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    Montana Baseball History
    Montana Baseball History
    Montana Baseball History
    Ebook248 pages1 hour

    Montana Baseball History

    By Skylar Browning and Jeremy Watterson

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    The Wild West had nothing on Montana's first baseball games. Fights, booze, cheating and gambling fueled the state's inaugural professional league in 1892. The turn of the century brought star-studded barnstorming tours and threats of bloodshed. Big Sky Country embraced a distinctly different version of the old ballgame, and Montana players who made their way to big league diamonds helped change the sport on and off the field. From the Lewis and Clark expedition to Dave McNally's historic career, award-winning journalist Skylar Browning and researcher Jeremy Watterson reveal Montana's relationship with America's pastime.
    LanguageEnglish
    PublisherThe History Press
    Release dateJun 15, 2015
    ISBN9781625855251
    Montana Baseball History
    Author

    Skylar Browning

    Skylar Browning is the editor of the Missoula Independent, Montana's only alternative news weekly. His award-winning feature writing has involved everything from spending time at the state's only nudist colony to standing in the huddle with the local semi-pro football team. He's been honored by the Montana Newspaper Association and the Society of Professional Journalists, and received an NEA Fellowship in 2009. Jeremy Allan Watterson grew up on the Fort Peck Indian Reservation along the Hi-Line in Wolf Point. He has provided color for baseball games on KVCK radio. He is a member of the Society of American Baseball Research, and earned a degree in sociology from the University of Montana in Missoula. He has had photography, poetry and other co-authored baseball writing published in weekly newspapers and western Montana journals. Montana Baseball History is his first book.

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      Book preview

      Montana Baseball History - Skylar Browning

      shine.

      INTRODUCTION

      The first Montana native to reach the majors did so in a way that would make his home state proud. Players called him loyal and hardworking. Beat writers respected him. The owner of one of the original professional franchises considered him a trusted friend and confidant. He was so admired in the game, he ended up meeting with three different presidents during the course of his career—Theodore Roosevelt before a game in 1910, William Howard Taft during a campaign stop in 1912 and Woodrow Wilson in the White House over a casual conversation about baseball in October 1913.

      Never mind that Frank James Burke—most often referred to as Brownie and best known for standing just four feet, seven inches—served as a mascot. Despite his small stature, the Marysville, Montana native ended up making a big impact on the national pastime.

      Perhaps it’s fitting that Montana’s first contribution—and one of its most memorable connections—to Major League Baseball would be so unusual. It almost had to be. The Treasure State is far from a hotbed of major league talent; its ball fields are still under snow when pitchers and catchers report to spring training in Florida and Arizona every year, and those fields often remain buried well into the first months of the Major League Baseball season. This sort of geographic disadvantage is part of the reason so few players ever jump from Big Sky Country to the big leagues—twenty-two over the last 143 years—or former major leaguers retire to this remote part of the northwest. It isn’t exactly California, which has sent more than two thousand players to the big leagues over the same time period, nor is it the Dominican Republic, which is almost ten times smaller than Montana but home to more than six hundred major leaguers.

      Senator Mike Mansfield of Montana umpires behind John F. Kennedy as Senator Henry Scoop Jackson of Washington takes a swing in this undated photo. Mansfield Library, Archives and Special Collections, University of Montana. Photo No. 99.2808.

      No, Montana isn’t the first place fans think of when they consider baseball history and tradition, and that’s part of what makes Brownie’s story so perfect. Born in 1893, less than four years after Montana achieved statehood, he was the fourth of eight children in a large Irish American family. His father worked as a carpenter and his mother as a housewife, but the community of Marysville revolved around the gold- and silver-rich Drumlummon Mine. When the mine started to dry up, the family moved to Helena, where Brownie thrived. According to his biography by the Society of American Baseball Research (SABR), Brownie managed the routes of the two competing Helena daily newspapers and, once, when a popular play arrived in town, he purchased all of the tickets to then resell them at profit. As an eleven-year-old in 1905, he began the first of at least four winters as a page in the Montana Senate. He also served as a drum major in Butte’s celebrated Boston and Montana Band, with which he traveled throughout the West to perform in competitions.

      In 1909, the precocious Brownie was working as a bellhop at West Yellowstone’s Mammoth Hot Springs Hotel when he caught the eye of Cincinnati Reds president August Garry Herrmann. (SABR allows for the possibility that the two had met previously, through their affiliation with the Elks.) Impressed by the lad’s outgoing, confident demeanor, Herrmann offered him the role of ‘continual mascot’ with the Reds, contingent upon parental approval, wrote Phil Williams for SABR. Brownie wrote his mother, obtained her blessing, then traveled eastward to catch up with the Herrmann party in Chicago. On August 3, 1909, owner and mascot arrived in Cincinnati.

      According to a story in the Cincinnati Post, Brownie, just sixteen, made his on-field debut five days later.

      At the time, it wasn’t unusual for baseball teams to employ men of small stature as mascots. The now politically incorrect practice stemmed from the antiquated belief that midgets and dwarfs, as they were known then, brought good luck. Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack, who won more games than anyone else in the history of baseball, hired Louis Van Zelst in 1910 to be his team’s mascot. Mack later credited the hunchbacked dwarf with helping his team’s rise to prominence. Players would rub their bats against Van Zelst’s hump to help break a slump.

      Lefthanders, hunchbacks and cross-eyed people were all considered [lucky], wrote Harold Seymour in The Golden Age of Baseball. Touching a hunchback was popularly believed to bring good luck.

      But mascots like Van Zelst and Brownie became more than just superstitious sideshows. Brownie worked more as a batboy than, as SABR put it, a magical charm. He suited up for each game, delivered fresh balls between innings to the umpires and organized equipment for the Reds’ players. Before a July 24, 1912 game, he helped Cincinnati pitcher Frank Smith warm up. The Cincinnati Post reported the next day that Brownie couldn’t catch Smith’s spitter, much to the amusement of opposing pitcher and future Hall of Famer Christy Mathewson.

      Brownie also helped off the field, becoming something like Herrmann’s assistant. When a player was released, Brownie delivered the message straight from the owner to the player. Former Reds manager Joe Tinker, after being fired from the team in 1913, told the Cleveland Plain Dealer he believed Brownie spied on players away from the ballpark and reported his findings to Herrmann.

      During Cincinnati’s off-season, Brownie stuck by Herrmann’s side at social events. He accompanied the owner on trips to the World Series, performed at the owner’s country club and made those three appearances with sitting presidents. His banter with President Wilson caught the attention of the New York Times, which wrote about the exchange on October 16, 1913. After Wilson good-naturedly ribbed Brownie for Cincinnati’s lackluster showing in the season standings, the mascot remarked about the president to the paper, He’d make some baseball manager.

      Simply put, people liked to be around Brownie. His showmanship and natural gregariousness would eventually lead to Brownie’s departure from the Reds, and with the financial and moral support of Herrmann, his pursuit of an acting career.

      Success followed Brownie during stage productions—one review called his turn in The Forest Fire sagaciously and vivaciously enacted…a work of art—but his next grand move came in a different sort of theater. Despite falling five inches short of the U.S. Army’s height requirements, he angled to enlist during World War I. In letters on file at the Baseball Hall of Fame and quoted by SABR, Brownie wrote Herrmann, I’m going to telegraph [Montana’s] Senator [Thomas] Walsh again and if he can’t do anything to hasten my going into service, I’m going to pull my freight and go to Canada where I’m pretty certain I will have my chance.

      Brownie was enlisted into the Ninetieth Infantry Division, Headquarters Detachment, on June 1, 1918, and began serving overseas a few weeks later. In typical fashion, he made a quick impression. American Legion magazine wrote in a 1940 article that every solider and the Germans in Berncastle knew this little fellow. After the war, Robert Ripley of Ripley’s Believe It or Not credited Brownie as the shortest man during World War I serving in the AES, according to the Helena Independent Record.

      Brownie returned home to Montana a hero and later continued his acting career in California. His run of luck came to an end during the Great Depression, however, and he died in 1931 at age thirty-eight, broke and mostly anonymous. The Cincinnati papers made no mention of his passing.

      Montana was a different story. After all, Brownie was the first native son to make the majors, arriving at least five years before St. Louis Cardinals pitcher and Cascade-born Rees Steamboat Williams, who has long been recognized as the state’s trailblazer to the bigs.

      Alas, such an opportunity for baseball immortality eluded Brownie Burke, and he is largely forgotten today, wrote Phil Williams for SABR. During his half-decade in baseball, however, his wide-ranging role with the Reds made him one of the sport’s most public figures. By all evidence it was a very happy existence, one a turn-of-the-century boy from a remote, working class background could only dream of.

      An unknown pitcher in Montana, 1910. HMFM Ralph Ripke Collection (1987.004.016).

      That’s the thing with Montana baseball stories: they don’t always make Ken Burns documentaries, end up on the pages of Sports Illustrated or lead off Sports Center, but like the state itself, they tend to reveal overlooked or underappreciated treasures. These stories help create the fabric of the game and provide a window into not only the history of baseball but the state of Montana itself.

      Sifting through old bios and box scores, reading obituaries and news clippings and interviewing historians and ballplayers and surviving relatives has revealed a veritable trove of stories. There are bona fide superstars and spectacular flameouts, community pillars and small-town footnotes. There are storybook stare-downs with Babe Ruth, comical run-ins with Honus Wagner and battles with Cy Young. There are threads to Montana’s cornerstone industries, their booms and busts, as well as lasting legacies in the form of dedicated landmarks. There are nicknames like Doc, Dad, Buddy and Big Serb. There are controversies and frauds. There are record breakers and career wreckers. There are game changers, both on the field and off. There’s also a decorated umpire still in the game, a long-tenured manager preparing to win the American League East and one of the game’s few professional female players. And at the beginning, there’s the story of an ambitious little person who parlayed a big break in professional baseball into a successful acting career and unlikely tour of duty during World War I.

      Jim Thorpe, a two-time Olympic gold medalist, member of the Football Hall of Fame and regarded as The World’s Greatest Athlete, played baseball for the Shelby Seals in 1926. He’s standing third from left. Marias Museum of History and Art.

      Make no mistake—this isn’t your conventional baseball book. While we’ve gone to great lengths to chronicle the Montana players, managers and teams that have reached the highest level of professional ball, we’ve also kept a keen eye on the aspects of those ties that best speak to the sport and the state. For a game that’s long captured the nation’s imagination, there’s plenty of material to draw from—even way out here in left field in Montana.

      1

      THE EARLY YEARS

      BARNSTORMING AND BOOMTOWNS

      The first baseball played in Montana probably went by a different name. Members of the Corps of Discovery, led by Meriwether Lewis and William Clark, played a game called prison base as they ventured toward the West Coast and notably introduced it to the Nez Perce (Nimi’ipuu) during their return journey.

      For Lewis and Clark’s men, the game provided respite from the rigors of their journey and also was a way to keep in shape. On the expedition’s return trek east in 1806, it reached the Bitterroot Mountains in central Idaho with snow at the high elevations still too deep to pass. The crew was already intimidated by traversing the range that had almost killed them on their initial pass—the most terrible mountains I ever beheld, one of the men wrote—and decided to camp with the Nez Perce for a month before pushing through into Montana and their camp at Travelers’ Rest, near Missoula. To keep the corpsmen fit, Lewis and Clark had them compete with the Native Americans in foot races and horse races, pitch quoits (similar to horseshoes) and play prison base.

      "Several foot rarces [sic] were run this evening between the indians and our men, wrote Lewis in his journal on June 8, 1806. The indians are very active; one of them proved as fleet as our best runner Drewer and R. Fields, our swiftest runners. When the racing was over the men divided themselves into two parties and played prison base, by way of exercise which we wish the men to take previously to entering the mountain."

      While there are no specific references in the journals to prison base being played in Montana, it’s not a stretch to imagine a pickup game along the Yellowstone or Missouri during the corps’ travels.

      K.D. Swan arrived in Missoula in 1911 as a Harvard-educated Forest Service employee. Known for his expansive photographs of wilderness areas, here he captured four Native American men sitting with their baseball equipment. Mansfield Library, Archives and Special Collections, University

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