Michael Joseph “King” Kelly — storyteller, entertainer, dandy and, most notably, Hall of Fame baseball player — was born in 1857 in Troy, N.Y., to parents who had fled poverty in Ireland in the decades before the Great Famine of the late-1840s, most likely during the period 1825-39. He became, in time, indisputably the most popular athlete of the late 19th century, exceeding even the great heavyweight boxer and fellow Irishman John L. Sullivan, who was also his friend. He was the A-Rod of his day, minus the salary but with all the notoriety and attention. When he died of pneumonia at 36, en route to a stage performance in Boston, a Boston writer remarked: “Money had no charm for the king, unless he could make it talk and make his friends merry. No man ever had a sunnier disposition than he.”
Kelly first made a name for himself on the ballfield, where his skill and flamboyant style made him a fan favorite in the days before radio and TV. A catcher and outfielder who stood 5-foot-10 and weighed 170 pounds, he broke in with the Cincinnati Reds in 1878 and played with the Chicago White Stockings, Boston Beaneaters, Boston Red Stockings, Cincinnati Porkers and New York Giants in a career that spanned 16 years. He had a career batting average of .307 and led the league in hitting in 1884 and ’86. It was the era of the dead ball, but he still managed to hit 69 career home runs. And yet it was Kelly’s speed that really set him apart from his contemporaries. He stole at least 50 bases in four consecutive years and once had 6 in a single game. He remains one of only 10 major league players to score 6 runs in a single game. What’s more, he is credited with inventing the hit-and-run play and his daring baserunning led fans to cheer him on, yelling, “Slide, Kelly, slide.” In 1887, a year after he batted a career-high .388, the White Stockings sold him to the Beaneaters for $10,000 (about $200,000 today), more than twice the amount every paid for a player. He was dubbed the “$10,000 beauty,” after an actress who had won a $10,000 beauty contest years earlier.
Kelly was by all accounts a natural, a heady player with the tools to match. A teammate, Fred Pfeffer, said of him: His strongest advantage was that he was always ready. He could take advantage of a misplay which others wouldn’t see until afterward.”
If Kelly’s playing skills and smarts earned him initial attention, his mouth and wit were what made him memorable. Teams of that era did not have professional coaches. Teammates were in charge of shouting encouragement and directions. Catchers, positioned as they were beside the usually lone umpire, were in a prime spot to talk. By all accounts Kelly relished the chance to talk to the batter, especially when distracting him could help his team’s chances. He seems to have enjoyed arguing with the umpire as well.
Recalled Pfeffer: “He played the umpire as intelligently as he did the opposing nine. He would engage his confidence and in various ways get the best of close decisions.”
While playing for Chicago in 1886, Kelly was described this way by a writer for the Boston Herald: “[He] is a caution. He is always moving, always kicking. He can’t keep still when he is sitting on the bench, and when he doesn’t wag his tongue he wags his bat. When a Chicagoan gets his base it wakes him up, and he will coach whether he is within the coacher’s lines or not. Then there will be a perpetual communication with Kelly to the runner or the umpire.”
Umpires and opponents weren’t the only people toward whom Kelly shared his powers of persuasion. Players in the 19th century also regularly engaged fans during the course of a game.
The Herald continued: “Very frequently [Kelly] breaks up pitcher [sic], catcher and the umpire, not to speak of the audience. When he can do this, he is happy; then, the Kelly smile; it is infectious, and all forget feelings to follow suit. When he bats he can’t keep still. He kicks at the ground and bats away at the plate until he hits the ball, when he is off like a racehorse. There is only one Kelly, and he has no imitators.”
Indeed, few players of his day could match Kelly as a crowd pleaser. As Boston’s catcher in 1892, he threw out a runner at Chicago after having fumbled the ball. “Toss it up, scoop it up, eat it up,” he yelled to the crowd. Later in the game, he made an error. Fans hooted and stamped their feet. He turned to the crowd and said, “Now, please. Don’t be hard on me, boys, for I swear that was the first error I ever made in my life.”
That year at Cleveland, he caught and coached in “fine style, while keeping up a running fire with the spectators,” a Boston writer reported. Someone in the grandstand asked Kelly, “How would you like to play here?”
“Not in a thousand years,” he replied.
“We wouldn’t have you in the town,” said an elderly man nearby.
“What, get me out here in the woods, among a lot of Reubens [country bumpkins]? Oh, no,” he reposted.
After saying that, the writer reported, “Kelly went up to cover his face with the mask.”
It’s little wonder then that going to a ballgame at the time was frequently compared as going to the theater, a rather intimate experience that provided an opportunity to experience powerful and unique performances that the rest of the country could only imagine. Kelly, to be sure, relished the lead role in that pageant. In fact, theater and baseball merged so naturally in Kelly that he seems to be the most plausible player-model for the title character in the 1888 poem “Casey at the Bat.”
Kelly’s unique slang was renowned among fellow players, sporting buffs and reporters. When fans teased him at Cleveland, he replied, “Youse ducks make me tired insulting decent people. I’d fire youse all from the grounds.” After his death in 1894, Kelly, one writer noted, “never said money, always ‘dough.’ He would say ‘tink’ for plug hat. He would wallop players on an opposing team until there wasn’t enough left of them ‘to fill a tin cup.’ Also, whiskey was always ‘red eye’ during the week and ‘pop’ on Sundays. But Kelly was greatest in getting off his ‘see?’ either in private conversation or on the ball field.”
What Kelly’s voice sounded like, or even the veracity of his longer quotes, are hard to verify before the age of tape recorders. But clearly he had a knack for communication that extended beyond the ballpark. In his retirement, he parlayed those skills into a successful, if tragically brief, stage career.
In the last full off-season of his life, 1893-94, Kelly embarked on a vaudeville career, touring with the variety show “O’Dowd’s Neighbors,” starring Mark Murphy. While on tour in Worcester, Mass., Kelly reminisced to a reporter: “I remember the first time I ever played in Worcester. It was in 1880. I was with the Chicagos. We came here from the South to play our first game on Memorial Day. There were seven men on our team, each of whom weighed 200 pounds, and the Worcesters were little fellows. We had the sleeves of our shirts cut, and what with sliding bases and the effects of a southern sun, we looked like a lot of Dagos [Italians] who had been working in a sewer. The Worcesters were a clean set, and you would never find a speck of dirt on their uniforms. I remember after we rode out to the grounds at Agricultural park, when we walked down the track somebody in the crowd shouted, ‘Look at the murderers.’ “
While Kelly’s Hall of Fame plaque honors his excellence as a player, it might just as easily recall him as “a clever mimic and one of the best storytellers in the profession,” as a Cincinnati writer put it in 1891. Kelly, he said, is “always first to pick up the popular songs and slang of the day, and, altogether, he is a first-class entertainer.”
(Howard W. Rosenberg is the author of the spring 2004 book Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly: U.S. Team Sport’s First Media Sensation and Baseball’s Original Casey at the Bat.” His first book, “Cap Anson 1: When Captaining a Team Meant Something: Leadership in Baseball’s Early Years (2003),” is currently available at www.capanson.com