Twelfth in a season-long series
Who was the first fan? For me that is an interesting question, once we move beyond the earliest unknown enthusiasts, whether adults or children. In the 1850s, when baseball became an event for spectators as well as players, the watchers were nonplaying members of the opposing clubs, sometimes their lady companions, a motley passel of players from other clubs, and the inevitable gamblers and rowdies. As the game grew and professional leagues were formed, the civic or emotional attachment grew in intensity, to the point that by 1897, The New York Times stated that “local patriotism is at the bottom of the business which baseball has come to be.”
It was the fan — not a Doubleday or Cartwright, nor a Chadwick or Spalding — who transformed baseball from a boys’ game into a nation’s sport. By the early 1880s the baseball-mad were commonly called cranks or bugs, both terms intended to reference chronic and incurable illness, with more than a dash of lunacy. The 20th-century word fan is not, as is often written, a truncation of the 18th-century term “the fancy,” a flock of aristocratic fops who enjoyed slumming with the rabble at boxing matches. I am persuaded by Peter Morris that fan was a term that players used to deride their bleacher nemeses, and that it was a trope for the endlessly flapping motion of all those cognitively detached tongues.
Players have generally felt scorn for fans, especially those who made a specialty of drawing attention to themselves at the ballpark, with a cowbell (Hilda Chester) or a megaphone (Lolly Hopkins) or a drum (John Adams). In looking to identify pioneer fans, we may safely ignore the certifiably lunatic — Thomas J. Murphy, who in 1883 shot Providence outfielder Cliff Carroll; Ruth Ann Steinhagen, who shot Phillies first baseman Eddie Waitkus in 1949; Cleveland druggist Charley Lupica, who in that same season perched atop a flagpole until the Indians repeated as pennant winners (they didn’t, and he came down).
And yet: how else would a fan of yesteryear be remembered except by being a bit of a jerk? Sure, the players are important, the “superfan” knows, but he or she is the real star of the game, the one upon whom the outcome depends.
The most famous fan of the 1890s was sometime inventor and inveterate ne’er-do-well Frank B. Wood, shown above at the Polo Grounds. Zane Grey wrote a story about him called “Old Well-Well.” Grey had been a Polo Grounds regular from 1890s to the middle of the following decade, and many times must he have heard the sarcastic cry “Well! Well!! WELL!!!” with which the Giants rooter annotated the most awkward or disappointing moments of a game.
I could have picked Boston’s leather-lunged Arthur Dixwell, who screeched “Hi-Hi” at propitious points of the game. A jocular New York sportswriter noted: “Dixwell came here with the Bostons and the talk about the General’s ‘Hi, hi, hi’ screech made Wood jealous. He has issued a challenge to Dixwell for yelling-matches in New York and Boston….” But let’s bypass Dixwell because Zane Grey immortalized Wood in “Old Well-Well,” a story first published in Success magazine in July 1910. It was included in the author’s famous baseball collection The Redheaded Outfield and Other Stories (1920).
Grey had gone to New York’s Polo Grounds in search of the man who was “famous from Boston to Baltimore as the greatest baseball fan in the East.” The aspiring dentist and minor-league baseball player, soon to become an author, had been a regular at the Polo Grounds and Philadelphia’s Baker Bowl; many times must he have heard Wood’s eccentric squawk. But Grey was eerily prescient in returning his character to the Polo Grounds after a long absence — Wood had been banned from the ballpark by the Giants manager — to emit one last, near-fatal whoop.
In fact, at the time Grey wrote his story, Wood had not been permitted to return. Death came to Frank B. Wood, fan, age sixty-nine, on December 9, 1914, the year in which he had been readmitted to the Polo Grounds to make one final yelp as Mike Donlin struck out. Grey’s story may be read here: https://bit.ly/3q5d65l. (The story’s site is the Polo Grounds, but the Giants bat first, a wrinkle common in the years before 1900 and permissible until 1950.)
Question: Must a fan go to the park, or watch games on TV? What about collectors, or, dare I say it, historians like Ernie Lanigan, who early on ceased to attend games … or myself who, as I grow older, love the lore of the game more than last night’s box score?
Then there is the fan who collects, perhaps beginning with Michael “Nuf Ced” McGreevy of Boston’s Royal Rooters and his Third Base Saloon, “the last stop before home.” I think that must be a separate entry in the Pioneers series, probably for next week.
Below I will list fans who became famous, distinguishing these from the already famous who also became known as fans (so no Walt Whitman or Louis Armstrong, no DeWolf Hopper or Bill Robinson, no Jerry Seinfeld or Penny Marshall). Alas, for they would have been fun to write about.
Fans of Fame: The baker’s dozen below is faintheartedly alphabetical; rank ’em as ye will.
Steve Bartman
Doris Bauer
Hilda Chester
Arthur “Hi-Hi” Dixwell
Lib Dooley
Wild Bill Hagy
Lolly Hopkins
Mary Ott
Dr. James Penniman
Freddy Schuman
Sam Sianis
Ernest Lawence Thayer
Frank B. Wood
PIONEERS: Frank B. Wood was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.