As promised/threatened, Part Four, from 44 years ago
This series commenced at: https://ourgame.mlblogs.com/tales-of-the-hudson-river-league-d7f463349066.
Outfielder-pitcher Rube DeGroff was clearly the top player on the 1903 Saugerties entry in the Hudson River Baseball League, but the best athlete, by all accounts, was second baseman Ed Phillips. “Oh, he was a dandy,” recalled Merce Farrell of Montgomery Street. “He could jump eight feet in the air, I believe. He could stand still and jump over a table four feet high.” Bill Jacobs of Washington Avenue said Phillips was “a real hero — a great hitter and runner, besides being a broad jumper.”
Phillips was a large fellow, well over six feet and two hundred pounds according to Farrell; his size would have made him an unlikely candidate to play second base in this age, but back before 1920 there were many middle infielders of those dimensions in the majors — Nap Lajoie, Honus Wagner, and Rogers Hornsby, to name a few. In later years Phillips added to his girth and continued his public life as drum major in the local parades.
Ed’s aunt, Ella Phillips, was the grandmother of Myrtle Genthner, who married the catcher’s son. The receiver’s name was Bill Hanna, and so was that of the son, William Cortland Hanna, who was also a catcher in his turn, and was known as Cort. And Cort’s son was likewise named Bill, played ball here, and now resides on Partition Street.
Jack Hughes, the third baseman in 1903 and right fielder in 1904, came to this town from New Jersey to play minor league ball, and subsequently moved on to Bridgeport in the Connecticut State League. But when his baseball days were over, Jack returned to Saugerties and, according to Steve Brice of Washington Avenue, may have become a policeman. Hughes’ daughter Alice was a lifelong resident who passed on just a year or two ago.
Art “Bucky” Oliver, a speed-balling pitcher originally from the town of Andes in Delaware County, stayed on in Saugerties for many years, but seemingly has no relatives here today. He lived on West Bridge Street and worked as a housepainter.
The first baseman, Tom McGuirk, was a “loaferish” veteran, in the description of the Kingston Daily Leader, who remarkably had played the position for Newburgh in the original Hudson River League of 1886. In August McGuirk’s get-up-and-go got up and went, and so did he. The club’s president and general manager, Harry T. Keeney, was in a terrible fix for a first sacker and for a couple of games, handed the post to someone named Jacobs, who then disappeared himself. Was this the father of Bill Jacobs? Bill swears not, suggesting that the village tailor who also went by that name may have had a son who played ball.
Keeney, who in later years lived on Market Street and worked in the Saugerties National Bank, was the prime mover behind our community’s lone venture into fully professional baseball. He was present at the creation of the league and one of the ten stockholders in the Saugerties Baseball Association. The others, for the record, were David Elliott, George P. Hilton, R.F. Diedling, John C. Shultis, C.A. Spalding, W.W. Porter, L.B. Howard, Carroll Whitaker, and Clinton Van Buskirk — many familiar names here. The club appears to have been well run, not only finishing its 95-game season over .500 but also turning a profit.
But Keeney’s triumph of 1903 soured the following year. Several of the hometown favorites — Phillips, Hanna, Harry Brown, and Dave Elliott among them — were bumped aside in favor of comparatively high-priced imports; when the newcomers proved to be duds, and the club broke from the gate poorly, the natives grew restless. In Late May, the editor of the Saugerties Post wrote: “The directors of the Saugerties Club may take their franchise to another city owing to lack of support and unreasonable criticism of the people here. The directors are spending $1,000 a month trying to provide a good team, and because the team has not been winning the people are not standing by the club. If baseball is taken out of Saugerties it will not be half so pleasant to some of those who try to disrupt things by their uncalled for remarks.”
The dissatisfied fans were not won over by this argument; the team played out the 1904 schedule in relative privacy and then disbanded in mid-1905. Keeney had lost the better part of his investment, and his illusions. Bill Jacobs remembers Keeney telling him, “I made a terrible mistake bringing the Hudson River League to Saugerties. Once I brought that team in, when anybody played ball after that they always wanted to get paid. In other words, they were pros. If you got an amateur team, nobody wanted to play unless you slipped him ten dollars.” Men of the Bushwicks and the Saugerties A.C., was that so?
The Hudson River League continued for two years and part of a third after Saugerties pulled out, and produced many major leaguers who played on our turf. I’ll talk about them next week, in my concluding column.
Even More Tales of the Hudson River League was originally published in Our Game on Medium, where people are continuing the conversation by highlighting and responding to this story.