The champion's captain, Charlie Comiskey, returned home yesterday morning, having left the club at Philadelphia Sunday night. Though suffering considerably from a broken thumb, he looks at matters very philosophically, and is very sanguine as to a speedy recovery of the use of his injured member. He does not regard the present broken-up condition of the champions as detrimental to their work this fall in the world's championship series, but thinks the long rests Bushong and Foutz have had will be greatly to their benefit when they return to the diamond. During his absence, commencing next Saturday in the Cleveland game, Dave Foutz will cover first base, and will continue to cover it through the Association season. He thinks and hopes Detroit will win the League championship, as there is without doubt a greater desire to see the champions contest honors with Dunlap and Detroit than any club or aggregation in the country. Though the series is not yet arranged, he thinks there will be at least eleven games, if not thirteen, played with Detroit this fall, two of which, in all probability, will take place at Sportsman's Park.
-St. Louis Globe-Democrat, September 14, 1887
This article actually highlights two of the reasons behind the Browns' refusal to play the Cuban Giants. First, Comiskey wasn't with the team when the players revolted against the exhibition game. I've argued that if Comiskey had been with the team, the player revolt probably wouldn't have happened. Second, the club was beat up and dealing with a lot of injuries. They only had nine guys on the eastern trip and could barely field a team. The last thing they needed was to play an exhibition game on a scheduled day off. The fact that the Cuban Giants were a black club, I've also argued, was merely a pretext for not playing the game. The most interesting thing in the entire affair was that this was an acceptable pretext.
No comments:
Post a Comment