The First Baseball Game of the 20th Century

April 19, 1900: Daylight, Nightmarish Pitching and a Boston Loss, For Openers

By Eric Enders
Published in The New York Times (April 3, 2000) 

It was the spring of 1900, and Americans had grand dreams. The United States was in transition from the antiquated ways of the 19th century to the exciting new technology of the 20th. One thing, though, promised to remain the same: Baseball, the national pastime since shortly after the Civil War, was as popular as ever.

The country was moving quickly. In Utah, outlaw Butch Cassidy met with the state’s governor, promising to go straight in exchange for a pardon. (It didn’t work.) In the Klondike, gold panners flocked from Dawson City to Nome, abandoning the bustling mining town for new dreams of paydirt. In New York, Samuel Gompers announced plans to form a professional baseball players’ union under the auspices of the American Federation of Labor. In Cuba, the Cuban X Giants— a team composed not of Cubans, but of African Americans barred from the major leagues— played an international series against authentic Cuban teams.

And on a sunny Thursday afternoon in Boston, an overflowing crowd at the South End Grounds watched the Philadelphia Phillies beat the Boston Beaneaters, 19-17, in ten innings. It was the new century’s first major league game, and one of its most remarkable.

The game started a few minutes after 2:30 p.m. on April 19— an hour earlier than the standard starting time— beating the National League’s other three opening day games by just an hour or two. By 1:45, all the seats were taken, and latecomers were sold standing room tickets on the playing field in deep center. (A special ground rule was enacted for the day: Balls hit into the roped-off crowd counted as singles.)

Three months before opening day, the 1900 season had begun with a shock for the Boston team. On January 19, at his quiet New England farm, Beaneaters catcher Marty Bergen hacked his wife and two children to death with an ax before slitting his own throat with a razor blade. Bergen was neither violent nor a drinker, was apparently happily married, and had no financial worries. The reason for his sudden outburst remains a mystery.

The game started poorly for the home team, perhaps still haunted by the Bergen incident. “The visitors opened with a rush, scoring five runs in each of the first two innings off Pitcher [Vic] Willis, one of the most effective and successful pitchers in the country,” the Boston Herald reported. Three of those runs came in the second inning when slick-fielding Phillies shortstop Monte Cross— one of the worst-hitting position players in history— smashed a three-run homer, the first of the 20th century. The power display was a rarity for Cross, who ended his 16-year career with a .234 average and 31 home runs, but most newspaper accounts of the opening game failed to even mention his homer.

The Phillies continued to pound Boston pitching for most of the game, and at one point they led 16-4. But Boston clawed its way back into the game, helped by an eighth inning triple by Chick Stahl, and a single by Jimmy Collins to drive him in. Stahl, a right fielder who had batted .351 in 1899, and Collins, a diminutive third baseman on his way to the Hall of Fame, were roommates and close friends. After the 1900 season, the pair jumped together to the Boston team of the new American League, and Collins was made player-manager. When he resigned in 1906, it was his friend Stahl who took over the reins, while Collins stayed on as a player. Stahl led the team to a last place finish, and during spring training the next year, he killed himself in Collins’ presence by swallowing three ounces of carbolic acid. His mysterious dying words to Collins— “It drove me to it”— fueled speculation that the frustrations of managing a last-place club had taken their toll on Stahl. But years later it was discovered that Stahl— who had married just four months earlier— was being harassed by another woman claiming to be pregnant by him. Whatever the reason for Stahl’s suicide, it was the first of many tragedies to befall the Boston Red Sox.

But back to 1900. After the run produced by Stahl and Collins, Boston trailed 17-8 entering the ninth. Pinch hitter Buck Freeman was the leadoff man for the Beaneaters. Freeman, a compact power hitter, had connected for an astounding 25 home runs the previous year, a total that would not be matched until Babe Ruth came along. Amazingly, though, Freeman was not considered by all to be a great player. The 1900 Spalding Guide, baseball’s premier annual publication, denounced “sluggers” whose “sole object was to hit it out of sight.” Freeman was the obvious target of the Guide’s criticism. “Of course muscular strength and keen sight are esssentials in batting,” the Guide wrote, “but sound judgment and mental ability, and their practical exemplification in strategic skill in batting, are even more necessary, and the batsman who excels in these latter characteristics is worth a dozen of your common class of home-run hitters.”

Boston manager Frank Selee must have agreed, because when the game began, the man who had hit more home runs than four entire teams the previous year was sitting on the bench. When he was sent up to pinch hit leading off the bottom of the ninth, though, Freeman was ready. The Herald wrote: “Freeman had two strikes called on him, and then he sent the ball high and dry over the Columbus Avenue boundary.” Freeman’s homer began an amazing nine-run rally that would enable Boston to tie the game. Phillies pitcher Al Orth, who had started the game, endured the entire barrage and was charged with all nine runs. Orth, a tall, imposing righthander, was known as the “Curveless Wonder” because he eventually managed to win 204 major league games with a mediocre fastball and no curve whatsoever. The secret to his success was pinpoint control: He had walked 19 batters the previous year while allowing fewer runs than any other starter in the league. His bat helped keep him in the lineup, too. For his career, Orth hit .273 and often played other positions when he wasn’t pitching. The year before, he had hit a comebacker so hard that the pitcher was knocked unconscious, and Orth was imprisoned at a police station until it became certain that the injured pitcher would live.

With the game tied after nine full innings, Boston brought in its star pitcher, and the Herald reported: “When Charley Nichols walked to the pitcher’s box, everybody felt secure that the day would go to Boston after all.” But the Phillies touched Nichols for two runs to take a 19-17 lead. In the bottom of the tenth, Orth was relieved by Strawberry Bill Bernhard, who retired the side in order to end the game.

The Herald called it “one of the most remarkable ball games ever played on the South End or any other ground between teams that were the leading exemplars of the beauties of the national game.” The statistics alone are eye-popping. The Beaneaters’ nine-run ninth inning still stands as one of the greatest comebacks in history, and the five batters in the middle of their order combined for 18 hits in the game. Orth, the winning pitcher, gave up all 17 Boston runs. (High-scoring games were not unusual in 1900, but the next year – when foul balls began to be counted as strikes – offense would plummet.)

Perhaps such a memorable contest could have been expected from these two teams. Ten of the game’s participants, including umpire Tommy Connolly and Boston manager Selee, were eventually inducted into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown -- though that institution would not exist for another 39 years. The Boston franchise, however, was but a crumbling remnant of the powerhouse that had won five pennants in the 1890s. Nichols, the team’s star pitcher, had won 297 games in the previous decade, but would win only 32 more before returning to the minors. Center fielder Sliding Billy Hamilton, by far the best baserunner of the 19th century, was 34 and had lost much of his speed. Left fielder Hugh Duffy, 33, had once batted .440 but would never again play a full big league season. Shortstop Germany Long was considered a good fielder, though he still holds major league records for errors in a season (122) and a career (1,096). But Long, too, was past his prime.

The Phillies’ lineup, however, included the two best all-around players in baseball: first baseman Big Ed Delahanty and second baseman Napoleon Lajoie. The raucous Delahanty, the eldest of five brothers to play big-league ball, had led the league in 1899 with a .410 average, 238 hits, and 137 RBI. He was still a star when, one night in 1903, he was put off a train at Niagara Falls, Canada, for being drunk and disorderly. He somehow fell off the international bridge, and his body washed up at the bottom of the falls a week later. The 25-year-old Lajoie, meanwhile, went on to a long and distinguished career, and got five of his 3,242 hits in the 1900 opening day game.

Neither team would be successful in 1900. By October Brooklyn had run away with the pennant, while Philadelphia and Boston finished third and fourth, respectively. The transition from the 19th century to the 20th, meanwhile, still loomed large. In the West, after pulling off one last robbery, Butch Cassidy and the Sundance Kid fled for South America, while miners, with the gold fields of Nome drying up, moved on to greener pastures. In Alabama, Booker T. Washinton was writing Up From Slavery; in North Carolina, Orville and Wilbur Wright made their first crude experiments at Kitty Hawk. Samuel Gompers’ plans for an AFL-sponsored baseball players’ union had fizzled out quickly, but the players themselves, led by Pirates catcher Chief Zimmer, soon formed a shaky union of their own. Meanwhile, a team called the Chicago Bloomer Girls, featuring pitcher Maud Nelson, toured the Midwest playing (and defeating) men’s teams. In Chicago, Ban Johnson, president of the country’s top minor league — the American League — made plans for his circuit to claim major league status in 1901. And in Baltimore, a 6-year-old boy named George Ruth, already a troublemaker, began playing ball in the streets outside his father’s saloon, where he would learn to hit a baseball harder than anyone before or since.

[Note: This article has been expanded from its published version. To view it as originally published, use the search function at www.nytimes.com.]

EricEnders.com Home
Baseball · Books · Film · Music · Photography