But there was little else that seemed impressive about this team, the Enquirer gloated. From its perspective, the sweep had revealed critical flaws in Chris Von der Ahe’s improved Browns. “If any member of the St. Louis base-ball nine, or any backer of the aggregation, has been troubled by the buzzing of the championship bee in his bonnet, he must be by this time thoroughly convinced that such a hope is the veriest delusion, only to be classed with the things of the past, and as impossible as the wild dreams of the enthusiastic inventor who is ready to announce he has solved the problem of perpetual motion.” The taunt rang truer when St. Louis went on to Columbus and dropped two of its three games against the weak expansion club. “It is not probable that the St. Louis nine will be met by a delegation of enthusiastic citizens with a brass band on their return from this trip,” the Enquirer laughed. Von der Ahe was at least as irritated and impatient as the club’s most fanatical followers. Though he had pledged to leave club management to Sullivan, he wanted instant remedies through roster shakeups and changes in strategy. Even before the regular season began, Ted had been forced to fend off a report that Von der Ahe was prepared to shake up the outfield—”a statement as vicious as false,” Sullivan snapped, one “calculated to create distrust among the players in those positions and to destroy their usefulness. Happily, however, they are men of good sense and judgment, and having confidence in the management, have gone on playing a good game notwithstanding the slurs aimed at them.” For all of Ted’s huffiness, the rumor was essentially true. Von der Ahe had been working behind the scenes already to undermine the manager’s control.
Trouble erupted only a few days into the regular season, on May 5, when Sullivan telegraphed Von der Ahe his starting lineup for the game in Columbus. Against the owner’s explicit instructions, Sullivan inserted his trusted captain, Tom Loftus, in center field. Von der Ahe immediately telegraphed orders to Sullivan to yank Loftus out of the starting lineup and replace him with utility man Tom Sullivan. Loftus had looked terrible at the plate—during the month of May, he could only muster a .182 average—and Von der Ahe had concluded, perhaps egged on by Reid, that the new captain was simply not up to this level of play. All spring, Loftus had “not been enjoying his usual good health,” Sullivan admitted, and it is doubtful Tom’s well-being improved when, in a preseason game, a wild pitch struck him “full on the side of the head,” the Missouri Republican reported, adding: “He staggered and fell—the blow was hard enough to break his neck.” Loftus had struggled back onto his feet, and “after a moment or so he resumed his place at the bat and brought the run home.” But, since then, he had looked pretty bad.
Mulling over his boss’s direct order to sit Loftus down, Sullivan faced a dilemma. He knew players often came around after a tough start. If he permitted Von der Ahe to dictate his daily lineups, Ted would have little authority for the rest of the season. If he resisted—well, no one could say how the rash Von der Ahe would react. In the end, Sullivan ignored his boss’s telegram and sent Loftus out as planned. The power struggle was on. Later that day, the Browns front office informed the press that Loftus and left fielder Jack Gleason were about to be released. That, in turn, prompted Bill Gleason to declare that he would quit, since his older brother’s firing “was unwarranted by the circumstances and . . . he was merely being made a scapegoat for the short-comings of somebody else.” Happy to see Ted Sullivan instantly plunged into a boiling cauldron of controversy, Dave Reid charged that the new manager had divided the team into competing cliques, with his new players and Iowa cronies on one side, and the veteran, pro-Cuthbert Browns on the other. “It is hoped, for the good of base ball interests in St. Louis, that the trouble will be found out and eliminated,” Reid lectured. “Just at present the club can scarce stand any serious disaffection of the sort. . . . A day or two will probably bring matters to a climax.”
Von der Ahe, worried that his high-priced team was collapsing and certain that he alone could set things right, impulsively “made preparation to start at once for Columbus to smooth out matters,” Reid reported. But he arrived at the station too late to catch the train and had to postpone the trip. When the Browns trounced Columbus 9–1—with Loftus firmly ensconced in center field—victory seemed to release some of the tension. “Manager Sullivan was happy last night. He can now return to St. Louis with safety,” the Ohio State Journal reported, half-jokingly.
In truth, Von der Ahe was far from satisfied. Having missed one train to Columbus, he intended to catch another to Louisville, the Browns’ next stop. Rumors ran wild that he was heading to Kentucky to fire Sullivan for insubordination, less than two weeks into the season. Although Von der Ahe assured Reid that that was not his intention, Reid portrayed him as less than pleased with Sullivan. From here on out, Von der Ahe declared, he would be “watching matters more closely and would have his say in all that pertained to management in the future, with a view of making matters work in better harmony than they had been.” Sullivan seemed to be on an exceedingly short leash—remarkably so, given Von der Ahe’s extravagant gift of the watch and pronouncements about the manager’s supposed authority a month earlier.
In Louisville, the owner forced Sullivan to accept that Der Boss President was the boss after all. As promised, Von der Ahe dumped both Jack Gleason and Loftus. A firefighter like his brother Bill, Jack was a brave man. He had been injured so severely battling a St. Louis blaze prior to the 1882 season that “for a time it was feared he would be permanently crippled.” An alumnus, with his brother, of Sullivan’s great Dubuque Rabbits in 1879, Jack was bitterly unhappy that Sullivan had moved him to the outfield in 1883 to make room for Arlie Latham at third base. He met privately with Von der Ahe to complain that “he could not do himself justice” playing out of position. Fortunately, Louisville quickly picked Jack up. Though Bill wanted to follow him out of St. Louis, he calmed down and stayed put. While he accepted Jack Gleason’s departure, Sullivan must have been disappointed by the dismissal of Loftus, his handpicked, hard-driving captain from Dubuque who later enjoyed a lengthy career as a respected manager.
After firing Loftus, Von der Ahe tried to pacify Sullivan by seeking his advice for a new field captain. “Being a little angry at Loftus’s release, I told him that I would suit myself, and I did not want any more of his dictating,” the manager recalled, surely exaggerating his defiance. Sullivan chose a young player he knew well. In a Louisville hotel room, Sullivan called the men together and informed them that Charlie Comiskey would be the new captain. Then Sullivan told Von der Ahe that Comiskey wanted a $500 raise for the season for the extra work. “All right, Ted, if you think he is worth it,” responded Von der Ahe, who, whatever his faults, was willing to invest in talent.
It soon became clear that both leaders had been right—Von der Ahe, in removing Loftus, and Sullivan, in turning to Comiskey. Watching Comiskey day after day with the Browns, Sullivan knew that his young protégé, though still maturing at age twenty-three, was a natural leader, able to tamp down disagreements and turn the team’s focus to winning. A relentless competitor, “Commy” shifted nervously on the bench when watching the game and brooded over baseball during his off-hours. “He never went to sleep at night,” his roommate Bill Gleason recalled, “until he had figured out how he was going to win the game the next day.” Comiskey would go on to win 840 games as a big-league manager and then make millions in the risky business of founding the Chicago White Sox and the new American League. All that was “solely due to his aggressiveness and fearless spirit,” Sullivan proudly noted. But it was Sullivan—and Von der Ahe—who put him on that path in 1883.
Charlie Comiskey
(Library of Congress)
WHILE VON DER AHE TUSSLED WITH HIS MANAGER, DEASLEY AND Mullane healed enough to play again. Mullane wasted little time reprising his well-known intimidation tactics. When Jack Leary of the Louisville Eclipse dared hit a home run off him on May 13, the “Apollo of the Box” promptly sent him a painful message. The next time Leary came
to the plate, Mullane smoked his first pitch into the batter’s right hand, “mashing two fingers and disabling him so that he will not be able to play for three or four weeks,” the Louisville Commercial reported. Leary angrily swore that Mullane “threw the ball at him intentionally so as to cripple him,” and few could honestly doubt it. Eleven days later, Mullane inflicted more shocking damage, slamming Louisville’s tall, skinny captain, Joe Gerhardt, with a fastball in the ribs. “It sounded like a drum, and poor Joe staggered and fell, and stretched out unconscious with pain,” said the Missouri Republican. “The poor fellow uttered a groan, dropped as a shot and stiffened out like a dead man. He was carried back to the players’ bench and rallied in a few minutes, but was incapacitated for play,” the Globe-Democrat added.
The Louisville Courier-Journal’s baseball reporter, having watched Mullane pitch the season before, had no doubt of his evil intent. “It is a well-known fact that Mullane has shown throughout his career as a pitcher a desire to cripple any man who could bat him, and two of the best players in the club have become victims of this desire,” he wrote. If it could be proved that Mullane had deliberately struck down Leary and Gerhardt, the writer argued, “he should be instantly expelled from the association.” But it couldn’t be proved. Mullane stayed on, brutalizing batters all season while professing innocence. “Some of these days Mullane will get his neck broken,” warned the Cincinnati Enquirer, noting that “he kept up his practice of disabling batters by hitting Long John Reilly in the head during the last St. Louis Waterloo. John still carries a lump as big as a walnut under his hat.” Mullane’s hometown Globe-Democrat rallied to his defense, blaming the victim: Reilly “didn’t dodge worth a cent when he got hit by that ball.”
By the end of the road trip, the Browns had started to recover, winning two of three in Louisville to return with a 3–6 record. A beautiful sight awaited them in St. Louis. “The diamond and outfield at Sportsman’s park have been mowed by Superintendent Solari,” the Republican reported, “and looked as pretty as a huge sheet of green velvet yesterday.” The Browns proceeded to reassert themselves, beating the Cincinnati Reds in the home opener and, healthier now, going 6–3 during the home stand to reach a .500 record. As April’s exhibitions had suggested, this team was very different from the 1882 edition. They played hard under Sullivan, even violently. They grabbed and tripped enemy runners. When running the base paths, they slammed into their opponents, then broke for the next base while the flustered fielders fumbled with the ball. “It was well worth the price of admission yesterday to see Latham, Nicol and Comiskey profit by every opportunity to steal a base,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat enthused. “Daring work in this department leads to more fielding errors than any other branch of the game.” Still, Von der Ahe was not satisfied. Just as the Browns were starting to click, he pulled another stunt that undermined and embarrassed his manager.
In late May, the owner decided to bring back, of all people, Ned Cuthbert—this time purely as a player, not as a manager, though no one could say what the future might hold. Dave Reid was delighted. “This is a little humiliating to the management, but shows wisdom,” he gloated in the Republican. “His being shoved overboard by the club was a mistake in the first place.” The signing had not come about easily. After Cuthbert’s release, Reid explained, “personal troubles” had developed between him and Von der Ahe, “and it required considerable time to soften these down.” Cuthbert had been ready to leave the city in a huff to manage a club in Quincy, Illinois, to the horror of his longtime St. Louis friends. “Finally, through the hard work and ministrations of a mutual friend,” Roger A. Brown, who ran the club’s headquarters, Reid noted, “matters were adjusted yesterday, and Ed is once more a member of the force on which he has done much good work in years gone by.” St. Louis baseball lovers demonstrated how pleased they were with Cuthbert’s return by presenting him with a floral “canopy with a base ball design in immortelles on the bases and Ed’s initials.” Betrayed by the man who ran his club headquarters, Sullivan was now saddled with a disgruntled, weak-hitting, thirty-seven-year-old outfielder—to turn thirty-eight in June—who was still popular with fans and angling for the manager’s job.
Meanwhile, more than the club threatened to come apart. After a huge Sunday turnout of 12,200 on May 27, the upper deck of Sportsman’s Park “swayed perceptibly” and “shook as if it would tumble to pieces” as customers made for the narrow staircase that served as the deck’s only exit. Fortunately, no one panicked, but after the crowd got down, good citizens implored reporters to speak out about the danger before the structure collapsed and killed dozens of people. Such an accident “would be a death blow to base ball in St. Louis,” the Missouri Republican warned. “It’s dollars to doughnuts that the architect never suspected it would be used for such a purpose,” the Globe-Democrat added. Von der Ahe got the hint. The owner called in German-born Edmund Jungenfeld, a prestigious St. Louis specialist in brewery architecture who had designed buildings at the Budweiser plant and the facility owned by club director Nolker. Jungenfeld strengthened and lengthened the roof while adding open seats on top of it. Von der Ahe was eager to cram all the paying customers he could inside his Sportsman’s Park, which now had the hefty seating capacity of 11,000.
The 1884 St. Louis Browns and the grandstand at Sportsman’s Park
(Transcendental Graphics/theruckerarchive.com; reprinted with permission)
Somehow, in the midst of all this, Sullivan was able to turn his attention to the field as he led the Browns on their second road trip. After winning two out of three from the Allegheny Club in Pittsburgh, and sweeping the Orioles in three in Baltimore, St. Louis headed up to Philadelphia to take on the fearsome Athletics. Lew Simmons’s men, with their torrid 19–4 record, .826 winning percentage, and full five-game lead over second-place Louisville, now seemed poised to run away with the pennant—unless someone stopped them.
GETTING INTO THE SPIRIT OF THE BIG SERIES, VON DER AHE boisterously declared that he would reward each of his men with a box of expensive cigars if they could capture at least two of the three games from the Athletics. The prospect of good smokes wasn’t enough to prevent the boys from making a disastrous start in their opener in Philadelphia, on the cloudy Thursday afternoon of June 7, as they fell behind 7–1 in the first inning. Even so, Sullivan’s men refused to become rattled. When rain started to fall, they shrewdly shifted tactics and began dragging their feet, blatantly trying to secure a rainout before the five innings could be played to make the game official. “They came in from the field as slowly as if each man had the rheumatism,” said the Philadelphia Press. Deasley was typical. He went to the club bat bag and slowly pulled out nearly every one before finding one that suited him. “Then he had a little conversation with the umpire in regard to some point that he wanted settled, and after that he found considerable difficulty in getting planted in his position. He finally had to make a base hit.” All the time the rain fell. When the Athletics came to bat, Browns hurler George McGinnis threw fat pitches straight over the plate, “the obvious intention being to give everybody a hit and put no one out, so that the inning could be protracted indefinitely.”
The Athletics, catching on immediately, made an equally desperate effort to speed things up. The contest degenerated into a soggy farce. Athletics batter Jack O’Brien “adopted the counter tactic of trying to strike out,” but catcher Deasley “was equal to the occasion, and failed to catch the ball. O’Brien then refused to run and thus compelled the umpire to declare him out.” George “Grin” Bradley, next up, hit the ball but deliberately ran out of the baseline so that he would be called out. When another Athletics batter came to the plate, equally eager to make an out, Browns third baseman Arlie Latham called time and dashed off the field for his jacket. By then, the heavens had opened. “The umpire shouted after him in vain, and a moment later both teams followed him pell-mell to their room, while the crowd disappeared under the seats and the grand stand.” After another t
hirty minutes of pouring rain, the umpire called the game. The Browns had scored a substantial psychological victory by dodging defeat.
The narrow escape became doubly important when St. Louis lost on the following day, a Friday afternoon game. But the Browns finally found their groove on Saturday. Comiskey, running the bases much as the demonic Ty Cobb would a generation later, kept one rally going when he dropped a bunt in front of home plate, sprinted down the line, and surreptitiously swatted the ball out of first baseman Harry Stovey’s hand. The illegal act, unseen by the umpire—only one man worked each game, making it easy to cheat—permitted Arlie Latham to scamper home from third. Comiskey promptly stole second base, then third, and scored on a ground ball, having manufactured a run from essentially nothing. The Browns won 3–0.
The Summer of Beer and Whiskey Page 11
