The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

by Edward Achorn

  Next stop for the Browns was New York’s Polo Grounds, a tough venue for any visitor. The New York Metropolitans were a strong club, and their right-handed ace pitcher, Timothy John Keefe of Cambridge, Massachusetts, was putting in one of the greatest seasons in major-league history. Grit ran in the family. Tim’s Irish-born father, a carpenter named Patrick, had been trapped in the South during the Civil War and was given the choice of imprisonment or service in the Confederate Army. With two brothers fighting for the Union—both would die in 1862—he chose imprisonment, and spent three years making bullets in a prison factory. After being repatriated to Massachusetts, Patrick had high hopes for his son, and he felt miserably disappointed when Tim insisted on wasting his life on baseball. After starring for Troy in the National League—his microscopic 0.86 earned run average in 1880 is rated the lowest in major-league history—Keefe came to America’s biggest, most vibrant city in 1883. Having mastered a killer change of pace to go with his fastball and curves, he would go on to win forty-one games this season and lead the Association in some impressive categories: hits and walks per inning (only 0.963); innings pitched (a stunning 619); strikeouts (359); and complete games (68). On July 4, he pitched both ends of a doubleheader against Columbus, winning the first on a one-hitter and the second on a two-hitter.

  Tim Keefe

  (Library of Congress)

  Keefe helped make the Mets a very good team, one destined to win the pennant in 1884. Still, they were something of a redheaded stepchild to their owners, the Metropolitan Exhibition Company, led by a young tobacco merchant named John B. Day and Truthful Jim Mutrie. The company owned two teams, the American Association’s Mets and the National League’s New York Gothams, and Day and Mutrie made it a point to steer financial resources and their best players to the franchise in the older and superior league. The pair had started off in 1880 with a club they called the Metropolitans, an independent team run on a shoestring, much like the Athletics or Browns before their Association days. Mutrie’s idea was to fill the Mets roster with players from the disintegrating Rochester Hop Bitters, a very good professional team named after, and designed to promote, a patent medicine of limited curative value but loaded with highly therapeutic alcohol. Unfortunately, he and Day lacked the $500 in train fare needed to get the men down to New York. Mutrie first tried to raise the cash from area sporting-goods dealers, but baseball’s reputation was in such disrepair that he was unable to collect a dollar. Finally, an old friend, Jack Lynch of the Washington Nationals, and later of the Metropolitans, suggested that Mutrie talk to the prominent book publishers Charles Dillingham and Walter Appleton, as they were “lovers of baseball and liberally inclined.” To Mutrie’s delight, they agreed to join him and Day in backing the club.

  Lynch, it turned out, was also instrumental in locating a home field. While the ballplayer was getting his shoes shined at Earl’s Hotel at the corner of Manhattan’s Canal and Central streets, a precocious newsboy asked why Lynch’s club went all the way to Brooklyn to play its games. “Why don’t you go to the Polo Grounds and give us New York boys a chance to see the games?” he asked. Up until that time, no major-league team had played ball regularly in Manhattan; even the National League’s New York Mutuals of 1876 were a ferryboat ride away in Brooklyn. In the 1870s, the Polo Grounds, located at 110th Street between Fifth and Sixth avenues, were exactly what the name suggested—a grounds where polo matches took place. Mutrie was dismayed to discover that it contained stables for the polo ponies and “was in poor shape for baseball.” Still, the level, grassy field was surrounded by a fence, which made it useful for baseball, and the polo clubs rarely used it anymore. Although the grounds had previously been considered a bit too far uptown to draw spectators, having been carved from undeveloped meadows north of the city, the site had already been engulfed by New York’s relentless northward expansion. Now the city’s new elevated railroad was but a brief walk away. Mutrie took the plunge, rented the space, and laid out a baseball diamond. Soon, Day and Mutrie were packing in customers and reaping tremendous profits.

  In 1883, the first year New York was represented in two major leagues, the Gothams and the Metropolitans shared the park, sometimes at the same time. The owners did it by dividing the spacious field into two cramped halves, separating them with a portable eight-foot-high canvas fence. On occasion, a ball would sneak over or under it, interrupting the game on the other side. The divided field removed all doubt that the Metropolitans, once the darlings of New York, had been relegated to second-class status. The Gothams, who charged an admission of fifty cents and catered to wealthier League fans, had first dibs on the superior Fifth Avenue side of the grounds. Their side featured a new double-decked grandstand. The Metropolitan club, which charged twenty-five cents for admission and appealed to a lower class of customer, had to make do with a shabbier stand that had been moved from the old site to the Sixth Avenue side.

  Operating a club in a city as big, brassy, and money-obsessed as New York could present its challenges. On the rainy Saturday of April 7, during the spring exhibition season, a pair of young men came to the Polo Grounds and asked to speak to an employee, supposedly about buying a horse. “The employee was busy at the time, and after answering their questions left them to saunter out alone,” a later investigation revealed, as reported by the New York Herald. But, rather than leave the ballpark, the visitors craftily concealed themselves at the Mets’ Sixth Avenue gate. When a crowd formed, expecting a game would go in spite of the rain, the men coolly opened the gate and charged each person queuing up a quarter to get in. “After making quite a little haul the men cleared out and left the gate standing open,” the Herald said. By then, Day and Mutrie had decided to call off that afternoon’s game on account of the weather, only to confront about five hundred people seated in the Metropolitan club’s grandstand. They had paid their way in and “refused to be pacified” until they got their money back. The furious Day organized a manhunt. Gothams manager John Clapp and the Polo Grounds watchman tracked down one of the thieves in the barroom of a roadhouse on Harlem Lane. They hauled him back to the ballpark, where, in the presence of a police detective, a number of spectators identified him as one of the men who had taken their money. The culprit, Harry Sheldon, lived near the ballpark at the corner of Fourth Avenue and 109th Street. Life in the big city required constant vigilance against rip-off artists.

  It was here, on the Sixth Avenue side of the Polo Grounds, that the St. Louis Browns came to play on August 27, followed soon thereafter by their owner. One can only imagine Ted Sullivan’s dismay upon discovering that Von der Ahe was on his way, no doubt to micromanage, second-guess his decisions, and undermine his authority, even though the Browns had won ten of their last twelve games, all on the road. Five months earlier, Von der Ahe had gathered the men in the clubhouse and declared that they were under Sullivan’s sole management, and that Sullivan would hold them responsible for their conduct. Back then, he claimed to be interested in a strong-willed manager with “a mind of his own.” By late August, he seemed to have forgotten all of that.

  Upon arriving in the mighty metropolis—the city he had first set foot in seventeen years earlier as a young immigrant from Westphalia—Von der Ahe immediately checked out the mental state of his players, who had made ugly headlines during the long road trip with their embarrassing late-night escapades. According to the Republican, he found them in remarkably good spirits and perfect discipline. “Nothing could be more unfounded than the reports of dissensions in the ranks of the St. Louis club, and they are all absurd fabrications,” the newspaper reported, faithfully passing along the owner’s spin. “Mr. Von der Ahe found everything quiet and placid, the men in the best condition and spirits and in considerably better shape than any of their present or prospective antagonists. There is no quarreling and no slugging going on”—except against enemy pitchers. Then he settled into his seat at the Polo Grounds to watch the action. In the Monday opener, St. Louis clobbered the superb Tim Keef
e and the Mets, 8–3, before four thousand fans, to retain a half-game lead over the Athletics.

  Von der Ahe’s professed satisfaction with Ted Sullivan’s managing was short-lived, unfortunately. In the second game at the Polo Grounds, on Wednesday, August 29, Sullivan finally gave a break to the exhausted Tony Mullane. He had been filling in for George McGinnis, who had rested for an entire week because of an aching, dead arm. It became obvious that the hefty McGinnis was still having problems, though, when New York pounded him without mercy, jumping to a 3–0 lead in the first. Von der Ahe, watching from the grandstand with increasing frustration, called Sullivan over and ordered him to replace McGinnis with Mullane. The request was “so absurd,” Ted recalled, “that even the players laughed.” Flatly refusing, Sullivan tried to explain to his boss why the switch would only hurt. “It’s no use now,” he supposedly told Von der Ahe. “The Mets have a deciding lead.” It was more prudent to risk the loss of that game than to bring in Mullane yet again, tiring him out before the next game, and risking an arm injury that would effectively end the Browns’ pennant chances. The Mets coasted to victory, 7–1, dropping the Browns to second place, .005 behind the Athletics in winning percentage. Von der Ahe was furious. The New York Clipper tried to point out the obvious point that the owner seemed unwilling to accept: “If President Von der Ahe wishes to see the St. Louis champions he had better let his manager run the team, and not interfere with him, otherwise defeat will likely follow.”

  Already angry that he had been defied in the afternoon, Von der Ahe grew angrier still late that night, when he made an impromptu bed check at the Broadway Central Hotel, at Broadway and Third. He found several beds empty of their assigned players, who were apparently out enjoying the nightlife of America’s biggest city. Von der Ahe had just finished telling the St. Louis press before he left that he intended to crack the whip, and here was Sullivan failing to enforce his will. All season he had grappled with what he saw as Sullivan’s poor decisions, weak discipline, and outright insubordination. Way back in the first week of the season, Sullivan had refused to yank Captain Loftus from the lineup at Von der Ahe’s orders, forcing the owner to release the man—and then Sullivan had insisted on choosing the new captain himself. This very day, he had spurned orders to replace McGinnis in the box. Von der Ahe had been forced to deal with constant complaints about Sullivan’s decisions: from Jack Gleason, who felt he had been played out of position; from McGinnis, who thought he had been overworked by the second game of the season; and from Dave Reid, who had long deplored Sullivan’s every move. Von der Ahe had been forced to step in time and again to fine and discipline the players: McGinnis, for getting too fat; Deasley, for imbibing “spirituous liquors”; Latham, for foolishly trying to steal home; Lewis, for drinking too much. The owner had been forced to make excuses when Tom Mansell fell down an elevator shaft, and when Deasley and Lewis got arrested in Columbus.

  Talking himself into a rage, Von der Ahe confronted Sullivan sometime after midnight. Though the manager had led the team to a remarkable number of wins on the road, with a strong chance of capturing the pennant, Von der Ahe was convinced that Sullivan was hurting the club by failing to enforce discipline, and he warned him to shape up. Astonished by the accusation, Sullivan “retorted warmly and . . . they had a very bitter passage of words.” When Sullivan pointed out that he had turned the Browns around and made them one of the best teams in baseball, Von der Ahe pooh-poohed the notion. Von der Ahe complained that he, the owner, “had had most of the management to do himself and had to take hold several times at great inconvenience to himself.” No doubt, he considered this hasty trip to New York a prime example of that.

  For Sullivan, that was the last straw. “Chris had been interfering with me for a week or so before the climax came, and finally I could stand it no more,” Sullivan recalled. “I told him I had enough of his interference and that he could take his club and run it.” Ted pulled out the beautiful gold pocket watch that Von der Ahe had given him that spring—the one inscribed with the owner’s thanks for Sullivan’s efforts—and flung it at him. “I should not have done so, but I was at the impulsive stage of my life where I could not bear his inconsistency—especially when I had the Browns at the top of the list.” Sullivan demanded his release, and Von der Ahe, red-faced with fury, gladly granted it.

  At the height of the pennant race, with a month to go, in the middle of a big series in the great metropolis of New York, the Browns were suddenly bereft of the manager who had turned the next-to-last-place team of 1882 into a baseball machine on the verge of a championship.

  THE EMBITTERED SULLIVAN QUICKLY EXPOSED SOME OF THE Browns’ dirty laundry. “I have brought this club up to its present standing, and it is hard, after putting it in a fair way to win the championship, to be treated thus badly,” he told the New York Times. “Mr. Von der Ahe understands but little about base-ball, and if I had obeyed all of his orders during the season, the club would be nearer the foot than the head in the race.”

  Sullivan caught a train for a long and lonely trip to St. Louis, leaving his pennant-contending club and its owner behind. As Von der Ahe cooled off, he seemed to realize he had made a terrible mistake. He pleaded with Sullivan to return. But the manager stubbornly refused. “He says he was badly treated by President Von der Ahe, and that he would never go back again to the club,” the Philadelphia Item reported. Von der Ahe announced that, from here on out, he himself would manage the team and enforce its rules, though he turned over the daily leadership of the club to Charlie Comiskey, Sullivan’s longtime protégé and friend.

  Back in St. Louis, the stunning shakeup got mixed reviews. “Mr. Von der Ahe thinks that he, with the assistance of Comiskey, can successfully manage the affairs of the club for the remainder of the season,” the Globe-Democrat reported, adding, doubtfully, “Whether he can or not will be seen by the future success of the club.” By contrast, Dave Reid of the Missouri Republican was ecstatic that the arrogant little popinjay from Dubuque was gone. His paper hailed the departure:

  GOOD-BY, SULLIVAN!

  The Browns at Last Relieved of Their Disturbing Element.

  Charley Comiskey to Manage the Club the Balance of the Season.

  Joe Quest’s Debut at Second Base Entirely Satisfactory.

  The last two lines referred to Sullivan’s final gift to the club: the acquisition of yet another seasoned National Leaguer for the concluding weeks of the Browns’ pennant drive. The five-foot-six Quest, the former star second baseman of the Chicago White Stockings, had great speed and quick reflexes, at least when he was at the peak of his performance. But he had not been quite the same since seeking his release at the end of the 1882 season, fleeing an ugly scandal and, perhaps, a husband’s wrath.

  A handsome, witty fellow, Quest had long eyelashes, a carefully waxed handlebar mustache, and a meticulously tailored wardrobe. Though he was short and starting to lose his hair, he had a suave way about him, and he had earned a reputation as one of baseball’s most successful womanizers. “Joe, though not exactly a dude, is and has always been a mad masher,” the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette asserted. “It has been his business ever since he played ball to break the fragile female heart. In nearly every case Joe has loved not wisely, but too well. His ‘small difficulties’ in Chicago have been as frequent as the moons of summer.” One sportswriter playfully described him as a champion racehorse—almost, one might say, a stud: “He has plenty of style, is richly coated (it cost $6.50), is strong in the loins, has a good mouth, and is an excellent breaker (of cheap female hearts). He is in good health and is jogged every morning.” Rumor had it that Joe’s morning jog in the summer of 1882 came courtesy of a Mrs. Waters, an attractive woman who shared his boardinghouse on State Street.

  In November that year, Hiram Waters, the thirty-one-year-old husband of Quest’s lady friend, put a gun to his own chest and pulled the trigger. Hoping to uncover a titillating scandal, local reporters hustled to the victim’s boardinghouse that nig
ht and began asking questions. The building’s gossips had much to say. Mrs. Waters had gone to Boston a month earlier, supposedly to meet up with her lover, who was identified only as a well-known man who shared the same Chicago boardinghouse. While she was gone, her husband heard stories about his wife’s infidelity. After drinking heavily off and on for four weeks, he went to his room and tried to kill himself. Neither the Inter-Ocean nor the Chicago Tribune named Mrs. Waters’s suspected lover.

  The Chicago Herald was the first paper to break the silence, identifying the man who had boarded with Mrs. Waters as none other than Joe Quest. “It seems Mrs. Waters became completely infatuated with him. She would go to the Base Ball Park at nearly every game last Summer, and was out with him frequently.” Other big-city newspapers, including the Philadelphia Item, picked up the story and spread it further. While the press probed his private agony, Hiram Waters clung to life with the aid of a doctor who kept him under the influence of opium most of the time. Although the physician couldn’t extract the ball from Waters’s chest, he believed his patient might yet survive. Four days after the shooting, a “weary and excited” Mrs. Waters arrived from Boston and rushed to her husband’s side.

  Ted Sullivan, with his usual indifference to a player’s personal foibles, sought out Joe Quest to fill in at second base for the weak-fielding George Strief, who could be moved to the outfield. But Quest brought something more than talent to St. Louis at its crucial hour—namely, a brain stuffed full of the hardball tricks and strategies he had learned while playing for Cap Anson alongside Mike “King” Kelly. Debuting for St. Louis on the day Sullivan quit, Quest “played a brilliant game, his one error being off a difficult shooting ball owing to rough ground. His batting was thin, but his handling of the ball in his double plays was very rapid.”