The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

by Edward Achorn

  But, even now, the Eclipse players were professionals, and they were determined to go down fighting. The season’s final days would demonstrate just how hard Joe Gerhardt’s men could battle when all hope was lost.

  AS THE CINCINNATI REDS SURGED AHEAD OF LOUISVILLE INTO third place, making their run at Philadelphia and St. Louis, O. P. Caylor overflowed with confidence. “If anyone thinks the Cincinnatis’ chances for the flag are less than any of the other three, he is much mistaken,” he wrote. “We cannot believe they are not the strongest team collectively in the Association.” Starting to see luck go their way, the Reds turned back into the loose, swaggering team they had been in 1882. Suddenly, they were doing everything right. “Four fine double plays, remarkable running catches of difficult flies by Sommer, Jones, Corkhill, McPhee and Carpenter, and equally marvelous foul-bound catches by Reilly and Snyder, makes [sic] yesterday’s game a jewel among games,” Caylor wrote after a 3–1 victory over Columbus.

  On July 21, the Reds managed to pull off the most celebrated scam of the season. It began when the ever-confused Hick Carpenter missed the team’s train from St. Louis to Columbus and wired manager Pop Snyder that the earliest he could arrive was 4 P.M.—precisely the time the game was to begin. By then, unfortunately, Snyder would have to have his lineup in place; under 1883 rules, substitutions were not allowed after the game began, except in cases of extreme injury or illness. Determined to get his star third baseman into the game somehow, Snyder ordered backup pitcher Harry McCormick to grab a horse and carriage and head for the Columbus depot with Carpenter’s uniform. Once he had Carpenter aboard, McCormick was to “drive like hell” back to the park while Hickory got dressed in the carriage en route. Snyder’s next concern was delaying the start of the game until Carpenter had safely arrived. Here, Chick Fulmer, the Reds’ handsome shortstop, came to the rescue. “I don’t feel very well, and may be real bad at 4 o’clock,” he assured Snyder. The infielder knew something about acting: he was known as “Uncle Tom” Fulmer in Philadelphia for his work off-season as a manager arranging popular stage performances of Uncle Tom’s Cabin. Now, he intended to put his theatrical experience to good use.

  When game time arrived, Fulmer was nowhere to be found. Launching a search party, the two teams found him in the clubhouse, curled up on a chest, complaining of terrible cramps. “Then he groaned in G flat . . . while everybody could see the cold sweat start out at every pore of his Parian brow. The Columbus boys at once thought of the Egyptian plague, and several faces blanched.” While the players solicitously dosed Fulmer with ginger, hoping to get him into a condition to play, Columbus manager Horace Phillips went out on the field and apologized to the crowd for the delay, explaining to the grandstand “how desperately sick” the infielder was. Jimmy Williams, a club official and American Association secretary, was discussing how to deal with cholera when a carriage tore onto the grounds at full speed. Carpenter leaped out in uniform, and Snyder, seeing him, shouted, “Come on, boys.” The remaining Reds—including Fulmer—calmly emerged from the clubhouse. Williams reportedly looked at Carpenter, then Fulmer, rubbed his finger up and down the side of his nose, and exclaimed, “Well, dog my buttons!”

  “Fulmer in Cramps,”

  by John Reilly, Cincinnati Commercial

  Gazette, July 31, 1883 (Library of Congress)

  The Reds relished their little trick. First baseman Long John Reilly, a talented illustrator, celebrated it in a cartoon published in the Commercial Gazette. It depicted Fulmer doubled over with his eyes shut in pain, his mouth wide open, and his tongue hanging out. Soon after that, Caylor was ordering more cartoons from Reilly. His funny, boldly drawn work began to appear on the front of scorecards sold at the games, though the twenty-four-year-old’s greatest artistic contribution that summer was at the plate. He hit .311 and finished third in the Association in home runs and hits and second in triples, runs, slugging average, and total bases.

  Between late July and mid-August, Cincinnati won thirteen of fifteen games to close within three of the league-leading Athletics and two of the Browns. In a league of drunks, actors, minstrel stars, cartoonists, tea merchants, dreamers, newspaper correspondents, bombastic grocers, epileptics, hot-tempered Irish managers, fainting catchers, fetishistic and hard-of-hearing sluggers, great shaggy mammoths, owners playing in their street clothes, inauspicious yellow dogs, and seriously confused left-handed third basemen, anything might happen as the great season approached its climax.

  THE 1883 PHILADELPHIA ATHLETICS: (top, left to right) Harry Stovey, George W. Bradley, Mike Moynahan, Lon Knight; (center, left to right) Bob Blakiston, Cub Stricker, Jud Birchall, Bill Crowley, Jersey Bakley; (bottom, left to right) Bobby Mathews, John O’Brien, Fred Corey, Ed Rowen

  (Robert Edward Auctions; reprinted with permission)

  THE 1883 ST. LOUIS BROWNS, posing in front of their new “Bulletin Board” late in May. Stars include Charlie Comiskey (standing, left), Pat Deasley (standing, right), Bill Gleason (seated, far left), Jumbo McGinnis (seated next to Gleason), Tony Mullane (seated, fourth from left). On the ground are Hugh Nicol (far left) and Arlie Latham (third from left). The little man in the center, with the derby hat and incipient beer belly, appears to be club owner Chris Von der Ahe.

  (Transcendental Graphics/theruckerarchive.com; reprinted with permission)

  9

  FIRST-CLASS DRUNKARDS

  IT WAS A PLEASANT SUNDAY EVENING, WITH A FRESH BREEZE cutting the July heat of St. Louis, and young lovers strolled along the streets, chatting and enjoying the night air. Along Grand Avenue, people were flowing into Sportsman’s Park, where Von der Ahe was putting on a fireworks display, price of admission twenty-five cents for adults, ten cents for children. He had beautifully illuminated the park with Chinese lanterns that gave off a warm glow of red and gold, green and blue, “forming a picturesque scene in the clear, bright starry night.” Von der Ahe was something of a fireworks fanatic, and in April 1882 he had sent away for “a very curious implement,” a Japanese mortar used for daytime fireworks. It was a cannon-shaped device made of bamboo wrapped in steel wire, and as soon as it arrived from New York, he put it on display at Sportsman’s Park. Now, on a Saturday night in 1883, he was playing again. With a startling flash, a rocket shot up in the air, erupting in piercing sparks and embers that sank to earth, followed by others. Unfortunately, the grand climax mistakenly went off with a stupendous explosion early in the show, and a display reading “Success to the St. Louis [club] of 1883” crackled to life. “It went off with a boom,” said a reporter, “and showed up very brilliantly.”

  It was a fitting symbol, since the Browns themselves were showing up brilliantly. The club was in the thick of the pennant fight, winning game after game under the generalship of the little Irish chatterbox, Ted Sullivan. Not that there weren’t challenges. Von der Ahe had impulsively benched one of the team’s two starting pitchers at a time when he was sorely needed. The Athletics were getting hot again; they would win fifteen of the last twenty games of their big road trip. And the Browns were dealing with injuries. “Gleason is suffering with a lame leg,” said one report. “[Second baseman George] Strief is also lame and sore, and Comiskey’s sides and arms are all raw, the result of sliding while running the bases.” As Comiskey recalled, he and his teammates varied the style of their sliding—head first, feet first, right or left—on the basis of which parts of their bodies were bruised by the bumpy, pebbly infields of the day. “It was much like broiling a steak,” he explained. “If rare on one side, turn it over.” Midway into the 1883 season, Comiskey was rare on all sides.

  The Browns were also suffering from dismal offensive production by the outfield. Tom Loftus and Ned Cuthbert had both flopped, and Tom Dolan, a catcher thrown into the outfield, could hardly get the ball out of the infield. When Sullivan got wind that the National League’s Detroit Wolverines were prepared to release Tom Mansell, he moved fast. The redheaded Mansell, twenty-eight, a brother of major leaguers Mike and John, all
of Irish stock, was a solid professional hitter and outfielder, having won praise for capturing “horizon searchers” in his hands “like hickory nuts in a bag.” But something had ruined his play this year. After showing up at spring training twenty pounds overweight, he had performed sluggishly and slumped to .221, earning the Boston Globe’s description of him as a “wretched fielder and a very moderate batter.” Detroit manager Jack Chapman would have none of it, praising Mansell “in the highest terms as a batsman and fielder,” and insisting he was forced to release him only to free up room in the payroll for new acquisitions.

  Desperate to give his lineup some National League punch, Sullivan ignored the criticisms and any potential skeletons in Tom’s closet, signed Mansell, and sent him on to St. Louis. There, on the scorching Tuesday afternoon of July 3, Von der Ahe discarded his suit jacket to watch in shirt-sleeves as Billy Gleason hit line drives and fly balls to Tom, who captured each one and threw the ball “back like a shot” nearly the length of the field. “Nothing wrong with that man,” Gleason called out. “He is all right.” Sullivan planned to play him the following day, in the big Independence Day holiday doubleheader, with one game in the morning and the second in the afternoon. Unfortunately, at the scheduled starting time of 9:30 A.M. on July 4, Mansell was nowhere to be seen. He had climbed aboard a horsecar earlier that morning, thinking he had plenty of time, but failing to factor in how sluggish the St. Louis system was. Fifteen minutes after game time, he arrived at Sportsman’s Park, and raced to dress in five minutes. The game, which had been held up for him, began at 9:50 A.M. Though he was late, Mansell proved worth the wait. He went 3-for-3 en route to a .402 American Association batting average.

  Tom Mansell,

  New York Clipper, October 27, 1883

  (Library of Congress)

  Having picked up one strong outfielder in the West, Sullivan headed out East for another. He had his eye on Ed Glenn, a promising twenty-two-year-old left fielder for the outstanding Richmond Club, of Virginia, which would join the American Association in 1884. But Sullivan told Von der Ahe that he would also stop in Philadelphia to try to buy slugger Fred Lewis from the floundering Phillies, who were securely holding last place in the National League. “Yes, Ted, you can hit one bird with a double stone,” Von der Ahe responded. It was one of the German owner’s classic malapropisms, yet there was a kernel of wisdom in it, for when Sullivan missed out on Glenn with one stone, he hit Lewis with another, buying his contract for $800.

  In nabbing Lewis, Sullivan was once again overlooking a player’s skeletons. Lewis was an arrogant, dull-witted, barrel-chested center fielder whose heavy drinking plainly presented a discipline problem. But he could drive the ball long and hard, and the Browns badly needed that right now. Reds first baseman Long John Reilly described him as “a queer character”: a batter who cared so little which pitchers he faced that he couldn’t even “recall them by name,” much less reflect on their best pitches and strategy. “They all looked alike to him,” Reilly noted, “and he hit them all.” Since the peddling of human beings in baseball through the sale of their contracts was still a novelty, the Lewis deal drew amused comment. It “shows the market for flesh and blood is as good as it was in the days of slavery,” cracked the National Police Gazette. “St. Louis is engaging players by the bunch, like you buy radishes,” Cincinnati sports-writer O. P. Caylor opined, warning that Von der Ahe was destroying team chemistry by introducing so many foreign elements. “Better let well enough alone.”

  For his part, Lewis was “much pleased” to leave the wretched Phillies behind for a team in the thick of a pennant race. “He is a man of fine physique, showed splendid fielding points and is a terrific batsman,” a St. Louis reporter enthused after watching Lewis’s first two-hour practice in a Browns uniform. “From all appearances he will be one of the heavy guns of the nine and will carry out all that is promised for him.” Though Lewis was the heaviest man on the team, tipping the scales at 190 pounds, he could be surprisingly graceful. In his debut with St. Louis, Lewis made a lovely running catch in deep right-center field, then slammed three hits, including a triple. Like Mansell, he would feast off American Association pitching.

  Fred Lewis,

  New York Clipper, November 17, 1883

  (Library of Congress)

  Sullivan’s midseason acquisitions dramatically improved the Browns’ pennant chances. With Mansell in left and Lewis in center, joining little Hugh Nicol (another National League alumnus) in right, St. Louis suddenly possessed the Association’s elite outfield.

  Yet, for all their talent, the Browns remained a collection of obstreperous and temperamental young men, up to and including their manager and owner. Soon after taking Jumbo McGinnis out of the starting rotation, Von der Ahe benched a player who was, if anything, even more critical to the Browns’ hopes: the gritty, Irish-born Pat Deasley, the club’s only first-quality catcher, who had reportedly failed to report on time for one practice and had plied himself with “spirituous liquors.” Deasley had already been lost to the team for many games through a series of agonizing injuries, one of the reasons the Browns had trouble winning at the start of the season, so Sullivan could not have been very happy. Once again, Von der Ahe insisted that he had been compelled to step in to enforce discipline, leaving unsaid that his manager had failed to do the job. “I have determined . . . to draw the reins very tight and insist upon the men doing as the rules require them to,” Von der Ahe declared through his mouthpiece, Reid. “I dislike being harsh, but I intend making the men work for the championship and carry out their part of the contract. They are all big salaried and should certainly live up to the requirements. If they do not I will inflict the penalties at any cost. It is too serious a state of affairs to permit any indulgence and it will not be tolerated.”

  VON DER AHE HAD GOOD REASON TO BE CONCERNED. A NUMBER of his players were notoriously hard drinkers, even by the standards of a business filled with them, and it was difficult to keep watch on their nocturnal activities. In theory, an 11 P.M. curfew hung over players’ heads, and on the road most managers did bed checks. Ballplayers often spent their nights in the hotel, people-watching or talking baseball, puffing on cigars, or playing friendly games of billiards. Others might stroll the neighborhood or take in a show—a comedy, minstrel performance, or vaudeville extravaganza—at twenty-five cents to a dollar a ticket. But many athletes, addicted to adrenaline and adulation, would sneak out after curfew in search of more unsavory recreations. Like thousands of other men away from home and on their own in a big city, they found their way to the redlight districts and crowded bars, to houses of prostitution, to gambling parlors, or to low dives, where shapely young women undulated to the jangling notes of a piano going out of tune.

  Some young men, plunged into that world, drank to excess, to the point that they showed up at the ballpark the next day with throbbing headaches or slurred speech. The Chicago Tribune maintained that a ballplayer, who was generally good for little else in life, could make a princely sum of $350 to $500 a month, “with his traveling expenses borne by the club, and himself carted about the country in palace-cars and fed at first-class hotels.” The least he could do was “present himself on the field in fit condition to tender something near an equivalent for such extravagant compensation. . . . The ‘black list’ . . . should be relentlessly carried out” to enforce discipline. But it wasn’t. Baseball, confronting the necessity of filling out the rosters of two major leagues with talent, often looked the other way. As the Pittsburgh Dispatch pointedly asked in an editorial, if every player who drinks is banished, “who will play base ball?”

  The Pittsburgh Commercial Gazette, much like the Chicago Tribune, found it astonishing that any professional ballplayer would squander his extraordinary good luck by becoming a drunkard. After all, many men toiled six days a week, ten hours a day, doing brutal, dangerous physical labor for a pittance. The paper noted that:

  a ballplayer’s path in summer time is on beds of flow
ery ease. He gets a big salary, travels all over the country, stops at good hotels, and has the best of everything. He is paid by the public to furnish one hour and a half of amusement each afternoon, and he certainly should be able to keep clear of whiskey during the season, especially as he had all winter to get even. The great trouble with some men on the Allegheny club is that they look on base ball merely as a pretext to open their pores and enable them to sweat out the whiskey drank the night before. They regularly fill up and regularly sweat it out at the expense of the reputation of the management and the regret and sorrow of all lovers of ball playing hereabouts. Without whiskey the Alleghenys are the equal of any club in the association.

  When Ormond Butler quit the perils of umpiring to take over the Alleghenys, reputed to be an assembly of drunkards, some wondered if he had made a wise decision. “He will soon find that the abuse which he received from the spectators was extremely pleasant in comparison with managing the smoky city team,” said one observer. Sure enough, within two months, his men were scorning his orders. Meanwhile, the press was attacking him viciously, contending that he did not have “the spunk of a louse.” Within days of Butler’s taking over, three members of the Allegheny club—Jackie Hayes, George Creamer, and the Association’s top hitter, Ed Swartwood—engaged in some “slugging and brutal kicking” in an early-morning fracas at Harff and Cramer’s saloon in Cincinnati. Tom’s brother, Mike Mansell, and Reds pitcher Harry McCormick were also involved, although, the Cincinnati Enquirer insisted, they “did not participate in the disgraceful affair except in their efforts to pull the ruffians off of their prostrate victim.” Butler complained that the press got the story wrong. “I know the Enquirer’s story was unjust,” he said, “because the disturbance in front of the saloon occurred between 10 and 11 o’clock in the evening, and McCormick was not arrested for fighting, but for firing a Jackson cracker in the street. He had a revolver with him and it was thought he had discharged a shot from that.” Apparently, the notion of a ballplayer carrying a concealed revolver in front of a saloon late at night did not especially trouble the manager.