The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

by Edward Achorn

  Butler insisted that the persistent report that the Alleghenys were “‘lushers,’ in other words drink too much, is entirely undeserved, at least since I took charge. I find the members gentlemanly and willing to obey any orders which I give.” In an interview four years later, though, Butler admitted that his players had bamboozled him. “I had a number of good drinkers on my team, but I was keeping a close watch on them,” he said. “They went to bed early every night, and I saw that they were sober, but when they came down in the morning they had red eyes and big heads, and a couple of times I smelt beer in the rooms.” Certain that someone must be providing the men refreshment, Butler carefully monitored the staircase leading to their floor. Night after night, he could find no evidence. One night, he was smoking in his hotel’s billiard room, trying to figure out how his players were “working” him. “Suddenly, I saw something white shoot past the window and go flying up into darkness.” Curious to know what it was, Butler stuck his head out of the hotel window and looked up. “And what do you think I saw? . . . There was one of the gang pulling like blazes on a rope, the other end of which was fastened to a big water pitcher. . . . Those fly lushers had bribed a bell-boy to fill that jug about every half hour, and they kept it up until they were too weak to pull up the line.” Butler did not last out the season. “Personally Butler is a gentleman, but his forte is not managing an unruly ball club,” the Dispatch noted.

  One of the most somber stories of the 1883 season was the fall of Ed Nolan, a pitcher of such incomparable brilliance that he had earned the nickname “the Only.” In 1877, the Only Nolan was a national celebrity, one of the best pitchers anyone had ever seen, with blistering speed and a killer “downshoot,” or sinking curve. He threw an astounding thirty-two shutouts for the independent Indianapolis Dark Blues, who toured the country and took on all comers.

  Hoping to cash in on Nolan’s following, the National League imported the entire Indianapolis team into its circuit in 1878. But early into that season, it became clear that Nolan had badly damaged his arm with overwork. He took to drinking heavily. On one day in August, Nolan refused to take the field, saying his brother had died back in Paterson, New Jersey, and he wanted to go home to mourn. When the club discovered that no brother was ill or dead, it expelled Nolan, and he wound up for a time on the National League’s dreaded blacklist.

  After a couple of comeback attempts, and his release from the blacklist, Nolan signed in 1883 with the American Association’s Pittsburgh Alleghenys. Considering the Alleghenys’ bibulous reputation, the team was just about the worst he could have joined. From the start, his spring was a disaster. His arm still hurt and a bad cold plagued him, and his temper was frayed by the time his club embarked on its first road trip in May. Returning to his New York hotel late after a night on the town, Nolan found manager Al Pratt waiting for him with a $10 fine. Flying into a rage, Nolan informed Pratt that he would give him a better cause to fine him. While the manager slept, Nolan drank all night, swilling one cocktail after another, running up a tab that he charged to his team. This time, Nolan received a $100 fine and a hasty trip back onto the blacklist. The “shameful jamboree” probably marked the end of Nolan’s celebrated career, the Pittsburgh Dispatch noted with some sadness. “There was a time, a few years since, when the ‘Only’ was considered one of the finest pitchers in the land, but he has weakened wonderfully of late and is of little use to any team. . . . Nolan was a good fellow at heart, but too much of the ardent knocked him out.”

  At a meeting in June, the club directors considered reinstating him, in part because the Alleghenys had failed to land George Bradley as a replacement, and in part because every player on the club pleaded that the likeable pitcher be given one more chance. Even manager Pratt noted that Nolan had apologized profusely for his binge and had otherwise followed the rules. To prove he was serious this time about changing his ways, Nolan took a solemn oath of abstinence before his parish priest. Reluctantly, the directors gave him one last try. But in less than three weeks, he was back to drinking, and the Alleghenys wanted nothing more to do with him. “They have dumped ‘the Only Nolan,’ whose dissolute habits have at last reaped their reward,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. Nolan had been “once more thrown on the cold charity of the world and free lunch rooms.” He was never great again.

  Von der Ahe did not want his stars to end up like that.

  ALTERNATING THREATS AND PUNISHMENTS WITH OPEN AFFECTION, the owner threw a big dinner on the Tuesday night of July 24 for his players and their families at Bodeman’s Grove, near Gravois Road and Arsenal Street, a popular destination for German immigrant picnickers. The resort, with its handsome columned house, tall trees, sloping plush green lawns, and gleaming blue pond, offered a bucolic escape from the noisy, dusty city. The splashy dinner was the kind of bighearted gesture that made Von der Ahe, for all his foibles, well liked by his players. In a few days, the Browns would set off for their final road trip of the season, a crucial twenty-eight-game odyssey that would take them to every other American Association city, and Von der Ahe wanted to show them his appreciation and support.

  Just as characteristically, he blew his top two days later, when the Browns lost their final game of the home stand, a 5–4 heartbreaker against the Louisville Eclipse. When Arlie Latham entered the clubhouse, a furious Von der Ahe was there to greet him.

  “Latham, I’ve fined you five dollars.”

  The astonished Latham asked why.

  “For running in from third base that time you got thrown out at the plate,” the owner answered.

  Latham, merely playing the Browns’ standard game of highly aggressive running, had tried to score on a double steal, the kind of bold, risky attempt that had helped St. Louis win many times. Von der Ahe, surely, would have joined in the applause had the exploit succeeded.

  “You have no right to fine me. I used my best judgment. I thought I could get there. I won’t stand for it,” Latham said, getting heated.

  “If you talk that way to me I’ll make it fifty dollars,” the owner barked.

  “The third baseman thought for a minute,” reported the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, “and walked away.” Sullivan apparently defended his player, for he and Von der Ahe did “some very loud talking.” Then the owner launched into a postgame diatribe, singling out Deasley for more abuse. On that note, the men headed for the train station, and the grueling road trip began.

  Safely away from their flammable owner, the Browns quickly won two games in Louisville from Joe Gerhardt’s crippled club. Arlie Latham, wearing padded pants to give him some protection while sliding, sprinted so recklessly in catching a foul ball that he “went through the boards” of the Cincinnati grandstand “like a battering ram” and needed help dislodging his leg. Despite such effort, the Browns blew three straight ninth-inning leads in one stretch and lost five of six, including three of four to the roused and suddenly dangerous Cincinnati Reds. Along the way, manager Sullivan paid the price for his hands-off approach to the players’ after-hours activities. He virtually lost control of his men. On the Saturday night of August 4, several hours after St. Louis’s sole victory in the series at Cincinnati, the Browns’ new slugger Tom Mansell returned to the lobby of the Grand Hotel and strode straight through the door of an elevator, failing to notice there was no car inside. He plunged several feet down an open shaft, gruesomely gashing his right knee. A doctor summoned to the scene dressed and bandaged the wound and told the Browns’ new star hitter that he would not be able to play for ten days to two weeks. George McGinnis, who had accompanied the outfielder into the hotel, remembered that he didn’t have his room key, and had gone back to the desk to pick it up. “On his return, he found poor Mansell down in the hole,” Von der Ahe recounted. A few days later, Mansell returned to St. Louis, his knee heavily bandaged, and “was transported with considerable difficulty” from the depot to his apartment on Grand Avenue for weeks of recuperation. He was so seriously injured that when he tried to rejoin his t
eammates in New York City at the end of August, the club sent him back home for more rest.

  Naturally, reporters were convinced that the Browns’ new outfielder had been drunk when he fell down the shaft. The Cincinnati Enquirer reported that Mansell and McGinnis spent the evening “with several residents of the city who were inclined to be convivial, and by the time they had visited several Over the Rhine saloons and tossed off sundry and numerous bowls of Cincinnati’s ‘amber,’ they were loaded to the gunwales.” Von der Ahe, trying to control the damage to his club’s reputation, insisted that he had launched his own investigation and found the report to be “an infamous misrepresentation.” Mansell “was as straight as a man could be.” But the Enquirer remained skeptical. “Tom, undoubtedly, is a good fellow, but the night he did the grand and lofty act down the elevator of the Grand Hotel he was either drunk, tired, or the red lights on Vine street had made him near-sighted.” Upper Vine Street in Cincinnati’s Over the Rhine neighborhood was notorious for its saloons, gambling dens, dance halls, and burlesque theaters.

  While Von der Ahe was busy issuing denials, another scandal erupted. One week after the elevator debacle, Fred Lewis and Pat Deasley, teammates on the 1881 Boston Red Stockings now reunited on the Browns, created a late-night ruckus outside a Columbus billiard hall. According to the Ohio State Journal, Ted Sullivan had hunted the two men down when they missed curfew. Possibly tipsy, they reportedly chased their manager out of the joint, while some of their teammates “made things lively for [Sullivan] by frequent blows in the region of the head.” Deasley and Lewis then fled the scene, disappearing into the gas-lit streets of muggy Columbus. Later that night, evidently roaring drunk, the two became so rowdy that police felt compelled to arrest them for disorderly conduct. Refusing to go peacefully, the ballplayers “had to be clubbed vigorously” by three Columbus officers “before they submitted.”

  The ugly incident served the Browns right, critics maintained. “Lewis was dropped by the Philadelphias for his lushing,” O. P. Caylor noted. “St. Louis deserves to lose for taking up men who make beasts of themselves.” The Boston Globe concurred, calling Lewis “a hard ticket” that the Phillies had sold off “on account of his bad habits.” Deasley, meanwhile, was “far too ignorant to have any character at all, and has gone downhill very fast since leaving Boston.” Both men were ordered to stand for trial. Instead, they skipped town with their team, forfeiting $15 in bail.

  Ted Sullivan hotly denied newspaper reports that his men had assaulted him, saying he had simply found the two men playing billiards in a saloon adjoining their hotel and “told them it was time they were in bed.” Then he had gone to bed himself. Later that night, he contended, Lewis and Deasley got into a loud argument with some Columbus players. The police, playing favorites, let the local ballplayers go and arrested the St. Louis men. Sullivan only learned that his stars had been jailed the following morning. By then, he found the two “so penitent and so regretful” that he decided their wretched night in jail was punishment enough. “He refrained from telegraphing to Mr. Von der Ahe about the matter and tried to hush it up to save the reputation of his nine, several of whom felt keenly the reflection upon their character as an organization.” More likely, he feared that an enraged Von der Ahe would immediately suspend them if he heard of it, robbing his lineup of two key players.

  Sullivan’s denials earned him only ridicule from the Cincinnati Enquirer. “Throwing two or three beer glasses at a manager’s head and running may be a new way of asking for a chew of tobacco or the time of day, but it is a way that most people would look upon as some kind of assault, Mr. Sullivan to the contrary.” Deasley and Lewis, meanwhile, sent off a protest to the St. Louis Post-Dispatch, calling its account of the incident “contemptible and malicious.” But the newspaper stood by its report. “It will be observed that Messrs. Deasley and Lewis do not take the trouble to say that the statements were untrue, and as neither man could come within a mile of spelling either ‘contemptible’ or ‘malicious,’ it is doubtful if they knew what they were trying to say in the telegram which was dictated for them.” The paper pointed to one educated man as the true author, saying: “Manager Sullivan knows he will be blamed for the want of discipline and this telegram is an attempt to square himself.” Club discipline was much worse than previously revealed, it argued. Deasley and Lewis had been arrested earlier in St. Louis, while fistfights between players had repeatedly broken out, with Tony Mullane battling Bill Gleason in one incident, and Tom Dolan tussling with Deasley in another.

  Though Von der Ahe talked down the Mansell injury and the Deasley-Lewis fracas in the press, he was getting angrier by the day about the severe discipline lapses on his club, and he blamed Sullivan for failing to get the men in line. There was little to do about it, Von der Ahe concluded, except head east, join the men, and assert authority himself—whether Ted Sullivan liked it or not.

  10

  CAP ANSON’S NIGHTMARE

  TIRED AND GRUBBY, CAP ANSON WAS IN NO MOOD FOR AN argument when the train bearing his Chicago White Stockings hissed into Union Station in Toledo, Ohio, on the steamy Friday morning of August 10, 1883. In the midst of a punishing road trip, Anson’s men had just dropped two out of three to lowly Detroit. As they disembarked, a Toledo Blade reporter took note of their deeply sunburned faces, so dark that they could have been suspected of being “tainted with black blood.”

  This was supposed to be their off day, crammed between the Thursday finale in Detroit and a big Saturday contest in Buffalo, and they could have used the rest. But Albert Spalding, club president, had shoehorned in an exhibition game that Friday afternoon. Although Toledo had only about fifty thousand residents, it was a baseball hotbed, home of the Blue Stockings, one of the top clubs in the game’s best minor circuit, the Northwestern League. A big crowd could be expected to hand over thousands of quarters to see the hometown boys take on the kings of the National League. That would boost Chicago’s profits—and why not, since they were passing through Toledo anyway? No reason, except that the men were getting worn to a frazzle.

  But it was not just the constant work, recent defeats, and ordeal of travel that had Anson in a foul mood. He had been hearing, with mounting disgust, about Toledo’s rising twenty-five-year-old catcher, Moses Fleetwood Walker. A tall, graceful young man, Fleet Walker was a rarity in 1880s baseball in that he was a college-educated gentleman. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported that he caught “magnificently” and declared that his throwing was “never excelled” in that city. The Sporting Life, which had a national reach, observed that Walker was “looming up as a great man behind the bat.” The Pittsburgh Dispatch reported that he was “said to be the whole team, and a dog under the wagon”—meaning well-equipped with talent.

  Anson, however, wanted no part of this nationwide celebration of Walker. He didn’t even want to set foot on the same field with him. For Walker was a light-skinned black man—and in Anson’s opinion, no such individual had a place in a white man’s world, pretending to be a white man’s equal. Many of his Chicago players staunchly agreed. Before assenting to the exhibition game, Anson had sought assurances that Walker would not play, and the Toledo club had indicated that Fleet needed a rest and probably would be benched. Anson accepted the hint as a promise, counting on the Blue Stockings to keep their black man out of his path. He didn’t like Walker’s presence in white professional baseball one bit, and he had a low opinion of the Toledo club for permitting it.

  Adrian Constantine Anson—named not after the Roman emperors, but, more prosaically, after two towns in Michigan where his father had once lived—had formed his rock-ribbed convictions of white supremacy early in life. It started with his dealings with the ragged remnants of a Pottawatomie Indian tribe that lived on the plains just beyond his hometown, the pioneer village of Marshalltown, Iowa. “I fancy they were not as fond of us boys as they might have been,” Adrian recalled with amusement, “for we used to tease and bother them at every opportunity.”


  One night, as a teenager, he awoke with a start to see two Indians standing in his room, one at the head of the bed, the other at the foot, each wielding a tomahawk. “That they had come to kill me I was certain, and that they would succeed in doing so seemed to me equally sure,” Anson recalled. He tried to scream, but could not, and watched in terrified silence as they vanished through the open doorway, disappearing into the darkness. In the morning’s light, when he dared to leave his bed and alert his father to the strange visit, the old man laughed and told the boy he had dreamt it all. But as long as he lived, Cap Anson fervently maintained that the visitants were real. “I saw these two Indians as they stood at the head and foot of my bed as plainly as I ever saw a base-ball, and I have had my eye on a ball a good many times since I first began to play the game,” he said. But even if he had not imagined the encounter, the Indians’ wordless warning never pierced his heart. For the rest of his life, he would demean and harass those whom he insisted on pigeonholing as his inferiors.