Amore: As player, executive and writer, Tim Murnane covered all the bases
From Dom Amore at the Hartford Courant on March 5, 2014:
When Timothy Hayes Murnane couldn’t play baseball any longer, he started writing about it. His impact, which was occasionally reported on the pages of The Courant, was felt in both industries.
“The Connecticut State League is perhaps the most prosperous baseball organization in the country outside of the big ones,” Murnane wrote as part of his “Gossip on the Game” column on July 27, 1900. “I spent a few days last week in the Nutmeg State looking over the young talent. … The games were well patronized and the playing of the snappiest kind.”
Murnane was born in Ireland but came to Naugatuck with his family in the middle-1850s, and then they moved south to the Saugatuck section of Westport. He is among Connecticut’s first significant ballplayers, playing with semipro teams in Norwalk and Stratford as early as 1869. When the “Mansfields” of Middletown joined the National Association in 1872, now considered the forerunner to the major leagues, Murnane was a member in good standing. He went on to play Major League Baseball in Boston and Providence and hit .261 before his career ended in 1884.
But Murnane didn’t let go of the game. He became an investor, an executive, an entrepreneur, a manager — he did everything including sell tickets for minor league teams in the 1880s and ’90s.
Read the full article here: http://www.courant.com/news/connecticut/courant-250/hc-250th-baseball-th-murnane-0305-20140304,0,7631399.story
Related link: Read the SABR biography of Tim Murnane by Charlie Bevis
Originally published: March 5, 2014. Last Updated: March 5, 2014.