Agate Type

The Colored Baseball Championship Game, 1914

William D. Foster, from Wikipedia.

 

A few years ago I wrote about a silent film called As the World Rolls On (1921), a Jack Johnson vehicle that featured footage of actual Negro league baseball games as an integral part of its plot. I didn’t realize it then, but there’s actually an earlier film about black professional baseball.

In 1910 William D. Foster (no relation to Rube Foster), a sportswriter and theatrical agent who wrote for the Chicago Defender under the name Juli Jones, Jr., founded the Foster Film Company (also known as the Foster Photoplay Company). Based in Chicago, it is commonly recognized as the first African-American-owned film company. In 1913 Foster directed The Railroad Porter, the first film with an all-black cast and director.

The following year Foster turned his attention to baseball, and produced a newsreel called The Colored Championship Baseball Game. The subject matter was the recent series between the Chicago American Giants and the Brooklyn Royal Giants, played from August 30 through September 7, 1914, in Chicago’s Schorling Park, and advertised as the “world’s negro championship series.”

I don’t know how long the series was originally scheduled to go, or if it was even a “best of” series or (more likely) just a set number of games that got christened a “championship series” for publicity purposes. In any event, it was not a contest. The Royal Giants suffered through 20 consecutive scoreless innings to start the series, and their bats never did get going, as Rube Foster’s pitchers held them to 12 runs in seven games (with Foster himself contributing a 4-to-2 win in game 4). The American Giants swept the Royals 7 games to none, by a collective score of 32 to 12.

From the title, it appears that William Foster’s film only showed one game, though there’s no way to know which one it could be. Possibly one of the two Sunday games (August 30 and September 6), which had big crowds, or maybe the contest on September 2, the day Rube Foster himself took the mound. Here’s the only contemporary description of the film I found, by Sylvester Russell in the Indianapolis Freeman (September 12, 1914, p. 5):

This is one of the most enticing prospects a Negro league historian will ever encounter: the possibility of in-game footage of players like Pete Hill, John Henry Lloyd, and Bill Monroe of the American Giants, or Charlie Earle, Jules Thomas, or the submarine thrower Dizzy Dismukes of the Royals.

Unfortunately, like As the World Rolls On and the film of the St. Louis Giants’ 1919 opening day, The Colored Baseball Championship Game almost certainly doesn’t exist anymore. Fully 75 percent of feature silent films released by major studios  from 1914 to 1929 are lost. The figures for non-feature films (educational films, newsreels, documentaries, short films) must be even worse.

But who knows? Maybe somewhere, in some dusty archive, footage of Rube Foster and his American Giants squaring off against the Brooklyn Royal Giants survives.

The 1914 Chicago American Giants

 

UPDATE 11:28 pm: Added the Freeman passage from 1914, which I had accidentally left out.

Rube Foster in Kankakee

Jimmy Yancey & Rube Foster

 

If you haven’t seen it yet, be sure to check out ESPN’s “The Diary of Myles Thomas,” an account of the 1927 Yankees from the (fictionalized) perspective of a minor figure on the team, the pitcher Myles Thomas. I’m not doing any of the writing on the “Diary,” but I have been helping with some research, as one of its central conceits is that Myles was a jazz aficionado who encountered black musicians and ballplayers. The latest entry shows us Rube Foster, confined in the asylum at Kankakee, Illinois, in 1927.

One of the main things I’ve done for them is figure out how we can plausibly have Myles encounter certain stories. It's fiction, sure, but we've been trying hard to make it believable fiction, to give it a sturdy grounding in nuts-and-bolts research. So we work out a lot of scenarios like, “Can we place Myles Thomas at the Negro League World Series in 1925? Or, failing that, can we place Myles in the same room as somebody who did see the ’25 World Series—before the end of the 1927 season?”

In the case of this particular entry, Jimmy Yancey, an early practitioner of boogie woogie piano, serves as the link between Myles and Rube Foster. Yancey was for many years a groundskeeper at Comiskey Park, and his Rock and Roll Hall of Fame entry says he played baseball for the “Chicago All-Americans” during World War I, which seems likely to be a reference to Foster’s American Giants (although I haven’t been able to substantiate any playing time for him with any teams I’m familiar with). (Using Yancey, by the way, is a fantastic idea—one I had nothing to do with.)

Quick notes about a couple of things:

• Yancey tells Myles the story that Rube Foster taught Christy Mathewson how to throw his famous “fadeaway” pitch. This was debunked by Dick Thompson in the Baseball Research Journal in 1996 (Mathewson learned it from a minor league pitcher named Dave Williams in 1898). The guys behind the “Diary” (Douglas Alden and John Thorn) are aware of this, and consciously chose to have Yancey help spread the legend.

•Yancey also tells the story that Foster gained his nickname by defeating Rube Waddell and the Philadelphia A’s. This is well-trodden ground, of course; it appears likely (in my opinion) that Foster in fact defeated Waddell and the white semipro Murray Hills in 1903, but Foster never seems to have faced the Athletics (though the A’s did play the Philadelphia Giants several times in the 1900s). In 1907, however, he stated in print that he beat Waddell and the A’s in 1905. Since Foster himself told the story this way, it makes perfect sense that Yancey could have heard it directly from him.

Topeka Jack Johnson, Part II

The 1907 Chicago Union Giants. Standing L to R: Will Horn, Topeka Jack Johnson. Seated, middle row, L to R: Albert Toney, Joe Green, Jimmy Smith, George Hopkins, Ginney Robinson, unknown. Seated, front row, L to R: unknown, Sam Strothers.

The puzzle about Topeka Jack Johnson is that, although you can outline his career in detail (at least for some years), it’s not really possible to figure out how good a baseball player he was. Currently there’s a grand total of 42 games for him against top flight black opposition in the Seamheads Negro Leagues DB. In these games he hit .247/.333/.331, for an OPS+ of 118—which sounds good, but it’s only 42 games, 178 plate appearances, scattered over 8 seasons. At best we have a very crude assessment that he was an above-average hitter in a little more than a month’s worth of games. Which is pretty much the same as saying we don't’ know anything.

Defensively, he’s even more out of focus, playing 19 games at second base, 12 at first, 8 at shortstop. He was tall and strong, sometimes described as a power hitter (relative to the times, of course), and probably had a decent arm (though he rarely appeared at third base). He tended to bat cleanup and play wherever he decided his team needed him. Aside from a few stints in Chicago, he played almost all of his whole career far from the hotbeds of blackball activity. He went to the east coast to box (once), but never to play baseball. He was never signed by any of the top teams of the time (the Philadelphia Giants, Leland Giants, Cuban X-Giants, etc.), He never went to Cuba. You’d have to concede that there’s not really any good evidence that he was anywhere near the class of the Pete Hills or Harry Buckners or the John Lloyds of the world. Maybe he was that good, but if so, the surviving record doesn’t back it up.

Instead, his significance rests on two other things: 1) his managerial career, most notably with the Kansas City (Kansas) Giants, who (with at least some justification) claimed the colored championship in 1909, and 2) his leadership in various efforst to organize black baseball leagues. His greatest achievements in both areas came during the 1909-1912 period.

We’ll pick up his story in 1907, after he returned from Philadelphia early in the spring. In March a scheduled fight in Omaha with the heavyweight Jim McCormick (the same guy he’d fought right before a game in 1906) was broken up by the police. A month later it was announced that Johnson was leaving Topeka and going back to the Chicago Union Giants as player/manager, although he still retained a partial interest in the Topeka Giants.

The Unions split their time between barnstorming trips through Illinois and surrounding states, and home stands in Chicago, where they played that city’s strong white semipro clubs, which often featured past or future major leaguers. On July 7, the Unions defeated the Artesians in Chicago 4 to 0, with Johnson swatting a home run. In the opposing lineup was a young Fred Merkle, playing third base. A week later Johnson got five hits off former Brooklyn Superbas pitcher Joe Koukalik (one of only nine major league players born in the Austro-Hungarian Empire, unless I've missed somebody) as the Unions defeated another white semipro team, the Oak Leas, 7 to 2. At season’s end the Unions played their only known game against black opposition in 1907, defeating the St. Paul Gophers 10 to 4, Johnson contributing a double and a single to the cause.

Continuing his pattern of changing teams every year, Topeka Jack moved north to the Twin Cities for 1908, joining the Minneapolis Keystones (right) along with three of his players from the Unions: infielders Alex Irwin and George Hopkins, and pitcher Charles Jessup. Known in Minnesota as Chicago Jack, his main position was first base, but he appeared at all four infield positions plus right field. Todd Peterson was able to find box scores for 32 games against all opposition; Johnson batted .269 and led the team in triples and home runs. Facing off against the rival St. Paul Gophers, the Keystones lost the series 3 games to 2; in the three games that have box scores, Johnson hit 3 for 12 with a triple.

His next stop was Kansas City—Kansas, that is, where some local businessmen wanted to defeat the Kansas City Monarchs (from the Missouri side; the original club, not the one founded by J. L. Wilkinson in 1920). They built a new club with Johnson and several Topeka Giants, most notably Tullie McAdoo and the Norman brothers (third baseman Big Jim and pitcher Billy, also known as “Chin” or “Shin”), as the core. Johnson added some of his old Union Giants teammates as well as an Albuquerque catcher named Bill Pettus, whom he might have gotten to know through his boxing connections, as Pettus was also a promising fighter who had been to the west coast.

The Giants inaugurated the season by beating the rival Monarchs 8 to 3, getting 16 hits off their pitcher, a 17-year-old from Lexington, Missouri, named Bill Lindsay. His team may given the youngster a torrid time, but Johnson saw something in Lindsay, and would remember him later in the year. By April 29, the Kansas City Journal reported that the Giants had not yet lost (though the paper didn’t say how many games they had played). A couple of days later the Journal declared that “if Jack Johnson of the Kansas Giants could apply the whitewash brush, or send his men through a bleaching process, the chances are such men as McAdoo, J. Norman, Skinner and Pettus would not be in our midst very long.”

The Giants kept winning through the summer, playing mostly in the Kansas City area with a couple of road trips to St. Louis and Oklahoma. In June they faced Bill Lindsay and the Monarchs again, prevailing 1 to 0 after thirteen innings. On July 27, on the eve of the Giants’ biggest journey of the year, to Chicago, the Kansas City Journal reported that they had won 54 and lost none on the season. I’ve been able to document 29 wins, no losses, and 1 tie during that time (mostly due to the work of Patrick Rock in combing the Kansas City Journal for reportage on the Giants).

The 1909 Kansas City Giants, from the Kansas City Gazette Globe (August 21, 1909). The photo is mostly too blurry to allow for easy IDs, but I think the middle row is, L to R: Tullie McAdoo, Dee Williams, Tobe Smith, Topeka Jack Johnson, Tom Sterman. The player in the front, on the left side, might be Bill Pettus.

On July 28, en route to Chicago, the Giants defeated the Moquoketa, Iowa, team, 2 to 1. Arriving in the Windy City, they played their first game at Logan Square Park against the stiffest opposition they had faced that year, the Cuban Stars. In a pitching duel between Billy Norman and Cuban ace José Muñoz, the Cubans came out on top, 2 to 1. If the Journal’s earlier report was accurate, this ended their undefeated streak at 56 games (55 wins, one draw). In any case, it’s certainly the first loss of the year I’ve found for them.

The Kansas City Giants’ two weeks in Chicago gave them a dose of reality.  They dropped 8 of 12 games against the Cuban Stars, including two pretty brutal losses to the legendary José Méndez, who struck out 21 Giants in 18 innings. They also lost twice to white semipro teams, most notably to the River Forests and their pitcher Arthur “Doc” Hillebrand, a college star who famously refused to play in the majors, despite many offers.

One might think that the Giants returned chastened to Kansas City. They had come out well under .500, and they hadn’t even played the true kings of the hill in Chicago, Rube Foster’s Leland Giants. The two teams had scheduled a five-game series, but for whatever reason, that didn’t happen. Instead, the Lelands came to the Giants’ Riverside Park in Kansas City, Kansas, in late August, for a three-game series. Jack Johnson and his team had their shot at redemption.

The 1909 Leland Giants. Standing L to R: Pete Hill, Andrew Payne, George Wright, Walter Ball, Charles Dougherty, Bill Gatewood, Rube Foster. Seated L to R: Danger Talbert, Harry Moore, Frank Leland, Bobby Winston, Sam Strothers, Nate Harris.

The Lelands took the first game, 5 to 2, as Walter Ball shackled K.C. on two hits. In the second game, Jack Johnson unveiled his newest acquisition: Bill Lindsay, now 18, whom he had poached from the Monarchs. The young hurler had the Lelands at his mercy, striking out 16 and allowing only a single unearned run. With the score tied and bases loaded in the eighth inning, Jack hit a Texas leaguer to bring in two runs, and the Giants won, 3 to 1. In the third game, another eighth inning rally netted Kansas City a 5 to 4 win. “Kansas Giants Champions,” trumpeted the Kansas City Journal. The Kansas City Giants subsequently claimed the “colored baseball  championship of the United States.”

The Giants continued to win, though not quite at the frenzied pace they’d kept up before the Chicago trip. In September the San Antonio Black Bronchos of the Texas Colored League came to Riverside Park. The two teams split a four-game series, with the Giants defeating the Bronchos’ ace, Cyclone Joe Williams, 4 to 2 in the last game. (Jack Johnson went 0 for 4.) Overall, the Giants won 11 and lost 12 against top-flight black teams. The Leland Giants were 17-13 against similar opposition, not to mention champions of the tough Chicago City League, despite an injury-plagued season in which no fewer than three players (Rube Foster, Bobby Winston, and Joe Green) suffered broken legs. It’s difficult to take the Kansas City Giants’ two out of three victory over the Lelands as evidence of superiority.

The 1909 St. Paul Gophers (from Early Black Baseball in Minnesota, by Todd Peterson). Standing L to R: Steel Arm Johnny Taylor, Sherman Barton, Bobby Marshall, Phil Reid, Johnny Davis, Will McMurray, Dick Wallace. Seated L to R: Rabbit McDougall, Eugene Milliner, Candy Jim Taylor, William Binga, Julius London.

Not only that, but earlier in the season the Lelands had lost 3 games to 2 to the St. Paul Gophers in St. Paul, and the Gophers (11-2 overall against the best black opposition) subsequently claimed the informal colored championship. Rube Foster, at the end of the season, dismissed the Gophers’ claims. “These were only exhibition contests,” he claimed, “and no man who ever saw the Gophers play would think of classing them as world’s colored champions, or would think the playing ability of the other clubs was very weak. No doubt they need advertising” (Indianapolis Freeman, November 13, p. 7). He didn’t even mention the Kansas City Giants.

That’s enough for this post. In the next one I’ll talk about Jack Johnson’s role in founding (or attempting to found) various leagues as well as his career in boxing (and further encounters with the “real” Jack Johnson).

“Let Me See That Ball!”

From Daniel Okrent’s 1989 book Baseball Anecdotes, p. 72:

You might be expecting a Bill James or Rob Neyer-style debunking in which I demonstrate that no such thing ever happened, or that the circumstances were totally different, or whatever. Actually, Okrent’s rendering of the incident seems completely accurate. Here’s the Brooklyn Daily Eagle account of it:

(Brooklyn Daily Eagle, August 8, 1915, p. 33)

So I’m not debunking this story, but I can point to a precursor. On August 22, 1907, under very similar circumstances, Rube Foster pulled the same thing on Indianapolis ABCs’ pitcher Leonard Griffin:

 

(Indianapolis Star, August 23, 1907, p. 9)

 

(Indianapolis Freeman, August 31, 1907, p.  7)

A week later, the Freeman printed a cartoon commemorating the incident:

(Indianapolis Freeman, September 6, 1907, p. 7)

Huggins’s 1915 deployment of the “let me see that ball” trick made its way into mainstream baseball lore, possibly due to its inclusion in the 1929 book Babe Ruth’s Own Story. Meanwhile, Foster’s 1907 conning of Griffin was remembered in black baseball history (though the details were sometimes left out), to be occasionally revived by later historians (such as Paul Debono in his 1997 book on the Indianapolis ABCs).

But there are many other examples of this trick stretching back into the nineteenth century. This example, pulled off in 1896 by former major league catcher Sam Laroque while playing for Dubuque in the Western Association, is noteworthy because Laroque’s phrasing is almost identical to that of Foster:

(Rockford, Illinois, Daily Register-Gazette, July 22, 1896, p. 3)

A couple of years earlier, while complaining about John “Egyptian” Healy falling prey to Mike Lehane’s request to see the ball in an Eastern League game, a Sporting Life correspondent called it an “old ‘gag’ which the writer has seen worked when he wore Knickerbockers”:

(Sporting Life, June 30, 1894, p. 6)

I haven’t attempted any kind of full archeology of this particular trick, but it wouldn’t be surprising to learn that Doc Adams had pulled it on somebody in the 1840s.

1904 philadelphia giants

Just wanted to point out this beautiful image of the 1904 Philadelphia Giants, which John Thorn has posted at least a couple of times (most recently in this entry on Sol White).

To my knowledge, the photograph was first published in the September 2, 1904, issue of the Philadelphia Inquirer (though one wonders if it didn’t first appear in the pages of The Item, the paper that employed the Giants’ owner Walter Schlichter).

Since when I originally noticed this photograph much of my interest came from its status as the earliest known photograph of Pete Hill, here’s a closeup of him:

And here are a few more, starting with Rube Foster:

Bill Monroe:

Johnny Hill:

 

Charlie Grant:

 

Will Horn:

 

Andrew Payne:

rube speaks

During the winter of 1926, Wesley Rollo Wilson, the dean of east coast black sportswriters, conducted an interview with Rube Foster that has become a key text in the modern reconstruction of Negro league history. I first happened upon it because I was looking for more information about the confusion between Walter Ball and George “Georgia Rabbit” Washington—but there’s a lot more here.

It was really not so much an interview as an oration by Rube Foster with Wilson as stenographer.

 

(Pittsburgh Courier, January 16, 1926, p. 12)

This column has been used as the source for a number of oft-repeated nuggets, claims, and facts, not all of which are strictly speaking accurate, though by no means is it a totally unreliable source. There are a few small corrections you could make to this column. Rube’s years are a little off sometimes—Pete Hill didn’t leave for Chicago until a year after Foster did, in 1907, for example, and Rube joined the Philadelphia Giants in 1904 rather than 1903—but these are trivial.

These are a few of the more interesting (and questionable, or in one case misquoted) claims that have been frequently cited and repeated, but only rarely (if ever) actually examined:

•Rube Foster names the 1910 Leland Giants “the greatest ball team in the history of the game, BAR NONE!”—and claims that the Leland Giants “won 123 games and lost 6.” I haven’t tried to compile all the games for the 1910 Lelands, but they did win 22 and lose only 2 (while tying 1) against black professional teams. In Cuba in the fall of 1910, however, they won 7, lost 5, and tied one—making their overall record against Cuban and “Negro league” teams for the calendar year 29-7-2. I’d guess Rube wasn’t counting Cuban games.

•Rube considered Bill Monroe “the greatest player who ever lived and one who would have been a star in any league. Ask John McGraw—he knows.” I think this quote has been a garbled a little and transformed into McGraw (rather than Foster) declaring Monroe “the greatest player of all time” (for example, see Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia, p. 561).

•Rube claims that the heavyweight champ Jack Johnson—“Yes, THE Jack Johnson”—played first base for the Philadelphia Giants in 1903 and 1904. This is apparently the source for Johnson’s entry in Riley’s Biographical Encyclopedia (p. 436), where Riley takes Rube’s claim at face value.  Needless to say, Johnson was not the Giants’ first baseman, then or ever. He was a friend of Foster, however, and there were some other baseball connections for Jack Johnson, which I might write about some other time.

•Rube declares that “In all the years I pitched I lost only SIX games to colored teams.” He had a great winning percentage, but not that great: 48-17 against black professional teams in the U.S., and 19-13 against Cuban teams in Cuba. Again, he probably wasn’t counting the Cubans. (I haven’t tried to separate out his wins over Cuban Stars teams in the U.S. from his overall “Negro league” record—maybe if you don’t count Cuban teams at all, anywhere, his claim holds up…)

There are also a couple of nuggets of information here that haven’t been much remarked on, but that are also pretty interesting.

•He says that when John Henry Lloyd joined the Lelands he was an outfielder until the shortstop (George Wright was the 1909 Lelands’ shortstop) fell ill in Jacksonville, presumably during spring training. “Lloyd was brought in to fill the position and our shortstop lost his job forever.” Of course Lloyd had already been a middle infielder for several years with the Cuban X-Giants and Philadelphia Giants. It’s hard to believe he wasn’t signed to play shortstop for the Lelands. Yet Rube seems to be saying here that he meant to convert Lloyd into an outfielder until fate intervened.

•And of course there’s the original reason I became interested in this interview. Talking about the Philadelphia Giants, he remarks that “Georgia Rabbit” Washington joined the team. This provides solid confirmation of my circumstantial case that George Washington (and not Walter Ball) was the “Georgia Rabbit” that Sol White was referring to in his book. To underline this point, earlier in the column, when Rube refers to Walter Ball coming to Chicago to play for the “Union Giants” in 1906 (Foster, or Wilson, means the Leland Giants) he calls him “Thomas Walter Ball,” and not George Washington Ball. (Official documents call him “Walter Thomas Ball.”)

olympia field / olympic field, harlem

I have wondered whether Olympia Field in Harlem (site of the “Rube vs. Rube” game in 1903) was the same as, or somehow related to, Olympic Field, which later became the home of the New York Lincoln Giants.  The address for Olympia Field was commonly given as 135th Street and Lenox Avenue, whereas Olympic Field was usually said to be at 136th Street and Fifth Avenue—so the locations were just a long block away from each other.

Well, as it turns out, Olympia Field was a distinct place from the later Olympic Field.  Olympia Field was built on the block bounded by Lenox Avenue, 135th Street, and 136th Street, with the field evidently well below street level. It seems to have existed as a major venue for as little as three years, from 1901 through the early months of 1904, hosting semipro baseball, high school sports, semipro or amateur football, a circus, track and field competitions, and during the winter skating events.

It served as the home field for at least two white semipro baseball teams, the Harlem Athletics in 1902 and the Murray Hills in 1903.  Olympia Field’s most famous baseball game was certainly when the New York Giants took on the Murray Hills on October 4, 1903, which was said at the time to be the first Sunday baseball game ever played in Manhattan by a major league team--although if the August 2, 1903, game between the Cuban X Giants and Murray Hills really was the legendary Foster/Waddell matchup, that would inarguably be the most historically significant baseball game played at Olympia Field.

(New York Times, October 5, 1903, p. 8)

But the biggest event ever to occur at Olympia Field was Buffalo Bill’s Wild West Show, which played Harlem in 1902.  They rented Olympia Field, annexed several adjacent lots still held by the city, and created a huge enclosed space with canvas-shaded seating for 16,000.

(New York Press, May 25, 1902, p. 12)

The parade that brought the Wild West Show to Olympia Field was probably much like the one filmed by the American Mutoscope and Biograph Company a year before, a march down Fifth Avenue on April 1, 1901:

 

After some skating championships in early 1904, Olympia Field vanished as a sporting venue.  By 1905 a block of eight six-story apartment buildings had taken its place, “egg shell” tenements built very quickly to house immigrants—while Olympia Field was a few blocks north of what’s usually thought of as Italian Harlem, I’ve found a number of contemporary references to this area as part of “Little Italy.”  In order to bring the lot up to street level it had to be filled in, apparently mostly with sand. Unsurprisingly the ground turned out to be unstable, resulting in the collapse of one of the buildings in March, 1905.  I don’t know much about the subsequent history of the site, but it’s currently occupied by the Harlem Hospital Center.

Meanwhile, Olympia Field was replaced by a new ballpark, Olympic Field, no doubt named with the older venue in mind.  This new park was just one block over, bounded by Fifth Avenue, Madison Avenue, and 136th Street, although I’m not sure of its precise location (I haven’t found a fire insurance or other map that shows it).  It was managed by the McMahon brothers, Eddie and Jess, later the founders of the Lincoln Giants.  The park was opened on April 3, 1904, with a game featuring Rube Foster (this time with the Philadelphia Giants) once again pitching against the Murray Hills:

(New York Press, April 4, 1904, p. 4.)

A few days later (April 8) Olympic Field hosted a game between the Murray Hills and a pick-up team made up of players from both the Giants and Highlanders, the major leaguers crushing the semipros 19 to 1.  The game account from the Times includes a few details about the ballpark:

(New York Times, April 9, 1904, p. 7)

Olympic Field lasted through the 1919 season, when it was torn down to make way for a parking garage.  The grand stands were moved to the Lincoln Giants’ new home in the Bronx, the Catholic Protectory Oval.

rube vs. rube, part 3

Here’s another contemporary mention of the Cuban X Giants’ defeat of Rube Waddell and the semipro Murray Hills at New York’s Olympia Field on August 2, 1903—the game that may have been the source of Rube Foster’s nickname.  From the Jersey Journal (August 13, 1903, p. 7):




The relevant sentence is this one:

Typically copy like this, retailing the victories of a traveling team, originated with the traveling team itself, there not being any easy way for reporters (or the manager of the local team) to keep track of black or semipro teams and all their doings. So, eleven days after the August 2 game in New York, it seems quite likely that E. B. Lamar was using the defeat of Waddell to advertise his Cuban X Giants.

rube vs. rube, part 2

 

If you haven’t seen it, I’ve been engaged (in the comments for these two posts) in a dialogue with Rube Waddell biographer Dan O’Brien about whether or not I’ve actually uncovered enough evidence to establish that Waddell faced Rube Foster in a game in 1903. 

In the meantime Scott Simkus has been able to add to the discussion by finding an instance where Rube Waddell was advertised as pitching for the Murray Hills against the Philadelphia Giants, albeit in 1905:

 

(New York Evening World, June 24, 1905, p. 7)


This is what Scott says:

Phil Dixon [in his book on the 1905 Philadelphia Giants] has the Giants rallying for ten runs in the ninth to defeat Murray Hills 14-13 on June 25. Phil was mystified by why Rube Foster, the Giants pitcher, had trouble getting anybody out. No mention of Rube Waddell, no mention of players in the Murray Hills line-up. The Athletics had a played at home a day or so earlier, were off on Sunday and then went to Washington DC for a series. Could Waddell have been joined by his mates (or some of them, anyway) in New York, to make a couple quick bucks? If the Philly Giants were losing 13-4 going into the 9th, did Waddell tire or get taken out of the game?

For my own part I haven’t uncovered any accounts of this game.  But it’s interesting that we now twice have Waddell linked to a game that featured Rube Foster vs. the Murray Hills.  Anybody who feels like jumping in with additional information, please do!  

UPDATE 9/20/2012: Dan O'Brien, commenting on a different post:

Washington Post—June 27, 1905, page 8:

“‘Rube’ Waddell was advertised to pitch for the Murray Hills in New York on Sunday, but the ‘Rube’ spent the day quietly in Washington.” That's the only way one could spend it here.

charley and the bean factory

Charles Dryden, Rube Waddell

 When Charles Dryden of the Philadelphia North American reported on the meeting between Rube Waddell and Andrew Foster in New York City, August 2, 1903, he used half his space to talk about a bizarre incident involving a foul ball off the bat of Waddell that supposedly ignited a box of matches in a spectator’s pocket, setting the poor guy’s suit on fire and causing an uproar.

Ten days later, Dryden wrote about another Waddell start, this one for the A’s against the Boston Americans, in Boston.  Here’s the last part of his account, which you may have seen before:

PRODIGAL WADDELL PITCHED AND LOST

As a Side Issue, ‘Rube’ Caused a Bean Factory to Blow Up.

In the seventh inning, Rube Waddell hoisted a long foul over the right field bleachers that landed on the roof of the biggest bean cannery in Boston.  In descending, the ball fell on the roof of the engine room and jammed itself between the steam whistle and the stem of the valve that operates it.  The pressure set the whistle blowing.  It lacked a few minutes of five o’clock, yet the workmen started to leave the building.  They thought quitting time had come.

The incessant screeching of the bean-factory whistle led engineers in neighboring factories to think fire had broken out and they turned on their whistles.  With a dozen whistles going full blast, a policeman sent in an alarm of fire.  Just as the engines arrived, a steam cauldron in the first factory, containing a ton of beans, blew up.

The explosion dislodged Waddell’s foul fly and the whistle stopped blowing, but that was not the end of the trouble.

A shower of scalding beans descended on the bleachers and caused a small panic.  One man went insane.  When he saw the beans dropping out of a cloud of steam, the unfortunate rooter yelled, ‘The end of the world is coming and we will all be destroyed.’

An ambulance summoned to the supposed fire conveyed the demented man to his home.  The ton of beans proved a total loss.”

(Philadelphia North American, August 12, 1903; quoted in Rob Neyer, Rob Neyer’s Big Book of Baseball Legends, pp. 1-3)

Although Dryden otherwise reported what actually happened in the Boston/Philadelphia game, it probably won’t come as a great shock to learn that he made up the stuff about the bean factory.  If you have any doubt, check out Bill Nowlin’s article, “Consider Your Sources: Baseball and Baked Beans in Boston,” in the Baseball Research Journal (volume 34, 2005, pp. 110-112; unfortunately not online yet). 

I should check the Philadelphia North American itself for other, similar stories.  Maybe Dryden made a running joke that year out of Rube’s foul balls causing slapstick mayhem.

Incidentally, I don’t think Dryden’s foul-ball fabulations call into question the veracity of the Murray Hills/Cuban X Giants game, or the truth of Foster facing Waddell that day; that the game happened is firmly established by other sources than Dryden, and his usual operating procedure was to add funny stories into otherwise factual accounts of real games. Given that he had no problem making up stuff about regular, high-profile American League games that were lavishly reported on in other papers, there’s no particular reason for him to have inserted Waddell into an obscure semi-pro contest in New York unless the Rube was actually there.

NOTE: The image of Dryden above is taken from the BJR article by Bill Nowlin.