The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

by Edward Achorn

  The Chicago Tribune wondered about the “putty ball” that Bradley’s team used, remarking that “instead of responding with a click when hit, it simply gave a dull thud like a chunk of mud.” When umpires finally caught on, and the League began requiring that game balls be taken only from sealed boxes, after being wrapped in foil, Bradley lost his edge and began spending more time at third base than in the pitcher’s box. He earned the nickname “Grin” for the ugly, even fiendish, expression that seemed frozen on his face. “No one before ever had such a tantalizing smirk,” one reporter recalled in 1892, “and none of the modern detachment has given evidence that they can successfully imitate it.” Given his fierce competitiveness, rampant cheating, and nasty bickering with umpires, some considered him little better than a thug. In April 1882, the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette quipped: “That portrait alongside the baseball column was generally mistaken for a likeness of George Bradley. It was, however, an excellent photograph of the dead outlaw and desperado Jesse James. Bradley still survives.” O. P. Caylor complained that Bradley—”he, of the ungodly grin”—was as “successful at making himself obnoxious to the crowd” as he was at pitching. “But he can grin and kick and spout billingsgate,” added another reporter. “In those things his average is No. 1.”

  By 1883, he was a thirty-year-old on the down slope of his career, working mostly as an infielder, but struggling to keep his job with the National League’s Cleveland club by showing off some new pitches during spring training. His manager, Frank Bancroft, was not impressed. Though the club was paying Bradley the not-inconsiderable salary of $175 per month, Bancroft dropped him from the regular team, condemning him to the reserve squad, and was prepared to grant him his release. Bradley began writing to other managers, letting them know he was available. Caylor, for one, thought the veteran was washed up: “Bradley is not a pitcher; has not been for years; his [more suitable] position is on a railroad, section hand, eighty-five cents a day.” Still, even though Bradley was not the hurler he once was, he didn’t have to wait long for a response from talent-starved professional clubs.

  Bradley quickly shook hands on a deal with the Association’s Pittsburgh Alleghenys, who had lost their number-one starter and desperately needed help. But before he could arrive, Pittsburgh fans were shocked to learn that Bradley had broken his word and jilted the Alleghenys for a better deal from the Philadelphia Athletics, who wished to use him at third base as well as in the pitcher’s box. “Moral: Never count on a ball player until you have him signed and locked up past the possibility of escape,” the Pittsburgh Dispatch observed bitterly. Philadelphia supporters, of course, were delighted. “Bradley’s ascension to the Athletic club has greatly strengthened the nine in its weakest point,” one reporter gloated. “Now let the Western clubs come on, and, in the language of Macbeth, ‘d—d be he who first cries hold, enough!’”

  The Alleghenys, run by Association President Denny McKnight, were not inclined to forgive and forget. Furious to be facing Bradley in his first Association appearance, the club lodged a formal protest, charging that he was ineligible to play because he had first pledged himself to Pittsburgh. The harsh feelings between the rivals threatened to fracture the Association. The owners convened an emergency meeting on June 5 in Cincinnati to try to resolve the dispute. Called to explain himself, Lew Simmons glibly reminded his fellow moguls that, although he may have violated the league’s rules in wresting Bradley from the grasp of another club, “every other club in the association, with the exception of the Cincinnatis, was equally as guilty.” The red-faced executives had to admit that Simmons had a point, and they went home without punishing anyone. Six weeks later, however, President McKnight was still barely speaking to Simmons, a man he now considered a scoundrel.

  ON MEMORIAL DAY AFTERNOON, IT FINALLY TOOK THE MUSCULAR athletes of the Philadelphia and Cincinnati teams, “by dint of pushing, threats and persuasion,” a full hour beyond the starting time, to enlarge the square of fans around the infield so the second match of the double-header could be played. The clubs quickly agreed to special ground rules: balls hit beyond the outfielders into the mob surrounding the field would be doubles, and runners would be limited to advancing one base after a passed ball.

  Even so, the large crowd made it hard to play ball. In the fifth inning, spectators twice got in the way of Athletics catcher Jack O’Brien as he tried to fight his way through the mob to grab pop-ups. Handed two extra outs to work with, the Reds pushed across two runs that badly burned the Athletics. With a desperate burst, the Philadelphia team tied the game in the ninth, only to lose in the eleventh inning, 10–9. The crowd went home disappointed, though nevertheless buzzing with excitement. The owner of the Reds, Aaron S. Stern, boasted that his team was now on its way toward repeating as champions. “The Athletics will be second and the Metropolitans third,” he predicted. “But, understand me, the fight will be a hot one.”

  Mathews massaged his aching right arm. That one got away, but there would be many more chances to win, if his wing could only hold out through September. The Cincinnati owner could shoot his mouth off all he wanted, but many observers knew that these Athletics, fortified by Bradley, could hold their own against anyone—the Reds, the New York Metropolitans, or even Ted Sullivan’s vastly improved St. Louis Browns. And Mathews would spend the next four months doggedly, painfully, almost heroically trying to prove it.

  6

  WHO’S IN CHARGE?

  THE BROWNS OPENED AWAY FROM HOME, IN CINCINNATI, ON May 1, leaving most St. Louis fanatics, in those pre-television, preradio days, unable to see or hear the game. But that did not deter local baseball lovers from following the action. They formed crowds around newspaper offices and the Browns’ headquarters downtown, where runners posted inning-by-inning results from Cincinnati, fresh off the telegraph wire, in plate-glass windows. As it became apparent that a great game was unfolding, more people crowded in, spilling over the sidewalks into the streets.

  Three hundred miles to the east in Cincinnati, the afternoon “was beautiful beyond compare—as perfect a May day as ever greeted the violets of spring,” O. P. Caylor observed in the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. In the ticket booth outside the Bank Street Grounds, a foghorn of a man named Charley Thompson sent his “sweet, silvery voice” floating out over Millcreek Bottoms neighborhood “like incense from the altar,” bawling: “Fe-orty and fee-fty cents in the she-ade, twen-ty-fe-ive cents in the sun. Have your little piasters available, gentlemen!” Twenty-five cents, in other words, got a spectator into the ballpark, to sit in the exposed bleachers; shade cost fifteen cents extra. Two backup Reds players, pitcher Ren Deagle and catcher Phil Powers, worked at a hectic pace collecting tickets at the turnstiles. Some 3,500 people filtered in, as vendors hawked the Reds’ new “neat and pretty” scorecards, a nickel apiece, featuring on the back standings of both the American Association and the National League, to be updated on a daily basis. The Enquirer was delighted to see the Cincinnati management “making good use of everything”—including the center field fence, where gaudy advertisements were now splashed—to “turn a few honest pennies to defray expenses” and increase profits.

  Profits would ultimately depend, of course, on how well the Reds defended their crown. For now, Cincinnatians were wild about their club. Fifteen minutes before the game, “a buzz of excitement” hummed through the sold-out ballpark. Prominent in the crowd was Browns owner Chris Von der Ahe, club director William F. Nolker, and their families, who had taken the Ohio and Mississippi Express to watch all three Browns games in “Porktown.” Nolker was a typical Von der Ahe associate, a fellow immigrant from Westphalia who had made it big in St. Louis as a co-owner of the new brewery Brinckwirth & Nolker. Under a brilliant blue sky, the baseball lovers looked out over packed wooden stands and a well-groomed diamond, with thirty-six carriages and buggies “and two ladies on horseback” parked deep in the green outfield. O. P. Caylor noted with pleasure that the audience was “not only large in numbers, but
was of a class which gives tone to the sport.”

  At exactly three o’clock, a gong rang out, and all eyes turned to the newly erected flagstaff north of the bleachers. Soon a massive, 9-by-18-foot pennant—”the price of so many hard-earned victories,” the Cincinnati Enquirer observed—was hauled up the pole. Manufactured by Horstmann Brothers of Philadelphia, the famous textile company that had earned a fortune supplying uniforms during the Civil War, it was made of the “best quality white bunting,” with a blue serrated border. “Champions 1883,” the pennant read in big blue letters. Though the Reds had actually won the pennant in 1882, that was not an error; under the conventions of the time, the title would be Cincinnati’s until the “1884” champions were crowned at the end of the 1883 season.

  As the flag was being raised, the wind suddenly died down, and the pennant hung lifeless, “drooping down the staff,” Caylor noted. Superstitious spectators instantly interpreted this as a dubious sign for the coming season. But just as the gong was rung a second time, summoning the Cincinnati Reds to the field, “the flag caught a passing breeze and proudly waved its graceful length before the 7,000 eyes that leveled at it.” The crowd roared its approval and settled in to see whether ace Will White would pick up where he had left off. He had dominated the league in 1882 as its greatest pitcher, by far, with a 40–12 record and a 1.54 earned run average. Unfortunately, Will had woken up that morning with a wretchedly sore shoulder. He announced he “would pitch if desired, though he knew he could not do the work he would warm up to in a week or so.” It was so desired.

  As soon as the game began, the Browns’ aggressive new captain, Tom Loftus, started up a steady chatter, trying to motivate his men and fluster the champions. Other St. Louis players joined in, jabbering away and taunting their opponents. That was standard practice for the Browns: Bill Gleason and Charlie Comiskey, while coaching the runners, liked to position themselves on either side of the enemy catcher “and comment on his personal habits, breeding [and] skill as a receiver, or rather lack of it.” The Commercial Gazette insisted that all this noise was a waste of breath, arguing that the cool Reds veterans were above getting rattled. The contrast between St. Louis’s prating and “the quiet, earnest, silent team work of the Cincinnatians was by no means creditable to St. Louis’ team.”

  Cincinnati struck first, jumping to a 4–0 lead, and deceiving most of the crowd “into thinking that the game would be transposed into a general picnic,” the Enquirer noted. But Browns starter Jumbo McGinnis recovered—in part by cheating, it seemed. From midgame on, the hefty pitcher “openly violated the pitching rules by throwing on a level with his head.” By raising his arm above the legal limit of his shoulders, McGinnis got enough power behind his pitches to successfully shut down the Reds. Cincinnati captain Pop Snyder hotly and repeatedly complained to the umpire that McGinnis’s overhand pitches were illegal, but the official “refused to enforce the rule.”

  While the Browns’ pitcher began to throw a series of scoreless innings, the St. Louis man who was most effective at riding the enemy, Arlie Latham, went to work trying to disrupt the rhythm of Will White. Latham’s bench jockeying had been so extreme during spring training that even his manager had ordered him to shut up. “I told him he was too d—n fresh,” Sullivan recalled. And for a while Latham tamped it down. But now that the games counted, he was back in form. “My dear Mr. White,” Latham shouted at the pitcher, “we have been very courteous to you during the game, but as the Browns need a few runs we will have to be a little rude to you for a while.” After one inning of Latham’s nonstop needling, White, wiping the sweat from his spectacles, came over to Sullivan. “I think all your players are gentlemen except Latham,” White groused. As Will got sorer, weaker, and angrier, the St. Louis boys rallied to tie the game in the eighth, 4–4, to loud applause, “their friends in the grand stand yelling themselves hoarse.”

  By then, the Enquirer noted, fans of both clubs were “worked up to a great pitch of excitement. Encouraging yells came from all sides to their respective favorites, and for a while it was perfect pandemonium.” Back in St. Louis, outside the Browns’ headquarters, a shout went up as a man posted the ninth-inning score, showing six successive goose eggs for Cincinnati. Tension mounted in the tenth, when he posted zeroes for both clubs. Delighted that the Browns were holding their own against the champions, the street crowd buzzed with “universal admiration . . . for the staying powers of the St. Louis boys in a game that so severely taxed their playing abilities.” Latecomers crowded in around the window.

  At the Bank Street Grounds in Cincinnati, “the excitement ran intense” as the small boy working the scoreboard ran up the number eleven. That inning would be a memorable one. The Browns’ leadoff batter, Jack Gleason, could only manage to tap an easy grounder to the Reds’ shortstop, but the crowd’s grateful yell “died in its infancy” when Long John Reilly dropped the throw—an occupational hazard of bare-handed first basemen. McGinnis, next up, plopped the ball into shallow right field, only to see Joe Sommer scoop it up and nail Gleason at second base. The Browns’ Hugh Nicol got a better piece of it, whacking a long drive over the head of left fielder Charley Jones, the handsome troublemaker with the handlebar mustache whom William Hulbert had tried to keep out of baseball. Jones raced back and leapt, but the ball skipped off his fingertips. While he raced to recover it, McGinnis sprinted home, finally giving St. Louis a 5–4 lead.

  The problem now was holding it. The Reds’ Sommer led off the bottom of the eleventh with a single, and twenty-five-year-old John Corkhill, nicknamed “Pop” because he was prematurely bald, came to the plate. He had been working as an off-season police officer in Philadelphia the previous November when Reds President Aaron Stern came looking for him, having heard about his prowess with the Phillies. Forced to search high and low through the streets of the officer’s precinct, Stern at last located Corkhill. He complained that Pop was a hard man to track down. “Don’t you know you can never find a policeman when you want one?” Corkhill deadpanned. On opening day, Stern must have been pleased that he had gone to all that trouble, because Corkhill drove home Sommer with a double, tying the score 5–5 and sending the crowd “wild with noble rage.” After Snyder grounded out, Reds shortstop Chick Fulmer blasted a hard grounder between the shortstop and third baseman into left field. The Cincinnati crowd turned “stark mad” as Corkhill crossed home plate with the winning run in the 6–5 thriller.

  However heartbreaking the defeat, many Browns loyalists took it as a moral victory. On the streets, it “was generally accepted as a big lift for St. Louis, playing so strong a game against the supposed heaviest team in the association.” Ted Sullivan must have known better. Already, thanks to injuries in the preseason, his Browns had taken on the look of a “hospital nine,” as the Enquirer put it. Catcher Pat Deasley, a crucial leader on the field, was out with a bad finger, jarred by a foul tip. Worse, handsome Tony Mullane, one-half of the Browns’ two-man pitching rotation, was suffering a “severe attack of inflammatory rheumatism” that made it impossible for him to throw hard.

  As a result, McGinnis, sore after pitching eleven innings on opening day, had to go out the very next afternoon and pitch all over again. Not surprisingly, he found it impossible to put anything on the ball. As Cincinnati batters slammed pitch after pitch, McGinnis became visibly angry, and he decided to go over his manager’s head. At the end of the third inning, “tired of hearing the sharp whizz of the ball as it came past his ears from the heart of the Cincinnati ‘sluggers,’” McGinnis walked over to the owner’s box to protest. Whining that “his arm was not only sore but that he believed it to be permanently injured,” McGinnis begged Von der Ahe to replace him with Mullane. Sticking up for Sullivan, Von der Ahe refused. McGinnis strode back to the pitcher’s box and deliberately “tossed in easy ones to his opponents.” By the fifth inning, Cincinnati was ahead 12–0. Finally, catcher Tom Dolan took over as pitcher and mercifully brought the game to a 12–1 conclusion. O. P. Caylor, st
ill irritated by McGinnis’s overhand throwing, was happy to report that, this time, the illegal delivery only “brought about disaster. Truly, virtue is its own reward.”

  While McGinnis was lobbing meatballs, at least one member of the Browns was still fighting hard to win—the insatiably aggressive Bill Gleason. On a bang-bang play at the plate, Gleason bowled over Reds catcher Phil Powers, who had just gotten over an illness that melted off twelve pounds and earned him the nickname of “Shadow.” The local papers found nothing to admire in Gleason’s combativeness. “This is the same player who ran into Powers last year and broke his wrist necessitating his retirement from the field for nearly six weeks,” the Enquirer pointed out. “The collision was most likely purely unintentional on Gleason’s part, but he should be more careful, and not let his zeal to win run away with his judgment.”

  Unfortunately, the zeal to win was in short supply among the Browns that week. The Reds completed the three-game sweep the following day, beating a St. Louis boy, Charlie Hodnett, a former apprentice printer who, in those days before massive scouting operations and farm teams, had been lifted off the city’s sandlots and rushed in to fill the yawning gap in the Browns’ pitching staff. Hodnett, about twenty-two, was so nervous that he walked the first two Reds batters before he was able to settle down. The rookie pitcher ended up losing only narrowly, 3–2. Caylor was impressed. “This young man is no slouch,” he wrote. “He shows the makings of a fine future pitcher. His rising ball in particular is very deceptive.” As it turned out, Hodnett would pitch only four games for the Browns, stepping aside as soon as Tony Mullane was able to throw hard again. (After pitching for St. Louis’s club in the Union Association in 1884, Hodnett died of a crippling rheumatoid condition before his thirtieth birthday. He ended up a pauper in the St. Louis Poor House.) While waiting for his throwing arm to heal, Mullane earned his keep by playing in the outfield and contributing some hits. During the third straight loss to Cincinnati, he “looked anything else but a sick man as he trampled the grass in center field,” the Enquirer noted. It was Mullane who made the longest hit of the day, a triple to right field. “His playing . . . would warrant any body in staking a few dollars that his chances for laying claim to his six feet of earth were very slim for a few days, at least.”