Charles Byrne

“Why that’s Charley Byrne, a man who has done more than anyone else to give Brooklyn the position it occupies as the centre of professional baseball.” i

Charles H. Byrne, the co-founder and first president of the Brooklyn Base Ball Club, was one of the most influential baseball club owners of the 19th century. Among other things, the diminutive Byrne, known as the Napoleon of Base Ball, was the man who:

• Created the franchise that would endure as the Brooklyn Dodgers and now the Los Angeles Dodgers.
• Promoted Ladies Day as a way to encourage better behavior at baseball games in a time when rowdy fans and players threatened to undermine the game’s growth.
• Established baseball’s first nonsmoking section at Brooklyn’s Washington Park.
• Introduced the rain check to induce fans to attend games on days when the weather was threatening.
• Created coaches’ boxes by pushing through a rule requiring base coaches to remain at least 75 feet from home plate.
• Built the teams that won Brooklyn’s first two major-league pennants, in 1889 and 1890.
• Moved Brooklyn into the National League in 1890.
• Arranged major-league baseball’s first tripleheader, in 1890.
• With Chicago’s Albert Spalding, helped kill the Players League, which threatened the National League’s existence.
• Played a pivotal role in the 1891 merger of the major-league American Association into a 12-team National League.

So who was this little-known visionary who helped shaped the game of professional baseball in its earliest days? Charley Byrne was born in New York City, the son of Irish immigrants, on September 10, 1843. An intelligent young man, he graduated from St. Francis Xavier College, attended law classes and worked as a sportswriter. He took a job in the purchasing department of the Union Pacific Railroad in Omaha, Nebraska, where he also was elected deputy sheriff. After his term was up, he returned to New York, where he began dealing in the city’s booming real-estate market.

Byrne soon became one of New York’s most eligible bachelors. He was small in size but muscular with a “shimmering black mustache” and a quick, sarcastic wit. He was bright, talkative, and articulate. He was even-tempered, believed in honor and fair play, and most of all he had a persuasive manner that could win even opponents over to his point of view. He also was a snazzy dresser. “Charley Byrne would be immaculate if there was a frost in Hades,” one sportswriter observed.ii

Byrne loved the New York theater, especially opera. In those days, he was much more interested in La Bohème than baseball. Then in the fall of 1882, he met 30-year-old George J. Taylor, a man with a dream. Taylor’s doctor had told the chain-smoking night editor of the New York Herald that he should find a healthier occupation. The newsman decided that managing a baseball team in the great outdoors would be the perfect solution.

Brooklyn had been without a professional team since 1875, even though it was the nation’s third largest city. (Brooklyn wasn’t annexed by New York City until 1898.) New York City, the country’s biggest metropolis, didn’t have a team either. But in 1883 the New York Gothams (later the Giants) were slated to play in the National League and the New York Metropolitans in the major-league American Association. So Taylor decided to start his own team.

He found a financial “angel” on Wall Street and obtained a lease for property in south Brooklyn to construct a stadium. When the backer backed out, Taylor went to see a lawyer in Manhattan. There he met Charley Byrne, who rented a desk at the office. Taylor, like Byrne, was a graduate of St. Francis Xavier College. The two men hit it off. As a former sportswriter, Byrne was familiar with Brooklyn’s past glories as “the city of base ball” with great amateur teams such as the Atlantics. He also figured that the planned opening of a great bridge connecting Brooklyn with New York would boost the economies of both cities. Baseball could be a great business if it could attract the average Brooklynite.

Though Byrne was well off financially, he needed more backers to start a baseball club. So he brought in his brother-in-law, “Uncle Joe” Doyle, who owned a casino on Ann Street in New York. Doyle in turn recruited millionaire Ferdinand “Gus” Abell, who owned casinos in Newport, Rhode Island, and a house in New York City. But Charley Byrne clearly was the man who ran the club. If a reporter asked about the team, Joe Doyle would point to his brother-in-law and say, “You will have to go to him, he is the Brooklyn talking-machine.”iii

The Brooklyn Club president had a clear idea of what was needed to succeed in this growing game of baseball. First, work began on constructing a state-of-the art baseball park, in the Red Hookiv neighborhood of Brooklyn. Byrne named it Washington Park because a stone house in the area was used by General George Washington as his headquarters during the Battle of Long Island in the Revolutionary War.  (Byrne originally used the old stone house as a ladies restroom and then as the Brooklyn dressing room.)The park cost $32,000, a huge sum in those days.

Next came finding players for the team. Baseball at that time was a rough-and-tumble game. Both Byrne and Taylor were determined to raise the level of play to attract a higher class of fans. They placed an ad for players in the New York Clipper, seeking temperate “men of intelligence and not corner-lot toughs who happen to possess some skill as a player but whose habits and ways make them unfit for thorough team work.”v

Finally, the club needed to join a league. In March of 1883, Brooklyn was accepted into the minor-league Interstate Base Ball Association, joining teams from small towns in Pennsylvania, New Jersey, and Delaware. In less than nine months, Byrne and his colleagues had given birth to a ballpark and a team, and had joined a professional league. A new era in Brooklyn baseball was about to begin.

The new Brooklyn team played its first home game at Washington Park on May 12, 1883, two weeks before the opening of the Brooklyn Bridge. The minor-league game against Trenton, which Brooklyn won, drew more than 6,000 fans, exceeding the 5,000 at the opening game of the major-league New York Gothams at the original Polo Grounds. That same day, Byrne hired a young assistant and ticket-taker. His name was Charles Ebbets, and he would become an iconic figure in the history of the Brooklyn club.

The Brooklyns (the team had no nickname – not Grays or Atlantics as is sometimes written) were in the middle of the pack when the first-place Camden Merritts disbanded. Byrne quickly made a move that would become his trademark. He swooped in and snapped up Camden’s best players at top dollar and generous salaries. With the influx of the Camden players, Byrne’s team won the Interstate Association pennant in the club’s first year in existence.

Byrne’s eye was on the big leagues, though, and in 1884 he was able to move his club into the American Association, then a major league along with the National League. The team, with co-founder George Taylor as manager, was a financial success but finished far down in the standings. Clearly, better players were needed for the big leagues. But as 1885 dawned, Byrne seemed to be doing nothing. Then the news broke that at 1 a.m. on January 5, 1885, Brooklyn had signed the top players of the National League’s Cleveland club, which had been disbanded. Under baseball rules there was a ten-day waiting period before any team could sign released players. With co-owner Gus Abell bankrolling the purchase, Byrne had hidden the players in a Cleveland hotel until the deadline passed.

Other owners were furious. “The outraged and outwitted delegates from elsewhere discussed Messrs. Byrne and Abell in a manner that made the swearing of the army in Flanders sound like a Sunday school address – but that was the good it did them,” said Charley Ebbets.vi The New York Times called the surprising signing “the biggest sensation ever made in baseball.”vii Brooklyn also signed the Cleveland manager, requiring George Taylor to move to the front office as club secretary. Taylor eventually turned the job over to Ebbets and returned to the newspaper business.

The big move didn’t pan out because of quarreling between the new Cleveland players and the old Brooklyn players. It may have been at this point that Byrne first said, “Baseball players are like eggs. Sometimes they aren’t what they are cracked up to be.”viii Early in the 1885 season, he fired the manager, Charlie Hackett, and eventually made himself field manager as well as club president.

Byrne treated his players as if they were his sons, calling them his “lambs.” He took them as a team to cultural events, such as a showing of Gilbert and Sullivan’s The Mikado. He had players open savings accounts. “When the cold winds come blowing, gentle Annie, my boys will be enjoying their hard earned money, while other ball players that I know will be living on snow balls and wishing that summer was at hand before the winter has fairly commenced,” he said.ix

Byrne was making an even bigger mark as a baseball executive. He was the first proponent of regular Ladies Day games and in 1885 expanded the free entry for women to every home game. “We have found by experience that where there is an assemblage of ladies at our matches we get more orderly gatherings,” Byrne explained.x Many of the ladies came to see Brooklyn’s handsome young pitcher Bill “Adonis” Terry.

Byrne’s policy was influential. “The good effects of the move were at once noticed, and he has been wise enough to keep up the practice,” The Sporting News reported. “The spectators are now more respectful and careful about the style of language they use in addressing the players and the umpires. … If other managers would follow in Brooklyn’s footsteps and admit the fair sex to their grounds, it would not only have a good effect on the game generally but it would increase the attendance and enlarge the dividends of the club at the end of the season.”xi

To protect the ladies from odorous cigar smoke, Byrne created baseball’s first nonsmoking section. “It will be a relief to numbers of the patrons to get rid of the smoking annoyance in the grand stand,” the Brooklyn Eagle commented.xii

After he noticed that the threat of bad weather kept fans away from the park because they feared paying to see a rained-out game, Byrne invented the rain check. A Philadelphia paper noted that the wisdom of the rain check “introduced by Mr. Byrne was made very evident last week at the Athletic grounds. Threatening and rainy weather prevailed all week, yet large crowds were present at each game. But for the rain checks not half the people would have taken the risk of seeing but a few innings and losing their money.”xiii

Byrne also was concerned about unruly play, which he feared attracted the wrong kind of fans and turned off respectable customers. Rowdy play was the style of the champion St. Louis Browns (now the Cardinals), who were the original Rough House Gang under its owner Chris Von der Ahe and player-manager Charles Comiskey. Commy was not averse to slugging his own players, and he constantly berated umpires in the foulest of terms. If things weren’t going well, he would pull his team from the field and refuse to continue. While coaching at first base, Comiskey and his third-base coach would yell insults at the opposing pitcher and run up on each side of the catcher to shout obscenities in his ears.

In 1886 the American Association called a special meeting in Columbus, Ohio, to deal with the issue, with Byrne as the presiding officer. The Brooklyn president pushed through a resolution banning “offensive coaching” and a rule requiring that base coaches stay at least 75 feet from home plate. Thus, Charley Byrne effectively created coaches’ boxes.xiv In 1887 Byrne also won a rule imposing a $1,500 fine on a team if it refused an umpire’s order to continue play.

Because of his intelligence and attention to detail, Byrne became the most influential owner in the American Association. He was named the sole Association member, along with two National League owners, on baseball’s Arbitration Committee, which resolved disputes in both leagues. “The one man of the Association who has shown himself capable of successfully meeting the League diplomats on their own ground, appears to be Mr. Byrne, of the Brooklyn Club,” Sporting Life wrote.xv The Brooklyn president also was named to a three-member Association committee overseeing the umpires as well as head of the scheduling committee.

“Mr. Byrne has become the ruling mind in the affairs of the Association,” Sporting Life concluded. “In fact, MR. BYRNE IS THE ASSOCIATION. As a natural sequence of superior general abilities, he is president, secretary, board of directors and all the committees. He is ‘Captain, cook and all the crew on board the Mary Jane.’ The other members of the ring fondly delude themselves with the belief that they are participating partners, and their thinking so is one of the greatest tributes to the peculiar abilities of Mr. Byrne. Either by study or by intuition this admirable diplomat becomes thoroughly conversant with the subtlest governing characteristics of his colleagues, and he manipulates this knowledge so delicately, and yet so skillfully, that there is responding result without even the manipulation or the true product being observed by the objects of it.”xvi

Byrne’s critics in St. Louis took a darker view of the Brooklyn club president’s rise. “His smooth, oily ways are captivating and his glib tongue wields a power to manipulate at will,” said the St. Louis Post Dispatch.xvii But the “Little General” clearly was having a big impact on the national game.

Charley Byrne’s record as a field manager failed to match his prowess in the front office. After a losing 1887 season, Byrne fired himself and hired baseball pioneer Bill “Gunner” McGunnigle to be the club’s manager for the 1888 season. Byrne finished his managerial career with a respectable record of 174 wins and 172 losses.

In his job as club president, Byrne again made history with the most spectacular dealings in baseball history to that point. First, in late 1887, he and his partners paid $25,000 for the entire New York Mets club, which had moved to Staten Island. Brooklyn kept the cream of the players, including big first baseman Dave Orr and scrappy outfielder Darby O’Brien, and sold the rest for a new American Association franchise in Kansas City.

Next, Byrne pulled off a historic deal with St. Louis owner Chris Von der Ahe, acquiring three St. Louis stars for a record $19,000. They were catcher Doc Bushong, outfielder Dave Foutz, and pitcher “Parisian Bob” Caruthers, who also signed a contract for a record pay of $5,500. The stunning deal made Byrne the talk of the baseball world. “Certainly, if pluck and energy, combined with liberal outlays of money, can achieve success in securing first-class players with which to improve his team, Charley is going to get it,” wrote legendary sportswriter Henry Chadwick.xviii

Before the 1888 season began, several Brooklyn players married, prompting sportswriters to give the team its first nickname: the Brooklyn Bridegrooms. The Bridegrooms turned out to be the bridesmaids that year, finishing second behind St. Louis. But Charley Byrne was determined. He opened the club’s pocketbook to acquire star outfielders Pop Corkhill and Oyster Burns as well as second baseman Hub Collins and pitcher Tom Lovett.

The result: In 1889, Brooklyn battled St. Louis down to the final day of the season. After winning the last game in Columbus, Ohio, Byrne and his Bridegrooms headed home by train not knowing the outcome of the St. Louis contest. When the train arrived, the team got word that St. Louis had lost, giving Brooklyn its first pennant. When Byrne heard the news, “his worried face relaxed into a contented smile, and his entire nervous system underwent a change,” Sporting Life said. “The strain had been long and severe, and the reaction was immediate.”xix

The Brooklyn club president quickly arranged the team’s first “World’s Series” with the National League champion New York Giants. The Giants were a heavy favorite with a lineup that featured six future Hall of Famers: Buck Ewing, John Montgomery Ward, Tim Keefe, Roger Connor, Mickey Welch, and Jim O’Rourke. No Brooklyn player would make the Hall of Fame. Nevertheless, Brooklyn roared off to a three games to one lead before losing the Series six games to three. Byrne’s consolation was that his moves to draw average fans to Brooklyn games resulted in a regular-season attendance of 336,000, the highest for any baseball club in the 19th century.

Charley Byrne then played a key role in a baseball revolution in 1890. First, when St. Louis owner Chris Von der Ahe moved to install his own anti-Byrne candidate to head the American Association, Byrne took Brooklyn into the National League. Fellow owners immediately made him a member of the league’s board of directors. They also relied heavily on Byrne and Chicago White Stockings owner Albert Spalding in coping with a development that threatened the League’s very existence: a revolt by the leading players of the day.

The players, led by Brotherhood president John Montgomery Ward, had formed the Players League as a third major league, with teams in every National League city. The champion New York Giants and most other National League clubs were decimated by defections. Brooklyn was one of the few teams to retain nearly all of its players, thanks to Byrne’s history of fair treatment. Speaking for many of his teammates, Brooklyn’s Hub Collins said, “Mr. Byrne treated me like a king, and I never hesitated about signing my contract for next season.”xx

With its team intact, Brooklyn swept to the National League pennant in 1890, making it the only team in baseball history to win consecutive championships in two different major leagues. Along the way, Byrne also made history by holding baseball’s first tripleheader, on September 1, 1890. Byrne heard that the rival Brooklyn Players League team, managed by Monte Ward, planned a Labor Day doubleheader. So he scheduled three games with visiting Pittsburgh. The Bridegrooms won all three games and outdrew the Players League twin bill. There have been only three tripleheaders in baseball history.

The pennant race was overshadowed by the battle between the National League and the Players League. The National League formed a war committee headed by Chicago’s Spalding, who vowed to crush the rebel league. He scheduled National League home games to directly compete with the home games of the Players League. This was a two-edged sword, especially for teams like the Bridegrooms, who had to compete in Brooklyn not only with the Players team but with a new American Association club.

The slash-and-burn strategy worked, destroying the Players League after just one season. Though Byrne had a soft spot for players, he was a team man who not only supported but also helped lead the battle by Al Spalding against the rebel league. “There is no dodging the statement that Mr. Spalding and Mr. Byrne accomplished the downfall of the Players League,” concluded Sporting Life.xxi But many baseball observers agreed that if Byrne had been in the National League sooner, he might have tempered some the league’s high-handed treatment of players that helped lead to the revolt. Brooklyn manager Bill McGunnigle, Sporting Life reported, said that “if the National League was run by such a man as the man he worked for on the Brooklyn team, there would be no Brotherhood, there would be no cause for one, and it would be impossible to form one.”xxii

After Brooklyn’s second pennant in two years, Brooklynites hailed Byrne as a conquering hero. At a postseason celebration at the Grand Opera House, “the mention of Byrne’s name was like putting the match to a dozen cannons,” Sporting Life reported. “As the little president stepped from the wings he faced a cheering, shouting gathering that sent their combined greeting at him like a cyclone. He looked wonder-eyed over the foot-lights, his legs wobbled and it was evident he was suffering a slight stroke of stage fright. But he had lots of time to get over it for the cheering was taken up again and again, lasting several minutes.”

Byrne struggled to regain his composure as he began to read his prepared remarks. The words of the usually articulate baseball man seemed stiff, and then a page of his written speech fell to the floor. Byrne, according to Sporting Life, “colored up” and continued talking as he stooped down to try to retrieve the paper, never taking his eyes off the audience. Finally, as he got to the end of a sentence, he managed to grab the missing paper. After only the slightest pause, he crumpled the paper up in his hand, stuffed the rest of his speech in his pocket, and began speaking from the heart.

“Like a born orator, he started in and electrified his hearers,” Sporting Life wrote. “There was no limit to his eloquence and the good, solid English he hurled at the big gathering worked all to a pitch of enthusiasm that burst bounds when he told them in language unmistakable that he was in a position to say that Brooklyn had in all probability seen the last of the base ball war and that next season would mark a return to old principles, and that Brooklynites would have only one club and one championship, and interest being undivided, another good spell of times would be quite a surety. This declaration was the windup of the night, and was received with a general and united shout.”xxiii

But Byrne, like nearly every other major-league baseball owner, was facing huge financial problems. Squabbling between the three leagues in 1890 had turned off baseball fans and attendance had fallen sharply. National League clubs rushed to woo investors from the disbanded Players League clubs, and Brooklyn was no exception. Byrne brought in investors from the former Players League Brooklyn team, Ward’s Wonders, but at a price.

First, he agreed to move the Bridegrooms’ games from Washington Park to the more distant Eastern Park, which had been built for the Players League team. Second, the investors demanded that John Montgomery Ward be made manager of the Brooklyn Bridegrooms. Byrne agreed, and Gunner McGunnigle was replaced despite two straight pennants.

In 1891 the American Association also folded. Byrne played a major role in merging some of the Association’s teams into a 12-team National League and drawing up a new National Agreement for baseball. He became a champion of the minor leagues. “These smaller clubs are absolutely necessary for the good of baseball,” he said, “and they must be encouraged.”xxiv

Byrne’s club struggled in the 1890s, and he never won another pennant. Attendance dipped at remote Eastern Park, where fans had to dodge trolley cars to get to the park. For a while the team became known as the Trolley Dodgers. The struggles took a toll on Byrne’s health. The Brooklyn club president, who never married, took leave from his post and went to Hot Springs, Virginia, to try to heal. But he couldn’t keep his mind off baseball. He had the Brooklyn team supply bats, balls, and uniforms for the employee team at his hotel. In the winter of 1897, despite ill health, he felt obligated to attend the National League meeting in Philadelphia. Afterward, Byrne’s health worsened further, and he fell into a coma.

On January 4, 1898, Charley Byrne died from Bright’s disease at his Manhattan home at the age of 54. Charles Ebbets succeeded him as Brooklyn club president. Byrne left behind a legacy that is unmatched among baseball executives of his day. “From the year Mr. Byrne made his advent in the base ball arena, up to the year of his last illness, he was foremost in every movement that was calculated to benefit the national game,” said Hall of Fame sportswriter Henry Chadwick.xxv

Byrne always put the interests of baseball above his own. “We are merely the backers of a sport that appeals to old and young,” he said. “If we betray that trust, we betray the cardinal principle of the game that we control.”xxvi

The Brooklyn baseball president’s “apparent anxiety to conserve only the best interests of the national game was dear to him more than anything else on earth,” Sporting Life said. “In that respect, he was easily the greatest magnate of them all.”xxvii

Charley Byrne’s name faded from view as baseball moved into the 20th century. But based on the opinions of those involved in baseball in the late 1800s, no executive made more contributions to the early development of America’s national game and the storied franchise that became the Brooklyn and Los Angeles Dodgers than Charles H. Byrne. The record is clear: The “Napoleon of Base Ball” deserves a place in the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.

 

Sources

Ronald G. Shafer, When the Dodgers Were Bridegrooms, Gunner McGunnigle and Brooklyn’s Back-to-Back Pennants of 1889 and 1890 (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company Inc., 2011).

Brooklyn Eagle

Sporting Life

The Sporting News

New York Times

New York Clipper

 

Notes

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Bill McGunnigle

William “Gunner” McGunnigle had a flair for fashion on a baseball field that likely will never be matched. McGunnigle managed and coached the bases wearing black patent-leather shoes, a cutaway suit coat, lavender trousers, a silk tie and a derby hat. “It’s only a good looking man like yours truly who could wear patent leathers on the field and get away with it without getting shot at,” he once joked to a reporter.ⁱ

The legacy of pioneer baseball man Bill McGunnigle goes far beyond patent-leather shoes, however. As a player he was credited with inventing the catcher’s mitt in 1875. As skipper of the future Brooklyn Dodgers, he won Brooklyn’s first two pennants and remains the only manager in baseball history to win consecutive championships in two different major leagues. He has the highest winning percentage of any manager in Dodgers franchise history.

William Henry McGunnigle was born in Boston, the son of Irish immigrant parents, on New Year’s Day of 1855. When he was a boy, the family moved to nearby East Stoughton (now Avon), next to Brockton, then the shoemaking capital of the world. Billy’s father, James F. McGunnigle, became a Civil War hero as a twice-wounded Union officer. At the Battle of Spotsylvania Courthouse, a rebel bullet smashed into McGunnigle’s chest, but his life was saved when the bullet hit a hunting watch that he carried over his heart in his shirt pocket. The watch had been a gift from a friend back home.

After the war young Billy, who had inherited his father’s dashing good looks, began playing baseball on East Stoughton’s green fields. After the eighth grade, he dropped out of school and began working in a local shoe factory to help support the family, which now counted six children. On November 24, 1874, he married Mary McCullough, the pretty daughter of Irish immigrants. But Billy also had another love, the game of baseball, and it would change his life.

Billy was watching an 1873 game between teams from the towns of Brockton and Grafton when Brockton’s catcher was injured. Brockton’s captain, Owen Canary, asked if anyone in the crowd could catch. “A young fellow of eighteen came out of the woods with a gun on his shoulder and asked for a chance to catch the pitching of Joe Hallett, local twirler for the Brockton nine,” said Canary. “I gave it to him, and he made good.”ⁱⁱ Billy’s strong throwing arm earned him a new nickname: “Gunner.”

In 1874 Gunner led the Howard Juniors, an amateur team in Brockton, to the Junior Championship of Massachusetts. “He was delighted and inspired when he hit his first home run in Brockton, ran crazily around the bases and turned a somersault as he crossed home plate to win the game. He decided that baseball was the game for him,” one of McGunnigle’s sons, William, wrote in a letter to the Baseball Hall of Fame.ⁱⁱⁱ

At this time, towns were starting to hire professionals to bolster their amateur teams. In June of 1875, the club in Fall River, Massachusetts, recruited McGunnigle to be the team’s first pro player. Though he was only 5-feet-9 inches tall and weighed just 155 pounds, young McGunnigle became the team’s starting catcher. In those days, catchers snared the pitcher’s underhand tosses without a glove or mask. As a result, a catcher’s hands took a severe beating.

When McGunnigle’s hands became very sore, the innovative young man decided to do something about it. Before a game with Harvard College, he borrowed a pair of thick bricklayer’s gloves. He tried them out during practice, but found they restricted his throwing. So he got out a jackknife and cut the fingers off the right-hand glove.^iv The padded mitt “was an immediate success,” the New York Sun said, that “will save the broken fingers known until now.”^v

Just who really invented what in the early days of baseball is often hard to pin down. But according to the 1895 Reach’s Official Baseball Guide, “The catcher’s mitt was first used in 1875 by William McGunnigle of the Fall River team.”^vi

Before the 1876 season rolled around, young McGunnigle had more big ideas. The National League began that year. McGunnigle argued that “Fall River was just as ripe for pro ball as Boston” or any other big city.^vii He persuaded the team’s owner to hire more professionals, and Fall River roared to the New England Association championship.

The speedy McGunnigle switched to the outfield, dazzling fans with spectacular barehanded catches. After a second-place finish in 1877, McGunnigle decided it was time to move on, much to the regret of local observers. “He is the greatest right fielder we ever saw,” said the Fall River Daily Herald.^viii

In 1878 McGunnigle signed for a salary of $700 with Buffalo in the International Association. The team’s star player was a stocky, 22-year-old pitcher named Jim “Pud” Gavin. McGunnigle became Buffalo’s change pitcher – filling in for the few games Gavin didn’t pitch – and on other days played right field. Dashing Billy McGunnigle, now also known as “Mac,” quickly became a fan favorite. “This handsome young man has no superior in the country as a right fielder, prancing over his territory with a nervous energy which is destruction to everything sent his way,” the Buffalo Express said.^ix

Mac’s specialty was charging like a shortstop to field a ball hit to right field and gunning the batter out at first base. “I have seen McGunnigle throw out as many as seven men in one game from right field to first base,” said Buffalo teammate Sam Crane. That season the New York Clipper newspaper awarded Mac its Clipper Prize as the league’s best right fielder, emphasizing his throwing 28 runners out at first, “his work in this respect being the best on record.”^x He also hit .243 for the season.

After Buffalo won the International Association pennant, both the team and McGunnigle moved into the major leagues in 1879 when the club was accepted into the National League. During the season Mac was benched because of weak hitting. But when Galvin was injured, McGunnigle pitched two straight wins over the Chicago White Stockings (today’s Cubs), enabling Buffalo to edge Chicago for a respectable third-place finish. McGunnigle hit an anemic .170 for the season, but rolled up a pitching record of 9 wins and 5 losses with a 2.62 earned run average.

Over the winter McGunnigle and his wife, Mary, stayed in Buffalo while Gunner worked at Staley’s Shoe and Boot Store on Main Street. The McGunnigles’ second child, William, was born in Buffalo in 1880 and their third, Mary, arrived in 1882. Like their father, both children were born on New Year’s Day.

McGunnigle began the 1880 season as Buffalo’s captain and manager. He also became part of baseball’s first pitching rotation, with McGunnigle pitching one game and newcomer Tom Poorman hurling the next. The change was born out of necessity after Pud Galvin left to play in California. McGunnigle won his first game, but his arm went lame and he was released after only 17 contests. He played in only three more major-league games – one with the Worcester Ruby Legs in 1880 and a doubleheader with Cleveland in 1882. Gunner’s short big-league career ended with a .173 batting average, and a pitching record of 11 wins and 8 losses.

Mac eventually returned home to Brockton, where he worked as a cigar salesman as his arm healed. Then in 1883 he was recruited to captain a team in Saginaw, Michigan, in the new Northwestern League. His teammates included future Hall of Fame pitcher John Clarkson. Saginaw finished second to Toledo, which was led by African American catcher Moses “Fleet” Walker. But Saginaw was awarded the pennant when Toledo joined the major-league American Association in 1884. (When that happened, Walker became the first African American to play in the big leagues.)

Meantime, an expanded Northwestern League ran into financial trouble and began selling off its players. McGunnigle was sent to the league’s Bay City, Michigan, team, where he joined hard-hitting Jim “Cuddy” Cudworth, who would become his best friend. Then the Bay City team folded, and Mac ended up in Muskegon, Michigan.

McGunnigle returned to Brockton in 1885 to form a new team in the Eastern New England League. Now 30 years old and sporting long sideburns and a handlebar mustache, he was a confident and self-educated man. In private he was “a story teller in several dialects, had a good singing voice and a hearty appreciation of friendships. His family cherished him and his numerous friends took great delight in his company,” his son William later recalled.^xi His pals included heavyweight boxing champion John L. Sullivan. Mac was a snappy dresser, preferring natty light trousers and cutaway jackets.

The new Brockton team was led by McGunnigle as playing manager and his Bay City buddy Jim Cudworth. About this time, all of baseball began allowing pitchers to throw overhand. But the pitcher’s box remained 50 feet from home plate, and hit batters didn’t get to take first base. Batters, as Mac discovered, were sitting ducks.

On July 22 in Brockton, McGunnigle stepped into the batter’s box to face pitcher Dick Conway of the Lawrence, Massachusetts, team. Mac dodged the first pitch, a fastball thrown squarely at his head. “The second was directly in the direction of the first, and the batter only saved himself by dropping suddenly on all fours to the ground,” the Brockton Weekly Gazette reported. When “a third ball sped from the pitcher’s hand like a bullet from a gun … the unfortunate batsman could not avoid the ball in time. And it struck him with a crash, which was heard in every part of the grounds. Poor ‘Mac’ fell like an animal beneath the butcher’s axe, and his quivering form was drawn up in agony as he lay upon the ground.”^xii

McGunnigle was badly hurt, but returned to play that season. After he had recovered, the notorious incident eventually led to a family poem that Mac’s daughter Mary passed on to her children:

Casey on the pitcher’s mound
McGunnigle at the bat
Casey let the ball go
And knocked McGunnigle flat.^xiii

McGunnigle led the Shoe City team to first place when the season ended in October – at least Brocktonites thought he did. Second-place Lawrence was allowed to play some postponed games and then won a three-game playoff with Brockton. Mac returned the next year, but the team played poorly. When the owners ordered McGunnigle to fine the players, he refused to do so and quit the team, leaving with Cudworth to play for the Haverhill, Massachusetts, squad.

Then in 1887, the New England League’s Lowell, Massachusetts, team hired McGunnigle as its player-manager. Led by McGunnigle’s underhand pitching and the hitting of Cudworth and future Hall of Famer Hugh Duffy, the Lowell Browns won the championship. Mac was a hero in Lowell but not in rival towns. One day while the team was on the road, he was getting a shave in a barbershop when the talk turned to the Lowell nine. “That darned McGunnigle,” the barber said. “If I had him here, I’d cut his big throat.” Mac chose to keep mum.^xiv

Gunner’s triumphs gained wider attention. McGunnigle “as a manager, player and general on the field is head and shoulders above anything in the league and excelled by precious few in the country,” said Sporting Life. “In the minds of the baseball public,” the Boston Globe said, McGunnigle’s name “is a household word.” The pennant-winning manager caught the eye of Charley Byrne, president of the Brooklyn team in the American Association, who hired McGunnigle as Brooklyn’s new skipper for a pay of $2,500.

Byrne also was making other moves to strengthen the Brooklyn team, which had been perennial also-rans in the major-league American Association to the champion St. Louis Browns, led by player-manager Charles Comiskey. First Byrne and his partners purchased the entire New York Mets team and kept the best of the players. Then Byrne spent an unheard total of $19,000 to acquire three star players from St. Louis – pitcher “Parisian Bob” Caruthers, outfielder Dave Foutz, and catcher Doc Bushong.

Just before McGunnigle’s first season began in 1888, several of the Brooklyn players married, earning the team a new nickname: the Brooklyn Bridegrooms. The new team and manager made their Brooklyn debut on April 16, 1888, against Cleveland. McGunnigle was no longer a playing manager, and he didn’t wear a uniform. The natty, mustachioed Mac was attired in a dark suit, a bright tie, a shirt with a high white starched collar, a derby hat, and black patent leather shoes with removable spikes, a shoe that he had invented and patented. (Umpires and visiting players, who usually changed into their uniforms at hotels, could remove the spikes and avoid tearing the carpeting.)

Despite the star players, McGunnigle and the team struggled. In August, Mac seethed over press reports that he was merely an empty suit on the bench, and that club president Charley Byrne really ran the team. “I have seen it in print, and I understand that it started in the West, that I am only a figure-head in the Brooklyn Club, and simply carry out Mr. Byrne’s orders. This is false all the way through,” Mac told reporters.^xv

According to Charles Ebbets, who was Brooklyn’s club secretary at the time, McGunnigle “was really the first manager Brooklyn ever had. Prior to that Mr. Byrne had been the actual manager although others had worn the title.”^xvi

After Brooklyn closed the season by winning ten straight games to finish second to the St. Louis Browns, club president Byrne decided that McGunnigle deserved another chance. The Brooklyn players unanimously supported the decision, with many declaring that Mac was the best manager they had ever played for.

As an ever-optimistic Irishman, McGunnigle had no doubt about the 1889 baseball season. The Brooklyn manager vowed to “make a head long plunge from the top of one of the towers of the Brooklyn Bridge into the East River” if the Bridegrooms didn’t capture the pennant.^xvii

After a slow start, Brooklyn jumped into first place in another close race with St. Louis. McGunnigle became known as the thinking man’s manager.

“Let me say a word of William McGunnigle, a man whose modesty tends to push his light under a bushel,” wrote one Sporting Life correspondent. “He does not court notoriety and always hugs the bench with his players. He is with his men at all times and on all occasions he is figuring at some method by which a profitable trick may be learned. Mac’s mind is ever on base ball, and you can seldom switch him off it, both in and out of school. The players think a heap of him, and the close attachment existing between he and they is evidenced in the fact that he is always a welcome guest to their circle.”^xviii

Mac blew a tin whistle to get his players’ attention. He studied opposing catchers and managers. “McGunnigle was the first of the great sign stealers,” said Lee Allen, the former official historian of baseball at the National Baseball Hall of Fame. “He was also the first manager to signal to players by waving a scorecard on the bench. Nervous as a sitting hen, McGunnigle also gave signs by tapping bats, drumming away as if he were a telegrapher.”^xix

It was later disclosed that the ever-inventive McGunnigle had some wild ideas that he wanted to try. One of his ideas “was what the boys called his electric heel tapper,” Sporting Life reported. Mac’s idea was to put a small metal plate in the batter’s box that would be wired to a button on the bench. McGunnigle would press the button to send shocks to his batters to signal what the pitcher was about to throw. He even called in an electrician to get a cost estimate, but dropped the idea when the electrician warned that the electrical current “might prove dangerous.”

Before long, the innovative manager had another idea. Brooklyn’s Washington Park had a big sign above the center-field fence. It was a cigarette advertisement with a huge picture of a dog’s head. McGunnigle wanted to paint one eye black and one eye white. “He proposed to manipulate the eyes by electricity, for, be it understood, Mac is an Edison in embryo,” Sporting Life said. “A straight ball coming he would let down the white eye. The black eye would indicate a curve ball.” His players kidded him out of that one.^xx

Even without shocks or winks, manager McGunnigle led Brooklyn to its first major-league pennant in 1889, winning the American Association flag by one game over St. Louis. Brooklyn played its first “World’s Series” against the National League’s New York Giants, who were led by six future Hall of Famers including Buck Ewing, Tim Keefe and John Montgomery Ward. Brooklyn took a surprising three games to one lead before the Giants stormed back to take the Series, six games to three.

In the clubhouse after the Series, Brooklyn players showed their esteem for their manager by presenting him with a gold watch and chain and a diamond-studded locket. Perhaps recalling his father’s Civil War adventure, McGunnigle told the players: “Boys, you caught me unprepared. Of course, I can’t tell you how much I appreciate your kindness. I can assure you that whatever happens the watch will never visit ‘my uncle’; that it will be kept in a chamois case and that it will always be carried in a pocket over my heart.”^xxi

In 1890 Brooklyn switched to the National League. That year McGunnigle and all of baseball got caught up in a storm. Many of the top players, led by Brotherhood president John Montgomery Ward, revolted and formed a third major league with teams in the very same cities as the National League. Almost all of Brooklyn’s players remained loyal to the club, and McGunnigle was able to lead the team to a second straight pennant, its first in the National League.

After spending a day on the bench in the final road series against Cleveland, when Brooklyn won all four games, a Sporting Life reporter wrote: “There isn’t a Brooklyn player who works harder to win a game than does Billy McGunnigle. He is here, there and everywhere sliding from one end of the bench to the other, always with a bat in his hand and one at his feet, and as nervous as a sweet girl graduate just before firing off her essay.”^xxii

McGunnigle and Brooklyn also made history that year by playing in baseball’s first tripleheader in a September 1 clash with Pittsburgh. The Bridegrooms won all three games. There have been only three tripleheaders in the history of baseball, and McGunnigle was involved in two of them. He was the manager of the Louisville Colonels when they played the second tripleheader, on September 7, 1896, losing all three games to Baltimore. The third triple bill took place on October 2, 1920, when Cincinnati won two of three against Pittsburgh.

Few men in the history of baseball at the time could match McGunnigle’s winning record, Sporting Life noted: “A great deal has been said at odd times of various players and managers who have been connected in their time with many champion teams, but one man, with a more remarkable record than any of the others many mentioned, has been entirely overlooked, simply because he is altogether too modest for the pushing baseball world and never blows his own horn. That man is Manager McGunnigle of the Brooklyn Club. … Even [Cap] Anson doesn’t approach McGunnigle’s record of handling winning teams by a long shot. Nine firsts and three seconds in 14 years is simply phenomenal.”^xxiii

Despite his success, McGunnigle became a victim of the fallout from the great baseball war. The Players League died after only one season, but the three-league competition had turned off fans and attendance plummeted. The surviving National League and American Association teams scrambled to woo investors from the former Players clubs. The Brooklyn Bridegrooms took on minority investors from the Players’ Brooklyn team, called Ward’s Wonders after its manager Johnny Ward. But as part of the deal, the Bridegrooms had to agree to make Ward the team’s manager. Bill McGunnigle was let go despite having won two straight pennants.

McGunnigle never spoke publicly about the dismissal, and the Brooklyn Eagle noted only that Mac “left this city with the best wishes of the men who employed him.” In his three years managing Brooklyn, McGunnigle won 267 games and lost 139 for a winning percentage of .658, still the highest in Dodgers franchise history.

There were hints that Mac left Brooklyn voluntarily so he could spend more time with his growing family in Brockton. Such speculation was undercut by the fact that in the middle of the 1891 season McGunnigle jumped at the chance to take over as manager of the last-place Pittsburgh team in the National League. But he got caught on the wrong side of an ownership dispute and was let go at the end of the season.

Still, McGunnigle left his mark. One of his players, catcher Connie Mack, noticed McGunnigle signaling with bats and scorecards. Mack later became manager of the Philadelphia Athletics for 50 years and was famed for signaling his players with a scorecard.

In 1892 McGunnigle returned home to manage another baseball team in Brockton. In July of that year, he helped baseball player Fred Doe organize the first professional Sunday baseball game ever played in New England, playing at Rocky Point Park in Rhode Island despite a state law barring baseball on the Sabbath.

Over the next few years, Mac became involved with polo and indoor baseball played on roller skates. His family had grown to seven children. He remained devoted to his wife, Mary. In 1895 he wrote about what makes a good marriage:

“Husband and Wife. Never should both be angry at the same time. Never deceive; confidence once lost, can never be wholly regained. Always leave home with a tender goodbye and a pleasant word, for they may be the last. Do not require a request to be repeated. Never reproach the other for an error which was done with good motive, and with the best judgment at the time. Never neglect the other for all that there is on earth. (I have done this) from Nov. 24, 1874 to this date.”^xxiv

Mac returned to the National League in mid-1896 as manager of the last-place Louisville Colonels. During a stop in Washington, D.C., he took his players to the White House, saying he knew President Grover Cleveland. The players assumed it was another of Mac’s practical jokes. At the White House President Cleveland greeted McGunnigle, “Why, Mac, how are you? We haven’t met in years.” The president, who was from Buffalo, explained to the startled players that he had seen McGunnigle play there in the late 1870s.

McGunnigle made worldwide news by asking Cleveland if he planned to run for reelection. For the first time publicly, Cleveland said, “No third term for me. Really, I couldn’t stand it.”^xxv

Despite a verbal two-year contract, Louisville fired McGunnigle after one season. He sued and won a small settlement out of court. McGunnigle’s five-year record as a major-league manager totaled 327 wins and 248 losses, for a winning percentage of .569.

Gunner returned to Brockton, where he opened a pub and poolroom downtown across from city hall. On the night of July 22, 1897, he was returning home with several others in a horse-drawn carrier that was struck by one of Brockton’s new electric trolley cars. Mac was thrown to the street and badly injured. Ironically, the man who once managed a team that became known as the Trolley Dodgers was done in by a trolley car.

McGunnigle never recovered his health and died on March 9, 1899, at the age of 44 at his home at 35 Arch Street. Among friends who attended his funeral were heavyweight boxing champions John L. Sullivan and Jim Corbett. McGunnigle, one obituary said, “seldom talked of his record and achievements, and the details of one of the most interesting careers in the baseball world passes with its subject.”^xxvi

In 1915 prominent Boston Globe sportswriter Tom Murnane predicted that “some day there will be an institution to honor the pioneer heroes of the diamond and also the modern stars. When that day arrives, Billy McGunnigle, because of outstanding playing ability, sagacious leadership and aggressiveness, should be one of the first enshrined therein.”^xxvii The National Baseball Hall of Fame opened in 1936 in Cooperstown, New York. In 1978 Murnane received the Hall’s J.G. Taylor Spink Award, conferred annually on a sportwriter.

Bill McGunnigle’s managing career didn’t last long enough for him to be considered for the Hall of Fame. However, there is a room at the Hall of Fame museum in Cooperstown devoted to baseball in the 19th century. Certainly, Gunner McGunnigle, the inventor of the catcher’s mitt and one of the most innovative baseball minds of the game’s early days, deserves a mention there.

 

Sources

Ronald G. Shafer, When the Dodgers Were Bridegrooms, Gunner McGunnigle and Brooklyn’s Back-to-Back Pennants of 1889 and 1890, (Jefferson, North Carolina: MacFarland and Company Inc., 2011).

 

Notes

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