The Irish in Baseball: An Early History (review)

With The Irish in Baseball, David L. Fleitz, author of biographies of Joe Jackson, Cap Anson, and Louis Sockalexis (all of whom appear in this new history), presents to his readers an account of the influence the Irish had on the early years of baseball. It would be difficult to overstate the importance of Irish-born and Irish-descended players, as Fleitz amply demonstrates in researching the earliest years of the sport. Bringing to light both the lives of the players as well as their achievements on the field, Fleitz has compiled a thorough history of the foundations of the national pastime from its birth in the amateur clubs through the consolidation of the modern professional leagues.

Following a “Prologue” in which Fleitz discusses the “Great Famine” of the 1840s and the resulting mass emigration to the United States of many Irish families, this history covers the earliest days of baseball’s amateur clubs of the 1850s–1860s through the development and solidification of the major leagues into the 1920s. The reader will find carefully documented accounts of the several leagues, teams, and players who rose and fell in a period noted for its impermanence. Fleitz does a remarkable job following the actions of these various players, who often moved between clubs and leagues, often in the pursuit of higher salaries; the satisfaction of their own temperaments; or, in one famous case, the formation in 1890 of the short-lived Player’s League, established by the largely Irish Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, the game’s first union. Most importantly, however, Fleitz demonstrates just how thoroughly Irish these various teams and leagues were, largely populated by players escaping the difficult mining and factory work that awaited the lower-class famine refugees who poured into the United States in the latter half of the nineteenth century, many of whom became some of the earliest stars of the game as both players and (later) managers.

Fleitz organizes his book, for the most part, into chapters devoted to major teams and their Irish stars. (The sole exception is his chapter “The Umpires.”) Fleitz details the lives and careers of such early stars as Cap Anson, Ned Hanlon, and Charlie Comiskey, three Hall of Fame inductees who as both players and managers helped the Irish to determine the direction of the sport for years to come. Charlie Comiskey, in fact, is the explicit subject of two chapters (“Charlie Comiskey and the St. Louis Browns” and “Comiskey and the White Sox”). And while Fleitz devotes very little of his discussion (a mere paragraph) to the 1919 Black Sox—material readily available in numerous other sources—this omission serves to give Comiskey’s fuller history and impact on the game. In particular, Comiskey’s cerebral approach to the game combined with an aggressive (if not downright abusive) treatment of officials and opponents became the dominant approach taken by the game’s earliest championship clubs. While notorious for his role as antagonist to his team in 1919, among Comiskey’s many lasting contributions to the game is an aggressive approach to fielding first base (assigning the pitcher to cover first while he would field bunts); Fleitz amply demonstrates Comiskey’s positive impact on a game that may forever associate him with one of the game’s darkest hours.

As comprehensive as Fleitz’s history is, it may be a little too comprehensive. At times the narrative groans under the weight of the sheer volume of statistical data. Discussions of players often include batting averages, pitching records, team win-loss statistics, and salary amounts—some of which is presented multiple times, in those instances where the players are central to the discussion of multiple chapters. Further, Fleitz includes as one of his Irish stars of the game Oliver “Patsy” Tebeau. Born to parents of French and German ancestry, the only thing Irish about Tebeau was his nickname, given to him by the Irish laborers he ran errands for in his youth. An important...