Russell Streur

COLLECTING THE HOUSE THAT RUTH BUILT: BASEBALL CARD SETS OF BABE RUTH AND YANKEE STADIUM

Entrance to Yankee Stadium, New York, Haberman’s, New York, 1920s.

There is no bigger name in baseball than Babe Ruth, and during his time, there was no bigger stage in the sport than the playing field at East 161^st Street and River Avenue in the Bronx, the original Yankee Stadium, The House That Ruth Built.

Constructed in 11 months after Yankee owners Colonels Jacob Ruppert and the equally-ranked but more aristocratically-named Tillinghast (Til) L’Hommedieu Huston finally grew bone-tired of being second-class tenants at the New York Giants home at the Polo Grounds, the stadium opened on April 18, 1923. Costing $2.5 million, the park was the most expensive ball ground built to date. With three decks it was also the largest, and the first in the United States to carry the weighty designation of stadium. The opener drew more fans than had ever before seen a game, besting the headcount set at Braves Field in Game Five of the 1916 World Series by more than 20,000 fedoras.

Somewhere north of 62,000 devotees mobbed the new home of the Yankees, packing the aisles and corridors for 90 minutes during the pre-game festivities. It was like “a subway crush hour” one witness testified, mellowed only by the consumption of Volstead lager at 15 cents a stein by the Prohibition crowd.

The New York Evening Telegram noted the scents of “fresh paint, fresh plaster and fresh grass” in the air on a cloudy, windy spring day when the temperature struggled to reach 50.

Shortly after 3 pm, John Philip Sousa and the Seventh Regiment Band led a battalion of baseball barons and civic potentates into center field and played the national anthem to the raising of the Stars and Stripes. Witnessed by “pretty much everybody who was anybody” in the city, the American League pennant won by the Yankees in 1922 followed Old Glory up the pole. The pennant gathered the loudest cheer.

After a round of pre-game pleasantries, Umpire Tommy Connolly called “Play Ball” at 3:35.

The late afternoon start to the game didn’t sit well with one observer. “Some day New York will be convinced that 3 o’clock is the proper hour with the fans for a ball game to begin, but as yet owners persist in holding off for those half dozen fans from Wall Street who can’t make it so early.”

Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis, running late to the ceremonies after choosing a proletarian train to the park, had to be plucked from the ticket lines and escorted into the stadium by the police.

Not everyone was lucky enough to get through one of the 40 turnstiles open for the event. The Fire Department ordered the gates closed with 25,000 hopeful patrons still outside the grounds. One latecomer, trying in vain to recover from a poorly-chosen subway connection, couldn’t get into the park for “money, marbles or chalk.”

Ruth hit two balls into the bleachers off Sam Jones during batting practice. The first landed harmlessly. The second splintered a wooden plank, scattering a group of young boys in one direction to escape the explosion, and then in another to capture the projectile.

In the third inning, he hit one that counted, smashing a slow, waist-high offering from opposing pitcher Howard Ehmke into the right field bleachers to drive in a pair of teammates and lead Yankees to a 4 to 1 win over his former team, the Boston Red Sox. A columnist for the New York Daily News depicted the scene:

From high noon on there had been a sound of revelry in the Bronx for Baseball’s Capital had gathered there its beauty and chivalry. But when the “Babe” tore into the ball the revelry became riot. The beauty and chivalry leaped to its feet and behaved unlike true beauty and chivalry should, tearing up programs, breaking canes, smashing neighboring hats and shrieking, shouting and howling. It was a notable ovation, or, as they say on some copy desks, demonstration.

A reporter described the homer, 325 feet or so into the right field bleachers, as one of Ruth’s best, a “terrific drive” that never rose more than 30 feet above the field. “And above all,” added the scribe, “it probably restored the old-time confidence of the ‘Babe.’ He hadn’t been going so good on the spring training trip. He was in great condition but he wasn’t smacking them.”

The Boston Globe wasn’t impressed. Ungenerously measuring the blow at 275 feet, the paper more accurately calculated the swing would have been nothing more than an out at Fenway Park.

It would have been a homer in the Sahara, retorted a Yankee partisan.

Ruth’s second wife Claire believed the round-tripper was her husband’s proudest moment. “He definitely talked about it more than any other homerun he ever hit,” she told one interviewer.

Ruth admitted he wanted to be the first to hit one into the stands in the new home of the Yankees. “I lost sight of the ball when the fans all jumped to their feet but I recognized the yell they let out,” Ruth explained. “I feel that I have been rewarded in part for all the hard work I put in preparing myself for the training season,” the New York outfielder concluded. “I guess there must be something in that old gag about virtue being its own reward.”

The Opening Day crowd couldn’t contain its admiration for the Babe. In the bottom of the ninth, fans hopped out of the bleachers and surrounded Ruth in right field until the game ended.

It all inspired New York Evening Telegram sportswriter Fred Lieb to name the park “The House That Ruth Built,” forever tying the man and the stadium together in the nation’s memory.

Entrance to Yankee Stadium, New York, Manhattan Post Card Publishing Co., New York, 1920s. An alternate view of the stadium’s entrance in the 1920s. Postcard manufacturers were not above retouching and colorizing a scene from the same stock black and white photograph.

It took years for the temple of baseball along the Harlem River to become formally known as Yankee Stadium. During all of the 1920s, the Associated Press attached an honorific article to the park’s name and lower-cased the Roman half of the sobriquet—“the Yankee stadium.” Other stylists upper-cased both halves of the title—“the Yankee Stadium.” The Great Depression leavened the label to simply “Yankee Stadium.”

Four particular collections of baseball cards connect Ruth to Yankee Stadium:

Megacards, The Babe Ruth Collection, 1992 (165 cards)
Megacards, Babe Ruth 100^th Anniversary, 1995 (25 cards)
Upper Deck, Yankee Stadium Legacy Box Set, 2008 (100 cards)
Upper Deck, Inserts, The House That Ruth Built, 2008 (25 cards).

Megacards, 1992, The Babe Ruth Collection

Sharing a common origin, it is no surprise that the cards in The Babe Ruth Collection closely resemble The Sporting News Conlon issues of 1991—1994. Top, Megacards, The Babe Ruth Collection, 1992, Card 105; Sultan of Swat; bottom, The Sporting News Conlon Collection, 1992, Card 663, promotional, Game of the Century.

Babe Ruth led an expensive, excessive and extravagant life that sometimes crossed the border into alcoholic debauchery.

Frank Lieb tells stories of a detective reporting Ruth having trysts with six women in one night, being run out of a hotel at gunpoint by an irate husband, and being chased through Pullman cars on a train one night by the knife-wielding bride of a Louisiana legislator. The press kept quiet. “If she had carved up the Babe, we would have had a hell of a story,” said one scribe who witnessed the race.

His salary demands were an annual source of amusement and debate among the sporting press.

Colonel Til Huston tried to rein in the Babe in 1922. “We know you’ve been drinking and whoring all hours of the night, and paying no attention to training rules. As we are giving you a quarter-million for the next five years, we want you to act with more responsibility. You can drink beer and enjoy cards and be in your room by eleven o’clock, the same as the other players. It still gives you a lot of time to have a good time.”

“Colonel, I’ll promise to go easier on drinking, and get to bed earlier,” Ruth promised. “But not for you, fifty thousand dollars, or two hundred and fifty thousand dollars, will I give up women. They’re too much fun.”

The high life caught up with Ruth in the spring of 1925. An ulcer put the slugger into the hospital for five weeks. It didn’t slow him down much. In August, he was suspended and fined $5,000 for showing up late to batting practice after a night on the town.

That fall, Ruth admitted he had been “the sappiest of saps” in an interview with Joe Winkworth of Collier’s magazine.

“I am through with the pests and the good-time guys,” Ruth declared. “Between them and a few crooks I have thrown away more than a quarter million dollars.”

Ruth listed a partial toll. $125,000 on gambling, $100,000 on bad business investments, $25,000 in lawyer fees to fight blackmail. General high living cost another quarter million.

“But I don’t regret those things,” Ruth said. “I was the home run king, and I was just living up to the title.”

Megacards, The Babe Ruth Collection, 1992. Card 103, Babe and his 54-ounce bat.

Four dozen bats waited for Ruth at the Yankees St. Petersburg training camp in 1928, some of the dark green “Betsy” color that powered many of Ruth’s 60 homers in 1927 and the rest the slugger’s favored gold. The bats averaged 48 ounces, 6 ounces less than Ruth had formerly swung.

“At last I’ve got some sense,” Ruth told sportswriter and cartoonist Robert Edgren that year. “I used to think Jack Dempsey was foolish to train all the time—but Jack never got fat, did he?

“So this winter I’ve been keeping up a mild course of training most of the time. I’ve done a lot of hunting and on top I spend my spare time playing handball, wrestling and boxing in Artie McGovern’s gym. But the diet is the big thing.”

“You can’t be a hog and an athlete at the same time,” McGovern admonished the Babe. “You eat enough to kill a horse.”

Ruth followed McGovern’s advice that spring, slashing his meat consumption and loading up on fruits and vegetables.

“More important,” said Edgren, “he still has a boy’s enthusiasm for baseball.”

McGovern’s watchful eye and the lighter lumber kept Ruth at the top of his game. So did his marriage to the ever-vigilant Claire Merritt Hodgson. Between 1928 and 1931, Ruth homered 195 times and drove in 612 runs.

Megacards, The Babe Ruth Collection, 1992. Card 121, Claire Hodgson.

The well-curated and comprehensive 1992 Megacards set traces Babe Ruth’s career in 165 cards. The set is divided into specific sections, among them year-by-year summaries of his baseball career, the records he established, his career highlights and anecdotes and remembrances by family members and teammates.

Megacards, The Babe Ruth Collection, 1992. Clockwise from upper left: Card 9, Ruth pitches Red Sox to 24 wins in 1917; Card 16, wins batting title in 1924 with a .378 average; Card 22, knocks nine home runs in a week during 1930, including the longest ever hit at Shibe Park; Card 25, drives in 100 or more runs his 13^th and last time in 1933.

Megacards, The Babe Ruth Collection, 1992. Top to bottom: Card 108, Ruth was the first player to hit 20, 30, 40, 50 and 60 home runs in a season; Card 92, in 1934, Ruth led a group of American League players on a 17-game exhibition tour of Japan. A half-a-million or more fans watched the players parade through the Ginza on the second day of the expedition; Card 94, inducted into the hall of fame, 1939.

Megacards, The Babe Ruth Collection, 1992. The home runs. Clockwise from upper left: Card 72, First Home Run; Card 77, First Home Run in Yankee Stadium; Card 81, Babe and Lou combine for 107 homers; Card 93, Last Major League Homers.

Megacards, 1995, Babe Ruth 100th Anniversary

Megacards followed up its biography of Ruth with a 25-card set in 1995 to mark the 100^th anniversary of the legend’s birth.

Megacards, Babe Ruth 100^th Anniversary, 1995. Top to bottom: Card 5, 177 Runs Scored in 1921, Card 5; Card 12, Fishing with Lou Gehrig in Sheepshead Bay, 1927 ; Card 3, .847 Slugging Average in 1920. The Babe is pictured here with fellow sluggers Jimmie Foxx, Lou Gehrig and Al Simmons in 1929.

Megacards, Babe Ruth 100^th Anniversary, 1995. Card 11, the Red Sox pitching prospect threw nine shutouts in 1916.

Upper Deck, 2008, Yankee Stadium Legacy

In 2008 and 2009, Upper Deck marked the last season of the original Yankee Stadium by issuing an enormous 6,742 insert set, one card for every game played at the park or other historic sporting event that occurred on the grounds. Ruth is featured on many of the cards, either as a representative player for the day or because of a game highlight. The final card in the set documents Andy Pettitte’s win over the Baltimore Orioles on September 21, 2008.

Upper Deck, Yankee Stadium Legacy, 2008. Card 6742, Andy Pettitte.

The company also issued a more accessible 100-card boxed stadium legacy set. During his time with the Yankees, Ruth overshadowed all his teammates. Only Lou Gehrig pulled some of the spotlight away from the home run king. Still, it was a big shadow. “There was plenty of room to spread out,” said the Yankee first baseman.

Upper Deck, Yankee Stadium Box Set, 2008. Some of the Babe’s teammates.

Clockwise from upper left: Card 10, George Pipgrass; Card 5, Waite Hoyt; Card 9, Urban Shocker; Card 8, Earle Combs. Pipgrass led the American League with 24 wins in 1928. Hoyt won 23. Shocker won 49 games for the Yankees between 1925 and 1927. The speedy Combs scored 143 runs in 1932, one of eight straight seasons the centerfielder scored 100 or more runs. Most of the cards in the boxed set picture later members of the Yankee fraternity.

Upper Deck, 2008, Inserts, The House That Ruth Built

Upper Deck also distributed a separate insert set of 25 cards in 2008 under the title The House That Ruth Built. The first three cards highlight the 1923 season.

Later in the set, an eight-card sequence including numbers 8, 10 and 13, below, chronicles Ruth’s 60-home run 1927 season.

In a time of cellphone cameras and Instagram, it’s hard to remember that postcards were once the quick and inexpensive way to connect with friends and family.

Yankee Stadium’s early decades coincided with the postcard industry’s Linen Age. The cards were not actually cloth—a manufacturing process increased the amount of cotton fiber in the paper stock and created a canvas texture during printing. The ridges gave a soft focus to the cards and the higher rag count allowed deeper saturation of inks. Bright and vivid scenes with a wide palette of colors resulted. Yankee Stadium was a natural draw for the postcard manufacturers of the era.

Yankee Stadium, New York City. The Union News Co., 1937. Babe Ruth’s Opening Day home run would have landed in the lower left-center of this view.

Unattributed. Early view of outfield at Yankee Stadium in 1920s with flagpole in play.

“The Yankee Stadium is indeed the last word in ball parks,” wrote F.C. Lane of Baseball Magazine. “But not the least of its merits is its advantage of position. From the plain of the Harlem River it looms up like the great Pyramid of Cheops from the sands of Egypt.

“There is nothing behind it but blue sky,” Lane continued. “Stores and dwellings and the rolling hills of the Bronx are too far removed to interfere with this perspective…The Yankee Stadium stands out in bold relief and the measuring eye gives it full credit for every ounce of cement and every foot of structural steel that went into its huge frame. As an anonymous spectator remarked, viewing the new park from the bridge that spans the Harlem, ‘As big as it is, it looks even bigger.’”

Manhattan Post Card Publishing Co., New York City, Yankee Stadium, New York City, 1942.

The 1923 Yankee opener outdrew the rest of the American League openers, combined. More than one million fans passed through the turnstiles in the Bronx during the year. The count led the major leagues, but by a lesser margin than might be expected—the Detroit Tigers drew 911,000.

Acacia Card Company, New York, New York. Lights were installed in 1946.

The Yankees were one of the last teams in the American League to light their field. Only Boston and Detroit waited longer. “It’s not really baseball,” Lou Gehrig said of the nocturnal version of the game. “Real baseball should be played in the daytime, in the sunshine.”

Alfred Mainzer, New York City. A flag bedecked and sold-out stadium, 1951.

Upper Deck, The House That Ruth Built, 2008. The Last Appearances at Yankee Stadium. Top: HRB-24, Babe Ruth Day; bottom: HRB-25, Jersey Retired.

On April 27, 1947, Major League Baseball celebrated Babe Ruth Day at each of the seven games played that day (Detroit at Cleveland was postponed). 58,000 fans attended the event at Yankee Stadium. The other parks drew a total of 190,000 and the ceremonies were broadcast on radio around the world. Francis Cardinal Spellman delivered the invocation, describing Ruth as a sports hero and a champion of fair play. On the secular plane, Ford Motor Company gave the Babe a $5,00 Lincoln Continental.

The presidents of the National and American League presented Ruth a medal on which was inscribed the message “To Babe Ruth, whose tremendous batting average over the years is exceeded only by the size of his heart.”

Suffering from throat cancer, Ruth was able to muster a short farewell speech barely audible into the microphone. “There’s been so many lovely things said about me,” Ruth concluded. “I’m glad I had the opportunity to thank everybody.”

The New York Times said the ovation for the slugger was the greatest in the history of the national pastime.

Almost as an anti-climax, the Yankees retired Babe Ruth’s number 14 months later on June 13, 1948. But the cheers were still there. “He never received a finer reception,” wrote Oscar Fraley of the United Press. “It was a roar that sounded as if the 50,000 fans were trying to tear down The House That Ruth Built.”

The Sultan of Swat died an old man at the young age of 53 on August 16, 1948. His body lay in state for two days after his death at the main entrance of Yankee Stadium. Tens of thousands of fans paid their last respects to the slugger.

Megacards, The Babe Ruth Collection, 1992. Card 163, Game Called.

All images from the author’s collections.

Origins of Baseball

It seems like an impossible job—condense the history of baseball in the 19^th Century to a set of one hundred cards. After all, it took Harold and Dorothy Seymour three hundred pages to cover the same ground in their collaborative volume Baseball: The Early Years. But that was the task undertaken by a small band of researchers in a set titled “The Origins of Baseball 1744—1899.”

Presided over by Jonathan Mork, the team included David Martin for artwork and Mer-Mer Chen for graphic design and photo restoration. Jonathan’s brother Jeremy authored the stories on the back of the cards. Issued by the American Archives Publishing Co. in 1994, the boxed collection logically balances most of its imagery between player and executive portraits, team photographs, playing fields and notable events. The year 1744 in the title refers to the date of an English woodcut of a game of Rounders included as card 3 in the set, below.

More than twenty-five years after printing, the cards need gentle handling. The black finish of the borders easily flakes.

Images were carefully selected from photographs and other illustrations maintained by the Hall of Fame’s National Baseball Library. The full-length studio photographs are especially striking in the card format. Clockwise from upper left: Jack Chesbro (card 92); Tony Mullane (card 66); Sam Thompson (card 93); and Paul Hines (card 37).

Noted personalities of the game include pioneering sportswriter Henry Chadwick (card 11), the grand old man of the game Connie Mack (card 84), and umpire Tom Connolly (card 72). The surprise is the 17^th President of the United States, Andrew Johnson (card 14). Said to be a fan of the game, Johnson is honored for allowing government clerks and staffers to clock out early when the Washington Nationals were scheduled to play an important game.

Team cards are an important part of the set. The collection naturally includes the founding Knickerbockers (card 5) and the undefeated 1869 Red Stockings (card 19).

The three powerful early Brooklyn teams are also pictured: the Atlantics (card 16), the Eckfords (card 9), and the Excelsiors (card 12). The Atlantics virtually monopolized the early championships of the sport. The Eckfords notched a pair of flags themselves. The third and deciding game of the 1860 championship match between the Atlantics and the Excelsiors produced one of the game’s first great controversies. With his team leading 8-6 in the sixth inning, Excelsior captain Joe Leggett pulled his club off the field when gamblers and Atlantic partisans in the crowd shouted one too many insults against his players. The two great teams never faced each other again. Leggett may have been incorruptible on the diamond; off was a different matter. Over the years, his hands found themselves in a number of tills to feed a gambling habit he could not afford. He disappeared in 1877 with $1,000 missing in liquor license fees from the Brooklyn Police Department Excise Bureau.

Teams of the 1880s are well-represented in the set. The Boston Beaneaters (card 98) were the most successful National League team of the 1890s, winning flags in 1891, 1892, 1893, 1897 and 1898. The City of Chicago lent its broad shoulders to the development of baseball behind the likes of National League founder William Hulbert, star pitcher and later sporting goods magnate Albert Spalding, and five-time pennant winner Cap Anson. The 1886 team is pictured on card 45. The 1887 National League Detroit Wolverines (card 51) played a 15-game championship series that year against the American Association St. Louis Browns. Eight of the games were played on neutral grounds. Detroit claimed the flag in Game 11, played in the afternoon in Baltimore after a morning tilt in Washington.

The set doesn’t sugarcoat the game.

Above: Jesse “The Crab” Burkett of the Cleveland Spiders (card 88) earns a spot in the set for his role in a post-game melee in Louisville that saw the entire Cleveland team hauled off to jail. Edwin Bligh (card 31) scandalized the game when he was accused of fathering a child with a 17-year-old girl.

Below: Hard drinking plagued the early years of the sport. A detective once trailed Mike “King” Kelly (card 48) into the early morning hours, reporting the Chicago catcher enjoying a glass of lemonade at 3 a.m. at a local watering hole. Kelly denied the allegation. “The detective is a complete liar. I never drink lemonade at that hour. It was pure whiskey.”

Ed Delahanty’s attraction to the spirits had a grim ending (card 74). The only player to win batting titles in both the American and National Leagues, the outfielder was thrown off a train in 1903 near Niagara Falls by a conductor for being drunk and disorderly. He fell off a bridge into the Niagara River and was swept to his death.

A SABR biography of Delahanty by John Saccoman can be found at https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/ed-delahanty/.

Several cards highlight the playing fields of the day. A diagram of a New England version of the game is shown on card 10:

The decades of the 1850s and the 1860s are summarized on individual cards.

Top: Elysian Fields, the ancestral homeland of the game, is shown card 7. A game between the Brooklyn Atlantics and the Philadelphia Athletics is shown on card 18. Gamblers congregate in the lower left. Seated umpires and the official scorers at their table take up station between home and first base.

Abraham Lincoln is featured on card 13 of the set. Commentary on the back of the card includes an early debunking of the theory that returning Civil War soldiers spread the game to the American South. As the back of the Lincoln card states, an especially robust strain of the game emerged in New Orleans before the Civil War. It sure did.

At least half a dozen baseball clubs were playing regularly by 1859. The Magnolia and Southern clubs squared off in one series; the Empire and the presiding elder Louisiana Base Ball Club played one match series against each other. The Louisiana club didn’t appear to take things as seriously as their younger counterparts. In one game, the patriarchs were forced to start with just eight players present, and in another with just seven. Other nines played side against side. The Orleans Club was active on and off the field of play, leading a political parade on horseback in red velvet caps on one occasion and giving a Mardi Gras masquerade ball on another.

The Magnolia and Southern clubs seemed especially well-suited to each other. After one game, the teams exchanged badges and then marched together to the United States Hotel for a round or two of drinks.

The clubs had trouble finding spaces for their games. The Third District, where many of the teams were located, had only three open fields. One behind Claiborne Circle was the province by seniority of the Black Racket clubs. White Racket clubs claimed the grounds near the Old Paper Mill behind the Pontchartrain Railroad by the same rights of prior occupancy. An open square on Claiborne Street was guarded by neighborhood youths known as the Squatters. When a Les Quatre club tried to use the field one day, the Squatters drew knives and pistols and ran them off.

The New Orleans Crescent described Racket as “the game of all games for the spectator,” a spirited Creole affair of base and ball with a high reputation for entertainment value, played with a short one-handed bat—the racket.

A box for a game between Les Quatre clubs shows a scored and umpired game of runs played in innings with 12 men to a side. By the following spring, the teams were described as baseball clubs.

City newspapers approved of all the play. The Sunday Delta observed:

Lately a furore has been started among us, which, if it only goes on progressing in the same spirit it has commenced, will make cricket and other games of ball as common in this section as they are in England. Whether it continues long or not, it will exercise a good influence as long as it lasts, and we see no reason for its abatement, as the better these games are generally understood, the more popular do they become.

The New Orleans Crescent apologized for not being to attend all the games. “There are now so many Base Ball and Cricket and Racket Clubs, and they play so frequently, appearing in the field nearly every day, up town, down town, and over the river, that we cannot keep the run of them.”

Up and down the great rivers of the United States the game still thrives, from town to town as the Crescent saw so long ago. One hundred cards cannot tell the whole story of the 19^th Century game, but each card provides a path to a different chapter in the story. It’s a fine set, worthy of time and study. Listed for $25 or so on eBay, it’s a steal.

DISCLAIMER

Images in this article have been brightened from original scans for presentation purposes. Master heckler William Gleason on card 36 is pictured before (top) and after modification (bottom).

Dexter Park: The House That Murder Built

There’s been a lot of baseball parks in Chicago. Before there was Wrigley, there was Comiskey. Before Comiskey, there was the West Side Grounds, and before that, Brotherhood Park, and Southside Park, and Lakefront Park, and others, all the way back to Dexter Park.

Located just south of the Chicago Stockyards between 43^rd and 47^th and Halsted Streets, Dexter Park was the Windy City’s foremost ball ground in the mid-1860s. It hosted the 1867 tournament that saw Rockford’s Forest City Base Ball Club shock the previously undefeated Washington Nationals, 29 to 23, on July 25. The Nationals avenged the loss two days later by hammering the Chicago Excelsiors 49 to 7, and then giving the same treatment to the home-ground Chicago Atlantics after another two-day break, 78 to 17.

With the amateur game giving way to the professional version, the Chicago White Stockings claimed the park in time for the 1870 season. Twenty-thousand fans are said to have witnessed the home team defeat the visiting Cincinnati Red Stockings in mid-October, 16 to 13.

But before there was Dexter Park, there was Dexter himself. Described as “high-spirited, nervous, wide-awake and intelligent,” Dexter was America’s most famous horse during his short career. Racing from 1863 until he pulled up lame in 1867, years before he would’ve reached his prime, Dexter ran 55 times and won 50. He was Inducted as an Immortal to the Harness Racing Hall of Fame in 1956.

Dexter beat all of the other famous flyers of the time—Stonewall Jackson, George M. Patchen, Jr., General Butler, Commodore Vanderbilt, Toronto Chief, Lady Thorne and others. Along the way, the equine powerhouse set speed records for the day in mile heats, best three-out-of-five heats, two miles, three miles, in harness, saddle and wagon.

In 1866, Dexter was stabled in Chicago and owned by George Trussell, a notorious Windy City gambler. One of Dexter’s most-anticipated races was scheduled to be held at the Chicago Driving Park Association grounds on September 4. Trussell expected a big day. But torrential rain soaked the Windy City that morning and a three-way $5,000 match against Patchen and General Butler was postponed. It still turned out to be a big day for Trussell, when Mollie Cosgriff shot him dead.

Trussell spent the last afternoon of his life at the Driving Park, drinking and gambling with friends despite the race postponement. The party moved downtown in the evening with a tour of bars. It was said that Trussell had a strong attraction to the spirits of the time, and so it wasn’t a surprise when he drifted into Seneca Wright’s tavern on Randolph for a nightcap and a song toward the 11 o’clock hour.

What was a surprise, was when Mollie Cosgriff showed up at the saloon, wanting a word or two with George. She looked, according to one newspaper, as if she had just come from a dancing party, wearing a striking white moire dress to the occasion, a shawl draped over her shoulders, drunk, and carrying a revolver in a pocket.

Mollie was no stranger to the tavern side of life. She ran a well-known house of ill-repute on Fourth Avenue.

George and Mollie were no strangers to each other. Mollie had fallen into the demi-monde in Chicago after moving to the city from her home in Ohio. Her attractive figure and alluring beauty naturally gained the temporary attention if not the permanent affection of Chicago’s fast young men, of whom George was no exception. An affair evolved, and a son by Mollie’s calculation, and the couple drifted apart, but Mollie never lost her devotion to the man.

The lingering feelings were not reciprocal. George didn’t feel much like talking with Mollie that night, and he tried to usher her out the front door of Wright’s place. There was some pushing and shoving at the entrance. Seneca stepped from behind the bar, separated the two quarrelers, and then went back to his duties. The former lovers continued to scuffle. One witness said that George struck Mollie. Others said he didn’t. Mollie pulled her gun and shot him in the side.

George careened back toward the center of the saloon. Mollie followed, and fired again, the bullet striking him in the back. George stumbled toward a side door. Mollie shot him a third time. He staggered out the door, into the entrance of Price’s livery stable, and collapsed.

As if just coming out of a trance, Mollie raced out of the saloon and fell on his body, shrieking frantically, “O my George! My George! He is dead.”

A notorious gambler and owner of a famous horse, killed in his prime. A jilted lover, a keeper of a lewd house, a drunken murderess. Newspapers across the Northeast quarter of the country followed the story with salacious glee. It was a sensation, pure and simple, and it seemed like it would be a tough act to follow. But Chicago was a tough town, and racing soon resumed.

“There is great excitement in sporting circles,” the Chicago Tribune declared on Friday morning, September 21, 1866, “about the great race…between General Butler and Cooley, for a purse of five thousand dollars a side, and set for tomorrow on the track of the Chicago Driving Park Association.”

General Butler was a popular harness horse whose career overlapped the Civil War. His likeness circulated on Currier & Ives and other lithographs.

Cooley was a black gelding and a favorite on Chicago race tracks. Locally owned, the fast trotter was described as “a big little horse” with “an eye full of intelligence and kindness.”

Heavy betting underscored the excitement for the sulky race between the horses. “The knowing ones seem to be about equally divided in opinion as far as odds are concerned,” the Tribune computed, “though the majority seem to think the General stands the best chance.”

The match between the horses was also a match between the drivers of the sulkies they pulled. Manager Bill Riley drove Cooley. Two men would steer General Butler that afternoon—jockey Samuel Crooks for the first two races, and quarter-owner William McKeever the remainder of the way.

McKeever was a cool customer, and a good enough athlete to have played for two of New York City’s premier baseball clubs. He began as an infielder with the Gotham club in 1859 before taking on pitching duties for the rough and tumble Mutual club in 1863.

In 1861, McKeever pitched for New York against Brooklyn and the great Jim Creighton in the famous New York Clipper Silver Ball Match. The Brooklyn Daily Eagle called McKeever “the most effective medium-paced pitcher in the country.” Creighton outpitched McKeever that day in Hoboken, but Creighton isn’t called great without a reason.

Now nearing 30, McKeever had traded away the mound work for the less taxing pursuits of harness racing and gambling. A half-hour delay after the scheduled start of the Driving Park match drew the disapproval of the crowd of thousands in attendance. Odds favored Cooley 25 to 10 when the match finally began at 3:30 p.m.

General Butler pulled ahead in the first heat, building a five-length lead at the half-mile post but the horses were equal at the final turn. A late surge by Cooley earned the win by a neck.

Cooley won the second heat by 15 lengths. Bettors on General Butler, suspicious of the slow times turned in by Crooks and on the verge of seeing their wagers wiped out, begged McKeever to make a switch. As the odds climbed to 100 to 25 on Cooley, McKeever took the lines for the third heat. The move paid off with a win by 20 lengths for General Butler and the odds reversed themselves.

Trouble began in the fourth heat. A half-an-hour was lost in fits and starts and ill-words between the drivers. With darkness rapidly falling, the heat finally reached its start. Two hundred yards into the race, McKeever suddenly swerved in front of Riley’s buggy, scraping Cooley’s nose. General Butler won the race by a half-length. Many in the crowd argued that the foul should have resulted in a dead heat, or the award of the race to Cooley. Disarray prevailed when the track judges stuck with the win for General Butler.

By the time order was resolved, night had fully fallen and only moonlight illuminated the racing grounds for the fifth and final match. More argument ensued, with half the crowd for the race to be called off due to darkness, and the other half demanding it continue. A start was made despite the conditions. General Butler broke in front along the rail as the horses disappeared in the darkness.

In due course, Cooley returned to view, heading down the home stretch toward the winning line. General Butler careened behind, without a driver. A search quickly located McKeever, bloody and unconscious, face down in the cinders on the back stretch. He was quickly carried to the home of J. R. Gore, a physician who lived nearby on Michigan Avenue.

Examination revealed extensive fractures to McKeever’s skull, with particular injury to the left temple, as if McKeever had been struck in the head by a hard object. Gore extracted three broken pieces of the cranium. Hopes were raised that the procedure would relieve pressure on the brain and allow McKeever to regain consciousness. It soon became apparent that the patient could not recover from the injury.

With foul play evident, police launched an investigation. After taking Riley into custody, suspicion fell on Peter and Tom Hickey, brothers who owned a tavern near the race track. Police arrived at the saloon at two a.m. Sunday morning and arrested the two after a desperate fight that left the officers and suspects bitten, battered, billy-clubbed and pistol-whipped.

McKeever died Sunday afternoon without ever coming out of his coma. His body was returned to his brother’s care in New York and internment at Greenwood Cemetery, final resting place of so many of the game’s pioneers. Remembering their former pitcher, the entire Mutual Base Ball Club attended McKeever’s funeral.

Back in Illinois, the Cook County Coroner opened an inquest on McKeever’s death. Chicago’s sporting crowd packed the Central Police Station to view the proceedings. A string of witnesses testified. Two said they saw Peter Hickey on the track between the fourth and fifth heat. There were other figures in the shadows. Tom Hickey denied any knowledge of the events surrounding McKeever’s death. Bill Riley testified he didn’t have anything to do with it, either. He closed with one admission. “I did say, ‘If I could win the race, I would.’”

The coroner’s jury returned its verdict on October without charges, finding only that a plot existed among unnamed friends of Cooley to prevent General Butler from winning the match, and that the result of this plot caused McKeever’s death. A later history of the Chicago Police Department named Tom Hickey as the killer.

Mollie Cosgriff went on trial that same month for the Trussell killing. The charge was manslaughter, for which a sentence of up to life could be applied. There was no argument that Cosgriff killed Trussell. The only argument was whether she was justified in pulling the trigger, in fear for her own life when Trussell tried to push her out of Seneca Wright’s tavern. The jury didn’t buy the entire bill of goods, but came close. After deliberating just over three hours, the jury returned with a guilty verdict and the minimum sentence allowable, a year in the penitentiary.

It might be expected that a woman of Mollie’s notoriety and profession would have some connections. In prison, she was given a private cell and allowed to receive visitors and wear her own clothes, but that was just a nickel ante in a smaller game. Mollie had bigger cards to play: she was pardoned by Illinois Governor Richard J. Oglesby after serving just a month of her sentence.

The Driving Park Association did not survive McKeever’s death. With its reputation completely ruined by the autumn’s gruesome murders, the grounds were sold at auction in December of 1866 and soon demolished. Dexter Park, specifically named after the trotter, opened in July of 1867 to replace the disgraced track. The spacious infield of the racing oval contained the baseball diamond.

A tobacco card celebrates Dexter

Dexter, 2:17 1/4
The Great American Trotters series (N231)
Issued by Kinney Brothers Tobacco Company 1889–90
Size: 1 7/16 × 2 3/4 in. (3.6 × 7 cm)
The 2:17 1/4 on the right-hand margin of the card represents the record time Dexter set in Buffalo in 1867 for the trotting mile.

The horse Dexter had a short career. So did the park named after him. It burned to the ground in 1871, a victim of the Great Chicago Fire.

William McKeever has never appeared on a baseball card.

The Milwaukee Racing Sausages

There are many mascot races in the major and minor leagues these days, but it all began at Milwaukee County Stadium on June 27, 1993, when a modest scoreboard animation suddenly burst into live action on the playing field.

That Sunday afternoon, the original Klement’s Famous Sausages—the Bratwurst, the Polish and the Italian—surged out from behind the left field fence and began running haphazardly toward home plate, weaving uncertainly back and forth in their seven-feet from head to knee lederhosen, red-and-blue striped koszulka, and tall chef’s hat.

Brainchild of Milwaukee graphic designer Michael Dillon of McDill Design, the racers were an instant hit with the 45,580 Brewer fans in attendance. At first, the races were only held on dates when a big crowd was expected. Later, the races occurred every Sunday. Finally, they became a ritual between the sixth and seventh innings at every game. In the mid-1990s, a Hot Dog was added to the County Stadium line-up. A fifth sausage, the Chorizo, later broke into the regular line-up.

*Topps Between Innings, 2014 BI-6, Famous Racing Sausages*

The races continued after the Brewers moved to the then-named Miller Park. On July 9, 2003, Pittsburgh first baseman Randall Simon took a playful tap of the bat at the back of the Italian Sausage as the runners passed the third-base visitor’s dugout. The poke knocked the mascot to the ground, and the hot dog tripped over the fallen racer. Young women were playing the role of each racer. Both suffered cuts and bruises.

Sheriffs at the ballpark took a dim view of Simon’s interference and launched a criminal investigation. Judicial proceedings ended with a $342 fine levied against the Pirate for disorderly conduct. Major League Baseball elbowed into the act and suspended Simon for three days.

*Topps Heritage, 2003 156, Randall Simon*

Despite the Simon incident, a friendly rivalry evolved between the Sausages and the Pierogies of the Pittsburgh Pirates, and the two mascot teams now face off with each other in an annual home and away relay race.

*Topps Between Innings, 2014 BI-2, Pierogi Race*

But don’t expect anything similar with the Racing Presidents of the Washington Nationals. There’s some bad blood between the mascots, with the Presidential team mocking the Milwaukee originals as cardboard “Un-talian sausage,” “No-lish Sausage,” “Not-Dog,” “Not-Wurst,” and “Choriz-No.”

No matter. The Racing Presidents baseball card is the ugliest baseball card produced so far in the 21^st century.