Before King George took over the Bronx,
Before the Dodgers and Giants flew west;
Baseball stars sparkled in New York
During seasons that ranked with the best.

Terry Cashman recited many of their names
While singing Willie, Mickey and the Duke;
Players who excelled on lustrous green grass,
Gaining glory, but few piles of loot.

But much of that excellence might not have been noted
Without descriptions from radio and print,
As reporters of news brought light to the sport
And expanded baseball’s big tent.

Men in booths spoke through eastern airways—
Shining stars of New York radio;
Their voices were heard in neighborhood streets
Recounting a pitch, hit, or heave-ho!

There was a Barber (not Sal), and a Hodges (not Gil)
And others of broadcasting fame:
Mel Allen and Harwell, Gowdy and Gleeson,
Vin Scully on the road to acclaim.

Dizzy Dean and “The Scooter” entertained after playing,
Joe E. Brown arrived from movie screens;
Connie Desmond and Doggett, Bob Delaney and Helfer,
Bill Crowley and Jim Woods could set scenes.

Andre Baruch sat among the Flatbush crew,
Nat Albright gave studio re-creations:
From his sound effects and imagination
Came ballpark sounds, even ovations.

Men with typewriters, meanwhile, fed bits and bites
To a public hungry for every phrase;
Morning and evening papers brought vivid accounts,
Further igniting a national craze.

The Herald Tribune, the Daily News,
The World-Telegram and the Times;
Competition reigned, and you could buy all four,
For only a couple of dimes.

The Journal American, the Daily Mirror,
Morning Telegraph and New York Post;
Topics affecting three major league teams
Kept readers absolutely engrossed.

To writers like Dan Daniel, and Drebinger,
Ken Smith and Roger Kahn;
Joe King, Kremenko, Murray and Gross of the Post,
Sports fans were habitually drawn.

Ed Sinclair, Joe Trimble, and Ben Epstein
Had loyal readers, too;
Rosenthal and Effrat, along with a host of their peers,
Shared quotes or an interview.

Willard Mullin attracted readers in a different way
As cartoonist for the World-Telegram and Sun;
By depicting characters from the New York scene—
Most notably his “Brooklyn Bum.”

All of which fed the fame of those men
Who were praised in Cashman’s great song;
A fame dependent upon, in an obvious way,
The cast that kept tagging along.

FRANCIS KINLAW, as a youngster in North Carolina, listened to hundreds of broadcasts of baseball games on New York radio stations for enjoyment but also to overcome a lack of access to the big city’s newspapers. A member of SABR since 1983, he resides in Greensboro, North Carolina, and writes extensively about baseball, football, and college basketball.

Sources

Databases maintained by SABR’s Baseball and the Media Research Committee.

Marc Okkonen, Baseball Memories 1950–1959 (New York: Sterling Publishing Company, 1993)

Stuart Shea (Gary Gillette, Executive Editor), Calling the Game: Baseball Broadcasting from 1920 to the Present (SABR, 2015)

Curt Smith, Voices of the Game (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1987) 

Recent study has revealed the claim of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York to pioneer status, as well as that of Alexander Cartwright to be the game’s inventor, to be suspect if not altogether baseless. I have taken up the latter claim at length in Baseball in the Garden of Eden and will not do so here, except to reiterate my view that baseball was not invented but instead evolved. All the same, however, it had many fathers—prime among them William Rufus Wheaton, Daniel Lucius “Doc” Adams, and Louis F. Wadsworth—each of whom may be credited with specific innovations that were previously credited to Cartwright.1

Adams played ball as early as 1839, the year he came to New York after earning his M.D. at Harvard.2 As he declared to an interviewer in 1896, when he was eighty-one:

I was always interested in athletics while in college and afterward and soon after going to New York I began to play Base Ball just for exercise, with a number of other young medical men. Before that [i.e., before 1839] there had been a club called the New York Base Ball Club, but it had no very definite organization and did not last long. Some of the younger members of that club got together and formed the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, September 24, 1845 [actually September 23]…. About a month after the organization of this club, several of us medical fellows joined it, myself among the number.3

Wheaton testified to an interviewer in 1887, when he was seventy-three, that he had written the rules for that New York Base Ball Club in 1837.4 And Wadsworth, who in 1857 gave to baseball the key features of nine innings and nine men to the side, began to play baseball with the Gotham Club, successor to the New Yorks, in 1852 or 1853.5

While the Knickerbocker was the most enduringly influential of the baseball clubs that sprang up prior to the Civil War, it was not the first to play the game, or the first to be organized, or the first to play a “match game” (one contested between two distinct clubs), or the first to play by written rules which we might regard as governing the “New York Game.” This regional variant, in which we may detect the seeds of baseball as we know it today, was distinct from the Massachusetts or New England Game, also called round ball or, with justice, simply “Base Ball,” a descriptive name that applies, in my view, to all games of bat and ball with bases that are run in the round—and thus not only to the New York Game but also to the versions played in Massachusetts, Philadelphia, and elsewhere.

If the Knickerbockers were not the first to play the New York Game, what clubs preceded them? Perhaps it was the Gymnastics and the Sons of Diagoras, clubs associated with Columbia College, who played a game of “Bace” in 1805, which the former won by a score of 41–34.6 Perhaps it was the unnamed clubs that contested at Jones’s Retreat in New York’s Greenwich Village in 1823.7 It may have been the men of the Eagle Ball Club, organized in 1840 to play by rules similar if not identical to those of the KBBC.8 Or it may have been the Magnolia Ball Club or the New York Club, each of which played baseball among themselves at the Elysian Fields of Hoboken in the autumn of 1843 and, like Doc Adams’s medical fellows, had played in New York City before then.

So, it must be said, had many other men who would become Knickerbockers. They were playing ball at Madison Square and Murray Hill in the early 1840s. Charles A. Peverelly, in his Book of American Pastimes (1866), wrote:

At a preliminary meeting, it was suggested that as it was apparent they would soon be driven from Murray Hill, some suitable place should be obtained in New Jersey, where their stay could be permanent; accordingly, a day or two afterwards, enough to make a game assembled at Barclay street ferry, crossed over, marched up the road, prospecting for ground on each side, until they reached the Elysian Fields, where they “settled.” Thus it occurred that a party of gentlemen formed an organization, combining together health, recreation, and social enjoyment, which was the nucleus of the now great American game of Base Ball so popular in all parts of the United States, than which there is none more manly or more health-giving.9

The Knickerbocker party of course did not wander about northern New Jersey looking for a place to play. They had been preceded by other clubs, both baseball and cricket, in selecting the Elysian Fields; proprietor Edwin Augustus Stevens (in conjunction with his brothers) had already donated the use of his grounds to the New York Cricket Club and the New York Yacht Club, and had offered liberal lease terms to the Magnolia and New York baseball clubs.10

In this support of sport, Stevens was of course encouraging traffic to the Elysian Fields: he controlled the ferries as well as the resort, which included the Beacon Course, a horseracing track opened in 1834. By encouraging play (and gambling) on his turf and along his waters, he created a long-standing model for “traction magnates” to own baseball clubs. Of less interest to scholars have been the naming precedents from clubs in sports that captured the public fancy earlier than baseball, but these provide archaeological hints at how baseball developed within pre-established models.

Both the Knickerbocker and New York names were attached to boating clubs in the early years of the century. Rowing was America’s first modern sport, in that competitions were marked by record keeping, prizes, and wagers, yet also provided spectator interest for those with no pecuniary interest. The first boat club to be organized in the United States was named the Knickerbocker, in 1811.11 As reported in the New-York Mirror of July 15, 1837, by boating veteran “Jacob Faithful,” who borrowed his nom de plume from an 1834 novel by Frederick Marryat:

This club suffered a suspension during the war [that of 1812], and for many years subsequently the boat which bore its name was hung up in the New-York Museum, as a model of the finest race-boat ever launched in this port. Subsequent attempts to revive the association fell through; and though many exertions to form new ones were made, yet the first effort that succeeded in establishing the clubs upon their present footing—viz., building their own boats, wearing a regular uniform, and observing rigid navy discipline, was made in the year 1830, by the owners of the barge Sea-drift, a club consisting of one hundred persons, which could boast of one no less distinguished in aquatick and sporting matters than Robert L. Stevens for its first president, with Ogden Hoffman, Charles L. Livingston, Robert Emmet, John Stevens, and other good men and true for his successors. To this club the rudder of the old Knickerbocker was bequeathed, with the archives thereto pertaining: nor was anything spared by the members, during the first years of their existence as a club, to give spirit to its doings.12

Baseball historians take note. Jacob Faithful was attempting to counter a recent assertion in the New York Evening Star that the Wave Club had been the first “to introduce the amusement.” The new organization of 1830 referenced above was named the “New York Boat Club.”13 The Knickerbocker Boat Club—whose very existence had already, by 1837, been cast into oblivion—did not disappear immediately after the War of 1812. It was still conducting boat races and theatrical benefits in 1820. For its celebrated race of November 1820 against the British-born boat builder John Chambers’ American Star, the Knickerbocker Club’s John Baptis built a replacement for his dry-docked Knickerbocker rowboat of 1811 and called it the New York. The New York was characterized in the press as “having the real Knickerbocker [i.e., American] stamp.”14

Boat racing was nothing short of a craze in the 1820s and ’30s, as recalled by Colonel Thomas Picton in Spirit of the Times, July 7, 1883:

After them [the New York and American Star] came the Atalanta, manned by dry-goods clerks; the Seadrift, by bakers; the Neptune, by Fulton Market butchers; the Fairy, by law students; the Columbia and the Halcyon, by city collegians; the Water Witch, by engine runners; the Red Rover, by Ninth Ward firemen, and so on to the end of a miraculous chapter, utterly exhausting the catalogue of sea-gods, nereids and hamadryads deified in pagan mythology. Boat-builders toiled night and day in the production of racing novelties, and one fair of the American Institute, appropriately held at Castle Garden, was almost entirely consecrated to specimens of their art, painted in all the colors of the rainbow, and in others, emanating from overtaxed imaginations, any man inventing a previously-unknown hue being tolerably certain of immediate canonization.

To my eyes, the boating craze, with its attachment of clubs to specific occupations and classes, parallels intriguingly the baseball craze of the 1850s and ’60s.

The New York Cricket Club that has come down in history was organized at McCarty’s Hotel (the Colonnade) in Hoboken on October 11, 1843, as an American-based answer to the St. George Cricket Club, which filled its playing ranks with English nationals. The first twelve members of the NYCC were drawn from the staff of William T. Porter’s Spirit of the Times, with elected members coming from the sporting set that swirled about that weekly journal, including Edward Clark, a lawyer; William Tylee Ranney, a celebrated painter who lived in Hoboken; and James F. Cuppaidge, an accountant who played as “Cuyp the bowler.”15 Some have speculated on a connection between the New York Cricket Club and the New York Base Ball Club, founded in the same year, but firm evidence has not yet emerged. Picton, the NYCC secretary, wrote in the Clipper:

“The New York, with commendable foresight…established their grounds at Hoboken, to the rear of the Elysian Fields. For a couple of years they played upon a section of the domain of Mr. Edwin A. Stevens but subsequently they removed to a more spacious and accessible locality [the Fox Hill Cricket Ground], just beyond the upper end of the old race track [the Beacon, which closed after the 1845 season].”16

The NYCC continued until 1873, but it had stood on the shoulders of earlier cricket clubs bearing the same name. A club of that name had formed in 1837, the same year as the Gotham or New York Base Ball Club, as referenced in the Wheaton reminiscences below. In 1838 it played a match with the Long Island Cricket Club for $500. One year later it played an anniversary match at its grounds on 42nd Street, near the Bloomingdale Road (today’s Broadway). Coexisting with the St. George Cricket Club for a while, ultimately the NYCC merged with it under the latter’s name, a move that inspired Porter to a nationalistic response in 1843.17

According to Chadwick, a “New York Cricket Club” had been founded in 1808 at the Old Shakespeare in Nassau Street; it lasted but one year. But another one predated that by at least six years, meeting at the Bunch of Grapes, at No. 11 Nassau (corner of Cedar and Pine) in 1802.18 A bit of newspaper digging for this essay has revealed an even earlier New York Cricket Club, going back to 1788.19

A New York Sporting Club for the preservation of game within city limits had been created in 1806.20 Members of the Hoboken Turtle Club—New York’s first club, founded at Fraunces Tavern at the corner of Broad and Pearl streets in 1796—were called to order in June 1820 for “Spoon Exercise.” In sum, the notion of a New York Club devoted to baseball did not arise from nothing.

Accordingly, a series of questions confronts us. If baseball was played by organized clubs prior to the Knickerbockers, which of these might lay fair claim to being the true first—that is, first to organize, first to draft rules for play, and first not only to play a match game but also to endure long enough to influence the game’s development? Reflect that the Knickerbockers are credited with playing the first match game, on June 19, 1846…yet history has not accorded an equivalent laurel to their opponents, the New Yorks, who defeated the “pioneers” by a score of 23–1. If the Knicks could not defeat them on the field, however, they were more successful in eradicating them from the historical record, dismissing the victors as unfairly advantaged “cricketers” or, even worse, “disorganized,” a slap at any purposeful aggregation in the rising age of system.

Peverelly offered this capsule portrait of the New York Nine: “It appears that this was not an organized club, but merely a party of gentlemen who played together frequently, and styled themselves the New York Club.”21 Henry Chadwick, who may have fed Peverelly his line, had written in the Beadle Guide in 1860, “We shall not be far wrong if we award to the [Knickerbockers] the honor of being the pioneer of the present game of Base Ball.”22

In fact, the New York Club not only preceded the Knickerbocker in every innovation cited above, but was also its progenitor. The process by which they became two separate clubs may not have been an altogether amicable split. The understanding of veteran baseball players at the turn of the twentieth century was exceedingly hazy as to who had been a Knickerbocker and who a member of the New Yorks. A widely syndicated article by Albert G. Spalding (it appeared in the Akron Beacon Journal on April 1, 1905) announced the formation of an investigative body to examine the origins of baseball; this has come to be known as the Mills Commission. (This article was read by Abner Graves, who responded to the editor of the newspaper and lifted Abner Doubleday to inventor status.) Extracting from the materials he had received from Chadwick, Spalding named eleven men as Knickerbocker Base Ball Club founders, including: “Colonel James Lee, Dr. Ransom, Abraham Tucker, James Fisher, W. Vail, Alexander J. Cartwright, William R. Wheaton, Duncan F. Curry, E. R. Dupignac Jr., William H. Tucker, and Daniel L. Adams.” The first four of these played with the New York or Gotham club, as did Wheaton and Tucker. The last named, Adams, did not join the Knickerbocker until one month after its founding.

Known as the New York or Gotham or Washington from the 1830s through the 1860s, these clubs were lineally the same, and appear to have gone by several names at the same time. The murky relationship between the original Gothams of 1837, the Washingtons, the New Yorks, the Knickerbockers, and the later Gothams may be summarized below.

Because they regarded themselves as the first organized club, the Gotham Club was also called the Washington. A matter of custom, this practice was said to denote that they were, like the father of our country, first. Another explanation, personally alluring but not yet proven, is that the Gotham’s alternative name referred to its origins with the influential merchant class—mostly butchers and produce brokers—of Washington Market, founded in 1812. Some of these men organized in 1818 as New York City’s first target company (for archery and riflery), which they named the Washington Market Chowder Club.23 It survived all the way through the Mexican War into the next decade. The Tribune reported on November 29, 1850:

Washington Market Chowder Club. A company bearing the above name, composed, we understand of the butchers of Washington Market, passed our office yesterday morning on a target excursion, accompanied by Dodsworth’s Band. They were very numerous, and fine looking body of men. And it would be indeed surprising that any company composed of butchers should be anything else than fine looking; that occupation embraces the most robust and hardy men in the city.

Many in the meat trade went on to become political wheeler-dealers and sporting men (not sportsmen), from Bill “the Butcher” Poole—whose father had been a Washington Market butcher before him, with his stand occupying the same place—to James McCloud, the butcher and pool-seller who facilitated the Louisville game-fixing scandal of 1877.

St. George Cricket Club at Hoboken, New Jersey, 1861. Note the child prodigy George Wright, standing at center.

The weekly New York Illustrated offered a colorful capsule of the Washington Market in 1870:

Flour, meal, butter, eggs, cheese, meats, poultry, fish, cram the tall warehouses and rude sheds, teeming at the water’s edge, to their fullest capacity. Fruit-famed, vegetable-renowned Jersey pours four-fifths of its products into this lap of distributive commerce; the river-hugging counties above contribute their share, and car-loads come trundling in from the West to feed this perpetually hungry maw of the Empire City. The concentration of this great and stirring trade is to be met with at Washington Market. This vast wooden structure, with its numerous out-buildings and sheds, is an irregular and unsightly one, but presents a most novel and interesting scene within and without. The sheds are mainly devoted to smaller stands and smaller sales. Women with baskets of fish and tubs of tripe on their heads, lusty butcher-boys lugging halves and quarters of beef or mutton into their carts, pedlars of every description, etc., tend to amuse and bewilder at the same time. Some of the produce dealers and brokers, who occupy the little box-like shanties facing the market from the river, do a business almost as large as any of the neighboring merchants boasting their five-story warehouses.24

This Gotham Base Ball Club pin, the only example known, belonged to Henry Mortimer Platt, who had played a single match game with the club in 1854. The three men in a tub refers to an ancient Mother Goose rhyme: “Three wise men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl,” it went; “if the bowl had been stronger, then my rhyme had been longer.”

At some point in the early 1840s the Gotham club was renamed the New York Ball Club, retaining most if not all of its Gotham members. The New Yorks then spun off the Knickerbockers, as Wheaton relates in the 1887 interview offered verbatim below. The Gotham, meanwhile, continued to play ball among themselves from 1845 to 1849, just as the Knickerbocker and Eagle clubs appear to have done. In 1850 those Gotham and New York members who had not attached to the Knickerbockers in Hoboken reconstituted themselves as, yet again, the Washingtons, playing at the Red House Grounds (“a most comfortable ‘asylum for distressed husbands,’” offered Spirit of the Times) at Second Avenue and 105th Street in New York.

In 1851 this Washington Base Ball Club challenged the Knickerbockers to match games that have been preserved in the historical record. In 1852 the club reverted to its old name of Gothams, “consolidating with” the Washingtons.25

Admittedly, this is a serpentine path. Let me now bring in William Rufus Wheaton to help fill in the story. Born in 1814, Wheaton attended New York’s Union Hall Academy, at the corner of Prince and Oliver streets, near Chatham Square and the racket court and handball alley at Allen Street, which he appears to have frequented. He read law with the notable attorney John Leveridge, passed the bar in 1836, was active in the New York 7th Regiment, and in 1841 was admitted to practice in the Court of Chancery and the Supreme Court of New York. His legal training, more than that of any other original Knick mentioned as a “father of baseball,” equipped him to codify the venerable if still anecdotal playing rules.

Wheaton was a solid cricketer as well as a baseballist. He umpired two baseball games played between the New York and Brooklyn clubs on October 21 and 24, 1845, both of which were played eight to the side and reported in the press, with accompanying box scores. He recruited members for the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club, as Peverelly noted. He was the club’s first vice president. Although paired with the tobacconist William H. Tucker as the entirety of the Knickerbocker Committee on By-Laws, Wheaton appears to have been the one who truly wrote the rules that were formalized on September 23, 1845. Before that, by his own account, he drew up the rules for the Gotham club of the 1830s, which the Knickerbockers adopted with little change aside from repealing the Gotham provision for an out to be recorded by a catch on the fly.

By the spring of 1846, however, barely six months after the founding of the Knickerbocker Club, Wheaton resigned. We do not know the circumstances. On June 5 of that year, the Knickerbockers, not yet one year old, elected their first honorary members, forty-nine-year-old James Lee and fifty-three-year-old Abraham Tucker, both of whom had been Gothams. Wheaton was not accorded such an honor.26 He left the Knickerbockers and returned to active play at cricket, going on to win a trophy bat for highest score in a match of the New York Cricket Club in October 1848.27

On January 28, 1849, a month before Alexander Cartwright’s departure from New York, Wheaton embarked for California in a speculative venture called the New York Mining Company, in which he was one of a hundred gold-besotted souls who purchased and outfitted a ship, the Strafford, for what would be a 213-day journey to San Francisco around Cape Horn. Although he returned east upon occasion, he made his substantial business and political career in the West.

On Sunday, November 27, 1887, an “interesting history” appeared on page fourteen of the San Francisco Examiner. It was entitled “How Baseball Began—a Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It.” This interview with an unnamed “old pioneer,” undoubtedly Wheaton, lay buried in the microfilm archives until 2004, when Randall Brown published extensive excerpts from it in his landmark article, “How Baseball Began,” in SABR’s National Pastime.28 Here is the entirety of the Examiner piece, with variant spellings and styles intact:

HOW BASEBALL BEGAN 

A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It.

PLAYED FOR FUN THEN. 

The Game Was the Outgrowth of Three-Cornered Cat, Which

Had Become Too Tame.

Baseball to-day is not by any means the game from which it sprang. Old men can recollect the time when the only characteristic American ball sport was three-cornered cat, played with a yarn ball and flat paddles.

The game had an humble beginning. An old pioneer, formerly a well-known lawyer and politician, now living in Oakland, related the following interesting history of how it originated to an EXAMINER reporter:

“In the thirties I lived at the corner of Rutgers street and East Broadway in New York. I was admitted to the bar in ’36, and was very fond of physical exercise. In fact we all were in those days, and we sought it wherever it could be found. There were at that time two cricket clubs in New York city, the St. George and the New York, and one in Brooklyn called the ‘Star,’ of which Alexander Campbell, who afterwards became well known as a criminal lawyer in ‘Frisco, was a member. There was a racket club in Allen street with an inclosed court. [A note in the Clipper on October 23, 1880, evokes the period: “In olden times Chatham square used to be an open meadow or common, and was the play-ground of the boys of this city.  Baseball was the favorite game played on the square, but it was then a simple pastime, with flat sticks or axe-handles for bats, and yarn balls. Occasionally a boy, more lucky than the rest, would bring on the ground a ball made of a sturgeon’s nose, procured from the racket court in Allen street, where it had been driven over the wall by a rash blow.”]

[“]Myself and intimates, young merchants, lawyers and physicians, found cricket to[o] slow and lazy a game. We couldn’t get enough exercise out of it. Only the bowler and the batter had anything to do, and the rest of the players might stand around all the afternoon without getting a chance to stretch their legs. Racket was lively enough, but it was expensive and not in an open field where we could have full swing and plenty of fresh air with a chance to roll on the grass. Three-cornered cat was a boy’s game, and did well enough for slight youngsters, but it was a dangerous game for powerful men, because the ball was thrown to put out a man between bases, and it had to hit the runner to put him out. The ball was made of a hard rubber center, tightly wrapped with yarn, and in the hands of a strong-armed man it was a terrible missile, and sometimes had fatal results when it came in contact with a delicate part of the player’s anatomy.”

THE GOTHAM BASEBALL CLUB.

“We had to have a good outdoor game, and as the games then in vogue didn’t suit us we decided to remodel three-cornered cat and make a new game. We first organized what we called the Gotham Baseball Club. This was the first ball organization in the United States, and it was completed in 1837. Among the members were Dr. John Miller, a popular physician of that day; John Murphy, a well-known hotel-keeper; and James Lee, President of the New York Chamber of Commerce. To show the difference between times then and now, it is enough to say that you would as soon expect to find a Bishop or Chief Justice playing ball as the present President of the Chamber of Commerce. Yet in old times everybody was fond of outdoor exercise, and sober merchants and practitioners played ball till their joints got so stiff with age they couldn’t run. It is to the oft-repeated and vigorous open-air exercise of my early manhood that I owe my vigor at the age of 73.

“The first step we took in making baseball was to abolish the rule of throwing the ball at the runner and order that it should be thrown to the baseman instead, who had to touch the runner with it before he reached the base. During the regime of three-cornered cat there were no regular bases, but only such permanent objects as a bedded boulder or an old stump, and often the diamond looked strangely like an irregular polygon. We laid out the ground at Madison square in the form of an accurate diamond, with home-plate and sand-bags for bases. You must remember that what is now called Madison square, opposite the Fifth Avenue Hotel, in the thirties was out in the country, far from the city limits. We had no short-stop, and often played with only six or seven men on a side. The scorer kept the game in a book we had made for that purpose, and it was he who decided all disputed points. The modern umpire and his tribulations were unknown to us.”

HOW THEY PLAYED THEN.

“We played for fun and health, and won every time. The pitcher really pitched the ball and underhand throwing was forbidden. Moreover he pitched the ball so the batsman could strike it and give some work to the fielders. The men outside the diamond always placed themselves where they could do the most good and take part in the game. Nowadays the game seems to be played almost entirely by the pitcher and catcher. The pitcher sends his ball purposely in a baffling way, so that the batsman half the time can’t get a strike [meaning “a hit”] or reach a base. After the Gotham club had been in existence a few months it was found necessary to reduce the rules of the new game to writing. This work fell to my hands, and the code I then formulated is substantially that in use to-day. We abandoned the old rule of putting out on the first bound and confined it to fly catching. The Gothams played a game of ball with the Star Cricket Club of Brooklyn and beat the Englishmen out of sight, of course. That game and the return were the only two matches [i.e., games with other clubs] ever played by the first baseball club. [NOTE: These undoubtedly refer to the contests of October 1845.]

“The new game quickly became very popular with New Yorkers, and the numbers of the club soon swelled beyond the fastidious notions of some of us, and we decided to withdraw and found a new organization, which we called the Knickerbocker. For a playground we chose the Elysian fields of Hoboken, just across the Hudson river. And those fields were truly Elysian to us in those days. There was a broad, firm, greensward, fringed with fine shady trees, where we could recline during intervals, when waiting for a strike [i.e., a turn at bat], and take a refreshing rest.”

LOTS OF EXERCISE AND FUN.

“We played no exhibition or match games, but often our families would come over and look on with much enjoyment. Then we used to have dinner in the middle of the day, and twice a week we would spend the whole afternoon in ball play. We were all mature men and in business, but we didn’t have too much of it as they do nowadays. There was none of that hurry and worry so characteristic of the present New York. We enjoyed life and didn’t wear out so fast. In the old game when a man struck out[,] those of his side who happened to be on the bases had to come in and lose that chance of making a run. We changed that and made the rule which holds good now. The difference between cricket and baseball illustrates the difference between our lively people and the phlegmatic English. Before the new game was made we all played cricket, and I was so proficient as to win the prize bat and ball with a score of 60 in a match cricket game in New York of 1848, the year before I came to this Coast. But I never liked cricket as well as our game. When I saw the game between the Unions and the Bohemians the other day, I said to myself if some of my old playmates who have been dead forty years could arise and see this game they would declare it was the same old game we used to play in the Elysian Fields, with the exception of the short-stop, the umpire, and such slight variations as the swift underhand throw, the masked catcher and the uniforms of the players. We started out to make a game simply for safe and healthy recreation. Now, it seems, baseball is played for money and has become a regular business, and, doubtless, the hope of beholding a head or limb broken is no small part of the attraction to many onlookers.”

***

The scorebook that Wheaton referenced, along with the Gotham by-laws and playing rules, was not a figment of his aged imagination. Gotham shortstop Charles C. Commerford wrote to Henry Chadwick in 1905 that the first baseball game he saw (he played in the 1840s and 1850s) was played by the New York Club, which “had its grounds on a field bounded by 23rd and 24th streets and 5th and 6th avenues.” Commerford would have seen this game just prior to the fall of 1843, when the New York Ball Club moved its playing grounds to Hoboken. “There was a roadside resort nearby [the Madison Cottage] and a trotting track in the locality. I remember very well that the constitution and by-laws of the old Gotham club, of which I became a member in 1849, stated that the Gotham Club was the successor of the old New York City Club.”29

Commerford added, in a 1911 letter to the New York World: “There was always some little contention between the Knickerbocker Club and the Gotham Club as to the date of organization. The Knickerbockers claimed that they were the first to organize and the Gothams claimed priority, as the New York Club was merged into the Gotham and the former (New York) always insisted that they were the first to organize as such.”30

To provide additional gloss on Wheaton’s reminiscence, the games cited above, in which the Gothams “beat the Englishmen out of sight,” were the very same games recorded in the press as pitting New York against Brooklyn in late October 1845. These were the last two of three games played between representatives of the two cities in that month, although we cannot say for certain that the first game was played by the same clubs as the latter two, as no box score survives to identify its contestants.

The Knickerbockers played their first recorded game, an intrasquad contest, in that month as well. On October 6, seven Knicks won by a count of 11–8 over seven of their fellows in three innings. Wheaton was the umpire. William H. Tucker scored three of the losing squad’s eight runs.31 Like Wheaton and other Knickerbockers, he had been a player with the New York Base Ball Club and maintained his tie to them, indeed playing in the two formal matches of the New Yorks with the Brooklyn Club on October 21 and 24 of 1845, a month after he had helped to form the Knicks. In The Tented Field: A History of Cricket in America, author Tom Melville pointed to an even earlier contest between Brooklyn and New York clubs, played on October 10 and reported in the New York Morning News.32 Research more than a decade later has revealed a somewhat fuller account in the obscure and short-lived newspaper the True Sun:

The Base Ball match between eight Brooklyn players, and eight players of New York, came off on Friday on the grounds of the Union Star Cricket Club. The Yorkers were singularly unfortunate in scoring but one run in their three innings. Brooklyn scored 22 and of course came off winners.33

Many of the early New York baseballists had cut their teeth on cricket, and this was true of the Brooklyn players as well. In the game of October 21, conducted at the Elysian Fields, the eight players of the New York club won handily. They did so again in the game three days later, played at the grounds of the Union Star Cricket Club, opposite Sharp’s Hotel, at the corner of Myrtle and Portland Avenues near Fort Greene. The scores were, respectively, 24–4 and 37–19. On both these occasions the Brooklyn baseballists included established cricketers John Hines, William Gilmore, John Hardy, William H. Sharp, and Theodore Forman.34 Their lineup appears to have been identical for the two games, as the Ayers in the October 21 box score and the Meyers of October 24 may be alternative renderings of the same individual. The other seven Brooklynites match up.

For me, the New York Base Ball Club second anniversary game of November 10, 1845, reported in the New York Herald on the following day, has much in common with the purported “first match game” of June 19, 1846, while the games of October 1845, particularly the latter two, seem to be true match games between wholly differentiated clubs. It could be argued—I certainly would—that the Knickerbockers played no match games until they met the Washington club on June 3, 1851, a game the Knicks won by a count of 21–11. Look at the cast of characters in the Herald’s account of the anniversary game.

NEW YORK BASE BALL CLUB: The second Anniversary of this Club came off yesterday, on the ground in the Elysian fields. The game was as follows:

J.M. Marsh, Esq., Umpire and Scorer

After the match, the parties took dinner at Mr. McCarty’s, Hoboken, as a wind up for the season. The Club were honored by the presence of representatives from the Union Star Cricket Club, the Knickerbocker Clubs, senior and junior, and other gentlemen of note.35

Several interesting things emerge from this notice of the game. Prominent Knickerbocker names are present—Wheaton, Tucker, Cone, Clair (Clare). So too are Gotham players of prominence—Lalor, Murphy, Johnson, Winslow, Case. The Davis who plays here and in the game of June 19, 1846, is not the Knickerbocker James Whyte Davis, who played opposite him in at least one contest after J. W. Davis’s entrance on the scene in 1850. Venn is Harry Venn, celebrated Bowery icon and proprietor of the Gotham Cottage (a billiard and bowling saloon) at 298 Bowery, longtime clubhouse to the Gotham BBC. Gilmore may well be the Union Star cricketer who played baseball with the Brooklyns on October 21 and 24.

The game of November 10 was played nine to the side, clearly to 21 runs or more in equal innings, a rule that may have been invoked only for formalized contests. The two sides were unnamed. While the New Yorks were celebrating their second year as an organized club, on another field in Hoboken that very same day, the Knickerbockers were playing an intramural match all their own, eight to the side.

So who were these mysterious NYBBC players, so important to baseball’s development yet nearly invisible in the shadow of the Knickerbocker Club? Let me supply a brief record with identifications for a few major figures. An addendum to this essay will portray, in a more perfunctory manner than it deserves, the reconstituted Gotham Club from 1852 until it drifted into inconsequence after the professionals formed their league in 1871. Someone ought to write a book.

***

According to Peverelly, the Gotham Base Ball Club of New York was organized early in 1852, with a mysterious Mr. Tuche as its first president. In his Book of American Pastimes he treated the Washington Base Ball Club as a separate entity, supplying slim details of their two matches with the Knickerbockers on June 3 and 17, 1851. For the first, which the Knicks won by a count of 21–11 in eight innings at the Red House Grounds, all that he had was a line score (both games went unreported in the press). For the second game, which the Knicks won 22–20 in ten innings, he listed the Washington players, several of whom we recognize as New York Base Ball Club players from the 1845 anniversary game and the purported match game of June 19, 1846: William. H. Van Cott, Trenchard, Barnes, William Burns, C[harles] Davis, Robert Winslow, Charles L. Case, Jackson, Thomas Van Cott. Peverelly also lists the officers of the Gotham Club since 1856 and describes the club uniform of ten years after as “a blue merino cap, with a white star in the centre; white flannel shirt, with red cord binding; blue flannel pants, red belt, and white buckskin shoes.”

This Gotham Base Ball Club pin, the only example known, belonged to Henry Mortimer Platt, who had played a single match game with the club in 1854. The three men in a tub refers to an ancient Mother Goose rhyme: “Three wise men of Gotham went to sea in a bowl,” it went; “if the bowl had been stronger, then my rhyme had been longer.”

When the Gothams met the Knicks on July 1, 1853, a game interrupted by rain and resumed on the 5th, their players included: (William) Vail, W. H. Van Cott, Thomas Van Cott, (Robert) Winslow Sr., (Robert) Winslow Jr., Jonathan (John) Lalor, Reuben H. Cudlipp, and two highly skilled new players—Joseph C. Pinckney and Louis F. Wadsworth, both of whom would soon leave the club for greener pastures, perhaps lured by emoluments. Another Gotham with a vagabond temperament was second baseman Edward G. Saltzman, who in the spring of 1856 relocated his jewelry trade to Boston. With Brooklynites Augustus P. Margot and Richard Busteed, Saltzman organized the Tri-Mountain Club to play baseball by New York rules.

On November 7, 1857, correspondent “X” wrote of that year’s edition of the club in Porter’s Spirit of the Times:

Their best men are: Messrs. Vail, Van Cott, Cudlipp, [William] Johnson, [John] McCosker, Wadsworth, Sheriden [Phil Sheridan], Turner, and [Charles] Commerford. Mr. Vail, one of the oldest players in this city, and one of the original members, has had great experience; he has filled the position of catcher since Mr. Burns left (the club miss this player very much). He is a strong bat, and plays with good judgment. Mr. Van Cott stands very high as pitcher, combining speed with an even ball. Mr. Wadsworth formerly belonged to the Knickerbocker [which he joined in 1854, coming from the Gotham], and until the last year or so played in all their matches, but left them through some misunderstanding. It is claimed by his friends that he is the best first base man in any club, perfectly fearless—he will stop any ball that may come within reach—is a good player in any position, as his fielding last Friday will show. McCosker and Johnson are both fine catchers, and remarkably strong batsmen; and of the others it may be said, that if not powerful batters, they are what is termed sure ones, and good catchers…. The Gotham formerly played on the grounds of the Red House, and would probably have played there to this day, had there not some difficulty sprung up with the proprietor or lessee. They play at Hoboken, on grounds but slightly inferior to their old locality.36

The Old Gotham Inn and Bowling Saloon, at 298 Bowery, as depicted in 1862.

The Gothams believed they were direct descendants from not only the Washington Club (which they averred to have organized in 1849, not 1850 as Peverelly had it), but also from the primal New York Club. The club limped along through the 1870s as the professionals took hold of the game. In 1871, following the formation of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, first professional organization, the Gothams joined with thirty-two other clubs, including the venerable Knickerbocker and Eagle clubs, hoping to keep top-level amateur play alive. In a last-gasp member-recruitment circular issued at the opening of the centennial year of 1876, the club’s directors wrote, “The Gotham Base Ball Club dates its existence from the year 1849; it is, therefore, one of the oldest—if not the oldest—organization of its kind in the country.”37

A few weeks later, The New York Times reported on the meeting of old Gotham players that resulted. It was noted that this club had “turned out more professional players than any other,” which oddly may have been true. Buried in the notice was the still, to this day, not fully fathomed heritage of the club—like that of the game itself—in the rough and rowdy crowd that populated Washington Market long before.

The meeting on Monday evening was a large and very harmonious one. Old times were talked over, and a unanimous feeling prevailed in favor of reorganizing and keeping up the old club. Mr. James B. Mingay, a gentleman who has done business in Jefferson Market for over thirty years past, was elected president and Mr. Abraham H. Hummel, of the law firm of Howe & Hummel, at No. 89 Centre street, was made Vice President. [Hummel was the notorious underworld lawyer of his day.] The Secretary is Mr. Melchior B. Mason of No. 32 Chambers Street and the treasurer, Mr. Leonard Cohen, of Washington Market. There were about forty of the old members present; and among those who will take an active part in the new organization are Mr. Seaman Lichtenstein, of No. 83 Barclay street, who has been in business over thirty-five years…Mr. John Drohan, Mr. James Forsyth, and Mr. Richard H. Thorn, all merchants of Washington Market, of between twenty and thirty years’ standing.38

PLAYER PROFILES

Cornelius V. Anderson: President of the Washington Club in the early 1850s after being the Chief Engineer of the Volunteer Firemen from 1837 to 1848. His portrait was prominently displayed at Harry Venn’s Gotham Cottage at 298 Bowery, the ball club’s headquarters after 1845. Born in New York City on April 1, 1809, Anderson was a mason by trade. In 1852 he became the first president of the Lorillard Fire Insurance Company. His health began to fail in 1856 and he died on November 22, 1858. He was revered among the city’s firemen, who erected an elaborate tombstone in his honor at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

Charles H. Beadle: First baseman and officer of the Gotham Club during and after the Civil War, into the 1870s. Charles’s brother, Edward Beadle, was also involved in the club and both brothers later moved to Cranford, New Jersey, where Edward served as mayor in 1885.

Edward Bonnell: Edward Bonnell was recalled by George Zettlein as “one of the players” on the Gothams. Born around 1825, Bonnell was a liquor dealer before becoming a member of the New York Board of Fire Commissioners in 1865. Zettlein reported that Bonnell was living in Philadelphia in 1887.39

William F. Burns: A Gotham catcher in 1855–56. According to the Clipper article quoted in the profile of Venn, Burns died in the 1857 sinking of the SS Central America. Contemporary coverage of that tragedy does indeed list among the missing: “William Burns of New York City. Had been in California about a year.”40

C[larence] A. Burtis: The leading Gotham player of 1860, in which his runs per game ratio was the third best in the National Association, behind only Grum of the Eckfords and Leggett of the Excelsiors. In a game against the Mutuals on September 4, 1860, Burtis hit two home runs. After playing for the Gotham Club in 1859 and 1860, Burtis was absent from the lineup in 1861. He was back by the summer of 1862 and played through at least 1865. He also played in an 1888 old-timer’s benefit game for John Zeller, crippled by a gruesome baseball injury. George Zettlein described Burtis [though recalling him as Bustis] as a “boss painter in the Ninth ward,” so he can only be Clarence A. Burtis, a painter who was born around 1835 and died in Manhattan on May 16, 1894. Burtis enlisted in the New York Infantry, Regiment 83, on May 26, 1861, and was a Sergeant-Major by the time of his discharge in June of 1862. Like many of his fellow club members, Burtis was also very active in the fire department.

Charles Ludlow Case: Born in Newburgh, New York, in 1818, he was a NYBBC player in the contest of November 10, 1845, when he resided at 7 Murray and was a merchant at 101 Front. He was at one time a butcher at Washington Market. He also played for the New York Club in the two games against the cricketers from the Union Star of Brooklyn on October 21 and 24, 1845. In the game of June 19, 1846, he played with the club designated as the New Yorks. Case arrived in San Francisco for the Gold Rush on February 27, 1849. At a meeting of January 6, 1851, he became a member of the Finance Committee of the newly formed Knickerbocker Association, composed of New York residents living in San Francisco. He was joined on that committee by Edward A. Ebbets and Frank Turk, who had been members of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York. It is reasonable to think that they were among the unnamed men reported to have played baseball in Portsmouth Square in 1851.41 Case returned east and died in Newburgh on March 25, 1857.

Leonard G. Cohen: Officer of the Gotham Club during and after the Civil War; catcher for the ball club. As of 1869 he was a fruit dealer in Washington Market and living at 144 West Street. Cohen was born around 1839 in New York to a Polish-born father (though one census had Germany). He later moved to Westfield, New Jersey, where he served as the first postmaster and was still living as late as 1910.

Charles C. Commerford: Born in New York City, June 2, 1833; died in Waterbury, Connecticut, February 6, 1920. Played shortstop with Gothams and later the Eagles. Moved from New York to Waterbury, Connecticut, in 1864, where he continued to play ball. After some political successes, he was appointed postmaster there by President Grover Cleveland in 1886. His father, the chair-maker John Commerford of New York City, was an abolitionist prominently identified with labor interests, and was a candidate for Congress on the Republican ticket in 1860.

John Connell: George Zettlein described this man as a member of the Gothams and added that he “was on the Herald for some time, and is still [in 1887] a writer.”

Reuben Henry Cudlipp: Reuben Cudlipp was a Nassau Street lawyer who served as vice president of the Gotham Club in 1856 and as one of the vice presidents of the NABBP in 1857. He also played for the first nine until 1858. One of the Gothams’ better players, he was proposed for membership in the Knickerbockers on April 1, 1854, the same date as that of Louis F. Wadsworth’s similar move.42 Still active as a New York attorney in 1894, he resided at that time in Plainfield, New Jersey, as did Wadsworth (as shown in the NYC Directory for 1894, via ancestry.com). Cudlipp was seventy-eight when he died at his daughter’s home in Yonkers on December 5, 1899.

C[harles?] Davis: A frequent entrant in the NYBBC box scores, he has been mistaken in print for the celebrated Knickerbocker James Whyte Davis, against whom he played.

William W. De Milt: Like Harry Venn and Seaman Lichtenstein, he was a member of the Columbian Engine Company, No 14. As a carpenter and machinist for the Union Square, Brougham’s Lyceum (where fellow Gotham George W. Smith worked in 1850) and other New York theatres, he was responsible for producing a wide variety of stage apparatus and special effects. Born 1814, died 1875. Buried at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery.

Patsy Dockney: Born in Ireland ca. 1844, he was a catcher with Gotham in 1864–65. Paid under the table to move to Athletics of Philadelphia in 1866, according to the Philadelphia Times, Dockney “used to play ball every afternoon and fight and drink every night. He was a tough of the toughs.”

Andrew J. Dupignac: Andrew Dupignac, Gotham Club secretary in 1860 and 1861, was born around 1828. He later became the president of the New York Skating Club and in 1903 was described as “the oldest living amateur skater.”43 Dupignac died in Brooklyn on November 27, 1908.

James Fisher: Identity not known for certain but after thorough review of the New York City directories and considering other factors, I tentatively conclude that this early player, according to Peverelly, was James H. Fisher. Roughly the same age as the two other prominent players who were named honorary Knickerbockers in June 1846—Col. James Lee and Abraham Tucker (the former born in 1796, the latter in 1793)—Fisher was born in 1798. Like Lee, he had made his fortune by 1850 and in the census lists his occupation as “gentleman.” Previously he had listed his profession, with subtlety, as “agent.” In 1847, the year of his death, his address was 134 Allen Street, the neighborhood from which Wheaton and his mates had begun their search for lively recreation.

Robert Forsyth: In 1855, the year after the death of the affluent patron of this independent military company, the Herald reported: The Forsyth Cadets, a well drilled company, composed chiefly of butchers belonging to Washington Market, will make their annual parade on the 18th inst.”44 Shortly before his death, the Clipper observed: “This organization is named in honor of Robert Forsyth, Esq., a gentleman whose name is a “Household Word” to all those who have occasion to visit Washington Market, being one of the most extensive dealers connected with that place. He must indeed feel honored at the compliment paid him by the ‘Cadets.'”45 Robert Forsyth’s sons, Joseph and James, were both Gotham Club members. According to the 1887 New York Sun article, Joseph was already dead while James was an oyster dealer.

George H. Franklin: George H. Franklin was one of the club’s representatives at the 1857 NABBP convention.

Andrew Gibney: Starting with Gotham Juniors in 1863, he graduated to senior club the following year and played second base with the Gothams in 1865, then center field with the Nationals of Washington in 1866. He played professionally with Olympics of Washington in 1870. Alfred W. “Count” Gedney played as Gibney with the Keystone club in Philadelphia in his early years, but these two are not the same individual.

John V(an) B(uskirk) Hatfield: Widely regarded as one of the best players of the 1860s, with the Eckford and Mutual clubs, he also played one year with the Gothams, in 1865.

Johnson: Played in the NYBBC anniversary contest of November 10, 1845. Harold Peterson, in his book The Man Who Invented Baseball, names him as a Knickerbocker and calls him F. C. Johnson. However, Francis Upton Johnston was a member of the Knickerbocker and the New-York Academy of Medicine., as were D. L. Adams and Franklin Ransom. One of his sons also practiced medicine for many years at Hyde Park, where he is buried. The NYBBC Johnson may, however, be neither man but instead William Johnson, named in a reminiscence of the Gotham Cottage by Colonel Thomas Picton in 1878, and a player for the club in the 1850s.

John Lalor: This sturdy New York and Gotham player is surely the Jonathan Lalor listed in the box score published in Spirit in the Times on July 9, 1853, detailing a match game between the Knicks and Gothams. He also played in the NYBBC second anniversary game of November 10, 1845. Harold Peterson, in his book The Man Who Invented Baseball, instead identifies the player as Michael Lalor, “Segar Seller.” I think it is constable John Lalor, who umpired the Knickerbocker intramural game of June 26, 1846 and signed his name in full this way. This fellow was an up-and-comer in the Whig party in the Fifteenth Ward in 1845, and later its leader in the Seventh Ward. A lawyer by profession, he served in the Civil War, organizing the 15th Regiment, known as McLeod Murphy’s Engineers. John Lalor was born in 1819 and died on February 21, 1884. His obituary in the Herald noted that he was “a member of the Gotham club.” At his death he was chief clerk at Castle Garden.

Col. James Lee: According to Wheaton, he was one of the original Gotham Club members of 1837. Born December 3, 1796, he was a prominent businessman and sportsman. President of the New York Chamber of Commerce, he claimed to have played baseball in New York City ca. 1800.

John Ward wrote, in How to Become a Base-Ball Player (1888),

Colonel Jas. Lee, elected an honorary member of the Knickerbocker Club in 1846, said that he had often played the same game when a boy, and at that time he was a man of sixty or more years. [In fact he was fifty.] Mr. Wm. F. Ladd, my informant, one of the original members of the Knickerbockers, says that he never in any way doubted Colonel Lee’s declaration, because he was a gentleman eminently worthy of belief.

In 1907 Ward added to his remarks about Lee a sentence that echoes editor Porter’s reason for establishing the New York Cricket Club:

Another interesting tale told me by Mr. Ladd was that the reason they chose the game of Base Ball instead of—and in fact in opposition to—cricket was because they regarded Base Ball as a purely American game; and it appears that there was at that time some considerable prejudice against adopting any game of foreign invention.46

Lee died June 16, 1874.

Seaman Lichtenstein: A candidate for the first Jewish player, Lichtenstein began to run with Columbian Engine No. 14 at the age of fifteen, becoming a member of the company in 1849, at age twenty-four. He began his business career salvaging scraps from the butchers at Washington Market, selling the meat to the Native Americans who lived in Hoboken and the bones to a manufacturer of glue (Peter Cooper). In the 1880s, he owned a trotter named for Gotham Cottage proprietor and archetypal Bowery B’hoy Harry Venn. He died at age seventy-seven on December 24, 1902.47

John McCosker: A third baseman, he began play with the Gothams in 1856 and played in Fashion Race Course Game 3 and in many games for the Gothams of the 1850s. Tom Shieber reported in the 1997 National Pastime: “In a match game played between the Gotham and Empire clubs in September of 1857, McCosker hit a home run with the bases full. While he was most probably not the first to accomplish the feat, the description in the New York Clipper is the earliest known recounting of what would later be termed a grand slam: ‘The Gothamites…scored 4 beautifully in their last innings, chiefly owing to a tremendous ground strike by Mr. McCosker, bringing each man home as well as himself.'”

George Zettlein described McCosker (“McClosky”) as an engineer of the Fire Department, so there can be no question that the ballplayer was John A. McCosker, who was born around 1829 and was a fire department engineer prior to the war. When the war started, McCosker was one of the organizers of the 73rd Infantry—the Second Fire Zouaves—in which he served as a quartermaster until being discharged on August 4, 1862. His whereabouts become much harder to trace after that, but he may have died in 1881.

Dr. John Miller: According to Wheaton, he was one of the original Gotham BBC members of 1837. In 1842 John Miller, physician, is at 74 James Street. In 1845 he is at 186 East Broadway.

James B. Mingay: Mingay entered the poultry business in Jefferson Market in his youth and remained in it until age seventy-two. For 14 years he was a member of the Volunteer Fire Department with Hose Company 40, the Empire. He was a member of the Jefferson Market Guard and a judge of its target excursion on Christmas Day, 1857, an officer of the Gotham club 1861–64, and in 1876 a director of the North River Insurance Company. Born January 6, 1818, he died April 27, 1893, at his 19 Christopher Street residence.

John M. Murphy: According to Wheaton, he was a “hotel-keeper” and one of the original Gotham BBC members of 1837. He played in NYBBC anniversary contest of November 10, 1845, in Hoboken. Murphy’s establishment is the Fulton Hotel at 164 East Broadway.

Joseph Conselyea Pinckney: In a celebrated early instance of revolving, or seeming professionalism, Pinckney played a game with the Gothams in 1856 while still nominally a member of the Union of Morrisania. Both the Unions and the Knickerbockers objected publicly. Along with Knickerbocker defector Louis F. Wadsworth, he played with the Gotham in 1857. The next year, back with the Unions, he was one of only three New York players selected for the Fashion Race Course match to play in all three games. Enlisting at the outbreak of the Civil War, he was Colonel of the Sixth New York Militia. In 1863 he was brevetted brigadier general of volunteers for war service. Afterward he served in New York City politics as an alderman. Born and died in New York City (November 5, 1821–March 11, 1881).

Henry Mortimer Platt: Born July 7, 1822, Platt died December 8, 1898. He played a match game in 1854 but otherwise served Gotham Club as scorekeeper. He merits mention because in 1939 his daughter donated the sole surviving badge of the Gotham Base Ball Club, featuring three men at sea in a tub, to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Dr. Franklin Ransom: In the game of June 19, 1846, Dr. Ransom played with the club designated as the New Yorks. In 1838 Dr. Ransom resided at 44 Wall. He was in a medical partnership with Dr. Lucius Comstock but also found time to invent a fire engine with a modified hydraulic system. Dr. Ransom exhibited his fire engine to the City Council in 1841 but came to believe that the city had stolen his design. In 1858 he took a patent infringement lawsuit against the Mayor of New York all the way to the United States Supreme Court, but did not prevail. Ransom was born near Buffalo in 1805 and earned his medical degree in 1832 from what was then known simply as the University of New York. He eventually returned to Buffalo, where he continued to file new patents but slipped into obscurity. He died there on March 25, 1873.

Edward G. Saltzman (Salzman, Salzmann, Saltzmann): Born about 1830 in Jefferson County, New York, he was schooled in Hoboken, New Jersey. Saltzman played second base for the Gotham club of New York for five seasons, from 1852–56 and helped to bring the New York Game to Massachusetts via the Tri-Mountain Club. He brought baseball to Savannah, Georgia, in 1865, forming the Pioneer Club, then returned to Boston two years later and resided there until his final year. He died August 14, 1883, in Brooklyn.48

T. Seaman(s): Playing in NYBBC anniversary match of November 10, 1845, he may be a billiard room proprietor of that name or, more likely, he is one and the same as the later Gotham player and treasurer Seaman Lichtenstein, discussed earlier.

James Shepard: After playing with Gotham, then Alpine BBC in 1860, he was a pioneer in establishing baseball in San Francisco, beginning in 1861.

William Shepard: Brother of James, he also played with Gotham, then Alpine BBC in 1860. Pioneer in establishing baseball in San Francisco, beginning in 1861.

Philip Sheridan: Sheridan Joined the Gothams in 1854 and frequently umpired. Said by Peter Nash in Baseball Legends of Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery to have been buried in Green-Wood Cemetery in Brooklyn, but that interred Philip Sheridan is not the Gotham player.

George Washington Smith: A member of the Gotham Club after 1845, he was born and raised in Philadelphia. Smith was considered the only male American ballet star of the 19th century. He went on to become ballet master at Fox’s American Theater. He also served in this capacity at the Hippodrome, where the costume of a dancer under his instruction caught aflame with fatal consequence. In his later years he opened a dancing school in Philadelphia. Born ca. 1820, he died February 18, 1899.

Oscar Teed: Oscar Teed, a celebrated ship’s fastener and oarsman as well as a Gotham player, was born in 1828 and died November 4, 1866. A boat named in his honor ca. 1860 continued to race.

Austin D. Thompson: Born in 1820, Austin Thompson was described in his obituary as “a Connecticut Yankee, who came to New York when a youth and opened a coffee house in Pine street, near the old Custom House. … The coffee house, which was called the Phoenix, was frequented by the notabilities of the neighborhood, politicians as well as business men, particularly Democratic politicians, for Mr. Thompson was a Jeffersonian Democrat of the old school.” As its proprietor, Thompson was the successor to the famed Edward Windust, 149 Water Street (Wall, corner Water). In 1851 his coffee rooms and restaurant relocated from 13 Pine to 25 Pine. It moved again in 1860, this time to 292 Broadway, where it remained until Thompson’s death on June 7, 1892. By then Thompson was “probably the oldest eating-house keeper in the city,” which made him “a man who knew nearly everybody and nearly everybody knew him.”49

Richard H. (“Dick”) Thorn: He played with Empire Base Ball Club in 1856, yet was a representative of the Enterprise Base Ball Club at the convention of January 22, 1857. With Gotham in 1858, he pitched for New York in Game 3 of Fashion Race Course Match that September. He returned to Empire 1859–61, then was with Gotham again in 1862, and the Mutual 1865–68. Since about 1850, a prominent member and revenue collector of the Washington Market Association, Thorn partnered with Lathrop and then Marcley in his produce business in the 1860s. In the 1870s he wholly owned Thorn & Co., 11–13 DeVoe Avenue, west of Washington St. On January 26, 1889 rode on horseback, with Seaman Lichtenstein, in a parade to mark the opening of the West Washington Market. In that year he lived at 233 West 13th Street, but does not appear in New York City directories thereafter, though he did testify at a hearing in 1890.

Tooker: He played outfield in Fashion Race Course Game 3, and later with the Henry Eckford Club. In 1871 he was a director of the Athletic Base Ball Club of Brooklyn. Possibly this is Theodore, son of William Tooker, ship’s carpenter, who joined his brother-in-law George Steers in the shipyards that built the America.

Trenchard: This could be Samuel Trenchard, constable or marshal in various years from 1835 until 1861. In 1846 he resided at 86 Ludlow, and played with the club designated as the New Yorks on June 19, 1846. He also played with Washingtons against the Knickerbockers in match game of June 17, 1851. Born in 1791, he died February 15, 1865 in his seventy-fifth year. This would make him a bit of a graybeard for active play in the 1840s and 1850s, so perhaps he is billiard-hall proprietor Alexander H. Trenchard, at 139 Crosby Street in 1855.

Tuche: After the 1856 season, Porter’s Spirit of the Times reported that the Gotham Club had been organized in the early summer of 1852 with “old ballplayer Mr. Tuche” at its head.50 Other accounts also name Tuche as one of the principals, but his name soon disappeared from the club’s annals and nothing more is known about him.

Abraham W. Tucker: Born in 1793, he was named an honorary member of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club in June 1846, along with another New York Ball Club player, Col. James Lee. In 1822 he operated a “segarstore” at 205 Bowery. In 1837 he resided at 48 Delancey Street. Tucker is believed to have died in 1853–54.

William H. Tucker was a tobacconist in business with his father, Abraham, who was also a player with the New Yorks. They operated at 8 Peck Slip and lived at 56 E. Broadway. In 1849–50 he lived in San Francisco. In Alexander Cartwright’s journal/address book he is listed as: “Wm. H. Tucker 271 Montgomery st. upstairs, San Francisco, Cal.” Tucker appears to have died in Brooklyn, at the home of his son-in-law, on December 5, 1894, in his seventy-sixth year, which would conform to a birth year of 1819 recorded in the 1850 census.

Nicholas “Nick” Turner: He played left field in Fashion Race Course Game 2. A shoemaker, he resided in the Tenth Ward in 1860. He was born in Bavaria, 1831. His first name was supplied by Waller Wallace and Henry Chadwick in Sporting Life in 1889.51

William Vail: He was the tobacconist at 179 Prince Street in 1849. Born in 1817–18, his wife Mary was born in 1822–23, and their children as of 1850 were all sons: William, Francis, Martin, Daniel, George, in descending order of age. He was known affectionately as “Stay where you am, Wail,” for his often disastrous derring-do on the base paths. In later years he played with Knickerbocker.52

Gabriel Van Cott: Gabriel acted as umpire for Gothams rather than player. There were a few Gabriels in the Van Cott family, but it appears most likely that this one was a cousin of Thomas and William. Another member of the family, Cornelius C. Van Cott (1838–1904), was the owner of the New York Giants of the National League from 1893  through 1895.

Theodore S. Van Cott :The son of Thomas, Teddy Van Cott later served in the Civil War and died in a home for old soldiers on August 23, 1905.

Thomas Van Cott: Thomas G. (1817–94), who married Harriet Murphy, was the Gothams’ best player in the 1850s, and the great pitcher of all New York ball clubs. The Elmira Gazette obituary of December 19, 1894, called him “The Father of Baseball” and the first man to pitch a curved ball. He was a bookmaker in later years, at the Saratoga Track.

William H(athaway) Van Cott: This brother of Thomas was born September 26, 1821, in New York City, and died June 30, 1908 in Mt. Vernon, New York. He played in Fashion Race Course Games 1 and 2. Elected first president of the National Association of Base Ball Players when it formally organized in 1858, Van Cott was a lawyer and justice by profession. He continued his family’s interest in trotters and began in the stabling business before entering the law. As Justice Van Cott he served sixteen years on the bench. His New York Times obituary reported that his efforts to rid New York of gangs led to two attempts to burn down his house.53

Harry B. Venn: Venn played in NYBBC anniversary match of November 10, 1845, and was a noted fireman with Columbian 14 and the proprietor of the venerable (1778) Gotham Saloon beginning in 1830, when he left his porterhouse at 13 Ann Street and took his first lease at the property. His successor in the lease, S.W. Bryham, transformed the cottage in 1836 to become the Bowery Steam Confectionary and Saloon. By 1842, under new ownership, it was renamed the “Bowery Cottage,” and was the headquarters for firemen, sporting types, and Bowery B’Hoys. Venn resumed his proprietorship sometime before 1845. Behind the bar at the Gotham was a case with the gilded trophy balls from victorious Gotham Base Ball Club matches. (These survived, amazingly, and were sold to collectors in the 1980s; it would be pleasant to think that the Gotham rules survived too!) The back-bar also featured a big gilt “6” taken from the Americus engine (the inspiration for Christy Mathewson’s nickname, “Big Six”). Boss Tweed was a regular patron at the bar. The Gotham Cottage was demolished in 1878, and Venn died a year later, on March 15, 1879. A contemporary wrote that his memorial might be inscribed: “Here lies one whose name was writ in whisky.” Much more could be written about Venn and the Gotham Cottage, but suffice for now this snippet from a long paean to the demolished house by Col. Thomas Picton in the Clipper on June 1, 1878:

“The Gotham” became, moreover, extensively known in connection with our national pastime, as beneath its roof was held the first general convention of baseball players, one of the earliest clubs in existence deriving its significant title from this snuggery in the Bowery. “The Gotham” Club [as re-formed in 1852] was a large association from the hour of its inception, organized through the election of Judge William H. Van Cott as president, and Gabriel Van Cott as secretary, with a roll of influential members, principally business men, embracing Harry B. Venn, Seaman Senchenstein [sic], James Forsyth, Joseph Foss, John Baum, George Montjoy, William Johnson, Edward Turner, E. Bonnell, Bates, Tooker, and a host of other notables. Its first playing members distinguishing themselves were Tom Van Cott, Sheridan, McCluskey [McClosky, “an engineer of the Fire Department,” as George Zettlein recalled, in fact John McCosker, who played catcher with the Gothams in 1858], Cudliffe [Cudlipp], and William Burns, its pitcher [catcher?], afterwards lost at sea upon the Central America, wrecked in the Pacific [sic].

Louis F. Wadsworth: Born in Connecticut in 1825, he commenced to play baseball with the Washingtons/Gothams in 1852. After a few years with the Knickerbockers (1854–57) he returned to the Gothams, whom he represented in Fashion Race Course Games 1 and 3. One of the veteran Knicks, in recalling some of his old teammates for the New York Sun in 1887, said:

had almost forgotten the most important man on the team and that is Lew Wadsworth. He was the life of the club. Part of his club suit consisted of a white shirt on the back of which was stamped a black devil. It makes me laugh still when I recall how he used to go after a ball. His hands were very large and when he went for a ball they looked like the tongs of an oyster rake. He got there all the same and but few balls passed him.54

His time with the Knickerbockers, and his crucial role in affixing nine innings and nine men to the rules of baseball, are covered at length in Baseball in the Garden of Eden. Dissipating riches and fame, he died a pauper in the Plainfield Industrial Home in 1908.

William Rufus Wheaton: discussed amply above.

Robert F. Winslow: Robert F. Winslow, a lawyer, played in NYBBC anniversary game of November 10, 1845, Hoboken. In the game of June 19, 1846, Winslow played with the club designated as the New Yorks, and played center field for Gothams in mid-1850s. He and his son Robert Jr. played for the Gotham in the match against the Knickerbockers that commenced on July 1, 1853 and, after a rain interruption, concluded on July 5. In 1854, an Albert Winslow played with the Knickerbockers. Some evidence points to Robert Jr.’s earlier demise, but the Robert Winslows are the only father-son pairing of that surname in New York at the time.

George Wright: He joined the Gotham juniors when he was sixteen, in 1863. One year later he graduated to the senior team and was the club’s regular catcher. He also caught for the club in 1866 under the name of “George” before transferring his allegiance to the Union of Morrisania, where he converted to left field and then shortstop. Born in 1847, George Wright was perhaps the greatest player of the nineteenth century and certainly its first national hero. He died in 1937, four months before his election to the nascent Baseball Hall of Fame.

Harry Wright: The Civil War so decimated the Knickerbockers’ schedule that Wright (1835–95) decided to leave them and join the Gothams in 1863–64. But by the next year he had tired of baseball and resumed his 1850s career, as a cricketer, in Cincinnati, Ohio. He had to wait longer than brother George to enter the Baseball Hall of Fame (1953). Leaving his post as the Cincinnati Cricket Club professional in 1867, he was persuaded to take the helm of the Cincinnati Base Ball Club. The rest is history.

William P. Wright: With Gothams in 1865, played in five games. Not related to Harry and George. Appears to have gone to Cincinnati with Harry Wright at year’s end. With that city’s Buckeye club in 1868–69, Live Oak in 1870.

Other Club Members: John Drohan, Joseph E. Ebling, Hackett, J.A.P. Hopkins, N.W. Redmond, Charles S. Riblet, Peter Roe, Albert Squires, Cornelius Stokem, Andrew Whiteside.

JOHN THORN is the Official Historian for Major League Baseball. He is the author of too many books.

—New York Sunday Mercury, September 1, 1867

This newspaper article gives us a glimpse of the nineteenth century. The New York World had carried a similar story a few days earlier which stated that “the Mutuals held a special meeting at their rooms at Willard’s Hotel to-day, and elected President Johnson an honorary member of the club. They then visited the President’s house, accompanied by the Committee of the Nationals, and held an interview with President Johnson.” It also notes that Coroner Wildey presented the President with his badge signifying his honorary membership in their club.

What in the world was going on under the surface? How much of this actually was about baseball? Why is a New York City coroner the only name mentioned in all the stories except for the President of the United States?

Baseball existed before the Civil War but New York-style baseball, the game as we know it today, was focused almost exclusively in New York. The Civil War helped spread its popularity but most importantly, a new sense of nationalism boosted pride in the game. Politics accelerated the professionalization of it, and once it became publicly significant competition that people were willing to pay to see, baseball became part of public policy and politics from then to now. When President Andrew Johnson became the first President to refer to baseball as “our National Game” during the 1865 baseball matches in Washington, it boosted the idea, first put forth by the New York Mercury and other New York newspapers, that baseball was becoming America’s national pastime.

Washington, Boston, Philadelphia and Cincinnati Base Ball Clubs began to hire better players post-War, even though the sport was still officially amateur. These “clubs” of young professionals included budding politicians and other emerging leaders often backed by key figures in the political, media, and economic establishment.

Upstate New York was then a powerful political counter-balance to the metro New York City area, and Brooklyn was still independent, but post-Civil War, Manhattan was increasingly dominant as the economic and media center of the country. A fire captain named William Tweed had re-vitalized the St. Tammany Society of New York into the most powerful local party political organization in American history.

The Mutuals were the first Tammany team and the dominant post-War Manhattan team, which was not unrelated. And the Tammany influence was carried forward from the Mutuals into the establishment of the major-league Giants, Yankees, and Dodgers. Though the Mutuals were expelled from the National League after by the 1876 season, baseball returned to Manhattan in 1883, when the New York Gothams joined the League. This would not have occurred without Tammany consent. The Gothams evolved into the New York Giants, which continued as Tammany’s Team particularly during the ownership of Tammany powerhouse Andrew Freedman and influence of Manhattan Borough President James J. Coogan (Coogan’s Bluff). It continued as such through the ownership of Tammany ally Charles Stoneham. Congressman Jacob Ruppert was but one of the prominent Tammany Yankees. State Assemblyman Charlie Ebbets and Walter O’Malley were the “Tammany Lite” Brooklyn Division.

This extraordinary linkage of professional baseball and Tammany Hall began with the rise of both baseball and Tammany prior to the Civil War. Fireman John Wildey was the point person for the Mutuals baseball team and aided Boss Tweed’s rise to political power. Post-War, Wildey was the first and last President of the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP), the organization that represents the major turning point in the official professionalization of baseball.

It is an amazing story of firemen, war, politics, corruption, and baseball.

Fireman John Wildey
NY Fire Department Baseball & Rise of Tammany Hall

John Wildey was born in New York City, March 28, 1823. He was a “plain but intelligent looking gentleman.”1 Wildey lived in the 8th Ward for over fifty years, moving late in life to Bayonne, New Jersey. He officially joined his first fire engine company in 1844, moving over to the Oceanus Engine Company No. 11 where he later served as foreman (i.e. chief).2 Wildey took fifty of his firemen and “their splendid engine” by steamboat to Boston to participate in a celebration of the Battle of Bunker Hill, which built recognition for Oceanus.3 Proving his popularity beyond his own engine house, in 1860 Wildey won a closely contested race to the New York area Board of Foreman and Engineers.4

He continued as a “prominent member of the Veteran Firemen’s Association” after retirement.5 When the Association visited Bayonne, they were “received by the Common Council and the Fire Department, John Wildey, an old New York fireman, acting as grand marshal.”6 In other words, while John Wildey was an enthusiast in numerous areas—baseball, politics, and the military—he was a fireman from his youth to his end. But the activities are not unrelated.

The Mutuals baseball team took its name from a firehouse. It wasn’t just any firehouse but arguably the most historically significant firehouse in our nation. Founded in 1737, Mutual Hook & Ladder Company No. 1 of New York City was the first volunteer fire department in New York City. Among things credited to it were the first use of a horse as opposed to just manpower and creation of the fireman’s hat design still used today.

Mutual Hook & Ladder Company No. 1 is yet another merging of politics and baseball. Fire and police departments were the backbone of the populist base of boss systems. The structures were hierarchical, with officer positions given through a combination of top down alliances, assessments, and the “bottom up” ability to deliver votes. Terry Golway wrote in Machine Made: Tammany Hall and the Creation of Modern American Politics that the “firehouse was a finishing school in the fine art of local politics.” While most would prefer the reputation of a firehouse was as a finishing school in firefighting, in most cities it was the most disciplined early political force along with the police department.7

In 1846, at the invitation of Assemblyman John J. Reilly, 23-year-old William Tweed organized Americus Fire Company No. 6, which took as its symbol a tiger. It later became one of the symbols of Tammany Hall.8 Tweed lost his first race for Alderman in 1850, then won in 1851, and was elected to Congress in 1852. The evolution of Tammany to a powerful organization built around graft began when Tweed was appointed to the County’s Board of Supervisors in 1858.

An 1887 New York Fire Department history described the origins of the baseball team this way: “The famous Mutual Base Ball Club was named after this company and was organized in their house. John Carland was its first president, and John Wildey followed him. They had their grounds at the “Elysian Fields” in Hoboken, and their contests in 1859 and 1860 with the Atlantic, Eagle, Empire and Gotham Clubs will be remembered by all old-time lovers of the game.” 9

The New York Sun made the political linkage clear: “In 1857 a number of local politicians in the city conceived the idea of forming a base ball club, and at once set about it. Money was somewhat plentiful with them at the time and it did not take long to organize the Mutual Club. The Mutuals were controlled by a number of local politicians, who spent money freely on the results…Bill Tweed was the leading spirit of the Mutuals for several years, and could be found at many of the games played by that club. For several years the club ranked as the most popular and strongest in New York, and for a long period held the lead over all the other clubs.” 10

The New York Mutuals baseball team and the rise of modern Tammany Hall were simultaneous in part because they were the same people.

Captain John Wildey: The Fire Zouaves and the Battle of Bull Run

From 1861 to 1865 the United States of America had been rendered asunder. No community in the nation failed to avoid the tragic impact of the Civil War. Not only did families lose loved ones, but communities lost leaders. Men without limbs, the walking wounded, and those left in homes for the invalid were daily reminders. World War II left America scarred and wounded, but it was not the same as a war fought on our soil against fellow Americans. The Civil War defined American politics for decades afterward.

Heroes also come from war. The first major battle of the Civil War took place just west of Washington, near a creek called Bull Run just north of Manassas and west of Centreville, Virginia. One of the celebrated heroes to come from that first battle was Captain John Wildey, fireman, future Coroner, head of the Mutual Club of New York, and Tammany man. He was a senior officer of the famed 11th New York Fire Zouaves, who were a national phenomenon far greater than baseball.

The leader of the Fire Zouaves had fame nearly unfathomable today. Elmer Ellsworth was raised in the town of Halfmoon, New York, in a very poor family. He moved to Chicago where he met a former French officer in the Zouaves, famed for their distinctive uniforms. Colonel Ellsworth created the first American Zouaves. The Chicago Zouaves went on a tour of the East. When they paraded, they did acrobatic flips and landed with their rifles in firing position. Civil War historian Adam Goodheart referred to it as a nineteenth-century version of Cirque du Soleil. For example, 25,000 people lined the streets of Albany to watch them. They took a fascinated nation by storm. Charles Dickens wrote that the “Zouave drill, which is almost acrobatic, delight the Americans.” President Buchanan hosted them at the White House. The fame of the Ellsworth Zouaves generated copycat units in all sections of the nation.11

Ellsworth’s young men became part of the entourage of a candidate named Abraham Lincoln in Illinois. Ellsworth became so close to the Lincolns that he caught measles from the Lincoln boys. When Lincoln went to Washington, so did Ellsworth as part of his escort. In fact, President Lincoln was planning to name Ellsworth commandant of the militias of the United States. However, when the Civil War began, Ellsworth decided to go New York City to form a volunteer division of firemen soldiers called the 11th New York Fire Zouaves.12

At the first call for Fire Zouave volunteers, firehouse foreman John Wildey raised a company of ninety men, all of whom belonged to a New York City firehouse. They were designated Company I of the Eleventh Regiment New York Volunteers. Wildey was elected captain.13 He had demonstrated his interest in military organization as early as 1853 as captain of the Carlisle Light Guard, which was considered “one of the best-equipped and disciplined in the city.”14

When Colonel Ellsworth’s volunteers prepared to depart New York City they were given the 1860’s version of a ticker tape parade. From the time of their arrival in Washington, the Zouaves were treated uniquely.

Congress was not in session because Southern defections and disputed elections left Congress without a quorum for months. The Capitol Building was thus put to use in other ways. A Harper’s Weekly etching from May 25, 1861, is titled: “The New York Fire Zouaves Quartered in the House of Representatives at Washington.” The drawings feature the Zouaves lounging around on the House Floor and the officers at a table in one of the major committee rooms in the Capitol Building.

Their first battle, however, wasn’t against southern soldiers. The City of Washington was filled with sympathizers to the Confederacy. Arsonists made an attempt to set the northern capital city on fire, beginning with buildings next to the Willard Hotel. As the fire spread unchecked, with the Washington fire department being a little slow to respond, the Fire Zouaves came to the rescue from their temporary home on the House floor. With smoke beginning to pour into the Willard, and fire right behind it, the New York firemen/soldiers saved the Willard. Harper’s Weekly again featured an engraving of the Zouaves battling the Willard Hotel blaze entitled “The Ellsworth Fire Zouaves fighting their old New York enemy in their usual way.” No wonder the Mutuals were welcomed at the Willard in 1867.

The Fire Zouaves moved out of the Capitol Building to a point across the Potomac River from what is now Ronald Reagan National Airport to help prevent southern sympathizers from launching attacks on Washington. The Zouave diarist noted that “in the absence of anything more exciting” that the Fire Zouaves began playing baseball with Wildey in “ball cap and ball shoes.”15

On May 7, Colonel Ellsworth announced that the Fire Zouaves were to remove some threats in Alexandria. As Ellsworth turned on King Street, he stopped in front of the Marshall House Hotel on top of which was flying a huge rebel flag that could be seen from as far as the Capitol Building. He said to those with him “that flag must come down.” Ellsworth charged up to the roof, and as he re-entered the hotel lobby, the owner assassinated him. The celebrated Col. Ellsworth thus became the first recognized death of an officer in the American Civil War.16

In spite of all that I have just noted, it is still hard to fathom that upon his death, Col. Ellsworth’s body was moved to the White House for viewing. The funeral was held in the East Room. This has been seldom done at any time in American history. Ellsworth’s death was personal to the President and his family. For a long time, Lincoln was known to weep at the mention of his name.17 Going into the Battle of the Bull Run the Fire Zouaves of NYC had extraordinary national fame, critical to understanding Wildey’s future fame in politics and baseball.

Wildey was the Zouave closest to Ellsworth. The more senior Lt. Colonel Noah L. Farnham, however, replaced Ellsworth as the Fire Zouaves commander. Farnham was “struck by a musket ball” during the Bull Run battle and soon died from complications from typhoid fever.18 Farnham had been the head of the Mutual Fire Company unit. Post-Civil War the G.A.R. (Grand Army of the Republic), an organization of veterans of the Northern Army, became a powerful national political organization.19 Not surprisingly, Wildey was a leader of the Noah Farnham G.A.R. Post No. 458 in NYC until his own death.20

The first Bull Run battle is enshrouded in more confusion and myth than most Civil War battles. Not only was soldier training minimal when the War began, but commanders were unfamiliar with one another and even uniforms were not coordinated. Some Southerners wore blue and some Northerners wore gray. This not only confused those trying to record what precisely happened, but was chaos on the battlefield during the fighting. Henry Hill became the pivotal ground during the Battle at Bull Run Creek. During the fight the N.Y. Zouaves, and the rebels, became confused as to whether oncoming soldiers were allies or enemies. Jeb Stuart spotted the Zouaves but then remembered there was a Southern unit dressed similarly so shouted out: “Are those our men or the enemy?”21

The Zouaves were in the heat of the battle and suffered serious casualties. They lost so many men that the unit did not survive. While most historians credit them with beginning the battle with bravery, they note that when counter-attacked the Zouaves panicked. Few reports, including those by soldiers present on the battlefield, agree on key facts. General Thomas Jackson received his nickname at Bull Run, though initially the reference to his standing there “like a stone wall” off the battlefield east of Henry Hill was not intended to be complimentary. When Stonewall Jackson did intervene, however, it was decisive.

The Union retreat at the First Battle of Bull Run stunned the North. Blame was flying everywhere. Today with the advantage of hindsight we know that the War would last four years and the other battles would have more significance. But in 1861, post Bull Run, the northern militia enlistment periods were about to expire. The Federal troops had been demoralizingly routed which put the survival of a united nation in doubt. Some heroes were immediately needed.

Captain John Wildey’s exploits made him famous. The New York Herald reported that “in the midst of the battle-field the stalwart form of Jack Wildey could at all times be found at the head of his comrades.” The Herald continued that when the regimental flag had been seized by Black Horse Cavalry Confederates of Jeb Stuart “Wildey rushed forward at the head of his brave men, and after a bloody contest, in which he killed two men, recaptured the flag.”22 In the Civil War men died defending their regimental flags. In this case, it was the flag of Ellworth’s famous Zouaves, firefighters from the largest city in America. Many sketches and lithographs appeared with the gallant Fire Zouaves fighting off the Black Horse Cavalry. More than 150 years later the image remains among the more prominent of the first Civil War battle.

Wildley’s fame was spread throughout the nation. In New York City, Wildey had become a hero, a defender of the city’s honor. Wildey was recalled home, ostensibly to recruit more soldiers. But Boss Tweed had other ideas. He needed Wildey to represent Tammany in the upcoming election.

Coroner Wildey: The Mutual Interest of Politics and Baseball

Tammany Hall under Boss Tweed played an important role in backing the North in the Civil War’s first years. It was a pivotal time for Tammany, which had begun as a national organization founded by Pennsylvania Revolutionary War leader John Dickinson as a more thoughtful alternative to Boston’s Sons of Liberty. Aaron Burr in New York helped perpetuate New York City’s branch long after others had faded away. Tweed’s goal was to politically dominate the Democrat Party (sic), and New York through Tammany Hall.

In 1860 Confederate sympathizer Fernando Wood was the Mayor. He was tied to the South’s cotton industry, which generated great revenue for the City and for his political base. Because of the Mayor’s opposition, Lincoln’s Secretary of War Edward Stanton desperately needed allies in New York City. Tweed made a deal: throw some support to Lincoln in return for, among other things, some shared power and more importantly to Tammany’s future, government contracts.23

Tweed’s Tammany system required power, and maintaining power required some election victories. ”It’s hard not to admire the skill behind Tweed’s system, though,” Kenneth Ackerman writes in Boss Tweed. ”The Tweed ring at its height was an engineering marvel, strong and solid, strategically deployed to control key power points: the courts, the legislature, the treasury and the ballot box. Its fraud had a grandeur of scale and an elegance of structure: money-laundering, profit sharing and organization.’”24

In the 1861election Tweed had parts of the Tammany organization align with the Union tickets (there were multiple slates). “Tammany Democracy” ran a full slate, including for the Coroner positions and highlighted by Tweed himself for Sheriff. This slate was calculated for show, not victory. Boss Tweed also participated in putting together a “fusion ticket,” with Tammany agreeing to support some non-Tammany candidates in return for enough Republican support for a few Tammany-selected choices. John Wildey for Coroner was one of the Tammany candidates selected to prevail (i.e. weak opposition slated against him). Included in the fusion ticket sweep of offices was Coroner John Wildey.

Coroner seems like an odd office for Tammany to focus upon. Even by Tammany standards, it is possible that Wildey’s experience at the Fire Department, Civil War reputation, and as a baseball player did not give him enough plausibility for a position with more power regardless of his popularity. On the other hand, it was enough to make Wildey one of the top citywide candidates in the election in spite of lacking any qualifications for Coroner. Being a Tammany Coroner was not like serving as a coroner today. It was a political undertaking, not medicine. A PBS documentary pointed out that “even in an era of rampant corruption, New York coroners stood out.”25

Obviously, the coroner does an autopsy to determine the cause of death. For each autopsy conducted the coroner received a fee plus all expenses covered. It would appear to have been a pretty scientific, straightforward post. As the city grew, in 1852 New York City went from two to four elected coroners to handle the increased load.

Because they were paid by the dead body, Coroners had an incentive to process as many as possible and as quickly as possible. “Suspicious deaths” could be lucrative, which Tammany obviously recognized. “I don’t want my husband to have committed suicide” was open invitation to assessing a fee to have that fixed. A study suggested that “skillful poisoning can be carried out almost with impunity.” How many “errors” were due to incompetence (since no medical background was required or Wildey, nor years later Tammany Boss Richard Croker, would not have been a coroner) and how much was the result of kickbacks to the coroners is impossible to determine.26

The funeral home business provided additional graft potential. After the negotiable death determination, if the coroner had a body a family wanted released, it was essential that one chose a Tammany-certified funeral home. This obviously provided more kickback opportunities.

Given that Wildey owed his political career to Tweed, it is likely that he was a willing participant in the corrupt coroner process. The New York Times 1889 obituary of Wildey states with a trace of irony: “He died in poverty. He had made plenty of money, but long ago lost the last of his fortune.”27 He didn’t make a “fortune” as a fireman, Civil War vet, or in baseball.

A coroner named Henry Woltman, a ward politician prior to becoming coroner, was particularly excoriated by a New York State Senate inquiry in 1877. They concluded that “a more thoroughly expensive, wasteful and incompetent set of officials never existed.” In addition to the opportunities for graft that I already raised, this inquiry cited many “gross abuses, among which were the following:

1. inquests were unnecessarily held.
2. juries were constantly called contrary to the intent of the statue.
3. in many cases jurors did not view the bodies of deceased persons, as required by law.
4. the inquest papers of the coroners were valueless as records, proving nothing.
5. there existed a ring of jurymen who served on hundreds of inquests, and were mere hangers-on, or creatures of the coroners.
6. the fees of the coroners were excessive, and their bills against the county, if legal, were far from being equitable or just.”28

Baseball man John Wildey was part of an important Tammany Coroner tradition, which is rather different from being an honorable tradition. Wildey obviously had grassroots political skills demonstrated repeatedly in fire organizations, baseball organizing, and military organizations. He was elected to two three-year terms as coroner. He formed a “John Wildey Association” similar to the powerful ones later formed by Tammany powers such as Big Tim Sullivan, John Ahearn, and Maurice Featherson which became the backbone structure of Tammany in the sprawling city. The New York Times noted John Wildey Association Annual Balls in 1864, 1865, and 1866.29

Wildey continued in politics post-Coroner. In 1869 and 1870 he ran for the position of election canvasser in the 8th Ward (Tweed was one of the two elected canvassers for the 7th Ward.)30 In other words, should there be any doubt about Wildey being Tammany connected, his position as an official Tammany-style vote counter removes it. It was the last political position in New York City for Wildey. Not coincidentally, Tweed was chased away for corruption in 1871. Tweed fled to England and eventually went to jail. Wildey crossed the Hudson River to Bayonne, New Jersey. There is no record of Wildey being charged with any crime.

George Washington Plunkitt of Tammany Hall is among the most famous political books of all-time because it boldly proclaims how Tammany did business. Even for baseball.

“I hear a young feller that’s proud of his voice… I ask him to join our Glee Club. He comes up and sings, and he’s a follower of Plunkitt for life. Another young feller gains a reputation as a baseball player in a vacant lot. I bring him into our baseball club. That fixes him. You’ll find him working for my ticket at the polls next election. I rope them all in by givin’ them opportunities to show off themselves off. I don’t trouble them with political arguments.” —George Washington Plunkitt31

Wildey’s Coroner’s office was one in which employment was found for Mutuals baseball players. But Tammany’s assistance was more than just jobs. SABR historian Tony Morante noted: “By 1869, Tammany was contributing generously to the upkeep of the Mutuals, who were all on salary, making them a truly professional team. When the New York City Council voted the team $1,500 towards a trip to New Orleans in 1869, Tweed countered with $7,500 from his own pocket, another way to secure votes.”32

Nothing in politics occurs in a vacuum. Once the context is understood—the Battle of Bull Run, Wildey’s election as Coroner, the Tammany ties to the Mutuals—the opening story in Washington becomes clear today like it was to the readers at the time.

The visit of the Mutuals to Washington D.C. in the fall of 1867 came during one of the most politically contentious times in American history. Tennessee Democrat Andrew Johnson had been selected as the Republican Vice-Presidential candidate because the prolonged War made President Lincoln vulnerable in the 1864 election. Republicans had not expected Lincoln to be assassinated after his victory. President Johnson was opposed to the Radical Republican agenda for Reconstruction of the South.

When the Mutual baseball team arrived in New York, among the New York Congressmen were Fernando Wood, the former Mayor, and John Morrissey, former Dead Rabbits Gang leader, gambler, long-time Tammany boss, and purported owner of the Haymakers of Troy. New York Democrats were the core of the Democrat Party. The head of the Mutual Club of New York was military hero Wildey. New York Democrats had not been of one mind in support of the Union cause, but they were united in opposition to the Radical Republicans.

Vice-President Johnson was mostly scorned by his new party. In March of 1867, Congress passed the Tenure of Office Act. It prohibited Johnson from removing federal office holders who had been confirmed by the Senate as they battled each other over implementing Reconstruction. In early August – just weeks before the Mutuals visited to play baseball in Washington – Johnson tested the constitutionality of the Act. Republicans in Congress were furious.

President Johnson desperately needed some friends and the united help of Democrats to survive the Republican purge attempt. (His impeachment by the House occurred in February 1868; he—like later President Bill Clinton—survived the Senate trial.)

What could be more dramatic than the baseball team of the Mutual Fire Company of New York, led by former Fire Zouaves Bull Run battle hero Captain John Wildey, coming to Washington? And the Mutuals weren’t just a baseball team. They were Tammany’s team and their leader was an elected official, part of Tweed’s political team.

When newspaper accounts record that the President hosted the team, was appreciative of being made an honorary member, and proudly put the Mutuals badge on his lapel, I’m sure they were completely accurate. In fact, Johnson was undoubtedly thrilled that the Mutuals had made sure that he was identified with the most prominent Democrat organization and a Civil War hero. Johnson might have liked baseball, but he loved important allies even more as he fought for his political life.

After the political tourism, they also played baseball. President Andrew Johnson attended, possibly still wearing his Tammany Mutuals badge. He was among political allies and friends. War and politics united them. Baseball was a respite from bitter politics.

NABBP President Wildey and the Rise of Professional Baseball

In 1865—the first post-Civil War convention of NABBP—baseball clubs gathered from ten states. The percentage from New York had dropped to 55%, a sign of increasing national popularity of the game. New York still held the majority but was a decline in dominance. It remained enough of a majority to elect Coroner John Wildey as the first truly national President (representatives from five states had been the previous high).33

The Mutuals were not known for honesty in baseball. The Mutuals cheated on a grander scale than most teams. John Thorn, the official historian of MLB, has written that gambling was the most important ingredient facilitating the growth of baseball (followed by statistics and publicity).34 But Bill Ryczek notes that in the Mutuals case, it was much more serious. Whenever a big upset occurred involving the New York team, it was suspected that the losing Mutuals had thrown the game.35

For example, on September 28, 1865, the Mutuals faced the Eckford Club of Brooklyn in what is considered to be one of the most significant baseball games because it helped push baseball towards professionalism.

During the first four innings, the Mutuals played like the favorites they were. Gamblers moved through the crowds changing the odds around events during the game, as they generally did and especially in New York. But in the fifth inning, things on the field changed dramatically. In what became known as “the Wansley affair,” the Eckfords scored eleven runs. It wasn’t just that they scored that many in one inning. Games could be high scoring in the days when fielders, for example, had no baseball gloves and catchers were getting battered by trying to nearly bare-handedly catch pitched balls. It was the more than suspicious way that the eleven runs were suddenly accumulated. Experienced Mutuals catcher William Wansley had two missed catches, six passed balls and four wild throws in the pivotal fifth inning.36

The Fix Is In by Daniel E. Ginsburg, a history of gambling in baseball, describes how Wansley corralled two fellow Mutuals players to help ensure that the Eckfords won (it wasn’t clear that his yeoman efforts to throw the game alone could have accomplished the mission). The gambler’s contact offered Wansley $100 to guarantee the success of their scheme. A few hours before the game, he drove the three players by wagon to the Hoboken Ferry where, once on board, Wansley kept $40 and gave the other two players each $30.37 Obviously, the informed gamblers were able to maximum their betting odds going into that inning and cashed in.

Early baseball historian William Ryczek noted that “the Mutuals followers were avid bettors and generally sore losers.”38 So were the Mutuals’ teammates of Wansley, Ed Duffy, and Tom Devyr. After the game, President of the Mutuals John Wildey, charged Wansley with “willful and designed inattention” during the game.39

When a repentant Devyr confessed his role in throwing the contest, the Mutuals-Eckfords match officially became the first rigged game in baseball history. The significance reverberated in baseball far more than if it had been a more obscure match. Not only did the game involve the top teams in the largest metro area in the nation but New York had been the cradle of baseball. The majority of the amateur teams were in the New York metro area. The game-rigging had occurred on the biggest baseball stage in the country.

But the time was nearing for John Wildey’s last hurrah. 1868 Wildey had spear-headed the return of suspended Devyr, in 1869 Duffy was re-admitted, and at the 1870 meetings Wildey pushed to allow ringleader Wansley back into baseball. At the November 30, 1870, meeting in New York City, Wildey was again elected to head the National Association of Base Ball Players by a vote of 18 to 8. The NABBP also voted by a two to one margin to become professional. Wildey of the Mutuals was thus the last President before baseball officially went pro.40

Wildey was not one of those wringing his hands about the evils of the change. He stated in response to a proposal to remain amateurs: “We are perfectly willing to adopt such a rule,” answered Wildey with a quaint smile, “but I fear, ladies and gentlemen, if we did, the players wouldn’t observe it. It seems to me that the days are over when baseball is purely a game for amateurs.”41 Of course, in New York, they hadn’t been purely amateur since the Civil War had ended. This just made professionalization official.

The National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (NA), the first professional baseball organization, began its first season in 1871. The Mutuals survived the Association but not without controversy. The National League was created in 1876, the official start of Major League Baseball, in order to provide more stability and integrity to professional baseball. The Mutuals were kicked out after the first season, officially for refusing to complete their schedule.

John Wildey had a very brief playing career for the Mutual Club prior to the Civil War but had been a leader of the powerful New York team for nearly two decades. He also served as an umpire, including a 1870 Mutual game against Brooklyn and a 1871 game versus the Haymakers.42

Four years before Wildey’s death, a history of the New York and Brooklyn fire departments concluded a brief biography of him stating: “Everyone knows of Jack Wildey of ‘Black Horse Guard’ fame. He was always a great admirer of athletic sports of all kinds, and, although sixty-two years old, he would astonish some of the present generation should they try their strength against him.”43

Capt. John Wildey, Tammany Hall, their baseball team the Mutuals, the Fire Zouaves at Bull Run, and the firehouses of New York City all played important roles, albeit stormy ones, in establishing professional baseball’s role in our National Pastime.

MARK SOUDER served as the US Congressman for northeastern Indiana from 1995–2010. He was a senior staff member in the US House and Senate for a decade prior to being elected to Congress. He was one of the primary questioners in the hearings on steroids abuse in baseball. His article “Why did Wrigley, Lasker, and the Chicago Cubs Join a Presidential Campaign?” was published in the 2015 The National Pastime. “When Boston Dominated Baseball” was included in the 2016 SABR book “Boston’s First Nine.” He has written articles that will appear in scheduled SABR books on Puerto Rican baseball and the Boston Beaneaters. The article on John Wildey in this magazine is an expanded version of his presentation at the 19th Century SABR Conference (The FRED) at Cooperstown in 2015. Souder is retired other than occasional political commentary and meddling. He lives in Fort Wayne with his wife Diane and his books.

Notes

The 1860 Excelsior Club. Star pitcher James Creighton is third from left. (NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)

The Excelsior club of Brooklyn toured Upstate New York, Pennsylvania, and Maryland in 1860, only two years after the formation of the National Association of Base Ball Players. The Nationals of Washington carried the baseball gospel to the Midwest in 1867, shortly after the Civil War. And, of course, the Cincinnati club under Harry Wright accelerated the acceptance of professional clubs with their 1869 and 1870 tours.

Tours by ostensibly amateur clubs from the New York City area began to increase after the Excelsior’s 1860 trip. These journeys, sometimes called starring tours — an example of the interaction between baseball clubs and theater troupes — were an outgrowth of playing on enclosed grounds where the owners of the fields charged admission to spectators, soon sharing part of those receipts with the clubs. Another movement in this trend was baseball clubs playing in trophy and prize games and tournaments. Creeping professionalism was an almost natural outgrowth of these developments.

By 1875, New York City teams were visiting those they identified as “country clubs” fairly routinely. Their more rural rivals were also on the rails visiting each other and their big city opponents. The Mutuals of Meadville in western Pennsylvania started out on a tour through Pennsylvania. Their journey eventually took them to Syracuse, Bridgeport, Connecticut, and New York City. Tours through Upstate New York became so common that the Comets of Norwich, New York, issued an invitation to all clubs touring Central New York to contact them about setting up games. This announcement was published in the New York Clipper on July 31, 1875. That paper’s same issue carried a request from the Mutual Club of Washington, DC, for dates with clubs that had enclosed grounds during their tour of western New York in August 1875. This Mutual club was a black team and the notice was signed by their secretary, Charles R. Douglass, son of Frederick Douglass. Even the New Haven professional team, a member of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, played some of the same Northeast Pennsylvania teams that the amateurs played. New Haven’s 7–40 record against NA teams may explain why they were looking for competition at this level and why they only lasted one year in the NA.

The Arlington and Flyaway were two New York City teams that were representative of the class of teams that participated in the tours, tournaments, and regional rivalries which defined New York area baseball below the National Association level at this time. An exploration of the clubs’ 1875 seasons will shine some light on the world of these lesser known “missing links” between the early amateurs and the major league, minor league, and semi-pro teams which were coming into existence at this stage in baseball’s development.

When the professional clubs broke off in 1871 to form their own association, some of the remaining teams formed the National Association of Amateur Base Ball Players at the suggestion of Henry Chadwick, and led by the Knickerbocker and Excelsior clubs.[fn]New York Clipper, March 18, 1876.[/fn] The group held no meeting in 1872 but was reorganized in 1873, meeting annually in convention for the next several years and maintaining active committees to deal with issues during the playing seasons. The Arlington and Flyaway were members of this organization, C.W. Blodget of the Arlington serving as Secretary going into the 1875 season.

The Amateur Convention on March 10, 1875, established the rules for the coming season and dealt with the two main issues troubling the amateur community at that time: payment of expenses and “revolving” (players switching teams). The convention determined that amateur clubs could split gate receipts to cover traveling expenses. Clubs that did that frequently played on enclosed grounds, while those that didn’t — like the Knickerbockers — usually played on open grounds that charged no admission to spectators. In order to address revolving, the Association prohibited players who played on one club during a season from playing on another club during the same season.[fn]Sunday Mercury, March 14, 1875.[/fn] In response to a May letter from the Chatham club complaining about Morris Moore’s defection from their club to the Flyaway, the editor of the New York Clipper pointed out that since amateurs could not accept payment, and a contract could not be legally binding without compensation, the revolving rule could not be enforced.[fn]New York Clipper, May 29, 1875.[/fn] The Sunday Mercury and the Clipper would complain about the leading amateur teams in the Association breaking the latter rule and bending the former during the season.

The 1875 tour of the Mutuals of Meadville took them from Pennsylvania eventually through Syracuse, New York; Bridgeport, Connecticut; and New York City. (CRAWFORD COUNTY HISTORICAL SOCIETY)

A review of the Arlington and Flyaway seasons published in the Sunday Mercury in December 1875 shows the Flyaway starting first with games against their second nines on April 22 and 26, with their first game in competition with other amateur clubs coming against the Cataract on May 1. The Arlington would jump into the fray with a game against the Star of New York on May 20. The Flyaway would play the Keystone, another premier amateur club in the New York City region, on May 24, beating them, 9–7. The Arlington would face the same opponent on June 10, “Chicagoing” the Keystone, 11–0. The Flyaway’s first defeat would come on May 12, losing to the Rose Hill, a team from St. John’s College, 11–7. The Arlington would not report a loss until they left the New York City area for their July Tour of Pennsylvania and Upstate New York. The Irving of Honesdale beat the New York City visitors, 8–6 on July 21. The New York Clipper, however, published two box scores on May 29, 1875. One showed the Rose Hill win over the Flyaway and the other showed the Arlington losing to the college club, 14–6.

The Flyaway were the much more active club, playing 45 games. They won 31 games, lost 11, and had three draws. In contrast, the Arlington played only 21 games, winning 16, losing four, and having one forfeit by the Olympic.

The two clubs met on June 24 on the Union Grounds in Brooklyn. Tied 4–4 after nine innings, the Arlington scored three runs in the top of the tenth and then shut the Flyaway out in their half of the inning. As was the custom of the time, Blodget(t) pitched all ten innings for the Arlington and Fallon for the Flyaway. All runs were recorded as unearned except for one by the Flyaway. No real details of which players did what were listed in the game accounts, including how the Arlington scored their three runs in the tenth.

Tournaments were a regular part of amateur clubs’ seasons. The Flyaway participated in the Watertown, New York, Tournament that started on June 29. First-class clubs paid a $5 entry fee to compete for prizes of $450, $350, and $250. On their way to the tournament, the Flyaway would cross the border to face the St. Lawrence club of Kingston, Ontario, on July 1, beating the Canadian club, 9–2. The Flyaway would play their first game of the tournament on July 2 against the Syracuse Stars, who had lost the opening game of the tournament the day before to the Lynn, Massachusetts, Live Oaks, 13–7. They dropped the July 2 game to the Flyaway, 14–12. The Flyaway’s next game in the tournament would be a 7–1 loss to the Maple Leaf of Guelph, Ontario. Their last game would be a return match with the St. Lawrence on July 6, the Flyaway beating them, 12–2 and taking the $250 third prize. The Live Oaks took first and the Maple Leaf second.

The Flyaway provided the Clipper with a report of their opinion of the Watertown Tournament. While very complimentary towards the organizers, the City, and their host — Mr. Harris of the Kirby House — they could not resist the nearly traditional dig against one of their opponents, the Maple Leafs. They accused the team they lost to of playing a professional, a man named Kerl.[fn]New York Clipper, July 17, 1875.[/fn] No player named Kerl is listed by Baseball-Reference.com, Total Baseball, or David Nemec’s 19th Century Encyclopedia, so, if he was a professional, he was probably not of the highest caliber. In their adventures away from the Metropolis, it was not uncommon for these teams to find some excuse for a loss to any of the “country clubs.”

The Arlington’s western tour, consisting of games in Pennsylvania and Upstate New York, was announced in the Mercury on July 18. It started with the aforementioned loss to the Irving of Honesdale on July 21. The next day they lost to the Carbondale club, 4–3. It was reported that several thousand watched the game. Gillespie and Kennedy are credited among those making “beautiful plays” in the game for Carbondale.[fn]New York Clipper, July 31, 1875.[/fn] Gillespie would go on to an eight-year National League career with Troy and the New York Giants. Kennedy would play four years in the American Association with the Metropolitans and Brooklyn.

The Arlington would recover their form once they hit Scranton, beating three teams in that city. The Scranton club fell, 7–5, in ten innings on July 22, the Hyde Park club being destroyed, 41–4, the day after, and Providence being wiped out, 28–7, the following. Wilkes-Barre would fare better on July 26 but succumb to the Arlington, 15–11. The New York City team returned to New York State on July 27, losing to Binghamton, 9–2. They would complete their tour with a 6–2 victory over the Star of Syracuse on July 28. Baseball in the hinterlands had improved by 1875. Three of the Arlington’s four losses in 1875 occurred on this tour.

C.W. Blodget would provide the Clipper with a report of the tour, published on August 7. He expressed his club’s thanks to the Honesdale, Scranton, and Syracuse people and congratulated Honesdale as the only team to win their game fairly. He criticized the Carbondale and Binghamton teams that had beaten them — as well as Wilkes-Barre whom they had beaten — for playing revolvers and picked nines. Wilkes-Barre’s response was published in the Clipper of September 4. They denied they were a picked nine and stated that every player in the club was a member and resident of the city and that all but one player had been with the club the past two years. They also said that none of their players were paid.

Carbondale was a slightly more complicated matter. Early reports of the Arlington’s planned tour indicate that they were to play a team called the Alerts in Carbondale. By the time they reached that city, however, the Alerts no longer existed. They had merged with another Carbondale team called the Lackawanna to form the Blue Stockings. This team existed before the Arlington tour and lasted into 1876. If this was a “picked nine,” it is hard to imagine that a city of 6,393 in the 1870 census could have gained an unfair advantage against a New York City team drawing from an 1870 population of 942,292.

The Arlington’s first baseman, Isherwood, seemed to have taken no offense to the Carbondales’ behavior, joining them as their captain on the tour they launched on September 10. He also played first base for Carbondale, as he did with the Arlington, in at least four games. No games as a club are listed for the Arlington after August 17.

The Flyaway decided to skip the Lynn tournament and instead take a tour through New York State themselves. They began what turned out to be a very successful trip on August 23. They won all their games but for one loss and two draws. The loss was to the Syracuse Stars on August 30 by a score of 3–1. They had beaten the Stars in the Watertown tournament and would win again on September 3, 7–4. The Flyaway’s victories were over the Lone Star of Catskill, Murphy of Troy, Clipper of Ilion (twice), Uticas, Franklin of Auburn, Comet of Norwich and Active. They played to a draw twice, 2–2 with the Binghamton Cricket on September 1, the game being called after ten innings, and 7–7 with Sunnyvale on September 4. It was reported that the first game against Ilion was played in Johnstown, New York, with the Flyaway getting $300 for their 20–8 win.[fn]New York Clipper, September 4, 1875.[/fn]

The $300 prize at Johnstown again raised the question of amateur status. This was a hotly debated subject during the 1875 season. The Sunday Mercury, in its preseason article for 1875, had raised the issue, stating in reference to amateur clubs, “It is questionable whether there are a hundred in the entire country.”[fn]Sunday Mercury, March 28, 1875.[/fn]

In its summary article at the end of the season, the Brooklyn Eagle stated, “It should be borne in mind, however, that in most cases of this kind the amateur nines were not exactly amateurs in the strict sense of the word, for two-thirds of the so-called amateur nines of 1875 included players who were compensated for their services, if not by regular salaries — as in the professional organizations — at least by a share of gate receipts, or some other form of remuneration. Hence such nines were able to devote the more time to that practice and training necessary to place them in a position to cope more successfully with the regular professional teams, than regular amateur nines could.”[fn]Brooklyn Eagle, November 23, 1875. (Thanks to Richard Hershberger for providing this reference.)[/fn]

While the article did not include the Arlington or Flyaway in their enumerated list of semi-professional teams, they ended that list with “and in fact every prominent amateur club of the country.” The Flyaway were certainly among the prominent amateur clubs as the Eagle listed them as the leading such team in New York City for 1875. The Arlington placed several players on the New York City all-star team that played a series of games with the best Brooklyn players at the end of the 1875 season, so they would also most likely have been considered among the prominent clubs. It was stated later in the article, “Two tours of a genuine amateur character only are known in the history of the game, and they were the tour of the old Excelsior club in 1860 …; and the grand Western tour of the National Club of Washington in 1867.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

The division between professional and amateur clubs was not resolved with the 1871 formation of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players. The status of those clubs which were not fully salaried stock clubs had varied before the divide and continued to evolve in the seasons leading up to 1875 and for years to come after. Before the launch of the 1876 season, the arrival of the National League would complicate matters for those clubs not included in the new organization even further. A review of the tours and tournaments of 1875 exemplifies the status of a confusing class of clubs on the verge of the next major change in the baseball world.

PAUL BROWNE is the author of “The Coal Barons Played Cuban Giants: A History of Early Professional Baseball in Pennsylvania, 1886–1896” (McFarland). His article on the Cuban Giants’ first victory over a major league team appears in SABR’s “Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the Nineteenth Century.” Browne has been a member of SABR since the mid-1990s. He has contributed several player biographies to the SABR BioProject, a previous article in the 2013 “National Pastime,” McFarland’s journal “Black Ball,” SABR’s Nineteenth Century and Minor Leagues committees, as well as local newspapers. Browne is executive director of the Carbondale Technology Transfer Center.

Sources

Articles

Brooklyn Eagle, 1875.

Carbondale Advance, 1875.

New York Clipper, 1874–76.

New York Sunday Mercury, 1874–76.

New York Times, 1875.

Books

Nemec, David. The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball. New York, N.Y.: Donald I. Fine Books, 1997.

Seymour, Harold. Baseball: The Early Years. New York, NY: Oxford University Press, 1960

Thorn, John, Palmer, Peter & Greshman, Michael, Editors. Total Baseball, Seventh Edition. Kingston, New York: Total Sports Publishing, 2001.

Websites

http://www.baseball_reference.com

New Yorkers love baseball. Their passion for the national game (and its bat-and-ball precursors) can be traced back into the earliest decades of the nineteenth century. Prior to the Civil War, scores of juvenile and adult teams in New York vied for bragging rights or trophy balls on emerald fields and dusty lots.1 Boys and men weren’t the only ones reveling in the excitement of smacking hard grounders past pitchers or putting runners out by catching a lofty fly ball (or on the first bounce by some early rules); girls and women were playing too — in cities large and small and in villages scattered across the rolling hills of upstate and western New York.

• Related link: Click here to view the appendix, “Female Baseball Teams in New York, 1850-1898”

In 1859 a 27-year-old dentist, Francis Guiwits of Steuben County, New York, informed Harper’s Weekly that baseball had been a popular game “in nearly all the villages and among the rural districts of Western New York” for at least twenty years. He added that baseball was “the game at our district schools during intermission hours, and often engaged in by youths of both sexes.”2

Earlier that year, newspapers in Albany, Troy, and Genesee County had debated the propriety of women playing baseball. One individual argued that “there seems nothing violent in the presumption that ball playing would prove as agreeable and useful to ladies as to gentleman,” while another retorted, “Bosh! Just think of looking for the ball every minute or two under the circumference of crinolined players.”3

Criticizing the assumption that women had to wear cumbersome clothing while playing baseball, the Troy Daily Times responded: “Humbug! As if a woman must at all times and under every circumstance, be arrayed in the stiff and conservative propriety of drawing room attire.”4 When an unnamed advocate suggested that women could wear bloomers while playing, the Troy editor countered: “We are no advocates of the Bloomer costume, but we can imagine that there are occasions on which short dresses, minus the outlandish pantaloons — in brief, a rig permitting the free and natural exercise of the lower limbs — would be worth[y], healthful and proper.”5

Fashion constraints weren’t the only thing deterring women from playing baseball in the nineteenth century. They also had to decide whether playing baseball was worth risking their fertility and their lives. Girls and women were inundated with warnings from physicians that they would be irreparably harmed if they overexerted themselves physically or mentally — particularly during or after puberty.

In October 1867 newspapers around the country reprinted an (erroneous) story that a 21-year-old woman in Allen’s Prairie, Michigan, had died after playing baseball.6 (Amaret Howard actually succumbed to typhoid fever.)7 That same year the Reverend John Todd warned about the dangers of encouraging women to ape men in their intellectual pursuits: “If it ministers to vanity to call a girl’s school ‘a college,’ it is very harmless; but as for training young ladies through a long intellectual course, as we do young men, it can never be done — they will die in the process.”8

Each girl and woman who threw herself into her academic studies or decided to pick up a baseball bat and dash around the basepaths in the mid-nineteenth century had to weigh the potential consequences of her actions. For the thirty-six young women at Vassar College in Poughkeepsie, New York, who organized three baseball clubs in 1866 and 1867, and for those who organized a junior and senior nine in Peterboro the following year, love of baseball outweighed warnings about infertility or death.9

In 1875, scores of students at Vassar College organized seven or eight baseball teams with the frightening pronouncements of Harvard Medical School physician Dr. Edward H. Clarke ringing in their ears. In his bestselling book, Sex in Education: Or, A Fair Chance for the Girls (1873), Clarke explained that youth needed to carefully regulate both “muscular and brain labor” so that their bodies had sufficient “force” available to manufacture their “reproductive machinery.”10 He ominously warned that young women who ignored his counsel risked “neuralgia, uterine disease, hysteria, and other derangements of the nervous system.”11

Fortunately for girls and women who loved to play baseball and to engage in other rigorous activities, there were also voices challenging Clarke’s proscriptions. Dr. Helen Webster was resident physician at Vassar College 1874–81. She encouraged students to keep playing baseball even after one of them injured her leg running the bases.12 Webster, like a growing number of physical fitness experts, understood the positive correlation between robust health and vigorous exercise. By the 1880s and 1890s, colleges across the country were hiring physical fitness instructors like Dudley Sargent and Senda Berensen, as well as building gymnasiums, swimming pools, and sports fields to promote athleticism and robust health in male and female students.

The new emphasis on athletics for women inspired more girls and women than ever before to try their hand at baseball — especially in New York state. During the 1870s, girls and women in Rhinebeck, Poughkeepsie, Brooklyn, Erie, Kingston, Auburn, Rochester, Phoenix, Syracuse, and New York City played on baseball teams. In the 1880s and 1890s, dozens more female teams sprang up in at least two dozen New York communities.13 Players came from all social strata. There were immigrants, like Maud Nelson, playing on New York-based barnstorming teams, black women, like Mary E. Thompson and Mary Jackson, playing on pick-up teams, and upper class girls and women, like those at Mrs. Hazen’s School in Pelham Manor and “society buds” in Greenwich, playing on scholastic and civic teams.14

There were so many women playing baseball by the mid-1880s that the New York World commented that sports like cricket and baseball were helping to “enlarge the sphere of the contemporaneous woman.” The World described the transition of the female athlete it was observing: “When the [contemporaneous woman] first took to base ball she was a little limp on the pitch and scattered a little on the home base. She caught a ball with her head over her shoulder, and had an abnormal fear of being struck below the belt. But these absurd things have passed away with development.”15

Girls and women played on the same types of teams as boys and men. In addition to school, college, civic, business, and pick-up teams, girls and women played on professional teams. The first women’s professional team was organized by men in Springfield, Illinois, in 1875, but many nineteenth-century women’s professional teams originated in New York City. They sported names like the Young Ladies Champions of the World Base Ball Club, the American Stars, the American Female Base Ball Club, the New York Giants, the Young Ladies Base Ball Club of New York, the New York Champion Young Ladies Base Ball Club, and even the deceptively named Cincinnati Reds.16

Sylvester Wilson Promotional Publication, The Young Ladies’ Athletic Journal, September 1890.

The earliest of the New York City-based female ball clubs was Sylvester F. Wilson’s short-lived American Brunettes and English Blondes, organized in late March of 1879.17 The team was short-lived because Wilson and his business partner, William Powell, were both arrested for “engaging girls under 16 for immoral purposes” and for having sexual relations with girls under 16.18

Wilson was the most notorious female baseball manager of the twentieth century. He was a narcissist, career criminal, and pedophile, and organized female baseball teams between 1879 and 1903 in places including New York City, Philadelphia, New Orleans, Chicago, and Cincinnati. James William Beul called New York City “the Great Maelstrom of Vice” in 1879 and Sylvester Wilson felt right at home in its seediest neighborhoods.19 Because he was continually running afoul of the law, Wilson used multiple aliases like H.H. Freeman, Harry Richmond, W.S. Franklin, and Frank W. Hartright to hide his identity from the police and child protective agencies like the New York Society for the Prevention of Cruelty to Children (NYSPCC).20

Agents of the NYSPCC kept tabs on Wilson after his arrest for sexual impropriety in 1879 and were successful in bringing Wilson to justice on several occasions, including his arrest in August 1891 for allegedly abducting 15-year-old Libbie Agnes Sunderland from her home in Binghamton to join his barnstorming troupe. The Society not only brought the charges against Wilson in the Sunderland case but also compiled testimonies from individuals around the country detailing how Wilson had duped, defrauded, or ruined them.21 NYSPCC agents were delighted when Wilson received a five-year sentence to Sing Sing and $1,000 fine in 1892.

Two months after Wilson’s release from prison in August 1898, Society agents began receiving reports that Wilson was making unwanted advances on a 17-year-old store clerk. The following May, Manager Fred Smithson of the St. George cricket grounds in Hoboken, swore out an arrest warrant against Wilson (using the alias, William S. Franklin) and his partner H.A. Adams when they absconded with the gate receipts from a baseball game between their female baseball nine and the Hudson Athletic Club.22

Narrowly avoiding incarceration, Wilson headed for Philadelphia where he quickly attracted the attention of the Pennsylvania Society for the Protection of Children from Cruelty (PSPCC) on suspicion of being a “procurer” and enticing young girls from home. In its Twenty-Fifth Annual Report, the NYSPCC noted that it was “the pleasure of this Society to furnish from its records the complete criminal history of Wilson” to the PSPCC so it could prosecute Wilson.23 Just over a year after walking out of jail in New York, Wilson was imprisoned in Pennsylvania’s Moyamensing Prison for a year. His whereabouts between his release and December 1902 are unknown, but in January 1903 he was back in New York City advertising for a partner to put up $500 to help fund another female baseball team. He was using the alias Frank W. Hartright and using 23 Manhattan Avenue as his contact address. In April, agents of the NYSPCC spotted one of Wilson’s ads soliciting young ladies to join a basketball club. The girls were to report to the stage entrance of the Bon Ton Music Hall — a seedy theater located at 112 West 24th Street. Society agents sprang into action, immediately opening another investigation on Wilson that bore fruit in June when Max Bracklow — an employee of the Waldorf Astoria Hotel — claimed that Wilson had defrauded him out of $200 he invested in Wilson’s “woman’s base ball team and vaudeville show.”24 Bracklow reported that he had accompanied Wilson and a group of young women to Peekskill where they had played basketball for a week to get conditioned for the upcoming baseball season. He testified that Wilson’s plan was to hold baseball games in the afternoon and vaudeville performances in the evening.25

Bracklow’s charges of fraud against Wilson paled in comparison to the NYSPCC discovery that Wilson had not only lured underaged girls from their homes to join his entertainment troupe, but that he had also had sexual relations with some of them and shown them pornographic photographs.26 NYSPCC detectives Pisarra and Fogerty gathered enough evidence against Wilson that he agreed to plead guilty to a first offense rather than go to trial. (Conviction on a second offense could have brought a 20-year sentence.) Wilson received a 9-year sentence to Sing Sing that ended up being a life sentence.27 The 1910 federal census indicates that Wilson was a “patient” in Dannemora, New York — location of the State Mental Hospital where state prisoners were sent; he was still there in 1920 and died there on December 7, 1921. He was 69 years old.28

Had Wilson not been the crook he was, he might have made a positive contribution to the history of professional women’s baseball instead of giving it a reputation for debauchery that took decades to overcome. Wilson was a masterful marketer whose hyperbolic flimflammery rivaled that of P.T. Barnum. He knew how to attract crowds — as evidenced by the dozens of hometown newspapers across the country that noted that attendance at Wilson’s games were the largest to date in their locales. Approximately 65,000 individuals paid to watch Wilson’s Young Ladies’ Base Ball Club play its 37 games in 1883.29 His biggest triumph as a baseball manager came in 1890 when 7,000 to 10,000 spectators turned out to see Wilson’s Black Stocking Nine play the Allertons at Monitor Park in Weehawken, New Jersey. Wilson planned the grand event with future Tammany Hall leader Charles Murphy who was a big baseball fan and manager of Monitor Park at the time.30

Wilson’s marketing brilliance was to recognize and leverage the shift in attitudes about women’s physical fitness. Wilson launched his baseball enterprises just as the general public was acknowledging the connection between vigorous outdoor exercise and robust health. His oft-repeated pitch to reporters was that he was not organizing female baseball teams just to make money, but “to popularize open-air exercises among the Women of the land . . . as a Beautifying influence.” He pointed out that the ancient Greeks had “understood the value of open-air Gymnastics, and produced those beautiful and graceful figures which, as shown in their marble representatives handed down to us, the world of today cannot rival.”31

Wilson was drawn to female baseball teams because they provided easy access to young girls, but he also seemed genuinely interested in producing a financially viable entertainment commodity. He invested significant capital in his female baseball teams and military drill companies.32 For his first foray into women’s baseball in New York City, he obtained property at the corner of Madison Avenue and 59th Street and built “Wilson’s Amphitheatre and Ladies’ Athletic Grounds” complete with 400 feet of billboards for advertisers.33 He announced in advertisements:

[M]y object is to start a new thing, to develop women of America. I am going to open here a field for their physical perfection. There is to be base ball, lacrosse, archery, polo, walking, running, velocipede riding and everything. Ponies are now in training. The doctors tell me it will knock seven-eighths of their business sky high.34

The idea of “developing” the women of America was a theme Wilson trumpeted with every new team he established and many young women eagerly joined his baseball teams.

Over the course of his twenty-year involvement with female professional baseball, Wilson gave over 130 teenagers and young women the opportunity to travel the country and play baseball. Unfortunately, Wilson did not recruit highly skilled female baseball players; his focus was on physical beauty and most of his players were “well formed” actresses, former circus performers, and young runaways. He taught them only enough baseball to enable them to navigate on the diamond and make a show of pitching, hitting, and catching.35 His rhetoric about promoting baseball as a “Beautifying influence” for women was bunk. Though a handful of Wilson’s players, like Pearl Emerson and May Lawrence, were genuinely talented players, they were not Wilson’s chief drawing card; he was selling sexual titillation and entertainment novelty.36 The majority of his players saw through his false rhetoric and played only a single season or less, but a handful of them stayed for five seasons or more, sticking with Wilson through thick and thin and testifying on his behalf before numerous judges in courtrooms across the country.37

Sylvester Wilson undoubtedly harmed the reputation of professional women’s baseball teams and of female players in general. During Wilson’s 1891–92 trial for abducting Libbie Sunderland, New York State Assembly representative W. E. McCormick introduced a bill entitled “An Act to Prohibit Female Base-Ball Playing.” Though nothing came of the bill, the fact that a New York politician thought to introduce it in the first place indicates the extent to which Wilson had besmirched the reputation of all female baseball players.38

Fortunately for the future of women’s baseball, there were enough girls and women who continued to play baseball in New York and elsewhere that women were able to keep a foothold in the game. As Wilson headed off to Sing Sing for his first stint, the Young Ladies Base Ball Club of New York began operating. Two years later, its star, the highly talented pitcher, Lizzie Arlington, was wowing crowds and helping to rehabilitate the reputation of women’s professional baseball.39

As Wilson’s sentence dragged on, girls and women engaged in games in Central Park, Rhinebeck, and on schoolyards and college campuses across the state and the nation.40 These girls and women inspired others to play and passed their love of the game on to the generations who followed them. Over a dozen New Yorkers played in the World War II-era All American Girls Base Ball League and groups like the New York Women’s Baseball Association and USA Baseball promote the game for countless New Yorkers today.4142 The future of women in baseball is bright. No thanks to Sylvester Wilson.

DR. DEBRA A. SHATTUCK has been researching women baseball players since 1987. Her area of expertise is the nineteenth century and she recently published a first-of-its-kind history documenting the extent to which girls and women have played baseball from its earliest inception: “Bloomer Girls: Women Baseball Pioneers” (University of Illinois Press, 2017). Deb is a retired Air Force Colonel and a long-time SABR member. She is Provost and Associate Professor of History and Leadership at John Witherspoon College in Rapid City, South Dakota, and, though far from her roots in northern Ohio, is still a proud fan of all things Cleveland.

• Read more: Click here to view the appendix, “Female Baseball Teams in New York, 1850-1898”

Notes

Examining the life span of a baseball stadium by profiling its first and last games is an interesting exercise—even more interesting when it becomes a number of different stadiums. This is the case with the Polo Groundses, four or five—depending on how one counts them—samely-named stadiums. Taking a look at ten different games over an 80-year span tells more than just the hits and errors in a particular game; it traces the history of baseball in America’s largest city.

Varying definitions of stadiums also lead to differing numbering systems among stadium aficionados (some refer to the original Polo Grounds as two stadiums since it had two diamonds). Just to add to the provocativeness of it all, other issues of contention arise.

Contention isn’t the goal of this article; it’s to be a summary of the first and last games, with accompanying information perhaps at times illuminating the issues surrounding oddly-shaped stadiums with an equally odd name for most of them, since polo was played only in the original version.

While others may differ, the author here refers to the original site as Polo Grounds I—even though there were two diamonds. Because the grounds had one diamond in the southeast corner and another in the southwest corner, some have labeled the different diamonds as Polo Grounds I and Polo Grounds II; I consider the entire facility as one stadium, labeling it as such while noting that it had two diamonds.

POLO GROUNDS I

These were actual polo grounds, extending from Sixth to Fifth avenues and wedged between 110th and 112th streets just north of Central Park. Professional baseball first arrived in 1880, and major-league baseball (the focus here) came in 1883.

Since there were two diamonds, there were two first and two last games here. And the final game on the southwest diamond is, in this author’s mind, not a certainty.

What is certain is the first major-league game on each of the diamonds.

First Game—Southeast Diamond

The New York National League team played its first game on the southeast diamond—the one with the elaborate grandstand—on Tuesday, May 1, 1883. This team eventually became known as the Giants. Many sources cite Gothams as the original nickname, although the author has yet to find that usage in any of the newspapers.1

The first game for the New-Yorks—as The New York Times referred to the team—was also the first major-league game on Manhattan Island.2 A previous team representing the city in the National League played in Brooklyn, which still had nearly another 15 years as a separate city ahead of it.

The city was ready for baseball. “The residents of Harlem were awakened from their usual state of quiet and repose yesterday afternoon by seeing immense crowds of people coming up town on their way to the Polo Grounds,” reported the New York Tribune.3

The crowd was reported at more than 15,000, one of the spectators being General (and former president) Ulysses Grant. New York batted first, built a 6–0 lead and held on for a 7–5 win over Boston. The New-Yorks had a lineup that featured four players now in the Hall of Fame—catcher Buck Ewing, first baseman Roger Connor, center fielder John Montgomery Ward, and pitcher Mickey Welch. (See Box Score 1.)4

First Game—Southwest Diamond

New York had two new major league teams in 1883. In addition to the National League Club, a team called the Metropolitan played in the American Association.5 Both the New-Yorks and the Metropolitan were owned by the Metropolitan Exhibition Company, of which John B. Day, a Tammany politician and wealthy baseball wannabe, was principal owner. Day planned to have his Association club play at the opposite end of the Polo Grounds from the New-Yorks and carved out a diamond in the southwest corner. The diamond wasn’t ready for the Metropolitan’s first home game, causing the team to use the southeast diamond.

On Decoration Day May 30, the southwest diamond was ready, and it was needed, because the New-Yorks were at home. Not only did the National League team have two games scheduled, the college national championship game was played in between.

On the southwest diamond, the Metropolitan also had two games scheduled—against two different teams, Cincinnati and then Columbus.6 The game against Cincinnati, which started at 9:30A.M., was the first on the southwest diamond. Tim Keefe, another future Hall of Famer, shut out Cincinnati, 1–0, as the Metropolitan came up with a run in the top of the ninth for the win. (See Box Score 2.)

With games going on at both ends of the grounds, a flimsy, canvas-covered fence separated the playing areas. Balls rolling under the fence remained in play, causing the bizarre scene of an outfielder emerging into the opposing field in pursuit of a ball. Although outfielders proved agile and adept at getting under the fence and to the fugitive balls, occasionally a hit that rolled under the fence ended up as a home run.

Starting on Decoration Day, the League and Association teams were at home over the next couple of weeks, so the canvas fence remained up with the teams operating at opposite ends. The Metropolitan then took off on a long road trip and didn’t return until July 23.

By then, the New-Yorks were away, leaving the entire Polo Grounds open. The question is, did the Metropolitan play on the southwest or southeast diamond? Many stadium scholars express certainty that the Association team played on the southeast diamond whenever it was available and played on the west end only when there was a conflict.

The author of this article—while acknowledging the likelihood of this—isn’t as convinced as others, whom the author believes are being swayed by nebulous evidence.7 Nevertheless, it seems more likely that the final game on the west diamond was September 4, two days before the Metropolitan’s final home game, which was probably played on the southeast diamond.

Last Game—Southwest Diamond

The opponent September 4 was the Eclipse (Louisville), which took the lead with seven runs in the fifth inning. Down by five runs after six innings, the Metropolitan caught up and tied the score in the ninth. When the Eclipse couldn’t counter in the bottom of the inning, the game was called by darkness and ended in an 8–8 tie. (See Box Score 3.)

Last Game—Southeast Diamond

The southwest diamond disappeared from the Polo Grounds after the 1883 season; eventually, so did the Metropolitan. The National League team, soon known as the Giants, continued playing in the southeast corner and made it to the World’s Series in 1888, playing the American Association champion St. Louis Browns in a series set at 10 games.

Four of the first five games were at the Polo Grounds, and the fifth game, on October 20, was the final game on the original Polo Grounds. The Giants trailed, 4–1, going into the last of the eighth but rallied for five runs. Buck Ewing brought in a run with a triple and then scored the tying run on an infield out. Roger Connor tripled and came home with the go-ahead run on a single by John Montgomery Ward, who added insurance via a stolen base, error, and passed ball. When the inning ended, umpire John Gaffney called the game because of darkness.

The Giants went on to win the series, six games to four. Until the Atlanta Braves closed Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium with a World Series game in 1996, the Polo Grounds on 110th Street was the only stadium to finish its history with a World’s/World Series game. (See Box Score 4.)

On the left is the Polo Grounds that opened in 1889. On the right is the new ballpark that opened to the north of the “New” Polo Grounds in 1890. Originally used by the New York team in the Player’s League and known as Brotherhood Park, it was taken over by the National League Giants in 1891 and renamed the Polo Grounds. The stadium the Giants abandoned took the name Manhattan Field. Its grandstand remained for several years, and the playing area was used for a variety of activities.

POLO GROUNDS II

First Game

Early in 1889 New York City moved ahead with plans to re-open 111th Street, which had been interrupted by the Polo Grounds between Fifth and Sixth Avenues, the site occupied by the Giants.

The Giants opened 1889 as an itinerant bunch, playing first in New Jersey and then on Staten Island before Day found a site just off the Harlem River in the southern half of Coogan’s Hollow in Manhattan, beneath the 155th Street viaduct and along Eighth Avenue. Day was concerned about confusion among fans as the team prepared for its third home of the season. He knew that New Yorkers associated the name Polo Grounds with his baseball team, so—to send an unambiguous message as to where the Giants would be headquartered—he christened the quarters the New Polo Grounds.8

Barely two weeks after work had begun to convert a field to a stadium, the Giants opened the New Polo Grounds with a game against Pittsburgh on Monday, July 8. Newspapers reported the crowd inside the stadium as more than 10,000, even though fewer than half that many seats were available. Many of those denied access retired to a beer garden across the street, an establishment that offered at least a partial view of the game through its windows. A larger group occupied the high ground to the west of the stadium. This area—officially Coogan’s Bluff—was dubbed “Dead-Head Hill” by The New York Times, which observed that the onlookers from the hill “were bunched together as closely as chocks in a dude’s trousers.”9

Cannonball Crane outhurled Pittsburgh’s Pud Galvin—a right-hander who had already amassed more than 300 pitching wins in his career—and also started a four-run third-inning rally with a single. New York beat Pittsburgh, 7–5. (The Giants would go on to win the pennant in 1889 and beat the Brooklyn Bridegrooms of the American Association in the World’s Series.) (See Box Score 5.)

Last Game

Brooklyn moved to the National League in 1890 and played the Giants more frequently. New York’s final home game of the season—on Saturday, September 13—was against Brooklyn and also the final major-league game in this edition of the Polo Grounds.

A doubleheader had been scheduled, but the teams weren’t even able to make it through all of the first game. The Giants trailed, 8–3, after six innings and scored a run in the top of the seventh before rain stopped play. The final score has been listed as 8–4 and 8–3, depending on if the Giants’ final run is counted in the uncompleted inning. (Per the rules in the Spalding Guide, the run should not have counted.) (See Box Score 6.)

This box score, counting the run scored by New York in the top of the seventh, is from The New York Times. Retrosheet lists the score in this game as 8–3 for Brooklyn, indicating that the uncompleted seventh inning was erased with the score reverting to the sixth inning.

POLO GROUNDS III

In 1890 the National League had a neighbor in New York as a new league—the Players’ National League of Professional Base Ball Clubs—formed. Backers of the New York team in what became known as the Players’ League leased the northern section of Coogan’s Hollow and built a stadium, Brotherhood Park, next to the Polo Grounds.

The Players’ League lasted only one season, and the Giants moved into the northern space, carrying the name Polo Grounds with them again.

First Game

The first National League game in Polo Grounds III was played on Wednesday, April 22, 1891, and a huge crowd was on hand to see the Giants reunited. Before the game, Giants who had remained with the National League team lined up on one side of the field with those who had gone to the Players’ League on the other. The two sides then came together to indicate that past differences were settled and that they were one team again.

Amos Rusie pitched for New York, John Clarkson for Boston, and the game was tied, 2–2, after eight. Rusie came home with the go-ahead run in the top of the inning on a single by George Gore, but Gore undid the good of his hit in the bottom of the inning. Boston had two on and one out when Herman Long sent a fly to center. “Gore started after it, and to the great discomfiture of the vast throng he lost his footing and fell,” reported the Times.10

The Boston Globe provided a different perspective: “Long came up with his long bat and hit the ball hard, but it sailed high and George Gore started to get under it, having plenty of time. He misjudged, however, and then made a muff of it, high over his head, the ball rolling along the field as Gore lay in a heap on the ground, having tangled himself up in reaching for the ball.”

The newspapers also differed on whether Gore was charged with an error or Long credited with a triple (as is indicated in the accompanying box score); in either case, two runs scored to give Boston a 4–3 win. (See Box Score 7.)

Last Game

The Giants remained in the Polo Grounds for nearly 20 years and expected to use the stadium longer. They lost to the Phillies, 6–1, in the second game of the 1911 season, a Philadelphia win preserved by a great catch by center-fielder Dode Paskert.11 Early the next morning a fire began in the grandstand, spreading quickly and destroying all but some bleachers in left field and the clubhouse/office building at the Eighth Avenue end.

A young sportswriter, Fred Lieb, was taken by the late-inning catch made by Paskert and years later reflected in his memoirs on the event and the fire that followed hours later. He wrote, “Reporters who were there liked to call the official account of the fire’s origin nonsense: it was Paskert’s electrifying and sizzling catch, they said, that sparked the Polo Grounds holocaust.”12 (See Box Score 8.)

POLO GROUNDS IV

The Giants accepted an offer from the nearby New York Highlanders/Yankees to move into American League Park as they figured out what to do about a new stadium. Owner John Brush decided to rebuild on the same spot but with more durable materials.

In fewer than three months, a burgeoning steel-and-concrete stadium with 16,000 seats was ready.

First Game

Christy Mathewson was on the mound against Boston—then at least informally known as the Rustlers—on Wednesday, June 28, 1911, for the first game of the final Polo Grounds.

Laughing Larry Doyle broke a scoreless tie in the bottom of the sixth with a home run into the right-field grandstand. It was all Matty needed, but his mates gave him two more runs as New York beat Boston, 3–0. (See Box Score 9.)

Through the decades the Polo Grounds expanded, keeping the familiar horseshoe shape of the predecessor, with the ridiculously short distances down the foul lines and even more absurd distance to center field. A gap between the bleachers was filled by the clubhouses and offices, set back to form a notch that contained monuments and stairways—all in play.

For much of the history of Polo Grounds IV, a 483-foot marker was attached to the clubhouse wall in center field. When the Mets moved into the Polo Grounds, the distance was listed as 475 feet.

Last Game

The Polo Grounds had several last games—at least what were thought to be the finales for the stadium.

The end of the New York Giants came with a 9–1 loss September 29, 1957. The Giants were off for the West Coast, but the Polo Grounds survived—used for other events—to still be around when another New York team in the National League, the Mets, began in 1962. A new ballpark in Queens was being built and was to be ready the following year as the Mets used the Polo Grounds in the interim.

On September 23, 1962, a crowd of 10,304 came out for another last game as the Mets beat the Cubs, 2–1.13

However, the new stadium still wasn’t ready, so the Mets had one more year in the Polo Grounds. Fewer than 2,000 fans were on hand for what really was the final game, a 5–1 loss to the Phillies on Wednesday, September 18, 1963.

“Maybe the fact that there had been two previous ‘last games’ at the Polo Grounds took a bit from the occasion,” wrote Gordon S. White, Jr. in The New York Times. “It is hoped that no more Mets games will be played at the Polo Grounds—if only to put an end to the string of finales.”14

Jim Hickman gave the Mets their only run with the final home run ever hit in the Polo Grounds. (See Box Score 10.)

Baseball was still played there, one more time, in October in a Latin All-Star Game, the National League beating the American League, 5–2.15 The New York Jets played out their football season, and the final event—a 19–10 loss to the Buffalo Bills—finished the Polo Grounds December 14, 1963.

History—from Merkle’s Boner to Mays’s Catch—all took place at some version of the Polo Grounds.

STEW THORNLEY is the author of “Land of the Giants: New York’s Polo Grounds” and editor of a soon-to-be-published anthology of the Polo Grounds. He received the USA Today Baseball Weekly Award for best research presentation at the 1998 SABR convention in San Francisco for a presentation on the Polo Grounds. Stew has been a SABR member since 1979.

NOTES

1 Nicknames were nebulous in the nineteenth century and beyond. Although reliable reference sources list nicknames for teams, some are “blatantly bogus,” according to SABR member and nineteenth-century expert Richard Hershberger.

2 The Times dropped the hyphen in New-York on December 1, 1896.

3 “Baseball News,” New-York Tribune, Wednesday, May 2, 1883, page 2. The Tribune dropped the hyphen in New-York on April 16, 1914.

4 Note that here and elsewhere, “runs earned” are those earned by batting, not in the modern sense of “earned runs.” Box scores replicate what appeared in the newspapers of the time.

5 The American Association had more of a focus on names than cities, differing from the National League. The Eclipse (representing Louisville), Alleghenys (representing Pittsburgh), and Athletics (representing Philadelphia) are among the examples of teams that shared the convention of the team representing New York, the Metropolitan.

6 Cincinnati and Columbus were also playing two games against different opponents, criss-crossing with one another by playing in Philadelphia as well as New York.

7 It’s clear that the southwest diamond was not constructed to be used only when there was a conflict with the east diamond. However, it’s possible that after seeing how inferior the playing and seating areas were in the southwest corner that John B. Day decided to have the Metropolitan play on the southeast diamond whenever possible. The nebulous evidence is that New York newspapers had ads for all home games, and the ads directed patrons to the Fifth Avenue or Sixth Avenue entrance, an indication of which diamond would be used. This is partially true; the specifics on the entrance, however, appeared only when both teams were at home. It’s known which diamond was used by which team in these situations. The entrance information does not appear in the ads when only one team was at home—information that could confirm if the Metropolitan used the southeast diamond whenever it was available or if it used the southwest diamond, as was the plan before the season.

8 “A New Baseball Field: The Giants Will Play Games in This City Again: Grounds Secured on the West Side of Town in a Convenient Place,” The New York Times, Saturday, June 22, 1889, 2; “The Giants New Grounds: A Home for Them on Manhattan Island at Last,” New-York Tribune, June 22, 1889, 7.

9 “The Giants Are at Home: They Open Their New Grounds in Grand Style,” New-York Times, Tuesday, July 9, 1889, p. 3; “A Royal Christening: Happy Giants Welcomed to Their New Grounds,” New-York Tribune, July 9, 1889, 2.

10 “Boston Defeats New-York: Over 17,000 Persons Witness the Opening League Game: The Giants Looked Like Winners to the Ninth Inning, but Lost by an Accident,” New-York Times, Thursday, April 23, 1891, page 2; “Grand Send Off: League Teams Begin the Battle for the Pennant: Over 17,000 People See the Game in Gotham: Boston Plays in Luck and Wins in the Ninth,” Boston Globe, Thursday, April 23, 1891, 11.

11 Paskert’s Catch: “Phillies Flay ‘Big Six’s’ Pitching,” The New York Times, Friday, April 14, 1911, p. 2.

12 Fred Lieb, Baseball As I Have Known It (New York: Coward, McCann & Geoghegan,Inc., 1977), p. 35; “Polo Grounds Swept by Fire,” The New York Times, Friday, April 14, 1911, 1.

13 “Mets Beat Cubs, 2-1, in Farewell to Baseball at the Polo Grounds” by Robert M. Lipsyte, The New York Times, Monday, September 24, 1962, 24.

14 “Era of Mets Ends at Polo Grounds” by Gordon S. White Jr., The New York Times, Thursday, September 19, 1963, 32.

15 “National Leagues Triumph at Polo Grounds, 5-2: Latin All-Stars Paced by M’Bean” by William J. Briordy, The New York Times, Sunday, October 13, 1963.

Middletown’s first reported baseball team was the Wallkills Base Ball Club. Founded in 1866 by many of the leading citizens, this amateur team played other towns and villages in the area as well as teams from northern New Jersey and New York City. Newspaper coverage of the Wallkills stops in the early 1870s, making it appear that the team had disbanded, but they resurfaced again with new personnel in 1880. In the interim, a team named the Lone Stars was formed and became the most prominent team in Middletown 1874–77. However, the resurgent Wallkills took back the local spotlight throughout the 1880s. During that decade the team won 79 games and lost 62, a fairly respectable showing. The team finally stopped playing shortly after a new Middletown powerhouse team came to life.

The rise of the Asylum Base Ball Club and its outstanding success is the story of an unlikely relationship between a hospital chartered to treat the mentally ill and a group of talented young men—some of whom would go on to careers in the major leagues, including Hall of Fame pitcher Jack Chesbro.

The Asylum Base Ball Club in 1891. Wilber Cook (manager) sitting in center.

THE ASYLUM BASE BALL CLUB

The Asylum Base Ball Club was formed in 1888 to represent the State Homeopathic Asylum for the Insane at Middletown, New York, and to provide amusement for the patients confined there. The State Homeopathic Asylum was the first of its kind in the United States, opening its doors in 1874. During its peak years in the late nineteenth and early twentieth century, it was the largest in the country. Baseball had been utilized in mental facilities as a recreational activity for patients for many years. However, Selden Talcott, the Superintendent of the Middletown SHA, believed that baseball could be therapeutic even for those patients unable to play the game, but who could be avid fans of a skilled team. He made it a priority to schedule games with the best teams in the region.

Between 1888 and 1894 the Asylum Base Ball Club was highly successful and posted an enviable record of 111 wins, 31 losses, and two ties against some of the top amateur, semi-pro, and professional teams in the New York area. In 1892 the team won 22 of 24 games played, and the only two losses were to the National League’s New York Giants by scores of 2-1, and 6-5 in 10 innings.

Another indication of the team’s strength was its record against two of the best professional Black Baseball clubs of the era, the Cuban Giants and the NY Gorhams. Between 1890 and 1894 the Asylum club won eleven of nineteen games against these fine teams.

THE CUBAN X GIANTS

In 1896, a rift between Cuban Giants owner John Bright and some of his players magnified. The players left the team and a new team, the Cuban X Giants, was formed under the management of E.B. Lamar. Bright sued Lamar over the use of the name but lost in court and renamed his own team the Genuine Cuban Giants. The Cuban X Giants took over the spotlight and became the Eastern Colored champions 1897–1903, and Colored champions in 1899. During 1896 and 1897, the Cuban X Giants opposed the Asylum Club four times, winning two (10-8 and 15-1), losing one (8-10), with one rainout.

In 2005, the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown commissioned a group of baseball historians and other experts to investigate 36 ballplayers, managers, and executives who had been affiliated with the Negro Leagues or pre-Negro-Leagues teams. As a result, 16 men and 1 woman were enshrined in the Hall of Fame in 2006. Two black men who played periodically against the Asylum baseball teams were included in this group, Sol White and Frank Grant.

The Cuban X Giants circa 1902, E.B. Lamar standing in suit.

A PLAN UNFOLDS

Wilbur E. Cook had been the manager of the Asylum team since its inception in 1888. By 1905, he had spent 31 years at the State Hospital, mostly as Patient Supervisor. Weighing well over 200 pounds, Cook was an impressive figure with his walrus mustache. Cook had come to work for Dr. Seldon Talcott after Talcott successfully treated him for a severe injury he had received on the baseball field. Over the course of his employment, he served several Superintendents, and his wife was also employed there for many years.

After many successful seasons, nine of the 1894 Asylum BBC starters left to join minor league clubs in 1895. The team was rebuilt, but over the ensuing years, baseball had slowly lost some of its local interest. Cook wanted to do something that would regenerate the previous level of interest in baseball at the hospital. He and former team captain John Degnan came up with what they thought was a great idea and as reported in the Middletown Daily Argus began corresponding with former Aslyum players by late summer 1905. They arranged for a “reunion” baseball game for the old Asylum players from the glory days to face the Cuban X Giants. Despite the years that had passed, Cook was still able to get many of the best players to commit to playing. Only one of the fan favorites—Pat McGreevy, the great Asylum catcher—had passed away in 1899 at age 32.

During the preceding decade, many of the former Asylum ballplayers had played with minor league clubs and a few had made it to the major leagues. When news of this reunion game broke, the old fans and rooters could hardly be contained. For weeks the game was anticipated with great interest by the baseball cranks (fans) of the city of Middletown and surrounding towns.

THE ASYLUM TEAM PLAYERS

“Happy Jack” Chesbro: Jack was a starting pitcher for the New York American League franchise—a team variously nicknamed by the press as Highlanders, Hilltoppers, and even Yankees. In 1904 Jack won 41 games and pitched 48 complete games, still top totals for seasons after 1893. The team would eventually officially adopt the Yankees moniker, and in 1946 Chesbro would be voted into The National Baseball Hall of Fame. Chesbro had come to the State Hospital in Middletown from North Adams, Massachusetts, in 1894 at age 19 to pitch for the Asylums and work as a hospital attendant.

Art Madison: Art was then a minor league shortstop for the Utica Pent-Ups of the New York State League. A boyhood friend of Jack Chesbro from Clarksburg, Massachusetts, as a youth he had played on local sandlot teams with Jack. In 1894 he also worked and played ball with him at the hospital, and was instrumental in getting Jack a tryout with the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1899. Art played with the Asylum team in 1894 and 1897, and went on to play briefly for the Pirates and the Philadelphia Phillies.

John J. “Jack” Lawlor: At the time of the reunion, he was player/manager of the Utica Pent-Ups. Lawlor had been playing minor league ball since 1891 primarily in the Eastern and the New York State Leagues. Jack was known as “The Gloveless Wonder” as he was one of the last professional players to field without a glove. He worked at the State Hospital from 1891 through 1909 during the offseasons, and would later be manager of Middletown’s entry into the NY/NJ League in 1913 and the Atlantic League in 1914. John was also named manager of the Asylum team in 1922, but passed away early in the season at age 53.

Pete Lamer (aka Pierre Lamers): Pete was with Dover in the Lackawanna League, and Pete’s brother E. B. Lamar Jr., was owner/manager of the Cuban X Giants. He had played with the Asylum club in 1896 and 1897. In 1898 he had gone to the Connecticut State League with New London. Per MarkOkkonen, Lamer spent several years in the minors and also played with Poughkeepsie (NY) in the Hudson River League in 1903. He had a cup of coffee in the major leagues with the Chicago Cubs in 1902 and later with Cincinnati in 1907.

George “Tuck” Turner: Tuck played on the Asylum team 1892–93. He went on to play in the majors with the Phillies 1893–96 and the St. Louis Cardinals 1896–98. Tuck had batted .418 for the 1894 Phils, and was playing minor league ball in New Bedford, Massachusetts, at the time of the reunion game. Tuck was inducted into the Staten Island Sports Hall of Fame in 2011.

Chris Genegal: Chris worked at the State Hospital from 1889 until 1901. He played minor league ball in the New York State League for Gloversville in 1895, in the Penn State League in 1896, and then Canandaigua, leading the NY State League in hits in 1897. He turned down several offers from the New York Giants to play in the National League. Chris continued to play locally for several teams and appeared in games as late as 1911 when he was 47 years old. He and Jack Lawlor were on the Middletown Athletic Club team that defeated both the Brooklyn Dodgers and NY Giants in 1908. Chris also played for the Middletown entry in the short-lived Eastern Association of 1909.

Charlie Tierney: Charlie was playing in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. He was from Goshen and worked as a clerk at Equitable Insurance, but always found time for baseball. He roamed the outfield when not pitching and he had played against Middletown teams since the mid-1880s, pitching effectively for strong Goshen and Walden teams. He also played with the Asylums on and off over a ten-year period, and played minor league ball with Albany/Johnstown in 1896 and Easton in 1896 .

Tommy Murray: Tommy played with the Asylum team 1891–97 and had a brief stint in the minors for Albany/Johnstown of the NY State League in 1895. When Tommy left the semi-pro Allertons in 1891, Wee Willie Keeler took his place at second base on that team. Tommy previously worked for the railroad, but was now a liquor salesman in New York City.

Tom Morehead (Moorehead): Tom was captain of the Dover team in the Lackawanna League. Tom had played with the Asylums 1891–93 and 1896–97. He was a cloth cutter for Hackett-Carhart and became his union’s president.

Chris Rhinecker (Reinacker): Chris was a member of the Asylum team 1896–97. He also played for many years in Hoboken, New Jersey. He was thought to be playing in Utica in 1905, and played for the New Rochelle (NY) Rough Riders, a semi-pro team in 1907.

Fisher Launt: Fish played for the Wallkills BBC of Middletown (1885–88) and became an initial member of the Asylum team in 1888. He played with the team through 1895, was a solid hitter to all fields, a great base runner, and the team’s spark plug. Fish was most noted for his wild style of base coaching, which was a popular treat for the spectators and a terror for the opposition. He worked as a conductor for the Ontario & Western Railroad and lived in Sidney, New York.

John Degnan: Degnan, another original member, was the Asylum Captain 1889–96. He also captainedMiddletown’s best amateur team, the Wallkills, 1883–90. On the three occasions when the Wallkills played the Asylum, Degnan and two other players, Launt and McGreevy, would have to choose which team to play for. John was the owner of one of Middletown’s plumbing companies, and quite active in local civic associations and politics. No longer actively playing, John was on hand to perform the umpiring duties.

September 29, 1905 – Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital Base Ball Team vs. Cuban X Giants

THE BIG DAY ARRIVES

On the day of the game, the players were given a rousing reception upon arrival in Middletown via the Erie Railroad. The Giants emerged smiling from the train, and several of the Asylum team had accompanied them on the ride. Jack Chesbro and his wife, Tommy Murray, Tom Morehead, Tuck Turner, Charlie Tierney, Chris Rhinecker, and Pete Lamer had all taken the rails. From the station, a parade headed up to the State Hospital with the Cubans occupying a large side-seated wagon and the Asylum players seated in four automobiles driven by Charles Higham (Middletown’s Chief Fire Engineer and former Wallkill BBC third baseman), and several other local businessmen.

Jack Chesbro had just come off his third year with the New York Americans winning 19 games and posting a 2.20 earned run average. It was a far cry from his 1904 season. In today’s baseball world there are still exhibition games scheduled by team management, but these are rare, and there are contract restrictions that make it impossible for players to play on their own for another club. However, many of the early baseball teams allowed individual players to play for teams outside the major leagues if schedules permitted. This practice continued into the 1950s.

Everybody wanted to see Chesbro, who was now an $8000/year pitcher in the big city, and more than 3000 fans were on hand on the hospital grounds. Tommy Murray, who was originally expected to play, acted as the second umpire. It was rumored that he had gotten too fat for any of the uniforms, and he did not deny this.

THE CUBAN X GIANTS PLAYERS

This was billed as the Cuban X Giants, but the players were essentially a black all-star team put together for this reunion game. These men played for a variety of black professional teams, and not all were on the Cuban X Giants 1905 regular season team.

THE LINEUP

Leading off and playing left field for the visitors was Pat Patterson. Since 1890, Pat had played with the NY Gorhams, Cuban Giants, Philadelphia Giants, Brooklyn Royal Giants, Page Fence Giants, and several other teams.

Danger Talbert at third base was batting second. Talbert started pro ball in 1900 and played mostly with Frank Leland’s Chicago teams, but joined the Cuban X Giants in 1905. He would play pro ball until 1911.

Bobby Winston was batting third and playing center field. Bobby was just finishing his first professional year, having moved from the Norfolk Red Stockings in August. He would go on to become a superior base stealer and star outfielder with several black teams through 1923.

Batting clean-up and playing first base was Ray Wilson. In his prime, Ray was considered the best first baseman in black baseball. He played with the Cuban X Giants from 1902–6, then switched to their rivals, the Philadelphia Giants, where he played until 1910.

Frank Grant followed at second base. Grant is considered by many to be the greatest black player of the nineteenth century. He played in the minor leagues 1886–91 until blacks were no longer allowed in the white leagues. He then played for the Cuban Giants, NY Gorhams, Page Fence Giants, Philadelphia Giants, and several other outgrowths from those teams including the Cuban X Giants. He was a consistent .300 hitter and a great fielder, and was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2006.

Harry Buckner was playing right field and batting sixth. Harry was a versatile player who pitched, caught, played outfield and infield for many teams in New York, Philadelphia, and Chicago between 1896 and 1918. Included in Harry’s list were the Mohawk Giants of Schenectady and the Paterson Smart Set.

Clarence Williams was batting seventh and doing the catching. Clarence had been barnstorming through Middletown for 18 years, beginning with the original Cuban Giants with whom he played for 10 years, after joining in their first year 1885. Clarence played minor league ball in the Middle States League, the Connecticut State League and the Eastern Interstate League (with Frank Grant ) until the colored line was drawn, played briefly with the NY Gorhams and Philadelphia Giants, then several years with the Cuban X Giants. The Negro Baseball Encyclopedia indicates he played until 1912 as Player/Manager with the Paterson Smart Set, however he actually finished his career with them in 1913. Clarence should be seriously considered as a candidate for the Hall of Fame. SABR’s Negro League Grave Marker Project placed a stone at Clarence’s unmarked grave in 2016.

Batting eighth was shortstop John Hill. Hill played 1900–07 primarily at third base, and was the backup for Hall of Famer John Henry “Pop” Lloyd on the Philadelphia Giants in 1907.

Pitching and batting ninth was John Nelson. John started his professional career with the NY Gorhams in 1887 and played for 17 years with several top clubs including the Cuban Giants, Page Fence Giants, and Philadelphia Giants. This included play in predominately white leagues (Trenton & York in the Middle States League, Ansonia in the Connecticut State League). John had often pitched against the Asylum teams.

Also present as substitute was Robert Jordan, who played with both the Cuban Giants and Cuban X Giants on a regular basis 1896–1906.

A game against the Cuban Giants on the Asylum Grounds in 1890.

THE GAME BY INNINGS

First inning: Patterson grounded to Reinacker who threw to Genegal at first. Talbert struck out. Winston hit safely, but Wilson struck out, retiring the side. For the Asylums, Morehead struck out, Madison hit a grounder to third and was put out at first. Genegal grounded to Nelson who threw to first; three out. No runs on either side.

Second inning: Grant pounded a hot grounder to Chesbro who gathered it in nicely and threw to Genegal. Buckner made a base hit over in the right outfield. Williams knocked a grounder to Reinacker who threw to Morehead at second and Genegal at first, catching Buckner and making a nice double play; no runs. For the Asylums, Turner flied out to Winston in center field. Lawler made a two-base hit. Launt followed with a base hit and Lawler scored. Reinacker grounded to third and was put out at first. Lamar made a base hit but was caught in attempting to go on to second. While he was making his run for second, Launt scored. Score: Asylums 2, Giants 0.

Third inning: Both Hill and Nelson grounded to Morehead who gathered them in easily and threw them over in Genegal’s bushel basket. Patterson hit a high fly which was captured by Chesbro. In the Asylum’s half, Chesbro grounded to Nelson who threw to first. Morehead was given his base on balls while Madison hit safely over second base. Genegal reached base while Madison was caught out at second. Turner made the third out leaving Morehead and Genegal on base.

Fourth inning: Talbot grounded out third to first. Winston flied out to Turner. Wilson fanned out. For the Asylums, Lawler made a ground hit to Nelson and was thrown out at first. Launt, who followed, did likewise only he hit to second base. Reinecker was passed to first. Lamar hit to Nelson and was thrown out at first. Neither side scored.

Fifth inning: Grant flied out to Chesbro and Buckner rapped a ground hit to Morehead which the latter fielded. Williams made a nice two-bagger, but Hill hit an easy grounder to Chesbro and was put out at first. When the Asylum’s half came, Chesbro threw the fans into an ecstasy of delight when he pounded out a three-bagger and ran like a deer around the bases. The team of Eagle Chemical Engine Company was standing in the road back of left field and the ball hit a horse named “Major,” rolling under his feet. Morehead was thrown out at first and Chesbro attempted to sneak home on the play: Williams was watching, however, and Chesbro was caught between third base and the home plate, Williams starting after him ball in hand. It looked to be all over with “Ches” but he made several twists, eluded Williams, and was back safely on third. Madison had a ground hit, but Chesbro was unable to score on the play. Genegal made a long hit to center which was caught and Chesbro tagged and scored from third. Turner hade a nice base hit which scored Madison from second base. Lawlor was thrown out at first on a grounder to Nelson. Two runs for the Asylums. The score was now Asylums 4, Cuban Giants 0.

Sixth inning: Tierney took Launt’s place in right field. Nelson was first at bat and made a base hit. Patterson flied out to Reinacker and Talbert did likewise to Morehead, who was also able to double Nelson who had strayed off first base. In the Asylum’s half, Tierney knocked a grounder to second and reached first on a muff, going right on to second safely when the ball bounced into right field. Neither Reinacker nor Lamer were successful as both made outs. Chesbro was next to bat. He batted out a hot foul up the right field line and nearly upset the umpiring Tommy Murray. The effort to stop laughing at Tommy was evidently taking his attention from looking at the ball as Chesbro fanned on the next ball thrown. Score still 4 to 0.

Seventh inning: Winston banged a hot liner over Madison’s head and reached first. His triumph was short lived as he was doubled up on a neat play by Chesbro, Morehead, and Genegal on a grounder of Wilson’s. Grant expired at first in the effort to knock a grounder past Madison. The last half of this inning was even shorter then the first half, as Morehead grounded out to Nelson, Madison flied out and Genegal grounded out to Hill. No change in score.

Eighth inning: Jordan took Buckner’s place and grounded out to Chesbro. Williams did the same, and Hill struck out. For the Asylums, Turner soaked out a hot one between first and second and reached second safely. He was put out a moment later on a double play made off Lawler’s fly to first base. Tierney flied out to second. No change in score.

Ninth inning: Nelson grounded out to Genegal. Patterson made a safe hit between short and third and ran on to second. Talbert flew out to Tierney and Winston grounded out to Chesbro. Final score Asylums 4, Giants 0.

Box score for the September 29, 1905 game. Click image to enlarge.

EPILOGUE

As anticipated, Chesbro didn’t disappoint the Asylum fans. His famous spit ball baffled the Giants throughout the game. The Cubans managed only five hits (the ninth inning hit may have been an error), four singles and a double, and Jack did not give any bases on balls. The Asylums didn’t exactly knock Cuban pitcher John Nelson around, either. But with Madison and Turner each getting two singles, Lawlor’s two-bagger, and Chesbro’s three-bagger, the Asylums gained the victory with a shutout, 4–0. Launt, Lamer, Genegal, and Turner each had runs batted in for the winners.

Manager Cook was very pleased with the outcome and told the newspaper “…this…may be the starting of a new Asylum team for next year. We didn’t think the people would take hold of it so strong and we’re certainly pleasantly surprised.”

At the conclusion of the game, there was another parade back to town where both teams took supper and headed back to New York City on the 7:35 pm train.

One of the papers that covered the event, The Daily Argus, mentioned that photographs of the game were taken and would be printed on souvenir postal cards. The following represent two of those photos.

1905 Asylum BBC: Standing L to R: John Degnan, Fisher Launt, Chris Genegal, Tommy Murray, W. E. Cook Manager in suit, Charlie Tierney, Jack Chesbro, Art Madison, Tuck Turner. Kneeling L to R: Pete Lamer, Chris Rhinecker, Tommy Morehead, John Lawlor. Photo by Charles A. Ketcham.

When I first saw this photo, I had been researching the Wallkill Base Ball Club and I was aware that there had been an Asylum BBC in 1892. In the above photo, I recognized Jack Chesbro immediately and had to find out more about this Asylum team. I originally thought that Chesbro was just brought in for this 1905 game, and wanted to find out what his connection to the State Hospital was. It was several weeks of investigation before I learned that he had worked at the hospital eleven years earlier, and had pitched 27 games (winning 21) for the Asylum BBC in 1894.

Researching the Asylum teams and individual players was most rewarding, and on one of my frequent trips to Thrall Library in Middletown, a staff member mentioned that a gentleman had come to Middletown to leave a book of thumbnail photos with the Historical Society. The original photos had been taken by his grandfather, Charles A. Ketcham, at the turn of the last century. Since the Historical Society was closed, he left the book with the library. As I looked through the book, I noticed that there was a copy of a photo that seemed familiar. It was of the Cuban X Giants in 1905, and I was certain that the background was similar to one of the Asylum team taken September 29 that year. At home that night, I looked through “A Collectors Guide to Post Cards of Middletown NY” and found a reference to Real Photo Post Cards of both the Asylums and Cubans. The photographer was anonymous, but was possibly unsigned Charles Ketcham. As a result of additional interaction with the owner in Missouri, I was able to purchase the following photo.

1905 Cuban X Giants: Manager E.B. Lamar Jr. in center. The author believes 1B Ray Wilson and C Clarence Williams are last two standing on right. 2B Frank Grant is kneeling on left with SS John Hill in the middle and P John Nelson kneeling 2nd from right. Other players: LF Pat Paterson, 3B Danger Talbert, CF Bobby Winston, RF Harry Buckner, RF Robert Jordan. Photo by Charles A. Ketcham.

The connection between Middletown and black barnstorming teams went beyond the field. The teams frequently shared banquets in town, and several of the players developed strong personal friendships. When Clarence Williams came back in 1913 with the Paterson Smart Set, it marked 26 years he had been barnstorming in Middletown. Over the years, he had become good friends with “Chick” Higham of the old Wallkill Base Ball Club who was now the Chief Fire Engineer and proprietor of the Commercial Hotel. Clarence expressed an interest in Chick’s fancy white ceremonial fire helmet, and by the time Clarence made the trip back to New York City and Paterson, New Jersey, it was with the gift of Chick’s helmet on his head.

With the exclusion of black players from white professional teams, barnstorming became the only stage for Americans to witness and appreciate the talented black players of the era. Middletown, New York, was extremely fortunate to have had this opportunity for so many years.

BOB MAYER is a retired bank executive from JPMorgan/Chase and Bankers Trust Co. A member of SABR since 2004, Bob collects vintage baseball artifacts and researches early baseball in the Westchester, Orange, Dutchess, Ulster and Putnam Counties in New York. He has spoken at many SABR and baseball historical conferences, produced the Old Timers Baseball Celebration in Peekskill (July 2012), and serves on the Board of Directors of the Middletown Historical Society. He is a trustee and former president of the Peekskill Museum.

Acknowledgments

The bulk of my source data came from old newspapers. However, my research brought me in contact with so many wonderful people who were willing to either share information or point me in directions that led to many things that would have been overlooked. The staff at the Thrall Library, in particular the research and local history librarians were very helpful and supportive. The Historical Society of Middletown & Wallkill Precinct granted me access to their files and hard copy newspapers that were over a hundred years old. Curator Marvin Cohen and his team of volunteers were especially helpful, often finding articles and other tidbits for me.

The folks that worked at the Middletown Psychiatric Center made me feel like one of the family during the year I spent there. I had the privilege of working closely with Judy McGrath, the former librarian at MPC, and cannot say enough about the assistance she provided. Jim Bopp, Director of MPC, was also a big supporter, and attending the Center’s formal closing dinner was an event I will never forget.

I also can’t forget the minor league research, support and encouragement that were afforded to me by my friend and SABR mentor John Pardon. John was one of the original 16 men who founded SABR in 1971. Sadly we lost John in October 2008 and he is greatly missed.

Sources

Newspapers

Middletown Daily Argus

Middletown Daily Press

Middletown Daily Times

Orange County Press

The Conglomerate: Volumes 1 – 7 (published by the patients at the Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital) June 1890 – May 1897

Books

Annual Reports of the Middletown State Homeopathic Hospital

City Directories – City of Middletown, New York

Gamwell, Lynn & Tomes, Nancy, Madness in America: cultural and medical perceptions of mental illness before 1914, Cornell University Press 1995

Hopper, DeWolf with Wesley Stout, Once A Clown, Always A Clown: Reminiscences of DeWolf Hopper, Little, Brown, and Company 1927

Kuntz, Jerry, Lawson’s Progress (unpublished manuscript) [now “Baseball Fiends and Flying Machines – The Many Lives and Outrageous Times of George and Alfred Lawson”, McFarland 2009]

Laskaris, Peter, Collectors Guide to Postcards of Middletown New York 1995

Peterson, Robert, Only the Ball Was White, Prentice Hall 1970

Riley, James, The Biographical Encyclopedia of the Negro Baseball Leagues, Carroll & Graf Publishers, Inc. 1994

White, Sol, History of Colored Base Ball, University of Nebraska Press 1995, incl. reprint of Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide 1907

Wright, Marshall D., The International League Year-by-Year Statistics, 1884-1953, McFarland & Company Publishers 2005

Websites

Baseball-Reference.com

Baseball Almanac

Baseball Library

Deadball.com

Minor League Ball, John Sickels

www.hickocksports.com

The Baseball Index

American Memory from the Library of Congress

National Baseball Hall of Fame

Ancestry.com

Other

Baseball Hall of Fame Research Library, Cooperstown

Conway (MA) Town Clerk

Middletown Historical Society

Middletown Psychiatric Center

New York State Archives, Albany

North Adams (MA) Library

North Adams Museum

North Adams Visitors Center

Norwich NY Museum

Ontario & Western Railway Archives

Sidney (NY) Historical Society

Thrall Library, Middletown (NY)

United States Census Data

John Degnan, Director of Middletown’s Business Improvement District (Asylum Photos)

Scott Fiesthumel (SABR Member), Utica Baseball

Vernon Hale Hawkins (Charles Ketcham RPPC)

Tony Kissell, Utica Baseball

Gerald Kleiner, Middletown City Council (Asylum Game Photo)

Joseph Lawlor (JJL Photo)

Peter Mancuso, SABR Member and Chair, Nineteenth Century Committee

Marc Okkonen

John Pardon, SABR Founding Member

Like 9/11, the sinking of the Titanic clings to American memory, slicing across sex, race, age, geographical, and class divides. Generations later, mental snapshots of the disaster develop at the briefest mention. An iceberg on a moonless night. The Law of the Sea: women and children first. The fortunate watching from insufficient lifeboats while others die in frigid Atlantic water.

What city was most traumatized by Titanic’s demise? Most would select its Belfast birthplace, perhaps European ports of call. Not so. New York was the catharsis epicenter, and the place baseball played an unexpected role in alleviating suffering.

The period from 1900 to World War I’s commencement is sometimes labeled “The Quiet Years.” World conflicts were few. Economic prosperity reigned. By 1912, post-diet, 270-pound President William Taft was facing a formidable election against Teddy Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson. A Quiet Leader, he had left scant legislative impression but had tossed the first Presidential Opening Day pitch, chewed peanuts with common folks at others, and pronounced, “Any man who would choose a day’s work over a day of baseball is a fool not worthy of friendship.”1

Taft’s bonhomie, however, contrasted with his nation, which was hardly quiet. Instead, America was beset with hectic change and unrelenting new technology. Henry Ford’s mass-produced Model T was transforming isolated villages into a mobile, connected network. Cameras, movies, telephones, and telegraphs were accelerating communication. Farm life was giving way to urban employment at the mercy of industrial and financial corporations. The average person lived about 50 years, most of it spent working brutal hours, which was viewed as the key to success. Even children toiled at this rigorous schedule, and like their parents were provided scant economic protections. Women slogged along, too, at repetitive jobs and ritualized household chores.2 Some fought the slowly successful battle for suffrage. Progressivism—political faith that science and rationality could salve America’s condition —weighed in with incremental, mixed results.

No city embodied this hustle in 1912 more than New York. With its first skyscraper rising in 1889, Manhattan had commenced a construction boom previously unimaginable and unachievable, highlighted by the in-progress 792-foot Woolworth Building, slated to be the world’s tallest building. With its boroughs recently consolidated, the city had trebled in size and exploded to 5.2 million people, second to London. Residents travelled via the new subway as well as horse, cable car, or trolley. Pennsylvania Station and the main library had just been built, and Ebbets Field had broken ground in March. With 80% of the city’s inhabitants immigrants or their children, many viewed their fluctuating home as a foreign country. Immensity and innovation now characterized an “Imperial City,” blessed by America’s grandest mansions, shamed by its worst slums. Only Tammany Hall’s corrupt governing machine, like a cockroach, remained ubiquitous and constant.

New York also hosted the world’s biggest ships. Appropriately, the city anticipated the Titanic’s maiden voyage. The Sunday, April 14 New York Times heralded the April 17 arrival of “The New Giantess,” marveling as we do at its 883-foot length and 94-foot width, the equivalent of an 11-story building laid end to end.3 Coverage extolled the opulent spas, services, lodging, and meals available to the age’s wealthy “1%.” Unexpressed was how these socialites crested atop of the technologically-unsurpassed ship’s “floating layer cake” while below, in a societal microcosm, one descended in class to the anonymous laborers fueling the ship deep in its boilers.4

Anticipation turned to dread when ominous reports surfaced regarding an iceberg encounter. Initial communication errors and journalistic speculation steered damage estimations into confusion and inaccuracy. One paper even proclaimed, “All Saved from Titanic after Collision.”5 The Times responded more cautiously, later revealing that developments, about 1,080 miles away, were far deadlier.6

As the grim news unfolded, New York entered post-9/11-like hellish days of waiting and wondering. Highly imaginative conjectures, wavering fatality statistics, embellished tales of heroism and cowardice, and cold facts dominated public encounters. Some even questioned “The Law of the Sea,” arguing Chinese hierarchy should have been followed by valuing women last.7 Meanwhile, citywide half-mast flags and news coverage of ships searching for bodies confirmed undebatable fatalities. Crowds up to 50,000 people huddled on streets at the ship’s White Star Lines Broadway office or at newspaper buildings, waiting for publicly-displayed bulletins regarding survivors. Smaller groups clustered at hotels, stores, and other buildings. “Conversations, sometimes half hysterical, sometimes filled with sobbing, were heard on every side,” the Times reported, even amongst those unconnected to anyone on board.8

Broadway icon George M. Cohan, a Polo Grounds habitue and friend of Giants manager John McGraw, in the process of selling copies of the New York American to benefit the Titanic’s survivors on Sunday, April 21, 1912, at the Polo Grounds. Assisting right behind him is Jack Sullivan, founder of the Newsboys’ Home, an organization with connections to assorted nefarious, nocturnal activities. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, BAIN COLLECTION)

President Taft cancelled his Opening Day appearance in Washington upon learning a close military aide had perished. But even the President was eclipsed by New York, which became the primary setting of suspense and resolution as the week dragged on. On a rainy Thursday evening, the rescue ship Carpathia passed 10,000 onlookers at the Statute of Liberty before docking at Manhattan’s pier 54 with its cargo of 712 Titanic survivors. Amidst heavy security, 30,000 people, 50 ambulances, and numerous relief workers and customs officials waited for the saved. As they disembarked, “a low wailing sound started from the crowd. Its cadences, wild and weird, grew steadily louder and louder until they culminated in a mighty shriek,” that swept the pier as if guided by “some master hand.”9 Next morning brought legal and political drama as a Senate inquiry into the sinking commenced at the Waldorf-Astoria.10 Testimony pinpointed root causes already surmised by the Washington Post: “Speed, madness, and a reckless disregard for human life in the scramble for business.”11

For many reasons, concern for the survivors abounded in New York more than anywhere in America. In a city that embraced size and technology, interest and suspense was already feverish. Titanic’s over 1,500 victims proved extremely personal, too: 11 city natives, 76 residents, and 146 people travelling to New York were on board; 129 died.12 Among them included such notables as Waldorf-Astoria builder John Jacob Astor and Macy’s co-owner Isidor Straus. New Yorkers could also easily relate to Titanic passengers seeking adventure or fresh opportunity. And most everyone recalled the 1904 General Slocum disaster, when a steamer filled with German-American families from the Lower East Side caught fire on the East River, killing 1,021 in the city’s worst pre-9/11 tragedy.

This empathy translated into action on many fronts. Mayor William Gaynor opened a relief fund that procured over $130,000 from socialites, companies, religious organizations, and average citizens. Prominent women organized another fund, raising almost $36,200. Newspapers, too, called for currency, including William Randolph Hearst’s New York American, which collected $62,000. Hospitals contributed beds, medical professionals their time, and persons of modest means whatever they could.

Perhaps the most unexpected effort came from New York Giants owner John T. Brush who Friday night offered his Polo Grounds to New York Yankees owner Frank Farrell for a Sunday fund-raising exhibition game between their teams. To do so, however, he challenged two traditions. First, the teams had a tense relationship. A decade previously, Brush had fought to prevent the new American League from moving a club into New York, then in 1904 had dismissively refused to play the junior circuit in the World Series when the Yankees looked primed to be its representative. 1910 brought a thaw and at season’s-end, a best-of-seven series, won by the Giants four games to two. (Each Giant’s winning share of $1,110.62 and Yankee’s losing share of $706.76 helped explain the “thaw.”13) A few more ice drops fell in April 1911 when Farrell, upon learning that a fire had destroyed the Polo Grounds, offered Brush shared usage of his Hilltop Park home, which the Giants quickly accepted to cover a three-month rebuilding process. But there had been no 1911 rematch.

Second were Sunday “blue laws.” Governing protections for Sabbath rest had arrived from England in the seventeenth century, when behavior ordinances were printed on blue paper. The laws weren’t always popular, yet they stuck. The National League ruled in 1876 against Sunday play, later retreating to allow games, as would the American League, upon local approval, which proved inconsistent and infrequent. By 1912, prohibitions against Sunday games were still in effect in New York and would remain so until the 1919 season.

Undeterred, Farrell quickly agreed to Brush’s proposal, both owners scuttling animosity to express written gratitude that baseball would take “a foremost part in the work of relieving distress.”14 No words explained blue law workaround negotiations, but possibly Farrell offered Brush a slice of instructive personal history. In 1906, he had hosted a Sunday game versus the Philadelphia Athletics, with no objections, to raise San Francisco earthquake relief.15 And in 1909, the Brooklyn Superbas had welcomed his team in a charity-driven Sunday match. With these likely precedents, both owners agreed to play Sunday, April 21 — a first for the Polo Grounds, and the first in-season interleague game since the American League’s formation.16 Program sales would substitute for admission, all proceeds directed toward survivors.

From a public relations standpoint, Farrell was in no position to decline Brush, nor was his team. Despite wearing their April 11-debuted pinstripes, the Yankees bore little resemblance to their modern, dominant counterparts. The team known in the press by numerous nicknames—including Americans, Invaders, Hilltoppers, Highlanders, and Yankees until officially adopting the last the following year—played second fiddle to the Giants. 17 Farrell’s club was consistently outdrawn by a heavy ratio, and habitual second-division finishes gave fans good reason to stay away. A 1911 .500 mark conveyed slight optimism, but spring training rains in Georgia had limited practice to a mere three days, paving a 0-6 start.18

The Giants were everything the Yankees were not. Brush’s public frailty due to debilitating locomotor ataxia was the club’s only infirmity.19 Regular first-division finishes, league-leading attendance, a 1905 World Series, and appearances in 1911 and 1912 testified to vitality. The Giants reflected the smarts and will of manager John McGraw, a man of amazing contradictions. Off the field, he frequented race tracks, pool halls, fancy restaurants, and vaudeville, and was regarded for his soft-touch generosity. On the field, he was known as “Little Napoleon” and his “great heart contract[ed] to the dimensions of a bean.”20 Supported by pitching legends Christy Mathewson and Rube Marquard, he personified the Deadball Era and hurled invective that “would have to be written on asbestos paper.”21 His team had swiped a post-19th century high 347 steals the previous year, would pilfer 319 in 1912, and had a champion’s swagger.

The Giants would bring another advantage: Charles “Victory” Faust. Mascots in 1912 mirrored industrial overlords’ relationship to its workers: top-down and exploitive. “Colored boys,” dwarves, hunchbacks, and “retarded” adults filled these roles, providing amusing good luck charms in a sport rife with superstition. The slow-witted, gap-toothed, eccentric 31-year-old Faust, from rural Kansas, fit right in. He had materialized the previous year, claiming a fortune teller had predicted a Giants championship if he were allowed to pitch. A windmill motion and soft tosses revealed little skill, but he became an all-star butt of practical jokes and purveyor of pre-game comedy—some intentional, some not. The team was 36-2 when he was in uniform, showcasing his act.22 Fans and newspapers devoured this burlesque. He was even allowed to pitch in two meaningless season-ending games, sporting a 4.50 ERA while being hit by a pitch and allowed to steal twice in a plate appearance. A World Series loss, however, burst the bubble. By 1912, McGraw had tired of Faust, refusing to let him “sign” with the team or don a uniform. But for the charity game, announcements signaled his resurrection.

At the Titanic benefit exhibition game on April 21, 1912, two members of the Female Giants — a women’s baseball team with connections to the New York Giants — roam the aisles to request donations to assist the ship’s survivors. A Polo Grounds employee, in hat and jacket, is in the background. (LIBRARY OF CONGRESS, BAIN COLLECTION)

Sunday afternoon delivered welcoming sunshine and moderate southern winds over Coogan’s Bluff, then a virtual countryside from which residents could view part of the playing field below. As the gates opened a “wild clatter of howls” erupted as fans purchased programs entitling them to unreserved seating.23 Brush arrived by limousine and sat in left center. Farrell attended, as did other Giants and Yankees employees, who assisted with the crowd: rich, poor, Tammany Hall cogs, Wall Streeters, and Broadway aficionados.

And what a horseshoe-shaped park to be in! Concrete-and-steel with detailed, captivating architectural flourishes had replaced the wooden firetrap. A clover-shaped infield even featured ornamental circles built into the dirt. Baseball Magazine described the 34,000-seat “beauty” as rivaling the “silent grandeur” of the Pyramids.24

To ensure victory—and laughs—Faust took center stage in a discarded 1911 World Series uniform, pitching left-handed and running bases to the crowd’s delight. Also on hand was McGraw pal and park habitué vaudeville icon George M. Cohan, “the man who owned Broadway,” the entertainment capital of America. Covering the city on an aid-seeking mission, he roamed the stands in sweater and slanted cap, soliciting relief and selling New York American newspapers on the survivors’ behalf. Assisting him was a far murkier character: Jack Sullivan, founder of the Newsboy’s Home. Outwardly, this “Home” was an athletic/meeting place for boys who hawked newspapers on street corners. On a primal level, the hard-scrabble club was linked to prostitution, the Mafia, and other nefarious, nocturnal activities.25 Months later Sullivan would be indicted in the murder of bookmaker Herman Rosenthal, whom he possibly collected for, a crime memorialized in The Great Gatsby.26

With flags at half-mast, World Series-like rituals were enacted. As the teams entered— Yankees outfitted in road grey, Giants in home white with pinstripes—they were greeted by loud cheers. Both managers received a warm reception as they shook hands at home plate. Soon thereafter, veteran chief umpire Cy Rigler and second-year base umpire Bill Finneran appeared. Each had been vilified for controversial calls in the preceding two days, but bygones were bygones now, and they were given a big hand as they volunteered their time. Movie men and photographers moved about, capturing the scene. Rigler neared home plate at three o’clock, barked out the starting batteries via megaphone, and the game was on.

Leaving their box seats, some Female Giants began working the crowd, requesting New York American-relief fund donations and storing their gatherings in caps borrowed from Giants players. Patronized as “featherweights” in one news account, they were anything but. Rather, these Giants—led by Broadway celebrity, Hollywood actress, and “the best all-around athlete of America,” pitcher Ida Schnall—consisted of 32 young women athletes who played each other throughout the city, sometimes joined by the Giants.27 Clad in restrictive, layered clothing and ornately-plumaged “tray hats,” they accepted contributions from similarly-garbed female fans and men in dark suits, ties, and derby hats.

Due to injuries and illness—and Wolverton’s decision to sit many starters—the Yankees led off against seldom-used youngster Bert Maxwell with a lineup of scrubs. Smooth-fielding but notoriously corrupt first baseman Hal Chase, the lone infield regular, singled in a run for a promising start for the visitors.

Then the Giants batted. Pre-game reportage that Brooklyn would contribute players proved inaccurate, which was unfortunate: The Yankees needed help. McGraw fielded several front-line players, who came out electrically charged. Five runs were tallied off starter George McConnell’s spitball before an out was recorded. Two walks, four hits, sloppy fielding, and a blown “safe” call by Finneran authored quickly daunting math. And “McGraw ball” ran amok: Tillie Shafer and Fred Snodgrass swiped the first of two Giants double steals that afternoon, while Fred Merkle and Red Murray scampered for solo bags. 5-foot-10, 175-pound catcher Gus Fisher suffered a nightmarish inning, unsure where to throw next, once even wisely declining an attempt to nail a runner.

In the second, the Yankees scratched out another run and held the Giants scoreless for two frames. Then, in the fourth, slaughter returned. Whacks of Giants hits rang out while the Yankees assisted with a walk, a hit batter, three errors, and overall infield ineptitude. Five runners scored. After that, everything else was garbage time. McGraw inserted subs wholesale. His roster’s depths delivered the tongue-twisting Phifer Fullenwider, who allowed no runs in the highest-profile game of his career: He would never pitch in a regular season major league game.28

During the sixth, another exhibition briefly flared. Two men in front of the lower grand stand commenced fighting, “maul[ing] away regardless of Queensberry [rules]” until stopped by police.29 (Yankees fans surely welcomed the distraction.) In the stands, fans smoked cigars and cigarettes, and purchased pie slices and hot dogs—a recent Polo Grounds innovation—from coat-clad waiters. Sunday laws banished alcohol, outfield fence ads promoting it notwithstanding.

The contest concluded in two hours: an 11-2 Giants “bragging rights” pasting. Available box scores differ slightly but enumerate a grim Yankees afternoon: Eight innings of 12-13 hits, three-four walks, and a hit batter surrendered by McConnell; six-seven stolen bases allowed; and four-five errors recorded along with other unclassifiable folly30 In perspective, though, only these numbers mattered: 14,083 patrons, $9,425.25 raised at the game, nearly $20,000 gathered by Cohan’s newsboy efforts and evening theatrical performance.31 And no number could quantify the value of a pleasant afternoon diversion during a tumultuous week in which the national pastime helped humanity when it was most needed.

DAN VanDEMORTEL became a Giants fan in Upstate New York and moved to San Francisco to follow the team more closely. He has written extensively on Northern Ireland political and legal affairs, and his Giants-related writing has appeared in San Francisco’s “Nob Hill Gazette” and SABR’s “The National Pastime.” An investigation into the shooting of a spectator at the Polo Grounds will be published in 2017 in a Polo Grounds anthology. He is currently writing a book and related articles on the 1971 Giants and welcomes feedback at giants1971@yahoo.com.

Acknowledgments

My appreciation goes out to MLB historian John Thorn, Hall of Fame librarian Matt Rothenberg, and the New York Giants Preservation Society for their research assistance. Blessings to Ken Manyin’s proofreading eyes, to SABR stalwarts Stew Thornley and Greg Erion for reviewing parts of this article, and to Leslie Cassidy for tracking down information at the New York Public Library.

Notes

The Brooklyn Robins reached the World Series for the third time as a National League franchise, under manager Wilbert “Uncle Robbie” Robinson during the 1920 season. Brooklyn’s first National League championship occurred in 1890, when they finished first in the NL with an 85–44 record; they tied the American Association champion Louisville Colonels in the 1890 World Series 3–3–1. The team celebrated its second NL championship in 1916, but lost the World Series to the Boston Red Sox in five games.

The 1920 Robins were led by future Hall-of-Fame pitcher Burleigh Grimes, Hall-of-Fame outfielder Zach Wheat, star pitcher Leon Cadore, and solid third baseman Jimmy Johnston. The Robins started strong by winning eight of their first 11 games and never dropping more than four games from the National League lead throughout the season. On September 9, Brooklyn defeated St. Louis to secure sole possession of first place, and clinched their fifth National League pennant on September 27 after their crosstown rival New York Giants lost to the Boston Braves.1 Brooklyn completed the regular season with a 93–61 record, finishing seven games ahead of the Giants. The Robins ultimately lost to the Cleveland Indians, 5–2, in a best-of-nine series that featured two notable firsts in World Series history—both accomplished by Cleveland players during the momentum-shifting Game 5: a grand slam and an unassisted triple play.2

As such, the 1920 Robins may be remembered more by the Indians’ achievements and events on the national stage rather than their own successes and failures. The 1920 season marked the introduction of the liveball era and the only fatality occurring during game play, and the Black Sox scandal cast a shadow during the World Series.3,4 In Brooklyn, Uncle Robbie’s ballclub overcame an unsettled infield, a stretch of 58 innings covering three games in early May when the club went 0–2–1, the loss of outfielder Tommy Griffith, and a late June swoon, by playing .800 baseball during September to earn the pennant. The team overcame preseason prognosticators and challenges throughout the year; following the regular season, Uncle Robbie quipped, “No special system of playing won the 1920 pennant for the Brooklyn Superbas.”5

Like all major league clubs, the Robins were severely impacted by World War I. Although they made their third World Series appearance in 1916, four years later the only regulars playing in the same positions included shortstop Ivy Olson and left fielder Zach Wheat. During that span, Johnston moved from the outfield to infield and the other players no longer played for Brooklyn. The pitching staff had changed too, with Grimes and Cadore complementing Jeff Pfeffer and Rube Marquard. Staff ace Burleigh Grimes topped 20 wins and 300 innings for the first time in his career, Zach Wheat finished fourth in the NL with a .328 batting average, and outfielder Hi Myers paced the National League in triples for the second straight season.

Twenty-one Robins appeared in at least 20 games during the 1920 season; nine were purchased outright from other ballclubs, four joined via the Rule 5 Draft, four were acquired via trade, and four were selected off waivers. The top four players appearing in the most games that season—Johnston, Myers, Wheat, and Olson—had also played in the 1916 World Series against the Boston Red Sox. Catcher Otto Miller was the only other non-pitcher acquired before 1916. Table 1 describes how the Robins’ roster was compiled for all players who appeared in more than 20 games for the team during the 1920 season. Brooklyn owner Charles Ebbets wanted his team set entering the 1920 season; a month before training camp started, Ebbets had signed 27 of 28 ballplayers by mid-February. The lone holdout was Tommy Griffith, who was debating retirement from professional baseball.6

Table 1. 1920 Robins’ team assemblage

The 1920 Brooklyn Robins opened their season with a 9–2 victory over the Philadelphia Phillies on April 14 at Ebbets Field during unseasonably cold weather. Both pitchers went the distance, with Cadore allowing two runs on eight hits while striking out two hitters and walking none, and Philadelphia starter Eppa Rixey allowing nine runs (five earned) on nine hits with four walks and no strikeouts. According to The New York Times, the game was more lost by the Phillies than won by the Robins: “Weak pitching in the pinches, uncertainty in fielding and a generally poor performance made the Phillies appear even worse than the preliminary dope on the team had promised.”7 Konetchy was the offensive star, registering two singles and three RBIs. Hitting third in the Phillies lineup that afternoon was right fielder Casey Stengel, who famously guided the Dodgers 1934–36 during the first stop in his 25-year major league managerial career.

The Robins continued to play solid ball throughout April, although the infield struggled during the season’s first month. The initial team report printed in The Sporting News concluded, “The new Brooklyn infield is showing rather more brains than skill as yet. It was responsible for the seven mechanical errors in the two games with the Phillies, but it made no mental mistakes.”8 Brooklyn finished the month with an 8–4 record, a half-game behind Cincinnati. The Robins were second in runs scored, and allowed the third fewest runs in the league, only six fewer than the Boston Braves, who had played only nine games through April 30. The team was pointed in the right direction.

The first weekend in May proved to be an extremely long one for the Robins, first playing the Boston Braves in Boston, then back to Brooklyn for a game against the Phillies, followed by a return to Boston before taking on their crosstown rival Giants in a three-game series at the Polo Grounds. The estimated 4,500 fans who attended the Saturday, May 1 game between Brooklyn and Boston were treated to a marathon pitching duel that lasted for 3 hours and 50 minutes—26 innings.

Leon Cadore, the Robins’ starting pitcher, had started the season strong. After his complete game win against Philadelphia, he fired an 11-inning, 7-hit shutout against the Braves, then allowed two earned runs over six innings in a loss against New York, bringing a 2–1, 1.38 ERA into the contest. His mound opponent, Joe Oeschger, also pitched three games in April: a 6-hit shutout against the Giants, a tough-luck 1–0 loss against Brooklyn where the lone run was scored in the bottom of the 11th inning, and a third consecutive complete game win against the Phillies when he allowed a lone earned run and two unearned runs, to increase his ERA to 0.63. These two hurlers pitched the entire 26-inning game, with Brooklyn scoring in the fifth inning when Olson singled home Krueger. Boston responded with their only run during the following frame when Tony Boeckel singled home Walton Cruise after Cruise tripled to left-center field. Cadore allowed 15 hits and five walks while striking out seven hitters and Oeschger allowed nine hits—all singles—and struck out seven with four walks before the game was called because of darkness.9 Interestingly, as the game progressed through the extra innings, the two sportswriters covering the game—Eddie Murphy from The New York Sun and Thomas Rice of The Brooklyn Eagle—were receiving story requests from other area newspapers; they were also exhausted by night’s end.10 The previous record for longest game occurred when the Boston Americans lost to the Philadelphia Athletics, 4–1, in 24 innings on September 1, 1906.

The Robins returned to Ebbets Field the following day, hosting the Phillies, with Philadelphia starter George Smith facing Brooklyn ace Grimes. The Phillies struck first in the third inning as Bevo LeBourveau crossed the plate on a Dave Bancroft double. Philadelphia padded their lead on a two-run LeBourveau homer. The Robins responded with two runs later that inning: Neis scored when Myers doubled and reached third on a dropped ball; subsequently, Konetchy plated Myers. In the bottom of the ninth, Wheat tied the game when he blasted a 3–1 pitch over the right field wall. The teams remained scoreless until the 13th inning when Bancroft scored on a sacrifice fly after Stengel was walked to load the bases, giving the Phillies a 4–3 win. Once again, both pitchers went the distance, and now Brooklyn established a record of playing 39 innings in two games on successive days.11

The next day, Brooklyn appeared in Boston with Sherry Smith taking on Braves’ starter Dana Fillingim, who brought an 0–2 record and 0.00 ERA into the Monday afternoon contest. Fillingim pitched 17 innings over two starts but all his runs allowed were unearned. The Robins scored first when Johnston reached on a fielder’s choice but Smith came home on an error during the fifth inning; Olson also attempted to score on the play but was thrown out at home. The Braves tied the game in the sixth inning as Walter Holke’s sacrifice fly brought in Charlie Pick. The game remained tied for the next 11 innings when manager Robinson asked the game to be called on account of darkness; his request was denied. Two innings later, John Sullivan scored the winning run on a Boeckel single and Boston won, 2–1. Both starting pitchers threw complete games; Fillingim earned his first victory and now carried a 0.00 ERA over 36 innings into his next start. After playing 58 innings in three consecutive days—or six full nine-inning games with four additional innings—during which they went 0–2–1, the Robins fell into third place. The New York Times opened the game report, “Rumors were circulating around Braves Field late tonight the members of the Braves and Dodgers baseball clubs were about to assemble in mass meeting in Faneuil Hall and declare themselves on this business of working overtime.”12

In addition to their marathon extra-inning games to begin the month, Brooklyn proceeded to play five more extra-inning games during May, including three of the six subsequent games. The Robins still finished the month with a 13–10 record; with an overall 21–14 record, they were a half-game behind the Chicago Cubs and percentage points ahead of Cincinnati. Although their offense sputtered during the month, their strong pitching and fielding kept them competitive. During the month, the Robins strengthened their bench by purchasing utility player Bill McCabe from Chicago and selecting outfielder Wally Hood off waivers from Pittsburgh. In addition, Tommy Griffith returned to the diamond after threatening retirement from baseball. During the preceding offseason, Griffith profited from working as a stock salesman, and was still upset over his trade from the Cincinnati ballclub the year before. Once Griffith was assured his salesman career would not suffer from playing ball, he returned to the Robins.13

During the first week in June, the Robins reeled off a four-game winning streak, which included a 7-hit shutout by Pfeffer and a 6-hitter by Grimes, to take over first place. However, their success was short-lived; after the streak, Brooklyn lost nine of their next 11 ballgames. After a late-inning rally fell short, resulting in a 9–7 loss to Pittsburgh on June 22, the Robins extended their losing streak to four games and dropped into third place.14 The papers called out their poor play: “Such baseball as was produced would have shamed a respectable sand-lots team.”15 Brooklyn was now only a half-game in front of surging St. Louis. The Cardinals were in the midst of their own five-game skid, but had won 13 of 14 starting June 1 to jump from sixth to third place. The Robins rebounded with a three-game winning streak following their loss to Pittsburgh, but their inconsistency resulted in a following six-game losing streak, which included losing five games to the struggling Braves. Although the Brooklyn offense was showing signs of life, they couldn’t capitalize on opportunities and the pitching was ineffective.16

Brooklyn’s fortunes improved over the summer, as their 23–12 July record and 14–13 August record moved them back into contention with Cincinnati and New York. Although the Robins suffered a four-game losing streak in the final week of August, they captured back those games with an equivalent four-game winning streak that included back-to-back shutouts by Grimes and Cadore. The Robins were swept by Philadelphia in a Labor Day doubleheader, and promptly returned the favor the following day, initiating a 10-game winning streak which culminated with a doubleheader sweep of the Cubs on September 13.17 Their sweep resulted in a five-game lead over both Cincinnati and New York and commanding control in the pennant race. Cadore delivered back-to-back shutouts during the streak, and the team’s overall offensive production was increasing. John McGraw’s Giants were coming on strong with a 20–11 August record, but it wasn’t enough to catch the cruising Robins, while Pat Moran’s Cincinnati Reds played .511 ball from July 1 onwards. Finally, on September 27, Brooklyn won the pennant after the Braves dramatically ended the Giants’ World Series hopes on a Boeckel ninth-inning clout during the second game of a doubleheader.18

Hall-of-Famer Zach Wheat enjoyed another great season at the plate. He led the Robins with personal career highs in runs (89), hits (191), and slugging percentage (.463), and also led in batting average (.328), OPS (.848), and home runs (9); he finished second in doubles (26), triples (13), and RBIs (73). He still remains the Dodgers’ all-time franchise leader in hits, doubles, triples, and total bases.19

Although the Robins lost their fourth attempt at securing a world championship, two lesser known events occurred that October: a curse created by a slighted mascot, and brothers who faced each other for the first time in World Series history.

The 1920 Robins were arguably victimized by one of the earliest curses in the twentieth century, when Brooklyn’s mascot Eddie Bennett was prevented from joining the Robins for the four games scheduled in Cleveland following Game 4. Although Bennett had served as a good-luck charm for the Robins during the season and during the previous year with the American League pennant-winning Chicago White Sox, his disappointment over not traveling with the team led to his supposedly “placing a curse” on his hometown Robins.20 Bennett joined the Yankees the following season, and for twelve years served as a batboy/mascot for four World Series winners.21 The curse tale gained notoriety during the next decade; while the Yankees enjoyed success, the Robins wouldn’t return to the World Series for another 21 years.

Secondly, brothers faced each other for the first time during the 1920 World Series. Doc and Jimmy Johnston were born just over two years apart in Cleveland, Tennessee. Doc, whose given name was Wheeler Roger Johnston, tended first base for the Indians while his younger brother Jimmy, or James Harle Johnston, covered third base for the Robins. The brothers enjoyed similar careers; Doc played 1056 games, compiling a .263 career batting average with 14 home runs and 381 RBIs and Jimmy played 1377 games, compiling a .294 career batting average with 22 homers and 410 RBIs. In 1920 their batting averages were extremely close—Doc hit .292 over 535 at-bats while Jimmy delivered a .291 average over 635 at-bats: “Wheeler has it on Jimmy in the Frequency (sic) and weight of his hits, but Jimmy has it on Brother Wheeler in stealing and sacrificing.”22

Doc debuted in 1909 with the Cincinnati Reds, playing three games while going hitless in ten at-bats. According to his younger brother, Doc received his nickname from his father, “who used to say that he would grow up some time to be a Doctor.”23 The following three years he played in the minors, with the Chattanooga Lookouts (1910), Buffalo Bisons (1910), and New Orleans Pelicans (1911–12), before returning to the majors with Cleveland for 43 games toward the end of the 1912 season. Three years later he was purchased by the Pirates; during the following season, Pittsburgh sent Doc to the Birmingham Barons—as one of the players to be named later for a young spitball pitcher named Burleigh Grimes, whom he also faced during the 1920 series. Grimes reached the majors during the 1916 season with Pittsburgh before the Pirates traded him, pitcher Al Mamaux, and infielder Chuck Ward to the Robins for second baseman George Cutshaw and outfielder Casey Stengel in January 1918.24

Jimmy played a single game with the Chicago White Sox in 1911; he was selected by the Chicago Cubs in the 1913 Rule 5 draft, appearing in 50 games with the Cubs the following year. He joined Brooklyn in 1916, and played with the Robins until the 1926 season. Jimmy played all the infield and outfield positions during his early years before Brooklyn manager Wilbert Robinson settled on him playing third base, a position with a revolving door in the preceding years: “Here Johnston has played a resolute, active game, which has given abundant satisfaction to the public accustomed as it was to seeing a new performer at third base about three times a week.”25 In 1920 and 1921 Johnston played 146 and 150 games at third base, respectively, the steadiest assignment he held throughout his 13-year career.

Both brothers attained career highs in games played that season (Doc 147, Jimmy 155), with Jimmy tying for the National League lead with New York’s Highpockets Kelly and St. Louis’s Milt Stock. Doc also reached career highs for his 11-year career in hits (156), doubles (24), and RBIs (71). Jimmy posted solid numbers, leading the Robins in plate appearances (707), stolen bases (19), and finishing second to teammate Zach Wheat in runs (87) and hits (185). Jimmy posted career highs in batting average, doubles, triples, home runs, and stolen bases the following season. Although Jimmy had the lower regular season batting average, Doc held a slight edge during the 1920 Series—going 3-for-11 and scoring once in five games compared with Jimmy’s 3-for-14, two-run performance covering four games. Doc’s lone run scored came on Cleveland pitcher Jim Bagby’s home run during the notable game five. Both brothers retired to farms following their playing careers, and both passed away in Chattanooga, Tennessee.

The 1920 Brooklyn Robins were more than just the Indians’ opponent during the Series; Uncle Robbie led the team through a challenging season of peaks and valleys, a three-way season-long pennant chase with the New York Giants and Cincinnati Reds, and unique performances from key players.

GORDON J. GATTIE serves as a human-systems integration engineer for the U.S. Navy. His baseball research interests involve ballparks, historical records, and statistical analysis. A SABR member since 1998, Gordon earned his Ph.D. from SUNY Buffalo, where he used baseball to investigate judgment/decision-making performance in complex dynamic environments. Originally from Buffalo, Gordon learned early the hardships associated with rooting for Buffalo sports teams. Ever the optimist, he also cheers for the Cleveland Indians and Washington Nationals. Lisa, his lovely bride who also enjoys baseball, continues to challenge him by supporting the Yankees. Gordon has contributed to multiple SABR publications.

ADDITIONAL REFERENCES

Baseball Reference: http://www.baseball-reference.com

Blanpied, Ralph B. (2005). Brooklyn v. Boston in 26 Innings. In Andrew Paul Mele (Ed.) A Brooklyn Dodgers Reader. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers.

Golenbeck, Peter. (2000). Bums: An Oral History of the Brooklyn Dodgers. Chicago, IL: Contemporary Books.

James, Bill. (1997). The Bill James Guide to Baseball Managers from 1870 to Today. New York: Scribner.

Retrosheet: http://www.retrosheet.org/

Simon, Tom. (2004). Deadball Stars of the National League. Cleveland, OH: Society for American Baseball Research.

Thorn, John; Palmer, Pete; Gershman, Michael; and Pietrusza (2004). Total Baseball: The Official Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball. New York: Viking Press.

NOTES

1 Daniel, “Fifth National League Pennant for Brooklyn,” The Sun and New York Herald, September 28, 1920: 14.

2 Joseph Wancho, “October 10, 1920: A game of World Series firsts: unassisted triple play and grand slam,” SABR Baseball Games Project. Accessed 04 December 2016 at http://sabr.org/gamesproj/game/october-10-1920-world-series-game-firsts-unassisted-triple-play-and-grand-slam.

3 Associated Press, “Ray Chapman Dies of Blow by Ball; Mays Exonerated,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 17, 1920: 1.

4 Associated Press, “Indict Two Gamblers in Baseball Plot; Men Named by Williams in Confession; Inquiry Here to Guard the 1920 Series,” The New York Times, September 30, 1920: 1–2.

5 Thomas S. Rice, “Nerve and Spirit Won Pennant, Says Robinson,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 30, 1920: 1.

6 Thomas S. Rice, “All Dodgers Signed Early in February,” The Sporting News, March 4, 1920: 2.

7 “Giants and Yankees Lose But Robins Win in Opening Game of Major League Season: Dodgers Open With Easy Victory,” The New York Times, April 15, 1920: 15.

8 Thomas S. Rice, “Dodgers Please By Display of a Punch,” The Sporting News, April 22, 1920: 3.

9 “Brooklyn Ties in Record Game of 26 Innings,” The Sun and New York Herald, May 2, 1920: 1.

10 Frank Graham Jr., Brooklyn Dodgers: An Informal History (Carbondale, IL: Southern Illinois University Press, 2002): 78.

11 “Ruth’s Home Run Liner Enables Yankees to Defeat the Red Sox, 7 to 1—Dodgers Succumb to Phillies by 4 to 3: Dodgers Go 13 Innings to Defeat,” The Sun and New York Herald, May 3, 1920: 9.

12 “Yankees and Giants Lose in Nine Innings, Brooklyn in Nineteen,” The New York Times, May 4, 1920: 12.

13 Nelson “Chip” Greene, “Tommy Griffith”, SABR Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/00873ae1.

14 “Dodgers Continue to Slip: Brooklynites Drop Fourth Straight Game, Losing to Pirates,” Democrat and Chronicle (Rochester, NY), June 23, 1920: 26.

15 “Late Rally Fails to Save Dodgers,” The New York Times, June 23, 1920: 12.

16 “Yankees Score 3 Runs in Ninth, Beating Red Sox by 6 to 5—Giants Win From Phillies by 7 to 1—Dodgers Lose: Cadore Ineffective Against the Braves,” The Sun and New York Herald, June 30, 1920: 13.

17 “Giants Win and Dodgers Take Two Games While Reds Lose—Ruth’s 49th Homer Enables Yankees to Beat Tigers: Dodgers Twice Rout Cubs, Increasing Lead in Race,” The Sun and New York Herald, September 14, 1920: 10.

18 Thomas S. Rice, “Brooklyn Wins Pennant—World Series Opens in West,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, September 28, 1920: 20.

19 Eric Enders, “Zack Wheat,” SABR Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/c914f820.

20 Jack Kavanagh and Norman Macht, Uncle Robbie (Phoenix, AZ: Society for American Baseball Research, 1999): 126.

21 Peter Morris, “Eddie Bennett” In Jacob Pomrenke (Ed.) Scandal on the South Side: The 1919 Chicago White Sox (Phoenix, AZ: Society for American Baseball Research, Inc., 2015): 265–68.

22 Thomas S. Rice, “Others Have Beaten Indians Sluggers—Why Not Superbas?,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, October 4, 1920: 2.

23 F.C. Lane, “When Brothers Meet in a World’s Series: How the Two Johnston’s (sic) of Cleveland and Brooklyn Hope to Clash for a World’s Championship,” Baseball Magazine, November 1920: Volume 25, Issue 6, 578.

24 Charles F. Faber, “Burleigh Grimes,” SABR Biography Project, http://sabr.org/bioproj/person/0957655a.

25 F.C. Lane, “When Brothers Meet in a World’s Series: How the Two Johnston’s of Cleveland and Brooklyn Hope to Clash for a World’s Championship,” Baseball Magazine, November 1920: Volume 25, Issue 6, 578.

1923 also marked the third Fall Classic broadcast over the new phenomenon called radio. Broadcast licenses were rapidly being granted to stations all over the country; airtime was difficult to fill, prompting the coverage of unsponsored sporting events (like the World Series) as a public service. An early radio experiment had involved broadcasting the first game (only) of the 1921 series. The methodology used involved Newark Call reporter Sandy Hunt, phoning the action from the Polo Grounds to colleague Tom Cane broadcasting from the WJZ studio.

Commissioner Landis assigned broadcast duties for the 1922 series to prominent sports-writer Grantland Rice. Seated in the upper deck of the Polo Grounds, the respected scribe spoke into a microphone crudely perched atop a wooden plank, wired directly to station WEAF in New York. A man of few words, Rice spoke in a slow monotone, devoid of any excitement or enthusiasm. His habit of taking frequent breaks—to allegedly rest his voice—produced extended periods of dead-air silence.

When WEAF management learned Rice was returning to cover the 1923 Fall Classic, staff-announcer Graham McNamee was assigned to help fill airtime. In the fourth inning of game three, “Rice decided he’d had enough of the microphone, and McNamee was handed the entire broadcast.”1 Taking a deep breath, Mac confidently spoke into the microphone with a line that became his standard opening: “How do you do, ladies and gentleman of the radio audience? Graham McNamee speaking.”2

Red Barber described the circumstances suddenly thrust upon McNamee: “There was no lamp of experience for the pioneer broadcasters. They had no past by which to judge the future. This is what made McNamee and the others so great. Nobody had ever been called upon before to do such work. They had to go out and do it from scratch. If ever a man did pure, original work, it was Graham McNamee.”3

Five months earlier, McNamee was an unemployed opera singer, in receipt of a notice to serve jury duty. Fulfilling his civic obligation on a beautiful spring day in May 1923, McNamee decided on a long exhilarating walk during his lunch break. Selecting a route bypassing his usual diner, he chose instead to lunch at a pricey upscale establishment near the AT&T building, at 195 Broadway; the decision cost him an additional $0.50.

McNamee paused upon noticing a mesmerized crowd listening to a radio broadcast emanating from station WEAF in the AT&T building. Reacting on impulse, he ventured in and upstairs to the WEAF studios. Fortuitously catching the attention of station manager Sam Ross, he boldly inquired about a position as a singer.

Ross indicated no such opening existed, prompting McNamee to mention a window sign he spotted for a staff announcer. Ross liked the appealing tone of McNamee’s voice and definitely needed help in that department. Mac was hired on the spot at a starting salary of $3 a day. His job description was to “fill in between appearances of important people.”4

Early radio announcers worked gruelingly long hours, performing a laundry list of duties around the station. Jobs included general maintenance, answering phones, chauffeuring celebrities, and improvising to fill airtime. As described by author Gerald Nachman, McNamee’s “magnetic voice and dramatic flare were tempered with an easygoing personality that set him apart from the mellifluous voices that dominated the microphones of the 1920s.”5

The newest hire at station WEAF New York was the son of John and Anne McNamee, both of Irish ancestry and Ohio residents when they married in 1885. The couple moved to Washington, DC, after John accepted a position as a legal assistant to the Interior Secretary during the Cleveland administration. Thomas Graham McNamee, their only child, was born in DC on July 10, 1888.

The family relocated to St. Paul, Minnesota when Graham was two years old, after his dad accepted a position as a railroad attorney. A trained musician in her own right, Anne McNamee taught her son to sing by age four and play piano at age seven. Attending high school in St. Paul, Graham did well academically in languages and music, while excelling at football, baseball, and wrestling.

After graduation, John McNamee arranged for his son’s first job as a freight clerk with the Great Northern Railroad. Graham was next employed as a deliveryman (by horse and buggy) for the Chicago-based Armour Meat Packing Company. After wrecking eleven buggies in twelve-months of employment, he was terminated.

Graham’s ambitious mother was convinced an opera career awaited their son; his dad leaned heavily toward law as a profession. Family upheaval due to John McNamee’s work-related travel ultimately lead to a divorce. After the split, Graham accompanied his mother to New York, where she assumed her son would receive superior vocal training. The 1920 census lists Anne as the owner of a rooming house on West 57th St.; Graham resided on the premises.

McNamee joined an opera company, there meeting aspiring singer Josephine Garrett from nearby Bronxville. The couple sang in the Dutch Reformed Church choir as their relationship blossomed. When they married on May 3, 1921, Josephine’s classically trained voice made her the more likely spouse to potentially have a singing career. Opportunities existed for Graham too; in 1922 he received an invitation to perform at New York’s prestigious Aeolin Hall, a legitimate stepping stone for aspiring opera singers. His new job at WEAF meant placing operatic aspirations on hold.

McNamee cut his teeth as a sports broadcaster on August 31, 1923, when assigned to announce the Harry Greb-Johnny Wilson championship fight. His next foray was at the Polo Grounds on September 14, where a crowd exceeding 60,000 fight patrons gathered for the Jack Dempsey- Luis Firpo bout. Thousands more heard Major Andrew White (assisted by McNamee) describe the action on radio. This important live broadcast of a championship fight was a significant radio milestone, greatly increasing the popularity of the fledgling medium. Dempsey retained his heavyweight championship despite being knocked through the ropes (and landing on McNamee) in the second round.

A deluge of positive fan mail followed, attesting to McNamee’s style; “the few detractors generally commented about his slight exaggeration, but the listening audience loved the hype and couldn’t get enough of the announcer with the baritone voice. McNamee freely admitted to being an entertainer first and a broadcaster second.”6 His approach to radio was simple: “You make each of your listeners, though miles away from the spot, feel that he (or she) too is there with you in the press-stand, watching the pop bottle thrown in the air, Gloria Swanson arriving in her new ermine coat; McGraw in his dugout, apparently motionless, but giving signals all the time.”7

Miscues were common (and even expected) during a McNamee broadcast. Realizing nothing could be done to correct a mistake, the broadcaster thought it best to simply admit regret and go on to the next factoid. “Once at a baseball game, he confused the players and plays to such an extent, sportswriter Ring Lardner was prompted to observe that there had been a doubleheader yesterday–the game that was played and the one that McNamee observed.”8 Quick with a pun, Mac observed a fight in the stands resulting in a pop bottle being hurled at an umpire. McNamee called it: “a ball… and a strike.”9

McNamee’s broadcast of the 1926 Rose Bowl included extensive details regarding the changeable California weather, accompanied by overly thorough descriptions of attendees’ attire; game details were occasionally mentioned. Humorist Will Rogers later publicly scorned McNamee for his insignificant tangents, unrelated to sports, but the listening audience couldn’t get enough of the announcer with the baritone voice.

Stations WEAF and WJZ merged to become the National Broadcasting Company, forming a cross-country network, connected by 3,600 miles of phone lines. The official kick-off ceremony took place on November 15, 1926, with a celebratory broadcast from the grand ballroom of the Waldorf-Astoria. An estimated 10 million listeners heard Graham McNamee open the festivities by officially greeting the vast NBC audience. This milestone broadcast marked the start of what would become radio’s Golden Age. “When asked to name radio’s greatest asset, NBC president Merlin Hall Aylesworth replied—Graham McNamee.”10

McNamee’s voice became synonymous with fall and the World Series. His broadcast of the Yankees-Pirates 1927 Fall Classic marked the first year a nationwide audience enjoyed the play-by-play over network radio. Mac’s immense popularity warranted assignments to cover prominent newsmakers such as Charles Lindbergh, Admiral Byrd, Neville Chamberlain, and Amelia Earhart. The Lindbergh coverage at the Washington Navy Yard resulted in an unruly crowd crashing through a Marine guard, trampling the press area. In the commotion, McNamee was knocked to the ground; miraculously unhurt, he continued broadcasting from a prone position on the pavement.

McNamee pursued assignments with dogged determination, often driving poorly lit back-roads, in the dark of night, to arrive for an early morning interview. If time was of the essence, Mac wouldn’t think twice about hitching a ride aboard a rickety crop-duster and landing on a corn-field to conduct an interview. He once covered a college regatta while hovering above the race in a chartered plane.

The broadcaster graced the cover of Time magazine when the October 3, 1927, edition hit the newsstands. The announcer’s fame segued into his personal syndicated newspaper column, appropriately titled Graham McNamee Speaking. Under his byline, the announcer waxed poetic regarding news events, while providing insightful anecdotes to accompany celebrity interviews. His commentary included analysis of current events while responding to reader inquiries, often of a personal nature.

No slouch on the lecture circuit, McNamee was scheduled to conduct a 1927 speaking engagement in New Castle, Pennsylvania. The well-publicized event was sold out at curtain time, as a filled-to-capacity audience sat in anticipation of his arrival—but he never showed. Mac personally kept his own schedule and apparently jotted down the wrong date. The New Castle News published an unflattering editorial, blasting the announcer’s blatant snub of the event.

Learning of his error, McNamee took full-responsibility, contacted organizers and insisted all attendees be invited back the next evening, to enjoy the lecture at no charge. “The next day’s news took back its raspberry-laced criticism and praised the great man to high heaven.”11 Remarkably, McNamee, “never prepares his program in advance but depends on his extraordinary extemporaneous speaking ability to entertain his audience.”12

At the close of the 1920s, McNamee’s style placed him at the top echelon of all radio announcers. His annual income was estimated to be in the $50,000 range, a remarkable sum at the time. The salary allowed the former out-of-work juror to comfortably reside in a vine-clad cottage atop a swanky New York penthouse.

In 1930, close pal Babe Ruth opened a haberdashery shop in New York for men and boys. Serving as master-of-ceremonies, McNamee: “cheerfully addressed the crowd through a loudspeaker; the ever-confident salesman casually covered the lines of apparel stocked in Babe’s new retail shop.”13 Other celebrities accompanying Babe to the grand opening included Knute Rockne of Notre Dame, Yankees manager Bob Shawkey, and teammate Lou Gehrig.

McNamee’s crowded workload increased further when assigned to narrate Universal Newsreels in 1930. Josephine began referring to herself as “the original microphone widow.”14 Tabloid publications didn’t help solidify the couple’s relationship, alluding to rumors of an ongoing affair, apparently discovered by Josephine. The couple divorced in 1931.

McNamee re-married on January 21, 1934, tying the knot with Ann Lee Sims, a Louisiana native and aspiring New York actress. The Washington Post reported the ceremony as taking place in Elkton, Maryland, “where the couple hurriedly motored into the little town, secured a license and were married by one of the town’s marrying parsons.”15 The bride was over twenty years younger than her new husband.

McNamee’s favorite radio gig was his stint as the announcer on the Texaco Fire Chief, a highly rated NBC radio program, starring veteran comic Ed Wynn. The energetic comedian essentially performed variations of his old vaudeville routines before a live, in-studio audience. In addition to handling the announcing chores, Mac also dutifully performed as a stooge to Wynn’s madcap brand of comedy.

Author Elizabeth McLeod noted: “Wynn apparently was a very insecure man. It was McNamee who calmed him down each week, McNamee who gave him the courage he needed to face that forbidding black enamel box. The two men became close friends—and McNamee’s regular-guy enthusiasm acted on the air as the perfect complement to Wynn’s manic comedy.”16

While broadcasting the National Soap Box Derby from Akron, Ohio, McNamee was behind the mike on August 12, 1935, when a young participant accidently crashed into the judge’s stand. McNamee sustained a serious head injury after being struck by the youngster’s two-hundred-pound racer. Recuperation and ultimate recovery required a two-week hospital stay; lingering effects of the head injury would remain with the announcer for the rest of his life.

A new generation of sportscaster began arriving on the scene, loosely following McNamee’s style, but more analytical and thorough in broadcast preparation. By 1935, Red Barber became the heir apparent to announce the World Series. Ironically, McNamee attended, solely as a spectator, seated silently next to Red during the broadcast. Barber poignantly noted in his book: “The parade had passed the pioneer that rapidly, that harshly, that remorsefully, in only a dozen years.”17

McNamee’s distinctive voice and proven ability to sell advertisers’ products made his work on network radio-programs more valuable than sports reporting. In addition to being on the Wynn program, his regularly scheduled announcer slots included: Major Bowes Original Amateur Hour, Ripley’s Believe It Or Not, Treasury Hour, Millions for Defense, and The Rudy Vallee Program. Periodically Vallee gave McNamee the opportunity of stepping away from his announcer’s duties to perform as a featured singer.

The December 7, 1941, Pearl Harbor attack thrust the country into war. Among the high-profile stories making headlines in the aftermath was the conversion of luxury liner Normandie into the battleship Lafayette. On February 9, 1942, in New York harbor, a blaze of unknown origin consumed the entire ship. Reporters converged on the dock area as sabotage was initially suspected. The fire was ultimately determined to be accidental, caused when welding equipment ignited a spark. Broadcasting from the cold, rainy dock area, McNamee came-down with a sore throat.

Continuing to work his grueling schedule, the throat ailment developed into strep, and the announcer’s health progressively deteriorated. Admitted to St. Luke’s Hospital in April, a new series of tests revealed evidence of a serious heart ailment. The golden baritone voice was permanently silenced on May 9, 1942, with the official cause of death listed as a brain embolism. Services were held at the Frank E. Campbell funeral church in New York.

Shortly before his passing, a broadcast colleague asked McNamee to identify the greatest sports moment he’d ever witnessed during his extensive career. Without hesitation McNamee responded: “Babe Ruth and the ‘called-shot’ in the 1932 World Series.”18

At the time of his passing, the New York Times estimated “the late broadcaster uttered ten times the number of words in an unabridged dictionary during his radio career.”19 McNamee was just shy of 53 years old, however, as Red Barber remarked: “He’d lived a thousand years.”20 The broadcaster was buried in Akron, near the location of his father’s interment.

Broadcast partner and fellow WEAF announcer Phil Carlson commented: “His voice was the most trusted and vibrant in radio, for nearly 20 years it thrilled the people who heard it. There was never such a voice of excitement heard in this land, as that of Graham McNamee.”21

McNamee was inducted into The American Sportscasters Association Hall of Fame in 1984. The National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum presented the Ford C. Frick Award to McNamee in 2016, commemorating his significant contribution to the origin of baseball broadcasting.

CORT VITTY resides in Maryland with his wife Mary Anne and their pet golden-doodle Sparkle. A New Jersey native, Vitty graduated from Seton Hall University and continues to root for the New York Yankees. He’s been a SABR member (Bob Davids Chapter) since 1999 and his articles have been featured in both the “Baseball Research Journal” and “The National Pastime.” He has contributed to several SABR book projects and his work is also posted at Seamheads.com and PhiladelphiaAthletics.org.

Notes