After two arrests and a season-long suspension in 1889, and another arrest and stints with four teams in 1890, George Borchers seemed to have settled down.
The San Francisco Chronicle said in January of 1891 that he was “taking excellent care of himself and will be ready to play winning ball.”
George Borchers
From 1891 through 1893 he pitched in the Pacific Northwest and California League’s and seems to have stayed sober and out of jail.
He was essentially a .500 pitcher, with less than average control; when he was with the Los Angeles Angels in 1893 he walked 210 batters, hit 24 and had 17 wild pitches.
The Los Angeles Herald regularly noted Borchers’ wildness. In his first appearance for the Angels in April of ’93 he walked six and hit two batters in the first inning, yielding four runs, and was removed in the second after another walk and two more hit batsmen. After a 21-12 May victory against Stockton the paper said: “Borchers did himself proud, allowing 13 men to walk to first base, 12 for base on balls and one for being hit. How the Angels managed to win with him in the box is a marvel.”
From 1894 through the 1896 season he was a baseball nomad, playing for nine teams in six leagues, including a single, disastrous final major league appearance with the Louisville Colonels in May of 1895—he started a game against the Brooklyn Grooms, lasting just two-thirds of an inning, giving up a hit, three walks, a wild pitch and two runs—earning the loss as the Colonels went down 11 to 0.
Caricature of Borchers from The San Francisco Call
Borchers was out of organized baseball in 1897 and it’s unclear what he was doing and where he was doing it, but he resurfaced the in 1898 as a minor league team owner. The Pacific Northwest League, which folded after the 1896 season, was resurrected as a four-team circuit organized by Dan Dugdale and William Works. Dugdale took the Seattle franchise; Works took Tacoma, a Spokane “newspaperman” named Hutchinson took that town’s team, and George Borchers was awarded the Portland club.
The league struggled, and Borchers was stripped of his franchise in early July. The Tacoma Daily News explained the problem:
“George Borchers is beginning to look upon matters of baseball in a new light. The (league) is holding an inquest on his official corpse this afternoon, sitting in Portland. The chief is not to figure any longer as manager of the Portland baseball team…The trouble has all arisen over Borchers’ treatment of his men. He has not distributed cash since the opening of the season and as he is still short on the amount due the league will be displaced…Mr. Borchers has merely made excuses.”
Borchers returned to California and appeared in games for three Pacific Coast League teams during the remainder of the season: Santa Cruz, Stockton and Watsonville.
Borchers would continue, on and off, as a player until 1903—including a season as player/manager with the California League’s San Jose Brewers in 1899. But in 1901 he made headlines when he became embroiled in a scandal.
Borchers was pitching for the Oakland Commuters in the California League, and failed to show up for a game he was scheduled to pitch on May 1. The San Francisco Call said:
“George Borchers, the star pitcher of the Oakland baseball nine, has disappeared…None of the missing player’s close friends in baseball circles can explain why he decamped so suddenly nor where the absent ballplayer has gone.”
—
“Some of the Oakland players are injecting a bit of romance into the story, the names of some of the fair enthusiasts of Golden Gate being introduced as the possible cause for the handsome pitcher’s sudden leave taking. But none seem to be able to tell with certainty the story that he has fallen victim to the charms of some fair one.”
The plot thickened the following day when Oakland owner J. Cal Ewing hired a private detective to track the missing pitcher, and an angry father went public.
J. Cal Ewing
While Ewing’s investigator hunted, an Oakland real estate developer named Don Miller told The San Jose Evening News his daughter Grace had disappeared:
“(Miller) is convinced that she has gone with the ballplayer. Neither Borchers, who has a wife in Portland, not Miss Miller has been seen since last Monday, when they boarded an eastward-bound train.”
Miller told the paper:
“I am endeavoring to locate them now, and if I ever find the man who has broken up my home he’ll need nothing but a coffin. I’ll find them yet.”
After a week, he turned up in Ogden, Utah, pitching for that town’s club in the Inter-Mountain League. The Santa Cruz Evening Sentinel said:
“He says he left simply to better his position and justifies his action on the ground that the California League takes players who skip out on other leagues and the local players are in competition with them all the time. He thinks he had the right to skip out likewise and better his position. He claims the reason he left secretly was because he feared Ewing would cause him trouble.
“He was worried over the account that he had left with Miss Grace Miller, but denied it.”
The paper noted that while Borchers wife remained in Portland, he had received two train tickets from the Ogden club.
Eventually, the truth came out. Borchers returned to California to secure a divorce from his wife and married the former Miss Miller. He spent 1902 playing and managing for a team in Salt Lake City, and managing a bowling alley there.
The second Mrs. Borchers became ill in November of 1902 and died two weeks later from peritonitis.
His last scandal behind him, Borchers married again and operated a large dairy in Sacramento until his death in 1938.
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Tags: Brooklyn Grooms, Cal Ewing, California League, Dan Dugdale, George Borchers, Inter-Mountain League, Los Angeles Angels, Louisville Colonels, National League, Oakland Commuters, Pacific Coast League, Pacific Northwest League, San Jose Brewers, William Works
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