“If you let that mad galoot step into the ball he’ll knock its cover off.”

That’s what Pat Tableau, the old manager, said of him — that’s the legend of Ed Delahanty. Six foot one, 190 pounds, who grew up in a boardinghouse in Cleveland, who had four brothers playing with him in the bigs and was the best of them all. It didn’t matter that he swung at anything, that he couldn’t resist a wild pitch. He reached for everything, his huge frame stretching over the plate, over the other batter’s box, “like a kid trying to pick the ripest cherries at the extreme end of the branch.” He tore off the infielders’ shoes. He broke ankles with line drives, the ball hurtling through the air as if “shot from a cannon.” And if he didn’t like the pitcher, he would complain. If he had a bad day, he would complain. He smoked cigars, and he chewed tobacco, and he drank, and if the circumstances of his team weren’t going his way, he would threaten to quit.

Big Ed couldn’t hold back. That was what made him great; that was what stopped him, he said, from being greater.

***

In his breakout season — 1892, four years after his debut — Delahanty finally earned the title of “a decent utility man.” His first four years in baseball were passable. But he decided he was done with that, with “not doing much brilliant work.” He slugged .495 in 1892, the best mark in the league. He kept climbing. The league’s best slugging percentage in 1893 was his again, but nearly a hundred points higher. He hit 19 dead-ball homers. He had the most total bases. In 1894, he did his slugging percentage one better, adding a .405 average into the mix. He was 25. Read the rest of this entry »

In 1936, Alfred Lovell Dean, better known by his nickname Chubby, decided to take his baseball career into his own hands. He was all of 20 years old, a native of Mount Airy, North Carolina, and a valued pitcher on the Duke baseball team — until he quit, that is.

Maybe he left due to the lack of run support offered by his collegiate teammates — a 16-strikeout game in the 1935 season ended in a loss on his record. That same year, “renowned” baseball statistician J. Gaskill McDaniel rated Dean the most valuable player of the Coastal Plains League, which might have increased Dean’s perception that his talents were being wasted where he was. At any rate, in cold early days of the year, Dean packed up his things and headed north to find his fortune. His sights were aimed no lower than the New York Yankees.

But the New York Yankees didn’t see what J. Gaskill McDaniel saw. They saw a 20-year-old with a wild arm and limited hitting ability. These were the Yankees of Ruth and Gehrig, whose every season began with an expectation of a World Series title. So they turned Chubby Dean down. There was no place for him there.

***

There was a place for him, though, a little to the southwest. Connie Mack was looking to bolster a last-place Philadelphia Athletics team that had been on a steady decline since their seven-game World Series loss to the Cardinals in 1931. He was willing to take a chance on almost anyone who showed talent. On February 10, Duke baseball coach John W. Coombs confirmed from his hospital bed in Palestine, North Carolina, that his erstwhile pitcher had signed with the A’s. Read the rest of this entry »

Everyone gets the blues. Sometimes it’s for obvious, “good” reasons, like a global pandemic upending your life and taking hundreds of thousands of others. Sometimes it’s for complicated reasons, like bad brain chemistry and the reverberating effects of trauma. And sometimes it’s for trivial reasons, barely any reason at all. You lose at a game. You trip on a rock. You make a small, forgivable error at work. A tiny thing, in combination with the many other tiny things that make up life, can cast a pall over the ensuing several hours — even days.

Baseball players, being human people, are also subject to the occasional onset of the blues. The public nature of their jobs, though, can make the stakes of these incidences much higher: A small, forgivable error on the field, timed poorly, is a national disgrace, or a step toward the public, humiliating loss of one’s job. And with higher stakes come more dramatic reactions from the players. Reactions like, say, suddenly disappearing.

***

“Rabbit” Sturgeon — that’s how he was always referred to in a baseball context, never by any real, non-animal name — seems to have been born somewhere in Minnesota. He reported his age on the 1930 U.S. Census as 45, putting his birth date around 1885. There’s nothing much on the public record about his early life, but when William E. Sturgeon was around 20, he got into the two professions that would come to define the rest of his life: the railway and baseball.

Rail in the U.S. was hitting its peak at the beginning of the 20th century, and increased regulation made the historically dangerous jobs involved in railroad operations rather less so. Still, doing such work was hardly easy, and the job of a brakeman was one of the most notoriously difficult. Brakemen were responsible for the application of brakes — a simple-sounding but absolutely vital task, especially when massive freight trains were involved. Brakemen also made sure that the axle bearings of train wheels weren’t overheating, kept an eye out for stowaways, and ensured that cargo and passengers were safe. Read the rest of this entry »

Not far from Igerna, California, the home of the once-missing B.R. Logan, is the city of Yreka. Yreka, now the seat of Siskiyou County, is a place that holds onto its history as part of the Wild West — you can take a walking tour of historic buildings through the city, and municipal websites still tell the tale Mark Twain himself wrote about the town’s naming. With a population of 7,765, it’s a quiet place, held by the low noise of the nearby Shasta River.

Back at the turn of the century, though, Yreka was a gold rush boomtown. The city was founded as a mining settlement in 1851, and it didn’t take long for the bustle to begin. Its streets were full of people; there was a steady stream of immigration, with Chinese communities establishing themselves not long after the town was incorporated. The Yreka Flats, as they came to be known, ended up being a prodigious source of gold, sustaining the town for decades after it was first discovered there.

And that’s where our story begins — just a few years after the greatest game of baseball ever played in Southern Oregon. Our hero, as it turns out, was a resident of Ashland, Oregon, the antagonists in that contest; one imagines him reading the Ashland paper, shaking his head at the violence and treachery of that undefeated Grants Pass team. His name was Billy Hulen, and by the time we meet him in 1906, his titles were already plentiful: “The Kid,” Phillie and Senator, the best left-handed shortstop you’d ever seen, survivor of spring-training malaria, Northwestern League champion, member of the Order of Elks and the Knights of Pythia, and — most importantly — one of the most beloved baseball players up and down the Pacific coast.

He was in Yreka that February tending to his gold claim. One day, he headed north to Seattle on some non-specific business. A month later, no one had heard from him. None of his many friends had seen him — not since he had passed through Ashland without even telling his wife he was going to be in town. And so, on March 20, the call was put out for friends of Billy Hulen — in Vancouver and Everett, Ashland and San Francisco, all the way to St. Louis, where he was under contract for the next season — to begin searching for him. Billy Hulen simply had to be found. Read the rest of this entry »

On November 28, 1902, a young man from Igerna, California, headed north with two friends on a hunting trip into the wilderness of southern Oregon. It was an area he would have known fairly well: He often traveled this way on his way to face the baseball nines of various small towns. The young man’s name was B.R. Logan, and he was a baseball player.

On December 1, Logan, outside the cabin where he and his companions were staying, thought he saw a deer. He bade his friends farewell and headed off in pursuit. A day passed. Then another. Then another. His friends began to worry. After two weeks, they began to despair. It was the winter, in the middle of the forest, and there was no sign of their friend.

On December 13, the Associated Press published an item about Logan’s disappearance. “MISSING BASEBALL PLAYER,” it read. By this point, the search party wasn’t looking for Logan. They were looking for his body.

Read the rest of this entry »

The frequency of North American baseball players randomly disappearing from their teams reached a peak in the early 20th century. Baseball was a big enough deal that a player going missing was newsworthy, which allowed me to read about their disappearances a century later. At the same time, baseball was not yet a big enough deal that choosing to skip out on your team meant missing a multi-million dollar payday, or the prospect of multi-million dollar legal action brought against you. The phenomenon seemed so common in the early 1900s that the stories of players going missing were often preceded with “another” or followed by “again,” and the tales were plentiful enough to allow for quite a bit of variety in their conclusions.

While the tale of the bridegroom who never came arrived from the late 19th century, the stories that will follow over the next few entries hail from a time when both the American and National Leagues existed alongside a veritable wilderness of competitive minor league teams, constantly moving, changing names, collapsing, scheming, and springing up again. It was the perfect time for baseball players to get lost in intrigue and confusion — and a time in which it was easy for players to be obscured by history. We begin with a story of the latter.

***

This is the very brief tale of Everett L. Sweetser, a 27-year-old semiprofessional baseball player and resident of North Yarmouth, Maine. By all accounts, Sweetser wasn’t a particularly notable player. In fact, I can find no public connection between his name and the word “baseball” until August 6, 1912: the day that his missing notice was published in the Boston Globe.

Read the rest of this entry »

Back in January, before all of this happened, I found myself wondering about baseball players who had simply disappeared. Players often fade from our memory, but thanks to the archival work of organizations like SABR and the Hall of Fame, and websites like Baseball-Reference and Retrosheet, rarely are they ever lost entirely. Baseball is comfortingly recurrent, comfortably concrete — to have a player go missing, their status unknown, struck me as likely to be a uniquely destabilizing and impactful event.

Of course, a lot of things have changed since January. We now find ourselves in a situation wherein Major League Baseball itself is suspended in a state of uncertainty, and many minor league teams are unsure whether they’ll continue to exist next year at all. I abandoned my search for the missing of baseball history in the face of the Astros cheating scandal, which at that point seemed much more pressing; now, when baseball is missing and we are missing baseball, it seems like the right time to pick it back up. 

Many of the stories that I found were comedies; some were tragedies. Some were political, some were trivial, and some were, ostensibly, romantic. All of them, I think, are worth exploring. Without baseball games to attend, now seems as good a time as any to reflect on our relationship with the sport, its stories, and the people who play it.

The story that follows is the earliest that I found, coming from late 1892 in St. Joseph, Missouri, the town that was once the jumping-off point for the Wild West, and that has hosted professional baseball since 1886. Read the rest of this entry »