The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

by Edward Achorn

  Nobody had told Ted that working for Von der Ahe was going to be easy, but this was getting ridiculous.

  8

  BASE BALL MAD

  WHEN THE PHILADELPHIA ATHLETICS TOOK OVER FIRST PLACE in May and early June, they looked unstoppable. But then came the two losses to the Browns in Philadelphia—the ones that earned the St. Louis boys their premium cigars—followed by two losses to the Louisville Eclipse, including one on June 14 that was particularly painful. In the bottom of the ninth, Louisville’s Jack Gleason stood at third with the club’s best hitter, Louis Rogers “Pete” Browning, at the plate. The A’s got out of a terrible jam when Browning hit a sharp grounder, and Gleason foolishly attempted to score, only to get thrown out at the plate. But the pesky Browning, taking first, immediately bolted for second in an attempted steal, and when A’s catcher Jack O’Brien wildly heaved the ball over second base, it rolled right through the legs of Philadelphia’s sleepy center fielder, Fred Corey. By the time Corey ran down the ball and returned it, Browning was crossing home plate with the winning run.

  With the taste of that preposterous defeat in their mouths, the Athletics embarked in mid-June on their longest, most grueling road trip of the season. Before returning to Philadelphia more than a month later, they would play a total of twenty-four games in all seven of the other American Association cities—the kind of marathon that could quickly humble even a great team. Still, the owners preferred such endurance tests to more frequent excursions that ended up costing more money for train travel. In a world without television or radios, of course, the city’s Athletics fanatics—so passionate that they had snapped the gates off their hinges on Memorial Day—were bereft of their team for weeks. The city’s newspapers, battling for circulation, filled the void with extensive coverage of the trip by telegraph. Though papers of the time preferred using wire reports to the cost of sending a reporter on the road, the Philadelphia Item found a novel way to feed the craving. It hired a member of the club to file anonymous dispatches providing inside tidbits.

  As the A’s caught a westbound train, the American Association pennant race tightened into a four-team struggle involving baseball-crazed Philadelphia in the east as well as the Midwestern hotbeds of St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville. But in all eight of its markets, the Association was transforming the public’s perception of baseball itself, turning it from a fading game stained by corruption into a lively, affordable, fun-filled form of entertainment, the perfect two-hour escape from lives circumscribed by hard toil. In only its second season, the Association offered an array of colorful stars: Tony Mullane, Harry Stovey, Bobby Mathews, Pete Browning, Tim Keefe, Charlie Comiskey, Will White, Ed Swartwood, and Long John Reilly. Growing numbers of fanatics were obsessed with baseball, and they talked incessantly about players, acquisitions, injuries, and their favorite club’s prospects. Even the National League perked up, having been forced by the American Association to enter bigger markets and compete for top players. “The whole country seems to be base ball mad!” the Boston Globe marveled in August.

  The madness ignited by the Association was so intense that the Reverend H. C. Morrison, pastor of the Methodist Episcopal church on Chestnut Street in Louisville, felt compelled to deliver a Sunday sermon against it, warning that “in base-ball and all other games there is a tendency to run to extremes and subvert what was originally innocent amusements.” The young were especially susceptible. “They absorb the mania for base ball, even to its worst features,” which laid the foundation for a life of “sin and recklessness,” in part through exposure to “obscene language and ribald oaths.” Concerns about Sunday baseball were common to many homes. According to one account, a mother chided her boy Bobby for attending a game on the Lord’s Day. “Think how grieved your father will be when I inform him of it,” she said. “Oh, you needn’t do that,” Bobby said. “Oh, you told him, did you?” his mother asked. “No,” replied Bobby, “he saw me there.”

  THE ATHLETICS HEADED FIRST TO CINCINNATI, AMERICA’S EIGHTH largest city and home of the defending champions, for games on June 18, 19, 20, and 21. The Reds’ quiet, workmanlike little second baseman, Bid McPhee, spent the night before the series opener under the care of a doctor, suffering agonizing stomach cramps, possibly from having consumed spoiled food or bacteria-laden water, a constant danger in 1880s America. But McPhee struggled out of bed in the morning to do his part, with the defending champions now only three and a half games behind. Nor could drenching rain all morning deter three thousand Cincinnatians from crowding into Bank Street Grounds in the afternoon. The field “looked like a young lake,” the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette observed, but a grounds crew armed with brooms went to work on it, sweeping away the water, and a hot sun started to bake the muddy ground.

  The Athletic club, shaking off the effects of jostling nineteenth-century train travel, stepped onto the field, and, according to the Philadelphia Item correspondent, turned in a sharp, brilliant practice. “This nerved us and there was not a member of the nine but that was confident of victory.” One problem: they faced the Reds’ lanky ace, Will White—a fearsome competitor, even if he did come across as a timid, rather professorial man, with his wire-rimmed spectacles, premature baldness, and formerly blond hair, which had turned white when he was just twenty-eight. Rather than blow his baseball money on women and drink, Will invested in a lucrative tea shop on Lower Market Street downtown, where hero-worshipping children turned out to watch him work behind the counter.

  Will White at his tea shop, depicted

  with a comically massive pitching arm,

  Cincinnati Enquirer, September 2, 1883

  (Library of Congress)

  On this afternoon, battling the Reds’ toughest adversary, White set down the first thirteen Philadelphia batters in succession. The Reds third baseman, Hick Carpenter, preserved the string with a phenomenal leaping catch of a Lon Knight line drive in the fourth inning, a play that made spectators in the pavilion leap to their feet and wave their hats. It was not until the fifth inning that the Athletics’ Mike Moynahan broke up the no-hitter by plunking the ball into left field. But by then, the game was essentially over. The Athletics scratched out only three more hits and lost 6–0, a most disappointing start to the road trip.

  “We had made up our minds to wipe out the disgrace,” the Item’s player-correspondent noted before game two, when the rubber-armed Will White took the box for the second straight day. Incredibly, White was even more dominant this time, winning 7–0 and holding the Athletics to a sole hit. Later that night, Athletics second baseman Cub Stricker had a strange dream: his club was on its way to Columbus, and although Harry Stovey, the team’s best hitter and most aggressive runner, managed to get on board in the very last car, no matter how hard the rest of the Athletics sprinted to catch up and climb on, they could get no closer. The train gradually pulled away without them, carrying only Stovey. The dream’s uncanny pertinence to the pennant race would not be revealed for months. But the next morning, outfielder Bill Crowley, who had a friend who interpreted dreams, persuaded his teammates to buy a book on the subject. Catcher Ed Rowen studied the tome for a time and came up with an interpretation: in that afternoon’s game, “one run would be made by the Athletics, and that would be by Stovey.”

  Sure enough, Stovey scored the Athletics’ sole run that day. But, contrary to Rowen’s reading, it was far from the winning run. Pitching his third game in three days, Will White allowed only four hits in the Athletics’ third straight drubbing. Some 3,100 Cincinnati fans “howled themselves hoarse” in appreciation of the 11–1 flogging. The Athletics, the dominant team during the first seven weeks of the season, seemed to have run out of steam, while the Reds looked increasingly like the champions of the year before. In one of the great pitching feats of his era, a bespectacled tea merchant had thrown twenty-seven innings over three days and held the first-place Athletics to nine hits and one run. Suddenly, the A’s had dropped seven of their last eight, and their lead wa
s down to half a game. Meanwhile, the Reds made plans to rush in carpenters and expand their park by some 1,000 seats before July 4, “as the fever is growing with the crowds.”

  Something was bringing the boys from Philadelphia terrible luck, and the Cincinnati sportswriters thought they knew what it was. For more than a month, a yellow pup owned by Reds groundskeeper Charlie Mc-Nickel had been making his appearance on the field during games just before momentum swung Cincinnati’s way. Clearly, the hound dog—dubbed “the yaller purp” by the local press—was some sort of good-luck charm. And charms were something that the deeply superstitious ballplayers of the time took terribly seriously. In the ninth inning of Will White’s one-hitter, “to show his utter contempt for the Athletics’ failure to bat,” the yaller purp “walked up to their bat bag and deliberately insulted it in the presence of the vast crowd,” eliciting great laughter.

  Captain Lon Knight, having seen enough of the ineffective pitching of the tired Bobby Mathews and George Washington Bradley, gave the ball in the series’ fourth and final game to utility man Fred Corey, who had previously pitched a little—mostly poorly—for Worcester in the National League. No one could be sure what he would do now. “He sent in the balls with gunshot speed,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported, “and had a habit of tramping out of the [pitcher’s box] and all over the grass like a nervous colt immediately after delivering the sphere.” Nervous or not, Corey came through for the Athletics, surrendering only four hits, partly because Bradley made two brilliant catches in center field. The “fiend of the grin,” as the Enquirer reporter called Bradley, also terrorized on the base paths, raising his arm and smashing Reds first baseman Long John Reilly in the mouth as he crossed the bag. “The blow might have been accidental, but it didn’t look so to the spectators in the stands[,] and Bradley was hissed repeatedly,” the paper said. Many in the audience thought Bradley should have been turned over to “the tender mercies of the coppers on the grounds.” Meanwhile, the Reds played a listless game. “‘Hick’ Carpenter couldn’t have stopped a part of the roof of the grand stand had it blown over his way,” groused the Enquirer.

  Hick Carpenter

  (Library of Congress)

  Freed from the curse of the yaller purp, who for an unknown reason “never once came out to smell . . . the visitors’ bat bag” and lift a leg on it, the Athletics finally broke out of the doldrums, winning 14–5. The Enquirer urged management to hire a “cheap boy” to coax the dog across the field whenever the Reds were in danger of losing.

  Despite salvaging that final game, the Athletics departed from Cincinnati in a state approaching shock. “We are alive and thankful for that,” wrote the unknown player for the Philadelphia Item. “Another such week I never desire to pass through, and I simply voice the sentiment of the entire team when I say we are all broken up. . . . All we want is to get out of this Jonah town.”

  Their luck did indeed change once they left Porkopolis behind. The Athletics swept three in Columbus, took three out of four against their archrival St. Louis Browns—including the game umpired by Charley Daniels after his $300 train ride—and two out of three from the Eclipse. But their visit to the Association’s southernmost outpost, roasting Kentucky, was simply hellacious. “In my lifetime I have struck some very hot weather and very hot places,” the mystery player wrote, “but Louisville is entitled to the championship belt for the boss Hades on earth.” In the morning half of the broiling independence Day doubleheader there, the heat proved almost literally deadly: the Athletics’ Jack O’Brien, wearing a stifling woolen uniform like everyone else, was behind home plate, slaving away as catcher and getting hotter and hotter, when he got dizzy and blacked out, felled by heatstroke. He was carried off the field, and doctors were immediately summoned. They did all they could for the unfortunate catcher, but he remained unconscious for hours, close to death. It was not O’Brien’s first serious brush with mortality. A year earlier, on June 2, 1882, he had freakishly collided with the Reds’ Bid McPhee, getting knocked senseless while the second baseman’s spikes slashed his face. Fortunately, there was a doctor in the stands that day, “but for whose timely services O’Brien might have been past all suffering.” His friends hoped his toughness would save him now in Louisville. The members of the Louisville Eclipse did all they could to help, and pitcher Sam Weaver sat by the bedside of his former catcher late into the night. Finally, hours after the game, O’Brien woke from his coma. He was forced out of action for a few days, but lucky to be alive.

  The Athletics had no spare player available when O’Brien fell. Second baseman Cub Stricker took over the catcher’s position, while Lon Knight filled second base. That left a hole in right field. Fortunately, co-owner Charlie Mason, a onetime Williams College pitcher who had later served with Philadelphia and Washington teams in the National Association, was sitting up in the grandstand. Mason clambered down, “threw off his silk hat, put aside his seer-sucker coat, rolled up his pants, and took Knight’s position in right.” Even in his street clothes, the thirty-year-old executive made no errors and slapped out a base hit—leaving him at the end of the season leading the team both in batting (.500) and fielding (1.000), facts he was delighted to point out to the “real” players. For now, though, the Athletics faced a long pennant fight with an enfeebled catcher, a man who was almost as vital to the team as Bobby Mathews.

  John O’Brien,

  New York Clipper, August 12, 1882

  (Library of Congress)

  Unfortunately, the Louisville heat got worse. After the O’Brien scare, the captains of the two clubs, Lon Knight and Joe Gerhardt, met to discuss the situation. To the relief of both teams, they quickly agreed to postpone that Friday’s game on account of the intolerable weather. But they would have to play on Saturday, come what may; neither team could afford to surrender the lucrative weekend gate take. As temperatures kept soaring, the Athletics’ correspondent warned that there might be “nineteen grease spots on the field Saturday, representing all that is left of eighteen ball players and an umpire.” Stranded in hellish heat, gasping for breath in those days before air conditioning, the exhausted Athletics lost their taste for nightlife and kept to their miserably hot, sticky hotel, or its porch, for the rest of the week. All the time, they looked forward to completing their trip in Pittsburgh and Baltimore, then heading home at the end of July. “I can assure you,” the anonymous player wrote, “there will be a happy lot of boys when we once more put our feet on Philadelphia’s streets.”

  ON THE AFTERNOON OF JUNE 30, MORE THAN A WEEK AFTER THE Athletics had left town, Reds third baseman Hick Carpenter strode to the plate with one man out and a runner on first. The Cincinnati crowd broke into applause, hoping to inspire its hero to keep the rally going and produce some runs against the New York Metropolitans. Alas, Carpenter hit a sharp grounder straight at Mets shortstop Jack Nelson—a likely double play unless Hick could beat the throw to first. He didn’t even try. As soon as he saw Nelson flip the ball to second baseman Sam Crane, Carpenter abruptly stopped running, turned, and walked away—letting the puzzled Crane lob the ball to first, easily completing the double play. The Mets went on to win that afternoon, by a score of 9–5—dropping the Reds further behind the first-place Philadelphia Athletics.

  Confronted after the game, Carpenter made an embarrassing confession: he didn’t run because he had lost count of the outs. He thought the force at second base was the third out, ending the inning, not the second. Such a lack of concentration by a well-paid professional was bad enough, but in the heat of a pennant race it was unforgivable, thought O. P. Caylor, a Reds shareholder and club secretary, who, blithely indifferent to the conflict of interest, also covered their exploits for the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. “It was pure carelessness, and inexcusable in any player,” Caylor chided in the next day’s paper. “Such slouchy work is calculated to disgust spectators and demoralize a nine.”

  The lecture did little good. Only a few days later, Carpenter tapped a ball down the l
ine, then stupidly waited to see whether it would roll foul. After a few seconds, it dawned on him that he had better sprint to first base. But the fielder, seeing the befuddled Carpenter stall, snatched the ball and threw him out by half a step. “His only excuse was that he thought the ball was going foul,” Caylor fumed, reminding readers that Carpenter thought there were already two outs when he came to bat earlier in the week. “A player has no right to think anything but that he has hit the ball and he is wanted quick at first base.”

  Carpenter was a good player—almost certainly the best left-hander to ever play third base in the major leagues. Southpaws in that position are a rarity, since they have to pivot to make the throw to first. But his mental lapses were all too typical of the 1883 Reds. That same week, Bid McPhee misread a pick-off sign and got caught out of position. As a result, an enemy batter was able to drive a grounder through his vacated spot on the right side of the infield to keep a rally alive. “This mistake cost three runs, and maybe more,” Caylor complained. “There is no use disguising the fact, the team needs closer discipline. . . . It is running too loose for perfect success.”

  Still, Caylor was not seriously worried. Even as Cincinnati languished in fourth place in July, he was convinced that the club simply had too much talent to remain there. “If any one thinks the Cincinnatis’ chances for the flag are any less than the other three he is much mistaken,” Caylor asserted. “The Cincinnati team has men in its make-up who are bound to yet make the city feel proud of their work.” That same week, Caylor quoted from a letter he had just received from Albert G. Spalding, president of the National League champion Chicago White Stockings, who were also struggling unexpectedly.