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The Real Life Bad News Bears Grown Up: The Cleveland Spiders

There should be a movie made about them. Their manager and second baseman, Joe Quinn, was, appropriately, an undertaker in the off-season. The first baseman, Tommy Tucker, was a mouthy hothead, who, often got in fisticuffs and had challenged an opposing player to a duel, not with swords or pistols, but with baseballs at pointblank range. The centerfielder, Tommy Dowd, was nicknamed Buttermilk, out of all likelihood, because any manager that coached a team Tommy was on had to drink buttermilk to calm their stomach down after a game. Blessed with amazing speed and a decent stick, the university-educated Dowd was the Typhoid Mary of losing, a proverbial black cat with any team he joined being the ladder. Their most talented player was fan favorite Louis “Chief” Sockalexis, who lasted a grand total of seven games, before being released after being found by police, passed out drunk in a local theater. This second incident was a bit too much for the team to handle, as they were already battling the bad publicity of him hurting himself a couple of years earlier, jumping from a second story window of a brothel. (There is some debate among baseball historians as to whether the city of Cleveland’s three-season love affair with Sockalexis, including war whoops, war dances, and tomahawk chops, are the roots behind the latter Cleveland Indians’ name.)

They had a pitcher everyone called Crazy because of his on-field antics, facial gestures, and pantomimes surrounding each pitch. There were often debates as to whether he was drunk or not on the field, or crazy like a fox. Another pitcher was a flake, sporting long blonde hair that made him look like a modern Samson, except whatever strength he got from such a look did not show up in his fastball, which often seemed to have trouble defying gravity enough to get to the home plate. The man behind the plate’s hands were so gnarled and twisted that they resembled bags of peanuts. Their shortstop could not field the ball and get it to first base even if he put a stamp on it and had the post office deliver it from him. There was a pitcher nicknamed Highball, not because of any pitch he threw, but because a person was more likely to see that drink in his hands than a baseball, another that never met a racetrack he did not like, and another player, Ossee Freeman Schreckengost, who would cause a near riot in a restaurant by showing his displeasure with a tough piece of meat by attaching it to a wall with a hammer and nail.

(The phrase “eating crackers in bed” comes from one of Ossee’s contracts with the Philadelphia Athletics which forbid him from doing such, as he shared a bed on road trips with pitcher, best friend, and fellow legendary nut job, Rube Waddell. Schreckengost returned the favor by having a clause placed in Waddell’s contract that Rube was forbidden to eat spicy sandwiches, especially those containing onions and Limburger cheese, in bed or several hours before they turned in for the night. (Or it could have been vice-versa depending on the source.) Another season, when urged by A’s manager Connie Mack to get in shape, Ossee went on a special milkshake diet, consuming fifteen to twenty of them a day, until management discovered that Ossee’s special milkshakes were half sherry.)

The 1899 Cleveland Spiders, originally called The Blues or The Forest Citys, the nickname Spiders came from the 1889 season when the local newspaper reported that the young, lean players look liked Spiders in their uniforms, were a team of misfits, psychopaths, drunks, players too out of shape to button the fronts of their uniforms, has-beens, loons, and never-will-be rookies who were getting their lone cup of coffee in the major leagues. They were probably the worst team in the history of professional sports, a real life Willie Mays Hayes, Pedro Cerrano, Ricky “Wild Thing” Vaugh Major League Cleveland team. They finished the season with a .130 winning percentage, 20-134, and no pitcher had more than four wins. Nicknamed by the press and fans, if they had any, as The Wanders, The Exiles, The Misfits, The Forsakens, The Outcasts, and Orphans, The Spiders found new and interesting ways of losing. They were the Bad New Bears grown up, every Cleveland joke in cleats. Charlie Brown and the Peanuts gang could have beat them, even with Snoopy on the disabled list with a broken tail.

While everyone loves a winner, the more interesting story is always in the loser’s locker room. Say what you want, the Spiders were certainly interesting, not interesting enough to watch, but interesting. While baseball was the country’s most popular sport, thousands going to games, the local newspaper joked that they should hire cowboys to rope stray people on the streets outside of the stadium, hogtie them, and force them to sit through the game. There was a game in June where 58 people showed up at the park and another where they squeezed in 101 fans. The team averaged 145 fans per game. (Compare this to St. Louis, which averaged just below 15,000 a game.) Because visiting teams got a cut of the gate, one team’s ownership expressed outrage when they took home $56 for a four game stand in the Mistake by the Lake. In turn, as the season progressed, other National League teams refused to play them in Cleveland. They had to play 113 games on the road, complying a record of 11-102.

Not only had the fans turned on this once proud franchise, they were just taking their cue from the team’s ownership, Frank and Stanley Robison, a pair of brothers who had made their fortunes operating streetcars. Four years earlier the team had won the Temple Cup (an early form of the World Series) and had three future hall-of-fame players on their roster including the immortal Cy Young. Fans and the press saw nothing but great things ahead for them until Robison bought what would later become the St. Louis Cardinals in a bankruptcy sale. Renaming their new team the Perfectos, the brothers, angry over not being allowed to play Sunday baseball in Ohio and lukewarm fan support, sent most of the Cleveland team to Missouri, which had finished last the previous season, and sent the leftovers Cleveland’s way.

The brothers promised they were going to build winners in both cities. The St. Louis club spent spring training enjoying Warm Springs, Arkansas. Cleveland froze in Terre Haute, Indiana, having to spend much of their practices at a local school gymnasium to avoid frostbite and snowstorms. St. Louis got brand new uniforms. Cleveland got the Missouri team’s old uniforms on which the words “St. Louis” could still be seen in the stitching after the logo was removed. St. Louis got its stadium renovated, a parade and the governor of the state to throw out the first pitch. Neighbors surrounding the Cleveland team’s field complained that the park’s signs needed to be repainted and the place was becoming an eyesore. With only a single stenographer left behind, it would have been hard to find someone to take care of the problem anyhow.

Maybe the only person who still cared about the team was the traveling secretary, George Muir, who had watched each and every painful inning, dealt with the press, handled all the personal moves dictated to him and of most of the off-field problems, and with the Spiders there were a lot of off-field problems, especially when the paychecks stopped materializing on time at the end of the season. He was also, probably, the only one who knew the team would be disbanded at the end of the year.

When you care about a team, root for them, you look for a silver lining, a couple of players who could be building blocks, or a rookie or two to place future hopes on. Cleveland was the dark cloud in every silver lining. There was no other side of the rainbow with its pot of gold for this team. Still, Muir must have been surprised to see a new face in the clubhouse putting on a uniform for the last game against the Cincinnati Reds. Maybe his undertaker managers had found a blue chipper somewhere? The kid’s name was Eddie Kolb, 19-years-old, and he was going to pitch. Rookie pitcher Charlie Harper, who had just been signed a month earlier, was sick.

Eddie was taking the mound. Had Eddie been found on a sandlot somewhere, like Roy Hobbs in The Natural? Had he wowed manager Joe Quinn with his talent and guts? No, the kid ran the cigar stand at the Gibson House, the hotel the team was staying at, and when he discovered that Harper was under the weather he volunteered his services. He loved baseball. The rookie manager shrugged his shoulders, figured the kid could not do worse than any of his other pitchers and told the clerk if he gave him a box of cigars, the youngster could do the honors.

How did this baseball Rocky do? This was real life and a Cleveland sports team. He got shelled, giving up 18 hits and 19 runs, 9 earned, over the course of the game. The Cincinnati newspaper claimed he looked like a Kansas grasshopper on the mound and had “the complexion of a yellow fever convalescent.” Final score: 3-19. The Cleveland players gave three cheers and ran off the field. They finished 84 games out of first place. Their season in hell was over.

Before boarding the train to head back to Cleveland, Quinn and the other players chipped in and presented Muir with a diamond locket for his courage to stay with the team the entire season. Sometimes the only bright spot in life is a diamond locket.