When I worked at the Troy Record in the early 1980s, a character named Broadway Abe used to wander into the office and hang out in the sports department, often watching whatever game was on TV.
One afternoon the old fellow could be heard shouting, sputtering, and kicking the file cabinets. His hometown team, the San Francisco Giants, was losing.
Abe was not from California; he was from Troy. But so were the Giants.
Though a small city, Troy fielded a baseball team for four years in the early days of the National League. The club never managed a winning season, but it had a number of solid players, including five later elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame.
Before this, Troy fielded a team for the initial two seasons of the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players, the first professional league. Organized by players, the poorly managed NA lasted only from 1871 to 1875. Some historians consider the association a major league, but baseball officialdom does not. In 1876, the NA was succeeded by the National League.
Amateur Years
For several years before joining the pro league, Troy had an amateur team that was highly regarded. It was founded as the Unions of Lansingburgh in 1866. Lansingburgh was then an independent village north of Troy; it became part of the city in 1900.
The team became known as the Haymakers in 1867 after beating the New York Mutuals, one of the most powerful teams in the amateur era. After their defeat, the Mutuals wondered how they had lost to a bunch of “haymakers.” It was meant as an insult suggesting boorishness or rusticity, but the Troy club adopted the moniker as a badge of honor.
Although teams were ostensibly amateur, it was an open secret that many clubs, including the Haymakers, found cushy or no-show jobs their good players. In 1869, the Cincinnati Red Stockings became the first openly professional team and toured the country, beating everybody until they met the Haymakers.
On August 26, in Cincinnati, the Haymakers scored 13 runs in the first two innings. The Red Stockings came back to tie the game 17-all. Then, following a dispute over a foul tip, the Haymakers walked off the field. Rumors flew that it was a ruse to protect gambling wagers. The Troy team, after all, was controlled by John Morrissey, a professional gambler, former heavyweight boxer, and well-known politician. In Baseball: The Early Years, Harold Seymour says the Haymakers “were notorious for fixing games.”
But Thomas Gilbert, another baseball historian, argues in How Baseball Happened that there is no proof that Troy forfeited the game to bail out gamblers. “Modern historians often say that the forfeit was a trick by Morrissey to avoid losing a wager, but this is dubious. There were rumors that Morrissey had money on the Red Stockings; others said that he had bet on Troy. In any case, Morrissey was not at the game or in Cincinnati.”
Harry Wright, the Cincinnati captain, regarded the 17-17 tie, though officially a forfeit, the only blemish in his team’s undefeated season. They went 65-0. The next year other teams followed Cincinnati’s example and turned pro. Shortly before the 1871 season, the National Association of Professional Base Ball Players was founded.
National Association
In the first year of the National Association, the Haymakers batted .308 as a team and yet placed only sixth among nine teams, finishing with a record of either 15-15 or 13-15, depending on which source you choose. The Great Encyclopedia of Nineteenth Century Major League Baseball credits the team with 15 wins but notes that three of them were forfeits.
The Haymakers’ first captain was Lip Pike, a New York City native whom baseball historian David Nemec describes as “the first indisputably Jewish player in ML history” (Nemec regards the association as a major league). The club also signed the league’s first Latin American player, Esteban Enrique Bellan, who was born in Cuba. He played third base and hit .248.
After just four games, Pike was replaced as captain in favor of Bill Craver, a Troy native. Pike remained on the roster, playing right field and batting .377. In this dead-ball era, he was quite the slugger: his four home runs led the league.
Craver also had a good season, playing second base and hitting .322. In 1877, his major-league career ended abruptly when the NL banished him for his supposed part in a game-fixing scheme that cost the Louisville Grays the pennant. He later became a Troy policeman.
Three other starters hit above .300: outfielder Steve King (.396), first baseman Clipper Flynn (.338), and shortstop Dickie Flowers (.314). Catcher Mike McGeary led the league in stolen bases with 20. However, the offense could not overcome the mediocrity of the pitching: John McMullin, who started every game, had an ERA of 5.53. Case in point: on July 27, they scored 33 runs against the Philadelphia Athletics but lost.
For the second NA season, Troy fielded a revamped lineup. Pike and Craver had jumped to the Baltimore Canaries. Of last year’s starters, only King and Bellan remained. But the newcomers performed well. As a team, the Haymakers batted .301. Just as important, they had a strong pitcher: the hard-throwing George Zettlein, who posted a 2.16 ERA.
The Haymakers looked like contenders, but the club went bankrupt and dropped out of the league in July. At the time, they had a 15-10 record. “The Troy club is no more,” the Brooklyn Eagle reported. “It commenced with a flourish and has gone out like an exploded sky rocket.”
Wasted was the performance of third baseman Davy Force, who hit .398 and scored 40 runs in Troy’s truncated season. After the club went bust, he too joined the Canaries, hitting .417 in his remaining 19 games. Before the 1875 season, Force would sign contracts with two clubs, creating a controversy that contributed to the association’s demise.
National League
Eight cities fielded teams for the National League’s inaugural season of 1876, but when the New York and Philadelphia clubs failed to honor their schedules, both were kicked out. In the next two seasons, only six teams competed. In 1879, the league returned to an eight-team format. Troy was one of the new entries.
The Haymakers had a few good players, but not enough to keep them out of the cellar. The team finished with a dismal 19-56 record. One bright spot was the major-league debut of Dan Brouthers, a first baseman from Sylvan Lake in Dutchess County, who batted .274 and hit four homers.
Over a 19-year career, Brouthers would hit .342 and earn five batting titles. Many regard him as the finest hitter of the 19th century. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1945.
In 1880, Troy improved to 41-42 (fourth place), but no thanks to Brouthers. He appeared in only three games for the Haymakers, playing most of the season for independent clubs in Rochester and Baltimore.
Fortunately, the Haymakers signed another rookie slugger destined for the Hall of Fame: Roger Connor. In 83 games, Conner hit .332, scored 53 runs, and batted in 47. Over his 18-year career, he would hit .317, leading the NL in 1885 with a .371 average. He also led in doubles once, homers once, RBIs once, and triples twice.
The Haymakers’ two main pitchers–the rookies “Smiling” Mickey Welch and Tim Keefe–also were embarking on Hall of Fame careers. Welch, the 1880 workhorse, threw 574 innings in compiling a 34-30 record with a .254 ERA. Keefe joined the team late in the summer and so threw only 105 innings. He was just 6-6, but his ERA was a minuscule 0.86–the lowest in major-league history among qualifying pitchers. Both pitchers would go on to win more than 300 games in their careers.
In 1881, the Haymakers slipped to fifth place with a 39-45 record. By this time, Brouthers had moved on to the Buffalo Bisons, but the other three stars remained. Connor had another solid year, batting .292 (best on the team) and scoring 55 runs in 85 games.
Buck Ewing, who got in just 13 games the previous year, emerged as a full-time player and hit .250, splitting his time between catcher and shortstop. Today, Ewing is widely regarded as the best catcher of the 1800s. He, too, would be inducted into the Hall of Fame after an 18-year career in which he hit .303.
Keefe started 45 games and completed all of them, finishing 18-27. His ERA rose to 3.24. Welch started and completed the other 40 games. He eked out a winning record of 21-18, with a 2.67 ERA.
In 1882, the Haymakers endured another losing season, finishing seventh with a 36-48 record. Connor had a great year, batting .330 and leading the league with 18 triples. Ewing, playing catcher and third base, improved his average to .271. Keefe and Welch carried their usual heavy loads. Keefe had an impressive 2.49 ERA, one of the best in the league, but ended with a losing record of 17-26. Welch was 14-16 with a 3.46 ERA.
One wonders why the Haymakers, with four future Hall of Famers on their teams, failed to do better in their final two NL seasons. The answer seems to be that Connor, Ewing, and a few other decent batters couldn’t make up for the duds in the lineup who hit in the vicinity of .225 or worse.
Next up, the Giants
The National League was challenged for supremacy by the rise of a rival league, the American Association, which entered the scene in 1882. After the season, in an attempt to head off the threat, the NL expelled its two weakest clubs, Troy and Worcester, and replaced them with teams in the big cities of New York and Philadelphia.
John B. Day, a wealthy cigar maker, purchased the Haymakers and divided the players between his two clubs: the New York Gothams in the NL and the New York Metropolitans in the AA. The Gothams got Connor, Ewing, and Welch. The Mets got Keefe.
The Mets outshined the Gothams, finishing a strong fourth in 1883. Keefe pitched an otherworldly 619 innings en route to winning 47 games. The next year, he won 37 games as the Mets won the AA pennant.
Meanwhile, the Gothams finished no better than fourth in those two seasons. To improve his NL club’s chances, Day transferred Keefe to the Gothams for the 1885 season. It paid off as the Gothams rose to second place, just behind the Chicago White Stockings. Welch went 44-11; Keefe, 32-13.
(Welch once attributed his pitching success to beer: “Pure elixir of malt and hops, Beats all the drugs and all the drops.”)
Baseball lore has it that Gothams manager Jim Mutrie, gushing over his players, referred to them as “my Giants” during the 1885 season. More likely, the nickname was bestowed by a New York sportswriter in his account of an exhibition game in April. In any event, the team has been known as the Giants since 1885. But those familiar with the club’s history might prefer to think of them as the Haymakers. I gather Broadway Abe would.
Illustrations, from above: The 1871 Haymakers, with manager and second baseman Bill Craver (front center) and slugger Lip Pike (back center); portrait of Lip Pike; and the “Haymaker’s grounds.”
