On Wednesday afternoon, June 17, 1953, at Milwaukee’s County Stadium, Warren Spahn, one of baseball’s greatest left-handed pitchers, was on the mound for the Milwaukee Braves to take on the visiting Philadelphia Phillies. While the veteran Spahn already had a celebrated career with four 20-plus-win seasons, this was only his third start in Milwaukee. Spahn had pitched in Boston for the previous decade for a franchise that dated back to 1871. The club had suddenly and unceremoniously announced its move to Milwaukee during spring training, ending 82 years of a National League club in Boston. While there was excitement in the Brew City over its new franchise, which would lead the NL in attendance and see a World Series title in 1957, there was the empty shell of Braves Field in Boston and the now-forgotten landmark where the South End Grounds once stood amid the roar of streetcars.

Probably few fans noticed the presence of a guest from Oregon who came to watch the Braves that day. He owned a walnut ranch out there, but Wisconsin was his home state, where he learned to play baseball in the cow pastures. He was Billy Sullivan Sr., a former major-league catcher famous for his time with the Chicago White Sox in the first decade of the twentieth century. Sullivan was of a small few still around who had played in the nineteenth century, and he had played for Boston in 1899. When he died in 1965, just a few days shy of his 90th year, Sullivan was the last living member of Boston’s baseball dynasty of the 1890s.

“I’m a Braves rooter because I played with the Braves long ago when the team was known as the Beaneaters,” Sullivan told Sam Levy of the Milwaukee Sentinel. Even after a half-century, those days were still fresh in his mind, including those of his batterymate, Kid Nichols, who he said was the fastest pitcher he ever caught. “The Kid was one of the best,” he said.1

More than a century has passed since the “glorious Beaneaters” era of Boston’s baseball history in the 1890s. Sullivan actually wasn’t a major factor in that history, having played only 22 games for Boston in 1899 and not having experienced the pennant seasons of 1891-1893 and 1897-1898. The franchise now lives on in Atlanta, but it’s doubtful you ever hear reference made to the Beaneaters. Their stories are largely forgotten by all but the serious follower of baseball history. Yet, while Boston would soon have a second baseball club that would capture the hearts of New England, never again would there be such dominance over a decade as the Beaneaters accomplished.

Nine of these players would one day become hall of famers. There was John Clarkson, whose mental health issues late in life overshadowed a truly remarkable pitching career which saw him win 327 games in a 10-year span. Kid Nichols was Boston’s ace on the mound during the era. Despite seven seasons of at least 30 wins and 362 career wins he was “pushed into baseball’s medieval past” in the words of historian Bill James. There were the “Heavenly Twins,” Hugh Duffy and Tommy McCarthy, who roamed the Boston outfield with speed and grace. Yet, no one could top the speed of Sliding Billy Hamilton, whose career stats in walks, runs, steals and batting average still make the modern researcher shake their head. Jimmy Collins won pennants with both Boston franchises and has been dubbed by Charlie Bevis as “the patron saint of today’s Red Sox Nation.” Vic Willis was just a rookie when the Beaneaters dynasty was winding down, but his 25 wins helped propel them to the 1898 pennant and he enjoyed seven more seasons of at least 20 wins. And what can you say about King Kelly, baseball’s true first superstar whose exploits on and off the field elevated the game into the world of popular culture? Sporting Life called Frank Selee “a thorough baseball general” and he exhibited his leadership in guiding these Beaneaters to five pennants throughout the 1890s.

If you’re a baseball fan but don’t recognize these names, you’re not alone. The Baseball Hall of Fame itself seemed to forget these legends. They were part of a forgotten era as America steamed into the twentieth century. Fortunately, the game eventually remembered their names and their times. Some were inducted while in their golden years, but time ran out on others who never received the recognition they deserved. Now enshrined in the Hall, their stories live on, enabling a group of SABR researchers to delve deeper into who they were and what the game was like.

But we have to ask, what is a Beaneater?

“Beaneaters” was not even an official nickname for the team, but one coined by sportswriters, as Charlie Bevis wrote, “to drum up more interest among readers than by continuing to use the bland ‘Bostons’ term.”2 Yet, the name stuck and the Beaneaters and the 1890s remain a distinct era in Boston’s baseball history.

This book is the result of SABR researchers who believe the Glorious Beaneaters era of the 1890s is a story worth telling. We attempt to do so by telling the stories of the men who played for Boston and some of the interesting games they were involved in. “The tumultuous 1890s witnessed a player revolt against high-handed and monopolistic management,” wrote baseball historian John Thorn, “epitomized by a cap on salaries, followed by a nearly ruinous contraction from three major leagues to one 12-team circuit. The national economy suffered a panic in 1893 and a sluggish recovery thereafter; baseball attendance dwindled; and the lack of postseason interleague competition after 1890 (as there had been since 1884) was sorely felt. The game was in a period of consolidation, or hibernation, or stagnation; one’s perspective depended upon whether he were an owner, fan, or player.”3 Legendary manager Connie Mack remembered that era firsthand as “a turbulent decade of the so-called roughhouse days in baseball. The Boston Beaneaters were ready for any fray, ever willing to take on the pugnacious Baltimore Orioles and give them a dose of their own medicine.”4

We hope this book will give you, the reader, an enjoyable journey into the 1890s and the era of the Glorious Beaneaters.

Notes

1 Sam Levy, “Billy Sullivan, Sr., Here to Watch ‘His Braves,’” Milwaukee Sentinel, June 18, 1953: L9.

2 Charlie Bevis, Red Sox vs. Braves in Boston: The Battle for Fans’ Hearts, 1901-1952 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2017), 50.

3 John Thorn. Total Baseball 6th ed. (New York: Total Sports, 1999), 6.

4 Connie Mack, “Roughhouse 1890’s Recalled by Connie,” Philadelphia Inquirer, April 4, 1950: 34.

The Red Stockings (i.e., Red Sox, Reds) nickname began in professional baseball in Cincinnati. The Braves nickname was a gift to Boston by New York City Tammany Boss Charles Murphy’s business partner and close ally James Gaffney when he bought the Boston NL team. Unlike the other nicknames, Beaneaters is the truly original Boston baseball nickname because Boston and beans have long been associated. The nickname evolved informally because Boston was universally recognized as Beantown.1 Eventually the city promoted itself with assorted symbols of the bean. In fact, they still do as is symbolized by everything from Boston Hard Rock Café beanpot pins to the annual Boston Beanpot Tournament featuring four local college hockey teams.

To understand why the Bostons became the Beaneaters requires some understanding of what is called “bean migration” and how Boston became associated with beans. More specifically, how Boston baked beans became the most geographically identified beans in the world, rivaled only by the lima bean.

Why Are Bostonians Associated with Beans?

Boston is not the home of beans in the Americas. Bean migration is more about when various beans are noted in print than their actual appearance on earth. In 1551 the term “kidney bean” was first used in England so the English bean wouldn’t be confused with common beans from the Americas, such as the lima bean, which migrated into the American colonies from what is believed to be Peru through Guatemalan distributors.2

When the first European settlers migrated to the Boston region, the beans had long ago arrived. While beans were not noted in the first “thanksgiving” feast between the natives and the Pilgrims (only venison, fowl, and maize are named), there is little doubt that beans were served, since it was a common staple that accompanied maize in the natives’ diet.3Beans often get shortchanged in publicity. The Pilgrims soon adopted beans and beanpots as their own, largely for spiritual reasons: They could be prepared on Saturday so cooking did not have be done on their Sabbath Day.

While beans were in Boston before it was Boston, they were everywhere else as well. So how did beans become a worldwide association with the city of Boston? While there were a number of villages named Beantown, the Beantown most often referred to in the nineteenth century was in Maryland. But by the 1880s Boston was referred to as Beantown. Nearby Beverly complained about being neglected since it had the largest beanpot manufacturer, and occasionally had been referred to as the city most associated with beans such as in an 1839 New Orleans Picayune, article4, but it was Boston that had a bean style named after it: Boston baked beans.

Before focusing on how Boston became the bean capital and why in 1883 the media began calling the baseball team the Beaneaters, a bit of bean history further explains an important role of Boston in American history and why Americans across the land easily associated Boston with baked beans. In marketing terms, it is cognitive resonance. In other words, people already associated beans with Boston, thus Boston (including baseball) marketed the term successfully because it already resonated with a logical association.

First one must understand what Boston baked beans are. The essential characteristics of baked beans are white beans, which are baked, including bits of pork, and then are cooked in a sauce of tomato, molasses, and corn syrup – or even maple syrup in the Quebec version. The cooking in the sauce turns the white beans brown. The original Boston version utilized molasses, as did most variations in New England.

While this explains the product, since it was widely produced in New England and Canada, how did Boston become the original focus of the baked beans, so associated with baked beans internationally that Boston baked beans are still a common term regardless of their origin? The simple answer has two parts: Both Boston’s port and the related rise of manufacturing, both for canned goods and pottery production.

Long-distance travelers needed to preserve food. France is notable in bean history, as in most gastronomic history. Napoleon is credited with stating that “an army marches on its stomach,” though it is attributed by some to Frederick the Great.5

What is true for armies, who are generally on land, is even truer for navies. Boston was a vital port in early America, home of the best harbor closest to England. Its importance is illustrated by the frigate Constitution, known as Old Ironsides, the the oldest commissioned naval vessel still afloat, and is preserved in Boston at the old Charlestown Navy Yard.

Beans were a poor man’s protein substitute for meat. Meat was often “salt pork” and “dried beef” (“salt beef”). Boston, as the heart of New England, thus became the center for beans as well as cod and dried beef, which could be preserved for seafaring men. New England was also America’s original manufacturing center to a large degree because of Boston and other regional ports such as Newport, so materials to store the items as well as cook them also centered on Boston.

The small white beans called haricot beans are the preferred bean for Boston baked beans, though other white beans can be used. Haricot beans are generally referred to as navy beans because of their ubiquitous use by the navy.

Molasses imported to Boston from the Caribbean was the key ingredient that improved the taste of the canned navy beans. Molasses was heavily used for rum, the favored drink of the era. Samuel Adams was an importer, but despite the eponymous beer, it is not clear that Adams brewed beer or rum. But he likely imported molasses and certainly imported malt. Sam Adams was at least a “maltster.”6

But the real breakthrough was in canning. Boston canneries were the first to invent a can that preserved the beans. (The beanpots were not hard to make.) The key canning firm was Henry Mayo & Co. of Boston, which was the first producer of baked beans in cans (notwithstanding Van Camp’s claim).

The company experienced a setback when, after receiving the silver medal for the best baked beans in the world at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878, Henry Mayo was awarded a contract from the French government for 100,000 dozen cases. The company attempted to fill it, but the French government canceled the contract and Henry Mayo & Co. was awash in canned goods. It began national advertising, which greatly advanced the close tie of Boston to baked beans, but the firm went belly-up six years later.7

The world’s first distinctively marine exhibition, the International Maritime Exhibition, was held in Boston in 1889-90. One of the exhibits was by Potter & Wrightington. It featured ship’s supplies including “Boston baked beans, Boston brown bread and Boston codfish balls.” A publication on the exhibition stated that “the firm of Potter & Wrightington is so old and well-established, and so widely recognized for the superiority of their goods, that they need no introduction to the people of the United States.”8

An advertising card for Potter & Wrightington Boston Baked Beans (Old South Brand) says, “For SUPERIOR excellence our brand received highest prize at Berlin, 1880, OVER all Boston competitors.”9 A late nineteenth-century ad for Van Camp’s of Indianapolis advertises “Boston Baked Pork & Beans” featuring two children each holding a can labeled baked beans. They look as though they could be Pilgrims but are actually Ludwig & Lena, patterned after the German Hansel & Gretel. Though Henry Heinz of Pittsburgh arguably popularized the German craze for baked beans beginning in 1910, Potter & Wrightington of Boston had received the highest prize in Berlin for baked beans 30 years earlier. The point is that identification with Boston was the key to selling pork & beans.

As one tracks bean migration and evolution, the confluence of multiple factors resulted in Boston’s international association with baked beans: 1) the rising power of the US Navy; 2) the leadership of Boston in canning as well as pottery firms that led in beanpot manufacturing; 3) Boston bean firms winning major international bean awards beginning at the Paris World’s Fair in 1878; and 4) the rising importance of advertising in developing national brands.

The 1890s weren’t just glorious years for the Boston Beaneaters in baseball. The years from 1890 to 1907 were the peak years of Boston being the world’s bean capital. The bean era of Boston began with the Grand Army of the Republic annual encampment being held in Boston in 1890 and ended with Boston’s Old Home Week celebration in 1907.

Any veteran with an honorable discharge from the US military was eligible for membership in the GAR. It was a potent political organization after the Civil War. Five presidents were members of the organization. During the latter part of the nineteenth century the Republican Party refused to run a candidate without the GAR’s endorsement.10

The annual encampments began in the founding year of 1866. Boston held its first in 1871, when the membership was small. When the GAR next returned to Boston, in 1890, the Civil War Union Colonel Benjamin Harrison was president, and the organization hit its membership peak of 409,489 members.11 Boston didn’t roll out a red carpet, but did present several thousand ornamental beanpots marked “Beverly Pottery” to attendees. E.B. Stillings & Co. sold metal tokens featuring a tag labeled “Dept. Mass. G.A.R” with a beanpot connected by a chain on a card stating that the souvenir was “officially endorsed.”12 There were other variations as well. It further solidified the association of Boston, baked beans, and beanpots across the nation. The items still command significant dollars today among Civil War collectors.

The bean decade of the 1890s was topped off when in 1896 an ornamental beanpot was placed on the top of the clock in the gallery of the Common Council chambers in Boston City Hall.13

As the century turned, baked beans and history continued their close association with Boston tourism. Singular or multiple beanpots were included with various Boston sites like Faneuil Hall, Paul Revere’s home, and famous churches on postcards mailed by tourists. Functional beanpots were sold, mini-beanpots were tourist collectibles, as were paperweight copper beanpots featuring Faneuil Hall and other scenes.

As the twentieth century began, the GAR was beginning a steep decline in membership as Civil War veterans died and memories became more distant. President William McKinley, assassinated in 1901, was the last of GAR member presidents. Still, the national encampment’s return to Boston in 1904 resulted in another proliferation of beanpot souvenirs. It is not insignificant that it is estimated that in 1904 approximately 94 percent of baked beans were still baked at home by housewives in beanpots.14

In 1907 the city of Boston held a celebration called Old Home Week marketed mostly to attract former residents. Almost all postcards and city materials featured at least one beanpot, or at least a small beanpot logo stamped on whatever piece of advertising material was utilized.

After 1907 Boston’s focus on baked beans had declined enough that in 1908, when the Dovey brothers purchased the Beaneaters and dressed the team in white uniforms, the media nicknamed them the Doves. 

Production of canned beans had shifted from Boston as other manufacturers expanded while Boston’s declined (e.g., Van Camp’s, Heinz, Bush). Nevertheless, Boston did not totally abandon its association with beans. Boston Baked Beans, the candy covered peanuts, were invented in Pittsburgh in the early 1930s but the only connection the candy has with the baked navy beans in molasses is that peanuts and beans are both legumes.15 In 1993 the Massachusetts Legislature declared the baked navy bean the official bean of Massachusetts.16 (It is the only state to have an official bean and one of the few to even have a designated state vegetable.) And since the Beanpot college hockey tournament is an annual Boston attraction, the city has not totally lost its beans.

Red Stocking to Beaneater Base Ball

In 1871, when professional baseball first arrived in Boston, the Paris World’s Fair of 1878 was still seven years away and Boston was still getting its promotional “bean legs.” Besides, teams were commonly referred to by their city’s name, which was featured on the uniform or by the first letter (e.g., “B”). Beyond the name of the city, the teams often were referred to by the color of their stockings. In 1878, for example, the National League was particularly unimaginative. The six teams were the Cincinnati Red Stockings, Boston Red Stockings, Chicago White Stockings, Providence Grays, Milwaukee Grays, and Indianapolis Blues.

The entire “naming” problem beyond America’s largest cities (Boston, New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, and Chicago) was complicated by the coming and going of teams in every league. A Wolverine would briefly appear and then vanish. Some teams would be named after some variation of the most prominent player or the owners. There were even variations of that phenomenon. For example, when Cap Anson was dropped as the manager of the Chicago team, they were commonly known as the Orphans.

The first Boston baseball nickname, the Red Stockings, is the granddaddy of all baseball names since two teams still carry it: Cincinnati in the National League and Boston in the American League. Writers shortened the names to Reds and Red Sox over the years, but those names still refer back to the Red Stockings. The 1869 Cincinnati Red Stockings were the undefeated champions of baseball. When the club’s George and Harry Wright resettled in Boston in 1871, they brought the team’s name to the first professional major league, the National Association. The Boston Red Stockings dominated baseball during the National Association era. Cincinnati went back down to club-level amateur ball. The transplanted nickname carried such legendary baseball status that it stuck in Boston, at least until Cincinnati re-emerged as a baseball power.

In 1876, when the National League was founded, both Boston and Cincinnati were the Red Stockings. After the 1880 season, Cincinnati was tossed out of the National League over its failure to support NL policy banning beer and Sunday baseball. (The Cincinnati Red Stockings re-emerged in 1882 as part of the American Association.) 

The NL had a huge problem. While the Providence Grays and Buffalo Bisons were established teams, the Troy Trojans and the Worcester Ruby Legs struggled. The AA had what the NL needed: New York, Brooklyn, Philadelphia, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Pittsburgh.

The Cincinnati Red Stockings of 1882 compiled the highest winning percentage of any Cincinnati team in history, including the Big Red Machine of the 1970s. They were again the dominant Red Stockings.

The year 1882 is a bit confusing in Boston baseball nickname history: Some historians refer to the team as the Red Stockings, but a few cite Red Caps as an alternative name. A Cincinnati newspaper made a Boston Bean-eaters reference in May 1880, though it attached it to the entire city in a headline after an earthquake shook the Boston area.17

In June 1880 the Chicago Inter-Ocean noted that “two bean-eaters died at home plate,” referring to baserunners in a Cleveland-Boston game.18 In 1881 and 1882, the Cincinnati Enquirer often called the Boston baseball team the “bean-eaters.” The Detroit Free Press also began using the Bean-eater nickname to refer to the Boston team.19

What is clear is that after Cincinnati’s dominant AA championship season of 1882, Boston abandoned the Red Stockings nickname the Wrights had brought with them from Cincinnati.

Newspapers increasingly referred to them as the Beaneaters since not only had Cincinnati powerfully re-emerged with the moniker Red Stockings, but then joined the NL in 1890. The Red Stockings (e.g., Reds) name was also claimed by Boston teams in the Players’ League (1890) and the championship Boston franchise in the AA beginning in 1891 (once Cincinnati had joined the NL). While modern marketers utilize the nickname Beaneaters on baseball cards, uniforms, and other materials, the nickname does not seem to appear in primary sources other than in news coverage or informal references. Perhaps it was because the nickname was not universally adored.

In 1882, as Boston baseball transitioned to Beaneaters, a headline on the front page of the New York Tribune exclaimed: “Shooting His Companion Because He Was Called A ‘Boston Bean-Eater.’” The word was not intended as a compliment. The article began: “A shooting affray that came near to a fatal termination for one of the participants and endangered the lives of many people not engaged in it …” Two men, referred to as “confidence men” and apparently intoxicated, began arguing when the New Yorker referred to the Bostonian as a “Boston bean-eater.” The reporter noted that when the Boston man “fully comprehended the meaning of those words, he shifted his stick into his left hand while with the right hand drew a large revolver and fired with a deliberate aim at the gray-haired, bare-headed man.”20

If this were the end of this story, it would be fascinating enough, but it dragged on as a mini-press war between the two cities that was enjoyed in faraway places. A story a month later in distant Jamestown, North Dakota, quoted the Boston Journal as responding to the New York media by asserting that the shooter “may at some time have lived in Boston, but he was not – could not have been a Bostonian in the deepest and most glorious meaning of the word. Clearly a man who considers himself insulted by being called a ‘bean eater’ can have none of the commendable local pride which distinguishes the citizens of this favored metropolis.”21

Because beans were used as a cheaper, healthy substitute for meat, the term was used as both descriptive and a derogatory reference to the poor. It also could be used to convey that a person was “cheap,” substituting beans for meat when they could have afforded meat. Had the term come from a Puck satire, baseball historians might have assumed that the Beaneaters were named after penny-pinching Beaneater owner Arthur Soden.

And then there is the rather uncomfortable issue of flatulence. While it provided some occasional sarcasm from newspaper writers, the fact is that other alternative Boston names associated with the city would also have been uncomfortable at times. The early canners who made baked beans famous were also known for clam chowder and fishballs. The Boston Chowderheads or Boston Fish Balls would not have improved the situation. Had they chosen to be named after a product of co-owner William Conant’s factory, the Boston Hoopskirts would have provided much mirth.

When Beaneaters was emerging in 1883 as the universal nickname for the Boston baseball team, Boston baked beans were rising in their national fame. Boston firms won awards for their baked beans in Paris in 1878 and Berlin in 1880. The first widespread advertising of baked beans had recently begun. The baseball team nickname did not occur as an isolated event but rather simultaneously with Boston merchants’ promotional push for Boston baked beans.

How much the name change to Beaneaters inspired the Boston team to greater success in 1883 is debatable but they posted a 63-35 record and won the championship of the National League. To quote Johnny Cash’s song, “I know if papa was here right now he’d sure be pleased, And papa, if you can hear me look at them beans.”22

With all due respect to the Boston Red Sox’ transplanted Cincinnati name and the Boston Braves’ borrowed symbol from New York’s Tammany Hall, there is no more appropriate name for a Boston team than the Beaneaters.  If being a beaneater was good enough for the world boxing champion, it was good enough for baseball. In 1882 a bout between American boxing champion John L. Sullivan (also known as the Boston Strong Boy) and English champion Tug Wilson was headlined “Bean-Eater and Briton.”23

It was also politically correct. The 1907 celebration of Boston Old Home Week, which featured Boston baked beans and beanpots in most promotions, was planned and staged when the Boston mayor was John F. Fitzgerald, aka Honey Fitz. He was later chairman of the Boston Royal Rooters and the grandfather of John Fitzgerald Kennedy. Honey Fitz clearly was a bean man. There can be no clearer Bostonian political stamp of approval than that. 

Notes

1 “It is for baked beans that Boston came to be known as Bean Town. The Puritan Sabbath lasted from sundown on Saturday until sundown on Sunday, and baked beans provided the Puritans with a dish that was easy to prepare. The bean pot could be kept over a slow heat in a fireplace to serve at Saturday supper and Sunday breakfast. Housewives too busy with other chores were able to turn the baking of the beans over to a local baker. The baker called each Saturday morning to pick up the family’s bean pot and take it to the community oven, usually in the cellar of a nearby tavern. The free-lance baker then returned the beans with a bit of brown bread on Saturday evening or Sunday morning.” Brett Howard, Boston: A Social History (New York: Hawthorn Books Inc., 1976), 126-127.

2 Maricel A. Presilla, “Lima Beans’ History is Ancient, Exalted,” Pittsburgh Post-Gazette, July 1, 2007. post-gazette.com/food/2007/07/11/Lima-beans-history-is-ancient-exalted/stories/200707110267; aggiehorticulture.tamu.edu/archives/parsons/publications/vegetabletravelers/beans.html.

3 Megan Gambino, “What Was on the Menu at the First Thanksgiving?,” Smithsonian.com, November 21, 2011. smithsonianmag.com/history/what-was-on-the-menu-at-the-first-thanksgiving-511554/.

4 “Out of Beans, or the Half Mast Flag,” New Orleans Times Picayune, June 20, 1839: 2.

5 oxfordreference.com/view/10.1093/oi/authority.20110803095425331.

6 “11 Things You Probably Didn’t Know About Sam Adams,” mentalfloss.com, n.d. mentalfloss.com/article/60927/11-things-you-probably-didn’t-know-about-sam-adams.

7 Roger M. Grace, “Cans of Baked Beans Produced on Mass Scale in 1878,” Metropolitan News-Enterprise (Los Angeles). The silver medal note is on a Henry Mayo & Co advertising card owned by the author.

8 John W. Ryckman, compiler and editor, International Maritime Exhibition, Boston, 1889-90, Press of Rockwell and Churchill, 325.

9 “Old South Brand Baked Beans, Potter & Wrightington; Packers of Canned Fish, Poultry, Beans, Soups &c., 197 Atlantic Ave. & 118 to 128 Commerce St., Boston, Mass.” Advertising card with drawing and additional copy on the reverse side (author’s collection), date unknown but does note, “For Superior excellence our brand received highest prize at Berlin, 1880, OVER all Boston competitors.”

10 https://ohiohistorycentral.org/w/Grand_Army_of_the_Republic. Accessed November 20, 2019.  

11 http://www.treasurenet.com/forums/civil-war/73486-national-encampments-grand-army-republic.html. Accessed November 20, 2019.

12 Card: “Officially endorsed by Dept. Mass. G.A.R.; E. B. Stillings & Co., Sole Manufacturers, 55 Sudbury Street, Boston.” Attached is a small metal badge with “Dept. Mass. G.A.R.” on it with small chains holding a beanpot labeled “Beans” (author’s collection).

13 http://www.celebrateboston.com/architecture/old-city-hall.htm . Accessed November 20, 2019.  

14 Jeffrey L. Cruikshank and Arthur W. Schultz, The Man Who Sold America (Boston: Harvard Business Review Press, 2010), 101.

15 Marjorie from Missouri, “Boston Baked Beans,” oldtimecandy.com, n.d. oldtimecandy.com/walk-the-candy-aisle/boston-baked-beans/.

16 https://statesymbolsusa.org/symbol-official-item/massachusetts/state-food-agriculture-symbol/baked-navy-bean . Accessed November 20, 2019.

17 “Boston Bean-eaters Shaken by an Earthquake,” Cincinnati Daily Star, May 14, 1880: 1.

18 “Boston vs. Cleveland,” Inter Ocean (Chicago), June 29, 1880: 8.

19 For example, in 1881 the Cincinnati Enquirer used Bean-eaters for the Boston NL team in May, June, July, and August. Examples in 1882 include “May 1st will settle Wise’s career as a Boston bean-eater,” section titled “Base-Ball,” Cincinnati Enquirer; April 23, 1882: 13, and “Boston Bean-Eaters Down the New Yorkers,” Cincinnati Enquirer, April 25, 1882. Other newspapers had also begun referring to the Boston team as the bean-eaters: a front-page headline in the Detroit Free Press on May 2, 1882, proclaimed that “The Bisons, Bean-eaters and Clam-eaters Beat Chicago, Worcester and Troy.” “Clam-eaters” refers to the Providence team, generally referred to as the Providence Grays. This is a great example of the fluidity of team nicknames.

20 “A Quarrel Between Confidence Men,” New York Tribune, November 13, 1882: 1.

21 Jamestown (North Dakota) Weekly Alert, December 8, 1882: 6.

22 Concluding lyrics of the song “Look at Them Beans” from the Johnny Cash album Look at Them Beans, 1975.

23 “Bean-Eater and Briton,” Black Hills Weekly Times, Deadwood, South Dakota, July 22, 1882: 1.

On March 24, 1890, the Boston Reds of the Players’ League played a game against the University of Virginia team in Charlottesville, winning by a score of 14-4 but at the same time achieving recognition for the new team. The National League and other clubs that were organized under the National Agreement had tried to squelch the upstart league. Indeed, wrote Tim Murnane in the Boston Globe, those clubs had “tried to intimidate the collegians here into not playing with the brotherhood clubs.” The manager of the university team said, “We will allow no one to dictate to us as to who we shall play.”2  

The Boston team had arrived from Richmond at 2:00 P.M., changed into their uniforms at the hotel, and played before 1,800 spectators. They had been working out in Richmond for about a week beforehand.3 The crowd was said to be “the largest crowd ever gathered to witness a ball game.”4

Back in Richmond, the Reds played a game on April 1 against the New York club of the Players’ League (also named the New York Giants), winning 12-1 before 1,500. Both teams left for New York at 7:13 that evening, bound for separate destinations in Massachusetts, New York to play in Holyoke and Boston to play in Worcester.5

Frank Selee’s Beaneaters stayed close to home, though the February 16 Boston Herald wrote, “Manager Selee will arrange more games for this vicinity in the spring than usual.”6 The first eight of the team to report gathered at the YMCA on March 18, planning to start practice in the gymnasium of the Y. on the 19th.7 The league schedule was released a few days later. The team held a practice game in Boston on April 1, playing at the South End Grounds against the Boston Athletic Club. It was their first game of the year.8

On Fast Day, the Players’ League team and the National League team both played in Boston, with the Players’ League team outdrawing the NL team.9 Selee ascribed that to curiosity, and a special appeal being made to laboring men to support the Players’ League, but didn’t expect there to be any true threat to National League dominance.10 Selee’s men made preseason appearances in Washington and Baltimore, prepared to play, but rain prevented playing actual games.

1891

Selee was manager of the Beaneaters for the full decade of the 1890s. The team had finished in fifth place in 1890. In this year, 1891, they finished first.

He arranged preseason games against Baltimore on March 28, 30, and 31. The Daily Inter Ocean of Chicago added, “It is probable that the Boston league team will go someplace in the vicinity of Richmond, Va., around March 20, and indulge in two weeks’ outdoor practice before the Fast day games.”11

There was, however, no Southern trip. As the Boston Journal reported, “The League team will not go South, as originally intended, but will take its practice at home, playing local clubs until the opening of the regular season. With good weather the club can get as much practice here as in the South, and the Southern trip would be a losing one financially in any event. Manager Frrank Selee is strong in his belief that the club is a winning one, and is hopeful of the best of results.”12 He may have forfeited a $300 deposit paid to secure a signed contract with the manager of the University of Virginia team.13

Selee arranged to play three games against Harvard, two of them at the South End Grounds, after Fast Day and before the start of the season.14 On Fast Day itself, April 2, the Bostons hosted the 1890 champion Brooklyns for a 2:00 P.M. game. Selee’s Beaneaters had worked out the day before at their home park. The first game against Harvard was on April 4; the next two four were on April 8, 10, 13, and 15.

Other games arranged in the spring were to be against the John F. Morrills on April 6, with games on the 11th in Fitchburg, the 14th in Portland, the 16th in Meriden, the 17th and 18th at New Haven, the 20th at Lynn, and the 21st at Worcester.15

1892

In 1892 the Beaneaters trained in the South, with the arrangements being announced on February 10. The plan was for all to meet in Boston on March 21 and train in Charlottesville until April 1. They planned to play against the University of Virginia nine every day. On April 2, they were to play New York at Richmond, followed by games against Waterbury on April 4, against Yale at New Haven on April 6 and 7, against Brown at Providence on April 8 and 9, and against Princeton on April 11. Of the plan to go South and play games, the Boston Globe said, “The management has acted wisely in sending their great team to a place where the boys can work off the superfluous flesh gained by several months’ rest.”16Manager Selee had reportedly been courted with offers from a number of communities from as far away as Florida. Some of the men had been with the 1890 Players’ League team during their visit to Charlottesville.

Six left Boston on the New York & New England Railroad at 3:00 P.M. on March 22. Others came to Charlottesville from other locations. A number of conversations among the players and ownership before the train left Boston were recounted in the March 23 Globe.17 They played their first practice game against the University of Virginia on March 24. The park in which they played was a mile and a half from their quarters, and with morning and afternoon practices or scrimmage games, that meant six miles of walking for the men. A number of the players took a roundabout route that gave them an extra five miles of walking. The Boston Herald correspondent wrote, “Manager Selee is delighted by the spirit shown by his men in this preliminary work. He says he never saw men so anxious to get right down to fighting trim. He firmly believes in the efficacy of outdoor work, and is supported in the view by his men. Not a member of the Boston team believes in gymnasium work. It is far more dangerous and risky to the limbs than outdoor practice.”18

Some of the games were lopsided, of course, such as the 20-3 drubbing given the university team on March 29. Nash had three home runs in the game. In 1892, the Beaneaters finished in first place again.

1893

In 1893 Selee started later. Players were ordered to report to the South End Grounds at 10:00 A.M. on April 1. They started outdoor practice at once, and on April 5 planned to play Brown University at Providence, with the same two teams coming to Boston for the Fast Day game on April 6. On April 7 and 8, Boston was to play at New Haven and on April 10 at Bridgeport. It was Hartford on April 11, Princeton on April 12, and at Petersburg, Virginia, on April 12 and 13. Richmond was April 15, and then the Bostons would remain at Charlottesville from April 16 through the 26th.19 The schedule had not yet been formalized, and the time in Charlottesville might have been shortened, but indeed the first championship game was held in New York on April 28.

As it happened, snow prevented the two games against Brown from being played. On a chilly April 10, the game against Yale was held, with around 1,000 spectators, Boston winning, 8-5.20 The game at Richmond was deemed a “farce,” with Boston scoring 10 runs in the first inning against the city league champion team of Richmond, which played so “wretchedly” that playing against them provided little in the way of helpful competition.21

Boston won 86 regular-season games and lost exactly half as many (43); they finished first in the standings for the third year in a row.

1894

In 1894 the players were asked to report to the South End Grounds on April 2. The first preseason game was set for the very next day, in Providence.22 “Not a player who showed up was fat or out of condition,” wrote the Globe, “and manager Selee will not need the patent steam tubs of Arthur Irwin’s.”23 Hugh Duffy’s wife had died due to illness, almost on the eve of reporting. And weather in the Northeast was a hindrance; on April 3, it was simply “too cold” to practice outside.24 The April 6 game against Yale was played in bitterly cold conditions and ended in a row, with the umpire declaring New Haven had won, 5-3, due to interference on the part of Boston captain Billy Nash, while Boston argued it had been a 5-5 tie when play was suspended due to the argument.25

It was said that by forgoing some degree of practice in the South in 1894, the team might have put itself at a disadvantage, the New England weather being unconducive.26 They won in Waterbury, 13-0, on April 10. After the team arrived in New York, two games next planned for Princeton were canceled due to weather. Most of the players wanted to head back to Charlottesville to get in a week’s work, but Selee said he had games scheduled for Brockton and Fall River, and then Springfield, and he couldn’t get out of the obligations.27 Though “too chilly for good ball playing,” they got in the game against Springfield, winning 15-6.28

In championship play, Baltimore finished first, with the New York Giants second. Boston placed third, eight games back.

1895

There was no hesitation in 1895. The team was ordered to report much earlier, in New York on March 16, and to travel from there to Charleston, South Carolina, for spring training.29 It was actually in Columbia that they were based, and they played their first game against a local team on March 19. There was a game planned for March 20 against Washington but it was rained out. On March 21, in Charleston, Boston beat the Washington ballclub, 8-4. A number of the players went to tour Fort Sumter. On the 26th they played in Savannah and, although Washington scored six runs in the first inning, Boston scored five – and put the game away with 12 runs in the fifth inning. On March 28 Selee’s men played an intrasquad game, Colts vs. Regulars, on the grounds of Converse College in Spartanburg with women comprising most of the audience.30 The weather had been good enough, but the trip had still placed them in some less than desirable circumstances. In general, it was felt that “the hotels are execrable.”31

On March 29 they had to lend five players to the local team in Greenville, but they got in a game, winning narrowly, 6-5. When they arrived in Charlotte, North Carolina, on March 31, they were greeted by 300 people at the depot, and another large crowd met them at their hotel. It was the fields of play that were subpar.

Selee summed up the Southern trip to date: “I am perfectly satisfied with the work done by the team thus far and with the exception of a few lame arms the team is doing nicely. There are only one or two men overweight and should the good weather continue, the team will surely be able to do themselves justice at the end of the week. I am glad to know that we have at least reached a place where my men can do some field work. Every city we have visited thus far has had poor accommodations for grounds, and the players were afraid of doing themselves more harm than good, but I know they have worked faithfully and I must say they are in excellent condition, all things considered.”32

On April 1 some 1,200 people turned out. The Charlotte field was the best to date, and they beat the University of North Carolina, 17-3. The next day’s game, against the local Charlotte team, was rained out. The schedule saw the team head to Portsmouth, Norfolk, Richmond, Princeton, New Haven, and Springfield, with no games played at all in the Boston area prior to the season.

The Beaneaters finished in fifth place.

1896

There wasn’t a chance the team was going anywhere other than Charlottesville in 1896. In speaking with Joe Kelley of the Baltimore team, Tim Murnane wrote, “The Boston brotherhood team was the first to go there, as the university of Virginia was the only college team at that time who would take a chance to play a brotherhood club, owing to the national agreement. That team won the pennant.

Manager Selee told Tim Murnane, “The next season the Boston association club went to Charlottesville and won the championship. Then for two years I took the league team to that place for spring practice, and each year we pulled off the pennant. Ed Hanlon got in ahead of me for 1894, and Baltimore got their practice there and won the championship.

“Last season none of the clubs visited this southern practice grounds and Baltimore won the flag. I went down there at the close of the season last year and made all my arrangements for grounds and hotels. And this spring the boys will start in for the championship from the old lucky starting place.”33

A new pattern was being set for spring training. Every National League club except Washington was planning to go south – Jacksonville, New Orleans, Hot Springs, and Galveston among the destinations.

The Beaneaters planned to play the university nine, then have games against Richmond, Portsmouth, and Norfolk, head north via Princeton, and then play a number of games – mostly in in New England – at Fall River, Paterson (New Jersey), Melrose, Bridgeport, Derby (for “Harry Wright Day” on April 13), Newton, Providence, Brockton, Middletown, and Newport before heading south via Wilmington and opening the regular season in Philadelphia.

Their first workout had been on March 20 and the lack of a trainer or physical therapist was noted. “A mistake was made in not following the example of other league clubs in having a man accompany a team to rub the pitchers down, and attend to their wants. This has got to be a necessary thing nowadays. So much depends upon the pitchers that they should be surrounded with every convenience, and no greater convenience can be found than one of these ‘rubbers.’ The Philadelphias, the Brooklyns, and the New Yorks all have such men with them on their southern trips. A pitcher cannot look out for himself as a rubber can, and the expense of carrying such a man is a trifle compared with the results achieved.”34

The university team had been working out for more than a month and put up a good showing in the first game of Boston’s spring, a 12-7 win for the professionals. Hugh Duffy’s team of regulars beat the second-string Roustabouts, 22-1, in a six-inning March 26 game umpired by Selee.

If Charlottesville was meant to ensure good luck, it didn’t take; the Beaneaters finished fourth. They’d actually been shut out in Norfolk, 5-0, but after just six innings when the local umpire hurriedly called off the game because of what had reportedly been only a very few raindrops.35 The Beaneaters’ record of 74-57-1 saw them 17 games behind the first-place Baltimore Orioles.

1897

The plan was to train at Augusta, Georgia, in 1897 but Selee found that the Philadelphia team had secured an option there before he could act. He held one himself for the grounds at Hot Springs. The deal he ultimately signed, however, put the team in Savannah.36 This year, they took a boat south, departing from Lewis Wharf, Boston, on March 18 on the Nacoochee. They arrived on the 21st, several of them having been quite ill from seasickness on the voyage south, including manager Selee.37 Despite damp and cold conditions endured by some at the team hotel, by the time they arrived in Charleston on April 4, they were reportedly in good condition.

Stops included Norfolk, Richmond, Princeton (a close 3-2 win), Elizabeth, Middletown, a two-game day with games at Winsted and Torrington (both in Connecticut), and Springfield.

Boston reclaimed its place atop league standings with a record of 93-39 (with three tie games).

1898

Greensboro, North Carolina, was the choice for 1898, the selection made on January 25. The team planned to play five intrasquad games and then begin to take on opponents. Boston was the last of the 12 teams to head south, and it was a quirk of the contracts at the time that they were dated to be effective as of April 15, so there was no way to insist that players report before that date.38 Fortunately, most of them wanted to get in shape and hone their skills.

On March 23 the Yannigans beat the Regulars by an astounding 15-3. The next day Boston beat Augusta, 18-3, in four innings before the rains came. They played an intrasquad game at Winston-Salem on March 26. There was rain on the 29th and 30th. There was an intrasquad game at Danville on April 1. Rain prevented a game against the university team at Charlottesville. They won a 10-inning game against Richmond, 8-7, on April 8.

The Lancaster, Pennsylvania, team beat the Beaneaters 7-3 on April 12. While stopping at York the night before, Billy Hamilton gave his opinion on spring training: “Spring training is only valuable to me so far as it enables me to cultivate my batting eye. If a man takes good care of himself during the winter he is ready in a jiffy to field, but it takes time to get back your batting skill. I never hit hard at the ball in the spring, and I think it a mistake to swing too hard in the beginning. I take things easy and work myself by degrees to the proper point. All I want to do is to satisfy myself that I can meet the ball just right. Our players are all right as far as fielding is concerned, but we need batting practice badly, and I hope we will get it in these games with the Pennsylvania clubs.”39

The schedule was a longer one. The Beaneaters placed first, with 102 wins against 47 losses. There were again three tie games.

1899

Seemingly never content to train in the same place twice, the Beaneaters chose Durham, North Carolina, as their springtime home in 1899. The team offered $35 a week, plus expenses, to entice players to come for training, and once again were one of the last teams to head south, but the enticements were not enough and a number of players – some of whom had other business interests – elected to report later.40 

On Sunday, March 27, after most of the players attended church in one part of town or another, they left at 2:30 P.M. for a five-mile hike and jog. Selee stuck to his guns; he “never allows his men to do gymnasium work of any kind, maintaining that the only place a player can get into proper condition is in open air. … There are fine baths at the college gymnasium here, but Selee refused to allow his players to go near the institution.”41 They played Trinity College at Durham (and won by scores of  11-4, 17-4, and 20-1), and had been planning to play the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, but after a few days of rain decided to cancel the visit, Selee seeing “the long drive over a waste of time.”42 They beat Norfolk, 11-0, but then heavy rain prevented a game in Richmond. They had gotten in their work, though, and on April 15 were in Brooklyn for the start of the 1899 season. The Beaneaters won that game, 1-0, in 11 innings.  The Brooklyn Superbas got their revenge, however, and beat out Boston for the pennant, an eight-game margin separating the first- and second-place teams.

Bostons in Training

We add here a first-person account of the Beaneaters during spring training 1899.

Bostons in Training at Durham NC

From the Boston Journal of April 23, 1899

It is interesting to note the methods of different ballplayers in the preliminary spring practice. The veteran, confident in his prowess, begins very slowly, while the colt, ambitious to show his mettle, starts off at a much more rapid gait. The veteran nurses himself along, the colt often has to do some serious nursing afterward, because he did not use his muscles cautiously at the start.

A staff correspondent of the Journal accompanied the Bostons South this spring and remained with them during their stay at Durham N.C. The merits of any place as a training ground for ball players are so dependent on the weather that a place which might be decided a failure one year would be a success the next. Judging solely on results Durham was a success, for certainly the Bostons never started North after two weeks’ limbering up in such splendid physical condition. This state of affairs would not have been predicted at the close of the first week at Durham. It rained four days of that week, and what was equally discouraging was the absence of about a third of the players. Then came the reaction. The weather improved and the belated players began to report, and most of them showed that they had already been doing some work, so that they would soon be on a par with the first comers.

Frank Selee was so well pleased with the results attained that he asked for a refusal of the grounds at Trinity Park for next spring. The weather at Durham was tempered just enough with the cool breezes of the north to make the players go slowly in practice. Manager Selee contends that so long as the weather is sufficiently warm to permit the playing of base ball without discomfort it is better to train his men somewhere in the Middle South than to take them far South. They are then less likely to be affected by the changed conditions once they come North.

There was one drawback about the college ball grounds at Trinity Park. It had a “skin” diamond, an in fact there was not a blade of grass in the entire area. The soil was a mixture of sand and clay which was either heavy and muddy or hard, almost flinty, in the infield so that the ball was soon fuzzy or “wingey” as the ball players term it. A ball in this condition is extremely difficult to throw. It is heavy and does not carry well. For this reason the Bostons favored their arms and trained their eyes, both on the field and at the bat. Their heavy hitting in the games following their departure from Durham proved the wisdom of their judgment.

There was one feature of the sojourn. It could be declared a success in point of comfort. The ban of the ball players’ visits South have been the hotels. The players found the Carrolina Hotel very much to their liking. Manager Selee had looked the ground over last December, a precaution which past experience had made necessary.

The daily routine of the players in training varied according to the weather. They rose at 8 o’clock each morning and at 10 started for the grounds, a mile and a half away, on foot and dressed for play. On the first day the morning practice did not last much more than half an hour, but this time was gradually extended to an hour and a half and more. A fast walk or slow jog back to the hotel followed this warming-up. Then a bath and a rubdown found the player very nearly ready for lunch. At 2:30 in the afternoon the morning program was repeated, except that often, instead of practice, there was a game with the Trinity College nine. Some days the condition did not favor playing at Trinity Park, especially in the first week, and on these days Manager Selee led his men in long walks across the country or along the road towards Chapel Hill. The genial manager often set the pace and always proved to be a stayer.

The Journal correspondent took with him to Durnam a camera that had seen service in Cuba. He had never snapped a kodak in his life and he had about as much knowledge of its working as the average citizen has of the partition of China. He had been told not to face the sun, and to do several things in sequence. In his innocence he attempted to take snap shots of the players in rapid action. He had been told that if someone had snapped a camera on him when he was scurrying after a fielder who was either running down a grounder or chasing a fly the Journal might now publish a series of comic pictures worthy of our funniest weeklies.  The Journal man “got in” a little training on his own account shooting his camera at fleet-footed ball players, and he flatters himself that, whatever his failures artistically, his aim was good. The picture of Duffy catching a line fly was taken under hazardous conditions. The camera fiend thought he saw a good opportunity to catch Boston’s “Little Corporal” when Klobedanz lined out a fly. The fellow with the kodak tried to judge a fly and adjust his camera at the same time. The scene must have been ludicrous, for at the time the camera was snapped the Journal man was running backward as fast as he could move his legs in order to avoid a collision.

The pictures of Lowe and Frisbie at second, of Klobedanz in the box in a game and of manager Selee and others at the players’ bench were taken by Mr. George R. King, a well-known expert photographer of this city who was in Durham during the second week of the Bostons’ stay there. None of the parties in the Selee group knew they were being photographed, so that the Boston Manager’s appearance with a catcher’s mitt on his left hand and a seater tied around his neck was not improvised for the occasion.

If the players had any one object to Durham as a place of training, it was its lack of opportunity for amusement during the leisure hours. Time dragged heavily, especially at night. There were practically no public amusements. There was little to do other than sit about the hotel, to read or to write letters. There was not a billiard table in town, so far as the players could discover. There were several pool tables and a nickel-in-the-slot machine which proved a better winner than several players who stacked up against it. The Carrolina (by the way this spelling with two r’s is correct, as the name is a combination, the owners name and the name of the State) had no billiard or pool room and no bar. It was therefore difficult for the boys to go wrong. As Manager Selee expressed it, there was nothing to do but tend strictly to business. A visit to one of the leading factories was very interesting and Uncle Moses Hester’s sermon to some of the players on Easter Sunday was almost as a minstrel show but a darky cake walk in a dimly-lighted tobacco warehouse was disappointing as a disturbing element interfered every time the walkers made a beginning. George Yeager discovered a boot black who could execute a buck and wing dance and George billed him for a number of matinees on the hotel piazza. If the Bostons go to Durham next spring Manager Selee will have to manufacture diversions to keep his men from being homesick.

Note: On the following page, the Journal printed a full page of photographs.

BILL NOWLIN has been eating Boston baked beans ever since he can remember. It’s still a frequent staple with home-grilled hot dogs. His preferred brand is B&M, from the can. A native of Boston, living in Cambridge, he is one of the founders of Rounder Records and has also written or edited numerous books about baseball. He has been on the Board of Directors of SABR since 2004.

Notes

1 springtrainingonline.com/features/history.htm.

2 T.H. Murnane, “Wings on a Ball,” Boston Globe, March 25, 1890: 5.

3 “Twelve to One,” Boston Globe, April 2, 1890: 2.

4 “Champions Going South,” Boston Globe, February 11, 1892: 2.

5 “Bostons Play a Fine Game,” Boston Herald, April 2, 1890: 2.

6 “Signs of the Season,” Boston Herald, February 16, 1890: 16.

7 “Boston Base Ball Club,” Boston Journal, March 18, 1890: 1.

8 “Bostons Play a Fine Game.”

9 For more on Fast Day, see Joanne Hulbert, “Fast Day – Boston’s Original Opening Day,” in Bob LeMoine and Bill Nowlin, eds., Boston’s First Nine: The 1871-75 Boston Red Stockings (Phoenix: SABR, 2016), 196-199. It was traditionally observed on the first Thursday of April.

10 “Boston’s Seventeen,” The Sun (Baltimore), April 10, 1890: Supplement 2.

11 “Sporting Scraps,” Daily Inter Ocean (Chicago), February 20, 1891: 6.

12 “Will Not Go South,” Boston Journal, March 27, 1891: 4.

13 “Stricker Has the ‘Grippe,’” Boston Herald, March 29, 1891: 2.

14 “The Boston N.L. Nine to Play Harvard,” Boston Daily Advertiser, February 26, 1891: 8.

15 “Spring Games of the League Nine,” Boston Herald, April 4, 1891: 10.

16 “Champions Going South.”

17 T.H. Murnane, “Champions Go South,” Boston Globe, March 23, 1892: 10.

18 “The Champions in Training,” Boston Herald, March 26, 1892: 10.

19 “Coming of the Champions,” Boston Herald, March 29, 1893: 2.

20 “Yale Played Well,” Boston Daily Advertiser, April 11, 1893: 8.

21 “Just Play for the Bostons,” Boston Herald, April 16, 1893: 6.

22 “Ordered to Report,” Boston Globe, March 18, 1894: 10.

23 “Look Well and Strong,” Boston Globe, April 3, 1894: 5.

24 “Base Ball Notes,” Boston Globe, April 4, 1894: 2.

25 “Champions Caught Napping,” Boston Herald, April 7, 1894: 7.

26 “Games in the South Missed,” Boston Herald, April 9, 1894: 8.

27 “Canceled Both Games,” Boston Globe, April 12, 1894: 2.

28 “Champions Play in Springfield,” Boston Herald, April 15, 1894: 4.

29 T.H. Murnane, “Boston Going South,” Boston Globe, March 10, 1895: 24.

30 “Own the Town,” Boston Globe, March 29, 1895: 2.

31 “Regular Ice-Water Pitchers,” Boston Herald, March 28, 1895: 3.

32 “Bostons in Dixie’s Land,” Boston Journal, April 1, 1895: 8.

33 T.H. Murnane, “Signing Champions,” Boston Globe, February 9, 1896: 17.

34 “Bostons Take the Field,” Boston Herald, March 21, 1896: 12.

35 T.H. Murnane, “Tell It Softly!” Boston Globe, April 7, 1896: 2. Selee later hired a “female massage operator” to work on the pitchers’ arms. See “Base Ball Notes,” Wilkes-Barre Times, April 3, 1896: 5.

36 “Sure of Grounds,” Boston Globe, January 22, 1897: 10.

37 “Arrive Alive,” Boston Globe, March 22, 1897: 3.

38 “Warmer Climate,” Boston Globe, March 20, 1898: 17.

39 “Boston Nine in Good Trim,” Boston Herald, April 11, 1898: 10.

40 T.H.M., “Avoid the South,” Boston Globe, March 20, 1899: 9.

41 “No Gymnasium Work Allowed,” Pawtucket Times, March 27, 1899: 2.

42 “Boston’s First,” Boston Globe, April 1, 1899: 2.

Come 1891, the PL had dissolved and most things were back to normal, 140 games starting in mid-April and ending by October. The Beaneaters were one of two clubs to play 140 games, yet there was one game they didn’t play in Philadelphia, a late July rainout that was never rescheduled. They tied New York in a classic 4-4 duel between Amos Rusie and host Charlie “Kid” Nichols that went 10 innings before dark set in, and deadlocked with Pittsburgh, 7-7, another unresolved game, so Boston took the season series 16-3-1. Boston was 15-5-1 versus the New York Giants.

When the AA broke up after 1891, that prompted a big change in the NL 1892 schedule. Four teams were absorbed (making 12 total for the NL), and the schedule was revamped so that the teams played each other 14 times for 154 total games. In hopes that some interest would not be lost late in the season by a runaway pennant race, the campaign was split: the winner of the first half to play the winner of the second half at the season’s conclusion. Boston took the first half and probably should have won the second half as well, but Cleveland came along and made the campaign interesting and provided fodder for a “postseason” series matchup. To accommodate these extra games the year started a week earlier (April 12) and finished later (October 15). Big winner Boston (102 wins total) played 17 doubleheaders, the same as last-place Baltimore (46 wins).

Complaints about awful spring weather and October boredom forced changes so the schedule was tweaked again for 1893. The dozen teams would play one another only 12 times, cutting way back to 132 games, and the split-season idea was abolished. Teams began on April 27-28 and ended before October 1. Pennant winner Boston (86 wins) played 11 doubleheaders while lowly Washington (40) endured eight. In general, this schedule remained intact for another four years until 1898, when League owners suddenly decided to generate additional revenue with more games. For both 1898 and 1899, the teams played 154 games, 14 apiece against one another. In 1898 the pennant-snatching Beaneaters (102-47) played 12 doubleheaders while the bedraggled St. Louis Browns (39-111) managed 26 twin bills, seven in its nine days of October play. All teams started by April 20 and ended by October 10. To end the decade and century, the NL went back to eight teams playing 20 games against one another (140) in 1900.

In terms of starting each 1890s campaign, the Beaneaters had a selfish lock on the April 19 date, to join in with the Patriots Day celebration (officially beginning in 1894) in the city of Boston. Seven times in 11 years that was Opening Day in the Hub, though for six years they did begin on the road. The season’s end at their “cozy confines” of the South End Grounds was on a wide range of dates from September 6 to October 14 through the 1890s. It was normal for the Beaneaters to begin on the road and come home for just Patriots Day and then be on the road again. In 1896 they played 27 road tilts bookending three at South End Grounds, Patriots Day included. For 1898 it was two on the road, host Patriots Day, and then 11 more away, followed by 1899’s three away games, Patriots Day and 13 more out of town. April 19 was that important to their gate. The years 1890-94-95-97-1900 produced a favorable schedule, which had them open the season at the South End Grounds.

Homestands and road trips fluctuated greatly during that decade. Such things were uneven at best and sheer madness at worst. In 1891 Boston had back-to-back 20-game stretches, home and away, and late in the year they were away for 19 and then home for 26. The longest homestand of the decade was 34 games in 1893 followed by 33 in 1897 and 29 in 1896. Boston traveled the longest in 1897, 30 straight games worth, and in 1895, 26. It was not until 1898 that the length of trips and comfortable home stays were scaled down to under 20. The wildest lack of team travel occurred in 1893, when only three homestands of 34, 17, and 14 games balanced off four lengthy road trips. By 1899 there were 10 shorter cuts of both, preparing twentieth-century fans for what became normal to them.

Sources

Retrosheet game logs for each season.

I played a game of base-ball, I belong to Casey’s nine,
The crowd was feeling jolly, and the weather it was fine;
A nobler lot of players I think were never found,
When the omnibuses landed that day upon the ground.
The game was quickly started, they sent me to the bat,
I made two strikes, says Casey, “What are you striking at?”
I made the third, the catcher muffed and to the ground it fell,
I run like a divil to first base, when the gang began to yell:2

Mike “King” Kelly need not say any words to the assembled audience. The song said it all for him. A song that despite its seemingly admonishing tone reflected the regard the cranks held for this player who embodied all the good – and sometimes the less reputable side – of the national pastime, and he had captured the affection of another man who owned the Kelly name.

(Chorus)

Slide, Kelly, slide, your running’s a disgrace,
Slide, Kelly, slide, stay there, hold your base;
If some one doesn’t steal you and your batting doesn’t fail you,
They’ll take you to Australia, slide, Kelly, slide.3

How the song came to be written brings up the history of another Kelly – James W. Kelly, an Irish comedian and author of popular songs during the last decades of the nineteenth century. He was born in Philadelphia in 1854 and was called “a mirth provoker.”4 He was described as “having a wonderfully expressive face, a musical voice of limited range, which he knew how to use to the best advantage, and that mother wit, said to be one of the distinguishing traits of the Celtic race, from which he sprang. Though not a musician, he had a natural ear for melody, and composed the airs of all his own songs.”5 Parodies were his most reliable formula, and he carried over themes and cadences that ended up in other of his renditions. Why he was so smitten with King Kelly could be chalked up to being his namesake, or King Kelly deserved a stirring ballad to complement his outsized image on the baseball diamond. King Kelly needed no introduction to the cranks across the country. 

“Slide, Kelly, Slide” immediately became a favorite on the vaudeville circuit and was also a financial gold mine for the publisher, Frank Harding, who purchased James Kelly’s interest in it. Harding published 27,000 copies of the words and music, and Henry Wehman, the Park Row publisher who secured the right to print the words, sold 40,000 copies of it. James Kelly probably made more money out of this composition than any of his other popular songs.6 At the height of his career, James W. Kelly was the highest-paid performer on the variety stage, receiving as much as $400 per week. The Boston Vaudeville Club paid him regularly $100 for a single performance. Unfortunately he did not possess many frugal habits – “being a hail fellow well met, his large earnings were dissipated with the rapidity with which they were made.”7 He died on June 26, 1896, at his mother’s home in New York City of an attack of acute gastritis at the age of 42.

’Twas in the second inning they called me in, I think,
To take the catcher’s place while he went to get a drink;
But something was the matter, sure I couldn’t see the ball,
And the second one that came I broke my muzzle, nose and all.
The crowd up in the grand stand they yelled with all their might;
I ran towards the club house, I thought there was a fight;
’Twas the most unpleasant feeling I ever felt before,
I knew they had me rattled when the gang began to roar:8

(Chorus)

James Kelly wrote 15 comic songs. His most popular along with “Slide, Kelly, Slide” were “Come Down, Mrs. Flynn” and “Throw Him Down, McCloskey,” a ballad that celebrated a popular boxer of the time and the chorus of this song hinted at the rhythm and cadence of his most famous song:

“Throw him down, McCloskey,” was to be his battle cry –
Throw him down, McCloskey, you can lick him if you try,
And future generations, with wonder and delight,
Will read on histr’y’s pages of the great McCloskey fight.9

The tragic demise of King Kelly in 1894 and also that of James W. Kelly in 1896 did not spell the end of the song. The cranks kept up the chorus “Slide, Kelly, slide!” at baseball games. Soon the phrase found its way into the American slang dictionary – another addition bequeathed by baseball. The phrase turned up in odd and interesting places. An apocryphal tale relates that as King Kelly was carried into a Boston hospital on a stretcher that toppled over, tossing him to the ground, he weakly lamented, “This is my last slide.”10

Ultimately, any person with the name Kelly was fair game to have the phrase used to their advantage. Any report of icy sidewalks or any warning of uncertain footedness conjured up the warning: ‘Slide, Kelly, slide!” Fred C. Kelly, a Cleveland Plain Dealer columnist, wrote about the burden the name Kelly placed upon him, and how it soured him on playing baseball as everyone insisted he “slide!” – when he didn’t want to.11

But what was it that connected Mike “King” Kelly with the “slide”? The story and the legend of Mike Kelly lived on long after his death. James J. Corbett, in his syndicated column “In Corbett’s Corner,” reminisced in 1919 about Kelly and his connection to the slide. Corbett called it a stunt, that Kelly had perfected the head-first slide, a tactic that was considered either brave or foolhardy, and was discouraged by managers as potentially injurious.12

In 1907 at a preseason meeting in New York City, a new rule was adopted that if one baserunner passed another in an attempt to score while the other was being “tagged” out, the runner who passed would be declared out – all this thanks to an incident made famous by Mike Kelly. The new rule was calculated to prevent such stunts as the world-renowned slide pulled off by Kelly when he was a member of the Chicago team during a game in Boston in 1885.

“It happened in the last half of the ninth inning, when the score stood 1 to 0 against Chicago. Kelly was on first base and Ed Williamson was on second, and Anson knocked a fly ball out into right field. At the instant the fielder caught the ball both Kelly and Williamson made a dash for second and third. The ball was simply returned to the second baseman, but Kelly slid in and beat it by a hair. When Kelly arose from the ground and saw Billy Sunday at bat, he grabbed his arm, and pretending to be writhing in agony, he signaled to the umpire to call time. Then he called to Ed Williamson to come and pull his arm. While Ed was doing so, Kelly whispered to him as follows: “Say, Ed, when the pitcher throws the ball in, I’m going to start for third. This will draw the ball down to catch me, and then you make a dash for the plate and I’ll be right behind you. By the time you get near the plate the catcher will be waiting for you with the ball, but get as near as you can to the plate, then open your legs wide and I will try to slide in.”13

At the appointed time Kelly dashed for third. The ball was shot down to that base, and then Ed made for home, while the third baseman sent the ball back to the catcher. Kelly by this time had rounded third and was right behind Williamson, for whom the catcher was waiting with outstretched arms. When within a few feet of the plate, Williamson halted, suddenly spread his legs wide apart, and as the catcher jumped forward to tag Ed, Kelly slid between Williamson’s legs and had his fingers on the plate before the catcher knew what had happened. Chicago made another run in the 10th inning, and this won the game.14

Kelly turned to the crowd and shouted: “It’s all over! The game’s won! You can’t get it back! Open the gates and go home!”15 He laughed, and at first the crowd was enraged and protested he didn’t touch third base. Sam Wise yelled, “He cut the bag by 5 yards!” But then a great cheer arose from the crowd of 10,000 for the trickiest ballplayer who ever walked the diamond. This trick was original with Kelly, and many players have since tried it.16

As baseball stories go, the tale of Kelly’s slide spread across the land. The feat quickly became material for the song, as no one had ever heard of such a ploy to score a run, but James W. Kelly saw a lucrative opportunity by exploiting that move and the phrase and song “Slide, Kelly, Slide!” live on forever in baseball history.

They sent me out to centre-field, I didn’t want to go,
The way my nose was swelling up, I must have been a show;
They said on me depended victory or defeat,
If a blind man was to look on us, he’d know that we were beat.

Sixty-four to nothing was the score when we got done,
And everybody there but me said they had lots of fun;
The news got home ahead of me, they heard I was knocked out,
The neighbors carried me in the house, and then began to shout:17

Slide, Kelly, slide, your running’s a disgrace,
Slide, Kelly, slide, stay there, hold your base;
If some one doesn’t steal you and your batting doesn’t fail you,
They’ll take you to Australia, slide, Kelly, slide.18

Notes

1 “Mike Kelly Receives the Pennant,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 12, 1890: 3.

2  “Slide, Kelly, Slide.” Copyright, 1889, Frank Harding. Words and Music by J.W. Kelly.

3 Ibid.

4 “Exit J.W. Kelly, the Famous Rolling Mill-Man Responds to the Final Call,” Philadelphia Inquirer, June 27, 1896: 1.

5 Ibid.

6 “John W. Kelly’s Songs,” Duluth News-Tribune, July 7, 1896: 6.

7 “Exit J.W. Kelly,” Philadelphia Inquirer, October 12, 1890: 3.

8 “Slide, Kelly, Slide.”

9 “John W. Kelly’s Songs.”

10 “Greatest of All,” Oregonian (Portland), December 29, 1907: 7.

11 Fred C. Kelly, “The Burden of a Name,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 23, 1911: 4.

12 James J. Corbett, “In Corbett’s Corner,” Macon (Georgia) Telegraph, January 19, 1919: 10.

13 “Runners Did Not Pass Each Other,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, April 5, 1907: 16.

14 “Kelly’s Slide Home,” Dallas Morning News, March 31, 1907.

15 “How Kelly Cut Third,” Philadelphia Inquirer, July 18, 1897: 18.

16 Ibid.

17 “Slide, Kelly, Slide.”

18 Ibid.

In Boston, in particular, there was open disagreement, as the Association wanted to place, for the first time in its 10-year history, a team in the Hub city. The AA expected that a Boston team would be able to sign to contracts for 1891 many, if not most, of the players who had played for the Boston Reds, the champions of the defunct Players’ League.

The NL Boston Beaneaters’ President, Arthur H. Soden, stated that he would not object to an AA team in Boston, but thought that both clubs would lose money. What Soden, and the other two-thirds of the Triumvirs (as the three men who owned the Beaneaters – President Soden, Director William Conant, and Treasurer James Billings – were known) were hoping to get, though, were some concessions from the Association in exchange for accepting an AA team in Boston. Namely, they wanted some of the players from the previous season’s Boston Reds roster: second baseman Joe Quinn, third baseman Billy Nash, and outfielder Hardy Richardson.1

The Triumvirs had run the Beaneaters franchise for several years. “Soden first got involved with the Beaneaters when he bought three shares of stock, at $30 per share, in the Boston League Base Ball Club back in 1876. Buying stock in a ball club then was done simply to help the game, as a dividend was never thought of. He became president of the club in 1878.”2

“Messrs. Billings and Conant, who are equal partners in the Boston league club, were baseball enthusiasts simply, until Mr. Soden got them to take stock. Mr. Billings became interested along about ’79, while Mr. Conant came to the front in ’83, the year Boston pulled off the league pennant for the last time.”3

In January of 1891, the AA announced that it would indeed place a team in Boston.4 Then, in early February, the Beaneaters made a shocking announcement – they had signed outfielder Harry Stovey, a longtime AA star and one of the main cogs in the previous season’s Boston Reds Players’ League championship team.5 This signing, along with that of second baseman Lou Bierbauer by the NL’s Pittsburgh club, caused an uproar throughout baseball.

The AA’s Philadelphia club, the Athletics, claimed that they owned the rights to Stovey and Bierbauer, since they had been under contract when they jumped to the Players’ League in 1890. Now that the Players’ League no longer existed, the Athletics claimed that the two players should return to Philadelphia under the rules of the reserve system in place under the so-called “national agreement” between the two major leagues (and the Western League, a high minor league).6

Meanwhile, Director Conant of the Beaneaters was discussing the possibility of getting superstar catcher Mike “King” Kelly to return to the team after his one-year hiatus with the Boston Reds.7 Kelly had played with the Beaneaters from 1887 to 1889 and was idolized by all of the baseball fans in Boston. Kelly was considered by most people in baseball to be the sport’s biggest drawing card and, possibly, its best manager and motivator, too, so getting him back was a high priority.

Then, in mid-February came a blitz of announcements that would shape the course of baseball in 1891 and beyond. On February 14 the National Board, the governing body overseeing all affairs of the leagues participating in the national agreement, ruled that Stovey was awarded to the Boston League club and Bierbauer to Pittsburgh (causing the team forevermore to be known as the “Pirates”). Soden was quoted as saying, “We have a perfect right to sign Stovey and will insist that he remain with us. Mr. Stovey would not play Sunday games, and was anxious to play with the league, and he was just the man we wanted.”8

The next day it was revealed that Allen W. Thurman, president of the American Association and one of the voting members of the National Board, had, shockingly, voted for the ruling favoring the League.9 (Thurman was summarily dismissed as AA president, replaced by Louis Kramer.10) Two days later, there was an announcement that Kelly would captain the Association’s new Cincinnati club, permitted to go there by the management of the Boston Reds.11 And then the following day, National League President Nick Young received official notification from the AA of its withdrawal from the national agreement, precipitated, of course, by the ruling of the National Board.12

This set up a “war” between the two leagues that would have a major impact on the possibility of a world’s series between the champions of the Association and the League at the end of the 1891 season and, more importantly, set the stage for the ultimate demise of the Association and the League’s monopoly and syndication of major-league baseball throughout the remainder of the nineteenth century.

In early March the Beaneaters acceded to the financial demands of Billy Nash (reportedly $5,000 for each of the next three seasons plus a signing bonus of $2,500) and signed him as their third baseman and captain.13 And in late March the members of the team started slowly trickling into town to begin preparing for the season. The Beaneaters used the YMCA gym on Boylston Street when the weather was bad and practiced at the South End Grounds when the weather was pleasant.14

Boston planned a big preseason exhibition game for Fast Day (April 2), the Beaneaters hosting John Ward’s Brooklyn AA team, known as “Ward’s Wonders.”15 More than 6,000 fans came to the South End Grounds and saw the League team whip Brooklyn, with Stovey hitting a home run and stealing a couple of bases in his Beaneaters debut.16 The regular season was still weeks away, and, wrote the Boston Globe, “it was a very cold day, but it was Fast day, the bell had rung, the umpire was all ready to shout ‘play ball,’ and another season of the glorious old sport was about to begin.”17

Tim Murnane, the Globe’s prominent sportswriter, saw the Reds as heavy favorites to win the American Association pennant, but in the National League he thought the Giants were the best team, with Chicago and Brooklyn not far behind. As for the local team, Murnane said, “How about Boston? Oh, the Bostons can play ball, but I am a few chips shy when putting the team down for pennant winners. If the men should all work together, without an eye for individual records, they will most likely get into the first division.”18

Boston opened its National League season on Wednesday, April 22, in New York, where the heavily favored Giants hosted the Beaneaters in front of a huge crowd of 17,000. The game was a close pitchers’ duel between Boston’s veteran ace John Clarkson and the Giants’ young, fireballing Amos Rusie. The Beaneaters won in the ninth inning, 4-3, on a fly ball hit by shortstop Herman Long that Giants center fielder George Gore misplayed.19 Three days later, Boston had completed a four-game sweep of the stunned Giants and stood tied for first place with the Cleveland Spiders.

On Monday, April 27, a large crowd of 7,500 showed up at the South End Grounds to see Boston’s first home game of the season. The story was the lead on the Boston Globe front page and even included an illustration of Massachusetts Governor William Russell arriving at the game.20

The Beaneaters’ young ace, Kid Nichols, threw a five-hit shutout and Stovey hit two doubles and a triple as Boston beat Philadelphia, 5-0.21 Boston ended up only splitting that four-game series with Philly, but they were still in first place, a game ahead of three other teams.

The Beaneaters then split four games in Brooklyn, but were still tied for first place with Cleveland, a half-game ahead of Chicago. Murnane expressed his strong opinion that the team was already in desperate need of an additional pitcher, as third starter Charles “Pretzels” Getzien, who had pitched well for the Beaneaters in 1890 and for Detroit previously, had declined rapidly and was simply not capable of filling in adequately when Clarkson and Nichols needed rest.22

There was a lot of excitement in the Hub at the beginning of May, as King Kelly’s “Killers” visited the Reds at the Congress Street Grounds, while Buck Ewing’s Giants came to the South End Grounds, hoping to gain some revenge on Boston for having swept New York in their season-opening series.

The Giants won two out of three, as Boston tried out new pitchers John Kiley and Cyclone Ryan during the series (neither of whom ever pitched in the majors again). On May 10, as the Beaneaters prepared to travel for a long trip out West, where they were scheduled to play four games against each of the four Western teams, they found themselves in second place, one game behind Cap Anson’s Chicago club.

John Clarkson pitched Boston to a series-opening win in Chicago, aided by Stovey’s fourth-inning homer that was “hit far over the outer wall among the bitter weeds.”23 Despite a sterling second game from Stovey (another homer, plus three assists, throwing out runners at second, third, and home), the Colts pounded Kid Nichols.24 The two teams split the next two games, too, so the Beaneaters still trailed by one game when they left Chicago for Cincinnati.

The last-place Cincinnati team called on “Old Charley” (also called “Old Hoss”) Radbourn to beat his former team twice in the series (Radbourn had pitched for Boston for four years before jumping to the Boston Reds of the Players’ League). The Beaneaters, having lost three of four in Cincinnati, then lost three of four in Cleveland, with Cy Young outdueling Kid Nichols in one game that was controversially called because of darkness, causing captain Billy Nash to make “a vigorous protest, but it was of no avail.”25

As the Beaneaters finished up their road trip in Pittsburgh, their need for additional pitching was made all the more clear during the three games with the Pirates, as Nichols and Clarkson won their games, but new pitcher Charles Brynan lasted but one inning and never pitched in the major leagues again.26

On May 27, in what turned out to be a critically important move, Boston obtained from the Pirates 24-year-old Harry Staley, a workhorse who had started nearly 50 games and pitched around 400 innings in each of the previous two seasons.27 It is worth noting that Pittsburgh’s record on this date was 15-12, putting them in second place, three games behind Chicago. They would finish last. And the Beaneaters on that day were in fifth place, closer to cellar-dwelling Cincinnati than to first place Chicago.

Decoration Day (now called Memorial Day) on May 30 marked the first notable holiday of the season, celebrated with doubleheaders in both leagues. At the South End Grounds, 4,000 people attended the morning game, while 10,000 saw the afternoon game.

The Beaneaters swept their two games from Cincinnati, Staley winning his Boston debut in the first game, while Clarkson beat Radbourn in the second. The Boston Globe report gushed about Staley’s work “in the box,” but was especially nostalgic about Radbourn and his mid-1880s glory days with the Providence Grays:

“The real sendoff of the game was given to Old Hoss Charley Radbourn as he walked from the bench to take his position in the box before the game,” wrote the Globe. “‘Rad’ tipped his cap and handled the ball nervously as the crowd cheered. The bronzed old warrior of the diamond felt the blood come to his cheek when he stood on the spot he had made famous but a few years back when he was the main stay of that Rhode Island champion team in the stubborn contests with the Bostons when games lengthened out in to 14 and 16 innings and the score of both teams seldom reached five in all.

“The day as a whole was a base ball success, from the jingle of the half dollar and the merry tick of the turnstile to the smile of the honest face of William Nash.”28

At the end of May, the National League standings saw Boston in a five-team logjam, 3½ games behind first-place Chicago.

In early June Harry Stovey missed five games to be at home with his family, tending to his two-month-old daughter,29who died on June 6 (her twin was stillborn on April 1).30 The Beaneaters lost three of those games and were 4½ games back when Cap Anson’s first-place Chicago Colts made their first visit to the South End Grounds.

“Anson is willing to wager anything, from a chew of tobacco to a dress suit, that his Chicago nine can beat any team in the league for a place, and with a little odds will take his team for a pennant winner,” wrote the Globe. “The Chicago team has always been the leading attraction in this city, and the next four games will be a test of the drawing power of our league team this season. Bill] Hutchinson and Clarkson will most likely do the pitching. Hutchinson is looked on as a wonder, and is doing half the pitching for his team.”31

The attendance at the South End Grounds totaled 12,000 for the four-game series, which the two teams split, Hutchinson and Clarkson each winning one of their two duels.

The New York Giants, meanwhile, were surging. By mid-June, after having swept four games from visiting Chicago, including a Saturday game in front of a record 22,289 fans at the Polo Grounds, to run the Colts’ losing streak to six games, the Giants had won 15 of 16 and were in first place, four games ahead of Chicago and 4½ ahead of Boston.

On June 17 Boston hosted a doubleheader to celebrate Bunker Hill Day, but the cold, wet weather kept the attendance down to about 2,000 for each of the games at the South End Grounds. The Beaneaters beat visiting Brooklyn’s “Ward’s Wonders” twice, Nichols and Staley picking up the wins.

Although Cincinnati’s “Kelly’s Killers” were playing .500 ball in the Association and drawing decent crowds, there was talk of Mike Kelly coming back to Boston. Chicago’s Anson was quoted as saying the Bostons should never have let him go, since Kelly was “one of the greatest ball players in the business and the best drawing card that Boston ever had.  It was a big mistake to let him leave the league. With Kel in the Boston team the crowds at the South End grounds would have been just double.”32

The Cincinnati Commercial Gazette reported on what it saw as Boston’s motive: “By getting Kelly away from Cincinnati they would serve a double purpose in breaking up the association club in this city and in adding to their own team one of the most popular players that ever set foot on a ball field. Capt. Kelly today is rated as one of the greatest players in the profession, and he hasn’t an equal as a drawing card.”33

With nothing but rumors about Kelly swirling, the Beaneaters wrapped up their long homestand winning 13 and losing 7, tied for second place with Chicago, 2½ games behind New York. They then left, on June 21, for Philadelphia, embarking on a 3½-week road trip in which they would visit every other team in the league.

Boston won its first game on the trip with Clarkson handling the imposing Phillies’ lineup that included future Hall of Fame outfielders Billy Hamilton, Sam Thompson, and Ed Delahanty, but the Beaneaters then lost the next three in Philly.

They then moved on to another showdown with the Giants in New York. The first scheduled game was rained out, but Clarkson beat Rusie in the second game in front of a large Saturday crowd of more than 7,000. With no Sunday game scheduled, as usual in the NL, Roger Connor and Jim O’Rourke each got three hits off Clarkson on Monday and the Giants beat Boston to split their two games.

The last day of June saw Stovey suffer the ignominy of striking out five times in one game, against Brooklyn’s George Hemming, becoming only the second player ever to do so (the first was the Buffalo Bison’s Oscar Walker in 1879).34

At the end of June the Beaneaters were in third place in the National League, 4½ games behind first-place New York and 3½ behind second-place Chicago.

The Beaneaters played their July 4 holiday doubleheader in Pittsburgh, in front of crowds of more than 5,000, and came away with two wins, Clarkson and Staley beating Silver King and Mark Baldwin. The Giants also won twice on the road, winning in Cincinnati, while the Colts, playing at home in front of crowds of 6,682 and 11,117, lost both ends of their doubleheader against visiting Brooklyn.

There were still plenty of rumors going around about the Beaneaters reacquiring Mike Kelly, especially since Boston manager Frank Selee was said to be disgusted with first baseman Tommy Tucker’s play, both hitting and fielding. Murnane thought that Tucker was not putting up the game that was expected of a man getting a salary of over $4,000. Director Conant, “a warm friend” of Kelly’s, and manager Selee wanted Kelly back, but President Soden and Treasurer Billings were not keen on his return.35

By the middle of July, the National League pennant race had narrowed down to three contenders: New York, Chicago, and Boston. And the second-place Colts, having just lost two of three at home to the first-place Giants, welcomed the third-place Beaneaters for a three-game set. Chicago won the first game easily, with Ad Gumbert shutting out Boston, but each of the next two games went to extra innings before the Beaneaters succumbed. The last game was described as the most exciting of the season. Boston had taken a two-run lead in the top of the 12th inning, but in the bottom of the inning, with two on and two out, a pop fly fell just in front of Stovey, whose throw to the plate “went against the stand, all three men scoring and the game was won before the crowd realized what had happened.”36 And with that sweep, at the midpoint of the NL season, Chicago jumped back into first place.

The Beaneaters’ long 3½-week road trip, during which they won 10 games and lost 10, was finally over. “Staley, Nichols, and Clarkson were the back bone of the team, Kid Nichols doing phenomenally good work in the box,” wrote the Globe.37 With the exception of a brief series in Philadelphia scheduled for the end of July, Boston would be welcoming all of the other NL teams at the South End Grounds over the next month.

After getting swept in Chicago, Boston bounced back during the last two weeks of July and the first week of August, winning 10 of 13 games and jumping into second place ahead of New York and trailing Chicago by only 1½ games, just in time for Cap Anson’s team’s visit to the Hub city.

The first game, on Thursday, August 6, played before a South End Grounds crowd of more than 5,000 fans, ended in the 13th inning when Nichols hit a Chicago batter with the bases loaded, forcing in the winning run. The loss dropped Boston back into third place.

The next day the Colts, behind their workhorse pitcher Hutchinson, won in extra innings again. The Beaneaters finally won on Saturday, in front of nearly 9,000 enthusiastic fans: “It was one of the old-time crowds that witnessed the game yesterday at the South End grounds,” the Globe noted. “About every seat in the pavilion and on the bleachers was taken.”38

By the middle of August, with Boston having concluded its long homestand by winning four of its last five games, and with Chicago losing two of three in New York, the National League race was as tight as it could be, with the Colts in first place, a half-game ahead of the second-place Beaneaters, and one game ahead of the third-place Giants.

Boston then left for its last long road trip of the season, a three-week tour of every NL city but Philadelphia.

At their first stop, in New York, the Beaneaters took two of three from the Giants, permanently relegating the Giants to third place in the NL pennant race. During their next stop, in Brooklyn, Harry Stovey again fell to the curse of Brooklyn’s George Hemming, striking out against him four times, almost equaling the five times Stovey fanned against Hemming back at the end of June. While on the next leg of their road trip, in Pittsburgh, there was a big headline on the front page of the August 26 edition of the Boston Globe:

“Kelly Jumps. Will Play with Boston League Team.”39

Mike Kelly signed a contract that would pay him $25,000 from that date to the end of the following season. It was the “largest salary ever paid to a ball player.”40

Director Conant said, “Well, the King is home again. He’s back with the club he first started with in Boston. He has cost a good deal of money, but he is worth it, and he is the greatest drawing card in the base ball profession. Just imagine the people who will go to see him in Chicago when he gets there.”41

There were, not surprisingly, major repercussions to this announcement. Coincidentally, representatives of the National League and American Association were meeting in Washington to try to hammer out a new national agreement, but the news about Kelly caused Association President Kramer to call a halt to the conference. “Breach is widened” was the subheadline in the Globe.42

And Globe columnist Tim Murnane couldn’t resist making this snide remark: “If Mike Kelly has signed with the league he will probably play with one arm, as he took an oath some time ago that he would cut off his right wing sooner than sign with the league.”43

Overshadowed by the controversial news about Kelly signing with the League and his reappearance in the Beaneaters’ lineup beginning with the games in Cleveland, the Beaneaters won only half of their games over the last two weeks of their road trip, and fell from a half-game back of the Colts to five games back when they arrived in Chicago for a three-game series in early September.

In the first game between the two remaining NL pennant contenders, Chicago walloped Boston, 10-1, Bill Hutchinson limiting the Beaneaters to just two hits.44 The next day, “Anson created a sensation by appearing on the field with flowing whiskers of snowy whiteness and long white hair. He played the game through in this disguise and the crowd seemed to enjoy the sight.”45 And Chicago won again, expanding its lead over Boston to a seemingly irretrievable seven games. The Beaneaters managed to salvage a small sense of pride by beating the Colts in the last game of the series, wrapping up their 19-game road trip with 10 wins and 9 losses. They then headed home, where they would host all of the League’s teams at the South End Grounds over the last four weeks of the season.

Despite being so far behind Chicago in the standings, “Manager Selee said that nothing would please him more than to see the Boston league and association teams playing a series for the world’s championship this fall. This would please the patrons of base ball in this part of the country more than any other thing the magnates could do.”46

The Labor Day doubleheader at the South End Grounds was rained out, but the Beaneaters played back-to-back doubleheaders against visiting Cleveland over the next two days, winning three of four. They then swept three games from visiting Cincinnati, reducing Chicago’s lead to 4½ games as the Colts arrived in Boston for their last visit.

In front of a large Monday crowd of more than 6,000 at the South End Grounds on September 14, Chicago’s “Cannon-ball Willie” Hutchinson beat the Beaneaters again, holding them to just three hits for his 42nd victory of the season. Chicago won again the next day, John Clarkson getting roughed up by the Colts. Chicago had extended its lead to 6½ games and the Boston Journal said, “The Bostons might as well at once give up all hope of winning the championship this year. In the first place there are too few games to play to catch up with Anson; in the next place, they must play a far better game than they have shown of late to be able to cope with any team of the ability of the Chicagos.”47

When Boston finally beat Chicago on September 16, Nichols beating Hutchinson, little did anyone know that the Beaneaters had begun what would turn out to be the most remarkable pennant-grabbing stretch-run sprint in baseball history.

After having a tied game called on account of darkness, Boston won three straight from Pittsburgh at the same time that New York was sweeping three from Chicago, Giants workhorse Amos Rusie winning two of the games.

The Beaneaters then took four in a row from visiting Brooklyn, followed by a three-game sweep of Philadelphia. The Colts pretty much kept up, winning all five of their scheduled games. Chicago’s 1½-game lead looked somewhat tenuous, but as they headed into the last week of the season, the Colts’ final two series would be with sub-.500 teams: fifth-place Cleveland and tail-ender Cincinnati. Boston, meanwhile, would have to face two teams with winning records: the third-place Giants and the fourth-place Phillies.

Then came the controversial series that would forever cast a shadow over the accomplishments of the 1891 Boston Beaneaters team. The New York Giants came to the South End Grounds a bit battered and lackadaisical after having been eliminated in the pennant race. In the first game of the series, the Giants sent 23-year-old Roscoe Coughlin to the pitcher’s box to face the Beaneaters. Coughlin was making only his fifth start of the season. Star first baseman Roger Connor and starting catcher Dick Buckley were not in the lineup for the Giants as they were pummeled by the Beaneaters, 11-3. The skepticism about the integrity of the Giants’ effort began right in Boston, as the Reds’ “Billy Joyce was at the South End grounds yesterday and said: ‘I wonder if that’s the team Jim] Mutrie [manager of the Giants] would put against the Reds for $1,000? Why, that crowd of Giants couldn’t beat nine schoolboys.’ ”48

Chicago, meanwhile, lost to the Spiders, with Cy Young beating Bill Hutchinson, so the Colts’ lead was down to a half-game.

More than 5,000 fans showed up for Tuesday’s doubleheader, as they saw the Beaneaters easily take both games from the Giants. Although New York had aging veteran Mickey Welch pitch the first game, its pitcher for the second game was Mike Sullivan, who was making his first-ever start for the team. Connor and Buckley were still missing from the Giants’ lineup, while Bobby Lowe and Harry Stovey led a barrage of hits against both Welch and Sullivan as Boston won, 13-8 and 11-3.49 Even Tim Murnane was disappointed in the way that the Giants were playing, writing, “The same teams play two games this afternoon, and the Giants should put a little more life into their work if they wish base ball to hold its present high standing among outdoor games.”50

Chicago won a wild back-and-forth game in Cleveland, 14-13, winning in the bottom of the ninth inning, but the Colts and Beaneaters were now in a virtual tie, Chicago leading by the smallest of margins in winning percentage (.626, 82-49 for the Colts vs .624, 83-50 for Boston).51

On the last day of September, more than 4,000 fans came to the South End Grounds to see Boston’s last home games of the season. The Beaneaters again won both games of a doubleheader, beating New York 16-5 and 5-3, running their winning streak to 16 games. Although Connor returned to the Giants’ lineup, star outfielder Hardy Richardson was absent, and the Giants started Coughlin in the first game and Sullivan in the second, a far cry from aces Amos Rusie (33-20 for the season) and John Ewing (21-8). And Chicago was again beaten by Cy Young, so, for the first time since early May, the Beaneaters moved into sole possession of first place, 1½ games ahead of the slumping Colts. The Globe effused, “The Boston league team wound up the season of ’91 at the South End grounds yesterday by taking two games from New York and going to the front in the greatest struggle known in the history of base ball.”52

President James Hart of the Chicago club was irate. That same day, Wednesday, September 30, he wrote to National League President Nick Young asking whether prior consent had been given for Boston to play all of those doubleheaders it had played recently at the South End Grounds (September 19 with Pittsburgh, September 23 with Brooklyn, and September 29 and 30 with New York). According to Hart, consent had to have been granted by six clubs prior to the games having been played. If consent had not been given, then Hart wanted the games “declared void and thrown out of the championship table and the decision made public in tomorrow morning’s papers.”53

The Globe reported that Hart later said: “Public sentiment is running high, and it seems to favor the idea that the Eastern clubs are not playing as well as they might. I have no accusations to make against anybody, but I will say that things do look suspicious.”54

On October 1, the Beaneaters clinched the pennant, with Clarkson beating the Phillies for Boston’s 17th consecutive win. In Chicago, meanwhile, in front of only 2,000 resigned fans, “Cincinnati won from Anson’s men today partly because Tony] Mullane was in wonderful form and partly because the Chicagos manifestly played like men fighting for a lost cause. All of their ginger is gone, and the game was as dreary a thing as one could wish to see, particularly after the score board had announced another Boston victory.”55

Two days later, there was a report from Chicago that “President James A. Hart of the Chicago club today received a telegram from Nick Young, telling him that every club but Chicago had given its consent to the extra games played by the Boston club lately.

“When he received this, Mr. Hart resolved on his course of action at once. On Monday he will forward to President Young formal charges of crookedness on the part of New York in their last games with Boston. ‘I shall probe the matter to the bottom,’ was Mr. Hart’s parting shot.”56

The following day the headlines on the front page of the Globe lauded the Beaneaters: “The league champions of 1892 will hail from Boston. It has been some time since Boston pulled off the league pennant, although they have made a good fight for the last three years. This year it looked almost impossible to overtake Capt. Anson’s Chicago team, but the boys set about the task three weeks ago, and the magnificent work they did from that time until Chicago was passed and the pennant landed was never surpassed in this country.

“To Capt. William Nash and Manager Frank Selee belongs the most credit for bringing the honor to this city. Selee got out all the play there was in his men, and saw they needed a pitcher, when Staley was secured.”57

As for the possibility of the two Boston champions playing a series to decide the world’s championship, an article from Washington stated that NL President Nick Young had received a dispatch from AA President Zach Phelps saying, “The pennant club of the Association hereby challenges the pennant club of the League to play a series of three, five, or seven games for the world’s championship.”58

The Reds, who featured future Hall of Fame sluggers Dan Brouthers and Hugh Duffy, led all of major-league baseball in runs scored. The Beaneaters, meanwhile, allowed the fewest runs in the NL, thanks to their star pitchers John Clarkson (33-19, 2.79), Kid Nichols (30-17, 2.39), and Harry Staley (20-8, 2.50). What an incredible series it would have been for the Hub – a baseball version of the irresistible force versus the immovable object!

However, the series never occurred, as President Young replied to Phelps, “I hold in my possession an agreement called the national agreement, which was solemnly signed by three parties, one of which was your association. I sincerely regret that the breaking of that agreement by your association renders such a series of games as you propose impossible.”59

Two days later, on October 12, the Globe published a letter to the Boston Reds club from President Phelps, saying that he had challenged the NL champs to a world’s series, but they declined. He also said that the club itself challenged the Boston NL club and they declined. He then mocked the NL’s excuse of using the national agreement. “There can, of course, be no agreement except there be at least two parties thereto, and the league alone is now party to what they are pleased to call the ‘national agreement.’ ”60

The next day the committee assigned to investigate the charges brought against the New York Giants by President Hart of the Chicago club submitted its final report, exonerating all involved. The report concluded that the Giants’ poor showing was attributable to their crippled condition. The committee thus determined that the charges of deliberate bad faith were unfounded and the committee regretted that full credit for having won the championship in such spectacular fashion was withheld from Boston as a result of the charges made by Chicago.61

The season of 1891 was arguably the city of Boston’s greatest in its long, rich major-league history. The controversy surrounding the existence of two teams in the city, the weaving throughout the season of the story of favorite son Mike “King” Kelly, the unprecedented stretch run, pennant-grabbing, 18-game winning streak of the Beaneaters, and the unresolved argument as to which team was better, the American Association champion Reds or the National League champion Beaneaters, all made the season among the most memorable ever.

Notes

1 “League Men Object,” Boston Globe, January 14, 1891.

2 T.H. Murnane, “He Loves the Game,” Boston Globe, August 1, 1891.

3 Ibid.

4 “Untangling the Tangle,” Boston Globe, January 16, 1891.

5 T.H. Murnane, “Two Stars Sign,” Boston Globe, February 6, 1891.

6 T.H. Murnane, “Pick of the Stars,” Boston Globe, January 18, 1891.

7 Ibid.

8 T.H. Murnane, “War Declared,” Boston Globe, February 15, 1891.

9 T.H. Murnane, “Base Ball War,” Boston Globe, February 16, 1891.

10 “Kranmer [sic] at the Helm,” Boston Globe, February 19, 1891.

11 “In War Paint,” Boston Globe, February 18, 1891.

12 “Kranmer [sic] at the Helm.”

13 “Big Money Got Him,” Boston Globe, March 8, 1891.

14 T.H. Murnane, “Experts at Practice,” Boston Globe, March 26, 1891.

15 T.H. Murnane, “How They Pitch,” Boston Globe, March 30, 1891.

16 J.C. Edgerly, “Boston on Top,” Boston Globe, April 3, 1891.

17 Ibid.

18 T.H. Murnane, “Murnane Sizes Them Up,” Boston Globe, April 20, 1891.

19 “Grand Send Off,” Boston Globe, April 23, 1891.

20 “Five Straight,” Boston Globe, April 28, 1891.

21 Ibid.

22 T.H. Murnane, “Trying Point Reached,” Boston Globe, May 4, 1891.

23 T.H. Murnane, “One on ‘Anse,’” Boston Globe, May 12, 1891.

24 T.H. Murnane, “Hoss and Hoss,” Boston Globe, May 13, 1891.

25 T.H. Murnane, “When Hits Would Tell,” Boston Globe, May 23, 1891.

26 T.H. Murnane, “Costly Experiment,” Boston Globe, May 27, 1891.

27 “Staley Signs With Boston,” Boston Globe, May 27, 1891.

28 ”Off His Fodder,” Boston Globe, May 31, 1891.

29 “Tried Two Pitchers,” Boston Globe, June 3, 1891.

30 Jean-Pierre Caillault, personal notes for future biography of Harry Stovey.

31 “Chicago Today,” Boston Globe, June 8, 1891.

32 T.H. Murnane, “They Are After Kelly,” Boston Globe, June 19, 1891.

33 Ibid.

34 Joseph L. Reichler, The Great All-Time Baseball Record Book (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1981), 92.

35 T.H. Murnane, “Wanted ‘King Kel’ Back,” Boston Globe, July 4, 1891.

36 “Played Twelve Innings,” Boston Globe, July 17, 1891.

37 “On Their Native Heath,” Boston Globe, July 18, 1891.

38 T.H. Murnane, “Anson Was Merciful,” Boston Globe, August 9, 1891.

39 J.C. Edgerly, “Kelly Jumps,” Boston Globe, August 26, 1891.

40 Ibid.

41 Ibid.

42 T.H. Murnane, “Breach Is Widened,” Boston Globe, August 26, 1891.

43 T.H. Murnane, “New Agreement Needed,” Boston Globe, August 26, 1891.

44 “Downed Again,” Boston Globe, September 4, 1891.

45 “Bostons Not in It,” Boston Globe, September 5, 1891.

46 “Leaguers at Home,” Boston Globe, September 8, 1891.

47 “Both Beaten,” Boston Journal, September 16, 1891.

48 “Base Ball Notes,” Boston Globe, September 29, 1891.

49 T.H. Murnane, “Won Both in a Canter,” Boston Globe, September 30, 1891.

50 Ibid.

51 Ibid.

52 T.H. Murnane, “Forged Ahead,” Boston Globe, October 1, 1891.

53 “ ‘Things Look Suspicious,’ ” Boston Globe, October 1, 1891.

54 Ibid.

55 “Still They Win,” Boston Globe, October 2, 1891.

56 “President Hart’s Action,” Boston Globe, October 4, 1891.

57 “Champions of ’92,” Boston Globe, October 5, 1891.

58 “League Club Cannot Play,” Boston Globe, October 10, 1891.

59 Ibid.

60 “Champions of the World,” Boston Globe, October 12, 1891.

61 “Exonerate All,” Boston Globe, October 14, 1891.

The league’s new name was now officially the National League and American Association of Professional Base Ball Clubs, which suggests a merger. It was not a merger but an absorption of the Association’s four most desirable clubs, Louisville, Washington, St. Louis, and Baltimore. The League, after 16 years, had evolved into a nice blend of six Eastern and six Western members in roughly the same Northeastern quarter of the nation that major-league baseball would represent for the next 66 years.2

The Triumvirs (Arthur Soden, James B. Billings, and William H. Conant) were in a windfall position since recent events left the Beaneaters (or Bean-eaters, or Bean Eaters, or even Reds in rare instances) as the sole major-league team in the Boston area. Actually, Charles A. Prince, owner of the Boston Reds of the American Association, had desired to leave baseball in any event and agreed to the League’s terms without much difficulty.

One of the first monopolistic moves that the owners undertook was to limit each club to 15 players, an increase of one from the previous five years.3 Manager Frank Selee’s roster was basically a mirror of last October’s club except for three remarkable gains. The first was Jack Stivetts, the stocky right-handed 33-game winner for the St. Louis Browns of a year earlier. Happy Jack, as he was called, was downhearted playing for Chris Von der Ahe, owner of the Browns, and signed with Boston for 1892 one month before the end of the 1891 season.4 Von der Ahe also lost his brilliant right fielder, Tommy McCarthy, to the Boston triumvirate and vainly demanded some sort of redemption from their organization. Von der Ahe’s redemption was achieved to his own peculiar satisfaction when he sent two constables to Tommy’s room at the Lindell Hotel in St. Louis on April 30 and seized his watch and chain to force satisfaction of a claim for $300 advance money given by the Browns’ owner. McCarthy paid $19.50 to get his timepiece returned; Von der Ahe then signed Boston’s recently released Steve Brodie, whom McCarthy replaced.5 McCarthy was a hometown boy, born in South Boston on July 24, 1863, and had played 40 games for the Beaneaters back in 1885. Manager Selee had managed McCarthy with Oshkosh of the Northwestern League in 1887.6 The Beaneaters also signed “Humpty Dumpty” Hugh Duffy, the center fielder at the Congress Street Grounds, where the Boston Reds played, and the only one of Prince’s athletes who signed to play at the South End, a player the Boston directors had coveted for years. Duffy, who was the spring season coach for the Brown University team in Providence, was “looking fine as silk” after shedding about 12 pounds.7 The outfield duo of Duffy and McCarthy became forever known as the Heavenly Twins.8

To heighten fan interest, the League-Association reintroduced a split-season format. With an expanded 154-game schedule, the champions of the first 77 games were to meet the winner of the second 77 in a best-of-nine series for the world’s championship.9

The “Spring Programme” arranged by manager Selee began on March 31 at Charlottesville, Virginia, with two or three games against the University of Virginia nine. The team also played games in Richmond, Virginia, and Naugatuck, Connecticut, near Waterbury. The schedule concluded with games against Yale University, Brown University, and finally Princeton University on the way south to Washington.10

The regular-season opener was played on April 12 at National Park in Washington on a bitter cold day before 6,000 to 7,000 spectators, overflowing the grandstand and bleachers.11 The Beaneaters, behind a 13-hit attack, trounced the Senators, 14-4, scoring six times in the seventh inning. Selee’s lineup included Herman Long at short, Duffy in center, Harry Stovey in left, Tommy McCarthy in right, Captain Billy Nash at third, aging Mike “King” Kelly catching, Australian Joe Quinn at second, switch-hitting Tommy “Foghorn” Tucker at first, and 30-year-old John Clarkson in the box.12

With essentially this same Opening Day lineup, Boston surged to the forefront with the power and purpose of 400 stampeding buffalo (which was about all that remained of the species in 1892). Selee’s nine won 12 of their first 15 matches.

His battery troupe alternated between catchers Mike Kelly, 37-year-old Charlie Bennett, and Charlie Ganzel, and pitchers Kid Nichols, Jack Stivetts, and Harry Staley, who together with Clarkson completed what appeared to be the first great starting rotation of four.

The Beaneaters won 15 of their first 18 matches, almost entirely on the road, before losing two in a row against the Cleveland Spiders at League Park on May 9 and 10. One of the more interesting games during that stretch was a scoreless 14-inning tie at Cincinnati’s League Park on May 6 between Clarkson and Icebox Chamberlain of the Reds. Both hurlers completed what they started in the 2-hour 35-minute marathon. The pitchers’ duel also extended to the bat, as the two boxmen both connected for two-base hits.13

The two victories on Decoration Day (Memorial Day) drew 3,687 fans to the morning game at the South End, while the afternoon game drew 7,367.14 The morning contest featured John Clarkson versus Cy Young and the Spiders in an exciting 10-inning duel cleanly played for the first nine innings. The game was decided in the 10th by two walks, Young’s miscue, and singles by Kelly and Stovey for a 4-0 triumph. If we ignore the five-run fifth that Cleveland fashioned, the afternoon match was a cakewalk for the Beaneaters, as the cranks were entertained to a 12-6 victory. King Kelly was the star with a double, two singles, and brilliant catching, helping Harry Staley win his eighth straight game.15

After Stivetts completed the three-game sweep of Cleveland by outpitching the Spiders’ Nig Cuppy on May 31 by a score of 2-1, Boston found itself with a 4½-game lead over the second-place Chicago Colts, and stood 27-9.

The individual statistics as of June 9 placed Duffy ninth in batting at .320, but Boston was only eighth with a .234 average. Stivetts was first in the long-forgotten average earned-runs-per-game-by-opposition at 0.91. The Bostonians ranked just fifth in fielding average with a .934 average.16 The early numbers and facts supported Cap Anson’s claim that the Beaneaters were lucky. Even Stivetts wondered how the club kept winning despite a lack of hitting. His guess was that winning can be attributed to pitching and baserunning.17

In June, the club won 18 of 27 matches behind the tandem of Nichols winning eight of nine games, and Stivetts who won seven of eight while pacing the league in batting. Nichols, with two straight shutouts on June 22 and 24, had a string of 23 scoreless innings before giving up a run in the first inning at New York on June 27. Staley, with his effective “drops,” started just four games, with meager run support. Boston had improved to 45-18 with a 5½-game lead over Brooklyn with just 12 days to go before the end of the season’s first half.

June was a month of adjustments as club owners cut their squads to 13 in an effort to help defray the $130,000 indebtedness owed to the four frozen-out clubs of the American Association. Boston’s two casualties were genial Harry Stovey and John Clarkson. Stovey, hitting just .164 over 38 games, was given the usual 10-day notice on June 20 for his release effective July 1.18 His lackluster performance possibly resulted from what was described as a case of vertigo, or sore side, or some other undescribed ailment along with a strained hip early in the season; nonetheless, the 35-year-old landed a job with the hapless Baltimore Orioles on July 9 and managed better personal results.19 John Clarkson was released on June 30 when his sore arm recurred.20 His record up to his discharge was eight wins and seven losses. In one grand fling to the winds, the Triumvirs unloaded two of their oldest players and their heavy contracts as well.

For Clarkson it was especially thankless. Handsome John piled up 149 victories during his 4½ years with the Beaneaters, placing him second only to Albert Spalding in the 22-year history of the club. He was also the club’s last 40-game winner (1889).

The loss of Clarkson was more than made up for by the singular efforts of Stivetts, the most valuable player on the squad. Not only did he match Nichols’ record of 35 wins and 16 losses, Jack helped himself offensively with three homers and a .296 batting average, second best on the team.

Stovey’s replacement in left field was Bobby Lowe, 26 years old, who was usually placed sixth or seventh in the batting order during the second half. Manager Selee, however, had no choice but to settle on his three remaining boxmen for the rest of the year, a simple task considering the lack in quality, depth, and endurance that the other managers were faced with. Clarkson’s last game as a Beaneater came on June 28 in an 8-1 defeat at the hands of Timothy Keefe and the rising second-place Phillies at their cavernous Huntingdon Grounds in Philadelphia. Clarkson eventually landed with the Spiders of Cleveland and lost all three of his starts against his former club, all against Staley.

Near the end of the first half, Billy Nash, under a two-year contract, decided that the rigors of being captain detracted too much from his performance on the baseball diamond. It didn’t help that he missed several games because of an injured hand with the first-half flag on the line.21 Kelly, with all his savvy and experience, was awarded the position, this time without John Morrill, his old nemesis, to oversee his off-field antics.22

On July 11, new captain King Kelly had his gang take the field sporting beards in all sorts of ridiculous uniforms of ethnic varieties at Chicago’s West Side Park, much to the dismay of Cap Anson and the Chicago reporters. The masquerade was in retaliation for Anson appearing at the South End with a set of long whiskers. Aside from the display, Boston won the match, 3-2, behind Kid Nichols.23

Billy Nash and Frank Selee guided their crew to a record of 52 wins and 22 losses to take the first-half title or pennant by 2½ games over Brooklyn. The Beaneaters defeated the Bridegrooms four out of seven times during the half.

The figures for the first half, which ended on July 13, showed that Stivetts was the top hitter in the league at .382, but with just 102 at-bats. For the twenty-first-century fan, the more acceptable leader was Oyster Burns of Brooklyn with a .366 average based on 262 at-bats. Among everyday players with an acceptable number of at-bats, Hugh Duffy was Boston’s top batter and fourth overall in the League-Association with a .333 average. Herman Long was third on the club at .296 and Tucker was fourth with a .266 average, which placed him 44th in the league. Apart from Stivetts, the Beaneaters pitchers collectively hit .159 with eight long hits. Fielding was mixed as Ganzel led all catchers in fielding average (.980), and pitcher Staley had committed just one error so far.24

The Bostons got off to a wobbly start in the second half, losing to St. Louis in the opener, 20-3, on July 15, as Nichols gave up 20 hits in the most lopsided defeat of the year. Their second-half record stood at 8-6 on July 31, which was good for a fifth-place tie but only a single game behind three teams in first.

Some of their troubles could be attributed to pesky injuries. Bennett had been knocked out in one game. Ganzel’s leg was incapacitated, unfit for duty, leaving poor-hitting Kelly to do all the catching. Long was suffering from an aching arm, resulting in a number of errant throws. And then there’s the familiar blame directed at the umpiring, particularly Tim Hurst, the long-serving arbiter.25

August was not much better as Selee’s crew managed a 14-11 record for the month and 22-17 for the half, rising to second place, but a distant seven games behind the surging Cleveland Spiders. The month featured four shutouts, two by Harry Staley. On August 5 Nichols pitched a 12-inning shutout against Brooklyn at Eastern Park that was finally decided when Tucker was hit by a pitch followed by a clean two-run homer by Stivetts, playing left field. The 6-foot-2 right-hander himself hurled an 11-0 no-hitter the next day against the Bridegrooms, marred a tad by five walks. It was the first in franchise history and the first one by friend or foe in Boston. On August 8 Staley pitched a four-hit whitewash of the Senators, a 7-0 victory at Boundary Field a.k.a National Park in the nation’s capital. Boston pitchers threw three consecutive shutouts and 33 consecutive innings without giving up a run.26 Notwithstanding Stivetts’s pitching, off the field he was the center of unrest on the club that may have contributed to their subpar play so far in the second half, bringing manager Selee to the brink of trading his star to Cincinnati in exchange for Tony Mullane.27

Four players made appearances in just one game for Boston during the season. The first was catcher Joe Daly, the 23-year-old brother of Tom Daly of the Brooklyn Bridegrooms. Daly began the year with Columbia of the four-team South Atlantic League that went belly-up in late July. His one appearance for the Beaneaters came in relief of Kelly on August 13 against Philadelphia.28 A fortnight later, handsome Lee Viau, recently released by Louisville, was signed and pitched one game on August 27, a nifty five-hit, 8-1 triumph over his former teammates at Eclipse Park. Selee changed his lineup for the match by placing Lowe in the leadoff spot and moving each player down a notch.29

On August 15, one month into the second half, the Bostons found themselves in third place, 2½ games behind Cleveland after Staley shut down John Clarkson and the Spiders, 5-0. Staley allowed only two hits, a double by Chief Zimmer and a single by Clarkson. Despite missing an entire week, left fielder Bobby Lowe was the topmost hitter on the club for the second half with a .313 average, followed by Billy Nash at .305.30

The determined Hubites steamrolled over the remainder of the second half, winning 28 out of 37 matches, and finishing three games behind the Spiders in second place. Under King Kelly’s field leadership, the Beaneaters won 50 out of 76 decisions that still prompted some observers to accuse Boston of coasting in the second half. The Beaneaters, in any case, made history and became the first team to pass the century mark in one season, amassing 102 victories overall and a .680 winning percentage.

As a point of interest, John Clarkson’s younger brother, Arthur, a blond 26-year-old right-hander nicknamed Dad at some point in his career, was plucked from the Philadelphia bench and/or the Troy Trojans where he had pitched 390 innings. He started one game for Boston and defeated Amos Rusie and New York, 3-1, in the second game of a doubleheader on October 8, a seven-inning affair.31 The only other player to appear for Boston in one game was catcher Dan Burke, formerly of the Brockton Shoemakers, on October 1, after Kelly hurt his finger the previous day.32

Part of Boston’s improvement over the 1891 season was due to the team’s consistency on the road. There was no missing the fact, however, that Boston only did what the other seven National League seniors had done. The four hapless remnants of the Association were picked to pieces by the gang of eight and finished 9th, 10th, 11th, and 12th. 

For good measure, Stivetts added a five-inning, 6-0 no-hitter against Washington at Boundary Field in the second game of a doubleheader on October 15, the final game of the regular season. It was also the last regular-season no-hitter hurled from the literal “box” of the pitcher.

There was a rumor or possibly a consideration that the world’s championship would not be played, but played it was to the satisfaction of Boston’s and Cleveland’s populace. The series would consist of three games in Cleveland, three in Boston, and three in New York if necessary.33

The much-anticipated first game was played at League Park in Cleveland on October 17 before 6,000 spectators including League President N.E. Young, and several League umpires.34 The crowd was blessed by a marvelous pitching battle between Jack Stivetts and Cy Young, backed by several extraordinary defensive gems and a pitching struggle for the ages as Stivetts battled Young in a scoreless tie that went 11 innings until darkness prevented its conclusion. Both teams had opportunities to score. Duffy in the fourth inning and Lowe in the fifth were the only Beaneaters to reach third base. For the Spiders, Jesse Burkett took a chance during a discussion between Quinn and the umpire and dashed for home.35Quinn threw a perfect throw to catcher Kelly and Burkett was tagged out one foot from the plate.36

The next day Harry Staley held the Spiders to three runs on 10 hits and bested John Clarkson, 4-3, before 7,500 spectators at League Park. The batting hero for the Beaneaters was Hugh Duffy with a double and two triples. Down 4-2, the Spiders had a chance to tie in the ninth inning when catcher Chief Zimmer banged a two-out triple that hit the top of the left-field fence, over 350 feet from home plate, scoring Jack O’Connor who singled. However, Clarkson – hitting just .139 for Cleveland – hit the ball hard to Staley, who fumbled momentarily before recovering and tossing the ball to Tucker at first to end the game.37

Game Three was played at League Park on October 19 before 7,500 fans on a clear, balmy afternoon. It was a rematch between Young and Stivetts in the box, as both struggled through the first couple of innings. For the Spiders, Cupid Childs led off with a smash past Nash at third base for a single; Burkett followed with a double to left, putting men on second and third. Ed McKean then drove both runners home with a one-out single to center. The Spiders never scored again. In Boston’s half of the first inning, Herman Long singled, but was forced out by McCarthy, who then stole second. With two out, catcher Charlie Ganzel singled to right, scoring McCarthy. In Boston’s half of the second inning, Bobby Lowe singled to left and was advanced to second base by Tucker’s sacrifice. Light-hitting Quinn lifted a fly ball to left field that Burkett misjudged, giving the second baseman a gift double and Boston’s second run and tying the game, 2-2. The teams failed to score until Boston’s half of the eighth inning when Stivetts doubled and then scored on McCarthy’s single for what turned out to be the winning run. Cleveland mounted a threat in the ninth as Jimmy McAleer got to third where he “died.”38

The two contestants then changed their base of operations and two days later, on October 21, the series continued at Boston’s South End Grounds before 6,547 spectators, enjoying the cool but fair weather. For the first time the Beaneaters appeared in blue stockings instead of their familiar red. The Boston battery consisted of Nichols in the box and Charlie Bennett behind the plate. The Cleveland battery comprised Nig Cuppy pitching and Zimmer once again behind home base.

Cupid Childs walked to open the match, but failed to reach second. In the Boston half of the first, Cuppy gave up one-out walks to McCarthy and Duffy without any damage. The Beaneaters scored in the third inning when McCarthy walked for the second time and Duffy hit the first offering over the right-field fence, much to the delight of the home crowd. Nichols continued to hold the Spiders scoreless with a couple of key strikeouts, backed by some fine fielding, especially by Billy Nash at the hot corner. In the sixth inning, Boston rallied for two more runs. Duffy opened with a single but was cut down by Zimmer trying to steal. Nash got to first on an error by first baseman Jake Virtue, who dropped shortstop Ed McKean’s wide throw. Nash stole second, and went to third on a safe bunt hit by Lowe, who then stole second. Light-hitting Quinn brought both runners in with a sharp hit up the middle. The final score was 4-0, as Boston won its third game without a loss.39

The fifth game of the championship series was played on Saturday, October 22, in the presence of 8,486 recorded fans at the South End. Cy Young complained of a lame arm and was replaced in the box by John Clarkson for his fifth attempt to defeat his former teammates.

The Cleveland devotees became jubilant after the Spiders scored six times off Harry Staley in the second inning. With two away, Chief Zimmer singled. The next batter was manager Patsy Tebeau, who gained first base on Herman Long’s fumble. Clarkson then cracked a homer over the right-field fence for a 3-0 lead, but the visitors were not finished. Another two runs were scored after a single by Childs and another error by Long allowing Burkett to reach first, and a walk to Virtue to load the bases. Shortstop Ed McKean drove in Zimmer and Tebeau with a blast off the top board of the right-field fence. Virtue scored the sixth run while catcher Ganzel tried to throw out McKean trying to steal second base.

The score stood at 6-0 until the fourth inning when the Beaneaters began to pound what were described as Clarkson’s dewdrops and cut the deficit in half with three runs on four singles and two sacrifice hits. In the top of the fifth Cleveland scored one run when McKean singled, McAleer sacrificed, and Zimmer got a base hit to drive McKean in. With the score 7-3, Boston answered in its half of the fifth with two more runs. Herman Long reached first on an error by third baseman Tebeau and scored on McCarthy’s double to right. Duffy sacrificed him to third and McCarthy scored on Billy Nash’s fly ball to deep left, making the score 7-5. In the last of the sixth, Boston scored four more runs to take the lead on a single by Quinn, a triple by Stivetts, a single by Long to tie the score, and a wild throw by Tebeau to put McCarthy on second. On the play, Childs threw out Long trying to score. Duffy’s double to right scored McCarthy for the go-ahead and eventual winning run, and a single by Ganzel drove in the ninth run. Three more insurance runs were tallied in the last of the seventh, the big blow being Tucker’s home run over the right-field fence. Jack Stivetts allowed just one man to reach first over the final three innings. The final score was an extraordinary come-from-behind 12-7 victory.40

Selee’s nine needed just one more victory to capture the championship. With the series outcome nearly assured, the turnout for the finale on October 24 was only about a third of the South End capacity.41 It didn’t help that the fair weather was in the 50s.

Once again Kid Nichols battled Cy Young. The umpires were Jack McQuaid on the bases and John Gaffney behind the plate. The Spiders grabbed a 3-0 lead in the third inning with singles by Young, Childs, and Burkett, who stole second base, and a wild throw. In the Boston half, however, the locals fought back with two runs as Nichols scored on Virtue’s error and McCarthy scored on Duffy’s double to left. In the fourth inning Boston teed off on Young’s curves, scoring two more runs as Tucker, Bennett, and Nichols all singled, giving the Beaneaters a 4-3 lead. They added a run in the fifth when McCarthy doubled, moved to third on Duffy’s hit, and scored on Tucker’s grounder. In the sixth inning, Bennett smashed a home run over the right-field fence, improving the lead to 6-3.42 Boston scored one run each in the seventh and eighth innings. The final score was 8-3 and Boston won the World’s Flag for 1892 and their ninth pennant in what was described as a “Blooming Walk.”43

When the final out was recorded, friends and fans of the team took to the field to congratulate their Beaneaters. Arthur Soden presented Frank Selee with a $1,000 check to be disbursed among the 13 players, about $76.92 per man.44

Not everyone was pleased. Had Cleveland won the fifth game, the series would have resumed in New York, where greater crowds meant more money, something the League’s magnates were quietly wishing for. In fact, the feeling in the baseball world was that the double season was doomed. On the other hand, the 12-team league was simply too large for a practical or interesting race.

Although he was well back of Cupid Childs (.3351) and Dan Brouthers (.335) in the batting race, Hugh Duffy, who led his team during the regular season with a revised .301 average [an original average of .302] became the pre-eminent hitting star of the series with 12 hits, two doubles, two triples, and one homer, stamping him “as a man for an emergency.”45

On October 27, 1,200 spectators attended a benefit in honor of the champs. The attractions included races and throwing competitions plus a five-inning match between a picked nine and the regulars that the Beaneaters lost through carelessness. The Beaneaters’ longtime booster, General Arthur Dixwell, awarded each member of the Boston club a scarf pin.46

After the benefit, the players left for their homes, although some, like King Kelly, appeared on stage with Tony Lions in a performance of We Never Strike Out.47 Kelly, along with Duffy and McCarthy, could be seen refereeing New England Polo League matches until winter set in. Bobby Lowe left for California after a stint with Uncle Billy Marshall’s billiard parlor, and manager Frank Selee left for Melrose, about eight miles north of Boston, to build a house.48

Notes

1 “The Real Situation,” The Sporting News, December 12, 1891: 1.

2 In 1958 the Dodgers and the Giants moved to the West Coast.

3 The 15-player limit is noted by Harold Seymour in Baseball: The Early Years (New York: Oxford University Press, 1989), 266.

4 George V. Tuohey, A History of the Boston Baseball Club (Boston: M.F. Quinn & Co., 1897), 106.

5 “Unworthy a Magnate,” Sporting Life, May 7, 1892: 1; “The Browns’ Work, Tommy McCarthy’s Case,” The Sporting News, May 14, 1892: 1.

6 A.D. Suehsdorf, “Frank Selee, Dynasty Builder,” The National Pastime, 1987: 330.

7 Boston Globe, February 22, 1892: 9; Jacob B. Morse, Hub Happenings, “That Cracking Outfield,” Sporting Life, March 26, 1892: 15.

8 Donald Hubbard The Heavenly Twins of Boston Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2008).

9 In 1892 the postseason series was normally called the World’s Championship and the Championship Series, and the World’s Championship series.

10 Jacob B. Morse, “Hub Happenings,” Sporting Life, March 26, 1892: 15.

11 Boundary Field was identified as National Park in The Sporting News, April 30, 1892: 1.

12 Duffy, McCarthy, Kelly, and Clarkson, as well as Selee himself were eventually enshrined in the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

13 National League “Games Played Friday, May 6,” Sporting Life, May 14, 1892: 8.

14 “Decoration Day Attendance,” Sporting Life, June 4, 1892: 2.

15 “Games Played Monday, May 30,” Sporting Life, June 4, 1892: 3.

16 “The Big League Averages,” The Sporting News, June 18, 1892: 4. 

17  “Boston Ways,” Sporting Life, July 16, 1892: 1.

18 T.H. Murnane, “Pretty Finish,” Boston Daily Globe, June 21, 1892: 12.

19 “New York Wants Stovey,” The Sporting News, May 7, 1892: 1; “Base Ball, Caught on the Fly,” The Sporting News, May 21, 1892: 3; T.H.M., “Boston Releases Stovey,” The Sporting News, June 25, 1892: 1; “Keeps the Boys Guessing,” Boston Globe, May 10, 1892: 21; and various other sources.  

20 Harold Kaese, The Boston Braves (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), 60.

21 T.H. Murnane, “Cannot Lose It,” Boston Globe, July 9, 1892: 5.

22 Sporting Life, August 13, 1892: 9; T.H. Murnane, “Awake at Last,” Boston Globe, July 21, 1892: 5.

23  W.H.K., “Kelly’s Little Joke,” The Sporting News, July 16, 1892: 1; Base Ball, “Caught on the Fly,” July 23, 1892: 3. 

24 “Work of League Players,” Sporting Life, July 23, 1892: 4. The author used original statistics.

25 Jacob C. Morse, “Hub Happenings,” Sporting Life, July 30, 1892: 9.

26  “National League,” Sporting Life, August 13, 1892: 3.

27 T.H. Murnane, “Shut Out,” Boston Daily Globe, August 27, 1892: 5.   

28  National League, “Games Played Saturday, August 13,” Sporting Life, August 20, 1892: 3.

29 The World, August 28, 1892: 8; Logansport (Indiana) Chronicle, September 15, 1906: 6.

30  “League Leaders,” Sporting Life, August 20, 1892: 3.

31  Jacob C. Morse, “Hub Happenings,” Sporting Life, October 15, 1892: 9.

32  National League, “Games Played Saturday, October 1,” Sporting Life, October 8, 1892: 4.

33 Boston Evening Transcript, October 17. 1892: 7.

34 According to various sources, the park had a capacity of 9,000 or 10,000.

35 Bob Emslie and Pop Snyder were the umpires, according to The Sporting News box score.

36  Logansport (Indiana) Daily Pharos-Tribune, October 18, 1892: 1; “For the Big Pennant, the Good Work Continues,” The Sporting News,October 22, 1892: 3. 

37 George Davis, who didn’t finish the first game due to a sprained tendon in his heel, was unavailable for pinch-hitting.

38  “For the Big Pennant,” The Sporting News, October 22, 1892: 3.

39 T.H. Murnane, “Duffy Again,” Boston Daily Globe, October 22, 1892: 11.

40 The facts for the fifth game were drawn from the October 25 issue of the Boston Globe and the October 29 issue of The Sporting News.

41 Two references reported a crowd of 2,000. The park’s capacity in 1888 was 6,800.

42 Cy Young thus became the last pitcher to serve up a home run from the pitcher’s box in a major-league game. The box was 5½ feet long and Young was required to place one foot on the back line before his delivery, a distance of 55½ feet from the four-sided home plate.

43 Bean Blower, “In a Blooming Walk,” The Sporting News, October 29, 1892: 3.

44 T.H. Murnane, “Five Straight,” Boston Globe, October 25, 1892: 5.

45  Duffy’s original average was .302 per Reach’s Official 1893 Base Ball Guide; also .319 per Clarence Dow, “Cold Numerals,” Boston Globe, October 19, 1892: 5. See also “The World’s Series, Review of the Series,” Sporting Life, October 29, 1892: 3.

46 “Picked Team Won,” Boston Globe, October 28, 1892: 3; Boston Evening Transcript, October 28. 1892: 10.

47  “Kelly’s Future,” The Sporting News, October 29, 1892: 3.

48 For Kelly, Duffy, and McCarthy, see Boston Post, November 5, 1892: 5; and various other sources. For Lowe, see Boston Post, December 1, 1892: 3; and for Selee, see “Personals,” Sporting Life, November 12, 1892: 3.

Novelist supreme Charles John Dickens was not a sportswriter and died (1870) 23 years before the 1893 Beaneaters season began, but the opening lines of his 1849 famed epic, A Tale of Two Cities, are perfect to describe the situation base ball found itself in by May 1893. Former player and Philadelphia sporting-goods entrepreneur A.J. Reach’s Official Base Ball Guide was on the stands by late March and told of how 1892 had been a disappointment to fans, players, and owners, but that 1893 would likely be better. There would be no competitors to the 12-team National League and the NL schedule was cut back to 132 games from 154. Opening days were in late April, the pitcher’s mound was moved back essentially 5 or 10 feet to facilitate more offense, owners had colluded and cut the largest player salaries (abhorrent to them and investors), and, finally, the split-season champion gimmick of 1892 was abolished. Because of these changes, there was springtime hope.1 

Outside of baseball circles appeared the daily newspaper promotional reminders of mankind’s self-backslap of great achievements, in the form of the wondrous Chicago Columbian Exposition, the World’s Fair, within the spectacular 640-acre “White City,” a nineteenth-century Disneyland, which included the first (specially constructed) Ferris wheel as one of many attractions. Baseball would open on April 27, and the fair would commence entertaining the world on May 1. Unfortunately, few saw the national doom of May 4 on the horizon. On that day the National Cordage Company, based in New Jersey but with tentacles all over the East Coast, went into receivership as it neared bankruptcy. NCC manufactured rope and had tried to corner the hemp market.2 Overspending, wild speculation, and other reckless misdeeds by out-of-control businessmen combined to ignite the Panic of 1893, much larger in scope than the disastrous Panic of 1873.

The NCC fiasco followed the “red flag” bankruptcy of the Pennsylvania and Reading Railroad (February 20) due to much the same policies. Even the nation’s gold reserves almost disappeared because of bank runs caused by these developments. The economic catastrophe brought about became national as eventually 500 banks closed, 15,000 businesses collapsed, and unemployment soared to 20 percent by the summer. Within a week’s time, what should have been a pleasant start to the baseball campaign instead found the sport merely hoping to survive a huge problem it had no part in creating. Hindsight analysis of the Panic explains that it took nearly four years for things to crawl back to normal thanks in part to clever financier J.P. Morgan, who loaned the government millions to help restore order. The daily life atmosphere was treacherous, but it didn’t stop the World’s Fair crowds or enthusiasm for baseball.

Reach’s Guide had interesting news specifically for Boston’s fan base. “The great slump in base ball interest in Boston has puzzled students of the game everywhere. Up to 1890 Boston bore the deserved reputation of being the best base ball city in the country. No other city could make a pretense of disputing that claim with her. Last year (1892) with a winning team, the club could scarcely draw patronage to pay expenses. This year, it is expected, will see Boston return to the old crowds.”3 The Guide’s attendance stats showed that the South End Grounds drew just under 124,000 fans, placing ninth in the 12-team League (total draw was 1.67 million).

In October 1892 the game had a lucrative “World’s Championship Series” between Boston and Cleveland. It drew more than 20,000 in Cleveland’s three games and almost 12,000 in Boston for three more. The Spiders and Beaneaters played a 0-0 tie in the first game and then Boston won the next five, making a joke of the best-of-nine event. Even winning the championship at home didn’t bring out as many Boston fans as expected. The Beaneaters had now won two consecutive pennants and looked to equal the Chicago White Stockings of 1880-81-82 as three-time NL champs. Only its ancestral National Association Red Stockings of 1872-73-74-75 had won four straight along with the American Association (“Beer and Whiskey League”) St. Louis Browns of the mid-1880s. 

Arthur Soden’s Beaneaters were a solid bunch and were kept hustling under the watchful eye of manager Frank Selee,then in his fourth season. The only changes made from 1892 were the release of aging stars, now deadweights, John Clarkson (p), Joe Quinn (2b), Mike King Kelly (c), and slugger Harry Stovey (of). Their slots were filled by younger teammates. Utilityman Bobby Lowe settled in at second base and Charlie Bennett and Charlie Ganzel formed the best catching tandem in the game. Cliff Carroll (of) was obtained from St. Louis and pitcher Hank Gastright arrived from Pittsburgh in July to round out the defending champions’ roster. The pitching core of Charlie “Kid” Nichols, “Happy Jack” Stivetts, Harry Staley, and Gastright threw all but 36 innings for the year.  With the expanded schedule in 1892, both Nichols and Stivetts had won 35 games. The infield of Billy Nash (3b), Herman Long (ss), Lowe, and Tommy Tucker (1b) was superb while flychasers Hugh Duffy and Tommy McCarthy could hit, run, and field with any opponent.

Starting sluggishly, the Beaneaters were 12-11 in late May but that changed during their decade-longest 34-game homestand (24-10), which included an eight-game winning streak. Later three nine-game streaks helped them into first place to stay by July 28. The “friendly and beautiful confines” of the South End Grounds were always helpful to the Beaneaters (49-15). Only Nichols, Stivetts, and Staley pitched in the first 58 games, but in July Gastright was bought from Pittsburgh and went 12-4. His acquisition is notable because Pittsburgh finished second to Boston that year. It was the only season of the 1890s when the Pirates sniffed the pennant, yet they parted with a good pitcher. Pittsburgh finished second in pitching (4.08 ERA) to St. Louis (4.06) and third in batting average, .299 to Philadelphia’s .301. The Smoky City stars were Jake Beckley (.303), Denny Lyons (.306), Jack Glasscock (.341), Jake Stenzel (.362), Mike Smith (.346), George Van Haltren (.338), Connie Mack (.286), and pitcher Frank Killen (36-14). The Pirates beat Boston in the season’s series 6-4-1, with one postponed game not played, but they still finished five games out.

Despite being fifth in both ERA (4.43) and batting average (.290), the Beaneaters raised the pennant. They were second in runs, 1,008, to Philly’s 1,011 (played two more games). Boston finished 30-6 against Baltimore, St. Louis, and Louisville to gain their edge. Leading the club were Duffy (.363, fourth) and McCarthy (.346), while reserve catcher Bill Merritt hit .348 in 39 games. Long topped the circuit in runs scored (149), with Duffy close behind with 147. Billy Nash knocked home 123 mates (NL fourth). Lowe scored 130 runs and was tied for third in home runs with 14 to Ed Delahanty’s 19, two guys who were later etched together forever in the record books. Nichols finished 34-14, second in wins to Pirate Killen (36) and tied with Cy Young of Cleveland. Head to head, Kid and Killen split two games in September. Staley surrendered the most home runs in the League, 22, of Boston’s 66 total, topping the circuit. Offensively, Beaneater bats whacked 65 round-trippers, second to Philadelphia’s 80.

The most noteworthy personal mark of the Beaneaters season belongs to veteran Staley (18-10) because it still lingers, more than 125 years later. On June 1 at the South End Grounds vs. Louisville’s Hal Rhines, Harry belted two of his seven career home runs in a 15-4 win, plating nine runs in the process. It remains the Boston-Milwaukee-Atlanta franchise RBI record. It was equaled by Atlanta pitcher Tony Cloninger (two slams) on July 3, 1966. Stivetts (20-12) had the honor of tossing the only shutout at the South End Grounds all season when he blanked Chicago, 7-0, on August 31. On the opposite side of things, Cincinnati hurler Elton “Icebox” Chamberlain no-hit the champs on September 23 in Cincy, 6-0, in seven innings before the game was called due to darkness.

Of the players who made their first appearance in that NL season, the best careers belonged to Jimmy Bannon (he joined the Beaneaters in 1894), Bill Lange, Bill “Boileryard” Clarke, Heinie Reitz, George “Candy” LaChance (of the 1902-05 AL Bostons), and George “Tuck” Turner. Ending their careers were Clarkson, Quinn, King Kelly, Cliff Carroll (pickup who hit .224), Parisian Bob Caruthers, Smiling Tim Keefe (342 wins), four-time home-run champ Stovey, Sam Wise of the 1880s Bostons, Ed “Cannonball” Crane, and Boston catcher Charlie Bennett, who lost parts of both legs in a train accident in January 1894. He is often cited as the best catcher of the nineteenth century.

Among those notables who passed away were 1870s batting star Lipman Pike (.322), one of the first players paid for his talents; Elmer Sy Sutcliffe (.288), William Darby O’Brien (.282), John J. Fox (13-28), and Clarence G. Dow, 2-for-6 for the Boston Unions in September 1884. At his death the Boston Globe, Boston Post, and Sporting Life claimed Dow was thought of as the most reliable baseball statistician in the country.  

In Reach’s 10-cent, 150-page publication for 1894, the 1893 campaign was declared a financial success despite the economic woes of the country. Attendance swelled and helped pay off a huge debt the League had incurred a few years before. Reach thought the reason the number of .300 hitters grew from a dozen in 1892 to more than 60 in 1893 was in great part the mound distance change.  He claimed, “The Public interest in the game was thereby most certainly stimulated. The more uncertain quantity in games under the increased batting gave fascination to the sport and the crowds which filled the grounds of the various clubs attested to the popularity of the new rule and its workings.”4 According to Baseball-Reference.com, 193,000 saw games at the South End Grounds, ranking seventh of the 12 teams.

Sources 

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author relied on Retrosheet.org, Baseball-Refrence.com, and the following:

Appleton’s Annual Cyclopedia and Register of Important Events for the Year (annual 1893-1897). (New York: D. Appleton & Company, annuals 1893-1897).

Stevens, Albert Clark. “An Analysis of the Phenomena of the Panic in the United States in 1893,” Quarterly Journal of Economics 8 (January 1894): 117-48. (Oxford University Press). jstor.org/stable/1883708.

Notes

1 Before 1893 the pitcher’s “box” was a five-foot area beginning 50 feet from home plate. The back boundary line was therefore 55 feet away but the hurler had the right to move around in his box to deliver a pitch. For 1893, new Rule 5 decreed: The pitcher’s boundary should be marked by a white rubber plate, twelve inches long and four inches wide, so fixed in the ground as to be even with the surface, at the distance of sixty feet and six inches from the outer corner of the home plate, so that a line drawn from the center of Home Base to the center of Second Base will give six inches on either side.

2 “Cordage Trust Goes Under,” New York Times, Friday, May 5, 1893: 1.

3 Reach Official Base Ball Guide (Philadelphia: A.J. Reach Co., Philadelphia, 1893), 44-45.

4 Reach Official Base Ball Guide (Philadelphia: A.J. Reach Co., Philadelphia, 1894), 10.

The team’s prospects for 1894 were derailed early that January when veteran catcher Charlie Bennett lost both of his legs in a train accident. Bennett’s work with the Boston pitching staff, particularly with ace Kid Nichols, had been a significant factor in the team’s pennant streak. He was also a steadying influence in the clubhouse, where his presence was decidedly missed during the 1894 season.

For the 1894 season, manager Frank Selee had a veteran, battle-hardened team. The entire infield returned from 1893, with Tommy Tucker at first base, Bobby Lowe at second base, Herman Long at shortstop, and Billy Nash at third base. Hugh Duffy and Tommy McCarthy continued to anchor the outfield, with newcomer Jimmy Bannon taking over right field. The team’s top three pitchers – Nichols, Jack Stivetts, and Harry Staley – returned as well, with Tom Lovett coming aboard as the fourth hurler. At catcher, Jack Ryan took Bennett’s spot in Boston’s three-man backstop corps, joining holdovers Charlie Ganzel and Bill Merritt.

In March 1894 a significant change occurred in the three-man ownership group of the Boston ballclub. Among the triumvirate, Arthur Soden and William Conant now controlled club policy, since James Billings was no longer a co-equal owner. Billings transferred to Soden and Conant all but one share of his stock in the ballclub in order to raise enough money to pay off the creditors of his bankrupt shoe factory.1 Now a minority owner, Billings, who had a more temperate attitude toward the ballplayers, had little voice in ballclub affairs. During the 1894 season, ownership decisions increasingly spiraled from frugal to downright penny-pinching, resulting in an under-insured ballpark and a more rampant discord among the players than in the previous two seasons

Several players staged holdouts into April, including Nichols, who later said he finally reached an agreement with Soden “to pitch two games a week and receive extra salary for extra games.”2 Early in the season, the disgruntled Boston players openly complained that they “ought to get better pay, because the team was playing good ball and the management was making money.”3 Ultimately, this “simmering discontent on the team” deflated the motivation of the players and thwarted Boston’s chance to repeat as league champion during the 1894 season.4

On April 19 Boston opened the 1894 season at the South End Grounds against Brooklyn to christen the new state holiday of Patriots Day. Replacing Fast Day, which had been held earlier in the month, Patriots Day celebrated the start of the American Revolution.5 The new holiday made an apt date for the opening battle of the baseball season in Boston for many years. Before a crowd of 8,000 for the holiday season-opener, Boston defeated Brooklyn, 13-2, to commence the season atop the National League standings.

During the ensuing three-week road trip, the Beaneaters played inconsistently and returned to Boston in fourth place. The player discontent became public. The Brooklyn Eagle reported, “There is promise of a tall rumpus over the salary question between the Boston players and management.”6 The New York Sun anonymously quoted one Boston player, reputedly McCarthy, who said, “To tell you the truth, the gang doesn’t care whether Boston wins or loses. You see, Soden and Conant cut all of our salaries down this spring, in spite of the fact that we won the championship three times in succession.”7 Once back in Boston, though, a second team-related adversity just four months after Bennett’s disabling accident provided the impetus for the disgruntled players to put aside their conflict with ownership (for a few months) and focus on winning ballgames.

On May 15 in the third inning of the game between Boston and Baltimore, fire broke out in the right-field bleachers at the South End Grounds. The Great Roxbury Fire not only destroyed the ballpark but also burned down 200 buildings in a 12-acre section of the adjacent neighborhood, leaving 1,900 people homeless. One of the homeless was John Haggerty, the groundskeeper at the South End Grounds, who had run to sound the alarm at the local firehouse. “When John got back to the grounds,” the Boston Globe reported, “the whole grand stand was afire, as well as his own little house close by on Walpole St.”8

Despite the personal adversity, Haggerty went to work to shape up the Congress Street Grounds, which the ballclub quickly leased to continue playing the team’s home games.9 However, the old ballpark, last used by a minor-league team in 1893, was in deplorable condition. Besides improving the field conditions, Haggerty had to borrow hundreds of chairs to put in the grandstand, since the ballpark seats had been sold earlier that spring.10

On May 16 Boston defeated Baltimore on the rough playing conditions at the Congress Street Grounds. Boston then moved its home series with Philadelphia to the City of Brotherly Love, to give Haggerty more time to get the grounds into better shape for the remainder of the six-week homestand, which reconvened on May 21. After the homestand ended on June 20, when Duffy poked a three-run walk-off homer to propel Boston to a 13-12 come-from-behind victory over Baltimore, Boston was in second place, a game and a half behind the first-place Orioles.

Home runs were hit unusually often at the Congress Street Grounds. In the renovation of the ballpark, the playing field likely was reoriented, resulting in an incredibly short 225-foot distance from home plate to the left-field fence.11 During the 27 games played at the Congress Street Grounds, players hit 86 home runs. This volume of four-baggers represented 14 percent of the league’s total of 629 home runs stroked in the 799 games played by all 12 teams that season. On May 30, 1894, Boston second baseman Lowe became the first major leaguer to hit four home runs in one game.

High-scoring games were also the norm at the Congress Street Grounds. For example, in the Decoration Day twin bill on May 30, Boston won the first game, 13-10, and, when Lowe hit his four home runs, won the second game, 20-11. In the Bunker Hill Day holiday twin bill on June 18 (the holiday, normally June 17, fell on a Sunday in 1894), Boston scored 16 runs in the first inning.

During the entire 1894 season, Boston scored 1,220 runs, which today remains the major-league record for the most runs scored by a team in a season. The Beaneaters averaged 9.2 runs per game over the 132-game season, averaging 10.6 runs at home and 7.9 runs on the road. Boston exploited a home-field advantage because visiting teams were unfamiliar with the Congress Street Grounds as well as the rebuilt South End Grounds (where Boston won an August doubleheader by the scores of 18-3 and 25-8). The Beaneaters also exploited the sore arms of the league’s pitchers that season.

The standard explanation for 1894 being a big-hitting year was that batters took advantage of the poor adaptability by pitchers to the longer pitching distance instituted in 1893 (from 55 feet to 60 feet 6 inches), since there were no major changes to the batting rules in 1894 (the infield-fly rule being the most significant change). “Pitchers, in exploring how to adjust to the new circumstances, exhausted their arms in 1893 by trying to sustain the customary pitching loads of the past,” one historian explained. “They then found themselves in 1894 not only struggling with the greater distance but also toiling with throwing arms made lame by the overwork of the previous year.”12

Nichols, Boston’s ace pitcher, was one of the few pitchers unaffected by the 1893 pitching-distance change.13 He led the 1894 Boston staff with a won-lost record of 32-13, his fourth consecutive season of 30 or more victories. This consistency before and after the rule change was the direct opposite of the experience of most pre-1893 star pitchers. Nichols made the adjustment in his delivery to maintain the speed of his fastball and the break of his curveball, so his arm was better conditioned to the longer distance.

Despite the success of Nichols, pitching scuttled the pennant chances for Boston in 1894. While Stivetts proved to be a capable number-two pitcher (26-14), Staley (12-10) was inconsistent and Lovett was released in early July, replaced by George Hodson in August. Selee tried out a half-dozen recruit pitchers, to no avail. Catching also presented complications. In mid-June Boston signed Fred Tenney, a left-handed catcher, to try to compensate for Bennett’s absence.

Hitting, on the other hand, was exceptional in 1894. During Boston’s four-week road trip, from June 21 to July 18, Duffy raised his batting average nearly 50 points, from .375 to .422, to solidify his stake as one of the league’s top batters in 1894.14 “Mr. Duffy has grown to be a full blown sunflower in the batting department of the game since the champions started out in dead earnest for that piece of [pennant] bunting,” the Boston Globe remarked.15 Duffy went on to lead the league with a .440 average, which remains the high-water mark for a single-season batting average in the major leagues.16 Five other Boston players hit over .300: McCarthy (.349), Lowe (.346), Bannon (.336), Tucker (.330), and Long (.324), as the Beaneaters compiled an eye-popping .331 team batting average.

Bennett, recovering from his leg amputations, attended Boston’s game in Pittsburgh on July 2 as well as the exhibition game the next day in Sharon, Pennsylvania, a few miles from Bennett’s hometown. Bennett’s presence seemed to inspire the Beaneaters. After splitting the Independence Day twin bill in Pittsburgh, Boston obliterated Cleveland, 22-7, on July 5 to move into a virtual tie for first place with Baltimore. Duffy had a 5-for-5 day and another four players garnered four hits apiece. “From the very start, the batters at the top of Boston’s list began to hit the ball,” the Boston Globe reported. “They kept it going until the tongues of the Cleveland fielders were hanging out from exhaustion.”17

Boston held first place for 10 days in July during the road trip before dropping back to second place at the trip’s conclusion, just one game behind Baltimore. On July 20 the Beaneaters returned to play in the rebuilt, now fireproof, South End Grounds. Because the former ballpark was not fully insured, the new structure was less grandiose than the previous facility and had just a one-story grandstand to replace the more regal double deck. For 1894, only one of three grandstand sections was completed, but there was ample bleacher seating.18

On July 21 Boston returned to first place as Nichols defeated third-place New York. After defeating Baltimore in three straight games at Baltimore in late July (taking the season series eight games to four), Boston was in first place with a five-game lead, its largest lead of the season. Boston seemed headed to its fourth consecutive pennant, but not everyone in the league agreed with that prognostication.

“They are all picking Boston to win the pennant. I don’t know about that,” Brooklyn team president Charlie Byrnecommented in mid-July. “Outside of the wonderful playing of four members of the Boston team, who have been playing lucky as well as brainy ball, I can’t see wherein they have a ‘cinch’ on the pennant. The showing of the Baltimores in the race is more clear cut than of Boston for Manager Hanlon’s men have hit the ball as well as fielded it, and hitting the ball is the thing after all.”19 Byrne turned out to be very prescient.

Boston merely chugged along in first place, maintaining just a slim lead during the first four weeks of August. Nichols began to falter on the pitching rubber during the dog days of August, but luckily Stivetts became a steadying force and newcomer Hodson helped to plug the gap. And Duffy continued to lead Boston’s hit parade. What little momentum Boston had in first place stalled after the August 25 game, an 8-3 victory over Cleveland, when a disappointingly small crowd of “3773 spectators were full of enthusiasm, and applauded the good plays of the game liberally and in a non-partisan manner, such as Boston is noted for throughout the country.”20 Despite the team contending for a pennant, home attendance was dismal all season.

Total attendance for the 1894 season was just 152,000 people, down substantially from 193,000 in 1893 and nearly half of the 283,000 drawn back in 1889. The economic depression was one reason for the tepid attendance. Another was the beginning of a shift in spectator composition at the ballpark. Businessmen, the primary spectator base, were moving their residences out to the streetcar suburbs that were far from the ballpark. They were slowly replaced by emerging middle-class Irish-Americans, who lived within a short trolley ride of the ballpark.21 Simply put, 1894 was a transition year for attendance, as the rowdier Royal Rooters began to attend games at the South End Grounds and would soon emerge at the dominant base of spectators during the next few years. 

President Soden blamed attendance for the team’s failure to repeat as champions. “I attribute the loss of the championship very largely to the apathy of the home crowds toward the home team. Time and again I have heard complaints from our players about this fact,” Soden said after the season ended. “If our people rooted as hard for their own players as the crowds do in Baltimore and Pittsburg[h], the club would undoubtedly have more [winning] games to its credit.”22

The largest crowd of the 1894 season at the South End Grounds attended on August 27 at the benefit game for Bennett, when 9,000 people bought tickets to generate a $6,000 donation to the double-amputee.23 However, the emotion of the benefit game appears to have negatively impacted the psyche of the Boston ballplayers, resuscitating their latent disgruntlement, as the team went into an immediate tailspin.

On August 28 Nichols surrendered four runs in the seventh inning as St. Louis broke a 5-5 tie and went on to defeat Boston, 9-5. Boston lost two of the three games with the lowly St. Louis Browns, which dropped the Beaneaters into a first-place tie with Baltimore on August 30. On August 31 the Beaneaters faded to second place when the New York Giants defeated them, 5-1, as Nichols lost his second straight game. On September 6, after losing to last-place Louisville in the season’s final home game, Boston fell to third place as the Boston Globe reported the obvious fact that “the outlook for the pennant is very doubtful.”24

During the season-ending three-week road trip, the energy was zapped from the Beaneaters as they played moribund .500 ball against weak opponents. Even the reward of postseason cash from the newly instituted Temple Cup series, to be contested by the top two teams in the league standings with the net proceeds going to the ballplayers, failed to motivate the Boston team. There was really no fight for second place between New York and Boston, as Boston finished the 1894 season in third place with an 83-49 record, eight games behind pennant-winning Baltimore.

In mid-September, Jake Morse, baseball writer for the Boston Herald, blamed the pennant derailment on the loss of Bennett. “Game after game has been lost to the champions this year by the poor work of the catchers,” Morse wrote, then blandly added that “a club which has won the pennant three years in succession is not likely to play the ball that a club will which is after the pennant for the first time.”25

During the season finale in Pittsburgh, Tim Murnane, baseball writer for the Boston Globe, explained a more sinister reason for the team’s collapse in 1894. “Nearly every one of the old men is anxious to get away from Boston,” Murnane wrote about the undercurrent of dissension on the team. “Several of the boys claim they have grievances against the owners of the club.”26

Boston barnstormed its way home from Pittsburgh by playing exhibition matches in Pennsylvania and New Jersey, as New York swept Baltimore in the inaugural Temple Cup series. Upon the team’s return to Boston, Duffy, the league batting champion, was feted at a banquet and opened a bowling alley in partnership with fellow outfielder McCarthy.27Nichols returned to his home in Kansas City, where he kept his right arm limber by competing in a bowling league.28

During the fall of 1894, both ownership and the ballplayers hoped to make more money in 1895. After producing an estimated $30,000 profit in 1894, the triumvirate looked forward to the completion of the rebuilt South End Grounds, which would encourage a greater number of spectators to make the trek to the ballpark.29 Talk of reviving the American Association to compete with the National League raised player hopes for higher salaries, but these expectations were dashed when that movement collapsed by year-end. The tussle over money would continue into the 1895 season.

Notes

1 “Business Failures,” Boston Globe, March 22, 1894: 7; “Treasurer Billings Fails in Business,” The Sporting News, March 17, 1894: 1; “Broken at Last: The Famous Boston Triumvirate Now Dissolved,” Sporting Life, March 17, 1894: 4.

2 Richard Bogovich, Kid Nichols: A Biography of the Hall of Fame Pitcher (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2012), 79.

3 “The Boston Row: The Triumvirs Do Not Relish the Floating Talk,” Sporting Life, May 19, 1894: 8.

4 Donald Hubbard, The Heavenly Twins of Boston Baseball: A Dual Biography of Hugh Duffy and Tommy McCarthy (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008), 108.

5 “Fast Day Goes: House Votes to Abolish Historic Holiday: April 19 Takes Its Place on the State’s Calendar,” Boston Globe, February 17, 1894: 10; “League Schedule: Season Opens in Boston on April 19,” Boston Globe, February 28, 1894: 2.

6 “Byrne Calls on Keefe,” Brooklyn Eagle, May 12, 1894: 2.

7 “Trouble Among the Champions,” New York Sun, May 10, 1894: 4.

8 “1900 Persons Homeless,” Boston Globe, May 16, 1894: 4.

9 “Grounds for the Present,” Boston Post, May 16, 1894: 5.

10 “The Boston Fire,” Sporting Life, May 26, 1894: 3. 

11 Correspondence dated July 13, 2015, with Ron Selter, an expert in re-creating ballpark dimensions. The distance to left field in 1894 was shorter by 15 feet from the distance in 1890 and 1891 when the ballpark was used for games in the Players League and American Association.

12 Reed Browning, Cy Young: A Baseball Life (Amherst: University of Massachusetts Press, 2000), 35.

13 Browning, Cy Young, 36. Two other successful converts were Amos Rusie and Cy Young.

14 Averages are from the estimated statistics published every Monday in the Boston Globe.

15 “Fine Stick Work,” Boston Globe, July 22, 1894: 7.

16 “Duffy Heads the List,” New York Clipper, October 27, 1894: 543. At the time, Duffy had a recorded .438 average, which has since been adjusted to .440 under modern rules.

17 “Poor Old John,” Boston Globe, July 6, 1894: 2.

18 “New Grand Stand, South End Ball Grounds,” Boston Globe, June 24, 1894: 16; “Must Be a Brick Stand,” Boston Globe, June 13, 1894: 4.

19 “Diamond Field Gossip,” New York Clipper, July 21, 1894: 312.

20 “Clever Hodson,” Boston Globe, August 26, 1894: 2.

21 Charlie Bevis, Red Sox vs. Braves in Boston: The Battle for Fans’ Hearts, 1901-1952 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2017), 46-47.

22 “Diamond Field Gossip,” New York Clipper, October 13, 1894: 511.

23 “Benefit to Bennett Was a Grand Success,” Boston Globe, August 28, 1894: 1.

24 “Champions Fall Before Battered Colonels,” Boston Globe, September 7, 1894: 2.

25 Jake Morse, “Reconciled to the Loss of the Pennant,” Sporting Life, September 22, 1894: 6.

26 Tim Murnane, “They May Quit: Boston Ball Players Are Not Satisfied,” Boston Globe, September 29, 1894: 1.

27 Hubbard, Heavenly Twins, 119.

28 Bogovich, Kid Nichols, 76.

29 Morse, “Reconciled to the Loss of the Pennant.”

Even after he retired from major-league baseball in 1893, Mike “King” Kelly was arguably America’s biggest sports star. He was the first ballplayer to have a hit song (“Slide, Kelly, Slide”) written about him. Some writers believe Kelly was the model for the Mighty Casey in the poem “Casey at the Bat.” Baseball Hall of Fame historian Lee Allen said, “Kelly was, in his day, as popular a figure as Babe Ruth would later be, and there was hardly a boy in the land who did not follow the daily doings of The King.”2

When Kelly was at his peak, he was the highest-paid player in the game. He bragged that he would never be a pauper. However, by November 1894, one year after his retirement and after spending a year playing for a minor-league team in Allentown, Pennsylvania, the King was broke. A Boston Globe reporter wrote, “[H]is money went like the mist before a noonday sun, for it came easy and he thought it would last.”3

The Cincinnati Reds signed Kelly in 1878. He had his first great year for the Reds in 1879, batting .348, but the financially-stripped club released all its players after the season. Albert Spalding and Cap Anson brought Kelly to Chicago to join the White Stockings for the 1880 season. In Chicago Kelly became a national star, soon called “King” Kelly or “The Only” Kelly.  His fans lived in every city. Kelly’s Irish heritage helped him become particularly popular in Boston. In 1887 the Boston franchise payed the princely sum of $10,000 to bring Kelly to Boston. Kelly also managed the Boston entry in the short-lived Player’s League.

In 1893 an out-of-shape and 34-year-old Kelly managed to play only 20 games for the New York Giants. It’s fair to say that his lack of playing time and diminishing skills didn’t diminish the great affection of Kelly’s fans.

When Kelly was at the height of his fame as a ballplayer he made extra money during the offseason by appearing in stage shows and vaudeville. Kelly loved attending the theater and enjoyed the company of actors almost as much as he did other ballplayers during his storied career.

Kelly’s Boston fans loved him, and producers expected them to turn out in great numbers to see him on stage. Kelly needed money to support his wife, baby boy, and lavish lifestyle. In 1894 acting offered Kelly the only reasonable opportunity to earn a salary approaching what he earned in baseball.

Kelly took a ship from New York City to Boston to start his tour. Cold winds blew and snow fell during his trip. Kelly walked the deck in this weather. He felt sympathy for a stowaway discovered by the crew, and Kelly gave his best suit to the ship’s bursar as security to cover the man’s fare. Over time, stories grew that Mike gave that stowaway his winter coat, which left Kelly with no defense against the snow and cold winds that assailed the boat as it sailed from New York to Boston.4

During his life Kelly was famous for his generosity, even to strangers. As Cap Anson, Kelly’s White Stockings manager, said, “He was a whole-souled, genial fellow, with a host of friends, and but one enemy, that one being himself.”5

Losing control of his best suit should not have significantly impaired Kelly’s health. Even his famed drinking would not have brought on pneumonia. Still, one can imagine a drunk Kelly roaming the deck of his ship in a snowstorm, forgetting to button his winter coat or perhaps not even wearing one. After all, Mike Kelly never thought anything bad would happen to him.

No matter what the cause, Kelly took ill on the passage. When he arrived in Boston, he was too ill to appear on stage. He rested at a friend’s house, hoping the chills and fever would go away. When they did not, Kelly’s friends summoned Dr. George Galvin, former team doctor for the Beaneaters. He saw Kelly at 2 P.M. on Sunday, November 4, and found he had difficulty breathing. By 4 P.M. on Monday, it was clear that pneumonia had set in, and Galvin moved Kelly to Boston’s Emergency Hospital. It was reported that when Kelly came to the hospital the stretcher carrying him slipped to the floor, and he said, “This is my last slide.”6

Doctors gave Kelly oxygen. News organizations around the country kept his fans updated on his condition. On Wednesday many papers reported that he was improving. Despite the encouraging reports, Dr. Galvin contacted Kelly’s wife, Agnes, to tell her to hurry to Boston. Agnes had friends and family watch their four-month-old baby and took the first train she could. She thought she was coming to help nurse her husband to health, and was astonished to find out when she arrived on Friday, November 9, that Kelly was gone.

As a reporter from the Boston Evening Record put it, “[H]is mind had been wandering all day.”7 Father Hickey from St. James Catholic Church administered the last rites. Around 6 P.M. on Thursday, Kelly roused himself to say, “Well, I guess this is the last trip.”8 Kelly lingered until 9:55 P.M., and then died.

A former teammate, the evangelist Billy Sunday, did not attend the funeral, but for years afterward in his temperance sermons would say Kelly “died a drunkard and was buried in a pauper’s grave.”9 While it was true that Kelly died a pauper, he was not buried in a pauper’s grave. Kelly was an Elk, and the Boston chapter of the Benevolent and Protective Order of the Elks made sure he was laid to rest in style.

Elks chapter members who wanted to remain anonymous paid the stowaway’s fare to the steamship company and recovered Mike’s best suit to bury him in.10 They felt it was important to send Kelly out in the style that he lived – in his best clothes, in front of a large audience.

They succeeded. Kelly’s body lay in state at the Boston Elks Hall on Sunday, November 11. Admirers sent so many flowers, according to the Boston Globe, that only “a narrow path” could be excavated to allow mourners to view the body.11 Playwright Charles Hoyt and vaudevillian Eddie Foy sent wreaths. Cap Anson sent a pillow of roses, as did the members of the Actors Protective Union. Albert G. Spalding, owner of the White Stockings during Kelly’s greatest years there, did not attend, but sent a white flower arrangement in the shape of a baseball with violets representing the laces. Reporting on the “grand” flower arrangements filled many column-inches in the Boston papers that week.

Over 5,000 mourners filed through the rooms of the Elks Hall to pay their last respects to their baseball hero. Thousands more stood in the street outside St. James Church when Kelly’s funeral Mass was conducted later that day. The crowd in the streets was so large that carriage drivers found it difficult to drop mourners close to the church for the funeral. The crowds spilled back from the church steps down Heyward Place and Washington Street as far as anyone could see. Not a few women and children, and many men in the crowd, wept.

The Boston Post reported the day after the funeral, “Safe at Home is Michael J. Kelly. … Now the sturdy form that used to electrify the crowds at the ball grounds are but memories.” The Post reporter described the lines of fans waiting to view Kelly’s body as a “never ending procession.”12

Sweet-scented flowers surrounded Kelly’s casket in the Elks lodge and on the way to the burial. Father Hickey, who had administered Kelly’s last rites, led the Mass. Kelly’s widow, Agnes, and his brother “Honest John” Kelly were the only family members who attended. Pallbearers included Beaneaters manager Frank Selee, Captain William M. “Billy” Nash, and players Tommy McCarthy and Hugh Duffy. Cincinnati’s Morgan Murphy, F.L. “Red” Donahue from Kelly’s last team, the Allentowns, and Elks Charles A. Kelly and Dennis P. Sullivan also came. Other attendees included Andy Leonard, a member of the 1869 Red Stockings, Boston players Herman Long, P.H. “Cozy” Dolan, and Fred Doe, Baltimore Orioles star Joe Kelley, and former stars Tommy Bond and Harry Schafer.

So many floral tributes filled the nave of the church that it took one large open wagon and two carriages to transport all the flowers to the burial. It was a closed-casket funeral. A large photo of Kelly in his prime sat on top of the coffin.

Fans also lined the streets on the way to Mount Hope cemetery. Several sources estimated the crowd outside the church and on the way to the cemetery at 7,000, which made Kelly’s funeral one of the largest for any major-league star before Babe Ruth’s in 1948. When the procession reached the grave site, Boston Elks Exalted Ruler William H. Blossom conducted the Elks funeral rituals with Leading Knight Sidney Sprague and chaplain John Waterman.

The hymn “Simple Yet Beautiful was sung. Elk Tom Henry played “The Lost Cloud” on the coronet while the casket was lowered into the earth. Five thousand people who followed the procession stood and watched the funeral rites with uncovered heads.13

Kelly left her nothing, and she had no means of support. The Boston Globe reported that the fund had raised $372 as of that day, including a $25 gift from DeWolf Hopper, famous for his vaudeville recitations of “Casey at the Bat,” and a $10 gift from Connie Mack. That amount was less than half of what Kelly earned in a month at his peak, but at least it was something.14

Agnes returned to Paterson, New Jersey, where her money soon ran out. She supported herself as a seamstress until her eyes went bad. A sister who lived in New Brunswick took her in, and Agnes lived with her sister until her death in 1937. It’s not clear what happened to her son. This writer was unable to find a record of him outside of the mentions in contemporary accounts. It’s probable that the baby died before adulthood; it’s hard to believe he would have let his mother move in with a sister had he lived into the twentieth century and could support her.15

Kelly’s fine funeral would remain the last ceremony the baseball world would give him. When he was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1944, because of World War II no induction ceremony was held. (An induction ceremony was held in 2013 for Kelly and others who never received a formal induction because of the wartime restrictions.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also consulted:

Appel, Marty. Slide, Kelly, Slide: The Wild Life and Times of Mike “King” Kelly (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 1996).

Kelly, Mike “King.” Play Ball, Stories of the Ball Field (Boston: Emery & Hughes, 1888, issued digitally in 2008).

Thorn, John. Baseball in the Garden of Eden: The Secret History of the Early Game (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011).

Tiemann Robert L., and Mark Rucker, editors. Nineteenth Century Stars: 2012 Edition (Phoenix: SABR, 2012). 

The Hall of Fame file on King Kelly contains a great deal of contemporaneous accounts of his career and funeral.

Thanks to the Baseball Hall of Fame Library and the Boston Public Library.

Notes

1 “Death of Kelly,” Boston Globe, November 9, 1894: 1.

2 baseballhall.org/hof/kelly-king.

3 “Funeral Report,” Boston Globe, November12, 1894: 5.

4 Joe Buchicio, The Evangelist (Albany, New York): 10A. Undated article from Kelly’s Hall of Fame file.

5 Adrian “Cap” Anson, A Ball Player’s Career (Chicago: Era Publishing, 1900), 115-116.

6 James A. Cox, “When Fans Roared ‘Slide, Kelly, slide!’ at the Old Ball Game,” Smithsonian Magazine, October 1982, 130.

7 Boston Evening Record, November 9, 1894.

8 Boston Post, November 10, 1894: 3.

9 Joe Vila, “Setting the Pace,” from Mike Kelly’s Hall of Fame file – no page or publication listed.

10 Joe Buchicio, The Evangelist.

11 Boston Globe, November 12, 1894: 5.

12 Boston Post, November 12, 1894: 3.

13 The funeral coverage relies upon reports in the local papers, the Boston Globe, the Boston Post, and the Boston Record. The coverage was remarkably similar.

14 Boston Globe, November 18, 1894: 5.

15 Alfred P. Cappio, The Story of Michael J. Kelly, The King of Baseball (Passaic County Historical Society, 1962), 18. This publication may have relied on local sources in Paterson and Passaic County, New Jersey.