Agate Type

Inside Sprudel Park

The West Baden Sprudels, a black professional team managed for four years by the great C. I. Taylor and starring such players as Dizzy Dismukes, George Shively, and C. I.’s brothers Ben and Candy Jim, played their home games in Sprudel Park. This was an amazing structure, part of the luxury West Baden Springs Hotel complex, that consisted of a baseball field circled by an enclosed, elevated bicycle track, with the hotel’s dome—the largest freestanding dome in the Western Hemisphere—looming in the background.

Kevin Pope has been able to collect some photographs and other materials related to the Sprudels. Among these items is the following postcard, showing the Sprudels inside the park sometime from 1910 through 1913:

 

The postcard is unfortunately too blurry to identify anybody for sure, although I will guess that the guy kneeling in the center with the collie mascot is C. I. Taylor. He appeared in this 1920 photo of the Indianapolis ABCs in a very similar posture (albeit without a dog):

Kevin has also dug up some ledger pages with some player names and salaries. Here’s one page from 1911:

I can confirm that a couple of these guys did indeed appear for the Sprudels in 1911: Luther O’Neal (catcher) and Sutton (no first name, first base). The others could include Albert Toney, Big Jim Norman, Leonard or Roland Griffin, W. Higbee, Hub Alexander, and Lou Oliver, all players around this time for the French Lick Plutos (the Sprudels’ archrivals), Indianapolis ABCs (C. I. Taylor’s next team), Birmingham Giants (Taylor’s previous team), or Chicago Union Giants. The $30 or $40 paid to everybody but “Griffen” sound like a week’s or maybe a month’s pay; Griffen’s $3 must be for one game.

In addition, Kevin has a much later version of the French Lick Plutos, the 1931 “Pluto Red Devils of French Lick and West Baden”:

The ’31 Pluto Red Devils were themselves probably not a top drawer professional club, but they did play the Louisville White Sox of the Negro National League:

(Louisville Courier-Journal, May 31, 1931, p. 39)

And Kevin has also run across some photos of a black fraternal organization from the same area, ca. 1910, perhaps showing some of the men associated with the ball club (though I don’t recognize anyone):

Dizzy Dismukes & Steel Arm Johnny Taylor, 1912

Dwayne Isgrig sent along this advert from the Delphi Journal (Delphi, Indiana), August 1, 1912. The ad includes both the photo of Dizzy Dismukes I posted a while back and one of Steel Arm John Taylor pitching, an image I’ve never seen before. Thanks Dwayne!

Dizzy Dismukes, West Baden Sprudels, 1912

Doing some research recently I was surprised to run into this photo, which I’ve never seen, of Dizzy Dismukes with the West Baden Sprudels in 1912.

(Indianapolis News, September 28, 1912, p. 10)

another early negro leagues no-hitter

Last year I identified Dick Redding’s whitewash of the Cuban Stars at Atlantic City on August 28, 1912, as the “first Negro league no-hitter.”  Here’s an even earlier candidate, though it depends on how you define “Negro leagues.”

On April 21, 1911, the aptonymous John Goodgame of the West Baden Sprudels set down the French Lick Plutos with zero hits, striking out eleven and walking one, at Pluto Park in French Lick, Indiana.

(Indianapolis Freeman, April 29, 1911, p. 7)

The only issue here, I guess, is whether the game meets the requirements to be considered a “black major league” game.  I’ve included the 1911 Sprudels in the Negro Leagues DB but not the Plutos, but this is simply because I haven’t found any box scores for Plutos games vs. other black teams.  (The 1912 Plutos are in the DB.)  Here’s a Plutos lineup from a game against a white semipro team three weeks later:

(Bedford, Ind., Daily Mail, May 15, 1911, p. 1)

They had George Shively, String Bean Williams, Albert Toney, Roland Griffin, and Henry Hannon, along with a few players from the pre-C. I. Taylor Indianapolis ABCs (Sam Thompson, W. Higbee, Otis Francis).  I’d say they were no worse than some of the weaker teams included in the DB.  At any rate this would, I think, be the earliest known no-hitter between black professional teams. (Though I wouldn’t bet against early no-hitters being found in, say, the Texas Colored League.)

sprudel park

A while back I called the Catholic Protectory Oval, the Bronx home of the New York Lincoln Giants, “one of the most remarkable settings for Negro league baseball.”  Now I’d like to introduce what’s unquestionably the most remarkable setting for Negro league baseball: Sprudel Park in West Baden Springs, Indiana, birthplace of Larry Bird and home of the West Baden Sprudels in the 1900s and 1910s.

The Sprudels were organized and run by black employees of the palatial West Baden Springs Hotel, which boasted of the largest free-standing dome in the Americas, and advertised itself as the “Eighth Wonder of the World.”

Both the Baden hotel and its great rival in the adjacent community of French Lick existed because of the mineral springs of the region, and both hotels marketed brands of mineral water—the West Baden hotel called its brand “Sprudel Water,” while French Lick sold the eventually much more famous “Pluto Water.”  The hotels’ black professional baseball teams named themselves after the mineral water brands.  By 1910 both clubs had gotten pretty serious—the Sprudels had hired Charles Isham Taylor, famous manager of the Birmingham Giants, to run the club, and he brought along his ballplaying brothers, including eventual Hall of Famer Ben Taylor.  The Plutos, meanwhile, had built their own ballpark, Pluto Baseball Park (more on this another time).

The Sprudels had no need to build a park, because a venue already existed.  The Indianapolis Freeman described it in 1911:  “The park is the prettiest in the West and very much different from all other ball parks, the fans having an opportunity to see the games from an elevated bicycle track, fifteen feet high” (March 18, 1911, p. 7).  This does not quite capture the reality of the park, as you can see from this 1911 postcard:

And here’s an amazing aerial view on another postcard, this one from John Martin Smith’s book of photographs and postcards, French Lick and West Baden Springs:

There’s also a Sanborn fire insurance map from 1913, which unfortunately cuts off in the middle of the velodrome/baseball park:

And here, also from Smith’s book, is a look at the upper level of the bicycle track, where fans could sit in deck chairs and watch C. I. Taylor’s Sprudels, or the major league clubs that took spring training here.

The odd shape, the bicycle track/grandstand with vacationers looking on from their deck chairs, the tennis courts in center field, the hotel’s great dome, possibly visible over the top of the structure if you looked back toward home plate, the ambience of the surrounding gardens…all of this combined to make the West Baden Base Ball Park, or Sprudel Park as it was usually called by the newspapers reporting on games, one of the weirdest settings for professional baseball you can imagine.

The Sprudels and Plutos began to fade away as baseball powers in the mid-1910s, and Sprudel Park burnt down in 1928.  But today, to judge from Google Maps, it looks like a baseball field of some sort, with a backstop and outfield fence, lies directly on the former site of Sprudel Park.  Even though the angles are a little different and the course of the creek seems to have been altered since 1913, you can orient yourself by the gray cross of the little bridge and walkway across the creek, which remains.