Some other bad days in Dodgers history
Getting shut out by 15 runs at home? Happens every 125 years! Playing like automatons!
Not that I actually watched the Dodgers lose at home to the Giants on Saturday by a 15-0 score, but followed updates on my computer instead, but it was a bad day. In the wire service story about the game, it was stated that the last time the Dodgers lost a shutout at home was on September 20, 1898 to Pittsburg.1
And as the Brooklyn Eagle above details, that was indeed the case. The Brooklyn Public Library makes much of the papers run freely available on the web and it’s a great resource and something you should appropriately impressed with.
The 1898 Brooklyn team, called the Bridegrooms by most reference sources, were not a very good team. They finished tenth in the then 12-team National League with a 54-91-4 record ahead of only the Washington Senators, who would go out of business in 1900 when the league contracted, and the St. Louis Browns (not yet the Cardinals) who were 39-111.
The most notable development for Brooklyn in 1898 was that the team’s founder, Charles Byrne, passed away and ownership of the team ended up with Charles Ebbets, who moved the team into a new stadium called Washington Park. (His eponymous stadium opened in 1912). Ebbets was managing the team on the field too for most of the 1898 season.
The team’s best player was 19-year old Jimmy Sheckard, who would go on to a long and solid career in the majors with Brooklyn and Chicago. In 1903, Sheckard would pull off a rare season leading his league in home runs (9) and stolen bases (67). That feat has been matched by just two others: Ty Cobb and Chuck Klein.
In his SABR Bio by Don Jensen, I learned this about Jimmy Sheckard.
On June 2, 1908, Sheckard nearly lost the use of his left eye as a result of a fistfight with teammate Heinie Zimmerman. During the melee Jimmy threw something at the young infielder. Infuriated, Zimmerman picked up a bottle of ammonia and hurled it at his assailant. The bottle broke as it hit Sheckard between the eyes, spilling ammonia all over his face. Chance ran to Sheckard’s assistance but Zimmerman had the best of the manager, too, until the rest of the team intervened.
The Brooklyn pitcher, who went the distance, is identified in the story as “Roaring Bill Kennedy” but he has come down to us in history by the name of Brickyard Kennedy. His SABR Bio (by David Nemec) has this interesting fact in it.
Stories abound that Kennedy was illiterate, but all of them cite nearly identical examples of his witlessness that are also attributed to players who preceded him to the majors. Kennedy’s actual education level remains unknown, as does most of his family history. What is known for certain is that his 174 wins during the decade of the 1890s put him fourth, behind only Kid Nichols, Cy Young, and Amos Rusie, all of whom are in the Hall of Fame. That Kennedy never quite achieved enough to join them may be largely attributable to his greatest failing as a pitcher: an utter inability to cover first base. He simply could never master the task and kept vainly trying to persuade his managers that it wasn’t part of a pitcher’s job description.
The 1898 Brooklyn team also featured a franchise favorite: having the less talented brother of a great player on the team. Before their Chris Gwynn, there was Butts Wagner, the starting shortstop in this game. Butts’ far more famous brother, Honus, was playing for Louisville in 1898 and would not join Pittsburgh until 1900. Butts never played in the majors again.
Other players on this team would go on to fame in other aspects of baseball. Pitcher Jack Dunn would become a very successful minor league team owner, running the Baltimore Orioles of the American Association from 1907 to 1928. Among the players he signed were two fairly good players named Babe Ruth and Lefty Grove.
The Dodgers used Fielder Jones in the outfield (Fielder was his given name). Jones would have some good years in Brooklyn, but his best years came for the White Sox, who made him a player-manager. In 1906, Jones led the White Sox, aka “the Hitless Wonders” to one of the biggest World Series upsets ever over the crosstown Cubs, who had gone 116-36.
Brooklyn would rebound from an awful 1898 season to win the pennant in 1899 and 1900. The wrinkle in this is that in 1899, the National League permitted what is known as syndicate ownership. So, the owner of the Baltimore Orioles, Henry Von Der Horst, joined up with Ebbets in Brooklyn to jointly run two teams. Baltimore’s old manager, Ned Hanlon, figured that commercial prospects were better in Brooklyn than Baltimore and the best Orioles player came up to Brooklyn, such as Willie Keeler, Joe Kelley, and Bill Dahlen.
You might say to yourself, “Seems that there could be some competition problems if one group owns two teams?” Well, you’d be right. The best example of that in 1899 are the infamous Cleveland Spiders, who shared their ownership with St. Louis. All the good players from Cleveland were sent to St. Louis and Cleveland was effectively abandoned as the team played much of the second half of the season on the road and finished 20-134.
By 1900, owners were limited to just one team and the league contracted to eight teams, where it would remain until 1962.
Of the 18 players in the game, Brooklyn catcher John Grim lived the longest. He died in 1961 at the age of 93. The first player in the game to pass away was Pittsburgh center fielder Tom O’Brien, who would pass away in 1901 at the age of 27 from pneumonia brought on after consuming a bucket of sea water in an attempt to make himself vomit, but overdid it.2
The Dodgers of 2023 will probably fare better than their 1898 ancestors. The current Dodgers are battling injuries all over the field. The 1898 Brooklyn team was just simply bad from top to bottom. And it only got better through some very iffy business dealings.
There was a brief period when the U.S. Government made all cities in the country that ended in “-burgh” to change their spelling to “-burg.” Every city went along with it, but eventually Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania complained about it and the city was allowed to regain its silent H. The city of Pittsburg, California did not get its H back.
Nobody made you click the link to read the story.
I hate Pittsburgh without an "h."
But look at the time of the game: 1:51! Isn't that the most important stat?