Our Game, Too: Canadian Baseball – Society for American Baseball Research

Introduction: Our Game, Too: Influential Figures and Milestones in Canadian Baseball

Jacob Pomrenke — Mon, 01 Aug 2022 21:36:31 +0000

“Make an endeavor to see more baseball; you need it.” So urged journalist Jack Calder, writing in the Chatham (Ontario) Daily News on July 31, 1934.

In various eras, and at diverse locations across Canada, such exhortation would not have been necessary. Not to the crowds as large as 10,000 who viewed the matches between London and Guelph in the 1870s, traveling between the cities on the newly-opened railroad, at a time when the combined population of the two cities was less than 27,000. Nor to the thousands who flocked to Vancouver’s Powell Street Grounds in the 1920s and ’30s to watch their local heroes, the Asahi.

Not to the thousands more who jammed cramped ballparks hosting the big-money semipro tournaments on the Prairies for two decades in midcentury. And certainly not to the more than four million who packed the recently-opened SkyDome for the Toronto Blue Jays championship seasons of 1992 and 1993.

Canadian baseball has a rich, diverse, and deeply rooted history, one that spans fully two centuries. In its early days, baseball’s development north of the border was shaped by the same social and economic influences, and the same competitive and entrepreneurial spirit, as was found south.

The stories in this book tell the tales of the influential figures and milestone events that defined and directed the game’s growth in Canada between the 1830s and the 1960s. While some names and subjects will be familiar to ardent baseball fans, these articles shine a spotlight on the movers and shakers, the pioneers, the leagues and games and tournaments, and the regions all across the country that hosted them.

The book is an initiative of the Centre for Canadian Baseball Research, and SABR’s Hanlan’s Point (Greater Toronto) Chapter.

It is the collaborative effort of more than 30 SABR members, almost all of them Canadian: Richard Armstrong, Bob Barney, Gary Belleville, Warren Campbell, Patrick Carpentier, Stephen Dame, Michel Dugas, Eric Frost, Larry Gerlach, Gary Gillette, Tom Hawthorn, Martin Healy Jr., Colin Howell, William Humber, Heidi LM Jacobs, Maxwell Kates, Martin Lacoste, Bill Lamb, Len Levin, Chip Martin, David Matchett, Andy McCue, David McDonald, Peter Morris, Andrew North, Bill Nowlin, Riley Nowokowski, Bill Pruden, Carl Riechers, David Siegel, Paul Sinclair, Allen Tait, Dennis Thiessen, Christian Trudeau, Max Weder, and Daniel Wyatt. Original cover art was generously provided by Sean Kane of Guelph, Ontario.

Make an endeavor to read more Canadian baseball; you need it.

ANDREW NORTH is a retired developer of statistical software. He is a director of the Centre for Canadian Baseball Research and serves on the Editorial Board of the Journal for Canadian Baseball. A SABR member since 1982, he lives in St. Marys, Ontario, where he maintains the research library at the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum.

Read more: Find more essays from Our Game, Too in the SABR Research Collection online
Biographies: Read player and executive biographies from Our Game, Too at the SABR BioProject
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The Beachville Game

admin — Fri, 29 Jul 2022 13:35:50 +0000

Adam Ford and his wife, the former Jane Cruttenden, ca 1872. Seated center is Jane’s father Lauriston Cruttenden, one of the early settlers of St. Marys. Ford’s marriage into the respected and influential family provided an immediate boost to both his social standing and his political aspirations. (St. Marys Museum and R. Lorne Eedy Archives, St. Marys, Ontario)

Baseball in Canada has a deeply rooted history. We know of “a game of base ball” in Saint John, New Brunswick, in 1793,1 as well as baseball-related games in the 1830s and 1840s in such diverse areas as Victoria, Manitoba’s Red River Settlement, southwestern Ontario, and Nova Scotia.2 During these decades, and the 1850s, the game’s evolution in Canada paralleled that in the United States, as more organization and structure developed, and rules of play were formalized. The first teams were formed in Hamilton, Ontario, in 1854, and in London the next year. In 1860 the first international match was played in what is now Niagara Falls, Ontario, between the Burlington club of Hamilton and the Queen City club of Buffalo.3 And Canadian teams have been part of Organized Baseball’s structure since the entry of Guelph and London into the International Association in 1877. But it was a game apparently played in a farmer’s field behind a blacksmith’s shop, and not described until nearly 50 years afterward, that put Canada on the baseball map. Referred to today as the Beachville game, it has been celebrated by both the Canadian postal service and the Royal Canadian Mint, yet it remains a subject of debate among historians.

BACKGROUND

Beachville is a small farming community in Zorra Township, Oxford County, in southwestern Ontario, roughly 90 miles southwest of Toronto.4 It was on the family farm just outside Beachville that Adam Ford was born to Irish immigrant parents in 1831. After local schooling, he travelled to Cobourg, Ontario, and Victoria College, where he studied medicine, obtaining his medical accreditation in 1855.5 A subsequent job search took him to St. Marys, a mere 25 miles northwest of his family home (and now the home of the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum).

Seemingly comfortable with his familiar surroundings, Ford settled in St. Marys as the local physician. He adopted a healthy and active lifestyle, befitting his profession, and became an enthusiastic advocate of both curling and horse racing, as well as maintaining the passion for baseball of his youth in Zorra Township.6 He was a man of zeal and initiative, immersing himself in community affairs and sports administration, in addition to his professional duties. His office was established in one of the downtown’s finest stone buildings.7 Personable and gregarious, he infiltrated the town’s higher social circles, aided somewhat by his marriage to the daughter of one of St. Marys’ most influential and respected citizens, eventually being elected mayor. He was popular and successful, in his personal life, his business, and in politics. But he had also acquired a fondness for alcohol, a weakness that led to his temporary undoing.

The doctor fell into the habit of hosting late-night drinking parties in his downtown office, earning the disapproval of both the conservative elements of the community generally and the burgeoning local temperance movement in particular. After one such evening’s festivities, a young man staggered into the street in obvious distress, claiming that Dr. Ford had poisoned him. Bizarrely, the man was a vocal temperance proponent. He later died, and Ford was held on suspicion of his murder. Ford spent time in jail, but was eventually released, primarily the result of lack of apparent motive, and was never formally tried or convicted. During the course of the investigations, an association was also revealed between the married Ford and a young woman of questionable repute. It was an altogether tawdry affair, and decidedly bad for business. In 1880 Ford decamped to Denver with his sullied reputation and his sons.

SPORTING LIFE

It was from Denver, on April 26, 1886, that Adam Ford penned a letter to the editor of the popular sporting weekly Sporting Life in Philadelphia. The letter was printed in the edition of May 5 under the heading “Very Like Base Ball – A Game of the Long-Ago Which Closely Resembled Our Present National Game.”8 In it, Ford describes in impressive (and surprising) detail a game played in his hometown of Beachville on June 4, 1838, and witnessed by a young Ford.

He recalls the day as a holiday, and that a passing detachment of Scottish volunteer soldiers stopped to view the proceedings. His memories include the names of many of the participating players and the location of the field within the town. He provides a layout of the diamond, and describes the equipment used, and their materials. The basic rules under which the game was played are outlined, as are the unwritten but apparently mutually understood responsibilities of batter and pitcher. Finally, Ford compares and contrasts his 1838 game with the more modern (1886) game, not surprisingly showing preference for the former.

The letter is an extraordinary feat of recall, particularly when one recognizes that Ford must have been only seven years old when he witnessed the game, and that nearly 50 years had passed between the witnessing and the writing. As historian Bill Humber has suggested, Ford’s account suffers not from lack of detail, but rather from the opposite: it’s almost too good to be true.9

INVESTIGATION

Perhaps not surprisingly, the letter was viewed with some skepticism. But the possibility of such a game piqued the interest and curiosity of Bob Barney, a professor in the Department of Kinesiology at the University of Western Ontario (now Western University). As a sport historian, he adhered to the prevailing belief that when southwestern Ontario had been visited by waves of American migrants following the end of the Revolutionary War, migrants westbound in search of land and better opportunities in such areas as what are now Michigan, Illinois, Wisconsin, and Minnesota, many of these migrants settled in Upper Canada, bringing with them their pastimes and recreations. He viewed a possible game in that area at that time as further validation of the belief, and decided to investigate.

With the assistance of one of his graduate students, Nancy Bouchier, Barney visited Beachville and its local museum. There, the two pored over everything they could find: the census records, the land records, the tax records, the geographical maps from the time, the headstone evidence, military histories. Everything they uncovered provided affirmation of Ford’s account. Men of those names were residents of the area, and were of an appropriate age. The purported owner of the blacksmith shop was listed, his shop was where it was stated to be, and behind his shop, where the game was said to have been played, was an open field.

Sources of Oxford County military history revealed the presence of the Third Oxford Regiment in the area in the summer of 1838,10 likely Ford’s passing spectators. Descriptions of the equipment were consistent with the homemade manufacturing methods of the time: the ball of yarn and calfskin, the club of cedar.11 The diamond layout described by Ford bears a striking resemblance to one shown in George Moreland’s Balldom,12 an early attempt at a history of the game; Moreland describes his “diamond” as “A Peculiar Shaped One Used in 1842,” a mere four years after the Beachville game. And with one important exception,13 the rules as set out by Ford were consistent with those codified in 1845 by members of the Knickerbocker Base Ball Club of New York.14

But perhaps the most telling feature of Ford’s account was the game’s date, June 4. By statute of Upper Canada, June 4 was indeed a holiday, Militia Muster Day, in recognition of the birthday of King George III. The day was to be set aside for military training and parades, much consumption of food and drink, and recreational pastimes of just such a nature as a game of baseball. Canadian historical artist Charles W. Jefferys described the festivities thus:

“The fourth of June, the birthday of King George III, was the most important holiday of the year in early Upper Canada. On that day, the annual muster of the militia was held. Every able-bodied male between the ages of eighteen and sixty was enrolled, and all were expected to turn out for the occasion. For most of them this annual muster was the only opportunity they had for receiving any instruction in military exercises. It was held in the most central or the most convenient place in each district; in an open field on the outskirts of the principal village, among the stumps of a forest clearing, or at a cross roads, known generally as ‘The Corners.’… Around the Training ground gathered the girls, the wives and mothers and children and old men, admiring or critical. The drill ended with three cheers for His Majesty. The warriors dispersed themselves among the houses of their neighbors. Many sought the tavern, the bar-room did the biggest trade of the year. There was a dinner for the officers and gentry, with a long toast list: toasts to the King, to the Duke of York, Commander-in-Chief, to the Army and Navy, to the Ladies, each accompanied by an appropriate sentiment, expressed in flowery language…. The day was made the occasion of wrestling matches, horse shoe pitching contests, or the settling of old scores by a fight, which frequently ended in a general melee with plenty of black eyes, bloody noses and sore heads, but with general satisfaction to all concerned.”15

Bouchier and Barney published their findings in 1988 in the Journal of Sport History.16 The article served (almost literally) to put Canada on the early baseball map. The Beachville game was celebrated by Canada Post in 1988 with the issuance of a stamp, and was featured on a silver coin issued by the Royal Canadian Mint in 2018 in celebration of 180 years of baseball in Canada. It was a watershed moment in Canada’s baseball history.

Or was it?

CREDIBILITY ISSUES

Despite the corroborative evidence supplied by the Bouchier and Barney paper, there are aspects of Adam Ford’s account that invite skepticism. In fact, the credibility of the event as a whole has been questioned by some historians, among them some of the most respected of baseball’s research community.

Researcher David Block is one who admits to needing further convincing. Block, an expert on bat and ball games, and baseball’s origins in particular, discusses the Beachville game in his book Baseball Before We Knew It.17 He finds Ford’s memory “prodigious,” particularly for a seven-year-old remembering 48 years after the fact. He would prefer a secondary reference, another account of the game from an independent source, before accepting its legitimacy: “The absence of direct corroboration that the game ever happened is probably the biggest reason for my doubts, but I don’t dismiss the possibility that Ford could have remembered witnessing some sort of baseball-like contest at Beachville as a child. However, I still maintain that, unless he was an extraordinary savant, it is virtually impossible for a chronic drinker to remember with uncanny specificity the rules, the precise dimensions, and the exact names of the participants of an event he witnessed 48 years earlier when he was but seven years of age.”18

Major League Baseball’s official historian, John Thorn, is somewhat more blunt in his assessment. In a documentary film, No Joy in Beachville, produced for the Canadian television network Sportsnet in 2015, Thorn likened the Ford tale to the Doubleday myth, terming it “all baloney.”19 He states: “My principal objection to Ford’s report is that it appeared in print nearly 50 years after the fact. In 1838 he would have been seven years old. The Beachville story, a game said to have been played in 1838 (with no contemporaneous reference) but recollected by Dr. Adam Ford almost 50 years later, may be filed with Abner Graves’ recollections of Abner Doubleday inventing the game … when Graves was five and Doubleday 19 or 20.”20

It should be noted as well that some Canadian sources have done the game’s credibility no service by overstating its significance. Misguided attempts at nationalistic one-upmanship have prompted the use of such phrases as “the first game ever played,” “pre-dates Abner Doubleday at Cooperstown,” and “pre-dates the first game played by the Knickerbocker Club, baseball’s first club.” Space does not permit discussion of the many flaws in these descriptions; suffice to say that statements that are demonstrably false do more harm than good.21

There are undoubtedly problems with Ford’s account, the most obvious the suspicious clarity of the recollection. It’s one thing to recall the names of some of the participants; after all, these families would have been among Ford’s neighbors when he was a child. It’s quite another to remember with exactitude such details as the distances between bases, distances that were likely not measured precisely to begin with. There are also identifiable errors. Although the game he claimed to have witnessed involved plugging (the practice of retiring a baserunner by hitting him with a thrown ball), and was therefore not the New York game, he does admit to having participated in a game played with that game’s harder ball upon his return home from his university studies. Since he obtained his medical degree in 1855, this would have been shortly thereafter. But the first game known to have been played in Canada under the New York rules does not appear until May of 1859.22 No matter their cause, the flaws in the 1886 account indicate that perhaps it is not quite so “too good to be true” as was first thought.

The delay between the 1838 witnessing of the game and the 1886 publication of its description seems less problematic. By 1886 Adam Ford was 55 years old. Memories, particularly fond ones, often prompt people of that age to share them in some way. Of greater import is a comparison with the writings of William Wheaton. Wheaton’s unsigned history, entitled “How Baseball Began – A Member of the Gotham Club of Fifty Years Ago Tells About It,” was published in the San Francisco Examiner on November 27, 1887.23 In it, Wheaton describes the game as it was being played on the common areas of New York in the 1830s, and the founding of the Gotham Baseball Club (which he claimed to be the first) in 1837. It is noteworthy that Wheaton’s memories, published 50 years after the fact, have not been questioned on that issue as have been Ford’s.

As to a secondary source for the Beachville game, a smoking gun, it is unlikely that one will ever be found, and unreasonable to expect one will be. Why would a newspaper, for example, commit any of its presumably limited resources to the coverage of an event of so little importance as an informal bat and ball game played as part of holiday celebrations? Particularly if that event was considered in no way out of the ordinary? Nonetheless, there have in recent years been uncovered some documents providing additional support to the credibility of the Ford tale.

Two of the families mentioned in the Sporting Life account are Williams and Dolson. Author and historian Brian Dawe, in a post to MLB historian John Thorn’s Our Game blog, notes that both of these families are part of an extended family named Burdick.24 (Enoch Burdick was the owner of the pasture in which Ford’s game was said to have been played.)25 The Burdick family emigrated to the Beachville area in the late 1790s from Lanesborough, Massachusetts, the neighboring town to Pittsfield in Berkshire County. This is the same Pittsfield that enacted a 1791 bylaw prohibiting baseball play for fear of broken windows. The Burdicks and a number of other Berkshire families had accompanied Major Thomas Ingersoll (after whom the present-day town nearby is named) as Ingersoll set about assigning land to families for settlement. The movement of the families, and their accompanying social customs and traditions, provide a means by which baseball play became a part of recreational life in the Beachville area.26

Of more direct relevance to Dr. Ford’s account is the discovery by Canadian historian Bill Humber of a game played in Hamilton, Ontario (then Upper Canada), in 1819. The game was first mentioned in the Hamilton Times in 1874, but reproduced in the Woodstock Sentinel later that year.27 The full text of the Sentinel’s report is shown below.

Woodstock Sentinel, July 10, 1874

The report records a Hamilton old-timer’s memories of what he refers to as Training Day, an alternate name for Militia Muster Day, in 1819. The old-timer describes the requisite military training in the morning, after which the fun began: fisticuffs and general belligerence, fueled by great quantities of potent drink. The “most jolly time” included as well the pursuit of various recreations, one of which was “the old style of base ball.” Note especially the date of the festivities: June 4 again, King George Ill’s birthday. Here is a record of another game of baseball of some form, again on the fourth of June, played 19 years before the Beachville game described by Dr. Ford. This report cannot be an attempt to verify, or substantiate, Ford’s account, as it was published in 1874, 12 years before the Sporting Life letter of 1886. It represents what is likely the strongest corroborative support discovered to date.

It is true that none of the evidence provided above constitutes definitive proof that the game happened. However, the recent discoveries, particularly the recurrence of the June 4 date known to have historical significance in Upper Canada, provide support for those aspects of Adam Ford’s letter already confirmed by the research of Bouchier and Barney. That a game of the type described should have been played in the Beachville area in 1838, and in Hamilton in 1819, fits nicely with the concept of the spread of migration following the Revolutionary War. Rather than being nurtured in Brooklyn and Philadelphia, and then exported to Canada as a finished product, we know that baseball evolved north of the border as it did south. If indeed those emigrating from the American Northeast to southwestern Ontario following the upheaval of the war, bringing with them the game’s rudimentary aspects and fundamental tenets, were responsible for sowing baseball’s seeds in the area, then the Beachville game could be considered the most substantial manifestation of early growth.

Notes

1 The Volunteer Review and Military and Naval Gazette, Vol. Ill No. 7, February 15, 1869. The 1790s seem to have been fertile ground for baseball references. It was in 1791 in Pittsfield, Massachusetts, that an ordinance was passed prohibiting baseball play. See John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2011), 23. And it was in 1798 in Hampshire, England, that Jane Austen wrote of cricket and base ball in Northanger Abbey (again see Thorn, 23).

2 William Humber, Diamonds of the North (Don Mills, Ontario: Oxford University Press, 1995), chapter 2.

3 Buffalo Morning Express, August 18, 1860.

4 Beachville is also only about five miles from both Ingersoll and Woodstock, two other sites of significant early baseball activity.

5 For more details on Ford’s youth, his time in St. Marys, and the unfortunate events leading to his departure, see Brian Martin, Baseball’s Creation Myth (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2013), chapter 4.

6 The London Free Press of August 13, 1869, describes a game between the visiting Tecumseh Club of London and the Young Atlantic Baseball Club of St. Marys. The box score shows the St. Marys center fielder as “Dr. Ford,” who would have been approaching his 38th birthday at the time.

7 Ford’s home, and the building that housed his business, still stand in St. Marys today.

8 For the complete text of Ford’s letter, see Nancy B. Bouchier and Robert Knight Barney, “A Critical Examination of a Source of Early Ontario Baseball: The Reminiscence of Adam E. Ford,” Journal of Sport History Vol. 15 No. 1, Spring 1988, 88-90, or Martin, Baseball’s Creation Myth, Appendix C.

9 Humber, 18.

10 Bouchier and Barney: 80.

11 Humber, 17.

12 See Bouchier and Barney: 82, and George L. Moreland, Balldom (New York: The Balldom Publishing Co., 1914), 10.

13 Ford’s rules include the use of plugging, or soaking, by which the baserunner could be retired by being hit by a thrown ball between bases. A feature of the early Massachusetts game, plugging was not part of the New York game played by the Knickerbockers and other early New York clubs.

14 Bouchier and Barney: 84.

15 Charles W. Jefferys, Training Day. https://www.cwjeff-erys.ca/training-day, accessed December 22, 2020.

16 Bouchier and Barney: 75-90.

17 David Block, Baseball Before We Knew It (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2005), 62-66.

18 Block, email correspondence with author, December 23, 2020.

19 https://www.sportsnet.ca/baseball/mlb/theres-no-joy-in-beachville-the-true-story-of-baseballs-origin-2/, accessed December 23, 2020.

20 Thorn, email correspondence with author, December 23, 2020.

21 There is no first baseball game: Baseball evolved, it wasn’t born. Abner Doubleday was nowhere near Cooperstown in 1839, and had no involvement with baseball. And the Knickerbocker Baseball Club was not only not the first baseball club, it was not even the first baseball club in New York. For a good discussion of these and other misconceptions, see Thomas W. Gilbert, How Baseball Happened (Boston: David R. Godine, 2020), chapter 1.

22 New York Clipper, June 11, 1859.

23 https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/how-baseball-began-William-r-wheaton-tells-his-story-4b278edc172, accessed December 29, 2020.

24 https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/pittsfield-1791-and-beachville-1838-6b07d3f20497, accessed December 30, 2020.

25 Bouchier and Barney: 81.

26 As well, it fits nicely with Bob Barney’s general theory of baseball migration northward and westward in the years following the Revolutionary War.

27 Woodstock Sentinel, July 10, 1874.

William Shuttleworth: A Man for His Seasons

admin — Thu, 28 Jul 2022 13:29:17 +0000

William Shuttleworth and Harry Sweetman of the Maple Leaf Baseball Club of Hamilton, 1860. (Toronto Globe, August 15, 1903)

After quietly resting in the backroom of Canadian sports history for over a century, William Shuttleworth is now fully recognized for his role in establishing the country’s first formal team, the Young Canadians (later Maple Leafs), in 1854. He had a distinguished playing career and organizational role beyond Hamilton, and contributed to the game’s growth from umpiring to its promotion. He was inducted into the Canadian Sports Hall of Fame in 2015, and the next year into Canada’s Baseball Hall of Fame and his local Hamilton sports hall.

William Shuttleworth was born in Brantford, Ontario (when the province was known as Upper Canada), in 1834. He lived most of his teenage and adult years in Hamilton, Ontario (when the province was known as Canada West before becoming Ontario following the country’s July 1, 1867, Confederation), and spent his final years with a son in Geneva, New York, where he died in 1903. He was buried with his wife, Matilda, in a Hamilton cemetery, and then was almost forgotten. Shuttle-worth, however, was more than an accomplished ballplayer in the game’s primeval past. He was president of the Maple Leafs (after they changed their name from the Young Canadians) for over a decade. He assumed vice president and president roles with the fledgling and original Canadian Base Ball Association in 1864 (when the game was still spelled with two words), as well as umpiring one of the most significant games of his era. He represents the overlooked independent identity of those playing baseball in Ontario in its formative years, almost exclusively Canadian- or British-born, and with negligible American input and content.

Baseball’s formative stages had deep roots in the Hamilton area. The Hamilton Times newspaper in 1874 had described an old-timer’s memory of locals playing the old-style game on the June 4 Militia Muster Day in 1819 in Hamilton.1 The old-style game was best characterized by the use of a softer ball thrown at a runner between bases. If the ball connected, the runner was out. It was a practice called soaking or plugging. Alongside the contentious (well, only to some American baseball historians) June 4 game in Beachville almost 20 years later, these games are among the earliest examples we have of human agency driving the regular playing of baseball at an appointed time. No longer would they be part of an obligation to an old-world folk custom with diminishing but still significant roots in what had once been an exclusively religious-ordained or primitive cultural celebration. The Canadian June 4 games were an essential proto-modern innovation predating even American steps to leave behind a game embedded in this folk culture.

Given these circumstances, we can be fairly confident William Shuttleworth played some version of baseball as a child growing up in nearby Brantford. Brantford is only 25 miles west of Hamilton, admittedly a considerable distance in pre-railway Ontario, but a necessary journey for settlers, traveling salespeople, and emerging civic leaders.

There are, as yet, no reports contemporary to the time of the Hamilton Young Canadians’ formation in 1854,2 but near-in-time records exist to confirm the year and Shuttleworth’s role. Thomas Hutchinson’s 1862-63 Directory for Hamilton3 stated that the Maple Leaf Base Ball Club (formerly Young Canadian) was organized in April 1854, and that its current officers (for 1862) included Wm. Shuttleworth, President; Chas. Waugh, Vice President; David Davies, Secretary; Thomas Carroll, Treasurer. They played on the grounds facing Central School, between Bond and Bowery Streets. The Burlington Base Ball Club was organized a year later. Its 1862 officers were J.C. Davis, President; P.W. Dayfoot, Vice President; J.J. Mason, Secretary; and George Black, Treasurer. They played on the grounds on Upper James Street at the corner of Robinson.

The second reference to the organization of Hamilton baseball was found in the Hamilton Spectator’s report of December 4, 1865, regarding the Maple Leaf Base Ball Club Dinner. It said:

“Last evening the members of the Maple Leaf Base Ball club held their first Annual Dinner in their room on John Street, the President Mr. W. Shuttleworth, occupying the Chair and Mr. Thos. Carroll the Vice-Chair. About 30 persons sat down to the spread, which was provided by T. Young, saloonkeeper and was got up in the best style. The usual toasts of the Queen, the Royal Family, the Governor General, the press, etc. were drunk with all the honors, and songs appropriate to these were sung by several members of the Club. The toast “Prosperity to the Maple Leaf Base Ball Club” having been proposed, the President replied in suitable terms, giving a short sketch of the Club, its organization in 1854, since which time it has been steadily increasing up to the present time. Toasts and speech making was kept up till a late hour, all apparently enjoying themselves.”

A report on the same gathering in the Hamilton Times of December 2, 1865, said the team was “virtually the parent of all other organizations of the kind in Western Canada as it most assuredly is the first in the science of the game.” It was then announced that the club was moving from its “old grounds upon Main Street” to new playing grounds on [Upper] James Street. In conclusion, the revelers in attendance declared, “For their efficiency in the game, and the general prosperity of the Maple Leaf, much is due to the President, Mr. William Shuttleworth. He has always manifested a deep interest in the same, and his encouragement of such manly recreations reflects creditably upon the character of the gentleman.” They concluded with a rendition honoring a “jolly good fellow.”

Finally, the Hamilton Times report of the Maple Leaf Base Ball Club’s annual supper in its February 23, 1867, edition said that Mr. Wm. Shuttleworth, the President, was proud to boast that the Maple Leaf was the father of all Canadian Ball Clubs, that he himself was the paternal head of the Maple Leaf, and finally that it had organized 14 years earlier under the name of the Young Canadian Club.4 The name change to Maple Leaf had occurred in the early 1860s.

The first, contemporary to its time, news coverage of baseball in Hamilton did not occur until 1858, when the team’s executive, but one not including William Shuttleworth, was listed. His exclusion can be ascribed to his desire to play the game rather than manage its off-field needs. A very primitive box score in the same year speaks only of teams from Hamilton’s East and West ends playing what might be a five-inning game, or maybe a game featuring five-a-side.5 We do not know, and will likely never know. One thing we can be certain of is that they were playing the Canadian old-style plugging game, since this is what William’s younger brother James, a shoemaker, introduced into Woodstock6 when he moved there after a downturn in Hamilton’s economy in the late 1850s.7 Notably, an 1860 description of this old-style game in the Ingersoll Chronicle8 also mentions its five-inning character, contrasting it with a two-inning version as played in London in 1856,9 suggesting that even in Ontario variations of the game were played.

In 1859, two teams of tobacconists10 from Hamilton and Toronto played the first game in this part of the world featuring the New York rules, and a year later Shuttleworth and Hamilton’s two teams, the Young Canadians and the Burlingtons, met teams from Buffalo in the first international games played under those rules. Shuttleworth’s team was preceded to the honor of being first by a few weeks, but the fate of both Canadian teams was the same.11 They lost, perhaps a consequence of their recent adoption of the New York rules game with its harder ball, and the Canadians’ unfamiliarity with this game’s speed and physical challenges.

A critic of this independent Canadian role in the game’s proto-modern and eventual modernization might cite this adoption of the New York rules game as proof of the Canadian subservience to American leadership, but in fact it proves the opposite. Baseball’s folk and proto-modern popularity dated to times long before the New York rules came into vogue in a variety of regional variations throughout North America, including southern Ontario. The adoption by these places of the New York rules game ensured that it would flourish elsewhere rather than remain a locally distinct recreation for its geographically close enthusiasts such as, but not limited locally to, the Knickerbocker Club. These regional variations, though generally favoring the “soaking” version of the game, opted for the New York rules game because it was considered a better game. The ball could be hit farther, the game required a higher level of skill, it was more dangerous and therefore more entertaining, and, perhaps most significantly, its adoption allowed baseball to rival cricket as a more scientific and adult game.

At all stages throughout the 1860s, with the exception of a brief period in 1861 when the Young Canadians changed their name to the Maple Leafs, William Shuttleworth was president of the team.12 No reason was given for the name change, though perhaps it was to avoid confusion with his brother James’s namesake Young Canadians in Woodstock. It may also have provided an excuse for some of the players from the rival Burlingtons to join a more neutrally named team. In return, the Maple Leafs, as noted above, eventually adopted the Burlington grounds on Upper James Street near the “Mountain,” forsaking the Young Canadians’ first home near the city’s Central School. Whatever laurels the Hamilton Maple Leafs had earned as Ontario’s leading team, however, were not long lasting, as by the end of 1861 Woodstock reigned supreme, having defeated the Maple Leafs by two runs in their first encounter.13 Never again would the Hamilton team come this close to defeating their southwestern Ontario rival.

One particularly notable aspect of its evolution further confirms the identity of baseball in Canada as a game developed alongside, rather than in subservience to, Americans during these formative years of transition from a proto-modern form to a fully modern game in the 20-year period from 1854 through 1873. That is a virtual absence of American participation and influence. William Shuttleworth is simply the best example of how this first generation of recognized Canadian baseball players were exclusively either Canadian- or British-born. While a few ballplayers had unclear birthplaces in either the British province of Canada, the United States, or Britain, with but one exception they were almost certainly raised from childhood in the British province of Canada before it became a formal nation in 1867.14

In the interest of full disclosure, the significant exception was an American immigrant and ballplayer, Charles L. Wood. Wood’s role was important, persuading Woodstock to switch to the New York rules in 1861. By that time, however, Hamilton and Toronto had already adopted them. Wood was not even an apostle from New York City, but came from central New York state, where he might have been initially exposed to the New York rules at the same time as Toronto and Hamilton players were experimenting with them. He came to Woodstock not as a baseball advocate but as an entrepreneur interested in running a hotel. He married into the ballplaying and tragic Douglas family15 of Woodstock before spending his last years peripatetically moving west with his wife to the American Pacific coast. His advocacy for the New York rules game was as much about being able to play other Canadian towns, there being only limited competition with teams from south of the border until the 1870s. As well, Wood, along with Shuttleworth, would make up the first executive of the Canadian Base Ball Association in 1864;16 Wood’s presidency lasted only a few months when for unknown reasons he vacated the post in favor of Shuttleworth.

In 1862 William Shuttleworth married Matilda White of Hamilton, whom he likely met at a church bazaar. They raised five children, as William first depended on a clerking job with a dry-goods firm. Later he briefly ran his own retail operation, in which he promoted and sold tickets for games with visiting teams, most notably Bob Addy’s famous Rockford (Illinois) squad in 1870. Eventually, however, he returned to employment under others. He thus lacked the personal wealth and the social position enjoyed by at least some of his teammates. Although an injury could have seriously jeopardized his ability to care for his young family, he nevertheless played the dangerous position of catcher throughout much of the 1860s. His limited protection was a piece of leather clenched between his teeth, and perhaps a small hand protector more like a thin glove than the trapper’s mitts of today. Despite a continuing absence of financial security, he traveled to nearby Canadian towns and cities to play and later umpire the game. He went to Detroit with the Maple Leaf team in 1867 for what was ambitiously called a World Base Ball Tournament. In the premier level of the competition the team captured a gold ball in recognition of its third-place finish.17 The prize remained in the family until at least the 1940s, in the possession of Shuttleworth’s youngest son Harry. Its fate thereafter is unknown.

Shuttleworth’s bravery and sense of civic duty were never better demonstrated than when he volunteered for the 13th Battalion in Hamilton in 1866, when Fenian raids from south of the border, aimed at freeing Ireland from Britain’s control, threatened to bring the British province into conflict with a potentially larger American invasion force, fresh from its Civil War experience. One account says that a Private Shuttle-worth was nearly killed by a bullet deflecting off his rifle.18 We cannot be certain it was William, but his early volunteering and later status as the 13th Battalion’s color sergeant argue forcibly for it being him.

In 1868 Shuttleworth umpired the raucous Canadian championship game between Guelph and Woodstock in the latter town before thousands of spectators, many of whom had come from Guelph by the early afternoon train. The game degenerated into chaos and brawling in the stands. Both sides applauded Shuttleworth’s neutral oversight as Woodstock retained its Canadian championship and the silver ball trophy.19

A year later brother James died suddenly at the age of 29. He had rejoined William’s Hamilton team in 1862. The papers sadly described the funeral procession for James, led by his Maple Leafs teammates, but gave no mention of what had brought about his premature end. A possible cause, however, might be found in a brief comment in a Bowmanville newspaper several days later.20 Bowmanville is about as far east of Toronto as Hamilton is west, and the towns often met in friendly baseball competition. Without naming anyone, the newspaper article described a Dundas-based shoemaker who had killed himself, unhappy with his home life, and whose business was doing poorly. The profession fits that of James Shuttleworth, and Dundas is a nearby urban adjunct to Hamilton. Imagining that another Hamilton-area shoemaker died under similar circumstances in the same week as James’s untimely and unexplained end seems improbable. A verdict of suicide would be a strong reason for such a paucity of details in local papers, and why silence followed.

William, nearing 40, had disappeared from the team’s executive by 1872, ironically, or perhaps not so, the same year Guelph began the process of bringing imported professionals into the country, in this case the former Boston Red Stockings player Sam Jackson. A few years later, however, William played in what is almost certainly the first-ever “Old Timer’s Game” in Canada, an event that was caricatured in the Canadian Illustrated News.21 He then departed the active baseball scene, perhaps because he was needed at home. In 1884 Matilda died, having been ill for some time from what was described as a brain disease. The widower William now relied increasingly on his grown-up children. His oldest son looked after the family’s younger siblings. William moved to Geneva, New York, with a son James in the 1890s, undertaking an artisan role as an upholsterer before dying there in 1903.

It is possible we would still have little or no awareness of William Shuttleworth but for Dr. Bryan D. Palmer’s book A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario.22 The book is a serious piece of academic research and analysis having little to do with baseball except for the story of the skilled workers who played the game in this nineteenth-century Canadian city. The Shuttle-worth brothers were central to his account. For baseball’s historians, it was an important example of why one’s research should never be restricted to obvious sports-related materials.

WILLIAM HUMBER’s five books on baseball include Diamonds of the North: A Concise History of Baseball in Canada (1995). He has been a facilitator since 1979 of an in-class and now online subject Baseball Spring Training for Fans, is an inductee into Canada’s Baseball Hall of Fame (2018), and was appointed to the Order of Canada (2022) for his baseball research. He finds it all a tad overwhelming.

Notes

1 At first appearing in the Hamilton Times, but not available today. A short essay, “Training Day 1819: George Ill’s Birthday and Its Celebration,” was first discovered in an 1895 brochure entitled, Souvenir book and programme for military encampment given by the Ladies’ Committee of the Wentworth Historical Society, edited and compiled by M.J. Nisbet, assisted by F.L. Davis (Hamilton: Griffin & Kidner, 1895), 44-45. Being so long after the events of 1819, there was concern for its reliability. Its later discovery in the Woodstock Sentinel (July 10, 1874), after being reprinted that year (1874) from the Hamilton Times, has put those concerns to rest, particularly because it appeared 12 years before Adam Ford’s 1886 Beachville remembrance of baseball play, also on a June 4 occasion.

2 The pages of the Hamilton Gazette reviewed from 1854 and 1855 make no mention of baseball, but given that the game was new and the club as formed was likely only for intrasquad purposes, the lack of reporting either directly or incidentally is not surprising.

3 Thomas Hutchinson’s 1862-63 Directory (Hamilton, C.W. [Ont.]: John Eastwood & Co., 1862), 224.

4 While 14 years does not line up neatly with 1854, the team may have been formed during the winter of 1853-54, and he simply subtracted 1853 from 1867. Or he could have included the year 1867 in his calculation, or simply been mistaken by a year. The year of 1854 is most plausible, however, given the other evidence.

5 Hamilton Spectator, August 14, 1858, with the barest of details, citing only East and West end clubs and what appears to have been a five-inning match, though it might also have been a five-a-side match lasting only one inning.

6 The source for this is a 1915 reminiscence by J. Henry Brown in the Woodstock Sentinel Review of April 12, 1915. “James Shuttleworth of Maple Leaf of Hamilton club came to work in Woodstock as a shoe maker [presumably in 1860 since he was in the games played that year against Ingersoll] and helped organize the team on a lot on Reeve St. back of the Post Office. Later a man named Wood [Charles L.] came to Woodstock and the old style game was given up and the regular American game adopted.” The small problem with this chronology is that the Maple Leaf moniker would not be associated with Hamilton’s team until 1861, but this may be due to a later confusion as to the timing of the club’s naming. James’s residence however is not in doubt. He appears in the 1861 census in Woodstock, though the name is misspelled as Suttleworth. One more frustration for later researchers!

7 “Then came the crisis of 1859, and with it financial disaster to Hamilton.” In Herbert Lister, Hamilton History, Commerce, Industries, Resources issued under the auspices of the City Council (Hamilton: Spectator Printing Company, 1913), 25.

8 The Chronicle (Ingersoll), July 27, 1860: “Each side had five innings, the Young Canadians [Woodstock] taking the first. The total amount scored by the Young Canadians was 83; and the total score of the Rough and Readys [Ingersoll] 59 – the Young Canadians winning by 24.”

9 New York Clipper, September 27, 1856 featured the box score for a game between the London base ball club and one from a nearby “suburban” adjunct, Delaware.

10 W.C.F. Caverhill, Caverhill’s Toronto City Directory for 1859-60 (Toronto: W.C.F. Caverhill, 1859); Thomas Hutchinson’s 1862-63 Directory (Hamilton, C.W. [Ont.]: John Eastwood & Co., 1862).

11 On August 18, 1860 the Burlingtons of Hamilton lost to the Queen Citys of Buffalo 30-25 in what historian Joseph Overfield (Niagara Frontier magazine, Summer 1964: 59-60) described as the first ever international baseball match. It was played in Clifton, what is now Niagara Falls, Canada. In late August 1860, the Young Canadian Club of Hamilton were humbled in their first cross-border match with the Niagara Club of Buffalo, 87-13, and though the account is somewhat unclear, it appears the Hamilton team may have played with the additional men common to the “Canadian” game, while Niagara played by the New York rules. At a return match in Buffalo, the Young Canadians lost by a more respectable 45-13 score (Overfield).

12 New York Clipper, April 14, 1860. For the first time on the public record, William Shuttleworth is listed as president of the then Young Canadian Base Ball Club of Hamilton, C.W. (C.W. is Canada West, Ontario’s name before the July 1, 1867, Confederation.) As late as 1870 (New York Clipper, May 7, 1870) it was reported that W. Shuttleworth had been reelected president of the (long since renamed) Hamilton Maple Leafs.

13 The Shuttleworth brothers confronted each other on the diamond on Tuesday, September 3, 1861, in Hamilton as the Young Canadians of Woodstock scored three in the top of the ninth to outlast the Maple Leaf of Hamilton, 24-22. As reported in the New York Clipper, September 21, 1861.

14 I reviewed, through Ancestry.com, players making up the lineups and administration of leading Canadian (really Ontario-based) teams in the 1854 through 1873 period. They included London Club and Delaware Club (1856), Hamilton Young Canadians (later Maple Leafs), Hamilton Burlingtons, Woodstock Young Canadians (old-style and New York game rules), Ingersoll Rough and Ready, Ingersoll Victorias, Dundas Independents, Guelph Maple Leafs, London Athletics and Tecumsehs, Kingston St. Lawrence, Bowmanville Victoria and Royal Oaks, Newcastle Beavers, Port Hope Silver Stars, Cobourg Travellers, Ottawa Mutuals, and early Toronto teams such as the Young Canadians and Dauntless. With one significant exception (Woodstock’s Charles Wood), these teams, both players and off-field leadership, consisted of those born in Canada or Great Britain, or having arrived at such a young age from the United States as to be considered essentially Canadian. They all learned the game in Canada. Even Bob Addy fit this mold. The 1854-1873 years were the beginning of baseball’s regular media coverage, and the tail end of proto-modern experiments from which regularity and modernism emerged. What does this mean? From a reverse historical engineering process, based on Canadian independence of play and operation between 1854 and 1873, a Canadian claim to be co-evolving North American participants in the game’s creative process is valid. If driven by American leadership in the proto-modern phase, we would not have expected to see that engagement so abruptly disappear in the 1854 to 1873 period. Recordings of the proto-modern era in Canada, though limited, show that the makeup of its baseball proponents generally matches the profile of those playing or organizing between 1854 and 1873. Finally, the remnants of the proto-modern period after 1854 consist largely of distinct but fading local interpretations of baseball. In one Canadian case it was even labeled as such. The roots of proto-modern games were in folk baseball play from England and Europe. Each region in North America experimented with variations on this play, from which the New York version ultimately succeeded. The arrival of itinerant American professionals in Canada only began in 1872 but was a significant minority until 1875. Canadian integration in a majority American baseball enterprise (the International Association) did not occur until 1877. Until then Canadians, except for adopting the New York game like everyone else, were creative masters in their own, and the larger, baseball domain.

15 Robert Douglas, the ballplaying and younger brother of Charles Wood’s wife Joanna, was a Woodstock saddler and harness maker who died in early 1872, possibly as a result of complications arising from a baseball accident in 1870 (London Free Press, July 9, 1870). He crashed into a teammate and was concussed, and may have suffered other physical injury. He played for the Young Canadians throughout the 1860s and early ’70s. His young widow, Sarah Jane, was just 25 and they had three young sons. The daughter of prominent local auctioneer and bailiff Samuel Burgess, she married Robert when she was 17. Her older brother Marenus was in the lineup of the Woodstock team playing the 11-a-side Canadian game in 1860. Young people meeting at the baseball diamond was obviously a custom with deep roots. Sarah remarried a year and a half after Robert’s death, and had three more sons, but she herself was dead by July 1878. She was buried under the Douglas name in Innerkip, northeast of Woodstock. Such are the short, marginally documented, but baseball-infused lives of long ago.

16 Hamilton Evening Times, August 24, 1864.

17 “The Base Ball Tournament at Detroit,” Hamilton Evening Times, August 10, 1867.

18 John Alexander MacDonald, Troublous Times in Canada: A History of the Fenian Raids of 1866 and 1870 (Toronto: W.S. Johnston and Co., 1910), 57. “Private Shuttleworth, of the 13th, had a narrow and extraordinary escape. While he was in the act of firing, the muzzle of his rifle was shot into by a Fenian musket ball and torn open.”

19 Recalling the events of that season many years later (Toronto Evening Telegram, September 27, 1923), Guelph ballplayer William Sunley described for reporter C.O. Knowles the second of the two games in which Guelph and Woodstock met that year. Guelph, he said, lost 38-28 [actually 36-28]. He then described the unusual circumstances: “… the game was lost owing to the absence of Mr. Nichols, the catcher on account of family affliction.” The box score of the game, noting Alfred Feast’s role as Guelph scorer and William Shuttleworth’s acclaimed duty as umpire, makes it clear, however, that James Nichols did play in the second game.

20 “A Shoemaker, Doing a Small Business in Dundas, Committed Suicide Because of Dull Trade and a Bad Wife,” (Canadian Statesman, September 2, 1869).

21 The peculiar Canadian Illustrated News drawing (September 11, 1875) of the Hamilton old-timers game was probably the last game in which William Shuttleworth, then 41, played.

22 Bryan D. Palmer, A Culture in Conflict: Skilled Workers and Industrial Capitalism in Hamilton, Ontario (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 1979).

The First Ever International ‘Base Ball’ Game

admin — Wed, 27 Jul 2022 13:38:07 +0000

The original Home Run Baker: Ottawan Godfrey Phipps Baker and his wife Elizabeth. (Author’s collection)

In a Niagara Frontier journal essay (Summer 1964), noted Buffalo historian Joseph Overfield described the first-ever international baseball match as being played between the Burlingtons of Hamilton C.W. (Canada West, or today’s Ontario), and the Queen Citys of Buffalo, New York, on August 17, 1860. The Queen Citys were victorious 30-25 in a place called Clifton, as described in the Buffalo Morning Express. For many years, however, the location of Clifton remained uncertain.1

Historians in the Society for American Baseball Research initially wrestled with Clifton’s location. A detailed survey of early games in upper New York state released in 2008 by Craig Waff described the place as Clifton, NY (for New York). Version 11 of SABR’s full Protoball Chronology loaded in April 2010 in its working chronology for Ballplaying in Canada was more circumspect, noting, “Clifton NY is not a location found near Buffalo. Perhaps it was the former name of a section of the city. An area called Clifton Heights is on Lake Erie SW of Buffalo.” Neither was definitive, however. Uncertainty surrounded the location until Canadian researchers looked within their own country and noted that until the 1880s Niagara Falls, Canada, went by the name of Clifton, a description still current today in the city’s tourist enclave of Clifton Hill.2

The location should not have been hard to uncover. There had been several reports in the New York Clipper newspaper3 the year before of cricket matches played by Clifton, C.W. One was against their nearby Canadian neighbor, Thorold, but more significantly, the Clipper, under the headline, CLIFTON VS ST. GEORGE, wrote, “… Clifton, C.W. defeated the latter of Buffalo, N.Y. in a match played at Clifton, on the 25th [July] … by three wickets.”

Just as Canadians would later be surprised to discover that the first international game of their favorite sport, hockey, had been played in Burlington, Vermont,4 so might the possibility of a non-American location for the first international game of their national game, baseball, have been a surprise to US-based researchers. Our deeply held belief systems do at times throw us a curve!

We must give some pause to this conversation, however, by clarifying our terms. While baseball’s ultimately successful New York form barred the practice of soaking,5 any game (whether a variation of the soaking game, or possibly one using a gradually harder ball), would have been a first for international recognition as long as it was played between formal teams from different national jurisdictions.

Two such games apparently meeting these criteria need, therefore, to be discounted. In 1859 a visiting team of prominent English cricketers had arrived in North America to play local squads in the Northeastern United States and in what today is eastern Canada.6 The English were so good they often allowed their Canadian and American rivals to place 22 men in defensive positions when the Englishmen batted, rather than the normal 11, and still the visitors won. Near the end of their tour, there were proposals for them to play a team of Americans at baseball, but finances proved too big a hurdle.

Instead, the English split into two teams, then filled out their lineups with available local Americans and at least one Canadian, Godfrey Phipps Baker, an Ottawa cricketer and that city’s postmaster.7 They played a game of baseball in Rochester, New York. The result was immaterial, but English newspapers borrowing their box score from Porter’s Spirit of the Times gave the match an international designation. While the nationality of the players was multinational, the teams were not formal baseball organizations, nor were they teams representing different national entities. For what it’s worth, the Canadian Godfrey Baker hit the first home run in the game, an achievement more notable had this been the first such international baseball game.

The other candidate was a match in Schenectady, New York, on May 19, 1860, between teams described, by the Sunday Mercury sporting paper as New York vs. Canada, and which were listed as the Mohawk Club of Schenectady and the Union Club of Upper Canada. The Upper Canada appellation had been discarded geographically by the act of union between Upper and Lower Canada in 1841. At that time Upper Canada had become known as Canada West (Quebec was Canada East), a name later replaced by Ontario in 1867 following Canada’s formal recognition as a national entity. No record of this team exists in Canada, and if they had come from north of the border for this one encounter they would, as was the common practice of the day, have been known by a specific place, and not by an out-of-date generic locale.

SABR researcher Robert Tholkes finally set the record straight in 2014.8 The Sunday Mercury item on the game involving the “Union Club of Upper Canada” in Schenectady on May 19, 1860, was also reported in the Schenectady Daily News of May 22, 1860. It stated, “THE MATCH GAME OF Base Ball played Saturday afternoon between the Mohawk club of this city and the Union Club of the Junior Class of Union College, resulted in the following score: Mohawk, 31 runs.” Tholkes wrote, “The article then listed the players, [but] without the box score sent to the Sunday Mercury. These matched the names in the [earlier] box score. Why the college club decided to pretend to be from Canada is unknown. Perhaps one or more of the players were Canadian. So we can reject any claim for this game having been an international first.”

None of this is particularly surprising. Most games were played in regionally confined outposts throughout North America, and significantly this includes locations in the “British Empire’s Canadian Province.” While such games would have featured players born in more than one country, they were either intrasquad affairs or between clubs specific to a shared territory, and within the same nationally defined jurisdiction. None was international. Likewise, expatriates from either country may have formed local squads to play other local teams, but since these would have been immigrants now residing in a host country, such games cannot be considered international. Finally, local squads of cricketers were known to often play simple games of baseball as a warm-up for their regular cricket match. Despite the possible international makeup of players, these were not formally defined baseball teams.

Our description requires that the two competing teams qualifying for status as participants in an international game must be formal baseball teams, whose primary identity is as such, and who each, in their name and regional location, represent a definable geographic territory distinct in national recognition from the other. It is/was not necessary that such places have formal status as independent national entities, but if they were a colony of another nation, they had to be distinct from the one against which they were playing. As such, the Hamilton Burlingtons game with the Queen Citys of Buffalo meets our criteria, in much in the same way as a game between a team largely but not exclusively of New York cricketers from the St. George’s Club and a Canadian team from the Toronto club and the Upper Canada College eleven qualifies as the first ever international match for that sport in 1844.9

Report of the match played at Clifton on August 17, 1860. (Buffalo Morning Express, August 18, 1860)

Notes

1 Joseph Overfield, Niagara Frontier, Summer 1964: 59-60; Buffalo Morning Express, August 18, 1860.

2 “In October of 1881, at the request of its residents, the former Town of Clifton [Ontario, Canada] received permission to change its name to the Town of Niagara Falls. By 1881, the population of the Town of Niagara Falls was 2,623 citizens.” From https://www.niagara-fallsinfo.com/niagara-falls-history.

3 New York Clipper, August 13, 1859.

4 https://www.mychampiainvalley.com/news/local-news/this-place-in-history-first-international-hockey-game/; or http://hockeygods.com/blog/hockeyhistory/The_1st_lnternational_lce_Hockey_Game_1886.

5 Soaking was the “old-style” practice of using a softer ball that could be thrown at a runner between bases. The runner was out if hit by the ball.

6 Fred Lillywhite, English Cricketers’ Trip [1859] to Canada and the United States (London: F. Lillywhite, 1860).

7 The Era, December 4, 1859: 13. As sourced online through the British Newspaper Archives, https:// www.britishnewspaperarchive.co.uk/viewer/bl/0000053/18591204/034/0013.

8 Email from Robert Tholkes to William Humber, April 16, 2014.

9 John I. Marder, The International Series: The Story of the United States v Canada at Cricket (London: Kaye & Ward, 1968), 16-25.

George Sleeman and the Guelph Maple Leafs

admin — Tue, 26 Jul 2022 13:39:47 +0000

The 1874 Guelph Maple Leafs, George Sleeman center. (Harper’s Weekly, September 12, 1874)

Baseball’s rise in the nineteenth century featured a storied cast of characters in a variety of locales. It is perhaps a reflection of the prototypically humble Canadian persona that the early “dynasties” north of the border were not from the larger metropolitan areas, but rather from less populous centers, notably a town (not even a city) that ranked 14th in population.1 And among the most significant figures was not a magnate or star player, but a young local businessman who later emerged as an influential leader in southwestern Ontario business, sport, and politics.

Nestled in the heart of southwestern Ontario, the town of Guelph was founded in 1827 and so was still in its infancy when the Sleeman family arrived in 1847. Among the newcomers was 6-year-old George Sleeman, the son of brewer John H. Sleeman and Anne Burrows. John was born in Cornwall, England, in 1805, and came to Canada in 1834 with his wife and three children. The family settled in St. David’s, Ontario (near Niagara Falls), and it was here that John built the Stamford Springs Brewery in 1836.2 George arrived five years later on August 1, 1841, their first and only child born in Canada.

In 1847, in search for a source of cleaner water, a crucial ingredient in the brewing process, John moved the family a full day’s ride northwest to the town of Guelph.3 After leasing a local brewery for three years, he purchased land in 1850 on Waterloo Avenue and built the Silver Creek Brewery, which opened the following year. He built a home near the brewery in 1859, and in this same year, son George took over the day-to-day operations of the brewery at the age of 18.4 By 1862, the brewery was renamed Sleeman and Son, and George undertook an even more prominent role in the family business.5 John retired from the brewery in 1867, and entrusted his son as sole owner. George’s involvement in the brewing trade continued throughout his life, but this did not preclude his pursuing several other passions, notably a significant interest in sport, particularly baseball.

His initial involvement in baseball may have occurred as early as 1861, as he recounted in a magazine article in 1923: “I was always a member of the [Guelph] Maple Leaf team, from the time it was formed in 1861 by A.S. Feast, who came from Hamilton.”6 He pitched for the Leafs in the early 1860s, but as the decade progressed and the team became more competitive, George transitioned from the playing field to a more managerial role.

Baseball in southwestern Ontario had been expanding greatly in the 1860s, as teams formed in Hamilton, London, Toronto, and Ingersoll, but none could unseat the Woodstock Young Canadians as Canadian Champions from 1865 to 1868. But by 1869, the Guelph Maple Leafs had established a solid core of local players, including pitcher William Sunley, veteran catcher James T. Nichols, second baseman Charlie Maddock, third baseman William “Bunty” Hewer, and 18-year-old shortstop Thomas Smith. The 1869 Championship for the Silver Ball, the trophy for the Canadian victors, was held in London in August, and pitted Guelph against the Ingersoll Victorias and the reigning champions from Woodstock. The championship game, which had to be rescheduled to September 24, resulted in a decisive 43-20 victory by the Maple Leafs over the London Tecumsehs. Woodstock was finally unseated as Canadian Champions, and Guelph retained this new title for another six years.

With the Maple Leafs as the new baseball dynasty into the 1870s, Sleeman was intent on further raising the profile of Guelph as the baseball capital of Canada. He also formed and managed a team “composed solely of home brews,”7 called the Silver Creeks, for whom he occasionally pitched. Games were held on an empty lot behind Sleeman’s brewery, and George paid for all expenses.8 Meanwhile, the reputation of the Maple Leafs continued to spread, as they accepted challenges from all comers from southwestern Ontario and New York state, and defeated such teams as the Dundas Independents, London Eckfords, Toronto Dauntless, Rochester Flour Cities, and Ilion Clippers.

In 1873, the “largest crowd ever assembled on the Maple Leaf ground” witnessed a game on August 22 between the Canadian champions and the “celebrated Bostons (champions of America).”9 The Boston Red Stockings were one of the top teams in the fledgling National Association of Professional Baseball Players, led by player-manager Harry Wright. It is perhaps ironic that the Leafs at this time were captained by former Red Stocking Sam Jackson, while the Boston team featured the first Canadian major leaguer, right fielder Bob Addy. Boston, with its legendary lineup that included no fewer than four future Hall of Famers (manager Wright in center field, his brother George Wright at shortstop, pitcher Al Spalding, and first baseman Jim O’Rourke), scored a decisive victory, 27-8, despite some “remarkably fine catches”10 by Guelph’s Tommy Smith and Johnny Goldie, and solid play by catcher Charley Maddock.

On April 7, 1874, the annual meeting of the Maple Leaf Base Ball Club was held, and George Sleeman was elected president of the club; as well, “motion was given for the creating of the office of Manager of the Nine, coupled with the name of Mr. Jas. T. Nichols,”11 a new position for which the duties “should be explained at the next meeting.”12 As president, Sleeman devised the Club Rules, and found a way to reward his players while maintaining their amateur status: Though no salary was paid, profits were divided up among the team members.13 The Leafs ventured successfully into international territory in 1874 on two fronts. In early July, at the Watertown (New York) tournament, they defeated all comers, including the Ku Klux Klan team from Oneida, New York, to take home the $500 prize. This success was due in no small part to the inclusion of a number of imports on the roster; Sleeman had signed several American players (second baseman George Keerl, from Baltimore; first baseman Hank Myers, of Ilion, New York; outfielder William A.Jones, aka William A. Silkworth, from New York; and third baseman Harrison Leslie Spence, also of New York). He imported more players the following year (William Bevan Lapham of Cincinnati and Johnny Foley), ensuring that the team would retain the Silver Ball Trophy as Canadian Champions in 1875.

In the meantime, while maintaining his management of the brewery and with the Maple Leafs, Sleeman somehow engaged in several other pursuits. He was elected president of the Guelph Turf Club in 1872 and remained in that position for over 20 years. A proud Guelphite, he became increasingly invested in civic matters, and was elected to the town council in 1876. All the while, he and his wife, Sarah Hill (married in 1863), continued to fill the rooms of the Sleeman home; soon after the end of the 1874 season, they welcomed their sixth child. (They eventually had 12 children.)

Sleeman sought to further elevate the status of baseball in Ontario with the formation of the Canadian Association for 1876. He was elected president of the Association and managed the Maple Leafs through another strong season. The highlight for the club was an exciting 9-8 victory over the National League St. Louis Browns in an exhibition game on August 29, William Squire Smith allowing only two runs over eight innings; the New York Clipper was less than effusive in its praise of the Leafs, declaring that they “played very steadily.”14 But with strong competition from rivals 75 miles to their southwest, the Leafs’ dominance came to an end as the London Tecumsehs were crowned champions of the Canadian Association.

Sleeman’s practice of importing American professionals had fueled much controversy and debate over the previous two seasons, and these were exacerbated during the 1876 season, as Sleeman continued to import more “amateur” players. This forced other teams to follow suit in order to remain competitive, and required teams and leagues to enact stricter rules to restrict the use of professionals in amateur leagues and contests.

With the success of the Canadian Association in 1876, Sleeman set his sights even higher in 1877; he sought to establish a fully international league that would also compete with the National League, then in its second year. Hence was born the International Association, wherein the London and Guelph clubs joined five American teams, but the Tecumsehs and Leafs followed very disparate paths. Though this did officially elevate the Guelph team to professional status (not to be confused with an amateur Guelph Maple Leafs team that also operated in the same season), the competition proved to be too much for both the team and Sleeman. He had to squash rumors in midseason of the team moving to Buffalo,15 and it was all he could do to finish the season. The Leafs posted a dismal 4-12 record to finish last, not taking into account the record of the Lynn Live Oaks, who disbanded in midseason. Guelph played its last league game against the Tecumsehs (who eventually followed as champions of the Association) on August 29, and despite a promising 6-1 lead after five innings, could not hold on, its season ending ignominiously with a 6-6 tie. This marked the end of close to a decade of Guelph superiority and success, and it was time for the club and Sleeman to move on.

Guelph did not return to the International Association for 1878. (And despite their tremendous initial success, even the Tecumsehs were only able to continue into August of 1878 before disbanding.) Rather, the Leafs languished as an amateur club, playing only sporadically over the next two seasons. Sleeman did not appear to have much involvement with the club at this time, but he did play right field for the Leafs on July 31 against the Harriston Browns. Sadly, on this same day, his older brother William died of a morphine overdose. From this point, perhaps as a result of this family tragedy, George seemed to relinquish any role with the Maple Leafs; the Guelph papers made little mention of him or the club for the remainder of the season. He kept a low profile until he was named chairman of the inauguration committee when Guelph became a city on April 23, 1879.16 He focused his energy more on civic matters, having gained such respect and popularity locally that he was elected the first mayor of the City of Guelph (by acclamation) in January 1880.

Mayor Sleeman returned to baseball for the 1880 season, as president of a new Canadian Association, which adopted the same constitution as the previous incarnation from 1876.17 Teams from Galt, Toronto, and Woodstock, and a pair from Guelph (Maple Leafs and Athletics) vied for the Amateur Championship of Canada, but played only a handful of games. By season’s end, both the Leafs and Woodstock Actives claimed they were entitled to the championship bat.18 While the Actives’ claim was justified by their 1-0 victory in the championship match on September 8, Sleeman and the Leafs asserted that “during the early part of the season, [they] vanquished all comers,”19 and that the two losses they incurred at the end of the season (as well as a 3-2 loss on August 27 to the Harriston Browns) were under protest, as both the Actives and Browns had, in a stroke of irony considering Sleeman’s prior management philosophy, “introduced professionals into their teams.”20 The final decision of the judiciary committee has not been found.

The Maple Leafs returned to independent amateur play in 1881, with Sleeman still as president. In an otherwise unremarkable season, another Sleeman signing caused yet another controversy. In early July, amateur pitcher John W. Jackson, known professionally as Bud Fowler, was engaged by the Maple Leafs, but “when he reached Guelph and the members of the club found he was a coloured youth, they snobbishly refused to play with him.”21 The Guelph Herald expressed its disappointment with the team’s reaction, and could only take solace in finding “that it is only a few members of the team”22 who objected to Fowler’s engagement.

Over the next two years, Sleeman was more preoccupied with civic duties, having been reelected mayor of Guelph for both 1881 and 1882. He was asked to run yet again in 1883, but declined. The Maple Leafs saw little activity during this time, until 1884, when they resurfaced as a member of the Western Ontario Baseball League. This new amateur league consisted of 10 teams, including two from Guelph, and three each from Hamilton and London. Sleeman was elected a director of the league, but appears to have had little to do with league or team operations. But this set the stage for perhaps his most ambitious baseball project yet, when he was elected president of the newly formed Canadian League for 1885. The Leafs, with Sleeman returning as their manager, joined the Hamilton Clippers, Hamilton Primroses, London Cockneys, and Toronto Torontos to play out a full season of approximately 40 games.

However noble his intentions, Sleeman reignited the flames of controversy yet again when he signed Cincinnati pitcher George Washington Bradley. Bradley had been under contract with the Philadelphia Athletics since 1883, and was suspended for having left to join the Cincinnati Unions. And as the Canadian League constitution “[forbade] the employment by League clubs of players under contract with or expelled from any other club,”23 other teams protested on the grounds that Bradley he was an ineligible player. But Sleeman insisted on putting Bradley in to pitch on July 9 against London, contending that he was indeed eligible, as the Canadian League was independent of the American Association. Regardless, the Cockneys refused to play, umpire Fred Goldsmith called the game, and a protest was filed. This scenario was repeated on July 11 in a scheduled game against Toronto. The Judiciary Committee met on July 14 in Hamilton to decide the affair, and despite its feeling that Sleeman had “acted conscientiously for what he considered to be in the interests of the Leaf Club,”24 it “could not endorse the club playing Bradley”25 and ruled against the Leafs. Sleeman “gave it as his opinion that a mistake had been committed, and that the Leafs were dealt with unfairly and unconstitutionally, and in consequence he thought the Leafs would go out of the League.”26 Three weeks later, it was reported that the Leafs management had decided to disband. The Hamilton Spectator expressed its disappointment: “The Maple Leafs started out with a fine team of local players; but the other league teams were strengthened beyond the calibre of the local players, and it was principally to the endeavor to keep up with the procession that the Leafs owe their present position. Hard luck, too, had a great deal to do with it.”27 The announcement proved premature, because Sleeman resigned as manager, which left “the boys [to] run the machine themselves,”28 but his “liberality and his love for baseball [were] again demonstrated”29 when he allowed the Maple Leafs free use of his ground and stand in order to “finish the season with profit to themselves.”30 “In face of the fact that Mr. Sleeman lost a large sum of money on baseball this year, the generous offer shows that he is willing to make great sacrifices for the good of the sport in Guelph.”31 Third baseman James H. Hewer took over managerial duties, and the Leafs managed to finish the season. But despite players of major-league caliber such as Louis Bierbauer, Dennis Fitzgerald, Mickey Jones, and Edward Kent, they finished in a battle for last place (with a record of 8-28) with the equally hapless Hamilton Primroses.

Sleeman, still president of the Canadian League, sought to put the challenges of 1885 behind him, and at the annual meeting on November 30 in Toronto, was reelected league president as plans were made for the coming season. Meanwhile, the “formation of an International League by affiliation with the New York State League was discussed,”32 and this indeed came to fruition, with Toronto and Hamilton (Clippers) withdrawing from the Canadian League to join the newly renamed league. Sleeman filed suit against the Canucks and Clippers, to no avail, but, undeterred, secured a “first-class team for the coming season, and lovers of the game in Guelph may rely on having a good nine placed in the field.”33 Considering the success that was to come, it is worth taking a brief look at the players Sleeman brought together to form the most victorious team that Guelph ever fielded.

Two of those who remained with the club formed the catching tandem. A 21-year-old Guelph native, Andrew Dillon, worked as an upholsterer, and showed promise as a young catcher, touted as “one of the coolest and gamest catchers in the country”34 by the Kalamazoo Gazette. He played in the Northwestern League in 1887 and for Lima in the Tri-State League in 1888, but died of typhoid and pneumonia only two years later.

James “Son” Purvis, from Port Hope, Ontario, had played with the Milwaukee reserve team in 1884, but returned to Canada in 1885 and played for both Guelph and London of the Canadian League. He enjoyed a lengthy career playing with Buffalo and London of the International League, as well as with clubs from Grand Rapids, Rockford, Peoria, and Des Moines. He finished with the Hartford Cooperatives of the Atlantic League in 1898, and thereafter, raised a family and worked as a cabinetmaker in Grand Rapids, Michigan. He died there in 1935.

Longtime Maple Leaf James Hewer played several infield positions with Guelph until 1896. A prominent businessman and merchant, he was elected mayor in 1897, and many Guelphites mourned his passing in 1916.

Sleeman brought in rising star Albert C. Buckenberger of Detroit to manage and play second base for the Leafs. He had been captain of the Cass Club of Detroit for three seasons, and had most recently played with Indianapolis, Terre Haute, and Toledo. He achieved greater fame as a manager for nine seasons in the majors, with Columbus of the American Association (1889-1890) and in the National League with Pittsburgh, St. Louis, and Boston between 1892 and 1904. He died in Syracuse in 1917.

As did Buckenberger, first baseman Wally “Jumbo” Millar, born in Jackson, Michigan, also played with amateur clubs in Detroit for several seasons. He impressed Sleeman very early on and was named Leaf captain. He returned to Sandusky in 1887 and managed the club several years later. He died in Detroit in 1935.

William George, born in Bellaire, Ohio, played primarily right field and shortstop with the Leafs, but also pitched in eight games. His brief turn on the mound got the attention of the New York Giants, who signed him as a pitcher for the following season. He pitched in 19 games in the majors with New York and the Columbus Solons of the American Association, then returned to the outfield in the minor leagues until 1899. His playing days over, he returned to Bellaire and operated a billiards parlor, then a saloon, before succumbing to peritonitis in 1916.

Benjamin Stephens of Pittsburgh (born Stephani in France) played first base and pitched on occasion for Guelph in 1886, having played the previous season with Macon of the Southern League. He spent the next several seasons playing in the Northwestern, Tri-State, and New York-Pennsylvania leagues, primarily as an outfielder. He continued to tend bar in Pittsburgh but troubles with alcohol led to a severe case of delirium tremens, and eventual death in 1906 at the age of 51.

Frank Scheibeck, from Detroit, also with the Sanduskys in 1885, was brought in by Sleeman to play shortstop and pitch for the Leafs. He enjoyed a lengthy career in baseball, including stints in London (International League) in 1888-89 and Montréal (Eastern League) from 1898 to 1901, and spent several years in the majors from 1887-1906 with seven teams. He was the last surviving member of the team when he died in 1956 in Detroit.

Scheibeck primarily alternated pitching duties with Harry Zell, who was born in Dayton, Ohio, and who, along with Stephens, had played with Macon in 1885, leading the Southern League in fielding. He played with Buffalo of the International League in 1887, then played for several other minor leagues before ending his career in Dayton in 1892. He owned and operated a saloon in his hometown, and died in 1912 after a long illness at the age of 47.

From the Sanduskys as well, Sleeman enticed third baseman Dan Mulholland, who had gained fame for his unassisted triple play against the National League Detroit Wolverines. He was one of the top hitters for the Leafs in 1886, but returned to play for Sandusky in 1887. He played a few more seasons before retiring to his hometown of Norwalk, Ohio, where he ran a saloon and later became a solicitor. He died in 1927.

Owen “Reddy” Williams had been a teammate of William George with the Bellaire Globes, and played left field for the Maple Leafs. He went on to play for Milwaukee of the Northwestern League in 1889, then played for several seasons in the Tri-State League. He spent his later years as a glassworker in Ohio and West Virginia, and died in 1929 in Fairmont, West Virginia.

The Leafs’ stalwart center fielder was Charles “Count” Campau, who had played with Buckenberger on the Detroit Cass Club. He was an “itinerant minor-league star who played for teams in at least 19 cities, including three stops in the majors.”35 He had played with Erie, Pennsylvania, in 1885 until that club disbanded, then finished the season with the London Tecumsehs. His first major-league tour was with the Detroit Wolverines in 1888, but it was his second stint in the majors that was his most successful, when he joined the St. Louis Browns of the American Association as player-manager in 1890. Despite an impressive record of 27-14 as manager, he was nevertheless replaced, but stayed on as a player. And although he hit an impressive .322 in 75 games and led the league with nine home runs, he was released by Browns owner Chris Von der Ahe with two weeks remaining in the season, in an effort to cut costs.36 He returned to the majors four years later, but appeared in only two games with the Washington Senators. He umpired for a few seasons in the minors, then left baseball altogether to work at racetracks tracks across North America. He died of pneumonia in 1938.

With Sleeman’s team in place, the Leafs barnstormed their way through Ontario and the United States, highlighted by an American tour in August that proved tremendously successful. They played top amateur clubs from Michigan, Indiana, Ohio, Virginia, and Pennsylvania, achieving a record of 23-1, and by September 1 their overall record stood at an exceptional 43-1. A mediocre final month still resulted in a formidable season record of 53-9, without question the greatest season enjoyed by the Maple Leafs.

Despite the successes, the Leafs underwent yet another dramatic transition, with an entirely new club in 1887. They merged with the Guelph Royal Oaks, and it was mostly former Oaks who comprised the 1887 Maple Leafs. Sleeman, essentially retired from the game by this time,37 remained as honorary president, while former Guelph pitcher William S. Smith assumed the role of club president.38 Considering the many changes, the local press was less than optimistic about the coming season: “Is the glory of the once champion Maple Leafs now allowed to be a thing of the past?”39 This would prove prophetic, as the Leafs played only sporadically over the next several seasons.

Though honorary president, George Sleeman no longer held an active interest in the Maple Leafs.40 Without his leadership, but with his blessing, the club soldiered on. It returned to organized play in 1893 as a member of the Canadian Amateur Baseball Association, then in 1894 finished first in the Western Ontario Baseball League, and repeated this the following year as a member of the Western League of the Canadian Baseball Association. A second iteration of a Canadian League was formed in 1896, including teams from Galt, Hamilton, London, and Guelph, and once again the Leafs finished first, with a record of 24-12. The 1896 roster featured two young local stars: Jimmy Cockman, younger brother of 1885 Leafs shortstop Tommy Cockman, played many years in the minors before finally reaching the majors in 1905 as a 32-year-old rookie to play 13 games at third base with the New York Highlanders; and William “Bunk” Congalton, who played with the Chicago Orphans in 1902, then with Cleveland and Boston from 1905 to 1907. His brief career was highlighted by a stellar season with the Cleveland Naps in 1906 in which he batted .320, which would have put him fourth in the AL had he had four more plate appearances. The Leafs and manager James Hewer returned to the Canadian League in 1897, but finished last of the three teams that remained by season’s end. There is no trace of the Leafs during the 1898 season, but they rejoined the then Class-D Canadian League for the 1899 season. Manager George Black guided them to an unremarkable record of 42-48.

The heyday of the Maple Leafs now years behind them, they played in amateur versions of the Canadian League in 1904 and 1905. By 1908, the former International League (or Association) operated as the Class-A Eastern League, and this allowed four teams from Ontario and New York, including Guelph, to form a Class-D International League. But the Guelph franchise shifted to St. Thomas, Ontario, on June 12, and the league itself disbanded at the end of July.

Professional baseball returned to Ontario in 1911, as George “Knotty” Lee formed a new Class-D Canadian League. The league remained relatively healthy through 1915, by which time it had attained Class-B status. The Maple Leafs themselves achieved moderate success in the first three seasons, and after a sabbatical in 1914, returned, managed by Lee, to finish a very respectable second to the Ottawa Senators in the league’s final season. This was the last year the Guelph Maple Leafs played at a professional level, though Lee once more brought professional baseball to Ontario in 1930 with the Class-D Ontario League; by this time, however, the Guelph team went by the nickname Biltmores.

With his role in baseball now relegated to that of an ardent fan, Sleeman became involved in several other areas of Guelph daily life. He had been an expert marksman, one of the best rifle shots in Guelph, and he was president of the Guelph Rifle Association from 1886 to 1906. He also delighted in winter sports, being named president of the Royal City Curling Club in 1888. When Mayor Thomas Goldie, also a former Guelph Maple Leaf, died suddenly in 1892, Sleeman agreed to take over and finish Goldie’s term.41 In 1894 George started the Guelph Railway Company, which constructed one of the first electric railways in Ontario.42 His father, having returned to St. David’s to enjoy a peaceful retirement working on his gardens, died early that year.

Sleeman returned to the mayor’s office in 1905, elected by an all-time majority, a reflection of his stature in the community. By this time he had retired from the family business and erected the Springbank Brewery, which he conducted until his death.43 He continued to be held in high regard in his city: He ran for mayor one last time in 1906, and won uncontested.

After his wife, Sarah, died in early 1917, George continued to surround himself with family and friends, being known by many for his hospitable nature.44 Entering his 80s, he remained in excellent health, and his sense of citizenship and community pride never waned. His passion for sport, notably baseball, remained undiminished: “It is worthy of note that in his last conscious moments his thoughts were about some of the men who were players of that famous baseball team.”45

Sleeman died after an abdominal operation on December 16, 1926, in Guelph General Hospital, and was laid to rest in Woodlawn Cemetery, a few miles from where still stands the old Sleeman Manor, near the site of the original brewery and ballpark. His grave is perhaps fittingly modest and not a reflection of his impact, with only a simple flat stone marker that simply states “George Sleeman, husband of Sarah Hill,” along with his dates of birth and death. Dubbed the “father of professional Canadian baseball for his role in the early organization of the game,”46 he and his impact were more fully acknowledged when he was elected to the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame as a builder in 1999.

MARTIN LACOSTE has taught high-school music for over 30 years, but has always had a passion for baseball, whether fondly recalling the Expos from the 1980s or digging into the Maple Leafs from the 1880s. Having been a SABR member in the 1990s, he is excited to again be a member (in the digital era) since 2016.

Sources

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

Newspapers, including Guelph Herald, Guelph Mercury, Hamilton Spectator, London Advertiser, London Free Press, Maple Leaf, New York Clipper, Toronto Globe, and Woodstock Weekly Sentinel.

Ascenzo, Denise. “Niagara’s History Unveiled: The Early Years,” https://www.niagaranow.com/entertainment.phtm-l/1266niagarashistoryunveiledtheearlyyears, accessed July 7, 2021.

Bernard, David L. “The Guelph Maple Leafs: A Cultural Indicator of Southern Ontario,” Ontario History (Toronto: Ontario Historical Society), September 1992.

Matchett, Micheal. “The Sleeman Family Brewery: 19th Century Paternalism to Prohibition-Inspired Myth,” Historic Guelph, the Royal City (Guelph: Guelph Historical Society, 1993).

Genealogical and player data was obtained from a variety of sources, including Ancestry.com, Baseball-Reference.com,census records, FamilySearch.org, vital records, minor-league player files of Reed Howard, and the author’s own player database and genealogical files.

Various ledgers and correspondence from the Sleeman Family Collection, Archives and Special Collections, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph.

George Sleeman, email correspondence with Murray Inch (descendant), 2020-21.

Notes

1 Census of Canada, 1870-71 (Ottawa: I.B. Taylor, 1873), 428.

2 “Timeline: Sleeman Family History and Events,” https://www.lib.uoguelph.ca/archives/our-collections/regional-early-campus-history/sleeman-collection/timeline-sleeman-family.

3 “The Early Days: The Silver Creek Brewery,” https://www.lib.uoguelph.ca/archives/our-collections/regional-early-campus-history/sleeman-collection/brewing-history/early-days.

4 “Timeline: Sleeman Family History and Events.”

5 “Timeline: Sleeman Family History and Events.”

6 “The Maple Leafs of Guelph,” Maple Leaf, Guelph, January 1923: 13.

7 Old Timers Will Remember Those Famous Silver Creeks Who Played ‘Way Back When Gloves, Masks and Pads Were Not Known,” Guelph Mercury, July 20, 1927: 90.

8 “Old Timers Will Remember Those Famous Silver Creeks Who Played ‘Way Back When Gloves, Masks and Pads Were Not Known.”

9 “The Base Ball Match,” Guelph Mercury, August 23, 1873:1.

10 “The Base Ball Match.”

11 “Maple Leaf B.B.C. Annual Meeting,” Guelph Mercury, April 8, 1874:1.

12 “Maple Leaf B.B.C. Annual Meeting.”

13 Maple Leaf Baseball Club Ledger (1874-76), Sleeman Family Collection, Archives and Special Collections, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph.

14 “St. Louis vs. Maple Leaf,” New York Clipper, September 9, 1876:186.

15 “Base Ball Notes,” Guelph Mercury, July 19, 1877: 1.

16 “Death of Mr. George Sleeman Removes Prominent Pioneer Business Man of Royal City,” Guelph Mercury, December 16, 1926: 1.

17 “Base Ball,” Guelph Mercury, May 12, 1880: 1.

18 “The Return of the Actives,” Woodstock Weekly Sentinel, September 17, 1880: 4.

19 “The Canadian Championship,” Guelph Mercury, October 14, 1880: 2.

20 “The Canadian Championship.”

21 “Base Ball,” Guelph Mercury, July 27, 1881: 2.

22 “Guelph’s Colored Pitcher,” Hamilton Spectator, July 4, 1881.

23 “Bradley’s Status,” Hamilton Times, July 8, 1885.

24 “Meeting of Judiciary Committee,” Guelph Mercury, July 14, 1885: 1.

25 “Meeting of Judiciary Committee.”

26 “Meeting of Judiciary Committee.”

27 “The Maple Leafs,” Guelph Mercury, August 11, 1885: 1.

28 “The Maple Leafs.”

29 “The Maple Leafs in Luck,” Toronto Globe, August 25, 1885: 8.

30 “The Maple Leafs in Luck.”

31 “The Maple Leafs in Luck.”

32 “The Canadian Baseball League,” Guelph Mercury, December 4, 1885: 1.

33 “Baseball,” Guelph Mercury, March 8, 1886: 1.

34 “Baseball,” Guelph Mercury, August 16, 1886: 1.

35 Stephen V. Rice, “Count Campau,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/count-campau/.

36 Rice.

37 Lisa Bowes, “George Sleeman and the Brewing of Baseball in Guelph 1872-1886,” Historic Guelph (Guelph: Guelph Historical Society, October 1988), 55.

38 “Guelph Baseballers,” Guelph Mercury, May 10, 1887: 4.

39 “Local News,” Guelph Mercury, April 30, 1887: 1.

40 Unattributed clipping from the Sleeman Family Collection, Archives and Special Collections, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph.

41 “Death of Mr. George Sleeman Removes Prominent Pioneer Business Man of Royal City,” Guelph Mercury, December 16, 1926: 9.

42 “Death of Mr. George Sleeman Removes Prominent Pioneer Business Man of Royal City.”

43 “Death of Mr. George Sleeman Removes Prominent Pioneer Business Man of Royal City,” Guelph Mercury, December 16, 1926: 1.

44 “Death of Mr. George Sleeman Removes Prominent Pioneer Business Man of Royal City,” Guelph Mercury, December 16, 1926: 9.

45 “Late Geo. Sleeman,” Guelph Mercury, December 16, 1926:4.

46 “George Sleeman – Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame,” http://baseballhalloffame.ca/blog/2009/09/17/george-sleeman/.

Robert ‘Bob’ Addy: And Now You Know the Rest of the Story

admin — Mon, 25 Jul 2022 13:33:33 +0000

Robert “Bob” Addy’s Canadian baseball success story begs a really big question. Why are we only hearing about him now? In the last 10 years, thanks to researcher Peter Morris, Addy’s Canadian roots have been highlighted, but this knowledge has taken its sweet time spreading to all corners of the baseball world.1 Now additional details of the Addy story, of which Peter was uncertain, can be told.

Bob Addy was the first Canadian not only to play, but also to excel, at both the nascent professional game and its major-league startups in the United States.2 He was the first Canadian to both umpire3 and manage,4 if only briefly, at the game’s highest levels. Some accounts say he was the first ballplayer of any origin to slide into a base, but given how the game is filled with such myths, it is more likely he was among the first to popularize the move.5 He even experimented with a version of baseball on ice.6 It was a dismal failure, but not too offbeat for a guy from Canada, where he was born in 1842 in Port Hope, Ontario.7 He not only learned to play baseball there, but his renown as a cricketer as well followed him throughout his later baseball career.8

Bob left Canada around his 20th year to join his older brother George in Rochelle, Illinois, near the Canada Settlement in Ogle County, Illinois, where he most likely hoped to pursue his career as a tinsmith, the training for which he had completed in Port Hope. Fortuitously, Rochelle was near Rockford, Illinois, home of one of the standout baseball teams of the 1860s and early 1870s, the Rockford Forest City.9 Addy joined the team in 1866. It featured two Baseball Hall of Famers, Al Spalding and Cap Anson, though not at the same time, and a number of players with near equal proficiency, including Addy and Ross Barnes. When the Rockford team joined the National Association for its inaugural 1871 season, Addy immediately became the first Canadian to play professionally at the game’s highest level. Bob Addy can therefore be considered Canadian baseball’s “missing link,” filling in the one gap (much of the 1870s) in the otherwise continuous record of Canadians playing the highest-caliber baseball in the United States. He flourished at that level while an increasing number of similarly gifted Canadian players elected to remain at home, their participation in the game in Canada enabling baseball to appeal to all ages, eventually in all parts of the country, and even to gain playing adherents among First Nations, women, and a small but enthralled African-Canadian population.10

To put the game in Canada into its historical context, we know that the ancestral “folk” nature of baseball-type games goes back thousands of years, long before their play in North America. These games were ritualistic, of a looking-back character, childlike in seriousness, and connected to religious custom or an associated culturally ordained celebration.11 In most cases they were introduced from the United States into the Ontario (then known as Upper Canada) portion of the British Empire’s territory of Canada through Loyalist and other settlement beginning in the 1790s.12 Such play, however, came as an English or European custom, not as an American-developed or -owned one. Baseball would co-evolve as a modern sport in Canada alongside its development in the United States in the period roughly between the 1820s through the early 1850s. Despite being unabashed Anglophiles, Canadians opted for baseball over cricket because they had contributed to the former’s evolution, and because it was seen by many as a better bat-and-ball game for participants.

While many additional examples of this process can be cited, of most significance to the career of Bob Addy were two reports from Upper Canada in 1803 demonstrating the manner in which the English and European, by way of the United States, folk game of “base ball” was becoming embedded in the emerging Canada. In 1878 H. Belden & Company’s Historical Atlas carried the following account:

“The first Court of Queen’s Bench that ever assembled in the counties of Northumberland and Durham was held in a barn on the premises of Mr. [Leonard] Soper, in Hope, on which occasion the judge (Major McGregor Rogers), lawyers and other officials, chose sides and played a game of ball, to determine who should pay the expenses of a dinner.”¹³

Hope is the territorial jurisdiction surrounding Port Hope. The account concluded, however, by noting:

“This statement is made on the authority of a pamphlet issued by Mr. Coleman a few years ago. As will be seen, further on, it is contradicted by the accounts of the ‘Town of Newcastle’ and loss of the ‘Speedy,’ with the judge, crown prosecutor, & c., on their way to hold a court at Presque Isle.”¹⁴

The contradiction was not regarding the game of ball, but the identity of the court proceedings on the 1803 premises of Mr. Soper as a Court of Queen’s Bench, when in fact they were a district Court of Quarter Sessions.15 The Belden Atlas description of the 1803 Court proceedings had essentially reprinted John Coleman’s 1875 acc ount.16 Since the Coleman account had been published only three years earlier, long after the 1803 event, its legitimacy could be questioned. So from whom did Coleman get his account? On page 44 of his 1875 booklet, he lists people who helped him in his research. They included Timothy Soper. In 1803 Timothy Soper was the 14-year-old son of Leonard Soper, on whose property the court was held. A reasonable conclusion is that Timothy Soper either witnessed the play of ball firsthand, or learned about it from his father, Leonard. When Coleman published his account in 1875, Timothy Soper was still alive. He lived until 1878 and is buried in the Bowmanville Cemetery.

An additional validation is found in the diary of Ely Playter (1776-1858), a farmer, lumberman, militia officer, member of the Upper Canada House of Assembly, and in 1801-02 a tavern-keeper who lived in and around York (Toronto). Concurrent with the time of his writing, he described coming to town and joining, on Wednesday, April 13, 1803, “… A number of Men jumping & Playing Ball…”17 We do not know definitively, and will never know, what “ball” they were playing, but Playter’s connection to Major McGregor Rogers, who presided over the Hope Township Court Sessions, is captivating. Rogers married two of Playter’s sisters, Sarah and Elizabeth (not at the same time, but after Sarah’s death). Playter and Rogers thus had a close personal relationship. While distance would have ensured they met only occasionally, we can see the real likelihood of their sharing an interest in the game of ball.

It is not surprising that Bob Addy grew up playing cricket, the more advanced of the two bat-and-ball games, but given the above early reference to “ball” in the vicinity of Port Hope, we can reasonably conclude he was also exposed to and played “base ball” type games as a child, and into his teenage years. We have at least five accounts from the Port Hope Guide newspaper of his cricketing prowess.18 His batting was a particularly strong point. But where is the baseball proof? At first glance it appeared to be found in a New York Clipper account (August 25, 1861) for a game that Addy’s hometown Port Hope Mechanics played against the Live Oak of Bowmanville, and for which it was reported, “The pitcher of the Mechanics, Addie, is also a very fine player and a very powerful bat.” Addy’s name was misspelled, but this was not surprising in an era when such was common. There are no other names similar to Addy in the Port Hope Directories of the era.19 There can be little doubt it is him but quibblers will still argue that the proof is tentative. It was confirmed however in the Port Hope Guide20 of November 15, 1873, as found in the publication, Doings of the Week the World Over, describing Bob’s one-time play with the Port Hope Mechanics beginning in 1858. The Guide story recognized the ballplayer’s relation to a local man, his brother James Addy.21 Most of the story, with the exception of his birth year, was correct, but researchers can’t have everything.

Additional information has also come to light regarding Addy’s family life. He appears to have met his wife, Ida, and married her when he was 28 and she was either 14 or 15. It was not a happy union. There was a boy, George, undoubtedly named after Bob’s older brother. In a telling commentary seeking a divorce in 1880, Ida cited multiple cruelties, infidelities, and actual violence against her.22 It later transpired that she probably needed a quick resolution of the matter, having become pregnant by her future husband. She withdrew the charges, the divorce went through, and eventually Ida and her new husband, Jerry Kinney, a railroad conductor, moved to Pocatello, Idaho, just down the street, as it turned out, from where Bob and his second wife settled.23 Ida no doubt wanted to be near her son, whom Bob had taken to Wyoming. For Ida’s part, she and Jerry had many more children and she lived long into the twentieth century, dying in 1938.

As he aged, Bob Addy made a point of disowning his past. The 1880 Wyoming census listed Bob and George with the misspelled last name of Addey, and Bob’s birthplace as New York. Eventually he was more specific, claiming to have been from Rochester, New York, despite ongoing descriptions of him as a Canadian.24 For years, baseball encyclopedias listed Rochester as his hometown, and even his daughter from his second marriage confirmed this heredity to the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. The reasons are complex, and possibly will never be known. However, when his Rockford team toured Canada on multiple occasions in the 1870s he tired of fans calling out his name as one of their own. “I care nothing for them,” he is said to have mouthed on one occasion, and in this era of advanced American xenophobia, hiding even this small “national” difference from his teammates seemed appropriate.25

But Bob’s connection to Port Hope was not quite severed. From a distance, he and George oversaw their younger brother’s last will and testament in 1886, and then their mother’s in 1889.26 Both had died in Port Hope. Meanwhile Bob continued to be listed locally as a possible returnee among Port Hope’s network of “Our Wandering Boys,” despite it being unlikely he would ever leave the American West.27 He eventually died in Pocatello in 1910; the house he built there now has heritage acknowledgment.28 Another side of his personality was revealed on jobs such as this. It was said “… boys would climb to roofs which he was tinning under an August sun to listen to his ceaseless chatter, which was more witty and clever than the routine of most professional monologuists.”29

An intriguing element in this family story was his brother George’s youngest daughter, and Bob’s niece, Jane. George had sent Jane’s older sister, Sara, to Port Hope in the late 1880s to marry a much older widower with whom she had six children in rapid succession.30 Jane might have feared a similar fate. She was a talented vocalist and to forestall any repeat, she relocated to England near century’s end, catching on with the D’Oyly Carte Opera company. Meanwhile, at the other end of the world, and with their research vessel, the Belgica, entrapped in the ice of an Antarctic winter, the crewmates passed their days of endless darkness admiring the photos of females in the magazines brought along. Polish scientist Henryk Arctowski fell in love with an image of Jane Addy.31 Eventually the freed boat made its way back to Europe, where Henryk pursued Jane to Paris. They married in London. The two became leading Polish intellectuals between the wars, Jane as a translator into English of Polish works, and Henryk as a respected academic.32 Only because they were attending a conference in Washington in 1939 were they spared the fate of so many Poles when the Nazis invaded their country. They never returned. Following their respective deaths in the 1950s, their cremated remains were collected in the United States and shipped to Warsaw for burial as heroes of the nation.33 Today, Henryk has a scientific base named after him in Antarctica, as well as a bi-annual award, while Jane’s acclaim among Poles historically matches her illustrious uncle Bob’s in the United States … and now in Canada!

Notes

1 Despite Peter Morris’s uncovering of Bob Addy’s true identity, many online biographies of William Phillips from New Brunswick continue to list him as the first Canadian big leaguer, while Addy, despite his playing acclaim, had yet to make it into Canada’s Baseball Hall of Fame in St. Marys, Ontario, as late as 2021. Editor’s Note: This oversight was rectified in November of 2021.

2 Addy’s statistical performance spans baseball’s fully emergent time and as such encompasses a formal league (the National), another not always afforded full major-league identity (the National Association), tournaments, one-off encounters (such as with the famed 1869-70 Cincinnati Red Stockings), and games outside the purview of what we now call “Organized Baseball” (in Port Hope and Denver). Many of these games are today described as “exhibition,” but unlike the contemporary understanding of such matches as marginal, preparatory, or frivolous, they were, in their day, the norm. Their recorded significance is closer to that of regulation games today, perhaps even greater given the fewer scheduled games played annually in the era as opposed to the number making up current league schedules. In fairness, there were often great disparities between teams in the early era, and players sometimes gave less than a full effort, hoping to “improve” the gambling odds for a return engagement. Encyclopedias and easily referenced online baseball sources provide statistics for Addy’s League and Association career but do not include perhaps his most productive years with Rockford in the 1860s.

3 Robert Addy’s umpiring appearance was in one of the last games ever played in the National Association (New York Clipper, November 6, 1875). The game in late October 1875 between the Athletic club of Philadelphia and the St. Louis Brown Stockings had been postponed several times. Addy was perhaps the only serious candidate remaining in town. He had played for the Athletics’ crosstown rival White Stockings.

4 The New York Clipper of November 24, 1877, reporting details from a New York newspaper, said, “Robert Addy, former captain of the Cincinnati Club, was dismissed from the club on Nov. 10 on the charge of dissipated habits during the past season. The facts are that Addy was not only honorably released from his engagement to the Cincinnati Club, but he was given a bonus of $100.” Other sources suggest he had assumed similar captain roles with the Philadelphia White Stockings. “Captain” was a means of describing an early manager role in this era.

5 Multiple sources over the years have fed the dubious story of Addy’s “invention” of the technique of sliding into base. A cartoon illustration from the Rockford (Illinois) Morning Star, April 18, 1930, reprinted in multiple papers of the day, described him as “the first man ever to employ the slide in stealing a base in 1866.” Al Spalding was the source, but the limited range of what was then his teenage experience and travel argues against the claim’s certainty. Intriguingly, at least two Canadian newspapers, the Saskatchewan Daily Star (September 24, 1921) and the Winnipeg Tribune (December 8, 1923), told the story of Addy’s innovation, but went beyond “burying the lede” by failing to mention his Canadian identity.

6 “The second game of base ball on ice between the Franklins and picked nine [featuring Al Spalding] was played yesterday afternoon at Bob Addy’s skating rink, on the corner of Madison Street and Ada,” Chicago Daily Inter Ocean, January 17, 1878.

7 The 1861 Canadian census listed Robert Addy as a 19-year-old tinsmith. Addy’s compulsory registration in 1863 for military service during the American Civil War shows him to be a 21-year-old tinner from Canada. His 1870 US federal census listing in Rockford describes him as a 28-year-old tinsmith from Canada. This documentation confirms three things: Addy’s Canadian place of birth, birth year of 1842, and tinsmith profession.

8 In their famous 15-14 loss to the Cincinnati Red Stockings during Cincinnati’s undefeated streak in 1869-70, Addy’s cry of “how’s that,” sounding like “howzat,” was an attempt to influence the umpire’s call. See the Editorial Correspondence to the Rockford Gazette from Cincinnati, July 25, 1869. It owed much to the cricket playbook where that phrase is shouted to compel the cricket umpire to make a favorable call. In practice there is no call, since the verdict is either clear, or a player’s integrity requires him to acknowledge a result unfavorable to him. If, in the latter case, he defers from doing so, the umpire can then be called upon for a ruling. Four years later, as reported in the May 24, 1873, New York Clipper, a game between the Atlantics and Philadelphia described a hot liner hit high over Addy’s head, “but the cricketer jumped up and held it in splendid style with one hand.”

9 George and Robert Addy played for the Clipper Club of Rochelle against the Rockford Forest City featuring the 16-year-old baseball prodigy Albert Spalding, as reported in the Rockford Weekly Register-Gazette, June 23, 1866. Rockford won easily, 49-16, but Robert Addy was so impressive that he was soon playing for the Forest City. George was nearing 30 and either was no longer a prospect or had no intention of becoming one.

10 African-Canadian baseball participation dates to at least 1869 with the Lincoln Nine team from London, Ontario. No doubt they were members of original Underground Railroad-fleeing Black families. It is possible that earlier accounts of such play within one of their communities will be found. Brantford’s baseball tournament in late June 1874 featured the Foresters, an early First Nations team representing the Tuscarora, one of the Six Nations of the Grand River Territory (Guelph Evening Mercury, June 30, 1874). A female baseball club was formed in the village of Dutton in the Ontario County of Elgin (Guelph Evening Mercury, May 26, 1876). A sense of the game’s spread beyond Ontario was provided by a Guelph Evening Mercury (June 12, 1872) item entitled Base Ball in Manitoba, and by a New York Clipper item (May 3, 1873) entitled Jacques Cartier B.C. about a Montréal club composed of French-Canadians led by Charles Gauthier.

11 Thomas Gilbert’s Playing First: Early Baseball Lives at Brooklyn’s Green-Wood Cemetery (Brooklyn: Green-Wood Cemetery, 2015) presents Melvin Adelman’s typology of folk and modern games. Adelman, however, did not include the crucial proto-modernity stage leading to the modern. Mike Huggins (“Associativity, Gambling, and the Rise of Protomodern British Sport, 1660-1800,” Journal of Sport History, Vol. 47, No. 1, Spring 2020, 1-17) describes proto-modernity as the period preceding and preparing for “modern” sport. “It had some but not all of the features of the modern, but [was] not coherently linked in the ways described in its ideal types.”

12 Brian Turner’s “Sticks or Clubs: Ball Play Along the Route of Burgoyne’s ‘Convention Army,'” from Don Jensen, ed., Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game 11 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2019), describes “bat and ball” play by both Patriots and British Army regulars. Likewise, British soldiers could have brought early baseball-type games directly into Canada without an American intermediary stop. An account from the July 1, 1841, Nova Scotian newspaper says, “Quadrille and Contra dances were got up on the green – and games of ball and bat, and such sports proceeded.”

13 The Illustrated Historical Atlas of the Counties of Northumberland and Durham, Ontario, released by H. Belden & Co. Toronto in 1878. Reprinted by Mika Silk Screening Limited, Belleville, Ontario 1972.

14 This is the spelling as given in the Belden atlas. Today the area near Brighton, Ontario, is named Presqu’lle.

15 The Dictionary of Canadian Biography describes Rogers as clerk of the peace for the newly established Newcastle District (1802), registrar of the district Surrogate Court (1802), and clerk of the district Court of Quarter Sessions (1802). This appears to confirm the identity of the court on Mr. Soper’s farm as that of a district Court of Quarter Sessions, and not the first Queen’s Bench. Here the matter sat until the 100th anniversary of Canadian Confederation in 1967, and the publication of The History of the Township of Hope, by Harold Reeve (Cobourg, Ontario: Cobourg Sentinel-Star, 1967). Reeve confirms the Hope Township’s court identity in his review of the minutes of the Quarter Sessions for Newcastle District as found in the Archives of Ontario [now located at York University in Toronto].

16 J. (John) T. Coleman, History of the Early Settlement of Bowmanville and Vicinity (Bowmanville, Ontario: West Durham Steam Printing and Publishing House, 1875).

17 Ely Playter’s diary is available on microfilm in the Public Archives of Ontario at York University in Toronto. An item dated April 13, 1803, in his fulsome penmanship, reads “I went to Town see a number of my friends walk’d out and joined a number of Men jumping and Playing Ball perceived a Mr. Joseph Randall to be the most active.” An excerpt is also found in Edith Firth, ed., The Town of York 1793-1815: A Collection of Documents of Early Toronto (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 1962), 248.

18 A cursory review of the Port Hope Weekly Guide uncovered five cricket matches featuring Bob Addy; there are probably more. The July 21, 1860, issue featured Port Hope and Lindsay. Port Hope won by 12 runs with Addy scoring 39 of Port Hope’s 187 runs. The July 25, 1860, Guide said of the game against Millbrook, “The batting of Mr. R. Addy of the Port Hope eleven was brilliant, his hits counting from two to four runs each.” The August 10, 1860, Guide described a game against a Peterborough eleven featuring Henry Strickland, the son of an English cricketer and nephew of two of Canada’s most noted nineteenth-century chroniclers, Catharine Parr Traill and Susanna Moodie. The August 11, 1860, Guide featured a match in which Port Hope’s first 11 played 22 other members of the club; Addy scored 52 of the first eleven’s 157 runs in a game they lost. The August 27, 1860, Guide described a game between the right- and left-handed members of the Port Hope club. The left-handed Addy did most of his team’s bowling, not surprising given the general preponderance of right-handers.

19 The Port Hope Town Directory of 1856-57 lists Mrs. Addy (Ellen), a widow for at least 10 years, and her oldest son, George, a clerk, living in a house on Harcourt Street near today’s main street, Walton, a heritage conservation district. The closest last names before and after them are Adams and Aikens. Robert and James were too young for listing. The Directory is available at the Port Hope history site at http://porthopehistory.com/1856directory/.

20 Michael Stephenson’s online Ontario Lakeshore Records Database listed an item for purchase entitled “Addy Robert, Boston baseball player, born Port Hope, Bio 1873.” The one-page sketch entitled “The Champion Right Fielder,” described its original publication in Doings of the Week the World Over and then its republication in the Port Hope Guide of November 15, 1873. It said Robert Addy was the brother of Mr. James Addy of this town.

21 The County of Durham Directory for 1869-70 (Toronto: Hunter, Rose and Co., 1869) listed James Addey [sic], occupation saddler, living in the Harcourt Street house in Port Hope. The misspelled “Addy” name was surrounded by last names of Adams and Aisthorp. James was a cricketer with the Port Hope Cricket Club and a baseball player with his town’s Silver Stars team. The latter often played against leading Ontario teams from Guelph and Kingston.

22Ida’s divorce suit against the “well-known base ball professional” said they were married August 12, 1870, and had a six-year-old child. She alleged he had kicked her in 1873, threatened her life with a razor blade in 1876, and had committed “several distinct adulteries.” The report in the Rockford (Illinois) Daily Register of March 12, 1880 said that if this was true, “Bob is a brute and villain and deserves to suffer something worse than separation from a bright, intelligent and long-suffering wife.” Two years later the same paper (April 26, 1882) reported, however, that the suit had been dismissed by Ida at her costs.

23 We know about Ida’s previous and subsequent life because of a fortuitous act of bravery by her second husband, Jerry Kinney, a conductor on the Oregon Short Line. Kinney’s train struck a rancher, Mr. H.W. Leaden-wall, who was hurled into a nearby river. Conductor Kinney rescued Leadenwall, and the railroad man was said to be eligible for a Carnegie Medal for bravery. In reporting the incident, even from a great distance, the Rockford Republic of October 21, 1908, said, “The wife of Mr. Kinney is a former Rockford girl. Miss Ida Seeley having left here as the wife of Bob Addy, the celebrated ball player….” Now that her new name was known, follow-up investigation through Ancestry.com, Genealogy Bank, and Newspapers.com was straightforward. Her marriage to Kinney and the birth of a son soon after appear to have brought a quick, “no-fault” resolution to divorce proceedings against Addy. Her family, future prosperity, and long life are well documented.

24 The Canadian Gentleman’s Journal and Sporting Times, November 23, 1877, stated, “The announcement recently made that Robert Addy, the Canadian ball player had been dismissed from the Cincinnati Club and that Foley was also to be thrown out, appears to be untrue.” As late as 2004 in a reprint of The Boston Braves 1871-1953, by Harold Kaese (Boston: Northeastern University Press, 2004), but originally published in 1948, it was said of Addy’s background on joining the Boston Red Stockings: “…Robert Addy, a Canadian, who had not played since 1872, but previously starred for the Forest Citys….” (page 11).

25 “The 10 man team departed Rockford May 17 [1870], accompanied by George Haskell as business manager (or traveling secretary); James Manny, Will Barbour, and CM. Utter, all helping out rather than merely along for the ride. Also with the team was a reporter for the Rockford Register who signed himself only as ‘N.’ The first games were easy and overwhelming victories over the Hamilton Maple Leafs (Ontario, Canada) [May 18, 1870], the Buffalo Niagaras, and the Syracuse Eckfords. In Hamilton the locals discovered Bob Addy was Canadian-born ‘and he was the object of special pride on the part of the Canucks, they claimed him from the start as one of them,’ which immediately made the star the target of jibes from his teammates: ‘I don’t care nothing for ’em,’ he exclaimed, ‘I tell you I don’t care nothing about ’em.'” From Nuggets of History, Volume 47, Number 3, September 2009: “The Eastern Tour of the 1870 Season for the Forest City Baseball Club” by John Molyneaux. The account originally appeared in the Rockford Register May 23, 1870. Perhaps Rockford’s 65-3 victory over the Hamilton Maple Leafs was an additional factor in Addy’s not wanting to be associated with a Canadian fandom.

26 The most definitive account of the Addy family’s Port Hope connections is found in the Surrogate Court Index of Ontario, Canada (1859-1900), Vol. 4 Northumberland and Durham Counties on microfilm at the Ontario Public Archives, based at York University in Toronto, in Cabinet 2 of the Archives Reading Room. Robert Addy and George Addy (and their known locations) are principal executors for their mother Ellen Addy (Probate number 2593, Probate date 1889, reel number 569) and their younger brother James Addy (Probate number 2185, Probate date 1886, reel number 566).

27 Several exercises were undertaken toward the end of the nineteenth century to uncover the current location of men (women were noticeably absent from such lists) who had once lived in Port Hope. The July 5, 1889, issue of the Port Hope Weekly Guide featured an article under the heading “Our Wandering Boys,” and subtitled The Export of Blood, Brains and Bones, A Partial List of Our Young Men Who have Gone to Better their Condition in Uncle Sam’s Domain. Robert Addy was said to be in New York, but this was incorrect; by then he had settled in the American West. A second list of “Old Boys” claimed to name those who returned for a 1901 reunion. It was compiled by Joseph Hooper, and indicated where the “Old Boys” were apparently living at that time. It included the brothers George Addy from Philadelphia, and Robert Addy from Salt Lake City in the Utah Territory. By then, however, Robert was living in Pocatello, Idaho, and almost certainly he and George did not attend the reunion. Source for the latter: http://porthopehistory.com/1901reunion/.

28 Multiple sources listed Bob Addy’s death on April 10, 1910, including the Rockford Daily Register-Gazette (April 11, 1910). Bob Addy’s last home at 507 N. Garfield in Pocatello, Idaho, is today described as a two-story home combining Colonial Revival massing, low-pitched roof and eave overhangs reminiscent of the Prairie Style, and Victorian/Queen Anne features in its rounded bay, porch encircling two sides of the first story and fenestration. Recognized as the Addy House in a walking tour guide, it is included in the Pocatello Westside Residential Historic District, as listed by the US Department of the Interior National Park Service’s National Register of Historic Places. Ironically, Bob’s old house in Port Hope straddles that town’s heritage district.

29 Frank Lander, “Bob Addy Was Talkative on Forest Citys,” Rockford Morning Star, April 18, 1930.

30 Twenty-four-year-old Sara E. Addy of Illinois married 58-year-old George Reading of Port Hope on July 17, 1888, in Port Hope, as listed in the Schedule B of Marriages for the County of Durham, Division of Port Hope.

31Frederick Cook, Through the First Antarctic Night, 1898-1899 (New York: Doubleday, Page & Company, 1909), in which Arctowski and Roald Amundsen, the famed Norwegian explorer, provided a breakdown of their crewmates’ votes for the most beautiful women. Henryk and Jane would later become close friends of Robert Scott and his wife, the sculptor Kathleen Bruce (Cincinnati Post, February 15, 1913). Scott was the ill-fated English adventurer who died on his return journey, having reached the South Pole shortly after Amundsen’s historic first. Jane Arctowska (the feminine spelling in Polish) treasured the gift of a silk scarf presented to her by Scott (p. 295-296).

32 One of which was Antoni Choloniewski’s The Spirit of Polish History, translated by Jane (Addy) Arctowska, The Polish Book Importing Co., Inc., 1918.

33 Correspondence between the US Department of State and the American Security and Trust Company dated April 6, 1960, discussed arrangements for sending the cremated remains of Jane Arctowska and her husband, Professor Henryk Arctowski, to Poland for a ceremony and burial. National Archives at College Park; College Park, Maryland, U.S.A.; NAI Number: 302021; Record Group Title: General Records of the Department of State; Record Group Number: Record Group 59; Series Number: Publication A1 205; Box Number: 386; Box Description: 1960-1963 Poland A-Z. Available on Ancestry.com.

Canada’s First Professional Baseball League

admin — Sun, 24 Jul 2022 13:51:31 +0000

The 1876 London Tecumsehs. Early curve bailer Fred Goldsmith is seated front row, second from left. (Canadian Illustrated News, July 15, 1876)

1876: A seminal year in baseball. Club owners and organizers recognized the necessity of providing increased stability and an opportunity to elevate the game of baseball on a national level by establishing a new professional baseball league. While meetings held early in the year in Louisville and New York laid the ground for the inception of the National League of Professional Baseball Clubs, similar meetings were held north of the border, in Toronto and Guelph, Ontario. These latter meetings resulted in the formation of the Canadian Association, the first professional league organized in Canada.

Organized baseball in Canada began in the 1850s, with the formation of teams in Hamilton (1854) and London (1855).1 The first game on record played under Canadian rules took place on September 15, 1856, between the London and Delaware clubs from London, Ontario. Two innings were played before the London club was declared the winner by a score of 34-33.2 Three years later, the first known game played under the New York rules3 took place on May 24, 1859, between the Hamilton Young Americans and Toronto Young Canadians. Toronto bested Hamilton by a score of 68-41.

Baseball expanded throughout southwestern Ontario in the 1860s, as nines were organized in Burlington, West Flamboro, Ingersoll, Dundas, and Guelph. These clubs remained amateur and independent, as team managers and secretaries coordinated games by telegraph and by post, and teams traveled by train for spirited contests and entertaining postgame events. As competitiveness increased and with it a desire for baseball supremacy, it was the Young Canadian Club of Woodstock, Ontario, formed in 1860, which staked a claim as the best club in Canada during these early years.4

As baseball’s popularity continued to grow, more teams emerged, and meetings were held in August 1864 in an attempt to establish an organized association of clubs from across Ontario.5 Though this did not come to fruition, it continued instead to be more customary for a Canadian champion to be crowned, earning the coveted Silver Ball trophy, after a short series of matches between the top contenders. Woodstock’s reign as champion lasted until 1869, when the Guelph Maple Leafs defeated the London Tecumsehs 43-20 in the championship match on September 24. In so doing, Guelph succeeded Woodstock as the new baseball dynasty in Ontario, as they kept possession of the Silver Ball as Canadian champions through 1875.

Baseball continued to expand in Ontario in the 1870s, resulting in larger crowds and increased coverage in the press. Teams from London, Guelph, Kingston, and Toronto scheduled more games in 1875, and team owners sensed the timing was right to proceed with another attempt at forming an organized association. On April 7, 1876, “a convention of Base Ball players was held at the Walker House, Toronto, for the purpose of forming an Association of the players of this game throughout the Dominion. There was a fair attendance, every leading club in Ontario being represented, with one noteworthy exception – the St. Lawrence, of Kingston.”6 Delegates from Guelph, London, Toronto, Dundas, and Dunnville were present, and the convention proved a success, as an “Association was formed as the Canadian Association of Base Ball players, and it was resolved that the entrance fee from each club contesting for the championship should be $10. The following officers were elected: – President, Geo. Sleeman, Guelph; Vice-President, Spaulding, Dunnville; Secretary, H. Gorman, London; Treasurer, W.F. Mountain, Toronto.”7

As clubs deliberated whether or not to join the Association, many teams continued to organize practice or exhibition games throughout the month of May. Team managers signed players and assembled their rosters, searching for key acquisitions that would ensure their club’s success. Several of these players had had prior major-league experience in the National Association, the precursor to the National League, while others attracted attention from major-league clubs during the season and in the years to follow.

The most notable player of the Canadian Association was undoubtedly the star pitcher for London, Fred Goldsmith. Before he joined the Tecumsehs, Goldsmith “played semipro and amateur ball in and around New Haven for several years, making a name for himself with his curveball. By 1875 he had drawn the attention of top-level professional teams, including the New Haven Elm Cities of the National Association.”8 The 19-year-old played one game at second base for New Haven on October 23, and achieved two hits and drove in a run in his debut. The Tecumsehs enticed Goldsmith north with an offer of $300 for 1876, and he proved himself worth every penny, as he led the team in batting and pitched every game for London, throwing at least nine shutouts in the process (in league and nonleague games). He remained with the club through 1878, then in 1879 played with Springfield of the National Association. Again, the major leagues sought him out, and he joined the National League Troy Trojans late in 1879, this time primarily as a pitcher. His brief sojourn with the Trojans drew the attention of Al Spalding and Cap Anson, secretary and manager respectively of the National League Chicago White Stockings, and they rushed to sign Goldsmith for the 1880 campaign. He starred with the White Stockings, winning 20 games each of the next four seasons. After a short stint with the Baltimore Orioles late in 1884, Goldsmith returned to London for the 1885 Canadian Association season, his last stint as a professional.

The Tecumsehs featured several other celebrated players, among them Goldsmith’s batterymate in London from 1876-78, Phil “Grandmother” Powers. Originally from New York, Powers debuted in the major leagues late in 1878 with the Chicago White Stockings. He played with four other major-league clubs from 1880 to 1885, chiefly with the Cincinnati Red Stockings. London also possessed an all-star infield, most notably shortstop Joe Hornung from Carthage, New York, who spent 12 seasons in the major leagues from 1879 to 1890 with four clubs, primarily with the Boston Beaneaters.

The major-league career of third baseman Mike Led-with, from Brooklyn, was significantly shorter, as he had played a single game with the Brooklyn Atlantics in 1874. First baseman George “Jumbo” Latham, from Utica, New York, had played in the National Association in 1875 with Boston and New Haven before he joined the Tecumsehs in 1876. Latham played with the National League’s Louisville Grays in 1877, then returned to play in the majors from 1882 to 1884 with the American Association’s Philadelphia Athletics and Louisville Eclipse. Two of London’s outfielders also played in the major leagues. William Hunter, from St. Thomas, Ontario, played with Guelph, St. Thomas, and Saginaw, primarily as a catcher, before briefly joining Jumbo Latham for two games with the Louisville Eclipse in 1884. And Jack Leary, from New Haven, Connecticut, the consummate utility player, played at every position except catcher with seven different major-league teams between 1880 and 1884.

The Guelph Maple Leafs, in a bid to rival the Tecumsehs, coaxed several prominent players to join their roster, including third baseman Michael Brannock, from Massachusetts, and shortstop George Keerl, from Baltimore, each of whom had played briefly with the Chicago White Stockings in 1875. Infielder Harrison Spence, from New York, never played in the major leagues, but managed the Indianapolis Hoosiers to a seventh-place finish in the National League in 1888. Perhaps the most notable player to join the Leafs, however briefly, was Pete Hotaling, from Mohawk, New York. After several previous efforts had been made to sign Hotaling, the outfielder finally left the Ilion club in midseason and debuted in right field for Guelph on August 9, only to return to Ilion a few days later. Hotaling saw regular playing time as a major-league outfielder for six teams in the National League and American Association between 1879 and 1888, concluding his major-league career with a respectable .267 batting average.

The only other Canadian Association player to play in the major leagues was Dundas native Charles “Chub” Collins, who played a handful of games at second base for Hamilton in 1876 as an 18-year-old, then several years later played for the National League’s Buffalo Bisons and Detroit Wolverines, and the American Association’s Indianapolis Hoosiers, in 1884 and 1885.

With the players then in place, the first “Base Ball Match for the championship, between the Maple Leafs of Guelph and the Tecumsehs of London”9 was touted as one of the most important events of “the fifty-seventh anniversary of the birth of Her Most Gracious Majesty Queen Victoria”10 on May 24, 1876. Admission to the Exhibition Grounds in London was set at 25 cents a couple for seats nearest the entrance gates, and “for the balance of the seats ten cents will be the rate.”11 Ladies and club members were admitted free, and the Great Western Railway made special arrangements for visitors from Guelph, offering round-trip tickets for $2.12

After an estimated 6,000 spectators, nearly half of whom were ladies, “had been treated to the usual opening ceremonies of the ball game – such as throwing, striking and catching – the appearance of the Maple Leaf nine at the entrance gate of the grounds was greeted with cheers and welcomes from thousands of tongues.”13 The toss was won by the Maple Leafs, and the Tecumsehs went to bat first, with Mr. William McPherson, second baseman for the Toronto club, acting as umpire.

London took an early lead with four runs in the second inning, courtesy of timely hitting by the Tecumsehs and errors by Guelph players Hewer, Maddock, and Myers. London expanded its lead in the fifth inning, scoring three more to run the score to 7-2 in its favor. But Guelph would inch back with two in the bottom of the inning, then one each in the seventh and eighth innings to close the gap to 7-6. In the bottom of the ninth, Guelph pitcher William Smith “made a clean hit for two bases and got third on Dinnen’s misplay.”14

A wild pitch by London pitcher Fred Goldsmith brought in Smith for the tying run and forced the game into the 10th inning. In the top of that inning, London shortstop Dutch Hornung “planted a safe [hit] to right centre, reached second and third on passed balls and remained there unable to touch the goal,”15 while Thomas Gillean and Thomas Brown were retired, the latter by a timely strikeout, the only one of the game by Smith. But with two outs, catcher Phil Powers drove a ball to center field that Lapham could not reach, plating Hornung for an 8-7 lead.

In the bottom of the 10th, Guelph was put out by two groundouts and a foul tip by Emery “into Powers’ unerring hands and the victory was won.”16 “Thus ended one of the best contested and most exciting games of base ball ever played in Canada.”17

In the evening “the players of both teams, with the officers of the Tecumsehs, enjoyed a pleasant social time at the Tecumseh House.”18 The organizers of the league could not have imagined a more thrilling beginning to their venture, one they hoped would kindle fervent enthusiasm for baseball among the citizens of the urban centers of southwestern Ontario.

With the Canadian Association season now officially underway, four clubs had by this point submitted the requisite entrance fee: The Maple Leaf Club of Guelph, Tecumsehs of London, Standards of Hamilton, and the St. Lawrence Club of Kingston. The final club to join, the Clippers Club of Toronto, entered into the competition for the Canadian championship in late May, despite not having a ground on which to practice, nor even a “representative nine.”19

Eventually these were both secured, and it was these five clubs that comprised the Canadian Association for 1876. Over the succeeding four months, they sought to ascertain whether Guelph could retain its Canadian championship or a new Canadian champion would be crowned.

The next league game, played on June 10, was a decidedly one-sided affair, with the London Tecumsehs defeating the Hamilton Standards in their first league game by a lopsided score of 27-1. The Toronto Clippers, often also nicknamed the Torontos, launched their season opener on June 17 against Hamilton. Though their belated entry into the league caused many to speculate that the Clippers would provide little competition, they nevertheless upset the Standards by a score of 5-3 for their first win.

Holiday celebrations in the nineteenth century often showcased a game of “base ball” as the centerpiece for the day’s events. Dominion Day festivities in Kingston on July 1 were highlighted by the debut of the St. Lawrence club, in a league match with the Hamilton Standards. The St. Lawrence club, “the majority of whom display an unusual amount of flesh and muscle,”20 were at a severe disadvantage with “the recent desertion of a couple of men occupying important posts.”21 And, “as ill luck would have it, the catcher did not arrive and the pitcher, Curtain, did not arrive in consequence of illness.”22

Hamilton, for its part, was more than a little apprehensive, admitting that “they represent amateur talent only.”23 Throughout the game their “weakness [was] apparent, especially in the batting and fielding,”24 and it was perhaps merciful that rain curtailed the game after five innings. Those in attendance who braved the elements were rewarded with an 8-3 victory by the home team. Supporters were hopeful the win would give “hope of Kingston cutting a good figure in impending matches,”25 but as the season progressed, this proved overly optimistic.

The long-awaited return match between London and Guelph took place in Guelph on July 20, with another sizable crowd of 5,000 in attendance. They were treated to another evenly-matched battle, but five runs in the fifth inning by the Tecumsehs and solid pitching by Fred Goldsmith secured another victory for London, 10-7. As it became evident that London and Guelph were the top contenders for the championship, the rivalry between them heightened, and this was both chronicled in and fueled by the press. It was, for instance, reported that the London citizens were more than enamored by the supremacy shown by their club: “It is rumored they intend having the statues of their nine cast in bronze and placed to ornament some of the principal public buildings, such as the Court House, the Lunatic Asylum, etc.”26

The third contest between the Tecumsehs and Leafs took place on the Civic Holiday, August 9, and was highlighted by another dominant performance by Goldsmith. He allowed only four singles as the Tecumsehs applied “what an on-looker called ‘an everlasting coat of whitewash’ to the Maple Leafs – something never before done,”27 to a final score of 5-0. The Leafs did not recognize the loss, as Guelph President George Sleeman “handed to the Judiciary Committee of the Canadian Base Ball Association a protest against the game … on the ground of erroneous and partial decisions by the umpire.”28

Committee chairman Edwin M. Moore of London was “chosen at the request of the Guelph men [to provide a ruling], who knew him well, and they certainly should be the last to growl at any of his decisions,”29 at least according to the London Advertiser. The Guelph Mercury unsurprisingly and unequivocally opposed this assertion, warning “all clubs against allowing him to act in such a position.”30 The committee, in what would prove to be a crucial ruling come season’s end, sided in Sleeman’s favor, and the game was eventually “struck out of the championship record for violation of rules.”31

In between league contests, Canadian Association clubs engaged in exhibition games, typically with other Ontario teams such as the London Atlantics, Guelph Silver Creeks, Woodstock Excelsiors, Cobourg Blue Stockings, and Stratford Maple Leafs. They also accepted challenges from American clubs, including several from New York (Ilion, Utica, Ogdensburg, Ithaca, etc.) as well as with nines from Detroit, Jackson, Indianapolis, and Fort Wayne, Indiana.

The most notable exhibition games of the season occurred during the Canadian tour in late August by the National League’s St. Louis Browns. The Browns, second in the League race at the time with a record of 35-17,32 were nevertheless defeated by both London and Guelph in two thrilling contests on August 28 and 29 (10-9 in 10 innings, and 9-8 respectively). The following day, the National League-leading Chicago White Stockings, with a record of 42-12,33 ventured to London as part of their tour to battle the Tecumsehs. “An immense number of persons were on the ground, probably over 3,000,”34 and though London fandom was proud of its club’s recent successes, there was not much hope held for victory: “The current opinion yesterday was that Chicago would win the game of base ball with the Tecumsehs by a score of about 12 to 3.”35

The White Stockings lineup featured legends Ross Barnes, Cap Anson, Cal McVey, Deacon White and pitcher-manager Al Spalding, and though Goldsmith held them scoreless for the first two innings, Chicago eventually collected 16 hits and almost “Chicagoed” the Tecumsehs, a single run in the bottom of the ninth making the final score 10-1.

By September, three Canadian Association clubs were decidedly out of contention for the championship. Kingston’s league matches were all played at home, in eastern Ontario, evidence that the team presumably lacked the means to support extended travel to southwestern Ontario. This placed the burden on other clubs to travel a significant distance for any engagement, and the St. Lawrence club accordingly secured only a handful of matches.

Guelph was able to head east in late September to complete its matches against Kingston, and in two days the Maple Leafs easily took four games from Kingston, outscoring them 52-12 overall. Despite its promising debut on Dominion Day, Kingston finished the season 1-6. The Hamilton Standards and Toronto Clippers both concluded their dismal seasons with humiliating whitewashings (Hamilton lost to Toronto 15-0 on September 9, and Guelph defeated Toronto 33-0 on September 16), and joined Kingston at the bottom of the standings. (Hamilton finished 2-7; Toronto finished 2-9.)

It remained for Guelph and London to contend for the Canadian championship. The Guelph Maple Leafs concluded their season with a splendid 14-4 record, but as the four losses all came at the hands of the London Tecumsehs, it was apparent to most knowledgeable observers which team had secured the Canadian championship. However, the decision regarding the game from August 9 meant that the “official count stood in favor of the Tecumsehs by 3 games won and 0 lost,”36 which was in violation of Article XIII, Section 3 of the Championship Code, which stated that “the series for the championship shall be four games, and each club shall play four games with every other contesting club.”37

As a result, “the Judiciary Committee of the Canadian Association met in Hamilton on October 22 and heard protests from the Maple Leaf Club against awarding the Championship to the Tecumsehs.”38 “Considerable discussion took place as to whether the protest should be sustained or not,”39 and the majority of the Committee held that the remaining game was “not necessary to make their record valid.”40 The Committee therefore “declared the Tecumseh Base Ball Club, of London, champions of Canada for 1876, which entitles them to fly the championship pennant during 1877.”41

Also bestowed upon the Tecumsehs was “the Silver Ball offered by Mr. Wm. Bryce,”42 awarded to “the club winning the greatest number of games in Canada during the season of 1876.”43 This offer was intended to “encourage the game of Base Ball among Canadian clubs,”44 and was even sanctioned by the Canadian government when it was “entered according to act of Parliament … in the office of the Minister of Agriculture at Ottawa.”45

Who was this “Mr. Wm. Bryce”? William Bryce was born in Glasgow, Scotland, in 1846, to William Bryce, gardener, and Catherine Berry Speirs. The family emigrated to Canada in 1854, first to Toronto, then to London, where William Jr. set up a bookstore on Richmond Street in the early 1870s. He expanded the business to include the sale of stationery, “music, music books, fancy books, wrapping papers, twines, small wares, and all kinds of games.”46 His interest in games and sports further intertwined with his business interests when he became a shareholder in the Tecumsehs.47

Then in April 1876, he published the Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1876, the “only book published that [contained] the Constitution, By-Laws and Rules of the Canadian Association of Base Ball Players.”48 For the price of 10 cents, readers could also consult a history of baseball in Canada, as well as statistics and club records from 1875 for Guelph and London. The guide served not only to publicize the Canadian Association, but also to promote Bryce’s business, as full-page ads were also featured for Bryce’s Ontario Game Emporium on Richmond Street, an outlet in which one could purchase fishing tackle, boxing gloves, and, predictably, baseball equipment, including balls, bats, and uniforms.

What inspired Bryce’s enthusiasm for baseball is not evident, but of interest is that in 1871 he lived next door to Margaret Morrison,49 whose 12-year-old son, Jonathan, later played for the Guelph Maple Leafs and Toronto Canucks, and also served two stints in the American Association in 1884 and 1887. Whether Bryce and Morrison had a more tangible baseball connection is not known, and though this is perhaps mere coincidence, it is at minimum a reflection of the widespread popularity of baseball in urban centers in southwestern Ontario during the 1870s.

Bryce continued to advocate for baseball in Canada with the publication of the Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1877. It followed a similar format to the previous edition, but printed instead the constitution and playing rules of the International Association for 1877. The guide also contained partial team statistics for Guelph, London, and Toronto from the year before, and A.G. Spalding granted permission to publish the National League team rosters for 1877.

Bryce’s association with baseball appears to have ceased after the publication of this second volume. He moved his business to Toronto in 1886, but “was burned out in the great Toronto fire [of 1904], and [from then on] carried on business at King and Spadina.”50 He died in 1921, eulogized as “one of the oldest wholesale booksellers and stationers in Canada,”51 having published a variety of magazines, games, maps, and books.

As mentioned, the primary focus of Bryce’s 1877 guide was on the coming inaugural season of the International Association. It made no reference to a sophomore campaign for the Canadian Association, as by the time the guide was published, it was evident that no such campaign would take place. On the heels of their success in 1876, the Tecumsehs were keen on seeking out other top opponents, and “an unexpected opportunity arose in late 1876 when [London manager] Harry Gorman learned some American clubs were considering a new organization of professional clubs to rival the National League.”52

Gorman attended the International Base Ball Convention in Pittsburgh in February 1877 on behalf of the Tecumsehs, and “presented credentials from the Maple Leafs … and was admitted to the Convention as [their] representative”53 as well. “An organization was effected under the title of the International Association of Base Ball Players,”54 with Gorman elected as vice president, and George Sleeman, Guelph manager, elected to the Judiciary Committee.55

At first, this development did not hinder plans to continue the Canadian Association for a second season. A “second annual convention of the Canadian Association of Base-ball players”56 was held in Toronto on April 5, 1877, with representatives “from the Maple Leaf (professional), the Maple Leaf (amateur), and the Silver Creek, all of Guelph; the Athletic, of London; the Iroquois, of Markham; the Athletics, of Elora; and the Torontos, of Toronto; various other clubs in the Association being represented by proxy.”57

It was not a fait accompli that London and Guelph’s admittance to the International Association would naturally preclude their participation in the Canadian Association, though “it was a noticeable fact that the Tecumseh Club, of London, did not think it worth while to send a representative.”58 This observation did cause some speculation and doubt as to the future of the Canadian Association: “Were the Tecumseh Managers of the opinion that by absenting themselves they would break up the association and thus hold the championship pennant for the season of 1877 without earning it? If such was the case, they were mistaken, as the Association is now on a sounder basis than ever.”59

This optimism was shared by the Guelph Maple Leafs and their owner, George Sleeman, as he was reelected president of the league for the coming season. However, by May 23, five clubs had entered the amateur championship of Canada, but “the only entry for the Professional championship of Canada [was] the Maple Leaf, of Guelph.”60 By then, both the Tecumsehs and the Leafs had commenced play in the International Association (headlined by an exciting 2-1 victory by London over Guelph on May 17 to launch the latter’s season), and all hopes for the return of the Canadian Association for 1877 were extinguished.

The Canadian Association and National League, fraternal twins of a sort, each encountered their own respective struggles in their early years. Six of the eight charter members of the National League had folded or been expelled in the first four years of its existence, but the League persisted through its well-documented challenges and controversies, and has cultivated a legacy rich in history and lore. The Canadian Association embraced the game with comparable zeal and commitment, and though it did not survive infancy, its presence and impact on the sport at such a formative time helped solidify Canada’s role and legacy in the evolution of baseball in the nineteenth century.

Sources

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

Newspapers, including British Whig, Guelph Herald, Guelph Mercury, Hamilton Spectator, Hamilton Times, London Advertiser, London Free Press, New York Clipper, Pittsburgh Daily Post, The Globe (Toronto), Toronto Star, and Woodstock Weekly Sentinel.

Genealogical and player data was obtained from a variety of sources, including Ancestry.com, Baseball-Reference. com, census records, city directories, vital records, minorleague player files of Reed Howard, Retrosheet.org, and the author’s own player database and genealogical files.

Various ledgers and correspondence from the Sleeman Family Collection, Archives and Special Collections, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph.

Notes

1 William Humber, “It’s Our Game, Too, Neighbor,” in Jane Finnan Dorward, ed., Dominion Ball (Cleveland: Society for American Baseball Research, 2005), 7.

2 “Base Ball in Canada,” New York Clipper, September 27, 1856:183.

3 “Young Canadian vs. Young America,” New York Clipper, June 11, 1859: 59.

4 William J. Ryczek, Baseball’s First Inning: A History of the National Pastime Through the Civil War (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2014), 205.

5 “Base Ball,” Guelph Mercury, August 26, 1864: 3.

6 “The Base Ball Convention,” Guelph Mercury, April 8, 1876:1.

7 “The Base Ball Convention.”

8 David Fleitz, “Fred Goldsmith,” SABR BioProject, https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/fred-goldsmith/.

9 “The Queen’s Birthday,” Guelph Mercury, May 23, 1876: 1.

10 “The Queen’s Birthday.”

11 “The Ball Field,” London Advertiser, May 23, 1876: 1.

12 “The Ball Field.”

13 “The Game in London or ‘How’s That?’,” Guelph Mercury, May 25, 1876: 1.

14 “The Ball Field,” London Advertiser, May 25, 1876: 1.

15 “The Ball Field.”

16 “The Ball Field.”

17 “The Ball Field.”

18 “The Ball Field.”

19 ” Base Ball,” Guelph Mercury, May 29, 1876: 1.

20 “Dominion Day,” British Whig, July 3, 1876: 2.

21 “Dominion Day.”

22 “Dominion Day.”

23 “Dominion Day.”

24 “Dominion Day.”

25 “Dominion Day.”

26 “Base Ball Field,” Guelph Mercury, from the Hamilton Spectator, August 11, 1876: 1.

27 “The Championship Base Ball Match,” London Advertiser, August 10, 1876: 1.

28 “Base Ball Field,” Guelph Mercury, August 12, 1876: 1.

29 “The Championship Base Ball Match,” London Advertiser, August 10, 1876: 1.

30 “The Base Ball Match,” Guelph Mercury, August 10, 1876:1.

31 Bryce’s Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1877 (London: Wm. Bryce, Publisher, 1877), 65.

32 Retrosheet.org.

33 Retrosheet.org.

34 “Yesterday’s Game,” London Advertiser, August 31, 1876:1.

35 “Yesterday’s Game.”

36 Bryce’s Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1877 (London: Wm. Bryce, Publisher, 1877), 65.

37 Bryce’s Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1877 (London: Wm. Bryce, Publisher, 1877), 35.

38 Bryce’s Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1877 (London: Wm. Bryce, Publisher, 1877), 65.

39 “Tecumsehs, of London, the Champions,” Guelph Mercury, October 28, 1876: 1.

40 “Tecumsehs, of London, the Champions.”

41 “Tecumsehs, of London, the Champions.”

42 Bryce’s Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1877 (London: Wm. Bryce, Publisher, 1877), 65.

43 Bryce’s Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1876 (London: Wm. Bryce, Publisher, 1876), 2.

44 Bryce’s Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1876 (London: Wm. Bryce, Publisher, 1876), 2.

45 Bryce’s Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1876 (London: Wm. Bryce, Publisher, 1876), 2.

46 City of London Directory for 1876-77 (London: W.H. Irwin & Co., 1876-77), 115.

47 Brian Martin, The Tecumsehs of the International Association (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2015), 64.

48 Bryce’s Canadian Base Ball Guide for 1876 (London: Wm. Bryce, Publisher, 1876): 1.

49 Library and Archives Canada. Census of Canada, 1871. Ottawa, Ontario: Library and Archives Canada, n.d. RG31-C-1. Statistics Canada Fonds.

50 “William Bryce Dead/Was Long a Merchant,” Toronto Sfar, October 3, 1921: 19.

51 “William Bryce Dead/Was Long a Merchant.”

52 Martin, The Tecumsehs of the International Association, 86.

53 Correspondence from Harry Gorman to George Slee-man, February 26, 1877, Sleeman Family Collection, Archives and Special Collections, McLaughlin Library, University of Guelph.

54 Correspondence from Harry Gorman to George Slee-man, February 26, 1877.

55“The Council of Ballists,” Pittsburgh Daily Post, February 22, 1877: 4.

56 “Convention of the Canadian Association,” Guelph Mercury, April 6, 1877: 1.

57 “Convention of the Canadian Association.”

58 “Convention of the Canadian Association.”

59 “Convention of the Canadian Association.”

60 “Base Ball Notes,” Guelph Mercury, May 23, 1877: 1.

A Canadian National Treasure: Tecumseh/Labatt Memorial Park

admin — Sat, 23 Jul 2022 13:48:03 +0000

Tecumseh Park hosts an International Association match between Guelph and London, 1877. (C.J. Dryer, Canadian Illustrated News. Photo courtesy of Library and Archives Canada)

There resides in London, Ontario, across Queen’s Avenue from the old early nineteenth century courthouse located above the confluence of the north and south branches of the Thames River (locally referred to as “The Forks”), one of baseball history’s grandest historical legacies, the fabled Labatt Memorial Park, the oldest continuously operated baseball grounds found anywhere in the world. There it rests in all its contemporary luster, a luxuriant jewel in the Forest City’s urban landscape.

We initially became interested in the historical lineage of Labatt Park in the face of an American challenge to the Park’s embrace of the distinction “oldest and continuously operated.” Hence, we resolved to carry out a mission to pursue a detailed history of Labatt Park’s origin, and to examine the credibility of its unique longevity status. With regard to the latter, we carry out that exercise in the accompanying appended commentary.

Beyond that secondary quest, however, we chiefly endeavor to leave to posterity a documented account of the Park’s place in the cultural lineage of the city of London, the province of Ontario, the national state of Canada, and, perhaps above all, its place in the greater history of North America’s long-standing preeminent team sport: baseball. Let us begin.

The record of baseball play in London predates the opening of Tecumseh Park/Labatt Park by two decades. In the City of London Directory for 1856, we note the establishment of a London Base Ball Club. One game of baseball appears to have been played in that year, a two-inning affair in which London edged a team from the nearby diminutive hamlet of Delaware by a score of 34-33.1

Over the following two decades, 1856-1876, baseball play in London expanded rapidly, creating competition with the sport of cricket for players, fan followers, and, even more critically, for suitable practice and playing space. In general, cricket experienced a steady decline in the face of an ever-rising passion of public interest for baseball. By 1900 the sport of cricket hardly existed in London’s sporting landscape.2 Embedded in such passion for baseball rose the London Tecumsehs and the need for an exclusive playing venue. Hence, Tecumseh Park.

To recount Tecumseh Park’s genesis authenticity, we turn to the pages of the London Daily Advertiser of the spring months March, April, and May of 1877. With knowledge that London’s premier professional baseball aggregation, the Tecumsehs, had been accepted as a charter member of the new International Association, a genuine “major league” competitor to the equally new (1876) National Association of Professional Base Ball Clubs (today, Major League Baseball’s National League) for urban franchises and baseball’s best players, the London Daily Advertiser of March 31 sought to educate its readers on the forthcoming 1877 season’s prospectus by offering for sale at 10 cents per copy the Canadian Baseball Guide, containing the “Constitution and Championship Code of the International Association,” the “Playing Rules of the League,” and “other valuable information connected with the Game.”3 There is little doubt that the prospect of the Tecumsehs playing in the new International Association sparked great interest among London’s sporting public.

Two weeks and two days later, on April 16, in a column headed “The Ball Field,” the Advertiser provided its readers with the “inside scoop” on reasons why a new baseball park was needed. Such a need was associated with limited Tecumseh practice and playing time on London’s only viable fieldsports venue, today’s greater Victoria Park area, which in 1877 served chiefly as the expansive parade grounds and drill field for the Crowns military garrison. Consequently, a new playing venue had to be secured, one with total Tecumseh control over its availability. Stated the Advertiser.

The vexatious delays in getting possession of part of the Park property, and the threatening attitude of certain parties who appear determined to have the ball ground at their own disposal, so as to benefit by the custom which large crowds invariably draw to people in their line of business, compelled the abandonment of the idea of utilizing the waste lands of the city for a ballfield. The conditions imposed by the Park Committee, one of which limited the size of the field to such narrow dimensions that it would be too small for either baseball, cricket or lacrosse, added another reason why it would be folly for the club to go to the expense of enclosing and preparing the portion of the Artillery Block set apart for its use. After visiting London East, the northern suburbs of the city and the Petersville and Kensington Flats, the most convenient plot, taking everything into consideration, that could be secured, was a piece of meadow land adjoining the west end of Kensington Bridge, on the north side of the road, and an agreement has been effected by the owners of it for its lease or purchase. Work will be commenced on it at once, and the expectation is that it will be ready in ten days, or a fortnight at the furthest. It is nearer to the business centre of the city than the exhibition grounds, and when the Street Car Company extend their track to the brow of the Court House hill, which would be to their interest to do, it can be reached from all parts of the city readily and comfortably.⁴

With respect to the site choice made by the Tecumseh Base Ball Club (“a piece of meadow land adjoining the west end of Kensington Bridge, on the north side of the road”) we are offered a then contemporary view of that particular piece of land that captured the favor of Tecumseh officials. There it lay, in its bucolic circumstance at the forks of the Thames River, the future site of Tecumseh Park, occupying a parcel of land that appeared to be endowed with a field of barley or winter wheat ready for harvesting, all painted in oils by the artist Charles B. Chapman in the late summer of 1875, a scant two years prior to the park’s celebrative beginning.5

Returning our attention to a historic newspaper comment on the site selection of the park, published on Friday, April 20, the Advertiser was once again prompted to comment on developments at the new ballpark location:

The rain of the past two days has retarded the work of preparing the new grounds for the Tecumsehs, but an extra force is at work today endeavoring to make up for lost time. The contract for two thousand yards of sodding has been let to Mr. Murdoch. The fencing and stands for the accommodation of spectators will be rushed rapidly forward. There is a brisk competition for the lease of the refreshment stands on the grounds. Everything is expected to be in readiness by the first of May.⁶

As the new Tecumseh ball grounds, named appropriately Tecumseh Park, were being established, the professional Tecumsehs played a practice contest on the old Military Park grounds. The result, an 8-2 victory over the Atlantics, “an amateur team of this city,” was played out before “a large attendance of spectators.”7 Baseball-fever-related activities surrounding the new Tecumseh Park under development continued to appear in the Advertiser, particularly with regard to the games planned for the gala inauguration of the facility:

The Great Western Railway have ordered reduced rates at all stations on their main line and branches for the 5th and 7th of May, to give people an opportunity of witnessing the base ball games between the Hartfords and Tecumsehs. Proposals are invited for leases of the refreshment stands on the Tecumseh’s new grounds; also for the privilege of decorating the fences with advertising announcements.⁸

On the last day of April, as the series against the Hartfords drew ever nearer, the Advertiser updated its readers on the new park’s condition:

The Tecumsehs’ ball grounds are beginning to look as pretty as a picture. The diamond is beautifully sodded and the clay paths around the bases serve to bring out the rich green surrounding them with double effect. The grandstand is a fine commanding building, and comfortably suited. The reporters and scorers, and telegraph operators are also well provided for. A large tier of open seats is being erected in the southeast angle. Though the grounds will be ready for playing on next Saturday, when the Hartfords open the season with the Tecumsehs, they will not be in their best condition for some weeks to come. The progress made during the past two weeks is something wonderful.⁹

But first, a critical moment in Tecumseh Park history – its first documented competition – a practice game between the Tecumsehs and London’s amateur Atlantics on the afternoon of Thursday, May 3, 1877. The outcome, a 5-1 victory for the Tecumsehs, is inconsequential to our study here, but the Advertiser’s commentary on Tecumseh Park itself is enlightening. On the eve of the “official” opening of the season against the Hartfords, one gets a full picture of the now classic baseball venue:

The new grounds are nearly complete in every respect of any of the kind in Canada, and but few American cities have such a convenient playing field. The place has been levelled under the management of Mr. Kitchen, who has worked hard in getting things into shape. The diamond and several feet around the borders are nicely sodded, while the base lines have been formed of clay, and are as hard as a rock. Mr. Murdock deserves a great deal of credit for the way he has done the sodding. A pipe well has been sunk, and a full supply of cool water is thus always in the ground; the well will also be useful in watering the grounds. A grandstand capable of seating 600 persons has been erected in the northeast corner of the field. This is for the use of members of the club and the seats have already been reserved for the entire season. At the southeast corner is the general stand, open to the general public in payment of a fee. To the south of the grandstand, which by the way is covered, is a Directors’ Pavillion, erected at the expense of the President, Mr. J. L. [Jacob Lewis] Englehart, who with Mr. Plummer, has given a good deal of attention to overseeing the fitting up of the grounds and buildings.

Directly behind the catcher is a booth to be used for a dressing and store room by the players, and above this is a point of observation for scorers, telegraph operators and reporters. It is hoped that they will be left alone by outsiders, as [they are] persons who have work to do and don’t care to be bothered by people shouting, applauding or criticising the play.¹⁰

On the afternoon of Saturday, May 5, 1877, the Tecumsehs met and were defeated by the Hartfords by a score of 6-2. The Advertiser reported that “fully two thousand persons” attended.11 Two days later, on the afternoon of Monday, May 7, the second game of the two-game series unfolded, an 8-4 series sweep victory for the Hartfords. The Advertiser, while reporting a crowd of “probably fifteen hundred,” extolled the visitors as “a fine body of men, quiet and gentlemanly in their manner, and never once in their two games did they question a decision or make a remark to which any exception could be taken.”12

There followed in London a two-game Friday/Saturday series against the Stars of Syracuse (New York), both contests of which the Tecumsehs won by scores of 7-2 and 9-8.13 And then, scarcely two days later, on Tuesday afternoon, May 15, “at 3:00,” Tecumseh Park spectators, among them “a large number of Maple Leafs” from Guelph, witnessed a 2-0 Tecumseh defeat at the hands of the Pittsburgh Alleghenys in “the first game of base-ball in this city in the international series.”14 And thus closed the first and earliest chapter in the history of what we know today as Labatt Park.

FLOODS, CYCLING, AND BASEBALL FEVER
TECUMSEH/LABATT PARK, 1877-1937

From the pages of the London Advertiser of the latter part of the nineteenth century15 and the London Free Press for much of the twentieth century16 comes the primary record that supports beyond all argument the record that preserves the distinction “continuously operating” that the hallowed park has rightfully earned. A thorough examination of two floods in question prove beyond a shadow of doubt that in both cases, the “one and the same” Tecumseh Park (1883) and John Labatt Memorial Park (1937) were in timely fashion renovated following the destructive inundations that in both cases interrupted scheduled activities. This study puts to rest the argument that the storied baseball park changed physical location.17 Such findings provide further evidence undergirding the bona-fide heritage distinction the park enjoys.

For the first five years of its existence (1877-1882), Tecumseh Park was the hub of London’s sporting activity. During that five-year period, not only was it the most active and prestigious venue for baseball, it also hosted the central activities of two other prominent sporting pursuits and their supporting constituencies, the “bicycle and lacrosse crowds.” London, like much of North America in the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries, embraced the period’s cycling craze. The cycling pastime experienced phenomenal growth in the city and its surrounding areas during much of the 1880s and 1890s; in fact, few recreational sporting activities rivaled cycling in terms of numbers of participants, individual club organization, and investment in facilities.18

London’s Forest City Bicycle Club headquarters, located in a large three-floor warehouse on Dundas Street, formerly a wholesale dry-goods establishment, was the envy of most of the city’s sporting aggregations. Referred to as “elegant and spacious,”19 the top floor was fitted out as a club room, the lower two floors for riding activities.20 Part of the club’s activities focused on track racing, much of which was presented in Tecumseh Park before enthusiastic crowds.

Lacrosse, riding the pinnacle of its success in mustering Canadian sporting attention over that of other “national sport claimants” in the 1860s and 1870s, also focused squarely on Tecumseh Park for its main competitive attractions.21 Members of the London Lacrosse Club, meeting on April 10, 1883, reported the Advertiser, “crowded into meeting rooms, showing that the national game has taken a strong hold on the lovers of sport in this city.”22 Club secretary Wylkie reported that the Management Committee had “… secured the entire [exaggerated] control of Tecumseh Park for the coming season. …”23

At a subsequent meeting, some two weeks later, the London Lacrosse Club announced an effort to “put Tecumseh Park in order, and have the stands moved and grounds scraped, so as to commence practice as soon as possible.”24 On May 3 the Advertiser reported that “the newly organized lacrosse club yesterday received a consignment of three dozen sticks from Brantford, where they are manufactured by the Indians. The sticks are pronounced in every respect first class. The first practice of the club will take place tomorrow morning on Tecumseh Park, and again on Saturday.”25 And on May 12: “The costume selected by the club consists of navy blue knickerbocker, blue and white striped shirt, blue stockings and polo dips. …”26

Learning of plans for a spectacular opening of the Lacrosse Club’s 1883 competitive season, the May 14 issue of the Advertiser reported the following: “Between thirty and forty members assembled for practice Saturday afternoon on Tecumseh Park. After practice, the President, J.B. Vining called the members together for the purpose of electing a captain, which resulted in the choice of Mr. P.J. Edmonds, who is in every way qualified for the position, and a zealous lacrosse player.”27 The “Grand Opening” occurred on May 24 against the Brants of Brantford, an affair that drew a reported crowd of about 2,500 to “the Tecumseh grounds.”28

Meanwhile, as Tecumseh Park played host to bicycle and lacrosse activity, it also accommodated the activities of London’s foremost baseball nines. The city’s 1882 champions, the Mutuals, determined to “retain the laurels won last year[,]” [were hoping] “to commence practice as soon as the state of weather permits” [while declaring an intent] to “secure, if possible, the Tecumseh Park.”29 During the month of May 1883 Tecumseh Park was the center of London’s busy baseball activity. A number of local baseball aggregations featured the play of both young adherents to the game, for instance on teams such as the Young Athletes and Young Tecumsehs, as well as older experienced players on such baseball clubs as the Eurekas, Alerts, Atlantics, and, of course, London’s “diamond pride,” the senior Tecumsehs.

What appeared to be a rosy and active athletics life for Tecumseh Park for the season of 1883 was torn asunder by events occurring on the evening and early morning of July 10/11. In what the Advertiser proclaimed “a catastrophe altogether unknown at this season of the year,” an “uninterrupted torrent of rain fell throughout the night, lasting until mid-morning the next day.”30 London West, and with it, Tecumseh Park, were hardest hit; the water was said to have reached the highest point ever known: “The whole of Tecumseh Park, fences, stands, and houses, together with Massie’s boat house, all went down the river.”31

And it was not solely baseball that suffered the consequences of the disaster. As the Advertiser reported: “All the effects of the London Lacrosse Club were swept away by the flood, including sticks, clubs, balls, etc. They were stored at Tecumseh Park, and were carried away with the buildings.”32 Tecumseh Park, for the moment, ceased to function. The remainder of the 1883 outdoor sports season in Tecumseh Park was suspended. London newspapers during that time were replete with reports of elite athletic contests normally contested in Tecumseh Park occurring instead on the grounds of rival teams.

Almost four months after the July 1883 flood, London city officials met on November 1 to decide on tax rates and priority expenditures, among which flood-related damage issues were prominent. The Advertiser reported that one subject of discussion was the plight of Tecumseh Park: “The baseball grounds should be looked after. The want of fence along the street renders walking after dark on the sidewalk a very dangerous matter.”33

A week later the London West Council met for further civic allocation purposes. No funds were allotted for Tecumseh Park, only a motion unanimously passed “that the Tecumseh Base Ball Club be notified to fence their property on Dundas Street, as it was in a dangerous condition.”34 As winter set in, thought and action toward rehabilitation of Tecumseh Park from the ravages of the great flood of July 1883 were put on hold until the following spring.

A decade after the 1883 flood, London’s foremost baseball venue underwent significant change – a geographical alteration in the location of the park’s baseball diamond. More than half a century later, in mid-December 1936, as the city rejoiced over the John Labatt family donation of Tecumseh Park to the City of London, the Free Press was moved to recall aspects of the park’s history. Accordingly, the following notation appeared: “Originally the home plate was at the eastern section of the park and the players batted towards the west. In 1893 the diamond was rearranged and the home plate was close to Dundas Street, with the teams batting towards the north. Later the home plate was placed within a few feet of where it is now.”35

Further documentation for this change from the park’s original 1877 infield location has yet to surface, but if the Free Press revelation is true, then the diamonds infield position within the park property’s confines changed from its original northeast location to a southwestern location in 1893. As seen in Figure 1, Dundas Street would have run somewhat parallel to the diamond’s right-field foul line; Wilson Avenue (in 1893, Central Avenue) ran parallel to the left-field foul line. Moving home plate away from the consistently menacing overflow of the Thames River might have been the motivation for such action, as well as placing the setting sun in the west in the eyes of the outfielders rather than the batters.36

Probably the single most critical development in the park’s diamond sport history evolved not from the impetus of baseball, but rather from the widely popular late nineteenth-century sport of bicycling. We have previously noted the prominence of cycling affairs in London.37 In the latter part of May 1895, the London Advertiser reported on the opening of the ball season, grumbling: “With decidedly uncomfortable weather, and a somewhat one-sided exhibition of baseball, the season of 1895 was opened at Tecumseh Park Saturday afternoon. Though the temperature was chilly and rain threatened to fall every minute the same old grandstand and the same old bleachers held about the usual number of cranks, who, however, owing to the tameness of the match, had little opportunity to whoop er up.”38

Figure 1: Approximate 1893 location of Tecumseh Park’s home plate, infield and grandstands.

And then, scarcely five days later, a startling Advertiser announcement: “It is a Go: The Much Talked of Bicycle Track Will be Built at Once.”39 An auspicious facility, “one of the best athletic parks in Canada” was projected to be finished in Tecumseh Park by late July.40 Auspicious indeed: “… a third of a mile brick-dust and cement track, complete with proper banking on the turns, and a baseball diamond mapped out, the infield arranged inside the perimeter of the track itself, together with a grandstand seating 2,500 folks, all at a cost of $3,000.”41 [See Figure 2.]

There was more! Specific enhancements render a graphic picture of the park’s new arrangement.42 Representatives of the London Bicycle Club, among them W.J. Reid, the owner of Tecumseh Park, were the conceptual architects and exclusive financers of the entire endeavor. Throughout June and July, well into August, London newspapers, particularly the Advertiser, reported the progress of the grand project,43 carried on without the need to curtail the park’s baseball activities. And then, finally, the grand opening of Tecumseh Park’s “new look.”

On Saturday afternoon, August 17, 1895, a procession of townsfolk and dignitaries led by the Musical Society Band formed at Richmond and Dundas Streets and marched to Tecumseh Park, arriving in pouring rain. A crowd of some 800 souls, considerably short of the several thousand expected, braved the weather to attend.44 London Mayor J.W. Little opened the formal ceremonies by orating on the prospective value of the cycling development to London youth and the debt owed to the facility’s initiators: “The cultivation of these qualities and their application to our regular duties should certainly under ordinary circumstances, lead to success in any calling. (Applause) We are, therefore, under obligation to those who furnish facilities for the development of young people in this way.”45

Then, J.M. Reid spoke to the spectators and explained: “I trust … this is only the start of an era of bicycle riding in the city, and I will gladly do anything in my power to further the sport. We will have in the near future, so Mr. Human has told me, a cricket club laying out their crease here. We already have a baseball diamond, and with a cricket crease and bicycle track we will have as good an athletic grounds as there is in the country.”46 Despite the August 17 attendance disappointment, subsequent bicycle race events held at Tecumseh Park’s new cycling track generated robust spectator crowds witnessing races for prizes, often bestowed in the form of ornate rings set with diamonds.47

Figure 2: Approximate 1895 relocation of Tecumseh Park’s home plate and infield, together with the “a third of a mile” bicycle racing track embracing a “homestretch” in front of the central spectator grandstand.

And so ended yet another chapter in the transformation of Tecumseh Park, one that brought the historic grounds closer to the perspective in which the park resides in these times. In closing this discussion of the bicycle club’s installation of its racing track and subsequent relocation of the park’s baseball diamond to the track’s elongated oval infield in 1895, it should be noted that possibly by 1916, cycling activity, along with the celebrated racing track, had disappeared from the park’s scheduled activities and physical landscape, the victim of a rapidly emerging preoccupation of Canadians and Americans alike with a relatively new technological fascination, the soon-to-be ubiquitous automobile.

Sometime prior to 1922, possibly dating to 1916, Tecumseh Park noted a reconfiguration of the park’s expansive grounds, the installation of a new facility to accommodate the play of the Western University Mustangs football team. A 1922 aerial photograph of Tecumseh Park demonstrates that the football facility was laid out across the baseball diamond, directly in front of the spectator grandstand. In the late 1920s, the Western Mustangs abandoned Tecumseh Park to instead play their contests in the university’s newly constructed J.W. Little Stadium, built on the campus proper and inaugurated in the autumn of 1929.48

By the mid-1920s the football arrangement in Tecumseh Park no longer existed, and, for all intents and purposes, the park stood as a facility almost totally focused on London’s ever-expanding baseball scene. Nevertheless, it remains ironic that one of the most significant “change agents” in the arrangement of the park’s modern baseball playing field location was the sport of cycling and its spectacular racing track, which disappeared completely from the sporting scene, the victim, in part, of the development of and infatuation with the automobile.

The most devastating disaster in London’s now two-century community history was the great flood of April 1937, an event that had repercussions for the city’s premier baseball precinct. The catastrophic late April flood was preceded by an event occurring scarcely five months previous, the donation of the park property to the City of London by a recent purchaser, the John Labatt family. In mid-December of 1936 the London Free Press blared the good news: “City Is Given Tecumseh Park, $10,000: Famous Playground Donated by Labatt Family to Citizens.”49 Officially renamed the John Labatt Memorial Park, it became known by most folks as simply Labatt Park. The Labatt family gift of $10,000 came in the form of an endowment sum to be used for capital improvements. Little did London city fathers know at the time that the endowment sum would be pressed into needed service within a few months.

The December announcement and local celebration of the Labatt bequest had hardly subsided, when, once again, as was annually anticipated, the city began to brace itself for the fallout from melting snow and ice and the onset of heavy spring rainfalls. In early January of 1937, omens of approaching disaster were placed before London newspaper readers: “Nearly Five Inches of Rain in 15 Days,” reported the Free Press.50 And, approaching mid-February, continuing alarm: “Heavy Rains Flood River Flats.”51 And finally, the late April 1937 catastrophe: “… the swollen waters of the Thames River overflowed its banks in a wild rampage today….”52

The preliminary flood damage cost rested at $3 million; newspaper descriptions underscoring the flood’s consequence detailed a great citywide tragedy,53 from which Labatt Park was not exempt: “Flood Plays Havoc to Ancient Grandstand … John Labatt Memorial Park now completely covered by water … grandstand has been cracked and temporary bleachers have been washed away….”54

Unlike the July 1883 flood, which nullified any further sports activity at Tecumseh Park until the spring of 1884, the early April 1937 London flood disaster did not have such sustained consequence for the newly christened Labatt Park. On the eve of the flood’s occurrence the Free Press reported on an inspection of Labatt Park by Frank Dark, construction superintendent of the Public Utilities Commission, and William Farquarson, London playgrounds supervisor. The property was “in bad condition. Fences need immediate attention, the roof of the grandstand leaks, fungus is growing on the grandstand seats.”55 Together with flood damage itself, pre-flood deterioration conditions added to a restoration urgency toward providing improvements and upgrading of the facility.

Ultimately, the park remained unavailable for all activity for a little over a month. During that period alternative arrangements were made for previously scheduled contests. The Free Press, for instance, noted that the London Senior baseball team would “play [their] first six games away from home,”56 the first home game to occur on June 19, 1937. Commencing in mid-June, the Seniors played the remainder of the 1937 season at Labatt Park.

LABATT PARK IN ITS MODERN FORM AND FUNCTION

After the flood, certainly by 1940, Labatt Park was once again transformed. The two spectator stands that previously extended from both sides of the central main grandstand (placed there originally to accommodate the homestretch of the bicycle racing track), were destroyed in the 1937 flood. Neither was resurrected in its original place. Instead, extended spectator stands were arranged contiguous to and behind the first base/right field and third base/left field foul lines. Home plate remained in roughly the same position as it did prior to the flood. A softball diamond was installed on the northern end of Labatt Park’s grounds, a facility that particularly related to the explosion of ladies’ softball in London and vicinity in the 1940s and early 1950s.57

Since the location of home plate in the park remains somewhat controversial, our research on the subject inclines us to argue that the home plate’s location and its accompanying infield changed at least four times in its now almost century and a half of history.

After the 1937 flood, Labatt Park’s baseball diamond remained generally located in its 1895 perspective, that is, with Wilson Avenue located directly west behind home plate, and batters hitting eastward. In 1937, too, at which time the city’s representative in the Intercounty League was known as the London Silverwoods, the storied dressing-room building was erected that still remains today as a complementary Labatt Park reminder of London’s baseball past. By 1940 the park was close to its present circumstance. Enlargements in spectator seating, dugout accommodation for players, and relocation of home plate to a slightly more northerly location were established in the decades of the 1950s, 1960s, and 1970s.

In 1989, just in time for the reemergence of professional baseball in Labatt Park, the City of London completed an important civic development that deflected on the historic baseball facility. The most important development between 1971 and 1989 was the extension of Queen’s Avenue with its own bridge westward over the Thames River to intersect with Dundas Street running parallel to it, thus forming a junction from which Riverside Drive extends through London West. The Queen’s Avenue extension necessitated removal of the small cluster of houses in the deep right-field corner, which in turn modified the dimensions of the right-field portion of the playing field. By 1989, too, the houses bordering Labatt Park on the east side of Wilson Avenue had been removed, greatly enlarging the park’s main entry precinct. Other developments between 1971 and 1989 were the construction of extended bleachers along both foul lines, a warning track around the perimeter of the outfield, and impressive landscaping beautification.

Figure 3: Changes in Tecumseh Park / Labatt Park home plate location: 1=1877,2=1893, 3=1895, 4=post-1937.

Many of baseball history’s luminaries have played in Tecumseh/Labatt Park at one time or another, including Hall of Famers Ty Cobb, Charlie Gehringer, and Canada’s own Fergie Jenkins. The longest-standing baseball tenant of Tecumseh/Labatt Park has been the London representative in the Intercounty Baseball League, an enduring organization established in 1919. The first London entry in the Intercounty League, the London Braves, commenced play in 1925.

Since then, depending on team sponsorship, London’s Intercounty team has been known at various times as the London Winery (1934-1936), the London Silverwoods (1937-1938), the London Army Team (1942-1943), the London Majors (1944-1959), the London Diamonds (1960-1961), the London Majors again (1962), the London Pontiacs (1963-1969), the London Avcos (1970-1973) and the London El-Morocco Majors (1974). Since 1975 the team has stuck with the London Majors moniker.

Late in the twentieth century, professional baseball returned to Labatt Park, a first since the time of its earliest occupants, the London Tecumsehs. In 1989 the London Tigers, a Double-A Eastern League affiliate of the American League Detroit Tigers, took up residence in a much improved and beautified Labatt Park. Improvements made for the arrival of the Tigers cost in the vicinity of $1 million. They included new lighting, concession booth enhancements, a 40- by 19-foot electronic Scoreboard (partially sponsored by Labatt Breweries), new dressing rooms, and new dugouts.

The Tigers in London were short-lived. The franchise moved to Trenton, New Jersey, for the 1994 season. In 1999 the London Werewolves of the fledgling Frontier League arrived in London. Their tenure in Labatt Park ended in 2001, a victim of limited attendance and skyrocketing operating costs. And in 2003 Labatt Park became the home of the London Monarchs of the equally short-lived Canadian Baseball League, which folded in midseason due to financial difficulties.

EPILOGUE

Finally, what is in store for the storied park and its illustrious historic distinction? How might it be protected from the ravages of urban expansion and corporate development? One answer, of course, is heritage distinction reinforced by authority. We understand that “reinforced authority” is bestowed at three levels: municipal, provincial, and national. Labatt Park connotes much more than simply a venue for baseball activity.58 It is a sanctified public space for the gathering of Ontarians, indeed greater Canadians, to experience and celebrate a national cultural pastime now approaching two centuries duration.

The City of London, Ontario, realizes this fact. Since its ownership of the park commenced in 1937, it has poured millions of dollars into the park and its immediate surroundings. London fully realizes its value to the urban life of its citizens. On May 30, 1994, the City of London, under Part IV of the Ontario Heritage Act, named Labatt Park an Ontario Heritage Landmark Site. One month later, on July 1, 1994, in an act of civic heritage authority carried out at the park, a plaque was unveiled at Canada Day ceremonies presided over by Mayor Tom Gosnell.59

Though Labatt Park’s municipal and provincial heritage landmark distinctions are important barriers standing in the way of impacting urban growth/reconfiguration and corporate development expansion, the addition of Canadian National Historic Landmark Site distinction could well ensure a final measure for lasting preservation. Such a quest lies before federal consideration as this essay is written. Finally, if Lord Byron, the inimitable English poet, was on the mark when he asserted that “the best prophet of the future is the past,” then perhaps Labatt Park has before it a glorious future in its service to London and Canadian citizens,60 as well as to the annals of baseball history.

ROBERT K. BARNEY, an American citizen, has lived and worked in Canada at Western University for 50 years. Educated at the University of New Mexico, he received his PhD in 1968; in 2014 Western University awarded him a doctor of laws, honoris causa. Recently he has worked with City of London heritage officials on a proposal to federal authorities for Labatt Memorial Park to be awarded National Heritage Site distinction.

RILEY NOWOKOWSKI is a PhD Candidate at Western University in London, Ontario. He loves all types of sport but takes a particular interest in baseball history. His work largely has focused on sport during the late nineteenth and early twentieth centuries.

Acknowledgments

Special thanks to Devin Lindsay, Stephen Harding, and the entire London Room staff of the London Public Library.

Notes

1 We are indebted to Martin Lacoste for his penetrating compilations of baseball history’s earliest published record of games played in Ontario. Lacoste has documented that, by 1865, some 80 games had been played, most carried out under New York rules, between teams established in the Toronto/Hamilton/Woodstock/ London corridor. “Table of Baseball Games Played in Ontario, 1856-1865,” email Martin Lacoste to Robert K. Barney, July 27, 2020. A full list of these games through 1870 is available at http://baseballresearch.ca/early-games/.

2 For a detailed examination of cricket play in London in the nineteenth century, and its jousts with baseball for public following and playing space, see Tony Joyce, “At Close of Play: The Evolution of Cricket in London, Ontario, 1836-1902,” unpublished master’s thesis, University of Western Ontario, 1988.

3 See “Ready,” London Advertiser, March 31, 1877.

4 “The Ball Field,” London Advertiser, April 16, 1877.

5 Charles B. Chapman, born Charles Trollope in Norfolk, England in 1827, emigrated to the New World in 1848, settling eventually in New York City, where he earned a living in the bookbinding business and dabbled in drawing and watercolors, an artistic bent he demonstrated in his elementary-school years in England. In New York he married a French-Canadian woman. Hearing that a town in “Canada West” offered a “good opportunity for a bookbinder,” the couple left New York in 1855, crossed into Canada, and settled in London, Ontario. There, at the urging of his wife, he discarded the name Trollope, with its crude French connotation, and adopted the surname of Chapman, the maiden name of his wife’s mother. Between 1855 and 1875 Charles Chapman graduated from being an amateur artist to one of noted professional qualification. His watercolors and oils, mostly of landscapes, won prizes at various competitions, fairs and exhibitions. An excellent example of his work was his classic 1875 oil painting of the “Forks of the Thames,” displaying as it did the future site of Tecumseh/Labatt Park. For Chapman’s place in Canadian art history, see Nancy Geddes Poole, The Art of London: 1830-1880 (eBook Published by Nancy Geddes Poole, 2017), 25-26.

6 “The Ball Field,” London Advertiser, April 20, 1877.

7 “Out-Door Sports,” London Advertiser, April 23, 1877. The Atlantics, though a team composed of amateur players, were a formidable aggregation. By 1877 they deserved the distinction of being known as one of the top amateur baseball teams in the entire Dominion.

8 “Base Ball,” London Advertiser, April 24, 1877. The Hartfords, a seasoned professional team from Brooklyn, New York, were not members of the International Association. Known as the Dark Blues of Hartford, Connecticut, they had been an original member of the National League in 1876, moving at season’s end to Brooklyn for the National League’s second season in 1877. They visited London after playing games in Chicago and Detroit.

9 “Summer Pastimes,” London Advertiser, April 30, 1877.

10 “The Ball Field,” London Advertiser, May 4, 1877. Brackets ours.

11 See “The Ball Field,” London Advertiser, May 7, 1877.

12 See “The Ball Field,” London Advertiser, May 8, 1877.

13 See “The Ball Field,” London Advertiser, May 12, 1877 and May 14, 1877. See also Brian Martin, The Tecumsehs of the International Association: Canada’s First Major League Baseball Champions (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2015), 29.

14 “The Ball field,” London Advertiser, May16, 1877.The reference to “Maple Leafs from Guelph” refers to players and officials of the Guelph Maple Leaf Baseball Club, the London Tecumsehs’ chief Canadian baseball rival, as well as a fellow member of the new International Association.

15 The London Advertiser, established by John Cameron in October 1863, was an evening newspaper, in contrast to the morning London Free Press. The Advertiser, an almost immediate success, proved an able competitor to the Free Press, right up to its eventual demise in the fall of 1936. It was born in the midst of the American Civil War, a landmark struggle between Union and Confederacy that captivated the attention of London citizens, particularly as hundreds and hundreds of fugitive Southern Negro slaves sought freedom in Canada, particularly in southwestern Ontario. See Fred Landon, Western Ontario and the American Frontier (Toronto: McClelland and Stewart, 1967 – Carleton Edition, original publication 1941), 215.

16 The London Free Press, an extension of the London Canadian Free Press (1849-1852), was established in 1856.

17 Admittedly, the position of home plate within the park grounds did indeed change, it would seem on at least four occasions over time, to its present position (2021).

18 For the importance of the safety bicycle in London, Ontario, see in particular Robert S. Kossuth and Kevin Wamsley, “Cycles of Manhood: Pedaling Respectability in Ontario’s Forest City,” Sport History Review, Vol. 34, No. 2, 170. For more, see Glen Norcliffe, The Ride to Modernity: The Bicycle in Canada, 1869-1900 (Toronto: University of Toronto Press, 2001). Here, Norcliffe argues that “the bicycle carrier wave formed a small part of an even larger cultural movement in Canada known as modernity” (31). Further, in his “National Identity, Club Citizenship, and the Formation of the Canadian Wheelman’s Association,” Journal of Canadian Studies, Vol. 51, No. 2 (January 2018), Norcliffe argues that the Canadian Wheelman, an early magazine published in southwestern Ontario, played a major role in the growth of the late nineteenth century Canadian bicycle craze (468). See also, Nancy Bouchier, For the Love of the Game: Amateur Sports in Small-Town Ontario, 1838-1895 (Montréal: McGill-Queen’s University Press, 2003).

19 “Sporting,” London Advertiser, April 11, 1883.

20 For more on this elaborate facility, see Wheelman issues of December 1883 (Vol. 1, No. 4) and November 1883 (Vol. 1, No. 3).

21 The term “national sport” associated with lacrosse dates to an 1867 attempt by the Montréal dentist William George Beers to persuade Parliament in Ottawa to legislate the sport as Canada’s official “national game.” His attempt failed, but many in Canada, oblivious to Beers’ failure, then and now, think that lacrosse is Canada’s de facto national game. Beers himself was a noted lacrosse player in Montréal in the 1850s and 1860s. Further, he published the first standardized rules for lacrosse in 1860, was instrumental in expanding the number of lacrosse clubs in Ontario and Quebec in the decade following, formulated the National Lacrosse Association and its first annual convention, and helped organize the first international lacrosse tours to England in the 1870s. For this and more, he enters the annals of Canadian sport history as the “Father of Lacrosse.” For more, see Donald M. Fisher, Lacrosse: A History of the Game (Baltimore: Johns Hopkins University Press, 2002).

22 “Sporting,” London Advertiser, April 11, 1883.

23 “Sporting,” London Advertiser, April 11, 1883. Brackets ours.

24 “Sporting,” London Advertiser, April 28, 1883.

25 “Sporting,” London Advertiser, May 3, 1883.

26 “Sporting,” London Advertiser, May 12, 1883.

27 “Sporting,” London Advertiser, May 14, 1883.

28 “Sporting,” London Advertiser, May 25, 1883.

29 “Sporting,” London Advertiser, April 6, 1883. Brackets ours.

30 “The Latest,” London Advertiser, July 11, 1883. A prolonged subheadline told the tale: “Terrible Destruction by Water- London West and Low Points of the City Submerged – Immense Loss of Life Feared – Moving Tales of the Flood – The Damage to Property Incalculable.”

31 “The Latest,” London Advertiser, July 11, 1883.

32 “Sporting,” London Advertiser, July 18, 1883. The July 1883 flood proved a disaster for the sport of lacrosse in London, especially lacrosse activity in Tecumseh Park. Shorn of its sticks, balls, and other equipment, which were carried away in the flood, the Lacrosse Club saw its membership dwindle, especially in the face of ever-increasing interest in cycling and baseball. In early August 1883, the London Lacrosse Club, now referred to as “The City Club,” made a “last moment” arrangement for a game against London East, to be played on the Queen’s Park grounds. The City Club “failed to muster a full team and were in consequence obliged to call upon London East for an additional supply.” See “Sporting,” London Advertiser, August 3, 1883. We could not find a record of lacrosse activity in Tecumseh Park after the 1883 flood.

33 “London West,” London Advertiser, November 2, 1883.

34 “London West,” London Advertiser, November 7, 1883.

35 “City Is Given Tecumseh Park, $10,000,” London Free Press, December 15, 1936.

36 The logic here being that far fewer “sun affected” plays by outfielders occurred in comparison with “each pitch” experienced by batters in the course of the game.

37 We originally became interested in the orientation of a bicycle track in Tecumseh Park introduced in 1895 due to a reference made to us by Stephen Harding, for which we are grateful. Furthermore, there is a notation regarding the bicycle track in Daniel Brock’s Fragments from the Forks: London, Ontario’s Legacy (London, Ontario: London and Middlesex Historical Society, 2011), 147.

38 “The Green Diamond,” London Advertiser, May 20, 1895.

39 “It is a Go,” London Advertiser, May 25, 1895.

40 Discussions on building a bicycle racing track occurred as early as 1894, as noted in the Canadian Wheelman Magazine. For example: “The Meteor club has a membership now of about 70, and we are receiving applications for every meeting. We are growing fast, and, ‘to put a flea in your readers’ ears,’ it is our intention to make a strong bid for the C.W.A. meeting of 1895. By that time we expect to have one of the best athletic grounds in the Dominion, including an up-to-date bicycle track. We are in the swim to stay.” “London Meteors,” The Canadian Wheelman, August 6, 1894.

41 “It is a Go,” London Advertiser, May 25, 1895.

42 “Work Begun,” London Advertiser, May 27, 1895: “… The track has been staked out. The home stretch is to be west of the baseball diamond and 30 feet wide. The course will gradually narrow, until on the east side, or near the breakwater, it will only measure 16 feet….”

43 See, for instance, daily copies of the London Advertiser, May 25 to August 16, 1895.

44 For an enlarged description of the entire grand opening, see “Wheelmen Happy,” London Advertiser, August 19, 1895.

45 “Wheelmen Happy.”

46 “Wheelmen Happy.”

47 “The Diamond Meet,” London Advertiser, August 29, 1895.

48 For more on this, see Robert K. Barney, Mustangs 100: A Century of Western Athletics (Straffordville, Ontario: Sportswood Printing, 2013), 12, 17.

49“City Is Given Tecumseh Park, $10,000: Famous Playground Donated by Labatt Family to Citizens,” London Free Press, December 15, 1936.

50 London Free Press, January 14, 1937: “Last night streets ran deep with water and small floods were reported at one or two city parks.”

51 London Free Press, February 9, 1937: “Old Man River went on a rampage in London following heavy rains….”

52 London Free Press, April 26, 1937: “Scores of homes were menaced, streets were submerged, at least four district bridges were closed to traffic….”

53 London Free Press, April 27, 1937: “… mounting menace of disease, one man drowned, 6,000 without homes, South London completely isolated to motor traffic.”

54 “Labatt Park Is a Young Lake,” London Free Press, April 28, 1937.

55 “Labatt Park in Bad Condition,” London Free Press, April 6, 1937.

56 Howard Broughton, “On the Sport Trail with Howard Broughton,” London Free Press, May 14, 1937.

57 For a full treatment of this phenomenon and Labatt Park’s role in the development, see Carly Adams, “Communities of Their Own: Women’s Sport and Recreation in London, Ontario, 1920-1951,” unpublished Ph.D. Dissertation, University of Western Ontario, 2007.

58 Better known, but similar circumstances, are associated with many original historic sporting precincts, for instance, the Kentucky Derby and Churchill Downs in Louisville, Kentucky; the Boston Red Sox and Fenway Park in Boston, Massachusetts; and the Indy 500 and the Indianapolis Speedway in Indianapolis, Indiana.

59 Co-author Dr. Bob Barney was present at those proceedings, and in fact rendered the keynote commemorative address.

60 Lord George Gordon Byron’s notable quotation appeared in a letter written by him on January 28, 1821, composed in Greece, the country of his residence for the last three decades of his life. For the letter’s transcription, see: https://www.gutenberg.org/files/16609/16609-h/16609-h.htm.

Labatt Park’s Longevity Claim

admin — Fri, 22 Jul 2022 13:58:07 +0000

The art deco façade of the newly named John Labatt Memorial Park upon its reopening after the flood of April 1937. (D.B. Weldon Library, Western University Archives)

There has been but one serious challenge mustered against Labatt Park’s distinction: “baseball history’s oldest continuously operating ball grounds.” That challenger is Fuller Field in the town of Clinton, Massachusetts.

Clinton, nestled in bucolic surroundings some 40 miles west of Boston, nevertheless suffers from a long-embedded “tiredness.” It was a bustling nineteenth-century town of world fame, but much of its present business landscape renders the impression of being in recession. Many of the town’s streets and sidewalks are in disrepair. Though a fatigue-like mist appears to envelop today’s Clinton, in its heyday in the nineteenth century, Clinton was a dynamic community, featuring some of America’s best-known manufacturing firms, most especially those linked to a booming textile industry. In fact, Clintonian Erastus B. Bigelow rose to become one of the world’s most important and best-known inventors/entrepreneurs with his invention and development of the power loom, including his subsequent scientific application of that loom to what we know today as the process by which screening for windows, doors, and porches is manufactured.

Then, too, Clinton was an enviable center of cultural flamboyance. Appearing in Clinton’s civic halls and private salons for over a half-century were many of America’s most celebrated writers, entertainers, cause-conscious lecturers, sports stars, even presidents of the United States, a legion of men and women that included such historical luminaries as Henry David Thoreau, Ralph Waldo Emerson, Frederick Douglass, Mark Twain, Carrie Nation, John L. Sullivan, Agnes Moorehead, and two Roosevelts, Franklin and Theodore.1

We are grateful to the librarians of the Bigelow Free Public Library in Clinton for providing us, during a research visit there in August 2018 with historical documents appropriate to Clinton’s challenge to the Labatt Park distinction. Baseball has been a fixture in Clinton for nearly as long as some of the earliest historical records of the sport in American culture can attest. One can certainly pinpoint an 1865 Clinton newspaper notice offered by one of the local baseball aggregations, the “We’ll Try Baseball Club,” inviting ladies and gentlemen to attend its annual “baseball-sponsored ball.” 2

A “darkened and dog-eared by age”3 four-by-five-foot oilcloth survey map of Clinton, dated 1878 and discovered by officials of the Clinton Historical Society in 2004, depicts a baseball infield diamond on property bounded by High and Allen Streets. Clinton’s argument proposes that the infield diamond presently in place on Fuller Field, a “multi-purpose” facility operated by the town’s Parks and Recreation authority, is situated in exactly the same place as the baseball diamond depicted on the 1878 “oilcloth survey map.” Researching into the antiquity of baseball parks and diamonds, local Clinton historian Bastarache found no other claim equal to or offering an older date of baseball diamond origin and continuous use, with the exception of that of Labatt Memorial Park in London, Ontario.

Upon inquiry to London’s Labatt Park historians,4 Bastarache learned that Tecumseh Park (the park’s original name), though predating Clinton’s 1878 “origin claim” by one year (1877), was devastated by a flood in April 1937, causing it to cease to function for an interim, not to reappear until 1938 as Labatt Memorial Park, and, in Bastarache’s incorrect conclusion, “moved” to a completely different location. To Bastarache, then, Labatt Park’s “continuous use” claim could not be defended after the season of 1936. But apparently unknown to Bastarache was the fact that Tecumseh Park/Labatt Park was never moved. In the wake of the devastating 1937 flood, Kensington Flats, including Tecumseh Park, was inundated, and the park’s playing surface and infrastructure severely damaged. Operations at the ball grounds ceased entirely. Over time, the flood waters receded; the Flats returned to normalcy. But the ground’s ball field and supporting infrastructure were ruined.

Nevertheless, the John Labatt Brewing Company purchased the former Kensington Tecumseh Park ball field land and promptly deeded it to the City of London in perpetuity. Further, the Labatt family gifted $10,000 to the city for the restoration of the baseball park in the identical spot of its origin. Tecumseh Park rose in all its original splendor, renamed Labatt Memorial Park. But Bastarache was on a mission. Hence, to Guinness World Records and the National Park Service, he proceeded to launch a quest to have Clinton’s Fuller Field ordained as the oldest continuously used baseball field in the world, dating to 1878. In fact, Bastarache went further, claiming that the Fuller Field baseball site “may actually date back to 1865 when baseball began in Clinton.”5 Had Bastarache consulted an 1876 Clinton map, he would have found that the Fuller Field baseball site was clearly not in place prior to 1878.

While Guinness certified Bastarache’s claim, and accordingly in its 2007 annual edition affirmed the authenticity of Fuller Field’s unique baseball antiquity, certification of the “Clinton distinction” failed in the halls of decision-making in the National Park Service’s National Registry of Historical Landmarks.6 We would suspect that the National Park Service’s Registry of Historical Landmarks remains decidedly more rigorous in its survey of “origin evidence,” to say nothing of the proof of “continuous use,” than does a commercial press such as Guinness. The silence from government authority, the custodian of historical landmark claims, is a deafening commentary on the legitimacy of Clinton’s assertion. On Guinness‘s website appears the following: “The claim (Clinton) is based on maps of the town that date as far back as 1878, and box scores from games played every year.”7 This is the only occasion where a reference to evidence of “continuous use” (“box scores”) is offered, but it is merely a reference, rather than evidence itself. If such evidence exists, Bastarache would surely have brought it forth to support the “continuous use” aspect of his argument. We believe no such evidence exists, but if it does indeed exist, has never been examined relative to the Clinton claim. Finally, disastrous to Clinton’s claim was the removal of Fuller Field from Guinness World Records, replaced in its 2009 edition by Labatt Memorial Park in London.8

Notes

1 For more on this see A.J. Bastarache, An Extraordinary Town: How One of America’s Smallest Towns Shaped the World (Clinton, Massachusetts: Angus MacGregor Publishing, 2005).

2 See Bastarache’s chapter, “Making Sports History” (p. 95), in his An Extraordinary Town.

3 The phrase “darkened and dog-eared by age” is from Peter Schworm, “Fielding Dreams: A Central Massachusetts Town Hopes an 1878 Map Will Bring Visitors and Bragging Rights to a Spot in Baseball History,” Boston Globe, August 14, 2005: 29. The phrase may in fact have been spoken directly to Schworn by his interviewee, A.J. Bastarache.

4 In this case, Barry Wells, as told to the authors by Wells himself during a tour of Labatt Park on November 10, 2018.

5 Bastarache, 95.

6 For the earliest notation of the National Park Service Submission, and actual Guinness submission, see Schworm, “Fielding Dreams.”

7 https://www.waymarking.com/waymarks/wm5566_Worlds_Oldest_Baseball_Diamond_in_Continuous_Use_Fuller_Field_Clinton_MA.

8 Craig Glenday, ed., Guinness World Records 2009 (New York: Bantam Books, 2009), 191.

The 1877 International Association Championship Game

admin — Thu, 21 Jul 2022 13:45:22 +0000

George H. “Foghorn” Bradley, seated at left, with the Grafton Baseball Club in 1875. Touch three out of four, George. You’ll never hit a bigger triple in your life. (Courtesy of John Thorn)

Mike Timlin scurried toward the first-base line, scooped up Otis Nixon’s bunt, and tossed to a waiting Joe Carter at first base. The play retired the speedy Nixon, and the Toronto Blue Jays were World Series champions for the first time. The year was 1992, and the Toronto victory was hailed as Canada’s first championship on the major-league baseball stage. Forgotten in the euphoria were the exploits of the London Tecumsehs, who 115 years earlier had won the championship of the International Association. The Association, and its 1877 champion Tecumsehs, have been relegated to the dustbin of history by a 1969 decision to deny the league major-league status, a decision with which not all baseball historians agree.1

BACKGROUND

The International Association was established on a basis different from that of its rival, the National League. The latter was controlled by the owners, and operated for their benefit. Many of the Association’s teams, in contrast, were cooperatives, interested more in the social and political benefit to be gained from hometown glory than in financial profit. Some were even player-led.2 Twenty-three such teams comprised the Association for its inaugural season of 1877. Of these 23, seven paid the additional $15 fee required to contend for the championship pennant.3 Only games played between pairs of these teams were to count toward the championship; all other games were the equivalent of exhibitions.

The Association season represented London’s first opportunity for structured play against top-level competition. The highlight was the opening of Tecumseh Park as the Tecumsehs’ new home.4 The park hosted its first professional game on May 6, as the Tecumsehs fell 6-2 to the visiting Hartfords of Brooklyn of the National League.5 A Victoria Day game against the League’s Boston team drew a crowd estimated at between 6,000 and 8,000 on the national holiday; a late London rally went for naught as the Bostons prevailed 8-7 in 10 innings behind ace Tommy Bond, who would win a league-leading 40 games for the eventual league champions.6 Any Guelph-London game was another highlight, as the rivalry between the two cities had intensified over the preceding years.7

The pennant race developed into a two-team affair, but it was a tight one. Tuesday, October 2, dawned with these championship standings, the Lynn Live Oaks having disbanded two weeks earlier:8

London	13-4
Pittsburgh	11-4
Rochester	8-8
Manchester	7-9
Columbus	4-8
Guelph	3-12

Since the Pittsburgh Alleghenys had only two games left to play (both against Guelph) after Tuesday, and London none, a win by London would give the Tecumsehs the title. But both London and Pittsburgh were still in contention.

THE GAME

Tuesday’s cool, clear skies belied the Tecumsehs’ sombre mood. Ed Somerville, the team’s popular shortstop, had taken ill during the previous week. He died, a victim of pneumonia, on October 1, the day before the game. His teammates took the field wearing “crape [sic] bows on their breasts”9 in his memory, having served as his pallbearers a mere 24 hours earlier.10 No less daunting was the prospect of facing the Alleghenys’ starting pitcher, Pud Galvin. The 20-year-old right-hander, the ace of the Pittsburgh staff, was early in a Hall of Fame career in which he would win 365 games, the fifth-highest total in baseball history.11 Starting for London was the Tecumsehs’ own ace, 21-year-old right-hander Fred Goldsmith. Goldsmith was a popular figure in London, having recently married a local woman and taken up residence there. He had also been instrumental in the team’s success that year; he was credited with 46 wins in total, including a 13-4 record in championship games.12

As was the rule in the International Association that year, the Tecumsehs batted first. Galvin retired the side in order, shortstop Mike Burke being caught on a fine one-handed catch by center fielder Russ McKelvy.13 A single by McKelvy was the only damage off Goldsmith in the bottom half. Both pitchers quickly warmed to the task at hand. Through five innings, Galvin allowed no hits, the only batter to reach base doing so on an error. Goldsmith allowed only the McKelvy single over the same span, striking out the side in the third.

The Alleghenys threatened in the sixth. With one out, first baseman Jake Goodman singled to right, and McKelvy to center. Goldsmith escaped unscathed when shortstop Candy Nelson hit into a fielder’s choice, and Galvin struck out for the third time. In the top of the seventh, the home side struck. With one out, Burke reached on an error by second baseman Chick Fulmer. Left fielder Joe Hornung singled past shortstop for the Tecumsehs’ first hit. Both Burke and Hornung scored as first baseman George “Foghorn” Bradley14 tripled into right-center, Bradley himself scoring on a subsequent sacrifice by Marshall Quinton. London led 3-0.

Goldsmith continued to dominate, allowing only a harmless single by Bill Holbert in the eighth. The Tecumsehs struck again in the top of the ninth. Phil Powers’ double and Goldsmith’s single with one out put runners on first and third, Powers scoring on a misplay near home plate by catcher Tom Dolan. Burke’s single scored Goldsmith, and London led 5-0. A third single followed, by Hornung, but Galvin escaped further damage by inducing successive popups. To this point in the game, London had committed no errors, a remarkable display of fielding for the era. This changed quickly in the bottom of the inning, as a single, a wild pitch, an infield single, an overthrow and a subsequent outfield fumble allowed two Pittsburgh runs to score. It was too little, too late, for the Alleghenys, though, as London triumphed 5-2.

Pitching and fielding prevailed, as each team managed only six hits. Goldsmith in particular was excellent, his 10 strikeouts an impressive indication of his dominance.15 That evening the team was feted at the Tecumseh House Hotel downtown. The International Association pennant had been won by one of its two Canadian entries.

MAJOR LEAGUE?

The Tecumsehs’ victory was acknowledged with approval at the time by no less than Henry Chadwick in the New York Clipper.16 It has not been widely recognized as the first international baseball championship by a Canadian team, however. This is primarily because the International Association has not been recognized as “major league,” a distinction denied it by the 1969 decree. But is the reasoning behind that decision sound? Two of the more important characteristics of major-league status are stability and caliber of play. Let’s look at these more closely.

Stability refers to strength of ownership, franchise retention from one year to the next, and the ability of teams to complete their schedules. In these respects, it is true that the International Association did not distinguish itself. For the Association’s 1877 season, not all of its seven original competing franchises completed their championship schedules. The Lynn Live Oaks disbanded before season’s end. After the season two more franchises disbanded, and three new ones were added. The numerous cities comprising the Association for 1878, including the nonparticipants for the championship, included places as small as New Bedford, Massachusetts, and Hornellsville, New York. The Association was too large, scattered over too large a geographical area, and financially shaky. By 1880, it was out of business.

But what of the National League, the Associations only rival? Now regarded as a long-standing bastion of consistency, the National League of 1877 was all of one year old. In its first season, 1876, it consisted of eight teams. Here’s how it evolved over the course of the next three years alone:

1877 (6 teams)

Drop New York, Philadelphia

1878 (6 teams)

Drop Louisville, Hartford, St. Louis
Add Providence, Indianapolis, Milwaukee

1879 (8 teams)

Drop Indianapolis, Milwaukee
Add Buffalo, Cleveland, Syracuse, Troy

Instability was the rule, as league founder William Hulbert struggled to find reliable competition for his Chicago franchise. During the first decade of the League’s existence, 21 teams were members at one time or another. In fact, National League expansion and contraction, and replacement of franchises with others, was to be commonplace for the next few decades. It wasn’t until the settlement of its dispute with the Western League at the turn of the twentieth century that the League settled into the largely stable structure that we know today.

So, yes, the International Association was unstable. But so was the National League. Rather than considering this a weakness peculiar to the Association, then, it’s more reasonable to view this instability as a typical characteristic of the professional baseball landscape at that time. And when comparing the Association with the League, it’s important that we focus on the League of 1877, rather than view the League as we know it today.

With respect to caliber of play:

One of the biggest issues facing baseball in its professional youth was the problem of “revolving,” or contract-jumping. It was very common for players not to meet their contractual obligations, abandoning one team for another in the same league, or moving to another league, in midseason.17 Such was the case between the Association and the League in 1877. The more players switched from one league to the other, the more homogeneous the player pool of the two leagues became. It therefore becomes hard to accept that either league could boast a caliber of play noticeably better than its rival’s.

In 1877, the supposedly superior National League lost 72 games to outside clubs.18 It has been noted that a number of these games were against semipro teams, competition that might not warrant the National League team’s best lineups or efforts. This cannot be said of any games involving the two Canadian Association franchises. Both London and Guelph paid salaries, were stockholding companies, and had wealthy backers supporting them.

Collectively, the players on the top six International Association teams of 1877 accumulated more past or future seasons of major-league play than did the players of the top six National League teams.19

Clearly, then, the Association’s caliber of play was at least the equal of the League’s, if not better.

Evidence suggests that the Tecumsehs’ league of 1877 was a viable competitor to the National League, in no way a poor cousin. The International Association should be recognized as a major league, and its championship as a major-league championship. A number of baseball historians do so already. David Voigt, for one, discussing the financial problems faced by the National League in its early years, comments, “Although managerial austerity, salary cuts, and new stock issues lightened the burden somewhat, it was a discouraging picture. Ranged alongside the modestly profitable Association era, it goes far to debunk the myth of League superiority.”20 Author David Pietrusza, for another, opines that “a good caliber of ball was played by these nines. International Association and National League players were equally named to nationally recognized all-star teams.”21 And the New York Clipper obviously held the Association in high regard, referring to it early in the 1878 season as “the ruling professional association in the country – which it now unquestionably is.”22

The London Tecumsehs’ victory was Canada’s first on the international baseball stage, and its only major-league championship until 1992. It deserves to be recognized as a significant milestone in Canadian baseball’s historical development.

Note: A radio recreation of this game was a featured presentation at the 2018 Canadian Baseball History Conference in London. The Conference venue overlooked the outfield fences of Tecumseh Park (now Labatt Park).

Acknowledgments

A tip of the author’s cap goes to London journalist and historian Chip Martin. His research for his book The Tecumsehs of the International Association provided the basis for much of the content of this article.

Sources

Statistics from Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org.

Notes

1 In 1968, Commissioner William Eckert formed a Special Baseball Records Committee to determine (among other things) that portion of baseball’s statistical record to be considered “major league.” The committee’s rulings the next year accorded six leagues such status; the International Association was not one of them. Questionable in particular are the designations of two leagues that could be considered little more than vanity projects: Henry Lucas’s Union Association of 1884 and, to a lesser extent, John Montgomery Ward’s Players’ League of 1890. The special committee and its decisions were in the news again more recently, as Major League Baseball in 2020 granted major-league status to the Negro Leagues.

2 Brian Martin, The Tecumsehs of the International Association (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 2015), 4.

3 The seven were the Columbus Buckeyes, Guelph Maple Leafs, London Tecumsehs, Lynn Live Oaks, Manchester, Pittsburgh Alleghenys, and Rochester. The Guelph and London teams were Canada’s first professional league franchises. The rivalry between the two, fueled by civic boosterism, had been ongoing for several years.

4 The park is still in use for baseball today, having been renamed Labatt Park in 1937. It is the oldest continuous-use ballpark in the world.

5 Martin, 119.

6 Martin, 122.

7 The crowd for a holiday game in London the previous year, for example, had been estimated by a visiting Guelph reporter at between 9,000 and 10,000. See Guelph Mercury, August 10, 1876. While this may be an overestimate, note that attendance for National League games in 1877 was typically in the 1,500 to 2,000 range.

8 London Advertiser, October 2, 1877.

9 London Advertiser, October 3, 1877.

10 Martin, 142.

11 Galvin was baseball’s first 300-game winner. He reached that milestone late in the 1889 season, although it was neither recognized nor celebrated at the time. Were Galvin’s 36 wins in his two seasons in the International Association to be included, he would have reached 300 early in the 1888 season. His career wins total of 401 would then have been surpassed by only Cy Young and Walter Johnson in baseball history.

12 Goldsmith compiled a 112-68 record in his subsequent six-year major-league career. He is recognized as one of the earliest practitioners of curveball pitching. He formed what may have been baseball’s first pitching rotation with teammate Larry Corcoran on the Chicago White Stockings teams of the early 1880s.

13 All play-by-play details are from the London Free Press, October 3, 1877.

14 “Foghorn” is George H. Bradley, not the George Washington Bradley who threw the National League’s first no-hit game, in 1876.

15 To put this into perspective, strikeouts per nine innings for the entire National League in 1877 were just over 2.

16 New York Clipper, October 13, 1877.

17 Such frequent player movement was facilitated by the absence of anything resembling a reserve clause, which emerged only gradually during the next decade.

18 David Nemec, The Great Encyclopedia of 19th Century Major League Baseball (New York: Donald I. Fine Books, 1997), 102.

19 Nemec, 102.

20 The 1877 season was a particularly trying one for the League. Every League team lost money, even champion Boston. League magnates also had to deal with the Louisville Grays game-fixing scandal, the June disbanding and subsequent reorganization of the Cincinnati club, and the discovery that the latter franchise had never paid its membership dues, resulting in the nullification of all Cincinnati game results. (Most modern sources do include these results; see, for example, https://www.retrosheet.org/boxesetc/1877/YJ877.htm.) See Martin, Chapter 9. Also see David Voigt, American Baseball Vol. I (State College: Pennsylvania State University Press, 1983), 76.

21 David Pietrusza, Major Leagues: The Formation, Sometimes Absorption, and Mostly Inevitable Demise of 18 Professional Baseball Organizations, 1871 to Present (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1991), 48.

22 New York Clipper, May 12, 1878.