The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

by Edward Achorn

  “We do not intend to lose the championship up here, do you?” Spalding wrote.

  “Frankly, Al, we do not,” Caylor responded. “The two champion clubs of ‘83 are great on pulling out in the end of the season.”

  WHILE THE REDS STRUGGLED TO FOCUS, LOUISVILLE SWEPT PAST them into third. During a four-week period, the Eclipse won thirteen of seventeen games, including a 14–0 demolition of the Pittsburgh Alleghenys. Kentucky crowds were enjoying the way the local sluggers ripped through enemy pitchers. But none of the batters delighted them more than Pete Browning, a quirky, homegrown boy who had been nicknamed “the Gladiator.” He was a right-handed batter known far and wide for his savage line drives and obsessive interest in the art of hitting, one of the great new stars being showcased by the American Association.

  The youngest of eight children, Browning was born in the modest Jefferson Street home that he would share nearly all his life with his mother, Mary. His father died in October 1874, when Pete was thirteen, succumbing to injuries sustained in one of the Midwest’s terrifying tornadoes. The fatherless boy routinely skipped school, hiding his books beneath a doorstep at the home of his pal John Reccius, who himself would one day be a major leaguer. The one sport Browning didn’t like was swimming, because it hurt his ears too much. Browning suffered from an inflammation of the mastoid bone covering the inner ear, an ailment that rendered him almost entirely deaf—and would drive him to drink throughout his adulthood to numb the pain. His difficulty hearing may have contributed to his aversion to school. He remained illiterate throughout his life, which surely inhibited him socially. Longing for female companionship, he resorted to brothels—and, like Old Hoss Radbourn and Bobby Mathews, he died of complications from syphilis.

  Browning played baseball tirelessly as a teenager. He perfected his skills as a member of local amateur and semipro teams, including the Eclipse, which, like the Browns and Athletics, had earned a national reputation before the Association’s founding. Twenty years old on opening day in 1882, the tall, lean kid led the American Association with a .382 average while finishing among the leaders in total bases, home runs, doubles, and bases on balls. Browning did it while refusing to move up close to the plate. Perhaps because of the pain in his ear, he lived in horror of being hit by a pitch, a flaw that enemy pitchers naturally tried to exploit. The Browns’ Tony Mullane, of course, often threw at Browning, even when the Gladiator had backed far off the plate. “Pete has a holy terror of ‘Tricky Tony,’” noted Harry Weldon of the Cincinnati Enquirer. But Mullane could not seem to win the war of nerves. “Time and again Mullane has knocked off ‘The Gladiator’s’ cap, or hit the bulge in his flannel shirt, but has never been able to get a fair soak at the ‘Pride of Louisville.’”

  Weldon described Browning’s remarkable powers of concentration: “He stands erect, with his bat slung over his shoulder. He has a great ‘eye’ and will not go after a bad one. The ball must come over the plate before he will attempt to hit it. When he does select a ball, he steps forward in the box, his bat whizzes through the air, and when it meets the sphere he throws the weight of his body with the blow, and the ball leaves his bat with almost the force of a rifle-shot.” During the 1883 season, he would hit .336, third best in the league, with an on-base average of .378, second highest.

  Reporters loved him, for much the same reason they did Von der Ahe. From the start of Browning’s career, his escapades spiced up their stories. Most amusing, perhaps, was his all-consuming devotion to baseball—and his utter indifference to the world around him. In 1883, the Cleveland Leader told the story of Browning’s reaction to the death of President James Garfield, who succumbed to infected wounds after an assassin’s bullet tore into his back. The morning that the news broke to an anguished nation, a friend asked Browning if he was going to the ballpark that day.

  “Yes,” Pete answered.

  “Why, don’t you know that Garfield is dead?” asked his friend.

  “No-o,” replied Pete. “What position did he play?”

  Harry Weldon believed that Browning was putting on an act. “Pete is not as stupid . . . as his talk would seem to suggest, and, with an eye to the main chance, he has turned these stories to his own advantage,” Weldon wrote. “He is fond of seeing his name in print, and treasures every article that appears about him, no matter whether good, bad, or indifferent. He thinks they are a good advertisement, and Pete is a great believer in advertising.” On road trips, for example, the Kentucky boy liked to get out of the train “at every little water-tank town and introduce himself to the few rustics he found on the platform,” convinced such gestures would help him build a following, as indeed they did. According to one quirky tale, he carefully studied baseball’s best hitter, the National League’s Dan Brouthers, for pointers. Rather than pick up something about his batting stance, or his approach to certain pitchers, Browning noticed that Big Dan habitually dropped his pair of first basemen’s gloves in foul territory beyond first base at the end of each inning. “Well, I don’t play first base,” Pete explained, “and I don’t wear gloves, so I set myself to thinking what I could do to help my batting. I used to spend my time while in center-field trying to think of some good scheme. One day I was coming in from the field, and I happened to step on the third-base bag. Well, I made a hit. I stepped on it again going out and coming in, and got another. I got four in that game, and I have continued to step on that base ever since.” That was a laughable lesson to draw, to be sure, though it is undeniable that great hitters have long used personal rituals to calm their jitters and help prepare them mentally to bat.

  Browning was likewise fetishistic about his treasured bats, adorning each of them with the name of a character from the Bible. When he broke his favorite one in 1884, he went to an apprentice woodworker named Bud Hillerich for a replacement, which had to be made to his careful specifications. Armed with his new club, Browning went 3-for-3 the following afternoon, breaking a prolonged slump. From then on, he insisted that Hillerich make all his bats, and the famed “Louisville Slugger” was born. Eventually, Browning owned two hundred of the beauties. Soon, scores of major leaguers insisted on buying duplicates of the bats that Browning used, and the firm of Hillerich & Bradsby took off.

  The bane of Browning’s career, and an affliction that earned him greater name recognition than even he must have wanted, was his alcoholism. From his rookie season on, Browning imbibed heavily, making a public spectacle of himself and earning the nickname “the Prince of Bourbon.” As early as August 1882, he appeared on the field visibly drunk. “His play and conduct were maudlin in the extreme and excited the laughter and derision of the crowd,” said one game account. Though the reporter blasted Browning for daring to show up, he grudgingly added, “Browning did get two hits and only made three errors in eight chances which was pretty good in his condition.” By July 1883, the Louisville club had hit players with a total of $140 in fines for violating the rules, including those against drinking—$130 of them to Browning alone. Yet the fines had little apparent effect on him. Benching might have worked, but the owners were reluctant to sit down their best player. “Browning and Leary have been drinking,” O. P. Caylor reported in May. “The former was suspended, but Louisville wouldn’t know how to play ball without Big Pete.”

  Pete Browning

  (Library of Congress)

  “So far as we Cincinnatians are concerned, Pete may get stone-blind drunk this week and remain so till Saturday night,” Caylor wrote before the Eclipse visited Cincinnati in early July. “For Pete Browning sober is considerable of an ingredient of any ball game he interests himself in.”

  BY MID-JULY, PENNANT VISIONS DANCED IN THE HEADS OF KENTUCKY baseball fans. Eclipse boosters found their dreams coming true when their boys whipped Cincinnati, 5–0, on July 10, in the opener of a big five-game series against the Reds. “The present champions met the coming champions yesterday afternoon, and were knocked out . . . in a way that opened their eyes,” the Courier-Journal cro
wed. First baseman George “Juice” Latham helped by leaping to snare a line drive high over his head, then tagging the helpless runner off the base for an unassisted double play. “The boys played with more spirit and energy than they have displayed for a long time, and demonstrated beyond a doubt that they are by odds the better club of the two,” said the Courier-Journal. And they did it without Browning, who did realize his greatest fear—getting hit by a pitch. In the previous series in roasting Louisville, Athletics pitcher Grin Bradley had smoked a ball that struck Pete in the leg, injuring it so badly that it forced him to miss a series of important games. Even when the Gladiator did return, his leg was so lame that he enlisted another player to stand at home plate and run to first for him when he hit the ball—a legal form of substitution in 1883, if the opposing club granted permission.

  But Louisville’s bliss was short-lived. The champion Reds reasserted their dominance over the next four cruel afternoons, winning all four games, by scores of 9–3, 11–2, 3–1, and 9–3. Immediately, the talk about “the coming champions” collapsed like a leaking balloon. “We have hoped beyond hope. There is no use hoping any longer,” the Louisville Commercial keened. “We are not hogs. We know when we have had enough.”

  A scapegoat was quickly found in the person of shortstop and heavy drinker Jack Leary, who was having a terrible time getting on base. (He would bat a feeble .188.) The baseball writer for the Commercial nicknamed the weak-hitting infielder “Old Energy” and penned a sarcastic poem in his honor, dedicating it to “John Slugger Leary”:

  Old Energy sat in his easy chair,

  Smoking his pipe of clay;

  I’ll do it, he said, I’ll do it, be dad,

  I’ll make a base hit this day.

  But even Louisville’s hardest hitters accomplished little in the devastating series against Cincinnati. Shot after shot down the third-base line was smothered by Hick Carpenter, who may not have had a sprightly mind, but compensated for it with astonishing physical dexterity. “It isn’t much use to hit in the neighborhood of third base . . . when Old Hickory is holding it down,” one reporter noted. “Hickory doesn’t think any more of stopping a base hit than Jack Leary does of striking out.”

  The Reds series left Louisville sportswriters so despondent that they refused to perk up even after the Eclipse went on to Columbus and won four straight. Even though the local club stood in third place, only three games behind, the Commercial reporter employed sledgehammer sarcasm to mock local baseball fanatics who still believed the Eclipse would capture the pennant. “The local club is immense,” he wrote. “It is a consolidation of great ball players, and can just knock the spots out of any base-ball club in America, not excepting the Orioles, of Shepherdsville, nor the O’Leary Fairies, of Indianapolis.”

  That skepticism turned out to be well placed. The Eclipse lost five of their next eight games against the St. Louis Browns, then three of four to Columbus and four of five to the Reds in Cincinnati, to tumble nine and a half games out of first place by mid-August. “K-E-E-P C-O-O-L! Some of these days the Eclipse nine will snatch a victory from a first-class club,” the Courier-Journal jabbed. In truth, the newspaper continued, Louisville fans had grown so disgusted that they would just as soon never see the team again. “If Gerhardt will lead his club out into the woods and lose them, he will confer a favor upon many base ball admirers in this city.” Noting their penchant for dropping balls, the Louisville Commercial groused after a 9–0 loss to the Browns that the “Eclipse players couldn’t have held a tendollar gold piece if somebody had placed it in the palm of their hand.”

  The Commercial’s correspondent even took out his frustrations on Cincinnati sportswriter O. P. Caylor, claiming that Caylor, whom he dubbed “the Ghoul” because of his pale, slender appearance, had badly skewed his coverage. “Physically, he is a ghost, with less blood in him than the meek and lowly turnip, which has been his principal diet for the last sixty-two years. Mentally, he is one of the nine goose eggs that the Cincinnatis earned in the first game at Louisville last week. As a whole he is that part of a horse’s anatomy which is always nearest to the dashboard.” For much of the rest of the summer, that same scathing Louisville columnist offered an amusing take on the local team by treating readers to conversations between two fictional ardent women fans, Margaret Fresh of Market Street and her friend Isabella Smart. Written in the style of melodramatic Victorian-era romance novels, the sketches pitilessly lampooned the local club for daring to pretend it was offering Louisville high-quality baseball.

  In one of his first items, the columnist reported that a “light of a great joy” had recently appeared in Margaret’s eyes. “‘Thank heaven,’ she said devoutly, ‘it has come at last,’ and then she burst into a flood of happy tears. Leary had made a base hit.”

  Massive first baseman Juice Latham, who chomped on big wads of tobacco (hence his nickname) and wore a filthy uniform, was another favorite topic of the ladies’ conversation. They contended he could pass for “a great hairy, shaggy Siberian mammoth.” In one column, “the fair face of Margaret Fresh wore an expression of deep gravity” as she asked: “Isabella, have you heard the news?” When Isabella confessed she had not, Margaret broke it: Juice Latham had actually changed his shirt. “For a moment there was an oppressive silence and then a dull moan of agony, as the form of a fair girl fell heavily to the kitchen floor. Isabella had fainted: the awful information had paralyzed her.”

  The pair frequently discussed the club’s pathetic acquisitions of broken-down veterans and outright drunkards. As Margaret stood at the window in the August heat, contemplating having to do the laundry the following morning, Isabella burst in with some momentous news: Louisville had just signed a new player:

  Margaret Fresh shrank convulsively back in the shadows. Her right hand wildly clutched at a round of the spectral clothes-horse, and her breath came in quick, short gasps. She trembled for a moment from head to foot, and then in one masterly effort overcame her terrible emotion. Directly she spoke. Her voice was hard, and cold, and steady.

  “Is the new player a drunkard?” she asked.

  “No, quite the contrary. I understand he is a prohibitionist,” replied Isabella, lightly.

  “Has he a bad leg?” continued Margaret Fresh in the same cold voice.

  “No, his legs are straight and sound,” answered Isabella as she looked up wonderingly into her companion’s white, cold face.

  “Is his arm lame?” continued Margaret.

  “Nay, he has not even a lame arm,” answered the other.

  “Surely he must have a sore thumb or a splintered finger,” urged Margaret in an excited voice.

  “No, sweet one, his hands are without a blemish.”

  Margaret Fresh stood firm and still for a moment like a Statue of Galatea, and then suddenly lowering her head until her ruby lips touched the pink and white ear of Isabella Smart, she said in a low, determined voice:

  “Speak, Isabella, I command you; is the new player deaf and dumb?”

  Isabella Smart hesitated for a moment and then slowly bowed her head [in] assent.

  “Thank God,” murmured Margaret. “He will not be entirely out of place in the procession.”

  By the time that column appeared, catcher Dan Sullivan was injured, Browning was limping, and the team was badly demoralized. “Move Up Joe” Gerhardt, the club’s scrappy, tobacco-chewing player-manager, was taking it harder than anyone. (Gerhardt won his nickname by screaming to his base runners: “Move up! Move up! Take a step, take another, take a step! Move up! We’ll all move up!”) The son of a heroic Union general, the Prussian-born Joseph Gerhardt, young Joe had been “as proud as a boy with a pair of new copper-toed boots” when he landed the manager’s job and became a stockholder in the Eclipse Club. Gerhardt knew he needed victories to boost his income. The defeats, and his inability to stop them, were grinding him down.

  On the evening of July 25, when he was sitting in front of the St. James Hotel in muggy St. Louis, mul
ling over the next day’s tough game against the Browns, Gerhardt suddenly felt a sharp pain in his left arm. He doubled up, vomited, and found he was unable to move the left side of his body. Stunned friends carried him to his room and summoned a doctor, who “pronounced the trouble a light paralytic stroke, caused by overexertion and undue excitement, and requiring absolute rest.” Later that night, a reporter found Gerhardt lying in bed, his left side covered with blankets. He was in surprisingly good spirits. “I can use my leg now and the feeling has come back into my hand,” Gerhardt informed the journalist. “My side is still numb, but I know from the way I am feeling that it will be better in a little while.” In fact, Gerhardt seemed far less concerned about himself than his club’s ailing pennant chances, expressing the concern that “my sickness will take the heart all out of the boys.” Healthy, Louisville could have beaten anyone in the American Association, Gerhardt insisted. “We have had terrible bad luck, and that’s what has brought on this stroke. I am a hard worker and a hard loser. I don’t say much when I lose, but, oh, I feel it and it hurts me.”

  Gerhardt was an epileptic, and such paralytic attacks felled him periodically as time went on. His teammates, however, were convinced that Gerhardt’s stroke owed everything to the viciousness of Browns pitcher Tony Mullane. Gerhardt had been suffering pains in his side ever since one of Mullane’s savage fastballs had struck his chest on May 24, making the sound of a drum. “You can just bet your life that I believe that ball, and nothing else, is the cause of his being paralyzed tonight,” fumed Louisville outfielder Leech Maskrey. When the men returned to Louisville the next night, they took their player-manager with them. “He was able to walk, but his left arm was useless and his left side was quite numb,” the St. Louis Globe-Democrat said.