The Summer of Beer and Whiskey
Page 9
The A’s had already won one game that morning, beating Columbus 8–5. But when Mathews arrived for the Athletics’ second holiday game, set to start at 4 P.M., thousands of people blocked his way to Athletic Park. What’s worse, the gates had been locked shut. The little wooden ballpark was already stuffed with fanatics, eager to see the soaring Athletics take on the defending American Association champions, the Cincinnati Reds, in one of the most intensely anticipated match-ups of the young season. The Athletics had been forced to suspend ticket sales at 3:15 P.M., forty-five minutes before game time, leaving thousands out of the action. Every seat had been sold, small boys lined the tops of all the fences, and thousands of people stood on the rooftops and filled the windows surrounding the park. And still, every horsecar of every railway line arrived crammed full of baseball enthusiasts, with twenty more people clinging to the roof who were trying not to tumble off.
Athletic Park, 1883 scorecard
(Robert Edward Auctions; reprinted with permission)
Confronting locked gates and SOLD OUT signs, many disappointed Philadelphians gave up and walked a few blocks away to Recreation Park, grudgingly purchasing tickets to see the National League’s wretched, cellardwelling Philadelphia Phillies, who were already on their way to one of the worst seasons that any major-league club would ever have. (One sports-writer, learning that Boston players had discovered a lucky horseshoe in the dust marked “O. Winn,” joked that if the Phillies had found one, theirs would have been stamped “O. Hell.”) But thousands more remained at the Athletics’ ballpark, milling around, desperately seeking some way in. In their frenzy, hundreds of sweating men pressed against the locked gate of the Twenty-sixth Street entrance until it gave way with a loud crack. The mob rushed for the gate, and nearly one thousand people poured in before club-wielding policemen barricaded the entrance. The throng burst onto the field, where thousands of others had already gathered. Many got in only after their clothes were torn or their hats mashed.
The owners now feared that someone might get trampled in a bloody stampede if they opened the gates even a sliver to admit late-arriving season ticket holders—or the players themselves. They had to call for ladders to be placed against the outside fence. Under tense police guard, Bobby Mathews and his teammates climbed up and over the fence into their place of work. It was clear that a mania for baseball was gripping the country. Everywhere that there was a game, the stands were stuffed, the crowds overflowed onto the field, and more buses were on the way, all loaded to the rooftops with fanatics. Browns owner Von der Ahe, traveling with his team (after promising to keep his distance), could hardly believe the explosion of interest that he had helped to ignite. “I thought St. Louis had it pretty bad, but it is worse, if anything, elsewhere,” he told reporters. “At Baltimore the crowds are enormous, six and seven thousand people going to the grounds. The club has made more money than St. Louis and has $7,000 in the bank ahead of its season. In Philadelphia the grounds are not big enough to hold the people, and so it goes.”
But, while this sudden spurt of baseball madness delighted owners, its display on Memorial Day appalled many Americans. This was a day that had been set aside not for sporting events, but to remember the hundreds of thousands of young men who had lost their lives in the Civil War, North and South. A writer for the Pittsburgh Dispatch touched on the guilt some felt that afternoon at Exposition Park: “All day long momentous storm clouds hung over the city like omens of disaster, and at frequent intervals showers of rain would come pelting down like reproaches on the heads of pleasure-seekers for the solemnity of a day made sacred by the memories of the nation’s dead.” Even so, eight thousand people attended the doubleheader there—the biggest crowds in Pittsburgh baseball history to that point—and the ballpark rocked with “the most tumultuous applause ever heard on a Pittsburg[h] ball field.”
The Providence Press defended the fans, arguing that it was unrealistic to expect the harried, hardworking younger generation to care as much about America’s searing tragedy as did older folks who had suffered through it. “Americans have so few breathing spells and live in such a hurry and rush at all other times, that it is not surprising to find that, as memories of the war grow less vivid, and new generations are coming on, to whom the great civil strife is only history, the day has less solemnity and more of general pleasure-seeking for the masses,” the paper said. It was useless to complain that the younger generation failed to appreciate the sacrifices of those who bled and died in the Civil War: “It is impossible that the intense feeling of the actual experience should be aroused in mere listeners, and working people need all the holidays and pleasure-seeking they can get.” The New York Herald, noting the mobs of happy people on the streets and in the ballparks, shared that view, pointing out that “Americans have none too many holidays . . . so this newest excuse for a general getting-out-of-doors cannot be too carefully cherished.” In any event, the Providence Press said, “it was a great day for base ball, and proved that the national game is losing none of its popularity.”
To say the least. In Philadelphia, the chaos on the field inside Athletic Park that Memorial Day was almost as bad as the mob scene out on the street. Fifteen minutes before the scheduled starting time, the Athletics pushed their way out of the dressing room into a swarm of people. Grown men gawked at them, one reporter observed, the way children stared at Jumbo, the celebrated giant African bush elephant that P. T. Barnum had purchased two years earlier from the London Zoo for $10,000. Mathews, accompanied by catcher Jack O’Brien, tried to find an opening in the crowd so he could warm up, but the spectators jammed around them eight or ten deep, barely giving the pitcher room enough to swing his arm. Losing patience, Mathews barked at them so fiercely that they backed off, though he was smaller than many of them.
At five-feet-five-inches and a scant 140 pounds, Bobby Mathews was only about an inch shorter than the average American male in 1883. But he was small for a professional athlete, a fact that reporters liked to stress. The National Police Gazette, with a characteristic sneer, called him a “little shrimp.” But though he was diminutive, the Baltimore native was a stubborn competitor, a gnarled veteran of well over a decade in professional baseball. In the days before reconstructive arm surgeries and careful conditioning, only a handful of pitchers managed to survive so long, and Mathews paid for it in constant pain and physical deterioration. He had started his long, hard career at age sixteen, with the Maryland Juniors, and moved up quickly, joining the professional Marylands and then the Kekionga Club of Fort Wayne, which was in the first all-professional league, the National Association.
Bobby Mathews
(Robert Edward Auctions;
reprinted with permission)
He pitched and won what some consider the very first major-league game, beating Cleveland with a five-hit, six-strikeout, 2–0 shutout on May 4, 1871, a stunning performance in the days when run totals regularly soared into the 20s. (Shutouts became much more common in the 1870s as a deader ball came into use and top professionals improved overall fielding.) Moving on to the Baltimore Canaries, New York Mutuals, and Cincinnati Reds, Mathews found his arm worn down by constant use. When no National League team would sign him in 1878, he had to rebuild his career with the Worcester Live Oaks in the minor-league International Association. But, though he was expelled for drunkenness—the team hired a black pitcher, John “Bud” Fowler, to replace him—Mathews fought his way back to the big-time. Now he had begun an incredible run of three magnificent seasons.
By 1883, he looked much older than his thirty-one years, his face lined, weather-beaten, and stress-worn—at least the part of it that could be seen behind his shaggy mustache. But as scrawny and battle-worn as he appeared, Mathews was still a master at making skilled batters look foolish flailing at his junk pitches. Like Old Hoss Radbourn, a former teammate at Providence, Mathews brought a keen mind to his craft. “He had the most remarkable memory for a batter’s weaknesses of any pitcher who ever lived,” base
ball executive James Hart told the Chicago Tribune. “He was quick to size up a batsman. . . . He had perfect control, and this enabled him to put them up just where a fellow didn’t want ‘em. . . . Another thing about Mathews, he could pick up tricks of other pitchers quicker than anybody you ever saw. And there wasn’t any trick of pitching that he couldn’t pick up. If he saw you doing something new one day he would be doing it the next—that is, if he wasn’t doing it the same day. He was one of the really great pitchers of the profession.” One of the first men in baseball to throw a curve, Mathews had learned the art by standing behind home plate and studying how rival Candy Cummings held the ball and let it go. Within a short time, he could make his own pitches break much better than Candy’s. As it turned out, Cummings won a plaque in the Hall of Fame as the reputed inventor of the pitch, while Mathews, who developed its potential and used it to vastly greater effect, got left out.
Before coming over to Philadelphia, Mathews had won nearly 200 major-league games: 131 of them in the old National Association—42 in 1874 alone, with the New York Mutuals—and another 61 in the National League, helping to propel the Providence Grays to their pennant in 1879. Simmons and his ownership team had to spend a good deal of money to lure him away from the superior league and the Boston Red Stockings—$2,200 a season, making him the highest paid member of the Athletics. (Billy Sharsig recalled that he met Mathews in New York’s Bingham House during the 1882 season and slipped him a $1,000 advance to seal the deal.) The Athletics even signed Mathews’s catcher with the Red Stockings, Ed Rowen, to make sure the pitcher would feel comfortable in Philadelphia. They had staked a lot on the little man’s arm.
At the start of the 1883 season, the Sporting Life, a Philadelphia-based weekly, advised the Athletics to send Mathews out to pitch every game, instead of following the newfangled practice of rotating the top man every other game with a lesser pitcher to spare the ace’s arm. “Bobby is tough and can stand the work,” the writer promised. That was easy for him to say. In reality, expanding schedules were making life excruciating for pitchers. There were fourteen more games on each team’s schedule in the National League in 1883 than in 1882, and eighteen more in the American Association. Adding to the strain was a rules change that allowed—in effect, compelled—pitchers to throw much harder. Early baseball rules required the ball to be pitched underhand; now, in 1883, pitchers merely had to release it anywhere below the shoulder, though many cheated, sneaking in overhand throws. And under the dray-horse standards of the time, pitchers worked an astonishing number of innings, finishing almost every game they started. The great Pud Galvin, for example, who hailed from the St. Louis Irish neighborhood known as the Kerry Patch, led the National League that year with 656 1/3 innings pitched—about three times more than the season leaders in modern ball. But, as tough as pitchers were in the 1880s, few men’s arms could endure the punishment of throwing hard curves every game without a break, especially after more than a decade of wear and tear.
Mathews tried to do it, at least for the first few weeks of the season, because the Athletics had no sound number-two pitcher. Like most players of that era, he seemed to bear pain with remarkable fortitude. On May 29, the afternoon before the Memorial Day doubleheader, a ball glanced off his bat and slammed into his unprotected ear; batting helmets had yet to be invented. Two physicians in the stands rushed onto the field as soon as they saw Mathews crumple and fall. But after a short delay, Mathews shook off his wooziness and returned to the batter’s box. Then he resumed his place in the pitcher’s box and defeated the Reds 2–1, striking out the side in order in the ninth.
Less than twenty-four hours later, the little shrimp was back to try again—but whether the holiday crowd would let him was another matter. The Athletics had to halt their batting practice almost as soon as they started for fear of killing one of the many fans milling around them. Meanwhile, the thousands who had come early enough to obtain seats were clearly enjoying their day off at the ballpark. When a few drops of rain fell, one man pulled a handkerchief out of his pocket to brush the dust off his hat before it could make a permanent stain. Suddenly, ten thousand handkerchiefs appeared, the laughing owners slapping away at their garments, while five thousand more fluttered their handkerchiefs for the fun of it.
But good-natured as it was, the crowd posed serious logistical problems. At 4 P.M., when the game was supposed to begin, thousands were still clogging the field, many forming a square around the infield two to five people deep—and they weren’t budging. The few Philadelphia policemen on the grounds proved useless. Lew Simmons appeared and bawled at the crowd with a voice trained to be heard in the back row of opera houses. But his pleas had no effect. He’d have to figure out another way to move the mob so that the game could begin. Even so, his impatience was tinged with amusement. This was his beloved team, and he was having enormous fun making more money than he had ever imagined possible.
THE CROWDS OBVIOUSLY LOVED WHAT THE FORMER MINSTREL STAR had done with the Athletics. He had begun his shopping spree many months earlier with a brilliant acquisition: the superb Harry Stovey, who was then languishing with the National League’s soon-to-be-defunct Worcester club. Stovey, only twenty-five at the time, was a born ballplayer. Tall and slender, fond of wearing his cap at a jaunty angle, he was a triple threat: a swift runner, a graceful fielder, and a hard hitter. During the deadball decade of the 1880s, he blasted more home runs than any other player in the major leagues, most of them long line drives that shot past outfielders while he galloped around the bases. Although early records are hopelessly incomplete or misleading on this score, Stovey was also probably the greatest base-stealer of his age. His left hip became so bruised and lacerated from sliding into the bases that he invented his own sliding pad, possibly the first ever used. Al Spink marveled at his aggressive running, noting that Stovey slid hard feet-first into a base “and, rebounding, he would come to a standing position fully prepared to continue his chase around the bases in case the throw was not right on the mark.”
In leaving Worcester behind for Philadelphia, Stovey was returning to the place he had once called home, the city of his birth and youth, the scene of his first amateur triumphs in baseball—triumphs that he had tried to hide from his family. A direct descendant of the man who recast the Liberty Bell, he was born Harold Duffield Stow, but had played under the invented name of Stovey to keep his less-than-respectable career a secret from his mother. To lure him back to Philadelphia, Simmons reportedly promised him a handsome salary of $2,000, fully 60 percent more than he was earning with Worcester—the kind of big money that the Association’s business model and large crowds made possible.
And there were still more National Leaguers in Simmons’s clutches. Rhode Islander Fred Corey, obtained from Worcester, could play infield and pitch. The Athletics’ suave new captain, Philadelphia-born right fielder Lon Knight, came from the Detroit club. He had risen from a tough childhood: born Alonzo Letti, he was nine when his father succumbed to typhoid fever. Lon was sent to Girard College, a private school in a bucolic setting on the outskirts of Philadelphia that had been founded in 1848 with a bequest by Philadelphia financier Stephen Girard to help fatherless boys escape a life of destitution and crime. There, his name was changed to Knight, perhaps because of the ethnic hostility that persisted against Italians. The Athletics’ new shortstop, the hardhitting, redheaded, Chicago-born Mike Moynahan, was another former National Leaguer, and a tough customer to boot. In 1882, a thrown ball shattered the forefinger of his left hand, which was unprotected, since fielders’ gloves were not yet in use. Ignoring the pain, Moynahan picked up the ball and threw a runner out at third base before leaving the field. Later, the hopelessly mangled finger had to be amputated at the first joint. Yet Moynahan kept on playing ball. All this talent from the firstrate National League instantly made the Athletics a top contender for the 1883 Association flag.
Simmons discarded most of the members of the 1882 Athletics, retaining only the four you
ng men he considered the best of the lot. One was twenty-two-year-old catcher Jack O’Brien, the top hitter on the 1882 squad, author of three of the club’s four home runs, and the gutsy man who had been smashed in the chest by Bill Gleason. In Henry Chadwick’s opinion, O’Brien had “but few equals for pluck and coolness in his position.” He described the catcher as “a swift and accurate thrower, clever in judging and catching foul balls, and expert in watching the bases.” Another survivor was John “Cub” Stricker, a twenty-three-year-old who would prove himself one of the finest second basemen of his generation. Determined to focus entirely on his professional career, the young man set aside his milk delivery route during the winter of 1882–1883 to devote his full attention to hard practice. “Stricker says he is not going to allow anyone to outplay him at second base next season,” the Item noted. “He has got so he can catch bullets shot out of a rifle.”
IT WAS A GOOD ENOUGH TEAM TO BURST OUT OF THE STARTING gate, rushing to first place, winning eighteen of twenty-one games in May and building up a five-and-a-half-game lead in the American Association. But Simmons didn’t stop there. He could see that Mathews, as tough as he was, would not survive the season without pitching help. He set out in early May to get him some—and price was no object. “The man who stops to question the cost of a thing that will benefit the club or please the public is an idiot and will soon find himself left,” explained Simmons, who was used to spending big dollars on stars to make money as a minstrel entrepreneur. Unfortunately, finding a good pitcher at this point wouldn’t be easy at any price. An unprecedented number of professional teams—thirty-two of them in the major and top-tier minor leagues—had already combed through the nation’s amateur and lower professional ranks for talent.
Even so, one battered veteran turned up in May who was available to the highest bidder. George Washington Bradley was a name pitcher and a “sharp, hard hitter,” a fierce competitor who was not above using violence to win, and one of the greats of early professional baseball. In 1876, pitching for the St. Louis Brown Stockings, he was nothing short of brilliant, winning forty-five games, posting the National League’s lowest earned run average, throwing the first no-hitter in League history—and coming within one out of throwing the second. Granted, he may have owed at least some of his success to knavery: before many games, Bradley reportedly met secretly with his catcher, and the two softened the game balls by slamming them with a bat against a stone slab, carefully covering them first with a cloth so that they would not be stained. Such deadened baseballs, of course, were harder to drive for distance.