrence Hogan:

Prior to this time, black baseball clubs played for essentially a white clientele. The rise of black enclaves in the North, however, was too important for black ball to ignore. A new generation of both black and white entrepreneurs would attempt to tap into this growing market.”20

But how, exactly, were they to do so? In addition to the most consistently cost-effective and reliable method of marketing, word of mouth, spreading information by means of an informal network of neighborhood institutions like barbershops, beauty parlors, and social clubs,21 as well as displaying game placards in store windows, on taxicabs, and streetcars,22 black baseball’s entrepreneurs relied upon the weeklies. Since African American ball clubs depended upon gate receipts for revenue,23 publicity in the weeklies was an absolute necessity.

Ed Bolden’s Hilldale Club, one of the very few African American teams to control its own diamond, Hilldale Park in Darby, Pennsylvania, advertised regularly in the Tribune. According to the team’s ledgers, the Hilldales routinely budgeted between six and nine dollars monthly during the season to promote their games in the Tribune in the early 1920s. Although this seems like a paltry sum to dedicate to newspaper advertising, it represented a significant investment for a team that operated in the red during this period.24 In order to ensure that Philadelphia residents would be able to find their way to Darby, a mill town close to the city, long home to a considerable African American population, many of the team’s newspaper ads include specific directions to the park, via the “No. 13 Car on Walnut Street.”25

The relationship between the black press and the teams was reciprocal. Teams depended upon advertising on the sports pages, as well as promotion by the editorial staff, to ensure attendance, and the papers depended on teams to provide content. Directly below a series of ads for the Hilldale Club, an announcement in the Tribune reads “Feature your Own Ball Game—Send Snappy Accounts to the Tribune as soon as the game is over.—We Boost Clean Sports.”26

As was true of the black weeklies in general, the Tribune could not afford beat reporters to cover local African American teams as the mainstream press could. This made it necessary for teams to provide their own coverage. Such coverage, however snappy, was often unreliable at best. But no matter how snappy an account may have been, the Tribune’s ad copy makes it clear that news of games tainted by gambling or other unsavory activities were not acceptable. Only “clean” games were deserving of the Tribune’s support.

By virtue of its proximity to Hilldale ads, this notice serves yet another purpose. However indirectly, it tells readers that Bolden’s team is nothing if not on the up-and-up. The connection between the Tribune, the Hilldale Club, and good sportsmanship was further reinforced by the relatively huge sign atop Hilldale Park’s scoreboard, the only ad in the park, urging fans to “Read the Philadelphia Tribune.”27

With the rapid increase in urban America’s black population came an increased demand for housing. In Baltimore, for example, this led to the expansion of the city itself, including the annexation of formerly rural areas like Catonsville, home to a small African American community.28 With expansion came real estate development. And with real estate development came its natural by-product, advertising. A large ad in the Afro American of October 29, 1920, announces the opening of a “New Colored Development, Sale of Choice Lots, McDonough Heights, Catonsville.” “Ideally situated on high, healthy ground,” reads the pitch, offering prospective purchasers the opportunity to own beautiful lots, starting at 98 dollars each, which could be financed with the “Easiest of Easy Terms.”

But this offer to own a prospective piece of the American Dream was not enough to lure Baltimore’s black residents to fairly remote Catonsville, only a streetcar ride away. No, for that a “special attraction Sunday,” and the chance to watch Piedmont Tigers take on the Catonsville Social Giants in a game of baseball, would be necessary.29 That developers of a “colored” subdivision would advertise in the pages of the Afro American, using a game between blackball clubs as bait, certainly points to the growth of a vibrant community, a community to which baseball was clearly important during this period. But it also points directly to the harsh realities of African American life in Baltimore circa 1920. There was strict segregation on the playing fields and strict segregation in the housing market.

Game announcements and other baseball-related advertising regularly appeared in the many of black weeklies throughout the 1920s, despite the fact that attendance at the games themselves declined toward the end of the decade, a casualty of worsening economic conditions.30 And baseball was not alone. Even before the crash of 1929, black-owned businesses, a source of race pride and, more important, income, failed at an unusually high rate.31 The last to be hired, black workers were the first fired. By 1932 the black urban unemployment rate stood at close to 50%. Nearly half of all African American families in Northern cities were on relief rolls by 1935.32 Once again the economic profile of black communities was reflected by the advertising related to baseball in the black weeklies.

Alongside pitches for hair straighteners, pomades, and patent medicines claiming to alleviate “male problems” on the sports pages were ads for publications like Aunt Sally’s Policy Player’s Dream Book, Stella’s Lucky Dream Book, and Number Hit Forecast and Guide, asking black baseball fans, “Want to change your luck? Release your Lucky Number at glance.”32 Specifically, each of the publications claimed to guarantee success in playing policy or the numbers, a popular form of gambling in urban America during the Depression, especially black urban America. According to Paul Oliver:

Black superstition was the subject of lucrative exploitation of charms and philters, and cheap pseudo-religious votive ornaments and accessories alike, but it was in the systematic organization of the Numbers Racket that the most relentless and deliberate exploitation took place. The policy racketeers published “Dream Books” which gave lists of numbers which were supposed to have a mystic connection with aspects of human experience, with objects natural and man-made, and with every conceivable circumstance that might occur in dreams.34

Among the dream symbols to which numbers were attached, several were, in fact, related to baseball.

Numbers lotteries gave impoverished African Americans—in this case, readers of baseball news in the black weeklies—a chance to achieve social mobility, no matter how slim. With as paltry a bet as a single penny, numbers players, who had little opportunity for economic or social advancement, due in large part to race, could hope for a payoff as high as 500-1. And pay off the numbers did, particularly for the bankers who controlled the rackets. While in Harlem the numbers were controlled by Dutch Schultz during the 1930s,35 elsewhere numbers bankers were, in fact, race men, like Abe Manley, Alex Pompez, and, most notably Pittsburgh policy kingpin, Gus Greenlee, Negro League owners all. “Black underworld figures,” writes Neil Lanctot, “long a part of the industry and seemingly impervious to Depression conditions, would provide a necessary influx of capital into the moribund enterprise” of black baseball.

As the nation’s economy improved in the late 1930s, so too did the economic circumstances of black baseball’s primary fans, urban African Americans, though more slowly than that of their white counterparts. This improvement is reflected in baseball-related advertising, particularly in the black press. A series of ads, for example, appeared in the Chicago Defender, distinguishable from the paper’s editorial content only by the fine print at the top reading “advertisement,” with the headline “Piney Woods School Offers Youth Unusual Opportunities.” “A school that is famous for its extracurricular activities,” the ad touts Piney Woods’ black baseball pedigree in this way:

Followers of the Kansas City Monarchs like to see Ivy Barnes pitch who is sometimes called a carbon copy of Satchell (sic) Paige. This year, the Homestead Grays will present to the baseball loving public three Piney Woods boys, Leroy Bass, catching; Buddy Thompson, pitching; and Luke Easterling, third base. All of those boys received training with the Piney Woods Giant Collegians who have bested some of the fastest semi-professional teams in the country, including the famous “House of David.”37

The Piney Woods Country Life School in Mississippi’s Black Belt, here offering young Chicago boys with a talent for baseball the opportunity to secure scholarships, was founded in 1909 by Lawrence C. Jones, known to his students as Professor Ed or Uncle Ed, who began his career in education teaching sharecroppers to read in a sheep shed. According to an article published in McClure’s in 1922,

at Piney Woods they learn things like these: plowing, horse shoeing, washing and ironing, sewing, cooking, basket making, carpentry; they are working with the white people and never against them.38

Baseball was also a major part of their curriculum, though more so in 1940 than in 1922.

To a great extent, this ad does more than try to attract prospective ball-playing boys to a traditional black boarding school, it uses baseball in an attempt to reverse the trend of the Great Migration, to save poor young black children from the squalor of the city by offering them an education in country life. The ad promotes the school as a sure path to the Negro Leagues, one followed by Thompson, Bass, and Easterling, but in reality, what it offers is an education in manual labor and working for white people, never against them. The ad for the Piney Woods School sends two separate messages. On one hand, it banks on race pride associated with star Negro League players to attract students. On the other, it seems to refer back to the accommodationist attitudes of Booker T. Washington, who in 1895 told African Americans to “cast down your buckets where you are,” in the segregated South.39 In this way, it expresses a conflicted attitude about race that is reflected in baseball-related advertising in general.

As America moved closer to war, more and more African Americans were attracted to urban areas by the prospect of employment in the defense industries. Increased employment meant increased disposable income, which also meant increased attendance at games and increased purchasing power. But not all baseball-related advertising during this period pitched games or products. Some baseball-related ads spoke to a more important purpose. With a drawing of a beefy ballplayer of indeterminate race and the headline, “What is SWOC’s Batting Average?” the Steel Workers Organizing Committee urged readers to vote for the SWOC in the labor board election of September 25, 1941, in a nearly full-page ad on the “Afro Sports” page of the Baltimore Afro American. It reads:

This is baseball season and everybody thinks in terms of batting averages. If you know a man’s batting average you can tell he’s a big-leaguer. If you know a team’s batting average, you can tell whether that team is going places. So it’s a fair question to ask the SWOC: What is your batting average.40

It goes on to give a series of reasons to vote the union in, each ending with the tag line, “Not a bad batting average is it?” in bold print.

Why does the SWOC use baseball language and images to promote its cause, the unionization of Bethlehem Steel’s Sparrow’s Point plant? After an extremely contentious three-year battle to unionize the plant, at which many African Americans were employed, the SWOC, an affiliate of the CIO, forced an election. Perhaps in order to fight charges that unionization was anti-American, the SWOC chose that most American of images, the baseball player in mid-stride. It is no wonder that the player bears some resemblance to Lou Gehrig, who, though no longer the Iron Horse, had come to represent not only resilience but grace under pressure.

In a very pointed way, this ad differs substantially from the majority of baseball-related advertising in the black weeklies. While the race of the player is indeterminate, the language of the ad is not. The ad claims that if you know a player’s batting average, you can tell if he’s a big leaguer. Quite apart from the spotty statistical reporting for which black weeklies were known, there is one thing that readers of the Afro American knew for sure in 1942, that the players on teams they followed were not big leaguers, no matter how gaudy their batting averages.

Rare for an ad in a black weekly in 1941, this one makes no attempt to pitch its point directly to African Americans. Instead, it tries to reach the black readership with the same ad used to appeal to white steelworkers. Although the language seems insensitive, given baseball’s color line, it is, in its own way, quite the opposite. By refusing to change its language to speak specifically to one segment of its demographic, it indirectly points toward an emerging move toward equality within the union, if not within baseball or society as a whole. Editorial support of SWOC by the Afro American as well as the fact that it was voted in overwhelmingly by workers, African American and Caucasian alike, supports this notion.

Beginning in the 1920s, a mainstay of print advertising in the mainstream media was the celebrity product endorsement. And often the celebrities in question were baseball players. This practice proliferated in the 1940s, but not in the black weeklies. Certainly Negro League baseball, then in its heyday, had its fair share of star power. But for all the Josh Gibsons, Cool Papa Bells, and Satchel Paiges, product endorsements were virtually nonexistent. Paige and Gibson, when mentioned in a game ad, might guarantee a good gate, but they were not paid to sell Camel cigarettes or Gillette razor blades to African American consumers.

As popular as these exceptionally talented players were, they could not hold a candle to the iconic black athlete of this period, boxer Joe Louis. Endorsing everything from hair pomade to local tailor shops across America, he stands out as the lone African American product endorser of note during the late ’30s and ’40s. Even before his knockout of Max Schmeling at Yankee Stadium on June 22, 1938, made him a champion to Americans, regardless of race, Louis was featured prominently in ads in the black press. So popular was he that he inspired the naming of the Brown Bomber Baking Company of New York City, by their own account, “The World’s Largest Negro Baking Company,” whose ad was illustrated with a drawing, in monumental style, of a strong black pugilist pummeling a white boxer. Brown Bomber Bakery, pitching its product with the slogan “11 cents spent for Brown Bomber gives you double value… a loaf of tempting delicious bread plus part payment of some Negro’s salary,”41 did not rely entirely on the sweet science to promote their “soft bread.”

One of the company’s most notable marketing ploys was its sponsorship of a semi-professional team, the eponymous Brown Bombers. In a way, the bakery took a page from Page Fences, using a baseball team as a living promotional tool. But while Page Fences sold enclosures, Brown Bombers sold race pride.

Oddly, bread, not hair pomade, dream books, or beer, was the one of the first beneficiaries of an endorsement by an African American ballplayer in the 1940s. Though his testimonial takes a position subordinate to a large endorsement by a bathing beauty who has clearly availed herself of one of the many skin- lightening products advertised throughout the black weeklies, praise is heaped upon Bond Bread by a proud-looking player in pinstripes, wearing the well- known interlocking NY of the lily-white New York Yankees, identified as “Walter Wright, famous ‘Brick Top’ of the Black Yankees.” It reads, “With rationing cutting down on the muscle builders we used to get in meat, I’m mighty glad to get Bond’s extra protein.”

Bond bakery, unlike Brown Bomber, was not black-owned. It did, however, advertise regularly in the New York Amsterdam News. While Bond routinely relied on the image of a happy African American homemaker to sell its products to New York’s black population here, the bakery capitalizes on the community’s enthusiasm for baseball. Unlike so many of the other baseball-related ads, however, Bond Bread did not advertise on the sports page. This ad appeared in the retail advertising section, where products were pitched almost exclusively to women. In this regard, Bond seemed to realize that African American women were a largely untapped market of baseball fans, and one that often controlled its family’s purse strings.

The dearth of product endorsements by African American baseball players in the pages of the black weeklies did not last into the 1940s. Seemingly from the very moment Jackie Robinson stepped across the major league color line, his name and image seem to appear on virtually every page. “For a treat instead of a treatment…I recommend Old Gold Cigarettes,” reads a testimonial ad by Robinson, a non-smoker, for the Brooklyn Dodgers’ radio sponsor, not just in the Amsterdam News and the New York Age, but also in black weeklies across the country. Where ads for Tuxedo Club Pomade, “the Pomade of Champions,” had once featured the profile of a black pugilist, now it sported a baseball player. And Jackie Robinson sold Bond Bread to New York City’s women, too. Appearing in the Amsterdam News in August 1947, one Bond ad relies on one of the oldest tricks in the advertising book, hearkening back to the days of the Page Fence Giants. Depicting a trade card with an image of the Dodger, the ad reads, “Your grocer will give you a pocket-size reproduction of this Jackie Robinson photograph, free for the asking.”42 The ad also features a little cartoon baker, decidedly Caucasian, saying “Take It From Jackie Folks, Homogenized Bond Bread is Really Something: It Stays Fresh Days Longer, Too!”

Jackie Robinson’s emergence as a major product endorser, coinciding with his emergence as a major leaguer, heralded a change in the connection between baseball, advertising, and race. What was once an extremely limited practice, using images of black baseball players to sell consumer goods, appealing to a marginalized demographic, became far more widespread, appealing to a much larger segment of the American buying public. In many ways, Robinson would lead the way to changes in the way in which African Americans were perceived in the media as much through his role as pitchman as through his role as ballplayer.

As other players followed Robinson from the Negro Leagues to the majors, they also followed him into the ranks of major product endorsers, often for national advertisers like Beechnut Gum, Pabst Blue Ribbon Beer, and a variety of tobacco products, in both the black weeklies and the mainstream media. Televised baseball, emerging, along with Robinson, as a force in 1947, contributed to the process, acclimating American consumers to the vision of baseball in black and white. Advertisers, while hardly color-blind, increasingly recognized the power of testimonials by black ballplayers to sell their products to a broader spectrum of potential purchasers.

The desegregation of major league baseball sounded the death knell for the organized Negro Leagues, as well as barnstorming and semi-professional African American baseball. But black baseball’s demise, and with it the demise of related advertising, was far from sudden. As the official souvenir program of the 1949 East-West Baseball Classic illustrates, Negro League baseball at its best was still popular enough to attract significant advertising dollars. With ads on virtually every page, the souvenir program attracted national advertisers like Coca-Cola, Pepsi, and Oscar Meyer, selling products associated with baseball, no matter what the race of the players and, more important, the fans might be. Longtime advertisers in the black weeklies, it is hardly surprising to see their ads in the program.

More thoroughly represented than national advertisers, however, are local, primarily black-owned Chicago-land businesses, courting African American consumers. Funeral homes, pharmacies, saloons, and segregated hotels make up the bulk of the program’s advertising copy. In this respect, the ads in the souvenir program resemble those published in Sol White’s Guide, half a century earlier. With the slogan, “For a Winning Personality,” for example, an ad for the Payne School of Modeling and Charm features a photograph of an elegant African American woman, clearly a product of the South Side school’s instruction in “Fashion Modeling, Photographic Modeling, Wardrobe Assembling, Body and Figure Control, Self Assurance, Corrective Make-up, and Hair Styling.”43

But unlike the tired chauffeurs and newly supplied waiters targeted by the advertising in White’s Guide, this ad is aimed at women. The women it targets, moreover, are not aiming for jobs which are functionally equivalent to those held by the original consumers of White’s Guide, maids, waitresses, and the like. Nor are they housewives, looking for the extra protein in Bond Bread. Rather, they are younger women considering careers in modeling, or those presumably looking to improve their prospects, seeking professional employment or simply in search of suitable young men.

Connecting athletics with ad copy, several of the ads in the program are visually and textually tied together with a theme, “From sports to business.” The enduring popularity of Joe Louis is apparent in a full-page ad for the Chicago School of Automotive Trades, Inc., with the slogan, “From the Boxing Ring to Business.” Ostensibly a profile of the heavyweight, entitled “The Influence of Sports on the Life of Joe Louis,” penned by sportswriter Wendell Smith, the copy reads, “He soared from the poverty-stricken cotton fields of Alabama to the heavyweight championship, like a shooting star zips across the azure skies.”44

Following a brief, though no less hyperbolic, synopsis of the Brown Bomber’s career, the profile tells consumers that since his retirement, “he has devoted all his time to his various enterprises and businesses. He is president of the Chicago School of Automotive Trades.” As the producers of Brown Bomber bread knew in the 1940s, Louis’s endorsement branded their product with the image of African American strength and resilience. Like Louis, the ad implies, students at the Chicago School of Automotive Trade might also ascend like a shooting star across the azure skies of success and financial security. Although its target consumer differs from that of Payne’s school by gender, its message is not entirely different. In its own way, each of these ads seems to suggest that entry into the middle class, even into the elite, is hardly out of reach.

Like Joe Louis and the beautiful woman gracing the Payne’s ad, a little hard work and proper training may be only a phone call away for the predominantly African American fans at the East-West game. And unlike the ads in White’s Guide, these speak to a rising sense of African American empowerment in a still largely segregated society, rather than representing the segregated status quo.

African American empowerment is also the unspoken message in an ad for John B. Knighten Jr. and Co., a South Side, Chicago, real estate company. It features an illustration of the nearly perfect nuclear family, consisting of a pipe-smoking father, a well-coiffed mother, perhaps a graduate of Payne’s school, and a little girl in pigtails, dreaming, via a balloon, of their slice of the American pie, in the form of what appears to be a spacious home, surrounded by ample open space. Outside the dream balloon, there is a nest resting on a branch, complete with chirping baby birds. The ad reads “Birds Have Nests! Do You Have a Home?” The only thing that distinguishes this ad from similar real estate advertising which might have been placed in the mainstream press, or in souvenir programs from a major league game, is the fact that the skin of the family in the illustration is shaded with crude lines. Its message seems to be, “You, too, African American baseball fan, can participate in the American Dream of Home Ownership.”45 With the appropriate training from the Chicago School of Automotive Trade and Payne’s, the final step toward the post World-War II American ideal is a visit to John B. Knighten Jr. and Co.

While, as the relatively large number of advertisers in the 1949 East-West game program suggests, African American baseball was still a going concern two years after Jackie Robinson made his debut in Brooklyn, that was not the case only a few years later. The 1952 East-West Game, for example, drew only 14,122 fans, as opposed to 46,871 nine years earlier.46 In a sense, black baseball ended as it began, not with organized leagues but with barnstorming teams owned by enterprising white promoters, traveling to small towns, often in the upper Midwest, playing in front of predominantly Caucasian audiences. Harkening back to the first professional African American baseball team, the latter-day Cuban Giants, owned and promoted by former Kansas City Monarchs owner Thomas Young Baird, were one such team. But the 1950s Cuban Giants, unlike their 19th-century namesake, were, in fact, Cuban.

Touring towns like Aurora, Illinois, Dubuque, Iowa, and Yankton, Nebraska, in the early 1950s, appearances by the Cuban Giants were touted in “advertorials,” promotional speech masquerading as editorial content. Long a mainstay of African American baseball reporting, Baird raised the black baseball advertorial to a high art, going as far as to pay at least one sports journalist in Texas, under the table, in order to promote an appearance by one of his teams.47 In the St. Joseph Michigan Herald Press on June 4, 1952, for example, on the same page as a one-inch-high ad, stretching across all seven columns on the bottom of the page, is an advertorial with the headline “Baseball Blends With Dancing At Ausco Park.” It reads,

President Ty Baird of the visitors has signed up three entertainers, two musicians who play an instrument called a ‘bongoe’ (sic) and a dancing comedian named Peter Sel who reportedly will imitate a waltzing penguin.48

Taking a page from his occasional business partner, Syd Pollack, the baseball impresario responsible for keeping alive the Indianapolis Clowns, Baird insisted that good baseball was simply not enough to put fans in the seats. Competing with the same increasingly popular medium that brought Jackie Robinson into American homes, television, a crisply played, interracial, multi-ethnic ball game was not enough. Much like the fans of the previous century, who were faced with the choice of whether to spend their precious entertainment dollars and leisure time on Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, Nero’s fiddling, or exotic black baseball, residents of St. Joseph were lured to Edgewater Park in its “twin city,” Benton Harbor, to see the Cuban Giants take on the team fronted by Ausco Products, Inc., a major area brake manufacturer.49

Fans were attracted not just with the promise of the slugging prowess of “Havana’s Babe Ruth,” ‘Bambino’ Berrera,50 but with penguin imitators, accompanied on that most exotic of instruments, not heretofore seen in person in the upper Midwest, the bongo. For the well-heeled readers of the Herald-Press, African Americans calling themselves Cuban would no longer be acceptable. For an audience increasingly familiar with “real” Cubans like Desi Arnaz’s alter ego, Ricky Ricardo, who made his first appearance on their television screens in 1951, only authentic Cubans would do. Despite the desegregation of the major leagues and the increasing visibility of African American baseball players in advertising, racial and, in this case, ethnic stereotyping still served as popular entertainment and promotional fodder.

Although large sections of the country, South and North alike, resisted desegregation, both formal and informal, the blurring of the color line by African American baseball players did herald changes, pitifully slow, but changes nonetheless, in the way in which race was perceived in America. The legacy of Page Fence Giants, The Chauffeur’s Rest, the SWOC, and Payne’s School of Modeling and Charm is on display in advertising today, be it in print, on television, or online. One of baseball’s ubiquitous pitchmen, Derek Jeter, may be seen as the new image of the “all-American boy,” one formerly held by the likes of the blond-haired Mickey Mantle. Most tellingly, Jeter defines himself as neither black nor white but both. This self-definition, as much an example of the social construction of reality as Effa Manley’s self-definition as black, speaks volumes about perceptions of race in America. Though, as reviled slugger with precious few endorsement opportunities, Barry Bonds, notes, race prejudice is still very much a part of American culture, its presence in advertising is conspicuous by its absence. Today, manager Willie Randolph sells Subway sandwiches in a New York Mets uniform, not Page Fences.

ROBERTA J. NEWMAN is a member of New York University’s Faculty of Arts and Science, specializing in the cultural history of both baseball and advertising. The recipient of a SABR-Yoseloff grant, Dr. Newman has published a number of articles on the socio-historic implications on the intersection of baseball and advertising.

NOTES

1. “Amusements,” New York Times, July 5, 1888, 7.

2. Sol White. Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball with Other Documents on the Early Black Game, 1886-1936. Lincoln:Univ. of Nebraska Press, 1995, 12.

3. “Amusements,”7.

4. “William F Cody, Buffalo Bill,” www.pbs.org/weta/thewest/people/a_c/buffalobill.htm, March 9, 2006.

5. Jerry Malloy, “The Strange Career of Sol White,” in Out of the Shadows: African American Baseball from the Cuban Giants to Jackie Robinson, ed., Bill Kirwin. Lincoln: Univ. of Nebraska Press, 2005, 64.

6. Jerry Malloy, “Sol White and the Origins of African American Baseball,” in White, xxxiii.

7. White,24.

8. Ibid.,24.

9. Ibid.,83.

10. Ibid.,52.

11. Ibid.,69.

12. Ibid.,79.

13. Neil Lanctot. Negro League Baseball: The Rise and Ruin of a Black Institution. Philadelphia: Univ.of Pennsylvania Press, 2004, 24.

14. White,116.

15. Geoffrey C. Ward. Unforgivable Blackness: The Rise and Fall of Jack Johnson. New York: Vintage, 2004, 67.

16. White, 7.

17. Campbell Gibson and Kay Jung, “Historical Census Statistics on Population Totals by Race, 1790 to 1990, and by Hispanic Origin, 1970 to 1990, for Large Cities and Other Urban Places in the United States,” www.census.gov/population/www/documentation/twps0076.html, March 10, 2006.

18. Lanctot, 4.

19. Armistead S. Pride and Clint C. Wilson. A History of the Black Press. Washington, DC: Howard Univ. Press, 1997, 133.

20. Lawrence D. Hogan. Shades of Glory. Washington, DC: National Geographic Society, 2006, 128.

21. Lanctot,190.

22. Janet Bruce. The Kansas City Monarchs: Champions of Black Baseball. Lawrence: Univ. of Kansas Press, 1985, 45.

23. Lanctot, 196.

24. Hilldale Club Ledgers, 1921-1922, Cash Thompson Collection, Box 3, African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA.

25. Philadelphia Tribune, May 3, 1928,11.

26. Philadelphia Tribune, May 16, 1925,10.

27. Undated photograph, Cash Thompson Collection, Box 6, African American Museum, Philadelphia, PA.

28. Catonsville Historical Society,“Catonsville History,” http://catonsvilleweb.com/history.html, September 28, 2006.

29. Baltimore Afro-American, October 22, 1920,8.

30. Hogan, 204.

31. Lanctot,6.

32. Hogan,204.

33. New York Amsterdam News, September 23,1939,14.

34. Paul Oliver. Blues Fell this Morning: Meaning in the Blues. London: Cambridge Univ Press, 1960, 132-135.

35. Burton B. Turkus and Sid Feder, Murder, Inc.: The Story of the Syndicate.” New York: Da Capo, 1992, 95.

36. Lanctot,9.

37. “Piney Woods School Offers Youth Unusual Opportunity,” Chicago Defender, April 20, 1940, 8.

38. Alma and Paul Ellerbe, “Inchin’Along,” McClure’s Magazine, vol. 54, no. 2, April 1922, 45.

39. Ward, 40.

40. “What Is SWOC’s Batting Average?” Baltimore Afro American, September 20, 1941, 22.

41. New York Amsterdam News, April 6,1940,12.

42. New York Amsterdam News, August 23,1947.

43. East-West Baseball Classic: Official Souvenir Program, August 14, 1949. Collection of the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown, NY.

44. East-West Baseball Classic: Official Souvenir Program.

45. Ibid.

46. Negro American League Expenses from the East-West Game, 1943 and 1952, Ty Baird Papers, 414:2:2, Kenneth Spencer Research Library, University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS.

47. Baird Papers,414:2:4.

48. “Baseball Blends With Dancing at Ausco Park,” St. Joseph Michigan Herald Press, June 4, 1953, 12.

49. www.fortmiami.org/museum.html,October6,2006.

50. “Baseball Blends With Dancing at Ausco Park.”