Harry Steinfeldt was the missing part of the famous infield memorialized in the title of David Rapp’s new book
Adapted from Tinker to Evers to Chance by David Rapp published by The University of Chicago Press. © 2018 by The University of Chicago. All rights reserved.
Baseball history has always been rife with brain-teasing trivia questions, some of them meaningless, others loaded with significance. For more than a hundred years — at least since F. P. Adams penned his famous lines about a “trio of bearcubs” — one of the great barroom stumpers has been: Who was the fourth member of the Chicago Cubs’ Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance infield?
The answer, while in one sense trivial, does come with a measure of historic and cultural impact.
In late 1905, Frank Chance, after taking over as interim manager from the ailing Frank Selee, saw a number of holes in his roster. A big one was at third base. He wanted a heavy hitter and run producer, an experienced big leaguer who could provide some wallop in the middle of the lineup. To get someone like that, Chance had no compunction about giving up a mainstay or two of the current squad. “We need pitchers, we must have a new third baseman, and a hitting outfielder before we can win the pennant,” he told confidants.
Chance looked down his roster for expendables. There was “Doc” Casey, the erstwhile dental school student and senior member of the squad, who had held down the third-base job for the previous three years. Casey had won the respect of his teammates — he was Selee’s choice over Chance as team captain the year before — but Chance knew that Doc was a journeyman at best. Chance also had inherited outfielder Billy Maloney, whom Selee had acquired a year before from Cincinnati. The speedy Maloney could be sensational performer at times — the “idol of the crowd” — legging out fourteen triples in 1905 and leading the league with fifty-nine stolen bases. But Chance considered him erratic.
As a first step, Chance told team owner C.W. Murphy to dangle both Casey and Maloney as trade bait. What followed was “one of the most spectacular deals ever recorded in baseball history,” according to Hugh Fullerton, the Chicago Tribune’s veteran baseball beat writer. Chance had set his sights on Jimmy Sheckard, an outfielder in Brooklyn who had a long track record as a run producer but had fallen afoul of club owners by jumping to the American League during Ban Johnson’s “war” of 1902. The subsequent Peace Treaty between the leagues sent him back to Brooklyn, but by then Sheckard was persona non grata with the brass of the Superbas.
Rumors of Sheckard’s discontent wended through the player network to Chance, who told Murphy to act fast. Murphy dutifully offered up Casey and Maloney, then tossed in another outfielder and a pitcher — plus $2,000 — for Sheckard. The deal “stunned Chicago followers of the game,” Fullerton said, but it instantly made Chance’s outfield first-rate. They formed a safety net that could chase down almost anything that managed to get past the infield gauntlet. Sheckard was known as “one of the surest, most deadly outfielders on fly balls that ever choked a near-triple to death by fleetness of foot and steadiness of eye and grip.”
Of course, Doc Casey’s departure had left a hole at third base, but there, too, Chance knew who he wanted. Word got around that Cincinnati was not that happy with its current occupant at third base. “Again, inside gossip directed Chance to a man while older managers, not closely in touch with players, listened to other stories,” observed Fullerton. Murphy must have been listening to those old hands, too, because he traveled twice to the Queen City to make the trade Chance wanted, though he came back empty-handed. “What third baseman shall we get?” an exasperated Murphy kept asking. The always-blunt Chance kept replying: “Steinfeldt.”
Harry M. Steinfeldt would soon take his place in the Cubs’ storied infield, where he held down third base for five dynastic years and became the answer to that age-old trivia question. The price was not small: Murphy and Chance had to give up Tornado Jake Weimer, arguably the team’s best pitcher over the previous three seasons, to obtain him. Murphy also had to sweeten the pot for the ever-restless Steinfeldt, who made noise about leaving baseball entirely. Yet Murphy’s investment produced immediate dividends.
In 1906, Steinfeldt would lead the league in hits (173) and runs batted in (83) and maintained a batting average of .327, second only to Honus Wagner. He also possessed a whiplike arm at third, leading the NL in fielding percentage in three of his five seasons in Chicago. “When it comes to a thrower whose method is a treat to the eye for its grace, speed and unerring airline flight, Harry Steinfeldt . . . is an accomplished actor,” said one admirer. “There is a beautiful harmonizing of lift and speed to his flings.”
Born in St. Louis on September 29, 1877, Harry M. Steinfeldt had moved at the age of four to Fort Worth, Texas, with his German-immigrant parents. His father, Henry, worked for the Anheuser-Busch brewery, which had sent him there from St. Louis to set up a distribution warehouse. Harry, second of five children, was a precocious athlete. At sixteen, Harry joined in the bicycle craze that was sweeping England and American cities. He must have been pretty good at it: He belonged to the League of American Wheelmen, participating in many of its local and national events.
“Craze” is no overstatement in describing the popularity of cycling in the mid-1890s. Almost as soon the chain-drive “safety bicycle” entered the market, people of all ages and skills learned to ride the increasingly affordable two-wheelers. In every American city, about four times as many people owned bicycles as horses. Bicycle races and riding exhibitions were among the most popular spectator sports in the country, according to urban historian Evan Friss. “Like horse racing, baseball and other sports, bicycle racing attracted a mass audience seeking to experience the thrill of speed and the excitement of competition.”
Steinfeldt’s skills as a “wheelman” earned him a national reputation and even got him his first job (as a bank messenger). But his wanderlust, paired with a typical adolescent rebellious streak, must have called. In the fall of 1894, still only sixteen, he joined a traveling minstrel show. The prime tool of this unusual trade wasn’t bat, ball, glove, or bicycle wrench. It was burnt cork.
Blackface minstrelsy — a musical-comedy genre in which white men made themselves up in demeaning caricatures of African American singers, dancers, and comedians — was the most ubiquitous form of entertainment in late nineteenth-century America. Some sixty years after the Christy Minstrels and “Jim Crow” (Thomas Rice) made their first stage appearances in the antebellum South, minstrel revues remained happily ensconced in several theaters in New York City, while a dozen or more touring companies roamed the nation. Suited up in outlandish costumes, their faces smeared black except for white lips and wide bugging eyes, minstrel entertainers “banged and sawed and rattled” through a lively and ritualized set of dance tunes and ditties such as “Jim Along Josey,” “Old Dan Tucker,” and “Coon, Coon, Coon,” interspersed with a rapid-fire banter of jokes told in broad, stereotypical dialect.
Minstrelsy is difficult to talk about — or even contemplate — today. Its vicious, mean-spirited caricatures of African-American mannerisms can’t be excused even by the mores of its day. Yet blackface song and dance was the nation’s first indigenous theatrical art form. (Everything else, from opera to classical music to theater, had been imported from Europe.) And it is hard to overstate its impact on all forms of American musical culture: minstrel legacies trace a path through turn-of-the century ragtime, vaudeville, burlesque and tap dance, musical theater, and improvisational jazz, all the way to rock-and-roll, rap, and hip-hop. “Simply condemning it all as an entertainment that pandered to White racism does not begin to account for its complexities, its confusion, its neuroses,” according to historian John Strausbaugh, author of Black Like You.
Harry Steinfeldt was one of an untold number of young men who found a perverse kind of refuge in the counterculture world of minstrel entertainment, much the way teenagers in a later age gravitated to “scandalous” rock’n’roll in the 1950s. He hooked up with Al G. Field’s Greater Minstrels, a national touring company that tramped its way through Texas every year in the 1890s. The proprietor and star performer, Alfred Griffith Hatfield, was one of the most prominent cork artists and impresarios of his day. “Merely to announce that the famous minstrel and his company were to appear at a given place was practically saying that the minstrel loving population would turn out en masse to greet them,” commented a historian in the early twentieth century.
Al G. Field intermixed the highly formulaic minstrel routines with never-before-seen musicians and novelty acts; he was one of the first to feature ragtime music pioneers like Harry Van Fossen, for instance. Field also became the first producer to create a separate traveling show of 125 African American actors, giving many black entertainers their first break in show business even if they, too, had to apply burnt-cork makeup and perform absurdist stereotypes of black people. White audiences loved Field’s theatrical touches. “Everything they do is original, their jokes are new and upon timely topics, while their singing and dancing and character are as artistic as it is possible for them to be,” a Fort Worth newspaper critic said in October 1892.
Steinfeldt was probably a cast member or understudy in a motley troupe that grew as large as “1/2 a hundred,” as Field’s advertisements boasted. It’s not certain what type of showbiz career he thought to pursue — a central role as vocalist, dancer, or comedian; a novelty act like gun-and-sword juggler or “apodal” (footless) contortionist; or a background role as choral singer of “good old fashioned negro melodies.” (Field also had a three-man acrobatic act featuring Jasper the educated mule.) It turns out, however, that something else caught Harry’s restless imagination as he made his way across Texas. At almost every stop he found a way to join an amateur team for a baseball game. Word must have gotten around about his dexterity and skill, because it wasn’t long before Steinfeldt was playing shortstop and second base for the Houston Mudcats of the Texas-Southern League.
He hopped around Houston, Fort Worth, and Galveston clubs for the next two seasons, playing any number of positions. Then came a promotion to Detroit in Ban Johnson’s Western League, where in one season Steinfeldt played well enough to earn a big league contract with Cincinnati the following year. Steinfeldt played super utility man to the Reds’ star-studded infield for a couple of years before cracking the starting lineup at third base. Manager Buck Ewing liked his defensive skills, especially his quick release: “The ball is hardly in his hands before he has it sailing through the air,” he beamed. Steinfeldt’s breakout season came in 1903, when he batted .312 and led the NL in doubles, with thirty-two. But injuries, a revolving door of managers, and his own displays of apathy soon dampened his production. He started to gain weight and lose his edge, and his disenchanted attitude suggested he was bored with baseball.
Frank Chance, however, remembered the untroubled, aggressive player he watched dazzle the crowds in California’s winter ball circuit, where Steinfeldt had gone in the off-season a few years back. Chance soon made Steinfeldt more than welcome in Chicago. Shortly after the Cubs announced the trade, Steinfeldt wrote to Murphy and Chance from his home in Marlin Springs, Texas, assuring them he had been working out all winter, would report to spring training at his old playing weight of 170 pounds, and was in “fine fettle.”
The Cubs of late 1905 and early 1906 finally started to gel, giving the 1905 champion New York Giants some fierce competition for the first time. Every Chicago player began to reevaluate his commitment and work ethic. “We were pointed toward the pennant, and we knew it,” recalled Johnny Evers. “This knowledge, instead of causing us to take our work easy, had the reverse effect. It made us work all the harder.”
Chance, Tinker, Evers, and Steinfeldt started coming to the ballpark early every game day, but not for the half hour of casual ball tossing that most teams put in. The foursome would practice elaborate plays over and over again for almost two hours, drilling a single routine for as long as six weeks before trying it in a game. They made a pact that the first to quit a morning workout had to treat the others to lunch or cigars. “Peerless Leader” Chance never initiated a break, of course, so Tinker and Evers colluded to run him ragged at first base with throws in the dirt or over his head. Chance still would not relent, and they got no succor from their new partner. “Strange as it may seem, Steinfeldt, who was the veteran of the quartet, refused to quit until someone else did,” Evers said.
Here the Chance combine developed its peerless mastery of the game. This was an era of deep outfields and baseballs battered and worn to the seams, which meant that a game-changing home run was as rare as a triple is today. To score a run — to win a ball game, no less — required constant tactical decision making from the first pitch to the last out. Every player in the Cubs’ lineup was expected to be proficient — and ready to execute — a sacrifice, suicide, or “bluff” bunt; a stolen base, a delayed steal, or a double steal; a hit and run, or a run and hit. At any moment in a game, Chance might signal for some new trick to advance a runner closer to home so that even a weak grounder might secure a tally. “It is a game of surprises, freaks and accidents,” according to Evers. The idea was to eliminate as much of the surprise as possible on your team’s end and create as much uncertainty as possible on the other’s.
Led by Chance, Evers, Tinker, and now Steinfeldt, the Cubs would go on to win 116 games in 1906, losing only 36, resulting in a mind-bending winning percentage of .763. (Only the Seattle Mariners of 2001 have since equaled that victory total, though they needed all 162 games of the expanded schedule.) Chicago won the pennant going away in 1906, inexplicably losing the World Championship series to the cross-town White Sox, then won NL pennants and World Championships in 1907 and 1908. Another pennant in 1910 gave them four pennants, two world’s championships and a record 530 victories in five years, more wins in that time span than any team in major league history.
The 1911 season was the beginning of a precipitous end to the great Cubs machine. The first clue that this campaign would be different came in March, when Frank Chance sold Harry Steinfeldt’s contract to St. Paul of the American Association. Chance believed he had better, younger replacements at third base, and he turned out to be right. Steinfeldt’s best days were behind him.
The Cubs’ show-stopping third baseman made a half-hearted attempt at a comeback in 1911 in St. Paul and then Boston, but in mid-July he came down with a mysterious illness, thought to be typhoid fever. Then in August he was hospitalized with a “complete nervous breakdown.” Over his wife’s objections, he tried another comeback but was eventually cut loose. He went home brokenhearted to Bellevue, Kentucky, and soon came down with an extended illness that turned out to be fatal.
Harry Steinfeldt, wheelman, showman, and third baseman extraordinaire, died on August 17, 1914, of a cerebral hemorrhage. He was thirty seven.
David Rapp has been a political journalist and publishing executive in Washington, DC, for more than thirty years. He is the former editor of Congressional Quarterly, as well as the author of How the U.S. Got into Agriculture — and Why It Can’t Get Out.
“I Don’t Know” Is on Third was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.