With the series locked at one victory apiece, the Browns looked even stronger during the final game, a Monday makeup for the rainout. Not that there weren’t some stressful moments for the visitors. In the eighth inning, St. Louis led the Athletics by a seemingly insurmountable 9–4 when Philadelphia’s Grin Bradley came up with the bases loaded. Bradley worked the pitch count to two strikes and six balls—the 1883 version of a full count—before driving a long fly ball past the outfielders, sending all three runners scurrying across home plate. At the last moment, Bradley decided to follow them, dashing home with visions of a grand slam, only to be cut down within a foot of the plate by a terrific relay throw. The Browns held on to win, 9–7, earning their fancy cigars, to the disgust of many Philadelphians. One local paper called the St. Louis men “about the toughest and roughest gang that ever struck this city. . . . Vile of speech, insolent in bearing, impatient of restraint, they set at defiance all rules. . . . The captain is an illiterate individual named Comiskey, whose sole claim to distinction rests upon his glib use of profane language.” Rough or not, they went on to win ten of the eleven games on their road trip, a brilliant streak that thrust them into pennant contention.
They left New York at 7 P.M. on Thursday, June 13, and arrived in St. Louis on Saturday at 8 A.M. “Looking sunburned and warrior-like,” the players found a beaming President Von der Ahe and a mob of “their near friends” waiting at Union Depot to tender them a hearty welcome home. The papers, which had been whipping up interest with telegraphed reports of the Browns’ eastern exploits, promised a much larger crowd, a “monster gathering,” at Sportsman’s Park the following afternoon to greet the boys at their first home game in more than three weeks. With any luck, they might even capture first place during their home stand.
Although he was relieved that his team had turned its season around, Sullivan knew the Browns were still hampered by a serious lack of offensive production by the outfield, something he was trying to remedy. Von der Ahe was willing to open his pocketbook to buy better players, but America’s storehouse of baseball talent was nearly empty, thanks to the plethora of professional teams that had sprung up in 1883. At the same time, the leagues’ new agreement to respect each other’s contracts had limited the opportunities for raiding. “President Von der Ahe has offered fabulous sums to players, but the fact is that the market is run absolutely bare,” the Missouri Republican lamented. American Association executives were swarming over even such weak semipro teams as the Chicago Dreadnoughts, elbowing each other aside to purchase anybody remotely worth having. “Every one of them went away empty-handed,” explained Dreadnoughts Manager P. J. Norton, “for the team was drained early in spring of all the players worth having.”
Sullivan, who had as good an eye for talent as anyone, told Von der Ahe he would keep looking. But in his frenzy for someone—anyone—who might hit, the owner, without bothering to consult Sullivan, went after the eighteen-year-old kid brother of the great Buck Ewing, the mighty catcher for the National League’s New York Gothams, on little more than the naïve hope that talent might run in the family. Unlike his muscular sibling, John Ewing was “long, lean and about as big around as a bean pole.” He had earned the sobriquet of “Ginger Ale John” for his solemn pledge to forever abstain from liquor. When Von der Ahe heard rumors that the Louisville Eclipse club was interested in Ewing’s brother, Der Boss President made a beeline for Cincinnati in a panic and signed the teenager. Sullivan needed to watch him in only one game to form an estimation of both his talent and Von der Ahe’s eye for it. Ginger Ale John went 0-for-5. “He was sent home the next day,” the Sporting News noted, “and that was the last time Chris hired a man on the reputation of a relative.”
Meanwhile, Sullivan had to give Von der Ahe’s old friend Ned Cuthbert some playing time. The former player-manager appeared in twenty-one games, batted a wretched .169, and managed to produce exactly one extra-base hit, a double, before Sullivan could finally be rid of him. The search continued for hard-hitting outfielders who might lead the Browns to the American Association pennant, while Sullivan resisted the urge to strangle his insufferably “helpful” boss. But Von der Ahe was just starting, and a fight that would change the whole pennant race was coming.
7
THE $300 SPECIAL
THE SUNDAY AFTERNOON OF JUNE 17, 1883, WAS LIKE MANY sweltering days in St. Louis, the atmosphere almost unbearably heavy with heat and moisture. At 2:30 P.M., the skies suddenly discharged their burden, letting loose torrents of drenching rain. Some of the men and women who planned to watch the game that afternoon rushed inside Solari’s old place, the Grand Avenue saloon, which was tucked into Sportsman’s Park’s right field. Thousands of people who were already inside the park scurried under whatever roofing they could find. Some two or three thousand more “who could find no shelter huddled like kittens,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported. Sheets of water beat down their umbrellas, “and two-thirds of those present were drenched to the skin in five minutes’ time.” The playing field quickly became a lake, while Grand Avenue turned into a rushing river. About a thousand people thronging the sidewalk clamored “wildly and ineffectually” to be let inside the park.
Suddenly, the rain stopped, and the sun burst through the clouds, gloriously illuminating the scene. “Then it was seen what kind of a base-ball crowd St. Louis can turn out even with adverse elements,” the Globe-Democrat said. The stands were packed. So were the new seats on the roof, which had been “loaded down with people until it became dangerous”—though there was no trembling this time. The open bleachers were filled, and people jammed the park’s standing-room areas. “It was the biggest crowd that ever attended a ball game in St. Louis,” the Globe-Democrat declared with amazement. At 3:30 P.M., a gallant nine of men in red caps, white shirts, white knickers, and red stockings appeared through thickets of fanatics and marched as a “platoon” to the center of the field. That was the signal for the crowd’s first outburst of the day, a great roar of clapping, whistling, “hallooing,” and pounding, perhaps the loudest cheer that had ever been unleashed for a ball club in St. Louis. “It was a grand ovation, a prolonged howl of triumph and welcome. It thrilled everybody who heard it,” the paper said, and it did not let up until the platoon broke up and began to play catch, warming up. Next, the visiting New York Metropolitans appeared, each man carrying his own case with a bat in it. “They were a neat looking lot, not as heavy as the Browns, but supple and lithe-looking,” though their uniforms seemed a tad dingy and soiled. “A few hours’ practice in the laundry this morning would not do them any harm,” Dave Reid quipped. Since the game either had to start by 4 P.M. or would have to be played as a pointless exhibition, the grounds crew raced to dump absorbent sawdust into the puddles along the base paths and the pitcher’s box.
Though the people of St. Louis were only too happy to be enjoying the Lord’s Day with beer, baseball, and joy, the Mets’ star center fielder, John O’Rourke, refused to play because of his convictions as a devout Irish Catholic. John, the brother of an even better ballplayer (Jim, now in the Baseball Hall of Fame), was hardly a shirker. In an 1880 game, he had crashed so hard into the center-field fence at the Troy Ball Club Grounds that he had taken a five-inch gash in his throat and had needed to be carted off the field. But religion was a profoundly serious matter to many Americans in the 1880s, especially in the eastern cities, and not everyone shared the idea of Von der Ahe and his fellow Germans that Sundays were meant for fun.
From the start, the game was a tense affair, and the crowd “vigorously hissed” the ball and strike judgments of umpire Ormond Butler, twenty-eight, a former actor and manager of Ford’s Opera House in Baltimore. The umpire, who showed up in his official Association uniform, may not have enhanced his aura of authority by removing his gold-buttoned blue jacket in the brutal heat, revealing a light summery “negligee” shirt. Dave Reid, for one, was disgusted. “One of the objects of the uniform was to give judicial gravity to the umpire,”
he lectured.
In the first inning, Charlie Comiskey launched the ball over the head of the Mets’ Charlie Reipschlager, a catcher who had been conscripted to take over in center field for the more pious and talented O’Rourke. The titanic blow yielded a triple, driving home Hugh Nicol. Comiskey himself scored on a wild throw, producing a 2–0 lead and a burst of applause that lasted for a full minute. The Mets fought back to take a 4–3 lead, but the Browns would not lay down. In the eighth, Billy Gleason hit a two-strike blooper to left field for a single. Arlie Latham, next up, was hit hard by a pitch, which, under 1883 rules, did not award him first base. But he dusted himself off and clubbed a double into the gap, driving home Gleason with the tying run. Then, on an 0–2 count, Comiskey blasted the ball “as if from a cannon” over the hapless Reipschlager’s head, yet again, for his second triple of the day, driving in the go-ahead run. In their final inning, with the Metropolitans loading the bases with two outs, Bill Holbert clubbed a drive toward the gap in right-center. “Nicol started for it amid a deathlike stillness,” reported the Globe-Democrat. The game rested on Little Nick’s catching it—bare-handed, of course. The crowd let out a loud roar, and the Browns ran off the field with a 7–5 victory.
There were some complaints after the game. Sam Boyd, the chief of city detectives, grumbled that Von der Ahe was “so blanked stingy” with his free passes that the mobbed park came close to being left without police protection. Even a reporter was blocked at the gate, unable to get in amid the throng of paying customers. He had to send a friend to hunt up Von der Ahe or the club secretary personally so he could gain entrance. Reid griped that the press box, which Von der Ahe had enclosed to spare the sportswriters annoying interactions with spectators, was “boarded up in winter style,” blocking any breeze, “and the atmosphere was thick enough . . . to cut with a knife.” But for all the kvetching, there was much to celebrate. Von der Ahe raked in nearly $3,000 for Sunday’s game alone, and it was now clear that the team he had bought, with Ted Sullivan’s painstaking guidance, was a splendid one. The Browns had clawed their way all the way back to second place, just behind the Philadelphia Athletics. And that afternoon, a beaming Von der Ahe distributed his box of superb cigars, as promised, to each of the men.
Over the unseasonably cool, bright, breezy days that followed Sunday’s deluge, St. Louis struggled toward first place against an unyielding Metropolitan club. The tone of the game on Monday, June 18, was set early when Mets outfielder Chief Roseman boldly stretched a single into a double, and tried to score from second on a single. The ball was pegged perfectly to Browns catcher Tom Dolan, who held on, “just as Roseman came flying home, running with terrible force into him, doubling him up. It was a terrible collision.” For a time it appeared the battered, woozy Dolan might have to leave the game, but the catcher toughed it out. St. Louis finally won the bitterly contested game in the tenth inning, 8–7. The Browns won again, 5–2, on Tuesday as the Athletics lost. For the first time in 1883, St. Louis was tied for first place.
After the Browns lost a thirteen-inning nail-biter on Thursday to the Metropolitans, 2–1, they swept the lowly Baltimore Orioles in three straight, thus earning fourteen victories in their last sixteen games. In honor of the Browns’ impervious infield, named after Confederate General Thomas J. Jackson, the vendors at Sportsman’s Park began selling “Stone-wall Sandwiches.” Ted Sullivan declared that his players were “all anxious and willing to play,” and he “never saw such eagerness” to get into the game. Dave Reid, for once sharing in the joyful mood, mused about the beauty of Sportsman’s Park in a poetic passage that surely strikes a chord with anyone who loves baseball: The field, he wrote, “was sown in clover some weeks ago and is daily sprinkled and rolled. Some days ago it was mown from one end to the other, and, save where the brown and white marks of the diamond are traced, looks like a spread of emerald velvet. It is a sight one can gaze at for a long time without wearying.”
Yet the umpiring continued to nettle. When the Mets’ Chief Roseman tried to stretch a single into a double, and Browns second baseman George Strief appeared to tag him out two feet from the base, umpire Butler, “whose sight was like his judgment,” called him safe. The disgust by St. Louis cranks got so bad that, when Butler suffered a terrific blow on the side of his head from a wild pitch, “a number of persons so forgot their humanity, good sense and decency as to cheer.” It got worse. In late June, Von der Ahe would get so riled up about the umpiring that he made something of a national laughingstock of himself. But he was hardly alone in that era in despising and distrusting the men in blue.
THIRTEEN MONTHS EARLIER, ON MAY 30, 1882, A YOUNG CLERK AT a store on Woodward Avenue in Detroit noticed a sheet of folded paper on the floor, a letter that must have dropped out of the pocket of some customer who had come and gone. When the clerk picked it up and began reading, he knew this was no ordinary note.
The letter was addressed to a well-known Detroit gambler named James Todd. The writer, who signed himself “Dick,” explained to the gambler that he had to catch a train and would be unable to attend their prearranged meeting. But Dick left explicit instructions: Todd was to bet on the Providence Grays on Tuesday. On Wednesday, Todd was to bet on Detroit—unless he received a telegram that said, “Buy all the lumber you can,” in which case he was to stick with Providence. “When you send me any money,” Dick instructed Todd, “you can send check to me in care of Detroit B.B. club, and it will be all right.” Here was explosive evidence that, even after all the angst of the late 1870s and William A. Hulbert’s harsh punishments of transgressors, baseball at its highest level was still filthy.
The clerk promptly brought his discovery to William G. Thompson, president of the Detroit Base Ball Club and mayor of the city. No fool, Thompson instantly recognized that the letter would reopen concerns about the honesty of National League games. There was no escaping the grim reality: “Dick” had to be thirty-year-old Richard Higham, a well-liked, hard-hitting former outfielder who, though repeatedly suspected of being crooked as a player in the 1870s, had been allowed to become a League umpire after his retirement. He had worked most of Detroit’s 1882 home games to that point.
Acting quickly, League directors convened an emergency hearing. Behind locked doors, three handwriting experts confirmed that the signature was indeed Higham’s. Worcester manager Freeman Brown testified that he had seen the umpire in the company of a noted gambler in his city. Frank Bancroft, then managing the Detroit club, supplied additional details of suspicious behavior. The only witness in Higham’s defense was the umpire himself, who vigorously protested his innocence. The directors, though, had heard enough. They voted unanimously to expel him from the game for life—making Higham the first and only big-league umpire drummed out for corruption. By that winter, Higham was reported to be in “congenial company,” making his living as a professional gambler in Chicago’s dens.
The National League had as good as asked for this disaster. It had recklessly clung to an antiquated system under which home clubs hired umpires on a per-game basis from a list of twenty-four men who had been preapproved by all eight League teams. The pay was $5 per game plus expenses, an amount so paltry that critics complained that no honest man of any intelligence or talent would even want the job. Inevitably, the list came to include the usual hard drinkers and ne’er-do-wells who were on the periphery of professional sports. “The only way to secure competent men is to pay them well,” the venerable Harry Wright had warned, pleading with the National League for years to build a professional umpire staff. The progressive-minded American Association had done just that in 1882, hiring four umpires on salary, monitoring their work, and assigning them to games. The system had generally worked well, somewhat reducing squabbles between clubs and building public confidence in the honesty of the sport. But many fans and journalists continued to believe that umpires, even at the major-league level, were stupid, incompetent, corrupt, or a toxic blend of all three.
After the Higham sc
andal, the National League followed the American Association’s lead and finally funded a full-time staff of four umpires, paying each $200 a month. Association umps earned less—only $120 a month, plus travel expenses and a $3-per-day board allowance. Association umpires also had to supply their own uniforms: a blue flannel, double-breasted jacket, with military cap, trimmed with gold cord and buttons. One St. Louis fan, getting a gander at the getup in May 1883, dryly remarked to another, “He only needs a whisk to look like a Pullman car man”—in other words, a railroad conductor aboard a fancy coach. As if on cue, the umpire “took one of the utensils from his pocket and began to dust off the home plate.” It is remarkable—or perhaps a sign of how hard it was to earn a living in 1880s America—that so many good men were willing to endure the risks this job entailed for $120 a month.
Major-league umpiring was definitely not for the faint of heart. First of all, an umpire in those days faced the impossible task of trying to rule justly while working a game alone, since club owners were willing to fund only one umpire per game. A ballplayer who was good at cheating could easily exploit that, as Chicago White Stockings star Mike “King” Kelly amply demonstrated. He regularly cut from second base to home without ever getting near third, while the umpire’s head was turned to follow a ball hit to the outfield. “Ball players are up to constant tricks, and nothing but the closest watch will keep us from being beaten by them,” observed one of the toughest early umpires, former professional boxer Billy McLean. Yet parsimonious owners resisted the idea of even a two-man crew for nearly thirty years. When Hugh Nicol suggested that it made sense to post three umpires—one along each foul line, and one behind the plate—his proposal earned outright derision. “It is a wonder he doesn’t think it would be beneficial to the health and comfort of the players to have nine beautiful young ladies on the field to face the players when they come in from the field,” the Sporting News jeered. It wasn’t until 1933 that the major leagues adopted the three-umpire system. In 1952, a four-man team was instituted for all regular-season major-league games.
The Summer of Beer and Whiskey Page 12
