The Irish in Baseball ALSO BY DAVID L. FLEITZ AND FROM MCFARLAND Shoeless: The Life and Times of Joe Jackson (Large Print) (2008) [2001] More Ghosts in the Gallery: Another Sixteen Little-Known Greats at Cooperstown (2007) Cap Anson: The Grand Old Man of Baseball (2005) Ghosts in the Gallery at Cooperstown: Sixteen Little-Known Members of the Hall of Fame (2004) Louis Sockalexis: The First Cleveland Indian (2002) Shoeless: The Life and Times of Joe Jackson (2001) The Irish in Baseball An Early History DAVID L. FLEITZ McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Jefferson, North Carolina, and London LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING-IN-PUBLICATION DATA Fleitz, David L., 1955– The Irish in baseball : an early history / David L. Fleitz. p. cm. Includes bibliographical references and index. ISBN 978-0-7864-3419-0 softcover : 50# alkaline paper 1. Baseball—United States—History—19th century. 2. Irish American baseball players—History—19th century. 3. Irish Americans—History—19th century. 4. Ireland—Emigration and immigration—History—19th century. 5. United States—Emigration and immigration—History—19th century. I. Title. GV863.A1F63 2009 796.357'640973—dc22 2009001305 British Library cataloguing data are available ©2009 David L. Fleitz. All rights reserved No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher. On the cover: (left to right) Willie Keeler, Hughey Jennings, groundskeeper Joe Murphy, Joe Kelley and John McGraw of the Baltimore Orioles (Sports Legends Museum, Baltimore, Maryland) Manufactured in the United States of America McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers Box 611, Je›erson, North Carolina 28640 www.mcfarlandpub.com Acknowledgments I would like to thank a few people and organizations that helped make this book possible. The Internet has changed the nature of research, on baseball and all other topics, and I used the computer to perform much of my investigation into early baseball. One helpful web site is called Paper of Record, a historical newspaper search engine that features images of The Sporting News beginning with its inau- gural issue in 1886. The Brooklyn Public Library has digitized the Brooklyn Eagle from the years 1841 to 1902, and the LA84 Foundation, endowed with funds left over from the 1984 Olympic Games in Los Angeles, maintains a digital archive of Sporting Life and Baseball Magazine for the 1897 to 1920 period. These archives are free, and extremely useful to any sports researcher. The Eugene C. Murdock collection of baseball books and materials at the Cleveland Public Library was, as always, invaluable, as were Tim Wiles, Gabriel Schechter, and the other knowledgeable staff members at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library in Cooperstown, New York. I also made use of the SABR (Society for American Baseball Research) Lending Library, a valuable service that is, of itself, a good enough reason to purchase a membership in SABR. I would also like to thank my wife Deborah, as always, for her editing skills and moral support. v This page intentionally left blank Table of Contents Acknowledgments v Prologue 1 1. Beginnings—The Irish in Boston 5 2. The Irish White Stockings of Chicago 16 3. Shamrocks, Trojans, and Giants 28 4. Charlie Comiskey and the St. Louis Browns 43 5. White Stockings, Colts, and Cubs 56 6. Patsy Tebeau and the Hibernian Spiders 68 7. Ned Hanlon and the Orioles 82 8. The Heavenly Twins and the Boston Irish 96 9. The Umpires 110 10. Comiskey and the White Sox 123 11. McGraw and the Giants 135 12. Wild Bill, Whiskey Face, and the Tall Tactician 150 13. Red Sox and Royal Rooters 164 Epilogue 178 Notes 181 Bibliography 187 Index 189 vii This page intentionally left blank Prologue Ireland is a nation with a troubled history. It had been a center of art and scholarship during the early Middle Ages, but the rise of its island neighbor, England, brought an end to Irish independence. After a series of invasions, rebellions, and civil wars, the English con- quered Ireland and imported Scottish and English Protestants to colonize the Catholic coun- try. The Protestants failed to subjugate the Catholics, but gained control of the counties of northern Ireland, setting the stage for centuries of religious conflict. After several unsuccess- ful rebellions against British rule, Ireland officially became part of the United Kingdom (which comprised England, Scotland, and Wales) in 1801. Catholics were still second-class citizens, banned from participating in politics or sitting in the British Parliament, but the Catholic Emancipation Act of 1829 brought hope to the Irish. Unfortunately, these hopes were dashed two decades later, when famine, disease, and emigration decimated the country. By 1911, the population of Ireland had fallen to not much more than half of what it had been in 1845. The depopulation of Ireland was the result of perhaps the greatest human tragedy of the 19th century. The “Great Famine,” which the Irish called An Gorta Mór, struck the country with full force in 1845. It was caused by a fungus, introduced to Ireland from continental Europe, which destroyed that year’s potato crop, leaving most of the rural counties without food for the harsh winter that followed. The city of Dublin and the Protestant counties of the north were less affected, but the blight laid waste to the largely Catholic areas of the south and west. The potato crop did not recover in 1846, and the following year, remembered in Irish history as “Black 47,” saw the worst suffering of all. The conservative government of Great Britain, which ruled the island country, was ineffective or (some say) not interested in providing humanitarian aid to the Irish, and reliable statistics indicate that between 1845 and 1851, more than a million and a half Irish died of starvation, while nearly as many fled the country.1 The failure of the potato crop was not a new phenomenon. Earlier versions of the fun- gus had struck the country several times during the previous 100 years, and as recently as 1830 the counties of Mayo, Donegal, and Galway had suffered widespread starvation. Local- ized crop failures followed during the next decade and a half, but the Irish were unable to diversify their agriculture. The population of the nation had exploded, from 2.8 million in 1785 to more than 8 million 80 years later, and Ireland had become a country of poor peas- ant farmers, growing barely enough to feed their families on tiny plots of land. The potato was the only crop that could be grown in enough quantity to feed the Irish people, and the 1 2 Prologue disaster of An Gorta Mór was, in retrospect, probably inevitable. In the words of British writer and historian H. G. Wells, “the weary potato gave way under its ever-growing burthen,”2 with famine and death as the result. The famine, and the Diaspora which followed, turned Ireland into what Wells described as “a land of old People and empty nests.”3 Ireland was slowly dying, but the United States of America was vibrant and growing. Though the country had existed as an independent nation for fewer than 80 years, it was expanding westward, increasing in population, and building itself into an industrial giant that would one day rival Great Britain as the wealthi- est and most powerful nation of the world. It had room for a seemingly limitless number of immigrants, and the desperate Irish, tired of hunger, religious persecution, and British oppres- sion, fled their homeland in droves to build new lives across the ocean. In the nine years imme- diately following the onset of the famine, some 2,164,000 Irish men, women, and children made the passage to the New World, and the total number of Irish who emigrated by the end of the 19th century topped three and a half million. Some of these immigrants spoke only Gaelic, the ancient language of the rural counties, but about three fourths of them spoke English, giving those an advantage over arrivals from Germany, Italy, and other European nations. Still, Irish immigrants faced many difficulties in their new land. Most had been peasant farmers and brought no usable talents with them to America. As a result, the only jobs open to them involved unskilled manual labor with long hours and meager pay. Few of the Irish could afford to travel far from their point of entry, so they settled a short distance from where they landed, overwhelming the ability of New York, Boston, and other eastern port cities to absorb them. Irish slums grew quickly in these cities, and the waves of new arrivals made the tenements more crowded and the competition for jobs more fierce. Poverty, chronic unemployment, and crime were the inevitable result, and not until 1855, when the worst of the famine had abated, did the flood of humanity arriving from Ireland begin to slow. Once settled in their new land, the Irish made incredible strides. Women found jobs as domestic servants (which their upper class employers called “bridgets” or “biddies”) while the men gravitated to factory jobs, dock work, and construction projects. They began to build a place for themselves in their new country, and while their work was hard and the hours long, the Irish were determined to succeed. They were proud of their heritage, holding parades on St. Patrick’s Day and banding together to fight discrimination, but they were Americans now, with their focus on the future. Immigrants and children of immigrants won political office in the large cities, fought with distinction (in the famous “Irish Brigades”) in the Civil War, and integrated themselves into the fabric of their communities and their nation.