Now I had seen Mike “King” Kelly the previous year, when Mother had taken me to St. Louis to see Chicago play the Browns in one of the United States Championship contests. And I had watched from the bench when Albert Goodwill Spalding’s White Stockings came to Kansas City for our season opener. Chicago, of course, won those two games against us, and likely would have won three, but our first game had been rained out. Like most baseball enthusiasts in America, I had read about King Kelly, had worshiped him, and envied him. And now he stepped over the batsman’s line, and hefted that Spalding No. 3 bat.
He laid the top of that thirty-nine-inch long, handsome piece of basswood, shining with orange shellac on his shoulder, spit tobacco juice over home base, and put his hands over the handle that looked too thick for even my big hams to get around.
“Low,” he said in a heavy Irish brogue as he bent his knees and stared at me with such intense focus that I felt beads of sweat pop out on my forehead. My hands suddenly felt clammy. My mouth turned to sand.
Mike “King” Kelly, the man Frank Harding would write a poem about a few years later, and, in 1893, George G. Gaskin would turn into a popular song: “Slide, Kelly, Slide.”
Five-foot-ten, 170 pounds, handsome as any ballist around, with a well-groomed mustache and piercing blue eyes. Back in ’78, when he was but twenty years old, he had joined the Cincinnati Red Stockings before moving to Chicago in 1880.
The voices of women, yelling encouragement at their favorite ballist, came from the stands. Never before had I heard a woman, except Mother, at a baseball game—and usually I was sitting next to her. Sure, they came to many ball games, but to my understanding ladies were supposed to be quiet.
“Play,” the umpire barked, and Fatty Briody moved his thick hands toward the inside of home base.
I went into motion, and, to my amazement, saw King Kelly watch the ball slide past the corner of the plate right above his knee. Even more amazing to me, was the fact that Fatty Briody didn’t even have to move his hands, although he dropped the ball on the plate, rose from his squat, and shook his stinging hands, all the while cursing.
“Strike!” the umpire called.
The King stepped out of the box, smiled at Fatty as my catcher picked up the ball to throw back to me. After Fatty settled back into his position, Kelly looked at the umpire and said, “I imagine, Mister Coffelt, that you won’t allow me to change where I’d like my pitches.”
“You know the rules, Mike,” the umpire said.
“Aye, Kerry. That I do.” He stepped back toward home base, and his eyes, his focus, grew even more intense.
Fatty set up in the same spot, and braced himself for another hard pitch. Yet something about Mike Kelly made me think, Not so hard this time. He has seen your fast ball. Slow this one down.
Actually, I took a lot off that pitch, more than I expected, more than Fatty was prepared for, but I certainly fooled King Kelly.
He swung so hard, and so early, that he spun around and fell to his knees.
The crowd gasped.
“That’s strike two,” the umpire said.
Kelly brushed off his pants, checked his bat, spit tobacco juice into his hands, and looked at the umpire. “I don’t recall seeing this bloody kid before, Kerry. Do you?”
“Fresh fish,” the umpire said.
That was King Kelly, to be sure. As Fred Pfeffer would tell me at Tom Cobb’s saloon later that night. “It’s King’s way, son. He plays smart, you see, plays the umpire as wisely as he plays the opposing nine. Makes a friend of him, he does, engages his confidence, figures a way to get the best of those decisions. You won’t find a smarter ballist than King Kelly, sonny, and that’s the God’s honest truth.”
Two strikes. No balls. Fatty moved his thick hands toward the far side of the plate, and I sent a fast ball out of the reach of King Kelly’s giant bat. King Kelly, of course, was too smart to chase a ball that far out of the strike zone.
He tapped the heels of his shoes with his thick bat, one foot at a time, and settled in for another pitch. Which I blew past him, just below the belt, dead center. He cut loose with a mighty swing, but couldn’t catch up to my pitch that knocked Fatty Briody onto his hindquarters, who managed somehow not to drop the ball.
“The striker,” the umpire said, “is out.”
As the Chicago fans groaned, and maybe even cried, Mike Kelly stepped away from home base, spit tobacco juice, and shot me a glance as he walked back toward the bench. In that glance he winked at me, shook his head, and then tossed his bat to Cap Anson before fetching his glove and trotting off to center field.
I moved to our bench, where Fatty, McQuery, and Myers all slapped me on the back. We prepared for our last at-bat.
“C’mon,” Jim Lillie said. “We’re still in this game.”
We weren’t. Paul Radford and Fatty Briody grounded into outs on the first pitches in the ninth inning, and McQuery popped up to Kelly in center to end the game.
“We’ll get ’em tomorrow, boys,” Charley Bassett said.
“Like hell,” Dave Rowe mumbled as he shook his head and opened a bottle of beer.
“’Cause we don’t play tomorrow, Kansas,” Fatty told him, dipping his stinging hands in a bucket of water. “Tonight’s Saturday. What say you and me go find us some chirpies?”
“I don’t know,” Charley whined.
“C’mon. How ’bout you, kid? You pitched fine, boy. Time to celebrate with some gal you’ll fancy.”
“Didn’t pitch that fine,” Dave Rowe said, and finished off his beer in about one swallow. “We lost, didn’t we?”
“Not because of the kid, Skip.” Fatty pulled his red hands from the water, and held them out for our manager’s inspection. “Time you laid off him, too, Skip. And it’s time you let him do some hurlin’.”
“Who the hell made you manager, you fat slob?”
“Hey, Dave!”
Rowe turned toward Mox McQuery, who held up a bottle of gin. Our surly manager with the sour face tossed his empty bottle toward the fence, and headed for the liquor McQuery had offered him. As Dave Rowe had turned, McQuery gave me a wink.
Another thing I learned about most baseball players: teammates have short memories. McQuery had forgotten all about that poker argument. I decided he would make a mighty fine peace officer when his days on the baseball diamond had ended.
So we found our way back to our hotel. Naturally, Fatty Briody, Charley Bassett, and a few others made their way to some dance hall or brothel; Dave Rowe headed out to piss somebody else off; some players went to supper; Stump Wiedman stayed in bed; a few went to the hotel saloon. I found my way to Tom Cobb’s saloon.
Fatty Briody had once told me that beer was an acquired taste. I had acquired it early.
I bought a beer for Fred Pfeffer, and he bought one for me. Unlike that dreary grog shop in Philadelphia, Tom Cobb’s place was pleasant, and full of baseball players, professionals and amateurs alike.
After my sixth pail of lager, a hand slapped my back, and I turned to stare into those blue eyes of King Kelly.
“Tell me you’re from County Cork,” he said, putting his right foot on the brass rail and tapping on the bar with a coin. “Another pail for this thrower of flame, Tommy, and three for me.”
“I’m from Kansas City,” I said softly.
“But you’re Irish, right, laddie?”
“Missouri,” I said.
“No matter. You’re a King, and I’m the King.” The beer arrived. We drank. Then we drank some more. I forget how many. In fact, I don’t remember much of anything until I found myself in a hack well past three in the morning, sitting next to Mike “King” Kelly, trying to sing a song, even if he was singing in Gaelic. Suddenly, King Kelly leaned out of the conveyance, and began banging on the roof. “Mack!” he called out to the driver. I reached over quickly, getting my fingers i
nside his belt—for the ballist still wore his baseball pants—to keep him from falling onto one of Chicago’s paved streets. “Stop this bloody torture chamber!” he yelled.
“Whoa!” called out the driver, and the hack pulled up alongside a curb.
Out jumped King Kelly, and I followed, watching him as he weaved around the rear of the cab, to the sidewalk, against the shuttered brick building, then stumbled back to the rear wheel of the wagon. He loosened his belt, unbuttoned his britches, and began urinating on the wheel and the street.
“I have … to …” He gripped the top of the wheel, finished his business, and began working on buttons and belt, though he couldn’t seem to figure out which he should do first—and, even drunk as I was, I had no intention of helping him.
“King!” called out the driver.
“Just a minute,” I said, and whispered to the speedy, daring White Stockings outfielder, “Hurry, King. Hurry.”
“I always hurry,” he said, managing to buckle his belt and get most of the buttons done up. He turned, fell back against the cab, and grinned. “And sometimes … I cheat.”
“King!” the driver called out again. “We’re coming.” Turning to open the door, I saw the policeman and drew a sharp breath.
It was then I remembered what the concierge—whatever he was supposed to be—had told me at the hotel: “Coppers have been tetchy, you see, since that Haymarket riot in May.” He had gone on about those damned anarchists and told me to be careful. I knew even I might be bad-tempered after seeing a bomb and a gun battle leave eight policemen dead and fifty-nine wounded.
“Mike,” I said, trying to rouse him, but I stepped away as the policeman approached us. I smiled, letting him see the palms of my empty giant hands.
He was a big man with a handlebar mustache, wearing the brass buttoned blouse and the high pith helmet. His shoes clicked on the sidewalk, and his left hand clutched the handle of his nightstick.
“What’s the trouble?” he asked.
That Irish accent made me feel a little better.
“Oh.” I waved toward Mike Kelly, who had turned back to grip the wheel again. I feared he might vomit, or pass out. “The wheel seemed to be … um … unstable,” I ventured. I looked up at the top of the coach, but saw only the dark night. Criminy, I thought, I might pass out or vomit myself. “Driver asked us to check it out.”
That’s when Mike King Kelly turned around and fell against the coach again. At least he kept his feet.
The policeman walked up to me, but kept his eyes on Kelly. After peering through the open door of the coach to make sure no anarchist remained inside, he stepped to the rear wheel. At length, his hand left the nightstick, and he turned to me.
“Aye, yes, I see your problem, lad. It’s your wheel. It seems to have sprung a leak.”
He moved back to me, gave the cab driver a mean stare, and stood inches from my face. “That’s King Kelly, isn’t it?” he asked.
“Yes, sir.”
“You know that miser of an owner he has … Mister I-Must-Be-God Spalding … held out two hundred and fifty dollars of King’s pay this year. He doesn’t get it back if he keeps on drinking. Do you know that?”
My head shook.
“Don’t you play with him, lad?” the peace officer demanded.
“Against him.”
“Against him?” The policeman stepped back, which allowed me to breathe again, for his breath stank of tobacco and rotten food.
“I’m from Kansas City,” I said. “With the Cowboys.”
Now he smiled. “And what are you doing with the enemy on a night like this?”
I shrugged. “He’s not an enemy. Only an opponent.”
“Now, that is an attitude I like. Get him home, lad. Home and to bed. Maybe he’ll make Mass, though I doubt it. As long as he’s ready for the Monday game, right?”
My head bobbed, and I moved fast, practically shoving Kelly onto the floor of the coach. I turned back toward the Irish peace officer.
“Thank you, sir,” I said.
“Don’t thank, me, lad. Just get King Kelly home before I change my mind.”
I wet my lips. “I don’t know where he lives.”
“Get him somewhere.”
Which proved to be a Catholic church, just off Taylor Street, not far from West Side Park. It was the cabbie’s suggestion.
By the time I made it back to the team’s hotel, the sky was turning light gray in the east, and, somehow, I managed to find enough money in my pockets to pay the hack. I even felt sober, relatively speaking. When I reached my room, I found Fatty Briody snoring. The room smelled sour, so I moved to the window, forced it open, and sat in the chair, letting the wind—cool for June—waft life back into the room and myself.
I had struck out King Kelly, and, in return, he had taught me a lesson. I could go through my baseball career—however brief it might turn out to be—like King Kelly or Fatty Briody, as a drunkard. Or I could stop, practically before I had even started, right now.
Which is what I did. Since that night in Chicago, I have never consumed more than one glass of wine or a bottle of beer—and never any ardent spirits—with supper. And even those occasions prove rare.
No one ever wrote a poem about me. People never sang a song about me. Emery & Hughes would not ask me to pen my autobiography in 1888, or any other time. Few people remember me. But as I write this in 1903, on a beautiful October afternoon before the fourth game of the first “World’s Championship Series” between the National League and the new American League, I know this.
Mike “King” Kelly, who the world remembers as one of the greatest ballists ever to steal a base, chase down a fly ball, or hit a mammoth home run, has been dead for nine years. He left behind a widow and bar tabs across Boston, where he had been sold to the Beaneaters after the 1886 season and where he would spend most, but not all, of his final years in professional baseball. He was only thirty-six years old when he drank himself to death.
Chapter Sixteen
A herd of Texas longhorn cattle, fifty yards across, two miles long, moves across the Flint Hills of Kansas on a miserably hot August morning. You can’t see most of the cattle, however, and certainly not much of that rolling countryside. All you can see is the dust, thick and chocking, like smoke.
In my imagination I could see, though, everything, clearly. I even saw myself as one of the cowboys, riding on the western flank—or maybe the swing position … I never could get those two straight in my mind. Swing? Flank? Which one was which? Certainly not point or drag—those positions I understood. Yet I found no Dan Dugdale here to sort out such details about driving a herd of cattle from Texas to some Kansas end of trail. While I could certainly point out second base or shortstop on a baseball diamond, despite all my interest in cowboying, swing and flank still confused me.
“Boy,” a voice said as someone sat down in the seat across from me. “What the Sam Hill are you staring at?”
That vivid image of me working cattle disappeared, replaced by the reflection of a teenager pressing his head against the window in a Wabash, St. Louis & Pacific passenger car. As the locomotive rolled through midnight’s blackness somewhere between Chicago and St. Louis, the glass felt cold against my forehead, and I shifted my head from the window to the hard back of my seat, yawned, and answered, “Nothing. I’m not looking at anything.”
Then I realized who had taken a seat across from me.
Dave Rowe, our hard-rock manager, stared in silence at me, smoothing his light-colored mustache with tobacco-stained fingers.
“Nothing.” I made myself repeat.
“Uhn-huh.” Rowe looked across the aisle, where Charley Bassett and Grasshopper Jim Whitney were sleeping. No one else in the car was awake.
My neck ached, probably from daydreaming about being a real cowboy, instead of a baseball Cowboy who had not pi
tched in months. I made the mistake of rubbing the back of my neck, grimacing while I kneaded the joints, and that gave Dave Rowe an opening to resume our—well, for the two of us—conversation.
“It’s a grind, ain’t it?” Rowe said.
Releasing my neck, I blinked. “Huh?”
“Baseball. A hundred and twenty-six games. End of April to early October. A grind. Wears a body down.”
My stomach knotted. This was Dave Rowe, our pistol-packing manager, and the man who had sworn—and pretty much lived up to his word—that I would never set foot in a ball game as long as he told the umpire who started. Yet Rowe was speaking civilly, and had not uttered one bit of blasphemy.
Sure, baseball had been a grind. Spring had blended into summer. Games—most of those losses—got all mixed up. Did Fatty make that error that cost us the game in Detroit? Or had George Baker been catching that one before he busted his hand? Train trips and hotels were forgotten. We kept losing. I kept sitting on the bench.
“I guess so,” I said. I could think of no fitting response, yet a fierce edge—as though I sat on a dozen shattered bats—replaced that weariness and outright boredom I had been feeling. Dave Rowe, I told myself, must have decided to set me up, see what I would say, just to give him an opening to jump down my throat, embarrass me, or—given the nature of a man like our outfielder and manager—whip out his .32 and put me out of my misery.
He hooked a thumb in the direction of the our snoozing ballists. “Shorty’s knees are worn out. Stump’s got nothing in his arm except gumption, and Jim Lillie twisted his testicles in Detroit. Ain’t sure if he done that against the Wolverines or some hussy. Yep. It’s a grind, baseball. Wears on a fellow. And we got a lot of games left before this charade of a season and travesty of a team are over.”
No longer could I wait for Dave Rowe’s ambuscade. That’s something else Dan Dugdale had told me about cowboying. “Cattle are stupid. Even dumber than cowboys. You get suspicious of one, think that old mossyhorn’s figuring out a way to gore you, just pop him on his hindquarters with a lariat. Let him know you ain’t dumber than he is.”
The Kansas City Cowboys Page 13