About a year ago I had an idea for a feature story: Find all the former local players I could that played professional sports.

A couple of those are easy: Alex Erickson of Darlington currently plays for the Cincinnati Bengals in the NFL, while Ric Mathias, a former Cheesemaker, played for the Bengals in a handful of games in the 1990s. In basketball, Bob Anderegg left Monroe to go to Michigan State and then donned a New York Knicks uniform in the early days of the NBA.

Baseball is a little bit different. The professional game is more than 150 years old, and information on where players come from is based more on birthplace than where they attended high school.

One search I had came up with just a handful of names, then I expanded to nearby towns, like Shullsburg, Evansville, Mineral Point; and to the south like Freeport. A few more names were added, but for most, the theme was the same — when I came across a name, they had played for a handful of games or less, saw mediocre success and that was that.

Also, most of these names played before World War II — and even more still, most were from the Dead Ball Era (1900-1919) or before.

As I searched randomly over the past year, I learned more and more about that era of baseball. I already considered myself a baseball guy — even taking a baseball history class at UW-Milwaukee. But you don’t learn the full history of a sport and all its players in a class that spends an hour together twice a week for a semester.

Back in the 1800s, the structure of the sport looked different than today. The National League was around, but was one of almost a handful of leagues considered “major.” The American Association, Western League, and Southern League were all big-named leagues at the time, with one-year wonders being the Union Association and Player’s League.

Each league had around 8-12 teams and seasons steadily grew year after year from about 60 games to 112 at the turn of the century. 

In the 1880s, the two most prominent leagues, the National League and the American Association began playing in an end-of-season championship series, loosely called the World Series, the predecessor to today’s championship.

The clubs of these “major leagues” found their players from all over — maybe playing at local semi-pro games or traveling by train as rail workers. Such a case, Abner Dalrymple of Warren, Illinois. 

Abner caught my eye first because his birthplace is listed in most sources as from Gratiot. My mother and her siblings grew up on a farm just outside of Gratiot. My mother-in-law is a Gratiot native. It’s a small town that I never would have expected would have produced a 12-year MLB player that led baseball in a variety of statistical categories throughout the years. Also, upon research, I found the man was pretty colorful in a prankster sort of a way and yet was deeply human — he was the original goat of the World Series, botching a crucial fly ball in the late innings of the deciding Game 6 in the 1886 loss to the St. Louis Browns.

In 1986, Bill Buckner let a ball go through his legs — 100 years after Dalrymple misjudged a ball in left field. I found this fascinating and missing from my baseball trivia memory bank. 

By the end of the 19th century, the American Association merged with the National League, while the Western League was the outline of the American League, which was founded in 1901. The first modern World Series came in 1901, and much of today single season stat records go back to that era when teams started playing a minimum of 120 games in a season. Today that number is set at 162.

It’s not readily available why so many teams went through dozens of players with just a handful of games or less. Surely some got injured or left because the base pay wasn’t as great as expected — even in today’s game, minor league players make slightly more than minimum wage, which means side jobs are needed to make ends meet. 

One guess is that as teams traveled from one city to another — say, from Chicago to Pittsburgh to New York and Worchester, a player may fall ill or miss the train after a night out at a local establishment. The following day (remember, no night games), in order to fill out the roster, a team likely scraped and looked for any local player with baseball experience to put on a uniform and be ready to pinch run or pinch hit. One game, two games, maybe six on a road trip — and that’s it.

Charlie Newman of Juda logged 19 games in his career, all in 1892. He played three games with the New York Giants, then went to the Chicago Colts for 16 games. Was he traded (or sold)? Or did he simply catch on and hang around for a while. He was 4 for 12 with the Giants batting, but hit just .164 with Chicago. That was it. 

In 1884, Dick Lowe of Evansville went 1 for 3 in his only appearance for Detroit. Monroe’s Tom Tennant received two pinch-hit at bats in two games for St. Louis at age 29 in 1912. He went hitless. 

These men likely all played at semi-pro or independent clubs for many years. Even Dalrymple played multiple seasons in leagues not considered “major” in his later years, but information on those leagues and stats are hard to find using the world wide web — and even harder when local museums and libraries are locked down due to the current stay-at-home order.

One thing is for certain, a year ago when I sought out to find former local players, I never expected I would find out all the information I did, especially for a player like Dalrymple — a man who played with Cap Anson, and whose team president (Al Spalding, the man who first wrote down the rules of the game in order for leagues and the game to be unified) retired from playing the year before he came in. 

Dalrymple, a leadoff hitter, once hit 22 home runs in a season of just 112 games. It was the third highest total that year. The most home runs in that season was the 27 hit by Dalrymple’s teammate Ned Williamson. Williamson’s total was a record. It would take 35 years for Williamson’s record to be broken by none other than the Titan of Terror, the Sultan of Swat, the King of Crash, the Colossus of Clout, the Great Bambino himself: George Herman “Babe” Ruth.

Dalrymple, Anson & Co. set all sorts of team hitting marks in their time together. Their single season home run mark of 140 in 1884 lasted until Ruth, Lou Gehrig and the “Murderer’s Row” of the Bronx Bombers, AKA New York Yankees, broke the mark by playing an extra 42 games in 1927. 

The field of play was also much different, but the feats remain just as spectacular. 

And as a baseball guy, it made for some happy research while the game I love so much is put on extended hold.

— Adam Krebs, AKA the Great Bambi (you mean that wimpy deer?), is a reporter for the Times and can be reached at akrebs@themonroetimes.net.