Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball

Jerrold Casway

Description

Jerrold Casway’s fascinating biography of legendary baseball player Ed Delahanty (1867–1903) offers a compelling examination of the first “King of Swatsville’s” life and career, including the enigma surrounding his tragic and untimely death. Through Delahanty’s story, Casway traces the evolving character of major league baseball and its effect on the lives and ambitions of its athletes.

Delahanty’s career spanned the last decades of the nineteenth century during a time when the sons of post-famine Irish refugees dominated the sport and changed the playing style of America’s national pastime. In this “Emerald Age” of baseball, Irish-American players comprised 30–50 percent of all players, managers, and team captains. Baseball for Delahanty and other young Irishmen was a ticket out of poverty and into a life of fame and fortune. The allure and promise of celebrity and wealth, however, were disastrous for Delahanty. He found himself enmeshed in desperate contract dealings and a gambling addiction that drove him to alcohol abuse. The owner of the fourth highest lifetime batting average, Delahanty mysteriously disappeared and was found at the bottom of Niagara’s Horseshoe Falls.

This rich biography, which relies on previously unavailable family papers and court transcripts, as well as the colorful sports reporting of the period, will appeal to anyone interested in baseball, sports, or Irish history.

Sujets

• Sport
• Autour du sport
• Histoire du sport
• Baseball
• Hall of Fame
• Obermodern-Zutzendorf
• Phillies de Philadelphie
• Niagara Falls
• History
• United States
• Washington Senators
• Philadelphia Phillies
• Recreation
• National League
• American League
• Modern history
• Dead-ball era
• Béisbol
• Modern
• Sports
• 19th Century

Informations

• Publié par: University of Notre Dame Press
• Date de parution: 30 avril 2021
• Nombre de lectures: 2
• EAN13: 9780268159160
• Langue: English
• Poids de l'ouvrage: 9 Mo

Extrait

E D
D E L A H A N T Y
in the Emerald Age of BaseballEd Delahanty, 1867–1903
Chicago Daily News, June 1903.
Negative collection snd-001412. Courtesy of Chicago Historical Society.University of Notre Dame Press
E D
D E L A H A N T Y
in the Emerald Age of Baseball
J E R R O L D
C A S W A Y
Notre Dame, IndianaCopyright © 2004 by University of Notre Dame
Notre Dame, Indiana 46556
www.undpress.nd.edu
All Rights Reserved
Pbulished in the United States of America
Paperback edition published in 2006
Reprinted in 2009
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Casway, Jerrold I.
Ed Delahanty in the emerald age of baseball / Jerrold Casway.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
isbn-10: 0-268-02285-2 (cloth : alk. paper)
isbn-13: 978-0-268-02291-4 (pbk. : alk. paper)
isbn-10: 0-268-02291-7 (pbk. : alk. paper)
1. Delahanty, Ed, d. 1903.
2. Baseball players—United States—Biography.
I. Title.
gv865.d45c37 2004
796.357'092—dc22
2003024041in memory of my father
S I M O N C A S W A Y
who threw the first pitchCo n t e n t s
Preface ix
Introduction: Delahanty Is Missing! 1
1 Baseball’s Beginnings 5
2 Irish Kid from Cleveland 10
3 Making the Majors 22
4 Triple Jumping 38
5 From Cleveland to Philly 57
6 The Emerging Slugger 69
7 King of Leftfielders 86
8 Marriage and Maturity? 99
9 The Great and Only 11110 Princely Jollyers 123
11 A Season in Wartime 141
12 Captain Ed, Batting Champ 157
13 The “Hoodoo” Season 172
14 The New League 197
15 Cresting in Washington 221
16 Get the Money 239
17 The Fall 259
Epilogue 283
Appendix 302
Notes 305
Bibliography 351
Name Index 359
Subject Index 367
viii ContentsP r e f a c e
Baseball is a game learned as a child that is nurtured by the seasons
of our lives. Like a lingering melody, the sport and its players are
tied to our experiences, linking the progress of years to the
succession of baseball campaigns. These recollections do not age in our
mind’s eye; they are forever etched as we first saw them. For most
of us these memories were nurtured by our fathers who were
nourished by their own childhood remembrances.
My dad introduced the game to me around the breakfast table,
explaining the morning box scores. The names and numbers were
brought to life by voices carried over summer-evening radio
broadcasts and by the flickering black-and-white images on a small
round television screen. The game was taught after dinner by my
father in front of our small row house on a narrow city street. The
ultimate initiation came when dad took me to old Shibe Park for a
Sunday afternoon ballgame. The stadium’s vast green fields and the
sound of thousands of excited fans nearly took my breath away.
The passing decades have not extinguished these keepsakes. I can
still call up the many hours spent with my father and younger
brother Howard listening, watching, and talking baseball.
Perhaps these enduring mementos explain why a wearied historian of
seventeenth-century Irish studies became fascinated with the topic
of baseball history.
The prospect of putting aside twenty years of research to study
an alien topic made no sense, unless it was personally grounded.
Having already written one biography, I was not sure I was ready
to do another, particularly of a troubled athlete whose career was
ixrouted toward a pathetic death. But working on Ed Delahanty had
certain advantages. I could draw upon my Irish historical
background, and through baseball renew a link to my dad, my youth,
and my hometown of Philadelphia.
Ed Delahanty’s feats and his bizarre death have always attracted
a great deal of attention. But no one has studied him in the context
of his community and culture, a son of Irish postfamine refugees,
whose career embodied the ethnicity of late-nineteenth-century
baseball. Throughout Delahanty’s troubled career, the Irish were
baseball’s dominant ethnic group, sometimes totaling as much as
40 percent of major league rosters. It’s what I call the “Emerald Age
of Baseball.” This prominence was a product of the expansion of
urban professional sports and its allure to second-generation
IrishAmerican youths, like Ed and his brothers. Baseball for them, had
an acculturating flavor and nonelitist pretensions, a kind of
sporting crucible for boys raised in ancestral bat and handball traditions.
But to identify Irish athletic ambitions as a conscious medium for
social mobility is to ignore the intentions of young men whose
expectations were personal and immediate. Baseball for Irish kids
was a shortcut to the American dream and to self-indulgent glory
and fortune.
By the mid-1880s these young Irish men dominated the sport
and popularized a style of play that was termed heady, daring, and
spontaneous. This competitiveness was an expression of their
survival instincts, a search for advantages and one-upmanship against
society and its prevailing norms. Delahanty embodied many of
these traits, but unlike the major practitioners of this style of play—
Charlie Comiskey, Ted Sullivan, John McGraw, Ned Hanlon, and
Connie Mack—Ed struck another popular chord. He personified
the flamboyant, exciting spectator-favorite, the Casey-at-the-bat,
Irish slugger. The handsome masculine athlete who was expected
to live as large as he played.
Ed Delahanty’s story is also a baseball chronicle. It’s about a
player who rarely gave thought to life after baseball or paid
attention to the rigors of ordinary living. He drew his identity and
expectations from the game he exploited. Delahanty had no other
livelihood or training. His life was pillared between baseball
seasons and determined by the sport’s labor-management disputes.
As a young ballplayer these controversies humiliated him and
rex Prefaceduced his earning power. A decade later interleague clashes incited
Delahanty with a destructive sense of entitlement that led him to
squander his options, money, and reputation. These fatal setbacks,
unfortunately, were suffered in the public limelight as an active
ballplayer and cannot be told without understanding the sport.
The game, when Delahanty played it, was the unrivaled
national pastime, a product of the growing popularity of recreational
sports and urban living. Baseball was part of a new cultural totem
that permeated America in the Gilded Age. These years were marked
by unprecedented contrasts. It was an epoch of big business and
labor unrest, prosperity and recession, opportunity and racism, and
provincialism and national chauvinism. These times and their
values determined Delahanty’s stage and audience. They even
dictated the circumstances of his demise.
Delahanty’s story took eleven years to research and write and
indebted me to a great many people and institutions. My efforts
were made easier by a grant from the Irish American Cultural
Institute. Their confidence in the Delahanty project and their generosity
got this effort off on the right foot. The Society for American
Baseball Research (SABR) was an ideal affiliation for me and my work.
This organization provided a forum for my ideas and a venue to
understand the character and workings of this neglected era of
baseball. Their support, particularly their microfilm lending library,
made my work more manageable. I am also appreciative of the
assistance I received from the staff at the National Baseball Library
in Cooperstown, New York. I benefited greatly from their
attention and expertise. The Library of Congress, the National
Archives, the Paley Library at Temple University, the Free Library of
Philadelphia, the Wagner Free Institute of Philadelphia, the
Pennsylvania Historical Society, and the New York Public Library were
also generous with their time and resources. Finally, I must thank
the staff of the Teaching and Learning Services area of Howard
Community College, who were always accommodating and
sustaining: Sharon Frey, Sharon Gover, Chris Dodd, Carolyn Wuyts,
Ela Ciborowski, and Quentin Kardos. A special appreciation also
goes out to David Hinton and his computer design wizardry and
to Susan Randt for her genealogical support and guidance in tracking
Preface xiCas 00 (i-xii) REV 11/17/05 2:07 PM Page xii
the Delahanty family. Thanks also to Helen Brown, a Delahanty
descendant, for her enthusiasm and insights into the family.
Speaking of the Delahantys, my understanding of the family
after Ed’s death was dependent on the support I received from Earl
and Dorothy McDonald of Mobile, Alabama. The McDonalds
were friends of Florence Delahanty Randall, Ed’s daughter, and the
guardians for Norine Randall, his granddaughter. Thanks to the
McDonalds I met Norine before her death in June 1993. Their
hospitality, trust, and insights were very much appreciated and
deserving of my gratitude and recognition.
My thanks are also extended to Bruce Kuklick, Ernie Green,
and Robert Lowery, who read drafts of the manuscript and were
valuable sounding boards of baseball lore. Bill Wagner, an
indefatigable researcher and thoughtful authority on nineteenth-century
baseball, also gave me editorial input. His meticulous collecting of
Delahanty’s game-by-game statistics corrected existing data and was
invaluable to this project.
Critical with keeping my work on task was the ability to talk
baseball and share experiences with other enthusiasts. Thanks to
long-suffering Philadelphia baseball mavens like my brother
HowardCasway, my cousins Joel Cassway and Gary Foreman, and
longtime mates Craig Horle, Don Insley, and the sage of forebearance,
Larry Aaronson. Each was a receptive audience to my thoughts
about baseball history.
My understanding of nineteenth-century ballparks was enlarged
by conversations and correspondence with Bob Bailey and the late
Larry Zuckerman. Talks with Tom Jable helped me understand the
history of sports in Pennsylvania, and the late Dennis Clark and Ed
“Dutch” Doyle gave me insights into Philadelphia’s Irish
communities and their passion for baseball. I am also indebted to “Skip”
McAfee, of SABR’s new bibliography committee, for his
dis