by Tim Wendel
Born in New York City in 1841, Creighton grew up in Brooklyn. There he discovered the ever-evolving game of baseball. He began as an infielder for the Star BBC of Brooklyn in 1856 and got a chance to pitch in 1859. Instead of a soft toss to the batter, Creighton’s low, swift delivery rose from the ground, often crossing the plate at the batter’s shoulders. By the start of the 1860 season, Creighton was a star for the powerful Excelsior Club, and the debate was on about whether his newfangled delivery was legal or not. The Brooklyn Eagle dispatched a reporter to decide if his pitching was a jerk (something that was against the rules) or a “fair square pitch.” The paper said it was the latter, and the path of baseball was set, the game forever changed. The verdict allowed speed and sometimes intimidation to seep into the game. Without Creighton, we would have had no Bob Gibson or Sandy Koufax a century later. Creighton’s fast-paced pitching made the Excelsiors virtually unbeatable, and he was likely the game’s first paid player. While the National Association of Base Ball Players prohibited actual salaries, it was rumored that Creighton was slipped money under the table.
Unlike many who followed him to the mound, Creighton was also a quality hitter and continued to star in the field. Many credit him with starting the game’s first triple play.
“Not one player in 5,000 has the capacity to fill all positions ably and excel in each,” Henry Chadwick once wrote, “the ability required being too great except for one like the admirable Creighton.”
It was swinging a bat that led to Creighton’s tragic demise, though. In October 1862, against the Unions of Morrisania—a ballclub from New York City—he lunged at a pitch. A loud pop was heard just before his bat struck the ball. Accounts differ on whether or not Creighton hit a double. What is known is that he shouted out to a teammate, “I must have snapped my belt.”
But it wasn’t his belt that was broken. Creighton soon passed out on the field. He was taken to his father’s house on Henry Street in Brooklyn and died four days later, likely of a strangulated intestine. Some contend that he first suffered the injury a few days earlier and fatally aggravated it against the Unions. In any event, the game’s first star was dead, only six months shy of his 22nd birthday.
In Creighton’s memory, the Excelsior Club erected a granite obelisk, with bats, balls, and a scorebook carved into its ornate base. A marble stone baseball topped the impressive monument, and for years afterward players and fans made the pilgrimage to Creighton’s resting place to pay their respects. And that’s exactly what Greg and I have come to do today.
Angling away from Green-Wood’s main entrance, hiking along Landscape Avenue, we planned to find Creighton’s grave and still have time for lunch. After all, how hard can it be to find an obelisk with a stone baseball on top? But soon our plan goes awry. Although the computerized printout leads us to a lot in the cemetery’s far corner, there are no Creighton headstones and certainly no granite spires with baseballs on top.
We fan out, walking through the tombstones, searching in all directions. While the January day remains mostly sunny, the wind has a cruel bite as it gusts in from New York harbor several blocks below us. We look and look, but don’t see anything resembling a shrine to baseball. Soon, due to the cold, we’re jogging through the graveyard with the crazed look that Eli Wallach has in the closing scenes of The Good, the Bad and the Ugly.
Digging through my backpack, I flip through the clippings the Hall of Fame supplied me with about Creighton. Without my gloves, my fingers soon grow cold in the wind. One of the older clips says that Creighton’s obelisk stands upon the crest of Tulip Hill. I look around, seeing Tulip Avenue, Tulip Path, but no Tulip Hill.
A Green-Wood pickup truck comes roaring along the road and I flag it down.
“Where’s Tulip Hill?” I shout.
The employee, a bona fide grave digger, climbs down from the cab, and together we study the map from the computer kiosk.
“That’s Tulip Avenue,” he says, pointing behind me.
“So is this Tulip Hill?”
“I don’t know. Not for sure.”
During the conversation, I’ve lost track of Greg. A tall, lanky guy, he finds basketball is more his game. He plays in weekly pickup games and teaches history at the City University of New York. I remember him saying something about actually bothering to read the inscriptions on the older monuments.
The Green-Wood grave digger and I begin to climb up what we hope is Tulip Hill. At the top, Greg is waiting for us.
“This is it, right?” he says.
Indeed, there’s the name Creighton in block letters across the base, with the faint images of balls and bats still visible. But no stone baseball sits atop it.
“Things like that can fall off,” the grave digger says. “Especially on the real old ones.”
For a moment, the three of us gaze about, admiring the harbor off to the left and the famous Manhattan skyline beyond.
“I don’t come back here much,” the grave digger adds. “Not much business anymore.”
“But if the stone ball did come off,” Greg asks, “what would happen to it?”
“Most times, we bury things like that right next to the grave,” he replies. “You don’t want anybody taking them.”
To make things official, I pull out the clips again and read aloud: “A monument was erected to Creighton upon the crest of Tulip Hill. Across the face of the column, surrounded by a pair of oak leaves cut in the granite, is a design embodying a pair of bats crossed, a cap, a baseball and a score book, surmounted across the top of a scroll with the world Excelsior carved upon it.”
Greg is able to make out these images.
“And this must be Tulip Hill,” the grave digger says.
We’ve found him—the game’s original fireballer.
Exiting Green-Wood, we stop by the office and purchase Nash’s book and pick up some more literature about the cemetery.
“Maybe we should have done this on the way in,” I offer.
It would have been helpful because back on the bus to D.C., after lunch at Di Fara, Brooklyn’s famed pizza kitchen, I read that the elements “totally disintegrated” the ball that once topped the monument to Creighton. Despite the monument being a shadow of what it once was, there’s no denying the impact the man had on the game.
“One could argue that Creighton was as pivotal to the game’s development as Babe Ruth,” Tom Shieber at the Hall of Fame tells me.
Babe Ruth? The Sultan of Swat?
“Ruth was really the first to combine great power with a high average, right?” Shieber says. “Everyone knew that if you swung harder, you could hit more homers. But it was generally thought that this was poor form, as your batting average would drop and the gains of the homer would be outweighed by the losses in times reaching base. Ruth showed that he could hit homers and still hit for a high average. Others soon followed Ruth’s lead, though not to the magnificent level of Ruth, of course.”
OK, I’ll buy that. But what puts Creighton in that kind of company?
“Others tried to follow Creighton’s example as well, and initially, none could duplicate his speed and accuracy,” Shieber explains. “Indeed, the result was a significant rule change. With pitchers trying to throw hard but not able to throw accurately, the governing body of baseball found that the game was slowing down with so many unhittable deliveries. Unhittable because they were not within reasonable reach of the batter. With Creighton imitators failing to duplicate his accuracy, the concept of a walk [bases on balls] was introduced in 1863, the season after Creighton’s untimely death.”
Whether you agree or not with Creighton being put in the same class with Ruth, there’s little doubt that thanks to the Brooklyn star a quality fastball was here to stay. Following in Creighton’s footsteps were George “the Charmer” Zettlein; Tommy Bond, who tossed an amazing 532 ⅔ innings in 1878; and Al Spalding, who reached the Hall of Fame in 1939 as one of the game’s pioneers.
What further helped keep the fastball in play was a regular ca
tcher. Most historians believe that Deacon White, who played more than 20 years of pro ball, was the first one to station himself behind home plate to take the throw.
Creighton may have fostered the call of balls and strikes, but the exact amount in play was like an early version of The Price Is Right. According to Bill James of the Baseball Abstract, the original number of balls required for a walk was nine. It was changed to eight in 1880, to seven in some leagues in 1881, to six in 1884, back to seven in 1886, to five in 1887, and finally to four in 1889.
Gone were the softball-like deliveries. Still, some curious restrictions remained. Until 1887, believe it or not, a rule was on the books that allowed the batter to actually call for a high or a low pitch. Sounds like tossing to your toddler at the playground, doesn’t it? But the batter could demand that the pitch be high (waist to the shoulder) or low (waist to a foot or so above the ground). That was eliminated as the strike zone (starting at about the knees and up to the shoulders) became standard throughout the game.
Of course, rule changes can only go so far. Somebody has to come along and take things to the next level. That finally happened thanks to a series of pitchers people barely remember these days—Charlie Sweeney, Pud Galvin, and Amos Rusie. The latter two are enshrined at Cooperstown.
Sweeney was a right-hander who alternated between pitching and the outfield. He was a beneficiary of being permitted to use the full overhand delivery, and many consider him to have the best arm of the 1880s. His record of 19 strikeouts in a game stood (though tied a number of times) until Roger Clemens struck out 20 over a century later. But Sweeney was known as much for his carousing and for signing a lucrative contract with St. Louis of the Union Association as for his ability to throw bullets. Maybe even more than the great sluggers of the game, the fireballers really relished the good life. They remind me of the donkey boys in Pinocchio. Will they stay on the straight and narrow long enough to stop sprouting big ears and a tail? Can they slow down in life’s fast lane long enough to put together a memorable career on the mound? More often than not the answer is a resounding no.
Somebody who did make the most of what physical talent he had was James “Pud” Galvin. One of the great things about baseball, at least before everybody started making so much money and got too prissy about such matters, was the plethora of swell nicknames. There was “Hustling” Hughie Jennings, “Buttermilk” Tommy Dowd, and George “Twinkletoes” Selkirk. One of my favorites was Sammy Byrd, often a defensive replacement for the Bambino himself, who was dubbed “Babe Ruth’s legs.” And perhaps the best one is Robert “Death to Flying Things” Ferguson. (A so-so hitter in the game’s early days, Ferguson gained his nickname for catching just about anything in sight.)
Galvin’s nickname of “Pud” came about because his outstanding heater was said to turn batters to pudding. Born on Christmas Day 1856, Galvin grew up in the “Kerry Patch” section of St. Louis. Populated by Irish immigrants, the neighborhood was an early hotbed for baseball. Even though the professional game didn’t reach St. Louis until 1873, there were plenty of quality amateur teams (the Empires and the Reds), and by the time he was a teenager, Galvin was considered the best prospect around. When the Reds became a professional outfit, they signed the right-hander, which was OK with Galvin, whose only other marketable skill was steamfitting.
For a guy who would one day reach the Hall of Fame, Galvin didn’t look like much of an athlete. He stood 5-foot-8 and was close to 200 pounds. At first glance, the only feature that separated him from the pack was his handlebar mustache. But when Galvin took the mound he could bring the heat. In 1876, “the Little Steam Engine” (another of Galvin’s nicknames) pitched two no-hitters for the hometown Reds. A year later, he was with the Alleghenies, an independent ballclub, and a season later found his way to Buffalo, which was then in the National League. There he fired two more no-hitters—in 1880 against Worcester and in 1884 against Detroit. One of his early gems is recognized as the first official perfect game in pro ball.
On the mound, Galvin made nearly every pitch an event.
“He turns the ball around in his hands six times,” a writer of that period observed, “mops his forehead, pulls a kink out of the seat of his pants, pulls out his handkerchief and wipes his eyes, turns to the second baseman and asks what o’clock it is, pats both hands in the dust, wipes the dust off his trousers, licks the end of his fingers, tosses the ball over his left shoulder, absorbs a little more dust with his palms, tells the boys to look out, and pitches the ball.”
Now that’s pitching as performance art.
Despite being a bit of a drama queen, Galvin proved to be a workhorse. He finished his career with 5,941 ⅓ innings pitched, second only to the legendary Cy Young, who had a quality fastball himself. To get a good idea of how much the game has changed, consider the following statistics from the 1883 season: Galvin started 75 games for the Buffalo Bisons and completed an incredible 72 of them. He threw a league-leading 656 ⅓ innings in that season alone. Some teams today are lucky to get that many quality innings out of their entire starting staff. During his time with Buffalo alone, Galvin won 37, 20, 28, 28, 46, and another 46 games for a team that never finished better than third place. He pitched an incredible 639 complete games during his 14-year career.
Even though he followed in the footsteps of Candy Cummings, who popularized the curveball, Galvin believed in throwing fast and faster. Galvin further exploited the advantage of sheer speed by repeatedly picking runners off first base. Once he walked three men in an inning and then picked each one off first base in order.
“If I had Galvin to catch, no one would ever steal a base on me,” Hall of Famer Buck Ewing once said. “That fellow keeps them glued to the bag. You notice that funny false motion of his that can’t really be called a balk. He fooled me so badly one day that I never even attempted to get back to first base. And he certainly also has the best control of any pitcher in this league.”
During the 1885 season, Galvin left Buffalo and joined Pittsburgh of the American Association. He remained in the city until a National League franchise was awarded the team two seasons later, and he won the first two games in the team’s history. In his first four years in Pittsburgh, not counting the partial season of 1885, Galvin averaged nearly 26 victories a season. By 1890, though, his fastball was fading fast. Two years later, after splitting time between Pittsburgh and St. Louis, Galvin retired and opened a big-time saloon in Pittsburgh, which was so large that it had nine bartenders. Unfortunately for Galvin, the bartenders usually took home more money nightly than he did. It looked “as though he had found a sure road to prosperity,” the Pittsburgh Gazette reported, “but Galvin was not a man of business.”
The right-hander died penniless in a rooming house on the north side of Pittsburgh in 1902. He was only 45, and news of his death was overshadowed by the flooding of the Ohio River, which left thousands homeless.
The fastest of all time? It’s hard to say. As Feller would say, Galvin was certainly in the ballpark. Few in modern times appreciate Galvin’s accomplishments, and he wasn’t elected to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown until 1965. In reality, Galvin should be remembered as the fastball pitcher who bridged the gap from the underarm delivery of the game’s beginnings to the conventional overhand method of today.
In a perfect world, Amos Rusie would have been recognized as one of the game’s true pioneers, too, and inducted into Cooperstown while he was still alive to enjoy the honor. Instead, he was posthumously elected to the Hall of Fame in 1977—34 ½ years after he died. In a way, Rusie has become baseball’s version of Forrest Gump: a guy who was always around the action, but whose own accomplishments are overshadowed by the events and history he helped put into motion.
No doubt about it, though, Rusie threw hard. Legend has it that as a boy he started going hunting without a gun. When his father asked where his rifle was, Rusie replied that he didn’t need one.
When the hunting party came upon a jack rabbit, Rusie p
ulled a stone out of his pocket before his father or brother could fire. And with deadly accuracy, Rusie threw it, nailing the rabbit dead in the head.
“Where’d you learn to do that?” his father asked.
“Practicing,’” Rusie answered.
There are several versions of how Rusie came to play big-league baseball. In one, the Indianapolis Athletic Club had to replace a sick pitcher at the last minute. Rusie was summoned and did so well that the Indianapolis National League team picked him up. My favorite has one of the proprietors at the state fair hearing about Rusie’s throwing prowess. The two of them worked up a scheme in which the barker would charge folks 25 cents apiece to have the honor of witnessing Rusie throw a ball through a wooden fence from about 20 yards away. It was a stunt that would become part of the game’s lore. Steve Dalkowski, for example, once won a bet from a teammate by doing pretty much the same thing. Rusie was supposed to go easy every now and then, so that the ball didn’t bust through the board right away. This was supposed to work up a bigger crowd. But he purportedly just couldn’t contain himself and often proceeded to demolish the obstacle in a few minutes. Thankfully, one of those who caught the act was a scout for the Indianapolis ballclub. After inspecting the wooden fence, to make sure everything was on the up and up, he became convinced Rusie had the goods to make it in professional ball. The pitcher they soon called “the Hoosier Thunderbolt” was in uniform for the 1889 season.
At 6-foot-1 and 200 pounds, Rusie was reportedly “a perfect specimen of youthful vigor.” Yet many of the same stories also mentioned how the fun-loving fireballer was easily tempted, which only added to his reputation and infamy as a fireballer.
Sam Crane, a major-league shortstop who became a sportswriter, said Rusie began “life with everything in his favor, [but he] went through his active pitching days as though on a continuous joy ride. He broke training when he felt like it and never looked upon life as a serious matter.”
Just 17 years old when he joined Indianapolis in 1889, Rusie went 12–10 in his rookie year. During the off-season, the National League dropped Indianapolis and Rusie’s rights fell to the New York Giants. His first season with them he lost a league-high 34 games, but he also won 29 and, more importantly, struck out 341. That would be the only losing season for Rusie in New York. Pitching every other or third day, he went 33–20 the following season and notched a no-hitter against Brooklyn.
