Lew Simmons and his banjo,
Lew Simmons’ Songster (author’s collection)
A few years into his budding career, the question that the minstrel shows implicitly raised—whether black Americans really were fully human—ignited the Civil War. Simmons, who was twenty-two years old when the firing on Fort Sumter plunged America into war, successfully avoided service. But he contributed to the cause on stage, helping to popularize the stirring new battle song “When Johnny Comes Marching Home.” In 1864, he joined the famous Carncross and Dixey’s Minstrels in Philadelphia, and by the end of the war, he was one of America’s greatest minstrel stars.
A seventy-two-page paperback book, Lew Simmons’ Songster (1868), celebrated his fame. It included pictures of his act—some disturbingly racist—and lyrics to his hit songs, including “The Base Ball Fever,” “Conducting a City Car,” “Going Out a Skating,” and, poking fun at German immigrants, “De Man Vat Likes de Lager Beer.” In 1870, he boldly formed his own his minstrel company, Simmons and Slocum, and built a handsome opera house at 1003 Arch Street in Philadelphia that was still in existence in the twenty-first century as the Trocadero Theatre. Simmons traveled the world, performing in blackface in Turkey, England, China, and South America. He spent one winter as the proprietor of a minstrel troupe at Cape Town, South Africa, catering to British soldiers fighting in the Zulu War.
During his off-hours, Simmons indulged himself in skating and baseball, demonstrating an athlete’s grace and coordination in both sports. Over the winter of 1866–1867, Lew made headlines by combining the two skills, playing baseball on ice in one of those silly exhibitions that seemed to delight the nineteenth-century mind. In warmer weather, when the theaters tended to be shut down, Simmons was a good enough ballplayer to take the field for the Philadelphia Athletics, already one of the best teams in the country. Highly regarded for his heavy batting, he scored ten runs in a single game on July 30, 1866, as the Athletic and Philadelphia clubs inaugurated Oakdale Park, at Eleventh and Huntington streets. The following spring, the club awarded him a gold-headed cane “as a slight appreciation of his efforts on behalf of Philadelphia’s favorite team.”
Title page,
Lew Simmons’ Songster (author’s collection)
Simmons’s performing career was too profitable for him to play baseball full-time, yet he never stopped loving the game. He got out to the ballpark whenever he could, and his piping cry of “pretty work!” was a familiar sound in the grandstand for years. But, just as in St. Louis, baseball in Philadelphia had withered by the late 1870s, rotted out by gambling corruption and the loss of a place in the National League. In 1881, two Philadelphia men—Billy Sharsig, a theatrical manager, and Charlie Mason, a former professional ballplayer who now owned a cigar store, and who was known as more of a devotee of “highball” cocktails than of baseball—decided to make a stab at reviving baseball in their city. They formed a partnership to field an independent, gate-splitting team named after the once mighty Athletics. According to Al Spink, “Sharsig’s capital consisted of a stocking of gold, the life savings of his old mother which he had borrowed.” They brought Simmons on as an experienced theatrical manager and diehard baseball lover. He would serve as their business manager.
For a time, it appeared that Sharsig had squandered his aged mother’s nest egg. “When I went around among the newspaper offices and asked them to publish some baseball matter,” he recalled, “they said: ‘Billy, get out. We have no time to talk about a dead crow.’” Sharsig found he had to bribe editors to put squibs about the Athletics into the papers. Perhaps this, from the Philadelphia Item in June 1881, was one of them: “Baseball is destined to be as popular as ever in the city. The Athletics were the entering wedge to this return of enthusiasm over the game.”
Oddly enough, though, the prediction started to come true as summer wore on. The players seemed to be honest, the games were exciting, and the owners knew how to entertain crowds. Late in the year, Sharsig and Mason offered second baseman Chick Fulmer an ownership stake for $200; when he balked, Simmons jumped in as the third financier. He caught a train to Cincinnati in November 1881 to help found the new American Association, with his Athletics as a charter member. It proved to be an exceedingly astute investment. When the Athletics finished in second place in the circuit’s inaugural season, attendance exploded. The three owners, who “kept no books but divided the receipts after each game,” began taking home bags stuffed full of cash. Serving as ticket collectors themselves to spare the cost of hiring staff, the triumvirate reportedly pocketed $22,000 in clear profit for 1882. Once he saw the money pour in, Simmons abruptly reversed his career direction. He dropped his remaining minstrel work to pursue baseball full-time.
In a flowery statement sent out to prospective season ticket holders in April 1883, Simmons, Sharsig, and Mason boasted that they had revived baseball’s “old-time popularity” in the city by ridding the grandstand of gamblers and ruffians and presenting an honest contest on the field. “Conducted on business principles, and freed from the demoralizing influences which had for several years alienated its most worthy patrons, [baseball] has, Phoenix-like, arisen with former prestige restored and rejuvenated,” their announcement asserted. Using language designed to appeal to Philadelphia’s wealthy Protestant establishment—the ones who could afford season tickets—the owners stressed that people of quality could once again attend Athletics games without revulsion. “Those whose education and refinement had for a time sought suitable companionship only at cricket matches found again last year congeniality and enjoyment among the throngs that witnessed the skillful and exciting games of baseball played on our grounds.”
Hoping to attract more such customers, the owners announced that each Thursday home game in 1883 would be “Ladies Day.” Any woman who was accompanied by a ticket holder would be granted free admission. Women not only drew men to the park, they tended to keep the crowd under control, since men limited their swearing and violence around the fairer sex. The National Police Gazette joked that there was another reason why Mason was behind the concept, “as there is not a greater ladies’ man in the United States than Charley. He is extremely handsome, has winning manners, is a great society man, and a pet among all the ladies. When Charley comes about all the mashers crawl into their holes.” In any event, the owners pledged that the public’s nasty experiences at ballparks infested with rowdies, drunks, gamblers, and their like were a thing of the past. The owners vowed:
Ladies and gentlemen will be protected from the annoyance of distasteful expressions and spectacles by the rigid enforcement of our rules, which are that rowdies, drunkards or other objectionable characters will not be admitted under any pretense. The price of their tickets, if presented, will be refunded. Pool-selling or open betting will not be allowed. Respect for the umpire’s decisions, however distasteful, will be enforced. Profanity, obscenity or other disorderly conduct among the audience will not be tolerated. The presence of a sufficient number of uniformed officers will guarantee the execution of the above rules, and the summary ejection of their transgressors.
Such promises were easier to make than to keep in the raucous American Association, especially in Philadelphia.
Of course, a well-regulated park and Ladies Days could accomplish only so much. To draw really big crowds, Simmons and his mates would have to field a champion team. Much like Von der Ahe, they resolved to buy a pennant. “This year, we decided to get solid players, regardless of salary,” Simmons explained to a reporter. The buzz about Simmons’s rebuilding effort had the desired effect: Philadelphians who had shrugged off baseball for years could now hardly wait for the new season to begin. “All of the Athletics’ season tickets have been sold, and double the number could have been disposed of if necessary,” the Item reported on January 21.
The Athletics would be playing in a handsomely rebuilt ballpark, though not by choice. After the owners of the team had gone to considerable expense renovating shabby Oakda
le Park in 1882, they found the grounds sold out from under them during the off-season to a housing developer. The club had to hustle to sign a lease on a large city-owned vacant lot. Bounded by Twenty-fifth and Twenty-seventh streets in one direction and Master and Jefferson streets in the other, it was a busy location served by five horsecar lines—the very spot used by the old Athletics in 1864 and 1871 through 1877, and, incidentally, the site of the first game in National League history, on April 22, 1876. To be sure, these hallowed grounds had not been perfectly preserved during the five years that pro baseball had been gone. The deep outfield was now covered with buildings, though the New York Clipper reassured readers that the remainder was “large enough for all practical purposes.”
As soon as the winter broke, “landscape gardeners” quickly went to work, making the field “almost as level as the bed of a billiard table.” By mid-April, the playing field was still an expanse of dirt, but it had been “plowed and harrowed and sowed heavily with lawn-grass seed.” The club erected a lovely new grandstand, “handsomely ornamented with fancy cornice-work” and painted white, at relatively little cost, by recycling the lumber from the dismantled fences and grandstand at Oakdale Park. The new grandstand featured 1,600 arm-chairs, with room for 400 more. On the upper deck sat the press box, which could accommodate twelve reporters, as well as thirty-two private boxes, each with five chairs. Large bleachers stretched out along the foul lines, making the park’s total seating capacity about 6,000. The players’ dressing rooms were placed under the grandstand, and the club’s business offices had been built near the left-field corner. “Although not yet completed,” the Clipper reported that April, “enough has been done to show it will be one of the finest baseball grounds in the country.”
When the unfinished park formally opened on April 7, 1883, four thousand hardy Philadelphians shivered in the cold to welcome back baseball. The exhibition game featured the Yale University squad, the best college team in the country, which had garnered fame largely on the strength of its wonderful pitcher, Dan Jones. The beefed-up Athletics crushed their amateur opponents 12–0, with the club’s new slugger, Harry Stovey, “[leading] off with a three-bagger, which would have been a home run if the field had not been soft,” and then scoring the first (and winning) run. Bobby Mathews, the Athletics’ new pitcher, threw a four-hit shutout, letting only one Yale runner reach third.
It was not college ball, though, that most paying customers wanted to see in the spring. They yearned for hard-fought interleague games, which in those days took place only in the spring or fall, not during the regular season. Association President Denny McKnight had banned those in October 1882. But an astonishing truce in the bitter war between the National League and American Association had suddenly made them possible in the spring of 1883.
ABRAHAM GILBERT MILLS HAD BETTER THINGS TO DO WITH HIS life than to bicker with the saloon owners, beer manufacturers, minstrel stars, and sportswriters who seemed to run the American Association. In January 1883, the corporate attorney from Chicago had started a new, high-pressured job in New York City as vice president of Otis Brothers, the manufacturer of a hot high-technology product—the elevator, essential to the steel-reinforced skyscrapers that were suddenly going up all over the country. It was only out of love for the game and respect for the late William Hulbert that Mills had agreed in late 1882 to add to his already heavy workload by taking on a tough, time-consuming volunteer position that paid nothing: the presidency of the National League. He took over for the interim president, Boston Red Stockings owner Arthur H. Soden.
Mills was a brave and honorable man. As a youth in 1861, he had quit the Brooklyn Atlantics to serve with the 5th New York Volunteer Infantry Regiment, known as Duryea’s Zouaves, and had fought in some of the fiercest battles of the Civil War. But he tended to view matters less moral-istically and more pragmatically than Hulbert. By the time Mills took the job of League president, he was resolved to do everything in his power to end the war between the top two professional baseball leagues. “We seem to be drifting in the direction which nearly ruined baseball many years ago, when contracts were disregarded and players employed on the basis of their skill—without regard for the odium their past conduct had brought upon the game,” he wrote in a private letter. He did not share the belief that the time for talk had passed, and that President McKnight’s threatened “war to the knife” was inevitable. “I take it,” he wrote, “that these associations are run by full-grown men, and whatever the faults of the past may have been,” these men should be able to “honor each other’s contracts and return the good opinion of the public, which we are equally liable otherwise to lose.”
Mills was far from the only influential voice demanding a halt to the rival leagues’ internecine war. “It requires no keen sight to perceive that such a course must result disastrously to the pecuniary interests of both associations,” Henry Chadwick wrote in the New York Clipper. The leagues simply had to stop their “Kilkenny fight” and work together if they hoped to root out corrupt players and keep salaries under control. The League’s terrified owners, fearing the Association was about to crush them, were only too happy to pursue peace, and Cleveland’s new manager, Frank Bancroft, was ecstatic about the renewed prospect of games between the two circuits. “If they can play together, it will put thousands of dollars in the pockets of both,” he wrote to a friend. Bancroft believed “the representatives of the two associations are able and honorable gentlemen” and that all would go well “if the cool-headed men are in the majority.”
It turned out that they were. President McKnight, tired of seeing players sign agreements only to bolt, stressed to his fellow Association owners that, “although his club has suffered as badly as any from violated contracts, he was willing to let that pass, rather than to bring about a worse complication of troubles.” Lew Simmons, declaring that he had “slept on the matter,” swung around and supported peace. In the end, only one of the Association’s eight owners opposed the peace movement: the stubborn Chris Von der Ahe of the St. Louis Browns. He argued, to no avail, that the Association, with its bigger crowds and profits from liquor sales, would win a war of attrition if the owners only had the guts to wage it.
The lawyer Mills drew up a “Tripartite Agreement”—the third signatory being the minor Northwestern League—that made perfect sense: the three leagues would agree to respect the contracts now in place; honor the reserve clause; and forget about the players they had lost, no matter how strong their claim, setting aside “narrow-minded views and personal vindictiveness,” as Chadwick put it. Each club, except those in Philadelphia and New York, would own a monopoly on baseball in its city. In the interest of peace, the National League would also shrink its blacklist, springing some talented players from the dungeon of unemployment and shame. Although League owners themselves refused to take back three former stars whom they held in particular contempt—Joe Gerhardt, Charley Jones, and Phil Baker—they would no longer block the way if American Association clubs wanted them.
Through their teams of negotiators—the prominent figure from the American Association being Cincinnati journalist O. P. Caylor, who served as secretary—the two leagues finally met on February 17, 1883, at the Fifth Avenue Hotel in New York City. There, they reached a peace accord. It was a landmark day for baseball. Later called the National Agreement, Mills’s deal became the framework for organized baseball down to this day. “If Hulbert made the National League possible,” historian Lee Allen observed, “Mills made organized baseball possible.” Wisely, the deal said nothing about Sunday games and beer. Even John P. Campbell of the Philadelphia Item, who had fumed for years at Hulbert’s confrontational tactics and had even wished him dead, was delighted to see peace. “It may be said to have started the game on a new career that will prove highly advantageous to all concerned,” he predicted. More than 130 years later, it is clear that Campbell’s prophecy was a wild understatement.
THE DEAL CERTAINLY PROVED HIGHLY ADVANTAGEOUS IN
Philadelphia. On April 14, the first truly beautiful spring day of 1883, some ten thousand people stuffed themselves into the new Athletic Park for the initial interleague clash between the Association’s Athletics and the League’s Philadelphia Phillies. It was the biggest baseball crowd in Philadelphia since the halcyon years of the early 1870s, when the rivalry between the Athletics and the Brooklyn Atlantics drew thousands. Henry Chadwick, writing in the New York Clipper, viewed that afternoon as a turning point in baseball history—the golden day when it became clear that the “Philadelphia public’s confidence in the integrity of play of the professional clubs of the city has been restored, and it is to be hoped permanently.”
The Phillies had been a rush job, thrown into the National League on short notice in 1883 to give the senior circuit a presence in a crucial baseball market. Nobody expected much. They were only a slightly upgraded version the 1882 Phillies, a low-salaried independent club that won only sixteen of its sixty-five exhibition games against National League teams. Betting men thought Lew Simmons’s highly touted Athletics would easily walk away the winners of this first clash, the Clipper noted, “and their money talked to the tune of 100 to 80, and in some instances greater odds offered, and these were not eagerly taken.” Even the Phillies shared that opinion. “They hoped for the best—a close fight—but were prepared for the worst,” observed the Clipper. By contrast, “it was all-important for the Athletics to win this first game, not only to show the improved strength of the new team, but to inspire confidence in their ability to win the American pennant-race.”
Although the game would not start until 3:30 P.M., a crowd began to form around the main entrance at Athletic Park at noon, and it grew to a thousand by 1 P.M. The nostalgic Chadwick loved the scene. “On squeezing through the narrow portal of the entrance we saw the veterans of the old-time Athletics Tom Pratt and Al Reach on hand attending to ‘biz,’ and Manager Lew Simmons and Superintendent Ryan up to their ears in preparatory work.” Co-owner Mason, a man renowned for his “genial disposition, attentiveness and politeness,” spotted the dean of baseball writers and led him upstairs to the press box, “from whence a splendid view of the extensive grounds and capitally-prepared field was obtainable. . . . It was a sight to see the rush.” Every seat was taken by 3 P.M. Philadelphians who came later were herded onto the field, where they stood six deep in front of the outfield fences. Latecomers, stunned to find the game sold out, offered “fancy prices” for tickets “without avail.”
The Summer of Beer and Whiskey Page 6
