Over the thirty-one years that Comiskey owned the White Sox, his team would win four pennants and two world championships. But Comiskey’s club was indelibly stained in 1919 when several of his best players sold the World Series. It was baseball’s darkest hour since the Louisville scandal of 1877. Such revisionists as director John Sayles in the 1988 movie Eight Men Out have pinned much of the blame on Comiskey, rather than the cheaters themselves, portraying him as a greedy capitalist who took advantage of the innocence of his players, virtually driving them into the arms of gamblers. It is indeed true that the owner was notoriously tight with his budget—one of his stars left to earn more money in semipro ball—but he was also deeply committed to his city, to baseball, and to the vitality of his club. In 1910, he built the first Comiskey Park and opened it to the public free of charge for special events, including amateur games, picnics, and church festivals. Many who knew him personally did not see him as a coldhearted capitalist. “In all the years I have known Comiskey, I have always found him the pink of kindness with always a respect and consideration for the rights and feelings of others,” veteran sportswriter Alfred H. Spink wrote in 1909. When Comiskey died in 1931, he was one of the most revered figures in American sports, and few held him responsible for the 1919 scandal. Eight years later, he was enshrined in baseball’s Hall of Fame.
August Solari, the Browns’ groundskeeper, won a place in baseball history for inventing the use of tarpaulins to protect the infield from rain. Eventually, he quit to run a beer garden on the outskirts of St. Louis at the corner of Olive Street and Taylor Avenue. He advertised it in 1887 as “about the coolest and best place to pull up at while out on the road.” Customers could “find him and a choice selection of wines, liquors and cigars on hand at all hours as well as the most tempting lunch to be found on the road.”
The narcissistic Tony Mullane tried to jump to the St. Louis Maroons in the new Union Association in 1884, but got cold feet when he was threatened with blacklisting. Von der Ahe might have taken him back but, worried about a lawsuit by the Maroons if Tony played in St. Louis, thought it best to loan the Apollo of the Box to the American Association’s weak Toledo team. There, he compiled a marvelous 36–26 record—remarkable, given that the rest of the staff was a feeble 10–32 and that, as a racist, Tony crossed up his black catcher. Rather than come back to St. Louis, as promised, in 1885 after the Union Association folded, Mullane signed with the Cincinnati Reds. Von der Ahe used his clout to have him banned from baseball for a year as a punishment. That was significant, since Mullane fell only 16 wins short of the 300-win plateau that would almost surely have earned him a spot in the Baseball Hall of Fame. After his ball-playing days, Mullane moved to Chicago, where he ran a saloon for a time before settling into a long career as a police officer. Operated on in 1911 for the third time for a brain abscess, he reportedly nearly perished. But he didn’t: he retired from the force in 1920 and lived on until 1944. As a reporter had noted way back in 1883, “Tony does not ‘kill’ as easily as some people.”
Little Arlie Latham, the sparkplug of the great Browns teams of the 1880s, went on to score one hundred or more runs in eight straight seasons. Thanks to his constant jokes and chatter, the infielder became such a prominent figure in the newspapers that Lew Simmons gave him a starring role in his 1888 production of the Broadway play Fashions. Arlie greeted audiences with the cry:
I’m a daisy on the diamond!
I’m a dandy on the stage!
I’d ornament a horse-car,
Or look pretty in a cage!
After his major-league career wound down in 1896, Latham moved down to the minor leagues for three seasons, happy just to keep playing the game he loved. He returned to the big show in 1909 as the first full-time coach in major-league history, helping the farsighted John McGraw run the New York Giants. During his three seasons with the club, Latham danced jigs and amused himself with other acrobatics. Giants outfielder Fred Snodgrass rated him “probably the worst third-base coach who ever lived.” But Latham did teach McGraw’s men how to steal bases. Under his tutelage they went from 181 per season to 347, the most ever in the twentieth century. In 1909, when Latham was fifty years old, he was still so spry that McGraw threw him into four games at second base for the Giants. Latham became, on August 18, the oldest man in major-league history to steal a base.
After leaving the Giants, Latham crossed the Atlantic, found a job at a hotel checking hats, and took on the unpaid role of international ambassador for American baseball. He even claimed to teach the game to the future monarch, the Prince of Wales. (“King George had only a fair arm,” Latham confided later.) When he returned to the States, he parlayed his baseball connections into a job as press-box attendant at Yankee Stadium, where he marveled over the play of Joe DiMaggio and Phil Rizzuto. Arlie died in 1952 at age ninety-two. He was the last surviving player from the 1883 season.
The fellow whom Latham most enjoyed teasing, Chris Von der Ahe, suffered a crueler fate. During the mid-1880s, he reached a pinnacle of sorts. Through baseball, the immigrant owner had made a fortune that reportedly totaled $300,000. Rolling in loot and proud of his achievements, Von der Ahe commissioned a heroic, larger-than-life statue of himself—shoulders thrown back, chest pushed out, one foot thrust boldly forward—that he placed in front of Sportsman’s Park and later used to top his cemetery monument. But the once frugal grocer surrounded himself with “a numerous army of flatterers and hangers-on” and “handled $1000 bills as if they were peanuts to feed to monkeys.” After the American Association collapsed and he joined the National League, Von der Ahe found his fortune melting away at an alarming rate. His downfall was hastened by his fellow owners, who stole away his best players. The generous and goodhearted but disastrously hotheaded Von der Ahe was quickly picked clean by his associates. Reporters claimed that he deposited his watch with the hotel clerk before his last National League meeting for fear his fellow magnates would pinch it.
The Von der Ahe statue
(Edward Achorn)
Desperate to boost attendance at Sportsman’s Park, Von der Ahe added a racetrack and amusement park, advertising the place as “The Coney Island of the West,” a farsighted attempt to make a ballpark an entertainment destination, a strategy adopted by baseball magnates today. But nothing worked. A costly fire at the ballpark set him back. He went through two bitter divorces. His son turned his back on him, and his creditors wrested away his ball club, selling it at a forced auction. At one point, he was arrested—kidnapped, in truth—and thrown in a Pittsburgh jail for welching on debts. After it all, he managed only to scrape together enough money to buy a saloon on the outskirts of St. Louis, virtually ending up as he began. Paying their respects to the ruined owner, the new owners, Edward C. Becker and Frank DeHaas Robison, sent their very first complimentary book of season tickets to Von der Ahe. He was too proud to accept it.
In April 1899, his former team—shedding the old nickname of Browns, and soon to be known as the Cardinals—staged a grand parade before the first Sunday game of the season. As the procession neared Third Street, someone saw Von der Ahe emerging from the doorway of a vacant building to listen to the brass band. “He looked about and saw the eyes of the crowd about centered on him,” Sporting Life reported. “His face flushed a deep crimson. For a moment he hesitated, thinking to brave it out[,] but the struggle was too much for him and he retreated to the rear of the building.” Brokenhearted, feeling tired and old, he could not repeat his earlier success with a saloon. In 1908, his former club played a charity game to raise money for him. Von der Ahe might have starved had it not been for regular gifts of money from his old manager, the supposedly stingy, heartless Charlie Comiskey, who paid him a visit in February 1913. “It certainly makes me feel good to think you came here just to spend three hours with your old boss,” Von der Ahe told him. When Comiskey asked Von der Ahe how he was “fixed” for the future, he replied, “I’ve got a lot and a nice monument already built for me in Bellefo
ntaine cemetery,” and began to weep. Ailing for months, Von der Ahe suffered nephritis, a kidney disease, and cirrhosis of the liver from a lifetime of heavy drinking. He died on June 7, 1913, at the age of sixty-one.
St. Louis had not forgotten him. On the day of Von der Ahe’s funeral, hundreds of baseball fans gathered outside his home at the corner of St. Louis and Grand avenues, crowding the street for blocks and standing with their heads bared. Flowers and testimonials filled the house. The Reverend Frederick H. Craft chose a baseball motif for his funeral sermon. “First base is enlightenment; second base is repentance; third base, faith, and the home plate the heavenly goal!” he declared. “Don’t fail to touch second base, for it leads you onward to third. All of us finally reach the home plate, though some may be called out when they slide Home.” For all he did to save and revitalize baseball, to popularize Sunday ball and beer, to lend color and dazzle to the game, and to found and lead one of the great franchises in baseball, Chris Von der Ahe deserves a plaque at the Baseball Hall of Fame. But his flamboyant personality, and the stories that he himself cultivated, left later generations with the impression that he was nothing but a buffoon, unworthy of such recognition.
The statue that had once stood outside his park, and which Von der Ahe had moved to top his burial monument, can still be seen in its pseudo-regal glory at Bellefontaine Cemetery. His pallbearers included five members of his 1883 Browns: Charlie Comiskey, Bill Gleason, Jack Gleason, George McGinnis, and, poignantly, Ted Sullivan, the man who had resigned that ‘83 team in a huff, throwing his watch at the fuming Mr. Von der Ahe.
He may have driven them all half-crazy, but in the end, they all loved and admired the German immigrant who had changed baseball forever.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
THIS BOOK WAS STRENGTHENED IMMEASURABLY BY GENEROUS men and women who love the history of this great game. Jeffrey Kittell, curator of the richly detailed website This Game of Games (http://thisgameofgames.blogspot.com/), was extraordinarily helpful, reading the manuscript through, making dozens of wise suggestions, and answering incessant questions. Jeff and Steve Pona of the St. Louis Baseball Historical Society drove me around their beautiful city, helped me visit the key sites related to Chris Von der Ahe and the Browns, and shared with me, a lifelong Red Sox fan, the magic of a hard-fought Cardinals game at Busch Stadium. John Thorn, the official historian for Major League Baseball, was unfailingly gracious and helpful. Eric Miklich, the man behind the illuminating website www.19cbaseball.com, read through the manuscript and made many helpful corrections and suggestions. He and his fellow early-baseball enthusiasts at the Vintage Base Ball Association also enriched my understanding of how baseball of this era “plays.” Peter Mancuso, chairman of the Nineteenth Century Committee of the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR), jumped to my aid whenever asked, as did the participants in SABR’s nineteenth-century listserv.
David Nemec, author of scores of baseball books, including The Beer & Whiskey League, was helpful both personally and through his work. Mark Fimoff put his brilliant analytical skills to work in helping to identify long-forgotten faces in old photos. Thomas Wright graciously provided help tracking down genealogical material. The great nineteenth-century baseball scholar Frederick Ivor-Campbell, though sadly no longer with us, was a continuing inspiration, and his widow, Alma Ivor-Campbell, intrepidly dug through his papers searching for information for me. Candy Adriance read through the manuscript, made countless helpful suggestions, and assisted me in obtaining documents. Historian Maury Klein, who read through an early version of this book, kindly shared his thoughts and knowledge of the craft with me. Robert Lifson and his colleagues at Robert Edward Auctions generously tracked down and shared wonderful vintage images.
David Miller and Lisa Adams at the Garamond Agency believed from the start in this tale of beer, Sunday baseball, and some of the most delightful characters in the game’s history; I fondly recall David laughing over lunch about the Philadelphia crowd’s initial reaction to Jumping Jack Jones. Stanley M. Aronson, MD, dean emeritus of medicine at Brown University, answered my many questions about nineteenth-century medical diagnoses. Howard Sutton, publisher, president, and CEO of the Providence Journal, was always supportive. Mike Tamburro, president of the Pawtucket Red Sox and an illustrious member of the International League Hall of Fame, was greatly encouraging, as was the late owner Ben Mondor, also a Hall of Famer, who opened the PawSox clubhouse on his eighty-fourth birthday to host an unforgettable launch party for my previous book. J. Thomas Hetrick, author of Chris Von der Ahe and the St. Louis Browns, kindly shared some of his expertise on the topic. Lauri Burke of the Barrington (Rhode Island) Public Library graciously tracked down books and documents for me through interlibrary loan. The Sterling Memorial Library at Yale University provided me with useful information about Jumping Jack Jones and Al Hubbard. Numerous other institutions supplied invaluable help, including the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, the Library of Congress, the Chicago Historical Society, the Boston Public Library, and the St. Louis Mercantile Library. Thanks also to Ranger Elaine Brasher of the US National Park Service, for showing me around St. Louis historical sites and sharing her insights on the city’s history, and to Phil Swann, for urging me to never give up.
Many thanks to Lisa Kaufman, Brandon Proia, and their superb team at PublicAffairs for improving the book in a hundred ways.
Thanks go to my beloved children, Jean, Matt, and Josh, to whom the book is dedicated. Special thanks, of course, to my wife, Valerie, for her love and support—and her faith that the story of baseball’s rebirth through German immigrants was one eminently worth telling.
APPENDIX:
AMERICAN ASSOCIATION, 1883
Final Standings
Batting Leaders/Batting Average
1.
Ed Swartwood (PIT)
.357
2.
Pete Browning (LOU)
.338
3.
Jim Clinton (BAL)
.313
Dave Rowe (BAL)
.313
4.
Long John Reilly (CIN)
.311
Home Runs
1.
Harry Stovey (PHI)
14
2.
Charley Jones (CIN)
10
3.
Long John Reilly (CIN)
9
4.
Chick Fulmer (CIN)
5
Tom Brown (COL)
5
Runs Batted In
1.
Charley Jones (CIN)
80
2.
Long John Reilly (CIN)
79
3.
John O’Brien (PHI)
70
4.
Mike Moynahan (PHI)
67
Harry Stovey (PHI)
67
Slugging Percentage
1.
Harry Stovey (PHI)
.506
2.
Long John Reilly (CIN)
.485
3.
Ed Swartwood (PHI)
.476
4.
Charley Jones (CIN)
.471
5
Pete Browning (LOU)
.464
On-Base Plus Slugging
1.
Ed Swartwood (PIT)
.869
2.
Harry Stovey (PHI)
.852
3.
Pete Browning (LOU)
.842
4.
Long John Reilly (CIN)
.810
5.
Charley Jones (CIN)
.799
Runs Scored
1.
Harry Stovey (PHI)
110
2.
Long John Reilly (CIN)
103
3.
Hick Carpenter (CIN)
99
4.<
br />
Lon Knight (PHI)
98
5.
Jud Birchall (PHI)
95
Pete Browning (LOU)
95
Pitching Leaders/Wins
1.
Will White (CIN)
43
2.
Tim Keefe (NY)
41
3.
Tony Mullane (SL)
35
4.
Bobby Mathews (PHI)
30
5.
Guy Hecker (LOU)
28
George McGinnis (SL)
28
Earned Run Average
1.
Will White (CIN)
2.09
2.
Tony Mullane (SL)
2.19
3.
Ren Deagle (CIN)
2.31
The Summer of Beer and Whiskey Page 29
