King Kelly
King Kelly | ||
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Runs batted in 950 | | |
Stolen bases | 368 | |
Teams | ||
As player
As manager
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Career highlights and awards | ||
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Member of the National | ||
Baseball Hall of Fame | ||
Induction | 1945 | |
Election method | Old-Timers Committee |
Michael Joseph "King" Kelly (December 31, 1857 – November 8, 1894), also commonly known as "$10,000 Kelly", was an American
In only the second vote since its creation in 1939, the Old Timers Committee (now the Veterans Committee) elected Kelly to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1945.
In concluding where to truly give Kelly credit as an innovator, a 2004 book devoted to 19th-century rule bending in baseball—and which came close to exhaustively accounting for all contemporary reporting on various subjects—placed stress on the following: "Kelly's hook slide does sound special, and players probably tried to copy it. Also, he seems to have been the first big leaguer to successfully cut a base (when the usually lone umpire wasn't looking), at least according to the newspaper record." And, "Kelly could have been the first to foul off lots of pitches on purpose. Doing so was a top trick of some Baltimore players of the 1890s. At the turn of the century, that trick was defused when all foul balls began counting as strikes."[2]
Kelly's
Early life
Kelly was born in
Early career
By 1873, the fifteen-year-old Kelly was good enough to be invited to play baseball on
In 1877, he was with the Paterson Olympics until around June 10, when he joined the Delawares of Port Jervis, New York. In mid-July, a Paterson paper said he had signed with a Springfield, Ohio, team after rejecting a Port Jervis offer of $70 a month (equivalent to $2,003 in 2023). A few weeks later, Port Jervis had not played again when he signed "with the celebrated Buckeye club of Columbus, Ohio."[4]
He made his big league debut in 1878 with Cincinnati. In 1877, Kelly's friend
Career in Chicago
After playing in Cincinnati for two years as an outfielder and backup catcher, Cincinnati and
As of 1879, Chicago was the most important city financially in the National League, as it drew the best attendance for teams taking long train rides from the East Coast.
Kelly was now a young, good-looking man in the big city with money in his pocket. Rather than buying a house, he immediately moved into the
As a member of the White Stockings, he was annually among the league leaders in most offensive categories, including leading the league in runs from 1884 through 1886 (120, 124 and 155 respectively), and batting in 1884 and 1886 (.354 and .388). One of the best defensive catchers in baseball, he was also one of the first to use a glove and wear a chest protector. Chicago won five pennants while Kelly played for the White Stockings.
Career in Boston
After the 1886 season Spalding sold Kelly to the
As a result of the sale, he became known as the "$10,000 Beauty." In 1881, actress Louise Montague had been so dubbed after winning a $10,000 contest for handsomest woman in the world.[7]
It was in Boston that Mike became "King" Kelly, although he was still overwhelmingly referred to as "Mike" or "The Only" in contemporaneous reporting. As a member of the Beaneaters, he continued to be a key run-producer, scoring 120 runs in 1887 and 1889. He continued to play well and was a great box office draw, but Boston didn't win any pennants. Freed from the watchful eye of Spalding and Anson, Kelly became less self-disciplined. One day in 1888, Boston player-manager John Morrill fined him $100 for not reporting to the grounds. After dinner the night before, Kelly had told Morrill he was ill, and Morrill said he should still report. The Boston Herald said, "Every man on the team thinks [the $100 fine] was deserved." The Herald also said of Kelly, "At times he goes in and plays with his whole spirit, and he puts life into the team. A sample of that was seen in yesterday's game, a game that he won for the Bostons. At other times he plays carelessly and indifferently, puts on a spirit of independence, disobeys Morrill on instructions at will, and does as he pleases."[8]
Kelly
During the 1890 season, friends bought him a $10,000 house at South Hingham, Massachusetts, about 15 miles southeast of Boston. Contributors included former umpire John Kelly, the owner of their New York bar; Boston fans Arthur "Hi! Hi!" Dixwell and Frank Norton, and Boston Players' League President Charles A. Prince and Secretary Julian B. Hart. They contributed $300 each (equivalent to $10,173 in 2023). Others who gave included John Graham, Jim McCormick, and captains Buck Ewing of New York and John Montgomery Ward of Brooklyn. The house, worth $10,000, could not be mortgaged based on the $1,100 in donations, $400 of which went for a horse and carriage, so in the winter of 1890-91, father-in-law John Headifen "came to the rescue of his (Kelly's) [sic] friends and subscribed $1800", the Boston Record said. The Old Colony Savings Bank in Plymouth then gave a matching $2,500 loan, and with that a mortgage was obtained. When he signed with Boston in August 1891, the club's directors gave him a check for $4,300 for "lifting the mortgage on his 'popular subscription' home."[9]
The house, stable and land would be put up for sale in the spring of 1893 for unpaid taxes of $123 (equivalent to $4,171 in 2023). It also had a $2,000 mortgage left at five percent interest. In October 1893, the house would be sold.[10]
In 1898, Boston National League Director William H. Conant would recall having paid, around the time of the 1891 payment, a $200 bar bill for Kelly and friends and being forwarded, on a visit to the bar later that night, another Kelly tab for $140.[11]
Later career
In
After spending the
Kelly's big league career ended after the 1893 season, having compiled 1357 runs, 69 home runs, 950 RBI, and a .308 batting average. Unreliable record-keeping practices of the era prevent an accurate estimate of how many stolen bases Kelly compiled over his career, but statistics kept during his later years indicate he regularly stole 50 or more bases in a season, including a high of 84 in 1887. He also managed to steal six bases in one game.
In 1894, Kelly signed with Albert L. Johnson, the main benefactor of the 1890 Players' League, to play for his new minor league club in Allentown, Pa. Days before signing him, Johnson had assumed control of the Allentown & Lehigh Valley Traction Company, a trolley line.[12]
In one of the last significant comments about Kelly's baseball career, financially, while he was still alive, George W. Floyd said the following to the Chicago Herald in March 1894:
"Kelly got the worst of it in every deal he made. When he went from the Boston players' team [in 1890] to the local [association] club [in 1891] he helped that team to make over $100,000 [about $2 million today]. The club at that time was no better than fifth [not sure if that detail is relevant] and his desertion more than anything else gave the finishing blow to the brotherhood [Players' League]. Mike was popular wherever he played. The trouble with him was that he had no brain as he himself was concerned. He knew enough to make money for others, but never could make anything for himself. I don't think that his playing days are over yet, but every club in the league seems inclined to turn him down. Mike has a great many friends in every town where baseball is played and it will be bad policy on the magnates' [owners'] part to retire him from the game which he has adorned so long."[13]
In mid-August 1894, Allentown left the Pennsylvania State League for the Eastern League and moved to Yonkers, N.Y., where Johnson also had a streetcar line. "The parting may be cruel and mercenary--but regrets--well, hardly any. So au revoir, Mike", the Allentown City Item said. Before disbanding, Kelly failed to heed Johnson's instructions to release the players. By not releasing them, his old league was able to file a complaint with baseball's Board of Control challenging the maneuver. At a meeting in New York, the board ruled that for the next ten days, the Pennsylvania State League could claim Allentown's players. Eastern League President Pat Powers said Kelly was to blame "and President A. L. Johnson of the latter club [Allentown], who was also present, voiced the same sentiments", the New York Sun said.[14]
Slide, Kelly, Slide!
The song, "Slide, Kelly, Slide" was America's first "pop hit" record, after its release by
Howard W. Rosenberg's 2004 biography of Kelly dispelled any notion that Boston reporter Jake Morse had been the ghostwriter, by quoting Drohan's involvement with the book at length, including unearthing the following sentence from a biography of Drohan in an 1889 book about the Irish in Boston: "His only literary work outside of his newspaper was the preparation of M. J. Kelly's book, 'Play Ball.'"[17]
Vaudeville career
Kelly took up acting soon after his arrival in Boston. Fellow Boston
In March 1888, Kelly made his regular play debut, as Dusty Bob in
As an example of his later vaudeville career, during the off-seasons of 1892-93, which extended into the 1893 season, he appeared in January 1893 in New York at the
In the off-season of 1893-94, Kelly performed with Mark Murphy in "O'Dowd's Neighbors." Of the first city on the tour, Dover, N.J., Murphy said Kelly called it "the very first town I ever played a game of ball in out [sic] of Patsy!" Patsy, Murphy explained, "is Kellyesque for Paterson."[13]
Casey at the Bat
This article possibly contains unsourced reliable published sources.(April 2014) ) |
There is an unsettled debate about whether Kelly was the model for the title character in Ernest Lawrence Thayer's 1888 poem "Casey at the Bat." Thayer, as a baseball reporter for the San Francisco Examiner, had seen Kelly play after the 1887 season, when he was on a playing tour to San Francisco. A "best guess" is to take Thayer at his word that he chose the name "Casey" after a non-player of Irish ancestry he once knew. However, open to debate is who, if anyone, he modeled Casey's baseball situations after. Arguably the best big league candidate is Kelly, the most colorful, top player of the day of Irish ancestry. Thayer, in a 1905 letter, singles out Kelly as showing "impudence" in claiming to have written the poem. If he still felt offended, Thayer may have steered later comments away from connecting Kelly to it. Cap Anson 2, the definitive biography of Kelly, states that it did not find Kelly claiming to have been the poem's author.[21]
Controversy and cheating
Kelly was an adept baserunner, leading the National League in runs scored three times and ranking among the league leaders in stolen bases.
His baserunning was legendary in other ways as well. His arguably most frequent brilliant play was always legitimate—a feetfirst hook slide to avoid being tagged. In 1889, Tim Murnane of the Boston Globe said nine times out of ten, Kelly will "throw himself out of the reach of the baseman, and catch the bag from the outside." Also, "Kelly is not a sprinter, but can get a great start, and this counts more than a fine slide, as a catcher is likely to be hurried when he sees the runner well on his way to a base."[22]
Upon Kelly's death, former teammate Tom Brown said, "He originated the slide which I do now in base running, and which is very generally copied by many ball players. The scheme is to slide to the side and get out of the way of the baseman, and not dash into him in the old way. Owing to the success of Kelly's sliding the topical song [`Slide, Kelly, Slide!' by J. W. Kelly, of no relation] was written."[22]
Kelly also became famous for making unusual plays. He seems to have performed most just a few times and probably made a bigger mark with verbal trickery, while catcher or coacher at first or third base. Right after his death, his longtime captain-manager in Chicago, Cap Anson, said he was a "genius" as a coacher. Apparently referring to Kelly's ability to distract opposing fielders, Anson said, "Many a run has been scored through Kelly's trickiness. He was a rattling all-around man, but his cleverest work was done behind the plate [while catching]. He was full of tricks and was never so happy as when playing a practical joke." A year later, Anson said, "Mike Kelly was the prince of base runners. I've never seen a man equal to him in that line, and he could get away with more sharp tricks than any man who ever wore a baseball uniform."[21]
Kelly's uniqueness was in making four attempts to cut bases, while the then-lone umpire wasn't looking, in the apparent first prevalent year of the trick: 1881. A methodical study of trickery in early baseball found Kelly cutting bases just a few more times over the rest of his career, and none at other times through 1886, his last year with Chicago. From 1887 to 1893, four seems to be his number of cuts. One was a success. Twice he was called out. Once he went back after being spotted. From 1881 to 1893, the relevant years to compare, dozens of players cut bases.[23]
In his day, a much more common tricky play was fouling off pitches to draw a walk. Until the first years of the twentieth century, batters were generally not charged with a strike for fouling off a pitch. Fouled-off bunts started counting as strikes in 1894, when Kelly's big league career was over.[24]
Some of the wildest stories of his trickery were not reported contemporaneously by reporters. Perhaps the most famous play that has been wrongly credited to Kelly—at least as taking place during a game that mattered—is from around 1890. In his 1994 The Rules of Baseball, David Nemec relates the following "often-told Kelly tale" and is the rare writer to say it is either false or embellished. As cited in Rosenberg's definitive biography of Kelly, Cap Anson 2 (2004), a former teammate of Kelly, Charlie Bennett, said the following after Kelly's death in 1894:
Supposedly, Kelly was not in the game when an opposing batter hit a foul fly. Seeing that catcher Charlie Ganzel could not catch the ball, Kelly announced himself in and made the play. The story would have most likely been from 1889, 1891 or 1892, when Ganzel and Kelly were teammates. Bennett said, "During a game one day, [Kelly] sat on the bench and Ganzel was behind the bat [catching]. A foul fly was popped up, out of Ganzel's reach, when quick as a flash `Kel' ran forward, ordered Ganzel out of the game, caught the ball, and then ordered the umpire to declare the batter out. [Kelly] maintained with a great deal of force, that he had as much right to order Ganzel out of the game, while a ball was in the air, as at any other time during the progress of the game. However, the decision went against him."[22]
Rosenberg could not find a contemporaneous account of Kelly having done that, and it is possible he did so in an exhibition game. The closest sounding story to the above appeared right after Kelly's death, when John D. "Johnny" Foster of the
Death
In November 1894, Kelly died of pneumonia in Boston. He had taken a boat there from New York to appear at the Palace Theatre with the London Gaiety Girls. At the start of the final week of his life, an advertisement in Boston read: "Slide, Kelly, Slide. Palace Theatre. The London Gaiety Girls, Chaperoned by King Kelly, the Famous $10,000 Base Ballist."[26] During the week, his name was deleted when he was too ill to appear. "He caught a slight cold on the boat from New York, but thought little of it", a writer said upon his death.[27]
During that week in Boston he stayed in the Plymouth House, owned by Bill Anderson, a fellow Elk. Noticing how ill Kelly seemed, Anderson had him rest and called for a doctor. The doctor had him taken to his private room in the hospital. Kelly's wife and brother were notified but did not arrive in time to see him alive. Anderson, fellow Elk John Graham and the former secretary of Boston of the Players' League and the American Association, Julian B. Hart, were with him at the end.[27]
About 7,000 people passed by the open casket. At a benefit for widow Agnes "Aggie" [nee Headifen] a week later, some of the songs performed were "The Irish Queen", "Nothing is Too Good for the Irish" and "Poor Mick."[28]
George W. Floyd, a main organizer of the benefit, wired Aggie with news about the proceeds. Days later, he presented a letter to National League owners meeting in New York. Aggie needed money, he said. Right after adjourning a meeting, the owners pledged $1,400 to her (equivalent to $49,302 in 2023).[29]
Aggie, who never remarried, died in 1937 in New Brunswick, New Jersey. After Mike's death, she made her living by sewing, stopping when her eyesight failed. Seventeen months before her death, and her health declining, she was interviewed by the New Brunswick Sunday Times. She said Mike to her was "just an overgrown kid" and, in a reporter's paraphrase, "always eager to help a young fellow on the field [presumably a teammate], never pugnacious despite his marvelous build of 190 pounds and six feet in height [really 5'10"], and charitable to the extreme."[30]
When Kelly was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1945, there were no immediate family members to mark the occasion, as his apparently lone child had died in 1894 – after living only an hour.[31]
See also
- List of Major League Baseball batting champions
- List of Major League Baseball annual runs scored leaders
- List of Major League Baseball annual doubles leaders
- List of Major League Baseball career triples leaders
- List of Major League Baseball career runs scored leaders
- List of Major League Baseball career stolen bases leaders
- List of Major League Baseball player-managers
- List of Major League Baseball single-game hits leaders
References
- General
- Rosenberg, Howard W. (2004); Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly: U.S. Team Sport's First Media Sensation and Baseball's Original Casey at the Bat. Arlington, Virginia: Tile Books. ISBN 0-9725574-0-7
- Appel, Marty (1996); Slide, Kelly, Slide. Lanham, Maryland: Scarecrow Press. ISBN 1-57886-003-2
- Cullen, James (1889); "The Story of the Irish in Boston." Boston, Massachusetts: J.B. Cullen & Co. ISBN 1-4366-1806-1
- Specific
- )
- ISBN 0-9725574-2-3., p. 319.
- ISBN 0972557415., pp. 15-17.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., pp. 19-20.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 22.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., pp. 113-114.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., pp. 121-122.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 308.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 187.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 189.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 188.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 240.
- ^ a b Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 237.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 253.
- ^ Ken Burns (1994). Baseball: A Film By Ken Burns (DVD). PBS Home Video.
- ^ Appel, Martin. Slide, Kelly, Slide: The Wild Life and Times of Mike "King" Kelly. (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 1996), pp. xii and 137.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 145, citing James Bernard Cullen and William Taylor Jr., The Story of the Irish in Boston, Together with Biographical Sketches of Representative Men and Noted Women (Boston: J.B. Cullen & Co., 1889), 315-16.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 43, 215.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 43.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 28.
- ^ a b Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 2-3.
- ^ a b c Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 7.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 3-4.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 4.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 7. For a wide survey of Kelly's trickery, see the "Casting Kelly" subhead in Rosenberg, Howard W. Cap Anson 3., 327-333, and 337-339.
- ^ "Slide, Kelly, Slide!". The Boston Globe. November 4, 1894. p. 19. Retrieved June 18, 2023 – via newspapers.com.
- ^ a b Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 258.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 259.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 260.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 264.
- ^ Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 317.
External links
- King Kelly at the Baseball Hall of Fame
- Career statistics and player information from Baseball Reference, or Fangraphs, or Baseball Reference (Minors)
- Quick-on-the-Trigger Kelly Played Ball Like Cobb 25 Years Before, by Harry Grayson, May 9, 1943