More On Dolan

I have to pass this along because it's full of awesome:

A master of deception his entire career, Tom Dolan claimed to be 17 when he caught for the independent St. Louis Reds in 1876, but he was really 21.  He then spent the next dozen years deceiving ML teams into believing he was a good player even though most of the evidence was to the contrary.  His grandest deception of all was actually not of his making - seemingly not, anyway.  For a number of years The Sporting News Official Baseball Record Book recognized him as the record holder for the most outfield assists in a season with 63 in 1883 even though most of his assists that year came as a catcher.

Nevertheless, Dolan truly does own some significant distinctions.  Beginning in 1877, he was Jim Galvin's most frequent catcher until Galvin became an established ML pitcher in 1879.  Later in his career he became the only man ever to catch for three different St. Louis teams in three different major leagues in three different seasons (1883-1885).  But perhaps his chief claim to sports fame is that in the mid-1880s he was the best handball player in baseball, so good that even Fred Dunlap, who fancied himself the kingpin, assiduously avoided playing Dolan.  Finally, Dolan perpetrated one of the bloodiest on-field fights in baseball history on May 11, 1887, while playing for Lincoln of the Western League, when he and Denver's Pat Tebeau went at it so savagely that each was fined the munificent sum of $5.  It was his customary way of taking care of business on and off the field.  Soon after joining the Browns in 1883, Dolan, according to the St. Louis Republican, hired a teammate to beat up first-string catcher Pat Deasley so that he could obtain the job.

The son of John Dolan, a saloonkeeper whose business catered to a rough, working-class crowd that disregarded the racial boundaries then in sway in St. Louis, Dolan and his father openly bankrolled a local "colored" team in St. Louis called the Black Stockings in the early 1880s after he had already begun to play professionally.  Dolan remained an active player until 1890, when his 3-year-old son died while he was playing in the Western Association.  The following year he joined the St. Louis fire department, having earlier been a fireman during the off-season.  Seriously injured in an electrical accident in 1894, he recovered to captain the fire department team for several more years.  Never one for taking great care of himself, Dolan died in St. Louis in 1913 of cirrhosis of the liver.

-Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, Volume 1


I have absolutely no problem admitting that this brief but wonderfully witty biography of Dolan, written by David Nemec and David Ball, is substantially better than any biography I contributed to the project.  If you've yet to pick up the two volumes of MLB Profiles or the companion The Rank and File of 19th Century Major League Baseball, you're missing out.  They're just full of great stuff like this.       

The Rank And File Of 19th Century Major League Baseball

The Rank and File of 19th Century Major League Baseball is out and available at fine bookstores everywhere.  This a companion book to the two-volume Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, and includes a lot of great stuff that we were unable to get into the first two books.  Basically, it's volume three and, if you take the work as a whole, you have a fantastic reference source for 19th century baseball.  David Nemec has to be commended for the work he put in to get these books published and all of the contributors did a fantastic job.

My copy was waiting for me at home yesterday, after I got home from work, and the first thing I flipped open to was the entry for Packy Dillon.  I can't tell you how great it feels to see all the information about Patrick Henry Dillon that was entrusted to me by the Dillon family find its way into print.  Dillon is probably my favorite 19th century baseball player and it's really cool to see him get the recognition that he deserves. 

So go buy a copy because, let's face it, this is something you want and need.      

With Spring Training Just Around The Corner...

...that means it's time for new baseball books to come out.

Peter Morris sent me a link to an article that lists twenty-two new baseball books that are coming out this spring.  The article includes brief synopses of the books, release dates and prices.  There are some really great books coming out and I'm looking forward to picking up Roy Kerr's biography of Buck Ewing and Tim Wendel's Summer of '68 (as in 1968, not 1868).  I love the fact that two of my favorite annual events, spring training and the release of the new baseball books, are tied together and it makes me yearn (like Rogers Hornsby staring out a window) of the baseball season.

 

The reason Peter passed the link along was that the article contains a nice, little review of Base Ball Pioneers, which is available for pre-order.  I can't tell you how much I'm looking forward to getting my hands on this book.  I was fortunate enough to get to write the chapter on St. Louis pioneer clubs and, while that's great and all, I really can't wait to read what everyone else wrote.  Also, the article has a review of The Rank and File of 19th Century Major League Baseball.  This is, essentially, the third volume of Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, and has over one thousand biographical sketches that we couldn't fit into the first two volumes.  I'm excited about this book coming out because David Nemec, who did such a fantastic job editing the books, told me that the Packy Dillon bio that I wrote would be included. It's also available for pre-order.

 

In the spirit of shameless self-promotion, I recommend you get both books (as well as the first two volumes of Profiles, if you don't have them yet).  Trust me when I say that I'll have more on both books as we get closer to the release dates.  And pitchers and catchers report in ten days.          

The Herrs: The Error That Went Viral

I got an email from friend of the blog Cliff Blau two months ago pointing out a discrepancy and some confusion regarding Joe Herr and Ed Herr.  I've been meaning to write something up about this ever since and never got around to it until now.  This is a convoluted story, so bear with me.

Over three years ago, I wrote a series of posts about the 1888 St. Louis Whites, a club that David Nemec, in The Beer & Whiskey League, called "a kind of farm team."  The club was owned by Chris Von der Ahe and played in the Western Association.  Essentially, I was looking for evidence of a relationship between Von der Ahe's Browns and his WA club in order to prove or disprove David's statement about the nature of the Whites, an opinion that Peter Morris also supported.  While I was initially sceptical, I think that I was able to prove that the Whites were essentially a proto-farm team for the Browns and that David and Peter were correct.

Now in the course of writing up the series on the Whites, I identified on of the players on the club as Ed Herr.  If you look at the tags in the right-side column of the blog, you'll notice a tag for Ed Herr that leads you to all of the posts I've written that mentions him.  I wrote the following brief sketch of Herr:

Ed Herr: shortstop; played three seasons in the majors between 1887 and 1890; played with the Browns after the breakup of the Whites (and again in 1890); after he was finished with baseball, Herr worked as a carpenter in St. Louis; he died in 1933, drowning in the Mississippi.

The problem here has multiple parts.  First, there was a 19th century baseball player by the name of Ed Herr but he never played for the Whites or the Browns.  Second, the player who did play with the Whites was named Joe Herr but Ed Herr's full name was Edward Joseph Herr.  Both Joe Herr, of the Whites, and Ed Herr, not of the Whites, were born in St. Louis, less than a decade apart.  Both Herrs died in St. Louis, exactly a decade apart.

What appears to have happened is that somehow Joe Herr became identified as Ed Herr, essentially confusing the two men.  The error appears in numerous places.  It's on my website.  If you search "Ed Herr" at Baseball-Reference, one of the entries that pop up is Joe Herr.  It's at Deadball Era, where Frank Russo provides an obituary from The New York Times that identifies Ed Herr as having died in 1933, information that matches Joe Herr's date of death at Baseball Reference.  It's at Find A Grave, which has entries for Edward Joseph Herr, Joseph "Joe" Herr and Edward Joseph "Eddie" Herr.  The Beer & Whiskey League identifies the Whites' player as Ed Herr (although David has told me that, like myself and just about everybody else, he made an error).  It's at BR-Bullpen.  It's at Wikipedia.  

This error, which essentially is the misidentification of Joe Herr as Ed Herr, is everywhere you look.  It is an error that went viral.  And I played a part in that, something which I have to take responsibility for.  I made a mistake and the information that I passed along about was wrong.  I take a great deal of pride in this website and I've spent years building my credibility as a historian and researcher.  I make a lot of jokes about how few readers I have but the truth is that there are a lot of people who read this blog and use it as a resource.  The people who visit my site trust me to provide them with accurate information and, in this case, I failed to do so.  Now, I don't want to be all dramatic about this but I did make a mistake and I think I played a role in spreading this error.  So I do feel the need to apologize and take steps to correct the error.

So here's what I know:

The guy who played with the Whites and the Browns in the late 1880s was always referred to as Joe Herr.  The St. Louis Globe-Democrat, Sporting Life, Inter-Ocean and various other papers always referred to him as Joe.  I have not seen one reference to this player being called Ed Herr.  Joe Herr played with the Whites in 1888 and with the Browns in 1888 and 1890.

Ed Herr played with various minor league clubs, beginning in the mid 1890s.  In the newspaper sources I've seen, he is always referred to as Ed, Eddie or Edward.  He was never, to the best of my knowledge, referred to as Joe.  Ed Herr never played with the Whites or the Browns.

Now as to their biographical data, I haven't bothered to run that down.  I assume that the data given for Joe Herr at Baseball-Reference and Find A Grave, which states that he was born on March 4, 1865 in St. Louis and died on July 12, 1933 in St. Louis, is correct.  Also, I assume the information for Ed Herr, which states that he was born on May 14, 1873 in St. Louis and died on July 18, 1943, is correct as well.  It does appear that their baseball records, as they appear at Baseball-Reference, are also correct.  But just to be clear, this is Joe Herr and this is Ed Herr.

Again, I apologize for my part in all of this but the best part of working in the media I do is that I can run corrections like this and make it a permanent part of the record.  To that end, I want to note that there is an entry for Joe Herr in Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, Volume 1 that was written by Peter Morris and David Nemec.  They wrote the following:

A carpenter by trade, Joe Herr grew up near where the St. Louis Maroons' Palace Park was built in 1884 and by 1885 was a member of the famed semi-pro Peach Pies.  He began 1886 with independent Bellville, IL, and then moved to St. Joseph of the Western League.  Signed for 1887 by the new Cleveland AA entry, Herr was released to Lincoln of the Western League in May of that season at his own request after deciding that he could not play his best with such a weak team. 

The following spring Herr was named captain of the Western Association St. Louis Whites...In a WA game on May 1, 1888, he became only the fourth man to hammer a ball over the LF fence in Sportsman's Park...Herr later also became the fifth and sixth man to perform this feat.  The latter blast came in an AA game on June 27 after he had joined the Browns once the Whites folded.  Having established that he had extraordinary power, Herr soon also demonstrated that he lacked the necessary range to play SS...Although Herr remained on the Browns for the remainder of 1888 and participated in the World's Series against the New York Giants, he collected just 172 ABs.  Since RBI were not an official stat then, no one could have realized that his retrospective 43 RBI would be 12 more than any other player in AA history compiled in a season with less than 200 ABs. 

Something appears to have happened to Herr that winter, or perhaps he simply lost motivation after the Browns dropped him the following spring.  Herr began 1899 in the Western Association but was released by Milwaukee after 26 games...He then played in the Central Interstate League with Evansville...Riddled by Players League defections, the Browns rehired him in June 1890 and then released him less than two weeks later to Waco of the Texas League...That July, Herr took an offer from Jamestown of the New York State League but regretted it almost as soon as he arrived in that tiny town and was back in St. Louis in August.  Over the next eighteen months or so he married and began a family, seemingly having wasted a large quantity of baseball potential.  He was an unemployed carpenter living apart from his wife, Marie, in a men's shelter when he drowned in 1933.

Go buy the book so David doesn't yell at me for copying and pasting such a big chunk of it.  And remember, Joseph Herr played for the Whites and the Browns and Edward Joseph Herr, no relation, was a career minor leaguer who never played for a major or minor league St. Louis club.  

                             

How Jack Brennan Came To Be Called Jack Brennan

In the post yesterday about Jack Brennan, I had a bit of a throwaway line about not knowing why Jack Brennan, who, according to B-Ref, was born John Gottlieb Dorn, was actually called Jack Brennan.  Well, I got an email from David Ball mentioning that there was an entry on Brennan in Major League Baseball Profiles and it mentioned how Brennan came to be called Brennan.  David, as usual, was correct:

Reportedly, after catching amateur games in the early 1880s he would tour St. Louis taverns, endlessly singing the song "Brennan on the Moor."  Eventually, he became known as Brennan himself.  The story is no doubt somewhat apocryphal, as is the version that he clandestinely assumed the identity of John Brennan, a boy who lived down the street from him, and to further baffle his pursuers he was listed for well over a century in baseball reference works as James Augustus Brennan, who proved to be a different man entirely.  The first intimation that something odd was afoot with Brennan came when he and Perry Werden appeared in the TSN offices one day in the spring of 1890 and Werden informed TSN that Brennan's real name was John Gottleib Dorn, leading Brennan to counter that Werden was really Patrick Ward.  

-Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, Volume 2

The entry on Brennan, which was written by Peter Morris and David Nemec, lists Brennan's actual name as John Gottleib Doering Jr., which is an even better name than John Gottlieb Dorn.  It also mentions that Brennan, during the 1890s, worked winters at a gambling hall in Madison, Illinois, which is about thirty blocks from where I'm currently sitting.

And, yes, this is really nothing more than a shameless plug for the book.    

   

Shameless Self-Promotion

Major League Baseball Profiles, 1871-1900, is now available for pre-order from Amazon.com, as well as other fine book retailers. I happen to have my copy already and would recommend that you take advantage of Amazon's pre-order deal to get a great price on what is really a fantastic reference book. If you're interested in the history of 19th century baseball (and, since you're here reading this, I imagine that you are), you'll love it.

While I had a very small role in writing this thing, the vast majority of the credit for what should become one of the standard baseball history reference books goes to David Nemec, who put the project together and did most of the work. David did a great job with this thing and I'm impressed and happy with how it turned out.

Word on the street is that there will be a third volume out sometime next year and that volume will have an entry on Packy Dillon, which pleases me to no end. But you really shouldn't wait till then to get your copy of the first two volumes. Get 'em now while supplies last.