The Atlantics of Brooklyn was a venerated name in the early history of baseball. The club, organized on August 14, 1855,1 was a member of the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) from 1858 to 1870, playing professionally in 1869 and 1870.2 An Atlantic club was also a member of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NAPBBP) from 1872 through September 1875 when it disbanded. An entirely new Atlantic nine formed to play on the Capitoline Grounds in April 1878, but in less than two weeks, most of the team, including Candy Cummings and Bill Barnie, were spirited away to New Haven by Ben Douglas for his International Association team.3 Another Atlantic team, initially attributed to Barnie, was organized in April 1879 by manager Jack Chapman, but by the end of May he had left to manage an International Association team in Holyoke.4 Eventually, Barnie, in April 1881, organized yet another Atlantic team to play at the Union Grounds, joining the short-lived Eastern Championship Association.5

The Athletics of Philadelphia originally formed as a town ball club on May 31, 1859, and reorganized as a base ball club on April 7, 1860.6 The Athletics were members of the NABBP from 1861 to 1870, playing professionally in 1869 and 1870, in the NAPBBP from 1871 to 1875, and in the National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs in 1876.7 After being expelled from the NL for failing to complete their final Western trip, an independent Athletics team organized in 1877 as a stock company under new president Charles H. Downing and joined the League Alliance in order to protect the club from player raids by National League clubs.8 The Athletics reorganized for 1878 under manager Alfred H. Wright, utilizing 40 players en route to a 45–16–1 record as an independent team.9 Yet another Athletic club formed in 1879 under William W. Hincken and reorganized for 1880 with William Sharsig as president.10 With Sharsig as nominal president through 1883, the 1881 Athletics joined the Eastern Championship Association under manager Horace Phillips.11

The Westerners

O.P. Caylor and Justus Thorner. Oliver Perry Caylor, born in Dayton, Ohio, on December 14, 1849, was admitted to the bar in Cincinnati in 1872, but opted for a journalistic career with the Cincinnati Enquirer in November 1874. Ascending to the position of sports editor, Caylor garnered a reputation for his clever, humorous, and often acerbic reporting.12

Justus Thorner, a manager for local breweries, was president of the semi-professional Star Club of Cincinnati in 1879.13 After President J. Wayne Neff of the rival Cincinnati National League club announced that his players would be released on October 1, 1879, and forwarded the club’s resignation from the League, Thorner met with National League president William Hulbert in Chicago, formally applying for membership in the League.14 At the annual meeting of the National League, held in December in Buffalo, New York, rather than Cincinnati, as originally scheduled, the organization’s Board of Directors admitted the Star Club to membership and Thorner was elected to the Board of Directors.15 On December 22, the stockholders of the new Cincinnati club elected directors and officers, including Thorner as president.16 Thorner and Caylor represented the club at a special meeting of the National League on February 26, 1880, in Rochester, New York.17

In early July, the directors of the club requested and received the resignation of Thorner as president, and W.C. Kennett represented Cincinnati at the special meeting of the League on October 4 at Rochester, New York. Henry Root, president of the Providence club, proposed an amendment to the League constitution that would prohibit the sale of alcoholic beverages on club grounds and the use of such grounds for Sunday baseball, both of which the Cincinnati club depended on. All except Kennett pledged to vote in favor of the amendment at the League’s December meeting.18 On October 6, the membership of Cincinnati in the League was declared vacant.19

By late April 1881, a new baseball club had been formed in Cincinnati. It began play in St. Louis May 28, with Caylor reporting on the games.20 Only days earlier, the leasehold and grounds of the Cincinnati club had been sold to “four prominent Cincinnati gentlemen,” later revealed to be Caylor, Thorner, Victor Long, and John Price.21 Caylor resigned his position with the Cincinnati Enquirer in August, ostensibly to return to the practice of law. Nonetheless, Caylor soon joined the staff of the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette.22

Alfred Spink. Alfred Henry Spink was born on August 24, 1854, in Quebec, Canada. Moving with his family to Chicago after the Civil War, he moved in 1875 to St. Louis, Missouri, where his brother Billy was sports editor for the St. Louis Globe-Democrat. Soon thereafter, Alfred began covering baseball for the Missouri Republican, subsequently becoming sporting editor for a number of St. Louis newspapers, including the St. Louis Post-Dispatch. Becoming acquainted with saloon owner Chris Von der Ahe, vice president of the Grand Avenue Base Ball Club in 1877, Alfred and Billy began organizing semi-professional baseball teams in 1878. Their 1879 team, called the Browns or Brown Stockings, won 20 of 21 games.23

Because dates and sources conflict, the baseball situation in St. Louis becomes convoluted beginning in 1880. Most likely Al Spink, with veteran player Ned Cuthbert, organized the co-operative St. Louis Browns and, with a number of local men, organized the St. Louis Base Ball Association.24 In May, another team using the Brown Stockings name was organized under the presidency of Chris Von der Ahe.25 By the end of May, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat was referring to Cuthbert’s club as the Reds or Red Stockings and Von der Ahe’s club as the Browns or Brown Stockings.26

In October, Von der Ahe and others formed the Sportsman’s Park and Club Association, with Spink as secretary, and secured the lease on Grand Avenue Park, which was to be enlarged and improved and would be known as Sportsman’s Park.27 In March 1881 the Sportsman’s Park and Club Association incorporated.28 The Brown Stockings were organized in April, formally opening Sportsman’s Park on May 22 with a defeat of the rival St. Louis Red Stockings before at least 2,500 people.29 Five of the Browns players had been members of the Reds in 1880, most significantly Bill and Jack Gleason.

The Easterners

Horace B. Phillips. Horace B. Phillips was born in Salem, Ohio, most likely on May 14, 1853, yet earlier reported as May 20, 1856.30 Growing up in Philadelphia, he began his baseball playing career with local amateur teams in 1870. Securing his first professional engagement with the Philadelphia club in 1877, Phillips soon succeeded Fergy Malone as manager. A baseball vagabond in his early career, he subsequently played for and managed clubs in Hornellsville and Syracuse, New York, before managing clubs in Troy and Baltimore in 1879 and Baltimore and Rochester, New York in 1880. Returning to Philadelphia in 1881, Phillips was reported managing the independent professional Athletics team by the end of May.31

Billy Barnie. William Harrison Barnie, born in New York City on January 26, 1853, began playing for amateur baseball clubs in Brooklyn at an early age, manning the Nassau club for three years beginning in 1870 and the Atlantics of Brooklyn in 1873. He initiated his professional career with Hartford in 1874, playing with the Buckeye club of Columbus, Ohio, in 1876 and managing it in 1877. Barnie played for and managed the Buffalo club later in 1877 and was a member of the Atlantics team that moved to New Haven, then Hartford, in 1878. After playing for the Knickerbocker club of San Francisco in 1879 and 1880, he returned to Brooklyn and organized an independent professional Atlantics club in April 1881, becoming its secretary.32

The Pittsburghers

Al Pratt. Albert G. Pratt was born on November 19, 1848, in Allegheny, Pennsylvania, and joined the Union Army at the age of 15, serving in the infantry. He helped form the Enterprise Base Ball Club of Pittsburgh in 1866 and later joined the Allegheny Club. After a season with the Riverside Club of Portsmouth, Ohio, Pratt pitched for the famous Forest City Club of Cleveland from 1869 to 1872. He returned to Pittsburgh and pitched for the Enterprise club from 1873 to 1875 and played with the Xantha club from 1876 to 1879.33 Pratt then served as a National League umpire in 1879 and substitute umpire in 1880.34

H.D. “Denny” McKnight. Harmar Denny McKnight was born in 1847 in Pittsburgh and graduated from Lafayette College in 1869. Pursuing a business career, he became director of an iron manufacturing company in 1876. That year he helped organize the independent Allegheny baseball club, serving as one of its directors. The following year McKnight was instrumental in the formation of the International Association of Professional Base Ball Players and served as its president after Candy Cummings resigned. However, the Allegheny club disbanded in June 1878.35

Out West

As Alfred Spink stated in his book The National Game: “I wrote to O.P. Caylor, then the sporting editor of the Cincinnati Enquirer and I suggested to him the idea of picking up all that was left in Cincinnati of the old professional players, forming them into a nine, christening them the Cincinnati Reds and bringing them here to play three games on a Saturday, Sunday and Monday with my reconstructed St Louis Browns.” Spink continued: “Mr. Caylor, accepting my suggestion, quickly got together a team of semi-professionals, called it the Cincinnati Reds and brought it here to help open the reconstructed St. Louis baseball grounds, which my brother William had named Sportsman’s Park.”36 Their Sunday, May 29 game, won by the Browns 16–2, drew an estimated four thousand spectators, making it a substantial success.37

More Spink: “The Dubuques, the Cincinnati Reds and the Chicago prairie teams came to St. Louis and the games drew such crowds, especially on Sundays, that soon news of the prosperity wave reached the East.”38 Among the well-attended Sunday games in St. Louis were the July 3 game against the Eckfords of Chicago (4,000), the July 17 game against Dubuque (nearly 5,000), and the August 14 game against the Buckeyes of Cincinnati (over 5,000).39

Spink: “Later I wrote to Horace B. Phillips, then managing the Athletics of Philadelphia, and to William Barnie, then operating the Atlantics of Brooklyn. Both the Athletics and the Atlantics were free lances outside the pale of the National League and were willing to come all the way to St. Louis to meet the St. Louis Browns for a division of the gate receipts.”40 Barnie later reminisced: “Horace Phillips of the Athletics and myself then formed the idea of organizing a big league. We learned through the papers that large audiences were being attracted by base ball teams in Cincinnati, Louisville and St. Louis and began negotiating for a trip to those cities. The Western clubs guaranteed us more than enough to pay our expenses on the round trip. We accepted and both the Atlantics and Athletics took the journey.”41

In late July, Cincinnati applied for admission to the National League for 1882.42 In mid-August Phillips was reported to be in Chicago, meeting with National League President William Hulbert to request admission for the Athletics, who withdrew the application within two weeks and released Phillips only days before the October meeting.43

The Atlantics of Brooklyn and the Athletics of Philadelphia formed one of the most intense rivalries during baseball’s pioneer era. This graphic depicts a match between the clubs at Philadelphia from 1865.

The Tours

The Athletics were the first to embark on a Western tour. On September 2 in Louisville the Athletics defeated the Eclipse of Louisville, with manager Phillips playing in center field. The next day in St. Louis, the St. Louis Browns beat the Athletics. On Sunday, September 4, before an astounding 7,000 fans, the Browns proved victorious. The final game in St. Louis September 5 was won by the Athletics. Returning to Louisville, the Athletics on September 8 lost to the Eclipse morning and afternoon games. On September 9 the Athletics defeated an ad hoc team in Cincinnati.44 According to one source, Thorner found out about the game and joined the crowd of 200 in the eighth inning.45 Later, in a letter to the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, Phillips stated that he did indeed consult Caylor on this occasion.46 The next day on their way home, the Athletics lost to the Detroit National League club in Allegheny (near Pittsburgh) before 2,000 fans, with Al Pratt serving as umpire.47

After defeating the Athletics in Philadelphia on September 14 and 15, the Atlantics arrived in Louisville on September 17 and bested the Eclipse. The next day the Eclipse prevailed and again on September 19. On September 22 the Eclipse again won. Heading to St. Louis, the Atlantics prevailed over the Browns on September 24, scoring the winning run in the top of the ninth. On Sunday, September 25, the Browns were victorious. The game scheduled for September 26 was canceled due to the death of President Garfield. The third game, postponed due to rain, was played September 28, but was suspended due to darkness with the score Atlantics 13, Browns 12. The following day, the Atlantics beat the St. Louis Reds by the identical score. As the St. Louis Browns devolved into chaos at the beginning of October, the Atlantics defeated one of the clubs claiming the Browns’ name on October 9. On their way home to Brooklyn, the Atlantics stopped over in Philadelphia and defeated the Athletics.48

Phillips, upon his return to Philadelphia, stated that “the movement [to form a new league] was meeting with great favor in St. Louis, Pittsburgh, Louisville, and Cincinnati….”49 The Cincinnati Enquirer, probably Frank Wright, agreed: “The outlook is very promising. (A) scheme is on foot to organize a new association, to include St. Louis, Louisville, Philadelphia, Baltimore, Washington, Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, and New York. Already the proposition has been entertained in St. Louis and Louisville, and a meeting will be held in Pittsburgh, October 10, to perfect arrangements.”50 The Clipper reported: “THE NEW ASSOCIATION will hold a meeting Oct. 10 in Pittsburgh. Clubs who intend sending representatives will please communicate with H.B. Phillips, Great Western Hotel, Philadelphia Pa.”51

One of the most enigmatic figures of nineteenth-century baseball, president Chris Von der Ahe led the St. Louis Browns to four consecutive pennants during the ten-year existence of the American Association.

The Meetings

Who was actually at the meeting is a matter of conjecture. Justus Thorner’s 1889 account of the meeting erroneously stated that Phillips was there. Later, Caylor stated: “The Association was christened at the Pittsburgh meeting, and neither Mr. Phillips nor Mr. Von der Ahe was present.”52 Nonetheless Thorner recalled: “We called another meeting at the St. Clair Hotel, Pittsburgh and I brought on with me O.P. Caylor from Cincinnati and another reporter named Wright. These two, Mr. Phillips and myself were all the people who showed up…. Phillips and I took a stroll into Diamond Street and there learned that a baseball crank named Al Pratt was working in one of the mills and we found him. He told us of Denny McKnight and he was also secured. [W]e organized for all practical purposes, and I suggested that we have baseball representatives at Louisville, Washington, Philadelphia, New York, and St. Louis to send me their proxy as to where the next meeting should be held. We led everyone wired to believe that he was the only one absent from the meeting, and that caused an immediate reply.”53 In another account by Thorner from 1894, he stated: “It was during the latter part of 1881 that I read in some paper of a call for a meeting, at a Pittsburg hotel, of all those favoring a new baseball organization. In company with O.P. Caylor I took a run down to Pittsburg and…found the call to be on the order of a hoax, as no one showed up outside Caylor and myself. I inquired of the hotel keeper whether any one in town was fond of baseball, and was referred to Denny McKnight and Al Pratt. We called on these gentlemen…. We then declared the meeting adjourned to Cincinnati, November 2, and Caylor and I returned home.”54

The day after the meeting, numerous newspapers published virtually identical accounts. Possibly authored by Frank Wright of the Cincinnati Enquirer, the report was replete with misspellings and name-dropping, perhaps in an effort to impress prospective league members. It stated, with the correct names in parentheses, that temporary officers chosen were M.F. Day (John B. Day), of the Metropolitan club, Christ Van Derahe (Von der Ahe), James J. Williams (James A. Williams), and H.D. McKnight. Justus Thorner and Charles Fulmer were appointed to a committee to draft a constitution and by-laws.55 John B. Day was owner of the highly-successful independent professional New York-based Metropolitan club and James A. Williams was a former pitcher and the secretary, treasurer, and main driving force behind the recently defunct (Inter)National Association.56 Charles Fulmer was a prominent Philadelphia baseball player who accompanied the Athletics on their Western tour.57 Despite the supposed selection of officers, none of the accounts specifically stated who was actually present at the meeting.

The New York Clipper was more circumspect: “An informal meeting was held Oct. 10 in Pittsburg in the place of the proposed convention of clubs to organize a new Association, at which there were but two or three of the representatives of the clubs present who were to have sent delegates. After some talk together it was resolved to hold a meeting for permanent organization at the Gibson House, Cincinnati, Nov. 2.”58

Despite numerous unanswered questions, conventional wisdom holds to Harold Seymour’s account. That is, that Phillips instigated the meeting but dropped out; that Justus Thorner, Caylor, and Frank Wright went to Pittsburgh and met with Al Pratt and Denny McKnight; and that they sent to prominent non-National League clubs telegrams worded so as to give the impression that each absentee was the only one not present at the meeting.59

The American Association of Professional Base Ball Clubs formed on November 2, 1881, at the Gibson House in Cincinnati, Ohio, with six charter members; the Athletics of Philadelphia, the Atlantics of Brooklyn, St. Louis, Cincinnati, the Alleghenys of Pittsburgh, and the Eclipse of Louisville. Delegates to the convention included O.P. Caylor and Justus Thorner, Chris Von der Ahe, Billy Barnie, and Denny McKnight. Charles Fulmer represented the Athletics, and Horace Phillips represented the Philadelphia club of Al Reach. After some talk of consolidation, Fulmer was admitted as the representative of the Athletics, and Phillips was excluded. McKnight was made temporary chairman and Jimmy Williams was chosen temporary secretary.60 At the March 1882 meeting of the American Association, the Atlantic Club of Brooklyn resigned, to be replaced by a club from Baltimore.61

This 1865 photograph of the Atlantics of Brooklyn by Charles H. Williamson depicts the “Champion Nine” of 1864 and was given to opposing teams who played The Atlantic Club. In September and October of 1882 the club undertook a tour, making stops for multiple games in Philadelphia, Louisville, and St. Louis, with a second stop in Philadelphia on the way home. Such tours were part of the basis of formation of the league known as the American Association.

Afterword

Who should receive credit for the formation of the American Association? Alfred Spink and O.P. Caylor had been reporting baseball since 1875. Justus Thorner had been involved in Cincinnati baseball since 1879. Veterans Billy Barnie and Horace Phillips had faced each other on the field for years, including 1881, when their teams were members of the Eastern Championship Association. Spink helped form an independent team in St. Louis and encouraged Caylor to do the same in Cincinnati. Spink wrote to Philips and Barnie, inviting their teams west. Barnie and Phillips noted the success of teams in St. Louis, Cincinnati and Louisville. Caylor and Phillips met in September. Soon thereafter, Phillips issued the call for the first meeting. All these men deserve a measure of credit in this enterprise.

BROCK HELANDER is the author of “The Rock Who’s Who” (1982), “The Rock Who’s Who Second Edition” (1996), “The Rockin’ ’50s” (1998), and “The Rockin’ ’60s” (1999). Since joining SABR, he has been researching nineteenth century baseball, focusing on the history of baseball in cities that were represented in the major leagues exclusively in the nineteenth century.

Notes

1. Preston D. Orem, Baseball (1845–1881) from the Newspaper Accounts. (Altadena, California: Preston D. Orem, 1961), 14.

2. Marshall D. Wright, The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857–1870 (Jefferson, North Carolina; McFarland & Co., Inc., 2000).

3. New York Clipper; April 27, 1878; New York Clipper, May 4, 1878

4. New York Clipper; April 12, 1879, Brooklyn Eagle; April 13, 1879, 4; New York Clipper. May 31, 1879.

5. Brooklyn Eagle, March 25, 1881, 1; New York Clipper, April 2, 1881; New York Times, April 12, 1881 8.

6. New York Clipper, October 13, 1883.

7. Wright.

8. New York Clipper, January 6, 1877; Chicago Tribune, March 4, 1877, 7; New York Clipper, March 10, 1877.

9. New York Clipper, April 6, 1878; New York Clipper, November 23, 1878.

10. New York Clipper, May 10, 1879; New York Clipper, May 8, 1880; New York Clipper, March 24, 1883.

11. New York Clipper, March 19, 1881; Brooklyn Eagle, April 17, 1881, 6; (Philadelphia) North American, May 16, 1881.

12. David L. Porter, Biographical Dictionary of American Sports: Baseball (Westport, Connecticut: Greenwood Press, 2000), 235–236; Frank V. Phelps, “Oliver Perry Caylor (O.P.),” Baseball’s First Stars (Cleveland: Society for American Baseball Research, 1996), 25; Sporting Life, October 23, 1897; New York Clipper, October 30, 1897.

13. Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, November 17, 1881, 4; Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 137.

14. Chicago Tribune, September 25, 1879, 5; The New York Times, October 25, 1879, 2; Chicago Tribune, October 28, 1879, 7; Chicago Tribune, November 16, 1879, 11.

15. New York Clipper, December 14, 1878; Brooklyn Eagle, November 17, 1879, 3; New York Clipper, December 13, 1879.

16. New York Clipper, January 3, 1880

17. New York Clipper, February 27, 1880.

18. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 5, 1880, 3; Chicago Tribune, October 5, 1880, 3.

19. Chicago Tribune, October 7, 1880, 5.

20. New York Sun, April 21, 1881; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 27, 1881, 6; Chicago Tribune, May 31, 1881, 6.

21. New York Clipper, July 2, 1881; Rocky Mountain News, October 2, 1882, 2; Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, December 31,

22. (Chicago) Daily InterOcean, August 28, 1881 3, citing the Buffalo Courier; Brooklyn Eagle, September 1, 1881, 3; Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, October 8, 1882, 7; Frank V. Phelps, “Oliver Perry Caylor (O.P.),” Baseball’s First Stars, 25.

23. Ray Schmidt, “Alfred Henry Spink,” Baseball’s First Stars, 156; William A. Kelsoe, St. Louis Reference Record: A Newspaper Man’s Motion Picture of the City (St. Louis: Von Hoffman Press, 1926), 14; Alfred H. Spink, The National Game (Carbondale and Edwardsville, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2000), 46; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 11, 1877, 6; New York Clipper, November 22, 1879.

24. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 12, 1880, 7; Washington Post, January 6, 1898, 8; The Sporting News, June 12, 1913, 4; Sporting Life, June 14, 1913, Vol. 61, Number 15, 9.

25. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 9, 1880, 12.

26. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 30, 1880, 13.

27. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 17, 1880, 2; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 31, 1880, 12; Spink, 46.

28. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 17, 1881 3; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 27, 1881, 11.

29. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 7, 1881, 7; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, 25 April 1881, 3; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 23, 1881, 7.

30. Hy Turkin and S.C. Thompson, The Official Encyclopedia of Baseball (New York: A.S. Barnes and Company, Inc, Third Edition, 1963), 309; Peter Palmer and Gary Gillette, ed., The 2005 ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia (New York: Sterling Publishing Co., 2005), 1294; New York Clipper, July 26, 1884.

31. New York Clipper, July 26, 1884; New York Clipper, May 28, 1881.

32. Brooklyn Eagle, March 25, 1881, 1; Brooklyn Eagle, April 26, 1896 16; Jack Kavanagh, “William Harrison Barnie (Bald Bill),” Baseball’s First Stars, 6.

33. New York Times, 23 November, 1937, 23; Daniel E. Ginsburg, “Albert George Pratt (Uncle Al),” Baseball’s First Stars, 128.

34. Peter Palmer and Gary Gillette, ed., 2489, 2492.

35. The Sporting News, 19 May, 1900, 1; Frank V. Phelps, “Henry Dennis McKnight (Denny),” Baseball’s First Stars, 109.

36. Spink, 47, 48.

37. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, May 30, 1881, 3.

38. Spink, 48.

39. St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 4, 1881, 7; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 18, 1881, 8; New York Clipper, August 20, 1881.

40. Spink, 48, 50.

41. Brooklyn Eagle, January 30, 1898, 9.

42. New York Tribune, July 28, 1881, 8.

43. Cleveland Herald, August 16, 1881; New York Clipper, September 10, 1881; New York Clipper, October 18, 1881.

44. Cleveland Herald, September 3, 1881, 4; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 4, 1881, 3; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 5, 1881, 5; Cleveland Herald, September 6, 1881; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 9, 1881, 7; Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, September 9, 1881, 5; Cincinnati Daily Gazette, September 9, 1881, 2; New York Clipper, September 17, 1881.

45. Cincinnati Daily Gazette, September 10, 1881, 8.

46. Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, November 18, 1882.

47. New York Clipper, September 17, 1881.

48. Philadelphia Inquirer, September 15, 1881 3; Philadelphia Inquirer, September 16, 1881. 2; Cleveland Herald, September 19, 1881, 3; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 9, 1881, 5; New York Clipper, September 24, 1881; New York Clipper, October 1, 1881; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 25, 1881, 7; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 26, 1881, 3; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 27, 1881, 7; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 28, 1881, 5; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 29, 1881, 6; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 30, 1881, 6; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 2, 1881, 3; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 4, 1881, 2; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 9, 1881, 6; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 22, 1881; New York Clipper, October 10, 1881.

49. Buffalo Express, citing the Philadelphia Times, September 14, 1881.

50. Cleveland Herald, citing the Cincinnati Enquirer, September 17, 1881.

51. New York Clipper, September 24, 1881.

52. Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, November 18, 1882.

53. Pittsburgh Dispatch, November 9, 1889, 6.

54. Washington Post, March 11, 1894, 6.

55. Cincinnati Enquirer, October 11, 1881; Cincinnati Daily Gazette, October 11, 1881, 9; Chicago Tribune, October 11, 1881, 7; (Chicago) Daily InterOcean, October 11, 1881, 7; Cleveland Herald, October 11, 1881; St. Louis Globe-Democrat, October 11, 1881, 6.

56. David Pietrusza, “John B. Day,” Baseball’s First Stars, 49; New York Clipper, March 19, 1892.

57. New York Clipper, February 23, 1879; Joseph M. Overfield, “Charles John Fulmer (Chick),” Nineteenth Century Stars (Society for American Baseball Research. Manhattan, Kansas: Ag Press, 1989), 49.

58. New York Clipper, October 22, 1881.

59. Seymour, 137–138.

60. New York Clipper, November 12, 1881.

61. New York Clipper, March 18, 1882.

The Jefferson Street Neighborhood in 1860. From 24th Street to where Turner’s Lane ends is the ballpark site.

The Philadelphia ballparks situated at Jefferson and Master Streets, between 27th and 25th Streets, have a significant historic importance for our national pastime. Originally, this plot of land was known as the Jefferson Parade Grounds. It was used as a bivouac and training site in the years leading up to the Civil War.1

In the antebellum era, the major Philadelphia teams – the Athletics, Olympics, Mercantiles, and Keystones – found it difficult to secure suitable playing grounds in the city. Because of the community’s opposition to recreational sports, Philadelphia ball clubs were forced to play in Camden, New Jersey or across the Schuylkill River above the Fairmount Avenue Bridge near Harding’s Inn and Tavern. With baseball’s growing popularity, playing grounds soon encroached the outskirts of the city at 32nd and Hamilton and 11th and Wharton. It was not until the early war years that playing fields appeared at more accessible sites such as 10th and Camac Lane and 18th and Master Street. Eventually residential pressures compelled the Olympic and Mercantile ball clubs in 1864 to lease from the city “a handsome piece of ground at the north side of the Spring Garden Market” at 25th and Jefferson.2

Each club had two days a week for their practice. For a cost of about $1,500, the Olympics immediately built a clubhouse along Master Street and made substantial improvements by leveling and re-sodding the playing surface. The first game was played on Wednesday, May 24, 1864, between picked nines from Pennsylvania and New Jersey for the benefit of the United States Sanitary Commission. Without an enclosing fence, 2,000 spectators, paying 25 cents for admission, established the field’s boundaries. The only field-sitting was for ladies who sat behind the players’ bench.3 This ballpark was marked by certain features. Along the third-base/Master Street side was the grass embankment of the old Spring Garden Reservoir. Trees also disrupted the playing site, and until the grounds were enclosed, neighborhood animals wandered onto the field of play. Parking for horse carriages was in the left field foul territory, and no elevated reporters’ seating box existed until 1871.4 Visible behind the 27th and Master home plate intersection on the Girard College campus was the towering Greek-styled Founders Hall with its Corinthian columns.5

The Jefferson Grounds experienced a significant overhaul when the city’s best team, the Athletics, relocated there for the inaugural 1871 National Association of Professional Base Ball Players season. The Athletics had previously prospered at a popular site at 17th Street between Columbia and Montgomery Avenues before a housing development forced them to move to the Jefferson Grounds. Almost immediately, the Athletics tore down the old wooden grandstand and the encircling fence that had been erected in 1866. The new tenants re-sodded and leveled the playing surface, erected a 10-foot vertical slatted fence, and built a pair of tiered pavilions that abutted near the original home plate area on the corner of 25th and Master. Bleacher benches extended along the outfield lines. This rebuilt ball field held over 5,000 fans. This figure doubled during major ball games, when spectators lined up in front of the outfield fences and stood on wooden boxes that supported unstable raised wood planks. Those attendees who could not gain admission purchased 25-cent roof-top seats on neighboring houses, or sat on the branches of overhanging trees. These fans were termed “tree frogs,” and were likened to “living fruit.”6

Initially, the ball park was popular with women, but they eventually were turned off by the cursing, drinking, and the tobacco juice splashes on their dresses. Management tried to curb this rowdy behavior and attempted to attract fans with a music bandstand.7 There was even talk in the off-season about having football games at Jefferson Grounds.8 For the 1872 season, the champion Athletics resurfaced the infield, particularly the irregularly graded shortstop area. If these modifications were not completed in time for the new season the Athletics intended to schedule early-season games across the Delaware River in Gloucester, New Jersey.9

During the Athletics’ third season at the Jefferson Grounds, alarms were raised over the possibility that the site would be sold to housing developers. The Athletics’ directors were upset because they claimed to have invested over $7,000 on the ball field. After much debate and lobbying the politicians relented and the sale did not go through.10 A subsequent concern was the building of additional cheap seats in the outfield. In 1874 this need intensified when the grounds welcomed a new tenant, the Philadelphia Centennials (also known as the Quakers or Fillies). The new club had the field every Monday and Thursday. The Athletics took the site on Wednesdays and Saturdays.11 Prints of the playing grounds from a home plate perspective portrayed a wooden porch-styled construction.12

Near the 24th and Masters intersection, circa 1865–1866. Behind the clubhouse is the reservoir.

In spite of the clubs’ successes the ball park was losing money. The tenant teams compensated by raising ticket prices and erecting a new interior fence that could be plastered with paying advertisements. But the prevalence of gambling and drinking at the ball field kept people away.13 Eventually, the expenses of park maintenance and renovation exceeded revenues. They could not even afford a tarpaulin to cover the infield.14 It was hoped that the Athletics’ affiliation with the new National League in 1876 might save the old ball field. But the well-worn Jefferson Park did not appeal to fans and with low income and poor attendance the Athletics could not afford to remain in the new League. The unaffiliated and homeless Centennials now shifted their games to 24th Street and Ridge Avenue, Recreation Park, and the expelled Athletics’ rump team in 1877 played unsanctioned games wherever they could find a ball field. It was obvious that more revenue could be made by turning part of the Jefferson Grounds over to residential developers. It took the creation of the American Association in 1882 to revive the Athletics and the old Jefferson Park ball field.

The Athletics initially played their inaugural Association season at Oakdale Park at 11th and Cumberland. This leisure recreation site had a large lake and an adjoining playing field, used early on for cricket. Some distance from the Jefferson/Columbia ball-playing corridor, the Oakdale grounds had been in use since 1866.15 After nearly a decade the ball field became downtrodden until the displaced Olympics revived the grounds [1877-1881]. It was thus an ideal place for the revitalized Athletics to re-establish themselves.

Once the contracts had been signed, the Athletics razed the “old and unsightly” existing structure and replaced it with an upgraded wooden grandstand that held 2,000 spectators. The grounds were re-sodded and enlarged and open outfield benches were re-built for another 2,000 fans. A new fence was also erected for the start of the 1882 season.16 Despite these renovations the ball field could not accommodate the large crowds that embraced the new Athletics. As a result, the Athletics decided to relocate back to the Jefferson Street ball field. Unfortunately, the original two-block 25th Street square site no longer existed. The city had committed the eastern portion to a new high school and 26th Street was cut through the original ball grounds. But the Athletics, recognizing the transportation convenience of the site, negotiated an initial lease for $1,000 for the remaining 27th Street remnant. As a result, the former center-field space became the new home plate area for the Association’s Jefferson Street ball field.17

On the corner of 27th and Jefferson, the Athletics constructed “the handsomest ball grounds in the country.”18 The corner was backed up by a semi-circular two-tiered grandstand. Painted white and adorned in “ornamental … fancy cornice work,” the pavilions’ occupants enjoyed arm-chair seating behind a wire-mesh screen. The structure eventually was topped by 32 private season boxes, each holding five people, and a 22-person press box. The grandstand sat 2,200 people and open benches bordering the outfield held more than 3000 fans.19

After a successful 1883 championship season, the ballpark’s capacity was increased to 15,000. Special features abounded. The Oakdale flagstaff was planted at the 27th and Master Street corner20, a private external staircase for box ticket holders was erected, a ladies room, with a female attendant, was set up and a bandstand, linking the third-base pavilion and outfield seats, was erected. The outfield benches were fronted by a horizontal slatted barrier and the left-field fence held a scoreboard and advertisements. Towering over the left-field benches was the Jefferson Street Mission Church. In the distance, beyond center field, was the still-visible Founders Hall on the Girard College campus.21

The new Athletics and their renovated ball field were overseen by a popular local triumvirate, Charles “Pop” Mason, Lew Simmons, and Billy Sharsig. They raised funds to finance the franchise and redesigned the grounds to suit their needs and limited budget. Each served a term as team manager, but Sharsig managed the ball club for five out of the eight years at Jefferson Street. The Athletics’ record for these years was 519-464 for a .528 percentage. For most of their tenure at Jefferson Street the team was competitive and held their own attendance-wise against the National League Phillies. Their popularity was due to ballplayers like Bobby Mathews, Henry Larkin, Harry Stovey, and Louis Bierbauer. But Mason and Simmons recognized that the financial well-being of the franchise would be enhanced by Sunday ball playing. Unfortunately, Pennsylvania “Blue laws” forbade games on the Christian Sabbath. To counter this restriction Mason and his partners revived an old practice of scheduling games in Gloucester, New Jersey. Fans would assemble early on a Sunday morning at the South Street ferry and take a 45-minute crossing to Gloucester. Games were contested at a site next to the centrally-located race track that was served by horse trolleys. Radiating from this sporting juncture were saloons, betting parlors, fishcake stands, and other hostelries. One editorial called Gloucester “a nineteenth-century Sodom.”22

1883 ballgame at the new 27th and Jefferson Street field, looking north towards Jefferson street. Home plate is at 27th Street. The big building on the right is the Mission Church at 26th and Jefferson.

The Athletics began the 1886 season with an advertisement claiming to be the “oldest playing organization in the United States.” They asserted how they gave the Jefferson Street patrons “honest ball playing” when they posted the opening season schedule of games. These contests began at 4:00 P.M. and admission remained at 25 cents. Even the train schedule from Broad Street was publicized.23 Despite this confidence, the ball field was again threatened by city officials. These ambitious politicians were deterred when they were reminded that no one except the Athletics was willing to pay the $2,000 lease for the grounds.24 Once this issue was settled the Athletics re-dedicated their resources to repairing the grounds. They raised the infield, put in new cinder paths and purchased “an immense canvas to cover the entire infield.”25 Two years later, Mason and Simmons, looking for revenue, changed the ticket prices. General admission became 50 cents, and for an extra quarter women and their escorts could sit on cushioned seats in parts of the grandstand.26 This new revenue was intended to cover the expenses of erecting a new fence, replacing old floorboards and re-painting the pavilions.27 In spite of these changes, the growing threat of a players’ strike put the Athletics and their ball park in jeopardy.

In 1890, the players’ Brotherhood union brought a player strike team to Philadelphia. This anticipated rivalry moved the Pennsylvania Railroad to offer the Athletics a new ball field at a more competitive location with easy access from the Broad Street Station. It was rumored that the club was offered a five-year free lease if they moved to a site in West Philadelphia on the other side of the river below the Fortieth Street Bridge.28 Rather than lose or alienate their existing fan base, the Athletics turned down this speculative offer. Instead the Athletics, in grounds which had been updated in a number of seasons, prepared for the 1890 strike season, competing against two Philadelphia ball clubs in different leagues. The season, as expected, was a hardship for the American Association Athletics. Attendance waned and expenses mounted. By the end of the year the Athletics had new management and the Jefferson Street grounds were on the verge of being eclipsed.

By the middle of the strike season the Athletics were plagued by pre-existing financial woes. In 1888, this condition moved Mason, Simmons, and Sharsig to seek new investors, like H.C. Pennypacker and his partner William Whitaker. But during the strike season of 1890 the club’s problems mounted. In one instance, a suit for almost $300 was brought against the franchise in the Court of Common Pleas by carpenters who were not fully paid for their work on the pavilions.29 The ball club also owed $1200 in back rent and $1435 for lumber purchases. To pay these outstanding debts the grandstand, inside fence, seats, flagstaff, ticket boxes and office furniture , appraised at $765 were sold at the end of the season for $600.30 Sometime during these dealings, the Wagner brothers, J. Earle and George, wholesale meat distributers, took over the defunct franchise. Previously, the Wagners were stockholders in the city’s Player League team. After the Jefferson Street field’s sheriff sale, the Wagners shifted players from the three city ball clubs and set up their reconvene team at the Players League ball field, Forepaugh Park and Broad and Dauphin Streets.

Contemporary picture of the playground and softball field at the corner of 27th and Jefferson.

The Athletics played one more season in Philadelphia before merging with the new National League Washington ballclub that previously played in the American Association. It was a better end than what was in store for the Jefferson ball field. Vacant and partially denuded during the 1891 season, the ballpark was set ablaze by neighborhood youngsters in November. A good deal of lumber, stored for carpenters repairing the surviving outside fence, fed the flames.31 A month latter the Wagners’ offices on Vine Street burned down. Fortunately, the office safe, with the club’s records, tickets, and contracts, survived the fire.32 By the following summer the old Jefferson Street grounds, behind a new “substantial fence” were converted into an enclosed “pleasure park” and playground.33

By the mid-1890s there was speculation that a new baseball association would take over the Jefferson Street site.34 The future owners of the American League Athletics, Ben Shibe and Connie Mack, pondered the advantages of revisiting the old 27th Street ball field.35 They investigated the options of a new annual lease, but investors did not want to commit $30,000, necessary for preparing the ball park, to a short-term lease. Nor were neighboring residents and the new 25th Street School happy with the prospect of a new ball park and its anticipated crowds.36 As a result, the inaugural American League Athletics located to 29th and Columbia while the Jefferson Street site hosted leisure activities and an occasional Buffalo Bill Wild West Show.37

Today a memorial plaque to Billy Sharsig is mounted at the 26th Street recreation center and kids play on a softball field set on the grass and dirt of one of Philadelphia’s oldest and most important ball playing sites.

DR. JERROLD CASWAY is the Dean of Social Sciences at Howard Community College in Columbia, Maryland. He is the author of “Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball” and has completed, “The ‘Olde’ Ball Game: The Culture and Ethnicity of Nineteenth-Century Baseball.” He has written many articles on the early game and has frequently spoken at the Hall of Fame’s Nineteenth-Century Symposiums. He at work on a history of baseball in Philadelphia from 1832 to the building of Shibe Park.

Notes

1 Sunday Dispatch, March 27, 1859.

2 Sunday Mercury, May 16, 1866 and March 3, 1872.

3 Sunday Mercury, May 22, 1864; Philadelphia Inquirer, May 25, 1864. Olympics club house, c. 1866. Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Olympics Folder: B 13.55.

4 Evening City Item, May 15, 1871.

5 Painting by A. Kollner, 1865 in Logan Library, Philadelphia. See also T. Eakins painting, 1875, “Baseball Players,” at Rhode Island School of Design, Providence, Rhode Island.

6 Sunday Dispatch, September 15, 1872 and June 11, 1871; Philadelphia Inquirer, April 11, 1871.

7 Sunday Dispatch, April 7, 1873.

8 Sunday Dispatch, November 21, 1871.

9 Sunday Dispatch, April 7, 1872 and April 28, 1872.

10 All Day City Item, May 23, 1873.

11 Sunday Dispatch, January 25, 1874.

12 The Daily Graphic, April 30, 1873 and April 18, 1874.

13 All Day City Item, February 10, 1875; February 28, 1875; May 3, 1875.

14 All Day City Item, July 30, 1875.

15 Sunday Mercury, November 4, 1866.

16 Sunday Item, March 26, 1882.

17 By the end of the first year the Committee on City Property gave the Athletics a three-year renewable lease at $2000 a year. This agreement stood unless the new high school was built. In that case the city had to give the ball club a three-month notice of the forfeiture. Sunday Dispatch, December 9, 1883; Philadelphia Press, January 17, 1883; Sunday Dispatch, February 4, 1883,

18 Sunday Item, April 8, 1883 and April 1, 1883.

19 Sunday Item, April 8, 1883; Sunday Dispatch, January 14, 1883; Philadelphia Record, April 1, 1883.

20 Philadelphia Record, March 29, 1883.

21 Frank Leslie Illustrated Newspaper, October 6, 1883 and Gilbert & Bacon picture, 1884, Baseball Hall of Fame, B. 164.65. See also Philadelphia Record, March 29, 1883 and March 31, 1883. The late Larry Zuckerman calculated that the ball park’s dimensions were 288-440-352. Zuckerman to J. Casway, August 7, 1999.

22 North American, August 28, 1899; May 5, 1893; Philadelphia Inquirer, October 10, 1898.

23 Sporting Life, March 31, 1886.

24 Sporting Life, May 5, 1886.

25 Sporting Life, November 17, 1886.

26 Sporting Life, April 25, 1888.

27 Sporting Life, February 20, 1889.

28 Sporting Life, October 16, 1889; The Sporting News, October 19, 1889,

29 North American, June 26, 1890; Sporting Life, June 28, 1890.

30 North American, October 18, 1890; The Sporting News, October 18, 1890; Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 15, 1890.

31 Sporting Life, November 28, 1891.

32 Sporting Life, December 12, 1891.

33 Sporting Life, June 18, 1892; Sunday Item, June 19, 1892; The Sporting News, October 27, 1894.

34 Sporting Life, October 27, 1894.

35 The Sporting News, September 23, 1900 and November 24, 1900.

36 Philadelphia Press, December 20, 1900.

37 Philadelphia Press, May 13, 1901; Sunday Item, May 11, 1902.

The 1860s were a decade of rapid social change and radical perceptions of what it meant to be an American. The growth of the railroads and affordable train travel; the development of communication services, such as the telegraph and the typewriter; and the end of the Civil War all aided in the growth and development of baseball into a shared national experience. The game was simple to understand, inexpensive, relatively easy to play, and, according to its most vocal proponents, American in origin and nature. With little competition from other team sports, baseball in the 1860s stepped into a nation searching for a means of reunification and dedication to American ideals.

Baseball was also ubiquitous in this era as a part of many school physical education programs because it was cheap to fund—a ball and a bat—with many possible participants. The US Military used the game to develop physical strength and dexterity, mental agility, and team cohesion while sharpening the soldiers’ competitive skills. Local baseball associations developed personal camaraderie and civic devotion to town teams. The notion of baseball as a patriotic activity began in this decade and the flag was often presented by local groups to visiting clubs.

The 1866 Championship Match, a best of three affair scheduled for early October, between the six-time eastern champion Atlantics of Brooklyn and the up-and-coming Athletics of Philadelphia who arranged the competition, was a major event in the evolution of baseball into a professional sport: “The October 1866 series…was, to that point, the culmination of enticing players, arranging tours, promoting matches between top clubs and charging the public, all to maximize profit.”1 The first game was scheduled for October 1 at the Columbia Avenue and 15th Street grounds. Though there had been an advance sale of 8,000 tickets at 25 cents, Philadelphia was not prepared for the crowds that showed up for the ball game. The estimated attendance was in excess of thirty thousand spectators, many of whom were herded to the outfield. When the police force proved insufficient to the task of removing the fans from the playing field, the game was called in the second inning.2 The Philadelphia papers went into a paroxysm of excess about the possibility that a fervid devotion to baseball by half-crazed cranks would lead to the eventual demise of the sport:

Yesterday the base-ball fever culminated in a scene disgraceful to Philadelphia. The much-talked of game between the Athletics and Atlantics was prevented by the ignorant conduct of the vast crowd assembled to witness the sport. We do not overestimate when we say there were 30,000 people present, and of those 30,000 a large proportion lacked common sense. In their eager desire to secure advantageous positions, they sacrificed all propriety, and overreaching themselves, prevented the game which they all had come miles to see. It is a matter of extremely slight importance whether the game in question occurs or not, but an instructive lesson can be drawn from the conduct of those present on the occasion, We stated yesterday that the admiration felt for base-ball as for all physical sports, was a natural one; that it should be popular is proper. But at the same time we warned all lovers of the game that the excess to which it was being carried would prove its ruin.

The reporter discussed in depth the twin dangers that threatened baseball’s growing popularity: gambling and drinking. The article concluded with an appeal for moderation among all elements of fandom:

We like the game of base-ball. We think it calculated to strengthen the muscles, invigorate the system, and counteract the evils of the sedentary life lead [sic] by some many of our young men. But at the same time it would be better to have no game than what we fear it will become. Let the nuisance be abated, for nuisance it has become. Let us have it in moderation; for as long as the fever does not cool, the whole sport will be ruined, and base-ball and cricket rank among the things that were.3

On October 15 in clear weather conditions, the return match at the Atlantics’ Capitoline Grounds in Bedford, New York, was played with the home team winning, 27–17, after a close match through the first four innings. Equally important, the Brooklyn ownership organized the game effectively by decorating the 4,000-seat stadium in patriotic colors, selling no tickets in advance but insisting that all spectators that entered the grounds pay a quarter by exact change, providing dignitaries with special seating, and having a small army of police to ensure order with the crowd estimated to be in the neighborhood of 20,000.4

With the revenues from the first two meetings—the aborted game on October 1 ($2,000) and the Atlantics victory on October 15 ($1,000)—totaling $3,000,5 the 1866 series was turning out to be a financial if not artistic success. The third (and what turned out to be the final) game of the series took place back in Philadelphia on October 22. The Athletics were much better prepared for the anticipated fan interest with a stronger police presence and a new fence built around their field to limit the attendance to 4,000 paying spectators. To increase profits, the Athletics charged a dollar a ticket, an exorbitant, previously unheard-of fee to attend a baseball game.6 The actual game followed the same pattern as the October 15 match with a close game becoming a blowout for the home team in the later innings. Philadelphia outscored Brooklyn, 22–3 in the last three frames, before a downpour ended the game in the eighth inning with the Athletics leading 31–12.

A final deciding game was never played in this series due to a money dispute: The Athletics wanted to take the cost of their newly erected fence off the top of the revenues while Brooklyn wanted to share in the total gross profits.7

While the 1866 Match series was inconclusive in declaring an eastern champion, it did prove that there was enormous fan interest in championship level baseball and that a great deal of money could be made from such games, suggesting that baseball in the near future was a potentially solid business investment and profit-maker.

Civil rights activist Octavius C. Catto founded the Philadelphia Pythians in 1866.

During the same week that the Atlantics were facing off against the Athletics, the African American Albany (New York) Bachelors came to Philadelphia and laid claim to the first (unofficial) black baseball championship

Early in October the Albany Bachelor Base Ball Club headed the 260 miles south to Philadelphia to challenge the newly established black Excelsior and Pythian clubs. Eager to spread the gospel of baseball to African American organizations and communities, the Bachelors paid their own expenses and had a successful first-ever road trip for a black ball club. On October 3, 1866, the Bachelors met the Pythians at the Parade Grounds at 11th and Wharton Streets near the Moyamensing Prison.8

The Philadelphia Pythian Base Ball Club was founded in 1866 by civil rights activist and base ball star infielder Octavius V. Catto who recruited 50 percent of his middle class team from the Banner Institute (a literary and debating society that shared rooms with the ball club).9 Catto’s vision for the club was always larger than the won-loss column. He desired “equal participation and recognition” for African Americans in American society. He himself was instrumental in desegregating the city trolley cars. He believed base ball “built community ties, pushed racial boundaries, and established local and national networks of support.”10 (The Bachelors were led by a similarly motivated leader, James C. Matthews, who became the New York State Recorder on the Democratic ticket in 1895, and saw the national pastime as a means for African Americans to strive for equality.11)

This 1874 photo depicts Weston Fisler, who joined the Athletic Club of Philadelphia in 1866.

The result of the October 3, 1866, match game was a rout in favor of the Upstate New York visitors. The Albany Evening Journal was quick to reprint the results of the game: “Oct. 3—Philadelphia: A match game of base ball was played this P.M. between the Bachelors of Albany and the Pythians of this city, which resulted in a victory for the former by a score of 70 to 15.” The Syracuse Daily Standard (October 4, 1866) published the fact of the Bachelors’ victory and added that “this game attracted a large crowd of spectators.” Word of the Albanians’ resounding defeat of the Pythians was also reported in the Nashville Daily Union and American (October 4, 1866): “Philadelphia, Oct. 3—A match was also played between two negro [sic] clubs, the Bachelors of Albany, and the Pythians of this city [Philadelphia]. This game attracted a large number of spectators.”

On the following day, the Albany Evening Journal reported another solid diamond victory for the Bachelors: “Philadelphia, Oct. 4—Another match was played this P.M. between the Bachelors of Albany and Excelsiors of this city, which resulted in another victory for the Bachelors, by a score of 44 to 28.”

In 1867, the Pythians baseball club went 9–1. Trying to follow up on their on-field success, Catto’s club unsuccessfully attempted to participate in the Pennsylvania Convention of Baseball in Harrisburg on October 16 and, despite the support of Athletics of Philadelphia vice-president and president of the nominating committee E. Hicks Hayhurst, the Pythians were the only one of 266 clubs denied entry into the association. Later in the fall, the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) upheld the Pennsylvania decision.12

In spite of their failure to enter organized baseball, Catto’s Pythians were a major force in the attempted integration of the national pastime. The high visibility and political astuteness of its founder and the integrity and skill of its club members provided the Pythians a place of prominence in early black baseball’s fight against racial bias. Yet, by the fall of 1867, less than two years after the conclusion of Civil War, baseball had officially established a color line that was not to be lifted on a full-scale basis for 80 years.

Within a few weeks of each other in 1866, two major baseball competitions were held in Philadelphia that would lead to radical changes. Baseball was becoming America’s national pastime and a viable profession for talented players; the game was also doing so without the inclusion of African Americans. Money matters and racial prejudice, national issues that remain unresolved to this day, thus dominated the earliest years of our national pastime.

JEFFREY LAING is a retired English teacher who has published more than 150 articles on arts and culture, pedagogy, and sports. His baseball writing has appeared in “The National Pastime,” “Fan Magazine,” “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game,” and “Black Ball: A Negro Leagues Journal.”

Notes

1. Preston D. Orem, Baseball 1845–1881 from Newspaper Accounts, 54–55, cited in Eric Miklich’s “Money Ball: 1866 Championship Match—Athletics vs. Atlantics” The Base Ball Players Chronicle: 1–13. http://vbba.org/newsletter/?p=36. (Accessed 10/20/2012).

2. Ibid, 2–3.

3. Philadelphia Evening Telegraph (PET), October 2, 1866, 4.

4. Miklich, 4.

5. Ibid, 5.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. Jerrold Casway, “Octavius Catto and the Pythians of Philadelphia,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania: www.hsp.org/print/node/2931.

9. George B. Kirsch, Baseball in Blue and Gray: The National Pastime during the Civil War (Princeton University Press, 2003), 128.

10. “Playing for Keeps: The Pythian Base Ball Club of Philadelphia,” Historical Society of Pennsylvania. www.hsp.org/node/2937.

11. The Hamilton (Marion County, AL) News-Press (HNP), November 14, 1895.

12. For a comprehensive discussion of the life and untimely political murder of Octavius Catto and his Pythian Club SEE the following articles: Daniel R. Biddle and Murray Dubin, “An Early Quest for Equality on the Diamond,” philly.com: 1–6. www.printthis.clickability.com/pt/cpt?action=cpt&title (Accessed 9/16/3010); Jerrold Casway, “Philadelphia’s Pythians,” The National Pastime, 120–123; “On the field, the Pythian Club…,” Philadelphia Baseball Review: 1–2. www.philadelphiabaseballreview.com/pythian2.html. (Accessed August 20, 2011).

This environment led inevitably to controversies. One of the greatest was the claim that the New York clubs colluded in 1867 to steal the championship from the Athletic Club of Philadelphia, to keep the pennant in New York. This charge was made in Pennsylvania, and some writers accept it to this day. But is it true? This article will assess the claim in the context of how baseball was organized at the time.

The story of this dispute centers on two institutions of the amateur era: the judiciary committee and the championship.

Organized baseball and the judiciary committee

The National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) was the governing body of baseball in the 1860s. In 1857 a group of clubs in and around New York City held a convention for the purpose of promoting the game, primarily through the adoption of revised set of rules for inter-club play. The convention reconvened the following year and established itself as a permanent organization, the NABBP.

From the start, the rules included an administrative element in addition to playing rules. The 1857 rules required that “Any player holding membership in more than one club, at the same time, shall not be permitted to play in the matches of either club.” The previous September, the Knickerbocker Club had arrived at their grounds in Hoboken for a match game against the Gotham Club. They found one Mr. Pinckney among the Gotham players, much to their surprise, as they knew perfectly well he was a member of the Union Club. Their protest was forestalled by the Gothams, who informed them that he had joined the club the previous Tuesday, though without resigning from the Unions. “The presumption prevailed that he entered the Gothams for the purpose of this match” but the game went on. The Unions held a special meeting to condemn this, and Pinckney resigned from the Gothams the Tuesday following the match, “expressing his conviction of the impropriety of a person belonging to or playing matches in more than one club.”1 The practice had the double disadvantage of threatening the social structure of clubs and leading to the best players monopolizing match play. Thus, it was abolished.

There was obvious potential for a crafty player to get around this by resigning from his old club and rejoining it after the match. The following year this loophole was closed with the requirement that all players “must have been regular members of the club which they represent, and of no other club, for thirty days prior to the match.” This would remain the standard throughout the amateur era.

There remained potential for disputes. Suppose a club showed up on the appointed day for a match and found the opposing club fielding an ineligible player. Its only recourse, should the opposing club refuse to withdraw the player, was to refuse to play or to play under protest. In fact, this happened on July 20, 1862, when the Mutual Club fielded two such players in a match with the Empire Club. The Empires played, losing 24–12, and protested to the NABBP convention the following December. A committee was formed to investigate the matter, and a year later reported in favor of the Empires, nullifying the match. Justice delayed is justice denied, and a year and a half was obviously too long for a satisfactory result. At its December 1863 meeting the NABBP also created a standing judiciary committee to investigate and report on any future disputes in a timelier manner.2

This judiciary committee was to be the body that ruled in that Athletics’ dispute in 1867. It could not, however, overtly rule on the championship question.

The amateur championship

The defining characteristic of the baseball championship in the amateur era was that officially there was no such thing. The NABBP declined to sponsor one, in the entirely reasonable fear that “matches, except with the club holding the champion ball, would sink into insignificance, and the popularity of the game would therefore decline.”3 However, an unofficial, but widely recognized, championship system arose.

This unofficial system copied the existing model of boxing championships, grafting it onto baseball. As with boxing, aspirants would challenge the champion for the prize, with the initial champion determined through a combination of self-promotion and popular acclaim. This was combined with the existing custom of a best-of-three series. Usually the first game would be played on the challenger’s home ground (with the challenge likened to a social invitation), the second on the recipient’s home ground, with the third game, if necessary, played on a neutral ground.

This system was rife with potential confusion. The championships were conventionally stated in terms of the pennant for the season, but series were sometimes played over the course of two seasons, it not being entirely clear whether a championship could be won based on a series partly played the previous season. Also, a club might win the championship while it had partially completed other series. However, there was no clarity whether these would then transform into a championship series. There also was a widely held opinion that a club was ineligible for the championship if it had lost a series against some other club: “…it is one of the customary rules governing the championship matches that the loss of a match–best two out of three–throws a club out of the ring for the season, as a champion club, in order to have the right to “fly the whip,” must win every series of match games they play. They may lose a single game without invalidating their title, but two defeats out of three games with a club places them hors de combat for the season.”4

Only through good luck did most of these problems fail to arise. There were numerous games which, had victory gone the other way, could have put the whole system in confusion. The requirement that the challenging club itself lose no series did, as we shall see, arise in 1867. But as every contender for the championship had lost a series, all parties conveniently forgot the requirement. Indeed, it likely was an attempt at artificially generating interest in matches involving potential challengers for the championship.

The championship system itself coexisted uncomfortably with the ideology of amateur baseball. The archetypal baseball club was a social organization formed as a vehicle for young men of sedentary occupations to take their exercise together in a congenial setting. The vast majority of ball games were intramural affairs. Match games, in which two clubs tested their mettle against one another, were comparatively rare and were as much social affairs as they were competitive. Rivalry was not the goal. Clubs often played each other year after year if they were socially compatible, even if they were completely mismatched competitively. On the other hand, clubs might also refuse to play if they found the experience disagreeable, even if they were well matched on the field.

Championship matches were the logical outgrowth of match games, but they still operated within the assumptions of social norms. This began to change in the postwar baseball boom. Spectators, it was learned, were willing to pay for the privilege of watching ball clubs compete. Clubs needed the revenue as they sought to attract top players by paying them (surreptitiously, as the practice was prohibited by the NABBP). Arrangements for matches grew less like social engagements and more like business contracts with penalty clauses for default. These gradual changes lead to confusion and dissension as they were sorted out.

The Atlantics and the Athletics

There were perhaps a half dozen serious championship contenders, but only two concern us here: the Atlantic Club of Brooklyn and the Athletic Club of Philadelphia.

The Atlantics were the powerhouse organization of the amateur era. They had held the championship every year since but two its inception. They were also notorious for pushing the limits of gentlemanly competition. As a modest example, the first known use of the hidden ball trick was by an Atlantic player.5 More serious was the history of Atlantics supporters verbally abusing their opponents and, in an era when the spectators were not physically separated from the players, interfering with the course of play. While the Atlantic players could claim innocence on the grounds that they could not control their supporters, this did not stop them from accepting the advantage.6

Their reputation improved in the postwar years. Their continued success stifled criticism, while general standards within the fraternity lowered. In fairness, the Atlantics’ behavior also improved, as did crowd control in a fully enclosed ball ground. In any case, they were the team to beat for clubs striving for the championship.

The Athletics of Philadelphia were the only serious contender for this outside of the New York region. The baseball craze came to Philadelphia in 1860. The Athletics were one of the first baseball clubs there. In the early years they were merely one of several pretty good clubs in Philadelphia, none of whom stood a chance against the best New York clubs. They pulled ahead of the pack in 1865 through aggressive recruiting, collecting the best Philadelphia players, making the club essentially a regional all-star team. They supplemented this with out-of-town talent in the person of Al Reach, formerly of the Eckford Club of Brooklyn. Professionalism was outlawed by the NABBP, so was exercised secretly. Reach holds the distinction of being the first undoubted professional, though almost certainly not the first actual one. He semi-openly marketed his services, with the Athletics placing the winning bid. He opened a cigar shop in Philadelphia and went on to become a baseball equipment manufacturer. The Athletics built on this, and by 1867 were said to have four professionals.7

That Atlantics and the Athletics already had a contentious history going into the 1867 season. They first competed in 1863, with relations amicable through 1864. They soured in 1865. The two clubs had scheduled a series, the first game for October 30 in Philadelphia and the second for November 6 in Brooklyn.8 Then Matty O’Brien, a long-time member of the Atlantic Club, unexpectedly died. The Atlantics published a resolution of condolence, including a cancellation of all further play by the club for the season, in his memory. The Athletics followed with their own resolution of condolence.9 A rumor then spread that the Athletics were planning on appearing at their grounds on the day appointed for the match and declare the Atlantics forfeit. The Atlantics responded to this by sending a telegram the afternoon of the 29th stating their intention to play the next day. This forced the Athletics to scramble to prepare for the match, which they had understood to have been cancelled. Both sides felt aggrieved. There is no knowing if there was anything behind the rumor, but it seems likely that this was a breakdown in communication.10 The Atlantics went on to win both games, keeping their championship secure from Philadelphia’s first serious challenge.

The interest—and potential income from gate receipts—was too high for them to not meet again the following year. But where 1865 saw miscommunication and hard feelings, 1866 saw farce. The first game was scheduled for October 1 in Philadelphia. A contemporary account vividly describes the excitement:

In the meantime, as the hour approaches for the contest to commence, the steady tide begins to flow Columbia avenueward, until towards 1PM, when the mob of people, the crowd of vehicles, and extraordinary numbers of men, women and boys en route for the scene of action, is only equaled by the exodus from London on the great Derby day. The ground reached, what a sight is presented! No such scene of the kind was ever before presented to the public eye in this country, and probably will not again for some time, certainly not this season. Within a radius of a quarter of a mile from the centre of the circle were collected nearly 40,000 people, it is thought. Every window of every house within sight of the field was crowded. The house tops were peopled to an extent endangering the roofs. Trees were loaded with human fruit, and vehicles of every description surrounded the field, filled with all who could get a foothold on them. Inside the enclosure, the pressure was immense, and by the hour appointed for commencing play standing room within fifty feet of the base lines was at a premium, and, as a consequence, there was no space for the players for field operations, at least to an extent admitting of an equal contest. At last, out of patience with the delay, an effort was made to begin…11

London-born Al Reach played for the Eckford club of Brooklyn in the early 1860s before joining the Athletics of Philadelphia in 1865.

The pressure of bodies was too much. They pressed onto the field, and play had to be halted after one inning. As the crowd spilled onto the field “the whole affair broke up in a row and a number of heads had been smashed by the police, amidst the cries and screams of the ladies and children, the breaking down of fences, the throwing of stones…”12 This left only the pointing of fingers. The Athletics claimed that ruffian Atlantics supporters had started the trouble, pushing their way to the front of the crowd. The Athletics in turn were charged with allowing too many people within the enclosure in the quest for maximum gate receipts. The bottom line, though, was that the Athletics had failed their obligation as hosts to provide a clear field. They had allowed too many people into the enclosure and not hired enough police to control the crowd.13

The economics still called for the series to be salvaged, so the two clubs quickly negotiated a solution. The game scheduled for October 15 in Brooklyn went on, with extra precautions for crowd control including the presence of 100 policemen.14 The Philadelphia game was rescheduled for October 22. This gave the Athletics time to repair the ground, constructing a new, stronger fence. Ordinarily the home club retained all the gate receipts, but agreement was reached to compensate the Atlantics for the failed game by splitting the October 22 gate with them equally, after expenses.

The games went off beautifully. The Brooklyn game saw a huge crowd: “the estimate of a veteran of the Potomac army, well versed in numbering large bodies of men, was that there was not less that from twelve to fifteen thousand people within the enclosure” with the Atlantics winning 27–17.15 The Philadelphia game was thinly attended within the enclosure, as the Athletics experimented with a one dollar admission: a great leap from the usual twenty-five cents. They still attracted about two thousand paying spectators, as well as a large crowd gathered outside the fence. Best of all, the Athletics finally beat the Atlantics, 31–12.16

This would ordinarily have led to a third, and lucrative, game. But again some combination of miscommunication and bad faith intervened. The Atlantics understood their share from the Philadelphia game to be minus ordinary expenses, while the Athletics understood it to be minus all expenses, including the cost of the new fence, which ran to over half the gate receipts. The Atlantics refused their reduced share, regarding it as a swindle, while the Athletics saw the Atlantics reneging on a straightforward agreement. No third game was played in 1866.17

The Campaign of 1867

Once again financial demands overcame all obstacles. The two clubs in 1867 agreed to complete the previous season’s series, followed by a new best-of-three series. Ordinarily the clubs would split three ways the receipts from the third game of a series, with the proprietor of the neutral ground taking a share. The Athletics agreed to compensate the Atlantics with their share from the belated final game. This game was played in Brooklyn on September 16, with the Atlantics winning 28–16. The critics of the Athletics were only too happy to point to the large crowd, and that the Atlantics came out ahead from where they would have, had they been paid in the first place.18 The Atlantic victory also had the fortunate effect of avoiding any immediate claim by the Athletics to the championship pennant.

The first game of the new series came off successfully on September 23 in Philadelphia, the Athletics winning soundly by 28–8. The second game was scheduled for the following Monday, September 30, in Brooklyn. The Friday before, they requested the game be postponed, on the grounds that four of their first nine were injured. The Athletics refused to accept the postponement, and showed up in Brooklyn at the appointed time. A fiasco ensued. The Atlantics refused to play their first nine. After much discussion, they instead presented a “muffin” nine: the most inept amateurs on their club. There was a tradition of “muffin matches” which were considered the source of great hilarity. To play a muffin nine in a championship match was a mockery. There are two interpretations of this action. The more usual is that the Atlantics were shaming the Athletics to keep them from playing. There is also a claim that the muffin nine would play so incompetently that they would be incapable of getting the Athletics out (keeping in mind the requirement that the catcher hold a third strike for an out), and therefore of playing five innings before the game would be called on account of darkness. This claim is entirely plausible. Games in theory started at two o’clock, but this one obviously would start much later, and this being late September the sun would set around half past five. There also was ample precedent for clubs stalling, usually to force the score to revert to the last completed inning. So there was a reasonable argument that the Atlantics were not merely shaming the Athletics, but using an underhanded stratagem to avoid a complete game. In the end, the Athletics refused to play, claimed a forfeit, and thereby claimed the championship.19 (There also was a later assertion that the Atlantics had offered a ball, i.e. a forfeit, which the Athletics refused. This is not credible, as it only arose later, and no one seemed to take it seriously.)

Claiming the championship was one thing, but getting the rest of the baseball fraternity to acknowledge it was quite another. The Athletics filed a complaint with the judiciary committee, demanding a ruling that they had won forfeit. The committee considered the question on October 30 and ruled that the Atlantics had indeed failed in their obligation, and ordered the game to be played within 15 days. The committee admitted that there was no rule granting them such authority, but foreshadowed the much later powers of the Commissioner of Baseball with the argument that “their powers should be liberally construed when a palpable injury may result to the interests of the game.”20

This solution might seem as Solomonic. It was actually a repudiation of the Athletics, for the situation had changed. A forfeit as of September 30 would have given the championship to the Athletics. A victory by the Athletics in November would not. To everyone’s surprise the Unions of Morrisania defeated the Atlantics for the second time on October 10, making them the champions. Morrisania was then a village in what is now the Bronx. The Unions played not far from the modern site of Yankee Stadium. The Unions were an old established club that had for years hovered just below the top level. Their winning the championship was not quite scandalous, but it was widely regarded as something of a lucky fluke. It also rendered any future game between the Atlantics and the Athletics irrelevant, so far as the championship went.

The New York clubs, it is claimed, colluded to steal the championship from Philadelphia. The judiciary committee was dominated by New Yorkers. The ruling was apparently equitable, but not made in a vacuum. The championship had no official standing with the NABBP, but the ruling was made with the full understanding of the championship implications. If the Athletics’ complaint to the committee was justified, they should have been awarded the forfeit. If not, then there was no need to order the game be played. The ruling was crafted, it is charged, to ensure that the championship pennant stayed within the metropolis.

The record of the judiciary committee

The charge of collusion is plausible on its face because the ruling of the judiciary committee seems implausible. This presupposes, however, that the committee would have acted differently had it been a New York club making the charge. Quite the contrary, this would have been very much out of character.

The committee had an inglorious history from its inception, marked mostly by inactivity. In 1867 it had a sizeable docket of eleven cases, both large and small. Most were charges of a club using an ineligible player, usually on the grounds of a violation of the 30-day rule.21 Its decisions show an unmistakable pattern. If the defending club was an unimportant one, the ruling might or might not go against it. If the defending club was an important one, some grounds would be found to acquit it, even if the accusing club was also important. So, for example, the minor Chestnut Street Theater Club played a match using two members of the Alert Club, and this game was declared null and void. On the other hand, the charge against the important Excelsior Club of using four players claimed to belong to the Star Club was overturned, with the individuals declared “regular members of the Excelsior Club, within the meaning of the Rules.” It is possible that the evidence in each case supported the conclusion, but it is remarkable how well the conclusions correlate to the status of the defending club. Several cases with important defendants were also dismissed on technicalities, while those with minor defendants were uniformly free from such procedural defects.

The sole exception is a particularly illuminating case. The Unions of Morrisania charged the Mutual Club of New York—one of the top clubs—with playing one Tom Devyr. In 1865 Devyr had been expelled after confessing to accepting a bribe to throw a game with the Eckford Club. In 1867 he was reinstated with the Mutuals, contrary to the NABBP constitution. The committee ducked the issue once on procedural grounds, but when forced to make a decision, ruled against the Mutuals. Both the facts and the law were beyond question. Even at this early date the baseball community recognized the existential threat to the game of corruption by gamblers. This was a situation where the committee had to stand up to a powerful club.

What followed shows the realities of how the NABBP worked. For all that the committee acted like a judicial body, it was in fact a committee tasked to make a report to the convention. The convention as a whole would then accept or reject the report, in whole or in part. The Mutuals undertook a brazen lobbying campaign and used the convention to retry the case. The convention overturned the judiciary committee’s decision by a vote of 451–143, and then promptly passed a motion to reinstate Devyr “in the position he occupied previous to the playing of the Eckford and Mutual match in 1865.”22

This repudiation clearly shows the limits of the judiciary committee’s power, and explains its reluctance to take a stand on any less vital issue. It also shows the NABBP devolving into a banana republic, with different de facto rules for powerful clubs than for weak ones.

In light of this reality, it is clear that the judiciary committee could not possibly have awarded a forfeit to the Athletics, and with it the championship. This would have outraged both the Atlantics and the Unions. It would also have offended the wider baseball fraternity by moving the championship contest from the playing field to the meeting room. None of this has anything to do with civic rivalry. It would have been the same had the dispute been between two New York clubs.

It is also clear that the committee believed that the Athletics had the law on their side, if not political realities. They had ample room to rule in the Atlantics’ favor, in that the Atlantics had in fact presented nine players. The order that the game be played shows that the committee agreed that presenting a muffin nine did not fulfill the club’s obligation. This order was the best outcome that the Athletics could realistically hope for. If they were cheated, it was by circumstances rather than any sort of conspiracy.

And the Athletics finally win the championship

The transformation of baseball from an amateur social exercise to a business took a decade to sort out. The story of the 1867 championship takes place early in the process. The business of baseball needed new rules for how clubs would interactl. These new rules were not yet worked out, and no one really knew what the rules were.

The final game of 1867 was never played. Both clubs ignored the committee’s order. The championship campaign of 1868 was even more convoluted. (An article could well be written titled “Did New York Steal the Championship of 1868 from Philadelphia?”) The championship system was coming apart. The Cincinnati Red Stockings were clearly the best club in the country in 1869, but did not bother with the notional championship. That year the NABBP bowed to the inevitable and allowed open professionalism. The professional clubs in 1871 split from the NABBP to form the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players which established the first official national championship and the modern scheme of member clubs playing each other a fixed number of matches.23

This was the final era for the old clubs. New clubs, founded as joint stock corporations, were taking over. The old social-turned-professional clubs tried to adapt, but had too much institutional inertia to keep up. None survived the 1870s. The Atlantics faded fast, and stumbled through the 1875 season before disappearing.

The Athletics won their championship in 1871, making them the first official national champions of baseball. This was the high water mark for the club. They held out long enough to become a charter member when the National League formed in 1876, but they were on their last legs. They could not complete the season, and were expelled from the league. A derivative Athletics organization wheezed on a bit longer, but did not see the end of the decade. 

RICHARD HERSHBERGER researches and writes about early baseball up to 1885. He has published in “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game,” as well as SABR publications, and has both presented and served as a panelist at the Frederick Ivor-Campbell 19th Century Base Ball Conference. His particular interests are the organizational development of baseball, and early baseball in Philadelphia.

Notes

1. Porter’s Spirit of the Times, September 13, 1856; September 20, 1856.

2. New York Sunday Mercury, December 14, 1862; December 13, 1863.

3. New York Sunday Mercury, September 25, 1859.

4. Ball Players Chronicle, July 11, 1867.

5. New York Sunday Mercury, October 23, 1859.

6. The most famous example was a game in 1860 with the Excelsiors, which led to the Excelsiors refusing to ever again play the Atlantics. A less known, but vividly egregious example occurred two years earlier. As reported in the New York Evening Express of October 26, 1858, in a game with the Gotham Club: “The Atlantics won the game, the last two innings of the game being played under considerable difficulty on the part of the Gothams, who protested repeatedly—and justly, but without redress—at the unfair arrangements of the members of the Atlantic Club for keeping the field clear; while it was cleared most effectually to allow the fielders to follow the balls which were struck by the Gothams, and the openings in the fence in the left field were particularly left free and respected by the crowd of outsiders, yet no sooner was the Gotham side in the field and the Atlantics at the bat, than the crowd was allowed to close in on the openings in the fence, and become an impassable barrier. This was so barefaced in one instance, that the Gothams’ fielder, finding the crowd not disposed to give way, sat down in front of them until the the batsman had run home.” The Gothams did not play the Atlantics again until 1864.

7. There is every reason to believe that other top clubs, including the Atlantics, were doing the same thing. The Athletics differed only in that they also had a running feud with one Thomas Fitzgerald, the former president of the club, and Fitzgerald owned a newspaper, the City Item, which he used freely to air their dirty laundry.

8. This late in the season was typical of the era, when serious play didn’t get started until late May and ran through November. The major championship matches usually were played late in the season.

9. New York Leader, October 28, 1865; Fitzgerald’s City Item, October 28, 1865.

10. New York Clipper, November 4, 1865; Fitzgerald’s City Item, November 4, 1865.

11. New York Clipper, October 13, 1866.

12. Fitzgerald’s City Item, October 6, 1866.

13. The event was widely reported. In addition to those cited above, see the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury, October 7, 1866.

14. Philadelphia Sunday Mercury, October 14, 1866.

15. New York Sunday Mercury, October 21, 1866. This game is also notable by including the earliest known called third strike to end an inning. The account in the Philadelphia Sunday Mercury of October 21, 1866 also includes a description of something very like the modern wave: “Directly in front of the Philadelphia delegation a number of planks had been arranged as seats, the same being packed full of interested spectators. Said seats being too low for comfort, several of their occupants arose and indulged themselves in a good stretch, accompanying the action with the yawning sound peculiar under such circumstances. The cue was taken by the opposite side of the field, and soon the entire assemblage became infected, producing a scene ludicrous in the extreme. The satisfaction produced by this little by-play was heartily and good-humoredly manifested by the crowd on the left side of the field waving their handkerchiefs, which was promptly returned by their friends opposite, and soon thousands of pieces of white drapery were floating in the air, creating a sight probably never before witnessed on a similar occasion.”

16. Philadelphia City Item, October 27, 1866; Philadelphia Sunday Mercury, October 28, 1866.

17. Ibid.

18. Philadelphia City Item, September 14, 1867; New York Sunday Mercury, September 22, 1867.

19. Philadelphia Sunday Mercury, October 6, 1867; New York Sunday Mercury, October 6, 1867.

20. New York Sunday Mercury, November 3, 1867; Ball Players Chronicle, December 19, 1867.

21. Ball Players Chronicle, December 19, 1867.

22. Ibid.

23. This is still reflected in the official rules, which somewhat confusingly refer to “championship games” and the “championship series” in what is otherwise universally called the “regular season.”

John Mundell Jr. founded the Solar Tips baseball team in 1879. The first players were workers in the factory of John Mundell & Company, a shoe company founded by John Mundell, Sr. The Solar Tips were a company team established to promote the company’s line of children’s shoes with a patented tip to protect the shoes from the hard wear of children. One of the earliest mentions of Mundell’s Solar Tips regards a game scheduled for Saturday August 11, 1883, at Recreation Park (a site also used by Philadelphia’s new team in the National League) against a picked nine of striking telegraphers during a national telegraph operators strike. That a company team would play a strike team might seem unusual but John Mundell Sr. was a progressive business owner.

John Mundell Sr. was born in Ireland in 1829 of Scotch-Irish stock. He traveled from Belfast to New York as a stowaway at the age of 14 but became a cabin boy before the journey was over. He stayed at sea and became an able seaman, working at that job until 1847, when he arrived in Philadelphia. While working in the Quaker City fisheries he met a former apprentice of his father’s who was a shoemaker, and learned that trade from him and opened his own shoe shop in 1848. In 1870 he opened the larger firm of John Mundell & Company, where he developed his patented shoe tip and became wealthy.

Mundell and his employees were exceptionally loyal to one another. He is quoted as saying, “(L)et all who employ people look into the grievances of his employees, for in a great many instances, to my knowledge, the employees are right, but instead of listening to their workmen’s complaints many employers give them the cold shoulder, which they are apt to resent, and thus bring about strikes and lockouts.”1 Mundell’s company was home to strikes and labor unrest from time to time despite his attitude towards labor. In most cases, however, the problems occurred after Mundell and his employees had reached a frequently novel solution to a problem only to have the union’s regional officers outside the company reject it.

In 1884, Mundell’s employees formed the Solar Tip Mutual Improvement Land Association. Their plan was to purchase farmland a half-hour’s trip by rail from the city, build affordable homes, and sell them to the members, who made periodic contributions to pay them off.2 Mundell was an active member of the Republican Party when it was the party of “Free Soil, Free Labor, Free Men” and was a member of the Electoral College that elected Benjamin Harrison in the 1888 presidential election.

John Mundell Jr. apparently did not have as good a relationship with labor. He was once arrested, tried, and convicted, along with an associate, for beating up a former employee after an argument ensued while the ex-employee was picking up his last check. He became a member of the joint arbitrators’ board of the Phila-delphia Shoe Manufacturers Association in 1885. This body’s purpose was to arbitrate between management and labor.

The company team that promoted Mundell’s “Solar Tip” children’s shoes played two games on July 4, 1884, before crowds of over 2,000 people. The morning game was against Wanamaker’s Grand Depot team and the afternoon against Hood, Bonbright & Co. The Solar Tips won both games.

Another important game that season occurred in September against the American Association Athletics. The American Association was the major league rival of the NL at that time and the Athletics had won the AA championship in 1883. The Athletics won the game 8–2 with both Tip runs coming in the fifth inning. The Athletics had most of their regulars on the field with their second regular battery of pitcher Billy Taylor and catcher Jack O’Brien. Harry Stovey led the victors with a double and shortstop Kelly led the Solar Tips with a triple.

Young Mundell and his friends had ambitious plans for 1885. Meeting “at the base ball headquarters, 139 North Eighth Street,” Mundell, Fulmer of the Quaker City team, and Doyle of the Somerset team agreed to play nine games apiece against each other.3 The winner would receive $250 plus the local championship of Philadelphia and would be expected to challenge the Athletics and Philadelphia National League club at the end of the season.

This corporately sponsored amateur team continued on its usual path into 1888. They started the season as a member of the Philadelphia area trades league, consisting of teams formed by the 12 largest manufacturers in Philadelphia, ostensibly from among each company’s employees. The Tips’ opening game was at Recreation Park against Laird, Schoner & Mitchell’s team on April 28. The Solar Tips continued undefeated in this league into the end of May as did the McNeely Club. These two teams met on May 30 before a crowd of over 7,000 fans at Recreation Park, a site presently being called the Solar Tip grounds; the Philadelphia National League club had abandoned the field at the end of the 1886 season. Unfortunately for the Solar Tips, they lost their undefeated status and first place to McNeeley & Co., 4–3. The defensive play of the McNeeleys was credited for the victory.4 Other members of this league were Gumpert Brothers, Hastings & Co., American Sewing Machine, J.W. Cooper, the Allen Grays, and the Richmonds.

In this same period, John Mundell Jr. was exhibiting leadership in Philadelphia’s amateur baseball world. He was elected president of the Amateur Base Ball Union of Philadelphia at their organizational meeting on May 29, 1888, at Industrial Hall. The organization consisted of 62 amateur clubs (whose players were over 17), and was intended to form leagues from among the clubs, secure and maintain a clubhouse for transaction of business among the clubs, arrange a series of games for the amateur championship of Philadelphia, and establish an annual amateur day at which a baseball parade was to be held.5

The amateur season moved very quickly and plans for the amateur day parade were finalized at a meeting at Earley’s Hall, Arch Street, above 13th, on June 18. Fifty clubs had paid their dues and 19 more were in the application process. One hundred twenty-five clubs were signed up to participate in the parade, including junior clubs and visiting teams from other parts of Pennsylvania and New Jersey. The parade was to take place on Saturday, June 23. The parade was to begin formation at Industrial Hall at Broad and Vine Streets. The parade was then to proceed down Broad Street to Chestnut, turn on Fifth from Chestnut, up Fifth to Market, Market back to Broad, up Broad to Columbia and from Columbia to 24th, at which point they would enter the old Recreation Park. Here a game for the championship of Philadelphia was to be played between the Solar Tips, champions of the Trades League, and the Young Americas, which had been considered the amateur champions for some years.6 By the date of the parade a large banquet at Industrial Hall had been added as an evening event.7

The Young Americas held onto their championship, beating the Solar Tips 10–5 (though the two teams would have a rematch on the following Wednesday). The Solar Tips continued to make a strong showing in the Trades League.

On July 5, the Solar Tips played Easton of the Central League. The Central League was one of the top minor leagues in the country that year. The amateur Solar Tips acquitted themselves well in this game against a higher-level club, losing by a single run, 9–8. Attendance was reported at 2,500.8 Four of Easton’s players had brief major league careers. Buck Becannon had played for the AA Metropolitans in 1884 and ’85 and the Giants in 1887. Thomas “Sandy” McDermott played with the AA Baltimore Orioles in 1885. John Deasley, who was also a member of the Solar Tips in 1888, had been with Washington and Kansas City in the 1884 Union Association. Jim McKeever had also played in the Union Association for the Boston Reds. The Solar Tips had future major league players on the field that day. William “Bad Bill” Eagan would play with the AA St. Louis Browns in 1891, Chicago of the NL in 1893 and Pittsburgh in 1898. John Riddle would play with the Washington Nationals of the NL in 1889 and the AA Athletics in 1890.

About this time Camden withdrew from the Inter-State League (now sometimes called the Philadelphia Region League). The Inter-State League, operating in and around Philadelphia, started as a semi-professional league in January 1888. When Harry Wright’s Philadelphia Reserves announced their intention to join this league, the semi-pro status of the league began to look suspicious. The league’s other teams began to make announcements of players signing contracts. The large number of contract signings that continued to be reported with some teams also brings the organization’s status into question. The Philadelphia Reserves were all contract players; Frankford reported 14 players signed by late March, Somerset had 13, and Houston six. Camden and the Quaker City teams had also reported some paid players by this time.

James Farrington had been managing Camden when the Solar Tips brought him over to manage their team as it moved from an amateur league to—in theory, at least—a semi-pro league.9 Young Mundell’s take on this change is not known. Farrington had been a player/manager for Camden in 1883 and managed the Wilmington/Atlantic City team in the Eastern League for part of 1885. He would manage several Pennsylvania state league teams over the rest of his career.

“John Mundell & Co’s solar tip shoes Lead All in bright Dongola solar tip, pebble goat solar tip, pebble grain solar tip,” proclaims this 1889 advertisement.

The Solar Tips continued to play trade league clubs during their time in the Inter-State League. On July 21 they played a doubleheader, facing the non-league Keystones at 1:30PM and the other new ISL team, the Kensingtons, at 4PM. In a quirk of the times, the Solar Tips would be listed in first place in late July with a 2–1 record, followed by Houston at 12–6, Camden at 10–6, Brandywine at 8–5, Frankford at 11–7, Kensington at 1–1, Norristown and Germantown, both at 9–11, Somerset at 8–11 and the Quaker City in last at 7–14. It was not unusual at this time for even recognized minor leagues to have teams with very different totals of league games throughout the season or for new teams to enter a league without being credited or charged with the records of teams they replaced.

On July 23 the Solar Tips played Frankford. Down 2–1 in the ninth, Eagan walked, Graham of Frankford muffed a double play attempt, Clark singled and Deasley, now back with the Tips, hit a triple and drove in the tying and winning runs.10 On July 24 it was announced that the Solar Tips would again be playing the Young America for the amateur championship of Philadelphia. The first game was to be Saturday, July 28.

By August 7, the Solar Tips withdrew from the Inter-State League. They had compiled an impressive record of 10 wins and 2 losses (while their record is now sometimes listed as 8 and 2). They indicated their intention was to play all the leading amateur teams of the region. They also announced their plans to play the Cuban Giants on Thursday and Friday of that week. The teams were said to be evenly matched.11

This was a strange choice for a team wishing to play with amateurs. The Cuban Giants were the first fully-salaried black professional team. That the Tips were thought to be evenly matched with the Giants, and that they had players on their roster (not just pitchers and catchers) who had played minor league ball before and/or during the 1888 season, makes one wonder how the term “amateur” was being defined in Philadelphia at this time.

The Cuban Giants were a frequent rival of ISL teams in 1888. The Solar Tips met the Cubans on August 9. The “colored champions” opened the scoring, jumping out to a two-run lead in the bottom of the first. The Tips responded with a single run in the top of the second, narrowing the gap. Pitchers Rittenhouse for the Solar Tips and Stovey for the Cuban Giants then held their opponents scoreless for the next three innings. Stovey would go his opponents one better, silencing the Tips bats in the top of the sixth. Rittenhouse then gave up two runs in the bottom of that inning, the final tallies of the game. Clarence Williams and Jack Frye each had doubles to lead the Cuban Giants. Koons led the Solar Tips with a triple. The fielding of both teams was said to be very good and the 4–1 victory was placed in the hands of Stovey’s pitching.12

The Solar Tips faced a very good team that day. Bob Davids (SABR’s founder) once ranked the best black players of the nineteenth century. The pitcher, Stovey, and seven of the eight other players on the field that day, were on this list.13

On the other hand, the Solar Tips’ two key players that day, pitcher Rittenhouse and catcher Koons, had less auspicious careers. Rittenhouse was a mainstay of Pennsylvania state leagues but would see no major league action. There is no link to this Mr. Koons and any team but the Solar Tips of 1888 at this time.

When the two teams met again the next day, the Solar Tips were minus a manager. Criticized by president Mundell after the loss to the Cuban Giants, Farrington immediately resigned.14 The change in management didn’t help and the Solar Tips fell to the Cuban Giants 6–4 the next day. William Whyte and Clarence Thomas were the Cubans’ battery that day. Whyte had the highest winning percentage of the best black pitchers of the nineteenth century and many feel that Thomas’s exclusion from the Hall of Fame is an injustice.

The Solar Tips would continue to play, and frequently defeat, Philadelphia area teams for the rest of the 1888 season. The Interstate League was expected to fold shortly after the Solar Tips withdrew but certain teams continued to be referred to as members of that league until the end of the season. Frankford and Norristown of the ISL initiated efforts to form a new league for 1889. While Frankford would never play in this league, which became the mostly Pennsylvania-based Middle States League, the Cuban Giants, playing out of Trenton, becoming the first black team to play in a mostly white minor league. Before the 1889 season was over, they would be joined by another black team, the Gorhams, headquartered in Easton.

Many Solar Tip players would also make their way into the MSL. Catcher Rigby, first baseman O’Donnell, shortstop (and captain) Clark, and pitcher Rittenhouse would join Lancaster. Samuel Hoverter, another one-time Solar Tip, would play for York.15 It would also be reported that pitcher Smith of the Philadelphia Giants had played for the Tips the previous year.16

After the 1888 season the Solar Tips confined their activities to the Philadelphia regional circuit. They made no attempt to enter the MSL but Mundell Jr., along with N.B. Young, were at the head of an effort to form a semi-professional league. Former ISL teams Norristown, Brandywine, and Houston, and future MSL member Wilmington were targeted as potential members.17 Nothing appears to have come of this effort. The Solar Tips ceased play for a period after the 1890 season, a decision that was reportedly based on the Players’ League’s impact on the American Association.18

Coverage of the Solar Tips activities appears again in 1892. There are reports of losses to Camden and Burlington, New Jersey, and a victory over Rowlandville that year. In 1893 the Solar Tips reportedly lost to Trenton, Royersford, and Camden, and Camden would again beat the Solar Tips in 1894. The team lost its patron that year as John Mundell Sr. passed away on September 2. John Mundell Jr. continued to operate the company and sponsor a baseball team. There was a report of the Philadelphia-area Wyoming team defeating the Solar Tips in an 1899 game.

Young Mundell initially experienced success leading his father’s company. In 1900 they won the Franklin Institute ribbon and medal at the Export Exposition. On the day the prize was announced it was also reported that the company was expanding its plant on Market Street.19 In February 1901, Mundell had to make corporate and personal assignments to creditors, Charles F. Walton of England and Bryan & Co. leather merchants of Philadelphia. The cause of the failure was attributed to loss of government work which the company had become dependent on, its children’s shoe business no longer its strength.20

The Solar Tips team history exemplifies the fluid nature of baseball competition at this time. Major league teams frequently played teams from much lower level organizations. Teams formed as, or proclaiming to be, amateur sometimes included paid players, most often pitchers and catchers but the virus of professionalism often spread to additional position players quickly. Sometimes pay was in cash, other times it was hidden in a company payroll which carried players who supposedly had other jobs but whose real purpose was to promote the company by playing baseball. In the 1880s and 1890s the Solar Tips of Philadelphia began as a team of company employees, appear to have progressed to paying players and then returned to their amateur roots. They played against all levels of competition and showed well against all comers. No such team today could ever hope to test itself against the quality of competition the Solar Tips were able to face. 

PAUL BROWNE is Executive Director of the Carbondale Technology Transfer Center. He is a Carbondale City Councilman and President of the Carbondale Community Development Corporation. He researches and writes about nineteenth century base ball. He is a relative of former New York Giants player Pete Gillespie. Family stories led him to SABR and to writing Pete’s biography for the BioProject. In researching that article, he came across another nineteenth century major leaguer, Eddie Kennedy, and the New York Metropolitans.

Notes

1. “John Mundell Has Passed Away,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 2, 1894.

2. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 23, 1884.

3. Philadelphia Inquirer, June 15, 1885.

4. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 31, 1888.

5. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 30, 1888.

6. Philadelphia Inquirer, June 19, 1888.

7. Philadelphia Inquirer, June 23, 1888.

8. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 6, 1888.

9. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 7, 1888.

10. Philadelphia Inquirer, July 24, 1888.

11. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 7, 1888.

12. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 1888.

13. Sol White Introduction by Jerry Malloy, Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball with other documents of the early Black game, 1886–1936. (Lincoln, NB & London: University of Nebraska Press, 1995) p 161.

14. Philadelphia Inquirer, August 10, 1888.

15. Philadelphia Inquirer, April 17, 1889.

16. Philadelphia Inquirer, May 20, 1889.

17. Philadelphia Inquirer, March 22, 1889.

18. James Hampton Moore, History of the Five O’clock Club of Philadelphia, (published for private circulation, 1891). 268.

19. Philadelphia Inquirer, Mach 30, 1900.

20. Philadelphia Inquirer, February 3, 1901.

James was referring to George A. “Tuck” Turner, a member of the National League and American Association for seven seasons (1893–98) and a utility outfielder for the Phillies for the first five of those big league seasons.

Turner was born on Staten Island on Cherry Lane, the same street his father George, a laborer, and mother, Caroline, a house keeper, had both been born.[fn]Obituary of George A. Turner, Staten Island Advance, Staten Island, NY, July 17, 1945.[/fn] Cherry Lane is in the West New Brighton community on the Island’s north shore. According to every baseball reference until recent times, Tuck Turner was born there on February 13, 1873.

How Tuck Turner became a major leaguer and a member of the Philadelphia Phillies is an unusual story. Before joining the Phillies and appearing in his major league debut on August 18, 1893, Turner never played organized professional baseball, but he had played on some of the best amateur teams on Staten Island, and we know that he was on the island’s best semi-pro team of his day, the West New Brighton Corinthians, and several other highly respected semi-pro clubs in the greater New York City area.

In 1892, and for the start of the 1893 season, Turner played on one of the very best of these semi-professional teams, the New York State Asylum team in Middletown, New York. Some of the players worked at the asylum and others came to play on the team; patients did not play. The Asylum team would also be a stopping off place in 1894 for pitching great Jack Chesbro en route to his hall-of-fame, major league career.

Before Turner’s mid-August major league debut with the Phillies in 1893, he played for another excellent semi-pro team, the Plainfields of New Jersey.[fn]Mayer, Robert, email, Turner’s minor league teams; unpublished; January 9, 2007. In 1893 Turner played for the Plainfield Club in the New Jersey League (The Sporting News, August 25, 1894) which was most likely the Central New Jersey League. On July 13 and August 16, the team traveled to Middletown where the Asylums defeated the club 10–7 and 17–8 with Turner playing in the first game against the Asylums. The Middletown newspaper report referred to the team as the Crescents of Plainfield. Turner also played in several games for the Asylum team that year. In 1904 and 1905, Turner played for Hoboken, and on September 29 played with the Asylum BBC in their reunion game against the Cuban X Giants with Chesbro pitching against Frank Grant and Clarence Williams. (Phil Dixon, Phil Dixon’s American Baseball Chronicles Great Teams: The 1905 Philadelphia Giants, Vol. 3, (Charleston, SC: BookSurge, LLC 2006), 83, and Robert Mayer; email; unpublished, March 24, 2013).[/fn] Like the New York Asylum team, this team played against top competitors, including exhibition games with major and minor league teams, top college clubs and other semi-pro organizations, including racially segregated African American teams like the great Cuban Giants.

In 1893, two other Staten Islanders were playing for the Philadelphia Phillies; both were from Turner’s West New Brighton neighborhood. The first was right hand pitcher John “Brewery Jack” Taylor, who was in his first full season with the club, and who would, in just another year, become the Phillies’ top ace for several seasons. Taylor would be traded from the Phillies to St. Louis after the conclusion of the 1897 season and then on to Cincinnati for one season before a tragically young death at age 26 in February 1900.

The other was former New York Giants pitcher, then Phillies utility player, Jack Sharrott. Sharrott had come to the attention of New York Giants’ manager Jim Mutrie in early 1890 as Mutrie was in desperate straits to field a team as a result of the players’ rebellion that particularly decimated the New York roster. Mutrie’s “discovery” of Sharrott, who turned out to be a surprisingly good pitcher, is a story in itself, involving a mugging, a police intervention, a cop whose son was a pitcher, a tryout with the Giants, and a degree of entertaining speculation.

Sharrott had a brief, sometimes headline-grabbing, career as a Giants hurler before a base-sliding injury to his shoulder ended his days as a pitcher. He was a skilled enough athlete and hitter, however, to remain a Giant for another season before he was sent to the Phillies in 1893 in a high profile trade which included Giants future Hall of Famer Roger Connor.

It was in that season (1893) when Sharrott called to the attention of Phillies’ manager Harry Wright the presence of a young guy from his neighborhood back on Staten Island. This young man, Tuck Turner, now had a chance to show his skills. Playing only semi-pro ball at the time, Turner was free to try out for the Phillies. Harry Wright liked what he saw and immediately signed Turner and inserted him into the Phillies line-up every chance he had for the remaining six weeks of the 1893 season. Turner played in 36 games with 155 at-bats, which resulted in a very impressive .323 batting average; not too shabby for a 20-year-old rookie.

In one of those ironies of baseball and life, it was Jack Sharrott’s fate to be replaced on the Phillies’ roster by the person he scouted, his old friend, Tuck Turner. Sharrott was cut from the team’s roster shortly before opening day of the 1894 season, ending his four-year major league career. His departure, however, did not take place until the end of spring training and not before the taking of a team photo showing Turner and Sharrott (along with fellow Staten Islander Jack Taylor), causing endless confusion for modern researchers who do not understand how an 1894 Phillies team photo depicts all three players, while team records show Sharrott was not on the Phillies that year.

Although his major league career was over, Sharrott was an enterprising young man and remained attached to baseball for another two decades, mostly in the New England minor leagues. He even served on occasion as a baseball scout and signed a couple of players for the Detroit Tigers in the early twentieth century.

Not unnoticed by baseball historians, in 1893 (Turner’s debut season) the pitching distance was moved back. The pitching rubber was set 60 feet, six inches from home plate, instead of the forward line of the old pitcher’s box, 50 feet away. The new rule mandating that the pitcher keep a rear foot on this rubber slab resulted in a net difference of approximately four and a third feet further from the pitcher’s new release point to the plate.

Today’s observer might be shocked by the style of play in Tuck Turner’s era. Legendary baseball analyst Bill James describes baseball of the 1890s as:

Dirty. Very, very dirty. The tactics of the eighties were aggressive; the tactics of the nineties were violent. The game of the eighties was crude; the game of the nineties was criminal…. Players spiked each other. A first baseman would grab the belt of a base-runner to hold him back a half-second after the ball was hit. Occasionally, players tripped one another as they rounded the bases. Fights broke out from day to day. Players shoved umpires, spat on them, and abused them in every manner short of assault. Fans hurled insults and beer bottles at the players of opposing teams.[fn]James, Bill James’ Historical Baseball Abstract, New York, Villard Books, 1998, 38.[/fn]

Imagine Tuck Turner, at five feet, six-and-one-half inches and 155 pounds out there in the rough and tumble baseball world of the 1890s, competing with the best of them. And, compete he did!

After his August 1893 debut, he appeared in 36 games with 155 at bats. In addition to his .323 BA, he hit four doubles, three triples, and one home run. He stole seven bases and struck out only 19 times, while driving in 13 runs and scoring 32. Not bad for a short season rookie.

There remained a problem for manager Wright: Turner was an outfielder, and not a very impressive defensive one but adequate enough given his lively bat. Wright had arguably the finest starting outfield in all of major league history: “Big Ed” Delahanty in left field, “Sliding Billy” Hamilton in center field, and “Big Sam” Thompson in right field. All three would eventually be inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame and all three were at the prime of their careers in Philadelphia in the early and mid 1890s. Utilizing Turner as a Phillie, particularly as an outfielder, would be a challenge, but the opportunity would unexpectedly present itself the very next season.

After spring training in 1894, the Phillies were about to embark on the finest offensive season in major league history. The team’s record-breaking collective season batting average of .350 has never been surpassed.[fn]Westcott, Richard and Bilovsky, Frank, The Phillies Encyclopedia, Philadelphia, Temple University Press, 2004, 17.[/fn] Leading the way in 1894, of course was that incredible Hall of Fame outfield: Delahanty, .404; Hamilton, .403 and Thompson, .415. Amazingly, however, Tuck Turner outdid all three of them, hitting .418.

Turner’s .418 was not just a pinch hitter’s batting average. Due to injuries suffered by two of his outfield teammates, particularly Thompson (102 games) and Delahanty (116 games), Turner managed to play in 82 games and had 347 at bats.

From 1876 through 1920 the accepted standard for a player to qualify for the batting title was that a player had to appear in at least 60 percent of his team’s scheduled games.[fn]Daniels, John E., “Where Have You Gone, Carl Yastrzemski?: A Statistical Analysis of the Triple Crown,” The Baseball Research Journal, vol. 37, Cleveland, SABR, 2008, 107.[/fn] Tuck Turner met that standard in 1894. In that same season, however, Boston’s Hugh Duffy of that city’s National League team hit for the highest single season batting average in major league history, .440. This effectively gave Tuck Turner the first of his three major league records, the highest single season batting average not to win the league batting title.[fn]Dewey, Donald and Acocella, Nicholas, The Biographical History of Baseball, Chicago, Triumph Books, 2002, 428.[/fn]

Unlike a streak, when a player grows hot for a few weeks or even a few months and attains an exceptionally high batting average over that one portion of the season, Turner’s ability to hit at such a high level was sustained throughout the entire season, giving some savvy baseball observers reason to suspect that “park effect” might explain his level of sustained performance. That would be a reasonable speculation given that at the start of the 1895 season the Phillies moved into their new home field, Philadelphia Park (later known as Baker Bowl and the team’s home field through 1938). However, SABR researcher Trent McCotter’s paper, “The .400 Club,” which is a comparative analysis of all .400+ season batting averages, puts the “park effect” theory to rest. One of McCotter’s findings is that Turner achieved the highest on-road single season batting average in major league history, a sizzling .443.[fn]McCotter, Trent, “The .400 Club,” The Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 33, Charlton, Jim, Ed.; Cleveland, SABR; 2004; 64–70.[/fn] This is the second of Turner’s two records. As it turns out, there was no “park effect” in Philadelphia; it was all Turner, hitting at a record pace across 11 other major league cities.

Although outpaced by Duffy’s .440, Turner ended up ninth on the all-time highest single season batting averages list.[fn]Ibid.[/fn] He set a third record which is likely to remain unbroken. Turner’s .418 season average is the highest single season average ever recorded by a switch hitter.[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

In 2010 the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame inducted Turner posthumously and installed a plaque honoring this native son. In considering the six inscriptions on that plaque, two of these career accomplishments deserve further comment:

“Hit .323, .416, .386 in first three seasons with 1890s Philadelphia Phillies” and “Had 11 straight multiple-hit games, third best all time.”

Had there been a bigger plaque, two more inscriptions might have been included; one to give credit to his highest season average for a switch hitter and the other for Turner’s 12 consecutive games with at least one RBI, tying him with ten other players for eighth overall among all major leaguers.[fn]Ibid.[/fn] There are only seven players above him on that RBI list.[fn]McCotter, “Record RBI Streak Discovered,” Baseball Digest, Vol. 67, No. 3, Ibid, May 2008, 62–64.[/fn]

Although we may never know the full story of Tuck Turner’s obviously short career, there is something we do know today about Tuck Turner that Bill James and everyone else before him didn’t know; that is, when Tuck Turner hit .418 and scored and drove in all those runs in 1894 he was not a 21-year-old kid in his second big league season. He was actually 27 years old.

Turner had been practicing one of baseball’s oldest traditions, lying about one’s age. To all in the baseball world, Turner was born in 1873, when in reality he was born in 1867 making him a slightly less impressive 26-year-old freshman whose image was featured on the front page of The Sporting News.[fn]Image of George A. (Tuck) Turner, The Sporting News; August 25, 1894, 1.[/fn] Naturally, Turner’s West New Brighton teammates knew he was considerably older than they were, but this was baseball, and the practice of presenting one’s self as younger was so much a part of the game it was almost expected.

This tongue-in-cheek approach to lying about one’s age, however, didn’t keep Turner from giving up the charade after baseball. When he died on July 16, 1945, at his son’s home in Staten Island it was even recorded on his death certificate that he was born on February 13, 1873, which would have made him 72.[fn]Certificate of Death #1625, Borough of Richmond [Staten Island], Bureau
of vital Statistics, Department of Health, City of New York, filed July 18, 1945.[/fn] His obituary in the local newspaper was even more lenient about his age, it was headlined “New Brighton Ex-Ballplayer Dies at 70.”

Turner, however, was not going to mess with the US government. When the census taker visited the Turner household in 1900, 1910, 1920, and 1930, Turner told Uncle Sam his true age, which was always six years older than his baseball age. In addition, George Turner Sr., Tuck’s father, not knowing in 1870 and 1880 that his son would be trying out for the Phillies in the future, reported in those years’ censuses that his son George’s ages were three and 13 respectively. Finally, we arrive at the Turner family plot in Oceanview (formerly Valhalla) Cemetery in Staten Island where he was laid to rest beside his wife Louise (Kiley) Turner, who predeceased him in 1942 (they had been married for 52 years). The family headstone is inscribed, “George Turner 1867–1945”, making him 78 years old at the time of his death, which matches the census data.

Age was probably only part of the explanation of Turner’s major league decline. Part of the story seems to be playing time. His outfield teammates were three future Hall of Famers. He was not going to replace any of those stars. And, even though the Phillies completed one of the worst trades in baseball history in 1896, sending Billy Hamilton to Boston, they did acquire (in a different deal) another future Hall of Famer, second baseman, Napoleon Lajoie, who as a rookie they used mostly at first base.

The final blow for Turner might have been his transfer to St. Louis, which in 1896 was “baseball hell.” The National League and American Association Browns (later to be known as the Cardinals) were at the mercy of their megalomaniac owner, German beer baron Chris von der Ahe. Von der Ahe, who made, spent, and lost a fortune was, by 1896, the most erratic owner in all of baseball. His wife was suing him for divorce, his mistress was suing him for false promises, he had been “kidnapped” by agents of Pittsburgh Pirates owner Barney Dreyfus to stand trial for “kidnapping” Pirates pitcher Mark Baldwin, whom he tried to drag into State Court for breach of contract.

Von der Ahe, now cash strapped, was wheeling and dealing players like Monopoly properties. When Turner arrived in St. Louis, before he could put on a Browns’ uniform, he immediately found himself in St. Paul, Minnesota, as a minor leaguer, another Von der Ahe deal.[fn]Brooklyn Eagle, “Base Ball Notes,” June 29, 1896, 5.[/fn] He returned to St. Louis in time to play in 51 games, where he hit only .246. He followed up nicely, however, in 1897 with a .291 average, playing in 103 games. But, after a slow start in 1898, he was released after 35 games. He was now 31 years old, not very old, but not young by baseball standards.

Turner continued to play baseball in the minor leagues for another eight seasons, but never returned to the major leagues. His first year in the minors was in 1899 with Kansas City, of the top minor circuit Western League, which in 1900 would become the American League. From 1900 through 1906 Turner played in the competitive Eastern League, Connecticut State League, and New England League.

On July 16, 1905, Turner played in one of the finest displays of baseball in the era of racial segregation. Playing for his old Hoboken club, Turner accepted a challenge from the African American Philadelphia Giants and their great pitcher “Rube” Foster. Foster, a legendary pitcher in the early twentieth-century, later founded the Negro National League but on that July day in 1905, 38-year-old Tuck Turner had one of the only four hits that Foster allowed in a 2–1 Hoboken victory.[fn]Dixon, Phil S., Phil Dixon’s American Baseball Chronicles Great Teams: The 1905 Philadelphia Giants, Vol. III, Charleston, SC, Book Surge, LLC, 2006, 83.[/fn]

With his playing career behind him in the first decade of the twentieth-century, Turner worked as a laborer in various locations throughout New York City. He and Louise and their two sons, who were separated by 22 years (Harry, born in 1892 and Wilfred [a.k.a. Charles] born in 1914), lived both in Manhattan and Brooklyn. In the early 1930s, due to Louise’s declining health they returned to Staten Island and lived an almost invisible but idyllic life on a houseboat in a tidal estuary known as Lemon Creek on the island’s eastern shore. By World War II, Tuck and Louise were living not far from his old neighborhood on Staten Island’s north shore in the house of his now married younger son, Wilfred. With Louise’s passing in 1942, Turner remained at his son’s home where he died on July 16, 1945.

At the time of his death, Turner had not only survived his two Phillies Staten Island teammates, Jack Taylor (d. 1900) and Jack Sharrott (d. 1927) but he also survived all of Staten Island’s 19th-century major leaguers: Dude Esterbrook (d. 1901), George Sharrott (d. 1932), Jack Cronin (d. 1929) and major league manager Jim Mutrie (d. 1938). Only Esterbrook and Mutrie were born before Turner.

PETER MANCUSO is Chairman of SABR’s Nineteenth Century Committee. A native of Staten Island, New York he is the former Assistant Director of Training for the NYPD. He is an owner and partner of Mancuso Show Management which organizes and presents quilting festivals, antiques shows, and antiquarian book fares.

The park site consisted of an entire rectangular-shaped city block located in North Philadelphia. The ballpark site was bounded on the north by Columbia Avenue, on the south by Oxford Street, on the west by 30th Street, and on the east by 29th Street. The location of the ballpark was not far from downtown Philadelphia. The grandstand and home plate were located in the southwest corner of the park site. This park site, although consisting of the entirety of one city block, was not large: 400 (east-west) by 455 feet (north-south) and amounted to 4.2 acres. By comparison, other wooden Deadball Era major league ballparks occupied sites ranging from 3.9 acres (League Park III in Cleveland) to 9.6 acres (American League Park in New York). The 400 foot (east-west) dimension, along Oxford Street on the south and Columbia Avenue on the north, limited the extent of the ballpark’s right field dimension.

For Opening Day 1901, the ballpark’s seating areas consisted of a single-deck covered grandstand that extended from first base to third base, and sets of bleachers down both foul lines. Behind home plate, there was a short diagonal section of the grandstand that formed the backstop. On the roof of the grandstand were both a small press box and a wire screen on each side of the press box to try to keep foul balls from leaving the ballpark. There were short gaps between the grandstand and both sets of foul line bleachers. Both the first base and third base bleachers ran parallel to the foul lines—thus creating an ample amount of foul territory. The first base bleachers reached nearly to the right field corner, and the third base bleachers extended all the way to the left field perimeter fence on Columbia Avenue and then hooked around as far as the left field foul line to face home plate. There was a wire screen erected on top of the right field perimeter wall that was intended to keep home runs and foul balls from hitting vehicles in and possible pedestrians along 29th Street.

As home plate was in the southwest corner of the park site, the left field line ran due north-south, and right field was thus the sun field for afternoon games. There was a modest-sized scoreboard in right-center field that was set into the right field-center field fence. There was one small clubhouse (for the use of only the home team), but no dugouts—the players sat on benches in front of the grandstand. On Opening Day 1901, Columbia Park had seating for 5,000 in the grandstand, and 4,500 in the bleachers, for a total of 9,500. Capacity was expanded by a small amount in 1903 by adding seats to the foul area first base bleachers.1 Additional unspecified foul area expansion raised the seating capacity to 13,600 for the 1905 season. In the Deadball Era, capacity was an elastic concept. The all-time record attendance at Columbia Park—for a crucial game against the White Sox late in the 1905 season when 25,187 were in attendance—was far in excess of the park’s seating capacity of 13,600.

The A’s won two American League pennants playing at Columbia Park, but hosted only one World Series, in 1905 against the New York Giants. The A’s other pennant was in 1902, a year before the American and National Leagues agreed to a post-season series. Columbia Park was also used by the National League Phillies for 16 games in 1903 while the Phillies home park (National League Park, later known as Baker Bowl) was temporarily under repairs after a portion of the stands tragically collapsed.

Columbia Park was abandoned after the 1908 season when the A’s moved into the first of the Classic ballparks—Shibe Park. When the A’s left, the park was used by a circus and for other events for several years before being demolished. The site is now a mixed commercial and residential area.

The Basis of Columbia Park’s Configurations and Dimensions

No listed dimensions for Columbia Park were found in any of the usual ballpark reference books.2,3 The 1901 dimensions: LF 340, CF 396, RF 280 (all dimensions are in feet), were derived entirely from a finely-detailed 1907 Philadelphia City Atlas.4 This atlas provided the size of the park site, and the location and extent of the grandstand and bleachers. The foul lines were not shown. A diagram of the park and the dimensions of the park site were copied from the 1907 atlas. The details that were copied from the atlas included the location of the grandstand, bleachers, and the main entrance to the ballpark (located at the corner of 30th Street and Oxford Street). The location of home plate was based on photos of the park, and was estimated to have been 72 feet from the diagonal section of the grandstand that formed the backstop. Given the location of home plate, all of the outfield dimensions were then calculated from the park diagram. Because the shape of the land plat was a rectangle and the foul lines were parallel to 29th Street, the outfield fences were aligned at 90 degrees to the foul lines in both left field and right field. Based on research into home runs at Columbia Park, it was found that there had been home runs hit over an interior fence in right field and right-center.5 From the 1901 Opening Day photo in the Philadelphia Inquirer, this interior fence was quite close to the perimeter right-field wall and screen and included a modest sized scoreboard in right-center.6 The right field screen was constructed of chicken wire and was an estimated 25 feet in height. The screen was mounted on top of the perimeter right-field wall. This screen, as it was erected on the exterior wall, located behind the interior fence, was out-of-play and extended all the way to the center-field corner.

In summary, all of the Columbia Park dimensions were estimated from the 1907 Philadelphia City Atlas. As neither the foul lines nor the home plate locations were shown in the atlas, these dimensions contain a small amount of uncertainty. All dimensions were checked against, and are consistent with, the available photographic evidence and the home run data. Park data and dimensions for Columbia Park are shown in Table 1.

(Click image to enlarge.)

The Impact of the Park’s Configuration and Dimensions on Batting

Columbia Park, in its limited lifetime of eight American League seasons (1901­–­08), was the smallest ballpark in the American League. Over the ballpark’s eight major league seasons, Columbia Park was above average for batting average, on-base percentage, slugging percentage, and doubles. (See table below of Batting Park Factors.) In the 1902 season, the A’s compiled a .322 home batting average (highest in the American League) at Columbia Park, while hitting only .249 on the road. This 73-point difference was the largest home/road differential in batting average for any team in the Deadball Era.

(Click image to enlarge.)

As the smallest American League ballpark, Columbia Park was a poor park for triples and inside-the-park home runs (IPHRs). There were only 4.25 IPHRs per season at Columbia Park while the average American League ballpark had more than twice that number per year in the 1901–08 seasons. At Columbia Park, the large majority of IPHRs were hit to CF, as that was the only deep part of the ballpark. Bounce home runs were rare–less than one per season because (1) the stands were not close to the foul lines (except in deep left field), and (2) the outfield fences were a minimum of eight feet in height. Of the five bounce home runs hit at Columbia Park, four were into the foul area third-base bleachers and one bounced over the interior fence in fair right field. The distribution of over-the-fence (OTF) home runs reflected the outfield dimensions. Left field (340 feet) had 47 OTF home runs, while right field (280 feet) had 80 OTF home runs. The batting Park Factor for home runs during the eight-year life of Columbia Park was only 108, a surprisingly modest value for the smallest ballpark in the American League and one with a composite average outfield distance of only 346 feet. This result occurred because while OTF home runs were relatively numerous with this small park size, there were not many IPHRs. Throughout the Deadball Era, and especially before the introduction of the cork-center ball, there was no relationship between park size and home runs.

RON SELTER is a retired economist, formerly with the Air Force Space Program. He is a member of the Ballparks, Minor League, Statistical, and Deadball Committees, and his area of expertise is twentieth-century major-league ballparks. Selter served as text editor for “Green Cathedrals” (2006 edition, SABR) and as a contributor to “Forbes Field” (2007). He is the author of “Ballparks of the Deadball Era” (2008).

Born on a small farm on the outskirts of Bradford, Pennsylvania, Waddell’s journey to Philadelphia began in August 1901, when he went missing from the National League Chicago Orphans.[fn]The franchise became the Chicago Cubs in 1902.[/fn] His absence came as no surprise to many in the Chicago organization. After all, he had been obtained from Pittsburgh in May for a cigar after Pirates manager Fred Clarke marched into owner Barney Dreyfuss’s office. “Sell him; release him, drop him off the Monongahela Bridge,” ranted Clarke. “Do anything you like, so long as you get him the hell off my ball team!”[fn]Alan H. Levy. Rube Waddell: the Zany, Brilliant Life of a Strikeout Artist
(Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc. Publishers, 2000), 77.[/fn]

In the few months he was in Chicago, Waddell often argued with his manager (Tom Loftus) and teammates, was clawed in the (right) arm by a lion at a sideshow, frequently showed up to games intoxicated, and often skipped practice to go fishing. As the last place team’s only drawing card, Waddell’s eccentricities were initially overlooked, but his output began to drop. He seemed to be bored with the game. Rumors swirled as to Rube’s whereabouts. A lover of libations, it was said that he had quit to enter the saloon business. Some said that he would return to the team after tracking down a dog that had been shipped to him from St. Louis. Others sniffed a conspiracy, noting that Charles Comiskey was trying to lure him to Chicago’s South Side to the White Sox. To stoke the flames, Waddell was seen on the roof of South Side Park taking in a ball game, while the Orphans were playing across town.

It soon became known that Waddell hadn’t given up baseball after all. He was making the rounds in the town ball circuit, playing for teams in northern Illinois and southeastern Wisconsin. Although he was playing under the assumed name of Brown, Waddell was anything but inconspicuous. In one game, it was reported “every time Brown, alias Rube, came up to bat, he was wagering he could make a hit. Sometimes he won and oftener he didn’t.”[fn]The Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, WI), September 6, 1901, 8.[/fn] In another, Waddell ordered his infield to stand behind him at the mound. His teammates initially protested, but “Rube declared that if he did not have his way he would throw up the game right there as he was not accustomed to being disobeyed.”[fn]The Decatur Review (Decatur, IA), September 20, 1901, 5.[/fn] They finally conceded, watching Waddell strike out the next three batters. His bragging grew more audacious the next inning, when he ordered everyone but the catcher to sit on the bench. Once again, he struck out all three batters.

In early October, Waddell was in Kenosha, Wisconsin, playing for a team from nearby Burlington. He gave up four hits, but 13 errors led to an 11–5 Kenosha victory. Following the game, he decided he wanted to play for the Kenosha Athletics. All he had to do was play one more game for Burlington—against Kenosha. This time, Burlington prevailed with a 6–5 win, as Waddell “struck out seventeen batters and didn’t exert himself to any great degree.”[fn]Kenosha Evening News (Kenosha, WI), October 7, 1901, 1.[/fn]

It was apparent that Waddell had an affinity for Wisconsin. He first fell in love with the state in the summer of 1900, when he spent several weeks throwing for Connie Mack’s Milwaukee Brewers of the newly named American League. It was Mack who sought out the talented, yet erratic Waddell, traveling to Pittsburgh to obtain Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss’s permission to pursue the lefty. Waddell was still under contract with the Pirates (whom he had pitched for earlier in the year), but was then playing for semipro teams in the Punxsutawney area. Waddell had been nothing but a headache for Dreyfuss and Pirates manger Fred Clarke. “Go ahead. We can’t do anything with him—maybe you can,” was the owner’s response.[fn]The Sporting News (St. Louis, MO), November 19, 1942, 4.[/fn]

In their initial contact, made by phone, Mack made the crucial error of calling Waddell “Rube” (he preferred to be called “Eddie”). The conversation was brief and ended with the pitcher saying he was staying put in Punxsutawney. For the next two weeks Mack sent Waddell daily telegrams and letters. Finally, Waddell wired Mack: “Come and get me.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] The next morning Mack was in Punxsutawney. He woke Waddell and took him out to breakfast. They then went about town settling up Waddell’s debts. Before noon Mack had spent nearly $100 on a bar tab, fishing gear, a dry goods store bill, a watch, and the shipping of a dog Rube had received. Finally, Mack began to worry that they were causing such a stir around town that someone might alert the local baseball club, so they retreated to a hotel. Finally, at 2:45, they headed for the train depot for the 3:00 train.

Mack and Waddell weren’t at the platform for more than five minutes when a large group of men converged on them. They motioned Waddell over for a brief talk and then a man, who turned out to be the head of the local ball club, approached Mack.

“You Connie Mack, manager of Milwaukee?” asked the man gruffly.

“Yes,” replied Mack. He was certain that they were there to talk Waddell out of leaving, and worried for his own safety.

“Well, I want to shake your hand,” said the man, extending his hand to Mack. “My friends and myself have come down here to thank you. You are doing us a favor. Waddell is a great pitcher, but we feel that Punxsutawney will be better off without him.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Mack was still trembling as they boarded the train.

Waddell immediately took to his surroundings in Wisconsin, especially the plentitude of fishing holes. Fishing was one of his favorite hobbies, and the one that he was least likely to injure himself doing, so he was encouraged to indulge. Indulge he did; spending every moment that he could doing so. He traveled all over the area, finding a favorite spot when he took the trolley to Pewaukee.

In just over a month’s time, Waddell went 10–3, including throwing 22 innings in a doubleheader against the Chicago White Sox. After throwing 17 innings in the opening game, Waddell turned handsprings when he struck out the final batter. In between games Mack and White Sox owner Charles Comiskey decided to play an abbreviated 5-inning affair for the second game. Seeing Waddell showing no signs of being worn down, Mack approached the lefty about pitching Game 2. “Rube, how would you like to go to Pewaukee for a few days instead of going to Kansas City?” asked Mack. “Pitch the second game and win it for us and you can have a few days off, and can rejoin is in Indianapolis.”[fn]Fred Lieb. The Pittsburgh Pirates (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois
University Press, 2003), 71.[/fn] Waddell took the ball and won the second game 1–0, allowing just one Chicago hit.

During his brief hiatus from the Brewers, Waddell was also able to partake in another hobby—fighting fires. On his way back to Milwaukee, word spread that a barn had been hit by lightning and was engulfed in flames. Waddell jumped off the trolley and headed for the smoke. Upon arrival, he found farmers standing around watching the $5,000 barn burn. Waddell snapped into action, rushing into the barn and hitching a piece of wire to a wagon. Salvaged from the fire were “forty head of stock, wagons, buggies, machinery and other things.”[fn]Milwaukee Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI), August 22, 1900, 7.[/fn] In the process Waddell badly burned his non-throwing hand.

When asked about what took place, Waddell responded nonchalantly. “I’m a peach at a fire. There is nothing I like better than to fight fires. I was a fireman for seven years at Pittsburgh. I’m glad I was able to help the old farmer out some.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Shortly thereafter, Pirates owner Barney Dreyfuss heard about how well Waddell was performing, and recalled him to Pittsburgh. Despite finishing with an 8–13 record for the Pirates, his 2.37 ERA was tops in the National League.

With Waddell on the mound in 1901, the Kenosha Athletics made plans to play Appleton for the unofficial 1901 Wisconsin state title. The dream of a state championship was put on hold when the Appleton team asked to be released from their agreement to play. Their reason was that they were playing Racine in a three game series—for the state championship. Rube and the Athletics would have to wait two weeks before they would have their shot at a title.

In the meantime, Waddell immersed himself in happenings around Kenosha. He officiated boxing matches at the Kenosha Opera House and tended bar at the Grant Hotel (often in full uniform, including spikes). He had big plans for the future. Not only did he want to start a football team, but he was looking ahead to next year’s baseball season. He proclaimed that he “planned to remain here for a year and that he would like to have a team here next year.”[fn]Kenosha Evening News (Kenosha, WI), October 4, 1901, 1.[/fn]

While waiting for a shot at the Wisconsin state title, Waddell struck out 16 in a 7–2 defeat of the Chicago Spaldings, regarded as “the crack amateur team of the west.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] Finally, after much back-and-forth, a date was set for the postponed game with Racine, which by then had defeated Appleton.

On the morning of October 20, Racine’s Athletic Park filled up fast. Kenosha sent a dozen train cars, and by game time an estimated 5,000 packed into the grandstands, bleachers, and along the foul lines. Waddell’s mound opposition was Addie Joss, a Woodland, Wisconsin native who had gone 25–18 for the Toledo Swamp Angels of the Western Association.

Addie Joss and Rube Waddell could not have been more different. The spindly Joss was a former schoolteacher. Waddell was broad-shouldered and uneducated. What they had in common was that few people could throw a baseball like them. The game in Racine was the start of a long professional rivalry.

Joss had helped Racine win the three-game series from Appleton, but in the top of the first, he showed some nerves. The first three Kenosha batters reached base. Aided by a double play, Joss and Racine escaped unscathed. Waddell then showed his all-around game. After striking out the first three Racine batters in the bottom of the first, he drove in the first two runs of the game in the top of the second when he launched a deep fly ball over a bicycle track in right field. He could have had an easy inside-the-park home run, but loped into third base with a triple, giving Kenosha a 2–0 lead.

Neither team scored in the next two innings. Waddell struck out each of the batters he faced, giving him nine straight to start the game. Racine took advantage of Waddell’s wildness (he walked five in the game) and four errors by Kenosha’s second baseman. The result was four unearned runs—one each in the fourth, fifth, sixth and eighth.

After eight innings, Waddell had struck out 19, yet his team trailed 4–2. Still, he had a chance to win the game in the top of the ninth, when he came to the plate with two out and runners on first and second. He overswung at all three of Joss’s offerings. According to Joss biographer Scott Longert, when the final out of the 4–2 Racine victory was recorded, “Delirious rooters dashed en masse out of the grandstand, hoisted Addie on their collective shoulders, and carried him around the park on a jubilant victory lap.”[fn]Scott Longert. Addie Joss: King of the Pitchers (Cleveland, OH: The Society for American Baseball Research, 1998), 33.[/fn] Longert called it called it “probably the greatest semi-pro game ever staged in Wisconsin, and one of the greatest played anywhere.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] Joss called it, “One of the greatest games I ever pitched in my life.”[fn]The Toledo News-Bee (Toledo, OH), August 22, 1905, 7.[/fn]

The next weekend found Waddell on the gridiron for the Kenosha Regulars football team. A bruising fullback, he scored the only touchdown of the game, an 80-yard scamper, in a 10–0 defeat of a team from Chicago.

A week later Waddell was found living in Racine and tending bar at Sugden’s saloon and billiards room. He gave no reason for his move from Kenosha other than “Tisn’t what it’s cracked up to be down there.”[fn]The Racine Daily Journal (Racine, WI), November 8, 1901, 8.[/fn] Once again, Waddell had long-term plans to settle in Racine. He went about forming a football team and talked about plans for the next summer’s baseball team. A few weeks later it seemed his plans had changed. The football team he put together disbanded. By December, all that remained of Waddell in Racine were his clothes at the Drexel Hotel. He had headed to the warm weather of California to play baseball on a major league barnstorming tour set up by Joe Cantillon.

Cantillon, who had umpired in the American League during the 1901 season, got the idea to take two teams made up of players from each league (All-Americans and All-Nationals) on an ambitious 76-game schedule. They started “in Chicago on October 12 and soon moved across the country—meeting, for example in Louisville, Denver, Albuquerque, and Las Vegas—before arriving on the West Coast.”[fn]Thomas Barthel. Baseball Barnstorming and Exhibition Games, 1901–1962 (Jefferson, NC: McFarland and Company, Inc. Publishers, 2007), 27.[/fn] There was even talk of playing games in Honolulu.

Problems arose for Cantillon when the Boston Americans’ Cy Young, their primary pitcher, dropped out before the team headed west. The promoter scrambled to find a replacement, before cajoling Waddell, who was more than happy to see himself out of the situation he had created in Wisconsin. It didn’t take Waddell long to make an impression. As in most places he went, Waddell wowed locals with his baseball prowess. At Recreation Park in San Francisco, he won a game for the All-Americans with a long home run to center field.

Waddell did little wrong during the trip and was courted by all four teams in the California League. When the rest of the barnstormers returned east, Waddell stayed in the Bay Area. Unable to make up his mind, he agreed to terms with three of the league’s four teams: the Oakland Mud Hens, the Sacramento Mosquitos, the San Francisco Has Beens, and the Los Angeles Looloos. All three wanted him in camp immediately, so Waddell “told the three club owners to shake the dice for him.”[fn]Levy, 95.[/fn] Los Angeles won, so he headed south.

Waddell was an instant fan favorite for the Looloos. Barely a month into the season, he established the league’s single-season strikeout record. He loved batting and was ecstatic to play the outfield or first base when he wasn’t pitching. In Oakland, he was rewarded for hitting the first home run of the season at Freeman’s Park with “several prizes in the way of shoes, clothes, and many other articles donated by charitable shopkeepers, who like to see the ball-tossers dress like members of the swagger set.”[fn]The San Francisco Call (San Francisco, CA), June 19, 1902, 4.[/fn]

Of course, it wasn’t all baseball for Waddell. Beyond frequenting the local taverns and fishing holes, he was able to partake in another of his endless hobbies, boxing. Before a game in Oakland, he sparred with heavyweight champion Jim Jeffries. As with most everything, Waddell was good at it. He was described as having a “stiff punch and a block that is said to be a wonder.”[fn]The San Francisco Call (San Francisco, CA), May 10, 1902, 4.[/fn]

Waddell was also able to show his firefighting prowess. During another game in Oakland, a mattress that was being used as a backstop caught fire. The fans and players scattered, and Freeman Park’s wooden bleachers looked as if they would burn to the ground. Waddell swooped into action. “He ran over and tore the burning mattress from its moorings and plopped it on the field, where it burned harmlessly.”[fn]Levy, 96-97.[/fn]

Word of Waddell’s on-field success reached the east. One day, Connie Mack, now manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, was lamenting the state of his pitching staff to umpire Jack Sheridan.

“Why don’t you get Waddell back?” replied Sheridan. “He’s pitching in San Francisco.”[fn]The Sporting News (St. Louis, MO), November 19, 1942, 4.[/fn]

Mack tracked down Waddell and invited him to join the Athletics, then in their second year of existence. The two worked out an agreement. Mack sent Waddell $100 and a train ticket, but the pitcher never arrived. The Philadelphia manager wasn’t alone in being stood up. The same thing happened to Fred Clarke, the manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates, who also tried to woo Waddell.

While in Chicago, Mack was approached by a man who had some firsthand information about Waddell.

“I saw him get on the train at Los Angeles. Some men got on after him and talked to him for about ten minutes. He started to cry and I heard him say ‘I never did want to leave you, you have been so good to me,’ and he got off the train.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Immediately, Mack went to Ban Johnson, American League president, whose office was in Chicago. After hearing the story, Johnson took Mack to the nearby Pinkerton Detective Agency. There, a plan was hatched for detectives to track down Waddell in San Francisco, where the Looloos were playing, advance him $200, and bring him to Kansas City. From there, Mack would personally escort Waddell to Baltimore, where Philadelphia was scheduled to play next. Things didn’t go as planned.

The Pinkerton detectives found Waddell in his hotel room in San Francisco, despondent over a loss earlier that day. He gave little resistance. They traveled without incident to Kansas City, where the detectives ran into a problem. It was there Waddell met boxer William Rothwell, known as Young Corbett II. Rothwell had just defeated Terry McGovern for the featherweight title. Waddell became enamored with the newly crowned champion. He wanted to impress Rothwell, so Waddell decided to seek out one of the two Kansas City teams to pitch for in the coming days. Both would have gladly snatched up a talent like Waddell. The detectives called Mack and told him to come to Kansas City immediately.

When Mack arrived in Kansas City, Waddell refused to come with him, insisting on going to the park.

“I agreed to take him to the park and he came along with his $1 suitcase and $40 fishing outfit,” recalled Mack. “I don’t know how I did it, but I talked Rube out of pitching that day and got him on the train for Baltimore before anyone could grab him.”[fn]The Sporting News (St. Louis, MO), November 19, 1942, 10.[/fn]

Mack and Waddell arrived in Baltimore on the morning of June 26. Waddell implored Mack to let him pitch later that day. Initially, Mack refused, wanting Waddell to become acclimated, but finally, he gave in.

John McGraw was player/manger for the Baltimore Orioles. Having faced Waddell previously, he knew one of the few ways to beat him was to be in his head. From the Baltimore bench, McGraw jockeyed him relentlessly, agitating the big lefty. In addition, Philadelphia catcher Mike “Doc” Powers had trouble catching Waddell’s hard breaking pitches. Consequently, Baltimore won 7–3.

That same year, McGraw played a role in the Athletics franchise. In mid-season, he left the Orioles and the American League to manage the National League’s New York Giants. Speaking to a reporter about how much money the Athletics were losing, he said that Ben Shibe had “a big white elephant on [his] hands.” Mack, who had a good sense of humor, immediately ordered a white elephant to appear on all Athletics’ gear and apparel.[fn]Charles C. Alexander. John McGraw (New York, NY: The Viking Press,
1988), 91.[/fn] To this day, it remains emblematic of the team, now based in Oakland.

The magic of Rube Waddell in an Athletics uniform began on July 1 at Philadelphia’s Columbia Park against Baltimore. Mack inserted catcher Ossee Schrecongost, whom he had recently signed as a free agent from the Cleveland Bronchos.[fn]The Cleveland American League franchise has used the nicknames Blues (1901), Bronchos (1902–1904), and Naps (1905–1914).[/fn] The pitcher and catcher tandem became instant friends—not an easy thing for Waddell to manage. “They were roommates, drinking buddies, hunting and fishing pals, general partners in crime.”[fn]Levy, 104.[/fn]

Waddell and “Schreck’s” first game together was near perfection. In the second inning, Orioles right fielder Cy Seymour dribbled one past third baseman Lave Cross. On the next pitch, Seymour bluffed a steal. Still in his crouch, Schreck fired a perfect throw to first baseman Harry Davis, who slapped on a tag for the out. In the next inning Waddell set down the Orioles batters on nine pitches, his first documented “perfect inning.”

In the fifth inning, Baltimore’s Wilbert Robinson singled with one out. Trailing 1–0, McGraw, desperate to put a runner in scoring position, sent the 38-year-old catcher on a steal. It wasn’t even close at second base.

In the sixth and eighth innings, Waddell struck out the side. In the bottom of the seventh, he had added an insurance run with a booming double. When he took the mound in the top of the ninth, Waddell gave the crowd a playful wave, yelling “It’s all over, go on home.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] He struck out the final three batters, giving him 13 for the game, in facing the minimum 27 batters. Many of the 2,500 in attendance rushed the field and hoisted him onto their shoulders, parading him around the ballpark.

In just over three months with Philadelphia, Waddell amassed a 24–7 record. His 2.05 ERA and league-leading 210 strikeouts helped Mack’s Athletics to an 83–53 record, and the 1902 American League pennant (the World Series was one year away from being re-established).

Over the years, the line between fact and fiction has blurred. Waddell’s bizarre antics overshadowed his abundant skills. Waddell’s tenure in Philadelphia was mind-boggling. In six seasons he amassed 131 wins, including four straight 20-win seasons (24, 21, 25, and 27). He led the American League in strikeouts in all six years, and the major leagues in the last five (including an astonishing 349 in 1904, still an American League record).

Befittingly, Waddell was never the same after he suffered a serious shoulder injury when trying to punch a hole through a teammate’s straw hat in September 1905.[fn] It was ritual for any ballplayer that saw a teammate wearing a straw
hat after Labor Day to nab it off the offender’s head and break it. When Waddell saw fellow pitcher Andy Coakley show up at the train station with one, Rube saw an opportunity to have some fun. Coakley tried to conceal the hat, but Waddell would not let that stand in the way. Trying to avoid the charging Waddell, Coakley tossed his bag at Waddell. In the bag was Coackley’s spikes, which hit Waddell in the chin. Waddell’s jovial mood turned to anger. It took several teammates to restrain Waddell from pulverizing the shocked Coakley. In the process, the peace-keeping scrum stumbled over a suitcase, with all the weight coming down on Waddell’s left shoulder. That night, he rode the train with his left arm hanging out the window, taking in a stiff breeze. A few days later he could not raise it above his shoulder. The zip never returned to his fastball, or the snap to his curve.[/fn] He won 15 and 19 games over the next two years (and his last two strikeout titles), before being purchased by the St. Louis Browns in February 1908. He won 19, 11, and three over the next 2 1?2 years in St. Louis, before spending parts of the next four seasons in the minor leagues. In early 1913, he contracted pneumonia after spending hours stacking sandbags in icy waters in flood-ravaged Hickman, Kentucky, where he was living with Joe Cantillon. The pneumonia proved to be a symptom of tuberculosis which lead to his death on April 1, 1914, in a San Antonio sanitarium.

JOE NIESE is a librarian and member of the Society for American Baseball Research. He has written several articles on baseball’s Deadball Era. His first book, “Burleigh Grimes: Baseball’s Last Legal Spitballer” was published in Spring 2013 by McFarland Press.

Sources

The Daily Northwestern (Oshkosh, WI)

The Decatur Review (Decatur, IA)

Kenosha Evening News (Kenosha, WI)

Milwaukee Sentinel (Milwaukee, WI)

One controversial aspect of Rube Waddell’s career, while he was still playing and a century later, is what happened during the last month of the 1905 season that resulted in his missing the World Series. This was the first played by Philadelphia and would be his one opportunity to pitch on the grand stage.

A story has been told about a bit of horseplay when Waddell tried to destroy the straw hat worn by Philadelphia Athletics teammate Andy Coakley at the train station in Providence, Rhode Island, on September 8, 1905, resulting in Rube injuring his shoulder, causing him to miss most of the last month of the regular season, and the whole World Series versus the New York Giants.

Whether Waddell was actually injured as he claimed, or was bribed to fake an injury, has remained at the core of the controversy. Biographies of Waddell and Connie Mack, his manager, have described it, and it has even been the subject of a mock trial staged at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2008.[fn]Roger I. Abrams and Alan Levy, “The Trial of Rube Waddell,” Seton Hall Journal of Sports and Entertainment Law 19, (2009): 1–30.[/fn] A majority of those who voted on the verdict in this trial acquitted Waddell of the charge of bribery and faking the injury and most writers on the subject have generally taken a similarly sympathetic view.

However, by returning to the newspapers of the period, it is apparent that important evidence has been overlooked that may offer a different view of Waddell and what occurred in 1905. This may burst many of the widely held myths about what is supposed to have happened.

Rube Waddell Before September 8, 1905

Before discussing the final month of the 1905 season, it is useful to review his career.

By 1905 Waddell had established himself as one of the finest pitchers in baseball in the eyes of most observers, second only to Christy Mathewson in terms of greatness. From the time he made his debut with the Athletics at the end of June 1902, he dominated American League hitters. He led the league in strikeouts in 1902 and 1903 and in 1904 he struck out 349 hitters, a post-1900 major league record that lasted until broken by Sandy Koufax 61 years later.[fn]Except as noted, player statistics are from Baseball-Reference.com.[/fn]

Although his strikeout total declined to a league-leading 287 in 1905, that season is generally considered the greatest of his career. He won the AL pitching triple crown. Along with Eddie Plank, he was one of the Athletics’ two most important starting pitchers and also the team’s top relief pitcher.[fn]Baseball-Reference.com names Jim Buchanan of St.Louis as the American League leader in saves in 1905 with two, and Waddell none. A review of the 1905 season indicates that Waddell had at least four. John Thorn, in his book The Relief Pitcher (New York: E.P. Dutton, 1979) also credits Waddell with four and a tie for the league lead. The only other pitchers since 1900 who appear to have won this unofficial quadruple crown are Christy Mathewson of the New York Giants in 1908, and Lefty Grove for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1930.[/fn]

Although Waddell’s pitching skills were apparent from the time he reached the major leagues, he was always a difficult person to handle. First the Louisville-Pittsburgh combination, and then the Chicago team of the National League gave up on him because of his behavior and undependability. Connie Mack, for whom Waddell had pitched in the then minor league American League in 1900, was willing to take another chance on him in 1902 and, for at least a few seasons, was able to tame Waddell’s behavior to a certain degree.

Mack was willing to put up with Waddell’s antics that he would not have tolerated in any other player because of his pitching greatness and his ability to bring fans to ball parks. In 1911 Alfred Spink, the founder of The Sporting News, described Waddell as the greatest crowd draw in baseball history.[fn]Alfred Spink, The National Game (St. Louis: The National Publishing Company, 1911), 160.[/fn]

However, even Mack could not always control Waddell. In 1903, Mack suspended him for the last month of the season for missing practice and pitching for semi-pro teams. Mack would attribute the Athletics’ failure to win the AL pennant that year and missing the chance to play in the World Series to Waddell’s absence.[fn]Paul Proia, Just a Big Kid: The Life and Times of Rube Waddell (Baltimore: Publish America, 2007), 155.[/fn]

Throughout most of the 1905 season, Waddell generally behaved himself. He had an incentive to do so because that season he was under indictment for assault with a deadly weapon.

During the winter of 1904–1905, Waddell lived with his wife’s parents in Peabody, Massachusetts (although, curiously, his wife was living with friends in nearby Lynn). Waddell did little work during that period, preferring to spend his time telling stories about his baseball feats to the locals at a general store. He did receive adulation for putting out a potentially dangerous fire.[fn]Boston Herald, February 9, 1905.[/fn]

One night in February, Waddell returned to his in-laws’ home and announced he was leaving. Newspaper stories of the time indicate that he had been drinking heavily during the previous few days and suggest that he was drunk that night. When his father-in-law inquired about the money for board that he felt Rube owed him, Waddell took a flat iron and beat the man about the head, knocking out several of his teeth. When his mother-in-law tried to intervene, he beat her over the head with a chair. The only family member who managed any blows against him was his in-laws’ Newfoundland dog who sunk his teeth into Rube’s pitching arm before he punched the animal, causing it to release him from its grasp. Waddell realized that he was in trouble, and almost immediately grabbed a train out of town before a warrant could be issued for his arrest. He did not stop running until he made it back to Philadelphia.[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Initially, there was concern that if he tried to play in Boston once the season began he would be arrested, but it appears that some arrangement was made whereby any legal proceedings would be held in abeyance until the end of the season, and he pitched there several times in 1905 without hindrance from the law.[fn]It is possible that either Waddell or someone else eventually paid off his
in-laws. When the case finally went to trial in January 1906, they did not appear to testify against him and it was dismissed. (Wilkes-Barre Times, January 12, 1906).[/fn]

Although most descriptions of the 1905 season indicate that Waddell’s trouble began on the train platform on September 8, there were earlier signs that his behavior was again problematic.

In St. Louis in late August, Waddell, after spending the night at an amusement park, showed up at 1 a.m., knocking on Connie Mack’s hotel door. When the manager opened it, he found Rube standing there offering him what was called a “pazzazza” sandwich, consisting of limburger cheese and stale onions. Not surprisingly, Mack turned down the offer and went back to bed.[fn]Philadelphia North American, August 21, 1905.[/fn] Stories of the incident either implied or stated that Waddell had been drinking.[fn]Waddell’s drinking habits were sufficiently known that in late August 1905, Charles Dryden of the Philadelphia North American, upon learning that Rube had been asked to write an advertisement endorsing Coca-Cola as his favorite drink, reported; “We marvel much because a bolt of lightning did not enter the window and strike Mr. Waddell dead in the midst of his mendacious testimonial.” (Philadelphia North American, August 26, 1905.) The advertisement appeared in The Sporting News on September 16, 1905.[/fn]

From then on, Mack kept a close eye on Waddell, taking the berth below Rube’s on the Pullman car when they were traveling, and the adjacent room at hotels.[fn]Philadelphia North American, August 23, 1905[/fn] Mack also appointed the team’s trainer, Frank Newhouse, to be what the newspapers described as Rube’s “keeper.”[fn]Philadelphia North American, August 25, 1905[/fn] Newhouse had been appointed as trainer on the recommendation of Waddell, whom he had befriended when they met on the train when Rube came east from California to join the Athletics in 1902.[fn]Frank Newhouse is often described as the trainer of a boxer who fought under the name Young Corbett. In fact, he was more of a gofer. Corbett’s actual trainer when he was the featherweight champion was Harry Tuthill, the New York Giants trainer in 1905. When Corbett was no longer able to make weight as a featherweight his title was claimed by the boxer Abe Attell who would come to have a more infamous association with baseball of any professional fighter.[/fn] Newhouse’s job to keep Waddell out of trouble meant keeping him from drinking and thwarting attempts to keep him from pitching.

For the rest of the season, Mack gave Newhouse Waddell’s per diem travel money, requiring Rube to ask Newhouse to pay for anything Rube wished to purchase. Waddell made attempts to ditch Newhouse. While the Athletics were playing in Detroit, Mack gave Waddell time off to go fishing, which according to the manager was (along with drinking) the thing he loved most.[fn]Connie Mack, “The One And Only Rube,” Saturday Evening Post, March 14, 1936, 12–13, 106, 108–110.[/fn] Waddell tried to take off without Newhouse knowing it. However Newhouse tracked him down and visited as many places as he could in the area that served alcohol to warn them that Waddell had no money and therefore not to serve him. One hotel did serve Rube beer. When Newhouse found him there, Waddell told the owner to obtain the 30 cents he owed from Newhouse, who refused to pay, resulting in a fist fight that Newhouse, a former fighter, won.[fn]Philadelphia North American, August 27, 1905.[/fn]

Mack may have also been sending a message to Waddell in his treatment of Waddell’s friend, roommate, and favorite catcher, Ossee Schrecongost, whose last name was usually shortened in newspaper stories and box scores to “Schreck.” When, at the end of August, Schreck was in no condition to catch after a drinking binge, Mack decided to suspend him. It was only when the other players, knowing that Waddell did his best work with Schreck, begged Mack to change his mind that Mack relented.[fn]Philadelphia North American, August 27, 1905. Schreck caught almost every inning Waddell pitched in 1905 and when Waddell was called on to relieve, Schreck would enter the game with him.[/fn]

Despite his problematic behavior, Waddell continued to pitch well. On September 5 in Boston, he threw one of the best games of his career. He extended his scoreless inning streak to 43 2?3, and carried a one-hitter into the ninth inning before giving up two runs to tie the score. He ended up losing 3–2 in 13 innings, giving up three hits and eight walks while recording 17 strikeouts. (Cy Young was scheduled to oppose him but sat out due to a sore arm.)

Waddell next pitched on the day he was supposed to have been injured in his scuffle with Andy Coakley, September 8. Coakley had pitched and won the day before. He had been given permission by Connie Mack to spend that night and the next day with his family in Providence, Rhode Island, and to join the team when its train stopped there on its return to Philadelphia after the game.

What Happened on September 8, 1905

Virtually all discussions of Waddell and September 8, 1905, have focused on the purported incident with Coakley. However, another key event in the story, what occurred in the game against Boston that day, has largely been ignored. Biographies of Waddell and Connie Mack and most baseball histories either do not mention it at all, or note it only in passing.[fn]See Proia, Just a Big Kid; Alan H. Levy, Rube Waddell: The Zany Brilliant Life a of a Strikeout Artist (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2000); Fred Lieb, Connie Mack: Grand Old Man of Baseball (New York: G.P. Putnam’s, 1945); Connie Mack, My 66 Years In the Big League (Philadelphia: Winston, 1950); Norman Macht, Connie Mack and the Early Years of Baseball (Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2007). The SABR Baseball Biography Project biography of Waddell incorrectly states that Waddell defeated Cy Young in the game.[/fn]

Waddell started opposite Cy Young, and set Boston down in order in the first inning. In the Boston second, Jimmy Collins led off with a double, followed by a home run by Kip Selbach that went over the head of center fielder Danny Hoffman and rolled to the fence. Waddell appeared to recover, striking out Moose Grimshaw. Hobe Ferris followed with a single that most newspapers attributed to miscommunication between second baseman Danny Murphy and right fielder Socks Seybold.[fn]Philadelphia Inquirer, September 9, 1905.[/fn] Lou Criger then flied to center and Young struck out, ending the inning.

What happened next is a matter of controversy. It is certain that Waddell was pinch hit for in the top of the third, but why this occurred remains unclear. Most newspaper coverage of the game did not immediately offer any specific explanation for Waddell’s removal, choosing to instead focus on Jimmy Dygert’s excellent major league debut in relief. The next day, the Philadelphia Inquirer reported that Waddell had “demonstrated that he was not himself.” Horace Fogel of the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph briefly discussed what had happened, reporting that Waddell “had one of those off days which all pitchers have occasionally. He felt good but for some inexplicable reason could not reach any speed in practice” and that catcher Schreck had noted the problem, but that Waddell thought once he warmed up, he would be all right.[fn]Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, September 9, 1905.[/fn]

Several newspapers subsequently published stories that he was relieved in the September 8 game due to a sore arm.[fn]For example, see Associated Press report in the Richmond Times Dispatch, September 29, 1905.[/fn] Of course, this raises the question: if he already had a sore arm in that game, then how could he have developed it after the purported struggle with Coakley?

There was some difference of opinion as to whether Connie Mack took Rube out of the game or if Waddell removed himself. Newspapers did agree that after he left the game, instead of joining his teammates on the Philadelphia bench, or going to the clubhouse, Waddell sat in the bleachers. This behavior appeared curious even for Waddell. At least one newspaper attributed it to “being ashamed of being knocked out of the box,” certainly a strange explanation considering that Waddell was never noted for either being introspective about or ashamed of any of his behavior, no matter how bizarre, at any time in his life.[fn]Pawtucket Times, September 9, 1905.[/fn]

Some newspapers did comment that it was unusual for Waddell not to finish a game. The Philadelphia Inquirer noted the following day, “That Waddell, the man who always stood by in the hour of distress ready and willing to step into the breech [sic] after others have failed, should himself feel the need of succor is one of the rare incidences of the national pastime.”

It was certainly “rare” for Waddell to be taken out of a game he started in 1905. Until that game, he had finished all but five of his starts:

• Against Boston on July 7, he was struck in his pitching hand in the seventh by a ball off the bat of Freddy Parent. He completed the inning and started the eighth, but swelling in his hand prevented him from continuing and he was relieved.
• In his next start on July 13, he appeared to still suffer from the effects of this injury. Although he gave up four runs in the first inning, Connie Mack did not take him out until the fifth, when he gave up two hits and a walk.
• On August 11 against Cleveland, Mack relieved him in the middle of the sixth inning while losing 5–3.
• On August 20 against St. Louis, Waddell went to field a bunt by Tom Jones. As he bent down, Jones ran into him, hitting Rube behind the ear with his knee and knocking him out.

Even when Waddell appeared to be on the ropes early in a game, Connie Mack always gave him the chance to right himself as in the game on July 13. On August 2 against Chicago, Waddell gave up four walks and a hit and hit a batter in the first inning, resulting in three runs. He proceeded to strike out the next three batters and went on to a complete game victory to put the Athletics in first place.

The most famous example of Mack’s patience with Waddell that year occurred in the second game of the July 4 doubleheader versus Boston when he gave up four hits and two runs in the first inning. Waddell settled down and pitched all 19 shutout innings, beating Cy Young, who also threw a complete game. Each would subsequently describe this as the greatest game of their careers.[fn]The Sporting News, December 16, 1905.[/fn]

If it was Mack’s decision to remove Waddell from the September 8 game, he would seem to have been taking a risk. Chief Bender, who together with Waddell, handled most of the relief duties for the Athletics that season, was ill, leaving the manager limited options. Mack turned to Jimmy Dygert, a spitballer who had joined the team on August 31 from New Orleans of the Southern Association, and had yet to pitch in the majors.[fn]Mack wanted Dygert to join the Athletics by August 31 so he would be
eligible to play in the World Series. This proved to be no easy task as New Orleans was under quarantine for a yellow fever epidemic, and Dygert reported he had to elude inspectors on the train enroute to join the Athletics. (Philadelphia North American, September 7, 1905).[/fn] Dygert gave up one run against Boston the rest of the game, and beat Cy Young in what would be his only win for the Athletics that season.

The Fight with Coakley: Fact or Fiction?

The story of Waddell’s fight with Andy Coakley over his straw hat has become widely accepted. There is much to suggest that it never happened.

Even before the alleged incident on September 8, there were suggestions that attempts might be made to keep Waddell from pitching in the World Series. An article in the September 2, 1905, issue of The Sporting News by a Philadelphia correspondent writing under the name “Veteran,” reported a story from someone described as a gambler and friend of John McGraw, the manager of the New York Giants, that if the Athletics won the pennant, friends of McGraw would finance a fishing trip for Waddell that would last until the end of the series, causing Waddell to miss it.[fn]The identity of “Veteran” remains a mystery. Other Sporting News correspondents at the time reported that it was unknown to them. I believe it was most likely Horace Fogel, who was noted to be its correspondent at various times during the first decade of the twentieth century, though I was unable to find specific evidence that he was “Veteran” in 1905. If it was Fogel, he was being disingenuous, for several times he praised Fogel’s writings. I thank Norman Macht and Steve Steinberg for their opinions on Veteran’s identity.[/fn]

Skepticism about the straw hat story is supported by the prominent identities of the reporters who expressed doubt about its veracity. Although Joseph Vila of the New York Sun is often credited as most vocal in doubting the story and raising the possibility that Waddell may have been bribed, in reality Horace Fogel of the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph and Charles Dryden of the Philadelphia North American were the most vociferous. Fogel and Dryden were traveling with the Athletics, and would have had first hand knowledge if a fight had occurred.[fn]Dryden, who only reported on baseball, had traveled with the team for most of the season, while Fogel only did so after September 1. Contrary to reports that it was Vila who initiated and spread the rumor about Waddell being bribed, in The Sporting News of October 7, 1905, he actually expressed skepticism about it, asking “does anybody believe the story that ‘Rube’ Waddell has been fixed to keep out of the world’s [sic] series?”[/fn]

Dryden and Fogel were also the first to report the straw hat incident. Dryden, in the Philadelphia North American of September 10, in explaining why Waddell had been unable to relieve Bender in the second game of a double header when the Philadelphia fans had called for Rube, wrote: “In a straw hat smoking tournament on the way here from Boston the noble southpaw jammed his pitching shoulder.” Fogel would fill in some details in the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph on September 13. In this initial telling, the event occurred on the platform at the Providence train station when Waddell tried to grab Coakley’s hat and bumped his shoulder against the side of the train.

Both Fogel and Dryden began to express doubt about the story when they accompanied the Athletics to New York for a three-game series on September 19–20 and found its gambling and sporting circles awash with stories that arrangements had been made to ensure that Waddell would not pitch in the World Series. Bets were being taken on his not pitching.[fn]The Sporting News, September 30, 1905.[/fn]

In a September 20 article in the Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, Fogel wrote that Mack and most of the Athletic players “are beginning to feel a bit dubious about there being much if anything the matter with Waddell’s shoulder.” The next day, devoting virtually his whole column to it, he stated that Mack had never believed the Coakley fight story. That New York men without any apparent inside knowledge of Waddell’s health could be so certain that he would not be able to pitch in the World Series was especially unsettling to Fogel.

Waddell wrote a response to Fogel that was published in the Evening Telegraph on September 22, stating that his shoulder was injured, and emphatically denying that he had been bribed.[fn]Philadelphia Evening Telegraph, September 22, 1905.[/fn] Fogel expressed appreciation for Waddell’s willingness to address the rumors, but noted that Rube held the key to terminating them; all he had to do was to start pitching again. Mack did at least publicly defend Waddell and stated his belief in the straw hat fight story and that Waddell had perspired as a result of it and “caught a cold” in his shoulder.[fn]Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 28, 1905.[/fn]

What also troubled both Fogel and Dryden was that details of the incident with Coakley varied from telling to telling. In some, it was in the train station in Providence, in others, on the platform or on the train. Dryden even noted that some reports placed it in the station at New London, Connecticut rather than Providence.[fn]Philadelphia North American, September 21, 1905.[/fn]

Even more disconcerting was that they were unable to find any of the Athletics or apparently anyone else who reported witnessing a fight that supposedly had occurred in a public place. And, although Waddell stated that it had happened, there is no record of the one other person who could have verified it, Coakley himself, making any statement at the time. In fact he made no public comment at all about it until almost 40 years later when, in 1943, he did so in response to a letter from J.G. Taylor Spink, the publisher of The Sporting News, who was writing a series of articles on Rube Waddell, asking about the incident.[fn]J.G. Taylor Spink, “Rube Waddell,” Baseball Register (St. Louis, C.C. Spink & Son, 1944), 5–21.[/fn]

Spink could have saved the effort as Coakley’s rendition of the event was essentially the same as that provided by Connie Mack in his syndicated memoir My Fifty Years in Baseball, published in 1930, and in an article he published on his relationship with Waddell in the Saturday Evening Post in 1936.[fn]Connie Mack, “My Fifty Years in Baseball,” Albany Evening News, October 5, 1930; Mack, “The One And Only Rube.”[/fn]

Nowhere in contemporary accounts or in either of these remembrances did Mack explain why Waddell was removed from the game of September 8. Mack noted in the 1936 article that some reporters thought that he might have been behind creating a phony story so Waddell could sit out until the World Series to “throw the Giants off guard,” but denied there was any truth to this or to the rumors that gamblers had gotten to Waddell.

If Coakley lied in his response to Spink, he would certainly have had good reason. If he had given a significantly different story from Mack’s, he would have appeared to be accusing his former manager, who by 1943, was already considered the grand old man of baseball, of either being unaware of what was going on with his team, or of participating in a cover-up of a possible bribe.

Also, if Coakley had admitted to knowledge of such a cover-up, he might have faced his own problems. Kennesaw Mountain Landis was still the commissioner of baseball at the time, and anyone closely associated with the game would have been well aware of his banning of Buck Weaver from organized ball for life for not reporting knowledge of the 1919 World Series game fixing, although there was no evidence Weaver had participated in it. When he replied to Spink, Coakley was already 60 years old and was not going to play again, but he was the baseball coach at Columbia University (where he coached for another nine years before retiring after 37 seasons), and had an insurance business that might have also suffered.[fn]If Coakley was willing to go along with Connie Mack on perpetuating a
falsehood, it would not have been the first time he did so. In September 1902, a pitcher named McAllister made his debut with the Athletics. After the season, it was revealed that he was really Coakley, then one of the top collegiate pitchers in the country. When the college he was attending, Holy Cross, learned of his playing professional ball, it terminated his collegiate athletic eligibility. Mack admitted he had known McAllister’s true identity all along and was trying to protect Coakley’s eligibility through the use of the pseudonym. That Mack had no compunction about participating in future falsehoods is indicated by his similar willingness to have Columbia University student Eddie Collins play under the name Sullivan in 1906. For details on Coakley’s post-major league career, see his obituary in The New York Times, September 28, 1963.[/fn]

Perhaps the most suspicious of all events occurred at the end of September. By then, Mack had publicly stated that he had become disgusted with Waddell who, instead of taking care of himself, was spending most of his time drinking. Determining that Waddell was no longer of any benefit to the team that season, Mack informed him: “I won’t need you anymore Rube. You can spend the rest of the season among the breweries or any where you want.”[fn]Philadelphia North American, October 1, 1905.[/fn]

Within one to two days, Waddell suddenly announced that while he was shaving, he had heard something click in his left shoulder, and he was able to move it freely without any pain. He immediately rushed to the Athletics’ ball park to convey the good news, bringing his wife with him so she could confirm that she had also heard the click.[fn]Philadelphia North American, October 1, 1905. Some newspaper stories reported that Waddell went to his doctor first.[/fn]

Despite the reports that Waddell had regained his health, Mack remained skeptical. It appears that this may have less to do with how Rube was throwing the ball and more that his manager had lost trust in him. Waddell’s teammates believed he was physically able to pitch in the World Series. Team captain Lave Cross, on the opening day of the series said: “I’d like to clock him [Waddell] on the head with a bat. His work out yesterday on the quiet had both speed and curves. There is no reason why he should not pitch. He’s jeopardizing our chances of getting the bulk of the money, and is not there for the team.”[fn]New York Evening World, October 9, 1905.[/fn]

One final factor suggests the straw hat story was false. In September 1920, in the wake of the indictment of the eight White Sox players for fixing the 1919 World Series, Horace Fogel filled in more details of his story about 1905. He told of how a New York politician with significant financial interests in the gambling business, “Little Tim” Sullivan, and two New York gamblers met Waddell in a Boston hotel during the September road trip and offered him $17,000 to fake an injury and sit out the World Series.[fn]Philadelphia Inquirer, September 30, 1920.[/fn] Because the Athletics left Boston following the game of September 8, if such an episode had occurred, it would have had to take place before that game. Thus, if Waddell faked an injury to force his leaving the game that day, it would have fit in with the timeline provided by Fogel, and not the story involving Coakley and the straw hat.

That Fogel did not reveal these details until 1920 raises questions about the veracity of the claims. However we might understand this better in light of an account from 1908. The New York Giants and Chicago Cubs tied for the National League lead on October 7, 1908, at the end of the season. The teams met on October 8, 1908, in New York for a scheduled make-up game that would decide the pennant. It was later revealed that the game’s umpires were approached and offered a bribe. Fogel reported in 1908 that he consciously had withheld details from 1905 stories to prevent him or his paper from being sued for libel. Fogel wrote in 1908, “Let’s wait and see what the present investigation will show, and if I deem it necessary to take a hand in it for the good of base ball, I’ll tell a few things I know, later.”[fn]The Sporting News, December 17, 1908.[/fn]

It was not only the writers, Mack, and his teammates who grew skeptical that Waddell was in fact injured. Despite Waddell being the most popular of all the Athletic players, Philadelphia fans also began to voice disbelief about Waddell’s injury. During the third game of the World Series in Philadelphia, one fan mocked Waddell by throwing a straw hat onto the field.[fn]New York Sun, October 13, 1905.[/fn]

Two Vexing Questions

There are two questions that have troubled those who believe Waddell was bribed to sit out the World Series:

1. If he was bribed, why have him sit the last month of the season, before the Athletics had captured the AL pennant and were still engaged with the Chicago White Sox?
2. Gamblers benefit by keeping private inside information they have. If Waddell was on the take, what was gained by pretending he was injured which would have prevented him from pitching the Series as well?

While we can never know with any degree of certainty the motives of those who bribed Waddell, if there was a bribe, it is possible to speculate on several that would provide answers to both questions.

As it turned out, the Athletics did not need Waddell to win the American League championship. His sitting out the last month did not markedly imperil its chances. Even when Waddell was out of action, most observers still felt that the Athletics were going to win the pennant. The team was never out of first place during the rest of the season, although for one day, September 27, Philadelphia fell into a virtual tie with Chicago. Furthermore, in mid-September, there were some who thought that while both the Athletics and Giants were the betting favorites to win their respective league pennants, the latter might have had a tougher row to hoe as they faced an extended road trip. It was also noted that Pittsburgh, the Giants’ chief competitor for the pennant, was playing better ball than the White Sox, who were chasing the Athletics.[fn]Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 17, 1905.[/fn]

As to the timing of a possible bribe, baseball historian Steve Steinberg has suggested that one possible explanation is that bets may have been placed on the Giants winning the World Series before the season and that gamblers were making sure that Waddell would not be available to pitch against them.[fn]Steve Steinberg, “Horace Fogel: The Man Who Knew (and Talked) Too Much.” Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, 6 (2012):33–50.[/fn] If this was all bribers cared about, obviously it would not have made any difference when Waddell stopped pitching. Furthermore, having several weeks to observe that he did so would have given them some degree of assurance that he intended to keep his agreement.

An alternative and not necessarily contradictory explanation regards the fact that for gamblers it is not only who wins that is important, but also the odds gamblers will accept. Anyone who could manipulate these would clearly have a significant advantage.

It is important to remember that Waddell was not shut down completely after September 8 and did pitch in three more games that season. On September 27, he relieved Weldon Henley, but was taken out after having difficulty putting the ball over the plate and giving up a hit to the only Detroit hitter he faced. However, in his next appearance on October 6, when the Athletics captured the pennant due to a White Sox loss, he did better, pitching six innings in relief of Andy Coakley versus Washington, although he did give up six runs, while walking five and throwing two wild pitches.

On the surface, Waddell’s performance in that game appeared to be quite poor, but observers actually felt that, apart from diminished control attributed to his being rusty, he pitched well. In its coverage of the game, the Philadelphia Public Ledger the next day noted “he demonstrated that he is the same wonderful mechanism of speed and curves that has gained him a reputation second to none as a pitching marvel. But his work clearly showed his absence from the diamond. He not only lacked confidence, but was as erratic as an unbroken yearling.”

On October 7, the last day of the regular season, Mack started Waddell in the first game of a double header and relieved him after he gave up two runs in the first inning.

Until the World Series began, the public was uncertain whether Waddell would pitch at all. Some newspapers warned their readers against bets on the Series until they knew whether Waddell would be available. On October 9, the opening day of the series, the Cleveland Plain Dealer warned, “To those who wish to wager money on the result of the series or on a single game this is good advice: wait until the teams are lined up before you bet. This is based on the admitted fact that the Athletics will be at least 20 percent stronger if Rube Waddell is able to pitch two or three of the games.” The Philadelphia North American of October 7 would note that after the Athletics had won the pennant the day before, gamblers considering backing the team in the World Series were hesitant until they knew whether Waddell would be able to pitch.

There is also another possible sinister explanation for why Waddell might have been bribed to not only sit out the World Series, but also the final month of the season. If Waddell had pitched effectively in his regular spot in September, the Athletics most likely would have run away with the pennant. Sporting Life expressed an opinion after the season that if Waddell had not sat out during that time, the Athletics would have clinched the pennant at least one to two weeks before the end of the season.[fn]Sporting Life, October 21, 1905.[/fn]

The Giants had won the National League pennant a week before the season end and were rested for the Series. Even before he knew whether the Athletics or the White Sox would win the AL pennant, John McGraw noted that it did not matter. No matter the winner, the players would be worn by the pennant race and the Giants would “just walk in” to the world championship.[fn]Sporting Life, October 7, 1905.[/fn]

The details of the 1905 World Series are beyond the scope of this paper. Many observed at the time the poor play of the Athletics both in the field and at bat. There were undertones that things might not be on the level in the Series, although most observers attributed the poor performance to exhaustion from playing the next to last day of the season before clinching the American League pennant.

After the Series, Ban Johnson, the disappointed president of the American League, said, “It seems to me that the Athletics did not play up to the excellent form they showed toward the close of the American League season. They played with lightning speed then, but there was a noticeable diminution in the rapidity of play this week. Perhaps the defection of Rube Waddell discouraged the players.”[fn]Cleveland Plain Dealer, October 15, 1905.[/fn]

Suspicions that the World Series might not have been on the level were heightened when it was revealed later that the Athletic players and most of the Giants had agreed beforehand to split the players’ share of the receipts 50–50, instead of abiding by the official split of 75 percent for the winners and 25 percent for the losers. The Sporting News felt the need to publish an editorial denying that this should be interpreted as indicating that the players might have not done their best.[fn]The Sporting News, November 11, 1905.[/fn]

Postscript: After the 1905 Season

Despite Waddell’s phenomenal pitching record in 1905, reports appeared during the off-season that Mack was trying to move him to another team. There were stories of him being traded or sold to the Boston Americans or to Cincinnati, but how plausible any such deal might have been is unknown.[fn]Baltimore American, November 21, 1905; Boston Daily Globe, December 31,
1905.[/fn] Mack may have been unable to find anyone willing to give anything close to the value that a star pitcher would warrant if he was able to find any takers at all. Alluding to Waddell’s diminished reputation, Frank Navin, the then secretary and later owner of the Detroit club, stated after the series that he “wouldn’t give 30 cents for Waddell.”[fn]Grand Rapids Press, October 27, 1905.[/fn]

After the season, there were reports that Ban Johnson was trying to have the National Commission, the then ruling body of organized baseball, initiate a formal investigation of the bribery charge, perhaps scaring potential buyers or trading partners away.[fn]Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 8,1906. Johnson may have had suspicions about Waddell’s honesty and tried to distance himself from Waddell even before September 8. In August 1905, at a meeting of the National Commission, he and National League president Harry Pulliam chose all-star teams of the best players at each position in their own leagues. At pitcher, Johnson chose Jack Chesbro over Waddell. Although Chesbro had gone 41–12 in 1904, it is doubtful that by August of the following year many knowledgeable people would have rated him as superior to Waddell. New York Press, September 3, 1905.[/fn]

In his defense of Waddell, Mack stated many times over the years that followed that Rube did not care about money, and that what was most important to him was winning. Many never believed this.[fn]Lieb, Connie Mack, 93.[/fn] Even before the 1905 World Series, Charles Dryden wrote that “Rube Waddell does not care so much for the pennant but he would like to get one of the $50 diamond studded buttons [that the National Commission had promised to members of the World Series winning team]. It can be soaked [a synonym for pawning].”[fn]Philadelphia North American, September, 17, 1905.[/fn] Throughout Waddell’s career there were stories of schemes he invented to wrangle money out of others. That he was chronically short of money is indicated by the fact that even though he received well over $1,000 as his share of the money from the 1905 World Series, by December of that year, he was already asking Connie Mack for money.[fn]Washington Post, December 9, 1905.[/fn]

In later writings, Connie Mack forgave Waddell for being unable to play in the World Series, but Mack’s response afterward was to punish him the only way he could without hurting himself. In 1906, after Waddell’s wife sued him for non-support and desertion, a court required that he show his contract for that season so the amount he had to provide to her could be decided. It showed that the Athletics were paying him a mere $1,200, half of what he had earned in 1905.[fn]Trenton Times, May 4, 1906. For Waddell’s 1905 salary see Proia, Just a Big Kid, 147.[/fn]

Despite the reduction in salary, Mack continued to use Waddell in 1906 much as he had the previous season. For most of the season, Waddell pitched well, starting 6–2 with four shutouts before injuring the thumb on his pitching hand in a carriage accident on May 22. He missed most of the next month, but returned to his pre-injury form until the last month of the season, when he again let his teammates down, going 2–6, a major factor in the Athletics’ failure to challenge for the pennant. He lasted one more season with the Athletics before Mack sold him to St. Louis before the 1908 season, explaining, “While I still consider Waddell a great pitcher, I figure my team has been considerably strengthened by his sale. There was not the best of feeling between Waddell and several of the players, and as harmony is the chief essential to success he was disposed of to St. Louis.”[fn]Chicago Inter Ocean, April 12, 1908[/fn]

Conclusion

It is unlikely we will ever know for certain whether Rube Waddell was bribed to sit out the last month of the 1905 season or that year’s World Series. However, there is a great deal of evidence to suggest that the whole story of his fight with Andy Coakley over a straw hat, and an injury resulting from it, can itself be knocked into another type of hat, the proverbial cocked one.

STEVEN A. KING is a physician specializing in pain management and a clinical professor at the New York University School of Medicine. The primary focus of his baseball research is New York City baseball at the beginning of the twentieth century. His most recent baseball publication was on the myth of the Amos Rusie-Christy Mathewson trade that appeared in the Fall 2012 issue of “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game.”

It was an unlikely time for a post-game riot, even in a baseball-crazy city like Philadelphia. Yet that is exactly what occurred at newly-minted Shibe Park on the afternoon of August 3, 1909. Moments earlier, the hometown Athletics had completed an exciting come-from-behind 10–4 victory to sweep a doubleheader from the Chicago White Sox. The pair of wins served as further notice that this team, fielding a number of young players, was becoming a force to be reckoned with in the American League. The wins that day lifted the record of manager Connie Mack’s charges to 58–38, leaving them a mere two games behind the defending two-time AL champion Detroit Tigers. Not a bad day’s work for a squad that finished in sixth place just one season before. Nonetheless, as the final White Sox out was recorded in the top of the ninth, several hundred Athletics fans, instead of celebrating, rushed the field as others, in the upper tier, threw seat cushions, bottles, and even their straw hats. The target of their anger was veteran umpire Tim Hurst. Only the intervention of several members of the Athletics, including Mr. Mack, and eventually the police, saved Hurst from serious physical harm. Hurst did not know it at the time, but as he was escorted from the field he had just umpired his last game in the major leagues.

The call that served to end Tim Hurst’s storied career in baseball occurred late in the day’s second game. When 23-year-old third baseman Frank Baker, batting with the bases full of Athletics and one out, lifted a fly ball to center field, it started a chain reaction of relay throws that eventually saw A’s second sacker Eddie Collins attempt to advance from first to second. The action that unfolded at that point was described in one Philadelphia newspaper as follows:

It was in the [bottom of the] eighth inning when the White Sox were throwing the ball around in reckless fashion that Collins saw a chance to get to second and availed himself of it, though it were patent to all that he was only safe because [Sox second baseman Jake] Atz dropped the ball. To every one’s surprise Umpire Hurst called him out, claiming that he [Collins] knocked the ball from the Chicago fielder’s hand. As a matter of fact, Atz dropped the ball before Collins reached the bag. What Collins said to Hurst is not known, but it is claimed that when he came over to where the umpire was standing the latter spat at him.1

Hurst’s actions, post call, were more colorfully portrayed by sports writer Jimmy Isaminger of the Philadelphia North American. He was uncertain if Hurst acted intentionally or not, but told readers “it is a fact that the umpire distributed a mouthful of moistened union-made tobacco in the direction of youthful Eddie, who immediately called Tim’s attention to the Board of Health ordinance which prohibits expectorating in public places.”2

Whether Hurst’s actions violated any ordinances or not, it did violate the sensibilities of those locals who later rushed the field and threw Hurst’s way any and all objects close at hand. Not long thereafter it caught the attention of one Byron Bancroft Johnson, the AL’s president and baseball’s major domo. Johnson took special pride in his umpires. He had a short fuse for any indiscretions. The next day, Johnson relieved Hurst from duty indefinitely pending a report of the incident.3 There can be little doubt Hurst was suspended for spitting on Collins and not for his call. The reason for Hurst’s overt reaction to Collins’s protest is of interest. A more intriguing and less analyzed question is: Why had Hurst made what almost everyone agreed was such an egregious call? The question begs a closer look at Mr. Hurst.

According to Ring Lardner, describing the day’s activities for the “bugs” back in Chicago, the call, “[p]robably the worst decision Tim ever made in his life, and that means a pretty bad decision, stopped Philadelphia in the midst of a rally….”4 Lardner seems to be asserting that Hurst’s miscall was just another of many made over the course of his career. The writer, even in these years prior to You Know Me Al and national repute as a writer of short stories and plays, seldom missed a chance to interject some dry wit into his work. This might have been just one more instance. On the other hand, if Lardner truly believed Hurst was a subpar arbiter, it was not an opinion generally shared by others. In fact, it was just the opposite.

Timothy Carroll Hurst was known far and wide for his fairness as a signal caller. He made a bad call every once in a while, but far fewer than most. Tim was born into a large Irish family in Ashland, Pennsylvania, on June 30, 1865. His father had been in the wholesale liquor business. In the 1870s the elder Hurst purchased a horse and wagon and eked out a meager living delivering coal from local mines to customers in the area. A childhood friend had this to say about Tim’s turbulent early years:

As youngsters, Timmie and I worked picking slate in a colliery in Ashland. When we knocked off for lunch, there was always a fight or two between employes [sic] to see who was the better man. That is where Tim learned to handle his fists and got a love for fighting. But Tim was too smart to stay in the mines. He saw there was no future there for him.5

This same friend introduced Hurst to a career in umpiring when the friend’s nose was broken as he umpired a local game. The friend quit on the spot. When no one stepped forward to take his place, Tim, playing second base for one of the teams at the time, volunteered and finished the game as the ump. He received a dollar for his troubles and decided it might be an easy way to make more.6

In 1888, at age 22, Hurst began his professional umpiring career in the Central Pennsylvania League. A stint in the Southern League followed a year later. When that league broke up in mid-season 1889, he transferred his skills to the Western Association. Hurst, who was once described as a “bandy-legged, sorrel-topped, five-foot-nine-inch 175-pound bit of dynamite,” had the familiar combination of a keen Irish wit and the short, sharp temper to go with it.7 During his brief time in the Western Association, he impressed the owners of the Minneapolis Millers so much as an umpire that in June 1890 he was hired as their manager. Hurst’s Millers almost won the league championship, but Hurst fell out with team management and did not return as manager in 1891. Instead, he was hired as an umpire by the National League. He was now in the big time.

Plying his craft at baseball’s top level, Hurst developed a reputation for his dim view of players who questioned his calls, preferring to use his fists to cut arguments short. According to baseball historian David Fleitz, “(t)hey called him ‘Sir Timothy’ for his bearing and ‘Terrible Tim’ for his temper, and few players elected to punch it out with him.”8 That probably cut down on arguments, but he garnered even more respect for his knowledge of the rules and the way he applied them.

Over the years, perhaps owing to his own attempts at a professional boxing career, Hurst developed a reputation for refereeing boxing matches. He was known for calling a fair fight. As his reputation as referee spread he began working some highly publicized fights, mostly during baseball’s off-season but a few in the summer. This opened the door to offers to officiate bike races, running races, and even marathons. The men in charge of baseball were not impressed. In 1895 the magnates rose up and ousted him from the league. However, high-quality umpires like Hurst were difficult to find. After a season in the Eastern League, he was back in the NL, but not for long. On August 4, 1897, Tim was under heavy verbal assault from the fans during a game he umpired in Cincinnati. All at once, what had been mere verbiage turned physical when a beer bottle was heaved from the stands, striking Hurst in the back. He reacted quickly and violently, hurling the bottle back into the stands where it struck a city fireman over one eye and broke his skin. Fans immediately leaped from the stands onto the field and charged the fuming umpire. It took a police cordon to escort him safely from the field. Fortunately, the fireman’s cut did not prove serious. Hurst was charged with assault and battery, paid a fine and served no time in jail. Although he was not dismissed at the time, at season’s end he was quietly shuffled out of the league.

Hurst reappeared in 1898 as manager of the St. Louis Browns, a posting that did not survive a last-place finish. Interestingly, as a manager Hurst was a notorious umpire-baiter.9 His managerial career at an end, Hurst sat out a year then returned to umpire in the National League on a sporadic basis. In 1904 he umpired only one game.10

In 1905 Hurst resurfaced in the American League umpiring for Ban Johnson. The Irishman’s return to baseball was facilitated by Johnson’s desire to field a superior team of umpires who would lend reliability and credibility to the game. According to one writer, “Under Johnson the many-lived umpire was to be reborn again, and this time to a position of authority, dignity and secularity.”11 Hurst liked the sound of it. He enlisted and Johnson had an authority figure to add to a growing list of first-class signal callers, albeit one who carried the risk of an explosion every once in a while.

For the most part, Hurst toed the company line during his AL tenure, adding to his credibility and delighting fans with the spirited way he approached his trade. Nevertheless, there were those occasional bumps in the road. One such incident occurred in May 1906 in New York during a contest with the visiting Washington Nationals when Highlander manager Clark Griffith protested a Hurst call in a close play at first base. Griffith reportedly rushed toward Hurst waving his hands and flinging his cap into the air. Hurst ordered him away. Instead, Griffith moved closer and stepped on Hurst’s shoe. Hurst reared back to strike Griffith, before several players intervened. When Hurst grabbed Griffith by his lapel, intending to lead him off the field, the latter pushed Hurst’s hand aside. As Griffith’s men took control and led him toward the dugout, Hurst again approached and drew his fist back ready to take a swing. Order was eventually restored and Griffith ejected from the game.12 Spotted later with a swollen lip, Griffith denied it came from Hurst.13 Although various reports have Ban Johnson disciplining both men over the incident, Hurst umpired the next day in a ballgame featuring the same teams.14,15

Another significant bump occurred on May 7, 1909, in New York, three months before the spitting incident involving Eddie Collins. This time Hurst’s opponent was Highlander third baseman Kid Elberfeld. The Highlanders beat the Boston Red Sox in the bottom of the 12th, and the play that caused the ruckus occurred in the bottom of the 11th with the teams knotted at three apiece. Elberfeld stood at third with one out when teammate Joe Ward lifted a fly ball to left. Following the catch—or perhaps as one report had it, a little before—Elberfeld steamed for home. In his mind, he had beaten the throw from Red Sox left fielder Harry Niles and the game was over. He was stunned when Tim Hurst called him out, sending the game into yet another inning. Elberfeld had skirmished with Hurst before and was unwilling to back down. He rushed Hurst and jabbed him in the side. Hurst picked up his mask and swung away, striking Elberfeld in the jaw. After several Red Sox players intervened, Hurst tossed Elberfeld from the game.16 Hurst was suspended by Ban Johnson until May 13.17

By August, Hurst was in the eye of the storm that would end his career. To a casual observer, a pattern seemed to be emerging: in both skirmishes the individual called out was irate and argued strenuously with Hurst. The incidents, however, bore significant differences. The first call was made in a tie game. Had Elberfeld been called safe at home, the game was over, his Highlander team victorious. The call at second base in the August contest occurred with Collins’s Athletics team safely ahead, merely seeking to add to what appeared to be an insurmountable 10–4 lead. Where Elberfeld’s game was played right in New York, Hurst’s home base, the Collins dispute occurred in Philadelphia, a train commute for Hurst to his residence. While no one seriously disputed that Elberfeld’s play at the plate was a close call, almost every observer agreed that Jake Atz dropped the ball and Collins was clearly safe at second. Thus, in the first instance as opposed to the second, Hurst’s decision was justifiable.

Even the characteristics and circumstances of the two aggrieved ballplayers differed. Elberfeld had legitimately earned his nickname, “The Tabasco Kid,” by his presence at the center of controversy throughout his career. Two of his more noteworthy skirmishes with umpires occurred in 1906, each involving highly-regarded signal caller Silk O’Loughlin. In the first, The Kid went after Silk with a bat, while in the second, he attempted to kick and spike O’Loughlin in the foot. This second incident, described by The New York Times as “one of the most disrespectful exhibitions of rowdyism ever witnessed on a baseball field,” moved Ban Johnson to suspend Elberfeld for seven games.18 It is not so surprising then, if still not appropriate, that when Elberfeld rushed at Hurst in May 1909, the latter might strike back. On the other hand, three months later, when Eddie Collins attempted to advance to second following Frank Baker’s fly out, he carried none of Elberfeld’s baggage. At the time Collins was only 22, in his first full season as the A’s second sacker. There is no question that Collins played the game with a competitive spirit that at times—particularly on the base paths—seemed aggressive. In fact, only a couple of weeks before the row with Hurst, Collins had vigorously protested to no avail a call by rookie umpire Fred Perrine.19 But throughout a long and illustrious career his disputes over calls were brief and relatively few. Disputes he was involved in did not rise to the level of all-out war as did Elberfeld’s. He would eventually earn the nickname “Cocky” more for an attitude of quiet assurance than for any negative connotation.

Unlike “The Tabasco Kid,” Collins did not physically assault Tim Hurst on August 3, although there were some who said the young infielder kicked dust on Hurst’s patent leather shoes. This might have been enough to set off Hurst, a man known to buff his shoes prior to games until they glared back at him. Nonetheless, those wondering why Hurst, who did not eject Collins, went so far as to spit on him that fateful day need look no further than Sir Timothy’s own words. When he was eventually confronted by Ban Johnson for an explanation of his actions, Hurst supposedly told his boss, “I don’t like college boys.”20 Eddie Collins was a graduate of Columbia University, just one of a growing number of college-educated young men signed to a contract by the refined Connie Mack.

That might explain why Hurst spit on Collins. It does not explain why he made perhaps the worst call of his career. Hurst never spoke about the matter publicly. Thus we will never know the answer for sure. A reasonable explanation can be pieced together by a look at the timing of the call and revealing statements Hurst had made on earlier occasions.

The Collins incident occurred in the bottom of the eighth inning of game two of a twin bill. By this time, Hurst and his colleague Silk O’Loughlin had been umpiring for 17 innings. Game one had taken almost two hours to complete. The second game was heading toward the two-hour mark. (Today a two-hour game is considered short, but not so in 1909.) In the sixth inning the White Sox seemed to be in control, leading 4–0 behind veteran flinger Doc White. Then the A’s turned things around, scoring one in the bottom half of the sixth and five more in the seventh. They had pushed four more runs across by the time Collins tagged up and chugged toward second in the A’s half of the eighth. By that time the game was solidly in hand, the play of little consequence. When Sox second baseman Atz dropped the relay throw representing the third out, Hurst must have groaned. He had seen enough. Instead of calling Collins safe and allowing the inning to continue, he called the base runner out. A half-inning later, the game was over. So, it would prove, was Hurst’s long, storied umpiring career.

Hurst’s intentions that day did not go unnoticed by that keen observer, Ring Lardner. At one point in his game summary he wrote that “Hurst must be thanked for the fact that they are not out there playing yet….” Later he opined that the umpire “to the amazement of every one ruled Collins out at second on the ground that it was almost supper time.”21 This was not a far-fetched assertion regarding Hurst. One time when Hurst’s buddy O’Loughlin complained that an umpire leads a “dog’s life,” Hurst reportedly responded, “Sure it is, Silk, but you can’t beat the hours.” 22 On another occasion Hurst heard that Ban Johnson was interested in ways to shorten ball games. According to umpire Billy Evans, Hurst wrote Johnson suggesting the games be reduced to seven innings.23

It is said that when Hurst umpired in Philadelphia he would often call games due to darkness. The reason: He wanted to catch the commuter train back to his home in New York City.24 According to sports columnist Joe Williams, who called Hurst “the most colorful” of umpires, “Whenever he [Hurst] was assigned to Philadelphia he would always catch the train back to New York after the game. If the lure was particularly fascinating, as it was on the occasion when he was to have refereed a marathon race, he would cut the game short himself.”25

Of course, these statements and stories could be apocryphal, as are so many tales of the diamond’s early days. However, a pattern seemed to emerge that fit perfectly Sir Timothy’s ministrations of the late afternoon of August 3. In the crafty arbiter’s mind he could make a call on Collins at second that affected not a whit the outcome of the game. In so doing he greatly increased his chances for a pleasant night in his cozy abode. When Collins protested and Hurst reacted by spitting at him, it was to be the umpire’s undoing.

On August 5 Ban Johnson indefinitely suspended Tim Hurst pending an investigation into his actions. In announcing the suspension, the league president stated that any final decision would await his receipt of a report of the incident. It is said that neither Eddie Collins nor Connie Mack, who held Hurst in high esteem, ever wanted charges against Hurst.26 The way was clear for Hurst to explain his actions. He never offered an explanation—perhaps because there was none plausible—taking the same road he took when Johnson asked him to explain why he struck Kid Elberfeld in May. Johnson liked Hurst very much, and recognized his ability and valuable service to his infant league. But Johnson could not abide by this sort of repeated conduct from an official. When questioned on August 16 about reports that Hurst was still on the active list, he replied, “Hurst was dropped from the American league [sic] staff immediately after I investigated the charges against him and found them to be true.”27

Reports that Hurst’s unseemly deportment and seeming indifference in 1909 stemmed from an increasing weariness with umpiring were dispelled in 1910 when he returned to the minor leagues, umpiring in the Eastern League. That stint proved his last in baseball, although in 1914 he was mentioned as a candidate to umpire in the outlaw Federal League.28 In the ensuing years from 1911 until his death at age 54 on June 4, 1915, reportedly from ptomaine poisoning following an attack of acute indigestion, he continued to referee boxing matches—many at Madison Square Garden. He also acted as manager and matchmaker of the Garden Athletic Club, and in his last years sold real estate in Far Rockaway, New York.29

In 1946, before election of umpires to the Baseball Hall of Fame was permitted, Tim Hurst was recognized among some 39 managers, executives, sportswriters, and umpires named to the newly instituted Honor Rolls of Baseball. Hurst’s colleague and friend, Hall of Famer Billy Evans, would have seconded the nomination. According to Evans, “While Hurst hardly measured up to Jack Sheridan, Hank O’Day, Tommy Connolly, or Bill Klem as to perfection, he had the implicit confidence of every player in the majors. They accepted his decisions with respect, firmly convinced that he called the plays as he saw them without fear or favor.”30 No doubt Eddie Collins was of that mind as he approached second base in the eighth inning on August 3, 1909. Thus his uncharacteristic reaction when that confidence was shattered, as in turn was the illustrious career of an umpiring legend. What a shame if it all ended for Sir Timothy Hurst because were he to call Eddie Collins safe at second, he might just miss the 5:25 to Grand Central Terminal. 

RICK HUHN is the author of “The Sizzler: George Sisler, Baseball’s Forgotten Great,” as well as “Eddie Collins: A Baseball Biography.” His third book will be released by the University of Nebraska Press in 2014. It details the controversial 1910 batting race in which Ty Cobb and Larry Lajoie vied for a Chalmers automobile. Rick is an organizer and one of the coordinators for SABR’s Hank Gowdy Columbus (Ohio) Chapter.

Notes

1. Philadelphia Record, August 4, 1909.

2. Philadelphia North American, August 4, 1909.

3. “Athletics Cop Two From The Chicagos,” Philadelphia Inquirer, August 5, 1910.

4. Ring Lardner, “Sox Fall Twice; Fans Mob Hurst,” Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1909.

5. Edward Burkett Price quoted in “Terrible-Tempered Tim—Fighting Umpire (Part One),” column “Three and One” by J. G. Taylor Spink, The Sporting News, April 8, 1943, 4, 6.

6. Ibid.

7. Ibid.

8. David Fleitz, “The Green and the Blue: The Irish American Umpire, 1880–1965,” The Baseball Research Journal, 39 (Summer 2010): 28.

9. J. G. Taylor Spink, “Terrible-Tempered Tim—Fighting Umpire (Part Two),” The Sporting News, April 15, 1943, 4, 10.

10. Tim Hurst’s entry in www.retrosheet.com. See also Larry R. Gerlach, “Timothy Carroll Hurst,” Frederick Ivor-Campbell, Robert L. Tiemann, Mark Rucker, eds., Baseball’s First Stars (Cleveland: SABR, 1996), 80.

11. James M. Kahn, The Umpire Story (New York: G. P. Putnam’s Sons, 1953), 50.

12. “Umpire And Player Clash,” The New York Times, May 8, 1906.

13. “Orth Scattered Hits,” Washington Post, May 8, 1906.

14. For example see Eugene C. Murdock, Ban Johnson: Czar of Baseball (Westport CT: Greenwood Press, 1982), 101, citing The Sporting News, May 19, 1906, 4.

15. “Batted Out A Victory,” Washington Post, May 9, 1906.

16. “Cree Drives Home The Winning Run,” The New York Times, May 8, 1909.

17. Sporting Life, May 22, 1909, 11.

18. “Americans In The Lead After Stormy Series,” The New York Times, September 4, 1906.

19. “Browns Hand Out Jolt To Mackmen,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 18, 1909.

20. Murdoch, Ban Johnson, 101-102, citing Kahn, The Umpire Story, 46.

21. Lardner, Chicago Tribune, August 4, 1909.

22. Tim Hurst’s quote is variously reported, including Kahn, The Umpire’s Story, 10.

23. Billy Evans quoted in ibid., 70.

24. Ibid., 41.

25. Joe Williams, “Some Umps Who Stood Out: Hurst, Evans and Klem, They’re All Honest—Sure!” New York World-Telegram, date unclear, Tim Hurst’s clippings file, National Baseball Library, Cooperstown, NY.

26. Tim Murnane, “Murnane’s Baseball,” Boston Globe, August 22, 1909.

27. “Hurst Surely Out,” Boston Globe, August 17, 1909.

28. “Three National League Umpires With Federals,” Los Angeles Times, June 15, 1914.

29. Bill Lee, The Baseball Necrology (Jefferson NC: McFarland, 2003), 194. See also “Old Tim Hurst Dies,” Cleveland Leader, June 5, 1915.

30. Billy Evans quoted in Kahn, The Umpire Story, 43.