Agate Type

chester base ball ground, 1898

In the comments to my post on Cuban X Giant Ed Wilson’s three home runs off future major leaguer Stoney McGlynn in Chester, Pennsylvania, in 1902, I remarked that “at least two of Wilson’s were over-the-fence home runs, though who knows how big the Chester park was.”

Well, Bill Mullins found an 1898 Sanford fire insurance map of Chester that shows the ballpark.  It’s pretty definitely the same park, as it’s on 12th Street, and the Chester Times called it “Twelfth Street Park” in 1902.  While there’s no indication of where the fences were (and no guarantee that the park hadn’t been altered since 1898), this might give us some hint about its dimensions.  Going by the scale at the bottom, and granting some space between the grand stand and home plate, it looks like the right field fence would have been quite close (certainly much less than 300 feet down the line) while left field was substantially farther out, and center field was potentially quite spacious (relatively speaking, anyway).

So, where did Wilson hit his home runs in 1902?  Here are his four plate appearances:

In the second inning, “Wilson led off with a home run over the right wire…”

In the third inning, “Wilson repeated the trick and lined the ball over the centre field fence after two men were out and the umpire had called two strikes on him.”

In the fifth he struck out.

And in the eighth he homered again to help seal the game, but no details are given.

I don’t have any idea whether Wilson hit left or right-handed (or was a switch-hitter), and again we don’t know where the fences were exactly, especially in center field.  But right field was probably quite close, and the mention of “the wire” indicates that there might have been a high fence or barrier there to compensate for the short distance.

stoney mcglynn vs. cuban X giants, 1902

Looking for something else entirely I ran across this account of a 1902 game between the Cuban X Giants and the local team in Chester, Pennsylvania.  On the mound for Chester was Stoney McGlynn, a minor league superstar and sometime St. Louis Cardinal who is supposed to have been a distant relative of mine.  Although the game was close, the X Giants smashed four home runs off poor Stoney in their 5-to-3 win, three of the long balls coming from the bat of the almost completely unknown Ed Wilson.

You should be able to enlarge the story by clicking on it; be sure to read the notes on the game in the far right column.