ROOTS OF THE GAME

Early in the 19th century, athletic clubs formed in America to promote leisure and exercise. Two “fraternities” were spawned from these clubs, the “sporting” fraternity and an offshoot called the “base ball” fraternity. During the 1830s, amateur “town ball” clubs were formed, many in the Northeast. A variation on “town ball” was called the “New York game,” and the earliest set of published game rules, the Knickerbocker Rules, was written on September 23, 1845, by William R. Wheaton, a member of the Knickerbocker club. An early use of the statistical box-score was during a game between the New York Knickerbockers and the New York Nine. (The New York Nine prevailed by a 23–1 score.) In the years that followed, the “New York game” persisted over other forms of “town” ball, largely due to the influence of the fast-growing New York press during the middle of the 19th century. These early amateur games were often followed by elaborate parties. But in Baseball: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture, Ed Rielly states that “as soon as the New York Knickerbockers organized and started competing against other teams, spectators began betting on the outcome. Betting quickly became a problem, as the chance to win a wager fostered a desire to limit one’s risk by predetermining the outcome.”1 Winning and losing took on a different tone as the stakes, literally, went up.

By the early part of the 1850s, baseball had become increasingly organized. In 1856, the game was christened the “national pastime” in the New York Mercury, a newspaper of the era. In the year that followed, the amateur baseball clubs banded together to form the National Association of Baseball Players.

THE NEW YORK CITY MUTUALS AND THE BEGINNING OF CORRUPTION

After the Civil War, the good will of the game began to fade as amateur teams focused more and more on winning, and owners sought out the best talent and paid them “under the table.” Fixing or “hippodroming” of games fostered predetermined outcomes. In 1865 the first documented report of baseball corruption appeared. Three members of the New York City Mutuals, whose leader at that time was William Magear Tweed, conspired with a gambler to throw a game to the Eckfords of Brooklyn.

TAMMANY HALL, “BOSS” TWEED, AND CORRUPTION

The Society of St. Tammany was initially a fraternal organization run along the lines of a social club, but in the 1830s the Society grew more political in nature. The “hall” in the name was a reference to the headquarters of the organization. “Boss” Tweed became the head of the Tammany Hall political machine in 1863. As a member of many boards and commissions, he controlled political patronage in New York City and was able to ensure the loyalty of voters through the jobs he could create and dispense on city-related projects. The powerful cadre that surrounded Tweed was known as the “Tweed Ring,” and the extent of the corruption fostered by the Ring had never been seen in New York City. They controlled elections by bribery and the fraudulent counting of votes, filling elective offices with their cronies. Office-seekers could not get elected without Tweed’s support. The “Ring” wanted to exercise political power, but they also wanted to enrich themselves at the public expense. One infamous example: in 1858, the city allocated $250,000 to build a new courthouse behind City Hall. Upon completion in 1871, the final tab came to a staggering $12,000,000 with 75 percent of that total used as graft for fraudulently contracted bills. The courthouse stands today—with a recent complete renovation—as a monument to the corruption that Tammany Hall foisted on New York City.

For Tammany, baseball was another avenue for pursuing financial gains. The corruption uncovered in the 1865 Mutuals/Eckfords game was merely the tip of the iceberg.

Henry Chadwick, a journalist whom many consider the “father of baseball,” started writing about the game in 1857. Daniel E. Ginsburg in The Fix Is In noted that “Chadwick was the unquestioned leader in pushing for an end to corruption in baseball. He risked libel suits constantly as he worked to expose gambling related corruption in the game and clean up the sport he loved.”2

THE BEGINNING OF PROFESSIONAL BASEBALL

Even the sterling 1869 barnstorming season across the country by the Cincinnati Red Stockings (not beaten in 64 contests) was touched by the fingers of corruption. Tammany affiliate John Morrissey, leader of the Troy Haymakers and a famous pugilist who won the National Boxing Championship in 1853, was said to have placed a wager of over $50,000 on a game between the undefeated Red Stockings and his Haymakers. According to Ginsburg, Morrissey was so concerned with losing his money that he instructed his team to quit the game if they felt they might lose.3 Sure enough, after Troy had tied the score at 17 in the fifth inning, Troy seized an illegitimate opportunity to walk off the field. Although they forfeited the game, there was no mention of Morrissey having to fork over any cash. A few years later, Morrissey became a member of the anti-Tammany Hall movement.

Steven Riess wrote in Touching Base: Professional Baseball and American Culture in the Progressive Era, “amateur and professional baseball always had close links to Tammany Hall. Several prominent politicians got their start in politics through Tammany sponsored baseball teams.”4 The teams provided a means to attract ambitious, athletically inclined young men to politics. By 1869, Tammany was contributing generously to the upkeep of the Mutuals, who were all on salary, making them a truly professional team. When the New York City Council voted the team $1,500 towards a trip to New Orleans in 1869, Tweed countered with $7,500 from his own pocket, another way to secure votes.

Interest in professional baseball grew, and the first professional organization, The National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, a.k.a. the National Association (NA), was formed at a March 17, 1871, meeting held at Collier’s Café on Broadway and 13th in New York City. The league was run by the players, an undisciplined group with little business acumen, and it lasted only until 1875. John Thorn in Baseball in the Garden of Eden writes, “the low state of the National Association (NA) after the 1875 campaign could be chalked up to rampant corruption and drunkenness, as well as to radically unbalanced competition that permitted Boston to win the championship four years running.”5

The National League was formed at a meeting in the Grand Central Hotel on Broadway, between Bleecker and Bond, on February 2, 1876. William Hulbert, a midwesterner and the self-appointed mastermind behind the transference of the NA to the National League, felt that there was too much corruption in the Eastern teams. Under a ruse to gather representatives from some of the NA clubs, Hulbert claimed that he wanted to discuss some thorny problems that were undermining the game. Ironically, a locked hotel room was the venue for the introduction of the National League.

In 1877 the first major-league scandal took place, involving four ballplayers from the Louisville club. Although two of the players had previous ties with Tammany, there are no hard facts to suggest that Tammany had played a major role. There were more scandals in the ensuing years, but none necessarily perpetrated by Tammany Hall.

THOMAS NAST AND THE FAll OF TWEED AND TAMMANY

Seemingly, Tweed could not be touched. There was one man, however, who felt that Tweed was a detriment to society and had to be stopped. Thomas Nast, cartoonist for Harper’s Weekly, was that man. Nast’s most notable drawings include his rendition of a fat, jolly Santa Claus, as well as the Republican elephant and the Democratic Party’s donkey. But his greatest contribution was his full-bore attack on Tweed and his associates. Thomas Nast was an artist who realized that with his drawings, he could expose Tweed and fight his corrupt politics. “Tweed could not believe that his mighty sword was being taken down by a pen and lamented, ‘I don’t care what the papers say! A lot of people can’t read a single word! But oh, those drawings! Anybody can understand what they mean.”’6 Tweed did what he knew best and tried to buy Nast out for a reported sum of $500,000, to no avail.

Nast made life miserable for Tweed. His initial attempt to sketch him (in September 1868) ironically coincided with The New York Times drawing attention to the corruption of the Tweed Ring and Tammany Hall. Nast would eventually get his sketch and publish his first cartoon focusing on Tweed in April 1870. By June 1871 he would be depicting Governor John Hoffman as a cigar-store “Indian” being pushed by Tweed and his henchmen as a commentary on the fact that Tammny would be backing Hoffman in the 1872 US presidential election. As John Adler reported in Doomed by Cartoon, the day after the cigarstore image appeared, The New York Times called attention to Nast’s latest shot at the Ring. “Harper’s Weekly should be in everybody’s hands. The current number contains one of Nast’s best drawings-a drawing which would alone gain a large reputation for its designer.”7

In September 1870, the Times began attacking Tammany, and by 1871 was in full swing to expose the depth of corruption that existed in Tammany Hall. Edward Robb Ellis in his book, The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History, reported the headline which was the opening salvo against the Tweed Ring and subsequently, Tammany Hall. “THE SECRET ACCOUNTS ….PROOFS OF UNDOUBTED FRAUDS BROUGHT TO LIGHT…. WARRANTS SIGNED BY HALL AND CONNOLY UNDER FALSE PRETENSES.”8

Tweed was finally brought into court in January of 1873, but the trial ended with a hung jury. His second trial later that year was prosecuted much more diligently and Tweed’s cronies were kept out of the jury pool. Ultimately, as told by Ellis, Tweed was found guilty of 102 offenses and sentenced to twelve years in prison but served only one—in living quarters fit for a king. On the day that he was released, he was rearrested on a civil charge and sent to the Ludlow Street jail where he lived in a two-room suite that actually belonged to the warden. Minimum security was the order-of-the-day. Tweed lived the life of Riley. One afternoon in December 1875, accompanied by two security guards, Tweed took a carriage ride to his family’s brownstone on Madison Avenue. Then, in an elaborate getaway scheme which cost him $60,000, he walked out the back door to a waiting wagon which spirited him to a rowboat on the Hudson River. He hid out in the Palisades for three months and was then escorted to Staten Island where he hopped a schooner to the Everglades in Florida. He was picked up by a fishing boat that took him to Cuba where he boarded a ship to cross the Atlantic and landed in Vigo, Spain on September 6, 1876. Unfortunately for Mr. Tweed, he was traced to Spain. Although there were no photographs of Tweed that could identify him, the Spanish authorities amazingly recognized Tweed from a Thomas Nast caricature and turned him over to American authorities. Once back in the Ludlow Street jail, the broken Tweed caught a cold and eventually died of bronchial pneumonia on April 12, 1878. The two Tammany bosses who succeeded Tweed, “Honest John” Kelly through 1886 immediately followed by Richard Croker, brought along their own versions of corruption which were different from Tweed’s but no less damaging. Rev. Charles Parkhurst was a leader in the temperance movement and a longtime social reformer. Oliver Allen, in New York, New York, points out that Parkhurst’s observations, after a personal three-week tour of the Tenderloin (an area of New York City where vice and corruption flourished), persuaded the state legislature in 1894 to initiate an inquiry.9 The Lexow Committee, designed to embarrass Democrats aligned with Tammany, launched a thorough investigation of Tammany’s ties to New York vice and corruption.10 The committee unearthed evidence that the police were engaged in vice operations and were responsible for rigging elections and for police brutality. Another result of the Lexow Committee findings was the defeat of Tammany Hall in the 1894 municipal election. Sensing that the tides were turning against him, Croker resigned and sailed to England where he stayed for three years.

“BIG BILL” DEVERY

Tammany’s grip had been loosened, but the change in regime was not complete, and some of the leaders to rise after Tweed’s ouster also had ties to baseball. One was the corrupt police chief, William “Big Bill” Devery, whose motto was “See, hear and say nothing; eat, drink and pay nothing.” The reform police commissioner in 1895, Teddy Roosevelt (TR), vowed to nab a few upperechelon Tammany members, including Devery, but TR even had to fight members of his own party who were corrupted by the Tammany faction of the opposing party. He lasted only one year as commissioner. (Perhaps this was a blessing in disguise as he went on to become the President of the United States.) Devery eventually became instrumental in bringing an American League baseball team to New York. Ban Johnson, American League president, had been denied a New York team for two years, but Devery would change that. Johnson had brought his Western League to major league status on a par with the National League by offering a cleaner brand of baseball. By its second year of existence, the American League fielded teams in Baltimore, Boston, Chicago, Cleveland, Detroit, Milwaukee, Philadelphia and Washington. But Johnson felt that he desperately needed a New York team in order to survive. Tammany Hall, in control of the city’s real estate, thwarted every attempt on the part of Ban Johnson to establish a suitable site to erect a ball park.

In 1895, Andrew Freedman—a close friend and business partner of Tammany boss Croker—became owner of the New York Giants. As stated by Frank Graham in his book, The New York Giants: An Informal History of a Great Baseball Club, “For eight years Freedman ruled the Giants and almost completely wrecked them. Had he not been restrained he would have wrecked the league as well.”11 Freedman and Croker worked together to block Johnson’s efforts to plant an AL team in New York.

But the unpopular Freedman irritated the other team owners when he attempted to syndicate the game into what would be known as the National League Trust. As Graham further reported, “Common stock would be used in payment for the eight clubs with New York to receive 30 percent, Cincinnati, St. Louis, and Boston, 12 percent; Philadelphia and Chicago 12 percent, Pittsburg 8 percent and Brooklyn 6 percent.”12 Al Spalding, another “father” of baseball and an integral part of its early development, could not stand by and watch this travesty unfold. By way of an improperly held election in the spring of 1902, Spalding bluffed Freedman into thinking that his bold attempt to refashion baseball to fit his own needs had succeeded only in splitting the league wide open and that further measures on his part were bound to fail. As a result of this, Freedman promised to resign as soon as he could find a suitable buyer.

Meanwhile, another faction existed in Tammany Hall that was able to circumvent the efforts of Freedman to block Johnson and the AL. Devery and “Pool Room King” Frank Farrell were able to locate a rocky site for Johnson on Broadway between 165th St. and 168th St. The ballpark on the site would become known as “American League Park,” or more commonly “Hilltop Park.” Farrell and Devery became the first owners of the American League New York franchise that we now know as the New York Yankees. They purchased the Baltimore Orioles on January 9, 1903, for $18,000 and moved the team to New York City.

JACOB RUPPERT

George Ehret’s Hell Gate Brewery had the top-selling beer 1877–1888, with Jacob Ruppert Sr.’s Knickerbocker beer trailing just behind.13 After his son Jacob Ruppert Jr. took over the running of the brewery, as reported by Glenn Stout in Yankees Century, Knickerbocker needed a little push to grab the top spot in the market. Ruppert the younger joined Tammany, and his membership helped put him where he wanted to be: Number One. Knickerbocker was poured in every Tammany held bar in the city, and Ruppert eventually dominated the market.14 Tammany recognized Ruppert’s rise by giving him a spot on the finance committee alongside Andrew Freedman, the man reviled by National League team owners. Ruppert was then tapped by Boss Croker to run for Congress in order to cultivate the much needed and rising German vote. Ruppert followed the Tammany line while serving four terms 1899–1907.

Upon leaving Congress in 1907, Ruppert immersed himself in his brewery business. Stout claimed that “he owned yachts, raced horses, bred dogs and collected exotic animals, jade, porcelain, first editions, and mistresses.” But he always had an interest in owning a baseball team, preferably the New York Giants. Giants’ manager John McGraw introduced Ruppert to civil engineer Captain Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston, who made his fortune in the Spanish-American War, and then in Cuba. But the Giants wouldn’t be the team that Ruppert and Huston would acquire.

By 1914 the Highlanders/Yankees had fallen lower and lower in the standings, and Devery and Farrell were experiencing growing tensions in both their business and personal relationships. They were bleeding money, basically through a lack of any business acumen. American League president Ban Johnson, not wanting to see his New York franchise go under, set up a meeting with Farrell, Devery, Huston, and Ruppert to discuss the possibility of selling the franchise. A deal was consummated whereby Tammany Hall’s Bill Devery and Frank Farrell would sell their interests in the New York Yankees to former Tammany Hall Congressman Jacob Ruppert and Cap Huston for the sum of $465,000—quite a windfall from the $18,000 that they had spent on their charter.

By the late 1930s the influence of Tammany was beginning to wane, and the Society was officially disbanded in the 1960s. Jacob Ruppert, for his contributions to the game of baseball and the New York Yankees, was elected to the Hall of Fame in 2012.

TONY MORANTE has been a SABR member since 1995 and a baseball fan since 1949 when his father, an usher at the original Yankee Stadium, brought him to his first game. He started working in Yankee Stadium in 1958 as an usher and came aboard full-time in 1973 in the Group/Season Sales Department. Morante, with the encouragement of George Steinbrenner, instituted the Yankee Stadium Tour program and gave his first tour of the stadium in 1979. He is Director of Tours to this day. He serves as Vice-President of the Bronx County Historical Society and is writing a book about New York baseball.

SOURCES

Samuel Hopkins Adams, Tenderloin (New York: Random House 1959).

John Adler, Doomed by Cartoon (Garden City, NY: Morgan James Publishing LLC, 2008).

Robert F. Burk, Never Just A Game (Chapel Hill, NC: University of North Carolina 1994).

Edwin G. Burrows & Mike Wallace, Gotham: A History of New York City to 1898 (New York: Oxford 1898).

Edward Robb Ellis, The Epic of New York City; A Narrative History (New York: MacMillan 1966).

Mark Gallagher, The Yankee Encyclopedia (West Point, NY: Leisure Press 1982).

Daniel E. Ginsburg, The Fix Is In (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland 1995).

Warren Goldstein, A History of Early Baseball (New York: Barnes & Noble 1989).

Mark Gallegher, The Yankees Encyclopedia (West Point, NY: Leisure Press 1982).

Frank Graham, The New York Giants (Carbondale, Il., Southern Illinois University Press 2002).

Christopher Gray, New York Streetscapes (New York: Abrams, Inc. 2003).

Syd Hoff, Boss Tweed and the Man Who Drew Him (Syd Hoff 1978).

Noel Hynd, The Giants of the Polo Grounds (New York: Doubleday 1988).

Seymour J. Mandlebaum, Boss Tweed’s New York (Chicago: Elephant Paperbacks 1990).

J. D. McCabe, Jr., Lights and Shadows of New York Life (New York: Farrar, Strauss and Giroux 1970).

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

George Washington Plunkitt, Honest Graft (St. James, NY: Brandywine Press 1997).

Steven A. Riess, Touching Base (Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois: 1999).

William Ryczek, When Johnny Came Sliding Home (Jefferson, NC: McFarland & Co. 1998)

M.R. Werner, Tammany Hall (Garden City, NY: Country Life Press 1932).

Richard Zacks, Island of Vice (New York: Doubleday 2012).

Notes

1 Edward J. Rielly, Baseball: An Encyclopedia of Popular Culture (Santa Barbara, CA: ABC-CLIO, 2000), 110.

2 Daniel E. Ginsburg, The Fix Is In (Jefferson, NC and London: McFarland, 1995), 5.

3 Ginsburg, 10.

4 Steven A. Riess, Touching Base (Board of Trustees of the University of Illinois: 1999), 55.

5 John Thorn, Baseball in the Garden of Eden (New York: Simon and Schuster, 2011).

6 Syd Hoff, Boss Tweed and the Man Who Drew Him (Syd Hoff, 1978), 36.

7 John Adler, Doomed by Cartoon (Morgan James Publishing, LLC, 2008), 136.

8 Edward Robb Ellis, The Epic of New York City: A Narrative History (New York: MacMillan 1966), 348.

9 Oliver Allen, New York, New York (New York: Macmillan Publishing, 1990), 180.

10 Allen, New York, New York, 180.

11 Frank Graham, The New York Giants (Carbondale, IL: G.P. Putnam, 2002).

12 Graham, The New York Giants, 25-26.

13 Christopher Gray, “Where the streets smelled like beer,” The New York Times, March 26, 2012, RE6. www.nytimes.com/2012/03/25/realestate/upper-east-side-streetscapes-empires-of-rival-brewers.html?_r=0.

14 Glenn Stout and Richard Johnson, Yankees Century (New York: Houghton Mifflin 2002), 67.

The majority of Chicago-set baseball films have included (and occasionally showcased) the Cubs. Among them are Joe E. Brown’s Elmer, the Great (1933) and Alibi Ike (1935), the Grover Cleveland Alexander biopic The Winning Team (1952), the Dizzy Dean biopic The Pride of St. Louis (1952), and the family comedy-fantasy Rookie of the Year (1993). Sometimes, a fictional Chicago club is depicted. One example is Boulevardier from the Bronx (1936), an eight-minute Warner Bros. cartoon featuring the exploits of the Chicago Giants, whose star pitcher—a rooster—is named Dizzy Dan. (At the time, Dizzy Dean still was pitching in St. Louis; he did not join the Cubs until 1938.)

The town’s other big league nine has not been completely shut out onscreen. But it should surprise no one that two of the highest-profile Chisox films spotlight the Black Sox Scandal, and are worth comparing because they offer vastly different points of view. Eight Men Out (1988), based on the Eliot Asinof book, is one movie about baseball history that does not glorify its subjects. The Sox are portrayed in ensemble style as a rowdy, hard-playing bunch, easily the best major league team of the era. As depicted by director-writer John Sayles, however, they are also victims, oppressed as much by jowly Charles “The Old Roman” Comiskey (Clifton James), the team’s penny-pinching owner, as by underworld kingpin Arnold Rothstein (Michael Lerner).

Meanwhile, Field of Dreams (1989), adapted from W.P. Kinsella’s novel, deals with the Black Sox from a wholly different perspective. Field of Dreams is the It’s a Wonderful Life of baseball movies, a wistful fantasy about love, hope, and the timelessness of the game. Here, the defamed ballplayers are restored to their glory when their spirits come to play in an eternal, pastoral ball field. Their sins are not dramatized and, consequently, an idealized vision of American innocence is recaptured.

Eight Men Out is deeply cynical. At one point, Eddie Cicotte (David Strathairn) observes: “I always figured it was talent made a man big, you know. … I mean, we’re the guys they come to see. Without us, there ain’t a ballgame … but look at who’s holding the money and look at who’s facing a jail cell. Talent don’t mean nothing.” A heckler yells at Shoeless Joe: “Hey, Jackson! Can you spell ‘cat’?” Jackson (D.B. Sweeney) retorts: “Hey, Mister! Can you spell ‘shit’?”

In the nostalgia-tinged Field of Dreams, however, Shoeless Joe (Ray Liotta) utters “Man, I did love this game. I’d have played for food money” and “I used to love traveling on the trains from town to town. The hotels … brass spittoons in the lobbies, brass beds in the rooms. It was the crowd, rising to their feet when the ball was hit deep. Shoot, I’d play for nothing!”

Various non-baseball films also reference the scandal. In The Godfather: Part II (1974), gangster Hyman Roth (Lee Strasberg) declares: “I loved baseball ever since Arnold Rothstein fixed the World Series in 1919.” F. Scott Fitzgerald’s novel The Great Gatsby, filmed four times (in 1926, 1949, 1974, and 2013) and as a 2000 made-for-TV movie, includes the character Meyer Wolfsheim, said to have fixed the series and clearly based on Rothstein. In the 1926 film, the character is named “Charles Wolf.” In the 1949 version, he is “Myron Lupus.”

The disparate depictions of real-life ballplayers in Eight Men Out and Field of Dreams serve to emphasize that films featuring real-life individuals offer the subjective views of their creators. They also usually present skewed representations of history. Sometimes, inaccuracies result from sloppy scholarship; more often, they exist to keep the storyline lean and comprehensible.2 Both are the case in The Stratton Story, a biopic about White Sox hurler Monty Stratton.

The real Stratton, a Texas farm boy, was in 1937–38 a promising major league pitcher. But in November 1938, while target-shooting on his mother’s farm, he shot at a rabbit and his revolver accidently discharged while returning it to its holster. The bullet severed the femoral artery in his right leg, gangrene soon set in, and the leg was amputated above the knee.3

Though Stratton played for the Pale Hose in the 1930s—specific years and dates are not cited in the screenplay—The Stratton Story, made in 1949, is more a reflection of post-World War II America. Douglas Morrow, who earned an Academy Award for the film’s story and scripted it with Guy Trosper, had attended a game at the Sawtelle Soldiers Home, a Southern California facility for disabled GIs. “Seeing the armless and legless spectators, Morrow had the desire to find a film story that would give them hope,” wrote film industry reporter-biographer Bob Thomas. “He thought the story should be divorced from the war. Then he remembered Monte [sic] Stratton.”4

Stratton is played in the film by James Stewart. The ex-big leaguer was the film’s technical advisor and coached Stewart on the art of pitching. He noted that the actor “did a great job playing me, in a picture which I figure was about as true to life as they could make it.”5 Despite this hype, however, The Stratton Story is loaded with misinformation. In an effort to ensure narrative clarity, none of Stratton’s siblings are present onscreen and only two of the five seasons he spent in Chicago are represented. The hurler played in the minors in Omaha and Galveston (in 1934) and St. Paul (1935), yet only Omaha is cited in the script.

Other changes are historical revisions designed to make the scenario more acceptable to viewers. In the film, Stratton shoots himself with a hunting rifle rather than a revolver. The film ends with his return to the sport in a Houston exhibition pitting the “Southern All-Stars” and “Western All-Stars,” but he really did so in a White Sox-Cubs charity game, held in Comiskey Park, organized to raise money for him.

Other “facts” also reflect the 1940s rather than 1930s. One example: Stratton’s comeback game took place in 1939. In the film, his mound opponent is Gene Bearden, who did not pitch in the majors until 1947. The last batter he faces is Johnny Lindell, whose first big league appearance was a one-game looksee in 1941. Still others are even less explicable. When Stratton is recalled from the minors, a Clark Gable-Lana Turner film, Honky Tonk, is screening in a movie theatre. The film was released in 1941, three years after Stratton threw his last major league pitch.

Perhaps the most egregious error involves Stratton’s major league debut on June 2, 1934. This was his lone big league appearance that season, coming against the Detroit Tigers, and Stratton surrendered four hits and two runs in 3 1/3 innings. Stratton entered the game with two outs in the sixth inning, relieving Phil Gallivan. Hank Greenberg had just walked and promptly stole second on Stratton. Jo-Jo White then lined out to left field.6

In The Stratton Story, the hurler comes in to pitch in relief against the New York Yankees. “Dickey, DiMaggio, Gehrig. You can’t power past them, kid,” Barney Wile (Frank Morgan), Stratton’s fictional onscreen mentor, advises the hurler. “If you’re gonna get by,” Wile adds, “you gotta out-think ‘em, cross ‘em up, give ‘em what they don’t expect.” (According to the Chicago Tribune, the real-life Wile was “Jockie Tate, a former Texas leaguer, who always had a blank contract handy in case something good suddenly turned up.”)7

Wile’s advice may be sound, but what follows is pure fiction. The first batter Stratton faces is Bill Dickey (appearing as himself). The Bombers’ backstop homers on Stratton’s first pitch. (Stratton allowed no round-trippers in his actual debut.) Also included in the sequence is stock footage of Joe DiMaggio belting a dinger and circling the bases. There is a catch, however: The Yankee Clipper did not debut in the majors until 1936.

So Monty Stratton’s real debut was not nearly as disastrous as depicted in The Stratton Story. The question is: Why rewrite history? Simply put, having Stratton face Hall of Famer Dickey and the New York nine is more dramatically potent than having him pitch to Jo-Jo White.

The Yankees’ success also allowed for some repartee that surely would have delighted George Steinbrenner. Stratton tells his wife, “Honey, do you know there’s a tailor in Chicago that gives a suit of clothes away to any ballplayer that hits the scoreboard in center field? As of yesterday the New York Yankees are the best-dressed team in baseball.”

In June 1948, during the film’s pre-production, Roy Rowland—assigned to direct The Stratton Story—shot footage of the White Sox at Comiskey Park. By the time filming began, Sam Wood had replaced Rowland. Meanwhile, the Hollywood Reporter announced that Gregory Peck would be playing Stratton while Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, the studio producing the film, hyped Van Johnson for the part. But in the end, Stewart got the role.

The studio also reported that 72 pro ballplayers appeared onscreen. Many were at one point or another affiliated with Chicago teams; the list begins with Merv Shea, Hank Sauer, Peanuts Lowrey, Catfish Metkovich, Gene Mauch, Tuck Stainback, Lou Novikoff, Bobby Sturgeon, Steve Mesner, Lou Stringer, Red Kress, Al Zarilla, and Gus Zernial. Most significantly, Jimmy Dykes, who became the Sox player-manager fifteen games into the 1934 season and helmed the team into the 1946 campaign, appears as himself. Of Stratton’s teammates, Ted Lyons has the most screen time, but the real Lyons is not in the film. Instead, he is played by actor Bruce Cowling.8 Legend has it that Ronald Reagan, who three years later played Pete Alexander in The Winning Team, desperately wanted the Stratton role. But he was under contract with Warner Bros., which refused to lend him to MGM.9

Across the years, other real-life Chicago ballplayers have appeared onscreen. The Giants-White Sox Tour (1914) is the first notable feature-length documentary to spotlight big leaguers. Variety, the motion picture trade publication, described it as a “long reeled picture of the baseball players’ trip around the world the past winter… with here and there snatches of a baseball game played between the natives and the teams in foreign countries. The well-known ballplayers who went along are shown individually at different times, with Germany Schaefer always in the foreground whenever the camera was working…”10 (Schaefer had played for the Chicago Orphans [aka the Cubs] in 1901 and 1902.)

Some onscreen Chicago ballplayers are more obscure: Frank Shellenback, Ray French, and Smead Jolley had small roles in Alibi Ike; Shellenback also appeared in Joe E. Brown’s Fireman, Save My Child (1932). Others are Hall of Famers; Ernie Banks has appeared in over a dozen feature films, television movies, and television series. (He was billed as “Steamer Fan” in Pastime [1990], a baseball film, and played a cabbie in a 1985 Hill Street Blues episode.) A highlight reel of other Cooperstown inductees with Chicago connections begins with Rube Waddell, who pitched for the Chicago Orphans in 1901 and appeared as himself in the documentary shorts Rube Waddell and the Champions Playing Ball with the Boston Team (1902) and Game of Base Ball (1903); Leo Durocher, who managed the Cubs from 1966–72 and was seen in Whistling in Brooklyn (1943), The Errand Boy (1961), and such TV series as Mister Ed, The Munsters, and The Beverly Hillbillies; and Frank Thomas, who played The Rookie in Mr. Baseball (1992).11

Some films have actually featured the ballparks themselves. In this regard, Wrigley Field far outweighs Old Comiskey Park and its successor as onscreen locations or references. (Wrigley Field Chicago should not be confused with Wrigley Field in Los Angeles, built in 1925. Besides serving as a Pacific Coast League park, it was a playground for exhibition games featuring Tinseltown celebs. Countless films and TV shows were shot there, from the Babe Ruth feature Babe Comes Home [1927] through “The Mighty Casey,” a 1960 Twilight Zone episode, the Home Run Derby TV show, and “Herman the Rookie,” a 1965 installment of The Munsters.)12

An infinitesimal number of films feature on-location images of Old Comiskey. But one—a non-baseball film—is extra-special. Only the Lonely (1991) includes a sequence shot not long after the 1990 season, just prior to the park’s demolition. The hero is a Chicago cop (John Candy) who shares his first date with the woman he is courting by taking her to Old Comiskey, where they share an on-field picnic.

The then-new ball yard briefly appears, but the focus is on the soon-to-disappear park, which is paid homage via the line, “Boy, it’s a shame they’re gonna tear this all down.” The sequence reportedly was filmed on a Friday, with the demolition beginning the following week. Jacolyn J. Baker, an Only the Lonely location manager, described it as “a special night,” adding: “Everybody knew that this was going to be the last time anybody would be in Comiskey Park… In between takes, people were playing catch on the field. You felt that this was about to be taken away. It was really special.”13

Wrigley Field’s iconic status has more than occasionally been celebrated onscreen. The Chicago location of While You Were Sleeping (1995), a Sandra Bullock-Bill Pullman romantic comedy-drama, is established via a series of city landmarks. One, of course, is The Friendly Confines, as much a symbol of its town as Yankee Stadium is to New York. In Sleepless in Seattle (1993), baseball is a byword for romance, a loving family, and bliss. As the film opens, Sam Baldwin (Tom Hanks), a Chicago architect, has just lost his wife to cancer. As Sam mourns the loss of his beloved, there is a split-second flashback to a memory of a happier time as he, his late wife, and their young son pose outside Wrigley Field.

The first onscreen image in The Break-Up (2006) is a long shot of Wrigley during a game. The second is the red-and-white Wrigley sign. Die-hard Cubs fan Gary Grobowski (Vince Vaughn) is in the stands, and he rests his face in his hands in agony as a fly ball drops between three Cubs fielders. His pal Johnny O (Jon Favreau), who is garbed in White Sox regalia, laughs hysterically.

One of the more celebrated Wrigley references occurs in Ferris Bueller’s Day Off (1986), in which the title character (Matthew Broderick), a high school senior, cons most of the world into thinking he is deathly ill so that he can skip school. Ferris is joined by his girlfriend and best pal and the trio spends a day enjoying Chicago’s amenities. How could the afternoon pass without a Wrigley visit?

Ferris’ main nemesis is Ed Rooney (Jeffrey Jones), the pompous school dean determined to bust him. Rooney happens to be inside a pizza parlor and beside a TV set on which the Cubs contest is being broadcast. The home nine are in the field, the inimitable voice of Harry Caray notes that Lee Smith is on the mound, and the unnamed batter hits a long foul ball into the leftfield stands. Who do you suppose nabs it? None other than Ferris Bueller! But Rooney is oblivious. He asks the score and is told “nothing-nothing.” His doltishness is ever-apparent by his next question: “Who’s winning?” The not-amused pizza man tells him, “The Bears.”

Not all screen characters seeing a live Cubs game actually do so inside the park. About Last Night… (1986), a romantic drama based on David Mamet’s play Sexual Perversity in Chicago, is framed by softball games in Grant Park during successive summers in which Danny (Rob Lowe), the hero, and Debbie (Demi Moore), the heroine, meet and then become reacquainted after breaking up. In between, they watch a Cubs game not from Wrigley but from a nearby rooftop, where they can be alone. About Last Night… also features a peek into what some women might discuss at ballgames. Debbie and her pal Joan (Elizabeth Perkins) are chatting, and Debbie observes: “That second baseman’s got a really nice ass.” To which Joan responds: “I refuse to go out with a man whose ass is smaller than mine.”

In Hardball (2001), aimless Conor O’Neill (Keanu Reeves) finds direction in coaching pre-teen Little Leaguers from the Cabrini-Green housing project. At one point, Conor escorts the kids to a Cubs game. The boys are close enough to the field to attract the attention of what then was a premier Cubbie. “Yo, check it out,” one of the boys yells to his pals. “That’s Sammy Sosa over there … right there.” Alas, another boy points out that it is not Sammy, and the Sosa spotter is dissed by his pals. But then he spots the real Sosa, garbed in a warm-up jacket and wielding a bat. Quickly, the kids grab Sammy’s attention. He smiles, kisses his fingers, moves them to his heart, and shoots them a “V” for victory. The music swells on the soundtrack, and the boys are in baseball heaven.

Not only is The Blues Brothers (1980) among the higher-profile Chicago-set films of recent decades, it also features a baseball reference that is the equivalent of a grand-slam homer. At one point, the brothers Jake (John Belushi) and Elwood (Dan Aykroyd) elude the police but are not trouble-free; Jake points out to Elwood, “Those cops have your name, your address …” But not to worry. As Elwood explains: “They don’t got my address. I falsified my renewal. I put down 1060 West Addison.”

Surely, those cops are not real Chicagoans; if they were, they would not need Elwood Blues to tell them: “1060 West Addison. That’s Wrigley Field.”

ROB EDELMAN teaches film history at the University at Albany. He authored “Great Baseball Films” and “Baseball on the Web,” and, with his wife Audrey Kupferberg, “Meet the Mertzes,” a double biography of “I Love Lucy’s” Vivian Vance and famed baseball fan William Frawley. A frequent contributor to “Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game,” he has written articles on baseball and pop culture for many publications.

Notes

1. J. Weintraub, “Why They Call It the Second City,” Chicago Reader, July 29, 1993.

2. Rob Edelman, “The Winning Team: Fact and Fiction in Celluloid Biographies,” The National Pastime, Number 26, 2006.

3. “Stratton’s Leg Amputated Above Knee,” Chicago Tribune, November 29, 1938.

4. Bob Thomas, “Hollywood Highlights.” Spokane Daily Chronicle, February 24, 1948.

5. “Monty Stratton, 70, Pitcher Who Inspired Movie, Is Dead,” The New York Times, September 30, 1982.

6. www.retrosheet.org.

7. Irving Vaughan, “Plowboy to Mound Ace Is Story of Stratton’s Career,” Chicago Tribune, November 29, 1938.

8. Patricia King Hanson, Executive Editor, American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States, Feature Films, 1941–1950, Berkeley, Los Angeles, London: University of California Press, 1999.

9. “Monty Stratton, 70, Pitcher Who Inspired Movie, Is Dead,” The New York Times, September 30, 1982.

10. Rob Edelman, “The Baseball Film to 1920,” Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game, Volume 1, Number 1, 2007.

11. www.imdb.com.

12. www.wikipedia.org.

13. Michael Corcoran, Arnie Bernstein, Hollywood on Lake Michigan, Chicago: Chicago Review Press, 2013.

DURING THE SUMMER OF 1901, as the infant American League battled for acceptance, New York Giants owner Andrew J. Freedman invited fellow National League magnates John T. Brush of Cincinnati, Arthur Soden of Boston and Frank deHaas Robison of St. Louis to a fateful meeting at his Red Bank, New Jersey estate.

Until the advent of Charles O. Finley and George Steinbrenner, Freedman was widely considered the most unpopular owner in the history of the spoil. A German-Jewish bachelor who grew rich in dry goods and real estate, Freedman became the trusted crony of Tammany Hall’s Richard Croker and even served as his best man. Together the two engineered the election of Robert A. Van Wyck as the first Mayor of the consolidated City of New York. Together with financier August Belmont, he helped finance and control the new Interborough Rapid Transit subway.

By all accounts Freedman was highly unpleasant. Frank Graham termed his “Course vain, arrogant and abusive.” Albert Spalding found him “obnoxious.” Pittsburgh Sporting Life correspondent A. R. Cratty recalled that it was his duty to interview Freedman on each trip the Giants made to that city. “No job was ever harder,” he wrote on Freedman’s death, “unless it be the same act with the late John Tomlinson Brush as the target. Freedman never let you get away from the idea that he was a New Yorker. His whole attitude demanded sort of homage because he was from the big burg on the island. That high bearing cost him many friends on the circuit, or rather in the provinces. Some old and young feared him.”

Freedman once physically assaulted Brush in the barroom of New York’s Fifth Avenue Hotel. In return he was given a pasting by Brush’s friend, Bert Dasher. He once ran into J. Walter Spalding (A. G. Spalding’s brother), and so vociferously insulted him that Walter resigned from the Giants Board of Directors.

Freedman’s teams were chronic tail-enders as he fired managers with abandon, with four in 1895 alone; including an actor Harvey Watkins whose only qualification was his status as a long-Lime Giants fan. In July 1898 after an anti-Semitic remark by Orioles outfielder “Ducky” Holmes — “Well, I’m glad I’m not working for a Sheeny anymore.” — Freedman even participated in a near riot at the Polo Grounds by pulling the Giants off the field and forfeiting to Baltimore.

Brush had developed a scheme to turn the National League into one giant corporation, the ultimate baseball cartel. The plan remained secret until the National League’s annual meeting began in New York in December in 1901. On December 11 New York Sun broke the story. Common stock would be parceled out among the various clubs as follows: New York 30%; Cincinnati 12%; St. Louis 12%; Boston 12%; Philadelphia 10%; Chicago 10%; Pittsburgh 8%; and Brooklyn 6%. A five-man “Board of Regents”, to be elected by the stockholders, would govern the corporation. All managers at $5,000 each were to be hired through the Board. All players were to be “licensed” by them.

Brush’s scheme for such centralized, overreaching control emerged from an earlier plan of his to crush the American League. In mid-season, he had plotted to lure the weak Detroit and Baltimore clubs away from the American League. He would then force “Ban” Johnson to agree to a new twelve-club circuit, “dominant and in full control of baseball in this country.”

In any case, Brush’s plan drew the resentment of the four owners left out in the cold. It also raised the hackles of an American public decreasingly tolerant of “trusts” and monopolies.

As soon as the League Meeting began, Pittsburgh’s Barney Dreyfuss nominated Albert Spalding for President. As early as February rumors had Spalding replacing de ineffectual Nick Young, so as to better strengthen the circuit’s hand in the coming war. Many viewed Spalding’s election as a foregone conclusion.

It was a false prophecy. The “Red Bank” faction, as they were now called, raised all sorts of technical objections to the nomination and ended up standing firmly against Spalding voting to retain Young.

On the second day of the session, Spalding himself appeared to argue his own case. Spalding’s oratory failed to sway his opponents, however, so he took his case to the members of working press.

“In the event of my election…I will impose some conditions … that will be of lasting benefit to the game,” a perspiring and wildly gesturing Spalding thundered to a huge assemblage of reporters, “One of them I will make bold to state … I will demand that Andrew Freedman … be eliminated from the councils of the body…

The issue is now between Andrew Freedman and A.G. Spalding and when I go back actively into baseball Andrew Freedman gets out. He gets out right away or I’ll get out “

But despite Spalding’s stirring oratory, the deadlock continued for 25 ballots with AG. holding the votes of Chicago, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, and Pittsburgh, while Nick Young just as consistently held the other four.

After the 25th ballot, Freedman Brush and their allies left the room, leaving Nick Young with their proxies. Young then ruled a quorum no longer existed while Philadelphia’s Colonel John Rogers insisted that “once a quorum always a quorum.’

Young then left, but the others remained and elected Rogers chairman pro team. He called for another vote and Albert Goodwill Spalding, who was sound asleep in his hotel room, was “elected: President of the National League four votes to none.

At 4 AM Spalding ordered Young to immediately surrender League records, papers, etc. to him. Young at first demurred, allowing that he would turn the trunk of documents over to his son Robert. As negotiations proceeded, a porter hired by Spalding spirited the trunk away.

Spalding then called a league meeting and proceeded to move in for the kill. Only his four supporters answered his call, but Spalding noted that Giants Secretary Fred Knowles was lurking in the doorway while all this was going on. AG. ruled that by Knowles “presence” New York was represented. Thus, a quorum was created.

Spalding next called for a vote on the Freedman “Syndicate” plan, which not surprisingly, was quickly rejected. While Young was probably relieved to be out of all this turmoil, Andrew Freedman had no intention of surrendering so easily. Freedman went to court, and although his first motion was denied, on March 29,1902 a Judge Truax of New York ruled Spalding’s “election” invalid.

Deadlocked balloting proceeded once more. Finally on April 3, 1902 a compromise of sorts was reached. A triumvirate was named to guide executive functions as the war raged into its second year. Brush chaired the unwieldy group. Nick Young, the eternal Nick Young, was back as Secretary-Treasurer. Some allege that as part of this deal, Andrew Freedman sent word to A.G. Spalding that he would retire from baseball as soon as he gracefully could.

“Ban” Johnson, of course, was elated by such dissension in the opposition’s ranks. In every previous struggle, the National League had been firmly united, while its various interloping competitors had lacked cohesion. Now, the shoe was on the other foot.

“If they fight like a bunch of Kilkenny cats among themselves,” “Ban” Johnson chortled, “I know we have them licked.”

Following the 1901 season, the American League looked still more viable, as Johnson shifted his weak Milwaukee franchise (it drew only 139,034 in 1901) to St. Louis (which, next to Chicago, was the second largest city allowing Sunday ball.) The new franchise would utilize old Sportsman’s Park.

Late in the 1902 season, Andrew Freedman, much to the relief of his fellow magnates, bowed out of the game. He sold the Giants to John T. Brush, who in turn disposed of his Cincinnati holdings. After that season, jumping to the American League continued. Even Christy Mathewson and catcher Frank Bowerman were hopping from the Giants to the Browns.

The American Leagues invasion of Manhattan was now about to occur. Obtaining a field in Manhattan was always the major issue delaying the incursion as Andrew Freedman enjoyed considerable favor from the local politicians, so much so that any site considered would soon have a street cut through it by the City Fathers.

In December 1902 Johnson located a promising site between 142nd and 145th Streets and Lenox Avenue and the Harlem River. It was, moreover near a new station of the interborough Rapid Transit (IRT) subway. Johnson’s agents convinced John B. McDonald, an IRT contractor, to purchase the land and lease it to the American League. McDonald persuaded financier August Belmont II to come aboard. However, an IRT Director — one Andrew Freedman — soon killed the plan.

“You know that I am out of baseball, having sold my controlling interest in the New York club to Mr. Brush,” gloated Freedman to the press in early January 1902, “but you may quote me as saying that someone has been stringing these Western fellows all along.”

That situation was changing, however, and fast. On February 18, 1902 the estate of one Josephine Peyton had auctioned off twelve parcels of land for $377,800 to John J. Byrne, a nephew of “Big Bill” Devery. Devery, one of the Big Apple’s foremost gamblers, was a very active Democrat in the borough’s Ninth District, and, oh yes, a former city Police Chief.

Devery soon was in business with Frank Farrell, another major operator. Ex-saloonkeeper Farrell owned 250 pool halls in the city and was closely connected to “Boss” Sullivan, an even greater star in New York’s underworld firmament.

Coal dealer Joseph Gordon, acting as front man for Farrell and Devery approached Johnson telling him his group could easily arrange for a park to be built if given a franchise. Devery and Farrell paid $18,000 for the Baltimore franchise and installed Gordon as President. Devery’s name was missing from those listed as stockholders, although it was well known he had contributed approximately $100 000 to the enterprise.

“Me a backer!” Devery modestly, if somewhat dishonestly, exclaimed, “I only wished I did own some stock in a baseball club. I’m a poor man and don’t own stock in anything. Besides, how could I pitch a ball with this stomach.”

That’s one version of the story. Frank Graham in The New York Yankees tells another. According to sportswriter Graham, Johnson and his new ownership group were brought together by the New York Sun‘s Joe Vila. Vila had known Johnson since the League President’s own sportswriting days and introduced him to Frank Farrell.

Farrell was more than eager to purchase the Baltimore franchise, although Johnson was sure about his prospective new club owner. His reticence evaporated when Farrell produced a $25,000 check and handed it over to Johnson, proclaiming, “Take this as a guarantee of good faith. If I don’t put this ball club across, keep it.”

“That’s a pretty big forfeit,” replied an amazed Johnson.

“He bets that much on a horse race, Ban,” Vila informed him.

In any case the deal was made between the American League and its somewhat shady triumvirate. For $75,000 in actual construction costs (plus $200,000 in excavating the rocky, hilly terrain) rickety wooden 16,000 seat Hilltop Park was constructed. A local Democratic politico, Thomas McAvoy received contracts for both phases. A full five hundred workmen went to work, excavating 12,000 cubic yards of bedrock replacing it with 30,000 cubic yards of fill. On May 30, 1903 the Highlanders opened up before 16,243 fans and defeated Washington 6-2 behind “Happy Jack” Chesbro.

To help shore up the weak New York roster — which after all had finished dead-last in Baltimore — “Ban” Johnson dispatched reinforcements. Clark Griffiths, his pitching career winding down, would manage. Outfielder “Wee Willie” Keeler was lured from Brooklyn for a sizable sum. I signed Keeler, myself,” boasted Johnson,”and I found him an easy man to deal with” The strengthened club would finish a respectable fourth in 1903.

American League baseball — and with it a team to be known as the New York Yankees — had begun in New York City, the Big Apple.

One of baseball’s most absurd semiannual rituals takes place when the Atlanta Braves advance in the playoffs and a national audience is reintroduced to the “tomahawk chop,” an impression of Native American “braves” striking with a foam reproduction of the eponymous weapon. The subsequent discussion often devolves into an accounting of who is offended and who is not, the argument being that if enough Braves fans like it and not too many Native Americans are offended, the team is good to go. Commissioner Rob Manfred said as much in 2021:

The Braves have done a phenomenal job with the Native American community. The Native American community in that region is wholly supportive of the Braves’ program, including the chop. For me, that’s kind of the end of the story. … Ours is an everyday game. You’ve got to sell tickets every single day to the fans in that market. And there are all sorts of differences between the regions in terms of how the teams are marketed.1

Manfred’s approving Native Americans remain obscure; as an NBC News story noted, while he claimed to have spoken to “local Cherokees,” none of the three federally recognized bands of Cherokees dwell in Georgia (in fact there are no federally recognized Native American tribes or nations in the state at all), the Cherokees having been forcibly removed from the state by the government in the nineteenth century. “The Eastern Band of Cherokee Indians remains in nearby North Carolina,” wrote David K. Li and Graham Lee Brewer, “and Principal Chief Richard Sneed has said for years that the tribe doesn’t support the Braves’ cheer.” Added Jason Salsman, a spokesman for the Muscogee Nation, “I think for us, with the tomahawk chop, you’re not getting anything really authentic. You’re getting something that’s more of a caricature.” In a statement, the president of the National Congress of American Indians, Fawn Sharp, rejected Manfred’s remarks: “[T]he name ‘Braves,’ the tomahawk adorning the team’s uniform, and the ‘tomahawk chop’ that the team exhorts its fans to perform at home games are meant to depict and caricature not just one tribal community but all Native people. … Native people are not mascots, and degrading rituals like the ‘tomahawk chop’ that dehumanize and harm us have no place in American society.”2

This gets at the root of the “tomahawk” problem: If the gesture is meant to connect the Braves to the supposed actions of the Native Americans who, as we shall see, did not inspire the club’s name, then it invokes a traditional one-dimensional depiction of violence that is not only simplistic and overly broad, but doesn’t apply to Georgia’s history in particular: the Cherokees forced onto the “Trail of Tears” to Indian Territory by President Andrew Jackson and his successors were more likely to wield a plow than an ax; they were primarily farmers whose lands were coveted by White settlers, gold prospectors, and, like the Georgia governor who announced in 1821 that it was his intention to swap “all the red for a white population,” politicians who had a vision of an ethnically homogeneous state.3

Braves fans only began chopping in 1991, when outfielder Deion Sanders joined the team. Sanders had played college football with the Florida State Seminoles, a team with its own Native American-appropriated iconography whose fans did a version of the chop. Atlanta-Fulton County Stadium organist Carolyn King legitimized the activity by adding a two-note “tomahawk song” both accompanying and prompting the fans to chop. “My music teacher would be real proud of me,” she said. “A and G: that’s my life.”4

The two-note chop is an example of an ethnic pastiche, a leitmotif that may bear limited resemblance to the actual music of the group it purports to signify, yet has been heard so often that it trains the ear to hear it as if it does. Consider the use of the instantly identifiable “Indian” musical trope that accompanies the opening titles of John Ford’s 1948 Fort Apache (composed by Richard Hageman) or the themes by Max Steiner that accompany the Comanche scenes in Ford’s The Searchers (1956), both of which bear similarities to the “chop” music and singalong. This use of this music is, if not overtly racist, then reductionist, because it isn’t the thing it purports to be, and it comes freighted with all of the imagery it has underscored – in the case of Native Americans, generally attacks on White settlers and soldiers.

As Timothy E. Scheurer wrote in Music and Mythmaking in Film: Genre and the Role of the Composer, the use of these themes displaces the Native American from the American community as a whole even as they serve another, more overt purpose (underscoring a dramatic scene or, in the case of the Braves, exhorting the crowd):

Kathryn Kalinak has astutely observed that because we always hear the main title when the stagecoach is traveling across the landscape, “it is the Indian music, ironically, that seems out of place in Monument Valley, and Native Americans who seem outside the natural order of things in Stagecoach [another Ford film]. Thus music positions Native Americans not only as Other, but as intrusive, as not belonging.” That sense of otherness, from a musical standpoint, is the result of the marked musical elements used to underscore the presence of the Native American in the Western.5

King, the ballpark organist, was not immune to the power of these “native” leitmotifs, which occur in countless other Westerns. Indeed, in 1991 she said she had been playing the two-note theme, “about two years ago, because it sounded as if it would go with a team called the Braves.” (Emphasis added.)6

Manfred’s comment seemed to suggest not only that there isn’t an objective standard of appropriate conduct when it comes to ethnic appropriation and parody (“Is there harm?”), but that Braves fans are so invested in the club’s Native American iconography that giving it up would hurt the team. One of the most perverse aspects of that stance – besides its capitulation to racial caricature in the name of profits – is that the Braves name originally had little to do with Native Americans, but was chosen by a carpetbagger owner pursuing an internecine rivalry with a fellow creature of New York’s Democratic Party machine.

The National League team playing in Atlanta can claim a lineage going back to the foundational nineteenth-century Cincinnati Red Stockings, but it wasn’t referred to as the Braves until well into its 1871-1952 Boston residency. As with many teams in the early twentieth century, the club’s early nicknames were transient and informal, more often the invention of the press than a reflection of any effort at official branding by the team. The nascent Braves’ team colors early on were red, reflecting their founding, and they were referred to as the Reds or Red Stockings. They were called the Beaneaters for a while, a lost chance at advertising synergy. There wasn’t much imagination involved in coining these names: When the team was co-owned by Pittsburgh brothers George and John Dovey, the club became the Doves; when the team was held by New York lawyer William H. Russell, it was called the Rustlers.

This period of wavering nomenclature ended – with one brief exception – after Russell died in late 1911. On December 12 the team was purchased by the latest of a series of out-of-town owners when a partnership of former player-manager, Players’ League organizer, and attorney John Montgomery Ward, New York construction-company owner and political barnacle James Gaffney, and other investors consisting “almost entirely of members and associates of New York’s Tammany Hall.”7

Ward was initially team president and Gaffney treasurer, but the arrangement didn’t last long; tiring of conflict with his major partner, he sold out to him approximately eight months after buying in. The major legacy of his brief ownership may have been the Braves name. Ward biographer Bryan Di Salvatore suggested that the team “adopt[ed] the symbol of Democratic Tammany Hall: The Delaware Indian chief, Tammamend in ‘full headdress’” [sic] as an enticement to Gaffney to join his group. Harold Kaese’s Boston Braves assigns the impetus to Gaffney, saying he “let Ward pick the manager [Johnny Kling] but he selected the new nickname for his team. … They kept their white uniforms and red stockings, but instead of the Old English ‘B’ they bore on their bosoms, they now had the profile of a proud Indian. The new name caught on. It was not only original, it was aboriginal.”8

Kaese’s pun was inaccurate. The chief was a symbol of Tammany, not of North America’s indigenous peoples, even if it was hard to distinguish the two without realizing what was meant by the addition of the chief’s profile to the uniform (not initially on the breast but on the sleeve; it eventually gravitated to the uniform front and, in 1930, shrank to fit within the blouse’s column of buttons but was blown up to terrific size on the players’ backs). Tammany Hall invoked Native American iconography from its earliest days, but only in the insular, cosplaying way of fraternal organizations; they had no affinity or interest in actual Native Americans or their affairs.9

The origins of New York City’s Democratic Party machine began with a semimythical seventeenth-century Delaware or Lenni Lenape chief named Tamanend. His name had many spellings and was soon Americanized to Tammany. In 1682 or 1683, William Penn, proprietor of the colony that would come to be called Pennsylvania in his honor, met with Tammany and other Delawares under a tree at Shackamaxon (a site near the Delaware River in present-day Philadelphia) and agreed to a treaty of amity, not to mention land. Tamanend reportedly proposed that the Delawares and the colonists would “live in peace as long as the waters run in the rivers and creeks and as long as the stars and moon endure.”10

In a period in which expansion-minded White colonists often clashed violently with Native Americans, Tamanend became a symbol of the good Indian. “He never had his equal,” a missionary wrote. “He was in the highest degree endowed with wisdom, virtue, prudence, charity, affability, meekness, hospitality, in short, with every good and noble qualification.”11 Early Pennsylvanians, in a practice that spread to other colonies, adopted him as a hero and celebrated May 1 as Saint Tammany’s day. As John Adams later wrote, “The people here have sainted him and keep his day.”12 Tammany societies sprang up around the continent. One of them, the Society of St. Tammany or Columbian Order, was founded in Manhattan in 1788.13

Not initially an explicitly political organization except in its anti-aristocratic, pro-democratic leanings, Tammany (the “Columbian” aspect soon faded) immersed itself in Native American costume and jargon from the outset. The leader was the Grand Sachem; upper-level members were Sachems. The official who ran the meetings was a Sagamore, while the doorkeeper (that is, the sergeant-at-arms) was called a Wiskinskie. For a while, the president of the United States was granted the honorary title of Kitchi Okemaw, or Great Grand Sachem. Ordinary members were Braves. Tammany even had a bespoke calendar that divided the year into seasons and seasons into moons, and took its dates from Columbus’s “discovery” of America, the Declaration of Independence, and the organization’s founding. Thus July 1800 was, by Tammany’s reckoning, “Season of Fruits, Seventh Moon, Year of Discovery three-hundred and eighth; of Independence twenty-fourth, and of the Institution the twelfth.”14

Beginning around 1800, Tammany underwent a change reflecting national political conflicts between Federalists and the Democratic-Republican Party, or the Jeffersonian Democrats. Aaron Burr, that most controversial of the founding fathers, was one of the earliest and most effective political organizers in the nation’s history. At this turn he was working to capture New York’s electoral votes for the anti-Federalist Thomas Jefferson against presidential incumbent Adams. He found in the Tammany Society a group of like-minded politically engaged members. Gradually, Burr’s “Little Band” of Democratic-Republican operatives became part of the Tammany Society and Tammany Society members become part of Burr’s organization until the difference between the two evaporated.15

Due to the turbulence of his own career, Burr quickly gave way to others, but his acolytes remained in control of Tammany. As the Democratic-Republicans broke up and were supplanted by the Democratic Party, Tammany changed in turn. Its metamorphosis into one of the most perfect (which is not to say beneficent or productive) political machines in the country didn’t happen all at once, but by the middle of the nineteenth century, something that would become legendary had emerged. The key was the nation’s embrace of universal male suffrage and the concurrent influx of a great wave of immigrants, many of them fleeing the Irish potato famine. Tammany Hall, the Society’s meeting place, often referred to in the press as “the Wigwam,” became a byword for the organization itself. It originally had a mild nativist bent, but its midcentury leaders realized that in this increased democratization of the country came power if only they made themselves indispensable to these newly minted Americans. Richard Condon perfectly encapsulated Tammany’s apotheosis in his 1969 novel Mile High:

All of them – Italians, Irish and Jews – had come from countries where they’d had to fight like tigers to defend themselves from the steady wars declared on them by their own governments. The Irish were bashed and starved by the English; the Jews got it in the head from the Cossacks and the Czar; the whole citizenry of the south of Italy, and particularly Sicily, were looked on like some dumb and wild beasts by all the Italians in the north. They had to be against authority to survive. And when they got out and made it to the City of New York, where Tammany offered nothing but help and shelter in exchange for their votes, their inward-supported leaders took the guidance and the dignity. … It was a democracy contained and sustained by the politicians in good working partnership with the gangs who would man the polls on Election Day with knucks and clubs and knives and guns and guide their own ethnic groups through to vote the straight ticket. … The gangs needed the politicians for protection against the courts and the police and the law, and the politicians needed the sure vote. It was to be a long and increasingly successful marriage, perhaps never to end.

[It was] the greatest democracy, all of it exquisitely organized precisely along the lines of the church itself by Honest John Kelly. … The individual’s vote was captured by the tenement captain, who reported it to the block captain. All the block captains were members of the election district committee and accountable to an election district captain … who reported to [the] district leader, the equivalent of a cardinal. He reported to the executive committee of Tammany Hall, the city’s Curia, together with thirty-three other district leaders, and directly to the Leader of Tammany himself, their pope. All of them along the chain handed out bail money, Christmas turkeys, coal, jobs, justice, and clothes in return for votes and loyalty.16

Beginning with Burr, the Tammany’s hallmark was careful attention to the voters themselves. As historian Kevin Baker noted in The New York Game, “By the 1880s, Tammany was coming into its own as an organization, collecting payments and doling out favors and contracts with machinelike efficiency. Its power rested ultimately on the city’s new immigrants and America’s neglect of them. They went to Tammany for help in getting all the basic necessities of life, for jobs and bail money and shoes, and for the famous turkey at Christmas.

“In return, Tammany asked for their votes. These it used to wield power over everything in the public realm – street paving, garbage collecting, policing, firefighting, building inspection – and thus put itself in position to provide the jobs and the turkeys and the favors. The machine’s reach extended everywhere. … The machine was inherently conservative. Tammany might have been the only institution at the time that consistently cared for the poor, but it needed them to stay poor. … In Tammany’s New York, anything might be granted as a privilege, but nothing as a right.” As Oliver E. Allen put it, “Though ostensibly a friend of the poor, Tammany was in bed with the rich.”17

Tammany was, from an early date, in bed with baseball as well. It wasn’t just that, as Baker noted, the notorious grafter William M. Tweed “ran his own club, the New York Mutuals, who were reputed to have a payroll of $38,000 – all of it supplied by taxpayers, in the form of no-show jobs in the city’s Street and Coroner’s departments” or that Tweed’s famous fire company gave Christy Mathewson his “Big Six” nickname, but that its members and hangers-on achieved such wealth through what member George Washington Plunkitt called “honest graft” that they bought teams. As the “Ode to Tammany” reminded the sachems and Braves,

To public views he added private ends, And loved his country most, and next his friends.18

James Gaffney was one of those friends and practitioners of graft, though the “honest” aspect was debatable, at least to a few prosecutors. “A rather rough-looking, large and fleshy fellow wearing a loud suit and derby … the soul of shameless affability,”19 Gaffney was referred to as “Tammany’s mystery man” and “a power under cover” whose position has been unprecedented.”20 He was born on Manhattan’s packed, impoverished Lower East Side and grew up in what was then known as the Gas House District (as hard as it is to imagine now, for nearly 100 years, Consolidated Gas once had huge storage tanks parked in the East 20s). As with another Tammany hack turned baseball owner, Big Bill Devery, Gaffney began his public career as a police officer. Unlike Devery, he didn’t stay on but instead veered more directly into politics, becoming an election district captain under Grand Sachem Charles Francis Murphy’s brother Billy. This put Gaffney in position to go into partnership with the leadership. In 1901 Gaffney became the part-owner and frontman for the New York Contracting & Trucking Company. Although the majority owner “wished to remain anonymous,” it was likely Charles Murphy, appropriately nicknamed Silent Charlie.

Gaffney’s chance at the big money came when Tammany advanced him to the Board of Aldermen. “Honest graft” meant using inside knowledge of government actions to steer public dollars one’s own way. For example, if one knew the city was looking to condemn a parcel and take it for some civic need, he might buy himself a piece of the parcel before the news got out and caused the price of the land to skyrocket. The Murphy-Gaffney enterprise also practiced more direct, exploitative forms of self-dealing. In 1904 the Pennsylvania Railroad wanted to dig tunnels to their eponymous station. The Board of Aldermen, run by Gaffney, said no. The railroad then awarded the digging contract to New York Contracting, though its bid “had actually been $400,000 higher than that of a competitor, and whose owners had virtually no experience in the contracting business.” With that, the board reversed its decision.21

Gaffney got into real trouble only once: In 1903 he was indicted for using his position as alderman to enrich New York Contracting, having in 1901 acquired a lease on a pier at West 79th Street for the company despite aldermen being prohibited from leasing any city property. Gaffney claimed the case was politically motivated. The state Supreme Court ultimately vacated the charges on the grounds that the law was too vaguely written; surely the legislature had not intended to penalize someone who had “nothing more than a stockholder’s relation to the corporation having contracted with the city,” as Gaffney, to all appearances, had with New York Contracting. Multiply this sort of activity across all of the many city institutions in Tammany’s tentacle-like grasp and the amount looted from the taxpayers quickly reaches stunning proportions. This is what the Braves chief represented – not Native American heroism or nobility, but low theft.22

What the Braves represented to Gaffney was an opportunity to front a more legitimate business than New York Contracting. In this he was similar to his Tammany rivals Devery and Frank Farrell, a gambler and the owner of an opulent but illegal casino (who among other things ran a casino-protection racket). The two found their positions threatened by a reformist wave and attempted to cultivate a more refined image by buying the rights to the American League’s defunct Baltimore franchise, transferring it to New York, and founding the team that would come to be known as the Yankees. (Some of the money behind them belonged to Charles Murphy’s son-in-law.) Gaffney also wanted to beat Farrell to success in the game. This he did within a few years – the Farrell-Devery Highlanders never won anything – and then got out.23

The Braves lost 101 games in Gaffney’s first season of ownership and 82 in his second. Free of Monte Ward, he hired George Stallings as manager and in year two hit it big: the 1914 “Miracle Braves” won 94 games, ran away with the National League pennant, and swept Connie Mack’s Philadelphia Athletics in the World Series. Inspired, Gaffney built Braves Field (unsurprisingly nicknamed The Wigwam), a ballpark so cold and expansive as to be both extravagantly pitcher-friendly and fan-unfriendly given the way it kept home runs at bay even after the introduction of the lively ball in 1920. Not only did this cripple the team in its long war with the Boston Red Sox, but Gaffney retained ownership of the ballpark even after he sold the Braves club in January 1916. His heirs continued to collect rent long after his 1932 passing, a burdensome expense for subsequent owners. The National League would be forced to take over the lease in 1935. Gaffney’s widow and one of his former Braves partners finally sold the park back to the team in 1949.24

Thus Gaffney remained a direct influence on the team’s fortunes for approximately eight times as long as he owned the team, but the name he selected has lasted even longer. The team abandoned it only once: After the disastrous 38-115 season of 1935, a year so bad it chased both Babe Ruth and owner Emil Fuchs out of baseball, the new proprietors, fronted by J.A. Robert “Bob” Quinn, changed the name. For the next five years, the Boston National League club would be called the Bees and its park the Beehive. The club reverted to its old name in 1941, just as the actual braves of Tammany were beginning to go into eclipse, the result of failing to support Franklin Roosevelt in his run for the presidency, multiple corruption investigations, and 12 years of setbacks at the hands of reform-minded Republican Mayor Fiorello La Guardia.

Just as the chop itself is a Braves “tradition” that goes back only to 1991 when its adoption came about as the confluence of a tune played by the Braves’ organist and the club’s return to competitiveness after the mostly fruitless 1960s, ’70s, and ’80s (two division titles, two 100-loss seasons), the Atlanta baseball team’s ethno-appropriation was not a matter of inevitability but choice. It was a hollow reference to Tammany Hall that was retroactively filled in with faux allusions to actual Native Americans, including the addition of a tomahawk to the uniform jersey in 1946, a revised (roaring) chief’s head to the sleeve in 1957, and such cringeworthy episodes as the nearly 20-year run (1966-1985) of mascot Chief Noc-A-Homa, who came complete with a tipi in left field. Over time, the Braves took something that was general and made it very specific, adding a troubling component that emphasizes the violence of a people who, at the time Georgia and the federal government dispossessed them, did not wield tomahawks but were yeoman farmers and Christians, just like those who coveted their lands. Even in Boston the invocation of Native Americans as mascots was in questionable taste given New England’s ethnic cleansing in the aftermath of the Pequot War (1636-1638), but at least that was an event that could be dismissed as colonial-era primitivism, whereas the removal of the Cherokee remains a stain on the United States of America.25

Going back to 1991, the Braves have been one of the most successful franchises in baseball, playing in one of the most dynamic cities in America. Conversely, the original “Braves” notion is archaic, the tomahawk chant is archaic – as Eastern Band Principal Chief Richard Sneed said in 2019, it’s “so stereotypical, like old-school Hollywood.”26 Whether one approves of its branding or not, for so long as it remains the team will remain a contradiction, a club very much at the cutting edge of the present with iconography which is confusingly rooted in the past.

STEVEN GOLDMAN has been part of Baseball Prospectus for much of the past 20-plus years and currently serves as Consulting Editor and columnist. He edited, co-edited, and contributed to multiple volumes of BP’s best-selling annual and edited Mind Game, It Ain’t Over ‘Til It’s Over, and Extra Innings: More Baseball Between the Numbers. He’s also the author of Forging Genius, on the education of Casey Stengel, and Baseball’s Brief Lives: Player Stories Inspired by the Infinite Inning. His work has appeared in numerous other places ranging from Deadspin to The Daily Beast. He’s the host of the long-running Infinite Inning pod- cast, which sits at the crossroads of baseball, history, politics, and culture. He resides in New Jersey, where his wife, children, and cats total six.

Acknowledgments

Portions of this article are adapted from Steven Goldman, “If You Have to Ask, It’s Probably Racist,” Baseball Prospectus, October 28, 2021, https://www.baseballprospectus.com/news/article/70791/ycliu-atlanta-braves-racist-chant-chop/.

Notes

1 Chelsea Janes, “Braves Name and the ‘Chop’ Get Rob Manfred’s Support Before Game 1 of the World Series,” Washington Post, October 26, 2021.

2 https://www.nbcnews.com/news/us-news/tribes-push-back-against-mlb-claims-native-americans-approve-tomahawk-n1282516; https://sports.yahoo.com/national-congress-of-american-indians-rob-manfred-braves-tomahawk-chop-000709992.html.

3 Pekka Hämäläinen, Indigenous Continent (New York: Liveright, 2022), 392.

4 https://www.nytimes.com/1991/10/13/sports/sports-of-the-times-the-braves-tomahawk-phenomenon.html; Jeff Schultz, “Tomahawks? Scalpers? Fans Whoop It Up,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, July 17, 1991: B6.

5 Timothy E. Scheurer, Music and Mythmaking in Film: Genre and the Role of the Composer (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2008), 150.

6 Terence Moore, “Organist Carolyn King Encourages Tomahawking ‘Wave’ into a Ripple,” Atlanta Journal Constitution, August 9, 1991: 71.

7 Bryan Di Salvatore, A Clever Base-Ballist (New York: Pantheon, 1999), 380.

8 Harold Kaese, The Boston Braves (New York: Putnam, 1948), 129.

9 http://exhibits.baseballhalloffame.org/dressed_to_the_nines/database.htm.

10 William Pencak, Historical Dictionary of Colonial America (Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press, 2011), 233.

11 Alfred Connable and Edward Silberfarb, Tigers of Tammany (New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1967), 21.

12 Terry Galway, Machine Made (New York: Liveright, 2014).

13 Connable and Silberfarb, 21.

14 Gustavus Myers, The History of Tammany Hall (New York: Boni & Liveright, 1917), 5.

15 Oliver E. Allen, The Tiger: The Rise and Fall of Tammany Hall (Reading, Massachusetts: Addison-Wesley. 1993), 13.

16 Richard Condon, Mile High (New York: Dial Press, 1969), 5-6, 19.

17 Kevin Baker, The New York Game: Baseball and the Rise of a New City (New York: Knopf, 2024), 29, 51-52; Allen, The Tiger, ix.

18 Baker, 29; Connable and Silberfarb, 9.

19 Jill Jonnes, Conquering Gotham: A Gilded Age Epic (New York: Viking, 2007), 157.

20 “James E. Gaffney, Sportsman, Dies,” Brooklyn Times Union, August 17, 1932.

21 Allen, The Tiger, 210.

22 “J.E. Gaffney Dies at East Hampton,” New York Times, August 17, 1932: 17; Kaese, The Boston Braves, 128; “Alderman Indicted in Pier Lease Case,” New York Times, July 22, 1903: 14; “Gaffney Wins on the Doubt,” New York Times, September 22, 1903: 2.

23 Luc Sante, Low Life: Lures and Snares of Old New York (New York: FSG, 1991), 172; Baker, The New York Game, 113; Kaese, The Boston Braves, 128.

24 Robert S. Fuchs and Wayne Soini, Judge Fuchs and the Boston Braves, 1923-1935 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 1998), 26; “Fuchs Remains Braves’ Head,” Boston Globe, February 6, 1935: 1; “Perini Signs to Purchase Braves Field,” Boston Globe, January 22, 1949: 5.

25 Jeff Schultz, “Tomahawks? Scalpers? Fans Whoop It Up,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, July 17, 1991: 14; Dave Anderson, “The Braves’ Tomahawk Phenomenon,” New York Times, October 13, 1991: 8:1.

26 Johnny Edwards, “Chiefs of Georgia Native Tribes Call Tomahawk Chop Inappropriate,” Atlanta Journal-Constitution, October 13, 2019: A1.

This actor-baseball connection is no twentieth-century phenomenon. It dates from the last decades of the nineteenth century, prior to the dawn of the motion picture (not to mention the popularity of radio and television). Back then, the best-known American actors were New York-centric stage stars: They may have toured the provinces, but they always came home to Manhattan. And more than a few were fervent sports fans. “Many actors are fond of athletic enjoyments,” observed the New York Dramatic Mirror in 1889. “The natural game has no stauncher worshippers than those of its devotees that are connected with the stage.”1

Two such fan-atics were De Wolf Hopper and Digby Bell. Not only were they best pals and acclaimed entertainers: They also predated Tallulah Bankhead as fervent New York Giants devotees. The duo regularly attended Giants games; they and other late-nineteenth-century notables were members in good standing of “The High and Mighty Order of Baseball Cranks of Gotham,” a group that inhabited their own section in the Polo Grounds grandstand. Indeed, in his 1927 memoir, Hopper noted that “Digby Bell had converted me to baseball. … We were at the Polo Grounds every free afternoon.”2 They also followed the team on road trips and palled around with players. One of endless examples: On April 21, 1889, the New York Times reported that, on the previous day, Edward “Ned” Williamson, “the popular short stop of the Chicago Club,” arrived in New York and was feted at a supper by restaurateur Nick Engel. Among those present were Hopper, Bell, and a blend of baseball folk, entertainers, and civic figures.3

Hopper and Bell also were acknowledged baseball experts. In a review of A Ball Player’s Career, a reminiscence penned by Cap Anson in 1900, an unnamed writer began his critique by noting, “Joy untold will burst into the hearts of thousands of lovers of the National game when they learn that ‘Pop’ Anson has written a book. Who knows more about baseball than he? Why, not even Digby Bell or De Wolf Hopper.”4 Thirty-eight years later, New York Times columnist John Kieran dubbed the duo “as rabid a pair of fans as ever rooted home a run or roasted an umpire.”5

Legend has it that Hopper and Bell were even partially responsible for dubbing the team the Giants. Some sources claim that the name caught on in June 1885 when Jim Mutrie, the team’s manager, referred to his players as “My big fellows! My Giants!” after an extra-inning triumph over the Philadelphia Phillies. Others note that Mutrie might have employed the name earlier that season. However, in 1936, Horace C. Stoneham, the team’s president, declared that the nickname was directly related to Hopper and Bell. An “editorial note” printed in the New York Times claimed that, upon arriving home from a successful road trip in 1883, the actors were among a group of fans who told Mutrie that the team had played “like giants.”6

*****

The lives of Digby Bell and De Wolf Hopper reflect on both the American theater and the baseball world during the last two decades of the nineteenth century. Bell was born in Milwaukee in 1849 and died in Miss Alston’s Sanitarium on West 61st Street in Manhattan 68 years later. He won fame as an actor-comedian who, as noted in his New York Times obituary, was “one of the best known of American light opera singers. Some of his best known roles were in the operas of Gilbert and Sullivan.”7 But baseball was never far from his thoughts. On September 12, 1888, the Times reported that Bell was in excellent spirits. Boccaccio, an opera featuring the actor, had just opened at Wallack’s Theatre and was a “pronounced success.” The paper noted that Bell “was thinking how pleasant it was not to have anything new to study, no rehearsals, and nothing more serious to worry about than an occasional defeat of the Giants, for he is a baseball crank of the first magnitude. …”8

The year before, Bell had traveled with the team to Boston. Upon returning, he observed, “I never saw the boys play better in my life. They hit the ball hard, ran the bases like sprinters, and their fielding – well, it was just superb.” He added, “Don’t I wish that De Wolf Hopper had been in Boston! Why, he would just go into ecstasies if he saw the manner in which the Giants handled [King] Kelly and his eight shadows.” Bell then went on to offer a detailed description of the “unjust” decision-making on the part of “Umpire Sullivan.”9

Hopper, who was born in New York City in 1858, was described in his 1935 New York Times obit as the “noted musical comedian, whose career on the stage extended into the youthful memories of the oldest theatregoers …”10 The fifth of his six wives was Hedda Hopper, the actress and gossip columnist of note; William Hopper, their offspring, was best known for playing private detective Paul Drake on the long-running Perry Mason TV series. But Hopper’s lasting fame was linked to his countless renderings over a 45-year timespan of “Casey at the Bat,” the Ernest Lawrence Thayer classic. He first performed “Casey” at Wallack’s Theatre on August 14, 1888, less than a month before Bell’s Boccaccio played that venue. The actor then was appearing with the McCaull Opera Company in Prince Methusalem – both he and Bell were McCaull regulars – and Hopper recited the poem during the second act to amuse the New York Giants and Chicago White Stockings players who were in attendance as guests of the management. (Coincidentally, one noteworthy winning streak ended just as Hopper debuted “Casey at the Bat.” Earlier that day, the White Stockings bested Tim Keefe by a 4-2 score, thus handing the Giants star hurler his first loss after 19 straight victories.) 

Hopper’s “Casey” connection was not limited to the stage. In 1916 he starred onscreen in Casey at the Bat, a feature-length drama that is an extension of the poem. The actor plays Casey, a grocery clerk and “the baseball hero of Mudville,” who is devoted to his niece (May Garcia). On the day of an important game against Frogtown, she injures herself while climbing a tree and he refuses to leave her side. The yells of the fans persuade Casey to come to the rescue of his team in the ninth inning, but he strikes out as he notices a messenger in the ballpark who he thinks has arrived with bad tidings about the child.11

Happily, there is a filmed record of Hopper actually reciting “Casey.” In 1922 he did so in a DeForest Phonofilm, utilizing the sound-on-film technology developed by Theodore Case, and the result is a fascinating, unintentionally funny curio. Hopper, garbed in a tuxedo, a slightly askew bowtie, and the most obvious hairpiece, emerges from behind a curtain. “I am very glad that ‘Casey at the Bat’ has been asked for,” he tells the camera, boastfully adding that if he “should forget a line or two here or there … most anyone could prompt me.” He then recites the poem, becoming so involved in its emotion that his eyes close and pop open at the appropriate dramatic moments. Hopper orates as if he is trying to reach the patron in the last row of a theater balcony; back in 1922, sound-on-film was revolutionary and actors knew nothing of playing down to the camera. But to say that Hopper chews the curtain behind him is no understatement. He trills his r’s and wr’s; at the finale, as he describes how there is no joy in Mudville, he is practically bawling. After completing the recitation, Hopper bows slightly, smiles, and disappears behind the curtain.12

But Hopper’s love of baseball transcended his fame as the premier “Casey” interpreter. At his death, he was performing in Kansas City, Missouri, despite his failing health and, as reported in the New York Times on September 24, 1935, “A strange rounding out of fate appeared in the actor’s last words, which referred to his interest in baseball. … At 11 o’clock last night Mr. Hopper had insisted upon sitting up in bed to smoke a pipe while he looked over the sports pages of a newspaper. Physicians insisted that he needed a rest and tried to persuade him to go to sleep. But he waved them aside with a characteristic gesture. ‘See you tomorrow, Doc,’ he said. ‘I never sleep until 3 A.M. anyway. Run along while I see what the (St. Louis) Cards did.’” The following morning, a nurse discovered that Hopper had died in his sleep.13

In an homage to Hopper published in the paper, it was noted that by 1888 the actor “had been a baseball fan for years, had spent every free afternoon at the game and had with Digby Bell put on an annual Sunday night benefit for the local team.”14 Certainly, the duo was not the first to entertain entire ballclubs. For example, on July 16, 1877, the Boston and Chicago nines were in the audience at Chicago’s Adelphi Theatre. On May 5, 1884, the Grand Rapids team was on hand for a performance of Iolanthe in Grand Rapids; the following evening, they were joined by the Muskegon team for a performance of Olivette in Muskegon. But Hopper and Bell were the first to do so regularly.

In their presentations, they often concocted baseball-related entertainment. Such was the case when Hopper debuted his “Casey” recitation. Another example: On October 15, 1888, the New York Times reported that Hopper and Bell were among the organizers of a “roaring benefit” at the Star Theatre for the New York nine, which had just been crowned “League champions of 1888.” “Enthusiastic patrons of the pastime willingly paid $5 and $10 for seats,” the paper reported, adding, “It was estimated that the benefit would net the players between $4,000 and $5,000.” Some of the era’s top actors performed, and many of the numbers were baseball-related. “De Wolf Hopper and Harry Kernell entertained the audience in their own peculiar way for not less than half an hour,” the Times observed, “and the former made some felicitous remarks about the national game.” The finale, featuring Hopper, Bell, and British-American actress/contralto Laura Joyce Bell, Digby’s second wife, was “a comic baseball scene. Digby Bell, wearing a bird cage for a mask, a washboard for a protector, and boxing gloves, stood behind a china plate, where Laura Joyce Bell gracefully wielded a bat and waited eagerly for Hopper, standing in a low-neck dry goods box, to pitch. The scene was irresistibly comic.”15

And still another: On June 10, 1891, the Times reported, “Friday will be baseball night at Palmer’s Theatre. Manager Mutrie of the Giants and Capt. Anson of the Chicago club have accepted an invitation from Manager Harry Askin of the ‘Tar and Tartar’ company and Digby Bell for that night.” The paper added that “Mr. Sydney Rosenfeld and Digby Bell in collaboration have fixed up a lot of bright lines sparkling with diamond dust, so that the players will feel quite at home. Digby Bell will also recite his poem, ‘The Boy on the Fence’…”16 (Various sources list alternate titles for Bell’s creation. Some call it “The Boy on the Left Field Fence.” In 1909 Bell cut an Edison recording titled “The Tough Kid on the Right Field Fence.” It was hyped in The Edison Phonograph Monthly for its “realistic baseball talk indulged in by the youngster from a ‘deserved’ seat on the right field fence. He tells the home team how to play the game and what he thinks of them when their playing isn’t up to his standard. The Record ought to be a real treat to everyone who understands the language of our national game.”17 The following year, Bell recorded a second baseball ditty: “The Man Who Fanned Casey.” And yet another was “A Baseball Monologue.”)

Hopper and Bell were thrilled whenever their Giants copped what then was the equivalent of a World Series victory. In 1894 the Giants bested the Baltimore nine to win the Temple Cup, which was presented to the team in a ceremony at the Broadway Theatre. The venue was decorated with bunting, flags, pennants, and other baseball-linked items. The New York Times reported on October 11 that Hopper, Bell, and “a few other cranks have interested themselves sufficiently to undertake the distribution of seats and boxes for the occasion. Yesterday Messrs. Hopper and Bell astonished the members of the Stock Exchange by appearing in their midst. In the interest of the cause three choice boxes were sold for $100 each, and seats in the orchestra were readily bought, the brokers paying $5 each for them.” The proceeds were divided among the Giants players.18

During this period, newspapers featured accounts of the efforts of Hopper, Bell, and others to organize baseball-related benefits for ailing colleagues. On May 25, 1886, two actor-nines – one consisting of comedians and the other of tragedians – battled each other in the Polo Grounds in what the New York Times described as “a match … for the benefit of the family of the demented playwright, Bartley Campbell.” Playing for the comedians were Hopper, Burr McIntosh (“a new and handsome leading man [with] a record as a heart wrecker”), Francis Wilson (“the funny man in ‘Ermine’” and later the first president of Actors Equity), and Robert C. Hilliard (“the Adonis of Brooklyn society”); the tragedian nine consisted of dramatic actors and stage managers. McIntosh, a former Princeton University sprinter who a quarter-century later would play Squire Bartlett onscreen in D.W. Griffith’s Way Down East, was described as “the best ball player in either of the teams, and he opened the scoring with a home run which gladdened the hearts of the ladies and which made the gentlemen envious.” Additionally, three kegs of beer were placed near third base. All ballplayers who made it to third were encouraged to take a swig of the brew. The five-inning contest ended with the comedians on top, 19-7.19

Then, as reported in the Times on July 31, 1887, a “game of baseball has been arranged by members of the theatrical profession at present in the city, to take place at the Polo Grounds Thursday, Aug. 4, for the benefit of the popular soubrette, Miss Rachel Booth, whose illness during the past season has so seriously interfered with the fulfillment of her business engagements.” The “nines, umpires, and scorers” were selected from a long list of “well-known actors,” among them Hopper, Bell, Hilliard, William Hoey, umpire-turned-actor Frank Lane, and Maurice Barrymore, father of John, Lionel, and Ethel.20 And then on September 7, 1888, Hopper and Bell participated in a Polo Grounds contest pitting actors and journalists, which the Times labeled “one of the funniest games of ball in the annals of American history.” Hopper manned first base; his “long frame was attired in a loud red-and-yellow striped bathing suit, a life preserver, a pair of boxing gloves, and a straw bonnet, (which) would have made the veriest pessimist believe there was something worth laughing at in life after all.” Bell, meanwhile, was garbed “in his ‘Black Hussar’ schoolboy suit” and “pitched in the English bowling style.” The game was a benefit for Carl Rankin, a well-known minstrel who was terminally ill; he passed away two months later.21

Using time-lapse photography, the film shows the demolition of the famous Star Theatre. Judging from the various exposures, the work must have gone on for a period of approximately thirty days. The theater opened in 1861 as “Wallack’s Theatre,” and was re-christened the “Star” in 1883. It was well known for it’s excellent productions, and a number of celebrated actors and actresses worked there, among them Ellen Terry. The celebrated English actor Henry Irving made his first stage appearance in America at the Star. Using time-lapse photography, the film shows the demolition of the famous Star Theatre. Judging from the various exposures, the work must have gone on for a period of approximately thirty days. The theater opened in 1861 as “Wallack’s Theatre,” and was re-christened the “Star” in 1883. It was well known for it’s excellent productions, and a number of celebrated actors and actresses worked there, among them Ellen Terry. The celebrated English actor Henry Irving made his first stage appearance in America at the Star.

*****

It was during this period that show folk were banding together to form organizations of various types and for various purposes. In 1874 a group of actors established the Lambs Club, a social club; Hopper served as its president from 1900 to 1902. In 1888 Edwin Booth founded The Players, for the purpose of “the promotion of social intercourse between the representative members of the dramatic profession and the kindred professions of literature, painting, sculpture and music, and the patrons of the arts.”22 Hopper and Bell were among those involved with the White Rats of America, a male-only labor union formed in 1900, which lobbied for actors rights and against the monopolistic practices of vaudeville theater owners.

Meanwhile, athletic clubs of all kinds were sprouting up. The April 5, 1890, edition of the New York Clipper included a lengthy list of scheduled events for dozens of these organizations, from the Canadian Amateur Athletic Association to the Scottish American Athletic Club, the Acorn Athletic Club, and the Lorillard Debating and Athletic Association.23 Quite a few were baseball-oriented. The Amateur Baseball League, for example, comprised teams representing the New Jersey Athletic Club, Staten Island Cricket Club, Staten Island Athletic Club, and Englewood Field Club, with a championship series played each season.24

One such organization even linked actors with athletics. In 1889, Hopper, Bell, and other baseball-loving celebrities established the Actors’ Amateur Athletic Association of America, otherwise known as the Five A’s (or 5 A’s). On the afternoon of April 25, its organizers convened at Manhattan’s Bijou Opera House, where they adopted a constitution, agreed on the regulations that would govern the group, and elected officers. As reported in the New York Times, the constitution “provides that any gentleman who derives his living from the theatrical profession is eligible to sic membership if, of course, he is in good standing.” The organization was described as “a representative social athletic club of theatrical men, and the athletic feature will be carried out as soon as practicable.” Additionally, a “clubhouse will be secured, and will be fitted up with gymnasium, library, billiard and pool tables, bathing facilities, and other conveniences.” Dues were $1 per month; those who joined were assessed an initiation fee of $5; those wishing a life membership were charged $50.25

Given his standing as a theatrical luminary and his fascination with baseball, it was not surprising that De Wolf Hopper became the Association’s president. The first vice president was Burr McIntosh. William H. Crane, an actor-producer who enjoyed a 50-plus-year career primarily on the stage, was the second vice president. Not all the officers were performers. Two in fact were then affiliated with the Fourteenth Street Theatre. J. Wesley Rosenquest, its manager (and later owner), was the treasurer, while James T. Maguire, its business manager, was the secretary. Those on the governing committee were performers. The most prominent were Digby Bell and John Drew, described by critic-columnist-writer Ward Morehouse as the “leading light comedian of the era,” who was the uncle of John, Lionel, and Ethel Barrymore.26 Among the others on the committee: Robert Hilliard; Frank Lane; and Nat C. Goodwin, a comic actor best known for his mimicry.

The following month, the Association rented the clubhouse of the Land and Water Club, near Whitestone, Queens, but quickly realized that the cost would be prohibitive. So they sublet the property; for the time being, members could exercise on a track operated by the Manhattan Athletic Club. Almost immediately, they formed a “nine” and began scheduling ballgames. The May 10 Brooklyn Daily Eagle reported that “De Wolf Hopper and Bob Hilliard will be in their glory to-day. There is no matinee today and at the Manhattan Athletic Club’s grounds … the actors’ nines of the County Fair Club and the American Actors’ Athletic Association will play a match at 4 P.M.”27 The following month, the group held its inaugural track-and-field meet. Members competed in foot races, high jumps, mile walks, and broad jumps, with baseball represented via “throwing the baseball” and “running bases” contests.28 The New York Herald categorized the actor-athletes as “the heavy men, the juvenile men, the walking gentlemen and the deep, scowling villains of the stage,” adding that the “elongated comedian De Wolf Hopper stood on the field as judge and frequently became very much excited. Digby Bell … was also a judge and graced the meeting with his own peculiar smile. …” Lastly, the “obstacle race” winner even came away with the “De Wolf Hopper Cup.”29

Then in July, it was back to baseball as the Five A’s traveled to Middletown, New York, to battle a squad from the New York State Homeopathic Asylum for the Insane. Here, the thespians were bested by the “insane young gentlemen,”30 but this victory came with a bit of chicanery. As reported in the New York Press, an “elaborate spread was prepared for the Actors before the game, and to this the jolly Thespians afterward laid their defeat. While the overfed Actors were dozing in various parts of the field the erstwhile lunatics knocked out 20 runs. The actors scored but 8. Of course this was a tremendous victory for the Asylums, and their joy nearly sent the convalescent patients back to padded cells.” On a second visit, “the wily Asylums again tried to steer the actors up against a sumptuous spread, but they were not to be taken in. …The Asylums’ pitcher went back to his pristine wildness …” and he and his teammates lost to the Five A’s, 17-2.31

It was at this time that the Association rented a property, at 43 West 28th Street, that would serve as its clubhouse and headquarters and be furnished in “a ‘rich, not gaudy’ manner.” Amenities would include “a parlor gymnasium and a plunge bath.”32 By then, membership had topped 320. And the Five A’s were not the only organization to settle into a new residence: For part of the 1889 season and all of 1890, the New York Giants played their home games in what would be the second of three different Polo Grounds. Upon seeing the spacious new ballyard, slugger Roger Connor predicted that no player ever would belt a ball over the center-field fence. Not surprisingly, however, Connor himself was the first to do so, and a policeman reportedly retrieved the horsehide and returned it to the ballplayer. As noted in the New York Press, “Connor presented it to De Wolf Hopper, who will have it gilded, appropriately inscribed and hung up in the (Five A’s) club house. …”33

Additionally, more ballgames featuring the Five A’s were scheduled. On August 15 they took on a reporters’ nine at the Polo Grounds. McIntosh was the Association’s pitcher, while Hopper was an umpire; the final score was 13-12 in favor of the actors. More than 1,200 patrons paid 50 cents each to watch the contest, with the money split between the organizations.34 And the following year, they even played exhibitions against two pro teams. One, appropriately, was the New York Giants. It was noted in the April 16, 1890, New York Sun that the Five A’s “did not do themselves justice yesterday. … For three innings they played fairly good ball, but one or two bad plays completely broke them up, and then it became simply a question as to how many runs the big fellows would make.” (The final score of the nine-inning contest was 34-2 in favor of the Giants.)35 The actors also suited up against Ward’s Wonders, a Brooklyn club in the newly formed Players League.36 The Wonders were captained and managed by John Montgomery Ward, who in 1885 established the Brotherhood of American Base Ball Players, a secret organization that supported players rights. The Players League, which ceased to exist after one season, was an offshoot of the Brotherhood.

The Five A’s filed its certificate of incorporation in March 1890; its listed purpose was “to encourage all manly sports and to promote physical culture and social intercourse.” 37 It also was announced that, on Decoration Day, an Association nine would trek to New Jersey to take on the Red Bank Athletic Club. The following month was a busy one for the group. On June 12, they sponsored a track-and-field event at the Manhattan Athletic Club grounds. The competition included races, dashes, walks, hurdles, high jumps, and a “throwing baseball for members” contest.38 Then on June 25, they took on the Manhattan Athletic Club’s baseball team in a game that, as announced in the New York Times, “promises to be quite a notable one among amateur baseball people.”39

Off the playing field, the Association sponsored benefits to raise money both for themselves and for charity. On June 10, 1889, the New York Press reported that Five A’s members participated in a benefit at Palmer’s Theatre to solicit funds for victims of the Johnstown Flood, which had occurred a week and a half earlier.40 Five days later, the National Police Gazette noted that they “gave a matinee performance at the Metropolitan Opera House last week, in aid of the building fund. It was a big affair: The house was packed; the lobbies were full of girls selling flowers and fellows standing around and buying them. Our athletic actors got up a splendid programme.” Some were baseball-related: Hopper and actor Wilton Lackaye, for example, appeared in a comic skit in which they respectively played Cleopatra and Mark Antony. In it, Antony “dresses himself in a baseball umpire’s outfit and Cleopatra rushes around with a big lobster attached to her girdle.”41 Exactly one year later, a second benefit was organized at the same venue. The National Police Gazette described one of its highlights as a “monster minstrel exhibition” featuring more than 20 performers, among them Hopper and Bell.42

In January 1891 members served as ushers in a program at the Broadway Theatre. That May, the organization put together yet another entertainment at the Metropolitan Opera House, with the program including everything from the De Wolf Hopper Opera Company chorus backing up Della Fox as she performed her song “Columbia” to a scene from Romeo and Juliet. The finale featured the “Five A’s Circus,” spotlighting a hodgepodge of riders, acrobats, gymnasts, vaulters – and Hopper as the ringmaster.43 In February 1893 the Association organized a benefit, held at the Star Theatre, with the New York Times reporting that the “house was crowded, and the audience appeared to greatly enjoy the efforts of a score of well-known performers. …”44 Then in May 1894 a Five A’s benefit was held at Tony Pastor’s Theatre. The Times noted, “Many of the leading vaudeville artists now in the city have volunteered for the occasion. …”45

Not all those associated with the Five A’s were acknowledged stars. One of the more notable was a future legend of the silent cinema who then was a 20-something struggling to establish himself on the stage. In 1892 the “Professional Cards” sections of quite a few issues of the New York Dramatic Mirror cited review quotes from various productions featuring William S. Hart (“Mr. W.S. Hart, [as] Phasarius, has the most difficult part in the play, but he renders it most acceptably,” wrote the Louisville Courier Journal), and added that he may be contacted through the Five A’s. The Mirror also ran the following: “W.S. Hart, Leading Support, MacLean-Prescott Company” and “W.S. Hart, Leading Man, Mlle. Rhea’s Company, 1892-93.” His address remained in “care (of) Five A’s, 43 West 28th Street, New York.”46

Nonetheless, all was not sunshine and smiles with the Five A’s. In May 1893 the organization’s hierarchy began publicly condemning what the New York Times described as the “financial forgetfulness” of many of its members. More than 100 of them reportedly were in arrears of their dues, not to mention the cost of beer and wine that had been imbibed in the clubhouse. That May each one received a letter, signed by “Alfred D. Lind, Attorney and Counsellor at Law,” threatening legal proceedings if the funds remained unpaid. The club, noted Lind, “has a lot of dead timber on its hands and it wants to get rid of it. Many of its members think it is a big thing to belong to this great club of professionals, but they think it is too much for a good thing to pay for it.”47 The following month, two of them were the first to be sued: Lee Harrison, an actor, who owed the Five A’s $51.65; and Charles Davis, the business manager of Proctor’s Theatre, who owed $17.90. “I’ve started the ball rolling with these two suits,” declared Lind, “and others will follow.”48

Then in January 1894, the Association nearly was evicted from its quarters. Its rent had not been paid for two months and it was reported in the New York Sun that the Five A’s “has been in difficulties for some time. It recently tried to collect some $7,000 outstanding dues.”49 The New York World noted that its members in good standing were “much depressed” over the eviction. While the crisis was averted when enough money was collected to meet the rent, it was announced that “the club is now looking for smaller quarters.”50

Apparently, none were found and, within a couple of years, the Five A’s quietly disappeared from the public record. No longer were there media accounts of their fundraisers and sporting contests, baseball and otherwise. A host of other businesses soon occupied their West 28th Street clubhouse, including music publishers, florists, and “dramatic agents”; one was the fledgling William Morris agency, which went into business at this address as “William Morris, Vaudeville Agent.” Most interestingly, in 1896, Vitascope, an early film-production company, built an open-air studio on its roof. Two years later, in relation to the Five A’s, the New York Dramatic Mirror quietly noted that “the society gave up its clubrooms several years ago.”51

By then, the ballyhoo that accompanied the Five A’s inception had dissipated – and De Wolf Hopper and Digby Bell were immersing themselves in other theatrical enterprises. When Bell died in June 1917, more than 500 Lambs Club members and an unspecified number of Players Club representatives attended his funeral. Hopper was one of the pallbearers.52 And when Hopper died, in September 1935, two of the subheads on the New York Times report of his funeral arrangements were: “Delegations from Players and Lambs to Attend Services” and “Every Branch of the Theatrical Profession to Be Represented Among Pallbearers.” 53

Of course, by that time, no pallbearer was aligned with the Actors’ Amateur Athletic Association of America.

ROB EDELMAN is the author of Great Baseball Films and Baseball on the Web (which Amazon.com cited as a Top 10 Internet book), and is a frequent contributor to Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game. He offers film commentary on WAMC Northeast Public Radio and is a longtime Contributing Editor of Leonard Maltin’s Movie Guide and other Maltin publications. With his wife, Audrey Kupferberg, he has coauthored Meet the Mertzes, a double biography of Vivian Vance and super-baseball fan William Frawley, and Matthau: A Life. His byline has appeared in Total Baseball, The Total Baseball Catalog, Baseball and American Culture: Across the Diamond, NINE: A Journal of Baseball History and Culture, The National Pastime: A Review of Baseball History, The Baseball Research Journal, and histories of the 1918 Boston Red Sox, 1947 Brooklyn Dodgers, 1947 New York Yankees, and 1960 Pittsburgh Pirates. He is the author of a baseball film essay for the Kino International DVD Reel Baseball: Baseball Films from the Silent Era, 1899-1926; is an interviewee on several documentaries on the director’s cut DVD of The Natural; was the keynote speaker at the 23rd Annual NINE Spring Training Conference; and teaches film history courses at the University at Albany (SUNY).

Photo credits

Digby Bell, Harvard Theatre Collection.

Notes

1 “Athletic Actors,” New York Dramatic Mirror, May 4, 1889: 6.

2 De Wolf Hopper and Wesley Winans Stout, Once a Clown, Always a Clown (Boston: Little Brown and Company, 1927), 76.

3 “Short Stops,” New York Times, April 21, 1889: 3.

4 “Morality in Books,” New York Times, June 2, 1900: BR12.

5 John Kieran. “Sports of the Times: Si Sets Things Right,” New York Times, September 5, 1938: 21.

6 “Nickname of ‘Giants,’” New York Times, February 22, 1936: 11.

7 “Digby Bell, Actor, Dies in 69th Year,” New York Times, June 21, 1917: 13.

8 “A Cold Night for Digby Bell,” New York Times, September 12, 1888: 8.

9 “Sullivan Has Friends Who Say Boston People Who Criticize Him Are Cranks,” New York Times, August 18, 1887: 3.

10 “De Wolf Hopper, 77, Dies in Kansas City,” New York Times, September 24, 1935: 23.

11 Rob Edelman, Great Baseball Films (New York: Citadel Press, 1994), 51.

12 Edelman, 51-52.

13 “De Wolf Hopper, 77, Dies in Kansas City.”

14 “Hopper Idol of Playgoers for Half Century,” New York Times, September 24, 1935: 23.

15 “The Pennant Is Theirs,” New York Times, October 15, 1888: 5.

16  “Theatrical Gossip,” New York Times, June 10, 1891: 8.

17 The Edison Phonograph Monthly, Vol. VII, No. 5, May 1909: 18.

18 “To Receive the Temple Cup,” New York Times, October 11, 1894: 6.

19 “It Was a Comic Victory. Actors Make a Frantic Attempt to Play Ball,” New York Times, May 26, 1886: 5.

20 “Actors To Play Baseball,” New York Times, July 31, 1887: 12. Throughout her life, Ethel Barrymore – who was born in 1879 and debuted on Broadway in 1895 – prided herself on her love of baseball. Barrymore family biographer Margot Peters noted that Ethel “knew the batting averages and pitching records of every player in the major leagues; during the World Series, she hung over her radio.” In 1951, she cited her all-around major-league all-star team: Hal Chase [first base]; Charlie Gehringer [second base]; Pie Traynor [third base]; Honus Wagner [shortstop]; Babe Ruth [left field]; Tris Speaker [center field]; Ty Cobb [right field]; Mickey Cochrane [catcher]; and Walter Johnson, Christy Mathewson, and Carl Hubbell [pitchers]. Then on October 12, 1952, she was the mystery guest on What’s My Line?,, the TV game show. Given the time of year, it was not surprising that the first question panelist Dorothy Kilgallen asked her was, “May I assume that you are not in baseball?” After her identity was established, host John Daly observed, “I understand that you have a rather substantial interest in a thing called baseball.” After she acknowledged this, Daly asked Barrymore if she was in town for the World Series. She responded that she had seen “all of them on television.” Margot Peters reported that on June 17, 1959 – the day before her death – Ethel “listened to a Dodgers-Milwaukee Braves doubleheader.”)  

21 “A Comedy of Errors: Yesterday’s Benefit Ball Game Between Actors and Journalists,” New York Times, September 8, 1888: 3.

22 theplayersnyc.org/history.

23 “Athletic. Coming Events,” New York Clipper, April 5, 1890: 8.

24 The Sun’s Guide to New York (New York: R. Wayne Wilson and Company, 1892), 88.

25 “Actors’ Athletic Club,” New York Times, April 26, 1889: 4.

26 Ward Morehouse, Matinee Tomorrow: Fifty Years of Our Theater (New York: Whittlesey House, 1949), 2.

27 “The Babies Win,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, May 10, 1889: 1.

28 Outing: An Illustrated Monthly Magazine of Sport, Travel and Recreation,

The Outing Company Limited, April 1889-September 1889: 59-60.

29 “Thespian Athletes on the Field,” New York Herald, June 13, 1890: 9.

30 Documents of the Assembly of the State of New York (Albany: James B. Lyon, State Printer, 1890), 93-94.

31 “Lunatics As Ball Tossers,” New York Press, March 23, 1890: 19.

32 “Theatrical Gossip,” New York Times, July 31, 1889: 8.

33 “Diamond Tips,” New York Press, July 11, 1889: 4.   

34 “A Plucky Rally,” Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 16, 1889: 1.

35 “Sport With the Base Ball,” New York Sun, April 16, 1890: 4.

36 https://covehurst.net/ddyte/brooklyn/1890.html.

37 “General Metropolitan News,” Chicago Tribune, March 20, 1890: 2.

38 “Actors as Athletes,” New York Times, June 13, 1890: 2.

39 “A Great Baseball Day,” New York Times, June 24, 1890: 3.

40 “Stars of Hope for Johnstown,” New York Press, June 10, 1889: 2.

41 “Masks and Faces,” National Police Gazette, June 15, 1889: 2.

42 “Masks and Faces,” National Police Gazette, June 14, 1890: 2.

43 “Notes of the Stage,” New York Times, May 24, 1891: 13.

44 “Degradation of Amusement,” New York Times, February 27, 1893: 8.

45 “Theatrical Gossip,” New York Times, May 3, 1894: 8.

46 “Professional Cards,” New York Dramatic Mirror, February 6, 1892: 7; February 20, 1892: 7; April 23, 1892: 8; May 7, 1892: 14; September 17, 1892: 17; October 19, 1892: 17; November 5, 1892: 17; December 10, 1892: 17; etc. 

47 “Five A’s After Delinquents,” New York Times, May 18, 1893: 8.

48 “Five A’s Members Sued,” New York Herald, June 15, 1893: 13.

49 “Five A’s and No W’s,” New York Sun, January 16, 1894: 2.

50 “The ‘5 A’s’ Nearly Evicted,” New York World, January 16, 1894: page number undecipherable.

51 “Questions Answered,” New York Dramatic Mirror, October 8, 1898: 14. 

52 “Digby Bell’s Funeral,” Billboard, June 30, 1917: 4.

53 “De Wolf Hopper Funeral Friday,” New York Times, September 25, 1935: 23.

Yet, in a modest way, The Kid from Cleveland is a noteworthy film. It is so for its on-location filming throughout the city, allowing contemporary viewers a Polaroid portrait of Cleveland as it looked sixty years ago. But what really makes the film special is the number of real-life Cleveland Indians in its cast. Their appearances not only lend the film authenticity but also make for a valuable visual and historical record of a place and time in baseball history.

Bona fide major-leaguers may be seen in feature films from Right Off the Bat in 1915 and Somewhere in Georgia in 1916 to Analyze That (2002), Anger Management (2003), and Fever Pitch (2005). None of these films—including the Major League movies, which remain the best-known films that spotlight the Tribe—feature entire big-league ball clubs. The Kid from Cleveland does. Practically the whole Cleveland organization appears in the film: players from Gene Bearden and Ray Boone to Bob Kennedy and Ken Keltner, Early Wynn and Sam Zoldak; team owner Bill Veeck and player-manager Lou Boudreau; coaches Tris Speaker and Bill McKechnie; pitching coach Mel Harder; trainer “Lefty” Weisman; and the recently retired Hank Greenberg, then working in the Indians front office. A celebrated ex-Indian, Lew Fonseca, is credited as the film’s “Baseball Supervisor.”

Also cast in The Kid from Cleveland, whose working titles were Pride of the Indians and The Cleveland Story, are real-life sportswriters (local scribes Gordon Cobbledick, Franklin Lewis, Ed McAuley) and umpires (American League arbiters Bill Summers, Bill Grieve). They and the “Members of the Cleveland Indians Baseball Club,” are thanked at the film’s finale. Movie-star-handsome player-turned-actor John Berardino, who later played Dr. Steve Hardy on the TV soap General Hospital—and who, as Johnny Berardino, graced the rosters of the Browns, Indians, and Pirates between 1939 and 1952—is the one baseball personality who does not play himself. He is cast as Mac, a shady character who fences stolen goods. (As a publicity stunt, Veeck insured Berardino’s mug for $1 million during his tenure in Cleveland.) The film’s associate producer was a local celebrity: K. Elmo Lowe, a fixture at the Cleveland Play House for almost a half-century as actor, director, and artistic director. Lowe appears onscreen as well, playing an undercover cop.

The title character in The Kid from Cleveland is neither a fireballing “Nuke” LaLoosh-like rookie nor a composed Henry Wiggen-like veteran. He is Johnny Barrows (Russ Tamblyn, when he still was billed as “Rusty”), a troubled youth. Johnny’s alienation stems from his lack of rapport with his stepfather. But he loves baseball, and in particular the Cleveland Indians. During the course of the story, Johnny finds a mentor in Mike Jackson (George Brent), the team’s kindhearted radio broadcaster.

It is the presence of the Indians, however, that makes the film essential viewing for the baseball historian or buff—and, more pointedly, the Cleveland sports aficionado. When The Kid from Cleveland was released, the Indians were the reigning World Series champs. They play the role of the “godfathers” recruited by Jackson to help Johnny. Furthermore, interspersed throughout the film are shots culled from the team’s official 1948 World Series promotional film, and footage from a postseries victory parade and regular-season games at Municipal Stadium.

Most of The Kid from Cleveland was filmed on a twenty-two-day production schedule in May and June of 1949, with many of its exteriors shot on location on the city’s streets, bridges, and playgrounds. For example, sequences featuring the ballplayers in spring training were filmed not in the hot desert sun of Tucson, Arizona, but in Cleveland’s League Park, the team’s home field (and known as Dunn Field from 1916 through 1927) from 1910 to 1932 and 1934 to 1946. A scene set outside Tucson, on a ranch where the ballplayers consume a barbecue supper was shot on East 87th Street, north of Euclid Avenue.

In a 2005 post on the film’s Internet Movie Database “user comments” page, an anonymous Clevelander recalled:

I was an “extra” in the movie, which was filmed at the end of [the] street where I lived, near Hough Ave. It was very near League Park, at [the] other end of my street! Some of the kids in [the] neighborhood were also in the movie, of course we were all not paid but did have a lot of fun with the “stars” and were treated to a ballgame, taken by bus [to Municipal Stadium], where we ran around under the bleachers.

Upon seeing the film on television several years ago, the writer observed that it was “a bit of a ‘tearjerker’ as [it] brought back many memories of the days after WWII and the pride we in Cleveland had, and I still have, for our Indians.”

It is wholly appropriate, then, that The Kid from Cleveland opens with the following written prologue: “This is the story of a city, a kid and a baseball team.” (This line was slightly altered for the marketing campaign. The film was publicized as “the story of a kid… a city … and 30 Godfathers!,” with headshots of twenty Indians lining the top of its advertising poster.) It also was appropriate for the Indians organization to be involved with a film about a troubled teen. At the time, Veeck and his ballplayers were supporting efforts to fight juvenile delinquency in Cleveland.

Combating underage misbehavior is not the only critical issue explored in the film. Two years before The Kid from Cleveland went into production, Larry Doby became the first African American to play in the American League. This landmark event is paid homage onscreen. Near the finale, Bill Veeck offers a well-intentioned (but entirely fictitious) anecdote in which he describes Doby’s first major league at-bat:

When Larry first joined the club, he was kind of in a spot, something like Jackie Robinson of the Brooklyn Dodgers …. His first time up, he was nervous. Very nervous. Much more nervous than the average rookie. Because, you see, he had the additional load of some 15 million people riding on his back. And that’s quite a load. Larry wasn’t just batting for himself. He was batting for some 15 million people—15 million people who really believed in him.

And so when he struck out, he felt he let all those people down …. And after Larry struck out, he made that long trip to the dugout, and he went down the dugout steps and walked the entire length and sat down at the extreme corner. He was the picture of absolute dejection. And the next hitter was Joe Gordon, one of baseball’s really great hitters. [Gordon is shown on screen taking two strikes.] Joe took a terrific cut at the ball. He missed it by at least six inches more than Larry had. I don’t say that he did it intentionally. But I know he’s never missed a pitch by that much before. Joe too made that long trip back to the dugout. He didn’t stop, but walked the entire length to sit next to [Doby]. He too sat in exactly the same position, to prove to this boy that, here at least, he was just another ballplayer.

The critic for Variety, the show-business trade publication, described this sequence as “heart-warming,” adding that it “should enhance [Doby’s and Gordon’s] popularity.” Even though its content is fabricated, what really matters is the essence, rather than the specifics, of the anecdote and what it reveals about Larry Doby’s plight, Joe Gordon’s character, and Bill Veeck’s commitment to integrating major league baseball. Moreover, other sequences in which Doby and Satchel Paige casually mix with their fellow Indians are extraordinary for the late 1940s, a time when the civil-rights movement was in its infancy and Hollywood movies of recent vintage mostly depicted black characters as comical caricatures: maids and mammies, janitors and train porters who fecklessly wrecked the English language.

Perhaps it was the social-issue aspect of the film that drew its director, Herbert Kline, and screenwriter, John Bright, to the project. Kline was most acclaimed as a maker of humanist, anti-Fascist documentaries, while Bright was a co-founder of the Screen Writers Guild. By the early 1950s, in the wake of the House UnAmerican Activities hearings in Washington and the dawn of McCarthyism, both were blacklisted from Hollywood.

During the shoot, fiction and reality clashed in other ways. Just as the film was released, Leonard Lyons, the syndicated Broadway columnist, reported:

Republic Pictures hired Bill Summers to umpire a ballgame in The Kid from Cleveland, in which Lou Boudreau is called upon to hit a home run. The script provided that the first pitch to Boudreau was to be a strike, the second a ball—and the Boudreau homer …. Summers called the first one a strike, and then called the second one “strike two” … The director, Herbert Kline, corrected the umpire. “That’s a ball. Look at your script” … ‘I’m looking at the plate,” Umpire Summers replied. “Tell your pitcher to look at the script.”

The Kid from Cleveland had its world premiere at the Stillman Theater in the city on September 2, 1949, several days before going into national release. The Sporting News reported that “the premiere … was staged in Cleveland with all the fanfare of a Hollywood opening,” with many of the stars, professional actor and ballplayer alike, on hand to scribble autographs and wave to onlookers.

The film earned mixed notices, with the negative far outweighing the positive. A representative review was penned by Howard Barnes, writing in the New York Herald Tribune. Barnes described the film as

a quasi-documentary which is a silly patchwork of clips, amateur acting and a case history. Ball fans will find interest in authentic shots of the 1948 World Series …. Film fanciers will discover an extraordinarily inept production.

New York Times critic Bosley Crowther dubbed The Kid from Cleveland “a labored tale” and “generally routine.” His piece ran on September 5, and he noted, “In fact, Mr. Veeck and the Indians pay so much attention to [helping Johnny] that one perceives (since the time is the present) why maybe the Indians are in third place.” (Bob Dolgan, writing in the Plain Dealer in 2001, observed that the “distraction” of filming The Kid from Cleveland during the baseball season “is blamed for [the] Indians’ fall to third place” in the 1949 campaign.)

One of the few who liked The Kid from Cleveland was the Variety reviewer. After labeling the film “a sermon on juvenile delinquency,” the scribe admitted that its story was “nicely developed,” noting that it was “best when it focuses on the diamond triumphs and defeats of the 1948 World Champions.” The critic also observed that the film “incorporates the intense baseball enthusiasm in Cleveland.”

Ed McAuley, writing in The Sporting News, gushed over The Kid from Cleveland-perhaps because he appeared in the film. Among his observations: “The players prove surprisingly adept at switching to the world of make-believe” and “the baseball sequences are excellent.” At least he admitted, “This writer, being no movie connoisseur, can only say he got a big kick out of seeing a bunch of guys he knows so well act themselves.”

McAuley offered various witticisms, culled from his baseball knowledge and insider status as a sportswriter. He noted that Gene Bearden “talks much more than he did in The Stratton Story [another 1949 release, in which he played himself], when his contribution to the culture of his times consisted of the muttered word: ‘Okay.'” He observed that Ken Keltner “says more words in the picture than I’ve heard him speak in 13 years, but maybe that’s only because he doesn’t like to talk to sports writers.” McAuley added:

The script writer pulled an amazing boner when he ended the 1948 World Series with Dale Mitchell making the last putout. Lou Boudreau will wonder why he took the trouble to put Bob Kennedy in left field to bolster the defense in the final innings.

McAuley may have been the only “nonactor” participant who did not toss beanballs at the film. In Everything Baseball, James Mote quoted Lou Boudreau on The Kid from Cleveland: “I would like to buy every print of the film and burn it. Boy, that picture was a dog.” Added Veeck, “I have one unwritten law at home that I adhere to: I never allow my kids to mention or see that abortion.” On another occasion, the owner commented on the ballplayer performances by observing, “We failed at playing ourselves.” While interviewing Bob Feller in Cooperstown several years ago, I asked him if he had any memories of making The Kid from Cleveland. He had nothing whatsoever to say about the experience. In his book, Now Pitching, Bob Feller: A Baseball Memoir, he described it as “an entirely forgettable movie” and quipped, “Those ’30 godfathers’ must have been the only people who ever saw it. At least that’s what we hope.”

Despite this negativity, some contemporary Tribe fans and movie aficionados treasure The Kid from Cleveland. In 2006, Plain Dealer film critic Clint O’Connor published a piece on the all-time best baseball movies. The Kid from Cleveland was not one of them. He later reported that he received “about 50 e-mails and phone calls” from readers who suggested films they felt had been “tragically omitted.” Near the top of the list was The Kid from Cleveland. “Some callers suggested I was out of my mind for not including this one,” O’Connor reported, “and that it not only was a great baseball movie, but a great movie, period.”

Whatever one’s opinion of the film’s artistic merits, it is undeniably fun to watch The Kid from Cleveland and savor the presences of its long-ago ballplayer-heroes. One scene in the film features Johnny Barrows on a ballfield during spring training. Johnny has been warming up, and he asks Satchel Paige, “Is this the right windup for your hesitation pitch?” Paige advises him to “watch old Satch” as he shows him the correct way to throw. The youngster tries, but fails miserably. “Don’t worry about that, Johnny,” a supportive Paige declares. “It took me twenty years to get that pitch.” Bob Feller, who has been observing the scene, promptly quips, “Satch, some folks say it took you thirty years.” A second voice chimes in that it might have been forty.

In The Kid from Cleveland, ballplayers comment on their real-life opponents. At one point, Lou Boudreau pronounces, “I wish all my problems were that easy,” in response to a plot development, “Like getting rid of Ted Williams without the Boston Red Sox putting me in jail for it.” In another scene, Boudreau asks Hank Greenberg if he ever batted against a ghost. “I sure did,” Greenberg observes. “His name was Dizzy Dean. I never even saw the ball.”

Much of the dialogue might have been penned by a team publicist rather than a Hollywood screenwriter. After Greenberg’s remark about Dean, Johnny exclaims, “Bet he couldn’t pitch faster than Feller, or Lemon, or Bearden.” Predictably, the youngster wants to grow up to be “a ballplayer on the Indians, a shortstop like Lou Boudreau.” This is not surprising, as Mike Jackson volunteers that Boudreau is “one of the greatest clutch hitters in the game.” Of Tris Speaker, the broadcaster declares, “Mr. Speaker is as well-known in baseball as Shakespeare was a playwright.” In a glaring comment that mirrors life in America during the postwar years, Jackson observes, before Game 5 of the 1948 World Series, “It was a wonderful day for the game. Even the ladies turned out in large numbers, grateful for the nursery that Bill Veeck had introduced to play host to the next generation of Indians fans.” During this game, Veeck notes that over 86,000 spectators have packed into Municipal Stadium. Jackson tells his radio listeners, “Today’s gate raises the Indians total to almost three million people this season. No other team, not even the Yankees in their heyday with Babe Ruth, ever drew that many.”

Of all the nonprofessionals, Boudreau and Veeck have the biggest parts. Given his legendary flair for theatrics, it is no surprise that Variety reported that Veeck “shapes up surprisingly well as a thespian.” One would have to agree with Ed McAuley’s assessment of Veeck’s performance, with the sportswriter describing the owner as “the best of the amateurs.” McAuley might have been thinking of Veeck’ s Doby-Gordon “anecdote” when he observed that Veeck “is so natural that I half expected him to wink and say, ‘Stick around. When this is over, we’ll get together and tell a few lies.'”

The Indians organization received no compensation for participating in the film. The ballplayers also were not paid, but were promised a percentage of the profits. Only trouble is, there were none. The Kid from Cleveland cannot be found on the Variety list of top ninety-two moneymaking films released in 1949. Other baseball movies made the cut: Take Me Out to the Ball Game earned $3,350,000, for thirteenth place; It Happens Every Spring grossed $1,850,000, for fifty-eighth place.

In June 1952, The Sporting News noted:

Hal Lebovitz of the Cleveland News reports that the producers of the movie The Kid from Cleveland sent Lou Boudreau a financial report which showed the film … to be in the red by approximately $150,000 …. The producers added the note, “We hope the Indians win the pennant so we can reissue the film and wipe out the deficit. … Causing Lebovitz to observe, “They obviously forgot that Boudreau is now manager of the rival Boston Red Sox.”

FILM CREDITS

The Kid from Cleveland. Released by Republic Pictures. PRODUCER: Walter Calmes. DIRECTOR: Herbert Kline. SCREENPLAY: John Bright, from a story by Kline and Bright. CINEMATOGRAPHER: Jack Marta. EDITOR: Jason H. Bernie. MUSIC: Nathan Scott. ASSOCIATE PRODUCER: K. Elmo Lowe. BASEBALL SUPERVISOR: Lew Fonseca. RUNNING TIME: 89 minutes. CAST: George Brent (Mike Jackson); Lynn Bari (Katherine Jackson); Rusty (Russ) Tamblyn Johnny Barrows); Tommy Cook (Dan Hudson); Ann Doran (Emily Novak); Louis Jean Heydt (Carl Novak); K. Elmo Lowe (Dave Joyce); Johnny Berardino (Mac); The Cleveland Indians Baseball Team with Bill Veeck; Lou Boudreau; Tris Speaker; Hank Greenberg; Bob Feller; Gene Bearden; Satchell (Satchel) Paige; Bob Lemon; Steve Gromek; Joe Gordon; Mickey Vernon; Ken Keltner; Ray Boone; Dale Mitchell; Larry Doby; Bob Kennedy; Jim Hegan. Appearing uncredited: Bobby Avila; Al Benton; Allie Clark; Gordon Cobbledick; Mike Garcia; Bill Grieve; Mel Harder; Franklin Lewis; Ed MacAuley; Bill McKechnie; Frank Papish; Hal Peck; Bill Summers; Mike Tresh; Thurman Tucker; “Lefty” Weisman; Early Wynn; Sam Zoldak. Appearing in archival footage: Alvin Dark; Bob Elliott; Tommy Holmes; Phil Masi; Nelson Potter; Al Rosen; Sibby Sisti; Warren Spahn; Eddie Stanky; Earl Torgeson.

SOURCES

Barnes, Howard, “On the Screen.” New York Herald Tribune, September 5, 1949.

Crowther, Bosley. “The Kid from Cleveland.” New York Times, September 5, 1949.

Dolgan, Bob. “Lou Boudreau Highlights.” Plain Dealer, August 12, 2001.

Edelman, Rob. Great Baseball Films. New York: Citadel Press, 1994.

Feller, Bob, with Bill Gilbert. Now Pitching, Bob Feller: A Baseball Memoir. New York: Carol, 1990.

Gee, Michael. “Take me out to the movies.” Boston Herald, May 14, 2004.

Hanson, Patricia King, ed. American Film Institute Catalog of Motion Pictures Produced in the United States: Feature Films, 1941-1950. Berkeley: University of California Press, 1999.

“Kid From Cleveland.” Variety, September 7, 1949.

Lyons, Leonard. “The Lyons Den.” Washington Post, September 3, 1949.

McAuley, Ed. “Indians’ Reel Roles Marked by Realism.” The Sporting News, September 14, 1949.

Mote, James. Everything Baseball. New York: Prentice-Hall, 1989.

Motion Picture Production Encyclopedia, 1950 Edition. Hollywood: Hollywood Reporter Press, 1950.

O’Connor, Clint. “Baseball-flick fans tweak the lineup: Readers choose their favorite of critic’s picks, send in their own choices.” Plain Dealer, May 7, 2006.

Ruhl, Oscar. “From the Ruhl Book.” The Sporting News, June 11, 1952.

Of paramount concern was the question of how to deal with renegade players — the contract-breakers and league-jumpers who tried the patience of owners and tested the limits of baseball law. Of this group, one Anthony J. Mullane stood out as an especially iniquitous example, and much attention was paid him and his fellow transgressors in the run-up to 1885 and beyond. The helter-skelter player moves were paralleled by changes in franchise locations, ownership and league affiliation.

In terms of what was actually happening on the field, the perennial tug-of-war between pitcher and hitter tilted noticeably toward the pitcher in 1884, meaning that administrative bodies would be looking for ways to help batters through rules changes.

THE MULLANE CASE

Twenty-five year-old Tony Mullane had yet to acquire the colorful nicknames we associate with him today, “The Count” and “The Apollo of the Box,” but he had begun already to establish himself as one of the most talented and durable of nineteenth-century pitchers. He was also attaining a reputation as a revolver extraordinaire.

After a brief five-game trial with NL Detroit in 1881, Mullane enlisted for a tour with AA Louisville in 1882. He next signed with Chris Von der Ahe’s St. Louis Browns for a higher price in 1883, before really getting into hot water with his contract maneuvers in 1884.

Taking advantage of the Union Association’s disregard for the two established leagues’ reserve clause policy, Mullane accepted a whopping $2,500 offer from Henry Lucas and prepared to twirl for the St. Louis entry in the fledgling UA. But before the season could even begin, the young ace had second thoughts about jumping leagues, and returned to the AA fold, signing on with the new Toledo club for the same $2,500 salary the Unions had promised. Notwithstanding Mullane’s superb year between the points, the Blue Stockings crossed the finish line in eighth place, at 46-58. On October 25, firmly on the path to disbanding, the team brokered a deal with Von der Ahe to make Mullane, along with Curt Welch, Sam Barkley, Tom Poorman, and manager Charles Morton, available — naturally, for a hefty sum.

With a 10-day waiting period stipulated between release from one team and signing with another, Von der Ahe took the peculiar precaution of having the players appear before a notary and sign a pledge to finalize their contracts with St. Louis on November 4.

While the other ballplayers in the Toledo fire sale followed through on their preliminary pledge, Mullane once again went rogue. Approached by the Cincinnati club in the interim, and offered a $5,000 contract ($1,500 above the Browns’ offer), Tony took a generous $2,000 advance and inked the Cincinnati deal on November 4, thus provoking the enduring ire of Von der Ahe and the league itself.

Mullane’s singular case, along with a great many more mundane instances of contract and league-jumping, would bring swift and forceful action at the winter meetings.

IN FLUX

When it came to the number and locations of their franchises, the nineteenth century major leagues had made a habit of inconsistency. Although the NL generally held to an eight-member circuit, with occasional dips to six, they managed only twice to field the same eight teams two years running.1 The AA, meanwhile, had grown from six in 1882, to eight in 1883, to 12 in 1884.2 And of course, the Union Association underwent a dizzying swirl of transformations in its short career.

More changes were in the offing for 1885. At the end of October 1884, about the same time Toledo was selling off its cluster of stars to the Browns, another AA entry was liquidating its assets. The Columbus Buckeyes had done themselves proud in their sophomore campaign with a second-place finish but, facing insolvency, they decided to unload a large contingent of players. Charter AA member Pittsburgh coughed up $6,000 for the rights to Tom Brown, Fred Carroll, Jim Field, Rudy Kemmler, Bill Kuehne, Fred Mann, Ed Morris, Frank Mountain, John Richmond, and Pop Smith — nearly the entire Columbus reserve list.

THE ARBITRATION COMMITTEE

The first postseason meeting of note was that of the Arbitration Committee on Friday, November 7, 1884. Held at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City, it included representatives of “those professional associations of the country which are signers of the National Agreement”3 namely, the National League, the American Association, and the Eastern League. The Northwestern League would have been included, too, had it not just disbanded.

The leading business taken up by the Committee was the state of the Eastern League. Several of its clubs were in bad financial straits and League Secretary H.H. Diddlebock advised the Committee that those which did not make good on their debts by the Spring would be expelled. In fact, the Eastern as a whole was on quite tenuous ground and it was ordered that it (the Eastern League) must provide evidence of at least six active clubs by the time of the next Committee meeting in April or forfeit membership in the National Agreement.

An amendment to Section 3 of the National Agreement made the minimum player salary under the reserve rule $1,000, to apply to all Leagues, including the Eastern and the Northwestern (assuming those bodies returned in 1885). An amendment to Section 5 prohibited a released player or a player from a disbanded club from signing or playing with another club until the expiration of 10 days from the notice of release or disbandment.

The Committee also reiterated its stand against reinstatement of players who had jumped to the Union Association in 1884, citing specifically their denial of Clarence “Kid” Baldwin’s application for reinstatement. Informal discussions took place on a number of other subjects, e.g., putting an end to the “growing evil of drunkenness,” the Columbus sale to Pittsburgh, and the coming elections for President and Secretary in both the League and the Association. The Mullane case was discussed, and although it was not in a position to make any binding decisions, the Committee let it be known that it considered his expulsion “absolutely necessary.”4 The date and location of the Spring meeting were set for the first Friday in April, in Philadelphia.

THE NOVEMBER NL CONVENTION

The National League’s ninth annual convention, a two-day affair, began Wednesday, November 19, at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York. All eight League clubs were represented, Boston, Buffalo, Chicago, New York, Providence sending two men each, Philadelphia sending three, and Cleveland and Detroit, only one apiece. The first order of business was the reluctant acceptance of President Abraham G. Mills’ resignation. It didn’t take long for the convention to unanimously vote League Secretary Nick Young as Mills’ successor. Rather than seek a new Secretary, the two offices were combined, making Young both President and Secretary, as well as “custodian of funds.”5

After the official awarding of the 1884 Championship to the Providence Grays, a new five-man Board of Directors was installed, consisting of Young (ex-officio), Spencer Clinton of Buffalo, John B. Day of New York, Al Reach of Philadelphia, and a representative from Detroit to be named later.

Two Committees were next appointed, the Printing Committee and the Schedule Committee, both consisting of the same three members (Day, Arthur Soden of Boston, and Al Spalding from Chicago). John I. Rogers of Philadelphia was then appointed as NL member to the Arbitration Committee, replacing the resigned Mills.

With the routine administrative business out of the way, the first major player-related issue was taken up: the appeal for reinstatement of players expelled for abrogating the reserve clause by jumping to the Union Association. The case of Frederick Lander “Dupee” Shaw became the League’s exemplar in the matter.

Shaw, a pitcher with the Detroit Wolverines, had decided to stage a midseason walkout rather than pay a fine levied by the club. Going back to his Boston-area home to sulk, he shortly was offered a job with the Boston Union team, and within a week it was reported he had joined them.6 The left-hander went on to become a 30-game winner (combined NL and UA) and one of four pitchers to rack up over 400 strikeouts. But at season’s end, he was ready to return to the NL fold.

Despite the impressive performance credentials, the League was not ready to forgive and forget — not for Shaw, nor for any of the other renegades. The official resolution was denial of all reinstatement applications, the board’s proclamation stating, “This League will never consent to the reinstatement of any player who has deserted, or may hereafter desert any club identified with this League while held by the reserve rule.”7

Cognizant of the widespread dominance of pitching over batting in 1884, the Convention opened a discussion on amending rules governing the delivery of the ball. Central to the issue was whether overhand delivery should be prohibited. Proponents (of prohibition) argued that the greater speed of overhand throwing was a detriment to the hitting and fielding aspects of the game. They pointed, too, to the wear and tear, not only on pitchers’ arms, but to their battery-mates behind the plate. On the opposing side, it was noted that enforcement of such prohibition was a near impossibility for umpires, and that freedom of choice in delivery allowed for more strategy on the pitcher’s part.

With no solution imminent, action was deferred to the second day of the convention. But before the discussion was closed entirely, one of the delegates floated a new idea: that pitchers might be required to keep both feet on the ground while making their delivery, thus cutting down on speed. The idea was promptly embraced, and the rule adopted ran as follows: “A fair ball is a ball delivered by the pitcher while standing wholly within the lines of his position, and facing the batsman, with both feet touching the ground while making any one of the series of motions he is accustomed to make in delivering the ball to the bat…”8

Further attempts were made to improve life for hitters. The batter’s box was expanded from three feet to four and a half feet, allowing for greater freedom of movement. And an odd new amendment to Rule 14, Section 2, would permit a bat to be shaved or flattened by a half inch on one side — the idea being to enhance bat control and to reduce foul balls.

The balk rule was more clearly defined. Where the rule previously said, “A balk is a motion made by the pitcher to deliver the ball to the bat without delivering it,” the new wording said a balk occurs if the pitcher “when about to deliver the ball to the bat, while standing within the lines of his position, make any one of the series of motions he habitually makes in so delivering the ball to the bat, without delivering it.”9

There was an interesting take-back against the batters’ side, as Rule 65 was reworded to say that a fair ball hit over any fence less than 210 feet from home-plate would be a ground-rule double, thus precluding a repeat of 1884’s home-run barrage over the right-field fence at Chicago’s Lake Front Park.

The Spalding ball was retained as the League’s official sphere, and all printing concessions (score cards, show-bills, etc.) were awarded to John B. Sage of Buffalo. Appointment and control of umpires was put in President Young’s hands. The issue of Philadelphia’s admission fee exemption (they were allowed to charge only 25 cents rather than 50, largely due to the fact they had a powerful AA rival in town charging only 25) was deferred to the next League meeting, which was planned for early March.

THE DECEMBER AA CONVENTION

The American Association held its annual convention during the second week of December, the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York again being the venue of choice. The New York Clipper referred to it in advance as “the most important meeting the Association has yet had,” saying the delegates would be called upon to take up “a number of subjects of vital interest to the future welfare of the organization.”10

The Board of Directors held their preparatory meeting on Tuesday, December 9. The AA board included Brooklyn owner Charlie Byrne, Philadelphia co-owner Lew Simmons, Baltimore manager Billy Barnie, Louisville manager Jim Hart, and Von der Ahe of St. Louis, and was chaired by Association President Denny McKnight. After making the official award of the 1884 championship to the Metropolitans, the Board delved into its major piece of business: the Mullane case.

John J. O’Neill, a Missouri Congressman with connections to the St. Louis club, acted as counsel for the club and laid out the charges of dishonorable conduct against the pitcher. O.P. Caylor of Cincinnati — probably the only party possessing any sympathy toward the accused – stood in as defense counsel. Caylor could do little but try to point out similar offenses by other players which had gone unpunished. He noted, too, that St. Louis itself had acted less than forthrightly when it lured Mullane away from Louisville in 1883. (Von der Ahe must have felt a sting on that point.) But to no avail. The Board’s ruling is worth quoting in full:

“Whereas, Tony J. Mullane has been guilty of conduct tending to bring discredit on the baseball profession, causing discontent and insubordination among all professional players, and setting an example of sharp practice almost equivalent to actual dishonesty; therefore, it is

“Resolved, That this Board of Directors feel that such conduct must not be tolerated, and consequently they decree the suspension of said Mullane for and during the season of 1885, and they also order that he repay to the Cincinnati Club before Jan. 1, 1885, $1,000 of the money advanced him, and that he shall not play ball with any professional club during the season of 1885, or this suspension shall be increased to final expulsion.”11

The Clipper’s final pronouncement on the case recognized that the blame lay not only with the player: “There is no difference between the action of a club which endeavors to secure a contract surreptitiously and that of a player who breaks a written engagement.”12 The point surely hit home with the Cincinnati club, as they, by virtue of the Board’s decision, found themselves out $1,000 (half of the advance they had given Mullane).

The annual Association meeting proper began the next day, Wednesday the 10th. Delegates from nine of the 12 1884 teams were present: Baltimore, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Indianapolis, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. McKnight and W.C. Wykoff were reinstalled as president and secretary, and Von der Ahe was made vice-president. The Board of Directors was reduced to five, Byrne, Barnie, and Von der Ahe retained, Nimick of Pittsburgh added, with McKnight the chair, ex-officio.

The first important action taken was the reduction of the Association to eight teams, these being Baltimore, Brooklyn, Cincinnati, Louisville, New York, Philadelphia, Pittsburgh, and St. Louis. Indianapolis was thus left out in the cold, as was the Virginia franchise. Columbus and Toledo had of course already disbanded. Applications for membership were received from Newark and from the Washington team of the UA, but, as one Cincinnati paper put it, “it was deemed best to make the Association an octagon.”13 The only consolation for Indianapolis and Virginia was a promise to respect their player contracts for a year, and, in fact, a telegram was sent to the NL and the Eastern League soliciting similar pledges from those bodies.

Brooklyn’s Byrne put forward a proposal to change the system of dividing gate receipts between home and visiting clubs. Instead of the standard guarantee of $65 to the visitors, Byrne suggested a 25 percent share of receipts. The proposal fell one vote short of the required two-thirds to pass.

Constitutional amendments were taken up on Thursday the 11th, and several relatively mundane changes were made. Official scorers were given three days (rather than 24 hours) to submit scores. The Association president was invested with many “arbitrary” powers, including almost complete control over the umpires. He was granted authority to suspend any player, manager or umpire found guilty of open drunkenness. An amendment to Article 6, Section 2, said that if gate-money were refunded due to an early game stoppage, the guarantee to the visiting club would not be paid.

To underscore the sentiment of the Mullane decision, new language was added to Article 6, Section 4, stating, “Any eligible player who may be proved guilty of signing contracts with two clubs covering the same period of time, and receiving advance money from either, shall be expelled.”14 In addition, Section 7 added the stipulation that a club, manager, or player who would “in any way evade the spirit and letter of the ten-day clause” could be fined between $100 and $500.15

On-field activity was addressed through a number of modest changes. One moved the start of the season from May 1 to April 20, with season’s end moving from October 15 to October 1, though provision was made to allow makeup games to be played up to October 10. Fines were dictated for clubs that would leave the field before a game ends, such as in a disagreement over an umpire’s decision. The choice of first “at-bats” would be given to the home club, rather than leaving it to a coin toss. The Association adopted the NL’s stricter definition of a balk where the pitcher’s preliminary movements were concerned. The foul-bound catch rule was, for the moment, retained.

The Convention adjourned at 7:00 PM on the 11th, with the next meeting scheduled for March 2, 1885, in Baltimore.

THE UNION ASSOCIATION DECEMBER MEETING

When the board of the AA handed down its verdict on Mullane’s suspension on December 9, an indignant O.P. Caylor threatened to withdraw his Cincinnati club from the Association. This sparked a little jeu d’esprit from Billie Barnie, who dashed off a telegram to the owners of the Cincinnati Union team, inquiring as to their interest in stepping in should the Porkopolis slot in the AA become vacant. Caylor, being apprised of the communique, hastily backpedaled on his threat.

This was but one of a dizzying series of feints, dodges, and rumors lending confusion to the fate of the Union Association as the year 1884 came to a close. UA President Henry Lucas could take pride in his own champion St. Louis Maroons, but on the whole his upstart circuit was clearly in trouble. Only five of the original eight clubs — St. Louis, Cincinnati, Boston, Baltimore, and Washington — completed the full season of over 100 games. Chicago’s Unions, withering in the face of competition from the NL White Stockings, up and moved to Pittsburgh in late May but could not make it to the finish line there either, shutting down in September. Four other teams never got to play more than 25 games. It was unclear whether any club besides St. Louis had actually met expenses for the year.

Yet, reports persistently flooded the baseball channels about possible player transactions and club moves for the 1885 season. In October, Ned Williamson was said to be signing with the Maroons. At the same time, a Union team in Philadelphia was rumored. Larry McKeon of Indianapolis supposedly signed on with the UA’s Kansas City, and the same club offered large contracts to two catchers, Jocko Milligan and Jack O’Brien. In late November came reports of attempts to form Union clubs in the abandoned AA cities of Toledo and Columbus. Lucas visited Indianapolis in December and promoted the idea of that city joining. It was hinted at one point that the UA of 1885 might have no eastern clubs at all, that Lucas would establish a “Western Association.” The Cincinnati Enquirer, on the premise that Cleveland and Detroit would not continue as NL members in ‘85, ran an article encouraging them to shift over to the UA.16 In late December, Lucas was in Cleveland, trying to further that interest.

Whatever optimism was generated by all this fodder suffered serious deflation when reports began surfacing at the AA Convention that Lucas was actively pursuing an avenue by which to secure NL membership for his Maroons. While the idea of Lucas jumping leagues was regarded in some quarters as an improbability, due to the obstacles for all parties concerned, the likelihood of such an eventuality was, to others, soon apparent, requiring only a little more time for covert machinations to fully play out.

In the meantime, the Union Association finally got around to its annual meeting on December 18 in St. Louis. Besides the host party, delegates from only three other cities – Milwaukee, Kansas City, and Cincinnati – managed to show up. Indianapolis, looking for a home after being voted out of the AA, sent a proxy. Washington and Boston, not sending delegates, were dismissed from the league, and the resignation of the Baltimores was accepted. A few constitutional amendments were adopted. One called for a guaranty fund, to be held by the President, to which each team would make a $500 deposit as surety of their club remaining in operation. The President was granted full authority over umpires’ appointments, salary payments, and fines. In step with one of the AA’s amendments, a forfeit of $250 was mandated for any club failing to play out a game.

It was decided that the UA should be an eight-team league in 1885, and applications for membership were received from Columbus, St. Paul, Cleveland, and Detroit. All other matters, including any changes to actual playing rules, were deferred to the January meeting, to be held in Milwaukee.

JANUARY MEETINGS AND THE FATE OF THE UNIONS

Visiting Philadelphia at the end of December, Henry Lucas was asked about the status of his purported shift to the NL. He responded, “I do not see how we can join the League. As long as the National Agreement remains in force I could not join and play some of the men I now have under contract. These men have made me in baseball, and I will stick to them.”17 At the same time, Chris Von der Ahe was writing President McKnight that he would “not under any circumstances consent” to a rival St. Louis franchise in the NL.18

Within a week, however, Lucas was telling a reporter in Indianapolis that he had secured the transfer of St. Louis to the NL in place of Cleveland, and that negotiations for UA Cincinnati to replace Detroit were “well under way.”19 At least part of that claim was genuine.

On January 10, delegates of the National League hustled back to the Fifth Avenue Hotel for a special meeting. Cleveland had submitted its withdrawal from the League on January 5 — one day after Lucas’ Indianapolis interview — and action was needed to fill the vacancy. Although several potential replacements were discussed, Lucas’ team was undoubtedly the front-runner.

Two major stumbling-blocks stood in the way. One was the issue of the league-jumpers. The St. Louis Union team was loaded with former NL and AA stars who made Lucas’ club the giant that it was. For him to give up those players blacklisted for breaking the reserve clause would mean starting from Square One, a place he obviously did not wish to be.

The second huge obstacle was Von der Ahe. The National Agreement stipulated unanimous consent to confirm new membership in either league, and at the moment it appeared Chris was in no mood to give his blessing to a second ballclub in the Gateway City.

The delegates nonetheless went ahead and voted to admit the former St. Louis Unions to the League, and then waited to see how things would shake out.

While this tempest was brewing, the scheduled January 15 meeting of the UA in Milwaukee went forward, but in a sadly anticlimactic fashion, as the only clubs represented were Milwaukee and Kansas City – President Lucas neither appearing nor making any communication to the group. Those delegates present proceeded to disband the Association, while holding out the possibility of reorganizing in some new form. In fact, it was shortly thereafter reported that a “Western Association” was to be formed, containing teams in Milwaukee, Kansas City, Toledo, Columbus, Indianapolis, Cleveland, St. Paul, and Minneapolis.

With the assent of Von der Ahe to the Lucas membership still not forthcoming, NL president Young booked the Fifth Avenue Hotel for January 21 to convene yet another special league meeting. Hedging his bet in case the St. Louis deal fell through, Young at the same time solicited Indianapolis to apply for NL membership. After a full day of discussion without resolution, the decision was made to appoint a committee consisting of three NL club representatives to meet with a similar contingent of AA reps at the Association’s upcoming January meeting, for purposes of finding a solution to the dilemma.

Before such meeting could take place, however, the presidents of the rival St. Louis clubs came together — Von der Ahe inviting Lucas to a private conference on Sunday, January 25 – and in a mere half-hour the two moguls worked out an amicable resolution between themselves, thus averting a potential new NL-AA war. Von der Ahe blamed misunderstanding and “ruinous rumors” for keeping the two at odds as long as they were.20

The AA went ahead with its special January 27 meeting at the Monongahela House in Pittsburgh, but now, brandishing plowshares instead of swords, they confirmed their acceptance of the NL’s new St. Louis entry. A further resolution reiterated the strong stance against all contract/reserve-jumping players. It was also decided to move the season start from April 20 to April 18.

On the following day, back in New York, a trio of National League reps and another of American Association reps met to formalize the final agreement on the Lucas deal. It was a brief, self-congratulatory affair, and the League magnanimously agreed to return the favor if the AA should, for example, wish to install an American club in Chicago. Additionally, the two groups determined to appoint a joint standing committee that might deal with future conflicts in a more contained and expeditious manner.

A joint meeting of League and Association schedule committees took place February 17 in New York, its main concern being to avoid conflicts between the League and Association clubs in New York, St. Louis and Philadelphia.

MEETINGS OF MARCH AND APRIL

Echoing sentiments already expressed in the pages of the Clipper, Gothams great John M. Ward weighed in on the question of the reserve-jumpers in a letter to that paper.21 Declaring that there was but one capital crime in baseball — “crookedness” — and that that alone deserved the ultimate penalty of expulsion, the noted “clubhouse lawyer” argued that reserve-jumpers should not suffer de facto expulsion (blacklisting) for breaking a rule to which they had not agreed in the first place. Ward looked less kindly upon the contract-breakers and acknowledged the propriety of fines or suspensions on that front — but again, not the “ultimate” penalty.

The AA held its next regular meeting at the Eutaw House in Baltimore, March 2 and 3. In a preliminary conference, the Board of Directors considered an application for reinstatement by Dave Rowe, who had jumped from AA Baltimore to UA St. Louis, where he enjoyed an excellent year as Lucas’ center fielder. Cincinnati took the Clipper-Ward position and spoke up for reinstatement of reserve-jumpers, but in the end, Rowe was shot down. The convention then passed a resolution instructing Arbitration Committee members to vote against all reinstatement efforts.

In lesser business, an attempt at abolishing the foul-bound catch was defeated by a five-to-three vote. A new resolution granted either team the right to demand that a postponed game be replayed. And Billie Barnie declined to consent to the Eastern League’s proposal for a team in Baltimore.

The NL was back at the Fifth Avenue Hotel March 7 for what the Clipper termed “the most important Spring meeting ever held.”22 The first action was the unanimous endorsement of the January 21 election of the St. Louis club. A new amendment empowered President Young to levy fines of $250 against players or managers whose misconduct went unpunished by their own clubs. The standing committee recommended at the AA’s January meeting was endorsed, and Soden, Spalding, and Day appointed as League reps. They wasted no time calling a confab with AA reps, Byrne, Simmons, and Von der Ahe, and the sextet produced a joint resolution banning future payments of advance money to players or managers. Bob Ferguson was named head of the League umpires for 1885.

At the prodding of Henry Chadwick, one important playing rule received clarification, that concerning the new “both feet stationary” rule. A new definition, to be included in the President’s instructions to the umpires, said that “any movement whatever of the forward foot” was prohibited, but that the lifting of the back foot “was not to be regarded, as it cannot be lifted until the ball leaves the pitcher’s hand anyway, and therefore…does not violate the rule.”23 No warning would be given when a pitcher moved his forward foot: a “foul balk” would be called, two of which would give the batter his base.24

Finally, the question of reinstatement was addressed, as Newton Crane, Henry Lucas’ legal counsel, presented arguments on behalf of four St. Louis players seeking to return: Fred Dunlap, Orator Shaffer, Dave Rowe, and Charlie Sweeney. By a majority vote, the League followed the Association’s lead, and all applications were denied, seeming to ring the death knell for reinstatement in 1885.

Crane, interviewed back in St. Louis the next week, said that, at least in the case of Sweeney, it was only one negative vote — from Henry Root of Providence — that prevented the player’s return. Sweeney had been only suspended, not blacklisted, and the other club representatives were favorable to his plea, but Root apparently still held a grudge against the hurler who deserted him in the midst of a pennant race.

In New York, Lucas summed up the irony of the players’ situation to a Times reporter: “I induced them to desert, and if they committed any crime surely I was a party to it. Now the League has taken me into its fold and it refuses to reinstate them.”25

The Girard House in Philadelphia was the site of the Arbitration Committee’s annual Spring meeting on April 3. Day, Rogers, and Young represented the League, Barnie, Caylor, and McKnight, the Association, and George Ballard, Mike Scanlan, and Diddlebock stood in for the Eastern League.

The first important order of business was the Eastern League’s repeated request to locate a club in Baltimore, and this was again denied.

The Committee did not take up the cases of any of the blacklisted players already ruled on at the NL or AA meetings. It did, however, reinstate several players who had been expelled from “minor associations” for lesser infractions. The most notable names in this group were “Kid” Baldwin, Chris Fulmer, and Abner Powell, all of whom had been bounced by the Northwestern League. In light of this, and at a time when the threat of blacklisting was reportedly used to free clubs of indebtedness to players, the Committee saw fit to make an amendment to the National Agreement declaring “none of the united associations shall have the power of expelling a player unless the sentence is confirmed by the Arbitration Committee.”26

THE SECRET MEETING

One day after the Arbitration Committee’s meeting, a small group of National League officials convened in New York for a session that was not immediately reported in the papers. But small hints began to appear. Upon his return to St. Louis on Monday the 6th, Henry Lucas told the St. Louis Globe-Democrat that he had done his best to plead his case with the other League officers and, although he could not say for certain what the outcome would be, “You can say positively that I am going to stick to the League.”27 Curiously, the same paper reported the next day that Jack Glasscock was in town playing a practice game with the former Union nine, and that he expected to see his fellow Cleveland-deserters, Jim McCormick and Fatty Briody, soon.

The Clipper of April 11 gave no indication it was even aware of the April 4 meeting. But the Boston Journal of the same date dropped a bombshell, announcing: “A SENSATION IN BASE BALL: Unconditional Surrender of the League to Lucas.”

The Journal reporter had a contact among the club presidents — he assured his readership it was not Soden — according to whom, Albert Spalding had informed the group that Chicago “would drop out of the League unless Mr. Lucas…was enabled to secure the best talent that the country afforded.” And the only way to do that was “to give St. Louis the blacklisted men and Sweeney.”28

Much of what Spalding reportedly said was cribbed from Lucas’ own recent diatribes, but he also played on the financial heartstrings of the moguls, suggesting that with a well-stocked Maroons team, “the attendance at the St. Louis games would be very large, and visiting clubs would reap a harvest,” while, without the blacklisted men, “St. Louis would be dead to the League.”29 He also let it be known that the same profit incentive — or disincentive — would play a factor in going forward with major renovations he was contemplating for the Windy City ballpark. After some group discussion, it was decided to call a special meeting on April 18.

RETURN TO THE FOLD

Strangely, for an event of such magnitude, the NL didn’t play all its first-stringers in the April 18 meeting, which was held — you guessed it — at the Fifth Avenue Hotel. Day, Soden, and Rogers were there for New York, Boston, and Philadelphia. J.E. Allen, not Root, appeared for Providence, Al Spalding sent his brother Walter for Chicago, and Nick Young had proxy for Buffalo, Detroit, and St. Louis.

The oddly-assembled crew gave little time to preliminaries and were in short order voting on two resolutions: first, to reinstate Dunlap, Schaffer, Hugh Daily, and Emil Gross, with a fine of $500 each as their final punishment; second, to reinstate Sweeney, Glasscock, McCormick, Briody, and Dupee Shaw, with a fine of $1,000 each. Both proposals carried with only Providence and Philadelphia voicing initial objections before throwing in with the majority.

In the wake of the momentous League action, Denny McKnight convened his generals again in Pittsburgh on April 27. Von der Ahe, knowing an opening when he saw one, immediately applied for the reinstatement of Dave Rowe and Tom Dolan, but his was the only vote in favor: the AA held firm to the blacklist.

The next business was to deal with shenanigans in New York that had been fomenting since at least November, when John Day fired Gothams manager Jim Price and replaced him with Mets manager Jim Mutrie. Day, president of the Metropolitan Exhibition Company which owned both New York clubs, had begun a campaign of building up the NL Gothams at the expense of the AA Mets. The maneuvering continued when Mets stars Tim Keefe and Dude Esterbrook were suddenly released by the team, then disappeared with Day for an ocean cruise of some two weeks’ duration, and finally docked again in Manhattan signed with the Gothams. The Association recognized this little game of hide and seek for just what it was — a means to transfer players between teams without worrying about the 10-day rule.

Considering the extremely questionable ethics, the ownership was probably lucky to get off with a $500 fine for its ruse. For good measure, Jim Mutrie was banned from future employment in the AA.

It was then time to address the NL’s reinstatement decision. Declaring that the League had violated the National Agreement by reinstating players without approval of the Arbitration Committee, the Association declared it would no longer honor the reserve clause and voted unanimously “to suspend all further intercourse with the League until they had repudiated their open violation of the National Agreement.”30

The Association’s volley on the reinstatement brought a quick response from Nick Young, who denied the NL had violated the Agreement. In the League’s view, they had every right to reverse a resolution they (the NL) had passed in 1884, and besides, the Arbitration Committee was a judicial body, there to interpret laws, not create or remove them.

CODA

From there, the parties maintained a hostile but distant stand-off. After all, it was finally time to play ball again: the 1885 AA season had already opened, and the NL’s was about to begin. In June, the AA passed a series of amendments bringing them into line with current NL practices: the abolishment of the foul-bound catch, the removal of restrictions on the pitcher’s delivery (i.e., permitting overhand throwing), and giving the home-team captain the choice of first innings.

On August 20, a group of Association club presidents assembled in Atlantic City voted to revoke adherence to the ten-day waiting period for released players. In the AA’s view, the League had already abrogated the National Agreement by reinstating reserve-jumpers, and the Association thus was no longer bound by the Agreement where it did not suit them.

About a week later, hints emerged that the AA would finally capitulate on the blacklist question.31 According to a later report in Sporting Life, “Von der Ahe. . . recommended the reinstatement of Dave Rowe and has also asked President McKnight to take a mail vote on the question of reinstating the blacklisted players.”32 Rowe was back on the playing field September 16 and by the close of the season Tom Dolan, George Bradley, Jack Gleason, and Sam Weaver all returned to the baseball brotherhood.

Even a certain notorious ambidextrous pitcher was back in uniform before winter set in. On October 4, at Cincinnati, in the first of a series of six postseason exhibition games between the Reds and the St. Louis Browns, Tony Mullane made his first on-field appearance of 1885. He pitched masterfully, allowing only three scattered hits, but poor field work behind him resulted in a 5-1 victory for the St. Louis team.

Despite having his way with both the League and the Association, and getting all his UA stars back, Henry Lucas was frustrated in his hopes for glory in the established leagues. The outlaw owner who was responsible for so much of the turmoil of ‘84 and ‘85 saw his team finish dead last, 49 games behind the NL champion Chicago White Stockings.

Sources

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

Boston Herald, Cleveland Leader, , St. Louis Post-Dispatch, and Kerr, Roy. Big Dan Brouthers: Baseball’s First Great Slugger (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2013).

Lansche, Jerry. Glory Fades Away (Dallas: Taylor Publishing Co., 1991).

Nemec, David. The Beer And Whisky League (New York: Lyons & Burford, 1995).

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

Notes

1 The eight-member NL of 1882-1883 was a slightly different eight from that of 1883-1884, the former including Troy and Worcester, and the latter including New York and Philadelphia in their place.

2 The AA actually sported 13 teams in 1884, but Virginia was technically a midseason replacement for Washington.

3 “The Arbitration Committee Meeting,” New York Clipper, November 15, 1884: 554.

4 New York Clipper, November 15, 1884.: 555

5 “The League Convention,” New York Clipper, November 29, 1884: 587.

6 “Base-Hits Everywhere,” New York Clipper, July 19, 1884: 275.

7 “The League Convention,” New York Clipper, November 29, 1884: 587.

8 Constitution and playing rules of the National League of professional base ball clubs (Chicago, Illinois, A.G. Spalding & Bros., 1885), 31.

9 Ibid.

10 “The American Convention,” New York Clipper, December 13, 1884: 620.

11 “The American Convention Proceedings. The Meeting of the Directors,” New York Clipper, December 20, 1884: 634.

12 “The American Convention,” New York Clipper, December 20, 1884: 640.

13 “Fourth Annual Meeting of the American Base Ball Association,” Cincinnati Commercial Tribune, December 11, 1884: 4.

14 “The American Convention Proceedings. The Annual Meeting,” New York Clipper, December 20, 1884: 635

15 Ibid.

16 “Why Cleveland and Detroit Should Join the Unions,” Cincinnati Enquirer, December 14, 1884: 10.

17 New York Clipper, January 3, 1885: 668-669.

18 New York Clipper, January 10, 1885: 684.

19 Ibid.

20 “The Lucas Deal Completed,” New York Clipper, January 31, 1885: 732.

21 “The Reserve-Rule and Contract-Breakers,” New Yok Clipper, February 14, 1885: 763.

22 “The National League,” New York Clipper, March 14, 1885: 828.

23 Ibid.

24 Constitution and playing rules of the National League of professional base ball clubs, 31.

25 “The Association Refuses to Reinstate the Deserters,” New York Times, March 8, 1885: 2.

26 “The Arbitration Committee Meeting,” New York Clipper, April 11, 1885: 52.

27 “Lucas Will Go On In the League,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 7, 1885: 4.

28 “A Sensation in Base Ball: Unconditional Surrender of the League to Lucas,” Boston Journal, April 11, 1885: 6.

29 Ibid.

30 “The American Meeting — Its Momentous Action,” New York Clipper, May 2, 1885: 99.

31 “Other Base Ball. Notes,” Boston Journal, August 25, 1885: 3.

32 “Diamond Dust,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 8, 1885: 4, and “Notes and Comments,” Sporting Life, September 16, 1885: 4.

Serendipitously, the Call was founded in May 1919, a year before the formation of the first successful professional Black league, the Negro National League, and the organization of the Kansas City Monarchs. The Call’s founder was Chester Arthur “C.A.” Franklin (1880-1955). Franklin was born in Denison, Texas, to a barber and a teacher at a time when African Americans were leaving Texas and other Southern states in search of better educational opportunities for their children. In 1887 the Franklin family moved to Omaha, Nebraska, where C.A.’s father established a newspaper, the Omaha Enterprise. C.A. attended the University of Nebraska for two years, but because of his father’s ill health had to leave school to take over as editor of the Enterprise. To improve his father’s health, the family moved to Colorado in 1898 and bought another paper, eventually called the Star.

In 1913 C.A. Franklin moved to Kansas City, where six years later he began publishing the Call. The paper started as a four-page sheet with a weekly run of 2,000. Its circulation grew rapidly, soon reaching 18,000. Before long nearly every African American home in Kansas City was receiving a copy from a carrier. At the same time, mail circulation throughout Missouri and the states to the southwest expanded. The Call was on its way to becoming one of the largest, most successful Black businesses in the region. By the 1950s the Call had expanded to 32 pages with 40,000 copies sold each week.1

As soon became obvious in his first weekly editorials, C.A. Franklin was a strong advocate of Black self-reliance, endorsing the philosophy of W.E.B. Du Bois. For example, in the January 14, 1922, edition of the Call, under the headline “The Manhood of Kansas City Negroes Is Challenged,” Franklin decried the manipulation of Blacks in Kansas City politics, concluding “[we] are not underlings because other men say we are, we are masters of our fate. Strong men, just men of every race, will applaud the day when we cease to be measured by the scorn of our contemners, and offer our own proved merit.”

During its first decades the Call covered fully the campaign to expand the right to vote for African Americans and for equal opportunities for Blacks in employment, education, and housing. One of the Call’s first victories was breaking the ban in Kansas City that prohibited African Americans from serving on juries.

Nor did the Call shy away from addressing the most highly charged national issues facing African Americans. The paper strongly endorsed the struggle against segregation in the armed forces and the fight for nondiscriminatory hiring in government agencies. It also ran front-page stories on the scourge of lynching and kept track of the numbers of lynching victims state by state.

Some of the Call’s first subscribers were members of the Paseo YMCA volleyball team, on which Franklin played. Whether at the YMCA, where in 1920 the meeting to organize the NNL was held, or another venue, Franklin met and became good friends with J.L. Wilkinson (1878-1964), founder and principal owner of the Kansas City Monarchs. For the nearly three decades Wilkinson owned the Monarchs, he and Franklin worked closely together, and the paper was an enthusiastic supporter of the team and Black baseball in general. In its coverage of the organizational meeting of the NNL, the Call enthused in its February 27, 1920, edition that “[i]t was the first time in the history of a baseball meeting that there was exhibited so much harmony and good spirit.”

Known for his acumen as a promoter, Wilkinson quickly recognized the importance of a good relationship with Franklin and the Call. He assigned the Monarchs business manager, Q.J. Gilmore, the responsibility of providing the Call with a steady stream of positive articles about the Monarchs. The Call reciprocated with frequent endorsements of the team. When Wilkinson decided to name the team the Monarchs (upon the recommendation of one of his players, John Donaldson), the Call later proclaimed that the team had proven in its first years of play, in the words of eighteenth-century poet William Cowper, that they were “MONARCHS OF ALL THEY SURVEY.”2

C.A. Franklin recognized the role that Wilkinson and the Monarchs were playing in improving racial harmony in Kansas City. In its October 22, 1922, edition the Call noted that “[f]rom a sociological point of view, the Monarchs have done more than any other single agent to break the damnable outrage of prejudice that exists in this city. White fans, the thinking class at least, cannot have watched the orderly crowds at Association Park … and not concede that we are humans at least, and worthy of consideration as such.” When the team began playing games in Association Park, Wilkinson had insisted that the signs marking “colored section” be taken down and that patrons, regardless of race, be allowed to sit anywhere in the stands.

When the Monarchs moved to Muehlebach Field in 1923, Wilkinson’s agreement with the stadium’s owner, brewer George Muehlebach, allowed Black spectators to sit throughout the stands. In reporting on the agreement, the Call noted that “[f]ans from both races will continue to be able to sit side by side, and, after a while, the same relation may be carried to the workshop” (November 3, 1922). The Call had long recognized that Wilkinson expected clean play on the field, noting his slogan for how the Monarchs players were expected to deal with an opponent was “treat him right, but get him out.”3

In the July 20, 1923, edition of the Call, sports editor Charles A. Sparks claimed that the Monarchs and other Black teams were showing that the racist attitude of “the superiority of the whites and the inferiority of the Blacks” is dead. The Monarchs were proving that “Negroes play the game with much more thought and snap than the average white player.” The public is beginning to question, Starks maintained, the results of a World Series championship played between two white teams “when perhaps there are one of several colored teams in the country better than the contenders.”

When necessary, the Call also could be critical of the Monarchs and Black baseball, as in a scathing December 16, 1927, editorial by sports editor A.D. Williams that laid out the concerns he claimed needed to be addressed in the Negro leagues. Williams also chastised African American fans in Kansas City for lack of support of the team. At the end of the 1929 season Williams wrote, “If there ever was a club deserving the support of a city – it is [the Monarchs]. Their brand of baseball is second to none in the country. [J.L. Wilkinson has] always placed a real ball club on the field. … I wonder where that old Monarch loyalty is.”4

When Wilkinson introduced portable lights in 1930 to make night games possible, Williams and the Call were among the first to endorse the scheme that other journalists and baseball executives were rejecting as foolish and unworkable. In its January 10 and 24, 1930, editions the Call explained Wilkinson’s rationale for the experiment and Williams declared that the Monarchs owner had tested the lights sufficiently to go ahead. “Believe it or not,” Williams concluded, “there’s method in the supposed madness of friend Wilkinson. There’s one thing about him – he knows baseball … and the highway to the dollars.” After the lighting scheme had proved successful, the Call asserted that Wilkinson had risked everything financially and kept the Monarchs afloat “for the sake of the men who played for him. …”5

After six years (1931-36) spent exclusively barnstorming with his portable lighting system, as far north as Canada and south into Mexico, Wilkinson decided it was time to return the Monarchs to league play. He had a key role in the formation of the Negro American League in 1937 and was elected the new league’s treasurer.

In 1942 the Call’s reporting began with a January 2 article on the annual meeting of the NAL. The key issue at the meeting was the decision to join with the NNL in banning all clubs from playing the Ethiopian Clowns. Tom Wilson, president of the NNL, who was present at the NAL meeting, said that “the Eastern owners had long been of the opinion that the painting of faces by the Clowns players, their antics on the diamond and their style of play was a detriment to Negro league baseball.”

For Wilkinson and the Monarchs, not playing the Clowns represented a change in policy. The Call reported on Monarchs and Clowns preseason exhibition games and tours in 1940, playing in towns as far north as Winnipeg, Canada, and in 1941. For scheduling games with the Clowns, the Monarchs had drawn the ire of Cum Posey, owner of the Homestead Grays, and other Negro Leagues magnates, who claimed that the Clowns were playing to white stereotypes of Black baseball. However, Wilkinson maintained that the Monarchs played the Clowns not only because their showmanship drew crowds but because they played excellent baseball.

The 1942 Monarchs trained in Monroe, Louisiana, beginning their exhibition season on Easter Sunday, April 5, with a game against the Cincinnati Tigers. On April 24 the Call reported to the delight of Monarchs fans that Satchel Paige would be with the team for the 1942 season. On April 26 an overflow crowd of 15,000 at Pelican Stadium in New Orleans watched Paige pitch five innings against 1941’s top team, the Homestead Grays. It was the second game of a doubleheader, won by the Grays 10-7. The Monarchs took the first contest, 6-5, with Hilton Smith and Connie Johnson on the mound.

The 1942 Monarchs were considered by many, including Buck O’Neil, to be the best team in the franchise’s history, and games when Paige pitched drew large crowds; however, as the season got underway overall attendance began to decline. The Call’s new sports editor, Sam McKibben, questioned why African Americans were supporting the white Kansas City Blues instead of their own Monarchs. At Blues games, Blacks were still forced to sit in the bleachers, exposed to the sun and rain. “Apparently,” McKibben wrote sarcastically, “rank discrimination doesn’t spin their enjoyment of the game.” By contrast, at the Monarchs home opener, McKibben observed, “whites and Negroes sat together, cheered together, slapped each other on the back.”6

The Monarchs opened the 1942 regular season in Chicago on May 10, taking both games of a doubleheader with the Chicago American Giants, 7-4 and 6-0. Paige earned the shutout victory in the second game, and, according to the Call of May 15, “Old Satchel” showed “some of the smartest pitching of his brilliant career.”

The home opener at Ruppert Stadium on May 17 against the Memphis Red Sox featured a patriotic theme, with War Bonds on sale and soldiers in uniform admitted free (as they were throughout World War II). The Monarchs and Red Sox split a doubleheader as Paige took the loss in the second game.

On May 24, 1942, the Monarchs and Satchel Paige faced off at Wrigley Field in Chicago against a white team composed of major and minor leaguers led by Dizzy Dean. The game drew nearly 30,000 fans. The Call noted in its promotional article for the game (May 22, 1942) that Dean was still smarting at the losses he had suffered to Paige several years earlier. Indians ace Bob Feller was scheduled to play but had to withdraw when he was called back to active service in the Navy; he donated his fee to a Navy relief fund. The Monarchs won the game, 3-1, with both Dean and Paige taking the mound. As he would often do, after Paige pitched the first innings (in this game, six), Hilton Smith finished the contest. According to the Call’s game report (May 29, 1942), several of the big leaguers on Dean’s team “were loud and sincere in their praise of the Monarchs[,]” saying the several Monarchs could play in the white majors. However, the game drew the attention of Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The Call reported on July 3, 1942, that Landis was about to rule that games between teams led by Paige and Dean would not be allowed to be played in white parks.

On June 5, 1942, the Call reported that Frank Duncan, who had been sharing managerial duties with Dizzy Dismukes, was named permanent skipper. According to the Call, with the departure of J.L. Wilkinson’s brother Lee from team duties, Dismukes resumed the role of business manager and traveling secretary. The ban on NAL teams playing games against the Ethiopian Clowns did not stop the Call from publishing a picture of Clowns pitcher Peanuts Nyassas, “who performs antics that keep fans in an uproar.” On June 26 the Call noted that the Clowns were playing throughout the Midwest, drawing an average of 5,000 per game.

The lure of a big payday proved too great. Skirting the ban on games by NAL and NNL teams against the Clowns, “by special arrangement with KC Monarchs management[,]” a game between the Ethiopian Clowns and Birmingham Black Barons was played at Ruppert Stadium in Kansas City on August 9, 1942. In a promotional article on August 7, the Call noted that “all the Clowns’ stunts will be on display.” For example, Pepper Bassett would catch the game seated in a rocking chair, the Call reported. The Clowns were currently barnstorming before huge crowds through the Dakotas, Iowa, Ohio, Minnesota, and Illinois. More than 600,000 fans had paid to see them, the Call added. They had played to crowds as large as 25,000. In his “Sports Potpourri” column, Sam McKibben wrote that the Ethiopian Clowns would present their “baseball tomfoolery” … “Incredible feats will be accomplished before the final ball is thrown.” The game was a “must” for baseball fans, he dutifully wrote. They will “clown their way into the hearts of the Heart of America.” The Clowns lost both ends of the doubleheader before 4,000 fans.

NAL owners decided at their February 1943 meeting not only to allow teams to play the Ethiopian (now Cincinnati and later Indianapolis) Clowns but also to allow the Clowns to join the league.7 The Clowns played their home games at Crosley Field in Cincinnati. In August 1943 the Monarchs played a profitable series against the Clowns.

In 1942 the Call was also lending its voice to the campaign to break the through the color barrier in major-league baseball. On June 12 the paper published the full text of a resolution adopted by the 2,000 members of the National Maritime Union calling for Negro players to be allowed in the major leagues. Another union, the United Retail, Wholesale, and Department Store employees, had already passed a similar resolution. A copy was sent to Commissioner Landis.

In addition to its NAL schedule, the 1942 Monarchs were continuing to barnstorm. The Call reported on a June tour through Michigan, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, including a no-hitter hurled by Paige and Booker McDaniel against the Frigidaire Icemen at Ducks Park in Dayton, Ohio, on June 16.8

During the 1942 campaign Wilkinson made the turnstiles spin by booking games for the Paige All-Stars. The Original House of David team continued to be a popular rival, as on July 5 in Louisville, Kentucky. The Call enthused that “there is little doubt about the magnetic quality of Paige’s box office appeal.” In 1942 he was, according to the Call, having one of his best seasons, noting that “his fast hopper is jumping.”9

On Friday, July 17, 1942, the Monarchs met an Army team, Johnny Sturm’s Jefferson Barracks All-Stars, which featured several former major leaguers. The game took place at Ruppert Stadium, and the Call made clear in its July 24 issue that there would be integrated seating. The game was the brainchild of J.L. Wilkinson and Monarchs co-owner Tom Baird. They covered all the Monarchs’ expenses and the New York Yankees, for whom Sturm had played, and who owned the white Kansas City Blues, covered the ballpark expenses. The proceeds were to go to charity. The Monarchs staged a rendition of the popular pepper game before the first pitch and then shut out the All-Stars, 6-0.

In its July 24, 1942, edition the Call’s Sam McKibben noted that on July 17 “death claimed Segregation, Discrimination and Jim Crow, father, son and grandson, all pioneer residents of Ruppert Stadium. … There were no mourners, just 6,000 enjoying a baseball drama. The ushers, who are usually rude to Negro patrons, were bubbling with friendliness. That’s democracy at work. Whites seated next to Negroes without incident and asked, ‘Why don’t they allow the [white Kansas City] Blues to play the Monarchs?’ and ‘Why are Negroes kept out of the majors and minors?’ There was no trouble-making, no vile language, no fights. The Ruppert management had contended that white patrons would object to sitting next to Negroes at ball games. Oh well, if it never happens again, it happened Friday night. There was no segregation nor discrimination. Whites will benefit more than Negroes as a result of the charity proceeds, but Negro fans came out in huge numbers in support of the game.” McKibben went on to write that Commissioner Landis has let it be known he had not laid down a law saying Negroes cannot play in the majors, that it is up to club owners. There were some White owners willing to sign Negroes. “Let Negro league teams like the Monarchs play leading major league teams and owners could tell how Negro and white players compare in ability,” McKibben concluded.

The next week the Call printed the full statement of Commissioner Landis. In part, Landis proclaimed: “If [Leo] Durocher, or any other manager, or all of them want to sign one or 25 Negro players it is all right with me. That is the business of the manager and the club owners.” The statement was provoked by comment from Durocher that “he would hire Negro players if he were permitted.” The Call also included a response to Landis by civil-rights leader A. Philip Randolph that “the door was now open for Negro players, but it will not remain open. It is up to Negroes themselves with the support of their white friends to keep it open and open it wider. With so many players going into the military, the demand is now greater than the supply. If Negro players do not break in during the war, it is not likely they will after the war. We do not want Negroes to enter the majors as Negro teams we want them integrated into every baseball club in the country.”10

The July 31 edition of the Call returned to the July 17 game in an editorial by McKibben headlined “Modern Version: Dr. Jekel [sic] – Mr. Hyde.” He again contrasted the courtesy of the white ushers at the Monarchs-Jefferson Barracks game with the attitude toward Black fans attending games between the Kansas City Blues and other white teams. At a Blues-Toledo Mud Hens game, attendants insulted Black fans with racial slurs. Two Negro men responded to the ushers, saying, “[w]e are American citizens and entitled to the rights of Americans.” Before long Negro players, McKibben asserted, will be in the majors, and “the jim-crow practice will be drowning in its own sweat.” McKibben had guessed three weeks earlier that “some cellar-dwelling big-league team would buy some Negro players. [Josh] Gibson, [Buck] O’Neil, [Joe] Greene, [Satchel] Paige, [Hilton] Smith, [Willard] Brown, and [Ted] Strong, to name a few, are “on the threshold of a new day.”

On August 7, 1942, under the headline “The Monarchs Owner Is Elated,” the Call published an Associated Negro Press wire story. According to the release, “J.L. Wilkinson, co-owner of the Kansas City Monarchs, champions of the Negro American League, gave approbation this week to the plan of William E. Benswanger, owner of the Pittsburgh Pirates, to give Negro baseball players a tryout with his team. Moghuls [sic] of major league teams expressed themselves pro and con on the issue. ‘I think it would be a fine [day] for the game,’ said Wilkinson, ‘although we would lose some of our stars.’ Wilkinson is a former minor league pitcher who has been [involved with] Negro ball teams with his partner, Tom Board [sic], since [1920].” Wilkinson said he had talked “with Leroy ‘Satchel’ Paige, the pitching great” recently “and said he advised the right hand speed-ball [artist], ‘we certainly won’t stand in your way if you have a chance to play.’ Paige is under a two-year contract with the Kansas City club. … Wilkinson said he believed Josh Gibson, catcher for the Washington Homestead Grays, would attract the most attention next to Paige. … ‘There are at least a score of players who could make any major league team,’ added the Monarchs owner.”

Sam McKibben conducted an interview with Satchel Paige at the 1942 Negro Leagues East-West All-Star Game played on August 16 before 45,179 at Comiskey Field in Chicago. It was published in the August 21 edition of the Call under the headline “Paige Says Abolish Jim Crow and He Will Be Ready for His Major League Debut but Not Before at Any Price.” It clearly showed that Paige had given careful consideration to the prospect of his signing with a major-league team. McKibben wrote, “Satchel Paige doesn’t want a major league tryout, nor to play major league ball … unless two things come to pass: the complete abolition of JIM CROW on a NATIONAL scale … and he is given a contract identical to that tendered a white player getting a tryout. The white papers have been saying Paige is through. When Paige told a reporter that he wouldn’t sign a $10,000 contract with a big-league team, and refused to reveal his current salary, it was written that he was receiving $40,000 a year. Satchel is an enthusiastic talker and I just let him talk,” McKibben commented. “‘Imagine,’ he says, ‘me living at a Negro hotel although I play with a white team. Record my feelings when dishes, out of which I eat, are broken up in my presence. How could I pitch a decent game with insulting jeers coming from spectators and even some of the players? … Just convince me that agitation can be halted and I’ll push fast balls by Joe DiMaggio.’ ‘Why,’ he says, ‘if the President hasn’t made southern DEFENSE plants hire, and use Negro labor in government plants, how can Judge Landis, Connie Mack or anyone make the southern white folk accept the Negro as a ball player. His training camp life in the South would be miserable … and the camps won’t be moved for one or two Negroes. … What about the tryouts allegedly scheduled by the Pittsburgh Pirates. Who will ‘bell the cat’ (meaning end jim crow)? Will the white trainers work on a Negro to say nothing to take care of him. Indeed not. I’ve never been able to get any service out of one. … Tell the reading public,’ says Satch, ‘not to believe half of what it reads that I say in the [white] daily papers. I say to others what I am saying to you, but my statements are twisted. Negroes will never get into the major leagues because of jim crow. It’s a wonderful dream but will never come true. With the nation at war not one is going to try to abolish jim crow …. and even in peace time, jim crowism will flourish. Me, I am going to stick with Wilkie, J.L. Wilkinson, Monarchs owner, and whoever says I am afraid I can’t make the grade … is just plain nuts. I experience enough prejudice now, why court more?’”

In the same edition, in his “Sports Potpourri” feature, McKibben opined that “Negro soldiers are being killed in the South while in uniform for ‘mixing’ with whites. What will happen to Negro ballplayers training in the South?” He said that as a native Southerner, he believed “Jim Crowism will keep Negroes out of major league baseball. … Jim Crow must be destroyed but who will accomplish it? Truthfully, I am 100 per cent for Negroes in the majors – but too young to attempt self-disillusionment when overwhelming odds are stacking against it. … [I]t will take two years to properly season and infiltrate Negroes into major league ball.” “It’s time we sport writers cease sugar-coating. …”

The next week the Call noted reports of “[Ku Klux] Klan activity in a plot to stir up race hatred in the war industry” and “destroy national unity behind the administration’s win-the-war program.”11

In its September 4 edition the Call began its coverage of the 1942 Colored World Series between the Monarchs and the Homestead Grays, with the prediction that 32,000 would strain the capacity of Griffith Stadium in Washington when the Grays crossed bats with the Monarchs in the opening game of the 1942 Colored World Series on September 8. The Call noted that “the great Satchel Paige will be on the mound with power hitting Josh Gibson in the box. In two previous meetings this season in Washington, the Grays have edged out the Monarchs in extra-inning games.”

Since the Call was published weekly, fans would already have learned the outcomes and likely seen the box scores of the Series games, so the rest of the Call’s reporting on the Series (in the September 18 and 25 editions) focused not on individual games but on Satchel Paige’s famed confrontation with Josh Gibson in the second game, played in Pittsburgh on September 10, and a controversy that threatened to derail the Series. The former clash has become part of Negro Leagues baseball lore, but the latter event has received lesser attention.

In the September 25 Call, McKibben wrote an article headlined “Grays Employ Outside Talent to Beat Monarchs, 4-1” in which he gave a straightforward description of what the Grays had done. “With the aid of the Newark Eagles’ ace pitcher, Leon Day, who is reputed to be one of the classiest performers in baseball today, and who was aided and abided [sic] by more of his Newark Eagles’ teammates, Pearson and Stone, and Buster Clarkson of the Philly Stars,” McKibben wrote, “the Homestead Grays et al. defeated the Kansas City Monarchs 4 to 1, Sunday afternoon [September 24], at Ruppert Stadium. If the Monarchs had won[,] it would have ended the series. If won by the Grays[,] the series would have been extended from 4 of 7 to 5 of 9. … The facts make known the desperation of the Homestead Grays and explained why the ‘ringers’ were brought in to stem the tide.” The game was interrupted several times because someone was using emery to scuff the ball, but the offender was not discovered.

McKibben noted that the game was nullified at a meeting of NAL moguls called by Wilkinson and Baird. That left the Monarchs with a 3-0 lead in the series. Additionally, the use of emery boards and “other infractions of sportsmanlike ethics were ironed out to the satisfaction of all parties concerned.” The game was replayed in Philadelphia on September 29 and the Monarchs prevailed for a 4-0 Series win.

During the 1942-43 offseason the Office of Defense Transportation ruled that, effective March 15, 1943, the use of all privately owned buses by baseball teams would be forbidden. The order drew a quick reaction from NAL and NNL owners. They pointed out that Negro League teams appeared in several different parks each week and would not be able to play enough games to have financial stability without travel in private buses. In addition, since Black ballplayers were denied hotel accommodations in some cities, the buses were essential as sleeping quarters. The owners also emphasized that Negro League games provided much-needed entertainment for Black war workers in 11 metropolitan areas as well as competition for military teams.

Unmoved, the ODT refused to grant Black baseball an exemption to the ban. Wilkinson and Call editor C.A. Franklin joined forces in mounting a campaign to overturn the ruling. The Call published a series of articles condemning the ban and printed a “Save Negro Baseball” petition.12 It took until midway through the 1943 season for the campaign to convince the ODT to reverse its decision and to allow teams to use private buses.

The Monarchs continued to draw decent crowds through the 1945 season and peaked when Wilkinson and Baird signed Jackie Robinson. The turning point for the Monarchs and other Negro Leagues clubs was, of course, Branch Rickey’s acquisition of Robinson’s contract in August 1945, followed by Robinson’s joining the Brooklyn Dodgers in April 1947.

The Monarchs fielded teams in various manifestations into the 1960s and the Call continued its coverage, although more sporadically. In the final years of the Monarchs, the greatest attention in the Call’s sports section was devoted to Monarchs whose contracts were sold to major-league teams, more than from any other Negro League teams. The list includes Hall of Famers Paige, Willard Brown, Andy Cooper, and Ernie Banks, and the first African American to play for the New York Yankees, Elston Howard.

Sources

In addition to the articles in the Kansas City Call cited, other Kansas City Monarchs game reports are drawn from a timeline for the 1942 season compiled by Bill Nowlin.

Portions of this essay are drawn from William A. Young, J.L. Wilkinson and the Kansas City Monarchs: Trailblazers in Black Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, 2016).

Notes

1 William H. Young and Nathan B. Young Jr., “The Story of the Kansas City Monarchs,” Your Kansas City and Mine (Kansas City: Midwest Afro-American Genealogy Interest Coalition, 1950), 137-38, 142.

2 Kansas City Call, July 27, 1928.

3 Kansas City Call, June 17, 1922.

4 Kansas City Call, August 30, 1929.

5 Kansas City Call, January 26, 1934.

6 Kansas City Call, May 15 and 22, 1942.

7 Kansas City Call, February 26, 1943.

8 Kansas City Call, June 19, 1942.

9 Kansas City Call, July 3, 1942.

10 Kansas City Call, July 31, 1942.

11 Kansas City Call, August 28, 1942.

12 Kansas City Call, April 9 and 16, 1943.

Kansas City Royals: A Royal Tradition
Edited by Bill Nowlin 
Associate Editors: Bill Carle, Len Levin, Curt Nelson, and Carl Riechers  
Foreword by Ryan Lefebvre  
Publication Date: June 20, 2019
ISBN (e-book): 978-1-9701-5902-8, $9.99 
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-9701-5903-5, $29.99
8.5″ x 11″, 350 pages

Kansas City Royals: A Royal Tradition recounts the best moments and best players in the franchise’s first half-century and represents the collected effort of 48 members of SABR, the Society for American Baseball Research. 

A Royal Tradition includes biographies of George Brett, Paul Splittorff, Bo Jackson, Amos Otis, Freddie Patek, and Denny Matthews among many others, and recaps great stories in Royals history, from the creation of the icon Royals logo and Kauffman Stadium to historic games, like the 1980 defeat of the Yankees and the crowning achievement: the 2015 World Series championship. Foreword by Ryan Lefebvre.

From the Introduction by Curt Nelson, Director of the Royals Hall of Fame: “The history of professional baseball in Kansas City dates back to before the city took that name in 1889. When the Royals debuted in 1969 they were a continuation of an already rich Kansas City tradition. The Royals story now includes fifty years of highs and lows, thrilling moments, and memories to last a lifetime for those that lived them. More great players and colorful characters—and yes, more championships as well. This book is meant as a marker in time on this golden anniversary of Kansas City Royals Baseball to celebrate all that that has taken place in the past 50 years and the work and skill so many that made it all happen.

“Those of us that call Kansas City home like to think of our hometown as the heartland of America, and geographically speaking the claim has merit. As a matter of fact the geographical center of the contiguous 48 states of the United States is two miles outside of Lebanon, Kansas — not all that far from Kansas City (about 250 miles to the west). But we think the claim has merit beyond mere geography and though I’m hopelessly biased in the matter, the centrality of baseball to our cultural fabric and history is part of the reason why.

“Kansas City is fertile ground for baseball, and the Royals have flourished here—they have also been a worthy heir to the historic legacy that preceded them. Kansas City is the heart of America in my view, and I believe baseball is certainly a significant part of the Kansas City’s soul.”

SABR members, get this e-book for FREE!

• E-book: Click here to download the e-book version of Kansas City Royals: A Royal Tradition for FREE from the SABR Store. Available in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB/Kindle formats.
• Paperback: Get a 50% discount on the Kansas City Royals: A Royal Tradition paperback edition from the SABR Store ($17.99 includes shipping/tax; delivery via Kindle Direct Publishing can take up to 4-6 weeks.)

Buy the book

• E-book: Click here to download the e-book version of Kansas City Royals: A Royal Tradition for $9.99 from the SABR Store. Available in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB/Kindle formats.
• Paperback: Get the paperback edition Kansas City Royals: A Royal Tradition from the SABR Store ($34.99 includes shipping/tax; delivery via Kindle Direct Publishing can take up to 4-6 weeks.)

Below: Find player biographies and memorable game stories from Kansas City Royals: A Royal Tradition

Biographies

Game Recaps

Contributors include: Mark Armour, Jeff Barto, Russell Bergtold, Richard Bogovich, Thomas J. Brown Jr., Frederick “Rick” Bush, Bill Carle, Ken Carrano, Alan Cohen, Richard Cuicchi, John DiFonzo, Michael Engel, Charles F. Faber, Adam Foldes, James Forr, Brian Frank, Steve Friedman, Adrian Fung, Gordon J. Gattie, Peter M. Gordon, Paul Hofmann, Mike Huber, Stephen Katsoulis, Norm King, Tom Knosby, Steven Kuehl, Bill Lamberty, Kevin Larkin, Ryan Lefebvre, Bob LeMoine, Len Levin, Daniel R. Levitt, Robert Nash, Curt Nelson, Bill Nowlin, Larry Pauley, Carl Riechers, Max Rieper, Curt Smith, Glen Sparks, John Stahl, Mark S. Sternman, Andrew Stockmann, Clayton Trutor, Darin Watson, Gregory H. Wolf, Steve Wulf, and Jack Zerby.

The Base Ball Palace of the World: Comiskey Park
Edited by Gregory H. Wolf
Associate editors: Bill Nowlin, Kevin Larkin, and Len Levin  
Publication Date: October 17, 2019  
ISBN (e-book): 978-1-9701-5915-8, $9.99 
ISBN (paperback): 978-1-9701-5914-1, $29.95
8.5″ x 11″, 320 pages

Comiskey Park, affectionately known as the “Base Ball Palace of the World,” was the home of the Chicago White Sox for parts of nine decades, from 1910 to 1990. Despite being built on the site of a former dump, the ballpark’s address was one of baseball’s most iconic. At the intersection of 35th Street and Shields Avenue, it sat in the Armour Square neighborhood on the near-southwest side of the city.

The Base Ball Palace of the World: Comiskey Park is our humble volume which aims to evoke memories of the storied ballpark and introduce others to its exciting history through detailed summaries of more than 80 games played there and several feature essays. The SABR Digital Library volume is a collaborative and tireless effort of 50 SABR members.

Among the gems presented in this book we have Big Ed Walsh’s no-hitter in 1911, several Negro League contests including the 1933 East-West All-Star Game, the 1919 and 1959 World Series, Disco Demolition Night, the 1933 and 1983 MLB All-Star Games, and many more.

SABR members, get this e-book for FREE!

• E-book: Click here to download the e-book version of The Base Ball Palace of the World for FREE from the SABR Store. Available in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB/Kindle formats.
• Paperback: Get a 50% discount on The Base Ball Palace of the World paperback edition from the SABR Store ($17.99 includes shipping/tax; delivery via Kindle Direct Publishing can take up to 4-6 weeks.)

Buy the book

• E-book: Click here to download the e-book version of The Base Ball Palace of the World for $9.99 from the SABR Store. Available in PDF, MOBI, and EPUB/Kindle formats.
• Paperback: Get the paperback edition of The Base Ball Palace of the World from the SABR Store ($34.99 includes shipping/tax; delivery via Kindle Direct Publishing can take up to 4-6 weeks.)

Below: Find player biographies, memorable game stories, and essays
from The Base Ball Palace of the World: Comiskey Park

SABR Biography

Comiskey Park served as home of the Chicago White Sox from 1910 to 1990. (SABR-Rucker Archive)

Click here to read more about Comiskey Park at the SABR BioProject

Game Stories

Contributors include: Frank Amoroso, John Bauer, Nathan Bierma, Stephen D. Boren, Thomas J. Brown Jr., Ken Carrano, Matthew M. Clifford, Alan Cohen, Richard Cuicchi, Katie Dickson, Greg Erion, Doug Feldmann, Scott Ferkovich, Dan Fields, Brian Frank, John Gabcik, Gordon J. Gattie, Paul Hofmann, Mike Huber, Robert Kimball, Norm King, Adam Klinker, Russ Lake, Kevin Larkin, Bob LeMoine, Brandon Lee, Len Levin, Michael T. Lynch, Michael Marsh, Mark Mullane, Bill Nowlin, Will Osgood, Bill Pearch, Tom Pardo, Jacob Pomrenke, Alan Reifman, Richard Riis, C. Paul Rogers III, Joe Schuster, Lyle Spatz, Mark S. Sternman, Stew Thornley, Joseph Wancho, Bob Webster, Steven C. Weiner, Gregory H. Wolf, Bob Wood, Brian P. Wood, Brian Wright, and Don Zminda.