In 1871, Harry Wright took several of his Red Stockings players, as well as the team name, moved to Boston and joined the newly formed National Association. Wright’s exit from Cincinnati was contentious, but despite that he was invited back for an exhibition game in July between his former team and a “picked nine” consisting of the members of Wright’s current team and the Washington Olympics.
Advertisement for the July 3, 1871, game
The Cincinnati Enquirer said the two thousand people in attendance indicated “that the interest in base-ball is not dead in this city, but only needs the stimulus of first-class games to awaken it to renewed life.”
The paper said:
“The old Reds did not have the services of George Wright (who was injured), and did not play with the skill characteristic of them in 1868-’69, which may have been due to fact that there was nothing at stake than gate money.”
Albert Spalding pitched for the “picked nine” and beat Wright’s club, with Asa Brainard pitching, 15-13. The Enquirer said former Cincinnati players Cal McVey and Charlie Gould, who both joined Wright in Boston, “have improved in their batting powers.”
Wright’s team led 10 to 4 through five innings, but the opponents posted a five-run sixth which included a home run by Davy Force and added two in the seventh and three in the eighth.
The box score
One sign that all might not have yet been forgiven in Cincinnati: while Harry Wright was listed in the box score and the inning-by-inning recap of the game, The Enquirer didn’t use his full name in any of the game advertisements or articles.
Professional baseball returned to Cincinnati in 1876 when the reds became an inaugural member of the National league.
Harry Hooper, Hall of Fame outfielder for the Boston Red Sox and Chicago White Sox (standing, far right), with the 1907 St. Mary’s College team. The team, often called the best pre-World War I college ballclub, also included pitcher Harry Krause (center, second from left), and catchers Charlie Enwright (center, second from right), and Ed Burns center, middle)–The San Francisco Chronicle referred to the 5′ 10′ Krause and the 5′ 6″ burns as “the midget battery.”
After the team’s final game The San Francisco Call said:
“The Phoenix baseball team of St. Mary’s, satisfied that it has conquered the world, has closed its schedule for the season.”
How good were they?
“Perhaps no California team has ever had a more brilliant career than has the 1907 phoenix. Pitted 27 times against only first class teams, professional and amateurs, it has escaped from the fray without once having to bow to a foe. Moreover, but 39 runs have been scored against the Phoenix all season, while the Phoenix players have scored 137. No team made more than four runs on them, and this occurred but three times. They have had eight shutouts, eight one run games, seven two run victories (and) one three run contest.”
Hooper, left, with Red Sox teammate George “Duffy” Lewis after the 1915 World Series–the two were also teammates at St. Mary’s in 1906.
Oliver Perry “O. P.” Caylor’s death from tuberculosis in October of 1897 at age 47 took one of the most important chroniclers of 19th Century baseball.
The New York Herald, his last paper, said:
“Mr. Caylor’s fight for life was pathetic in its boldness.”
Caylor
Caylor, who had left the paper a month before his death to go to Winona, Minnesota to seek treatment from a “throat and lung specialist” in a sanitarium, engaged in a “one-sided” struggle, “but on his part it was heroic.”
The paper recounted Caylor’s final visit to the Polo Grounds before he departed for Minnesota:
“(Arriving in) a carriage, accompanied by his wife, and though scarcely able to reach his old seat in the stand, his courage never faltered.”
Caylor had been ill for several years. William “Billy” Norr, the sports editor of The New York World had a morbid wager with Caylor, Sporting Life said:
“(Norr) had made a bet with Caylor every New Year’s Day for seven years that he (Caylor) would die in twelve months.”
The 33-year-old Norr died seven weeks before Caylor after contracting Typhoid Fever:
“Caylor chuckles between hemorrhages, tickled with the idea that he has outlived Norr and is $35 ahead of the game.”
The tragedy of Norr’s early death was compounded when, just a week after the New York Giants and Brooklyn Bridegrooms played a benefit game for his family, his widow, Olga Norr, took her own life, The World said:
“So generous and so greatly beloved had her husband been that it was intended she should never need. She took her life because her heart was broken.”
Caylor’s friends and family were briefly optimistic about Caylor’s chance for recovery:
“He reached (Minnesota) as he predicted he would, and lighthearted letters were returned. He advised that he had gained in both strength and flesh…buoyed with the hope as he was that his fight for life might after all be successful.”
In a letter to friend in St. Louis, Caylor said the specialist he was seeing , “speaks confidently of pulling me through.”
The illness had robbed Caylor of his voice in the last months of his time in New York, but “he wrote column after column in his old-time forcible style, clearly defined, and then smiled at his friend who were astonished with the determination shown and the strength he displayed.”
Of Caylor’s legacy, The Herald said:
“Mr. Caylor was never rugged, but his blows for the welfare of the national game were those of a giant. Delinquent players were never given any quarter. Pitiless sarcasm in the face of abuse and threats of bodily harm were showered upon them, and reformation alone caused his suspension. He deemed it criminal to disappoint the public, and when the lapse of a player was due to his own folly his pointed allusions to the offending cut as a two-edged sword.”
He was, a, “Master of humor, he made giants appear as pygmies, but was quite as ready with words of praise and encouragement as he found them deserved.”
Al Spink of The Sporting News agreed with the assessment, and said that Caylor was unpopular among many players because of his style, but:
“The base ball world will sincerely mourn him, and he will be missed by all newspaper men, for he was a newspaper man in the truest sense. He was sincere in his though, he was above caprice or prejudice in his judgment, he was beyond the reach of corruption in all things. He made base ball more dignified, honorable, and more commendable to honest men by his thirty ears of labor in the legitimate field of sport.”
Francis Richter, the founder and editor of Sporting Life said:
“Hurlburt [sic, Hulbert] and Mills have no successors. There will never be another Harry Wright in our day, nor a successor to Anson when he, too, shall retire. No player is in sight to take up the mantle of the inimitable Latham; no magnates to duplicate the brilliance of Spalding, Reach, Young, Soden, and Byrne, all grown gray in the service of the king of sports; no writer to equal the brilliance of our dead brother Caylor.”
“The baseball world is beginning to roll itself into its usual spring prominence, and while managers are busy signing the players assigned to them, the public is awaiting patiently the beginning of what is predicted will be a new era in the sport.”
O.P. Caylor’s prediction in The New York Herald was made before the National League began the 1892 season as 12-team league playing a split season after the collapse of the American Association, and Caylor sought out the opinions of several players, managers, and executives about the coming season; they shared their “sanguine feeling on their part in the success,” of the game.
O.P. Caylor
Brooklyn’s Dave Foutz said:
“I don’t believe it will be necessary to make any changes in the rules. We have got our hands pretty full with testing the policy of a twelve-club league and a double season without trying any new rules to perplex the public.”
Foutz said the league was now composed of “the twelve best cities in the country to play in, and the best players will be put in the field.”
Chris von der Ahe, owner of the St. Louis Browns said:
“While I opposed the twelve-club league when the idea was first broached, I feel now that the interests of baseball are best subserved by the new agreement.”
He said the dissolution of the Association benefitted his team:
“The St. Louis club is stronger than it ever was, and we will show the patrons of baseball all over the country a championship form.”
Harry Wright, manager of the Philadelphia Phillies said:
“Never in the history of baseball has the prospect for a successful season been brighter; never has there been such a perfect harmony among the baseball powers in this country. This fact, in my opinion, leads to the hope that the game of baseball will be revived to all its pristine glory.”
Harry Wright
Wright said he felt the distribution of American Association refuges had been “fair and equitable” and said:
“As far as the two-season idea is concerned I believe it will be a success, and I think that the public generally will watch the finish each time with the same intense interest that has marked the great and close finishes of the past.”
New York Giants manager Pat Powers said:
“This twelve-club league, it strikes me, will be a decided success. Coming, as it does, in a presidential year is very fortunate.”
His rationale was that during every other presidential year “interest in baseball would decrease” as the election drew closer, and the new league format would mitigate that loss of interest.
Powers said the “twelve most representative cities “ were included and “the different clubs are composed of the very best players of the baseball profession.”
Powers said the split season would “keep the public interested,’ the larger league would be successful, and “the game will boom.”
Charles Byrne, the President of the Brooklyn club said the split season would allow fans to “witness the most exciting finish es baseball has yet known.”
The Boston Beaneaters won the first half, the Cleveland Spiders the second; Boston beat Cleveland five games to none for the championship.
Foutz and Byrnes’ Brooklyn Grooms finished third, Wrights’ Philadelphia Phillies fourth, Powers’ New York Giants eighth, and von der Ahe’s Browns 11th.
The split season was dropped before the 1893 season.
“Vitt is the most valuable player in the American League. He is the most valuable because he can play three positions in the infield. He is also an excellent outfielder and can field with the best of them. Vitt lacks the class to gain a regular position because he cannot hit.”
Ossie Vitt
Over ten seasons with the Tigers and Red Sox, Vitt hit just .238
A White Stockings Player on George Washington Bradley, 1876
After winning their first four games of the National League’s inaugural season—and scoring 40 runs–the Chicago White Stockings were shut out by St. Louis pitcher George Washington Bradley on May 5, 1876; Bradley yielded just two hits in the 1-0 win. An unnamed Chicago player was quoted by The St. Louis Post-Dispatch:
Bradley
“A man might just as well try to successfully strike his mother-in-law as one of his balls.”
Bill Terry on John McGraw, 1934
Despite their often-strained relationship—they once went two years without speaking, Bill Terry, speaking to The Associated Press, said of John McGraw after the man who managed him and whom he replaced as manager, died in 1934:
“I don’t think there ever will be another manager as great as McGraw. I had my little arguments with him but there was always a soft spot in my heart. He was the only man I ever played big league ball for, and to hear that a man who has spent his whole life in baseball has gone makes me feel humble. We will call off practice on the day of his funeral.”
Hal Schumacher on John McGraw, 1934
Hal Schumacher played for John McGraw as a 20-year-old rookie in 1931, and for part of 1932 before McGraw was replaced by Bill Terry. When McGraw died in 1934, Schumacher told The Associated Press:
McGraw
“I never could understand his reputation as an iron-fisted ruler. I never heard him bawl out a rookie.”
Harry Wright on fans and winning, 1888
Harry Wright, told The Pittsburgh Press about the difference between how fans treated winning clubs in 1888 versus his time with the Red Stockings in the 1870s:
Wright
“I won the championship six times, and the most we ever got was an oyster supper. Now the whole town turns out to meet the boys when they return from a fairly successful trip. They are learning how to appreciate pennant winners nowadays.”
Dick Hoblitzel on his “X-Ray Eye,” 1911
Dick Hoblitzel told The Cincinnati Times-Star in the spring of 1911 he was “training his batting eye,” and:
“(B)elieves he will soon be able to count the stitches on a ball before it leaves the pitcher’s hand. ‘It’s the X-ray eye that does this,’ he avers, and he has made a bet of a suit of clothes that he will finish in the .275 class or better.”
Hoblitzel, perhaps as a result of his “X-ray eye,” hit.289 in 1911.
Tommy Corcoran on Umpiring, 1897
Tommy Corcoran told a Sporting Life correspondent in 1897:
Corcoran
I believe I’d rather carry scrap iron for the same money than umpire a ball game. There is no vocation in which there is less sympathy or charity than in baseball. It must be awful for an old player to listen to the abuse he has to stand from those he once chummed with. There is an illustration of the heartlessness of some players. That umpire’s playing days are over, or he wouldn’t be an umpire. He is trying to earn a living and his old comrades won’t let him.”
In 1910, after close to 40 years in baseball, Jim O’Rourke talked to Tip Wright, a former Cleveland baseball and boxing writer, then with The United Press, about his life in baseball:
“As I like back to the day before we wore gloves I can scarcely understand how we went through the ordeal of a game. Before gloves were used, the catcher suffered unbelievable torture. On a hot day, when the blood circulated freely, the catcher’s hands would swell about the third inning. When the swelling started, the pain caused by the impact with the ball decreased, because the swollen flesh made sort of a cushion.
“But on a cold day, when the blood did not course freely, and the hands would not swell, the pain was intense. I have seen catchers hold a piece of soft rubber in their mouths, and whenever the ball was pitched they would screw up their faces and bite on the rubber as hard as they could to offset the pain.”
Jim O’Rourke
O’Rourke said that when the weather was warm it was sometimes said by catchers:
“Oh, I am getting along fine—my hands are swelling up in great shape.”
In addition to the scars carried by catchers, O’Rourke told Wright about the many players he saw “knocked senseless many times,” and that he still suffered from the effects of those early days:
“Talk about the roughness of football in these days, and the hopelessness of trying to stop it, but it is nothing compared to the brutality of baseball during the constructive period .
“My head has been so sore from being hit that I could not think and my hands so sore from catching that I could not hold an orange tossed from a distance of six feet.”
O’Rourke told Wright about joining the Boston Red Stockings as a 22 year-old in 1873, and his relationship with another Wright—Boston manager Harry:
“They called me ‘Harry Wright’s boy.’ He took me to live with his family, and, had I been spoilable, I would have been spoiled in a short time. But the things my mother taught me kept me straight. I never touched liquor or tobacco in my life. I never dodged temptations; in fact I exposed myself to them. When the boys went out they asked me to go along, knowing I would care for them when they got into difficulty.
“Had I headed wrong at this time my bright future would have been ruined…I advise young ballplayers that if they leave liquor alone they can dodge the other evil—late hours and loose living—that have ruined so many bright players.”
Of his brief stint as an umpire in 1894, O’Rourke said:
“I couldn’t stand it—I wouldn’t be an umpire for anything, so I went to Bridgeport, and because I could not keep out of the game, I played that year with the St. Joseph’s Temperance team.”
As for young players, O’Rourke said most didn’t compare with his son—James “Queenie” O’Rourke was in 1910, a 26-year-old infielder and outfielder for the Columbus Senators in the American Association:
Queenie O’Rourke
“I think James is as steady as I was. Every year when he leaves home, I say to him, ‘Now, James, if you will just leave stimulants alone, no harm can come to you. You can’t help but being a good man.’ And up to this time he has not touched either liquor or tobacco, and I know he won’t.
He kisses his mother goodbye each year, just as I used to kiss mine. I often look at the young fellows and wonder why they do not behave.
“Maybe one reason is they have too easy a time, compared with we old veterans, as many of the hardships of baseball have been removed by appliances and safeguards.”
Shortly before the 1875 National Association season, the St. Louis Brown Stockings visited Louisville to play an exhibition against the semi-pro Olympics.
The Louisville Courier-Journal wrote with admiration about the building of a professional club in St. Louis:
“The signs of the times indicate a far livelier season of base ball than has ever been enjoyed in America by lovers of the great national pastime. Especially will this be the case in the west, to which part of our country the great baseball wave has been slowly moving for several years.”
The paper said St. Louis was acting to eclipse Chicago as the “capital” of baseball in the west:
“In order to be honorably represented in the base ball arena, the Mound City folks formed a stock company; gathered in $20,000 from wealthy merchants and millionaires, procured twelve experts in the national game, and now the city smiles while she thinks how her club will walk forward to the pinnacle of fame this year.”
Recruited from “Eastern states,” The Courier-Journal said of the St. Louis team:
“The Brown Stockings, a gloomy title for so gay a set of fellows, though it is rather the fault of St. Louis papers than the base ballists, that they are forced to wear it. All in all, the St. Louis club is composed of as handsome a set of fellows as ever handled the willow or tossed the ball. We refer to face as well as form. Since their engagement by a St. Louis stock company the base-ballists have been under gymnastic training…The members have perfect understanding of each other’s movements, and act accordingly.”
Noting that many of the players had spent the previous season in Brooklyn, the paper said they chose to “come west, like all good people ought to do.”
The Courier-Journal reporter interviewed outfielder Jack “Death to Flying Things” Chapman, who offered a wealth of information on the 19th Century ballplayer:
Jack Chapman
“(He) is six feet high, and splendidly built, being a ‘man as is a man.’ He only weighs one hundred and seventy-seven and isn’t married, though he contemplates taking a partner someday.”
Chapman, the “best looking man on the team,” who “is much liked by his associates,” was designated the “team scholar” to talk to the press in the absence of manager Dickey Pearce who was ill. He said:
“St. Louis is bound to be the greatest place on the continent for base ball this season. Her stock company offered big inducements, and we accepted.”
As for the people who had built the club, Chapman said, they were:
“Very rich and nice people…(the club’s) officers are mostly millionaires, who desire their city ably represented in base ball. The people ‘turn out’ there in the thousands, and are all agog with base ball excitement. Five thousand people witnessed our practice game last week.”
Chapman was asked about salaries:
“Substitutes get from $900 to $1200. Regulars receive $1000 to $2500. Bob Ferguson (the other “Death to Flying Things), of our old club, gets $2500 this year for captaining the Hartfords.”
Asked what players did in the off-season, Chapman said:
“A good many loaf, and others work at different jobs. Generally whatever they hit upon that suits.”
As for the St. Louis club’s prospects to overtake the Boston Red Stockings as the nation’s dominant team:
“We hope to do it, and I believe we shall. The Reds are a good team, made excellent by having stuck together so long. I consider the (Philadelphia) Athletics the stronger nine this year. Harry Wright is the best captain in America. The (New York) Mutuals were the best club last season, and but for the bad feeling among the members would now be champions.”
Finally, Chapman was asked whether he thought Louisville could support a professional team:
“I do, indeed, and am surprised she hasn’t one.”
Chapman was hit and miss on his predictions. The Brown Stockings were the best club in the west, finishing the season 39-29, but no where close to playing at the caliber of Wright’s Red Stockings (71-8) , the Hartford Dark Blues (54-28), or the Athletics (53-20).
He was correct about Louisville’s chances to get a professional club, The Grays, with Chapman as manager finished fifth in the inaugural season of the National League.
When the Philadelphia Athletics visited Harrisburg, Pennsylvania for an exhibition game 1884, a reporter from The Harrisburg Telegraph talked to “an old base baller” who was attending the game.
The reporter asked:
“’Are base ball players superstitious?’
“’You betcher life,’ said the veteran; ‘why there is Harry Wright (who) always carries a black cat in the bat bag, just for luck. Al Spalding of the Chicago carries a buckeye in his pocket for luck, and Bob Ferguson begins to hedge in his bets if he meets a cross-eyed man while on his way to the grounds.’”
Harry Wright
The “old base baller” also told the reporter:
“Bobby Matthews will never pitch unless he has an old copper cent in his pocket, and Monte Ward, of the New Yorks, carries a mascot around his neck in the shape of a gold coin. (Jim) Whitney, of Boston, loses heart if he forgets to put his bunch of keys in his pocket before pitching. Just before the Athletics-St. Louis game last year to decide the championship, (Bill) Gleason, of the St. Louis, got as pale as a sheet when he saw a red-headed boy carry in the bat bag. He said it was bad luck, and, sure enough, it was.”
Bill Gleason
Philadelphia won the September 23 game 9-2, giving them a 3 ½ game lead in the American Association race, and held on to win the pennant by 1 game.
And the old player told the paper:
“Big (Dan) Brouthers, of the Buffalos, carries a barlow knife for luck. Oh, yes, base ball players are superstitious, an’ don’t ye forgit it.”
Tim Murnane, who began his career as a first baseman for Middletown Mansfields in the National Association in 1872 and later was a member of the Boston Red Stockings in the National League’s inaugural season in 1876, would go on to become one of the most influential baseball writers in the country.
Tim Murnane
Writing in The Boston Globe in 1906, he said he had discovered the one thing that caused the greatest harm to a baseball player.
“Over-feeding kills off more ballplayers than accidents or hard work on the ball-field.”
Murnane suggested two solutions. First, he recommended that, “The Fletcher system should be taken up by the veteran ballplayers without delay.”
The “Fletcher System” or “Fletcherizing” was a then very popular diet technique put forth by a “self-taught nutritionist” named Horace Fletcher. Fletcher claimed, in several books published during the first decade of the 20th Century that the key to weight loss was to chew food so completely that it was virtually liquefied before swallowing. Called “The Great Masticator,” Fletcher counted Thomas Edison, Henry James, Franz Kafka, John D. Rockefeller, J.C. Penny—and apparently Tim Murnane—among his adherents. His theories had fallen out of favor, replaced by diets based on calorie intake, by the time of his death in 1919.
Horace Fletcher, “The Great Masticator.”
Secondly, Murnane said, “(T)he rules of eating should be laid down by the management of every club.”
He said Harry Wright, who had been Murnane’s manager in Boston, “(W)as about the first baseball man to keep a close watch over his players during meal time,” and insisted they eat lightly before games.
“’Just a plate of soup. That’s plenty,’ would be Mr. Wright’s cry as the players filed into the dining room for lunch. The greatest athletic performances on the field have been accomplished on practically empty stomachs.”
[…]
“I have known at least half a dozen good ballplayers being passed up in Boston on account of paying no heed to the manager’s advice about overloading their stomachs. Frank Selee was just as much of a stickler in this line as was Harry Wright, and both were remarkably successful baseball managers. The manager who does not pay especial attention to this end of the players’ life must lose out, for his team will be unable to keep up a fast clip very long after the boys commence to take on flesh as the result of overfeeding and drinking.”
Murnane had other diet tips for readers:
“A ballplayer cannot drink too much good milk. The greatest drinker of milk I ever knew was James O’Rourke, and Jim, after thirty-three years on the ball-field, is just as lively a 10-year-old today. O’Rourke never used tobacco in any form, nor ever indulged in malt liquors, but what a milk drinker he has been all his life and what credit to the national game, from every angle you view the old sport!’
Jim O’Rourke, “The greatest drinker of milk.’
Murnane blamed the disappointing performance of the Boston Americans in 1905 (Fourth place, 78-74, 16 games out of first) on the dietary habits of the team:
“To be honest, I think the Boston Americans last season practically ignored condition from first to last. I never witnessed on one ball team so many men out of form by being overweight…This club would have won at least one dozen more games had they taken good care of their stomachs, and no one knows this better than Captain (Manager Jimmy) Collins himself, who has said it will be a much different season with the Boston club next season.”
The next season, 1906, was much different, but not in the way Collins had hoped. The team was 35-79 when Collins was replaced as manager by Charles “Chick” Stahl, and finished in last place with a 49-105 record.
Murnane concluded:
“Baseball was never intended for a fat man’s game, and Captain Anson was the only heavyweight who ever piloted a pennant winner, although my old friend Charley Comiskey was growing a bit stout when his boys carried off the prize five years ago.”
Before a game against the Philadelphia Quakers in 1883, Providence Grays outfielder Samuel “Cliff” Carroll was drinking from a hose. He then turned the hose on a Providence fan named Jimmy Murphy.
After the game, an 8 to 4 Grays victory, Murphy returned to the Messer Street Grounds with a gun.
Cliff Carroll
The Providence Evening Press said:
“Shortly after the ball game, Wednesday afternoon, the neighborhood of Messer Street was thrown into a state of great excitement by the announcement that a member of the Providence baseball club had been shot.”
The paper said the initial hysteria included reports that the player had been killed.
“A well-known baseball crank named “Jimmy” Murphy, has been in the habit, for some time past, of frequenting the ball grounds during the hours of practice, and imagining himself to me a player of extraordinary merit. Owing to his eccentricities he was a source of great amusement to the players, and was made by them the butt of many practical jokes. ‘Jimmy,’ who is said to be slightly ‘off’ mentally speaking, occasionally resented his treatment, but never until Wednesday did he report to violent means.”
The Evening Press said after Carroll “thoroughly drenched” Murphy with the hose:
“Murphy immediately departed, nursing his wrath, and in the afternoon returned, and waited outside the grounds until the players issued, after the game. Carroll came out with a number of men, among whom was (Joe) Mulvey, the change shortstop, and ‘Jimmy’ at once drew a pistol and deliberately fired at Carroll, but owing no doubt to his excitement, he missed his man, and the bullet struck Mulvey in the right shoulder, inflicting a painful, though not dangerous wound.”
Murphy, the shooter, fled from the scene, and was pursued by police, citizens, and Grays second baseman Jack Farrell. He managed to escape, but was arrested later in the evening. Neighbors told the paper “Murphy is a ‘crank’ in other matters besides baseball, and is not considered responsible for his actions.”
It was later learned that the wound to Mulvey was superficial, the ball never penetrating his skin:
“Mr. Mulvey quietly walked to his home on Crary Street, congratulating himself upon his narrow escape.”
The following day in court, Murphy was found “probably guilty in the justice court,” and “bound over to the court of common pleas.” While being led out of the courtroom, Murphy spotted Carroll and said:
“I will get even with you yet, I’ll break your head if I ever get out again.”
The eventual adjudication of Murphy’s case is lost to history.
Carroll was part of the 1884 “World Champion” Grays team, and remained with Providence until the club folded at the end of the 1885 season. He played with five more National League teams through 1893; although he sat out the 1889 season to operate a farm in Bloomington, Illinois.
There is no record of Murphy having ever having the opportunity to “get even.”
Carroll died in 1923 in Portland, Oregon. The Oregonian said:
“One of the greatest baseball players of the game died in Portland recently, but so modest was he that few even knew he had been spending his last years here.”
The Providence Morning Star reported on the day of the shooting that Grays Manager Harry Wright had agreed to “loan” Mulvey to the Quakers. Mulvey joined Philadelphia in early July. He was switched to third base, and was a member of the Quakers through 1889, he played until 1895
Joe Mulvey
Mulvey remained in Philadelphia after his playing days and worked as a watchman at Shibe Park. The Associated Press said on August 20, 1928, the man who had a brush with death at a ballpark in 1883, “attended a boxing show at the ballpark,” and “was found dead of heart failure in the club locker room,” the following morning.
Baseball History Daily 