Frank's Place: Looking back at Phillies' first spring in Florida
Spring training, at least as I recall it from the 1990s, is the best thing about being a baseball writer.
Spring training, at least as I recall it from the 1990s, is the best thing about being a baseball writer.
There's a comfortable rhythm to the work, an easy camaraderie among colleagues, a freedom the regular season's grinding pressures won't permit.
It's a welcome hiatus from the cynicism this profession fosters, a time when unhurried stories about untested talents can be lathered with optimism and hope.
All the hard work is offset by the warm days and the cold beer.
Baseball writers and spring training were both new concepts in 1889, when the Phillies spent two preseason weeks in Florida.
The Inquirer didn't even send a staffer to the faraway camp. Instead, it engaged Arthur Irwin, the Phillies' captain and shortstop, to report on its happenings.
Though he was one of the most fascinating Phillies ever, you wouldn't have known it from the cliche-riddled prose Irwin filed that March.
Here are some typical insights from the Inquirer's "special correspondent" in Jacksonville:
"The ponies are getting in shape." . . . "All the boys are working their loose fat off." . . . "We are good and tired tonight." . . . "Our joints are a little stiff."
His most inspired writing came when Jack Clements, the Phils' lefthanded catcher, corralled a loose horse.
"Clements stopped a runaway horse Sunday afternoon," Irwin wrote. "Nothing gets past him at the plate."
He wasn't much of a prognosticator, either. Though Irwin advised Philadelphians to "prepare to be astonished when we get home," the 1889 Phils were merely mundane, finishing fourth with a 63-64 record.
It's a shame the Inquirer didn't dispatch a professional to Jacksonville that spring. The Phillies' decision to practice so far away - the American Association's Philadelphia Athletics, by comparison, trained across the river in Gloucester - was historic, triggering the custom of preseason baseball in Florida that has continued for 128 years.
So in the 1889 preseason about all this newspaper's readers learned was that Kid Gleason was "pitching great," that Ed Decker and Pete Wood were "late," and that Irwin didn't like a new rule that forced runners to return to their original base if a ball struck an umpire.
He postulated on what might happen if, with a runner on third, a slow ground ball were hit to him.
"If I can't get the man at the plate, [it might be better] if I hit the poor umpire in the back of the neck."
He and his teammates left Philadelphia for Jacksonville March 1 and boarded the steamer City of San Antonio in New York. Their journey was aborted in Norfolk after the ship was involved in an accident, one the intrepid reporter never bothered to detail.
They played a few games in Virginia, then continued on to "the land of orange groves." For two weeks, manager Harry Wright's team practiced in the mornings near their Tremont Hotel, then each afternoon played a local team.
If Irwin's stories were bland and uninteresting, his life was just the opposite.
The native Canadian, whom fellow players called "Foxy" or "Doc," was the sporting equivalent of a Renaissance man. He was the first to devise and use a fielder's glove. He managed the Phillies and Penn at the same time. He invented an electric football scoreboard. He became president of a pro football league, owned a minor-league team, umpired in the National League, scouted for the Yankees, managed the Giants, operated a Philadelphia bicycle track, and created a game in which polo was played by men on roller skates.
But the most intriguing aspect of Irwin's life was how it ended.
Born in Toronto in 1858, the 5-foot-6 Irwin played 1,015 major-league games for the Phillies and several other teams during professional baseball's early decades.
The lifetime .241 hitter had his most notable achievement in 1883, when he was with Providence. After breaking the third and fourth fingers on his left hand, he took a leather riding glove and sewed its third and fourth fingers together to allow for more padding there.
Until then, only catchers and first basemen had worn gloves. But Irwin's innovation proved so popular that by 1884 most of his fellow players were using them.
In 1921, at the end of his frenetic post-playing career, Irwin was managing Hartford of the Eastern League when ill health forced him to step down. Doctors diagnosed stomach cancer, and the emaciated former player was given just days to live.
He boarded a Boston-bound steamer, the Calvin Austin, in New York, and on July 16 he disappeared.
Initial newspaper reports speculated that he might have been robbed and tossed overboard. But a fellow passenger informed investigators that Irwin had told him he was "going home to die." The death was ruled a suicide.
That investigation, however, did turn up something unexpected. For decades, it seemed, Irwin had kept one wife and family in Boston and another in New York.
According to the New York Times, he'd married Elizabeth in 1883 in Boston. Then, while coaching at Penn in the early 1890s, he'd wed a Philadelphia woman named May and later moved with her to New York.
Between his two families, there were three children, the oldest of whom was 37, and nine grandchildren.
When informed of Irwin's shadow family, Elizabeth told the newspaper that "the missteps of her husband must have been entirely the fault of the woman in New York."
Days before his death, the Times reported, Irwin had sold his interest in a company that produced the football scoreboards he'd invented. Before boarding the ship, he sent $1,500 from the proceeds to May and $500 to Elizabeth.
Gradually, other teams followed the Phillies' lead and began to train in Florida. Newspapers learned an equally valuable lesson.
They sent real reporters to cover the camps, to chronicle, more richly than Arthur Irwin ever could, the perspiring ponies, the runaway horses, the recurring promise of spring.
@philafitz