The Summer of Beer and Whiskey

by Edward Achorn

  Pitcher George Washington Bradley jumped to the Union Association in 1884, was blacklisted, and came back to the Athletics in 1886 for a dismal thirteen games as a short stop. He found employment as a night watchman and then as a Philadelphia policeman, dying of liver cancer in 1931. Second baseman Cub Stricker opened a cigar store near Recreation Park, home of the Phillies, then returned to delivering milk by his familiar horse and cart. He died in Philadelphia at age seventy-eight. Captain Lon Knight took a desk job at City Hall, helping to run the Highway Maintenance Department. After a gas line in his house broke in 1932, he died of gas poisoning. Fred Corey suffered a hunting injury in 1886, receiving a load of shot in the left eye that ended his baseball career. In his later years, he worked a lathe in Providence. He died in a hotel room there in 1912, asphyxiated while reading in bed. Bob Blakiston returned to California, where he made sails at the Mare Island Navy Yard and worked as a janitor, then died of tuberculosis in 1918.

  Lew Simmons, who fell out with his fellow owners, sold his share in the team, lost all $100,000, and had to hit the road again as a traveling minstrel player. He kept all his earthly wealth—mostly the proceeds from the previous night’s show—in his pocket. “But I am just as happy and perhaps a little healthier than when I stayed awake night[s] to count my money,” he insisted. In 1904, a Philadelphia magazine writer described the elder minstrel star’s appearance at the Pen and Pencil Club: “In response to loud calls he mounted the little club stage with banjo in hand, and in a moment he had many there traveling backward to the best years of their lives. Old faces became flushed with youth.” A quintet of college banjoists on hand looked on in wide-eyed amazement as the old man worked his magic with the strings. “Old! That’s a misnomer. Men like Lew Simmons never get old. Never in his palmist days did he make the banjo talk in sweeter tones.” Still, he never forgot baseball, and he loved to regale his listeners with tales of his glory as an owner of the pennant-winning Athletics. “It was in those days—the heyday of baseball—that the sport, if less refined, was more picturesque,” he said in 1902. In 1911, while still touring in vaudeville, the seventy-three-year-old Simmons stepped off a curb on a busy street in Reading, Pennsylvania, dodged an oncoming ice wagon that was in the wrong lane, and was struck down and killed by a beer truck.

  AFTER WINNING THE LEAGUE’S FIRST PENNANT IN 1882, THE Cincinnati Reds never captured another American Association championship. In fact, most of the team very nearly didn’t survive another year—they almost perished en masse during an October 1883 postseason stop for an exhibition game. After changing into their uniforms in their third-floor rooms at the Beckel House in Dayton, Ohio, they headed to the elevator. Instead of going down in groups, the team’s biggest stars—Will White, Long John Reilly, Bid McPhee, Chick Fulmer, Joe Sommer, Charley Jones, Pop Corkhill—all playfully packed themselves into an elevator with a reporter. The perennially late Hick Carpenter refused to join them at first, worried that the “thing might break” under the weight. One of the players laughed, saying, “Crowd in, Hick, you might as well die now as any other time.” Carpenter obeyed. Before the boy operating the elevator could even close the door, something snapped, and “the car shot down like a meteor” before the horrified eyes of teammate Phil Powers, who was standing in the hall. Carpenter instinctively grabbed for the elevator cable, but quickly “let go after the flesh on [his] forefinger had been gashed to the bone.” When the car hit the cellar floor, “the shock was terrific. Every particle of glass in the elevator was broken out.”

  Rushing down the stairs, “expecting to find the mangled remains of some of his companions,” Powers heard nervous laughter emerging from the shaft. To his intense relief, nobody had been seriously injured, though the boy operator got bruises and cuts on his face and various players complained of back and ankle aches. “A whiter-faced set of men were never seen than the Champions as they crawled out of the hole under the cellar,” noted O. P. Caylor in the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette. Then they went to the ballpark and drubbed the Dayton club, 15–0. “The elevator must have fallen on the Dayton nine,” Caylor joked. “White says it was the greatest ‘down-shoot’ he ever got off.”

  Having survived that horror, White took the manager’s reins in 1884, but quit with a 43–25 record, saying he lacked the drive and temperament to do the job effectively. He pitched another full season, then retired in 1886 with a lifetime record of 229 wins and 166 defeats. Incredibly, he completed all but seven of the 401 major-league games he started. No one in baseball history ever pitched more innings in a single season than White’s 680 in 1879, though Old Hoss Radbourn came close, with 678 ⅔ in 1884. The first major leaguer to wear glasses, White founded the Buffalo Optical Company in 1893. In 1911, at the age of fifty-six, he was teaching a niece to swim near his summer home at Lake Muskoka in Ontario when he suffered a heart seizure and drowned.

  O. P. Caylor, the controversial baseball editor of the Cincinnati Commercial Gazette, part-owner of the Reds, and cofounder of both the American Association and organized baseball, threw aside any last vestige of journalistic objectivity in 1885 and took over as manager of his team. The scrawny, pale sportswriter didn’t do half badly, leading the Reds to second place. After a less successful season in 1886, he moved on to the big city, New York, as manager of the famous Metropolitans, a team on its last legs, stripped of its best players. When the Mets folded, he founded the short-lived Daily Baseball Gazette before landing a job at the New York Herald. There, Caylor began to suffer a searing pain in his throat, while his body grew progressively weaker. Frantic to provide for his wife and child, Caylor kept pounding out stories even after he became desperately ill and lost his voice. He died in 1897 at the age of forty-seven. “Mr. Caylor was never rugged,” said the Herald, “but his blows for the welfare of the national game were those of a giant.”

  Long John Reilly and Hugh Nicol

  (Library of Congress)

  Long John Reilly, the Reds’ towering first baseman who moonlighted for Caylor by drawing baseball cartoons, eventually became a commercial artist. A voracious reader and keen student of human nature, Reilly “found the characters of Dickens on every field and Thackeray’s folk on the highways and byways leading thereto,” the Cincinnati Enquirer noted. “Had he cared to devote his pen to biography instead of the sketching pad, the ballplayer-artist might have been his own Boswell and the enthusiastic fans of the grand stand would have been the charmed devotee of the library fireside.” He died at age seventy-eight at his home on Stanley Avenue in Cincinnati.

  Chick Fulmer, the man who inspired one of Reilly’s funniest cartoons by faking stomach cramps to help Hick Carpenter get into a game, suffered an unpleasant end to the 1883 season. The handsome shortstop, who had been delighting crowds in postseason exhibition games with his dead-on impressions of Jumping Jack’s delivery and George Bradley’s grin, took a foul off his bat right in the face. “His nose was broken by the blow, and he retired to the dressing-room, bleeding profusely from the injured member,” the Cincinnati Enquirer reported. While setting his nose, a doctor had the sad task of informing Fulmer that it would never be “symmetrically beautiful” again. Fulmer insisted he “doesn’t mind it as he is married.” He called it quits for the season and, with bandaged nose, rejoined his wife and two young children back home in Philadelphia. He played one more season and retired.

  In August 1939, a bony, eighty-eight-year-old Fulmer showed up at a Phillies-Reds game at Shibe Park. He was carrying a cane, but looked dapper in a dark suit with a diamond-patterned tie and old-fashioned high collar. Hailed as the “oldest professional baseball player alive,” he spoke of the Reds’ pennant-winning season of 1882. Reds manager Bill McKechnie, in uniform, draped his arm protectively around the old man with deep-set eyes and a beak-shaped nose. “We’ll do it again,” he promised Fulmer. The Reds did, capturing the pennant that year, and again in 1940. Fulmer saw his Reds triumph in 1939, then died the following February.

  ED “THE ONLY” NOLAN,
THE HARD DRINKER BANISHED FROM THE Pittsburgh Alleghenys in 1883, worked in only sixteen more big-league games. Retiring from baseball in 1887, he joined the police force in his hometown of Paterson, New Jersey, the baseball hotbed that had also produced King Kelly and Jim McCormick. Officer Nolan died there in 1913 at the age of fifty-five. Even his obituary referred to his drinking: “He was one of those old time heroes who had friends in every city, and a personal following everywhere. A ‘personal following’ meant a coterie of good fellows in every city on the circuit, which welcomed the hero on his arrival and never let go of him until he left. There were champagne suppers without limit and small drinks without end.”

  New York celebrated its first pennant in 1884. It wasn’t won by the city’s “gilt-edged” National League team, but by its second-class American Association team, the Metropolitans, who had been shifted from the bad side of the Polo Grounds to an even shabbier field on the site of a former city dump. It wasn’t until 1888, after the Mets had been folded—their best players shifted over to the League—that the club now known as the New York Giants finally took home the National League pennant. For John B. Day, the owner of the Giants, success was short-lived. He lost his fortune—and his club—in the war against the Players League. Day died impoverished after a lengthy illness in 1925. “Truthful Jim” Mutrie, who lost everything with him, died a poor man in 1938 at the age of eighty-six. Others would enjoy the riches they always knew New York baseball would yield.

  American Association umpire Charley Daniels never forgot his most memorable brush with Von der Ahe’s impulsive temper: the owner’s decision in 1883 to hire a special train, at the enormous cost of $300, to rush him to a game in St. Louis rather than let the Association’s most respected umpire preside. Daniels served as an umpire until 1889 and then disappeared from the public eye. In his old age, this gentle man shared a farm home near Colchester, Connecticut, with his brother, both of them unmarried and miserably poor. After his brother’s death, the house burned down, and Daniels was forced to ask friends for shelter. In March 1932, at age eighty-three, he slipped and fell while trying to walk to town, slashing his head badly; a passing truck driver found him in a ditch. Daniels died the next day at Norwich Hospital. A sportswriter took it upon himself to raise money so that the famous umpire could get a decent burial.

  Daniels’s old colleague, “Honest John” Kelly, remained a top major-league umpire until 1888, stubbornly fraternizing, and even playing poker, with ballplayers. He also refereed some of the biggest boxing matches of the nineteenth century. After his retirement, he made a living off of the darker side of professional sports: he became a bookie and better, operating heavily at the racetracks, before opening his own gambling house in New York City. “I got into the gambling game because it was the most exciting one I could find,” Kelly explained. He prided himself on running a house where gamblers were not cheated, and he refused to pay the New York police protection money. “They kept me busy buying new front doors because I wouldn’t work to fill their pockets,” he said. According to the New York Times, the honest gambler came to be blessed with “a host of friends, in and out of the fraternity, and was respected as a man by many citizens who thought only evil of professional gamblers as a class.” Kelly died in 1926 of complications resulting from pneumonia. He was seventy years old, but he looked at least twenty years younger. “He had such a powerful physique, carried himself so erect and dressed so well that the years seemed to sit lightly on him,” the Times noted.

  Moses Fleetwood Walker left professional baseball after the 1890 season. He became an entrepreneur, literary man, and inventor, investing in the Union Hotel in Steubenville, Ohio; buying a movie theater in nearby Cadiz; publishing a weekly newspaper; and applying for patents, including for motion-picture equipment and an artillery shell. Embittered by life in America, he published a book in 1908 entitled Our Home Colony: A Treatise on the Past, Present, and Future of the Negro Race in America, which advocated black migration to Africa, the policy Abraham Lincoln had once espoused. “The Negro race will be a menace and the source of discontent as long as it remains in large numbers in the United States,” Walker wrote. “The time is growing very near when the whites of the United States must either settle this problem by deportation, or else be willing to accept a reign of terror such as the world has never seen in a civilized country.” But he proved just as wrong as Cap Anson. After a great struggle, America followed the path of integration, not racial division, in seeking to honor the founding idea that all men are created equal. Walker died in his home state of Ohio on May 11, 1924, about two years after Anson’s death. Before either of these ancient adversaries was gone, however, a child had been born in Cairo, Georgia, who would change everything. His name was Jackie Robinson.

  THE TEAM THAT TED SULLIVAN SO PAINSTAKINGLY BUILT, THE 1883 St. Louis Browns, shed their much-maligned scarlet stockings in 1884 and returned to classic brown. Under the guidance of Sullivan’s protégé Charlie Comiskey, they soon became an American Association powerhouse, winning four straight pennants between 1885 and 1888, including one world championship and another disputed one, soaring so high that they were celebrated on cigar boxes as a symbol of excellence—all in the face of Von der Ahe’s constant interference. Although the Boston Red Stockings (1872–1875), New York Giants (1921–1924), and New York Yankees (multiple times) tied that record of four straight pennants, only one franchise has ever bested it: the mighty Yankees of 1949–1953 and 1960–1964. “This team was the wonder of the baseball world for many a day,” Alfred H. Spink wrote of the Browns. “The players were not stalwart looking but rather slight and slim waisted and when they met heavy nines like Chicago and Detroit they suffered on the field in comparison.” Nonetheless, the Browns “played wonderful and speedy ball and . . . they knew how to win games,” compiling the best overall winning percentage of any club in American Association history.

  Ted Sullivan would never get to manage his beloved Browns again. In 1884, he won some measure of revenge by helping piece together the St. Louis Maroons of the Union Association before clashing, once again, with his club’s headstrong owner and moving over to manage that league’s Kansas City franchise. Thanks to Sullivan, Lucas’s Maroons—not Von der Ahe’s Browns—became the first team in St. Louis to win a pennant. Sullivan went on to manage several other clubs in several other leagues, big and small, including the National League’s Washington club in 1888. Connie Mack, a member of that team, remembered how Sullivan coaxed first-rate service out of waiters at various stops during the team’s trips. When the waiter started serving, Ted dropped a silver dollar on the table. The waiter, eyeing a bigger tip than he had ever received, delivered first-rate service and big portions. At the end of the meal, Sullivan coolly picked up the dollar and strolled out. “That silver dollar many times and in many cities made the difference between a good meal and a bad one,” Mack laughed.

  After helping found a number of circuits, including the American League, Sullivan became one of major-league baseball’s first full-time scouts. In 1903, he published a memoir that revealed what became of the famous timepiece he had hurled at Von der Ahe’s head before angrily quitting the Browns in the midst of their pennant race. “[Von der Ahe] put the watch in his pocket and . . . two months afterward, at Sportsman’s Park, placed it back in my hand and told me not to be so high strung.” Along with the watch, the remarkably generous Von der Ahe insisted that Sullivan take his pay for the remainder of the 1883 season. “But I would rather have won the pennant and enjoyed its glory,” the manager recalled ruefully. In a 1910 recap of his career, Baseball Magazine noted: “Though a great hustler in after years, the rebuilding and remodeling of the Browns and the handling of them in 1883 surpassed anything Ted ever did in baseball.” The unreconstructed racist, scout, and storyteller died in 1929 in Washington, D.C., at the age of seventy-seven.

  Jimmy Williams, the secretary of the American Association, took over as Browns manager in 1884. But Williams encountered the s
ame disciplinary problems that Sullivan had and similarly failed to last out a season. In 1885, Von der Ahe finally gave the job to Comiskey, who led the club to four straight championships. Inheriting some of his father’s political skills, Comiskey smoothed over Von der Ahe’s tantrums in a manner that the touchy Ted Sullivan could not. “The reason may be found in the fact that Comiskey never paid the slightest attention to the frequent outbursts of the boss but, penetrating the rough exterior, early discovered a heart as big as that of an ox,” Comiskey’s biographer wrote. Comiskey was also honest with Von der Ahe, explaining to him carefully what was going on, “and the mercurial magnate boasted to his friends that Charlie never worried him with any tricks, which to the sorely harassed executive meant a lot.” Though he hit only .264 over his career, his contemporaries considered him a major star—mainly because of his fierce dedication to winning, a trait one contemporary called the “quality of gameness.” He delivered hits in clutch situations, he played a heady first base, and he fine-tuned existing strategies, such as positioning fielders for specific batters. Eventually, he turned his back on his boss, Von der Ahe, defecting to the Players League. Years later, he would become an owner himself, creating the Chicago White Sox and helping to found the American League. He brought with him Von der Ahe’s lesson of twenty-five-cent baseball and kept one-fourth of his massive park available for two-bit admissions. “It doesn’t bring in quite as much money at the gate as the more expensive seats but it gives a greater number a chance to see my team and that is the big thing with me,” Comiskey said.