Monday 19 June 2023
The List
Here is The List, a compilation of names intended to serve as a more egalitarian and apolitical response to the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown. For a more comprehensive introduction to the concept and rules of eligibility, please see here, but suffice to say that the List was set up as a counterfactual - what if, starting with the founding of the professional National Association in 1871, the world of baseball awarded some kind of meritous achievement accolade to one person in two categories : professional players, and builders (and then added a third category with the rise to prominence of the Negro Leagues recognizing professional players outside of the recognized Major Leagues). Without further ado, here's the list :
The List : Class of 1880 2/2 : Jim Creighton
James Creighton, Jr (1841-1862), Builder
Eligble: 1871
Contributions: Until the end of the 19th century, the game's best players were compared unfavourably to Creighton. The best pitcher of the 1860s, Creighton was also a star hitter. He was likely the first to make pitching competitive, instead of simply serving the batter, the first national superstar produced by baseball, and considered by some the first professional player.
Some of the best advice you can get about choosing a career or making money is that, if you want to make it - really make it - you have to be the first, or you have to be the best. Jim Creighton did it all. He was the first, he was the best, he was the first to really make it, and he might have been the first to make money at it. This is the story of baseball's first superstar and 'The Man that Saved Baseball,' Jim Creighton.
Creighton was born in Manhattan in 1841, and by the time he was a teenager, Creighton was already a well-known cricketer and baseball player, especially as a batsman. Junior teams throughout the city vied for his services, but Creighton and some of his choice friends started their own junior club, the Young America, in 1857. They played a few competitive games, but disbanded in 1858 when Creighton's mother passed away and he moved with his father to Brooklyn. He joined a new club, the Niagara, and baseball historians have speculated that he may already have been supporting his father through his baseball playing at age 17.
This is as good a time as any to tackle one of the Creighton myths. He is often labeled the first professional player - to play for money - and indeed he may have been receiving payments as early as 1858, 11 years before the Cincinnati Red Stockings became baseball's first all-pro team. However, by 1858 'revolving' or team jumping had been commonplace for over a decade among New York's best ballplayers, and it has been well established that such revolving was often the result of 'emoluments, ' salaries disguised as gifts or do-nothing posts at unrelated businesses or clubs. Such emoluments lured our old friend Louis Wadsworth back to the Knickerbockers in 1854. Baseball operated under the veneer of enforced amateurism until 1871, but by the time of Creighton's move to Brooklyn, pay for play was a common occurrence. Creighton was almost certainly not baseball's first pro.
Creighton was a star for the Niagara in 1858 and '59, playing second base beside his friend and fellow standout, shortstop George Flanley. Partway through the 1859 season the Niagara were losing badly to the Star Club, one of the top teams in the city. The starting pitcher, Shields, was pulled for Creighton, and something special happened. The game was witnessed by Peter O'Brien, captain of the city's best team, the Atlantic. "When Creighton got to work, something new was seen in base ball -- a low, swift delivery, the ball rising from the ground past the shoulder to the catcher. The Stars soon saw that they would not be able to cope with such pitching." The Stars managed to salvage the game, but immediately invited Creighton and Flanley to join their club. The pair were soon poached by the Excelsior club, the #2 club in Brooklyn, eager to overtake the Atlantic.
By 1860 Creighton was a phenomenon in baseball, still just 18 years old. He threw harder than any other pitcher, with exceptional command, and he employed a 'snapping' of the wrist to add motion to his delivery that was technically illegal but undetectable by the umpires. He could make the ball rise or fade, and implemented a prototypical changeup dubbed a 'dew-drop' to throw off timing. Being able to induce poor contact or even miss bats made Creighton a formidable defensive weapon in an era where pitchers were supposed to be serving the ball to the batter. At the time, the goal of baseball was to showcase fielding, so putting the ball in play was prioritized. Pitchers were to deliver underhand, with an unbent elbow, in a fashion similar to softball pitching or bowling. Creighton's success can be attributed to his ability to hide an illegal delivery. An English national cricket team once toured America when Creighton was at the height of his powers, and played several games against American clubs, including games against Creighton, one of the country's best cricketers. They also watched one of his baseball games, and English cricketer John Lillywhite had this to say: "Why, that man is not bowling, he is throwing underhand. It is the best disguised underhand throwing I ever saw, and might readily be taken for a fair delivery."
In 1860 the Excelsior toured the US and Canada with their new star attraction, dismantling clubs wherever they went. They drew crowds in the thousands (remember baseball had, just 15 years ealier, been developed as a hobbyist exercise) and spectators marveled at how much better they were than their local amateur clubs. On 8 November he threw baseball's first shutout - this in an era of pitching underhand to the batter, gloveless fielders, and games where teams could score more than 100 runs. It's not likely that no baseball game had ever resulted in a team scoring 0 points, but the fact that the papers recorded it means it may have been the first shutout at that level of competition.
For the next two years, Creighton was the best player in the world, and while his pitching lives largely in anecdote, statistics exist of his batting exploits. He hit home runs when nobody else could. He didn't strike out once in 1860. In 1862 he somehow only made four outs.
The revolving didn't ever really stop. In 1861 Creighton and Asa Brainard (another talented young starting pitcher) quit the Excelsiors to join the Atlantic, only to be lured back weeks later. Both men also maintained their cricketing careers on the side - it should be noted that cricket in the United States was openly professional and around 1860 was of similar popularity to baseball. Which sport would win America's heart was far from a decided matter, and the war of popularity the two sports fought has been the matter of some study ever since.
Jim Creighton was probably baseball's best player for a period of several years (though John Thorn believes the best player of the early 1860s by reputation may have been Excelsiors catcher Joseph B Leggett), but it was not his life but his death which has made him legend.
On October 14, 1862, Jim Creighton had a fantastic day at the plate. Starting in the field, Creighton hit four doubles in four trips to the plate over the first five innings. In the fifth, he came in to relieve Brainard (likely in more of a time share than a modern 'relief' appearance), and in the bottom half of the inning something special happened. Creighton crushed a rare home run, and remarked to old friend George Flanley after returning to the dugout, 'I must have snapped my belt.' George said, 'I guess not,' and indeed the belt was intact, but after four days of agonized hemorrhaging at his home, Creighton passed away, diagnosed with a ruptured bladder. Modern physicians have retro-diagnosed him with a ruptured inguinal hernia, which you shouldn't google, but the cause of death is almost irrelevant: baseball's biggest star had died in the act of hitting a home run. He was 21.
The event was widely mourned. His Excelsiors draped the clubhouse in black and eulogized: "He was very modest, and never severe in his criticisms of the play of others. He did not care to talk about his own playing, was gentlemanly in his deportment, and very correct in his habits, and to sum up all, was a model player in our National Game... His death was a loss not only to his club but to the whole base ball community, which needed such as he as a standard of honorable play and ability."
This biographical note, and others like it, are a crucial part of the Creighton story. He is remembered as a pure champion of baseball, a talent like no other, but also a man of integrity and honor, which is laughable considering that he played for money when it was against the rules, made a name by pitching in an illegal manner, and switched teams as soon as it suited him. In any regard, in life, Creighton was the star baseball needed to continue gaining popularity, and even propel it past cricket in the national consciousness. In death, he would become its greatest hero until Babe Ruth. John Thorn calls him a martyr, and he seems to fill the role - baseball players and writers commemorated their great hero for generations after - Old Hoss Radbourn and Tim Keefe were both compared negatively to the great 'amateur', and even The Simpsons' Mr. Burns had Jim Creighton on his all-time baseball team.
Creighton was crucial to baseball history. At once a pioneer of technique, an accomplished hero in his own day and a martyr of the game today, Creighton helped push the game into the national spotlight, and into the realm of professionalism. Few men from his century helped the game evolve as Creighton did, in his time and even from beyond the grave.
Wednesday 14 June 2023
The List: Class of 1880, 1/2: Cal McVey
Calvin Alexander McVey (1849-1946), Player
Eligible: 1880
Contributions: Pro baseball's first recognizable slugger, McVey hit .346 lifetime with a 152 career OPS+.
In an era of downplayed offensive ability, offensive stars are hard to find. Rarer were men who were consistently valuable hitters - often a guy could hit .400 then disappear back to his local semi-pro league and from the history books altogether. Much rarer still is a man who could wield a valuable bat, year-in and year-out, and the first player to really be that guy is baseball's first consistent power hitter, Cal McVey. More than that, McVey was a baseball pioneer, a phenom who straddled the gap between the amateur era and the professional sport, and who was on-hand to watch it all unfold.
Calvin McVey was born in Lee County, Iowa, in 1849, the son of Caroline and William McVey. They had come west to start and lose a succession of farms in Iowa and Missouri. After giving up farming William had been a tax collector and by the time of Calvin's birth was a piano tuner. By the mid-1860s the family was living in Indianapolis.
As a young boy Calvin was a gifted athlete, known regionally as a talented gymnast and boxer. His first love, as an athlete, was baseball, though at the time of his growing up baseball was a game, a hobby for boys and young men - the professional game was still developing. His athleticism would be a hallmark of his career, and he would become known for celebratory handstands and backflips later in his career.
In 1867 McVey was working as a piano maker in Indianapolis and playing amateur ball with two clubs, the Actives and the Westerns, a semi-pro outfit known as one of the best in the western United States. When the Washington Nationals stopped in Indianapolis as part of their worldbeating national tour (see the Al Spalding entry) they took on the Westerns in a highly-anticipated matchup of championship clubs. While the Nationals won (as they always did on their tour), the 16-year-old McVey put on a strong showing and impressed not just the Nationals, but their attached reporter and scorekeeper, Henry Chadwick, who spread the word of the talented young man to his readers nationally.
In the spring of 1869, largely in response to the success of the '67 Nationals, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, led by baseball legend Harry Wright, went openly pro. Wright and the Reds recruited heavily from the east coast (Bill James notes that most pro baseball players at the time came from Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Brooklyn), but he saved one spot for a young man he had heard about from Indianapolis. When William McVey signed for his 17-year-old son, Calvin became the youngest player in professional baseball, and the first pro ballplayer born west of the Mississippi.
Athletic and handsome, thick in chest and shoulder, McVey was a hit immediately and, the papers reported, "a favourite of the ladies." Fleet of foot and with a strong throwing arm, McVey was a talented right fielder, but as one paper wrote: "His strength is with the ash in his hands."
The 1869 season was a wild ride for the young man. After defeating all of their midwest opposition, the Reds took off for a tour of the east. Much to the surprise of the baseball establishment, the east had no answer for the hayseeds from Cincinnati and the Reds went undefeated. After they destroyed the Nationals in Washington, the Reds were invited to the White House, and 18-year-old McVey shook hands with Civil War hero and sitting president Ulysses S Grant. Still searching for a challenge, the club headed west. On the coach to Omaha, Reds shortstop George Wright, younger brother to Harry and unanimous pick for the best player in baseball history to that point sat up front with the driver, and asked McVey to sit with him. McVey, who did not drink, was friendly with the teetotaling Charlie Gould and the Wright brothers, who were otherwise surrounded by the drunks and gamblers of the baseball fraternity. The Reds were the first ballclub to use the transcontinental railroad, travelling to San Francisco, where they beat all of their competition again.
They would not lose, famously, until June of 1870, in extra-innings against the Brooklyn Atlantic. Shortly thereafter the club fell apart, as it was not making money and Harry Wright fell out with much of the team over their drinking and lack of discipline. Club president AB Champion resigned and the board of directors voted to return the club to amateur status. The following season a splinter group of National Association clubs founded the game's first professional league, the NAPBBP. Harry Wright was hired to manage the Boston club, and he brought three of his old teammates with him - Gould, brother George, and McVey. They were three of the best players in baseball, and McVey might already have been baseball's best hitter, but it is no coincidence that the four men composed the sober, disciplined core of the otherwise rowdy Reds clubs. Harry Wright showed throughout his career an ability to recognize talent and reward discipline, as he would soon show with Al Spalding.
McVey, now 21, served as the team's starting catcher in 1871 and hit .431, finishing second in hitting and second in OPS at .995. He slumped to .321 the following season, but the Boston Red Stockings won the NA pennant both years.
In 1873 the Baltimore Canaries lured McVey to their club by promising him a managerial role. At 23 he was the youngest skipper in baseball, though he gave up the spot partway through the season to focus on playing full-time. He hit .380 and played every position but pitcher.
McVey was back in Boston for 1874-75 and the two years constituted his peak. He hit .357 and slugged .500, both best in baseball over that span. He was worth 69.4 batting runs in that period, far outpacing the league - second was Lip Pike at 53.2. McVey won his third pennant with Boston in 1874.
In 1876 McVey followed Al Spalding to William Hulbert's Chicago White Stockings, founding yet another super team. He kept hitting but began losing some of his power. In two seasons with Chicago McVey hit .357, but had been eclipsed by younger stars like teammate Cap Anson. He threw 151.1 innings over the two years, putting up a respectable 3.33 ERA, largely in relief or emergency starting.
McVey jumped clubs once more in 1878, returning to Cincinnati to play for the rebooted Red Stockings NL franchise. He could still hit, putting up a 135 OPS+ over two years in Cincinnati, and he managed '78 and shared '79 managing duties with old Boston teammate Deacon White. The club finished second in '78 but 5th in '79.
By 1880, with a young family and more money than he ever expected to make in baseball, McVey turned away from the spotlight and the major leagues. Perhaps he saw his skills slowly eroding, or a lack of managerial future, but he remembered California fondly after the 1869 trip, and he uprooted his family and moved to Oakland. He was joined by his parents, who were sharing a house with Calvin at the time of the 1880 census. William took up farming again, to questionable success.
McVey tried playing semi-pro ball in California, but his first team, Bay City, jumped leagues and then folded within weeks. He joined another team, the Californias, for several months, and ended the season with the San Fransisco Knickerbockers, a successor to the club started in the early 1850s by some of the gold-rushing original Knicks.
McVey kept playing independent ball throughout the 1880s, and we have records of him playing as late as 1886, though no records of his statistics survive. He was still known as a ballplayer, though - when he registered to vote in 1896 he was recorded as having 'fair complexion with brown hair and blue eyes,' with distinguishing characteristics: 'baseball marks on fingers.'
The McVeys moved about southern California and the Bay Area in the 1890s, often ending up back in San Francisco. By 1901 he was working as a special policeman by day and a watchman by night. He lost his home and his wife was seriously injured in the 1906 earthquake, and McVey was reduced to living alone in a small shack and panhandling. He was unemployed as late as 1908, but by 1913 had caught on with a mining outfit in Nevada until he was crippled in a 30-foot fall. An old Cincinnati teammate, Doug Allison, petitioned the NL for financial relief for the old hero, but little was raised and McVey remained mired in poverty.
The spirited, athletic teenage phenomenon had seemingly long disappeared, leaving a broken, poverty-stricken old man in his stead, but McVey had one final moment of glory - riding through the streets of Cincinnati before the 1919 World Series as part of a celebration of 50 years since that legendary 1869 Reds team. He passed away in 1926, and drew just one vote in the inaugural Hall of Fame veterans committee election ten years later.
While he has been largely forgotten by baseball history, and even by the 1930s was hardly considered a legend of the game, McVey was a closely-watched superstar by 16, was the game's most feared hitter from 1869-1875, and was tabbed again and again by kingmakers like Al Spalding, Henry Chadwick, and Harry Wright as one of the best in the game. Calvin McVey is an unsung hero of baseball history and one of the very best of his time.
Eligible: 1880
Contributions: Pro baseball's first recognizable slugger, McVey hit .346 lifetime with a 152 career OPS+.
In an era of downplayed offensive ability, offensive stars are hard to find. Rarer were men who were consistently valuable hitters - often a guy could hit .400 then disappear back to his local semi-pro league and from the history books altogether. Much rarer still is a man who could wield a valuable bat, year-in and year-out, and the first player to really be that guy is baseball's first consistent power hitter, Cal McVey. More than that, McVey was a baseball pioneer, a phenom who straddled the gap between the amateur era and the professional sport, and who was on-hand to watch it all unfold.
As a young boy Calvin was a gifted athlete, known regionally as a talented gymnast and boxer. His first love, as an athlete, was baseball, though at the time of his growing up baseball was a game, a hobby for boys and young men - the professional game was still developing. His athleticism would be a hallmark of his career, and he would become known for celebratory handstands and backflips later in his career.
In 1867 McVey was working as a piano maker in Indianapolis and playing amateur ball with two clubs, the Actives and the Westerns, a semi-pro outfit known as one of the best in the western United States. When the Washington Nationals stopped in Indianapolis as part of their worldbeating national tour (see the Al Spalding entry) they took on the Westerns in a highly-anticipated matchup of championship clubs. While the Nationals won (as they always did on their tour), the 16-year-old McVey put on a strong showing and impressed not just the Nationals, but their attached reporter and scorekeeper, Henry Chadwick, who spread the word of the talented young man to his readers nationally.
In the spring of 1869, largely in response to the success of the '67 Nationals, the Cincinnati Red Stockings, led by baseball legend Harry Wright, went openly pro. Wright and the Reds recruited heavily from the east coast (Bill James notes that most pro baseball players at the time came from Baltimore, Philadelphia, or Brooklyn), but he saved one spot for a young man he had heard about from Indianapolis. When William McVey signed for his 17-year-old son, Calvin became the youngest player in professional baseball, and the first pro ballplayer born west of the Mississippi.
Athletic and handsome, thick in chest and shoulder, McVey was a hit immediately and, the papers reported, "a favourite of the ladies." Fleet of foot and with a strong throwing arm, McVey was a talented right fielder, but as one paper wrote: "His strength is with the ash in his hands."
The 1869 season was a wild ride for the young man. After defeating all of their midwest opposition, the Reds took off for a tour of the east. Much to the surprise of the baseball establishment, the east had no answer for the hayseeds from Cincinnati and the Reds went undefeated. After they destroyed the Nationals in Washington, the Reds were invited to the White House, and 18-year-old McVey shook hands with Civil War hero and sitting president Ulysses S Grant. Still searching for a challenge, the club headed west. On the coach to Omaha, Reds shortstop George Wright, younger brother to Harry and unanimous pick for the best player in baseball history to that point sat up front with the driver, and asked McVey to sit with him. McVey, who did not drink, was friendly with the teetotaling Charlie Gould and the Wright brothers, who were otherwise surrounded by the drunks and gamblers of the baseball fraternity. The Reds were the first ballclub to use the transcontinental railroad, travelling to San Francisco, where they beat all of their competition again.
They would not lose, famously, until June of 1870, in extra-innings against the Brooklyn Atlantic. Shortly thereafter the club fell apart, as it was not making money and Harry Wright fell out with much of the team over their drinking and lack of discipline. Club president AB Champion resigned and the board of directors voted to return the club to amateur status. The following season a splinter group of National Association clubs founded the game's first professional league, the NAPBBP. Harry Wright was hired to manage the Boston club, and he brought three of his old teammates with him - Gould, brother George, and McVey. They were three of the best players in baseball, and McVey might already have been baseball's best hitter, but it is no coincidence that the four men composed the sober, disciplined core of the otherwise rowdy Reds clubs. Harry Wright showed throughout his career an ability to recognize talent and reward discipline, as he would soon show with Al Spalding.
McVey, now 21, served as the team's starting catcher in 1871 and hit .431, finishing second in hitting and second in OPS at .995. He slumped to .321 the following season, but the Boston Red Stockings won the NA pennant both years.
In 1873 the Baltimore Canaries lured McVey to their club by promising him a managerial role. At 23 he was the youngest skipper in baseball, though he gave up the spot partway through the season to focus on playing full-time. He hit .380 and played every position but pitcher.
McVey was back in Boston for 1874-75 and the two years constituted his peak. He hit .357 and slugged .500, both best in baseball over that span. He was worth 69.4 batting runs in that period, far outpacing the league - second was Lip Pike at 53.2. McVey won his third pennant with Boston in 1874.
In 1876 McVey followed Al Spalding to William Hulbert's Chicago White Stockings, founding yet another super team. He kept hitting but began losing some of his power. In two seasons with Chicago McVey hit .357, but had been eclipsed by younger stars like teammate Cap Anson. He threw 151.1 innings over the two years, putting up a respectable 3.33 ERA, largely in relief or emergency starting.
McVey jumped clubs once more in 1878, returning to Cincinnati to play for the rebooted Red Stockings NL franchise. He could still hit, putting up a 135 OPS+ over two years in Cincinnati, and he managed '78 and shared '79 managing duties with old Boston teammate Deacon White. The club finished second in '78 but 5th in '79.
By 1880, with a young family and more money than he ever expected to make in baseball, McVey turned away from the spotlight and the major leagues. Perhaps he saw his skills slowly eroding, or a lack of managerial future, but he remembered California fondly after the 1869 trip, and he uprooted his family and moved to Oakland. He was joined by his parents, who were sharing a house with Calvin at the time of the 1880 census. William took up farming again, to questionable success.
McVey tried playing semi-pro ball in California, but his first team, Bay City, jumped leagues and then folded within weeks. He joined another team, the Californias, for several months, and ended the season with the San Fransisco Knickerbockers, a successor to the club started in the early 1850s by some of the gold-rushing original Knicks.
McVey kept playing independent ball throughout the 1880s, and we have records of him playing as late as 1886, though no records of his statistics survive. He was still known as a ballplayer, though - when he registered to vote in 1896 he was recorded as having 'fair complexion with brown hair and blue eyes,' with distinguishing characteristics: 'baseball marks on fingers.'
The McVeys moved about southern California and the Bay Area in the 1890s, often ending up back in San Francisco. By 1901 he was working as a special policeman by day and a watchman by night. He lost his home and his wife was seriously injured in the 1906 earthquake, and McVey was reduced to living alone in a small shack and panhandling. He was unemployed as late as 1908, but by 1913 had caught on with a mining outfit in Nevada until he was crippled in a 30-foot fall. An old Cincinnati teammate, Doug Allison, petitioned the NL for financial relief for the old hero, but little was raised and McVey remained mired in poverty.
The spirited, athletic teenage phenomenon had seemingly long disappeared, leaving a broken, poverty-stricken old man in his stead, but McVey had one final moment of glory - riding through the streets of Cincinnati before the 1919 World Series as part of a celebration of 50 years since that legendary 1869 Reds team. He passed away in 1926, and drew just one vote in the inaugural Hall of Fame veterans committee election ten years later.
While he has been largely forgotten by baseball history, and even by the 1930s was hardly considered a legend of the game, McVey was a closely-watched superstar by 16, was the game's most feared hitter from 1869-1875, and was tabbed again and again by kingmakers like Al Spalding, Henry Chadwick, and Harry Wright as one of the best in the game. Calvin McVey is an unsung hero of baseball history and one of the very best of his time.
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