The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

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The Summer of Beer and Whiskey Page 7

by Edward Achorn


  The owners of the Athletics were caught unprepared for baseball fever of this intensity. Chadwick, noting how long it took the mob to exit after the game, urged the Athletics to build several more gates; “otherwise it will become a general resort for pickpockets to ply their trade.” Another irritant was the constant stream of visitors permitted to enter the press box and distract working journalists with their inane chatter. But the revived passion for baseball on display was the most important impression of the day.

  To almost everyone’s surprise, the much-despised Phillies walked off with an easy 6–1 victory over the vaunted A’s. “The defeat won’t do the team any harm,” Chadwick reassured the Athletics’ followers. “They were too confident before. They now see that they have work to do, and they will do it.” But they didn’t do it, at least not right away. Despite the resumption of that April’s miserable weather, six thousand Philadelphia baseball lovers came out for the rematch. In a cold, drizzling rain, the Phillies out-hit their opponents. The Athletics’ fumbling in the field was “unworthy of an amateur club.” The Phillies won 8–1. Five days later, Phillies pitcher Hardie Henderson carried a no-hitter into the eighth inning, leading his men to a 3–1 win over the Athletics, their third straight victory. “Simmons has become quite gray and has lost 50 pounds of flesh since the Athletic-Philadelphia series of championship games commenced,” the National Police Gazette chuckled. “He has learned an awful lot about baseball in the past few weeks.”

  But on April 26, just five days before the start of the regular season, the Athletics finally came around, clubbing the Phillies 10–2. Two days later, the Athletics did it again, winning 10–3. And on April 30, the eve of opening day, another massive crowd of ten thousand turned out to watch the final battle of spring training between the two Philadelphia clubs. They packed the grandstand and bleachers at Athletic Park, while the overflow spilled out into right field. For the third straight time, the Athletics pummeled the Phillies, winning 9–4. That tied the city series, leaving the question of superiority until the clubs would be able to meet again more than five months later—in the postseason contests already planned for October.

  Lew Simmons and his fellow owners could not have been terribly disappointed with the results. American Association clubs won only four of thirty-one games against League teams that April, and their Athletics owned three of those four victories. More important, the crowds were all that the triumvirate could have dreamed of. An astounding fifty thousand tickets were sold for the six Athletics-Phillies games, the equivalent of a full season’s attendance for many professional clubs during the late 1870s and early 1880s. None of this would have happened had the trio not boldly invested in baseball. Or had Mills and a handful of coolheaded owners—Simmons included—neglected to force a peace on baseball, one that arguably saved the game.

  The one man who had clamored for war to the end, the bitterly competitive Chris Von der Ahe, had no choice in the matter. He would now have to turn his ire from the National League to his American Association rivals and outsmart them to capture the pennant.

  4

  THE MOSES OF ST. LOUIS

  APRIL 1 IN ST. LOUIS WAS MISTY, GLOOMY, AND RAW—”ALMOST wintry at the ball park and thoroughly cheerless,” said one observer. The hundreds of men pouring in to see the game pulled their coats closer, rubbed their hands together, and blew on their fingers for warmth. But a short irishman taking in the scene had cause to smile as he saw the grandstand and bleachers start to fill up. He knew the boss would be pleased. in spite of the weather, there was going to be a big crowd today—very big, for a mere exhibition game. And Mr. Von der Ahe would surely know whom to thank.

  Timothy Paul “Ted” Sullivan, a peppery little fellow with a bushy mustache, had been working hard toward this day. He was an immigrant from County Clare in the old country. Born thirty-two years earlier, during the Great Famine that had claimed 1 million lives in Ireland, he had escaped to America at the age of ten with his parents. Blessed with an Irishman’s gift for talk, Sullivan had been putting it to good use for months in the service of his new employer, the St. Louis Browns. He had cajoled some of the nation’s best ballplayers into joining him in St. Louis in 1883. Then he had regaled local sportswriters, touting his dazzling lineup. Sullivan’s Browns had become a hot topic in local offices, barbershops, smoke shops, clubs, and saloons—wherever men gathered.

  And now, one month before the regular season’s May 1 opening, the baseball aficionados of St. Louis were coming out by the thousands to see for themselves, shivering a bit in their winter coats and hats, but chattering with excitement, their breath making clouds in the frigid air. By game time, the stands, still fragrant with new wood and fresh paint, were packed solid.

  A gong sounded, and some six thousand pairs of eyes turned to see the players march crisply out of Solari’s old place in the right-field corner. To the spectators’ amazement, the once disheveled Browns formed a straight line, in order of height, “in military precision, and not like stragglers.” The crowd roared its approval of the drill work, “which told that the efforts of the management in seeking to lift the game out of the rut were duly appreciated.” At another stroke of the gong, the men marched toward first base. Then, separating, they jogged “double-quick” to their positions and tossed the ball around, getting loose. The symbolism of that entrance by Sullivan’s men could not have been clearer: this year’s Browns would stress excellence.

  Even their uniforms helped to make the point. The Browns’ mismatched apparel of 1882 was no more: “The old and slovenly uniforms had vanished along with the cripples, and the neatly attired players looked as bright as new dollars and full of life,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat said. To the surprise of many spectators, the Browns had even traded in their traditional brown stockings, caps, and trimmings, without trading in the nickname many used for the team. They were now wearing scarlet, the color of their bitter Midwestern rivals, the Cincinnati Reds, the American Association’s defending champions—and the color that would later stick to the team when it became the St. Louis Cardinals. One customer grumbled, “when St. Louis plays Cincinnati there will be some sad mixing up. Better to have stuck to the brown.” But the roars drowned out the catcalls. St. Louis was ready for a winner, in any color.

  A beefy, red-cheeked young man surveyed the park with twinkling eyes. Von der Ahe loved the crisp new uniforms, and he loved showing off what he could buy with his fattened purse. He had made piles of money in 1882, as workingmen and their families responded warmly to his Sunday games and twenty-five-cent tickets. But his team’s performance had embarrassed him. Back on September 16, 1882, as the season entered its final three weeks, St. Louis languished in next to last place:

  However little he knew about baseball’s intricacies, Von der Ahe lacked the patience to endure repeated painful losses. Even before the schedule could be played out, he moved boldly to remake his club. And to lift the Browns to the next level, he had felt compelled to double-cross a loyal ally, his baseball adviser and player-manager, Ned Cuthbert.

  For years, the Philadelphia-born Cuthbert had been the de facto leader of professional baseball in St. Louis, patiently rebuilding the game as head of the independent, gate-sharing St. Louis Browns teams. He was regarded as something of a hotdog—he “played to the grandstand,” the Sporting News alleged, positioning himself deep in the outfield and swooping in for crowd-pleasing shoestring catches of routine fly balls—but he was well loved in St. Louis for his drive and dedication. After Von der Ahe had fended off the players’ short-lived rebellion in 1881, he had relied on Cuthbert’s judgment to assemble the team on the field—both in 1881, when Cuthbert led the Browns to an outstanding 35–15 record, playing against some of the finest independent clubs in America, and in 1882, when the Browns entered the new American Association, and the players signed season contracts rather than split the gate. In a moment of high hopes, Von der Ahe had promised his old friend a $1,000 bonus if he captured the Association’s fi
rst pennant.

  By September 1882, Von der Ahe had lost faith in the man. He needed a sharper baseball mind working with him, and he was prepared to discard Cuthbert as ruthlessly as he had William Spink and Augustus Solari, with the same effect: demonstrating who really controlled professional baseball in St. Louis. Blithely undercutting Cuthbert’s authority, the owner began openly seeking a replacement late in the season, even asking the players for advice. Some touted Ted Sullivan, a former minor-league manager who had a knack for organizing teams and developing great players. At the moment, Sullivan was hidden away in Dubuque, Iowa, running a profitable business hustling newspapers and snacks on train runs in the Midwest. But baseball remained his true love. He had managed an independent professional baseball team in Milwaukee, in 1876, and more famously, the 1879 Dubuque Rabbits, champions of the Northwestern League, a club he had loaded with future stars—among them Old Hoss Radbourn, the greatest pitcher of his era, and an ambitious nineteen-year-old named Charlie Comiskey, son of a Chicago councilman.

  The elder Comiskey, frustrated over his son’s obsession with baseball and poor performance in school, had shipped Charlie off to St. Mary’s College in the hopes he would shape up. Instead of buckling down, the teenager met Ted Sullivan, who instantly recognized his talent and shifted him from the freshman to the senior team—”his first promotion,” Sullivan recalled, “and I dare say his most cherished one.” The father became incensed when Sullivan turned the lad into a professional player, bringing him along to Milwaukee, and then to Dubuque. Sullivan coached his lanky protégé in a style of playing first base that dated back to the 1860s—standing well off the bag, where he could roam for grounders, counting on his long legs to get him back in time to take the throw if the ball went to another fielder. That strategy had gone out of fashion in the 1870s when the “fair-foul” hit came to dominate the game, as great batters like Ross Barnes learned how to plunk a ball in the infield, only to have it spin off into foul territory beyond the reach of fielders. The fair-foul hit had been eliminated before the 1877 season, the rules mandating that any ball that landed in fair territory but went foul before passing first or third base was, in fact, foul. First basemen who had previously been forced to hug the line could now roam, and Sullivan coached the lanky Comiskey to take advantage of that freedom.

  In 1881, Sullivan arranged to bring the Dubuque club to St. Louis for an exhibition game, showing off the resolute, sure-handed Comiskey. He later wrote to Von der Ahe, urging him to hire the first baseman for the 1882 season before some other club grabbed him. St. Louis was interested, but was willing to pay Comiskey only a paltry $75 a month, which was less than the $125 he was earning in Sullivan’s train business. But Sullivan offered his protégé some sage advice: The “baseball tide had come in” for him, and Comiskey should sail his boat, because nobody knew in 1882 if it would ever return. “If you intend to play ball in the back woods of America, two hundred dollars would not be enough, as you would never be heard or seen—it would be time lost. St. Louis is the proper market to show your goods.” If he shone there, the Browns would later reward him handsomely. Comiskey duly signed on for little more than what Von der Ahe paid the German-speaking deliverymen at his grocery. Still, when Charlie’s first payday came around, an appreciative Von der Ahe handed him $125, tacking on $50 more than the amount negotiated. It was a gesture the young ballplayer never forgot. Comiskey hit a feeble .243 with one home run in seventy-eight games that year, but he impressed Von der Ahe as a steady, hard-working, and intelligent young man who might someday become a leader. And when Comiskey spoke highly of Sullivan during the 1882 season, Von der Ahe listened.

  Al Spink, who also had Von der Ahe’s ear, was another Sullivan man. “To me he is today and always has been plain Ted Sullivan, the best judge of a ball player in America, the man of widest vision in the baseball world, who predicted much for the National game years ago, and whose predictions have all come true,” Spink recalled years later. Though small, Sullivan stood out in any gathering. He had “a face and eyes that beam intelligence,” Spink noted, “and a head which reflects nothing so much as the wide awake, go-ahead and aggressive spirit of the owner.” Von der Ahe had heard enough. Making clear that he was interested in a manager “who had a mind of his own,” he invited Sullivan to a face-to-face interview on neutral ground—Chicago.

  Von der Ahe poured on the charm. “He perfumed my atmosphere with the fragrance of the many bouquets he threw at me,” Sullivan recalled. Von der Ahe called him “his long-looked-for Moses,” the man who would lead the Browns out of the wilderness to the Promised Land. It is not clear whether Sullivan had qualms about Von der Ahe’s impulsivity, his tendency to insert himself into baseball management decisions, and his dismissive treatment of underlings, all qualities he had surely heard about from his former Dubuque players. The fusion of these two fiery “alpha males”—something like the volatile mixture of New York Yankees boss George Steinbrenner and manager Billy Martin a century later—was bound to set off an explosion at some point. But, charmed by Von der Ahe’s passionate faith in him and St. Louis baseball, eager to manage a top ball club, and no doubt convinced that he—rather than this clueless grocer—would be making the baseball decisions, Sullivan accepted the offer. In his words, he agreed “to enter the gilded cavern of professional baseball.”

  With six American Association games still left for the Browns under Cuthbert, the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported on September 20, 1882, that “Ted Sullivan, the little man who organized and managed the once famous Dubuque team, is to have charge of the St. Louis nine in 1883.” On September 24, Sullivan was spotted at Sportsman’s Park, watching the Browns beat the Nationals of East St. Louis, 6–0, in an exhibition game, and contemplating how he would tear apart the team and put it back together again.

  Wasting little time, Sullivan set out in the autumn of 1882 to buy a championship team for the man the papers called “Der Boss President.” In Boston, Sullivan won over Jim Whitney, perhaps the swiftest pitcher in the game, and Pat Deasley, his brave and long-suffering catcher, who had played in thirty-eight successive games with two broken fingers because no one else could stop Whitney’s bullets. At the eleventh hour, Boston tried to lure Deasley back by offering his wife a diamond ring, but the catcher declined. In Providence, Sullivan won pledges from the Grays’ superb third baseman, Jerry Denny, and the brilliant Old Hoss Radbourn, Sullivan’s former pitcher at Dubuque, who wanted to play closer to his home in Bloomington, Illinois. From the Chicago White Stockings came five-foot-four right-fielder Hugh Nicol, soon to be a favorite with St. Louis urchins because he was the player who most closely approximated their size. Sullivan stripped the Philadelphia Phillies of infielder Arlie Latham, who was destined to be one of the era’s most colorful and talented stars. Sullivan brought in his crony Tom Loftus from Dubuque, a shrewd baseball strategist, to serve as his new center fielder and captain. “Loftus on the field captains his men with the coolness of a Grant, and never becomes discouraged,” the Dubuque Daily Times had observed in 1879, comparing him to the stubborn Civil War general. “A better captain never walked the diamond.”

  As it turned out, not all of these fine players actually made it to St. Louis. The peace agreement struck between the two leagues forced the Browns to return Whitney, Radbourn, and Denny to their National League clubs. One of the big reasons that Von der Ahe had wanted to keep the war going was precisely to keep the Association clubs free from heeding the League’s reserve clause, so that he might keep these players. However disappointing to St. Louis, the loss of the three may have been a blessing in disguise, since they would surely have made the Browns far too dominant, ruining the competitive balance that produces crowd-pleasing pennant fights.

  Even without those stars, Sullivan built the nucleus of a club that would win four pennants and a world championship in short order. Von der Ahe’s long-looked-for Moses also weeded out the worst players from the team, including the unfortunate Cuthbert. Although Cuthbert
had once been among the fastest men in baseball, “now an ice wagon would have to be handicapped in a race with him,” the Cincinnati Enquirer jabbed. Such decisions incurred the wrath of some veterans and their advocates in the press, who hotly disagreed with his evaluations. “I had to cut and slash in the building up and beginning of that famous team,” Sullivan later recalled. “The grouches of the old fellows were not at all easy to wear down.”

  Pat Deasley

  (Library of Congress)

  One of the worst grouches was David L. Reid, the prominent baseball writer for the Missouri Republican who was, in defiance of the obvious conflict of interest, also the secretary of the Browns, acting as a kind of business manager. Reid had been associated with various forms of the St. Louis Browns since 1875 and had accompanied Von der Ahe to the founding meeting of the American Association in November 1881. Having hoped to get the job that was now going to Sullivan, the wounded Reid promptly set to work criticizing the interloper’s every move. Reid thought it was a mistake to sign Loftus and Nicol while letting other players go, and he objected to the change in club colors from brown to scarlet.

 

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