King Kelly

Last updated • 7 min readFrom Wikipedia, The Free Encyclopedia

King Kelly
Kingkellyphoto.jpg
Outfielder / Catcher / Manager
Born:(1857-12-31)December 31, 1857
Troy, New York, U.S.
Died: November 8, 1894(1894-11-08) (aged 36)
Boston, Massachusetts, U.S.
Batted: Right
Threw: Right
MLB debut
May 1, 1878, for the Cincinnati Reds
Last MLB appearance
September 2, 1893, for the New York Giants

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 Cleveland Leader wrote, "The nearest that he ever approached to downright malice in playing in Cleveland was during a game between Cleveland and Boston for the national championship when he called a Cleveland player's name as two men were running for a foul fly." [25]

Death

Headline in the Fall River Evening News announcing Kelly's death King Kelly is Dead (1894 headline).jpg
Headline in the Fall River Evening News announcing Kelly's 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 $49,302in 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

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References

General
Specific
  1. The Editors of Total Baseball (2000). "Baseball:The Biographical Encyclopedia" . Sports Illustrated . pp.  595–597. ISBN   1-892129-34-5.{{cite magazine}}: |last= has generic name (help)
  2. Rosenberg (2005). Cap Anson 3: Muggsy John McGraw and the Tricksters: Baseball's Fun Age of Rule Bending. Tile Books. p. 472. ISBN   0-9725574-2-3., p. 319.
  3. Rosenberg (2004). Cap Anson 2. Tile Books. ISBN   0972557415., pp. 15-17.
  4. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., pp. 19-20.
  5. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 22.
  6. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., pp. 113-114.
  7. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., pp. 121-122.
  8. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 308.
  9. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 187.
  10. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 189.
  11. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 188.
  12. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 240.
  13. 1 2 Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 237.
  14. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 253.
  15. Ken Burns (1994). Baseball: A Film By Ken Burns (DVD). PBS Home Video.
  16. Appel, Martin. Slide, Kelly, Slide: The Wild Life and Times of Mike "King" Kelly. (Lanham, Md: Scarecrow Press, 1996), pp. xii and 137.
  17. 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.
  18. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 43, 215.
  19. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 43.
  20. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 28.
  21. 1 2 Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 2-3.
  22. 1 2 3 Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 7.
  23. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 3-4.
  24. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 4.
  25. 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.
  26. "Slide, Kelly, Slide!". The Boston Globe . November 4, 1894. p. 19. Retrieved June 18, 2023 via newspapers.com.
  27. 1 2 Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 258.
  28. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 259.
  29. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 260.
  30. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 264.
  31. Rosenberg. Cap Anson 2., p. 317.