agate type

the lawson brothers

  

If you have a chance, pick up Jerry Kuntz’s seriously fascinating new book about the Lawson brothers—Alfred Lawson, who was (briefly) a major league pitcher, a baseball promoter who organized outlaw minor leagues and barnstorming tours of Cuba, an important figure in early aviation, and founder of his own religion, called “Lawsonomy”; and his younger brother George, a.k.a. “Andy,” a con man, vaudeville manager, and anti-Klan activist who tried to organize the racially-integrated Continental League in 1921.

Alfred, incidentally, founded the 1907 outlaw Atlantic League, whose Brooklyn club featured Luis Padrón, Emilio Palomino, Andrés Ortega, and Tinti Molina.

black baseball in the 19th century

While on the subject of black/white games in the late 1860s, I should mention one of the most fascinating recent baseball books I’ve picked up: The Early Image of Black Baseball by James Brunson (who comments here on occasion).  James includes a lavish selection of illustrations from nineteenth-century publications and quite detailed accounts of the early African American baseball scene in St. Louis, Cleveland, and Chicago. 

Along with Sol White’s History of Colored Base Ball and Michael Lomax’s Black Baseball Entrepreneurs, 1860-1901, this makes, I believe, a grand total of three books about nineteenth-century African American baseball.

washington olympics vs. washington alerts & mutuals, 1869

On September 3, 1869, the Olympic Club of Philadelphia (which dated back to 1832) played a match against the Pythian Club, led by Octavius Catto; the Olympics won, 44 to 23.  This marks, as far as I know, the earliest match game between white and black organized clubs.  A couple of weeks later (September 16) the Pythians defeated the City Items, a minor, newspaper-sponsored club, 27 to 17, marking the first victory by a black club over a white one.  The Pythians, as I understand it, attempted to schedule a game against the Athletics, the best team in Philadelphia and one of the very best in the country, but the challenge was never accepted.

Very shortly after these pioneering interracial clashes, another pair of matches occurred that may be even more significant.  Possibly inspired by happenings in Philadelphia, the Alert Club of Washington, D.C., issued a challenge to the Washington Olympics, at that time one of a dozen or so openly professional teams in the country and (along with the Nationals) one of the two leading clubs in Washington—and their challenge was accepted.

(“Letters from Washington,” Baltimore Sun, September 17, 1869)

Reports of the game, played on September 20, 1869, made their way into the Washington dispatches of a number of northeastern newspapers.  I haven’t found a box score, but the Washington Star reported the lineups:

(Washington Star, September 20, 1869)

The Olympics featured a number of familiar names, including Davy Force and eventual National League president Nick Young.  The figure most associated with the black baseball scene in D.C. at the time, Frederick Douglass’s son Charles, doesn’t appear among the Alerts’ players, and may by that time have moved to the city’s other important black club, the Mutuals.

The game didn’t go well for the Alerts on the field, but the event drew a big crowd, and was generally interpreted as a positive development:

(New York Tribune, September 21, 1869)

(Washington Star, September 21, 1869)

(New York Herald, September 21, 1869)

About three weeks later, on October 12, the Olympics played another match against a black team, the Mutual Club.  This time the time the result was much closer:

(Washington Star, October 13, 1869)

I haven’t been able to find any box scores or any other mentions of the Mutuals/Olympics game so far.  Nor have I found any evidence that competition between white and black clubs in D.C. continued into the 1870s, although the Mutuals were active for a number of years after this.  Still, this means we can trace contests between the top levels of the black and white baseball worlds all the way back to 1869, which is considerably earlier than is usually understood.

Incidentally, the scores for both the Olympics/Alerts game and the Olympics/Mutuals game are reported by Marshall Wright in his book, The National Association of Base Ball Players, 1857-1870.  He makes no special note of them, however, while mentioning the Pythians’ game against the City Items, so I’m guessing that he didn’t realize they were matches against African American clubs.

UPDATE 5:14 p.m.  Charles Douglass had indeed moved on to the Mutual Base Ball Club by September 1869; among the Pythians’ papers is a letter dated September 10, 1869, from Douglass in his capacity as the Mutuals’ corresponding secretary, proposing that the Pythians and Mutuals play a series in Washington.

UPDATE 10/17/2009 I should have remembered that Randall Brown mentioned the Olympics’ 1869 matches against both the Alerts and Mutuals in his excellent article “Blood and Base Ball” in the Spring 2009 issue of Base Ball: A Journal of the Early Game.

was the national association a major league?

Was the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players (1871-1875) a “major league”? Your answer, obviously, depends on what you mean by “major league,” and on how much importance you attach to the label.  People often interpret the conferral or denial of the major league label as a verdict on the league, its quality of play, and the admissibility of its playing records as measures of performance.  If the NA’s a major league, then its stats “count” for various purposes; if not, they don’t, which generally means that Ross Barnes or Deacon White or somebody is held not to be HOF-worthy.  Yet the NA’s quality of play is not what the debate was originally about.

The modern roots of this dispute lie in the decision of the Special Baseball Records Committee in 1968 to exclude the NA from the ranks of the major leagues due to its “erratic schedule and procedures,” while including as “major” such paragons of stability as the Union Association.

What was the context of this decision?  The Special Records Committee was convened by the commissioner to adjudicate problems and discrepancies that arose out of the effort to create The Baseball Encyclopedia.  What they were trying to decide was what should be included in the “official” record.  In the end, the NA could not be entirely ignored, because it was in fact the top level of professional baseball in its time.  But its numbers were segregated in their own section, and the players’ individual entries in the main section of the encyclopedia all started with the 1876 National League.

Look at the NA statistics in the early editions of the Big Mac.  There are no extra base hits, no batters’ walks, no pitchers’ walks or strikeouts.  Many, many blank spaces, in other words—a lack of detail that goes far, far beyond later gaps in caught stealing or batters’ strikeout data, for instance.  The statistical record on the NA was, in the late 1960s, just not up to the standard of the rest of major league history.

A number of the deficiencies commonly cited against the NA’s major status and held to taint its playing statistics—imbalanced schedules, the membership of second-tier clubs such as the Keokuk Westerns, the domination of the Boston Red Stockings—also characterize the putatively “major” Union Association, say, or the 1890 American Association.  Rather, I have a feeling that the sketchiness of the statistical record available for the league in 1968—a simple lack of numbers for many categories—was the key factor in getting it declared non-major.  It would have made the early players’ records look incomplete, even ugly; and it would have interfered with the calculation of career totals and averages.

That’s not really a problem anymore, of course.  But the dispute remains, partly because some people misinterpret the 1968 decision (and the institutional inertia that has allowed it to stand) as a verdict by knowledgeable authorities on the quality of play in the National Association when, I’d suggest, it was really about the completeness of information.  In other words, it was not about how the stats are unreliable measures of performance because of too many games against the Middletown Mansfields or whatever; it was about how the stats were (at that time) incomplete.

In the end, I completely agree with this post.  Whether or not you label the NA a major league really isn’t going to change the way people interested in the 1870s think about it.  Anyone analyzing the careers of early professional ballplayers will use NA data, regardless of MLB’s or the Elias Sports Bureau’s official dictates about its status.  The NA will remain what it was, no matter what labels we impose on it or which section of the encyclopedias we put it in.  And, with historical baseball data increasingly computerized and online, such editorial decisions are less and less relevant in any case.

UPDATE  11:55 a.m. Btw, it’s important to emphasize that the original 1969 Baseball Encyclopedia was a major event in both the baseball and publishing worlds as 1) the first trade book entirely typeset on a computer and 2)  the first attempt to reconcile and correct the whole major league record.  The “look” of the thing, and specifically the appearance of completeness, could not have been too far from anyone’s mind.

pop watkins, part three

The two articles I’ve posted about Pop Watkins really disagree only on his birth place and early life.  The Watertown Daily Times says Watkins was born on “a plantation near Durham, N. C.,” while the Baltimore Afro-American says Augusta, Georgia.  According to the Afro-American, Watkins moved to Brooklyn “as a youngster,” whereas the Daily Times has him starting his baseball career at age 17 with a South Carolina team.  On the other hand, they agree that he was 66 and that he played 25 years with the Cuban Giants as a catcher and first baseman.  Otherwise, though, they just cover completely different aspects of his life and career. 

I wanted to discuss three issues they raise: 1) Watkins’s Manhattan College connection; 2) his career with the Cuban Giants; and 3) his age.

On Manhattan College: the Jaspers have a great baseball tradition and an excellent team dating back until at least the 1870s.  While not quite 13 in one year, it is true that from 1902 to 1907 fully ten former Jaspers (Rod Nelson originally sent me this link), including the Colombian-born Luis Castro, debuted in the majors.  Watkins was certainly not Manhattan College’s head baseball coach, but he could well have had something to do with the program, and it’s quite possible we might be able to establish that.

On his career with the Cuban Giants: As James E. Brunson points out in the comments to the last post, the Cuban Giants as we know them did not exist in 1882, when the Daily Times claims he joined them.  They were founded in 1885.

As far as I can tell, looking through the writings of Sol White, Jerry Malloy, and Michael E. Lomax on the Cuban Giants along with all the standard reference books and what little nineteenth-century material I have, Pop Watkins enters Negro League history in 1899 with the Genuine (or Original) Cuban Giants.  This was the name by which John M. Bright’s team became known after Edward B. Lamar founded the Cuban X Giants in 1896 and enticed away most of Bright’s players.   

James Riley has Watkins with these teams:

Cuban Giants 1899-1904
Genuine Cuban Giants 1905-1906
Brooklyn Royal Giants 1907-1909
Pop Watkins Stars 1908

The Negro Leagues Book (edited by Dick Clark and Larry Lester) shows F. [sic] “Pop” Watkins with these teams:

Genuine Cuban Giants 1899-1900
Famous Cuban Giants 1905-1906
Pop Watkins Stars 1908

(Clark/Lester has no Watkins on the Royal Giants’ rosters for 1907-1909. A spot check of a few 1908 box scores from the Brooklyn Eagle shows Watkins appearing occasionally at first base for his own team [incidentally called “Watkins’ Colored Giants” rather than the “Pop Watkins Stars”], but not for the Royal Giants.)

If the 1857 birth date for Watkins is accurate, he would have started playing in big time African American baseball at the age of 42—and continued at least until he was all of 51.

I was able to find a Brooklyn family in the 1910 census that matched the detailed information from the Afro-American article.  It was headed by one John Watkins, 52, born in Georgia and a salesman of sporting goods (the last column on the right gives the state in which the person was born):

(click to enlarge)

Four sons (not three), one named Raymond, and one daughter.  The less common name Raymond Watkins (along with John’s employment in sporting goods) helps to seal the deal.  There are all of four black men named Raymond Watkins in the 1910 census.  It seems rather more than a coincidence that one of these four lives in Brooklyn with a family that resembles in every particular the one that appears in the Afro-American article.

Walking it backward, I was able to find the same family in 1900, again in Brooklyn.  Only here John Watkins, listed as 52 in 1910, is now listed as 30, having been born in March 1870.

(click to enlarge)

The 1870 and 1880 censuses yielded nothing certain, since it’s no longer possible to rely on the names of his wife and children.  And if he really were born in the 1850s, he was almost certainly born into slavery, and slaves did not appear by name either in the census proper or in the slave schedules.

Finally, there is Pop Watkins’s death certificate:

(click to enlarge)

Clearly, no one present was able to provide any details about Watkins other than the fact that he had been born in Georgia.  Tellingly the attending physician guessed his age to be…40. 

None of this constitutes definitive proof that Pop Watkins was not as old as he represented himself (and I certainly don’t think he was only 40 in 1924), but I do think there’s something to the idea.  Questions about baseball ages usually involve players claiming to be younger than they are, for obvious reasons; the notion that an athlete might claim the opposite sounds almost crazy to us now. But it might make a lot of sense for a guy nicknamed “Pop.”

Age exaggeration was a fairly common marketing tool, used by both players and sportswriters in the early part of the twentieth century.  Satchel Paige was only following a long-established tradition.  I have, for example, seen articles in the late 1910s and 1920s that added 10 or 15 years to the ages of Cyclone Joe Williams and John Henry Lloyd (not coincidentally, another “Pop”).  The habit persisted for decades, sometimes popping up whether the player in question encouraged it or not.  Bus Clarkson shaved three years off his age in an attempt to gain late entry to the major leagues, only to see the Chicago Defender insinuate that he was even older than he actually was.

pop watkins, part two

Pop Watkins died on February 22, 1924, in Durham, North Carolina, where he had wintered for several years (he had also coached baseball at Shaw University in Raleigh).  Here is an obituary from the Watertown, New York, Daily Times (February 26, 1924, p. 18).  The version of the article I have (from the Fulton History website) is a little difficult to read, so I’ve typed it out.  There are some obvious differences between this piece and the Afro-American article summarized yesterday, which I’ll take up in the next post.

“POP” WATKINS DIES IN SOUTH
Colored Baseball Mentor Dead at Durham, N. C.
PILOTED HAVANA RED SOX
Team Made Watertown Its Headquarters For Several Season.

(SPECIAL TO THE TIMES.)

Durham, N. C., Feb. 25—“Pop” Watkins, veteran colored baseball manager, died at his home here on Friday afternoon following a short illness, aged 66 years.  Although the leader of the Havana Red Sox had been in poor health for the past several months, his condition had never been regarded as serious.  Mr. Watkins arrived here from Watertown the latter part of last year.  During the past few months he had been busily engaged in organizing a strong barnstorming team.

When Watkins was not touring the north with his squad of balltossers, he was baseball coach at various colored colleges in the south, his baseball knowledge being recognized throughout the south.  For a time he was coach at Hobson college, Irmo, S. C., and also at Shaw University, Durham, N. C.

Funeral services and burial were held today.

John McCreary Watkins, known to thousands of baseball followers as just plain “Pop,” was born on a plantation near Durham, N. C., on May 18, 1857.  Shortly after the close of the Civil lWar when baseball began to gain in popularity, “Pop,” who was fascinated by the outdoor game, started on his career as a player.

At the age of 17 years Watkins began playing baseball with the Fox Hunters team in South Carolina and the following year, 1875, he played with the Quick Steps team of Georgia.  Up to 1882, he caught with various colored and white baseball teams, before colored players were barred from organized baseball.

“Pop” was a catcher and when in his prime was proclaimed to be the best colored backstop in the country in his days.  In 1882 he joined the Cuban Giants, famous colored nine, catching for them for 18 years and playing seven years at first base.  He was also captain of this team when he was playing first base.

In May, 1907, after fracturing his leg with the Cuban Giants at Oil City, Pa., “Pop” quit that club and started to organize a team of his own.  Being a veteran in the game he experienced no difficulty in forming a formidable outfit which he called the Havana Red Sox.  He than began touring the country, but the majority of the games were played in the northeastern tier.

News of “Pop’s” formidable baseball team reached Watertown in 1913 and promoters at once began angling for the appearance of this colored squad in this city.  On Sept. 7, 1913, the Red Sox, under “Pop’s” guiding hand, played their first game in Watertown.  The colored ball tossers defeated the All-Watertown nine by an 11 to 10 count in a thrilling diamond struggle, which was featured by heavy hitting.

The Havana Red Sox proved to be a big drawing card here and practically every year since 1913 the team has appeared in Watertown.  In 1917 the colored team took up its headquarters at Gouverneur, being managed by B. G. Parker of the that village.  During the war “Pop’s” team was hard hit when the majority of his players either enlisted or were drafted, and it was not until last season that Watkins brought his squad up to its former strength.

Watkins is well known to thousands of baseball fans throughout northern and central New York where his team has appeared for the greater part of the past eleven years.  The Sox have played in Ogdensburg, Alexandria Bay, Potsdam, Adams, Pulaski, Lowville, Croghan, Carthage, Malone, Sandy Creek and other places in this section of the state.

“Pop” was well liked in every town and city in which his team played.  In Watertown he was popular among the baseball followers.  He possessed a keen sense of humor and was witty in his remarks, both on and off the diamond.  “Pop” specialized in keeping the fans amused during the progress of the game by using words that had never seen the inside of Webster’s dictionary.  One of his pet words was “excivorating.”  Just what he meant by that word the genial colored pilot never disclosed.

“Pop” was well liked by his players and his ability to keep harmony among his team made other colored managers envious.  Although he would show his anger at his players when they failed to exhibit any “inside baseball” on the diamond and would shower “you yellar dog” and similar phrase at them, they never rebelled and took it good naturedly.

Without a doubt Mr. Watkins knew more colored baseball stars than any other man in the country.  It was through the keen judgment of “Pop” that many players, who formerly took part in sandlot games of the south, are now starring in Chicago and New York city in colored leagues.  As soon as “Pop” found that a player had ability he would immediately start to develop it with the result that within a few years the player would be graduated into faster company.  “Pop” discovered such famous colored stars as Dixon, Toussaint Allen, Phil Cockerell and Gifford McDonald, all of whom have played here.

“Pop” planned to celebrate his 50th anniversary in baseball this season with a formidable array of colored tossers.  Last November before starting for southern climes, the Red Sox manager announced that he would bring a fast team back to Watertown.  Since arriving in the south Watkins had written several letters to his friends in this city saying that he planned to return to Watertown in May.

When the Red Sox first appeared in this city “Pop,” equipped with a uniform, would take part in the infield practice and made a fine impression at first base, despite his age.  But during the past four years the veteran manager had directed his team from the bench.  He discarded the uniform for street clothes.  “Pop” was a married man.

pop watkins, part one

February 22 was the 85th anniversary of the death of John “Pop” Watkins, an influential but now obscure figure in the early history of black baseball.  He’s best known for the Havana Red Sox, a team he organized and managed in the 1910s and early 1920s.  It was one of those “Cuban” teams with no actual Cubans on it.  Their base of operations was usually in upstate New York, including a number of years at Watertown, and they generally played area semipro or amateur teams. 

Watkins developed a number of young players who went on to good careers in the Negro Leagues, including Phil Cockrell, Dennis Graham, Toussaint Allen, George Dixon, Luke Archer, and others.

(Syd Pollock, of Indianapolis Clowns fame, would later run a team of genuine Cubans he called the Havana Red Sox.  I don’t know if there was any connection with Watkins’s club.)

 A while back Rod Nelson sent me an article on Watkins (originally spotted by Kevin Johnson) from the Baltimore Afro-American (July 13, 1923).  It’s a little too faded to reproduce here, but I can recap the basics. 

These are the headlines:

“Pop” Watkins Is World’s Greatest Base Ball Scout
***
Discovered John McGraw, Hughie Jennings, John Hummel, Al Schact [sic] and Other Great Diamond Stars
***
In Baseball 44 Years
***
Now Devotes His Time To Training Players for Professional Colored Clubs

Watkins, the article says, was “born in Augusta, Ga., sixty-six years ago,” and moved “as a youngster to Brooklyn, N.Y., where he was raised.”

The article claims that Watkins played for the Cuban Giants for 25 years, taking the field against major leaguers many times.  He suffered three cracked ribs when Honus Wagner crashed into him at first base.  “Another souvenir is a scarred lip that was split by a pitched ball delivered by none other than the famous Christy Mathewson.”

Eventually big league clubs began to seek him out for his services as “scout and coach for young players.”  Supposedly he discovered the players mentioned in the headline (McGraw, Jennings, Schacht), and the young Jack Dunn (later owner of the Baltimore Orioles) “used to toss them into the mitt of the famous colored scout.” 

He also began to work for college teams: “One of the greatest feats ever accomplished by a coach he performed in 1904 when he coached Manhattan College, New York, sending thirteen youngsters up to the big leagues in one season, a record.”

The article winds up with these paragraphs:

HAS SON HERE

Despite his many years on the diamond, Mr. Watkins has found time to marry twice and raise a family of three sons and a daughter.  One son, Raymond Watkins, lives in this city [Baltimore] and is employed in the local postoffice, the others are married and living in Utica.

He was very much worried on his trip here for he had just received a telegram that his wife, whose picture, that of a youngish and very comely woman, he showed us proudly, had been taken suddenly ill since he left [Utica].

Shaking hands with “Pop” Watkins one got the impression of a man who was as young as any youngster on his team as far as the game was concerned and still able to play rings around many a colt who imagines he is a ball player.

I’m going to break this into three or four posts, as I’ve got quite a lot of material on Watkins.  Next—his 1924 obituary tells a somewhat different story.

Image from the New York Public Library’s Digital Gallery (via Rod Nelson).  It originally comes from Sol White’s Official Base Ball Guide (1907).

national colored league, 1887

Bill Mullins has sent in some items on the National Colored League of 1887, the first attempt at a national black professional league (a Southern league had operated in 1886).

Here is an article on the league’s organization from the St. Louis Globe-Democrat (November 14, 1886), which hints at one of the major reasons for the league’s demise—the ultimate refusal of the Cuban Giants, the best-known and most successful black professional club, to join the league.

This is from the New York Freeman, January 22, 1887, and includes the roster of the Louisville Falls Citys:

This item, also from the New York Freeman (February 19, 1887), lists the players for the Boston Resolutes:

Here’s a line score for the first game (Washington Post, May 10, 1887), including ominous remarks about the low attendance and lopsided result:

By the next day, the league was already “in trouble”:

                        (Washington Post, May 11, 1887)

And in only a couple of weeks the circuit was on its last legs:

                        (New York Times, May 26, 1887)

Thanks again to Bill for sending these in.

platooning in the 19th century

One of my favorite things written by Bill James is the “History of Platooning” from his first Historical Baseball Abstract (unfortunately left out of the newer edition, along with other classic pieces like “Minor League Baseball Stars”).  While George Stallings, buoyed by the success of the Miracle Braves, was the man probably most responsible for popularizing the strategy, James was able to find a platoon arrangement as early as 1905 involving Detroit Tiger catchers, apparently devised by the team’s little-known manager, Bill Armour.  But James adds this:

I still get the feeling, somehow, that somebody did platoon, sort of sometime in the nineteenth century.  It would have been awkward as hell, but they could have done it.  I fully expect some other baseball researcher to take an interest in this subject and find an earlier platoon arrangement. (p. 122)

Well, while looking for something completely different (information on Irvin Brooks’s Brooklyn Royal Giants, as it happens), I ran across this, from the Kingston (N.Y.) Daily Freeman, April 22, 1925:

According to this, Buck Ewing invented platooning in order to hide William “Dummy” Hoy’s (and other players’) vulnerability to left-handed pitching.  Buck Ewing actually managed Hoy on the Reds for three seasons, 1895 through 1897.  I thought I’d briefly check out the lineups for those teams to see if anything cries out “platooning.”

In 1896 Hoy played in 120 of 128 games in center field, and in 1897 he played in 128 of 134.  In neither case does that look much like a platoon arrangement. In 1895 the outfield situation is a little complicated, as Ewing, in his first year with the team, seems to have been switching guys around to find the best combination.  Hoy spent time in both left and right, but it’s hard to see the signs of a platoon combination from just numbers of games played at each position.  It might have happened.

However: in 1897 Ewing used the left-handed Eddie Burke 94 times in right field, while right-handed Bug Holliday played in 32 games (and switch-hitter Claude Ritchey 10).  This does resemble a stable platoon arrangement.  Also, switch-hitting Ritchey and right-hander Tommy Corcoran split time nearly equally at shortstop, and at first base the lefty-swinging Jake Beckley played in 97 games, with three right-handed hitters (including Ewing himself for one game) appearing in 39 games. 

Ewing sent Hoy packing after that season, but managed the Reds two more seasons.  In center field in 1898, left-handed hitter Algie McBride appeared in 115 games, and right-handers Bug Holliday and Harry Steinfeldt in 41.  Jake Beckley played in 118 games at first base, while assorted righty hitters, mostly Farmer Vaughn, appeared in 44. 

In 1899, the first base situation was more imbalanced, Beckley out-appearing Vaughn 134 to 21, and the outfield is too hard to make sense of: no center fielder played in more than 45 games, Kip Selbach and Elmer Smith were switched between positions, and Sam Crawford was elbowing his way into the lineup.

Obviously, all  this would be in principle easy to check in the box scores, though it would take some time.  Important context would be the proportion of innings pitched by left-handers.  I haven’t taken the time to figure it out, but checking through 1896, it looks like there wasn’t a single team with two left-handers in the top four in innings pitched, and a few teams without a left-hander at all.  I’d guess the proportion of innings pitched by southpaws to be less than 25 percent, maybe considerably less.

Before anyone points it out, I’m assuming that someone has already looked into all this, and probably written it up somewhere—so feel free to enlighten me in the comments!

UPDATE 7/3/2008 Whoever wrote this article misremembered Hoy’s nickname as “Dumpy.”  I’m not sure which one is worse.  Also, there is an article in the 1995 National Pastime on Cap Anson’s experiments with platooning, but I haven’t been able to locate my copy yet.

george h. wilson: “the whole show”

Todd Peterson, who’s working on a book for McFarland about the St. Paul Gophers and early black baseball in Minnesota, has written in about his research on George H. Wilson.  “Wilson,” Todd says, “was a tremendous pitcher and quite a flamboyant personality – the  ‘whole show’ as one paper called him.”  He “was part of a migration of Chicago players to Minnesota in the early 20th century and he pitched for several teams in the area, most notably the Waseca EACO’s, the Renville All-Stars and St. Cloud.” 

Todd has compiled the following chronology for Wilson (sources including Sol White; James Riley; Ancestry.com; and local newspapers):

George H. Wilson  P
Born July 1875, Michigan
1894                  Adrian (MI) Light Guard
1895                  Page Fence Giants
1895                  Adrian (MI) (Michigan State League)
1896-1898         Page Fence Giants
1899-1900         Chicago Columbia Giants
1900-1902         Waseca (MN) EACO’s
1903                 St. Cloud (MN)
1903                  Algona (IA) Brownies (late in season)
1904-1905         Chippewa Falls (WI)
1905                  Renville (MN) All Stars
1905                  Chicago Union Giants (late in season)
1906                  Sheboygan (MI)

There’s some question about whether the Sheboygan referred to in 1906 was the one in Michigan or the one in Wisconsin; a note in the Minneapolis Tribune (August 1906) about Wilson going home to pitch (he was from Michigan) led Todd to think it was in Michigan.  On the other hand, a couple of the references Joe Niese sent me about Wilson came from a Sheboygan, Wisconsin, paper, though they aren’t from 1906 and refer to Wilson playing for a team in Manitowoc, rather than Sheboygan.

It seems, from the material Joe sent me, that Todd can add 1906/07 Habana (Cuban League) and 1907-1909 Manitowoc (WI), Lake Shore League, to the list.

And Todd has sent me the following 1902 photo of George Wilson, in his Waseca EACO uniform (from the Minnesota Historical Society):

UPDATE 1/21/2008 1:13 p.m. David Skinner wrote in the following:

Hi Gary,

There is in fact no such place as Sheboygan, Michigan.  Frequently confused with Sheboygan, Wisconsin, however, is Cheboygan, Michigan, with a C.  Sheboygan is a small city of 50,000 plus which actually had minor league ball for a number of years in the 40s.  Cheboygan, on the other hand, is a VERY small town of under 5,000 and of course never had pro ball.  My definition of a very small town is one smaller than my beloved Bisbee, which has OVER 5,000 brave souls.  None of this has any bearing on George Wilson, who could well have played on a town team, which undoubtedly Cheboygan, like seemingly every other Midwest small town, had.

Best,
David

David also had high praise for Todd’s presentation on the St. Paul Gophers at the SABR national convention last summer.

And he sent a brief correction to his first message:

My bad.  Both Bisbee and Cheboygan have grown and gotten ahead of me. I checked the actual 2000 census figures and Sheboygan is still over 50,000, while Cheboygan has climbed over 5,000. But not to be outdone, Bisbee soared to over 6,000 (you'd hardly notice) and remained over 1,000 bigger, leaving Cheboygan as I said a very small town.