The Empire Base Ball Club of Freeport, Illinois, began its 1865 season by lamenting “the melancholy and terrible blow which has fallen upon this country by the untimely death of President Lincoln.”1 The assassination of “Father Abraham” only days after the surrender of the rebel Army of Northern Virginia especially distressed the residents of Freeport, site of a Lincoln-Douglas debate in 1858. Within hours of the president’s passing on April 15, the town’s ballplayers resolved to drape their club rooms in black and wear badges of mourning for thirty days.

Formed three years earlier, the Empire club never had enjoyed a peacetime season. As noted in the Freeport press, when the club was founded, “it was the only Base Ball Club in the State, with the exception, perhaps, of a club in Chicago.”2 (The big city, in fact, had fielded at least 18 clubs by 1861, but the sport there had “rather fallen into the background since the commencement of the war.”) With many area men away fighting in the Union Army, the Empire club did little during 1862 except practice the game and learn its rules. The following year, it searched in vain for contests in Illinois, Iowa, and Wisconsin, before finally arranging three games with the Garden City club of Chicago. Two wins at home after an opening loss in Chicago prompted the prairie upstarts to declare themselves state champions.

“In 1864 the club continued its organization and its practice,” as reported in the Freeport Journal, “but the war thinned out its ranks, and, although holding itself ready to play any aspiring club, it sought no contest, and the year passed without any match game of importance.”4 (The unimportant contests, however, included a “most exciting and entertaining game” in August with the fledgling Grant Base Ball Club, also of Freeport.5 Empire lost by a score typical for the era, 31-19.)

The townsfolk saw their next baseball six weeks following Lincoln’s assassination. Empire and Grant had since merged, but briefly separated again to play an intrasquad game June 1. “The lovers of Base Ball play, will have a rare treat on Thursday,” reported the Freeport Weekly Journal, “as the Empire have divided into equal sides…for a complete game of nine innings, ‘Home and Home Game,’ on Thursday at 2 o’clock.”6 Empire beat Grant, 46-33, in four hours on its field near the fairgrounds. Both sides exhibited “great energy and skill…although the heat was intense and labor hard.”7

The next week Empire issued a general challenge to all baseball clubs in the West (what is considered the Midwest today) for a series of games. An established club in St. Louis—also named Empire—earlier had challenged its Freeport counterpart to a game in Chicago; the smaller club had declined, claiming a challenged team’s right to select the ground. The two Empires now agreed to play at Freeport on the Fourth of July. “We understand there will be quite a number of the friends of the game,” a St. Louis newspaper noted, “who will take advantage of the opportunity and will accompany the club on their excursion.”8

The contest seemed a mismatch. St. Louis boasted a population of 160,000, while Freeport had fewer than 5,400. But talent is where you find it, and the underdogs were optimistic. The challengers arrived in town following a grueling twenty-five hour, 320-mile journey north on the St. Louis Alton and Terre Haute Railroad. They were “warmly received by the Freeport club at the depot and thence escorted to their hotel…. After supper [the St. Louis visitors] strolled through the town, and were agreeably surprised to find it not only a brisk business city but also an exceedingly beautiful one.”9

The national holiday dawned under a scorching sun and grew progressively hotter. “I was awakened of an early hour this morning, not by the ringing of bells or the booming of cannon, but by the excessive oppressiveness of the atmosphere,” a Chicago Tribune correspondent wrote. “It was as if red hot stoves had been suspended in the air, and placed by a lavish hand upon every available spot of ground in the town and the adjoining country.”10 Six thousand spectators turned out from as far away as Iowa to see the game at the local ballfield.

The Sporting News decades later called Empire- versus-Empire the “first fly ball match west of the Alleghenies.” In the past, both fair and foul balls caught on one bounce had been outs. A rule change in December 1864 meant fair balls were now outs only if caught on the fly. The switch took time to take hold, however, and the teams meeting at Freeport hadn’t decided whether to play under bounder or fly rules. “Just as you please,” the St. Louis skipper said when asked which it should be. Freeport’s captain then promptly chose the latter, since “the ‘fly’ game was still quite a novelty, and though some of the St. Louis boys felt a little weak over the chances of winning.”11

Play again lasted four hours, “and though the heat was intense, nearly all who were present were so deeply interested in the contest they remained until the close,” said the Freeport Weekly Journal.12 The St. Louis club’s experience was evident during most of the game. At the bottom of the ninth inning the Mound City men led, 27-13, but “really fine batting done by Freeport, and the poor fielding of St. Louis,” let the home team score seven runs before the visitors snuffed the rally.13 A New York newspaper said the 27-20 victory gave St. Louis the “Championship of the West.”14

“The St. Louis Club is unquestionably one of the best in the whole country, and the boys of the [Freeport] ‘Empire’ lost no laurels in being defeated by so close a margin by them,” the Weekly Journal said proudly. “Had they done as well throughout the game as they did near its close, St. Louis would have gone home vanquished. Both parties did nobly. Both gained in reputation.”15 The visiting team caught an evening train home and had to decline the hospitality offered by Col. John W. Shaffer, a political supporter and friend of the late president’s. Shaffer had gotten involved in Freeport baseball since his return from the war and his presence would be felt later in the season.

By midsummer, Freeport was fielding four baseball teams: “one old men’s—one young men’s—and two boys’ clubs.”16 Empire, Empire Jr., Union, and Atlantic played each other until the senior Empires traveled a couple of dozen miles east for a July 30 game at Rockford, Illinois. Empire easily beat the local Forest City club, 55-21, at the slightly larger town in Winnebago County. That game concluded baseball on the prairie for a while. “During the hot month of August the club took a breathing spell, and gathered strength for the fall contests.”17

Despite the summer’s heat, the Winnebago County Agricultural Society glimpsed possibilities in the new sport. It organized a state championship tournament to be played September 19 and 20 at its county fairgrounds. “We trust this favorable opportunity will be taken advantage [of] by the Base Ball Clubs of this city to measure batting, &c., with their Rockford friends, and mark the improvement each has made since last they met to contest for superiority in this manly game,” the Freeport North-West said.18

Empire entered the tournament, as did Freeport’s latest team, the Shaffer Base Ball Club, also known as Shaffer’s Nine. Filling out the slate were Forest City plus two clubs from Chicago, old rivals Atlantic and Excelsior. The championship trophy was a silver ball and rosewood bat. “All lovers of this truly exciting and beautiful game are invited to be on hand to witness some spirited contests,” the North-West said.19

 

 

Atlantic beat Forest City, 26-20, in the opening game on Tuesday morning. That afternoon Excelsior easily topped Shaffer, 37-8. The winner of the Atlantic- Empire game Wednesday morning was then supposed to play Excelsior for the title. “A large crowd assembled at the appointed time, eager to witness the sport,” the Freeport Weekly Journal said, “but, a dispute arising as to whether the Atlantic should be allowed to substitute two men in place of two of the players of the previous day, and add one man to make up their full nine, a long controversy ensued, which terminated in the withdrawal of the Atlantic from the contest.”20 The championship game thus became Empire’s only appearance in the tournament.

Empire and Excelsior met at two o’clock before a sea of spectators. Crowd estimates were as large as ten thousand. “Excelsior played beautifully; they showed that they had an easy job, and were in great glee,” the North-West reported.21 But betting was heavy as Empire rallied to trail by one run, 16-15, during the seventh inning. With one out and runners at the corners, the game then descended into chaos as St. Louis attempted a pickoff at third base. The umpire—a Mr. Marshal from the Capital City Club of Madison, Wisconsin— initially called an out, but reversed his ruling after outcries from the runner and fans nearest the base.

A Chicago newspaper later charged that Marshal had been “afraid to decide against several thousand for fear of a coup d’etat from unlucky countrymen who had bet and lost; therefore, from the first to the last, he decided against the Excelsiors.”22 Their outraged opponents, however, suspected the Chicagoans of trying to delay play until the game was called for darkness, securing victory. “The Excelsiors refused to play further unless that man [at third] was held to be out, whereupon Captain [R.M.] Buckman of the Empire told the Umpire to ‘declare the man out for the sake of going on with the game.’ He did so but still the Excelsiors refused to play.”23

Marshal declared Empire the winner. Threats flew both ways over possession of the championship silver ball and rosewood bat. Only the host Winnebago County Agricultural Society emerged with its reputation intact. A Chicago newspaper later called Empire- Excelsior “an unwise rivalry, and it is to be hoped that in their future matches they will study to cultivate a more gentlemanly bearing towards each other.”24

Empire’s final tournament of 1865 came September 29 at Dubuque, Iowa, for what was billed as the championship of the Northwest. Dubuque lay sixty- five miles to the west on the opposite bank of the Mississippi River. Empire’s morning opponent was again Empire of St. Louis. The second Empire-versus- Empire matchup was a gem. The Freeport Journal later called it “the best match game played that year in the United States.”25

 

 

The big city again bested the prairie town in a low- scoring, 12-5 affair that took three and a half hours to play. Unlike at Rockford, everyone at Dubuque exhibited good behavior. “The game was conducted in a most friendly and gentlemanly manner from beginning to end, no controversies of any kind arising.”26 Empire of Freeport then played the Julian club of Dubuque for second place during the afternoon, pulling out a 27-26 win despite its players’ weariness from the morning’s game.

The northwestern Illinois baseball clubs continued playing into the autumn. Shaffer’s Nine fell to Forest City, 31-23, October 20 at Freeport. “Some fine playing was exhibited on both sides. In the evening the members of the Forest City, Shaffer and Empire Clubs and a few of their friends met at Col. Shaffer’s, where a bountiful repast was served up and an hour or two passed in friendly intercourse, singing and having a good time generally.”27

The senior Empire club expected to end its season six days later, at home versus Excelsior of Chicago. “This game will be for the championship of the State, and will be well worth the attention of all who can attend upon the match,” the Weekly Journal proclaimed.28 But wet grounds and foul conditions thwarted the eagerly awaited finale, which “failed to come off on account of the weather. The Chicago men were on hand, but were compelled to return home with the question of State championship undecided.”29

Empire hadn’t quite concluded its first peacetime season. “The club rested from base ball during the winter, of course, excepting one game which was played among themselves on Skates in Stephenson Park,” the Freeport Journal said of a January 31 event. Despite the late October rainout, the newspaper added that the squad was “still the champion club of the State, and must be prepared every year to earn the honor of that position.”30 Empire’s players reemerged in the early spring of 1866, resembling Union artillery officers in their club uniforms of blue pantaloons with red stripes. “The sunny days have come,” said the North-West, “and with them we will have a renewal of this healthful out door sport. Freeport stumps the world on Base Ball playing.”31 

JIM LEEKE is a former journalist, creative director, and copywriter in Columbus, Ohio. He has contributed to various SABR publications, and also writes about other areas of American history. His numerous books include “From the Dugouts to the Trenches: Baseball During the Great War,” winner of the 2018 Larry Ritter Book Award.

 

Notes

1. “The Empire Club on the Death of the President,” Freeport (Illinois) Weekly Journal, April 19, 1865, 5. (The paper later switch to daily publication as the Freeport Journal.)

2. “Empire Base Ball Club,” Freeport Journal, June 6, 1866, 5.

3. Chicago, IL at Protoball.org: https://protoball.org/Chicago,_IL; “The City: Amusements,” Chicago Tribune, June 3, 1865, 4.

4. “Empire Base Ball Club.”

5. “That Base Ball Match,” Freeport Weekly Journal, August 10, 1864, 3.

6. “Base Ball Sport,” Freeport Weekly Journal, May 31, 1865, 3.

7. “Base Ball,” Freeport Weekly Journal, June 7, 1865, 3.

8. “Base Ball Match Game,” St Louis Missouri Republican, June 26, 1865, 3.

9. “Base Ball Match at Freeport, Ill., July 4,” St. Louis Missouri Democrat, July 8, 1865, 4.

10. “Freeport,” Chicago Tribune, July 7, 1865, 2.

11. “Back in 1865,” The Sporting News, November 9, 1895: 5.

12. “The Champion Base Ball Match,” Freeport Weekly Journal, July 12, 1865, 3.

13. “Base Ball Match at Freeport.”

14. “Ball Championship of the West,” New York Clipper, July 22, 1865, 116.

15. “The Champion Base Ball Match.”

16. “Base Ball,” Freeport Weekly Journal, August 2, 1865, 3.

17. “Empire Base Ball Club.”

18. “Base Ball Championship,” Freeport (Illinois) North-West, August 31, 1865, 5.

19. “Local Matters,” Freeport North-West, September 7, 1865, 5.

20. “Base Ball Tournament at Rockford,” Freeport Weekly Journal, September 27, 1865, 2.

21. “Base Ball Tournament at Rockford; Second Day,” Freeport North-West, September 28, 1865, 1. Published a day later, the North-West occasionally ran a headline that was similar or identical to one in the earlier Weekly Journal.

22. Chicago Times, reprinted in “Truth Versus the Chicago Times,” Freeport Weekly Journal, September 27, 1865, 3.

23. “Base Ball Tournament at Rockford; Second Day.”

24. Chicago Journal, reprinted in “The Base Ball Tournament at Rockford,” Freeport Weekly Journal, October 4, 1865, 3.

25. “Empire Base Ball Club.”

26. “Base Ball Match at Dubuque,” Freeport Weekly Journal, October 4, 1865, 3.

27. “Local Items of Interest,” Freeport Weekly Journal, October 25, 1865, 3.

28. “Base Ball Match,” Freeport Weekly Journal, October 25, 1865, 3.

29. “Base Ball Match,” Freeport Weekly Journal, November 1, 1865, 3.

30. “Empire Base Ball Club.”

31. “Local Matters,” Freeport North-West, April 19, 1866, 5.

 

Bud Fowler’s election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in December 2021 has brought new attention to this Black baseball pioneer of the nineteenth century. Fowler was one of the first Black players to make a living in so-called “Organized Baseball,” playing for a series of otherwise all-white teams between 1878 and 1895 before helping organize the Page Fence Giants, a pioneering Black professional team, in the 1890s.1 The teams that Fowler played for in his prime were all in circuits such as the Northwestern League, the Illinois-Iowa League, and the Nebraska State League, all minor leagues or independent leagues. He never played in any one place for very long, both because of the financial instability of these leagues, and because of the racism that faced him everywhere he went.

Some tantalizing evidence suggests that in 1888, Fowler was almost signed to a major-league contract by John T. Brush of the Indianapolis Hoosiers (then in the National League), but that racist objections by the Hoosier players sabotaged the idea. This story appears in several modern accounts of Brush’s life, including his Wikipedia entry, but these all ultimately derive from the same source: a typescript in the Giamatti Research Center (GRC) at the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in Cooperstown, New York.2 According to the typescript (henceforth the “Brush typescript”), the incident happened after the Crawfordsville, Indiana, franchise in the Central Interstate League collapsed. Brush, who “had been keeping his optics closely trained on her star second baseman, a negro—J.W. (Bud) Fowler,” arranged to bring Fowler to Indianapolis (about 50 miles from Crawfordsville) for a tryout. But the Indianapolis roster was full of Irish players whose strong objections caused Brush to drop the plan.3

The typescript is not in Fowler’s file at the GRC, but in the file for Brush, a baseball magnate who began his career in Indianapolis in the 1880s and eventually owned the New York Giants in their glory years of the early 1900s. The 20-page document is apparently a transcription of a handwritten original, consisting of an account of Brush’s early baseball career in Indianapolis, including the Fowler incident. The account was written by Guy M. Smith, whose name appears at the end, and may have been transcribed by sports- writer Dan Daniel, whose name is written in felt-tip pen at the top of the first page. It can be dated between 1937 and 1940 on internal evidence: Smith refers to “the late Harry S. New,” who died May 9, 1937, but refers to Joe Quinn, who died in 1940, as “now a St. Louis mortician.”4 In 1941, Smith said that he had almost finished writing a book called Across the Years in Baseball, and that if he couldn’t afford to get it published, “I’ll just hand along all of my records and data to the Cooperstown shrine.” Presumably this typescript (or the manuscript it is based on) was part of the materials for that never-published book, helping explain how it got to the Hall of Fame.5

At first glance, this does not appear to be a very reliable source: a typed transcription of a lost original, written 50 years after the events it describes. However, there are reasons to take this account seriously, starting with the author, Guy M. Smith. Smith was a very interesting character who was in a good position to know about the events in question. His published writings from the same time period are generally reliable in their broad strokes, if not in every detail, and the same is true of things in the Brush typescript that can be checked against the documentary record. In order to properly evaluate Smith’s account of Brush and Fowler, it will be helpful to explore Smith and his career in some detail.

GUY M. SMITH, INDIANAPOLIS BASEBALL HISTORIAN

Guy McIlvaine Smith was born in Indianapolis on December 2, 1870 (possibly), and grew up there as a rabid baseball fan, around the time of the events described in the typescript.6 Indianapolis nearly always had a professional baseball team during Smith’s youth, including three that briefly achieved major-league status (in 1878, 1884, and 1887-89). Smith regularly attended games and got to know some of the players and executives, especially on the 1887-89 team, of which John T. Brush was president. Smith attended DePauw University and worked as a newspaperman from 1889 to 1895, after which he moved to Danville, Illinois, and took a series of railroad jobs. In 1936 he retired after 34 years as a railroad mail clerk and became a full-time writer, mostly about baseball.7

By the 1930s, Smith had become well-known to sportswriters as a source of information about nineteenth-century baseball, especially if it involved Indianapolis. In 1935 he wrote his first baseball history article for The Sporting News, an obituary of Paul Hines, and over the next decade he wrote frequently for that publication, and occasionally for others. His memory appears to have been quite good well into his seventies, and he also had a formidable library of baseball books and publications. A 1941 profile of Smith in The Sporting News calls him “a veritable encyclopedia of the game,” and says that “if Brother Smith tells you something happened at 4 o’clock in the afternoon of Thursday, July 7, 1889, or August 11, 1886, put it down as correct.”8 This is undoubtedly an exaggeration, but many of the events Smith describes in his published articles (or in articles that quote him) can be at least partially confirmed in the historical record.

For example, in that 1941 Sporting News profile, Smith recalled how, as a child in 1876, he and his older brother “went to the Indianapolis park, where the famed Chicago White Stockings were to play an Indianapolis team that included such stars as Silver Flint and Mike Golden. Through a hole in the fence, young Guy and his brother saw Al Spalding pitch and Deacon White catch for Chicago.” Indianapolis did not have a National League team in 1876, but in fact the White Stockings did play exhibition games there on July 31 and August 4, 1876, against the local semi-pro team. In both games Silver Flint and Mike Golden played for Indianapolis, and Spalding pitched and Deacon White caught for Chicago.9 The newspaper account of the July 31 game describes the many people who watched the game without paying, including dozens on surrounding rooftops and boys who climbed telegraph poles.10

In that same 1941 profile, Smith recalled seeing Deacon White, now with Cincinnati, catching his brother Will White in 1878 while wearing an improved catcher’s mask he had invented. “As a boy, I saw Deacon wear the mask for the first time that year and it attracted much attention. At the close of the game, White explained its merits to a crowd that had gathered around. Silver Flint, who caught for Indianapolis that day, wore the old rubber face protector.”11 Two games in Indianapolis’s 1878 schedule fit Smith’s description: June 4 and June 6, in both of which Cincinnati was in town, with Deacon White catching and Will White pitching, and Silver Flint catching for Indianapolis.12 Existing (short) biographies of White do not mention the mask story, but it is consistent with what we know. After a decade as a star catcher, White had switched to first base and the outfield in 1877, in order to save his body from the punishing abuse that catchers of the day had to endure. But 1877 was also the year that catcher’s masks began to be widely adopted, and in 1878 White went back to catching full-time.13

 

 

Smith wrote most often about the National League team Indianapolis had from 1887 through 1889, with John T. Brush as team president.14 He personally knew Brush and many of the players, and witnessed many of the things he wrote about. For example, Smith wrote a long article about Jack Glasscock, star shortstop of the 1887-89 Hoosiers, for the July 9, 1939, edition of the News-Register of Wheeling, West Virginia (Glasscock’s hometown), in honor of Glasscock’s 80th birthday.15 Smith interviewed Glasscock for the article, which included Glasscock’s opinions on baseball in 1939 as well as Smith’s firsthand recollections of Glasscock’s fielding skill as a shortstop. The 1941 Sporting News profile of Guy Smith cites his 1939 interview with Glasscock and describes how Smith brought out a glove that he said Glasscock had given to him during the 1889 season after replacing it with a new one.

Much of the Brush typescript deals with Indianapolis baseball during the same period (1887-89), and it can be a valuable complement to Smith’s articles, as long as its limitations are kept in mind.16 For example, in his 1935 Sporting News obituary of Paul Hines, Smith wrote about an incident that he witnessed in 1889, when Amos Rusie was a rookie pitcher for the Hoosiers.17 After being sent to the minors for seasoning, Rusie was recalled to the big club in August, by Smith’s account, with his first start coming against Boston. In the third inning, manager Jack Glasscock almost pulled him from the game after the rookie issued a couple of walks, but “Rusie, humiliated by the presence of 200 South Side friends” who had come to watch him pitch, pleaded to be allowed to stay in. Paul Hines came over from first base and convinced Glasscock to keep Rusie in, whereupon “Hines, placing his arm around the youthful hurler, walked back with him to the box. The writer witnessed this act and it was the finest example of graciousness he has ever seen upon the diamond.”

The typescript gives a more detailed account of Rusie’s return to the Hoosiers in August 1889, though without mentioning the Hines anecdote. “Rusie went into action August 20 against Chicago with Ad Gumbert and gave the ‘Ruby One’ a run for his money but lost by ‘one’ run. Three days later he defeated Cleveland with Enoch Bakely—one hundred Grand Avenue rooters cheering him to the skies and his father and mother guests of Brush in the private loge.”18 Rusie’s first start after his return was indeed against Chicago (not Boston, as in the 1935 article), but it was a 12-6 loss on August 21 against Frank Dwyer, not a one-run loss on August 20 against Ad Gumbert (who had pitched on August 19). The typescript is correct that Rusie beat Cleveland in his next start on August 23, though the opposing pitcher was Henry Gruber, not Enoch Bakley (who had pitched the day before).19 This August 23, 1889, game against Cleveland is probably the one where Smith saw Hines comfort Rusie. Rusie did get into trouble in the third inning, but not by issuing two walks; rather, Paul Radford singled, went to second on an error by center fielder Ed Andrews, and scored on two sacrifice hits.20

This tendency to get small details almost right, but not quite, is a notable feature of the Brush typescript. When it came to filling in details that he had not personally witnessed or couldn’t remember, Smith relied on his reference library, which, while impressive for the time, was not always reliable by modern standards. Smith apparently had a list of all the games Amos Rusie had pitched, since he said in 1941 that “by careful checking he had established that Rusie never was taken out of a game for ineffectiveness during his National League career.”21 But this list must have had some mistakes that made their way into the Brush typescript, not surprising given that it had to have been compiled by hand in the days before spreadsheets and easily accessible online newspapers.

THE BRUSH TYPESCRIPT AND BUD FOWLER

With all this as background, we can take a closer look at Guy Smith’s account in the typescript of John T. Brush’s attempt to sign Bud Fowler. Unlike the Rusie material, this story does not appear in any of Smith’s published writings, nor is it described in any contemporary sources that I can find. Even so, it is detailed enough to be worth examining closely. The passage is short enough to quote in full. I have corrected a few obvious typos, but have kept Smith’s run-on writing style intact.

Crawfordsville, Indiana passed up her franchise in the Central Interstate in ’87. Brush had been keeping his optics closely trained on her star second baseman, a negro—J.W. (Bud) Fowler who was a member of the Keokuk Iowa Western League team of ’84 and pastimed there with such later day as D.C. Dugdale, “Mit” Kennedy and Nate Hudson. Brush arranged to bring Fowler to Indianapolis but it so happened that names like Boyle, Cahill, Daily, Denny, McGeachy and Seery formed on the club’s roster and in the minds of Indianapolis ball lovers, as well. A delegation from the foregoing group waited on Brush and informed him that there was positively nothing doing in connection with Fowler and both Brush and the colored star opined that it was best to avoid a collision with the Celtic temperament and Fowler joined Binghamton where he continued to star for several seasons. In 1892 he organized and managed the famous Page Fence Giants who were sponsored by the Page Mfg. Co. of Adrian, Michigan and who traveled the country in their palace on wheels built by the Pullman Co.22

The first two sentences are mostly accurate, except that the dates are off by one year, similar to the discrepancies we saw in Smith’s Amos Rusie story. Bud Fowler played for the Crawfordsville, Indiana, team of the Central Interstate League not in 1887, but in 1888; also, Fowler had starred for Keokuk of the Western League not in 1884, but in 1885. The Keokuk teammates listed by Smith were in fact with the team in 1885, as long as we assume that “Mit” Kennedy is a mistranscription for “Ted” Kennedy. Keokuk’s opening day lineup on April 8, 1885, included Fowler at second base, Dan Dugdale at catcher, and Ted Kennedy pitching; by mid-May, Nat Hudson, who would pitch for the St. Louis Browns the following year, had joined Keokuk as a second pitcher.23

John T. Brush may well have become aware of Bud Fowler in 1885 when the Black star played for Keokuk, and Indianapolis was one of the six founding members of the new Western League. Keokuk was initially an “alliance club,” meaning that they were officially independent but each Western League team agreed to play five games at Keokuk.24 Indianapolis traveled to Keokuk for games on April 30, May 7, and May 8, losing the first one, 12-6, and winning the next two, 10-4 and 8-4.25 Keokuk was admitted as a full member of the Western League in early June after the Omaha club collapsed, but less than two weeks later, the entire league imploded, and the Indianapolis directors sold their franchise and players to Detroit of the National League for a reported $5,000.26 Keokuk tried to continue as an independent team for a few more weeks before finally disbanding in July. Soon afterward, on July 22, 1885, Sporting Life wrote: “Fowler, the crack colored player…is one of the best general players in the country, and if he had a White face he would be playing with the best of them.”27

Three years later, when Brush was president of the Indianapolis franchise in the National League, he and Bud Fowler came into each other’s orbits once again. In the early part of 1888, Fowler played for Crawfordsville, Indiana, in the Central Interstate League, and quickly became the star of the team.29 On May 9, a writer going by “Punch” wrote in Sporting Life: “Fowler is playing a great game at second, and it is a very unusual thing for a ball to get by him. I shall be very much surprised if the ‘coon,’ as he is called, does not have a record equal to any in our League in his position.”29 Under the circumstances, it makes sense that Brush would “have his optics closely trained on” Fowler, as Smith wrote. Crawfordsville was only about 50 miles northwest of Indianapolis, with a rail line connecting the two. More significantly, one of the Hoosier players in 1888, Otto Schomberg, had been Fowler’s teammate at Stillwater, Minnesota, in 1884 and at Keokuk in 1885, and could have alerted Brush to Fowler.30

The Central Interstate League of 1888, like the Western League of 1885, was unstable due to financial difficulties. The Crawfordsville franchise moved to Terre Haute In early July, then disbanded on the morning of Monday, July 23, after which the players became free agents.31 That same day, Indianapolis was at home to open a three-game series against the Chicago White Stockings. The Indianapolis News reported Terre Haute’s demise in a small item on its front page on that evening.32 Brush could have read this item or a similar one and telegraphed Fowler an offer, intending to bring him with the team on the road trip they were due to depart for on July 25 if a deal was reached. Of course, this did not happen. On Wednesday, July 25, Fowler was in Terre Haute playing in a benefit game against a “picked nine” to raise money for the players, and two days later the Terre Haute Express was reporting that he had secured a position with Santa Fe, New Mexico.33

THE COLOR LINE IN 1888

According to Guy Smith’s account, racism by the team’s many Irish players was the reason Brush did not sign Fowler. This would not be surprising, given that the color line in the affiliated professional leagues was in the process of being drawn at this time. Numerous Black players had played on minor league teams over the previous few years, but a racist backlash had made it increasingly difficult for White teams to hire them. In 1887 more than a dozen Black players had played on affiliated minor league teams, including Bud Fowler, who played for Binghamton in the International Association. He put up outstanding numbers, batting .350 in 34 games with 30 stolen bases, but he and his Black teammate William Renfro faced relentless racism. In late June, nine White Binghamton players signed a petition refusing to play with Fowler and Renfro, just after two teammates had quit the team for the same reason. Fowler resigned from the team and eventually joined Montpelier in the Northeastern League.34

The most famous incident in the drawing of baseball’s color line happened shortly after Fowler’s resignation from Binghamton. Before the 1887 season, Newark (also in the International Association) had signed a Black battery, pitcher George Stovey and catcher Fleet Walker, who were quite successful. Stovey would win more than 30 games for Newark that year, while Walker was a top-notch catcher who is best known today as the first openly Black player in a segregated major league, playing in 1884 with Toledo in the American Association. (William Edward White, who had a White father and a Black mother, played in one game for the National League’s Providence Grays in 1879, but he “passed” as White.)35 On July 14, 1887, Newark was scheduled to play an exhibition game against Cap Anson and the Chicago White Stockings, but Anson announced that his team would not take the field if Stovey pitched. He had tried this tactic in 1883 when Walker was with Toledo, but Toledo had not backed down, and Walker played in the game (in right field). By 1887, though, the tide was turning, and Stovey did not play against the White Stockings, ostensibly because he was not feeling well. The same day, the International Association directors met to discuss “the question of colored players,” and decided that no more Black players could sign contracts to play in the league, though existing contracts would be honored.36

Before this infamous incident, Cap Anson had already derailed two attempts by the New York Giants to sign George Stovey. In 1886 Stovey was pitching for Jersey City in the Eastern League and doing an excellent job, compiling a 16-15 record with a 1.13 ERA despite deliberately poor support from some of his teammates.37 The September 8, 1886, Sporting Life reported: “New York has been seriously considering the engagement of Stovey, Jersey City’s fine colored pitcher. The question is would the League permit his appearance in League championship games?”38 Manager Pat Powers recalled several years later that the Giants were in a pennant race with Chicago at the time, and that team executive Walter Appleton wanted Stovey to join the Giants for a crucial four-game series in Chicago. “In fact, a deal was fixed between Appleton, the Jersey club, and Stovey to this end. Stovey had his grip packed and awaited the word, but he was not called owing to the fact that Anson had refused to play in a game with colored catcher Walker at Toledo and the same result was feared.”39

On April 7, 1887, the Giants played a preseason exhibition against Newark, for whom George Stovey and Fleet Walker were now playing. The Giants won in a squeaker, 3-2, with Hall of Famer Tim Keefe barely outdueling Stovey, and Walker threw out New York captain John Montgomery Ward trying to steal.40 The Giants were so impressed that the Newark Daily Journal reported on April 9 that New York manager Jim Mutrie had offered to buy the contracts of Stovey and Walker from Newark, but that “Manager Hackett informed him they were not on sale.”41 Twenty years later Sol White, a historian of early Black baseball, gave a fuller and slightly different version of the story. According to White, it was Ward who wanted to sign Stovey, “and arrangements were just about completed for his transfer from the Newark club, when a brawl was heard from Chicago to New York. The same Anson, with all the venom of hate which would be worthy of a Tillman or Vardaman of the present day, made strenuous and fruitful opposition to any proposition looking to the admittance of a colored man into the National League.”42

Given this history, it may not be a coincidence that Anson and his White Stockings were in Indianapolis at the same time that John T. Brush was (apparently) thinking about signing Bud Fowler in late July 1888. This is not to say that Brush’s plan would have succeeded if Anson had not been in town, but his presence nearby could have been a factor in the way things played out (as described by Guy Smith). As Sol White later wrote, “[Anson’s] repugnant feeling, shown at every opportunity, toward colored ball players, was a source of comment through every league in the country, and his opposition, with his great popularity and power in base ball circles, hastened the exclusion to the Black man from the White leagues.”43

Later in 1888 Anson again refused to play against Fleet Walker, who was now the popular starting catcher for the Syracuse Stars. When the team was celebrated at a banquet on September 22 after winning the International Association pennant, Sporting Life reported that “Catcher Moses Walker, of the Star team, returned thanks to the directors and citizens on behalf of himself and fellow players and everybody was happy.”44 However, when Anson and the White Stockings stopped in Syracuse for an exhibition game on September 27, Anson refused to let his team play if Walker was in the lineup. The team caved, no doubt fearful of losing the gate receipts (a large crowd of 4,000 was on hand), and Chicago won the game, 3-0.45 We only know about Anson’s demands from a couple of African-American newspapers, the Indianapolis World and the New York Age. Apparently, behavior like Anson’s had become so normalized by this time, and the color line so established, that the White press saw no need to mention it.46 This may also be one reason why no newspapers mentioned the Brush-Fowler incident at the time, leaving it to Guy Smith to describe it decades later.

A handful of Black players hung on in the minor leagues for a few years after 1888, but they continued to face enormous obstacles. Fleet Walker returned to Syracuse in 1889, but he was released in August and retired.47 Bud Fowler and George Stovey played for integrated minor league teams in 1889 and 1890, but after that, such opportunities almost entirely dried up, as the color line became entrenched throughout the minor leagues. Stovey played for the Cuban Giants and other all-Black teams until his retirement in 1897.48 Fowler managed to play partial seasons in two minor leagues that briefly integrated, the Nebraska State League (1892) and the Michigan State League (1895), but his major achievements were as an organizer, owner, and manager of Black baseball teams, most notably the Page Fence Giants.49 It is primarily thanks to this work as a pioneering organizer of Black baseball that Fowler was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Did John T. Brush almost sign Bud Fowler to a National League contract in 1888? The answer depends on how much we trust the Brush typescript and its author, Guy M. Smith. The evidence laid out in the preceding pages shows that Smith was quite a reliable witness, albeit one prone to confusing minor details. Although the typescript (or the manuscript underlying it) was written about fifty years after the events it describes, Smith retained a sharp memory, such that many of his eyewitness accounts can be confirmed by the documentary record. Furthermore, although his account of Brush and Fowler has some minor errors, it meshes remarkably well with the events of one specific week in central Indiana in late July 1888, when Fowler’s Terre Haute team folded just as Brush and his Hoosiers were preparing to leave on a long road trip. More broadly, the story is consistent with the state of race relations in professional baseball in the summer of 1888, when some Black players remained but the color line was rapidly being established.

If we accept that Smith’s account is accurate at its core, how much does it matter? Even if Brush had somehow succeeded in his plan, and Fowler had played in at least one major league game, the forces that were excluding Black players from all of affiliated baseball would undoubtedly have continued. Fowler might have joined William Edward White, Bumpus Jones, Fleet Walker, and Fleet’s brother Welday as Black players who played major league baseball in the late 1800s, but the color line would have still been established. Even if that’s the case, however, the Brush-Fowler incident is worth having as part of the historical record. It adds another piece to the story of how baseball’s color line came about, and it provides an important detail for the biographies of both Brush and Fowler, two men who were both baseball pioneers in their own ways. 

DAVID KATHMAN lives in Mount Prospect, Illinois, with his wife, stepdaughter, and three dogs, and works in Chicago as a mutual fund analyst for Morningstar. He has a doctorate in linguistics from the University of Chicago, and over the past 30 years he has written many scholarly articles on linguistics, Shakespeare, Elizabethan theater history, and nineteenth-century baseball history.

 

Notes

1. Jeffrey Michael Laing, Bud Fowler: Baseball’s First Black Professional (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2013).

2. Guy M. Smith, “John T. Brush,” typescript in the John T. Brush file at the Giamatti Research Center in the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Cooperstown, New York, pp. 5-6. Brush’s Wikipedia entry (https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/John_T._Brush; accessed September 10, 2022) does not have a specific citation for the Fowler story, but among the sources it lists is Baseball: The Biographical Encyclopedia (2000), which also includes the story in its entry on Brush (138-9). That book does not include source citations, but it is apparent that one of its main sources for Brush was Richard R. Johnson’s “The Forgotten Indiana Architect of Baseball,” in the May 4, 1975, Indianapolis Star Magazine. This article uses the Guy M. Smith typescript as a primary source, supplemented with the reminiscences of Brush’s younger daughter Natalie.

3. The typescript actually has “colfesion” where my quotation says “collision;” this is one of many obvious mistranscriptions in the typescript, which I have silently corrected here and elsewhere.

4. Smith, “John T. Brush,” 4, 6. Harry S. New was later a US Senator from Indiana and US Postmaster General.

5. Dick Farrington, “Guy Smith, Diamond Historian, Keeps Young By Romancing of Game’s Early Days,” The Sporting News, May 1, 1941, 5.

6. Farrington, “Guy Smith,” gives his birthdate as December 2, 1870, but various census data disagree. The 1880 census lists him as seven years old, while in the 1900 U.S. Census he gave his birthdate as December 1869.

7. Farrington, “Guy Smith.”

8. Farrington, “Guy Smith.”

9. Farrington, “Guy Smith.”

10. “Chicago vs. Indianapolis,” Indianapolis News, August 1, 1876, 1; “Chicago vs. Indianapolis,” Indianapolis News, August 5, 1876, 4.

11. Farrington, “Guy Smith.” According to Smith, “Deacon White, following the close of the 1877 season, worked out a blueprint for an improved mask and took it to a Boston wire worker, who fashioned a mask very much like the one in use today.”

12. “Nolan’s Day,” Indianapolis News, June 5, 1878, 1; “White Wins,” Indianapolis News, June 7, 1878, 4. Indianapolis also played home games against Cincinnati on June 26, 27, 28, and 29, but Flint played left field in those games, and with manager John Clapp at catcher.

13. Peter Morris, Catcher (Chicago: Ivan R. Dee, 2009), 123-27.

14. Technically, Brush did not become team president until July 1, 1887, after a scandal that led to the resignation of the previous president, Louis Newberger. See David Kathman, “John T. Brush: The Early Years, 1845-1888,” Base Ball: New Research on the Early Game 11 (2019), 118-39.

15. Guy M. Smith, “Play of Shortstop’s Position Revolutionized by Jack Glasscock,” Wheeling News-Register, July 9, 1939, part V, 2, 5.

16. The typescript was never edited, as Smith’s newspaper articles were, and sometimes it is rather hard to read. The fact that it is a transcription also means that there are errors and typos that were (probably) not in the handwritten original.

17. Guy M. Smith, “Passing of Hines Finds Few Flayers of His Period Among the Survivors,” The Sporting News, July 25, 1935, 3.

18. Smith, “John T. Brush,” 9-10.

19. See the 1889 Indianapolis game log at Retrosheet (https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1889/VIN301889.htm).

20. “Double-Umpire System,” Indianapolis Journal, August 24, 1889, 5.

21. Farrington, “Guy Smith.”

22. Smith, “John T. Brush,” 5-6.

23. Laing, Bud Fowler, 83-85; Sporting Life, April 22, 1885, 4; Sporting Life, June 3, 1885, 7; Sporting Life, June 24, 1885, 2.

24. Laing, Bud Fowler, 84; Indianapolis Journal, “Western League Affairs,” April 3, 1885, 8.

25. Indianapolis Sentinel, May 1, 1885, 4; Indianapolis Journal, May 8, 1885, 4; Indianapolis Sentinel, May 9, 1885, 4.

26. Indianapolis Journal, “The Ball Club Disbands,” June 16, 1885, 8.

27. Sporting Life, July 22, 1885, 4.

28. Laing, Bud Fowler, 98-99.

29. Sporting Life, “Crawfordsville Chips,” May 9, 1888, 9.

30. See Laing, Bud Fowler, 78-83; https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/ Bud-Fowler; and https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/otto-schomberg.

31. Terre Haute Express, July 4, 1888, 1; Terre Haute Express, July 5, 1888, 1; Terre Haute Express, July 24, 1888, 1.

32. Indianapolis News, “Terre Haute Base Ball Club No More,” July 23, 1888, 1.

33. Terre Haute Express, July 26, 1888, 1; Terre Haute Express, July 27, 1888, 1.

34. Laing, Bud Fowler, 89-92. Note that Smith’s account says that Fowler starred for Binghamton after the Brush incident, rather than before, but this is obviously another example of Smith confusing details.

35. Stefan Fatsis, “Mystery of Baseball: Was William White Game’s First Black?” Wall Street Journal, January 30, 2004; Peter Morris and Stefan Fatsis, “Baseball’s Secret Pioneer,” Slate, February 4, 2014 (https://slate.com/culture/2014/02/william-edward-white-the-firstblack- player-in-major-league-baseball-history-lived-his-life-as-a-white-man).

36. The best account of these events is still Jerry Malloy, “Out At Home: Baseball Draws the Color Line, 1887,” The National Pastime (SABR), 2 (1983); 14-28, reprinted in The Armchair Book of Baseball II, ed. John Thorn (Charles Scribner’s Sons, 1987), 267.

37. Brian McKenna, “George Stovey,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/George-Stovey.

38. Sporting Life, September 8, 1886, 5.

39. “Stovey, the Pitcher and his Experience in Jersey City – Anson’s Prejudice,” Cleveland Gazette, February 13, 1892; reprinted in Jerry Malloy, ed., Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, With Other Documents on the Early Black Game, 1886-1935 (Bison Books, 1996), 141-2.

40. Sporting Life, April 8, 1887, 9; David W. Zang, Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart: The Life of Baseball’s First Black Major Leaguer (Bison Books, 1998), 55.

41. Malloy, ed., Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, lvii.

42. Malloy, ed., Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, 76. White’s book was published in 1907. Benjamin Tillman was a violently racist US Senator from South Carolina; James Kimble Vardaman was the racist governor of Mississippi from 1904 to 1908, and later a US Senator. Both were White supremacists who openly advocated lynching Blacks.

43. Malloy, ed., Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball, 76-77.

44. “Syracuse Champions,” Sporting Life, October 3, 1888, 1.

45. Sporting Life, October 3, 1888, 1 (a separate item after the column cited above).

46. The Indianapolis World account is described by Malloy, “Out At Home” (p. 241 in the 1988 edition), and the New York Age account (from the October 13, 1888 edition) is cited by Zang, Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart, 141n47.

47. Zang, Fleet Walker’s Divided Heart, 61.

48. “George Stovey,” SABR BioProject.

49. Laing, Bud Fowler, 126-34.

 

Adrian “Cap” Anson was one of a handful of players whom William Hulbert pilfered from eastern clubs before the 1876 season.1 In a storied White Stockings career, Anson managed the team for 19 years, capturing five titles, becoming the first member of the 3,000 hit club, being elected to the Hall of Fame in 1939, and even becoming part owner of the White Stockings. But there is one goal he did not achieve, and it ultimately led to his exit from the team on terms very different than his career should have dictated. In turn, that exit led Anson to an ending hardly becoming of the man the Chicago Tribune once called “the most conspicuous ballplayer in the nation.”2

IN THE BEGINNING

Adrian Constantine Anson was born in Marshall (present-day Marshalltown), Iowa, on April 17, 1852. By his own admission, he was a lackluster student, but when it came to baseball, he practiced diligently until he mastered the game. At age 15 he earned a spot on the town team. At age 19 he signed his first professional contract with Rockford in the National Association for the princely sum of $66.66 per month.3

Rockford lasted only one season, but Anson outlasted the organization. He starred for the Athletics for the next four years, and then jumped from the National Association to the National League’s Chicago White Stockings, where he would remain for the final 22 seasons of his career.

Albert Spalding retired from his managerial and playing duties after the 1877 season, and took over the presidency of the Chicago White Stockings. He named Anson manager for the 1879 season. There he remained, as “Cap” for the rest of his career.

Anson opened the 1880 season with another title to add to his player-manager status: stockholder. On April 1, he purchased five shares of the team.4 This ownership of stock was credited as a powerful influence in keeping him from absconding to the Players’ League a decade later.5

The Players’ League was formed in 1890, competing head-to-head with the National League in seven of eight NL cities. By this time Anson was a 20-year veteran and had been a part-owner for half of that time. As such, he was not going to bolt to a new league, but he was severely critical of those who did. With Spalding working behind the scenes, Anson served as a foghorn, blasting the “traitors” who jumped to the new league. The PL lasted only one season, but the enmity Anson sowed amongst the players who returned lingered on.

While Anson was hailed in the press as “the man who saved the National League,” he was not viewed so gallantly by his former teammates. Stars Hugh Duffy and George Van Haltren refused to return to Chicago, crippling the White Stockings during the 1891 season. In September the White Stockings held first place, but a late-season surge by Boston gave them the flag. Anson blamed his detractors from the PL for easing up when they played Boston, allowing them to overtake his club down the stretch.6

In April 1891, after an exhausting but successful battle to defeat the PL, Albert Spalding resigned his club presidency in order to devote more time to his sporting goods business. He recommended club secretary James Hart for the position, who was unanimously elected by the board. He retained stock in the ballclub, and expressed his confidence in Hart, “a man thoroughly competent and well qualified.”7

The transition was not a smooth one. Anson was not happy to have been passed over for the presidency. Despite conciliatory words from Spalding, who assured him that Hart was merely a figurehead, the incident opened a rift between Spalding and Anson.8 Anson also had problems with Hart, and the two began to butt heads almost immediately. “Hart regarded Anson as a relic of the past who was unwilling to change with the times. Anson countered by calling Hart a usurper who undermined his authority by encouraging rebellion among the players.”9

In the fall of 1892 Spalding and Hart reorganized the club as part of a sale that would eventually result in Hart owning a majority of the shares. The new corporation was chartered by Hart and two associates, but the original stockholders had the opportunity to buy into the new corporation. Spalding and Anson took advantage of the opportunity, and Anson stayed on as field manager. Anson signed a new contract with the newly formed corporation, but it was for one year less than the ten-year pact he had signed three years earlier. Anson would later claim that he was unaware of this detail, and it would prove to be a costly oversight on his part.

The performance of the team fell off dramatically after Hart became president. Over the final six seasons of his tenure with the club, Anson’s Colts, as the press dubbed them, experienced four losing seasons, and never finished higher than fourth place. During his first 13 seasons at the helm, Anson had never experienced a losing season, compiling a .632 winning average and claiming five pennants. Anson publicly blamed Hart for the team’s struggles on the field, complaining that he was miserly and refused to obtain good players because he didn’t want to pay the salaries they would command.

1897 was a dismal season for Anson and the White Stockings. The team plunged to ninth place, 34 games out of first. Only once before during Anson’s tenure had they fallen so low and finished so far behind. Their .447 winning average was the third lowest in Anson’s 19 years at the helm. Anson’s on-field performance also fell short of his career standards. His RBI total fell for the third straight year, and his batting and slugging averages were below the league average. At 45, he was the oldest player in the league by five years, and it was starting to show.

The decision of whether or not to retire was not left up to Anson. His long-term contract expired in January of 1898 (one year earlier than originally negotiated) and Hart did not renew it, almost certainly with the blessing of Spalding (even though, as president, Hart did not need Spalding’s approval). The following month, perhaps as a consolation after his dismissal, Spalding offered Anson a 60-day window to purchase controlling interest in the team. But by the April 15 deadline, Anson did not have the money and the deal fell through. An incensed Anson accused Spalding of duplicity, charging, “there was never any intention on the part of A.G. Spalding and his confréres to let me get possession of the club.”10 Anson was probably right, in that Spalding certainly realized he was highly unlikely to be able to come up with that kind of cash in such a short period of time.

Hart explained that the decision to let Anson go was made by the stockholders, who felt the fans desired a change of management. He praised Anson’s long and faithful service to the club, wishing him the best in his future endeavors. “There is not now, and never has been, friction between Captain Anson and myself.”11 Both parties belied this lack of friction in a contentious exchange of letters published in the Chicago Tribune later that year.

Seeking to defend his motives, Hart explained Anson’s financial connections to the White Stockings. His contract called for a fixed salary plus a percentage of net profits each year. According to Hart there were no profits in any year from 1890-93. Nevertheless, in two of those years Anson was paid a sum “nearly double that called for in his contract.” And in a third a debt to the club in the amount of $2,600 for previously purchased shares of stock was forgiven. In 1897, Anson once again took an advance from the club, this time in the amount of $2,400, “which at the present time stands charged to him on the books of the club, and it has never been paid.”12

Anson rebutted, claiming that Hart overstated losses and denied, “emphatically that I owe the club $2,400…I worked for the club for a period of time extending over twenty-two years, my contract calling for a stated salary and 10 per cent of the net profits…but I have never been allowed to see [the books], and whether I have had all that was coming to me or not is an open question in my mind.”13

The end of the Anson era in Chicago was bitter and ugly, hardly becoming the career of a legend. After 27 seasons, Cap Anson’s playing career was over. He retired as baseball’s winningest manager, and its all-time leader in games played, at-bats, runs, RBIs, doubles, and hits. He was the first member of the 3,000 hit club, and its only member until 1914. The Chicago Tribune estimated that since he began playing ball as a teenager in Marshalltown, Iowa, he had piled up more than 7,000 hits.14 There would be no more.

 

 

Spalding planned a testimonial dinner for Anson, raising $50,000 for a tribute to the long-time star. “It seems a pity,” said Spalding, “that a man like Anson should be allowed to drop from sight without the people being given a chance to show their high esteem of him.”15

Anson refused the honor, saying “I don’t know as I am yet ready to say that I am out of baseball. I am neither a pauper nor a rich man, and prefer to decline. The public owes me nothing…the kind offer to raise a large public subscription for me…is an honor and compliment I duly appreciate… At this hour I deem it both unwise and inexpedient to accept the generosity so considerately offered.”16

Anson retired as a player, but returned to the bench in 1898, replacing Bill Joyce as manager of the New York Giants. He lasted only as many games as years he spent in Chicago. After going 9-13, he was fired, and Joyce was reinstated. It was his last official association with major-league baseball, though not due to lack of effort.

After his exit from the Giants, Anson tried to obtain a Western League franchise and move it to the South Side of Chicago, but Spalding, whose approval for the move was necessary under rules of the National Agreement, refused permission. For a third time, Spalding spiked his former teammate’s desire to move into the front office of a professional ballclub. Later, Anson served as president of an ill-fated revival of the American Association, which attempted to play in 1900, but folded due to financial pressures.17

BEYOND BASEBALL

In the summer of 1901 rumors abounded that Cap Anson was on the verge of making a comeback in Chicago by purchasing his old team.18 But the rumors proved unfounded. Instead, it was his nemesis, Jim Hart, who took over majority control.

Cap Anson was finished with baseball. He lived out the final two decades of his life in the entertainment industry, but not as a ballplayer. Anson opened a bowling and billiards parlor in downtown Chicago in 1899. He served as a vice-president of the new American Bowling Congress. He then turned to politics, serving one term as Chicago city clerk. In late 1905 Anson sold his stock in the Chicago ballclub and expanded his business.

He invested the remaining funds from his stock sale in semipro ball, purchasing a team (called Anson’s Colts) and constructing his own ballpark. He even occasionally donned a uniform and took the field, but the Colts never achieved more than mediocrity and Anson sold the team after three years.19

This was the latest in a string of failures for Anson. He had mortgaged his home to buoy his business ventures, and he lost it, leaving him penniless, homeless, and unemployed. He and his wife, Virginia, moved in with their daughter. In 1916, after a long illness, Virginia died. Though broke, Anson was still wildly popular in Chicago and his reputation as a ballplaying legend extended across the country. He thus began the final chapter of his career by hitting the boards and travelling the vaudeville circuits. Though he eventually reached the big time, he did not grow rich.20

In January 1922, Anson was hired to manage the new Dixmoor Golf Club, set to open later that year. He actively promoted the club and took enthusiastically to his new calling. But it did not last long. While taking a walk near his home, he collapsed and was rushed to the hospital, where he died a few days later, on April 15, 1922, just two days shy of his 70th birthday.

His death was front page news. The Chicago Tribune lauded him as an honest, temperate, and dignified gentleman as well as a model husband and ballplayer.21 Hugh Fullerton gushed that Anson was, “the greatest man in the history of baseball…what Ruth is to baseball today is but a small comparison to what Capt. Anson was when he led his White Stockings onto the field.”22

The baseball fraternity mourned Anson. His funeral was attended by hundreds, ranging from baseball fans to political and business dignitaries. The overflow crowd spilled onto Michigan Avenue, snarling traffic. The White Sox game that day was delayed until late afternoon to allow time for the players of both teams to attend the funeral, where Judge Landis delivered the eulogy.23

Anson did not leave an estate, and the National League paid for his hospital and funeral expenses. They also arranged to have his wife’s remains relocated from Philadelphia to lie alongside Anson in Chicago, and erected a tombstone at his gravesite. On it was inscribed the simple but certain epitaph, “He played the game.”24 

MICHAEL HAUPERT is Professor of Economics at the University of Wisconsin-La Crosse. His teaching and research interests include economic history and the economics of the sports industry. He has written three books, and more than 100 articles on the business of baseball. He has been co-chair of SABR’s Business of Baseball committee and editor of the committee newsletter “Outside the Lines” since 2012. He received the Doug Pappas Award in 2014 and the Alexander Cartwright Award in 2020.

 

Notes

1. For a full discussion of Hulbert’s machinations, see Michael Haupert, “William Hulbert,” SABR BioProject, and Michael Haupert, “Chicago Cubs Team Ownership History, 1876-1919,” SABR BioProject.

2. “Capt. Anson, Baseball Hero, Dies at 70,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1922, 1.

3. Thorn, John, “Anson’s First Baseball Contract,” May 1, 2019, https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/ansons-firstbaseball-contract-4c73bdb3ddef.

4. Cash Book 1876-1881, Chicago Cubs Collection, 223-24.

5. Harold Seymour, Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1960), 330, 331.

6. David Fleitz, “Cap Anson,” SABR bio project https://6sabr.org/bioproj/person/cap-anson.

7. “Hart is President Now,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1891, 5.

8. “Anson Replies to Hart,” Chicago Tribune, January 7, 1900, 17.

9. Art Ahrens, “Chicago Cubs: Sic Transit Gloria Mundi,” In Peter C. Bjarkman, ed., Encyclopedia of Major League Baseball Team Histories: National League (Westport: Meckler Publishing, 1991), 137-80.

10. David Porter, “Cap Anson of Marshalltown: Baseball’s First Superstar,” The Palimpsest 61, no 4 (July/August 1980): 98-107.

11. “Good-By to Anson,” Chicago Tribune, February 2, 1898, 4.

12. “Hart Writes of Anson,” Chicago Tribune, December 31, 1899, 18.

13. “Anson Replies to Hart,” Chicago Tribune, January 7, 1900, 17.

14. “Played 3000 Games,” Chicago Tribune, February 1, 1898, 4.

15. “Tribute to Anson,” Chicago Tribune, February 4, 1898, 4.

16. “Anson Won’t Take It,” Chicago Tribune, February 6, 1898, 7.

17. David Fleitz, “Cap Anson,” SABR BioProject.

18. “Anson May Get in Games,” Chicago Tribune, July 15, 1901, 2.

19. David Fleitz, “Cap Anson,” SABR BioProject.

20. Robert H. Schaefer, “Anson in Greasepaint: The Vaudeville Career of Adrian C. Anson,” The National Pastime, Vol 28, 2008.

21. “Capt. Anson, Baseball Hero, Dies at 70,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1922, 1.

22. Hugh Fullerton, “Even Ruth Unable to Touch Anson’s Role,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1922, 15.

23. “Notes,” Chicago Tribune, April 16, 1922, 26.

24. Hugh Fullerton, “Unveil Monument to ‘Cap’ Anson Today,” Chicago Tribune, September 16, 1923, 26.

 

Col. Frank Leslie Smith (1867-1950) was a banker, real estate dealer, congressman, and baseball fan. A slender, self-made man, Smith adhered to a simple doctrine that empowered his rise from humble roots into the political sphere: the end justifies the means.1 This motto helped forge formidable business connections and amass political clout on local, regional, and national stages. Smith also used any means necessary to construct a winning team for Dwight, Illinois, a strategy that paralleled his rise to national prominence and his ultimate downfall.

While Smith lacked talent to play professional ball, he gained status within the Illinois Republican party and weaved the game into his lifelong pursuit of elected office. Despite repeated efforts to secure office, he only made it to Congress twice. He claimed to stand “for the honest conduct of political office and public trust.”2 But when Smith died in 1950, the Chicago Sun-Times mentioned his scandalous pursuits of a US Senate seat, acknowledging defeat “by only 11,000 votes,” and ultimately, being “beaten by $285,000.”3

The town of Dwight today remains best known as the former headquarters of the Keeley Institute and its unorthodox alcoholism treatments. At the time of Col. Smith’s birth there, approximately 70 miles southwest of Chicago, Dwight was a community of about a thousand residents. Rockford’s Register-Gazette suggested in 1892 that Dwight was a first-class community devoid of any amusement, making it ideal for a minor league team in the Illinois-Iowa League.4

Dwight’s earliest documented baseball reference appeared in June 1868, when Willie Gardner, captain of the Pony Club of Dwight, challenged “any Base Ball Club in the City of Wilmington which has no member over 14 years of age” to a game.5 Later that summer, a scathing editorial shamed locals and asked, “What has become of the Base Ballists?” and questioned their desire “for allowing other towns of less magnitude to excel in the national game.”6 No local ordinances prohibited baseball, so perhaps “the young men are either too lazy or do not wish to run the risk of having broken fingers.”7 Perhaps the editorial prompted the 1871 formation of the Dwight Renfrews, named after Lord Renfrew, the Prince of Wales’ alias used during a local hunting expedition in 1860.8

While details of Smith’s childhood remain sparse, baseball proved formative. Smith was known locally as an expert ballplayer “playing just about as good ball as anyone” and “making good stops and placed the ball well when batting.”9,10,11 Many of the traits that defined his professional career—aggressiveness and a will to dominate—manifested themselves during juvenile sandlot games.12

Smith was likely too young to witness one of Dwight’s earliest organized games against Broughton Township in June 1871, but perhaps an 1874 military display sparked his passion.13,14 Prior to a game between the Renfrews and Pontiac Athletics, a steam engine exploded and injured several onlookers. Simultaneously a gentleman named Slane Turner suffered arm injuries when a cannon prematurely fired. Explosions aside, nearly 3,000 people watched Dwight win, 20-13.15

Smith’s rise to political prominence began in 1895 when he became the junior partner at Romberger & Smith, a real estate and private banking firm.16 After hours, he managed the firm’s semiprofessional baseball team—the Dwight R&S, named after his partner and himself.

Smith organized schedules against town teams and semipros from neighboring locales. He demonstrated a knack for securing elite homegrown talent and distinguished newcomers. Most of Smith’s players never advanced beyond the semiprofessional level, but several local players—Burt Keeley, George Cutshaw, and Bud Clancy—donned local jerseys before jumping to the majors. The roster included one Dwight native, Eddie Higgins, who briefly pitched for the St. Louis Cardinals. Smith even signed major league stars for short stints, including “Turkey” Mike Donlin and Bill Sherdel.

As Smith’s team gained notoriety for playing fast and dynamic games, he opted to test their mettle—and simultaneously shine a light on his burgeoning political aspirations—by attracting barnstormers and novelty acts to Dwight. He also arranged a handful of games against American, National, and Federal League teams on his home field.

One thousand fans traveled to Dwight on August 27, 1901, to witness the community’s most significant baseball game to date.17 Smith organized a contest against the traveling Nebraska Indians and granted Dr. Herbert Lehr—a recent transplant and University of Michigan three-sport star18—pitching honors. The Dwight R&S plated four runs in the bottom of the first inning as Lehr was unhittable until the third when the floodgates opened. The game ended in 16-6 onslaught in favor of the barnstormers. Despite the final score, Smith had established a standard for competition and a vehicle for self-promotion.19

In 1902, Smith gained control of his partner’s portion of the firm.20 With new business arrangements, he rebranded both the firm and baseball team. The Dwight R&S became the Frank L. Smiths.21

During the ensuing years, Smith’s political aspirations grew as did the quality of his team’s competition. He suffered an unsuccessful run for Illinois lieutenant governor opening in 1904, as the Smiths began challenging teams from Chicago’s semipro circuit and several Black baseball teams at Dwight’s West Side Park.22

Captivated by the Chicago-centric 1906 World Series, Smith aimed higher when he organized his team’s schedule in 1907. In June, the Smiths hosted the Cuban Stars of Havana. Jimmie Brown, the hometown pitcher, allowed two first-inning runs and received no offensive support. The barnstormers blanked the Smiths, 2-0.23

In late July, Seattle High School’s team descended upon Dwight promoting the upcoming Alaska-Yukon- Pacific Exhibition. The Smiths “lacked the fast, snappy work that won so many games” earlier that year.24 That afternoon, 16-year-old Charlie Schmutz—a future Brooklyn Robins pitcher25—stymied the local squad and the Seattleites won, 6-5.26

In mid-September of that year, Mabel Hite, eccentric ballplayer Mike Donlin’s wife, revealed the secret of her husband’s inexplicable disappearance. The actress and comedian shared that he was a patient at Dwight’s Keeley Institute receiving the so-called “Keeley cure” under an assumed name.27 Donlin opted for the vaudeville circuit with his wife following a preseason contract dispute with the New York Giants. He even played for Jimmy Callahan’s Chicago semipros, the Logan Squares.28 Ever the opportunist, Smith enlisted Donlin’s services for a significant engagement.

Smith and Callahan coordinated to bring one of the two pennant-winning teams to West Side Park. They arranged for the American League’s pennant-winning Detroit Tigers to challenge the Smiths in Dwight on Tuesday, October 22.29

The Tigers arrived via train and were warmly greeted by a throng of local baseball fans.30 Businesses were encouraged to close shop that afternoon and happily obliged.31 More than 1,500 fans flooded the ballpark as the Tigers thumped the Smiths, 8-1.32

 

 

The game remained scoreless until the fourth inning, when Ty Cobb reached first safely on a Donlin error. Cobb stole second base, then scored on Claude Rossman’s single. The Tigers padded their lead with single runs in the fifth and sixth.33 Detroit sealed the Smiths’ fate with a four-run eighth and an insurance run in the ninth, winning 8-1.

The umpires cut the Smiths some slack. During one at-bat, Donlin singled to right field. Cobb, aware that Donlin loafed toward first base, fielded and fired the ball to Rossman and beat the runner. When the umpire ruled Donlin safe, Cobb erupted into hysterics at the blatant hometown favoritism, unable to contain his laughter.34

Higgins, the 19-year-old local starting pitcher, limited the Tigers to nine hits, and perhaps with stronger defense, the result would have been closer. Dwight’s defense committed five errors that afternoon. For good measure, Smith played shortstop and recorded four assists and one putout. He reached base on a ninthinning fielder’s choice, but the game ended when he interfered with Donlin’s groundball toward first.35

Three-I League scouts were impressed and signed Higgins and George Cutshaw to the Bloomington (Illinois) Bloomers squad. Higgins joined the Cardinals in 1909 and played 18 total major-league games. Cutshaw enjoyed a 12-year major-league career with Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, and Detroit, playing second base for the Brooklyn Robins in all five games of the 1916 World Series.

President Theodore Roosevelt appointed Smith as internal revenue collector in Illinois’ Springfield district.36 That role proved beneficial and strengthened his connection with William Howard Taft, Roosevelt’s handpicked presidential successor.37 As Smith’s political ambitions strengthened, his passion for bringing baseball attractions to Dwight increased. On October 15, 1908, a hodgepodge of players identified as the American League’s Washington Senators arrived in town. Initial promotions billed a pitching duel between Eddie Higgins, now a member of the Bloomers, and Walter Johnson.38 Few actual major leaguers played with the remainder of the lineup selected from Chicago’s amateur ranks at the last moment.39 The Smiths jumped on Burt Keeley, a former Dwight R&S pitcher with no relationship to the Keeley Institute, but Washington managed to win, 4-3.40

As 1910 waned, Giants manager John McGraw received word that Arthur “Bugs” Raymond would curtail his drinking by entering Dwight’s Keeley Institute.41The Times (Streator, Illinois) noted that Smith’s players should gain some sage pitching insight from the National League hurler, but whether he tutored any Smiths is unknown.42 The Keeley Institute expelled Raymond quickly due to excessive horseplay.43

Though a competitive squad with a winning record, the Smiths’ talent waned for several seasons. In 1911, Col. Smith’s team traveled north to Dellwood Park—a lavish park constructed by the Chicago and Joliet Electric Railway to encourage ridership—for a series of games against the Joliet Standards in July and August.44 Typically known for top-notch quality of play, the Smiths’ decline was memorialized by The Joliet News after their 11-10 win on July 30, calling it “a slow game crowded with many stupid, asinine plays, faulty work and rotten judgment.”45

The Smiths’ performance regressed and wrapped the 1912 season with a 14-12 record, but concluded play with a contest against the Chicago Cubs on October 24.46 The Cubs trotted out their regulars, except for Johnny Evers who remained in Chicago.47 That same day, Cubs owner Charlie Murphy selected Evers as the team’s manager for 1913.48 Despite Smith securing Polly Wolfe, who played one game for the Chicago White Sox that season, the Cubs pounded the Smiths, 9-3.49 Cubs’ third baseman Heinie Zimmerman electrified the crowd with his hard hitting.50 After scoring five runs in the opening frame, the Cubs never relinquished the lead. Chicago plated another run in the second and three in the fifth. Spectators were buzzing after Zimmerman clubbed a home run and Jimmy Archer hammered a long foul ball that cleared a neighboring barn.51

Burt Keeley returned to Dwight on June 4, 1913, helming Chicago’s upstart Federal League franchise.52 Lacking a formal name, newspapers at the time frequently referred to his squad as the Keeleys, Browns, or playfully, the Keeley Cures.53,54 The Smiths played well; outhitting the minor leaguers and extended a 5-4 lead into the bottom of the fifth. The Keeleys answered with five runs and defeated Dwight, 11-7.55

With business thriving, Smith focused upon the 1916 gubernatorial election in Illinois.56 He flexed his political muscle and brought three high-profile contests to Dwight during 1915. First, the Smiths faced Chicago’s Sixth Ward Republican Club squad and lost a late-May contest, 8-2.57 Smith also arranged for two Federal League games.

On June 7, 1915, the Pittsburgh Rebels sat atop the Federal League standings, and squared off against the Smiths at West Side Park in ankle-deep mud. Player- manager Rebel Oakes tapped Charles “Bunny” Hearn to face Eddie Higgins. With a biting wind and suboptimal conditions, Oakes opted to rest his starters for the exhibition game.58 The Smiths plated five early runs and carried a 6-3 advantage into the eighth. Pittsburgh ultimately forced extra innings and plated the two winning runs on a throwing error in the top of the 11th.59

The Smiths concluded the 1915 season before a large crowd on October 12, with a 9-0 throttling by Joe Tinker’s Chicago Whales. Local rooters witnessed a game that The Pantagraph labeled “neither interesting nor spectacular.”60 Chicago’s Mordecai “Three Fingered” Brown pitched in relief and puzzled the Smiths’ batters that afternoon. After scoring three runs in the third, the Whales never looked back.

Determined to secure the Republican gubernatorial nomination in 1916, Smith’s campaign managers insisted that sports fans would vote for him. Chick Evans, winner of the 1916 US Open golf championship, endorsed Smith.61 To sway Cook County, the Friends of Col. Frank L. Smith booster club appealed to Chicago’s split baseball allegiance. The club organized with Joe Tinker as president and Ray Schalk as secretary. Other members included Buck Weaver, Jimmy Callahan, Art Wilson, Burt Keeley, Art Zangerle, and Billy Niesen.62 Despite the athletic horsepower, Smith finished third in the Republican primaries.63

After years of relentless campaigning, Smith served in the United States House of Representatives from 1919 to 1921.64 For all his political bluster, nothing significant distinguished his service. Rather than run for reelection, he sought the Senate nomination and lost.65 While serving, his connection with his baseball team is unclear as other Dwight-based teams emerged, namely the Midgets and Cubs, and the Smiths disbanded in July 1921.66,67 A team branded as the Smiths played in 1922, but Col. Smith’s connection is unknown.

Local coverage declared similar sentiments as in 1868 that “Dwight is not a baseball town,” and noted that attendance barely surpassed 200 per game.68 The Midgets were described as “remnants of the Frank L. Smiths and promising youngsters.”

Governor Len Small appointed Smith as chairman of the Illinois Commerce Commission in April 1921, a regulatory body overseeing public utilities. He served in that role until September 1926.69 During his tenure, he built powerful relations with Samuel Insull, a business magnate who controlled much of Chicago’s public transportation.70

As quickly as Smith’s team crumbled, so did his political career. In 1926 Smith ran against incumbent Illinois Senator William B. McKinley. During his campaign, rumors circulated about excessive primary expenditures. Despite these rumors, Smith defeated McKinley in a landslide and won the November election, but the Senate launched a campaign-spending investigation.71 When McKinley died unexpectedly in December 1926, Governor Small appointed senator- elect Smith to fill the remainder of his term set to expire in March 1927.

On January 19, 1928, the United States Senate, by a 61-23 vote, determined that Smith was not qualified to fill Illinois’ vacant seat due to fraud and corruption charges.72,73 The investigation determined that Smith spent more than $400,000 ($6.8 million in 2023) during the campaign and received $125,000 ($2.1 million in 2023) from Insull.74 Smith claimed, in an August 1931 open letter, that Chicago millionaire Julius Rosenwald offered him $555,000 ($9.4 million in 2023) worth of Sears Roebuck stock to withdraw his candidacy, but rejected said offer.75

Smith made a final unsuccessful run at political office in 1930. Following his defeat, he remained an active member of the Republican National Committee and continued his business pursuits in Dwight, but never organized another Dwight baseball team.76

Col. Frank L. Smith passed away at his home early in the morning on Wednesday, August 30, 1950, following a two-week illness. He was 82 years old. When he passed, Smith’s estate was valued at $400,000 ($4.8 million in 2023.)77, 78 

BILL PEARCH is a lifelong Chicago Cubs fan and serves as secretary/newsletter editor for SABR’s Emil Rothe Chapter (Chicago). In 2022, he helped establish SABR’s Central Illinois Chapter. Bill has contributed to SABR’s publications about Comiskey Park, the 1995 Atlanta Braves, and has written SABR’s biographies of Dwight, Illinois’ semipro team owner Col. Frank L. Smith and Deadball Era pitcher Eddie Higgins. Bill will have two game summaries in SABR’s upcoming publication, Ebbets Field: Great, Historic, and Memorable Games in Brooklyn’s Lost Ballpark. He is happily married to a Milwaukee Brewers fan. Follow him on Twitter: @billpearch

 

Notes

1. “‘Big Bill’ Uses Spicy Lingo in Talks at Election Rallies,” The Baltimore Sun, April 8, 1928.

2. “He is a Candidate for Lieut. Governor,” Streator (Illinois) Daily Free Press, November 30, 1903, 1.

3. “Frank L. Smith, 82, Dies; Long a GOP Leader,” Chicago Sun-Times, August 31, 1950, 33.

4. “Brief Ball Notes,” Rockford (Illinois) Daily Register-Gazette, April 9, 1892, 3.

5. “Base Ball,” Wilmington (Illinois) Independent, June 3, 1868, 5.

6. “News Items,” The Star (Dwight, Illinois), July 23, 1868, 1.

7. The Star (Dwight, Illinois), July 30, 1868, 3.

8. Dwight Centennial Committee. Dwight Centennial, 1854-1954: A Great Past—A Greater Future (1954), 18.

9. “‘Maple Lane’ Col. Frank L. Smith’s Model Farm,” (Bloomington, Illinois) Pantagraph, July 22, 1916.

10. “Flies,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, September 9, 1899.

11. “Notes,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, August 25, 1900.

12. Carroll H. Wooddy, The Case of Frank L. Smith: A Study in Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 71.

13. “Livingston County,” (Bloomington, Illinois) Pantagraph, June 9, 1871, 2.

14. “Military Display at Dwight, Ill.,” Chicago Tribune, August 15, 1874, 7.

15. “Telegraphic Brevities,” (Chicago) Inter Ocean, August 15, 1874, 4.

16. Anonymous. The Biographical Record of Livingston and Woodford Counties, Illinois (Chicago: S.J. Clarke Publishing Company, 1900), 32.

17. “Took Dwight’s Scalp,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, August 31, 1901.

18. Nelville S. Hoff, D.D.S., The Dental Register (Cincinnati: Samuel A. Crocker & Co., 1903), 533.

19. “Took Dwight’s Scalp,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, August 31, 1901.

20. Carroll H. Wooddy, The Case of Frank L. Smith: A Study in Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 72-73.

21. Paul R. Steichen, “Dwight Baseball of Bygone Days Full of Interest,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, August 11, 1938.

22. Carroll H. Wooddy, The Case of Frank L. Smith: A Study in Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 78-79.

23. “Base Ball Dope for the Fans,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, June 8, 1907.

24. “Defeated by Seattle H.S. Boys,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, July 27, 1907, 1.

25. “C.O. Schmutz, Former Major Leaguer, Dies,” Seattle Daily Times, June 28, 1962, 49.

26. “High School Boys to Take Southern Trip,” Seattle Daily Times, July 25, 1907, 15.

27. “On the Water Wagon,” Streator (Illinois) Free Press, September 19, 1907, 6.

28. Rob Edelman and Michael Betzold. “Mike Donlin,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/mike-donlin, accessed February 20, 2023.

29. “Detroit Tigers Coming,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, October 19, 1907.

30. Paul R. Steichen, “Dwight Baseball of Bygone Days Full of Interest,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, August 19, 1938.

31. “Detroit Tigers Coming,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, October 19, 1907.

32. “Tigers Whale Dwight,” Detroit Free Press, October 23, 1907.

33. “Ee-Yah!,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, October 26, 1907.

34. Paul R. Steichen, “Dwight Baseball of Bygone Days Full of Interest,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, August 19, 1938.

35. Paul R. Steichen, “Dwight Baseball of Bygone Days Full of Interest,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, August 19, 1938.

36. Genevieve Forbes Herrick. “Frank L. Smith is a Hero in His Own Home Town,” Chicago Tribune, April 15, 1926.

37. Doris Kearns Goodwin, The Bully Pulpit: Theodore Roosevelt, William Howard Taft and the Golden Age of Journalism (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2013), 11.

38. “Local News,” The (Fairbury, Illinois) Blade, October 9, 1908, 14.

39. Washington (DC) Herald, April 15, 1909.

40. “F.L. Smiths Play Against the Washington Senators of the American League,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, October 17, 1908.

41. “‘Bugs’ Says He Will Behave,” Chicago Tribune, December 31, 1910, 10.

42. “Trains at Dwight,” Streator (Illinois) Daily Free Press, December 31, 1910, 5.

43. Don Jensen. “Bugs Raymond,” SABR Baseball Biography Project, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/bugs-raymond, accessed February 20, 2023.

44. http://lockporthistory.org/dellwoodpark/dellwoodpark.htm (accessed February 16, 2023).

45. “Dwight Takes Farcical Game,” The Joliet (Illinois) News, July 31, 1911.

46. “A Resume for the Year of the F.L. Smith Club,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, December 7, 1912.

47. “Big Leaguers Defeat F.L. Smiths,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, October 26, 1912.

48. Jason Cannon, Charlie Murphy: The Iconoclastic Showman Behind the Chicago Cubs (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2022), 237.

49. Paul R. Steichen, “Dwight Baseball of Bygone Days Full of Interest,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, September 2, 1938.

50. “Cubs Defeat Dwight,” The (Bloomington, Illinois) Pantagraph, October 25, 1912.

51. “Big Leaguers Defeat F.L. Smiths,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, October 26, 1912.

52. “South Wilmington,” The (Joliet, Illinois) Herald News, June 5, 1913, 7.

53. “St. Louis Feds Even Up Series with Chicagos,” The (Chicago) Inter Ocean, June 4, 1913, 13.

54. “Federals Home to Tackle Covingtons Thursday Matinee,” St Louis Star and Times, June 4, 1913, 8.

55. “Chicago ‘Feds’ Win at Dwight,” Chicago Tribune, June 5, 1913.

56. “1916 Pot Boiling,” The (Springfield, Illinois) Forum, March 13, 1915, 1.

57. “Home Team Wins Another Game,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, May 29, 1915.

58. “Rebels Lose in Race by Idleness,” Pittsburgh Press, June 8, 1915, 28.

59. “Win One and Lose One,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, June 12, 1915.

60. “Whales Defeat Dwight,” The (Bloomington, Illinois) Pantagraph, October 13, 1915, 5.

61. “Hull is Gaining Fast, Says Banker Friend,” Chicago Daily News, August 18, 1916, 5.

62. “Merely Politics,” Chicago Day Book, September 9, 1916, 29.

63. Carroll H. Wooddy, The Case of Frank L. Smith: A Study in Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 94-95.

64. “Smith, Frank Leslie,” History, Art & Archives: United States House of Representatives.

65. Carroll H. Wooddy, The Case of Frank L. Smith: A Study in Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 96.

66. “Defeat Dwight Midgets,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, June 25, 1921.

67. “A Tie Ball Game,” Dwight (Illinois) Star & Herald, May 20, 1922, 1.

68. “F.L. Smith Team Quits,” The (Streator, Illinois) Times, July 28, 1921, 4.

69. Carroll H. Wooddy, The Case of Frank L. Smith: A Study in Representative Government (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1931), 9.

70. “The (Other) Man Who Tried to Buy a Senate Seat,” NBC 5 Chicago, June 3, 2011.

71. Sue Cummings, “Stormy Career Marked Dwight’s ‘Big Mover,’” The (Streator, Illinois) Times-Press, November 22, 1982.

72. “Senate Bars Smith by Vote of 61 to 23; Lorimer in Running,” Baltimore Sun, January 20, 1928, 1.

73. “… article about Frank L. Smith isn’t entirely accurate.,” The (Dwight, Illinois) Paper, July 6, 2022, 7.

74. “The (Other) Man Who Tried to Buy a Senate Seat,” NBC 5 Chicago, June 3, 2011.

75. “Smith Details Offer to Quit Senate Race,” Baltimore Sun, August 17, 1931, 3.

76. “Smith, Frank Leslie,” History, Art & Archives: United States House of Representatives.

77. https://smartasset.com/investing/inflation-calculator (accessed on February 19, 2023) “Frank L. Smith Estate Valued at $400,000,” The Times-Press (Streator, Illinois), September 21, 1950, 4.

78. “Frank L. Smith Estate Valued at $400,000,” The (Streator, Illinois) Times-Press, September 21, 1950, 4.

 

While the World Series returns to us annually, some Series live in legend forever. One of those classics was surely the 1906 World Series, which pitted the Chicago Cubs against the Chicago White Sox.1 The 1906 World Series was full of firsts. Being an all-Chicago affair, it was the first twentieth century “Subway Series”2 and marked the first twentieth- century appearance in the World Series for both teams.3 And while it would not be their last, their 1906 World Series appearance was the first for the Cubs’ famous infield of Joe Tinker, Johnny Evers, and Frank Chance.4 Sportswriter Franklin Pierce Adams would cement their legacy with these famous words, four years later: “These are the saddest of possible words: Tinker to Evers to Chance.”

But all of those firsts would be of little consequence if it were not a series that rewarded fans with unexpected drama, ending in a huge upset. The heavily favored Cubs, with the best record in baseball (116-36), were defeated by the White Sox, the so-called “Hitless Wonders,” who had the worst team batting average in the American League (.230) during the regular season. On their way to victory, the White Sox truly managed to outdo themselves in the Series, batting a mere .198 as a team.5

These are the important reasons that the 1906 World Series is memorable. Yet, arguably, its most lasting impact on baseball history lies elsewhere. This World Series was the first in which the umpires called the games with gestures behind home plate. In 1906, Jim Johnstone of the National League worked alongside American League umpire Francis “Silk” O’Loughlin. It was O’Loughlin’s first World Series appearance. Already recognized as “one of the greatest umpires that ever stepped on the field,” O’Loughlin made history in 1906.6

As the Chicago Tribune reported:

Fans who were fortunate enough to see the world’s series in this city last fall will recall that the din of rooting was so great it was impossible to hear an umpire’s decision. Umpire Johnstone, who worked behind the plate in the first game, had difficulty in making even the batteries understand his decisions. Next day, ‘Silk’ O’Loughlin supplemented his clarion voice with his characteristic gestures and his decisions were apparent to all. … (Before) the third game, both umpires were instructed to raise their right arms for strikes and their left arm for balls.7

There is a lot to unpack here. First, the impact of an intra-city Series leaps out. The noise was literally deafening. Second, what were these “characteristic gestures?” Third, how long had O’Loughlin been using them? Obviously, long enough that the Tribune thought of them as characteristic of the way that O’Loughlin called a game. Still, they were clearly not in use by most umpires. After all, it had not occurred to Jim Johnstone to use them, even as he struggled to make himself understood verbally. Fourth, where had these gestures come from?

 

 

The year 1906 holds all the answers. In April, just as the season was getting underway, the Washington Post reported that “O’Loughlin sprained his larynx Tuesday… and had no voice today. Instead of calling the decisions, he employed ‘Dummy’ Hoy’s mute signal code, which certainly was a novelty for Silk.”8 Over the course of the season, the use of Hoy’s signal code went from a “novelty” to a “characteristic” feature of O’Loughlin’s work.9

The reporters in 1906 acknowledged that the credit for the system should not go to O’Loughlin but to Hoy. The Post stated directly that O’Loughlin “employed ‘Dummy’ Hoy’s mute signal code.” Though not the first deaf player in major league baseball, Hoy was without question the most impactful. A center fielder, his career began with the Washington Nationals in 1888 and ended with the Cincinnati Reds in 1902.10

His system went with him from team to team. The Tribune described it in this way: “When Dummy Hoy was playing in the big leagues, his only method of ascertaining decisions on pitched balls was by watching the coach at third base, who held up his right hand when a strike was called on Hoy and his left hand for a ball.”11 The Tribune knew that fans had seen this system in baseball before and it was not original to hearing umpires.

Would O’Loughlin have seen Hoy’s system in use? In 1902, O’Loughlin was a rookie umpire. Hoy had just finished playing in Chicago, and was moving on to Cincinnati, taking his signal system with him. But it had left an indelible impression by this point, on both major leagues. The Washington Post reporter instantly recognized the thrust right hand for strikes and the upraised left for balls when O’Loughlin tried it out in April 1906 as “Dummy Hoy’s mute signal code.”

Hoy stated back in 1900 that his system was “well understood by all the League players.” He added that fans liked the system too, as “I have often been told by frequenters of the game that they take considerable delight in watching the coacher signal balls and strikes to me, as by these signals they can know to a certainty what the umpire with a not too overstrong voice is saying.” He further explained that the “reason the right hand was originally selected by me to denote a strike and the left hand to denote a ball was because ‘the pitcher was all right’ when he got the ball over the plate and because ‘he got left’ when he sent the ball wide of the plate.”12

The Chicago Tribune was confident that Hoy’s signs were coming to baseball permanently. “The movement for a system of signals to indicate an umpire’s decisions during a baseball game…seems to be spreading,” the paper declared in January 1907, predicting that baseball “will adopt some such system before another playing season arrives.”13Sporting Life had reached a similar conclusion by February 1907, noting, “The umpire arm- signal plan, so well demonstrated during the world’s championship series, is growing in favor, and, from appearances, will be in general use next season.”14

But just as Sporting Life thought the matter settled, the Tribune broke a story in February 1907 revealing that “electrical score boards operated from near the home plates probably will be adopted by the American league clubs to indicate to spectators every decision made during a game instead of the signal system by umpires’ gestures, which has been under consideration.”15Sporting Life picked up the same report, with additional sourcing, explaining that “the scoreboard idea results from the protest of Hank O’Day and other knights of the indicator on the making of themselves human windmills trying to interpret balls and strikes to the fans in the bleachers.”16 The scoreboard would replace the gesture idea. Such boards were considered “simple,” “practical,” and “reliable.”17

Unconvinced, the Tribune pointed out the obvious weakness to the scheme; namely, the scoreboard operator still needed to know what the call was in order to post it. Without implementing a gesture system for the umpires, the scoreboard operator would have to guess at the call. Besides, the paper went on, “the real fan does not like to take his eyes off the play long enough even to glance at a scoreboard except between innings….From the patron’s standpoint, therefore, no scoreboard can replace an umpire’s gestures.”18 In this way, the Tribune essentially argued that all baseball fans are deaf; they all rely on vision, not hearing, to understand the game unfolding on the field before them.19

Things came to a head in 1907. Umpires formally came out “against the proposed rule to have umpires wave their arms to designate balls and strikes.”20 But, at the turn of the century, their resistance was hardly surprising. Given that the system of gesturing originated with a deaf ballplayer, it would have been directly associated with deafness and with sign language, both of which were increasingly stigmatized as abnormal at the turn of the century.21

American Sign Language was under attack, as educators sought to eliminate it from schools. By 1907, teachers argued that “our first and foremost aim has been the development of the deaf child into as nearly a normal individual as possible.”22 Only by speaking, and never signing, could a deaf child become normal. A new ideal was emerging for deaf people, the ideal of “passing” as a hearing person.23 Deaf students who failed to do so were mocked; as historian Susan Burch notes, they “found themselves labeled as ‘oral failures’ and ridiculed as ‘born idiots.’”24

Deaf people were under attack in other ways. In 1907, the federal government updated the Immigration of Act of 1882 to bar entry to persons with “a physical defect being of a nature which may affect the ability of such an alien to earn a living.” Deaf immigrants found themselves turned away at Ellis Island, as hearing immigration officials assumed that deafness would render them unemployable.25

The American deaf community had few defenders of either its members or its language in the early twentieth century. But they had William Hoy. Hoy became a prominent symbol of deaf success in a hearing world. He signed, and did not speak, and he valued his deafness, arguing that it offered him an advantage over hearing players. In 1902, Hoy explained how being deaf positively affected all parts of his game:

In batting there is really little handicap for a mute. I can see the ball as well as others. … I think, perhaps, the fact that I have to depend so much on my eyes helps me in judging what the umpire will call a strike, and if the ball delivered is a little off I wait for four bad ones. In base running the signals of the hit and run game and other strategies are mostly silent, the same as for the other players. By a further system of signs my teammates keep me posted on how many are out and what is going on about me. … Because I can not hear the coaching I have acquired the habit of running with my neck twisted to watch the progress of the ball. I think most players depend too much on the coachers and often a man is coached along too far or not far enough, when, if he knew where the ball was himself, he would know what chances were best for him to take. In judging fly balls I depend on sight alone and must keep my eye constantly on the batsman to watch for a possible fly, since I can not hear the crack of the bat. This alertness, I think, helps me in other departments of the game. So it may be seen, the handicaps of a deaf ball player are minimized.26

Hoy challenged the expectations of hearing Americans; they saw hearing loss but Hoy saw deaf gain.27

At least in baseball, hearing reporters and fans came to recognize the benefits and contributions of deaf people. The deaf way to communicate, by gestures, was seen as superior to the hearing solution of screaming louder. In the face of the umpires’ resistance, the Tribune changed tactics. It moved to attack them, complaining that there was “too much consideration for the umpires.”28Sporting Life did likewise, arguing, “The umpire who cannot use the arm signal system without confusion or trouble is not fit even for amateur umpiring. … The system was tried in the world’s championship series and worked to a charm …”29 The press hoped that umpires would voluntarily agree to experiment with it.

It seems that this is what happened. Though umpires, as an organized body, resisted the system, some of their number reluctantly tried their hand at it. Bill Deane notes that “umpires’ hand signals were in mass usage by 1907, though standardization was lacking.”30 Unsurprisingly, O’Loughlin kept using gestures. Sporting Life noted his work, writing, “Silk O’Loughlin … is also in a class by himself. Silk yells ‘Stri-i-ik’ with particular emphasis on the ‘I’ and draws his right hand back over his shoulder and points his thumb at the grandstand. When he calls a ball, he makes no movement with his hands. Silk calls two ‘TUH,’ which never fails to raise a laugh.”31

 

 

The signs of baseball did not have much longer to wait. In 1909, they were made mandatory in both leagues. A majority of umpires had apparently concluded that such a system would not be too difficult to use. Perhaps O’Loughlin’s continued use of the system had helped to change minds. Or, perhaps, umpires had finally been persuaded that baseball was indeed a business. Catering to the needs of paying customers was a priority for baseball owners. As the Sporting Life acidly commented in 1907, “It is a reflection on the intelligence of umpires that they should require command to uniformly employ so simple a method of pleasing the patrons of the sport.”32

Fans at the World Series in Chicago in 1906 could scarcely have imagined what the future would hold. How could it be that Chicago would not see another Subway Series in the remainder of the century? How could the Cubs go from three consecutive World Series appearances, which yielded two championships, to a century-and-change long World Series drought? At least, Tinker to Evers to Chance would live forever.

Sadly, the contributions of Hoy and O’Loughlin would not. There remains resistance in baseball to the historical fact that Hoy brought the signs to baseball. A 2012 book flatly called it “a myth.”33 In truth, “Dummy Hoy’s mute signal code” entered baseball, was popularized during the 1906 World Series, and those signals are with us still.34 But the man himself has not been given the recognition that he deserves. Neither has O’Loughlin. He died in 1918, a victim of the flu pandemic. With his career cut short, his pathbreaking part in bringing Hoy’s signs to baseball was soon forgotten. Today, if you visit the National Baseball Hall of Fame, neither Hoy nor O’Loughlin have plaques. Instead, visitors learn that the man who brought the signs to baseball was umpire Bill Klem. As his plaque reads, in part, “Umpire. National League 1905-1951. Umpired in 18 World Series. Credited with introducing arm signals indicating strikes and fair or foul balls.”

This plaque provides an unexpected twist to the story, namely, a surprise ending. In 1906, O’Loughlin could hardly have imagined that the credit for his achievement would someday be given to a man whom he helped to break into major league baseball. O’Loughlin helped to arrange the professional introductions for Bill Klem that allowed him to advance out of the minor leagues and into the National League in 1905.35 Klem’s first World Series appearance came in Chicago, too— but in 1908, when the Cubs faced the Tigers, two years after O’Loughlin brought Hoy’s signs to the World Series, where they have been ever since. 

R.A.R. EDWARDS is a professor of history at the Rochester Institute of Technology in Rochester, New York. A native of Connecticut, she is a life-long Red Sox fan. Her most recent book was “Deaf Players in Major League Baseball: A History, 1883 to the Present” (McFarland, 2020). It was recognized with a SABR Baseball Research Award in 2021.

 

Notes

1. For more on this Series, see Bernard A. Weisberger, When Chicago Ruled Baseball: the Cubs-White Sox World Series of 1906 (New York: Harper, 2006).

2. While the term “Subway Series” for an intra-city World Series was not widely popularized until after the World Series became a regular all-New York City affair, it may be applied in spirit to the city of Chicago, despite Chicago not having a subway until 1943.

3. The Cubs had been in the 1885 and 1886 “World’s Series.”

4. For more on the trio, see David Rapp, Tinker to Evers to Chance: The Chicago Cubs and the Dawn of Modern America (Chicago: The University of Chicago Press, 2018).

5. This might seem like the performance floor, but in a list of the thirteen worst team batting averages in the history of the World Series, my Boston Red Sox managed to come in both first (1918 appearance, with an average of .186) and last (2013 appearance, with an average of .211). Talk about winning the hard way. And no, a decade later, I am still not entirely sure that the 2013 win makes up for the 2011 collapse, thanks for asking. And thanks, ESPN, for providing an online list to torture ourselves with.

6. Timeline of his career in “Silk O’Loughlin King of Umps,” Sunday Vindicator, April 29, 1906, 13.

7. “Gestures to Tell Umpire’s Ruling,” Chicago Tribune, January 6, 1907, A1.

8. “Nationals Lose Game,” Washington Post, Thursday, April 19, 1906, 8.

9. “Silk O’Loughlin Unique Umpire,” Meriden Daily Journal, October 16, 1906, 11.

10. For more on Hoy’s career see R.A.R. Edwards, Deaf Players in Major League Baseball: A History, 1883 to the Present (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2020).

11. “Gestures to Tell Umpire’s Ruling,” Chicago Tribune, January 6, 1907, A1.

12. “Calling Balls and Strikes,” The Sporting News, January 27, 1900, 5.

13. “The Referee: Sporting Comment of the Week,” Chicago Tribune, January 20, 190, A1.

14. “Easy To Execute,” Sporting Life, February 23, 1907, 4.

15. “Electrical Score Boards for the American League,” Chicago Tribune, February 13, 1907, 12

16. “Johnson’s Idea,” Sporting Life, February 23, 1907, 10. O’Day remains the only man to play, manage, and umpire in the history of the National League. He served as an umpire in the World Series in 1903, and would serve in 10 World Series over the course of his career. When O’Day died in Chicago on July 2, 1935, former NL president John Heydler called him one of the greatest umpires ever in terms of knowledge of the rules, fairness, and courage to make the right call. Umpire Bill Klem, however, referred to him as a “misanthropic Irishman,” while Christy Mathewson said that arguing with O’Day was like “using a lit match to see how much gasoline was in a fuel tank” (David Anderson, “Hank O’Day,” SABR Baseball Biography Project).

17. “Electrical Score Boards for the American League,” Chicago Tribune, February 13, 1907, 12. The Yankees are usually credited for first using an electronic scoreboard in baseball, in the original Yankee Stadium, when it opened in 1923. See G. Edwards White, Creating the National Pastime: Baseball Transforms Itself 1903-1953 (Princeton: Princeton University Press, 1996), 41-42. These 1907 articles, however, repeatedly point to this forerunner apparently in use in St. Louis as the inspiration for Johnson’s plan to adopt them throughout the American League. For more on the history of electronic scoreboards in baseball, see Rob Edelman, “Electric Scoreboards, Bulletin Boards, and Mimic Diamonds,” Base Ball 3, 2, Fall 2009, 76-87.

18. “The Referee: Sports Comment of the Week: Signaling Balls and Strikes,” Chicago Tribune, February 17, 1907, A1.

19. In theorizing fans as deaf, I follow the lead of Lennard Davis, who argues that the rise of reading in the eighteenth century similarly transformed hearing people. “Even if you are not Deaf,” he writes, “you are deaf while you are reading. You are in a deafened modality or moment. All readers are deaf because they are defined by a process that does not require hearing or speaking (vocalizing).” See Davis, Enforcing Normalcy: Disability Deafness, and the Body (New York: Verso, 1995), 4, 50-72.

20. “Echoes of the Diamond,” Washington Post, March 1, 1907, 8.

21. See Douglas C. Baynton, Forbidden Signs: American Culture and the Campaign Against Sign Language (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1996).

22. Oralist teacher as quoted in Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 146.

23. For more on passing, see Baynton, Forbidden Signs, 146-48. See also Susan Burch, Signs of Resistance: American Deaf Cultural History, 1900 to 1942 (New York: New York University Press, 2002), especially 146-49, and R.A.R. Edwards, Words Made Flesh: Nineteenth-Century Deaf Education and Growth of Deaf Culture (New York: New York University Press, 2012), especially 158-9, 200.

24. Burch 27.

25. See Douglas Baynton, “‘The Undesirability of Admitting Deaf Mutes’: U.S. Immigration Policy and Deaf Immigrants, 1882-1924,” Sign Language Studies 6, 4, Summer 2006, 391-415. See also Douglas C. Baynton, Defectives in the Land: Disability and Immigration in the Age of Eugenics (Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 2016).

26. Dummy Hoy as quoted in “How A Mute Plays Ball,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, January 5, 1902, 22.

27. For more on ‘deaf gain,’ see H-Dirksen L. Bauman and Joseph J. Murray, eds., Deaf Gain Raising the Stakes for Human Diversity (University of Minnesota Press, 2014).

28. “The Referee: Sporting Comment of the Week: Too Much Consideration for the Umpire,” Chicago Tribune, April 14, 1907, A1.

29. “Easy to Execute,” Sporting Life, February 23, 1907, 4.

30. Bill Deane, Baseball Myths: Debating, Debunking, and Disproving Tales from the Diamond (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 20.

31. Sporting Life, October 19, 1907, 8.

32. “Timely Topics,” Sporting Life, May 18, 1907, 7.

33. Bill Deane, Baseball Myths: Debating, Debunking, and Disproving Tales from the Diamond (Lanham, MD: Scarecrow Press, 2012), 17, 21.

34. In Peter Morris’s book, A Game of Inches (2010, Ivan R. Dee Publishers), he attributes the earliest use of the umpire hand signals to Ed Dundon in 1886. Dundon had been a teammate of Hoy’s at the Ohio School for the Deaf. See Brian McKenna, “Ed Dundon,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/ed-dundon.

35. Klem discussed his professional relationship with O’Loughlin in William J. Klem and William J. Slocum, “I Never Missed One in my Heart,” Collier’s, March 31, 1951, 59. See also David Anderson, “Bill Klem,” entry in The Baseball Biography Project, SABR.org.

In 1912, Chicago was under consideration by two upstart baseball leagues. On February 12, John T. Powers’s Columbian League awarded a franchise to Chicago (along with Cleveland, Detroit, Indianapolis, Kansas City, Louisville, Milwaukee, and St. Louis), but the venture failed to materialize due to a lack of money. On April 3, an official announcement was made that Columbian League would not operate in 1912, but might come back in 1913. The United States League was formed on December 21, 1911. Following a March 16 meeting, the league announced that Charles White and his New York franchise had until noon on March 18 to secure a field. A franchise for Chicago was sought by a representative for that city.1 According to the Chicago Tribune, “the majority of the promoters, it is understood, believe Chicago would help to balance the western end of the circuit and that its admission would give the league more prestige. The western men are strong supporters of Chicago.”2 After White failed to meet the deadline, New York was out of the league, to be replaced by either Baltimore, Buffalo, or Chicago. League President William A. Whitman was appointed a committee of one to choose among these three cities.3 He awarded the franchise to Chicago Gunthers owner William C. Niesen on March 23.

In addition to the Green Sox, Chicago newspapers referred to the new team by many names, including the Outlaws, Sams, US Leaguers, US Recruits (during the preseason), and Uncle Sams. The Green Sox played their home games at the 5,000-seat Gunther Park, owned by J.D. Cameron. Originally built in 1905, the park was located at the intersection of Clark Street and Leland Avenue, and served as home for the Chicago City League’s Gunther Nine. The field had a wooden fence in the outfield and a covered grandstand.

On April 5, the Green Sox began their preseason with more than 30 players. Their April 6 debut against the Gunthers at Gunther Park was cancelled due to rain after two innings. On April 7, an intersquad was played between the “Raymonds” and “Keeleys” at Gunther Park. The “Raymonds,” named for pitcher Bugs Raymond, defeated the “Keeleys,” named for pitcher Burt Keeley, 7-5. The preseason schedule included games versus the Gunthers and Chicago American Giants. Keeley signed on as the Green Sox player-manager on April 11. He had previously pitched for the Washington Nationals (1908-09). This was his first manager’s job.

The 126-game schedule was announced in the April 8 Chicago Tribune. Following a league meeting in Pittsburgh, a revised schedule was announced in the April 18 Inter Ocean, with the Green Sox opening the season on the road in Cincinnati on May 1. Their home opener was on May 8 versus Cleveland. The Green Sox were scheduled to finish their season on the road at Cleveland on September 22.

The 15 players announced on May 1 were as follows: Ed McDonough and Daly at catcher.4 The pitchers were Charley Gardner, Tom McGuire, Walter Parker, Henry Paynter (or Painter), and Bugs Raymond. The infielders were Crowley (first), Al Schall (second), Bob Meinke (shortstop), and Herman Walters (third).5 The outfielders were Jim Stanley (left), Lou Gertenrich (center), and “Bibbie” Lynch (right). Handy Andy wrote the following in the May 1 Chicago Tribune: “‘Bugs’ Raymond, who has signed a contract, may not pitch for some time, as he is still on the reserve list of the New York National league [sic] club. Owner Niesen expects to have him in the fold without causing a clash with the supreme body of baseball.”6 Gertenrich, Ernie Johnson, James McDonough, McGuire, and Meinke were Chicago natives. McDonough (Elgin) and Keeley (Wilmington) were Illinois natives. Stanley (Plymouth, Pennsylvania) was the only known player who was born outside of Illinois.

Only four players could boast of major-league experience. Ed McDonough played six games for the Philadelphia Phillies (1909-10). Meinke played two games for the Cincinnati Reds (1910). Gertenrich’s baseball journey began in 1891 as a pitcher with the American Boys team.7 After playing outfield in Milwaukee (1901) and Pittsburgh (1903), he played for the following Chicago City League squads (seasons unknown): Logan Square, Gunthers, Rogers Park, West Ends, Riverviews, and Anson’s Colts. Gertenrich also played for Springfield (Central) and Decatur (Three-I) in 1905.8 In 1909, the Brooklyn Superbas offered Gertenrich an opportunity to play for them while he was playing in the Chicago City League. He was playing for the Gunthers before he was signed by the Green Sox at the age of 36. Raymond’s professional career began in 1903 with Appleton (independent). He pitched in 136 games, including 95 starts, for the Tigers (1904), Cardinals (1907-08), and Giants (1909-11). He was kicked off the Giants due to alcoholism, and was pitching in semi-pro ball in Chicago before signing with the Green Sox.

With the season about to start, Niesen was optimistic about the league’s future. “‘We are on the shady side just now,’ he said last night, ‘but judging from reports from around the circuit, it will not be long before we cross into the sunshine. There is great interest in our league among the fans in the towns, and we hope to have good attendance from the start.’”9 The season began on May 1 for Chicago, Cincinnati, Cleveland, New York, Pittsburgh, Reading, Richmond, and Washington. Pregame festivities in Cincinnati included music, a parade of automobiles, speeches, and Mayor Henry T. Hunt throwing the first pitch. The Green Sox won the season opener, 5-4, in front of 5,000 Cincinnatians. Meinke sent a ninth-inning single into left field, driving in McDonough for the go-ahead run. Raymond lost in his debut on May 2, 6-5. The Green Sox next traveled to Cleveland, ending their two-city road trip 1-3-1 with one rainout.

 

 

Before the home opener on May 8, Chicago Mayor Carter H. Harrison II and Illinois Democratic gubernatorial candidate Edward F. Dunne led an auto parade including aldermen and local politicians down Clark Street from Hotel Sherman to Gunther Park. Despite scoring five runs in the bottom of the fourth and leading 8-4 in the eighth, the Green Sox fell 15-8 to Cleveland. Cold weather and rainouts hampered Chicago’s early season schedule. Between May 5 and 16, five games were cancelled, including four out of a five-game stretch.

Around the league, poor weather and attendance led to a lack of money, which led to clubs dropping out. Washington disbanded first on May 23. Cleveland followed suit the very next day, as players were quitting because they were not getting paid. David Pietrusza wrote in his book, Major Leagues, “On May 27 New York forfeited a game on its own field to Chicago when just 50 fans showed up. Owner Tom Cronin, a Bronx politician, gave up the next day, and declared the franchise forfeit.”10

On June 1, Reading declared bankruptcy and Richmond dropped out of the league. Marshall Henderson replaced Whitman as league president. Cincinnati disbanded on June 3 and was sued the next day by 14 players who were owed salaries. Chicago resumed its schedule against the remaining teams, Cincinnati and Pittsburgh. The Green Sox played nine more games. On June 23, they defeated the Pittsburgh Filipinos, 9-4, in their last league game. They finished by winning six of their last seven games and ended the season in third place.11

 

 

The Green Sox continued to play after the league officially disbanded on June 23. They played against local teams such as the All-Professionals, Cubans, Chicago Giants, Chicago American Giants, Chicago Typos, Fred Schmitt’s (or Schmidt’s) Joliets, Logan Squares, Professionals, Gunthers, Roselands, and West Ends. The July 9 Chicago Tribune and the Inter Ocean mentioned a possible four-team league with the Cubans, Giants, and Americans, but it would have needed approval from the Cubans’ Nat Strong. The Green Sox also played against out-of-state teams including the Cheyenne Indians, Chinese Giants (from Hawaii), Cincinnati (formerly of the United States League), Crawfords, Gary (Indiana), and St. Louis Giants. They last played together on November 3 in a South Side semiprofessional championship series that featured the Green Sox and the All-Professionals at Gunther Park, and the Roseland Eclipses and Woodlawn Ramblers at Roseland.

Raymond, who last pitched for the Green Sox on May 6 against Cleveland, was a spectator at a semiprofessional game in Chicago on September 1. According to the 1913 Reach Official American League Guide, “some one [sic] threw a piece of pottery which struck the pitcher on the face. Raymond picked up the missile and struck [Fred] Cigranz with it, and in the fight that followed, Raymond was knocked down and kicked in the head a number of times.”14 Six days later, Raymond was found dead at Hotel Veley in Chicago “from [a] cerebral hemorrhage due to a fracture of the skull.”15 Some of his Green Sox teammates served as pallbearers at his September 9 funeral. Fred Cigranz was arrested and confessed to murdering Raymond. It is not known how much prison time Cigranz (or Cingrang) served

The Green Sox did not return for the United States League’s second attempt in 1913. New York, Reading, and Washington returned along with newcomers Baltimore, Brooklyn, Lynchburg, Newark (New Jersey), and Philadelphia. The 126-game schedule began on May 10 and was intended to end on September 27. However, the return was short-lived. The season ended on May 12, after just three days.

 

 

Chicago returned as part of the Federal League from 1913 to 1915. The team was known as either the Chifeds (Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, and also styled the ChiFeds or Chi-Feds), the Keeleys, or the Whales (Baseball-Reference.com). Some of the Green Sox players played for the 1913 team under Keeley: Gertenrich, Lynch, James McDonough, John McDonough, McGuire, Painter, Schall, and Stanley. Their 57-62 record was good for fourth, 171/₂ games behind the Indianapolis Hoosierfeds. McGuire and Stanley returned in 1914 under new manager Joe Tinker. James McDonough was on the 1914 Chifeds roster, but did not play.16 The Chifeds finished second at 87-67, just 11/₂ games out of first place. None of the Green Sox were on the roster for the first place 1915 team.

McGuire made one appearance for the White Sox in 1919. Johnson had the longest Major League career after the Green Sox. He played 813 games for the White Sox (1912, 1921-23), St. Louis Terriers (1915), St. Louis Browns (1916-18), and the New York Yankees (1923-25).

Gunther Park was abandoned in 1913, shortly before the construction of Wrigley Field.17 It was later turned into a park by the Lincoln Park Commission, and renamed Chase Park, after Treasury Secretary and United States Supreme Court Chief Justice Salmon P. Chase.18 According to the Ravenswood-Lake View Historical Association: “In 1914 the Ravenswood Improvement Association and local residents petitioned the Lincoln Park Commission to convert the former baseball stadium into a public park. The park commission acquired the land in 1920. Within two years tennis courts, a playground, an athletic field, a wading pool and a field house were constructed… The original field house was replaced with the current building in 1976.” A few miles away in Lincoln Park, a fountain was dedicated to William C. Niesen in 1955. Funded by the Old Timers’ Baseball Association, it still stands near the South Athletic field house and Niesen Field.20 

STEVEN M. GLASSMAN’s article on the Chicago Green Sox will be his ninth National Pastime article. He previously wrote “Philadelphia’s Other Hall of Famers” (SABR 43), “The Game That Was Not— Philadelphia Phillies at Chicago Cubs (August 8, 1988)” (SABR 45), “Walking it Off (Marlins Postseason Walk-Offs)” (SABR 46), “A Hall of Fame Cup of Coffee in New York” (SABR 47), “Padres’ Near No-Hitters” (SABR 49), “The Baltimore Orioles’ 1971 Japan Trip” (SABR 50), and “The Future of Baseball Cards” (The Future According to Baseball), and “The Hidden Potato Trick” (Major Research on the Minor Leagues). Steven has been a SABR member since 1994. He graduated with a Bachelor of Science Degree in Sport and Recreation Management from Temple University. Originally born in Philadelphia, Steven currently lives in Warminster, Pennsylvania.

 

Sources

In addition to the sources mentioned in the notes, the author referred to Baseball-Reference, Newspapers.com, and Retrosheet for box scores, play-by-plays, and other pertinent information.

 

Notes

1. “U.S. League Wants Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, March 17, 1912, 24.

2. “U.S. League Wants Chicago,” Chicago Tribune, March 17, 1912, 24.

3. “No U.S. League Club in Gotham,” Chicago Tribune, March 19, 1912, 11.

4. I could not find a first name for Daly.

5. I could not find a first name for Crowley.

6. Handy Andy, “U.S. League to Start Today,” Chicago Tribune, May 1, 1912, 13.

7. His early amateur, semiprofessional, and professional career also included stops with the Clyburn Juniors (1892), Brands (Chicago City League, 1894), Garden Cities (Chicago City, 1895); Maroons (season unknown), and Auburn Parks (seasons unknown)

8. According to website Baseball History Daily: “For the next four seasons, Gertenrich remained one of Chicago’s best local athletes. At 33-years-old in 1908 he was still a good enough runner to win the City League Field Day title of fastest player; The Daily News said he rounded the bases in 14 and 1/₅ seconds.” https://baseballhistorydaily.com/2014/07/07/this-wealth-of-mr-gertenrich-has-cost-the-game-an-a-1-player.

9. “U.S. Leaguers To Open Up Tomorrow,” Chicago Inter Ocean, April 30, 1912, 4.

10. David Pietrusza, Major Leagues Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1991), 205.

11. The 1913 Reach Official American League Base Ball Guide (Philadelphia: A.J. Reach Company, 1913), 113.

12. The 1913 Reach Official American League Guide’s standings differ. They do not include games that Chicago played against Cincinnati and Pittsburgh after June 3.

13. Pietrusza, 339.

14. The 1913 Reach Official American League Base Ball Guide, 113.

15. The 1913 Reach Official American League Base Ball Guide, 113.

16. “Chicago Feds Name Lineup,” Reading Times, March 4, 1914, 8. McDonough was also purportedly rostered by the Cubs but did not play. See Bill Hickman, “Near Major Leaguers,” SABR.org. https://sabr.org/research/article/near-major-leaguers.

17. Ravenswood-Lake View Historical Association, January 9, 2010, https://www.ravenswoodhistorical.com/tag/chicago-green-sox.

18. The Official Website of the Chicago Park District, https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks-facilities/chase-salmon-park.

19. Ravenswood-Lake View Historical Association.

20. The Official Website of the Chicago Park District, https://www.chicagoparkdistrict.com/parks-facilities/william-c-niesen-memorial-fountain.

Baseball played a big part in Ernest Hemingway’s life. The subject was featured in many of his novels and short stories, including A Farewell to Arms and The Old Man and the Sea. One game that he attended in 1918 was so meaningful to him that he kept the ticket stub with him throughout his service in World War I as a volunteer ambulance driver and for many years after.

Ernest Hemingway was born in 1899 in Oak Park, Illinois, located just west of Chicago. It was a great place to be a fan. From the age of four until he left to serve in WWI at the age of eighteen, he witnessed exceptional baseball. During that time, at least one Chicago baseball team finished no worse than third place in their respective leagues every year, and the Chicago White Sox and Chicago Cubs each won two World Series. The Chicago Whales of the Federal League also finished in first place in 1915.

Hemingway was such a fan of the Chicago baseball teams that he ordered “action pictures” of Cubs players Mordecai “Three Fingered” Brown, Jimmy Archer, and Frank “Wildfire” Schulte from an advertisement in The Sporting News.1 He also ordered posters from Baseball Magazine of White Sox pitchers Big Ed Walsh and Ewell “Reb” Russell.2 He went to games with his father and would study the upcoming schedules to pick out certain games to attend. In a letter to his father from early May 1912, Hemingway asked if they could go to the May 11 game between the Chicago Cubs and New York Giants.3

The 1917 World Series between the Chicago White Sox and the New York Giants made a big impression on Hemingway and he would later write about it in his short story “Crossing the Mississippi.” The young man in the story, Nick Adams, would go on to appear in many Hemingway short stories and is partly inspired by Hemingway’s own experiences. After witnessing Happy Felsch’s game-winning home run at Game One in Chicago, in the story Nick travels to Kansas City to find work. Hemingway, in his real life, also went to Kansas City around this time to work for the Kansas City Star. While on the train, Nick (and one can assume Hemingway himself) finds out that the White Sox have won the Series and is filled with a “comfortable glow.”4

While at the Kansas City Star, Hemingway had the opportunity to interview members of the Chicago Cubs as they traveled to spring training in March 1918. He bought Coca-Colas for Claude Hendrix, Pete Kilduff, and Grover Cleveland Alexander, whom he referred to as “the worlds (sic) greatest pitcher.”5

In early 1918, Hemingway joined the war effort when he volunteered to be an ambulance driver for the American Red Cross in Italy. He was sent to New York City on May 13, 1918, for training. On Wednesday, May 22, right before he was to ship out to Europe, Hemingway was able to attend a ballgame. Luckily for him, the Chicago White Sox were in town playing the New York Yankees at the Polo Grounds.

As the United States had entered WWI about a year prior to this game, the Yankees announced that 25% of the gross receipts from the game would be given to the Clark Griffith Bat and Ball Fund, which provided baseball equipment for soldiers who were stationed in Europe. The New York Tribune stated that “no less than nine companies of soldiers, many of them with their bands, will be on hand.”6 Prior to the game, the soldiers were paraded around the field. Because of the overcast weather, only 5,200 total fans attended the game that day, although the Polo Grounds could have held around 38,000 spectators.

The White Sox, winners of the prior year’s World Series, had just lost their star outfielder, Shoeless Joe Jackson, less than two weeks earlier; he went to work at a Delaware shipyard to avoid the draft. To make matters worse, their starting pitcher for the game, Eddie Cicotte, was still winless with an 0-5 record.

The Yankees would be starting Herb Thormahlen, who was carrying a 19-inning scoreless streak into the game. Having appeared in only one game the previous season, the 21-year-old lefthander was unfamiliar to the Chicago sportswriters. His “name makes you think of some kind of tooth powder or disinfectant,” wrote I.E. Sanborn of the Chicago Daily Tribune.7

The game went into extra innings as both pitchers were dominant throughout. In the 12th inning, Buck Weaver hit a drive to right field that looked like it might clear the fence, but Frank Gilhooley “leaped into the air and caught the ball as it was about to impinge on the stands, and then fell headlong in the mud.”8

Both teams saved their most dramatic play for the 14th inning. In the top half of the inning, the White Sox loaded the bases with only one out. Unfortunately for the White Sox rooters, Buck Weaver could only manage to hit a grounder to third baseman Frank “Home Run” Baker, who threw home to easily force out Nemo Leibold. Chick Gandil then flew out to center field to end the inning.

With one out in the bottom of the 14th, the Yankees’ Baker and Del Pratt hit back-to-back singles. Wally Pipp then hit a single to center that drove in Baker for the winning run.

It was a tough loss for the White Sox, especially for Cicotte. He gave up only four hits through thirteen innings before finally losing the game one inning later. The Buffalo Enquirer reported that “Eddie Cicotte’s opinion of that fourteen-inning 1-to-0 defeat at the hands of the Yankees had been deleted by the censor.”9

The game must have made an impression on Hemingway. On July 8, 1918, Hemingway was badly wounded in both legs while bringing chocolate and cigarettes to the soldiers on the front line in Italy. He spent six months at the Red Cross Hospital in Milan, and did not return to the United States until January 1919. Throughout all of this, the ticket stub remained with him. The stub from that New York game between the White Sox and Yankees can now be found in the Hemingway Archives in Special Collections at the Oak Park Library.

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

 

Notes

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

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

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

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

5. Billy Sunday, Sawdust Trail, 67.

6. Billy Sunday, Sawdust Trail, 71.

7. Billy Sunday, Sawdust Trail, 73.

8. Billy Sunday, Sawdust Trail, 77.

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

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

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

12. Firstenberger, In Rare Form, 72.

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

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

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

 

In mid-March 1921—amid delay in the criminal proceedings pending against those accused of corrupting the 1919 World Series—baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis placed the eight indicted Chicago White Sox players on the game’s ineligible list. “Baseball is not powerless to defend itself,” an impatient Landis declared. “All these players must vindicate themselves before they can be readmitted to baseball.”1 Some four-plus months later, the Not Guilty verdicts returned by the Black Sox case jury put Landis’s resolve to the test. In the defining moment of his tenure, the newly installed commissioner reacted to the trial outcome swiftly and forcefully, proclaiming:

Regardless of the verdict of juries, no player that throws a ball game; no player that undertakes or promises to throw a ball game; no player that sits in conference with a bunch of crooked ballplayers and gamblers where the ways and means of throwing games are planned and discussed and does not promptly tell his club about it, will ever play professional baseball.2

And with that, Shoeless Joe Jackson, Eddie Cicotte, Buck Weaver, and the other acquitted Black Sox were permanently banished from Landis’s domain of the American and National Leagues and their affiliated minor leagues, consigning them to playing out their careers in outlaw exhibitions.

Since its promulgation, the Landis edict has been construed as confining its condemnation of third baseman Weaver to his failure to act upon pre-Series knowledge that teammates and gamblers were intent on throwing the Fall Classic. According to his champions, Weaver himself was not a fix participant. Nor did he accept any kind of payoff from those who financed the Series fix. Rather, Weaver was an honest player punished for his refusal to inform on his corrupted teammates, his permanent banishment from the game designed to serve as a warning and deterrent to players disposed to look the other way on game-fixing in future.

The purpose of this piece is to assay the legitimacy and proportion of the Weaver banishment via forensic analysis of the historical record. Unhappily for some, this exercise does not sustain the thesis that Weaver was no more than a silent confidante of Series corruption. To the contrary, the record yields persuasive evidence that Buck Weaver took an active part in the fix from start to finish, and that Weaver was among the White Sox players who threw games during the 1920 season, as well. There is no basis, therefore, to second-guess the sanction visited upon Weaver a century ago, as expulsion was a mandatory punishment for game-fixing. The deterrence rationale also justified Weaver’s banishment. To place these conclusions in context, we precede argument with a Weaver-centric review of the 1919 World Series and its aftermath.

A. BUCK WEAVER AND THE RUN-UP TO THE 1919 WORLD SERIES

By the time of the 1919 World Series, 29-year-old Buck Weaver had supplanted Home Run Baker as the American League’s premier third baseman. A rangy switch-hitter, Weaver joined the White Sox as a lineup regular in 1912 but both his hitting (.224 batting average) and fielding at shortstop (71 errors) were marginal. Over time, both skills improved, particularly after Buck was switched to third base in 1917. That season, Weaver was a reliable role-player on an American League pennant-winning club (100-54, .649) that featured three future Hall of Famers—second baseman Eddie Collins, spitballer Red Faber, and catcher Ray Schalk—as well as Cooperstown-caliber outfielder Joe Jackson and 28-game winner Eddie Cicotte. Buck then chipped in a solid World Series performance as the Sox topped the NL champion New York Giants in six games.

Batting .300, Weaver came into his own in 1918 but the season was a trying one for the Chicago White Sox. The manpower demands of World War I eviscerated the club’s roster, with Eddie Collins, Red Faber, and pitcher Jim Scott enlisting in the military, while other Sox players—including Joe Jackson, outfielder Happy Felsch, and pitcher Lefty Williams—left the club for shipbuilding work and other defense industry jobs. Despite having piloted his charges to a championship the previous season, a sixth-place finish (57-67, .460) cost Sox manager Pants Rowland his job. At the same time, a staggering drop-off in home attendance (from 684,521 in 1917 to only 195,081 in 19183) cost club owner Charles Comiskey dearly in the wallet.

Despite the financial setback, Comiskey rewarded Weaver for his stalwart performance, inking him to a handsome three-year contract in March 1919. His new pact yielded Buck $7,250 per annum and made him the second-highest paid third baseman (after Home Run Baker) in the big leagues. Meanwhile, the return of Eddie Collins, Red Faber, Joe Jackson, and the others who had left the 1918 club heralded likely restoration of the White Sox to championship form.

But the clubhouse that they were returning to was not a healthy place. Long-simmering resentment of the highly paid ($15,000), college-educated, and socially superior Collins by more hardscrabble teammates like Chick Gandil and Buck Weaver, and Comiskey’s public disdain of Joe Jackson, Happy Felsch, and other defense industry “slackers” who had avoided military service contributed to a fractious team atmosphere, with the club divided into two hostile cliques.4 Aligned with team captain Collins were Faber, Schalk, and outfielders Eddie Murphy, Nemo Leibold, and Shano Collins (no relation). In the other corner were Gandil, Cicotte, Weaver, Felsch, shortstop Swede Risberg, and sub infielder Fred McMullin, while quiet road roommates Joe Jackson and Lefty Williams mostly kept to themselves. Placed in charge of this talented but torn squad was new manager Kid Gleason, a coach on the 1917 World Series champion club.

Despite personal antagonisms, the 1919 Chicago White Sox were a powerhouse ballclub, ranking first in team batting average and leading the league in runs per game.5 Joe Jackson (.351/.422/.506), Eddie Collins (.319/.400/.405), and Nemo Leibold (.302/.404/.353) paced the batters with Buck Weaver (.296/.315/.401), Chick Gandil (.290/.325/.383), and Happy Felsch (.275/.336/.448, with 86 RBIs) also making significant contributions. Meanwhile on the mound, Eddie Cicotte (29-7, 1.82 ERA) and Lefty Williams (23-11, 2.64 ERA) hurled a combined 600+ innings, and were capably supported by undersized lefty Dickey Kerr (13-7), filling in for the frequently sidelined Red Faber (11-9).

Chicago led the AL pennant chase for most of the campaign and secured the crown with a 6-5 victory over the St. Louis Browns on September 24, Kerr notching the win in relief of ineffective starter Cicotte. Yet even before the pennant was clinched, the plot to dump the upcoming World Series against the Cincinnati Reds had been hatched.

B. THE PLAY OF BUCK WEAVER IN THE 1919 WORLD SERIES

In many respects, the fix of the 1919 World Series remains a murky affair to this day. Among the unsettled details are the number of Series fix conspiracies (there were at least two and perhaps a third); the identity of the fix financiers; how many Series games the fix actually lasted; and the timing, dollar amount, and method of payment of the corrupted White Sox players—all topics beyond the scope of this essay.

For now, suffice to say that Sox teammates Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson, Lefty Williams, and Chick Gandil, as well as fix insiders Bill Burns and Billy Maharg, all later identified Weaver by name as a fix conspirator. But as in the case of Joe Jackson, Weaver’s Series stats—at least superficially—belie the charge. Playing in all eight Series contests, Weaver batted .324 (11-for-34), second only to Jackson’s .375 Series average and, like Jackson, made no errors in 27 chances. On the minus side, Weaver registered zero RBIs, failing to drive in any of the 15 teammates on base when he came to the plate.

Going in, the White Sox were heavy Series favorites6—until a last-minute surge of money on Cincinnati installed the Reds as a slight betting favorite. Most sportswriters and other baseball cognoscenti, however, remained confident of a Chicago victory. But a few, including syndicated Chicago Herald-Examiner columnist Hugh Fullerton, were disquieted by rumors that the Series outcome had been rigged.

The Series began on a sour note for Weaver and the White Sox. In the top of the first, Buck came to bat with Eddie Collins on first. Recriminations ensued when Collins was caught trying to steal. Once back in the dugout, Collins accused Weaver of ignoring the hit-and-run sign that Collins had flashed him, with Buck replying that Collins just wanted an alibi after getting thrown out.7 Three innings later, an abrupt meltdown by pitching ace Cicotte put the Sox on the road to a stunning 9-1 loss.

In Game Two, a curious one-inning loss of control by Lefty Williams provided the baserunners needed by the Reds to prevail, 4-2. A three-hit, 3-0 shutout thrown by Dickey Kerr in Game Three got the Sox in the win column, but thereafter Chicago bats went silent. With heart-of-the-lineup batters Weaver, Jackson, and Felsch unproductive, baseball’s highest-scoring club went an astonishing 26 consecutive innings without scoring a run, dropping Game Four (2-0, losing pitcher Cicotte) and Game Five (5-0, losing pitcher Williams) in the process.

With the White Sox trailing 4-1 in Game Six and on the brink of elimination, Reds left fielder Pat Duncan and shortstop Larry Kopf played Weaver’s catchable sixth-inning pop fly into a double. And with that, slumbering Chicago bats suddenly came alive. A three-run Sox rally tied the score. Gritty pitching by Kerr then kept the Reds off the board until Weaver led off the tenth inning with a legitimate double. A bouncing ball single by Chick Gandil later brought him home with the run that gave the White Sox a Series-extending 5-4 triumph. The following day finally yielded the result that Series prognosticators had been expecting all along: an easy 4-1 Chicago win behind a sterling pitching performance by Eddie Cicotte.

In Game Eight, however, the World Series comeback hopes of White Sox fans were dashed early when starter Lefty Williams failed to make it out of the first inning. With the Sox in a quick four-run hole, Weaver came to bat in the bottom of the first with runners on second and third—and took a called third strike. By the eighth inning, the Reds’ lead had grown to an insurmountable 10-1. After a four-run Sox rally reduced the margin to 10-5, Weaver came to bat in the ninth with two runners on. But his lazy fly ball to right brought the Series to within an out of its close. Joe Jackson then grounded to second, making the Cincinnati Reds the World Series winner.

Although confounded by the outcome, most sportswriters accepted the Reds’ triumph magnanimously, heaping praise on the astute managing of Cincinnati skipper Pat Moran and extolling the standout work of the club’s pitching staff. Meanwhile, complacency and overconfidence were generally cited as the basis for the Sox downfall. Few blamed the likes of Joe Jackson or Buck Weaver for the Chicago defeat. Rather, Lefty Williams (0-3, 6.61 ERA), shortstop Swede Risberg (2-for-25/.080 BA, plus four fielding errors), outfielder Nemo Leibold (1-for-18/.056 BA), and manager Kid Gleason provided more logical scapegoats.

C. THE REVELATION OF WEAVER’S ROLE IN THE SERIES FIX

Suspicion that the 1919 World Series had been fixed was the subject of several post-Series columns by Hugh Fullerton. But only a handful of fellow pressmen subscribed to fix rumors and, over time, the subject faded from public consciousness. But in the Series aftermath, both White Sox club boss Charles Comiskey and American League president Ban Johnson launched discreet inquiries into the bona fides of Sox play during the Series. And neither liked what those investigations uncovered. For the time being, however, each man sat on findings that the Series had been corrupted. Meanwhile, the 1920 baseball season started, with the AL pennant race soon devolving into a tense, three-club battle between the White Sox, New York Yankees, and Cleveland Indians.

In early September, Judge Charles A. McDonald, the presiding judge of the Cook County (Chicago) criminal courts, invited a newly-impaneled grand jury to investigate the recent report that a meaningless late-August game between the Chicago Cubs and Philadelphia Phillies had been fixed by gamblers. The grand jury was also encouraged to probe Chicago’s lucrative but illegal baseball pool-selling rackets. No mention, however, was made by Judge McDonald of the previous season’s World Series.

But by the time the panel undertook a substantive look at baseball later that month, its primary focus had changed. Instigated by a private meeting between avid baseball fan McDonald and AL president Johnson, the grand jury commenced inquiry into the integrity of the 1919 World Series. And in flagrant disregard of the legal command that grand jury proceedings remain secret, panel doings were reported daily in the press.9

On September 25, 1920, it was widely reported that Comiskey had withheld the World Series checks of eight White Sox players, including that of Buck Weaver.10 Other press reports intimated that these eight players were now targeted by the grand jury for indictment on fraud-related charges.11 Two days later, the scandal dike burst with publication of a Series fix exposé in the Philadelphia North American, courtesy of local club fighter and one-time Philadelphia Phillies gofer Billy Maharg.12 Reportedly, White Sox players had thrown Games One, Two, and Eight of the 1919 World Series in return for a $100,000 payoff from gamblers.13 Within hours, wire service dispatch made the Maharg allegations known across the country.

Summoned to the office of White Sox corporation counsel Alfred S. Austrian on the morning of September 28, an unnerved Eddie Cicotte quickly broke down under questioning. According to Cicotte, the plot to rig the Series outcome in return for a payoff from gamblers was unveiled by Chick Gandil at a like-minded players-only meeting held at the Ansonia Hotel in New York City. Under pressure from Gandil, Swede Risberg, and Fred McMullin, Eddie reluctantly joined the conspiracy. Cicotte’s price was the $10,000 placed under his room pillow after a follow-up Warner Hotel meeting with fellow Sox conspirators and a pair of gamblers.14

Whisked to the Cook County Courthouse, Cicotte repeated those assertions before the grand jury that afternoon.15 Pertinent for our purposes, Cicotte identified Buck Weaver by name as one of the eight White Sox players taking part in the fix, and as attending the Warner Hotel meeting with fix gamblers.16 Immediately following Cicotte’s testimony, grand jury foreman Henry Brigham “sent for the newspaperman and in the jury’s presence announced the voting of [true] bills and the names of the players [charged].”17 Among the accused was Buck Weaver who, along with the other charged Sox players, was immediately suspended by club owner Comiskey.18

Later that day, the above exercise repeated itself with Joe Jackson. After being interrogated in the Austrian law office and thereafter confiding his culpability in the Series fix to Judge McDonald in chambers, Jackson testified before the grand jury.19 Analysis of the conflicted, often self-contradictory Jackson testimony can be found elsewhere.20 For present purposes the germane point is Jackson’s naming of Buck Weaver as a Series fix conspirator.21

Weaver strenuously denied the accusations against him, citing his solid Series batting average as “a good enough alibi.”22 But his protests were largely drowned out by deeply incriminating post-testimony statements made by Jackson to the Chicago press and by the next-day grand jury testimony of Lefty Williams.23

Like Cicotte and Jackson before him, Williams had been summoned to the Austrian office that morning. Once there, he quickly admitted his Series fix complicity. And like Cicotte and Jackson, Williams identified Chick Gandil as the fix ringleader, revealing that Chick had first importuned him outside the Ansonia Hotel. Lefty also identified Buck Weaver as a fix participant, placing Weaver at the fix meeting conducted at the Warner Hotel and at an eve-of-Game One conspirator conclave held at the Hotel Sinton in Cincinnati.24

The Hotel Sinton meeting related to a second fix proposition. This one was received from ex-major league pitcher-turned-gambler Bill Burns and former featherweight boxing champion Abe Attell, a sometimes bodyguard of New York City underworld financier Arnold Rothstein. But Williams never saw any of the $20,000 payoff that he expected from joining the Burns/Attell plot.25

 

 

Williams repeated his story before the grand jury that afternoon. But until the long-lost transcript of the Williams grand jury testimony resurfaced in 2007, it was not known to historians that Williams had expanded his account of the Warner Hotel fix meeting.26 The historical record now includes the Williams revelation that after he and the others had entertained the pitch of gamblers Sullivan and Brown, Lefty, Buck Weaver, and Happy Felsch discussed ways that Series games might be thrown during the walk back to their respective apartments. “If it became necessary to strike errors [sic] or strike out in the pinch or anything, if a critical moment arrived, strike out, boot the ball, or anything” were ways “how we would do it,” testified Williams.27

At the conclusion of the Williams testimony, the grand jury voted to indict the vaguely identified gamblers Sullivan and Brown. For purposes of clarity, readers should understand that Sullivan was Joseph “Sport” Sullivan, reputedly Boston’s biggest bookmaker. The true identity of Brown remained a mystery throughout the proceedings but Black Sox researchers now believe him to have been Nat Evans, a capable Rothstein lieutenant and junior partner in several Rothstein casino operations.

The two men likely served as emissaries of World Series fix bankroller Rothstein who funneled on the order of $80,000 through them to player ringleader Chick Gandil. Gandil then parceled out undersized portions of the payoff to corrupted Sox teammates while probably keeping the lion’s share (perhaps $35,000) of the loot for himself. This fully consummated fix is separate from the $100,000 payoff that the Burns/Attell cartel subsequently reneged on.28

With their roster decimated by player suspensions, the White Sox gamely pressed on during the season’s final week. But their outstanding final record of 96-58 (.623) was second-best to the 98-56 (.636) of the pennant-winning Cleveland Indians.29 Meanwhile, outfielder Happy Felsch became the fourth White Sox player to confess his complicity in the 1919 World Series fix. In the privacy of his home, Felsch unburdened himself to Chicago Evening American reporter Harry Reutlinger. Happy declined to name the other player conspirators but averred that everything contained in the publicly reported grand jury confession of Eddie Cicotte was the truth.30

D. THE TRIAL, ACQUITTAL, AND BANISHMENT OF THE BLACK SOX

In mid-March 1921, recently elected Cook County State’s Attorney Robert E. Crowe administratively dismissed the original indictments returned in the Black Sox case for strategic reasons. The case would be brought to trial on superseding true bills that expanded both the criminal charges and the roster of gambler defendants.31 Thereafter, Abe Attell and several other gambler defendants evaded an appearance in court by avoiding process, successfully resisting extradition, or pleading illness, while the charges against Sox infielder Fred McMullin had to be severed for trial at a later date when he did not arrive in Chicago in time for mid-June jury selection. That left Buck Weaver, six other White Sox players, and four gambler defendants in the dock when trial proceedings began.

While waiting for the Black Sox trial to commence, Commissioner Landis exercised the plenary powers granted to him by the major-league club owners when he assumed office in January. On March 24, 1921, he permanently expelled Phillies infielder Gene Paulette for suspected collusion with St. Louis gamblers in a game-fixing scheme.32 The Paulette banishment was ordered pursuant to the unfettered discretion accorded Landis to take whatever action he deemed necessary to further “the best interest of the national game of baseball.”33

After prolonged jury selection, the Black Sox criminal trial began in earnest on July 18, 1921. During those proceedings, the prosecution’s star witness was gambler defendant-turned-State’s evidence Bill Burns, who coolly recounted his part of the World Series fix over the course of three days on the witness stand. When it came to Buck Weaver, Burns identified him as one of the White Sox players in attendance at the pre-Game One fix meeting conducted at the Hotel Sinton.34 Due $40,000 after the Black Sox dumped Game Two, conspirators Chick Gandil, Eddie Cicotte, Swede Risberg, Fred McMullin, and two other Sox players whom Burns did not then recall gathered in Room 708 of the Hotel Sinton to await their payoff. But when Burns only produced $10,000—procured from cash-flush but greedy fix partner Abe Attell—Gandil angrily accused Burns of a double-cross.

Nevertheless, Chick assured him that the Black Sox would stick to the prearranged plan to lose Game Three, and Burns and Maharg bet accordingly. The hapless pair were then wiped out when Dickey Kerr pitched Chicago to an unscripted 3-0 victory.35 Later in the proceedings, Billy Maharg corroborated the Burns testimony, including the identification of Weaver as a pre-Game One fix-meeting attendee at the Hotel Sinton. Affable and seemingly guileless, Maharg was deemed a credible and effective prosecution witness by most observers.36

After a mid-trial suppression motion had been denied by the court, the prosecution also introduced in evidence the grand jury confessions of Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson, and Lefty Williams.37 Same were placed before the jurors via the reading of grand jury transcript colloquies by Special Prosecutor Edward Prindiville and grand jury stenographer Walter Smith. But here, constitutional protections and courtroom rules prohibiting the admission of hearsay evidence redounded to the benefit of Weaver and the other non-confessing accused.38 Where the grand jurors had heard Buck Weaver, Chick Gandil, et alia, identified by name as Series fix participants, the trial jurors heard only the anonym Mr. Blank wherever the name Weaver, Gandil, or others appeared in the transcripts—a process that rendered parts of the confession evidence largely unintelligible.39

At the conclusion of the prosecution case, the court dismissed the charges against gambler defendants Ben and Lou Levi on grounds of evidential insufficiency. Trial judge Hugo Friend also expressed reservation about the force of the proofs against Weaver, Felsch, and gambler Carl Zork. As a prima facie case had been presented against each, the court reluctantly allowed their prosecution to continue, but reserved the right to overturn any conviction that might be returned against them by the jury. The strength of the prosecution case against the remaining defendants, however, was manifest and not the subject of legal challenge.

Apart from gambler defendant David Zelcer, neither Buck Weaver nor any other of the accused took the stand when the defense turn came.40 For the most part, defense counsel simply stood up and rested their cases. Following brief prosecution rebuttal, two days of attorney summations, and Judge Friend’s instructions on the law, the case against the Black Sox was submitted to the jury.41 A breathless two hours and 47 minutes later, Not Guilty verdicts were returned for all defendants on all charges.42 This despite the fact that the prosecution had presented an overwhelming and unrefuted case against defendants Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams, and a strong, if more circumstantial one, against Gandil, Risberg, and Zelcer.43

A raucous defendant-juror celebration ensued in the courtroom.44 After taking a group photo of smiling defendants, defense counsel, defense supporters, and trial jurors on the courthouse steps, the Black Sox and those who had acquitted them repaired to a nearby Italian restaurant.45 There, jurors expressed both disdain of star prosecution witness Bill Burns and their affection for the erstwhile defendants.46 Stretching into the early morning hours, the player-juror revelry reportedly concluded with a rousing chorus of “Hail, Hail, The Gang’s All Here!”47

The celebration proved short-lived. Within hours of the rendering of the jury’s verdict, Commissioner Landis promulgated his edict permanently banning the eight accused-but-acquitted White Sox players from all professional baseball affiliated with his major leagues.48

E. CIVIL LITIGATION REVELATIONS

In March 1921, Charles Comiskey officially severed all connection with the Black Sox, terminating their contracts with the club and unconditionally releasing all eight banished players. In time, four of these ballplayers instituted lawsuits against the White Sox corporation. The first was a breach-of-contract action filed by Buck Weaver which sought payment of his $7,250 salary for the 1921 season, his withheld 1919 World Series share, and other damages totaling $20,000.49 More expansive lawsuits against the White Sox were thereafter filed in Milwaukee on behalf of Happy Felsch, Joe Jackson, and Swede Risberg.50

Although the lawsuits were lodged in different court venues, it was agreed that any evidence developed during the pretrial discovery period would be admissible in all proceedings. This produced developments little noted at the time but facially dispositive of the “Weaver as innocent fix bystander” claim if deemed credible: the civil trial depositions of Bill Burns and Billy Maharg.

Interrogated under oath in Chicago on October 5, 1922, Burns repeated his familiar account of fix-related events, but with one major addition—an expanded account of his delivery of the post-Game Two player payoff at the Hotel Sinton. This time when Burns related the events, he named Buck Weaver among the seven White Sox awaiting his arrival in Room 708.51 And Weaver was named as present when the $10,000 (of the $40,000 then due) was counted out on the bed by Chick Gandil.52

When deposed in Philadelphia on December 16, 1922, Billy Maharg provided corroboration of Burns’s account. Although Maharg had not accompanied Burns to Room 708 for the fix payoff, when Burns had returned to their hotel room, the two had spoken about the delivery of the $10,000 and the players’ angry reaction to the shortchange. And Maharg averred that Burns had specifically mentioned Buck Weaver by name as being among those present when the payoff was delivered.53

F. THE CAMPAIGN TO REHABILITATE BUCK WEAVER

Of the civil lawsuits, the Joe Jackson suit was the only one litigated to a verdict. But the Black Sox Scandal was old news by the time Jackson’s case came to trial in January 1924, and little, if any, press notice was taken of the deposition revelations of Bill Burns and Billy Maharg.54 And those depositions did nothing to slow a simmering campaign to rehabilitate the image of Buck Weaver.

Although pleas and petitions for reinstatement by Weaver himself to Commissioner Landis were repeatedly rejected, Buck gained some traction pleading his cause to the press. Newfound Weaver advocates in the Fourth Estate included nationally syndicated sports columnist Westbrook Pegler, who declared that “Buck Weaver was the victim of a singularly hypocritical deal in the reform that followed the [Black Sox] exposé. … Weaver was lynched because he just happened to be standing around the corner when the posse came yelling along with a rope.”55

Sportswriter John Lardner opined that “Joe Jackson and Buck Weaver were guilty of no more than thoughtlessness, under strong provocation.”56 Arguments for Weaver’s pardon, however, were invariably premised on the notion that Weaver had only been culpable of having “guilty knowledge” of the fix. Buck had not participated in the throwing of Series games. Nor had he received any type of fix payoff presumed Weaver’s press defenders.

Endorsement of that position came from a curious quarter: Black Sox gambler defendant Abe Attell. Attell had avoided removal to Chicago via extradition proceedings that bordered on courtroom farce.57 He then escaped prosecution altogether when Cook County State’s Attorney Crowe later administratively dismissed the indictments still pending against Attell and the other fugitive accused.58“I am not telling all I know, but an injustice was done Weaver when he was barred with the other players,” Attell confided to a Minneapolis sportswriter in 1934. “I know positively that Buck refused to be a party to the deal and never accepted the money proffered to him. … I always have felt sorry for Weaver,” Attell continued. “I wrote a number of letters to Judge Landis in which I explained Weaver’s innocence, but of course the judge wouldn’t take my word for anything.”59

Attell would continue sporadic efforts to clear Weaver over the next thirty years (while cashing in on diminishing interest in the Black Sox Scandal for his own benefit). This included a factually dubious first-person scandal account published in the October 1961 issue of the cheesecake magazine Cavalier.60 Here, Attell once again absolved Weaver of fix involvement.

But publication of the Attell yarn had been preceded by an equally suspect first-person scandal exposé that kneecapped the Weaver cause: “This Is My Story of the Black Sox Series” by Arnold (Chick) Gandil as told to Mel Durslag.61 Appearing in the high-circulation weekly Sports Illustrated, the Gandil account placed Buck Weaver among the White Sox players recruited by Eddie Cicotte and Chick for the original World Series fix proposed by Sport Sullivan. “Weaver suggested we get paid [the promised $10,000 per player] in advance. Then if things got too hot, we could double cross the gambler and also take the big end of the Series cut by beating the Reds. We all agreed this was a hell of a plan.”62

Weaver was also an enthusiastic backer of the second fix proposition offered by Bill Burns. “We might as well take his money, too,” quipped Buck, “and go to hell with all of them.”63 But Gandil further maintained that the players had gotten cold feet before the Series started and never went through with the fix. Still, he accepted that in being permanently banished from baseball, the Black Sox “got what we had coming.”64

However improbable and unnoticed, the Attell article in Cavalier netted the Weaver rehab campaign an unanticipated benefactor. The piece had been ghostwritten by novelist and television screenwriter Eliot Asinof. And in short order, Asinof became Buck Weaver’s foremost champion. In his seminal 1963 scandal book Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series, Asinof portrayed Weaver as “a ferocious bulldog to the Cincinnati Reds” who had spurned overtures to join the Series conspiracy and came to be regarded as “the enemy” by fix ringleader Gandil. But “Weaver didn’t care: He was there to play ball.”65

When Eight Men Out was converted into a movie 25 years later, co-screenwriter Asinof and film director John Sayles elevated Buck Weaver to the role of the wrongfully accused hero of the drama, equipping him with fictional street urchins to whom Weaver could express his bewilderment and anguish over the poor World Series play of teammates. Toward the end of the film, Asinof and Sayles also inserted a make-believe courtroom soliloquy that allowed Weaver to proclaim his innocence regarding the Series fix.66 And lest the audience somehow mistake the film’s position on Buck, Asinof proclaimed to movie reviewers that “Weaver was a total innocent. The only thing he did wrong was not rat on his buddies. He never took a dime.”67

Release of the 8MO film in 1988 was probably the high-water mark of the Buck Weaver rehabilitation effort, its heroic portrayal shaping the lasting public perception of Weaver. Shortly thereafter came a friendly, if little-read, Weaver biography, and submission of a strenuously argued if factually selective petition for Weaver’s posthumous reinstatement crafted by Chicago attorney Louis Hegeman.68,69 Baseball commissioner Fay Vincent, however, declined to entertain the application, deeming “matters such as this are best left to historical analysis and debate.”70

As a new century unfolded, Weaver’s cause was adopted by some in the Black Sox Scandal research community, including SABR Black Sox Committee founder Gene Carney. In Carney’s view, Buck “gave his best effort in every [Series] game … and was banned nevertheless for having ‘guilty knowledge’ of the fix and failing to inform his club.”71

 

 

G. THE OPPOSING VIEWPOINT RESURFACES

Those with an unsympathetic take on Buck Weaver mostly remained silent during the campaign to rehabilitate him. But the 2007 recovery of the Lefty Williams grand jury transcript and its incriminatory addenda to the Warner Hotel meeting provided new evidence of Weaver’s culpability in the Series fix. But perhaps far more crippling to the Weaver cause was renewed examination of White Sox play during the 1920 season.

At the time that the Black Sox scandal erupted in late-September 1920, contemporaneous concern about the integrity of Sox play that season had been expressed by various observers. During the close, three-way 1920 pennant race, Sox wins and losses seemed to coincide with how their principal rivals were faring on the scoreboard, and Yankees shortstop Roger Peckinpaugh later maintained that the accused players “were monkeying around so much that year you never could be sure” if they were playing on the level.72

White Sox captain Eddie Collins had no such doubts, attributing crucial Chicago losses to Buck Weaver and Eddie Cicotte. “The last series at Boston and New York was the rawest thing I ever saw,” Collins complained in late October 1920. “If the gamblers didn’t have Weaver and Cicotte in their pockets then I don’t know anything about baseball.”73 Dickey Kerr evidently felt the same way. During an important late-season game against Boston, Weaver muffed a force-out throw from Kerr. When the inning was over, the pitcher walked over to Buck and shortstop Swede Risberg and told them, “If you’d told me you wanted to lose this game, I could of done it a lot easier.” Scuffles between antagonistic Sox player groups thereupon ensued.74

As the centenary of the 1919 World Series approached, scandal scholars returned attention to the White Sox 1920 season. In 2016, Bruce Allardice, the SABR Black Sox Committee’s in-house expert on scandal gamblers, undertook a study of the Sox campaign. Surveying contemporary press reports, Allardice discovered that virtually every uncorrupted White Sox player had expressed misgivings or worse about the integrity of their accused teammates’ play during 1920. In the end, Allardice’s scrutiny of Black Sox player field performance led him to conclude that “the Sox threw games—at a minimum three, and perhaps as many as a dozen—in 1920.”75

More recently, a deep dive into the 1920 White Sox season was taken by baseball analyst Don Zminda.76 He, too, uncovered much evidence of dishonest work by Black Sox players. His review of games involving suspect play, however, rarely focused on Weaver individually, and Zminda ultimately rendered an equivocal judgment on Buck: “Weaver’s loyalty to his crooked teammates—and his performance in the games during the 1920 season that seem most likely to have been fixed—don’t exactly put him beyond suspicion.”77

ANALYSIS REVEALS BUCK WEAVER WAS ACTIVE IN THE FIX

Buck Weaver sympathizers have much in common with those who support the cause of Shoeless Joe Jackson. Both Weaver and Jackson were outstanding ballplayers and, by all accounts, nice men. The two also shared a deep love of baseball and were at or near their playing peaks when banished from the game. As for the 1919 World Series, Weaver and Jackson superficially appeared to hit well, both posting Series batting averages over .300. And from the time of their expulsion in 1921 until their deaths in the 1950s, Weaver and Jackson doggedly insisted that they were innocent of participation in the fix of the Series.

Buck Weaver and Joe Jackson have one more thing in common: a historical record containing near overwhelming evidence of their guilt in the Black Sox affair. That said, the cases against the two are not identical. (See the Spring 2019 issue of the Baseball Research Journal for this writer’s brief for the prosecution in the Jackson case.78)

Our point of departure on Weaver is, perhaps, an unlikely one: the content of the Landis banishment edict, particularly its condemnation of players who sit in conference with crooked ballplayers and gamblers intent on fixing baseball games and who do not report it to their clubs. It is universally agreed that Landis specifically directed this so-called “guilty knowledge” clause of his edict at Buck Weaver. What is mistaken is the long-prevailing notion that the grounds for Weaver’s expulsion were necessarily confined to his guilty knowledge of the Series fix.

In law, judicial rulings—and Commissioner Landis remained a sitting federal district court judge at the time he issued his Black Sox banishment order—are often couched in the alternative. This arguendo or “even if” aspect of decisions affords the court a fallback basis for the outcome in the event that its primary grounds are found faulty or inadequate upon appellate review.

In the Black Sox case, the belief that the expulsion of Buck Weaver was premised exclusively on his guilty knowledge of the Series fix is erroneous. As reflected in his denial of a 1927 Weaver reinstatement petition, Landis clearly deemed Weaver an active participant in Series corruption.79 Among other things, Landis cited Weaver’s incrimination in the grand jury testimony of Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson, and Lefty Williams, and Weaver’s making “common cause [at trial] with these three players who had implicated you” in game-throwing.80

Also cited by Landis was the trial testimony of “witness [Bill Burns] who acted as an agent between gamblers and the crooked players, arranging the fixing of the Series, and he also named you as one of the participants. Thus, there is on the record the sworn testimony of four admitted participants in the ‘fixing’ that you were implicated.”81 And finally, Landis disabused Weaver of the notion the jury’s Not Guilty verdict “exonerated you and the other defendants of game fixing.”82 As far as Landis was concerned, it did not. Viewed in this light, the “guilty knowledge” clause of the banishment edict represents no more than Landis’s fallback basis for the Weaver expulsion. First and foremost, Landis expelled Weaver as a World Series fixer.

As with Joe Jackson, Weaver supporters invariably cite his .324 Series batting average as proof-positive of his fix non-involvement. But again like Jackson, the stats argument is a malleable one, and just as easily susceptible to sinister construction.83 As for clean-up batter Jackson, most of his gaudy .375 BA/team-high six RBI statistical line was compiled after Game Five, the outermost limit of the fix in the mind of many Black Sox aficionados. Prior to that, Joe was hitless with runners on base and failed to drive in any runs.

If Jackson’s bat became dangerous toward the Series’ close, Weaver’s remained harmless throughout. Batting third in the lineup, Buck came to the plate 13 times with teammates on base—and produced zero RBIs. While he managed four singles in those at-bats (.308), the hits did little damage. As previously mentioned, Buck was next-to-useless with runners in scoring position. Here, Weaver’s batting lowlights included a fly out with Shano Collins on second in the first inning of Game Seven and grounding into a double play with two more teammates on base in the third frame, his aforementioned called third strike in Game Eight, as well as the fly to right for the second-to-last out of the Series, snuffing a last-ditch rally.

As for affirmative proof of Weaver’s active participation in the Series fix, the historical record reeks of it. Before the grand jury, Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams all specifically named Weaver as a fix conspirator. This is telling because, whatever their shortcomings, none of the three were malicious men or “had it in” for Weaver. To the contrary, all three were on friendly terms with Buck. More to the point, no evidence that Cicotte, Jackson, or Williams accused Weaver falsely has ever been uncovered—because none exists.

Weaver supporters concede Buck’s presence at the pre-Series fix meetings conducted at the Ansonia (New York), Warner (Chicago), and Sinton (Cincinnati) hotels that Cicotte and Williams told the grand jury about. The question therefore arises: If Weaver was as resolutely uninterested in joining the fix plot as Asinof, Sayles, and other champions maintain, why did Weaver attend a second fix meeting, this one with gamblers? Or a third, also with gamblers—and on the eve of Game One? Arguably, peer pressure, camaraderie, and/or curiosity may provide an excuse for Weaver’s attendance at the initial fix gathering. But after that, no. The only plausible explanation for Buck’s presence at follow-up meetings is that he was very much interested in getting a piece of the fix action.

The criminal trial produced more evidence of Weaver’s complicity as gamblers Burns and Maharg testified that Weaver was in on it. At the risk of overkill, Weaver’s participation in the fix can also be inferred from Felsch’s admission that the widely publicized grand jury testimony of Cicotte was the truth, and by the stated belief of post-Game Three fix revival gamblers Harry Redmon and Joe Pesch that seven White Sox regulars and one substitute player were fix participants.84 Doing the math here is just one more thing that puts Buck Weaver in the fix.

Decades after the fact, Chick Gandil’s Sports Illustrated reminiscences raised the number of Series fix collaborators who implicated Buck Weaver to nine—six of whom cited Weaver by name (Cicotte, Jackson, Williams, Burns, Maharg, and Gandil), three by inference (Felsch, Redmon, and Pesch). And they all accused Buck of more than just having “guilty knowledge.” These insiders portrayed Weaver as an active participant in the plot to throw the 1919 World Series.

Another Weaver talking point—the absence of evidence that he received payment for fix participation—is largely illusory, as proving a negative is always problematic.85 More instructive here is evidence that Weaver was among the Sox players who threw games during the 1920 season, with Clean Sox Eddie Collins and Dickey Kerr making specific charges of game-throwing that season against Buck. The question then arises: Would Weaver have done gamblers’ bidding in 1920 if he had not received payment for his efforts on their behalf in the previous year’s World Series? The question seemingly answers itself.

Lastly, if deemed credible, the civil case depositions of Burns and Maharg drive the final nail into the Weaver coffin. According to Burns, after the Black Sox had dumped Game Two, the corrupted players (save Joe Jackson) gathered in Room 708 of the Hotel Sinton for an expected $40,000 payoff. But Burns only delivered $10,000, a shortchange that angered the players and caused their separation from the second (Burns-Attell) World Series fix.

Burns’s placement of Weaver in attendance at that payoff gathering was corroborated by sidekick Maharg. In his deposition, Maharg distinctly remembered Burns mentioning Weaver as one of the players in attendance. With the Black Sox criminal proceedings concluded and the two in no kind of legal jeopardy, there is no apparent reason why Burns, and especially Maharg, would have lied about the incident when deposed in 1922. Needless to say, if the Burns and Maharg depositions are believed, Buck Weaver has no defense—as there can be no innocent explanation for his presence in Room 708 at the time of the fix payoff.

PERMANENT EXPULSION WAS THE APPROPRIATE SANCTION

There was ample precedent for the lifetime banishment of ballplayers engaged in game-fixing,86 and expulsion was the sanction compelled for game-fixing by the American League Constitution.87 In the Weaver case, once Commissioner Landis determined that Buck had actively participated in the plot to rig the 1919 World Series, his permanent expulsion from the game was mandatory. The Weaver banishment was further warranted under the “best interests” command of the Commissioner’s duties. As even Weaver supporters cannot dispute, the provision of the Landis edict that imposed banishment on ballplayers who “sit in conference” with those hatching game-fixing schemes had salutary deterrent effect. After the Weaver expulsion, game-fixing virtually disappeared from the American and National Leagues.88

In the final analysis, the historical evidence of Buck Weaver’s participation in the fix of the 1919 Series is as strong as it is regrettable. And if corruption of the World Series, the game’s ultimate event, would not warrant expulsion, then what would? So, to paraphrase Chick Gandil, with banishment Buck got what he had coming. In the end, much like Joe Jackson, Weaver presents a sad figure, but hardly an innocent one. 

BILL LAMB spent more than 30 years as a state/county prosecutor in New Jersey, retiring in 2007. He served as editor of The Inside Game, the quarterly newsletter of the Deadball Era Committee, from 2012 to 2022, and has contributed articles to various SABR publications including the Baseball Research Journal, The National Pastime, and the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee newsletter. Bill is also the 2019 recipient of the Bob Davids Award, SABR’s highest honor. He lives with his wife Barbara in Meredith, New Hampshire, and can be contacted via wflamb12@yahoo.com.

 

Notes

1. As quoted in the Boston Globe, Hartford Courant, and elsewhere, March 13, 1921.

2. As reported in newspapers nationwide, August 3, 1921.

3. Robert L. Tiemann, “Major League Attendance,” Total Baseball (Kingston, NY: Total Sports Publishing, 7th ed., 2001), 75.

4. Following the early 1918 season departure of Lefty Williams and back-up catcher Byrd Lynn for defense plant work, the vocally patriotic Chisox boss sneered, “I don’t even consider them fit to play on my club.” See “Comiskey Wipes 2 Shipbuilders Off Sox Roster,” Chicago Tribune, June 12, 1918, 11. Later, Comiskey was reported as vowing to use “every ounce of my strength and the last cent I have” to keep defense plant jumpers Joe Jackson, Happy Felsch, and Williams “out of organized baseball forever.” See “Shipyard Ballplayers Will Never Get Back, Says Comiskey,” Salt Lake Telegram, September 17, 1918, 4.

5. See Fangraphs Leaderboards, 1919: https://www.fangraphs.com/leaders.aspx?pos=all&stats=bat&lg=all&qual=0&type=8&season=1919&month=0&season1=1919&ind=0&team=0%2Cts&rost=0&age=0&filter=&players=0&startdate=1919-01-01&enddate=1919-12-31&sort=20%2Cd.

6. Early Series odds ranged from 10-7 to 8-5 in White Sox favor, with comparably little money being bet on the Reds. For detailed analysis of the betting odds on the 1919 World Series, see Kevin P. Braig, “Don’t Believe the Dope: Few Saw Fix Coming,” Black Sox Scandal Research Committee Newsletter, Vol. 11, No. 1 (June 2019), 20-32.

7. As recounted by Rick Huhn in Eddie Collins: A Baseball Biography (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2008), 152. The original source of the incident is an article by syndicated sportswriter Joe Williams published in the New York Telegraph, July 10, 1943.

8. Johnson and McDonald were longtime acquaintances, and Johnson had previously floated McDonald’s name as a candidate for a vacant position on the National Commission, the three-man governing body prior to the anointment of US District Court Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis as baseball commissioner in November 1920. A Landis biographer places the McDonald-Johnson meeting at Edgewater Golf Club on the outskirts of Chicago. See David Pietrusza, Judge and Jury: The Life and Times of Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis (South Bend, IN: Diamond Communications, Inc., 1998), 164.

9. The only justification offered for this egregious breach of black letter law was the belated pronouncement that “officials of Chief Justice McDonald’s court, desirous of giving the national game the benefit of publicity in its purging, lifted the curtain on the grand jury proceedings,” per the Associated Press wire and published nationally. See e.g., “Two White Sox Players Confess; 8 Are Indicted; Comiskey Cleans Out Team,” Baltimore Sun, September 29, 1920, 1, and “Officials Give Publicity to Purging of Game,” Grand Forks (North Dakota) Herald, September 29, 1920, 1.

10. See e.g., “Jury Convinced Crooked Work Was Done by Players in League with Gamblers,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 25, 1920, 14; “More White Sox Players Involved in 1919 Scandal,” Salt Lake Tribune, September 25, 1920, 10; “Scandal in Baseball Ranks,” Washington (DC) Post, September 25, 1920, 10.

11. See e.g., “Name of Baseball ‘Fixer’ Is Known by Grand Jury,” Boston Globe, September 25, 1920, 4.

12. Maharg is identified as an assistant trainer in a 1916 Philadelphia Phillies team photo and he played an inning in the Phils outfield in the final game that season. Earlier in 1912, the athletic Maharg had been a one-game replacement at third base during a brief Detroit Tigers players strike.

13. James C. Isaminger, “Philadelphia Gambler Tells of Deal with Chicago Players to Lose Series,” Philadelphia North American, September 27, 1920, 1.

14. Per the transcript of the Cicotte statement given at the Austrian law office, September 28, 1920, and viewable online via the invaluable Black Betsy website. Readers should note, however, that the posted transcript is an abridged eight-paragraph version of the Austrian-Cicotte interview. A complete, unabridged account of the interview is not available.

15. In so doing, however, Cicotte endeavored to minimize his fix participation, presenting a significantly different picture of his own culpability as compared to the abject admissions that he had made earlier in the day at the Austrian office. For comparison and analysis of these differing Series fix confessions, see Bill Lamb, “Reluctant Go-Along or Fix Ringleader? Analysis of Eddie Cicotte’s Role in the Corruption of the 1919 World Series,” Black Sox Scandal Research Committee Newsletter, Vol. 12, No. 2 (December 2020), 3-9.

16. Like much of the Black Sox record, the transcript of Eddie Cicotte’s grand jury testimony has been lost. A “Synopsis of Testimony of Edward V. Cicotte,” however, is among the scandal artifacts contained in the Black Sox collection at the Chicago History Museum. In all probability, this 24-paragraph synopsis of the Cicotte testimony was created by Assistant State’s Attorney Hartley Replogle or fellow Black Sox grand jury prosecutor Ota P. Lightfoot.

17. Per “Eight of White Sox Indicted,” Chicago Dally News, September 28, 1920, 1. The public disclosure of charges prior to the completion of the probe was highly unorthodox and ran counter to lead grand jury prosecutor Replogle’s previously stated preference that “all indictments … be returned in a bunch” when the inquiry concluded. Chicago Evening Post, September 28, 1920.

18. As reported in “Jackson and Cicotte Admit Guilt; Cleveland Almost Sure of Pennant,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, September 29, 1920, 1; “Comiskey Pulls Down Pennant Hopes to Steady Game’s Foundations,” Tampa Morning Herald, September 29, 1920, 7; and elsewhere.

19. The Jackson admissions in chambers were not memorialized, but testifying at the Jackson civil lawsuit against the White Sox in early 1924, Judge McDonald named Buck Weaver as one of the fix conspirators identified privately by Jackson to him. Transcript of Jackson civil trial, 552.

20. A detailed account of the Jackson grand jury testimony is provided by the writer in Black Sox in the Courtroom: The Grand Jury, Criminal Trial and Civil Litigation (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 2013), 52-54, and “An Ever-Changing Story: Exposition and Analysis of Shoeless Joe Jackson’s Public Statements on the Black Sox Scandal,” Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 48, No. 1 (Spring 2019), 38-40.

21. Transcript of Jackson grand jury testimony at 20-3 to 7.

22. As quoted in the Boston Globe and The New York Times, September 29, 1920. Weaver mistakenly gave his Series batting average as .333. He actually batted .324.

23. Among other things, Jackson complained about receiving only $5,000 of the $20,000 promised him for joining the Series fix and declared that “the eight of us did our best” to lose Game Three but were thwarted by the shutout pitching of “little Dick Kerr. … Because he won it, the gamblers double crossed us because we double crossed them,” first reported in the Chicago Daily Journal and Chicago Tribune, September 29, 1920.

24. Statement of Claude “Lefty” Williams, September 29, 1920, viewable online at www.famoustrials.com/blacksox, and elsewhere.

25. During his grand jury testimony, Williams stated that he received $10,000 from Chick Gandil the night before Game Five and that he gave half the money to Joe Jackson back at their hotel. Transcript of grand jury testimony of Claude Williams at 27-10 to 16. This money presumably emanated from the original Series fix arranged with Rothstein agents Sullivan and Brown.

26. The Williams grand jury transcript was among the scandal artifacts obtained at auction by the Chicago History Museum in December 2007. Although not publicly disclosed, the document’s source is presumed to be the successor of the law firm of White Sox corporation counsel Alfred S. Austrian.

27. Williams grand jury transcript at 29-26 to 30-7. Prior to the recovery of the Williams grand jury transcript, many scandal researchers simply supposed that the content of the Williams testimony was identical to the long-available statement that he had given in the Austrian law office.

28. The Burns/Attell group included Burns’s friend Billy Maharg and Des Moines gambler David Zelcer, with recently cashiered NY Giants first baseman Hal Chase facilitating matters. A nebulous post-Game Three fix revival effort orchestrated by St. Louis gamblers Carl Zork and Ben Franklin is yet another entry in World Series fix scenarios.

29. The excellent 95-59 (.617) record of the New York Yankees was good for no better than third place in the tight AL pennant chase of 1920. But the record-shattering 54 home runs swatted by Yanks pitcher- turned-everyday outfielder Babe Ruth that season would revolutionize the way that the game was played.

30. “I Got Mine, $5,000—Felsch,” Chicago Evening American, September 30, 1929, 1.

31. In addition to reindicting all the previously named defendants, the March 1921, superseding indictments made Midwestern tinhorns David Zelcer, Carl Zork, Benjamin Franklin, and Ben and Lou Levi answerable to the charges.

32. As reported in the Chicago Tribune, The New York Times, and newspapers nationwide, March 25, 1921.

33. See Pietrusza, Judge and Jury, 173-74.

34. As is the case with the grand jury minutes, only fragments of the Black Sox criminal trial record survive. But extensive verbatim excerpts of the Burns testimony were published in the press. See e.g., “Burns Reveals Further Facts in Series Plot,” (Indianapolis) Indiana Times, July 20, 1921, 8; “World’s Series Made to Order,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 20, 1921, 14.

35. As reported nationwide. See e.g., “Story of How Chicago Players Double- Crossed Gamblers When They Failed to Receive Bribe Money Is Revealed by Bill Burns on the Witness Stand,” Casper (Wyoming) Daily Tribune, July 21, 1921, 4; “Burns Admits on Stand to Being Stakeholder in Baseball Conspiracy,” San Francisco Chronicle, July 20, 1921, 14.

36. According to Eliot Asinof, Maharg was “an articulate witness [who] added a strong layer of testimony to the State’s already strong case.” Eight Men Out: The Black Sox and the 1919 World Series (New York: Henry Holt, 1963), 202.

37. No claim that the grand jury transcripts were inaccurate or unreliable was asserted by the defense. Rather, suppression was sought on the ground that the Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams grand jury testimony had been induced by broken, off-the-record promises of immunity. With questioning strictly limited to events occurring in and around the grand jury room, defendants Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams testified in support of the application out of the jury’s presence. In response, former ASA Replogle and Judge McDonald countered that no such inducement had been offered. In denying the motion, trial judge Hugo Friend necessarily decided this swearing contest in favor of the prosecution witnesses.

38. Although it would be decades before the protections of the Sixth Amendment’s Confrontation Clause would be applicable in state court prosecutions, the analogous provision in the Illinois State Constitution of 1870 shielded the non-confessing Black Sox defendants from the Cicotte/Jackson/Williams confessions.

39. As reported in newspapers across the country. See e.g., “Technicalities Galore Raised,” Grand Island (Nebraska) Daily Independent, July 26, 1921, 3; “Baseball Trial Goes by Spasms, Ogden (Utah) Standard- Examiner, July 26, 1921, 6. This editing process is known as redaction and was required by Judge Friend before the prosecution could utilize the Cicotte, Jackson, and Williams grand jury testimony before the trial jury.

40. The defenses of Chick Gandil and Carl Zork presented proof but neither Zork nor Gandil testified.

41. A prosecution attempt to belatedly introduce the Felsch newspaper confession as rebuttal evidence was rejected by Judge Friend—the court ruling that this damning proof should have been offered during the prosecution’s case-in-chief.

42. The Associated Press reported that jurors spent more time on mechanical chores like affixing their 12 signatures to multiple separate verdict sheets than they did deliberating on the proofs. See e.g., “‘Black Sox’ Doomed,” Bellingham (Washington) Herald, August 3, 1921, 7.

43. In previous works this writer has postulated that certain of the acquittals were the product of a rare but dread courthouse phenomenon known as jury nullification. See e.g., “Jury Nullification and the Not Guilty Verdicts in the Black Sox Case,” Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 44, No. 2 (Fall 2015), 47-56.

44. Jurors paraded around the courtroom with several of the player defendants on their shoulders, as reported in the Atlanta Constitution, The New York Times, and elsewhere, August 3, 1921.

45. Well known to Black Sox researchers, the group photo on the courthouse steps was originally published in the Chicago Tribune, August 3, 1921.

46. As reported in the Des Moines Evening Times and Los Angeles Times, August 3, 1921.

47. Per the Des Moines Evening Times and Los Angeles Herald Examiner, August 3, 1921.

48. Although occupied by his duties as a Chicago federal district court judge during the Black Sox trial, Landis had kept close watch over the proceedings via the trial transcript delivered daily to his chambers, as reported by the Chicago Evening Post, August 3, 1921. In banishing the Black Sox, Landis applied the precedent recently established by Pacific Coast League expulsion of ballplayers who had had game-fixing criminal charges dismissed by a Los Angeles court on statutory construction grounds.

49. The Weaver lawsuit was filed in the Chicago Municipal Court by attorneys Charles A. Williams and Julian C. Ryerson on October 18, 1921. Days later, the action was transferred to federal district court on diversity of citizenship grounds, the defendant White Sox having been incorporated in Wisconsin.

50. The Felsch lawsuit was instituted on February 9, 1922, while the Jackson and Risberg cases were filed on May 12, 1922. Representing all three plaintiffs was young firebrand Milwaukee attorney Raymond J. Cannon, a one-time semipro teammate of Happy Felsch.

51. Of the Black Sox, only Joe Jackson was absent from the room.

52. Deposition of Bill Burns as admitted in evidence at the early 1924 trial of the Jackson civil lawsuit. See Jackson trial transcript at 695-98.

53. Deposition of Billy Maharg. See Jackson trial transcript at 730-34.

54. A $16,000+ civil jury award in Jackson’s favor was promptly vacated by the trial judge who ruled that the judgment was based on perjured testimony. The suit was later quietly settled out of court for a pittance. A similar outcome attended the other actions. For more on the Black Sox civil litigation, see again William F. Lamb, Black Sox in the Courtroom, 149-98.

55. Westbrook Pegler, “Nobody’s Business: Great Chance Reporters Muffed,” Omaha World-Herald, November 13, 1932, 25.

56. John Lardner, “Hall of Fame Contenders Include Baseball Outlaws,” Springfield (Massachusetts) Republican, January 22, 1938, 10.

57. Among other things, Attell defense counsel William J. Fallon shamelessly argued that there were actually two Abe Attells and that prosecutors were trying to extradite the wrong one. Perhaps more effectively, Fallon also bribed the prosecution’s principal extradition witness (Chisox groupie Sam Pass) into testifying that the Abe Attell in court was not the gambler with whom he had placed high-stakes World Series wagers.

58. The outstanding indictments against defendants Attell, Fred McMullin, Sport Sullivan, Hal Chase, and Rachael Brown were dismissed by SA Crowe only days after the Not Guilty verdicts had been returned in court.

59. George A. Barton, “Sportsgraphs: Abe Attell Absolves Buck Weaver,” Minneapolis Tribune, April 27, 1934, 30.

60. Abe Attell, “The Truth Behind the World Series Fix,” Cavalier, October 1961, 9-13, 89-90.

61. Sports Illustrated, September 17, 1956.

62. Gandil, Sports Illustrated, above.

63. Gandil, Sports Illustrated, above.

64. Gandil, Sports Illustrated, above.

65. Asinof, Eight Men Out, 63.

66. In previous writings, this writer has dissected 8MO’s historically unreliable treatment of the Black Sox saga, with particular scorn reserved for the fabrications of the movie version. See e.g., “Based on a True Story: Eliot Asinof, John Sayles, and the Fictionalization of the Black Sox Scandal,” The Inside Game, Vol. XIX, No. 3 (June 2019), 35-43, and the 8MO historical errata catalogue appended to the Black Sox Scandal Research Committee’s online Eight Myths Out project. See also, Bill Lamb, “1919: A Loss of Innocence and a Few Key Facts,” Black Sox Scandal Research Committee Newsletter, Vol. 13, No. 2 (December 2021), 11-16.

67. As quoted in Ed Sherman, “Chicago Strikes Out,” Chicago Tribune, August 21, 1988, 288.

68. Irving M. Stein, The Ginger Kid: The Buck Weaver Story (Dubuque, IA: Brown & Benchmark, 1993).

69. Commentary on the Hegeman petition is provided in “Amnesty for Black Sox Third Baseman?” Wall Street Journal, January 17, 1992.

70. Same as above, quoting a December 12, 1991, letter from the commissioner’s office to Hegeman.

71. Gene Carney, Burying the Black Sox: How Baseball’s Cover-Up of the 1919 World Series Fix Almost Succeeded (Washington, DC: Potomac Books, 2006), 209.

72. As quoted by Donald Honig in The Man in the Dugout: Fifteen Big League Managers Speak Their Minds (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 1977), 216.

73. Frank O. Klein, “Collins Charges 1920 Games ‘Fixed,’” Collyer’s Eye, October 30, 1920, 5.

74. As related in Kuhn, Eddie Collins, 172. The incident was originally revealed in a 1924 article published in Baseball Magazine.

75. Bruce S. Allardice, “‘Playing Rotten, It Ain’t That Hard to Do’: How the Black Sox Threw the 1920 Pennant,” Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 45, No. 1 (Spring 2016). The article title quotes Happy Felsch.

76. Don Zminda, Double Plays and Double Crosses: The Black Sox and Baseball in 1920 (Lanham, Maryland: Rowman & Littlefield, 2021).

77. Zminda, Double Plays and Double Crosses, 270.

78. See again, Lamb, “An Ever-Changing Story.”

79. The Landis ruling is re-produced verbatim by Daniel E. Ginsburg in The Fix Is In: A History of Baseball Gambling and Game Fixing Scandals (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co., 1995), 148.

80. Ginsburg, The Fix Is In, 148.

81. Ginsburg, The Fix Is In, 148. Billy Maharg, a fifth witness directly implicating Weaver in the Series fix, went unmentioned by Landis.

82. Ginsburg, The Fix Is In, 148.

83. Analysis of Joe Jackson’s World Series stats appears in Lamb, “An Ever-Changing Story,” 45.

84. According to the grand jury testimony of Redmon and St. Louis Browns second baseman Joe Gedeon (a personal friend of Swede Risberg) the fix-revival meeting was conducted at the Sherman Hotel in Chicago and chaired by subsequently indicted St. Louis gamblers Carl Zork and Ben Franklin. The meeting’s intelligence that seven White Sox regulars and one substitute player were in on the fix was provided by the Levi brothers, also among those indicted.

85. This writer entirely discounts the putative, double-hearsay grand jury testimony attributed to Dr. Raymond Prettyman, the Weaver family dentist. Same concerned a package of cash supposedly delivered to the Weaver home by Fred McMullin. Both Weaver and McMullin denied the allegation, and it is unclear if Prettyman ever made it in the first place.

86. Expulsion of players engaged in game-fixing dated back to 1865. See John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 127-29. See also, Thorn, “Our Game: Baseball’s Bans and Blacklist,” February 8, 2016.

87. Adopted on February 16, 1910, the American League Constitution mandated the expulsion of any franchise that failed to terminate a player who had conspired to throw a league game.

88. Landis’s swift expulsions of Phil Douglas (1922), Jimmy O’Connell and Cozy Dolan (1924) provided the coda on game-fixing in the majors.