A King in Exile and The Cubs’ First Curse

Cap Anson helped the city of Chicago become an early baseball power. (via trialsanderrors)

Cap Anson helped the city of Chicago become an early baseball power. (via trialsanderrors)

Considering the Cubs’ woes in reaching – much less winning – the World Series, it is ironic that in the inaugural season of the National League, the American Centennial year of 1876, just five years after the Chicago fire, the Cubs (then known as the White Stockings) finished first. In a season of just 66 games, they were 52-14 for a gaudy .788 winning percentage. A few mediocre seasons followed, but the Cubs of 1880-1886 met all the requirements of a dynasty.

Thanks in large part to pioneers Cap Anson and Albert Spalding, renowned for their deeds on the field as well as in management, Chicago was the capital of the baseball world in those days. In truth, one could hardly find a better locale for recruiting fans (or cranks, as they were then known), as the city’s population had gone from virtually nothing at the beginning of the 19th century to 503,185 by 1880 – and that total more than doubled by 1890. This was the decade when Chicago surpassed Philadelphia and Brooklyn (then a separate city) and took over second place among American cities, where it remained till it was bypassed by Los Angeles a century later.

Of course, New York has been top dog in population since the first census in 1790. Somewhere between 1870 and 1880 it was the first American city to hit the million mark. The local pro baseball scene, however, did not reflect this status. The New York Mutuals started the 1876 season with the NL but were booted out of the league before finishing the season. The Giants (originally known as the Gothams) did not arrive on the scene till 1883. So in the early days of the NL, Chicago, by default, was baseball’s bellwether city.

In 1880, the famed North Side/South Side baseball rivalry did not exist. The White Sox have been South Siders since day one, but they did not arrive on the scene till the American League opened for business in 1901. For the most part, the White Stockings/Colts/Cubs were West Siders till 1916 when they moved to their current digs at Addison and Sheffield on the North Side. (The 100th anniversary of Wrigley Field last season was just that — the ballpark’s 100th year. It was the home of the Chicago franchise in the Federal League for two seasons before the Cubs moved in – which means the Cubs can hold another celebration in 2016, honoring the franchise’s centennial at Wrigley Field.)

But 135 years ago, North Siders, South Siders, and West Siders headed downtown (downtown Chicago was not known as the Loop until the arrival of elevated trains late in the 1890s) to watch the White Stockings play in “neutral” territory at Lakefront Park, where Grant Park is today.

1880 was also the year the Cubs embarked on a spree of five pennants in seven years. And it was the first season in Chicago for a promising young (22 years old) player named Michael Joseph Kelly, who had made his debut with the Cincinnati Reds in 1878 as a catcher, outfielder and third baseman. His sophomore season was particularly impressive, as he finished with a .348 average, third in the National League. But the Reds ran out of money before the end of the season and released their players. So in a sense, Mike Kelly was the first big-name free agent in baseball history.

Kelly’s offseason barnstorming tour with a team that included Cap Anson convinced him that Chicago was the ideal place for a young, up-and-coming ballplayer. Indeed, it was… for seven seasons.

Generally, 19th century baseballists get short shrift in the 21stcCentury, but Kelly is an exception. His life has been well chronicled, and his impact on the game, both on and off the field, can hardly be exaggerated. However you define the term “phenom,” Kelly was probably it.

Kelly was the first ballplayer to perform in vaudeville and inspired the song “Slide, Kelly, Slide.” With some help, he wrote baseball’s first autobiography. He was the first player known to be pestered by autograph hounds. Also, he pioneered the catcher’s glove, the chest protector, the hook slide and the take-out slide.

At a time when cheating (tripping opponents, cutting corners while running bases) was an integral part of a player’s baseball skills (fans found such hijinks entertaining), Kelly had few peers in that regard. Even without mass media to chronicle his heroics, he was known nationwide and put butts in seats all over the National League.

In his seven seasons in Chicago, Kelly batted .316 (899 for 2,843) with a .453 slugging percentage. In 1884, the team had an off year, finishing in fifth place, but Kelly led the league with a .354 average.

In 1885 Kelly and the White Stockings moved from Lakefront Park to West Side Park. In 1886, Kelly had his finest season, leading the league with a .388 average. His league-leading on-base percentage of .483 enabled him to amass a league-leading total of 155 runs scored – in a 118-game season.

During their first two seasons at West Side Park, the White Stockings won the NL pennant and played the American Association’s St. Louis Browns in a postseason series. The Browns joined the National League in 1892 and eventually became known as the Cardinals, so in retrospect, those 1885-1886 contests were previews of the modern NL Cubs-Cardinals rivalry.

These 19th century postseason contests were much less formal than latter-day October classics. Some years the winning team had to win four games, some years it took six games. Sometimes the series ended in a tie (1882, 1885, 1890). Sometimes games were played at neutral sites. And sometimes (1883, 1891) they just called the whole thing off.

A Hardball Times Update
Goodbye for now.

Like most postseason series in those days, it was probably more of an attempt to generate extra revenue than to determine a true champion. Some years there were allegations of “hippodroming,” which was a fancy term for throwing ball games. Unlike the Black Sox, the players did not do so to enrich gamblers but to add more games to the series, and hence to the gate receipts.

Despite the questionable results of these postseason games, the winners of such match-ups did not hesitate to call themselves World Champions. Even so, many players, Kelly included, were not happy about having to play postseason games for small stakes.

The 1885 series ended in a 3-3-1 tie, but Kelly hit .346 (9 for 26) with three doubles and a triple, good for a slugging percentage of .538. Fans were unimpressed, with attendance varying from 500 to 3,000.

The 1886 series was a different story. The Browns won the series 4-2 and Kelly hit a mere .208 (5 for 24). Crowds of up to 10,000 attended the games in St. Louis. Notably, the Browns won Game Six in extra innings after a pitch got by Kelly. There is some dispute as to whether the pitch was a passed ball, a wild pitch, or a botched pitchout, and whether the base-runner, Curt Welch, was attempting to steal home. If so, pitcher John Clarkson might have spotted him and rushed the pitch to the plate, thus crossing up Kelly.

But there is no dispute that Kelly did not corral the pitch and Welch scored on the play. The play was famously known as “the $15,000 slide” (so-called because the series was a $15,000 winner-take-all affair), even though it is not clear whether Welch scored sliding or standing up.

Obviously, this was a downer of a way to conclude what had been an outstanding season for Kelly and the team. It likely stuck in the craw of team owner Albert Spalding, a renowned exponent of clean living. After all, his team had just been bested by the Browns, a team not only owned by a saloon-keeper (Chris von der Ahe), but representing a league that permitted beer sales at the ballpark, not to mention gambling and Sunday baseball! More significantly, the loss was the last straw in Spalding’s relationship with Kelly.

Of course, even if Kelly had caught that pitch in Game Six, there’s no guarantee that the White Stockings would have gone on to win that game, much less Game Seven. But it was a galling way to lose an elimination game. In fact, Spalding was so disgusted by the series that he refused to pay train fare for his players to get back to Chicago. Players who had run out of money (betting on one’s own team was acceptable in those days) had to borrow money from the Browns. Some would not be back with the White Stockings in 1887.

If any ballplayer ever had job security, it should have been Mike Kelly in 1886. Despite his sub-par series against the Browns, he was only 28, a fan favorite, and had just enjoyed his best season. Unfortunately, he was also an overachiever in his consumption of alcohol. He was a superstar imbiber in an era when mere all-star imbibers were commonplace.
Then as now, team rules are supposed to apply to everyone, but some players are more equal than others. Spalding tolerated Kelly’s hell-raising to a point, but there was no denying he was a bad influence on his teammates. Kelly was duly disciplined for especially egregious behavior, but a lesser player would have been sent packing. It is easier to tolerate a problem child when he is also a wunderkind.

As a former player, Spalding certainly had no illusions about the integrity of the ballplayers of his day. An outstanding pitcher, (253-65), he retired in 1878 (he was only 27) due to arm troubles, just as Kelly was commencing his career. Spalding moved from the pitcher’s mound into the front office as club secretary (i.e., general manager) and eventually president in 1882. Only 36 years old at the time of the 1886 series, he wasn’t much older than some of his veteran players.

Spalding might have had second thoughts about clean living. His behavior had been impeccable, yet the boozers and brawlers had enjoyed longer careers than he had! Besides, given the drinking habits of ballplayers in those days, putting together a winning club of teetotalers might have been impossible.

At any rate, Spalding tolerated the tipplers and hell-raisers through 1886. After the postseason loss to the Browns, though, he broke up the team. Kelly was sold to the Boston Beaneaters. Rejecting a $5,000 offer for Kelly, Spalding let it be known he wanted twice that much. Boston eventually acceded to the then-record sum of $10,000. The amount was so incomprehensible to fans that Spalding went public with the paperwork.

Kelly’s longtime drinking buddy, pitcher Jim McCormick (who had his own bar in Paterson, N.J.), was shuffled off to Pittsburgh even though he had won 51 games in less than two full seasons (his fate was likely sealed when he showed up too drunk to find the mound before his second start of the Browns series). George Gore, an eight-year veteran with a .315 career average, was sold to the Giants, and Abner Dalrymple, a former stalwart who had been with the team since 1879, was sold to Pittsburgh.

Predictably, the baseball world was shocked by the departure of so many longtime White Stockings, but the Kelly deal drew most of the attention. Trading one of the best players in the game is bound to create controversy; so is trading the team’s most popular player. Dealing a player who is both is a real public relations challenge. At any rate, the sale of Kelly to Boston was a turning point in franchise history – dare we call it a curse? For sure, once the team got rid of Kelly, the luck of the Irish (and the White Stockings) went with him.

The other players had already enjoyed their best seasons. The loss of McCormick was fleeting, as he pitched just one more season in Pittsburgh, retiring at age 30 after a 13-23 season.  Dalrymple had suffered an off-year in 1886 and was never a productive player again. Gore hung around for six more seasons, but he was 32 when he left Chicago, and his career was winding down, though he did manage back-to-back .300 seasons for the Giants in 1889 and 1890, and got to play in two more quasi-World Series in 1888 and 1889.

Kelly, however, at age 28, was in his prime. He took his charisma to Boston, where he was dubbed “King” Kelly, but he was still fondly remembered in Chicago. On June 24, 1887, marking his return to West Side Park as a member of the Beaneaters, Kelly and his team were greeted by a crowd of 10,000. Sleeping off another bender, Kelly had to be roused to respond to his fans and the poem had been written in his honor:

Michael Kelly came to town,
To sing a little chanson,
He said, “I’ve come with Boston beans
To do up Baby Anson.
Oh, I come high but Yankee [meaning New England] land
With its bright shekels bought me,
And though I didn’t like to go,
Ten thousand dollars bought me.”

Not exactly Casey at the Bat, but it works better when sung to the tune of Yankee Doodle Dandy. Kelly doubtless thought it a superb drinking song.

Beginning with that 1887 season, the Cubs dropped from the ranks of pennant-winners to mere contenders. They dropped to third (71-50) in 1887, second (77-58) in 1888,third (67-65) in 1889, second (83-53) in 1890, and second (82-53) in 1891. One suspects Spalding was well aware that Kelly might have made the difference in at least some of those seasons. If he had it do over again….

Some of those pennants (1891-1893) belonged to Kelly and the Beaneaters. Kelly, who had left the Beaneaters after the 1889 season to dabble in the short-lived Players League and the American Association, returned to participate in the 1891 and 1892 pennant winners. The latter team went 102-48 and dispatched the American Association Cleveland Spiders in a five-game sweep.

By then, the Cubs had descended to the ranks of the also-rans, finishing seventh (70-76) in a field of 12 in 1892, ninth  (56-71) in 1893, eighth (57-75) in 1894. After that, their fortunes waxed and waned till the banner year of 1906. During that 20th anniversary of their previous pennant, they went 116-36, finishing in first ahead of a very good 96-56 (.632) Giants team by 20 games. That win total is still a record in the NL (Seattle has the AL record of 116, albeit in 162 games), and the winning percentage of .763 is still the best in modern major league history. So if Spalding’s deal had cursed the franchise, it had been most emphatically refuted.

Kelly, however, did not live long enough to see the resurgence of the Chicago NL franchise. In fact, he barely outlived his playing career. He played his last game on Sept. 2, 1893, as a member of the Giants. A little more than a year later, he was dead of pneumonia. Just how much his lifestyle contributed to a weakened immune system is matter for speculation. When he was inducted into the Hall of Fame in 1945, there were no descendants (attempts to track down his daughter failed) to attend the ceremonies.

Spalding was much more fortunate. Thanks in part, no doubt, to clean living, he lived to age 65, which was a pretty good run in those days. Of course, the income from his sporting goods company allowed him to purchase the skills of the best doctors of his time. He not only lived long enough to see the best days of the franchise, he got to loll away the last 15 years of his life in San Diego, where he died in 1915.

I don’t know what Spalding’s formal theological views were in the mid-1880s, but he later became involved in Theosophy, one of the earliest religious cults to become associated with Southern California, which evolved into Cult Central during the 20th century.

Spalding’s mistress/second wife had been involved in Theosophy, and in 1901 they moved to a Theosophist community in San Diego. Their home is now on the campus of Point Loma Nazarene University, whose baseball park is built on the cliffs above the Pacific Ocean. Baseball America once dubbed it “America’s Most Scenic Ballpark,” and that label has persisted. That’s a subjective judgment, but surely the list of ballparks where you can watch whales as well as baseball is a short one.

Curiously, the Cubs took a cue from their old boss and established beachheads in Southern California a few years after his death. The Cubs held spring training on Santa Catalina Island every year from 1921 to 1951, aside from three years during World War II. Owner William Wrigley had purchased the Cubs in 1918, then bought the island in 1919. He built a ballpark (the first Wrigley Field) there for his team. The same year the Cubs commenced spring training in Catalina, Wrigley purchased the Los Angeles Angels of the Pacific Coast League. In 1926, he opened Wrigley Field in Los Angeles for the franchise, which was affiliated with the Cubs from 1932 to 1956. (Since Wrigley Field in Chicago was known as Cubs Park till November 1926, it was in fact the third ballpark to bear that name.)

These days, Cubs fans might be happy with a pennant every two decades, but in the late 19th and early 20th centuries, a two-decade drought comprised almost two-thirds of NL history and might have seemed like an eternity.

For sure, old Albert Spalding would have been shocked if you’d told him on his deathbed that he had seen the Cubs win their last title. But we can’t blame the current curse on him. His ashes were scattered before the Cubs moved into Chicago’s Wrigley Field.


Frank Jackson writes about baseball, film and history, sometimes all at once. He has has visited 54 major league parks, many of which are still in existence.
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obsessivegiantscompulsive
9 years ago

Great article! Really enjoyed reading it. You have a nice writing style. Hopefully you can do one on the Giants early days, say, about Roger Conner, the career home run king for a while. Heck, each of the original teams must have pretty colorful beginnings.

William Kepper
9 years ago

Nice article. Unless you are referring to a specific chapter or group, calling Theosophy a cult is inacurate.

Cliff Blau
9 years ago

“The Cubs of 1880-1886 met all the requirements of a dynasty.” Of course they didn’t. A dynasty is a succession of rulers from a family, it isn’t the same person (or team) ruling for seven years. The only baseball dynasty was the New York Yankees, 1921-1964.

Also, King Kelly wasn’t the first big-name free agent. Before the reserve rule was implemented following the 1879 season, all players were free agents when their contracts expired. The Cubs had signed Anson as a free agent originally (actually before his contract had expired). Kelly was a free agent because he wasn’t on Cincinnati’s reserve list.

There was no World Series in 1882, just a couple of exhibition games between the two league champs. The first World Series was in 1884.

studes
9 years ago

Nice one, Frank. I’ve always maintained that the original Chicago curse occurred in the very first season of the NA, when the Chicago fire robbed the White Stockings of their first place finish.

http://www.baseballgraphs.com/main/index.php/site/article/mrs_olearys_curse

Paul G.
9 years ago

The New York Mutuals of 1876 were not booted out of the National League until December of that year. The reason they were ejected is because they refused to go on their final western road trip (bad team, money troubles), so in a sense they did not finish the season on the field but they technically survived the season. Teams failing to finish their schedules was a big problem in the National Association and the National League was going to have none of it.

Interestingly, which I have just learned at this very moment, the Mutuals actually played in Brooklyn. So depending how you look at it the National League either never had a team in New York until 1883 or it last had a team in 1877 when the Hartford team moved to Brooklyn for their last season. Also, the American Association added a New York team in 1883, so the city went from no teams to two teams, both of which were owned by the same two guys and both playing in the Polo Grounds.

MATT JOHNSTON
9 years ago

1907 1908