Lee Lowenfish’s recent Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman establishes itself as the place where future studies of Branch Rickey can begin.

With backgrounds in both journalism and academic history, Lowenfish has produced a thoroughly researched, extensively documented, and clearly written version of Rickey’s life, equally valuable for the general reader and the serious researcher. It clearly establishes the Mahatma as a major figure in baseball in the first three quarters of the twentieth century. It’s not surprising to learn that Lowenfish’s Rickey has won the Seymour Medal for 2008. Branch Rickeylived a life as busy as it was long.

Lowenfish focuses his account on “the man who had revolutionized [baseball] not once but three times” (1). These are the development of the farm system while he worked in St. Louis, the reintegration of baseball while in Brooklyn, and the expansion of baseball, which he helped inspire as president of the Continental League. As extraordinary as these changes are in themselves, Lowenfish keeps his focus—and the reader’s interest— on the man involved in making them.

The reader gets a full account of Rickey’s family heritage, youth, and education in rural Ohio, his involvement in college athletics, his own playing career, and his work for the St. Louis Browns. After his stints with the Cardinals and Dodgers, there are also accounts of Rickey’s difficult years in Pittsburgh and his last “senior consultant” position with the August Busch–owned Cardinals in the early 1960s. An executive, Rickey was in an owner’s role only in Brooklyn, and even there has had other owners to answer to. In effect, he was fired from all these positions—by Sam Breadon in St. Louis, by John Galbreath in Pittsburgh, and he was eased out by Walter O’Malley in Brooklyn. Lowenfish wonders if this isn’t one reason for his neglect by baseball historians (although one might argue and ask which baseball executive has been written about more).

Lowenfish does this in an inspired prologue, in the first half of which he describes Rickey’s last speech and his funeral. In the second half, he explains the nature of Rickey’s character and why historians don’t give him more notice. For Lowenfish, “it is past time to bring him back to life in the fullness of his passions and his intellect” (8). He concludes by characterizing Rickey as “a man of astounding energy and radical individualism, a most unusual conservative revolutionary” (9). In his prologue he focuses not on the three revolutions but on who Rickey is: his oratorical style, his busyness (Lowenfish calls it his “remorseless Protestant ethic to resist idleness” [6]), his collegiality, his loyalty, his respect for physical and spiritual courage, his Christian faith, his concern for social justice, his belief in the American capitalist system, his “genuine warmth, humor, and compassion” (9), and his love of family.

A member of what Lowenfish calls “the conservative inner sanctum of baseball’s managerial elite” (453), Rickey was, in fact, a conservative businessman, and a remarkable one at that. Yes, he valued home, family, church, and country above all else. Lowenfish speaks of his “faith in God, family, and baseball,” the last being an embodiment of national values (299). This included, in the postwar years, a cold-war anticommunism that enabled him to find some good even in Senator Joseph McCarthy’s excesses. As Lowenfish reports, Rickey felt McCarthy had “a good fastball, but no control” (518). In these beliefs, he was not unlike most baseball executives. What made Rickey unusual was his readiness to acknowledge other points of view and to encourage them if they could help him achieve his goals. Consider some of his protégés: executive Larry MacPhail, manager Leo Durocher, player Jay “Dizzy” Dean.

And consider the reserve clause, the cornerstone of baseball during Rickey’s lifetime. Lowenfish deals with the reserve clause in the player contract only briefly, but tellingly. As a member of baseball’s establishment, Rickey could be expected to regard it as essential to the game. Lowenfish describes him as “always consistent about the need for a reserve clause in any kind of professional baseball” (367). But as president of the Continental League, Rickey had to do something to relax the reserve system so that the league’s clubs would have access to players (555). He also used the threat of congressional action in his negotiations with Major League Baseball, despite his Republican wariness of government interven- tion in business (568). Finally, he supported the bill proposed by Estes Kefauver (eventually voted down) that would limit to one hundred the number of players reserved by any one club (568).

Rickey had never been inflexible about the reserve clause, it turns out. As Lowenfish reminds us, Rickey “had made individual exceptions in the past in the case of such star players as George Sisler and Rogers Hornsby” even though “he had been . . . uncompromising in defense of the strict restrictions on virtually every other player” (547). This, it seems to me, is what fascinates Lowenfish about Rickey: He is a conservative willing to be an innovator.

There are ten chapters on his St. Louis years, Rickey commenting on his ambition there: “I must make a great ball club,successful artistically and financially in a town where there is every handicap under the sun against my making good” (128). The material in the nine chapters on his Brooklyn years is more familiar material but examined from a different perspective. One motif that runs throughout the book but is most prominent here is Rickey’s language, his manner of speaking, and its effect on the press. A Brooklyn fan once remarked, memorably, that “he is a man of many faucets, all running at once” (324). Lowenfish speaks of Rickey’s “inevitable circumlocutions of speech” (319), adding that his grudges against sportswriters were “his least attractive character quirk” (400).

Rickey and Jackie Robinson were certainly two of a kind, “ferocious gentlemen” to be sure, but perhaps Leo Durocher and Rickey were the oddest couple of them all. Rickey felt Durocher “had the right kind of competitive smarts and leadership skills” (240). They shared, as Rickey said of Durocher, “a great will to win.” Their differences were stark.

As for Leo’s aggressive, almost delinquent behavior off the field, Rickey was used to dealing with such types from his earliest days as a country schoolteacher. It probably wasn’t a shock to him when he learned that Durocher had been expelled from high school for punching a mathematics teacher. Rickey was always confident that he could reason, inspire, and straighten out the way-ward member of any flock. (228)

Alas, Rickey’s plans for Durocher to be Jackie Robinson’s manager went awry when Durocher was suspended for Robinson’s rookie season. Worse, when Durocher returned the following year, Robinson was out of shape: “He was thin for Shotton, but he’s fat for me,” as Durocher put it. The animosity between him and Robinson became a feature of the great Giant–Dodger rivalry in the fifties after Durocher moved from Ebbets Field to the Polo Grounds.

Lowenfish keeps Rickey’s life beyond baseball in focus. His politics were enthusiastically Republican: “Herbert Hoover. possessed, in Branch Rickey’s opinion, the finest attributes of an American leader, a man who combined belief in capitalist enterprise with a genuine sense of social service” (188). An anticommunist and cold warrior, Rickey was in the audience when Winston Churchill gave his famous “Iron Curtain” speech (390). Finally, it is the sheer frenetic energy with which Rickey approached life that impresses the reader:

When he wasn’t visiting family, scouting farm teams and young prospects, speaking to church groups, or drumming up support for Republican candidates for office, Branch Rickey made time for an annual postseason duck hunting expedition with friends in rural Missouri and Illinois.(290)

So large a study of so large a man still must leave some things out, and this reader missed any treatment of Rickey’s relationship with Dodger statistician Allan Roth, who is mentioned only twice. The first time it is in an aside to a description of the statistical work that Travis Hoke, a young St. Louis reporter, did for the Browns. The second time is an acknowledgment that Roth helped Rickey prepare a Life magazine article that appeared under Rickey’s name in 1954 (74, 527). It’s odd that there’s nothing about Roth’s years with the Dodgers. There are the inevitable few errors, typographical and otherwise. My own favorite is the imputation that John Mize of the Giants led the league in home runs in 1942; it was Mel Ott who led, with 30, the Big Cat and Dolph Camilli tying for second place, with 26.

Lowenfish provides extensive documentation. I miss only an introductory description of the nature and location of unpublished papers, interviews, and other materials. Though much of this information is available in his acknowledgments, it might have been better to present it more formally here. Even so, Lowenfish’s endnotes and bibliography will be the best place to begin a study of Rickey from now on, at least until new information about the man is discovered. I learned about several earlier books involving Rickey as subject or author and was enthusiastic about going on to read them.

Arthur Mann’s Branch Rickey: American in Action appeared in 1957, and his relation to Rickey and Rickey’s involvement in the book make it interesting reading still. According to Lowenfish, Rickey felt Mann was no biographer and never read the book (Lowenfish 593). On the other hand, having served as a kind of personal secretary to Rickey, Mann presumably had privileged information, and it’s clear that Rickey had extensive input into the book. In addition to being its subject, the Rickey of 1957 is often invoked in such phrases as “Rickey said in describing” or “Rickey laughed inrecollection” or Rickey “calling the occasion to memory” (60, 108, 123). It’s almost as if Mann wanted his narrative to be as close to an autobiography as possible.

Two things seem especially interesting about Mann’s portrait. The first is Rickey’s language and its relation to his character. Mann acknowledges the many negative assessments of Rickey, particularly in the press. There are complaints about his “evasive phraseology” (132). He was considered a bad manager because he “talked over his players’ heads, was too theoretical” (78). In Brooklyn, fans 

picked up derisive nicknames for Rickey from the press—“Mahatma” and “Deacon” and “hard shelled Methodist” . . . Rickey was called the “Old Woman in the Shoe” and a violator of child labor laws.  When he tried to explain [his trading Dolph Camilli, his] . . . erudite explanations were dismissed as double talk and his office was called “The Cave of the Winds.” (228)

Out of material such as this, Bernard Malamud was to fashion the villainous Judge Goodwill Banner in his 1952 novel The Natural.

Mann wants us to understand all this differently. At the outset, he tells readers about “the simplicity of Rickey’s nature” (4) and then, on the next page, that “there have been many times over the years when Branch Rickey preferred not to be understood.” This is quite a picture. Something of it emerges in Lowenfish too. The tension between these conflicting qualities is something. Mann returns to late in the book, in a paragraph about Rickey’s decision to sign African American players. Interpretations of his motivation vary. Mann contends that

most of them fall short, because they are based on the assumption that his nature and thinking are deep and complex. Actually his erudition and easy command of a polysyllabic vocabulary cloak thinking that is, more often than not, simple and basic. (215)

This version of Rickey is directly related to Mann’s treatment of Rickey’s relations with the press. He met with incomprehension in St. Louis (66, 132), and in New York his efforts to win reporters over were largely useless (126). We get a detailed report of Rickey’s public encounter with Dick Young in 1948 (129–32). Mann is somewhat less forthcoming about Joe Williams’s accusation in 1946 that Rickey didn’t want the Dodgers to win the pennant and about Rickey’s relationship with columnist Jimmy Powers (238–39).

But there is no mistaking whose side Mann is on. In many ways the book is a defense of Rickey against his detractors. Mann covers thoroughly Rickey’s years in St. Louis and the development of the farm system, an innovation that, in Rickey’s mind, had its genesis in 1913, when he worked for Browns’ owner Robert Hedges (63). Mann’s account of the Brooklyn Dodger years takes on added importance when the reader bears in mind that Mann was there and an active participant in the introduction of Jackie Robinson into Organized Baseball. That Rickey’s tenure in Pittsburgh is reviewed only briefly may be understandable in a book intended to bring out his virtues and achievements.

*****

The only book by Rickey that appeared in his lifetime, The American Diamond, was published in 1965, the year of his death. Lowenfish remarks that Rickey, ever the man of action, “hated to write.” The American Diamond is autobiographical in an unusual way—much of it is devoted to “homage to the baseball people whose life and work he had shared,” as Lowenfish puts it (593, 594). In the introduction, Rickey explains his reason for writing:

I had good intentions about writing two or three books when I received a book called The Pros one day from a stranger. It was on pro football—and magnificent. I spent several days studying this work and realized it was a powerful piece of propaganda on football. (3)

What Rickey means but doesn’t say is that The American Diamond is to be a powerful piece of propaganda on baseball.

It’s a large, coffee-table-size book, and much of it consists of Rickey’s comments on Robert Riger’s photographs. But his involvement in the book is much more than that. The first part of the book is “Immortals,” “the sixteen men who have made the most significant contributions to the game over the years.” Here Rickey’s writing is primary, while Robert Riger’s drawings are secondary, illustrative.

Seven of the immortals are players: Honus Wagner, George Sisler, Christy Mathewson, Grover Cleveland Alexander, Ty Cobb, Babe Ruth, and Jackie Robinson. Two more played but were chosen more for their managerial careers: John McGraw and Connie Mack. Four are executives: Charles Comiskey, Ban Johnson, Judge Landis, and Ed Barrow (though Comiskey, like McGraw and Mack, played and managed as well). Two journalists, Henry Chadwick and Taylor Spink, make the cut. The “number one immortal” is Alexander Cartwright.

In the second part of the book, “The Game,” Rickey’s words take a back seat to Riger’s images, although Rickey’s fingerprints can be found in the emphasis (in 1965!) on the Brooklyn Dodgers. In “The Game,” Riger’s photographs start with youth and neighborhood baseball and work their way up to the professional game and then through the professional season from spring training to the World Series. Occasionally there are sections without pictures, as in “Courage,” which reads like the text of a Rickey talk. In the section on Brooklyn, Rickey writes, “My eight years in Brooklyn gave me a new vision of America, or rather America gave me a new vision of a part of itself, Brooklyn.” He goes on to add that “it was a crime against a community of 3,000,000 people to move the Dodgers” (166)—a sentiment that may have been genuine, although in his manner of expressing it the reader may hear echoes of the longstanding animosity between him and Walter O’Malley.

Rickey runs through the Dodgers’ starting lineup in the 1955 World Series, commenting on each player. His discussion of Snider, Hodges, and Campanella includes an argument that runs batted in is not a significant measure of a player’s value.“Reverse the [fifth and sixth batters] in the hitting order and you will frequently reverse their RBI total” (173). Elsewhere, he offers that the hit-and-run play is “much overused” (43).

In Rickey’s essay on courage, we get a brief glimpse of a youthful Enos Slaughter. Rickey had made the point that “sometimes it is a great quality in men to show modesty even to the point of timidity or apparent lack of courage” (96). His illustration is that “Enos Slaughter was afraid to say his name.” Slaughter, as everyone who has encountered him knows, got over this. His assessment of Rickey, comprising equal parts anger and admiration, is reported in Murray Polner’s biography of Rickey: “He noticed everything, that son of a gun” (Polner 92). In my experience, Slaughter was not always so pithy. In the mid-1970s, he appeared in a class in baseball history I was team-teaching with a member of the history department—his daughter was attending our college at the time—and talked nonstop, far beyond the 90-minute class period. We were all in thrall. Nobody dared leave.

Finally, Riger’s photographs step aside for Rickey’s meditations in the section titled “The Future of the Game.” He saw three problems that needed to be solved. He hoped for something that we now call “parity” and that many of us despair of achieving. Remember that, while Rickey was writing this in. 1965, the players were busy hiring Marvin Miller, a move that would eventuate in player salaries (and owner profits) beyond even Rickey’s powers of imagination.

He understood the inevitability of expansion, although it has proceeded along lines he deplored in 1965, the motive being “notone of nationalization but of prospective profits at the gate” (202).

Rickey saw television as a threat and hoped for a screen that would be friendlier to baseball.

More than once, he mentions his fear that professional football would surpass baseball in popularity. In the four decades since the book was published, all professional team sports have mushroomed and grown into gigantic industries, greatly blunting any tendency on the part of baseball people to look over their shoulder at the NFL or any other league. The American Diamond, Lowenfish reports, is “long out of print and,” he comments, “worthy of republication” (594). He is right.

*****

Branch Rickey’s Little Blue Book is a collection of Rickey’s writings and sayings edited by John J. Monteleone “from private and public writings,” as we read on the title page. Monteleone went to the Rickey archives at the Library of Congress and found a treasure, which he lists:

131 containers of Mr. Rickey’s writing, correspondence, and speeches employment contracts, award certificates, and receipts (along with fabric swatches) from his personal tailor scores of scouting reports on every conceivable level of players, from future hall of famers to anonymous bushers; hundreds of lectures on how to play, how to scout and judge talent, and more; scores of speeches on pressing political and social issues of the day; dozens of comments on character traits that yield success, and many memos, notes and articles on legal, administrative and business issues of baseball. (xv)

From such a treasure, Monteleone has organized his sampling into nine sections, with Rickey’s scouting reports “sprinkled. throughout.” They deal with character; luck; various baseball subjects, concluding with a section on Jackie Robinson; “musings on various subjects”; Rickey’s spirituality, and finally, others’ remembrances. Monteleone has compiled and organized the quotations masterfully. This reader especially enjoyed the assemblage of Rickey’s comments on pitching (25–38), which begin with this:

In pitching we want to produce delusions, practice deceptions, make a man misjudge. We fool him—that’s the purpose of the game. The ethics of the game of base- ball would be violated if man did not practice to become proficient in deception. (25)

That last sentence in particular has the sound of Rickey. According to Rickey, New York Giants’ pitcher Carl Hubbell “produced perfect deception. He was a ‘change of speed’ pitcher who continually presented the problem of timing to the batsman” (27).

A pitcher who appears and reappears throughout the book is Dizzy Dean, one of Rickey’s favorite players. He shows up twice in the section on pitching, first as the sort of pitcher who has “the ability to see another pitcher throw a certain pitch and go right out and duplicate it to his own benefit” (26). A few pages later he’s being lauded as a pitcher who was unbeatable in his prime: “About all the scoring off Dizzy Dean in his heyday was due to his jocularity, his carelessness, his momentary indifference, his knowing he ‘had ’em beat’” (36).

Rickey rated Dean’s character high, as high as he rated Ty Cobb’s desire to excel. “Dizzy Dean . . . never saw a man throwing a ball that he didn’t have an uncontrollable yen to do it, and beat him at it” (3). Later in the book, we get glimpses of Dean and Rickey together, surely an odd association. Monteleone cites this Rickey meditation:

I completed college in three years. I was in the top ten percent of my class in law school. I’m a Doctor of Jurisprudence. I am an honorary Doctor of Law. Tell me why I spent four mortal hours today conversing with a person named Dizzy Dean. (105)

These conversations must have been something. Monteleone describes one as follows: He imagined Dean, “his huge feet on the boss’s desk, lean[ing] back and talk[ing] country style.” After their conversation, Rickey had to meet the press in an unusually disheveled condition. “‘By Judas Priest,’ he began. ‘By Judas Priest! If there were more like him in baseball, just one, as God is my judge, I’d get out of the game’” (117).

This little blue book leaves us with a picture of a very large man. I found myself, because I especially enjoy hearing Rickey’s voice, wanting a section on obfuscation, in which there would be some examples of Rickey’s purposeful unintelligibility. Perhaps the best comment on this aspect of his language comes, once again, from Enos Slaughter, who remarked that “I didn’t know what he was talking about half the time, but it sure sounded beautiful” (126). And we do get some negative comments about Rickey along the way, especially about his parsimony.

*****

The original edition of Murray Polner’s Branch Rickey: A Biography was published by Atheneum in 1982. A glance through both editions suggests that little of the text was revised for the 2007 edition. There is some re-paragraphing, and divisions within. chapters are sometimes retained, sometimes not. There is a new foreword by Rickey’s grandson Branch B. Rickey and a brief preface to the revised edition by Polner. Some forty-two titles have been added to the bibliographic note, including not only Arthur Mann’s 1957 Branch Rickey: American in Action (surely its omission in the 1982 edition was inadvertent, given Polner’s citation there of “material [Polner] did not include in his [Rickey]”) but also Lowenfish’s Branch Rickey: Baseball’s Ferocious Gentleman. The photo gallery in the 1982 edition has been dropped and replaced by a new set of photos scattered through the text.

Polner says in his preface to the 1982 edition that he saw Rickey as “a genuine American hero the son of poor, rural southern Ohio farmers, who taught the worth of an ethical and moral way of life grounded in religious faith” (7). In the preface to the revised edition, he’s more specific. “One of the larger questions I wanted to know was why a conservative evangelical Christian could become so obsessed in fostering racial equality” (9). Polner concludes that “his religious faith was as decisive a factor as his well-known business acumen” (10). This interpretation has the effect of putting the Brooklyn Dodgers at the center of his biography of the man.

Polner cites Rickey’s “sense of adventure,” a quality seen in his leadership of college teams, and in his demonstration “of derring-do on the bases, of constantly attacking . . . opponents’ weaknesses” (60). Jackie Robinson, for example, Rickey described as “an adventurer,” “a man after my own heart” (183).

And in this light Rickey’s dealings with outfielder Gus Bell, as detailed by Andrew O’Toole, grow more intelligible. Rickey never liked Bell as a ballplayer and finally traded him to Cincinnati, where he had a fine career. Bell, as O’Toole reports, seemed bewildered.

I couldn’t seem to do anything to please Mr. Rickey. . . .The more I hustled, the more he’d get me for something. Why, he’d find things wrong with me that I never knew existed. He used to say I didn’trun in from the field fast enough at the end of an inning. Can you imagine that?” (O’Toole 81)

“He had no adventure,” Rickey said of him. In fairness to Bell, we should note that Rickey said much the same even about the young Roberto Clemente (O’Toole 135, 146).

This intense competitiveness, coupled with an equally intense piety, provoked intense responses from those who found themselves opposed to this man who believed so strongly in what he believed. As Polner sees it, journalists were alienated by Rickey’s circumlocution and aggressive rhetorical style, but the reasons for Jimmy Powers’s animus are never accounted for (90, 121–22). Polner allows Judge Landis to speak for the anti-Rickeyists. In private, Landis called him “that hypocritical preacher” and “that Protestant bastard [who’s] always masquerading with a minister’s robe” (137). In his interview with O’Toole, Tom Johnson, a member of the Pirates ownership, uses similarly intemperate language when describing Rickey, calling him “the old bastard” and lapsing into profanity to refer to his talent for evasive wordiness (O’Toole 54).

There comes a moment in Polner’s biography when he articulates the meaning of Rickey’s career, as he juxtaposes the values he finds in Rickey with those of Walter O’Malley. He compares

Rickey’s baseball—a nineteenth- and early-twentieth- century, slower, bucolic and pastoral sport, constant, tranquil, uninterrupted, a sentimental mirror of a world now gone—and O’Malley’s vision of change and technology, of jet travel, of the surge in population and hedonism, of amoral shifts of franchises lured by more and more revenue, and of the voracious appetites of television advertising. To Rickey, baseball remained a civil religion which acted out public functions organized religion was unable to perform; O’Malley’s faith rested on balance sheets and dividends (196).

Surely a good part of this vision of Rickey involves myth rather than reality, and he remains better understood as an adventurer. As Rickey sets forth on the Continental League enterprise, he wonders whether

[William A. Shea, who would eventually spearhead the formation of the New York Mets] and the committee want him to find a franchise for [New York City] or might they be interested in an utterly unorthodox approach requiring risk and courage? (232).

“A new and uncharted adventure,” a leitmotif in Rickey’s life, is what he envisioned this to be, the enterprise of forming a legitimate, lasting third league (233). (On third leagues, see the articles by Dan Levitt at page 97 and by David Mandell at page 104.)

*****

O’Toole’s Branch Rickey in Pittsburgh is a more focused book than Mann’s or Polner’s and is largely dedicated to a view of Rickey the general manager. The author relies on fewer sources than do his peers: newspapers, Rickey’s own papers, some interviews, and a few secondary sources, mainly Polner. All told, the book offers a great deal of Rickey in the first person, quoted from the newspaper sources and his papers. In addition, O’Toole includes some thirty pages of Rickey’s memos to other Pirate officials, including many player evaluations and along memo arguing for Ralph Kiner to be traded. These are fascinating.

O’Toole acknowledges “the wondrous Rickey” right away, even though Rickey’s years in Pittsburgh were disappointing for all concerned (vii). He is also quick, though, to quote part-owner Tom Johnson’s unflattering opinion—“the old phony” (15). Much of the book tells the story of the obstacles Rickey had to overcome to build a winning team in Pittsburgh. O’Toole characterizes it as “hindered from the start The conflict in Korea was taking young men from professional baseball at a rapid rate.” Moreover, and what made his job even more difficult, the Pirates“were effectively broke” (4). He devotes much of the book to detailing this sorry condition.

Rickey himself, O’Toole acknowledges, was part of the problem. He writes that Rickey “had vastly underestimated the job that awaited him. In addition to a major league roster that deservedly finished in last place, the farm system was almost totally void of talent” (35).

O’Toole argues that Rickey

was still the brilliant man that had built the dynasties in St. Louis and Brooklyn, but circumstances and times change. Few critics publicly recognized the financial constraints Rickey endured in Pittsburgh. The farm system was no longer a novelty. (156)

Rickey was no longer ahead of the curve, as he had been in St. Louis and Brooklyn. As a consequence, his time in Pittsburgh. appears a failure. In fact, his methods seem to have worked, they just took more time. The nucleus of the 1960 championship team was in place when Rickey left in 1955.

A particularly odd moment in the book stands out. O’Toole gives the arrival of the first African American and Latino players in Pittsburgh during these years a special look. His narrative strategy entails a rehearsal of Rickey’s experience in Brooklyn, and forthat he relies on Polner’s account. He goes back to Rickey’s experience with Charles “Tommy” Thomas, an African American on his Ohio Wesleyan team. O’Toole calls him “Tommy Thompson” throughout his account (117–18). It’s odd that neither the author nor anyone at McFarland caught this error.

*****

Each of these books is valuable, but Lowenfish’s Rickey is now the place to begin for anyone looking to understand—how would you describe him? The father of the farm system? The man who integrated baseball? The epithets, honorific and disparaging alike, could easily be multiplied, and they have been. What Lowenfish accomplishes is a broadening, deepening, and enrichment of the picture, and his meticulous acknowledgment of his sources enables fellow researchers to evaluate and either build on or question his judgments.

LEVERETT T. SMITH JR., a member of SABR since 1973, is author of The American Dream and the National Game (Bowling Green University Popular Press, 1975). Since the mid-1990s he has reviewed books for the Bibliography Committee Newsletter.

Parts of this review originally appeared in SABR’s Bibliography Committee Newsletter (August 2007).

True, some people find heckling obnoxious, and it often is. There are drunken fans, who tend not to be amusing and often just embarrass themselves. There are fans who get their kicks showering verbal abuse on the rich and famous from the relatively safe setting of the grandstand seats, as though belittling others were the path to taking pride in themselves. There are fans who have nothing interesting to say and fans who are inarticulate, unimaginative, and just plain wrong—I’m often ashamed by the “Yankees suck” chants of some of my fellow Red Sox fans. Other fans aren’t malicious but just enjoy being loud and attracting attention to themselves. A truly clever heckle, though, can cause even the most dour and disapproving of fans to crack a smile. And for people like Robert Szasz, heckling offers engagement and involvement in the game as well as interactions with players and other fans in a way that’s just plain fun.

As a fan in Boston, watching the 2003 Red Sox road telecasts from Tropicana Field in Tampa Bay, I kept hearing this one loud voice from the crowd every time Sox second baseman Todd Walker came up to bat. It took a few at-bats for me to realize there was a pattern here: Some motormouth was unloading nonstop every time Walker—and only Walker—came up to bat. I found myself looking forward to Walker’s next at-bat. I called my 12-year-old son Emmet in from the other room. He’s no baseball fan, but he. became highly amused at the patter, and it became a bit of a ritual: Next time the Sox were in Tampa Bay, when Todd Walker was due up, I’d call in Emmet to get ready for the heckler. He was hard to ignore. You could hear him loud and clear. After a couple of games, the Red Sox TV cameras focused in on him, and this anonymous front-row fan in a Devil Rays jersey became a minor celebrity during NESN broadcasts back to New England from Florida.

Come 2004, and the first telecast from Tampa on May 18, there he was again—the Tampa Bay Heckler—this time giving the bearded Sox center fielder Johnny Damon a hard time. I wanted to know more about this guy and, thinking there might be a story there, I telephoned the Devil Rays to learn more about the Tampa Bay Heckler. Needless to say, they knew right away who I meant, and they gave me Rob Szasz’s phone number.

Szasz is a land developer and builder in the Tampa–St. Petersburg area. He grew up in Toronto but came to the United States back in 1984. He’s been a baseball fan since 1977, when the Toronto Blue Jays came into major-league ball (and when hockey was indisputably the biggest show in town). The move to the Tampa area brought about a change in loyalties, and Rob now roots for the Lightning instead of the Maple Leafs, and for the Devil Rays instead of the Blue Jays.

He was one of the Devil Rays’ first season ticket holders, having seen a newspaper ad that ran in the mid to late 1980s when efforts to attract a major-league franchise to Florida got under way. Rob responded with a $100 deposit on two seats. He was one of the first thou- sand people to put some money down, and drew number 113 when a lottery was held among those charter applicants. He went down to the Trop and chose a couple of seats. A few seasons later, there was some mix-up and he complained to ownership; they sent him a letter saying he could sit wherever he wanted, and he took two seats in the front row, behind home plate, just to the visitor’s side of the tunnel that is directly behind the plate.

“All the tumblers fell into place, and so it worked out,” he says. He was drawn to the two franchises he saw from their birth—the Blue Jays and the Devil Rays—in part because of the underdog status they inevitably held as new teams in the majors. “Being now somewhat a Tampa Bay native and seeing what the Lightning have done and also what the Buccaneers have done, it makes me that much more of a fervent fan.”

Szasz has his priorities. “I hit about 80 percent of the games. I go to a lot of games. The only games I miss [are] generally when my kids have their own events—be it a soccer game or a Little League baseball game or something at the school. I’ve got three boys—5, 7, and 9. I always miss the games for the kids.”

How did he become a heckler? Was he always this way? “I’ve always been boisterous and supportive of our team. The Blue Jays, too. When I was a kid, I just remember people would stand up and just yell things out. To your own team, not to the other team. Things like, ‘Come on, you can do better than that. What kind of throw was that? You’re not supposed to throw that pitch when you’re behind in the count.’ Educated yelling. I do the same thing to these guys—the other team. ‘What’re you reaching for? You’re not going to hit the ball out there. It’s going to be coming inside on you!’ Of course, then they pitch outside and strike him out.

“I was always making a lot of noise. Fans are getting closer to the players than ever before. You’re really close to the players, so. they really pick up what you’re saying. And now with the cameras and the microphones everywhere, even the media pick you up a lot too. The proximity of where I sit, with the players right there, and the microphones there—people pick up on what I say. I think that’s what got me the attention.

“What got me really going on it was last year [2003], there was a series early in the year. Anaheim was in town. The first game of the series, Brad Fullmer was at third base and there was a very close play, and he was sliding into home plate to the catcher, Toby Hall. Somehow, as he was sliding home, he tried to slide around the tag and touch the plate, and he missed the plate. Toby reached over and touched him and the umpire called him out. He’s a big guy, and he just jumped up and he was screaming. He was just going out of his mind, crazy, yelling at the umpire. They threw him out of the game, and a couple of players had to come out and literally drag him off the field. So the very next game, he was back in the game again and I just thought I’d have a little bit of fun with him, and say, ‘Don’t touch that plate, Brad. It’s really hot’—in my really loud voice. I could see that he was hearing what I was saying, and everybody was kind of laughing about it. So I kept going off with a lot of little fun stuff like that. In between innings, I was sitting in my chair and my phone rings. I was there with my son and a couple of friends. My wife had called me on the phone from home and she said, ‘You know, you’re on TV. They have you on TV, yelling at Brad Fullmer and they think it’s funny. They’re really enjoying it.’ I said, ‘Really?’

“The next game I go to, people in the crowd are encouraging me, because it’s kind of funny. I said, sure, what the heck. You’re sitting here the whole time, listening to [other] people yell things. I’ve never lowered myself to the level of yelling nasty things or cursing. That’s not me. I don’t curse. I really try to keep it funny. I’ve often got the kids with me, too. I remember being a kid, yelling at the players. You yell at your own players to get their attention. I remember Dave Stieb, who was one of our pitchers for Toronto when I was little. A bunch of us would get together and go, ‘Hey, Dave!’ really loud. People would look over and we’d go, ‘You’re the greatest!’ Nobody ever said, ‘You suck! You stink!’ I never heard that before when I was a kid. To hear it today, well, it’s pretty childish when people just get drunk and yell stupid things like that. I don’t do that at all. I just thought, I’ll have a little bit more fun with it, and, from that time on, people come to the stadium actually looking for me to do this stuff. It’s hilarious.

“Last weekend, we had Fan Appreciation Day and I went down there early, because it’s for season ticket holders and I always get some autographs. One of our pitchers, Rob Bell, said to me, ‘Man, I loved your line on Ken Harvey, the 90210 line.’ They know all my lines. Ken Harvey, who plays for the Kansas City Royals, he went to Beverly Hills High School. So when he comes to bat, I always say to him, ‘How’s Mr. 90210, Hollywood Harvey, can you get me an autograph from Tori Spelling?’ All sorts of Beverly Hills jokes like that. It was really getting to him too. It was really funny. Strictly humor. All the players from the Devil Rays, they know all my lines for all the players. It’s pretty funny. They all listen to it all the time, and they get a big kick out of it.”

Does Rob ever heckle a Ray?

“No, never heckle a Devil Ray. It doesn’t matter how bad they are, what kind of mistake they make. I might say something under my breath, bite my lip, but I totally support the team 100 percent. I support the organization. Because they know what I’m about—the organization— they don’t ever tell me to stop what I’m doing. They never frown upon it, and they actually protect me.

“You might have heard the stories about when the Yankees were in town. It was last year and I was heckling Raul Mondesi. This was shortly before he did that walking-off-the-team routine and they booted him off the team. I did some research on him and I found that, for some reason, he used to have one of the worst averages in baseball with runners in scoring position. So I was all over him about that. He came to bat a few times with the bases loaded. Nothing. All the base hits he got were with nobody on base. It was pretty funny. It really came through, just like his numbers had shown. So I was heckling him, and during one of the games—I think it was the second game of the series—I was all over him, and it was in the third or fourth inning. I was there with my son and I see this guy come down the tunnel right next to where I sit. He’s standing there and he has a pager on his belt, and it has a Yankees logo on it. Within a minute after he shows up, the head of the Devil Rays security shows up—who I know because I always see him down there also—and a couple more security guards show up, and they’re there just sort of talking over by the side. They’re there for the majority of the game.

“Then when the seventh or eighth inning comes along, I have to get my son home for school the next day, so I get up and leave. As I walk up the tunnel from where our seats are, when you get to the top of the tunnel, off to one side is the Devil Rays locker room and on the other side is the visiting team’s locker room. When I get to the top of the tunnel, all of these security people just followed me up the tunnel. I couldn’t figure out what was going on. One group of Yankees security people walks off to one side and our guys disperse.

“As I finished walking up the tunnel, the head of our security comes up behind me and asked, ‘Do you know who that guy was?’ I said, ‘No, who was that?’ ‘That’s the head of Yankees security.’ I said, ‘No! You’re kidding!’ ‘Yeah, your heckling was getting back to New York and Brian Cashman got the word to send down the security guard to shut you up. When we heard about it, we came down here to say that no one’s going to come into our house to tell our fans what they can or can’t do.’ It was coming across on the YES Network really heavy back in New York, and they didn’t like it at all. I don’t know if it was Steinbrenner or what, but Cashman called down for the head of Yankees security to come down and shut me up.

“That was pretty big. It was on the Internet. It was in the paper when it happened. But the organization’s always been there to back me and . . . they treat me well. I get a lot of little perks around the stadium. They put me in a commercial for the Devil Rays during the off-season with Rocco Baldelli, our center fielder. A lot of little fun things. They like it. They know that I’m good for the team. They think I’m good for baseball. Doing my thing, the fans kind of rally around it. They get a little more into the game. They’re not doing great right now. The crowds aren’t the biggest, so I guess, if you have a few enthusiastic fans who give out a positive attitude, I guess they like that.

“I think it’s very poor taste to go to someone else’s park, just to be loud and make trouble there. People call me the tenth man on the field at the Trop. I just know that we have a winning record at home, and we have the most atrocious road record in baseball. If I do help at home, that’s great.”

Did Szasz ever have a player go after him?

“Not like what happened in Oakland. I’ve had a few players get pretty upset with me. Bret Boone. Where I sit, you look right into the visitor’s dugout. One series last year when Seattle came to town, one game he struck out twice, three times. His fourth time at bat, he actually made contact and hit the ball out to center field. Rocco Baldelli caught it and he was out. As he was running back into the dugout, I’m just harassing him all the way back into the dugout as I sometimes do, and I said, ‘Nice job, Bret. At least this time you made contact.’ I was just working him all the way back into the dugout. He gets to the dugout and he throws his helmet all the way across the dugout, towards the box that holds the helmets. He comes racing down towards the end of the dugout, which is close to me, and he’s just yelling all kinds of profanity at me and he throws me the double bird. So he was pretty upset about that. He wasn’t too happy.

“Terrence Long from Oakland, he came over and stood on the edge of the railing and he did the old slashing-the-throat routine. He tried to get the usher to throw me out, but the. usher was just laughing at him. He wasn’t too happy about it.

“That was last year. Most players this year know me and they all smile at me and laugh. None of them get that upset with me. This last weekend, Toronto was in town. Generally I go after Eric Hinske. He’s been one of my favorites the last couple of years. They gave him a day off and I was trying to figure out who I would play with a little bit.

“I don’t get personal, I don’t get nasty. I’ve had so many players come up to me Somebody from one of the local news channels supplied me an NESN tape from when Boston was in town last time and I was wearing the Johnny Damon disciple beard. They supplied me a tape of Remy and the boys having a good time with it. There was one play when I was doing the thing with Johnny and he struck out, and he’s looking back at me with a big smile on his face just laughing. That’s good. He struck out, but he’s a professional. He knows what I’m about. He knows it’s part of the game. He’s just laughing. It’s not the end of the world.”

What about Todd Walker?

“Todd Walker was a great sport. He came into town, it was shortly after that series with the Marlins. I got onto him because he tagged up and tried to score when you guys [Red Sox] were winning like 20–1. It was a bizarre score. A total blowout. It was a pretty big deal at the time. I called him the ‘Tag ’em Up Kid.’ It was funny. He came into town and he was batting very well, like .320 or something, so I was heckling him and I don’t think he got a hit the entire series. I was going ‘0 for 1, 0 for 2,’and so forth. By the time he left town, it was like 0 for 15 or 0 for 16. At the very end of the season, when he came back, he’d been hitting home runs a lot. I used one line on him, and he actually had to back out of the box— I got a laugh out of him—I went, ‘You got Batman, you got Rod-man, now we got Todd Walker Superman, hitting home runs like he never did before!’ He backed out of the box and started laughing. He had to compose himself. One of his last at-bats—he was on deck— I called over and said, ‘Hey, Todd, you’ve been a great sport this year. Good luck in the postseason.’ He turned to me and tipped his cap and said thank you and then went back to doing his business. He was a very good guy. “I appreciate a player who understands what I’m doing.

It’s funny. Usually the second or third time around, it’s hard to heckle the same guy, because he’s expecting it. By that time, he’s already through it. The shock value is the best. When you can get someone when they’re not expecting it, then they have a hard time dealing with it. I think Todd, the first time, when I had the countdown, he didn’t know what was going on. When he came back and I was calling him Superman, I think he put one in the seats. He was with it. “I wouldn’t even try to touch Johnny [Damon] this time. I think he’d be so ready for it, it wouldn’t be worth it to try to go after him. Mark Bellhorn, I’m not going to touch him. I touched him the beginning of the season and it was. just so boring. You’re yelling at the guy and he doesn’t even move. He didn’t even acknowledge me. Just stands there with a baton his shoulders. He just stands there and dares you to pitch to him.

“My power was out yesterday, and I was going to do my research last night, but I think I’m going to go after Cabrera, the shortstop from Montreal. Maybe I can use my French Canadian jokes on him. ‘What do you miss most from Montreal? The French fries, the French toast, French women, oo la la!’

“There are certain people you can’t touch. I wouldn’t touch Manny [Ramirez]. He’s untouchable. He’s just a machine, a wrecking machine. I won’t even attempt it. A guy like him, he’s just untouchable. I heckled Barry Bonds when he was in town, during interleague. He didn’t do anything. He didn’t get anything when he was here. The first game, I think he got two walks but no hits. The second game, I think he got two strikeouts. I enjoyed that one. That was a little bit of fun going on with him. He gave me a smile.

“I don’t mind the challenge. I’ll go after the best of them if I can. Sosa would be fun. I want to see Pujols. I think I can get to him. It would be a challenge, but I think I could get to him. Definitely Sosa, I’d like to get onto Sosa. No question about it.

“Who won’t I heckle? If I have a lot of respect for a player, like I think he’s a really, really good guy, or he’s a local person from the Tampa Bay area who does a lot of charity work, sometimes I’ll have a little fun with them while they’re on deck, but I won’t actually heckle them in the batter’s box. There’s nobody I don’t heckle. Well, let’s put it this way. I won’t touch somebody who’s really controversial. Somebody who has a lot of controversy around them and there’s a lot of material there, I won’t touch it. Like with Giambi, before they found out about he had all the problems with the tumor that he had, they always talked about all the steroid stuff. This group was sitting at this game, yelling ‘Steroid’ and things at him. That’s something I wouldn’t touch. It’s not funny. It’s not humorous. It may be true or it may not be true. Who knows? But it’s the kind of thing that I consider to be taboo and I won’t address. I’ll stay away from something like that.

“Anaheim was in town late last year, and I was on Troy Glaus. He came out of the game and Shawn Wooten came in to replace him, so I was saying, ‘Taking Troy Glaus’s place’ and all this stuff like that. Afterward, there was an article about me in the [St.Petersburg] Times, and this reporter went in the locker room and asked if anybody heard me. Shawn Wooten said, Oh yeah—he heard everything I said. The reporter told me this afterward. I don’t know if you are familiar with Shawn. He’s a very short, stout player. Very, very short and stout. He said most people harass him because of his height and his weight. When I was harassing him, I never brought up anything about his height or his weight or his stature.

Because I never touched that, he said, he paid attention to what I was saying and he heard everything that I said. He said he heard everything; he thought it was pretty funny. They hear it. The players all hear it.

“With Toronto, I always have a good time with Carlos Delgado and Vernon Wells. Two really good-quality players. Whenever they come up . . . usually a player I like, I’ll talk with them while they’re on deck. I’ll say, ‘Hey, Carlos, how’s it going?’ He waves at me. Same thing with Vernon Wells. I generally wouldn’t heckle them if I just had a little fun with them while they’re on deck.

“This weekend, I was on this guy Guillermo Quiroz, some kind of Triple A catcher from Syracuse, for Toronto. I was having a little bit of fun with him, and he turned to me and says, ‘Kiss my a-s-s!’ I’m like, ‘You’ve got to be kidding.’ That hasn’t happened since Bret Boone last year, that someone would cuss at me. So Vernon Wells came on deck. I was yelling at him, ‘Hey Vernon’ and he looks at me and goes, ‘Yeah, what do you want?’ I said, ‘You got to tell your boy Guillermo to watch his language out here. He’s yelling and cussing out here. Doesn’t he know this is a family sport? You’ve got to tell him to watch his language.’ He says to me, ‘You tell him! I think he can hear everything you say.’ He starts laughing and goes back to swinging his bat.

“This guy Quiroz, I wasn’t even heckling him in the batter’s box. Just a little bit on deck, and he swears at me. Everybody starts laughing, and says, ‘Oh my God, are you going to let him get away with that?’ I said, ‘No way!’ So I was all over him every time he went to bat. I don’t think he’d ever heard of me—he’d just come up from Syracuse—so I gave him a bit of a welcome.

“I don’t think anybody truly hates me, but I have heard [that] people who come down and ask for tickets ask not to sit close to me. They don’t want to get the headaches and stuff. One of my boys—the middle one— gets kind of embarrassed by it, but the other two love it. The youngest one loves it the most. The older one, he just sits there and laughs about it and tries to feed me lines all the time. Little-kid lines.”

So does Szasz do research beforehand, for better-in- formed heckling?

“Absolutely. You have to know everything about these guys. You have to find the one button to tweak to get their attention. Without pissing them off, obviously, but you want to get their attention.

“A lot of people ask if I script my stuff before I get there. I never script it. It just comes to me as I’m sitting there. I’ll play off how they react and what they’re doing at the time. It’s impossible to script heckling. It’s really difficult to do.

“I get a lot of messages through the fan forum from other cities, that there are a lot of other people who try to do what I do. I got a message from someone in Oakland asking me if I’m going to come out and watch the Rays play out in Oakland, because they have their own heckler that they want me to see. I get that from people all over the place—Cincinnati, St. Louis, San Francisco. Everybody has their own hecklers that they want me to see.

“I don’t want people to think I’m doing this for attention, or doing it for this or for that. I didn’t go there looking to heckle. I go there looking to watch a baseball game. I’m there as a fan. I am a fan. I understand the game. I research my stuff, what I do. It’s part of the game.”

BILL NOWLIN is vice president of SABR and author of twenty books on the Red Sox. He wants to thank Gene Sunnen for providing some inspiration to take the study of heckling seriously.

Ten Commandments of Heckling

I. Thou shalt not use profanity.
Remember this one thing: baseball is still a family sport. Father and son, mom and dad, the whole family. Nobody wants to hear you spouting off a bunch of @#$&%!

II. Thou shalt not insult the mother.
This should be obvious. What good would come from saying something about someone else’s mother? Is that what we want? I don’t think so. Leave Mom out of it. We don’t need any of this garbage at our games. We want people to appreciate what we do, not resent us for it.

III. Thou shalt be intelligent.
Do I really need to explain this? Know what you are talking about. Remember, credibility lends respect to your task.

IV. Thou shalt love baseball.
Is there any doubt about this? Who in this great country would disparage America’s pastime? If you don’t love baseball, what are you doing here?

V. Thou shalt be aware of the people around you.
This is a really touchy one. Even though some of the funniest stuff you have may be about overweight guys or bald guys, the person next to you may not think it’s terribly funny.

VI. Thou shalt be witty.
Only one rule to remember here: if you are the only one laughing, it wasn’t funny.

VII. Thou shalt not overkill.
Listen, if somebody does something funny in the first inning, you should not keep ragging on it in the fifth. The more you say something, the less effective it becomes. You must be aware that the same stuff gets really old after a couple of games—especially in a series against the same team. Unless something is really working on one or two guys, put it away for a couple or three games.

VIII. Thou shalt be friendly.
The best way to make these guys listen to you and divert their attention from the task at hand is to be just as nice as you can be. When you look into the dugout, wave and say, “Hi guys!”

IX. Thou shalt not cross the line.
That line is the line of brutality. Look, the players know that heckling is part of the game. Don’t make it personal between you and the players. Remember, they have bats, you don’t.

X. Thou shalt remember the children.
No matter what you want to believe about role models, the children are watching and listening. They hear what you say and see what you do. Be aware of that when you sit in the stands. If you don’t know whether you fit the bill, just ask yourself, would you want your best friend’s kid sister or brother to sit next to you at the next ball game? Well, would you?

SOURCE: Chris Snead, The Bleacher Bible (Lubbock, Texas: Cotten, 1997)

Before achieving fame as a leading literary voice of the Beat Generation, Jack Kerouac aspired to be a sportswriter and already as a teenager had created a highly detailed imaginary baseball universe. (COURTESY OF THE ALLEN GINSBERG ESTATE)

Buck Maxfield has the fastest, burningest, whistlingest speed-ball I’ve ever seen come down the aisle,” a sportswriter calling himself Jack Lewis wrote in 1937. “He’s a big, tough, raw-boned kid, and has what it takes to lift his big leg and burn it down.”

If you don’t recognize the names Maxfield or, for that matter, Lewis, worry not. Both are creations of the future literary icon Jack Kerouac (1922–69), who wrote those lines at age 15, when he dreamed of becoming a sportswriter with a baseball beat—a path markedly different from the one he took as the writer of that landmark book of youthful restlessness, On the Road, and as a leading voice of the Beat Generation in the 1950s.

Buck and other fictional players, such as the base-stealer Pancho Villa and Pittsburgh slugger Frank “Pie” Tibbs—a takeoff on Pie Traynor, perhaps?—are all creations of Kerouac’s decades-long obsession with fantasy baseball. Years before anyone had ever heard of Strat-O-Matic or Rotisserie baseball, Kerouac’s New York Chevvies, Cleveland Studebakers, St. Louis LaSalles, and Pittsburgh Plymouths ruled his fantasy base- ball universe—revealing both the hidden passion of a great American writer and an artist in search ofa style.

The evidence is a series of approximately twenty of Kerouac’s fantasy-baseball artifacts, which constituted a healthy chunk of the exhibition Beatific Soul: Jack Kerouac on the Road at the New York Public Library on Fifth Avenue. The exhibition, which was on view last fall through this spring (November 9, 2007, through March 16, 2008) to commemorate the fiftieth anniversary of On the Road, consisted of items taken from the library’s Henry W. and Albert A. Berg Collection of English and American Literature, which includes the Jack Kerouac archive, purchased in 2001.

“Baseball Chatter” and More

Kerouac’s celebration of the American road is well known. His interest in fantasy baseball, which he played occasionally with fellow Beat writer Philip Whalen, is not. Kerouac’s ardor for the game emerges in the exhibition’s yellowed newspapers, Jack Lewis’s Baseball Chatter, which resemble period copies of The Sporting News, and cover the doings of the forty or so fantasy games each of Kerouac’s six or eight teams played most years. The baseball items include detailed team rosters, explanations of his increasingly complex, self-made fantasy games, and even a fictional correspondence with Tom Yawkey, who owned the Boston Red Sox. (Kerouac, a native of Lowell, Massachusetts, was a lifelong Sox fan.)

“We knew Jack Kerouac had a strong interest in baseball—he wrote short stories about it, and On the Road contains scenes about playing baseball—but we weren’t aware of the extent,” says Isaac Gewirtz, the exhibition curator and author of its companion volume. “The young Kerouac wanted to be a sportswriter. He has a punchy style and there are flashes of originality. With baseball, he is a writer trying to find his voice.”

Along with diaries, photos, and paintings of the Beats and amidst the exhibition’s iconic 120-foot On the Road manuscript scroll, on which Kerouac composed and typed a late draft of the novel in three weeks before amending it in typescripts, are penetrating glimpses into Kerouac’s emerging gift for vivid description. The teenage Kerouac typed the broadsheets on the back of racing forms taken from his father’s printing business in Lowell. Some examples, taken mostly from 1938:

Of another “Buck,” a fantasy player named Buck Barbara of the Philadelphia Pontiacs, Kerouac writes that “he almost drove Charley Fiskell, Boston’s hot corner man, into a shambled heap in the last game with his sizzling drives through the grass.”

Of Bob Chase, an accomplished pitcher for the Chevvies, Kerouac claims “to be puzzled by his habit of excessively praising” his opponents. “The other day, [Chase] was moaning about the Pittsburgh Plymouths, saying they were the vanguard of rifted humanity, and complaining that they should not be roaming free in this great land of ours,” Kerouac adds. “Yet today he defeated them by a one-sided score and smiled wanly.”

Speaking of the Chryslers, Kerouac writes that the team, “by some strange[r] reason than I can think, did not join the league this season,” with its former players spread to all directions.

Lefty Fayne, the old southpaw, is with the LaSalles, Robin King has retired to his farm in Iowa Mike. Kuzinecz, and old Sam Wyatt, also have retired. And Vic Bodwell, an old [St. Louis] Cad slugger, is playing golf. And so many more.

Frank “Pie” Tibbs’s hitting “has been absolutely flawless,” Kerouac writes in 1939. “He wields a long black bat, swinging from the portside, and swings in a wide, upward arc which spells distraction for every pitcher he has met this season so far.”

In Kerouac’s teenage fantasy-baseball world, teams took the names of cars, as in the Chevvies, Pontiacs, and Fords. In the 1950s and adulthood, he continued to cover this baseball universe in fictional newspapers, but he changed the teams’ names to colors, including the appropriately named New York Greens and Chicago Blues—because, Gewirtz surmises, “he probably thought they were less childish, more realistic names.” Taking most of his players’ names from listings in telephone books, Kerouac occasionally planted an inside man or two, as in Villa, the Pontiacs’ center fielder and, not surprisingly, the league’s fastest man.

In some cases Kerouac drafted friends and acquaintances into his league. Named as manager of Pittsburgh and later the Chicago Blues was one Seymour Wyse; the real Wyse was Kerouac’s high-school classmate at Horace Mann School in New York City, and the man credited with introducing the young writer to live jazz. Riding the bench for the 1953 Plymouths is Robert Giroux, Kerouac’s editor at Harcourt, Brace. Playing for the Washington Chryslers is Stanley Twardowicz, an abstract painter Kerouac admired; in the early 1960s the two men found themselves living near one another on Long Island and became friends.

In the late 1950s, Kerouac traded Villa to the Boston Fords, perhaps because by then he had appointed himself manager. Around the same time, an influx of Latino players entered the league, as Roberto Clemente, Orlando Cepeda, and others were making an impact in baseball’s real world. For some reason, Kerouac made the Philadelphia Pontiacs the prime repository of Latino talent, who included a Cuban shortstop named “El Negro” and utility man Jorge Orizaba, the name of the Mexico City street where Kerouac lived in the spring of 1956.

“Many a youth made up such baseball cards,” baseball reporter Stan Isaacs once wrote. “The charm of Kerouac’s cards was the imagination he brought to them, creating wondrous personalities, keeping records, writing stories about the action.” (COURTESY OF JOHN G. SAMPAS, LEGAL REPRESENTATIVE OF THE ESTATES OF JACK AND STELLA KEROUAC)

Stat Man

From talking to Kerouac’s relatives, Gewirtz estimates that Kerouac started playing fantasy baseball at around age nine. One reason it held his interest for so long, Gewirtz adds, was Kerouac’s lifelong fascination with lists and statistics.“You could write a whole book on Kerouac as a list maker,” Gewirtz says. “Every week, it seems, he was compiling a list, from favorite foods to things to do and his favorite books.” Said Kerouac to Whalen on his zeal for the fantasy game, “I’ve got an obsession with statistics.”

Critics might argue that, with his slangy and occasion- ally clichéd prose, Kerouac was satirizing the glib sportswriting style of the day. But Gewirtz thinks other- wise, maintaining that Kerouac’s writing reflects a genuine enthusiasm for sports and his teenage goal of becoming a sportswriter. A gifted athlete, Kerouac starred as a running back on the Lowell High School football team before attending Horace Mann for a year, where he played baseball—“not a particularly good hitter,” Gewirtz says of Kerouac, “but strong in the field”—and earning a football scholarship to Columbia. Soon after Kerouac’s playing days came to an abrupt end in his sophomore year in 1942, when he broke his tibia, feuded with Columbia coach Lou Little, and left school, he joined the Lowell Sun as a sportswriter.

Finally, Kerouac had the kind of job he had dreamed about as a teenager, but it was short-lived—he inexplicably bolted the position after a few months. He failed to show up for an interview with a local baseball coach one day. It turned out that he had skipped town. A day or so later he appeared with a construction crew building the Pentagon in Virginia. Still, he retained his love for fantasy baseball and sports, often catching big-league games in New York and listening to baseball games and boxing matches with fellow beat Neal Cassady, the inspiration for On the Road character Dean Moriarty. The two men also enjoyed throwing around a football.

As fantasy baseball has developed over time, so Kerouac constantly tinkered with his personal version of it. In the 1950s and ’60s, a rudimentary design—bats were matchsticks, and the ball was a marble—gradually gave way to a more complex, two-man system involving cards, complete with player-skill levels, ball/strike ratios, and game scenarios such as “infield tap” and “pop foul.” And, as Major League Baseball integrated, so did Kerouac’s fantasy league—but earlier, in 1943, the same year that Bill Veeck said he was blocked in his effort to buy the Phillies and integrate the team with stars from the Negro Leagues. Two years later, the Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson to a minor-league contract, and it was not until 1947 that he played in his first major-league game.

Gewirtz and his staff were able to piece together the broad evolution of Kerouac’s fantasy game from the writer’s unpublished memoir, Memory Babe, which details his interests as a teenager and how he played the game. In addition to reporting on his fantasy games, the adolescent Kerouac incorporated baseball into other early literary endeavors. “Freddy watched Lefty’s first. pitch come bouncing back to him,” he writes in one such novella, “hissing sibilantly as it cut towards him in wild capers.”

Digging Mel Allen

Meanwhile, Kerouac sprinkled periodic references to baseball throughout his writing. In a 1951 letter to Cassady, Kerouac writes that he had been “digging the World Series and the tones of the various announcers”— particularly the “old reliable, southern-accent” Mel Allen. “How I dig all this,” Kerouac writes. “My mind, wrapped in wild observation of everything, is drawn by the back-country announcer, back to the regular, brakeman things of life.”

In a 1959 magazine piece, Kerouac writes, “When Bobby Thomson hit that home run in 1951, I trembled with joy and couldn’t get over it for days and wrote poems about how it is possible for the human spirit to win after all!” (See Tom Harris’s interview with Bobby Thomson at page 70-72.)

Kerouac died on October 21, 1969, five days after the Mets won their first World Series, of an abdominal hemorrhage brought on by alcoholism; he was only 47 and living in St. Petersburg, Florida, with his third wife, Stella, and his mother. To the end, baseball was one of the few constants of an otherwise rambling, psychologically unsettled life.

In recent years, columnists and writers have begun to explore Kerouac’s interest in baseball. In 2002, Stan Isaacs, the former Newsday baseball reporter, penned a colorful piece for TheColumnists.com about a fantasy game he had played against Kerouac on a wintry afternoon in 1961, when the writer was living in Huntington, New York. “He conducted a running commentary about the players as the game proceeded,” Isaacs writes. In one case, Kerouac’s Chicago Blues staged a rally that started when shortstop Francis X. Cudley—“an Irishman from Boston who stood up at the plate very erect, like a Jesuit,” according to Kerouac—fumbled a grounder by Johnny Keggs.

Johnny Keggs? “An old guy; his neck is seared from the Arkansas sun,” Kerouac told Isaacs. Keggs’s brother Earl, a former player, “now is back in Texarkana, selling hardware,” Kerouac said. For the record, Isaacs’s Pittsburgh Browns were too much for the Blues, and they won easily, 9–2.

“Many a youth made up such baseball cards,” Isaacs writes. “The charm of Kerouac’s cards was the imagination he brought to them, creating wondrous personalities, keeping records, writing stories about the action.”

In 2003, the Lowell Spinners (Class A, New York– Pennsylvania League) produced an instant collectible— the Jack Kerouac bobblehead doll. Ordering one thou- sand of the dolls for a giveaway in a game against Williamsport, the Spinners inadvertently created a new hit Ebay item in the process. In a recent online sighting, Kerouac bobbleheads were going for about $100.

But nowhere are Kerouac’s passion for baseball, emerging writing style, and acute sense of humor more evident than in the ongoing fictional correspondence, in 1940, between Kerouac, purporting to represent the interests of the Detroit Tigers, and Tom Yawkey of the Red Sox, along with a character named Jack Dudworth of the Yankees.

In a letter to the Yankees, Kerouac proposes trading future Hall of Famers Hank Greenberg and Charlie Gehringer and three others for another legend, Joe DiMaggio. “Dear John,” Dudworth writes back. “I would not let go of DiMaggio for those stumblebums if you threw in city hall, the library, B&M carshop and the Ford MC of Dt [Motor Company of Detroit].”

That means Greenberg and Gehringer stayed with the Tigers, right? 

JIM REISLER, a SABR member for more than twenty years, is the author of A Great Day in Cooperstown: The Improbable Birth of Baseball’s Hall of Fame (Carroll and Graf, 2006) and Babe Ruth: Launching the Legend (Macmillan, 2004).

Dummy Hoy taught his teammates sign language, which they began to use in game situations and even off the field. Initially, Hoy when at bat had to turn around to look at the umpire’s hand signal in order to see the call, ball or strike. Opposing pitchers would rush him. In 1887, after adopting the system where he got the signals from the third-base coach, Hoy saw his batting average improve dramatically. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS)

The year 2008 has been the occasion for several retrospectives—on Fred Merkle, the only world championship (so far) owned by the Chicago Cubs, and the song “Take Me Out to the Ballgame” (see Timothy A. Johnson’s article at page 138)—but it may mark as well the centennial of a feature so ingrained into baseball as we now know it that it tends to escape our attention. It is in 1908 that, as the historical record suggests, the practice whereby the umpire raises his right hand to indicate a strike finally took lasting hold in Major League Baseball.

What is the history behind that signal and, more generally, of hand signals used by players, managers, and coaches as well as umpires?

Baseball’s popularity as the national pastime grew rapidly among hearing people in the United States beginning in the second half of the nineteenth century, but it is often not recognized that, at the same time, deaf Americans too were being introduced to the game and playing it. No understanding of baseball history can be complete without some understanding of the influence that deaf people have had on the game.

Bill Klem is often said to have pioneered the use of umpires’ hand signals,¹ and a connection is sometimes made between their use and Paul Hines or other late- deafened players.² In the American deaf community it tends to be accepted as fact that hand signaling in baseball can be traced simply to its widespread use by deaf players. It was natural for American Sign Language (ASL) to pervade the game of the deaf ballplayer. A deaf person will translate new experiences into the sign language that he uses in his everyday life. Arguably, it is more plausible that deaf players in professional baseball taught their managers, coaches, and even umpires the new signs, and not vice versa—although one report of signaling among players, in 1860, does predate by five years what appears to be the earliest known playing of baseball in the deaf community.³

As hand signals in baseball probably emerged from a joint effort between deaf players and hearing players and officials, it is important to recognize how the personal experiences of deaf players were involved in this development. Looking at the lives of players who translated their experience from residential schools for the deaf to the major leagues, we can begin to see more clearly the history of hand-signal usage in baseball.

First, though, it will be helpful to take a close look at a couple of the signals themselves and then a broad, bird’s-eye view of the history of baseball hand signals in general.

Etymological evidence

The view that what are now baseball’s conventional hand signals have their origins in sign language used by the deaf is supported by the etymology of arguably the game’s two most basic signals. The signal for “out” in baseball is identical to the sign for the word out in ASL: A, or the thumbs-up handshape, is moved up and over the shoulder of the dominant hand. And the signal for “safe” bears a striking resemblance to the ASL sign for free—it is made with two open and flat hands with the palms down, which start crossed over one another and then move outward. The ASL sign for free involves the same hand placement and movement, the only difference being its two F handshapes (on each hand, thumb and index finger touch).

Historical evidence

No single source is available from which we can learn in detail exactly how deaf players communicated with each other and with deaf umpires. It is reasonable to assume they used sign language and gesturing to communicate plays, calls, and other relevant information. That such communication among umpires and players alike was mutual, and not unilaterally invented by umpires for the benefit of players (or vice versa), is important to note.

Deaf baseball began with sandlot games in 1865 at the Ohio Institution for the Deaf, in Columbus. Eventually, the players at the Ohio Institution would form the first deaf semiprofessional baseball team, the Ohio Independents, which played in baseball tours nationwide. Deaf players followed the same rules and played in the same style as did their hearing counterparts, except that they relied on sign language and gesturing to communicate.

In May 1867, the College Nine, known as the Columbia Baseball Club, made their claim as champions of the deaf-mute community.⁴ They had played against teams including the Union and the Actives of Capitol Hill, both members of the National Association of Baseball Players (circa 1857–75), whose dissolution coincided with the formation of the National League in 1876. Games with the Columbia team were like other games except that the umpire used a red flag to indicate foul balls or strikes. The players had short expressive signals of their own, mostly between pitcher and catcher. For outfielders, the keen eyes of a deaf player were often more quickly understood than the distant voice of a non-deaf player.⁵

Hand signals and flags were probably used, unofficially, as early as 1865 in games involving deaf schools. By the 1870s, Henry Chadwick was describing, and prescribing, hand signals among players, and already catchers were signing to pitchers both the type and location of pitches, although initially it may have been more common for the pitcher to sign to the catcher.⁶ David Anderson in More Than Merkle notes that “the umpires of 1908 were among those who had introduced the use of hand signals to communicate calls to a partner, the players, the bench, and the fans.”⁷ Quoting Spalding’s, Dickson goes on to describe the impact that the use of hand signals had on spectators:

Signaling strike, safe, and out calls was an important means of adding to enjoyment of the game. The signal system had been “invaluable assistance” to the umpires in “making their decisions understood when the size of the crowd is such that it is impossible to make the human voice carry distinctly to all parts of the field.”⁸

And so the formal incorporation of hand signals into baseball had, in addition to its logistical value as a means of keeping players informed of calls by the umpire, the unintended advantage of signaling to fans as well what the calls were. “In my day,” Dummy Hoy observed in 1944, many years after his retirement, “there were no electric scoreboards to announce balls and strikes or outs.”⁹ Moreover, the strain that umpires had to put on their vocal chords when their only means of communicating their calls was to bellow them was now considerably relieved.

A common and plausible assumption is that flags gave way to handkerchiefs, which eventually gave way to the hand signals. Along the way, a curious analog to that visual method of communicating calls made a short-lived appearance. Paul Dickson in The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime offers this interesting quote from Sporting Life (September 14, 1901): “The umpire is to wear a red sleeve on the right arm and a white one on the left People at the far end of the park, unable to hear even Sheridan, the umpire, can see colors.” Dickson adds, however, that sleeve colors were likely intended for the benefit of spectators sitting far from the field and that there is no evidence to support the view that the colors were ever intended to signal the umpire’s calls for the benefit of the players.¹⁰

Biographical background

We have reviewed a general history of baseball hand signals, showing how signals used in day-to-day sign communication among deaf individuals were adapted to baseball as it was played in deaf schools and eventually in the majors. We now turn to some of the individuals, deaf players and umpires alike, for a view from the inside, as it were, of their experience in baseball and of their lasting contribution to the very structure of the game.

Parley Pratt, a shoe-repair teacher and athletic coach at the Ohio Institution for the Deaf, was the first to teach baseball to deaf people, circa 1865.¹¹ He was also the first deaf umpire. He and another deaf umpire, W. S. Lott, officiated games for deaf teams in the early 1870s. In 1871, Parley umpired his first game, between the Independents and the Crescents,¹² and ten days later Lott was called in to officiate a game between the Red Stars and the Crescents.¹³

The first deaf player to reach the big leagues was Ed “Dummy” Dundon, a pitcher for the Columbus Buckeyes of the American Association (1883–84). It was from Pratt that he had learned the signals while playing for the Ohio Institution for the Deaf in 1879. He continued to use them during his professional career—he instructed the third-base coach to signal balls and strikes to him when he was at bat. At least one author has asserted, “The universal hand signs used by umpires were developed at this time so that Dundon and school mate William ‘Dummy’ Hoy could follow the proceedings of the game despite their [deafness].”¹⁴ Evidently hand signals were used by umpires for a time in the nineteenth century, though not yet universally, and finally were established as an integral part of the game after they were revived in 1908.

Probably the best-known deaf player in history is Dummy Hoy, an outfielder who played fifteen seasons (1888–1902) in professional ball, with the Washington Senators, Buffalo Bisons, St. Louis Browns, Cincinnati Reds, Louisville Colonels, and Chicago White Sox. Hoy requested that the umpires, his coaches, and managers use hand signals during his at-bats, and he was probably the first player for whom the home-plate umpire used what is now the conventional hand signal for a strike. “Hoy,” according to Richard Marazzi in The Rules and Lore of Baseball, “has been credited with initiating the practice of umpires raising their right hands on a called strike. He asked the umpire to raise his right arm to signify a strike, since he had no way of knowing what the count was. The idea soon became a standard procedure.”¹⁵ That Hoy initiated the practice has been criticized as an overstatement of his contribution to its eventual acceptance as the convention, but to speculate on his influence in this regard is warranted by the length of his career and the evident esteem of his peers.

In the beginning, Hoy would turn around to look at the umpire for each pitch to see what the call was. This put Hoy at a disadvantage, rushing him between having to look back at the umpire and then preparing for the next pitch. Most pitchers worked fast against him, giving him no break, and his batting average suffered.

In 1886, Hoy struggled at the plate (his exact batting average is disputed) with Oshkosh, but eventually the third-base coach remedied the situation by using hand signals to indicate the umpire’s call, the glance to third base from home plate being far less awkward. Moreover, he had the support of manager Frank Selee,¹⁶ and in 1887 his batting average rose to .367.¹⁷ In 1891, when Hoy was playing for the St. Louis Browns, manager Charles Comiskey, coaching third and following the plan that had worked so well for Hoy in Oshkosh, “signified a strike and ball with the index finger of both hands, the left meaning a ball and the right a strike.”¹⁸

Hoy taught sign language to his teammates, who often signed among themselves both on and off the field. It is interesting to speculate whether this team-shared sign language influenced the development of sign language for communicating in-game strategy.

Luther “Dummy” Taylor, a deaf-mute, pitched for the New York Giants (1900–8) and, briefly in 1902, for the Cleveland club of the newly formed American League. The Cleveland players were slow to learn sign language, however, and within months Taylor had been recruited back to the Giants. He taught sign language to his teammates and manager John McGraw. Taylor made use of a pad and pencil as well, which he always carried. Eventually the whole team learned to sign, with varying degrees of success—some of whom were deemed to be “all thumbs.” Hall of Fame pitcher Joe McGinnity was said to be careless with his finger spelling.¹⁹

McGraw used various finger spellings to communicate directions, which differed from the umpires’ hand signals for called plays. For example, while umpires might use actual signs to signal calls like “out” or “safe,” McGraw would spell out s-t-e-a-l for the runners to steal bases. “Hit and run” he would sign on his fingers.²⁰

Like many deaf people, Taylor relied on facial expressions, body language, and other visual cues to a degree that others often found mystifying. Paul Dickson notes:

For his part, Taylor seemed to be able to “read” situations the others missed. His obituary in the New York Times commented that “sportswriters of Taylor’s time observed that he gave up few stolen bases as he could divine a baserunner’s intention instantly by the facial expressions of the runner, the coaches and other players on the field.” ²¹

His deafness, then, in so far as it naturally led him to compensate by developing his ability to read situations, as Dickson puts it, may be considered to have actually given him distinct advantages over his opponents.

After Taylor retired, he coached the baseball team at the Illinois School for the Deaf. One of his players there was Dick Sipek, who would go on to play as an outfielder for the Cincinnati Reds in 1945. Sipek was the first deaf big-leaguer to escape the. nickname “Dummy.”

Sipek, in an interview in 2003, described his experience with signs and signals in baseball. When he was at bat or on the base paths, he would follow gestures made by the manager or his third-base coach. The manager would sign “swing the bat” to him to indicate that he was being put in as a pinch-hitter. On the bench, before Sipek’s turn at bat, Bill McKechnie, the Reds manager, would give him signals orally—Sipek reads lips well. Before the game, when the manager would meet with his players and go over the new signals for that day, Sipek had suggestions but frequently found them rejected.²²

Sipek taught his teammates Bucky Walters, Frank McCormick, Kermit Wahl, and other players sign language. His roommate, Wahl, was fast to learn. Upset at being called out on a close play one day, Sipek used a sign for a profanity, which the umpire failed to comprehend while the Reds’ bench broke up in laughter.²³ Sipek was the last fully deaf player in the majors until Curtis Pride, approximately the eighth in major-league history, debuted for the Montreal Expos in 1993 (The other five players—William Deegan, George Leitner, Thomas Lynch, Herbert Murphy, and Reuben Stephenson—all were cup-of-coffee players in the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.) In 1996 he became a free agent and signed with the Detroit Tigers. Both his third-base coach, Terry Francona, and his first-base coach, Ron Oester, used hand signals and signs to communicate with Pride during games.²⁴

*****

Hand signals have become integral to baseball; it is hard to imagine the game without them. Their function as the language where by those in the game—players, coaches, the manager, and umpires—can communicate when at least one of the parties is deaf is clear. That signing in baseball would eventually be adopted by the hearing as a superior means of communication may have been difficult to foresee back in 1865 when Parley Pratt and others at the Ohio Institution for the Deaf began to improvise. That single individual who can be designated as the one undisputed inventor of signing in baseball may be elusive, as is a definite date for its first clear appearance, and about broad assumptions that its origins lie solely in the deaf community we must exercise caution, but a look at the evidence—historical and even etymological as well as biographical and anecdotal—does indicate that the particular, highly inflected form of the language of baseball signing that is so familiar to us would have been impossible without the contributions of deaf people who have played, managed, coached, umpired, and loved the game.

JAMI N. FISHER is the American Sign Language Program coordinator and instructor at the University of Pennsylvania. She is a coda—child of deaf adults—and works to promote understanding and awareness of American Sign Language and Deaf cultural issues among deaf and hearing communities.

RANDY FISHER is a founding member of the William “Dummy” Hoy Committee, which promotes awareness and recognition of Hoy’s accomplishments as a deaf baseball player in the major leagues. He has been researching the history of deaf baseball players for more than twenty years.

NOTES

1. For examples, see entries for Klem at the websites of the Baseball Hall of Fame, Bioproject (SABR’s Baseball Biography Project), and Baseball Almanac:baseballhalloffame.org/hofers/detail.jsp?playerId=427281, http://bioproj.sabr.org/bioproj.cfm?a=v&v=l&pid=7595&bid=1221, http://www.baseball-almanac.com/quotes/quoklem.shtml (accessed 2 June 2008).

2. Robert L. Tiemann, “Paul Hines,” in Nineteenth Century Stars (Cleveland: Society for American Baseball Research, 1989), 60.
3. Rochester Evening Express, 9 July 1860, quoted in A Game of Inches: The Stories Behind the Innovations That Shaped Baseball—The Game on the Field, by Peter Morris (Chicago: Ivan Dee, 2006), 340.
4. It is important to note that, today, culturally deaf people do not embrace the term deaf-mute. The preferred term is deaf. However, culturally deaf people of the nineteenth and early twentieth centuries did refer to themselves and one another as “deaf mutes.”
5. The National Deaf Mute Gazette 1, no 6 (June 1867).
6. Morris, A Game of Inches, 47–48, 341.
7. David Anderson, More Than Merkle: A History of the Best and Most Exciting Baseball Season in Human History (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2000), 87.
8. Ibid., 87–88. 
9. Joyce Gordon McBride, Courier, 11 July 1987, 6.
10. Paul Dickson, The Hidden Language of Baseball: How Signs and Sign Stealing Have Influenced the Course of Our National Pastime (New York: Walker, 2003).
11. The Ohio Chronicle 10, 32, 10 March 1900, p. 1.
12. The Mute Chronicle (also known as The Ohio Chronicle), 3, 6 May 1871, p. 2.
13. The Mute Chronicle, 34, 13 May 1871, p. 2.
14. Joseph Santry, in Anchors Aweigh, July 1988, 15.
15. Richard Marazzi, The Rules and Lore of Baseball (New York: Stein and Day, 1980), 21.
16. Robert L. Tiemann and Mark Rucker, Nineteenth Century Stars (Kansas City, Mo.: Society for American Baseball Research, 1989), 64.
17. Randy Fisher, “William ‘Dummy’ Hoy and the Invention of the Umpire Hand Signals,” Herald Newspapers (Toledo edition) 71, 9, 28 February 1992, pp. 1, 10.
18. St Louis Daily Globe-Democrat, 9 April 1891.
19. Matthew Moore and Robert F. Panara, Great Deaf Americans, 2d ed. (Silver Spring, Md.: Deaf Life Press, 1996).
20. Lawrence Ritter, in Perennial (2002), 101; originally published in The Glory of Their Times: The Story of the Early Days of Baseball Told by the Men Who Played It (New York: Macmillan, 1966).
21. Paul Dickson, Signs: Baseball’s Hidden Language (New York: Walker, 2003), 74.
22. Randy Fisher, interview with Dick Sipek, via TTY, in March 2003.
23. William Mead, Even the Browns (The Zany True Story of Baseball in the Early Forties) (Chicago: Contemporary Books, 1978), 213–14.
24. Brown Syder, “A World of Silence Doesn’t Slow Pride,” Baltimore Sun, 6 June 1996, p. 5D.

It may look and sound like a familiar scene, one that can be found in countless parks across America—except for that “post,” and the run awarded for reaching first base. That’s because this is not the United States, but Cardiff, Wales. And it’s not the familiar game of baseball but a curious alternate version, confined to core areas of just three cities in England and Wales.

America’s national pastime has been a part (usually a small part) of the British sporting scene for more than a century, and in the 1930s it came close to establishing itself as a genuine rival to Britain’s traditional summer bat-and-ball game, cricket.1 Indeed, Britain remains in the record books as the winner of baseball’s inaugural World Cup in 1938, and the U.S. national pastime continues to be played at a minor level in the old country.

Less well known is Britain’s own indigenous version of baseball—a sport that has enjoyed and endured its own ups and downs and is now confined to parts of Cardiff and Newport in south Wales and to Liverpool in northwest England.

British baseball—often known as Welsh baseball— differs in several ways, including the number of players (11), scoring (one run for each base reached), pitching (underhand, as in softball), and the bat itself (shorter and with a flat surface).

As in cricket, there is no foul area, games have just two innings, all 11 players on each team bat at least once in each inning, and the inning continues until all 11 are either out or stranded on base. Unlike cricket players, however, British baseball players wear soccer – or rugby-style uniforms, including colorful jerseys and shorts.

Today the sport is organized by the Welsh Baseball Union (WBU) in Cardiff and Newport and by the English Baseball Association (EBA) in Liverpool. Wales boasts a men’s league, knock-out cup competitions, and a thriving women’s scene as well as junior events. In Liverpool, on the other hand, just three adult teams survive in a small area of the city.

A common set of rules is determined by the grandly titled International Baseball Board (IBB), which was established in 1927 and involves representatives of both governing bodies.

Origins and Development

Baseball has a long history in Britain. Literary references to it can be found in the eighteenth century and even earlier.2 However, the name seems to have faded from use, and by the early nineteenth century “rounders” had become a popular bat-and-ball game, especially among children. Later that century, rounders was being played by men at a highly competitive level. There. were teams in Scotland, in Gloucestershire (southwest England), south Wales, and northwest England, and probably elsewhere too. Liverpool appears to have been the most active rounders city and was home to The Rounders Reporter, a publication launched in 1885.

The name baseball for the indigenous British game was revived in 1892, when the Liverpool Rounders Association changed the name of its sport from rounders to baseball. Exactly why this happened is a matter for speculation. It is argued that the name rounders suggested a children’s game and did not reflect the manly sport played in these working-class areas.3 Inspiration for the name change may have come from recent visits to Britain by U.S. professional baseball teams—the Boston Red Stockings and Philadelphia Athletics in 1874 and the Chicago White Stockings and an All-America team in 1889. Both tours included games in the rounders hotbed of Liverpool.4

Following their Liverpool counterparts, the south Wales authorities renamed their game baseball in the summer of 1892, and since then this peculiar British sport has shared a name with its more famous American, and increasingly global, counterpart.

The British version of baseball has never managed to spread beyond its confines in south Wales and northwest England, although exhibition games have been played in the London area, and, during a boom period of the late 1940s and early 1950s, it was reported that the sport was becoming established in the English cities of Bristol and Coventry.5

British baseball never became a professional sport, but it did attract large crowds and was the premier summer sport in the poorer parts of its host cities for many years. Several top-level soccer and rugby players played baseball to maintain their fitness through the summer.

In addition to the elite clubs, there were the teams organized by local churches, stores, factories, and bars. Especially in the blue-collar neighborhoods of Cardiff, baseball was for many years the premier summer sport. Exactly why baseball flourished in these particular cities is a mystery. Some suggest that residents of the poorer areas of Cardiff, Newport, and Liverpool turned to baseball because they lacked the space and expensive equipment to play cricket. But that does not explain why baseball was not embraced in working-class areas in other cities. In any case, baseball needs as much space as cricket, and working-class cricket teams were flourishing in the late nineteenth century, just when rounders was becoming baseball.6 It may be that this renamed version of rounders grew in Cardiff, Newport, and Liverpool because they were all major ports with significant Irish communities, and a version of rounders—similar to British baseball—remains a competitive adult game in Ireland.7

Periodic efforts have been made to “convert” these areas to the U.S. game, but the peculiar British variety survives into the twenty-first century. American and Japanese teams have even faced teams playing the British code from time to time.

In 1933, the Liverpool Amateurs challenged a Japanese ship, the Lima Maru, to a game under American rules. This game reportedly drew an “unusually large crowd” and was won by the Japanese 12—9. However, a year later the Amateurs won the return game. A similar game had been played in the early 1920s against a Canadian ship, but there are no records of a result.8

On August 27, 1938, the Cardiff team Penylan faced the London Americans at Cardiff Arms Park. The contest saw one inning each under “Welsh” rules, followed by three innings under U.S. rules.

In July 1969, the Newport team Alexandra Old Boys met a U.S. Army team from a military base at Caer went in south Wales for a game of softball—a contest that the locals won 26—12, thanks to 13 runs in the eighth inning.9

The international game

The showcase event each year is the “international” game between England (effectively Liverpool) and Wales (drawn from players in Cardiff and Newport), which alternates between venues in the two countries. The 2008 game, held at Llanrumney High School, Cardiff, in July, marked the centenary of the contest. Wales scored a comfortable victory—its tenth successive win.

Back in 1908, the first international match-up was played to a compromise set of rules. Most significantly, the Welsh Baseball Association (as it was then known) conceded to having two umpires—one provided by each governing body. Batters were also permitted to move both feet while “at the plate,” but the English batters tended to use their accustomed one-handed tennis-style technique of swinging the bat.

The game took place on a public holiday, Monday, August 3, at the Harlequins Ground, also known as Cardiff Intermediate. School Ground, where Wales captain Lew Lewis won the toss of the coin and chose to bat first. He opened the batting himself, facing England pitcher Fred Mack of the Marsh Lane club.

Wales finished the first inning with 102—such scores are achieved because a run is awarded for each base reached, all 11players bat, and the inning continues until all 11 are either out or stranded on base. England started badly in reply, and had two men out for only five runs at one stage before being all-out with 57. Being more than 30 runs behind, England was forced to bat again—to “follow on,” as in cricket. The visitors did little better this time around, ending the second inning with 61, putting them just 16 runs ahead of Wales, who had yet to bat in their half of the second and last inning. W. Allen was the star for England, scoring 20 of those 61 runs, but the English batting was generally poor: “The using of one hand in batting seemed to hamper them considerably, for their hitting was not as great as that of the Welsh side.”10

Wales went back in to bat, needing 17 runs to win— a target they reached with the loss of four men. Contemporary reports highlighted several problems with this initial encounter between the two national teams— the two-umpire game was a problem, and in a later account the officials are described as “two argumentative referees . . . who wasted a good deal of time coming to decisions.” Even the venue was not ideal, because it was too small and “it was not too difficult for burly Lew Lewis . . . and Fred Wreford from Newport, to hit the ball out of bounds—either over the railway embankment or into Newport Road over the housetops.”11

No official attendance figures seem to have been published, but a report suggests that, despite other attractions on that public holiday, there were 2,000 people present half an hour before the start, and the crowd was still “steadily pouring in.”12

It took six years to arrange the second game between England and Wales. The teams met again in 1914 in Liverpool— when the English won in front of 4,000 people at Goodison Park, home of the famous Everton soccer club. Because of World War I, it was another six years before the teams met again, but since then—with the exception of the war years—the event has been played annually. The international has visited some illustrious sporting venues over the years. As well as Goodison Park, it has been to Cardiff Arms Park, home of Welsh rugby, and to Sophia Gardens, Cardiff, now an international cricket stadium.

The 1924 international at Cardiff Arms Park drew 10,000 fans, while both the 1925 game at the Police Athletic Ground, Liverpool, and the 1926 edition, again at Cardiff Arms Park, attracted 12,000. It has often been suggested that the 1948 international game, played in the picturesque setting of Cardiff Castle, was seen by a record 16,000.13 Contemporary press reports give the attendance figure as 10,000—still a significant number for an amateur event.14 This was the first international since World War II, and local hero Ted Peterson—regarded as one of the sport’s all-time greats—defied doctor’s orders to lead Wales to victory.

Major club games have also attracted five-figure crowds, and for decades the sheer number of games played in city parks, especially in Cardiff—and to a lesser extent in Newport and Liverpool—ensured that baseball was a major sport in terms of spectators and participants.

In the 1970s and ’80s, BBC Wales even broadcast a highlights show on television the day after the international game. More recently, however, the game has been confined to more modest venues, such as public parks, and media interest has waned, as have attendances, which rarely reach as many as 2,000.

British baseball today

Fallen from its peaks of popularity, as a serious summer rival to cricket in some areas, British baseball is now a. minor sport, even in the three cities where it survives. A serious decline in Liverpool, the only English city where the game is played, must put the future of the international game between England and Wales in doubt. Even in the Welsh cities of Cardiffand Newport, the sport is a shadow of its former glory. In 2007 there were only 24 men’s teams from Cardiff and Newport playing in the three-division Welsh League, though a separate women’s league continues to grow, as does a smaller-scale junior program. This contrasts with the picture in 1938, for example, when there were 40 men’s teams in Cardiff alone,15 in addition to countless other recreational clubs.

On the other hand, the death of British baseball has been predicted for many years. Back in 1966, Les Aplin, chairman of the WBU, wrote: “Some pessimists have already declared baseball to be ‘dead’ and seem eager to bury the corpse. But I am certain. their verdict is premature and [they] will find the ‘corpse’ to be very much alive in 1976.”16

British baseball was certainly still alive in 1976, and now in 2008—against all odds—the sport saw its centenary international game played in Cardiff in July. How much longer it will survive is a matter for debate, but it would be a brave person to bet against this unusual version of the sport continuing for many years. 

ANDREW WELTCH, a writer and public-relations consultant in Cardiff, Wales, is editor of the Welsh baseball website www.welshbaseball.co.uk and is currently researching the hundred-year history of the England–Wales baseball international.

ACKNOWLEDGMENTS

In addition to the sources mentioned, the author is grateful to John Day and other officials of the Welsh Baseball Union, and to Lawrence Hourahane and Matthew Yeomans for their invaluable help with this article.

NOTES

1. The near-breakthrough of baseball in Britain in the 1930s has been explored in a number of articles and books. See: Daniel Bloyce, “John Moores and the ‘Professional’ Baseball Leagues in 1930s England,” Sport in History 27, no. 1 (March 2007): 64—87; Josh Chetwynd and Brian A. Belton, British Baseball and the West Ham Club: History of a Professional Team in East London (Jefferson, C.: McFarland, 2007).
2. A Pretty Little Pocket Book of 1744 and Jane Austen’s Northanger Abbey (published in 1818, but drafted between 1798 and 1799) are the best-known For a superb bibliography of early baseball, see David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005).
3. South Wales baseball administrator and historian Ivor Beynon and journalist Bob Evans suggest that the term baseball was seen as “more appropriate to the skilfull style of play being developed.” Ivor Beynon and Bob Evans, The Inside Story of Baseball (Cardiff: publisher unknown, 1962).
4. For a British perspective on those international tours, see Daniel Bloyce, “That’s Your Way of Playing Rounders, Isn’t It? The Response of the English Press to American Baseball Tours to England 1874— 1924,” in Sporting Traditions 22, 1 (November 2005).
5. South Wales Echo, 16 August 1950.
6. For an examination of the rise of cricket in south Wales, including among working-class communities, see Andrew Hignell, A ‘Favourit’ Game: Cricket in South Wales Before 1914 (Cardiff: University of Wales Press, 1992).
7. For information on Irish rounders today, see http://rounders.gaa.ie/index.html.
8. See the Liverpool Trojans website, liverpooltrojansbaseball.co.uk/History%20Merseyside.htm (accessed 21 December 2007).
9. South Wales Argus, 21 July 1969.
10. South Wales Daily News, 4 August 1908.
11. Sid Rees, Western Mail journalist, who was at the 1908 game, writing in the program for the 1966 international.
12. Western Mail, 4 August 1908.
13. For example, Ivor Beynon and Bob Evans, The Inside Story of Baseball (Cardiff: publisher unknown, 1962), 25—26; Martin Johnes, “Poor Man’s Cricket: Baseball,Class and Community in South Wales 1880—1950,” The International Journal of the History of Sport 17, no. 4 (December 2000); Andrew Weltch, “Ted Peterson: A Legend in Welsh Baseball,” in Cardiff Sporting Greats, ed. Andrew Hignell and Gwyn Prescott (Stroud: Stadia, 2007).
14. Western Mail, 2 August 1948; Cardiff Times, 7 August 1948.
15. Martin Johnes, “Poor Man’s Cricket: Baseball, Class and Community in South Wales c. 1880—1950,” International Journal of the History of Sport 17, no. 4 (December 2000).
16. From an article published in the program for the 1966 international game.

You might say that Chadwick, a British-born journalist, who had arrived on this side of the Atlantic Ocean nearly two decades earlier, suddenly ceased being English and became American. He never lost his love for the intricate, demanding game of cricket, but he became convinced that baseball, fast-paced and rugged—a style that suited the American temperament—was good for Americans, that it would inspire them to take to the outdoors and to exercise. Chadwick saw that the nation was shifting increasingly from an agrarian to an industrial way of life. In baseball, he saw great possibilities for the promotion of public health—and, perhaps, for his career. Was it the platform on which he might be elevated to the level of fame enjoyed by his older half-brother, Edwin Chadwick, the sanitary reformer of England who many years later would be knighted?

Why did it take so long for Chadwick to appreciate baseball? He knew of the game’s existence and had even played it from time to time. It resembled, perhaps too much, rounders, a game that he played in childhood and so may have come to feel was too simple and unscientific. Chadwick often reminisced about playing rounders in Exeter, England, where he was born on October 5,1824. He recalled how, as youngsters, he and his friends would “dig a hole in the ground for the home position, and place four stones in a circle, or nearly so, for the bases, and, choosing up sides, we went in for a lively time at what was the parent game of base ball.”

Like all good English boys, Chadwick advanced to cricket as he matured. He was not quite a teenager when his father, James Chadwick, a noted radical journalist, decided to take his new family (Henry was the product of James Chadwick’s second marriage) and emigrate to the United States. Was it his allegiance to the principles of the French revolution that drew him to this country founded on a revolution by colonists from his homeland? In any event, in September 1837, with his wife Theresa, his son Henry, and his daughter Rosa, he emigrated to the United States, and American history would be forever altered.

Soon after landing in New York, the young family moved to Brooklyn. Henry in adulthood would cherish fond memories of his adolescence there; he spent his first years in Brooklyn fishing in Gowanus Canal, hunting birds, and stealing fallen apricots near a Brooklyn farm. He ice-skated in present-day downtown Brooklyn (Brooklyn Heights), on Court Street near Hamilton Avenue. It was in Brooklyn, in 1838, where he resumed his youthful interest in cricket, attending there a match between the English towns of Sheffield and Nottingham— a sporting event of a sort not so unusual in this early phase of American history, when the English sport was still the dominant sport in America. As a young adult, Chadwick made his livelihood by teaching piano. He never lost his passion for music. He even composed waltzes and quadrilles. Gradually, though, he found himself drawn to his father’s footsteps—his older brother, too, had dabbled in journalism before pursuing his career in public health. Chadwick began reporting for Brooklyn’s Long Island Star in 1844.

By the mid-1850s he had managed to integrate his love for cricket into his professional life, working as cricket writer for the New York Times. Like all enthusiasts of the sport in the New York metropolitan area, Chadwick would frequent Elysian Fields. He would later draw on his encyclopedic knowledge of cricket in formulating his suggestions for improvements to baseball, a younger game that was still somewhat unformed and that he sought to make “more scientific” and more “manly.”

The first journalist to report on baseball regularly was actually William Cauldwell, editor of the New York Sunday Mercury.However, because of Chadwick’s driving ambition to publicize the game and raise it to the status of the national pastime, he soon outshone Cauldwell. Later, Cauldwell hired Chadwick to take over as baseball reporter at the Mercury. After several minor successes in carving out space for baseball in the dailies, Chadwick in 1857 joined the staff of the New York Clipper, an entertainment weekly, which, like many New York weeklies at the time, was read nationwide. And so his articles on the New York game were circulating in Boston and Philadelphia, where town ball still dominated, but would eventually give way to baseball. Chadwick’s influence on this development would be hard to measure but also hard to deny.

His standing in the baseball world by this time had earned him a place with the rules committee. On the side, he began to make improvements to the format of the box score.

By 1860 he was working for Beadle Dime, editing Beadle’s Dime Base-Ball Player, which he would make into the quintessential baseball guide. It was there that Chadwick developed the framework for the in-game scoring system that, while evolving somewhat over the years, has remained an enduring feature of baseball in the press box as well as among fans in the seats. Use of the letter K to indicate a strikeout, for example, dates back to Chadwick’s work in the Beadle publication. Around this time he began to tabulate hits, home runs, and total bases. This practice led to the formulation of such familiar statistical metrics as batting average and slugging percentage, although Chadwick was not directly responsible for their invention.

Chadwick’s ongoing concern about the game’s rules led him to conclude that they needed reform. Early on, he began to advocate for the elimination of the bound catch, whereby the fielder would retire the batter by catching the ball on the first bounce. In his view, the fly catch was more manly and scientific. Moreover, it was the rule in cricket, the elder, established sport, that baseball had reason to emulate. Chadwick won the argument. In 1864 the rules committee voted to eliminate the bound catch. The move from the bound to the fly catch would coincide with the growth of the New York game and its expansion across the continent in the late nineteenth century. In related developments, Chadwick helped to promote the establishment of the overhand pitch as normative and to determine the uniform distance between the pitcher’s mound and home plate.

Chadwick’s contribution to the game’s inner workings—its rules and its systems for keeping score and keeping records—was great but should not be taken to mean that he ever lost sight of the larger social function he thought baseball should serve. In the early days of the Civil War, in 1861, he had arranged for a special baseball game, billed as the Silver Ball Match, to be played in late October—three months after the Battle of Bull Run. The Brooklyn nine defeated the New York nine, 18—6, in a contest that was welcomed as a necessary diversion from the stress experienced by a civilian population during wartime.

The great expectations that Chadwick had for this noble civic institution, as he saw it, were of a piece with his moral stand against drinking, gambling, and hippodroming (the practice of predetermining the outcome of games). He said he was moved to speak out against gambling after overhearing attempts by gamblers to fix the outcome of the Fashion Course games, an all-star series between New York and Brooklyn and an important matchup in the early years of baseball. Chadwick’s subsequent campaign against gambling earned for him a reputation as the conscience of baseball. Though it is unclear when he began to speak of “the best interests of baseball,” he is among the first to use the phrase.

Much of Chadwick’s hope for baseball’s moral reform was finally realized when in 1871 the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was created with the intention of cleaning up the game. In 1876 it gave way to the the National League, and Chadwick’s influence in professional baseball was curtailed but not ended. He still had a voice.

In the early 1880s, Chadwick began his new position as editor of Spalding’s Official Base Ball Guide. The official guide of the National League, it was distributed by his friend Albert Spalding, a sporting-goods magnate and a former pitching great for Boston and Chicago. Chadwick was among Spalding’s mentors, though Spalding had a special talent for marketing and a good baseball mind of his own, as the success of his sporting-goods business demonstrated.

Spalding and Chadwick remained friends despite the growing differences between them. As the business of baseball grew, so did Spalding’s business, and Chadwick began to lose touch with that side of baseball’s development. They found themselves divided as well on the issue of baseball’s origins. Motivated by nationalism and the calculation that it was good for his business, Spalding propagated the idea, now discredited, that baseball’s origin was entirely American, that it was invented in the United States and without any foreign influence. Chadwick maintained that baseball derived from the English bat-and-ball game he knew as rounders, which shared many of the same rules with baseball. Chadwick assumed, with good reason, that the English variant was parent to American baseball. Chadwick had said as much in the first Beadle guide, in 1860.

Spalding was adamant, however, and in 1907 he appointed the Mills Commission to determine baseball’s “true origins.” After some deliberation, the members determined that Civil War general Abner Doubleday invented the game in Cooperstown, New York, although Doubleday never mentioned baseball in his voluminous diaries and there is no evidence that he ever even played the sport. Authoritative voices from the four corners of the baseball world chimed in to affirm the commission’s finding, but Chadwick stuck to his guns, maintaining to theend that baseball’s origins in rounders were undeniable. He genuinely sympathized with Spalding’s wish to imagine a national pastime as a purely American game, though not at the cost of confusing fiction with historical fact.

He lost the argument, for the time being, but not his reputation. As early as the 1870s he had been carrying the title “Father of Baseball.” He had won admiration from all quarters; President Theodore Roosevelt saluted his work. In 1904, as Chadwick celebrated his eightieth birthday, Roosevelt wrote to him: “My Dear Chadwick: I congratulate you on your eightieth year and your fiftieth year in journalism . . . and you are entitled to the good wishes of all for that part you have taken in behalf of decent sport.”

Chadwick continued to write throughout the 1880s and 1890s, working as editor of the Spalding guides, and the Sporting Life was a venue for his opinions on a range of topics—the Player’s Revolt of 1890, the home run (an expenditure of too much energy, he thought), the rise of the American League in 1901, and Turkish baths, which he recommended. He was a versatile sportswriter and penned numerous articles and guides on football, chess, tennis, yachting, rowing, ice skating, and bowling (specifically, lawn bowls). In his last years, though, his output began to wane. He left the Sporting Life and returned to write almost exclusively for the Brooklyn Eagle.

Chadwick caught a cold after attending two opening day games in April 1908 and grew progressively weak. Though sick, he attempted to move some furniture from one apartment to another in his Brooklyn walkup. Overstraining his heart, he fell unconscious. His illness had worsened to pneumonia. Chadwick died the next day on April 20, 1908, a few minutes past noon. He was 83. He is buried in Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery, his grave marked by a monument on top of which is a granite sphere carved to resemble a baseball. The four corners of the site are marked by stones etched to look like bases.

Chadwick was the most important figure in nineteenth-century baseball, according to Christopher Devine in his biography of Harry Wright. (Spalding ranked second, and Wright third.) A visionary, Chadwick saw baseball’s great potential and dreamed of. the day when it would be enshrined as the national pastime, and all this at a time when it was relatively ill defined, fledgling, and under the shadow of cricket. Given the place of importance that baseball would come to occupy in American society and culture, Chadwick’s own place in American history has to be deemed high. We can only speculate whether it exceeds the aspirations he nurtured in his ambitious youth. In bringing his seriousness and reformer’s zeal to his work as a baseball journalist, he anticipated our own time, when sports news has the power to knock political news off the front page and often does. Chadwick was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1938. He is the only journalist enshrined in the player’s wing in the museum. 

ANDREW J. SCHIFF is author of “The Father of Baseball”: A Biography of Henry Chadwick (McFarland, 2008), the first full-length book devoted to the Hall of Fame journalist.

SOURCES

Adelman, Melvin L. A Sporting Time: New York City and the Rise of Modern Athletics, 1820—70. Urbana: University of Illinois Press, 1986.

Chadwick, Henry. The Game of Baseball: How to Learn It, How to Play It, How to Teach It. New York: George Munro, 1868.

Devine, Christopher. Harry Wright: The Father of Professional Base Ball (Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2003), 10.

Richman, Jeffrey I. Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery: New York’s Buried Treasure. Brooklyn: The Cemetery, 1998.

Schiff, Andrew J. “The Father of Baseball”: A Biography of Henry Chadwick. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2008.

For two of the great photos, however, their interpretation missed the mark. While 363 out of 365 is pretty good, those other two images do merit further analysis. One is significant, and the other is at least highly interesting, given the identity of all the individuals depicted.

Click on the image to read the rest of this article in its original pictorial layout:

PDF link to article: https://sabr.box.com/shared/static/jt1giajj477c21nndexbq2p7061zc5uz.pdf

MARK FIMOFF, an electronic engineer, is author of the “Mystery Photo” column in the SABR Pictorial History Committee Newsletter.

Jack Dunn in the second decade of the twentieth century had established in Baltimore a dynasty that would bring his Orioles seven consecutive IL pennants and corresponding trips to the JWS. In both 1920 and 1922 his teams had defeated St. Paul in the postseason event, and there was little reason to believe that Baltimore’s domination would end when the two teams met again in October 1924. The Orioles had finished 19 games ahead of second-place Toronto. After briefly trailing Buffalo early in the season, they had gone on to win the pennant handily.

Baltimore was paced by future Hall of Famer Robert Moses (Lefty) Grove (26–6, 3.01 ERA). Other significant members of their pitching staff were Jack Ogden (19–6, 3.63 ERA), later to see action with two of the St. Louis Browns’ better teams (1928–29) and with the Reds (1931–32); Cliff Jackson (16–8, 3.92); Tommy Thomas (16–11, 4.08), and Ed Tomlin (11–2, 3.61).

Second baseman Dick Porter led the IL in batting with a .363 average along with 23 home runs and 125 RBIs. He was injured in late August but returned in time for the JWS. At first base was Clayton Sheedy (.298, 16, 99). Joe Boley (.291, 4, 100) was at short, and Fritz Maisel (.306, 20, 88) at third. In the outfield was left fielder John Jacobs (.284, 14, 70), center fielder Merwin Jacobson (.308, 18, 97), and right fielder Tom Connelly (.312, 19, 98). Both Jacobs and Connelly had been acquired during midseason trades. The catching was handled largely by Joe Cobb (.320, 22, 84), who was backed up by Lew McCarty (.308, 4, 22). Off-the-bench outfielder Harold Clark (.339, 9, 39) was a major contributor as well.

*****

The 1923 St. Paul Saints had won 111 games but still finished second behind Kansas City in the AA pennant race. The 1924 version of the team would win “only” 96, but that was good enough for a first-place finish over Indianapolis. The team was piloted by backup catcher Nick Allen, succeeding long-time manager Mike Kelley, who had moved over to Minneapolis to assume the reigns of the Millers. Allen’s pitching staff was led by Cliff Markle (19–9, 3.01), Howard Merritt (19–17, 4.68), Paul Fittery (16–10, 4.37), and Tony Faeth (15–4, 3.45). St. Paul’s offensive leader was third baseman Charlie Dressen (.346, 18, 151), destined to become better known for his major league career as a manager, guiding the Brooklyn Dodgers to two pennants (1952, 1953) during his three years at the helm there. First baseman Johnny Neun, a Baltimore native, batted a healthy .353 with 5 home runs and 100 RBIs while leading the AA in stolen bases with 54. He would subsequently earn a degree of immortality after moving up to the Detroit Tigers in 1925 and, two years later, becoming one of only two first basemen in major-league history to execute an unassisted triple play.

Second baseman “Hap” Morse (.273, 3, 52) and shortstop Danny Boone (.259, 4, 65) rounded out the infield. Patrolling the outfield was AA runs leader Walt “Seacap” Christensen (.314, 8, 73) in center, flanked by Bruno Haas (.293, 11, 100) in left and, in right, Cliff Lee (.382, 3, 36). Leo Dixon (.272, 10, 67) was the everyday catcher. Also in the dugout was utility infielder Mark Koenig (.267, 0, 16), who would parlay this series into a starting role with the 1925 Saints before joining the Yankees and ultimately playing shortstop for the memorable 1927 team.

Baltimore had trained at Columbus, Georgia, and then barnstormed north, playing major- as well as minor-league teams. St. Paul had no opportunity to face major-league opposition during spring training. Assembling at Fort Smith, Arkansas, near the Oklahoma border in early March, the Saints broke camp on March 25 for a twelve-game exhibition tour of the Southern Association, through Memphis, Birmingham, Nashville, and Chattanooga, finishing with a record of 6–5 and one tie. The Baltimore Sun’s evaluation of the Orioles could have applied to the Saints equally well: “done well, without setting the world on fire.”

The tight AA pennant race of 1924

Unlike Baltimore, which won the IL pennant easily, St. Paul fought a hard, season-long pennant race. The AA season opened in mid-April. Indianapolis, Louisville, and St. Paul rose to the top of the standings, all of them holding first place at some point during the summer. By September 15, the Saints were on top at 84–62. Indianapolis was second at 82–65, and, at 82–66, Louisville was a close third.

A week later, with less than a week of the season remaining, the Indianapolis Indians, now holding a half-game lead over the Saints, went to St. Paul, where they lost four of five games and fell 21⁄2 games back. The Saints then split a four-game series against Louisville. Indianapolis got swept by the Minneapolis Millers in a three-game series, and that was the season.

The clincher came in the second game of a double-header versus Louisville on September 27 as Markle went the distance in the 5–3 win. Allen put things into perspective as reported by the St. Paul Pioneer Press: “It’s too early to start crowing. Our biggest job lies ahead of us. When we have beaten Baltimore, and I am sure this is our year, then we will be able to call it a successful season” (September 28).

Opening in Baltimore

The Junior World Series was to open in Baltimore on Thursday, October 2. The Saints took the train from Minnesota on Monday evening. After an hour’s layover in Chicago, they departed for Maryland in time to work out at the home team’s Oriole Park on Wednesday. No Saint was suffering from anything worse than minor injuries as Allen put the team through “a short, but intensive workout ”:

After the usual infield and batting practice Allen took the men over the field, inspecting the distances to the fences and discussing the possible developments from hits to any field. Standing in left, center, and right fields successively, the players discussed every possible play that might develop from balls bouncing off the short fences and a plan of campaign was outlined that pretty comprehensively covered all the possibilities of the opening game. (Pioneer Press, October 2)

The series would be best-of-nine, a format that the major leagues had used previously for the Fall Classic in 1903 and then again in 1919, 1920, and 1921.

Game 1

In Game 1, Allen went with Cliff Markle as his starting pitcher, while Dunn predictably sent to the mound Groves, as Lefty Grove was then known. Allen’s decision looked misguided when the Orioles’ lead-off hitter Fritz Maisel sent Markle’s second offering over the left-field fence to put the home team up in the first inning. The locals added another run and took that lead into the fourth when the Saints got to Grove for two runs. The tie held until the top of the ninth when Cliff Lee homered to right to give the visitors a 3–2 lead heading into the home ninth. After Maisel was retired, Connelly doubled to right, bringing up Merwin Jacobson, who “fixed his eye on the offering of the St. Paul pitcher,” according to the account in the Baltimore Sun (October 3), “gave a mighty swing at the whirling sphere and caught it squarely with his bat. Before it fell outside the park, a thousand fans were on the field to hail him chief, conqueror and premier batsman of the day.”

Despite the 4–3 defeat, the Pioneer Press in its account (October 3) was optimistic:

All in all, even in defeat, the Saints looked like the better team. Their superiority is marked in the outfield and even more so in the infield. The Orioles have an advantage in catching, not because McCarty is any part of the catcher Dixon is, but because he knows St. Paul’s hitters and guides his pitcher carefully and wisely [McCarty had played for 1923 AA Kansas City].

Five thousand St. Paul fans had stood outside the newspaper’s downtown offices at Minnesota Street watching the game’s progress on an electronic scoreboard. Others stood in windows and on roofs of adjacent buildings to catch the play-by-play reports. The crowd had taken heart when Lee had put the locals in front during the top of the ninth and called on Markle to preserve the victory. They were predictably disappointed when things turned sour in the last half of the inning.

Game 2

Allen had intended to start Tony Faeth for the Saints in Game 2 but decided against that move as the well-traveled Faeth was a fly-ball pitcher who could be easily victimized in the small confines of Oriole Park. He decided to save Faeth for more spacious Lexington Park and go with Howard Merritt, who responded with a masterful three-hit shutout as the Saints won 6–0 and evened the series. Dunn had elected to start Jack Ogden and stayed with him through eight innings and ten hits. Charlie Dressen’s RBI single in the fourth, scoring Neun, put the Saints on the board first. Dressen’s two-run home run in the sixth made it 3-0, opening the floodgates for the Saints, who added one run in the eighth and two more off reliever Ed Tomlin in the ninth, but even Dressen’s heroics couldn’t overshadow Merritt’s performance. His

quiet confidence, his deliberate planning of every move, his calmness growing more serene as the situation grew more critical, was just the tonic the Saints needed. . . .With two on and two out, Walter Christensen ended the game by a nice catch of Freitag’s fly and the Baltimore fans, much to their credit, gave Merritt a genuine ovation, the tribute that was due an artist’s masterpiece. (Pioneer Press, October 4)

Game 3

On October 4, in Game 3, three hours and ten minutes into play, the two teams were tied 6–6 after thirteen innings when the game was called due to darkness. Allen had rethought his reluctance to use Faeth in Oriole Park and got 52⁄3 innings out of him before bringing in Paul Fittery, who went the rest of the way. Dunn started Cliff Jackson, but he left in the fourth when the Saints came up with five runs. His relief, Tommy Thomas, finished the game. St. Paul carried a 6–3 lead into the sixth when Baltimore tied the game, Fritz Meisel chasing Faeth with a two-run homer. Both teams nearly won the game on solo home runs in extra innings. In the bottom of the eleventh, Connelly’s line drive nearly cleared the fence but was held to a double. In the top of the thirteenth, Dressen’s long fly missed going out by a yard or two.

Game 4

Before the next day’s game, on Sunday, October 5, Baltimore second baseman Dick Porter received a cup as a reward for winning the IL batting title. Unfortunately for the Orioles, he would be throwing to someone other than Clayton Sheedy at first base. Sheedy had sprained his ankle in the tie game the day before, forcing Dunn to use pitcher Ed Tomlin in his place now in Game 4. Each manager returned his Game 1 starter, Grove and Markle, to the mound, and with the same outcome.

Close to 11,000, the largest crowd either team would draw for the series, saw the locals build up a 6–0 lead after seven innings, largely as the result of a four-run third inning. Markle was hit hard, walked two batters, and uncorked a wild pitch to put St. Paul in a hole. Allen relieved him with Herb McQuaid, 7–9 on the season, who gave up a run before yielding to Oscar Roettger (8– 4) in the seventh. The Saints made it interesting in the top of the ninth. Trailing 6–4 with Christensen on second and two out, Grove faced local product Neun. “Johnny wasted no time,” as Saints fan would read the next day in the Pioneer Press (October 6).

Swinging at the first ball pitched, he drove a tremendous fly to right field. “It’s over,” shouted the fans, and so it seemed. Connelly raced for the fence, which in that part of the field is only a little over waist high. He threw himself against the barrier, reached into the crowd beyond and made the catch.

Game 5: Ed Onslow and Mark Koenig

Game 4 had marked the series debut of Mark Koenig, who batted for Morse in the seventh and took his place at second base. The San Francisco native would find himself in the lineup for good in Game 5, but not at second. During batting practice before the final Baltimore game, on October 6, St. Paul’s shortstop Danny Boone was hit in the head by Faeth, and Koenig was his emergency replacement. He would also be the Saints’ only bright spot in a 10–1 pasting that put them down 3–1 in the series.

Merritt, who had pitched so brilliantly for the Saints in Game 2, was opposed by Baltimore’s George Earnshaw. This time it was Earnshaw who would throw a three-hitter. He struck out 11, the only run he allowed being a solo home run by Koenig in the sixth. Baltimore pounded Merritt, McQuaid, and Roettger for 12 hits.

Already deprived of their regular shortstop, the Saints were now faced with an Orioles lineup to which a significant bat had been added. To replace Sheedy, Baltimore’s first baseman who was now out for the series, the Orioles had recruited Toronto’s Ed Onslow. Under the series’ rules, teams suffering a season-ending injury to a player were allowed to pick from other AA teams a substitute player who was comparable (Pioneer Press, October 8). The Saints’ manager protested.

The game was delayed several minutes while the umpires and managers discussed the substitution of Eddie Onslow . . . for Sheedy. Allen announced that he [would play] the game under protest. . . . Allen’s contention was that Onslow had hit forty points higher than Sheedy and was acknowledged to be a far superior fielding first baseman.1

Later the conference moved over to the box occupied by J. Conway Toole, president of the International league, and J. W. Norton, owner of the St. Paul team. Here it was decided that President Hickey of the Association had agreed to the substitution before leaving for [the series]. Under the circumstances, Norton consented to withdraw the protest. (Pioneer Press, October 7)

Baltimore had earlier lost catcher Lew McCarty for the series after Game 2, but had a backup, Otto Freitag, on the roster, to which they were now more than happy to add Onslow, who went on to hit .318 in the series. For their part, the Saints, after losing their shortstop Boone, tried to get either Les Bell (Milwaukee), Ray French (Minneapolis), or Maurie Shannon (Louisville) but to no avail. Bell, with his 18 home runs and league-leading .365, would have been a stronger addition to the St. Paul lineup than Onslow was to Baltimore’s. In the end, Allen had to settle for Koenig.

The new Saints’ backup shortstop was twenty years old and in his fourth professional season. He had had cups of coffee in St. Paul during his first three seasons. After hitting .288 and six home runs in 1923 with Des Moines in the Western League, he earned a roster spot as utility infielder with the Saints in 1924.

Game 6: On to St. Paul

The series now shifted west. The train carrying both teams to the North Star State stopped at Pittsburgh, Boone’s hometown, where he was immediately taken to the hospital, as he had complained of partial paralysis at the back of his neck. The Orioles were in high spirits, with visions of closing out the series in the next two or three games. The Saints’ coach was directly behind theirs, but there was little interaction between the players. They departed Baltimore on the evening of October 6 and arrived in Chicago the following afternoon. After a three-hour layover, the train then departed for St. Paul’s Union Station, arriving at 7 A.M. on October 8. Play was scheduled to resume the following day and, despite their two-game deficit, the Saints were quietly optimistic that home-field advantage would now turn the series in their favor.

The Saints know they can beat Baltimore at Lexington Park. To win four games out of five, however, as they must to attain a championship, is an assignment which will take their best effort and a running start. If, by tonight, the series score stands three games to two, the Saints believe they are virtually starting the fight over again with an even chance. (Pioneer Press, October 9)

In what they might have felt to be a bad omen, the Orioles shortly after detraining at Union Station in St. Paul learned that there were no accommodations for them at the St. Francis Hotel because of a convention of funeral directors. The team soon found lodging at the Hotel Commodore, off St. Paul’s upscale Summit Avenue, and readied themselves for the renewal of the series. In the first five games, Baltimore pitchers had struck out 20 Saints with men on base. Grove had won both of his starts, and Earnshaw was impressive in his win. With the Saints striking out so often in clutch situations and now with a questionable middle infield—a rookie at short and an unsteady fielder at second (“Hap” Morse made six errors in the series)—the Orioles had reason for optimism, their brush with the funeral directors notwithstanding.

The starters for Games 1 and 4 were at it again in Game 6, but this time Grove would be beaten and Markle wouldn’t figure in the decision. It was St. Paul’s turn for a pregame presentation, as manager Nick Allen received a new sedan from the fans. When he came to bat in the first inning, Johnny Neun was given a silver bat and ball for leading the team in hitting.

The Orioles carried a 2–0 lead into the bottom of the sixth when the Saints’ bats came to life. With one out, Koenig sent Grove’s offering to the roof of the neighboring Coliseum to draw the home team within one run. After Dixon fouled out, they went on to capture the lead. Paul Fittery, who had relieved Markle in the top of the inning, walked and moved to second on Christensen’s single. Then came a blooper that opened the floodgates. Morse, who not only was fielding poorly but hitting just as badly, got a Texas League single when Baltimore’s Porter, Jacobson, and Connelly let a catchable fly ball fall between them. Fittery scored to tie the game. Neun then singled, scoring Christensen, as Morse raced to third. When Grove cut off Connelly’s throw from right in an attempt to get Neun at second, the ball bounced off his glove, and Morse came in with St. Paul’s fourth run. The home team picked up another run in the seventh on a Koenig sacrifice fly as Fittery closed out the game, and the Saints held on to win 5–2. The Pioneer Press heaped praise on the future Yankee:

And they were looking for someone to take the place of Mark Koenig.

They combed the country for a shortstop, an experienced infielder who would not crack under the strain of a championship series, one whose throws would be true and, most of all, one who could hit.

They wanted a veteran to play for the youngster who, between cracks of his melodious gum, put St. Paul back in the fighting. They wanted Lester Bell (for his hitting)…… Koenig hit 1.000 for the day; they wanted Bell because he could range here and there…… Koenig ranged as far as Bell and sent some throws that Bell would envy. (October 10)

Game 7

Koenig couldn’t match that performance the next day, October 10, in Game 7. The only effective Saint was center fielder Walt Christensen. He collected two of only three hits allowed by Oriole starter Tommy Thomas as the visitors shut out the Saints, 4–0, and took what appeared to be a nearly insurmountable series lead of 4–2. Thomas had earlier pitched the near-equivalent of a full game when he relieved Jackson in the 13-inning game that ended in a 6–6 tie. He had struck out 7 then and struck out 11 here in Game 7 while driving in two of Baltimore’s four runs with a sacrifice fly and a single.

The sacrifice fly came in the fifth inning and scored Jacobs from third as the Orioles took the lead. An inning later, they got to Saints’ starter Howard Merritt for three runs in a rally that began with Jacobson’s lead-off triple. Porter doubled in Jacobson and went to third on Boley’s ground-out to Koenig. Onslow singled him in and scored on Thomas’s single. Merritt was gone after the sixth, as Allen brought in Roettger and McQuade to finish the game. They allowed no hits, the Saints lineup could do nothing against Thomas’s blazing speed. The victory put Baltimore one game from the championship.

In a practice that by today’s standards could only be called quaint, the Orioles dressed at their hotel and traveled to Lexington Park in taxis. The Pioneer Press reported that “they were greeted with hearty applause when they walked to their dugout” (October 10)—an early expression, perhaps, of what has come to be known as “Minnesota Nice”?

Now facing elimination, the Saints, as the Pioneer Press (October 11) described the situation, “are in a desperate predicament. They need to win three games running. Baltimore needs one. This is not wholly impossible, but it must be accomplished against the same kind of pitching that has effectively halted the Saints so far, for Jack Dunn has George Earnshaw in reserve and Earnshaw is just as fast as Thomas.”

Game 8

Dunn may have had Earnshaw and Thomas, but Allen had Tony Faeth on the mound and Mark Koenig in the lineup for Game 8 on October 11. Faeth had given up 9 hits in 52⁄3 innings in the tie game and in this contest surrendered 10, but they were scattered. He gave up only two runs, and the Saints held on to eke out a 3–2 victory. The Orioles took a 1–0 lead in the second when Onslow, who had singled and gone to second on an error, scored on Jacobs’s single. In the home third, Koenig doubled. The next two batters were retired, and then Christensen walked. The substitute shortstop came in with the tying run when Porter booted Morse’s grounder.

The next inning, Koenig singled Dressen in from second to put St. Paul up 2–1. Baltimore spent the next several innings failing to take advantage of scoring opportunities until they managed another run off Faeth in the seventh. With two down, Jacobson walked and reached third on Porter’s hit-and-run single. Onslow, who was proving to be a valuable addition to the Baltimore lineup, then doubled, bringing Jacobson in with the tying run. The visitors almost took the lead, but Porter was thrown out at home trying to score on Onslow’s hit.

It was Koenig again in the home seventh, as he found himself on third after his hit to right eluded Connelly and bounded off the stands. Dixon then singled him in to give the Saints the lead again. Dunn stayed with Earnshaw through the eighth. In the top of the inning, Allen had brought in Paul Fittery, who stayed in the game to close out the Orioles on two harmless hits.

The win brought St. Paul within a game of evening out the series. The Sun cited a controversial play in the Baltimore third that might have changed the game’s complexion:

The reversal of a decision by Umpire Harry Geisel (IL) really cost the International League champions the game. With one down . . . Jacobson slashed a single past Dressen . . . after Porter hoisted to Haas . . . Onslow came to bat.

Onslow sent a “sinker” to Christensen in center. The outfielder came in fast and in a lunge apparently trapped the ball. Jacobson pulled up at third. Geisel ruled that the drive had not been caught, but the St. Paul players, led by Manager Nick Allen, surrounded the arbiter, violently disagreeing. In his dilemma, Geisel appealed to Umpire Ollie Chill (AA), working behind the plate, and when Chill declared that Christensen had caught the ball, Geisel so decided.

This judgment was costly, for it made the third out. In the following inning, Boley and Jacobs pounded out clean singles. (Sun, October 12)

Predictably, the Pioneer Press said considerably less: “It looked as if Christensen had caught Onslow’s low liner but Geisel ruled he had caught it on the hop. Chill, however, overruled the base umpire and the side was called out” (October 12).

It was, of course, the classic “what might have been” scenario, but reading the accounts some eighty-plus years after the fact, one finds it difficult to accept Chill’s overruling Geisel, who presumably had a better view of the play. The intimidation factor from both Allen and the Saints’ players in front of a home crowd would appear to have played a role in Chill’s reversal. Nonetheless, who’s to say that Boley or Jacobs would have brought Jacobson home if the play had gone as a hit?

Game 9

Sunday, October 12, was an overcast day with occasional showers and low visibility. It was weather thought to be ideal for Lefty Grove’s fastball as Dunn went to his ace to finish out the series in game nine. Allen came back with Fittery, who had closed out game eight less than twenty-four hours previously. The thirty-seven-year-old veteran scattered five hits into the seventh inning before giving way to Cliff Markle. By that time, St. Paul led 3–1 on single runs picked up in the first, third, and fifth innings. Allen had reshuffled his batting order, moving Dressen to cleanup, placing Lee in right in lieu of Wade and batting him sixth, while Joe Riggert came off the bench to play left and bat fifth. Similarly, Dunn switched Jacobs and Connelly, with the former now batting second and the latter seventh.

The moves worked far better for the home team as Dressen went three for four and drove in two runs. Jacobs, who had gone three for four the day before, went hitless but very nearly put the Orioles ahead in the fifth. Trailing 2–1, with two out and a runner on third, he drove a hard liner to Riggert: “The first thought was that it would clear the fence . . . Joe Riggert . . . when he felt the fence at his back, made a desperate leap and brought the ball down to retire the side” (Pioneer Press, October 13).

The play was critical as the Saints scored in their half of the inning and the 3–1 lead held to the end of the game. Dunn had pinch-hit for Grove in the fifth, relieving him with Ogden, while Allen stayed with Fittery into the seventh when he brought Cliff Markle in to finish things off. Markle got Maisel to hit a looping fly into left center where Morse made a difficult catch to squelch Baltimore’s last rally.

The series was now tied at four games each and momentum—that oft-used phrase that had yet to enter sport’s vernacular—was now clearly on the Saints’ side.

The St. Paul management attempted to get the final and decisive game ten moved to Tuesday when they suggested that attendance would be better, but neither Dunn nor IL President Toole would agree. Was a bigger gate really the basis for the home team wanting the delay or was there a more compelling reason, such as perhaps another day’s rest for the projected Saints’ starting pitcher?

The Sun on October 13 sensed disaster looming:

That St. Paul is a hard club to beat on its home grounds is being brought home to the Orioles. They are trying their best to win the series, but the Saints are battling every inch of the way and have [the] most pepper. On Friday, the Birds were leading four games to two, but now are face-to-face with disaster.

A sense of cautious optimism was voiced by the Pioneer Press (October 13):

When the Saints came home from Baltimore, they needed four games out of five to win the Junior World’s championship. It seemed a hopeless task[,] but they won three out of four and now stand even with their rivals. Everything depends upon today’s game.

Game 10

The Game 7 starters would face each other again in the finale before 6,000 at Lexington Park. Mississippi native Howard Merritt made his fourth start of the series for St. Paul while Tommy Thomas, who had shut out the Saints for eighteen innings, went to the mound for Baltimore.

Dunn was soon to discover that Thomas’s touch had run its course, as the home team got to him for single runs in the second, third, and fourth innings. The last two runs were solo home runs by Dressen and Dixon. After the latter led off the fourth with his home run on Thomas’s first pitch, Dunn relieved with Cliff Jackson, who had made only one appearance in the series. Jackson was effective into the sixth, when St. Paul picked up two more runs as Koenig led off with a double, advanced to third after two outs, and came in on Christensen’s single down the third-base line. The Saints’ center fielder then stole second, advanced to third on Morse’s infield hit, and scored when Jackson balked.

Earlier in the fourth, the Orioles had seriously threatened when Jacobs and Jacobson opened with back-to-back singles, but Merritt bore down and retired the side. Now laboring into the seventh and clearly showing the effects of twenty-five innings of series work, Merritt faltered. With two on and two out, Maisel homered to bring the visitors to within two runs at 5–3. It would be as close as they would get. Merritt then shut the door.

Long after his [Merritt’s] curve had stopped breaking and his fast ball had stopped hopping he found enough of the courage and shrewdness, enough hidden power, to deliver the occasional baffling pitches which struck at the heart of the Baltimore attack. Alternately he pitched with caution and with daring but always with consummate wisdom and gameness. (Pioneer Press, October 14)

Merritt retired the side in order in the eighth and got the first two hitters in the ninth when Freitag singled. With Baltimore down 6-3, Dunn let Earnshaw, who had come in to relieve Jackson in the seventh and was a good hitter, come to bat. He grounded to Koenig, whose toss to Morse forced Freitag, and St. Paul had come all the way back to win the Junior World Series, accomplishing a feat that only seventy-two hours earlier was so improbable.

From the shadow of almost certain defeat to a faint, scarcely discernible glimmer of hope, from faint hope to actual opportunity and from opportunity to a joyous, explosive, cheer[-]crowned success the Saints fought their way doggedly and bravely to as glorious a victory, capture of the Junior World’s [S]eries, as has ever rewarded the fighting spirit of a fighting team. . . .

The suspense that the team has been playing under for the past five days broke loose . . . (at) the final out in the ninth. There was a hip-hip-hooray and the dash for the showers began. . . .

Spectators swarmed out on the field and started a demonstration, but they had so tired themselves rooting that their voices failed them. (Pioneer Press, October 14)

Merritt captured the most attention with his courageous late-inning efforts when it was apparent to all that he was almost beyond fatigue. He gave high praise to trainer John Bridges. “Were it not for Bridges,” he told the Pioneer Press (October 14), “I wouldn’t have been able to pitch today. My arm was limp Sunday. I couldn’t raise it and it seemed as if I never would be able to pitch again, but Bridges worked on it, and this morning it seemed like another arm.” Perhaps we now know why the Saints wanted Game 10 delayed.

Merritt had won two games, a number bested by Fittery, who sported a superb 0.47 ERA along with his three wins. Clearly, Mark Koenig had emerged as the Saints’ hitting star with a .474 average from nine hits in nineteen at-bats in seven games. Six of his hits were for extra bases and included two home runs. His second home run won Game 6, and his key hits in Game 8 helped St. Paul avoid elimination and win the first of the three straight games they had to win to take the series. St. Paul’s other heavy hitter was Charlie Dressen—.351, 2 home runs, 8 RBIs.

Whereas Dressen would go on to be remembered perhaps best, and if so unfairly, as the manager of Dodger teams that lost the World Series to the Yankees in the 1950s, Koenig‘s name would be forever linked with the great Yankees’ team of 1927. As their everyday shortstop, he hit a solid .285 with 62 RBIs. Over a twelve-year major-league career, he hit 279, drove in 443 runs, and played in five World Series—three with the Yankees and one each with the Cubs and Giants. “I was never the player I should have been,” he would say of himself years later. “I was too hard on myself.”2 But in October 1924 he was exactly the player he should have been.

The Saints celebrated that night at a banquet at Hime’s Café, on the site of the present-day St. Paul Travelers’ building, in an event open to the public. Allen got the greatest ovation, with his players leading the cheering. In only his first year as manager, he had done it all and had done it in a spectacular fashion.

As for the Orioles:

The Birds were a disconsolate band as they headed back to Maryland. They fell down miserably in the pinches and the batting was terrible. Porter, bothered by injuries, failed to shine on either defense or attack, while Connelly and Boley were weak as kittens at the bat. Failure of Lefty Groves to win a single game here hurt. The lefthander had captured a pair in Baltimore and was counted on to continue his victorious march here. (Sun, October 14)

The analysis is perhaps harsh, as Porter did hit .316, although with only 4 RBIs. Similarly, Jacobs, not mentioned above, hit .425, but with only 3 RBIs. Grove was the most noteworthy of the Orioles, and Dunn eventually sold him to the Philadelphia Athletics. Grove would go on to put up Hall of Fame numbers with them as well as with the Red Sox. He appeared in three World Series for the Athletics and logged a major-league career record of 300–146 with a 3.06 ERA.

“No cheering fans greeted the Orioles early yesterday morning at Union Station when the Birds returned after an unsuccessful quest,” reported the Sun on October 16.

“A few friends and relatives of the players were on hand to greet them, and the Orioles who live here lost little time in reaching home. Jack Dunn had little to say. ‘They beat us, and that’s about all,’ said the Oriole magnate, and the players in general were reticent in discussing their set back.”

The great come-from-behind victory would prove to be a high-water mark for the St. Paul Saints, as they avenged their defeats in 1920 and 1922 but would never win another Junior World Series, losing to Rochester in 1931 and Montreal in 1948.

ROGER GODIN, a SABR member since 1977, is author of The 1922 St. Louis Browns: The Best of the American League’s Worst (McFarland, 1991). He serves as team curator for the Minnesota Wild of the NHL and has written and researched extensively about hockey as played by Americans in the United States.

1924 Junior World Series

Game 1—Oct. 2
St. Paul 3
Baltimore 4
ATTENDANCE: 5,262

Game 2—Oct. 3
St. Paul 6
Baltimore 0
ATTENDANCE: 3,733

Game 3 (13 innings)—Oct. 4
St. Paul 6
Baltimore 6
ATTENDANCE: 4,919

Game 4—Oct. 5
St. Paul 4
Baltimore 6
ATTENDANCE: 10,949

Game 5—Oct. 6
St. Paul 1
Baltimore 10
ATTENDANCE: 3,190

Game 6—Oct. 9
Baltimore 2
St. Paul 5
ATTENDANCE: 5,487

Game 7—Oct. 10
Baltimore 4
St. Paul 0
ATTENDANCE: Unknown

Game 8—Oct. 11
Baltimore 2
St. Paul 3
ATTENDANCE: Unknown

Game 9—Oct. 12
Baltimore 1
St. Paul 3
ATTENDANCE: 5,552

Game 10—Oct. 12
Baltimore 3
St. Paul 6
ATTENDANCE: c. 6,000

Sources

Books

Bailey, Bob. History of the Junior World Series. Lanham, Md.: Scarecrow Press, 2004.

Minor League Baseball Stars. Cooperstwon, N.Y.: Society for American Baseball Research, 1978.

Minor League Baseball Stars. Volume 2. Cooperstown, N.Y.: Society for American Baseball Research, 1985.

Minor League Baseball Stars. Volume 3. Cleveland: Society for American Baseball Research, 1992.

Mosedale, John. The Greatest of All: The 1927 Yankees. New York: Warner Books, 1974.

Thornley, Stew. Baseball in Minnesota: The Definitive History. St. Paul: Minnesota Historical Society, 2006.

Weiss, Bill, and Marshall Wright. The 100 Greatest Minor League Baseball Teams of the Twentieth Century. N.p.: Outskirt Press, 2006.

Newspapers

Baltimore Sun

St. Paul Daily News St. Paul Pioneer Press

Notes

1. In fact, Onslow hit 33 points higher than Sheedy, .331 to .298.
2. John Mosedale, The Greatest of All: The 1927 New York Yankees (New York: Warner Books, 1974), 59.

Adrian C. Anson’s professional baseball career came to an abrupt end on February 1, 1898, when Chicago Club president James Hart unceremoniously sacked him without notice. Anson had made his living playing baseball since 1871, had been a member of the Chicago Club since 1876 and, as their captain since 1879, had risen to national fame. Now it was all over.

Although well fixed financially, the 45-year-old Anson was emotionally and psychologically unprepared for this brusque dismissal from his post. He had laid no plans for a future beyond the diamond. Forced to cope with restructuring his life, he turned his tremendous ego to forging a niche in Chicago’s business world. He lusted for the limelight and the glories that came with being a dynamic and conspicuous public figure, as he had been for all of his adult life.

After publishing his autobiography, largely devoted to an around-the-world tour in 1889, Anson focused on operating a business designed to please sporting men. Long renowned as a top-ranked amateur billiard player, he established a splendid billiard parlor in downtown Chicago. Remodeling of the building began in March 1899, and it opened on June 9 of that year. Located at 135–141 Madison Street, it housed a 10-lane bowling alley on the ground floor and a well-illuminated billiard academy with 24 tables on the second.1 The billiard room was elegantly appointed, and no expense was spared to provide its habitués with every possible luxury. Anson expanded his establishment in 1906 by adding to the ground floor an annex that contained 18 additional billiard tables and a lavish buffet called the Home Plate.

While operating his billiard room, Anson became heavily involved in politics. He was elected city clerk on the Democratic ticket in 1905 and served a full two-year term.

Although Anson was personally law-abiding, as city clerk he permitted some of his appointees to receive full pay while they were absent from the office. Accusations of other improprieties were leveled at him. On May 21, 1906, the Chicago Daily Tribune took him to task: “His record has conspicuously contradicted the idea that he knows much or cares seriously about the duties [of the office] . . . which ‘Captain’ A. C. Anson is paid $5,000 a year to manage.” In 1906 Anson sought the office of Cook County sheriff. He failed to win the nomination as the Democratic candidate and left politics.

On July 16, 1908, his billiard business failed. He owed more than $6,500 in back rent to the building’s owner, Mrs. Charles P. Taft, a sister-in-law of the Republican presidential candidate. The political connection must have been especially bitter to the lifelong Democrat. The business failure was said to have cost Anson more than $80,000.

In 1909 he returned to baseball and formed a semi-pro team. He leased grounds at Sixty-third Street and triumph, since immense sums of money were being paid to current baseball stars for daubing on greasepaint.

St. Lawrence Avenue, raising the money by taking a mortgage on the family home at 160 Thirtieth Street. Although Anson had owned this house since 1884, the title was in his wife’s name. Virginia agreed to mortgage the property so he could underwrite the enterprise. His new team, “Anson’s Colts,” competed against strong semipro teams in the Chicago area and even went on tour, traveling as far as New York to compete. Pop’s old friend and onetime rival Charles Comiskey arranged for them to play spring training exhibition games against the Chicago White Sox. The baseball venture also ended in financial failure as Anson defaulted on the ballground lease. Once more disaster found Anson, and his home was foreclosed on May 31, 1910. Pop admitted to the world, “I’m busted.”

Now almost 60, Anson was penniless, homeless, un-employed, and without a means of supporting his family. Owing to his lack of business acumen, coupled with a marked inability to forge viable business relationships, his economic options were limited. He still enjoyed unbounded personal popularity in Chicago, and his fame was undiminished nationally. He decided to draw on that capital, and he saw vaudeville as a potential avenue for triumph, since immense sums of money were being paid to current baseball stars for daubing on greasepaint.

Vaudeville Beckons

Live performances were the principal form of entertainment in Anson’s day. The major venues comprised the legitimate theater, vaudeville, burlesque, cabarets, opera, and the circus. Anson had appeared in one stage play, A Runaway Colt in 1895, which was a total fiasco.2 The origins of vaudeville are murky, but the word vaudeville can be traced to a region in France known as the Val de Vire, which had long nurtured a tradition of ballad singing and other forms of entertainment in local taverns.3

American vaudeville emphasized a straight, clean variety show—distinct from burlesque, which relied on off-color jokes, lowbrow or slapstick humor, and scantily clad women. Vaudeville’s goal was to present respectable comedy and a range of entertainments suitable for the entire family. It quickly became the theater of the people.4

A vaudeville program consisted of a series of unrelated acts that varied from just under 10 minutes to more than 35 minutes in length. A typical program consisted of nine acts with an intermission halfway through. Vaudeville hosted an unlimited spectrum of talent: singers, comedians, dancers, jugglers, trained animals, tumblers, sleight-of-hand artists, magicians, thespians, bicyclists, wire walkers, mimes, hypnotists, ventriloquists, monologists, and song-and-dance men. Ethnic jokes, stereotypical images, and pejorative terms—black-faced, Hebrew, Wop—that are unacceptable today were commonly used as a basis for humor.

The theater manager carefully selected the sequence in which the acts were presented. He had two goals as he fashioned a bill: to get the most out of the high-priced stars on his bill and to keep the audience entertained throughout the entire program.

To allow for the noise created by tardy patrons who arrived after the curtain went up, the first act did not depend on dialogue. Typically, a silent act—a mime, juggler, or magician—opened the show. The second spot, usually a comedian or a song-and-dance act, performed in front of the curtain. This allowed the hidden stage to be set for the very important third act. This position, considered “top billing,” was reserved for the show’s “headliner.” One or two more acts completed the first half. Following the intermission, the second half opened with a lively act. Next was a production number that might feature a star actor doing a scene from a famous play. Another big star was located in the next-to-last slot. The audience tended to leave the theater before the final act was over, and performers were not thrilled at being placed last on the bill.

Many star athletes were lured to vaudeville. Champions and near-champs from every sporting endeavor appeared in vaudeville theaters. Theater managers and booking agents considered these to be “freak” acts, since few athletes delivered true entertainment in these venues. They were exploited strictly for their box-office appeal. It was well understood that their life expectancy on the stage was short, that it was over as soon as they stopped making headlines. All types of athletes were in vaudeville. Fighters were the most numerous. Baseball players ran a strong second; Hammerstein’s Theatre in New York City was called the baseball player’s “home plate.”5

In the offseason, many famous baseball players captured big money by appearing in vaudeville. Rube Waddell took a turn on the boards soon after he became a star on the diamond, first appearing with a theater company in September 1903. “Turkey” Mike Donlin also capitalized on “vaude,” teaming up with Mabel Hite, a longtime star comedienne. The two of them worked up an act together. Turkey Mike remained in show business long after both his marriage and his career in baseball were over, finally landing in Hollywood, where he appeared in minor movie roles. Joe Tinker, of Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance fame, started doing a monologue in 1910, and then did a skit, “A Great Catch,” with Sadie Sherman. Christy Mathewson and Chief Myers, battery-mates for the New York Giants, did a skit called “Curves,” with May Tulley, that was written especially for them by Bozeman Bulger.

On October 21, 1911, Variety reported the following activities for ballplayers: The “Athletics’ Big 3—Jack Coombs, Chief Bender and Cy Morgan” were booked by Alf T. Wilton for Dockstader’s of Wilmington at $2,500 a week. The three ballplayers were teamed with the Pearl sisters, Kathryn and Violet, in a sketch called “Learning the Game.” The diamond’s star comedian, Germany Schaefer, teamed with Grace Belmont to launch a career in vaudeville but sadly discovered that his humor fell flat on the boards. Other ballplayers who daubed on greasepaint in 1911 included McHale, Buck O’Brien, Larry Gardner, and Bradley of the Boston Red Sox, who toured the New England area, while Doc White of the White Sox and King Cole of the Cubs worked in theaters around Chicago. Ty Cobb entered the “legit” theater, appearing in The College Widow. Cobb was lavishly entertained wherever the show appeared, and this forced him to remain up well into the wee small hours of the morning. These demands taxed his “nerves,” and Cobb quit the show on January 3, well in advance of the projected end date of March 1. Charles Faust, the “Jinx boy” with the Giants, also played “pop” houses.

John McGraw did well in vaudeville with a monologue titled “Inside Baseball,” but he chose to remain in New York rather than take it on the road. “After seeing John McGraw on the stage,” sportswriter Hugh Fullerton remarked, “we feel more and more tempted to compare Cap Anson with William Gillette” (Chicago Tribune, January 7, 1913). Gillette being the leading dramatic actor of the day, the reader was given to understand that Fullerton wasn’t overly impressed by Muggsy.

Rube Marquard made his vaudeville debut in 1911, appearing with Annie Kent at Hammerstein’s. The next year he teamed up with a beautiful headliner, Blossom Seeley, in a skit called “Breaking the Record.” Marquard sang and the couple did a dance together, the Marquard Glide. They later married. The rush of baseball stars to the footlights prompted Fullerton to comment that “the reason so many ball players go into vaudeville is that no one will pay $1,500 a week for them to jump over Niagara Falls.”6

As the result of an imbroglio with the National League in the spring of 1910, Cubs catcher Johnny Kling was fined $750. He hit on the scheme of appearing on stage at a vaudeville theater to raise the money. The Morris Agency booked him for a week of monologue at the American Music Hall in Chicago. Kling sent word that he didn’t think he could draw many people “just talking” and suggested a billiard act instead.7

Kling was a pocket-pool champion, and happily someone thought to match him against Chicago’s own Knight of the Cue, Pop Anson. The match came off on the stage of the American Music Hall on Monday, April 25, 1910, a miserable spring day with rain and snow. The game between the Pirates and the Cubs was cancelled because of the bad weather, and ballplayers and baseball fans filled the theater to cheer the contest. World-champion pool player Willie Hoppe was enlisted to referee the match.

The action was described in the next day’s edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune:

As an introduction to the match between two ball players, moving pictures of the Cub–White Sox series were shown. Then the manager of the theater presented Anson, whom he called, “The father of baseball.” Kling was introduced, and must have felt good over the noise that greeted his appearance. After shaking hands with Capt. Anson he made the following speech:

“I want to thank you, ladies and gentleman—and Mr. Morris—in behalf of me.”

These words made a tremendous impression. Jack Lait rang the gong and the pool match was on. You could almost see most of the shots by the aid of a mirror back of the table. Kling broke the balls and Anson had a majority at the end of the frame. John evened it up after the second break, and the score was 15 all. Neither player was up to his game, and Kling’s average suffered through errors. Anyhow, John won out by the tight score of 25 to 23, and then there were curtain calls for both heroes. On this second attempt Kling said:

“I want to say that I came back to play ball.”

He then made a hurried but graceful exit. Capt. Anson really shone as a speech maker, and won that battle even if he did lose the pool game.

Knight of the Cue, Pop Anson. The match came off on the stage of the American Music Hall on Monday, April 25, 1910, a miserable spring day with rain and snow. The game between the Pirates and the Cubs was cancelled because of the bad weather, and ballplayers and baseball fans filled the theater to cheer the contest. World-champion pool player Willie Hoppe was enlisted to referee the match.

The action was described in the next day’s edition of the Chicago Daily Tribune:

As an introduction to the match between two ball players, moving pictures of the Cub–White Sox series were shown. Then the manager of the theater presented Anson, whom he called, “The father of baseball.” Kling was introduced, and must have felt good over the noise that greeted his appearance. After shaking hands with Capt. Anson he made the following speech:

“I want to thank you, ladies and gentleman—and Mr. Morris—in behalf of me.”

Anson in Greasepaint

Anson was encouraged by this experience, and he decided to strike out on his own in vaudeville, doubtless influenced by the handsome wages Kling and other ballplayers were earning.

The record of Anson’s vaudeville appearances in 1910 is scanty. Apparently he didn’t do too well. On January 1, 1911, Sid Mercer of the New York Globe lobbied for a National League pension for Anson, writing that “the Cap has taken another wallop because the vaudeville he was counting on to pull him through his hard times has come a bloomer.”8

From the disaster that was A Runaway Colt, Anson had learned that he could not pretend to be an actor. He announced that the great showman George M. Cohan, who was also a devoted baseball fan, had prepared a monologue for him.9 In Pop’s new act, he was presented as Captain Anson, the living baseball legend. He spun yarns about his celebrated days on the diamond, speaking of the great players he competed both with and against. Pop recreated the glory days when both he and the men in the audience were young. Very simply, Anson talked about baseball to the adoring fans that filled the theater. On January 26, Pop made his first appearance at a New York theater since A Runaway Colt and tested his new act at a testimonial for William H. Wood. He prefaced his monologue:

I’m doing this because I need the money. That’s on the square. I need the money. I’ve got out of politics and billiards and I’ve got to find something else. My contract is a funny one. I’m being paid by the laugh; for a giggle I get $1; for a laugh, $5; for a scream, $10; and for a round of applause $25.”10

Anson got his round of applause that night, and the results of his new monologue were encouraging. On February 3 the Chicago Daily Tribune reported,

The West side, which has had Cap Anson for so many shinning [sic] years in baseball, will have him in vaudeville. Yep. The Cap has joined out and pleasing to relate—for he needs the money—he is getting by with it in excellent conformation.

Following this success Anson made his formal vaudeville debut in Chicago at the Hamilton Theatre on February 6, 1911. Pop’s friends bought out all the box seats and flocked there to support him.11 As luck would have it, Anson arrived at the theater at the exact moment that a spontaneous labor dispute halted the entire show.

The organization representing vaudeville artists was the White Rats of America. They and the Federation of Labor were in conference with the theater about the form of contract used by management. The actors refused to appear on stage until this issue was resolved. The theater was packed, and the audience was restless. Anson, not being a member of the White Rats, was urgently requested to make an immediate appearance on stage while the negotiations were under way. Without taking time to don his costume, Pop went onstage.

The veteran was given a round of applause as he strode to the front of the stage With as firm a grasp on his subject as he used to get on the wagon tongue which he laced out those stinging hits at the west side park, the captain went lightly from incident to incident like a butterfly, except that he stood in one spot. He touched on baseball things, ancient and modern, running the gamut from Mike Kelly to Johnny Evers.

Taking his hearers into his confidence, he explained that his second try at histrionics honors was due to his need for money with which to buy a ball club.

He admitted:

“I can’t act, can’t dance, can’t sing, and that leads me to the conclusion that some one must be crazy, myself, the people who hired me, or those who listen to me.”

The veteran was given a recall and recited a poem on the “Courtship of Swat.” This went along smoothly until “Cap” reached a line about pay day, where he tripped, a bad spot to trip on. [Chicago Daily Tribune, February 7, 1911]

Following this success, Anson was engaged as the headliner at Chicago’s Wilson Avenue Theatre for the week of March 24.12 Up until this time, apparently, Anson was acting as his own agent and doing his own booking. Now, the triumph of his Cohan monologue allowed him to enter the world of vaudeville more seriously. On March 4, 1911, Variety announced, “Cap. Anson, the veteran baseballist, has booked with Gus Sun to play all the towns of the Central league. He will open at Zanesville, O., April 23.”

The Sun circuit, owned and operated by Gus Sun (born Gus Klotz in Toledo, Ohio, in 1868), was perhaps the most important of the small-time circuits. Sun booked its acts at fourth-and fifth-grade houses, primarily in midwestern states.13 The redeeming value of the Sun circuit was as a proving ground for new acts. Gene Tunney and Jack Dempsey broke in with Sun. The acts that proved popular left the Sun circuit immediately. Acts that remained on it season after season never could shed the derogatory mantle of “small-time.”

Later that year, Pop, along with many other entertainers, donated his services to a worthy cause. A monster benefit was arranged for New York Giants secretary Fred Knowles, who had contracted a fatal illness. It was held on November 10 at New York City’s Wallack’s Theatre, which was jammed, and more than five hundred people were turned away.

Sam H. Harris arranged for the greatest theatrical bill ever seen in the city. Luminaries included George M. Cohan, Al Jolson, Mabel Hite, James J. Corbett, and Adrian C. Anson. Each of them took a turn entertaining the crowd. Pop made a speech and then concluded his act with a dance.

Many baseball souvenirs were contributed and auctioned off for Knowles’s benefit. Frank Baker’s World Series home-run bat went to George M. Cohan for $250. Baseballs autographed by Mathewson, Marquard, Bender, Coombs, and Cy Morgan brought from $5 to $20 each. More than $3,500 was raised at this event.14

In May 1913, Anson upgraded his act by joining the Sullivan and Considine circuit, a marked step up from Sun.15 The Sporting Life reported on October 4, 1913:

Cap Anson is to appear in this city [Philadelphia] at the Liberty Theatre week of Oct. 6. Some time ago Cap was engaged as a feature to present a witty base ball monologue in Western vaudeville and has just completed a tour of 25 weeks over the Sullivan and Considine circuit.

Anson’s career in greasepaint now rolled along in fine style. He had taken up golf and lugged his clubs with him on tour. Somehow, he found time to get in a game almost every day. He said that prior to establishing this exercise routine his weight had shot up to 233 pounds, but now that he was golfing regularly he was as fit as ever.

When Woodrow Wilson, well known as a baseball fan, was inaugurated as president in March 1913, Anson, loyal as always to the Democratic Party, wired his congratulations from Salt Lake City, where he was appearing:

Having been city clerk of Chicago on the Democratic ticket and also slightly connected with baseball, it pleases me greatly to know that you have gone to the front for the great national game of baseball. I am convinced now that I made no mistake in voting for you.16

Wilson was a golfer as well as a baseball fan, and Anson’s wire led to an invitation to play a round of golf with the new president. The two men toured the links while Anson was in the capital the following October for a theater engagement. When Anson arrived in Washington on October 10, he headlined the bill at the Cosmos Theatre. He was advertised as “the father of baseball, the man who invented and developed the bunt, the double steal, the hit and run, ‘place hitting,’ and other scientific plays of the game.”17

F. F. Proctor’s Fifth Avenue Theatre in New York City hosted a “Baseball Week” beginning December 7, 1913. The bill consisted of twelve acts, three of which featured baseball players. Lillian Lorraine, a singing comedienne, was the headliner.

Pitcher Rube Marquard and his charming spouse Blossom Seeley presented a skit, written by Thomas J. Gray, “The Suffragette Pitcher.” “The team does the same act as of yore,” wrote “Plain Mary,” the critic for Variety. “Rube doesn’t improve as an actor, and if it were not for Miss Seeley holding up the turn he would be hopeless. Rube has a good natured smile, though, and that helps some. His tango at the finish is a scream.”

Plain Mary wasn’t much kinder to Charley Dooin, a major-league catcher, and James McCool in her report on their song sketch “Baseball in Ireland.” “Dooin and McCool are showing the same act they have had for a couple of years,” she observed. “They work like full fledged actors now. The men talk a lot about baseball and recite. The two ballads are the feature of this act. The singing isn’t too bad, that is, if you are not too particular.”

Anson’s act lasted seventeen minutes. Plain Mary’s evaluation:

Captain Anson, billed as “The Grand Old Man of Baseball,” is offering a monologue by Geo. M. Cohan. The talk is all right in its way, but the way Captain Anson gets it over is no riot. He appears to have plenty of confidence and goes so far as to announce he knows he is good. However, he gets the sympathy of the audience by telling them he is old and poor and needs the money. As many fell for it, the Captain captured plenty of applause. At that, he has a little something on Rube Marquard for dancing, but you can never be forgiven for that recitation, Capt. So long as the public doesn’t take him seriously as an actor, Captain Anson can get by on his reputation as a famous ball player. He has played in the west. This is his first New York showing.

Anson had grown as a performer, gaining poise and polish. By now he was a veteran of the boards and, with skillful writing and directing, put on an impressive turn, as indicated by this review of his performance at the Forsyth Theatre in Atlanta in 1914:

So it is time to say a few words about Pop Anson. Of course Pop is first and foremost and always a ball player to the army of fans. He says he can’t sing, dance, can’t do any of the things that a regular actor ought to do, but at that—take it from me—he is better than many an alleged real actor Atlanta has suffered.18

At the end of the 1915 vaudeville season, Anson signed on with the B. F. Keith circuit. Now he had finally made the big time. It also marked the end of his career as a “single.” “Old Cap Anson,” Variety reported on November 8, “the Adrian C. Anson of Chicago baseball fame of the earlier days—is getting tuned up for vaudeville. Pop and his two daughters are rehearsing an act which will include a varied baseball picture display under Al Laughin’s stage direction. Ring W. Lardner is writing some talk for Anson. A Chicago debut is being fixed for next fortnight.”

Pop’s new act, Capt. Anson & Daughters, included his middle two daughters, 32-year-old Adele and 27-year-old Dorothy. His youngest daughter, Virginia Jeanette, remained at home and cared for Pop’s wife, Virginia, who was in poor health. After a protracted illness, she died on February 21, 1916. Virginia was 56 and had been married to Anson for more than forty years. Her remains were removed to Philadelphia, her hometown, for interment.

The new act was divided into two parts. The first was quite formal, whereas the finale involved audience participation and capitalized on Anson’s baseball ability. Anson’s entrance was heralded by a rousing rendition of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” written by Jack Norworth. Many years later, Dorothy Anson Dodge claimed that Anson introduced this song as a favor to Norworth while their act was appearing in Baltimore.19 (See Timothy A. Johnson’s article at page 138.)

Dorothy and Adele made their entrance dressed in fur-trimmed evening gowns. While music played softly in the background, they chanted: “Cap Anson, the greatest man that baseball ever knew./ The pitcher feared him, the bleachers cheered him./And he led the league in 1493.” With this introduction, Anson made his entrance. He wore formal evening clothes and tails while delivering his monologue. He began by lauding his old teammates and rivals, comparing these stars of the past to the luminaries of the present day. To no one’s great surprise, the old-timers prevailed, at least in Pop’s opinion.

For the finale, the trio changed into sports clothes. Anson was resplendent in his old Chicago uniform, and he wielded a silver bat presented to him by the Notre Dame alumni. The girls hauled out a huge bag filled with papier-mâché baseballs that A. G. Spalding & Co. produced especially for Anson. The girls now sang, “We’re going to take you to the game/ Where dear old Daddy won his fame.” They tossed the lightweight baseballs out to members of the audience, who then pitched them to Pop. Anson assumed his famous batting stance and drove the mock baseballs all over the theater. After the supply of baseballs had been exhausted, the girls and Anson marched offstage to the tune of “Take Me Out to the Ball Game,” concluding their act.

“Cap’Anson and his two imposing looking daughters hit in the high average class as a baseball sketch,” read the review in Variety after the performance of October 23, 1916, at the B. F. Keith Theatre in Philadelphia.

The “Grand Old Man” of baseball does a neat bit of work with his reminiscence stuff and the audience seemed willing to take him more seriously as a vaudeville offering than for his baseball achievements. The girls add to the picture as well as helping out with a couple of songs.

From Philadelphia, the troupe traveled to Buffalo, Syracuse, and other cities throughout the Northeast. On January 29, 1917, they arrived back home in Chicago, where they appeared at the Majestic Theatre. The review in the Chicago Daily Tribune the next day was glowing:

ANSON AS ACTOR GETS .400 MARK

After playing the New York State league and making the circuit of New England and International, Cap Anson jumped back to the major league cities yesterday, and revived the days of his baseball triumphs with a vaudeville skit at the Majestic. Cap shared honors with his two daughters, Adele and Dorothy, and the three interspersed a lot of dance steps, some tunes, some poetry, and a great deal of baseball lore with Ring Lardner quips. Ring wrote the sketch and the poems.

Part of the skit gave Pop Anson a chance to show how spry he is, despite his 64 years. He instructed the orchestra to strike up a tune so he could foot the intricate steps of the chicken reel, and also figured as a waltzer before the act was finished. Baseball friends and a box of billiard playing associates were out in front to give the old leader of the White Stockings a hand.

Variety joined in the chorus of praise for Capt. Anson & Daughters:

Much interest was centered locally in the [Chicago] vaudeville debut of Capt. Anson and his two daughters. The applause was spontaneous and the audience clamored for more. Act much better than Anson’s most sanguine friends expected and the entire turn was very well received. Pop acquitted himself like a stage veteran and when it comes to dancing shows Mike Donlin up.20

For the next four years, Capt. Anson & Daughters criss-crossed the continent and enjoyed great success. Their last known vaudeville performance was at B. F. Keith’s Theatre in Washington, D.C., on April 28, 1921. By then Adele and Dorothy were married and had families of their own. Their career on the boards came to an end, and so did Pop’s.

The Final Curtain

Anson began his career as a vaudevillian at the bottom, performing in hardscrabble theaters that played continuous shows and charged only a dime for admission. He doggedly worked at his craft, improving both his material and his delivery. He never became a major headliner, but he was an undeniable success. At the pinnacle of his career he appeared on big-time bills that headlined such stars as Irene Castle, Blossom Seeley, and Sophie Tucker.

Anson’s popularity in vaudeville was undiminished by time, as evidenced by his returning to the same cities, and indeed to the same theaters, year after year.

In January 1922, Anson was engaged to manage the new Dixmoor Golf Club. Construction of the course and clubhouse was expected to be completed in the spring.21 Meanwhile, he actively promoted the club and recruited new members by appearing at public links in Chicago while attired in knickers.22

Anson was suddenly stricken while taking his daily constitutional on April 8, 1922. He was rushed to St. Luke’s Hospital and operated on for a glandular condition. The initial reports indicated that he was resting well and not in serious condition. He responded nicely to the treatment, and because of his fine physical condition the attending physicians were confident of his recovery. But then he took a sudden turn for the worse and within a few hours died of apparent heart failure on April 14, three days before he would have turned 70.23

The entire world of baseball mourned Anson. His funeral on Sunday, April 16, 1922, was attended by hundreds of baseball fans and men high in business and political circles. Players of the Chicago American team, along with their opponents from the Detroit team, attended in a body. Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, baseball’s new commissioner, eulogized Anson, who was interred at Oakwood Cemetery, Chicago. Another modest tribute to Anson came on February 3, 1923, when the new Dixmoor golf course was completed, its second hole named in his honor. Anson did not leave an estate, and the National League paid for his funeral expenses. Virginia’s remains were relocated to lie alongside Pop, also at the expense of the National League.

A movement was immediately begun to raise funds for a fitting memorial in recognition of his contributions to the growth of the game. Anson’s papers indicated that he wanted his gravestone to bear the simple legend:

Here lies a man who batted .300.

When the imposing monument was dedicated on September 16, 1923, the inscription read:

He Played The Game.24

Acknowledgments

I am indebted to the entire staff of the Robert Marston Science Library, University of Florida, Gainesville, but especially to Missy Shoop, for the many courtesies and the professional assistance I received while using their outstanding facility. Rob Edelman provided very useful information, and I appreciate his assistance. Gabriel Schechter kindly provided important information. Howard Rosenberg was most generous in sharing data from his Cap Anson biographical series. Mary Bast’s rigorous editorial critique and insightful suggestions resulted in significant improvements to this article.

BOB SCHAEFER, in a forty-year career in the aerospace industry, participated in the Apollo, Shuttle, and Space Station Freedom programs. Since retirement he has conducted extensive research in nineteenth-century baseball. He has won the McFarland-SABR Research Award three times.

Notes

1. The Sporting News, 24 June 1899.
2. Robert Schaefer, “Anson on Broadway,” The National Pastime 25 (2005): 74–81.
3. A History of Vaudeville. http://english.cla.umn.edu/GraduateProfiles/KSurkan/4403/ville.html.
4. http://uwadmnweb.uwyo.edu/AMS/963/amst2010/studproj/vaudeville/vaudeville.htm.
5. Joe Laurie, Vaudeville: From the Honky-Tonks to the Palace (New York: Henry Holt, 1953), 118.
6. Chicago Daily Tribune, 7 January 1913.
7. Variety, 30 April 1910.
8. Chicago Daily Tribune, 1 January 1911.
9. Chicago Daily Tribune, 31 January 1911.
10. The Daily Northwestern, 26 January 1911.
11. Chicago Daily Tribune, 5 February 1911.
12. Chicago Daily Tribune, 17 March 1911.
13. Laurie, Vaudeville, 235–37.
14. Washington Post, 11 November 1911.
15. Los Angeles Daily Times, 5 May 1913.
16. Los Angeles Daily Times, 12 April 1913.
17. Washington Post, 12 October 1913.
18. Atlanta Constitution, 28 April 1914.
19. This claim was made in an undated newspaper interview found in the files at the Baseball Hall of Fame Library. The interview celebrated the occasion of Anson’s centennial, placing the publication date on or about April 11, 1952. It should be noted that Jack Norworth published “Take Me Out to the Ball Game” in 1908, and that it was an instant Anson & Daughters did not appear in Baltimore until 1916, making Mrs. Dodge’s claim suspect. Interestingly, Variety records that “Capt. Anson Co.” and Jack Norworth appeared on the very same bill at the Maryland Theater in Baltimore during the week of October 23, 1916. Perhaps this coincidence led to Mrs. Dodge’s confusion.
20. Variety, 2 February 1917.
21. Variety, 27 January 1922.
22. Variety, 18 January 1922.
23. Los Angeles Daily Times, 15 April 1922.
24. Chicago Daily Tribune, 16 September 1923.