Tag Archives: Springfield Midgets

The Tabasco Kid and “Blind Toms”

4 Mar

Kid Elberfeld, “The Tabasco Kid,” while managing the Springfield Midgets in the Western Association in 1930 “wrote” a series of articles for The Springfield Leader:

“A young chap was in the house one day reading some of the many clippings and letters that were sent to me by fans, and even reporters who had a dislike for me”

Elberfeld

Elberfeld said, “it seemed reporters couldn’t roast me enough,” so many fans wrote as well to “bless me down the line.”

His visitor observed: “They did everything to you on a ball field but pull a gun on you.”

Elberfeld’s Response:

“Sonny, that, too happened to me twice in my life. The only reason they didn’t publish it is that it would be a knock to the police of the town to pull a gun on a poor little boy like me.”

He said the first incident took place in Atlanta while he was managing the Little Rock Travelers. 

“Both clubs were up in the race fighting for every point. Sam Mayer the Atlanta captain, and I were at home plate arguing over a decision with the umpire. Sam said something to me I didn’t approve of and I grabbed his shirt.

“Police as a rule were always johnny-on-the-spot when our team was on the field in that town, immediately I felt something stuck in my side. I looked down and saw a nice, bright and shining pistol poked in my ribs. I said, ‘Say, look here’—I put my hand on the gun and pushed it away— ‘that damned thing, might go off.’ I don’t know why, but the policeman stuck it in his pocket.’

“not a word was mentioned in the paper about the policeman pulling the gun on me.”

He said he manager of the Travelers during the second incident as well—this one took place in Memphis. Elberfeld was having a “tough time with the ‘Blind Toms,’ his term for umpires:

“Boys used to say it was the hometown of the league president and the umpires wanted to show him they could run Kid and his players. If the umpires realized what a bad effect this had on my team, they would have been a little more lenient with the players and me.”

Elberfeld had a contentious relationship with Southern Association President John D. Martin–a Memphis attorney—Martin became league president in 1919 and suspended Elberfeld twice in the first month of the season—The Kid threatened to The Memphis News Scimitar after the second suspension that he would “manage my club from the grandstand hereafter,” to avoid additional fines and suspensions.

 Already believing the league’s umpires were particularly hard on him in Memphis, Elberfeld “was putting up a verbal battle,” with the umpire, who ejected him:

“I refused to heed his request and he immediately called out a police squad.

“Here they came. I was standing at home plate. First one pushed me, then another. I finally began pushing a little myself, but they grabbed me quick. I thought they put me in a vice and pulled me along. I was about to break away and run, when a big policeman stuck a gun in my back and said, ‘walk along.’ I did, never hesitating to the street, when they turned me loose.”

Elberfeld never stopped yelling at umpires, even at the point of a gun; and he said he never listened to anyone in the stands:

“Don’t listen to the fans, for everybody who comes to a ballgame gets crazy just as soon as they enter the park, and they are not responsible for what they say or do. Even the owners, secretary, umpires, and manager are irresponsible under the stress of the game, and the newspaper men are worse.”

Elberfeld did not appear to have any brushes with police on the field in 1930, although he was regularly combative and never let up on the “Blind Toms,” his Springfield Midgets finished 64-73, fifth place in the six-team Western Association. Elberfeld was let go after the season.

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Charles Barngrover

27 Oct

Charles Andrew Barngrover pitched in just a handful of minor league games, but his career as an itinerant professional baseball player in the first decade of the 20th Century provides a window into the world of the hundreds of young men who traveled the country earning a living on the fringes of the game.

He was born on January 1, 1883 in Ellinwood, Kansas, and started his career with a team in Great Bend in 1902; the league was comprised of most of the Central Kansas cities that would make up the Kansas State League when it was formed in 1905.

In 1903 he joined a team in Larned, Kansas and was involved in an incident that that made headlines across the state.

The Topeka Daily Capital said Barngrover and his teammates “fought their way from the hotel to the Hutchinson & Southern depot in Kingman last night after a disagreement concerning a 17-inning ballgame.”  When the fleeing ballplayers reached Hutchinson, Barngrover described the chaos to a reporter from The Hutchinson News:

“The Kingman boys have a good club and they managed to put it on us by a score of 3 to 0 in Monday’s game.  We had a series of three games in sight and were to receive $25 a game.  The game yesterday (Tuesday) was a hard one and there was a tie at the end of the ninth inning.  The tie lasted until the seventeenth inning.”

In the seventeenth, the umpire, a Larned player, called a close play at the plate in favor of his team, which gave the visitors a 7 to 6 victory.

“When the decision was made (a $60 side bet) was turned over to us and five of us started for town.  The Kingman club and the citizens generally went after the other Larned) boys (about the call) saying it would have to be changed of the $25 a game would not be forthcoming. “

According to Barngrover the umpire was forced to reverse his decision, and the four remaining Larned players told to take the field.  Kingman quickly scored a run and claimed victory.

“A short time after this the crowd came into town.  The Kingman boys found that we had the side bet money and they came to the hotel and demanded it.  We refused to turn loose and the fight started…There were about forty Kingman boys in the mob and they said they were going to get us.  Baseball bats and everything else in sight were used and we fought all the way from the hotel to the depot and stood them off until the train came in…As we got on the train we heard someone say that there were several broken heads in the crowd…We were lucky to get out alive, as the Kingman people are the worst we ever went up against.”

The following year, Barngrover’s hometown paper, The Ellinwood Leader reported that the pitcher “was lynched at Fort Worth, Texas a short time ago.  It is said that during a ball game he disputed a decision of the umpire and struck him over the head with a bat, killing him.  The crowd was so angered they avenged the murder by hanging him.”

The Hoisington (KN) Dispatch added:

“(Barngrover’s parents) are fairly well to do and highly respected…He pitched several games for Hoisington last spring but was not so popular among the ballplayers here on account of being accused of throwing a game.”

Several weeks later The Leader reported that the rumor was wrong; Barngrover’s parents had received word from him that he was in San Francisco, the paper gave no explanation for how the rumor arose, or whether or not Barngrover was involved in any such incident in Texas.

It’s unclear where Barngrover played after arriving in San Francisco in the spring of 1904, but he turned up two years later in Reno, Nevada.  The Nevada State Journal said the local agent for the Rainier Brewing Company had organized a team which “will defeat any Nevada team,” and signed Barngrover, who the paper said was “reputed to be the best amateur pitcher in California.

The stop in Nevada lasted just three months, and by June he was back in Kansas pitching for a team in his hometown and pitched for them on and off for the remainder of the 1906 season.  In August The Kansas City (KN) Globe said he had joined a barnstorming club called the National Bloomers:

“(He) is wearing bloomers and appearing as ‘Lady Rupert, one of the two World Renowned Lady Pitchers.’”

In 1907 he made his first appearance with a team recognized by the national agreement when he was signed by the Springfield Midgets in the Western Association—The Hutchinson News was not thrilled with his prospects:

“Hutchinson fans are wondering whether or not Barngrover can stick at Springfield.  He got off extremely lucky in three of his games but in the other four or five he has been radically wrong.”

Charles Barngrover

Charles Barngrover

After just 10 games, and a 4-6 record, he was released and returned to Kansas to play for a semi-pro team in Kinsley.  Barngrover then went from Kansas to Colorado to New Mexico and back to Kansas the next two years, playing with various semi-pro teams.

And, while he does not appear on any published rosters, Barngrover pitched in two games for the 1909 Western League Champion Des Moines Boosters in September; a 15-8 victory over the Topeka Jayhawks and he pitched the final two innings of an 11 to 4 loss to the Sioux City Packers.

He began the 1910 season, according to The Sporting Life, under the name “Smith” pitching the Quincy Vets of the Central Association to a 13-inning opening day victory over the Burlington Pathfinders—the game was later awarded to Burlington and after just one game, Barngrover was on the road again, to the Minnesota-Wisconsin League, where he was a combined 2-9 in eleven games with the La Crosse Outcats and the Rochester Roosters.

Barngrover, as "Smith" won his only game on the mound for the Quincy Vets

Barngrover, as “Smith” won his only game on the mound for the Quincy Vets

The wandering pitcher spent the next two seasons bouncing back and forth from the semi-pro fields of Kansas to La Crosse for a handful of games in 1911; then to Utah in 1912, where he spent a month with the Ogden Canners of the Union Association, and back to Kansas again.

He spent one more season pitching in Kansas before retiring.

Barngrover went to work for the Fort Worth & Denver Railway; it was as a result of his second career that he received the most media attention.

In the fall of 1921 he was indicted by a United States grand jury for theft of interstate shipments.  Barngrover cooperated with the government and, according to The Fort Worth Star-Telegram “was the government’s star witness in the prosecution of four men indicted with him.”  In all twenty-three men were indicted for stealing more than $100,000 in goods; the indicted men would hide in rail cars and throw “stolen goods along the tracks as the trains left Fort Worth, which were picked up by other members of the gang in motor cars.”

On March 10, 1922, Barngrover was preparing to testify at the trial of several more co-conspirators. While he had been fired from his job after the indictment, he was at the rail yard talking to former coworkers when he was shot and killed.  Two days after his murder, The Star-Telegram said:

“The body of C.A. Barngrover, ex-railroad man, self-confessed boxcar robber and Government witness, was placed in a modest grave in Greenwood Cemetery Saturday afternoon.

“And while the funeral services were said over his grave, police were endeavoring to solve the mystery surrounding the identity of the assassin who, concealed in a boxcar, shot Barngrover to death…Barngrover had 3 cents in his pockets when killed.”

A railroad employee was indicted for the murder, but there is no record of a conviction in the case.

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“The Words ‘Baseball Team’ are used Advisedly in this Instance”

22 Oct

Far from considering their local club a source of civic pride, The Springfield Leader was not thrilled about the prospects for the Missouri city’s baseball team, the Midgets on the eve of the 1907 Western Association season:

“Springfield will have a baseball team this spring.  The words ‘baseball team’ are used advisedly in this instance and with somewhat of a reserve.  A ball team is made up of nine men, not all of whom are ballplayers and sometimes not any of them.  Nine men dressed in similar uniforms and scattered in the orthodox fashion over the diamond and in the outer gardens, are generally understood to constitute a baseball team.  The difference between that sort of a team and a team as defined and understood by a genuine fan and follower of the game is almost as wide as the gulf that separates two classes of residents in the next world.

“In the cranium of the thoroughbred lover of the great national game a ball team is made up of ball players.  The mere wearing of a glove and uniform and being stationed somewhere in the playing field is not the only essential to a ball team as far as the fan is concerned.  The real test of a ball team is the ability of the bunch to play ball.  That is what the fans demand and what they expect.  Of course they do not object to the men wearing uniforms and gloves, but those are merely minor affairs, wholly secondary to the skill of the men in putting up a stellar exhibition of the game.  No ball team is a ball team unless the individuals who compose that team can play ball.  That is the doctrine of the fans, tested in the furnace of experience and labeled bottled in bond 100 percent pure.

“With these two propositions laid down and comprehended it is necessary to see which class the Queen City of the Ozarks will be when his honor, the umps, announces the batteries and informs the rivals that it is time to play ball.

“Springfield will have nine men with uniforms and gloves.  That is a settled fact.  They will undoubtedly have the pleasure of seeing a few men on the field who can play ball.  But so far as the ability of the outfield to put up a kind of game that father used to make is concerned—as Hamlet the melancholy Dane of Shakespearean repute once remarked in of  his famous after dinner speeches—‘Aye, there’s the rub.

“Somewhere in the neighborhood of two score men have been signed by Manager (Frank Richmond) Pierce (a Springfield bank executive) to try out with the bunch that is to report now in a few days.  A few, a very small few, are known to have played ball before.”

The paper singled out on player in particular for ridicule; shortstop John Welter hit .201 the previous season, and committed 60 errors in 88 games:

“(T)he big shortstop made a very poor impression last season and it is not likely that he could have signed in a 10-year-old kid corner lot league.”

The Leader was also upset about the sale of the team’s two best players, pitcher Harley “Cy the Third” Young, who won 24 games, and third baseman Gus Hetling, who led the team in most offensive categories, to the Wichita Jobbers:

“Both these players were good, and as the city did not need good players they were sold to make a little money.  As long as the fans don’t care for a good article of ball there is no use in paying the salaries to men who can play. Duds are good enough for any fan to watch and they are considerably cheaper, so what is the use in wasting money.  The fact that Wichita will likely come here and Young will allow the Midgets about one or two hits and Hetling will field without an error and knock the ball out of the lot three or four times, will make no difference.  The fans will still have the pleasure of seeing them play.”

The Leader said Pierce was not entirely to blame, because his stockholders “refused to come across with any coin.”

In response, Pierce told the city’s other newspaper, The Republican; his team would consist of “some of the highest salaried players that have ever signed with Springfield.”

Despite Pierce’s claim, the team fared about as well as The Leader predicted; winning just 46 games, with 92 losses, and Pierce sold his interest in the team in June—his first, and last, tenure as a baseball executive lasting just a few months.

After acquiring Springfield’s two best players—Young and Heitling—Wichita cruised to the league championship with a 98-35 record.

With the addition of Heitling (4) and Young (10) Wichita easily won the 1907 Western Association championship.

With the addition of Heitling (4) and Young (10) Wichita easily won the 1907 Western Association championship.

Young was 29-4 for Wichita; after the 1907 season he was sold to the Pittsburgh Pirates.  His major league career consisted of just 14 games with the Pirates and Boston Doves, posting a career 0-3 record.  He played seven more seasons in the minor leagues, but never won twenty games again.

Heitling hit .275 for the champions and played 10 more seasons, most on the Pacific Coast.

Welter, the shortstop The Leader said didn’t belong “in a 10-year-old kid corner lot league,” hit .222 (there are no surviving fielding totals for the season) and never played professionally again after 1907.

After two more seasons as one of the doormats of the Western Association this incarnation of the Springfield Midgets folded in 1909.

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