The Spirit of St. Louis: A History of the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns

By Peter Golenbock

No metropolis in America has more pure baseball spirit than St. Louis, Missouri. It's a love affair that began in 1874, when a band of local boosters raised $20,000 to start a professional ball club, and the honeymoon still isn't over. Now Peter Golenbock, the bestselling author and master of baseball oral history, has written another remarkable saga enriched by extensive and incomparable remembrances from the scores of players, managers, and executives who lived it.

These pages capture the voices of Branch Rickey on George Sisler. Rogers Hornsby and his creation of the farm system. Hornsby on Grover Cleveland Alexander -- and Alexander on Hornsby. Dizzy Dean on -- who else? -- Dizzy Dean. And so many others including "The Man" himself, Stan Musial; Eldon Auker, Ellis Clary, Denny Galehouse, and Don Gutteridge on the 1940s Browns; Brooks Lawrence, the second man to cross the Cardinals' color line; Jim Bronsnan, the first man to break the players' "code of silence"; Tommy Herr, Darrell Porter, and Joe McGrane on Whitey Herzog's Cardinals; and Cardinal owner Bill DeWitt, Jr., on the team today.

• Language: English
• Publisher: Open Road Integrated Media
• Release date: Feb 15, 2011
• ISBN: 9780062078568

Peter Golenbock

Peter Golenbock has written eight New York Times bestsellers, among them some of baseball’s most important books, including Dynasty: The New York Yankees 1949-64; The Bronx Zoo (with Sparky Lyle); Number 1 (with Billy Martin); Balls (with Greg Nettles); and Idiot (with Johnny Damon), as well as Personal Fouls and American Prince (with Tony Curtis).

Book preview

THE BROWNS

CHAPTER 1

THE FOUNDING

Long before the coming of the white man, a hunting party of Fox Indians from the Algonquin tribe spied a caravan of rival Sioux paddling large canoes on a wide river. That night, sitting around the campfire and discussing what they had seen, the Fox warriors discussed their sighting of the Missouri — the Big Canoe People—who were camped where the river converged with another powerful body of water.

To the smaller of the two rivers they gave the same name, Missouri, and to the other the name Mesisi-piya, which in Fox meant the Big River.

The Indians had this fertile expanse of land to themselves until whites began settling in the area in 1763. Two Frenchmen, Pierre LaClede and Auguste Chouteau, opened a fur-trading post in a log cabin on the west bank of the Mesisi-piya, ten miles downstream from where the mighty Missouri and Mississippi meet.

Back East, wearing a tall hat made of beaver was a sign of elegance. The Indians had an abundance of beaver, for whose pelts the European traders swapped cloth, tobacco, beads, knives, and whiskey. Gradually a village would grow around LaClede and Chouteau’s post. It would be named St. Louis in honor of the Crusader King of France, Louis IX.

After explorations by Frenchmen Jacques Marquette and Louis Jolliet, the French claimed territory along the Mississippi stretching from New Orleans at the mouth of the river north over an endless tract of wilderness spreading as far west as the Rocky Mountains and north as Montana. Napoléon I, who ruled France, had intended this land, called the Louisiana Territory, to be France’s stronghold in the New World, but he was in a war with England and knew his army’s power in the New World was shaky. To consolidate his position, he planned to subdue the rebellious slaves of Haiti, make the Dominican Republic his base of operation from which he would send troops to New Orleans, and then take control of the Louisiana Territory.

President Thomas Jefferson warned Napoléon I that if French troops stepped foot onto Louisiana Territory soil, it would be tantamount to a declaration of war. He asked Napoléon I to cede New Orleans to the United States to prevent any conflict. Napoléon I demurred, but when he lost 40,000 of his best troops in Haiti in a futile attempt to quell a slave rebellion, Napoléon I saw his dreams of empire in the New World crushed. He decided it would be wisest to sell France’s land holdings in North America even at a bargain-basement price rather than stand by and watch the Americans take them from him.

In July of 1803, Jefferson negotiated a deal to buy the 828,000 acres of the Louisiana Purchase for $15 million, doubling the size of the United States overnight. France received some much-needed cash, and Napoléon I could take some solace in knowing he had strengthened the United States against their mutual enemy: the hated English. In 1819, when the first steamboat, the Zebu-Ion Pike, docked along the wharf, St. Louis had 1,400 inhabitants. These were traders and trappers, many of whom toiled for the St. Louis Fur Company.

By 1850, St. Louis’s population had grown to 160,000, including 40,000 Germans fleeing poverty and religious persecution. When gold was discovered in California in 1848, St. Louis became the jumping-off point for thousands of westward-bound adventurers. River traffic grew. Six major rail terminals were built. In 1874 the Eads Bridge was built across the Mississippi River, spurring new railroad construction westward. It wasn’t long before nineteen major railroads chugged in and out of St. Louis. By 1870, 310,000 inhabitants had transformed the little trading post into the nation’s fourth-largest city.

Among the men who first traveled to St. Louis was a Frenchman by the name of Jean-Baptiste Charles Lucas. He had graduated with distinction from the University of Caen in France, and after going to law school in Paris had become friendly with a man by the name of Roy de Chaumont. Through him Lucas made the acquaintance of the American ambassador to France, Benjamin Franklin. Chaumont was coming to America to live, and at Franklin’s urging, Lucas decided to accompany him. Lucas arrived in the States bearing a flattering recommendation from Franklin.

In 1801 one of Franklin’s closest friends, President Thomas Jefferson, recruited Lucas to go on a mission. Napoléon I was waging war in Haiti. If he won, his next target would be the United States. He asked Lucas to personally investigate the conditions west of the Mississippi to ascertain the temper of the French and Spanish residents of Louisiana. Would they side with the French or with the Americans if war came? Jefferson appointed him one of the judges of the territory and made him land commissioner.

Lucas traveled by horseback to the fledgling outpost in 1805. Once there, Lucas foresaw St. Louis’s future greatness, and he invested heavily in real estate. The war that came was against the British, not the French, and after the British were repulsed, the land boom that followed the War of 1812 enabled him to sell less than a quarter of his substantial holdings for twenty times his investment. At the time of his death in 1843, J.-B.C. Lucas had become a very rich man.

Judge Lucas was survived by his only remaining son, James, and a daughter. James Lucas expanded the family’s real estate holdings during the 1850s by developing Lucas Place, the most exclusive residential district in St. Louis. He would go on to own the greater part of the city’s entire business district. Upon his death in November of 1873, he left more than $1 million to each of his seven children.

Two of his sons, J.-B.C. Lucas II and Henry V. Lucas, would spend part of their inheritance to start professional baseball teams in separate leagues. And for almost eighty years hence, two St. Louis teams would pull and tug for the loyalty of the citizenry.

According to Shepard Barkley, a judge on the Missouri Supreme Court, it was Jere Frain, a contractor, who introduced St. Louisiane to the game.

SHEPARD BARCLAY: It was in the early fifties that Mr. Frain brought the game to St. Louis. I was a little fellow at the time and with other boys I played all sorts of games on the field located right where Lafayette Park is now. I remember while playing there one day Jere Frain, a great tall boy, came among us. He was a stranger who had come from somewhere in the East, and on our field he laid out a diamond and showed us how to play the modern game of baseball. He built us a diamond much the same as the diamond in use today, and in fact, showed us just how to play the game. That was really the introduction of the game in St. Louis.

Frain, a second baseman, had played for the highly regarded Charter Oak Club of Brooklyn before moving to St. Louis. In 1864 he became captain of the Empire club of St. Louis. Other St. Louis teams, including the Unions and the Reds, were formed, but the Empire club remained St. Louis’s best.

In 1869 the immortal Cincinnati Red Stockings paid St. Louis a visit. The Red Stockings, led by the famed Wright brothers, George and Harry, had run roughshod over all opponents in 1869, and the Empires proved no match for Cincy’s powerful nine.

The Red Stockings then broke up and were replaced as the country’s best team by the Chicago White Stockings, led by star pitcher Al Spalding. After Chicagoans raised $20,000 to fund the team, the White Stockings became the paragons of professional baseball.

The White Stockings came to St. Louis in 1870 and trounced two of the city’s amateur teams, the Empires, 36–8, and the Unions, 47–1. In October the White Stockings beat the Empires again, this time by a score of 46–8. In 1871 the White Stockings joined the National Association of Professional Baseball Players. That year they traveled to St. Louis and defeated the Atlantics and Empires by the lopsided scores of 22–2 and 34–8. Other pro teams, the Philadelphia A’s, the Brooklyn Atlantics, and the Boston Red Stockings, soundly defeated St. Louis amateur teams. In 1873 3,000 fans attended a game in which the Empires were defeated, 24–4, by the Red Stockings. In 1874 the Chicago White Stockings soundly beat eight different St. Louis amateur teams. Al Spalding, the owner of the White Stockings, further enraged the St. Louis sporting fraternity when he signed two local St. Louis players: pitcher Dan Collins and shortstop Johnny Peters. When the White Stockings defeated St. Louis teams six more times, the cumulative score was Chicago 93, St. Louis 14. The local rooters were embarrassed as St. Louis clubs suffered through a streak of twenty defeats in a row at the hands of the Chicago juggernaut.

The constant losing was hard for the prideful St. Louis boosters to take, and in the fall of 1874 they organized and raised $20,000 of their own to start a professional team to play the next season in the National Association. They sold 450 shares at $50 each.

The president of the St. Louis professionals was J.-B.C. Lucas II, the wealthiest man in St. Louis. Charles Fowle, who owned an establishment called the Dollar Store, also invested. Orrick Bishop, a talented amateur player who ended his career in 1867 when he opened his law practice, was appointed managing director (general manager) of the team, a post he held all three years of the team’s existence. Bishop traveled East to sign players for the fledgling St. Louis team. He signed shortstop Dickey Pearce, right fielder Jack Chapman, first baseman Herman Dehlman, who was on the roster of the Brooklyn Atlantics, and Lipman Pike, who had played with the Hartford Dark Blues. (Pike has been called the first professional player. He was paid $20 a week in 1866 by the Philadelphia A’s.)

Pearce, who Bishop signed off the roster of the Brooklyn Atlantics, also was a pioneer. When he first began playing baseball, teams played four outfielders and only one infielder between second and third base. Pearce felt he could help his team more by playing between the third baseman and the second base bag. He cut off a lot of balls that otherwise would have gone into the outfield. Though thirty-eight years old when he joined the Browns, Pearce was still one of the best fielders in the game.

Bishop found the rest of his players in the Philadelphia area. He signed four Philly natives—third baseman Bill Hague, catcher Tom Miller, second baseman Joe Battin, and left fielder Edgar Ned Cuthbert, who had been a pro since 1865. Cuthbert, known as an innovator, was credited as the first player ever to slide into a base.

Cuthbert spent all but one season playing in Philadelphia. In 1873 with the Philadelphia Whites he led the National League in stolen bases. In 1874 Cuthbert played for Al Spalding and the Chicago White Stockings. During the winter, Bishop got him to agree to come to St. Louis.

Cuthbert then convinced Bishop to sign a kid pitcher by the name of George Washington Grin Bradley. An amateur at the start of the 1874 season, Bradley had been signed by Easton, Pennsylvania, as its batting practice pitcher. But Bradley was so impressive that Jack Smith, the manager and starting pitcher, benched himself and inserted Bradley. When the professional Philadelphia A’s sought to sign the boy, the youngster didn’t want to share mound duties with pitcher-manager Dick McBride and declined the invitation. When offered the chance to be the number-one pitcher for St. Louis, Bradley jumped at the chance.

When Bishop returned home to St. Louis with his signees, the local papers questioned why he hadn’t signed any local talent. Reacting to the criticism, Bishop signed two players to sit on the bench: catcher George Seward and an eighteen-year-old backup pitcher by the name of James Pud Galvin. (Galvin should never have been allowed to leave St. Louis. He would go on to win’ 360 games for Buffalo and Pittsburgh and be elected to baseball’s Hall of Fame in 1965.)

The St. Louis team uniform called for brown stockings, and that became the name of the club. (The other explanation is that the team’s stockings originally were white but quickly turned brown from the juice from chewing tobacco spat on each other by the St. Louis players.) Shortly after the Brown Stockings announced that they were going to play in the National Association for the 1875 season, another local St. Louis team, the Red Stockings, said that they too had gained a franchise. But the Brown Stockings were a far better team, and the Red Stockings folded before the end of July after a 4–15 start.

The Brown Stockings played their home games on a diamond first laid out in 1866 in the middle of a former German shooting park near the corner of Grand and St. Louis avenues known as the Grand Avenue Grounds (later Sportsman’s Park). The highlight of the 1875 season came on May 6 in a game between the St. Louis Browns and the city’s longtime nemesis, the Chicago White Stockings. St. Louis baseball fans saw this game as the first decent opportunity for a local team to defeat its rivals, and according to the St. Louis Democrat, a seemingly endless string of horse-drawn carriages rode down Grand Avenue on their way to the ballpark. Eight thousand fans squeezed into the park, while another 2,000 sought a view from light poles, housetops, and trees. It was a festive occasion, the likes of which was rarely seen before in St. Louis.

Grin Bradley started for the Brown Stockings against Chicago pitcher George the Charmer Zettlein. St. Louis scored first when Jack Chapman tripled to the left field fence to score Cuthbert, who had been safe on an error by Zettlein on a ground ball back to the box. The run was all Bradley needed in a shocking 10–0 rout. As soon as the Brown Stockings recorded the final putout, the St. Louis fans gave vent to their emotions, gleeful that the long losing string against Chicago’s juggernaut finally had been broken. Pandemonium arose in the grandstand. According to the St. Louis Dispatch, The entire assemblage rose to their feet and shouted until they were hoarse, danced, sang and threw their hats into the air as though they were taking leave of their senses. They kissed, wept and laughed over each other, embraced, shook hands, slapped each other’s back, ran to and fro like madmen.

The celebration lasted into the night.

About town last night, said the St. Louis Dispatch, everywhere, the excitement regarding the great victory was most intense. In hotel, shop, restaurant, bar room in the home circle and on the street, but little was talked of save the terrific ‘poulticing’ the Browns had administered to the Chicago Whites.

In the St. Louis Republican the next day, the writer exulted: Time was when Chicago had an excellent ball club, the best in the West, but that was before St. Louis decided to make an appearance on the diamond field and there, as everywhere else, attest the supremacy of the Western city with the greatest population, the most flourishing trade, the biggest bridge and the prettiest women.

The writer added: St. Louis is happy. Chicago has not only been beaten in baseball, but outrageously beaten. With all the bragging of that boastful city … the result only illustrates once more the old truth that bluster does not always win. In this, as other things, St. Louis proves stronger.

Two days later the teams met again. The traffic jam was infuriating. Every seat in the ballpark was taken. General William Tecumseh Sherman sat in the press box. In the spring of 1861 he had moved to St. Louis from Arkansas, anticipating secession. Before the Civil War, Sherman had worked for the Lucas family, running the North Broadway streetcar system. When the war started, he joined the Union side. His March to the Sea, which cut the Confederacy in half to help win the war for the Union, became part of American folklore.

In this game Bradley started against Jim Devlin. The Brown Stockings led 4–0 going into the ninth inning, when Chicago rallied for three runs. With the tying run on third, Bradley induced John Glenn to hit a grounder to third baseman Bill Hague, who fielded the ball cleanly and threw to first baseman Herman Dehlman for the final out. Once again the city held an impromptu celebration.

In Chicago the next day, the local papers mocked the importance put on these games by the St. Louis fans. Said the Chicago Tribune, The city of St. Louis [has made] itself ridiculous generally.

A poem in the St. Louis Democrat explained just how much the two victories over the hated White Stockings meant to the city. The author, Jack Frost, titled the poem A Tale of Two Cities—2000A.D.

This little village seemed accursed;

Soon all her gaudy baubles burst.

She proved what me thought her before,

A wind-bag burgh—and nothing more.

Where this wretched village stood

Now stands a sign of painted wood

On it these words: "Upon this spot

Chicago stood, but now stands not"

Her time soon came, she had to go

A victim, she, of too much, blow.

The two wins over Chicago provided the season’s highlights. Led by Bradley and managed by Dickey Pearce, St. Louis finished fourth in the National Association in 1875 behind the Boston Red Stockings.

At the end of the season, the league, badly run, folded.

Chicagoans Al Spalding and William Hulbert met with interested team executives from around the country, including two St. Louisianans, Charles Fowle and Orrick Bishop, to found the National League starting in 1876. Bishop, an attorney and later a judge, helped Spalding draw up the league’s constitution, the first schedule, wrote the initial players’ contracts, and formulated the entire program.

The St. Louis team, still called the Brown Stockings, played in the National League for only two seasons. In 1876 the team finished second, two games behind the White Stockings with a 45–19 record. Managed by first baseman Herman Dehlman, it was sparked by the superb pitching of Bradley, who finished the season 45–19 with a 1.23 earned run average, best in the league. The highlight was a no-hitter Bradley pitched against Hartford on July 15.

In 1877 team owner J.-B.C. Lucas II decided to begin the season as manager. Lucas would quickly learn a lesson gained by many wealthy men throughout the history of the game: Just because you have a lot of money and you like the game, that doesn’t qualify you to run a baseball team.

Lucas’s preseason started badly when star pitcher Grin Bradley was lured away by Chicago’s Spalding, the smartest and most cutthroat owner in the game.

Lucas sought to strengthen the team at the end of the ‘76 season by signing four starting Louisville players: pitcher Jim Devlin, outfielder George Hall, third baseman Al Nichols, and shortstop Bill Craver. It was an extremely unusual transaction. Observers wondered why Louisville chose to offer these excellent players for sale. As much as these players strengthened the team, they could not make up for the loss of Bradley, whose replacement, Fred Tricky Nichols, proved an unworthy substitute, compiling an 18–23 record despite a 2.60 earned run average. The Browns finished fourth to Boston, led by Harry Wright and pitcher Tommy Bond.

Before the ‘77 season ended J.-B.C. Lucas II would quit as manager. When it was revealed that the four members of the Louisville team whom Lucas had signed had admitted to throwing games the previous season, they were barred from baseball for life. Lucas, moreover, was accused of knowing about the fixed games and their tainted past at the time he purchased the players. After the 1877 season Lucas resigned as president and the St. Louis team withdrew from the National League.

CHAPTER 2

CHRIS VON DER AHE: THE BEER BARON

After the St. Louis Brown Stockings dropped out of the National League, the team continued as an independent club under the aegis of the St. Louis Sportsman’s Park and Club Association. Led by brothers Al and William Spink, the association raised money to outfit and run the team. The Spinks arranged the schedule and wrote up the games in the local newspapers, Al in the Missouri Republican, William in the St. Louis Globe-Democrat.

The team, skippered by veteran manager Ned Cuthbert, was a popular draw. As many as 2,000 fans attended the exhibition contests despite the amateur standing of the team. In 1880 the team played 21 games and won all but one, losing to the professional Louisville Reds by the score of 14–8.

In 1881 the team again lost only one game. In the fall of 1881 Cuthbert acquired a stylish first baseman by the name of Charlie Comiskey at a salary of $75 a month. For the next decade, Comiskey would star on the team, then he would manage it to greatness.

The twenty-two-year-old was born on August 15, 1859, in Chicago. His father was the first president of the city council and served as alderman for eleven years. He was also deputy United States internal revenue collector under President Andrew Johnson. His father believed it important that the boy learn a trade, and he was apprenticed to a master plumber by the name of Hogan.

When he was eighteen, however, Comiskey’s career path changed when in 1877 he pitched on a Chicago amateur team called the Liberties. After high school, Comiskey attended St. Mary’s College in Kansas, where he was named captain of the freshman team. At St. Mary’s Comiskey met Ted Sullivan, who would become his mentor and his ticket to the big leagues. Sullivan was the St. Mary’s shortstop, and when he pitched, at his request Comiskey would catch him.

TED SULLIVAN: "I picked out Comiskey because I considered him the smartest kid on the teams. One incident will show how quickly, even in those days, he grasped an opportunity. I noticed that a runner on third was taking a big lead. Comiskey signaled for a certain ball. I shook my head. He signaled for another and I repeated. Finally I left the box, all the time upbraiding him because of his bonehead strategy. He never said a word but met me halfway, and still bawling him out, I slipped him the ball while I returned to the mound.

All set behind the bat and Comiskey whipped the ball to third, nailing the runner by ten feet. I did not tell him what to do. I simply wanted to find out if he could think for himself. From that time on, I began to have respect for Charles, and he was only a kid at that.

Comiskey’s father had him transferred to Christian Brothers College so he would study more and play baseball less, while Sullivan became player-manager of the amateur Alerts in hometown Milwaukee.

Sullivan needed a pitcher, and when he asked Comiskey to come to Milwaukee and join his team, Comiskey asked for $50 a month. Sullivan knew that owner Thomas Shaughnessy, former president of the Canadian Pacific Railroad, didn’t have a budget for salaries, so Sullivan told the team owner he needed $50 to fix a hole in the outfield fence. Sullivan gave the money to Comiskey instead.

When Shaughnessy noticed that the hole had not been fixed, he asked Sullivan what he had done with the money. Sullivan pointed out the hard-throwing pitcher with the underhand motion. Because it was an amateur team, Shaughnessy needed to account for the money somewhere other than salaries, and he wrote down the $50 under general expenses.

In the spring of 1878, Sullivan and Comiskey played on the Elgin watch factory team in Elgin, Illinois. The team didn’t lose a single game all summer long.

In the fall of ‘78, Sullivan moved to Dubuque, Iowa, to run a company that supplied newspapers and candy to customers riding the Illinois Central Railroad. Sullivan offered Comiskey $50 a month to play ball during the summer plus a 20 percent commission on newpaper and candy sales. The offer was a lot more than what Hogan was paying him as an apprentice plumber, and it gave Comiskey the courage to tell his father he intended to be a ballplayer. Comiskey quit the plumbing business for good and headed for Dubuque.

CHARLIE COMISKEY

(Courtesy Brace Photo)

In Dubuque, Ted Sullivan not only ran the local baseball team, he organized the four-team minor league pro circuit in which it played, with the other three teams in Omaha, Rockford, and Davenport. At the end of the 1878 season, Sullivan’s league became the first minor league to complete a schedule without folding.

Sullivan had an unerring eye for talent. In 1879 he added third baseman Bill Gleason and future Hall of Fame pitcher Charles Old Hoss Radbourn to the Dubuque roster. In addition to his pitching duties, Comiskey played first, second, third, and the outfield. The team won the league championship, but still lost money.

In 1880 Sullivan didn’t have the money to continue as a professional team, so he scaled back and played other independent semipro teams. The team was called the Dubuque Rabbits, in large part because of the speed and skill at stealing bases of Comiskey and Bill Gleason. That year Comiskey injured his arm and became the team’s regular first baseman, a position he would play for eighteen years.

On July 16, 1881, the Rabbits were invited to play in St. Louis against the newly organized Browns at the team’s Grand Avenue Grounds. In a game that St. Louis won 9–1, Comiskey made a dozen plays at first base flawlessly, hit a double, and showed blinding speed as he ran the bases. When Browns manager Ned Cuthbert expressed interest in acquiring Comiskey, Al Spink, who was running the Browns along with his brother William, offered Comiskey a roster spot.

Comiskey was a dazzling base runner as well as fielder. Although he wasn’t the fastest runner on the team, no one could slide as deftly as he. He perfected the fadeaway slide that Ty Cobb would become famous for many years later. Usually, he would slide into a base headfirst. Comiskey once explained why he recommended the headfirst slide:

CHARLIE COMISKEY: I started sliding headfirst because I figured that to be the most advantageous way of getting a close decision. It is true that as the game developed, the greater number of players went feetfirst into the bag, but this is risky in more ways than one, even though it is more comfortable than the other. It sometimes means a broken leg, and in any case the runner is unable to see the bag. Of course, combining the phenomenal skill and the extreme speed of a Ty Cobb, the feetfirst slide has certain advantages, but for all-around efficiency the head slide, in my estimation, has the shade. The runner knows where he is going, he can watch the movements of the fielder, and his arms have the edge over the legs in reaching for the bag.

Comiskey was the Brown Stockings’ main attraction when in 1882 a local entrepreneur by the name of Christian Frederick Chris Von der Ahe bought the team and returned it to professional status.

Von der Ahe was born in 1851 in the farming community of Hille, Germany. He came to America at the age of sixteen when tough economic conditions and the likelihood of his being drafted into the Prussian Army prompted him to emigrate.

In the early 1870s, Von der Ahe opened a bar and meat market at the corner of Vandeventer and Grand avenues. His beer and knockwurst became popular items among the many German immigrants living in the area, and with his profits he began acquiring property after property along the two blocks stretching from Grand Avenue to Vandeventer to St. Louis avenues. On the property, he built rooming houses, units he rented to immigrant German laborers. In 1874 he opened a grocery store and the Golden Lion Saloon on the corner of St. Louis and Grand avenues, close to the ballpark where the Browns played.

Von der Ahe knew nothing about baseball, and when he first opened the Golden Lion he was mystified why in the afternoon his bar would fill with customers and then suddenly empty. An hour or two later it would fill again. He discovered the reason before that first year was over: His customers were attending the nearby Browns baseball games. Von der Ahe’s Golden Lion Saloon became a popular meeting place for the St. Louis drinking and sporting fraternity. Political careers would be launched there. The love of baseball was was what most of his customers had in common.

At first Von der Ahe didn’t pay any attention to the game itself, even though many of his customers were baseball fans. In 1881 Browns manager Ned Cuthbert, a regular customer who later became one of Von der Ahe’s bartenders, began explaining the beauty and complexity of the game to Von der Ahe. Cuthbert knew of which he spoke. He had been one of the nation’s early professionals, starting in left field for the Chicago White Stockings in 1874 and the next year playing in St. Louis with the Brown Stockings. By the 1880s, he had retired as a player, but was well respected as the Browns’ manager. Though a knee injury had cut short Cuthbert’s career, whenever the Browns found themselves a man short, he would still write himself into the lineup and play.

CHRIS VON DER AHE: It was Eddie [Cuthbert] who talked me into baseball. That was in 1881. He picked me out, and for months he talked league baseball, until he convinced me that there was something in it.

In addition to learning something about the game, Von der Ahe also came to understand how integral the Browns were to his bar business. During one of their conversations, Cuthbert said to him, Why don’t you bring your beer to them?

Von der Ahe loved the idea, but he discovered that the management of the St. Louis Sportsman’s Park and Club Association was on the side of the burgeoning temperance movement. Al and William Spink, who ran the association, would not allow beer to be sold at the ballpark.

There was only one way out of his dilemma: In 1881 the twenty-nine-year-old Von der Ahe leased the Grand Avenue ballpark from Gus Solari and bought the Browns from the St. Louis Sportman’s Park and Club Association. He paid $1,800 for 180 of the 200 shares issued by the club. Von der Ahe later would buy the other 20 shares from the Spink brothers.

Von der Ahe was a quick study and a man of vision. He realized that ballpark fans were a captive and willing audience. In addition to hiring beer vendors who sold tall steins of cold beer to customers in the stands, Von der Ahe converted a two-story home he owned behind right field into a beer garden where fans could sit and drink beer while watching the game. Before long, Von der Ahe could estimate the size of the crowd by the amount of beer he sold there.

AL SPINK: It was a turning point in the history of sport. Thereafter, beer would provide bucketsful of money for virtually every professional team in the land and for hundreds of colleges as well.

Beer had been popular in America since the Pilgrims landed at Plymouth Rock in 1620. George Washington had a brew house at Mount Vernon. Sam Adams was the son of a prosperous brewer. Francis Scott Key wrote The Star-Spangled Banner over a few brews at the Fountain Inn in Baltimore. The melody of Key’s anthem even came from an English drinking song, To Anacreon in Heaven. In 1816 Thomas Jefferson wrote of beer: I wish to see this beverage become common. By 1821, Jefferson’s beer was well known in Virginia.

CHRIS VON DER AHE

(Courtesy Brace Photo)

The beer industry thrived with the influx of hundreds of thousands of German immigrants beginning in 1849. Germans flocked to cities like St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Louisville, and beer consumption grew proportionally.

Some of the biggest breweries in America got their start in St. Louis. In 1859 Adolphus Busch teamed with Eberhard Anheuser to start a brewery, and as American beer drinkers began to show their preference for German beer over the English ale or stout, by end of the 1870s Anheuser-Busch would become one of the top breweries in the Midwest, and before long, in the country.

In the 1870s beer gardens, like Von der Ahe’s, began to flourish in St. Louis. One of the finest in town was Schaider’s Garden, opened by brewer Joseph Schaider. It featured a bandstand for an oompah band and Strauss waltzes.

By the 1890s, St. Louis breweries were second only to New York in beer sales. In addition to Anheuser-Busch, the firm of Wm. J. Lemp sold beer throughout the Midwest and South. A St. Louis brewery known as the English Cave became popular. (The beer was kept in a cave to keep it cool.) Other St. Louis breweries opened, including the City Brewery, Metcalfe & Son, and the Fulton Brewery. Von der Ahe’s establishment was one of the most popular in town because of its clientele: Every night the Browns players would sit and drink in his saloon with the fans.

Along with the rise in beer sales came a surge in the work of the temperance movement. The Anti-Saloon League had no political affiliation. It was the work of religious leaders, mostly from the Baptist and Methodist churches. The founder of the Anti-Saloon League, the Reverend Howard Hyde Russell, considered his leadership to be divinely inspired. Said another leader, the Reverend Purley A. Baker, It is the federated church in action against the saloon. It has come to solve the liquor problem.

The issue was like the abortion issue today. There was no debate. Each side believed it was right and would brook no argument or compromise.

The debate over the sale of beer in baseball parks was what allowed the St. Louis Browns to become a professional ballclub.

Al Spalding of Chicago, owner of the White Stockings and the reigning czar of the National League, had ruled with a moralistic, tyrannical hand since its inception in 1876. Spalding set the rules, and one of the rules he set was that team owners could not sell beer in their ballparks. The Chicago owner hated alcoholism and made his players pledge not to drink. In addition to the edict against teams selling beer at the park, Spalding also decreed that no gambling be allowed on the premises and that no games could be played on Sundays, in deference to Protestant religious doctrine that the day be preserved as one of rest.

Spalding had the power to eject from the league teams that did not adhere to his rules, and he did so when he saw fit. Before the 1881 season Spalding tossed four teams out of the National League: two for selling beer and two for refusing to finish out the schedule.

Von der Ahe’s timing in buying the Brown Stockings was exquisite. Since its withdrawal from the National League in 1877, the team had played on a sporadic, catch-as-catch-can basis against other amateur and semipro nines. What Von der Ahe badly needed was a professional league in which to play, and it was not long after he purchased the team that representatives of two of the four clubs jettisoned by Spalding and the six-year-old National League invited Von der Ahe and his Brown Stockings to join a new league, called the American Association, for the 1882 season.

The new league had been imagined by twenty-eight-year-old Horace Phillips, who had been the manager of the Philadelphia team when Spalding summarily tossed his team out of the league at the end of the 1880 season after the financially strapped Phillips refused to make the final road trip of the year in an effort to cut expenses.

That September Phillips sent postcards to a dozen representatives of professional and semipro teams asking them to attend a meeting in Philadelphia for the purpose of starting a new league. The only invitee to appear was Oliver Perry O. P. Caylor, a newspaperman who sought a franchise in the new league for the Cincinnati team. The Red Stockings had been tossed from the National League by Al Spalding because the team owners insisted on selling beer at the ballpark.

Phillips and Caylor agreed to pursue the notion of a new league, knowing that once they were taken seriously, other team owners who were chafing at Spalding’s iron grip would join them.

The morning after his initial meeting with Phillips, Caylor sent follow-up telegrams to Phillips’s list of independent team owners, including Chris Von der Ahe in St. Louis. Each telegram said that the recipient had been the only one not to attend the initial meeting and requested he attend the next one.

The ruse succeeded. By the late fall of 1881, four team owners including Von der Ahe joined with Phillips and Caylor to form the new American Association. On November 2, the league held its first formal meeting in Cincinnati, awarding franchises to Cincinnati, Pittsburgh, Louisville, Philadelphia, Buffalo, Baltimore, and to Von der Ahe’s St. Louis Browns.

Three of the teams, St. Louis, Louisville, and Cincinnati, were backed by beer money, so one of the league’s first edicts was to announce that brews could be sold to spectators. Predictably, Spalding derided the policy by predicting hooliganism by drunken fans. For the German and Irish immigrants, though, the announcement was met with rousing approval.

The rift between the National League and the American Association mirrored the split between the English temperance groups and those of German and Irish ancestry. Al Spalding was a puritanical purist who believed that the baseball game should be the primary attraction at the ballpark. Men like Von der Ahe believed in the very modern notion of doing commerce through baseball. The St. Louis owner saw that baseball was as much a spectacle as it was a game. Before the game the walrus-mustached Von der Ahe, flanked on either side by fawn-colored greyhounds, would don a top hat and frock coat and would lead his players, dressed in silk, in a parade into the ballpark. Von der Ahe held horse races and fireworks in his park, built lawn bowling lanes on the grounds, and provided an atmosphere of fun and merriment. The Browns were part of an amusement park atmosphere. Moreover, Von der Ahe believed that if the baseball fan was enjoying himself, he would buy a lot of beer.

Spalding understood Von der Ahe’s motives.

AL SPALDING: Mr. Von der Ahe was proprietor of a pleasure resort in the suburbs of [St. Louis], and he came to be interested in Base Ball from the fact that games constituted one among other attractions to his place.

But Von der Ahe didn’t care at all what Spalding or the temperance lobby thought. He was a businessman above anything else, and since this was America, no one was going to stop him from selling his beer.

For the 80-game 1882 season, Von der Ahe hired his bartender, Ned Cuthbert, to manage the Browns. Cuthbert led the team to a fifth-place finish in the six-team American Association.

At the end of the season, the Browns’ star first baseman, Charlie Comiskey, persuaded Von der Ahe that his old pal Ted Sullivan could do a better job running the team than Von der Ahe’s bartender. Von der Ahe fired Cuthbert and sent Sullivan, one of the shrewdest baseball men in the country at the time, to recruit players.

The Browns featured pitcher George Jumbo McGinnis, a St. Louis prospect who would win 25, 28, and 24 games the next three years, but to be successful, a team needed three pitchers on its roster. In those days, pitchers completed what they started. Rarely were they relieved. Sullivan signed pitcher Tony Mullane from Louisville, former Buffalo left fielder Tom Dolan, catcher Pat Deasley from Boston, right fielder Hugh Nicol, who had just been released by Chicago, and a young infielder, Arlie Latham, who had played with Buffalo in 1880.

The St. Louis Browns were pennant contenders from the start of the 1883 season. Mullane (35 wins) and McGinnis (28 wins) were two of the better pitchers in the league, and the Browns came within one game of winning the pennant.

If Von der Ahe had left Sullivan and his players alone, it is probable the team would have won the pennant. But from the beginning, Von der Ahe was a distraction. When he first bought the Browns, he made a public announcement that he would not interfere with management (almost 100 years later, another Prussian type, George Steinbrenner, would make the same unkept promise upon his purchase of the New York Yankees). Von der Ahe was an egoist who saw himself as the leader of any enterprise in which he was involved. He dressed like a European nobleman, sporting a flamboyant vest, gleaming top hat, and brilliant shoes. He had a broad-beamed face, in the middle of which protruded a broad, purpling, mottled, and bulbous nose. On his lower lip he wore tiny whiskers, like something he had missed while shaving.

Von der Ahe was so visible that, when writing about the Browns, reporters would refer to him as der boss president. He was the sort of person who believed he knew far more about the game than he actually did, and reporters enjoyed writing about his ignorance. One time after the Browns won a game when a player hit a ball to right field, he instructed his players to hit all balls to right field. He insisted he had the biggest diamond in the world. When someone explained to him that all ball fields were the same size, Von der Ahe said, Well, I got the biggest infield, anyways.

Von der Ahe saw himself as the brains behind the baseball team to the extent that he built a life-sized statue of himself to make sure that posterity had a chance to savor the living presence of the greatest feller in baseball. In a public display designed to demonstrate the financial health of his ballclub, he had a daily routine of pouring the cash receipts into a wheelbarrow, and, flanked by security guards with rifles as spectators looked on in admiration, he would personally parade the pile of coins and bills to a nearby bank.

Like many major league team owners who came after him, Von der Ahe was deluded into believing that because he was smart in business, he was equally sharp when it came to baseball. Constitutionally incapable of delegating authority, Von der Ahe constantly made strongly worded suggestions to his managers throughout the season. He second-guessed his players and fined them for their failure to perform. Manager Ted Sullivan, who knew the baseball season was grueling and that players had their good games and bad, did what he could to support and protect his boys, but Von der Ahe was the owner, and if Von der Ahe wanted to fine a player, all Sullivan could do was cajole and plead against such action.

Browns players had to put up with Von der Ahe’s controlling nature. Any player who signed with the Browns had to live in one of Von der Ahe’s rooming houses. This particularly irked third baseman Arlie Latham, who constantly chafed at Von der Ahe’s edicts. Latham was a talented comic, and one time he bought a fake nose resembling Von der Ahe’s and bought a derby like the owner wore. As the band marched single-file from the train depot to the hotel, Von der Ahe at the head, Latham behind him mimicked the owner, bringing laughter from the crowd. Von der Ahe asked Charlie Comiskey, Vy do dey laugh at us? Ve lick der stuffings out of dem every time in baseball.

Latham also chafed at Von der Ahe’s demand that his players drink only at his bar. His stated reason for the rule was so he could keep an eye on his players’ drinking habits. But while Von der Ahe’s players couldn’t escape him when they were inside his ballpark, they could outside it. To get some privacy, Latham and some of his teammates would sneak into Schmidt’s Saloon across the street to drink while Von der Ahe was checking local hangouts in the area, trying to find them. They would sit at the bar watching out the window for him. Von der Ahe, who did everything with flair, liked to walk accompanied by his prized hunting dogs, and when the players saw the dogs, they would escape out the back door of the saloon.

The players resented Von der Ahe’s desire to control them, and Sullivan was forced to spend almost as much time trying to mediate between his owner and his players as he did handling his baseball duties. Before the end of the 1883 season, Sullivan quit in disgust.

The loss of Sullivan hurt the team badly, and in 1884 it finished fourth to the New York Giants, led by its star pitcher, Tim Keefe. Jimmy Williams was no better able to handle Von der Ahe’s outbursts than Sullivan was, and he too resigned rather than put up with the interference of his flash-tempered, infuriating owner.

At the end of the 1884 season, Von der Ahe turned next to the twenty-five-year-old Charlie Comiskey, who had taken over for Sullivan at the end of the 1883 season, finishing 12–6. Comiskey had the skill, toughness, and smarts to fashion the St. Louis Browns into one of the greatest teams in the history of nineteenth-century baseball. He assembled a championship unit and managed it to four straight pennants and one world championship, while at the same time keeping Von der Ahe under control.

Al Spalding’s comment that the only reason Von der Ahe bought the ballclub was to sell beer turned out to be a cheap shot. Von der Ahe grew to love baseball deeply, and in the winter of 1884 Von der Ahe, notorious for his pinchpenny ways, opened his pocketbook in his zeal to bring St. Louis a pennant in ‘85. He spent money to decorate his office in a baseball motif, covering the walls with pictures of the diamond’s heroes in striking and catching attitudes. During that same winter, Chris Von der Ahe paid the freight as Charlie Comiskey signed the costliest ball team in the country. He paid the fourteen players under contract a total of $32,000.

The Browns could not have succeeded without Comiskey, but Comiskey needed Von der Ahe too. They had a stormy partnership, but they never lost their respect for each other. That mutual affection, moreover, lasted long after their association on the Browns. As a result of Von der Ahe’s money and Comiskey’s Midas touch, for four magical years the St. Louis Browns became the envy of sporting America, and almost overnight Chris Von der Ahe became one of the best-known and most powerful baseball magnates in the country.

CHAPTER 3

CHARLIE COMISKEY’S HOODLUMS

Charlie Comiskey, the manager and first baseman for the St. Louis Brown Stockings, was a mild-mannered, cerebral man off the field, but on the field, he could act like a common thug. He played the game with a controlled aggression designed to ground the opposition into dust. His focus was on victory, and he never permitted anyone to lose sight of the fact that he was there for one reason only: to win. Said Comiskey: First place is the only subject of conversation.

Comiskey would bait umpires and argue every call that went the other way. He fought as hard as he could on every play and expected his players to act the same way. He was indomitable. Comiskey explained his philosophy about fighting for victory years later: I have fought every point because, through bitter experience, I learned early that one lost decision sometimes may mean the loss of the pennant. It is the small things in life which count; it is the inconsequential leak which empties the biggest reservoir.

Comiskey encouraged his players to try to intimidate the opposition any way they could. He was a nineteenth-century role model for Leo Durocher and Billy Martin. He encouraged his players to knock over an opponent in the field or on the base paths, and if you didn’t like it, that was just too bad. On the base paths, Comiskey was a terror. In one game against Cincinnati, Comiskey threw himself into second baseman John Bid McPhee, causing him to throw wild to first, enabling the winning run to score. Ty Cobb, who came to the game twenty years later with a similar nasty disposition, had nothing on Comiskey.

His players followed his example. The next day Curt Welch did the same thing, throwing himself at McPhee as if hurled from a catapult. Said Welch, Well, we’re playing ball to win.

On defense Comiskey would stand in the path of base runners who were rounding first and heading for second. If the base runner wasn’t looking, a hip check would send him sprawling into the dirt. If the opposing player rose to object, Comiskey looked to start a fight. Under Comiskey, the Browns quickly gained a reputation around the league for their bad boy attitude. In the press, they were referred to as demons and Von der Ahe’s hoodlums.

The Browns’ Curt Welch, illiterate and vulgar, was an umpire baiter who was especially despised by opponents for deliberately trying to injure them. In June of 1887, the Philadelphia A’s pressed formal charges against Welch for trying to injure pitcher Gus Weyhing as the pitcher ran the bases. Six days later in Baltimore, Welch caused a riot when he smashed into second baseman Bill Greenwood on a steal attempt. Welch was arrested and Von der Ahe had to pay $200 to post bond.

Charlie Comiskey’s hard-nosed, trash-talking teammates followed his lead. The mouthpiece of the Browns was third baseman Arlie Latham. Before Latham, players didn’t talk it up. There was no Hey, batter, batter, no encouragement shouted by teammates to the pitcher or batter, certainly none of the endless bench jockeying that became Latham’s trademark. The chatter on Little League diamonds across America is the direct descendant of Latham’s philosophy of making as much noise for as long as possible.

Latham was an irritant to the opposition. Nicknamed the Freshest Man on Earth, Latham also was the most popular Brown. He had started playing ball in Stoneham, Massachusetts, at the age of fifteen, played for Buffalo in 1880, and joined the Browns in 1883. Latham was one of the finest fielders in the history of the game, ranking sixth all-time in total chances and eighth in assists. He was acrobatic in the field and on the base paths. Once in a game against Chicago, Latham bunted the ball down the first base line. Adrian Cap Anson fielded the ball and turned to tag the batter running up the line, but Latham jumped over the top of the stooped Anson, landed on his hands, did a somersault, landed back on his feet, and ran across the bag. While the crowd hooted, Latham asked, How do, Anse?

But it was Latham’s mouth that made him famous and drove the opposition wild. He would begin chattering on the first pitch and continue his running commentary on the opposition’s sins and weaknesses until they wanted to skull him with their baseball bats. His bench jockeying was so inflammatory that it invited commentary in rival newspapers.

During the 1886 World Series, the writer for the Chicago Inter-Ocean wrote the following: One feature of the St. Louis game might be eliminated with success, and that is the disgusting mouthings of the clown Latham. There was a universal sentiment of disgust expressed by the [Chicago] crowd that left the ball park at the end of the game at this hoodlum’s obscene talk on the ball field. One well-known merchant remarked that he never would attend another game that Latham played in. The roughest element that ever attends a ball game in this city could not condone the offense of such a player as Latham. Pres. Spalding should insist upon his being silenced, such coarse mouthings may pass in St. Louis, but will not be tolerated in Chicago.

Shortstop Bill Gleason was another St. Louis ballplayer who bullied the opposition. In the field, Gleason intimidated opposing players by deliberately slamming his knee or hip into base runners as they advanced from second to third. As base coaches, Gleason and Comiskey were reviled for their offensive coaching and use of vile language. The two in tandem so infuriated opponents with their obscenities that team owners called for the pair to be fined and/or suspended. At the end of the 1886 season, the American Association passed a rule to establish coaching boxes in an effort to contain Gleason and Comiskey. The coaching boxes became an institution in the game, and they still exist today.

ARLIE LATHAM (Courtesy Brace Photo)

JAMES HART (manager of Louisville in 1885): "The chalk lines which enclose the coaching boxes were added to the field diagram after Charles Comiskey had demonstrated their necessity. Comiskey and Bill Gleason used to plant themselves on each side of the visiting catcher and comment on his breeding, personal habits, skill as a receiver, or rather lack of it, until the unlucky backstop was unable to tell whether one or half a dozen balls were coming his way. Not infrequently the umpire came in for a few remarks.

" ‘He’s a sweet bird, isn’t he, Bill?’ Comiskey would chirp.

" ‘Never heard of him before, did you, Commy?’ would be the direct reply of Gleason.

" ‘The cat must have brought him in and put him in the keeping of the umpire or else how could he last more than an inning?’ and so to the end of the chapter.

This solicitous attention did not add to the efficiency of the backstop, so for the sake of not unduly increasing the population of the insane asylums or encouraging justifiable homicide, the coacher’s box was invented. This helped out the catcher, but the pitcher and other players on the opposing team were still at the mercy of Comiskey, and I know of no man who had a sharper tongue, who was in command of more biting sarcasm, or who was quicker at repartee.

Comiskey not only intimidated the opposition, he was also able to use his leadership skills to keep the excesses of owner Chris Von der Ahe in check. But Comiskey, unlike the other managers the owner had second-guessed or the players he had fined, didn’t see his owner as a foe, both because he genuinely liked him and also because he knew exactly how to handle him.

G. W. AXELSON (Comiskey’s biographer): The genius and diplomacy of his manager, and [his] facility of acquiescing in everything that Von der Ahe suggested and then doing the opposite, had the tendency to blunt the barbed shafts directed against ‘der boss president.’

Comiskey’s rough side hid his greatest strengths as a manager: an ability to motivate his players and an intellectual brilliance that allowed him to habitually outthink and outmaneuver the opposition. Comiskey had his rules, but he was not a martinet. His players, aware of his toughness, respected and rarely crossed him.

BILL GLEASON: ‘'There was always good discipline among the Browns, but occasionally some of the boys would take advantage of the manager. Comiskey was particular about the boys being in bed early, but occasionally they played hookey. [Yank] Robinson, for instance, would ostentiously take his key from the rack and retire only to slide down the fire escape. It was a lively bunch with which ‘Commy’ had to contend, but they all liked him and loved him as a brother, as he was on the square with everybody."

Once a game ended, Comiskey would immediately turn his attention to the next contest. He was a perfectionist.

G. W. AXELSON: He held himself responsible for the smallest detail, off and on the field.

Comiskey spent a great deal of time and thought analyzing the strengths and weaknesses of the opposing players.

BILL GLEASON: He never went to sleep at night until he had figured out how he was going to win the game the next day.

At the heart of Comiskey’s analytical skills was his remarkable memory. He needed only to meet someone once to remember his name.

G. W. AXELSON: His marvelous memory stood him in good stead. Once heard, a thing was never forgotten…. I have yet to meet a human being with the retentive memory of Comiskey. Repeated demonstrations of that faculty have been to me a constant source of wonderment for many years.

This ability allowed him to recall every incident he ever saw on the ball field, going back to his early days in baseball. If he spotted a weak point in an opposing player, he never forgot it.

G. W. Axelson related one example in which Comiskey—who from his position at first base told his pitchers where to aim their pitches—ordered pitcher Bob Caruthers to throw three straight high and inside fastballs to a batter the wily hurler had never seen before.

G. W. AXELSON: "A new opponent planted himself at the plate, backed by a big bat and a reputation as a slugger. A signal from first base to the pitcher, and the newcomer whiffed on three high ones close to the breast bone.

" ‘How did you know what he was weak on, Commy?’ the puzzled Caruthers asked.

‘Why, didn’t I see him put a ball over the fence on a low one on the outside a few years ago up around Galena? I figured he didn’t like the insiders.’

And it was Comiskey who pioneered playing first base the modern way. Until he came along, first basemen stayed close to the base. Comiskey positioned himself instead deep behind the bag and roamed wide and far for balls hit to the right side, with the pitcher covering first to take his throw. Under this system, the second baseman could play deeper and closer to second base, allowing him to get to more balls hit up the middle. He also taught the outfielders to shift, depending on where the batter was likely to hit the ball. On balls hit to the outfield, Comiskey was the first to order the pitcher to back up the base that was most likely to receive the throw.

Commented Hall of Fame second baseman Johnny Evers, Comiskey won pennants at St. Louis by his inventiveness, and it is a remarkable thing that every team he ever has handled has had great-fielding pitchers.

In addition to his managerial abilities, Comiskey also had the ability to judge talent. After he realized that the 1884 Browns were not skillful enough to be pennant contenders, he made moves during the winter to bolster the team. He added players to the roster until he had a combination that suited his style of play. He signed Bob Caruthers and Dave Foutz to pitch, Albert Doc