Umpires Weren’t Safe in Old KC: Ted Sullivan’s Baseball Cowboys Called the Shots

Calling balls and strikes continues to represent challenging work for baseball umpires, but conditions have improved in Kansas City, where fans attending games in the late 19th century sometimes brought their guns with them, making umpires – as well as league investors – nervous. As the Kansas City Royals open their 2021 season, the E-Journal presents the following article by Pat O’Neill and Tom Coffman, local authors of the forthcoming book, “Ted Sullivan, Barnacle of Baseball: The Life of the Prolific League Founder, Scout, Manager and Unrivaled Huckster.”

By: Pat O’Neill & Tom Coffman

In the summer of 1884, baseball pioneer Ted Sullivan’s Kansas City Cowboys team seem poised to capture a rare Union Association victory when an egregious decision by the team’s umpiring nemesis, George Seward, cost them the win. In response, the local crowd stormed the field and chased Seward through a door under the grandstand and into a waiting hack with a speedy horse. 

The Kansas City Times called Seward “drunk and incompetent,” and The Star predicted that “If Mr. Seward appears again in Kansas City, he will probably be carried home on a stretcher.” The reaction to Seward’s call was not untypical. Kansas City, in fact, was not a popular destination for adjudicators. Visiting teams liked to scare first-time, $5-a-game umps with stories of cowtown fans pulling their pistols after a questionable call and shooting the covers off fly balls to keep them from being caught. 

Anyone who paid attention to the sport in 1884 knew that baseball in Kansas City was not for the faint of heart, and Irish-born manager Ted Sullivan was at the center of the city’s national rough and tumble baseball reputation.

Bringing The Majors to Missouri 

In his day, T.P. “Ted” Sullivan was considered the best baseball mind in America. Some went so far as to call him “The Godfather” of the sport. He was early baseball’s town-hopping bandleader; the ringmaster of the minor leagues; a George Washington, a Harold Hill and a P.T. Barnum all rolled into one.

He was described by one old-time sportswriter as “a red-cheeked, sturdy little Irishman…good-natured, crafty, a chatterbox when wound up, very proud of his ancestry and himself.”

From the late 1860s until the day he died in 1929, the cunning, fast-talking, witty, charming, serious and sober Sullivan traveled more than a million miles in horse-drawn buggies, soot-spitting trains and lumbering steamships to spread the gospel of his beloved sport across the breadth of North America, Europe, Asia, and South America.  

A native of County Clare who emigrated to America in 1855 at age 7, Sullivan was no stranger to the Kansas City region. He was already mad for baseball in 1874, when he graduated from St. Mary’s College just west of Topeka, where he captained the school’s baseball team. By the time he returned to the Kansas City region a decade later, Sullivan had founded a historic minor league, built a reputation as the sport’s best scout, managed the St. Louis Browns and helped establish the upstart Union Association and bring major league ball to Kansas City.  

Sullivan’s 1883 success with the legendary Browns did not go unnoticed, especially locally. Henry V. Lucas, a 26-year-old heir to his family’s St. Louis real estate empire, sought out Sullivan to organize the Union Association, identify potential franchises, and ultimately create and manage his St. Louis franchise. The Union Association, weak as it turned out to be, was nothing less than a full-on attack on the baseball establishment by refusing the join the National League and American Association as a signatory to the National Agreement and its “Reserve Rule,” which, in effect, kept players in contractual bondage to their teams by “reserving” their services in perpetuity.  

Sullivan shared the young magnate’s opinion of the reserve rule. Sullivan was also ahead of his time with his prediction that courts would one day  override the reserve rule. Just as he had presaged the American League’s adoption of the designated hitter and the elimination of “whippoorwill swingers.”

Rubes, Maybes and Wanna-bes 

The Union Association was a “major league” in name only, with teams fielding mix-and-match rosters of rubes, maybes and wanna-bes. Still, Manager Sullivan had a great gig going in St. Louis managing Lucas’ Maroons franchise and nearly running away with the league. By the end of June, the elite team Sullivan had put together had a 35-4 record against the league’s vastly weaker franchises, and the Union Association was having a tough time staying alive. 

At the end of May, the Altoona squad, after playing just 25 games, had dropped out of the association, and the franchise was transferred to up-and-coming Kansas City, Missouri, making “the Paris of the Plains” the farthest west city ever to field a “professional” baseball team. 

Naysayers thought Lucas was really stretching his luck by gambling on such a small market, but still the steadfast optimist, Lucas countered: “Their population is 100,000 or over and their people understand the game and will patronize the club if it is worth patronizing.”  

Kansas City malt and grain merchant Americus McKim paid Lucas $15,000 for the franchise and refurbished and expanded Athletic Park, located near the current intersection of Summit Street and Southwest Boulevard. McKim ordered uniforms, picked up some of Altoona’s cast-off players and made a swing back east to pick up a few more players, but he was still taking applications from rock-throwing farm boys and out of work amateurs two days before the team’s first game. 

The “Kaycees,” or “Cowboys,” as they were called by their eastern rivals, presented a hodge-podge roster of mediocre veterans and unheralded youngsters who hadn’t met or played together before trotting onto the field to face the Chicago Unions in June. 

Although they lost that first game 6-5 in 12 innings, the baseball innovator Al Spink would later recall that “No official score was kept of this game for the reason that no one in Kansas City at that time knew how to keep a regular tabulated score.” 

The Evening Star reported that “the Kansas Citys played an uphill game and gave many evidences of skill. The fact that the Kansas City nine never played together before made the audience very charitable…. The Chicagos are very strong at the bat, the place where the home club is unmistakably weak.” 

By mid-July Kansas City was a Union Association doormat, but only one of many. The cranks – famously dubbed “fans” by Sullivan – across other Union Association cities were losing interest and the owners were losing loads of money. Desperate to keep his league alive, Lucas talked Sullivan into catching a cross-state train and taking over the hapless Cowboys. Lucas promised Sullivan part-ownership of the Kansas City organization, and a financial guarantee to the team’s primary owner, Americus McKim. On July 14, the St. Louis Globe Democrat announced that Ted Sullivan had been appointed manager of the Kansas City Unions. 

Sullivan found the Cowtown a wide-open river bluff town teeming with, as a writer for Harpers Weekly described it, “all classes and conditions of men – cowboys from the cattle trails, railroad laborers, farmers from down the rivers and immigrants from all parts of Europe” 

But work in the growing town was plentiful and The Kansas City Star observed that “The number of people who drift to this city from week to week is astonishing.”  

Lucas and McKim, and now Sullivan, were gambling on Kansas City’s legions of blue-collar workers – mostly Irish, German and Scandinavian, working as puddlers in the iron works, or throat slitters and beef boners in the massive slaughter and meat packing houses, to embrace and support professional baseball. 

Sullivan struggled to attract decent performers to the smoke-veiled town at the edge of the American west.  He did inherit or find a couple of young talents who would, in time prove to be keepers in the major leagues, including William “Billy” Smith O’Brien, a first baseman who three years later would lead the National League in home runs; and Emmett Seery, a reliable journeyman outfielder who would rack up nearly 1,000 games in an eight-year major league career. 

Sullivan’s managerial debut saw his Cowboys lose 17-5 at Baltimore in what the Journal gently called a “most ignominious fashion,” describing the play of KC’s nine as “ridiculous.” 

On July 21, the Cowboys were in last place in the new league with an embarrassing record of 3-19. Kansas City’s roster was so thin in talent that Sullivan reportedly shuffled at least 40 different players onto the field that season trying to find a combination that could tally a win once in a while.   

Despite the team’s awful play and record, attendance at home games continued to be strong. Sullivan hawked promotions like Ladies-Get-In-Free Days and experimented with group ticket sales, wooing organizations like The Knights Templar to help fill up the grandstand. And in the chase for a buck, Sullivan didn’t mind risking the wrath of preachers and the law by playing Sunday games, which drew double and triple the number of weekday fans. The team was proving profitable, but they continued to lose, and by September the manager was as frustrated as the fans.  

As often as not, those frustrations were taken out on umpires. 

The Cowboys took to relishing their reputation in the press as baseball’s wild and wooly western gunslingers prone to verbal harangues and fistfights. Several gun incidents in Kansas City reportedly made the league’s eastern investors nervous, causing them to have second thoughts about Kansas City’s future as a baseball town. 

Harassing and threatening the league’s umpires became the Cowboys’ calling card – with manager Ted often the first to stir up the crowd. During a losing effort against Milwaukee in early June, Sullivan accused the umpire, a fellow named Hoover, of “crookedness” and threatened to assault him.  

“I have been badly treated in the West,” umpire Tom York told The New York Times, upon quitting the profession. “I have often heard that an umpire’s position was a thankless one, but I have never realized it before. It’s bad enough to be hissed and called a thief, but in the West when the local club loses, an umpire is fortunate if he escapes with his life. Of all the cities in the league Kansas City is the worst.”

Recalled catcher Charlie Bennett: “The first time Ed Beaten umpired a game in Kansas City, he was scared as a man could possibly be. He came from Baltimore and his idea of the West was a sparsely settled country overrun by …cowboy desperadoes and train robbers. On the train to Kansas City, one of the boys told him to ‘be ready to throw your hands up at any moment, for those cowboys are dangerous fellows…They’d as soon shoot you as look at you.’”

Bennett said another player swore to the flummoxed ump that he was once playing in Kansas City, when a Kaycee player hit a high fly to the right fielder. As the fellow chased after it, he said, “a fusillade of shots” came from the grandstand. “The cowboys were shooting at the ball. They must have hit it a dozen times. The cover was torn off the ball by their shots, and the fellow managed to catch the cover.” 

“He claimed an out on the catch,” said Bennett, “but we disputed the claim, and the game broke up in a row. If I recall rightly, we (Kansas City) got the benefit of the doubt on all close calls that day.”  

When all was said and done of the Union Association’s one and only season, Sullivan’s Cowboys finished with a collective batting average of .199, had lost 63 of the 79 games (11-23 at home and 5-40 on the road) and finished at the bottom of the standings.  

Sullivan’s reputation as a manager suffered, but the Cowboys’ financial success gained attention from everyone in baseball. He and McKim reported an attendance of 54,000 for those 34 games at home, and claimed a season ending profit of $7,000, while most every other Union Association affiliates were dying in pools of red ink.  

Still, the league seemed to have a future and there was talk of “next year.” But when McKim and Ted went to the winter meetings of the Union Association, they were the only team representatives to show up, so, without the benefit of good-bye or benediction, the Union Association was declared dead. 

Sullivan’s Cowboys Stick Around 

Back in Kansas City, manager-turned-entrepreneur Sullivan found himself with bats, balls, uniforms and a few players, but no league to play in. So, in the winter of 1885 he put his hustler hat back on and again became the baseball version of a traveling Bible salesman. 

Sullivan and other survivors of the ill-fated Union Association circuit formed a new league – which the retributive major leagues insisted be strictly categorized as a “minor” league. As the new Western League’s traveling representative, Sullivan set about organizing franchises. Sunday games would be allowed, in hopes of boosting attendance and revenue.  

Milwaukee (the Brewers), Keokuk (the Hawkeyes), Indianapolis (the Hoosiers), Omaha (the Omahogs), Cleveland (the Forest Cities) and Toledo (the Avengers) bought into smooth-talking Sullivan’s new field of dreams, and he upped his own financial stake in the Cowboys. In Kansas City, he gathered and managed a nine composed of some of his better players from the Union Association Cowboys of the year before and added a sprinkle of untrieds, unprovens and weren’t-ever-gonna-bes. Realizing that good promotion was as important as good pitching when it came to selling 25-cent tickets to the working class fan, Sullivan honed his knack for publicity, managed ticket sales, and printed his own scorecards and advertising fliers on a small press in his office beneath the stands. The Gaelic character of Sullivan’s team and audacious style of their play reminded some observers of a popular New York vaudeville show of the day.

“A St. Louis exchange cruelly remarks that with the Dugans, the O’Briens, the Sweeneys, and the Sullivans, Ted Sullivan will have a team fit to appear in ‘Muldoon’s Picnic” as well as on the ball field.” The Kansas City Star, March 25, 1885 

On road trips he sometimes introduced the team as his “Red Lions,” and even sent them out in a second set of red and brown uniforms.  But the Cowboys of 1885 wore blue and white uniforms and were sometimes referred to during games as “The Blues.” As it turned out, they wouldn’t play enough games that year to soil either set of uniforms.  

Newspapers predicted there’d be “a dog fight” when the Cowboys locked horns with the major league St. Louis Browns, led by Sullivan’s apprentice from his St. Mary’s College days and baseball’s rising star, first baseman Charlie Comiskey. Upon arrival, the Browns were greeted by Kansas City’s “ninety-nine degree bugs” and carted to the St. James Hotel, drawn by the town’s finest white horses. The Browns proceeded to thank the local bugs by whipping up on their Cowboys 15-3. 

Despite the Western League’s minor league status, attendance at Kansas City home games was surprisingly strong, with crowds of 5,000 to 10,000 not uncommon. And that wasn’t counting the little bugs on the other side of the fence. Part of the attraction was Kansas City fans never quite knew what they might see at a Cowboys game – such as the day Sullivan made baseball history with the only dead man to pitch a game (you’ll have to read the book for that story).  

Sullivan’s unruly but mildly talented squad held its own through May and into June, alternating places at the top of the league standings with the Hoosiers of Indianapolis and paying for itself with steady gate receipts. But the business-minded manager nearly pushed his luck a bit too far at an exhibition game against the Forest Cities, played in nearby Atchison, Kansas. He boldly charged 50 cents a head for admission, causing the locals to grouse and protest. According to a reporter who was on the scene, Ted was able to calm the unhappy crowd by telling them they could not expect to see real live professionals for a quarter. The fans left satisfied after Billy O’Brien launched a home run to center field that knocked a ticketless young fan out of a tree, and the Cowboys won the game 5-4.  

In early June, pressure began to mount from churches and law enforcement agencies calling for an end to baseball on the Sabbath. On June 7 at Cleveland, police stopped a game between the Cowboys and the Forest Cities after just three innings of play, with Kansas City leading 3-0.  

“The authorities of the good old pious town have determined to enforce the Sunday laws,” crowed the Kansas City Evening Star. “Ted Sullivan… is indignant at the action taken by the ministers and says that all the men in his club were engaged with the understanding that they would be required to play Sunday games and that if the Sunday games are prohibited, he will disband the club.” 

Looking back years later, Sullivan conceded that, “In the middle of the ‘80s, minor leagues had no foundation and the best of them would hardly live through July.” By early June in ‘85, virtually every team in the Western League was starving for cash to survive. 

Paid in Glitter 

In Toledo, after playing three games against his old friend, the gregarious, and generous and always gambling Dan O’Leary’s Avengers, Sullivan went to collect his take of the gate. Ted remembered O’Leary, “calling me to one side and uttering the Irish phrase ‘sinn féin’ (we ourselves), then whispering: ‘It is this way, Ted, this backer of mine has no money.’”  

The backer, the owner of a jewelry store, had been paying Dan’s creditors with jewelry. Said Sullivan: “This indeed was a new phase in baseball guarantees and for genial Dan, with his ‘plámásing’ (ingratiating).” (Plamas: Plámás /'plɔ:mɔ:s/ ['plaw-mawse'] is an Irish noun and verb used in Hiberno-English; it means empty flattery, ingratiating talk, disingenuous praise.) Sullivan accepted jewelry and gave it to the landlord that had provided his Cowboys with three days room and board while in Toledo. 

The next day, on June 15, the Indianapolis club – atop the league standings with a 27-4 record – gave up the ghost, and Sullivan’s Western League died with them. Sullivan’s Cowboys were in third place with a 17-13 record and still profitable when the league collapsed. Billy O’Brien was leading the league in hitting (.372 over 30 games). Ernie Burch had hit .361 over 26 games, and Emmett Seery was hitting over .300, as well. 

The baseball season being still young, Ted took an overnight train to Memphis, where he signed on to manage the Reds in the fledgling minor Southern League. Billy O’Brien and some of the other Cowboys packed their saddlebags and went with him. Within weeks, Sullivan and his roughneck boys would be the most hated team in the South. 

To learn more about Ted Sullivan’s groundbreaking and colorful contribution to baseball history (including the dead pitcher in Kansas City), check out Ted Sullivan, Barnacle of Baseball: The Life of the Prolific League Founder, Scout, Manager and Unrivaled Huckster, written by local authors Pat O’Neill and Tom Coffman and available from McFarland & Co. in June 2021. https://mcfarlandbooks.com/product/ted-sullivan-barnacle-of-baseball/

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