1913 Blue Sox
Even in professional baseball, sometimes if you build a small ballpark the crowds still won’t fill it. The Covington Blue Sox learned that in the spring of 1913.
The Sox belonged to the upstart Federal League, which a year later would try to crash its way into baseball’s organized professional establishment as a third major circuit, alongside the American and National leagues.
Unfortunately for Covington, whose citizens still were feeling economic woes from the Ohio River flood of March and April 1913, thoughts weren’t entirely on baseball. After the successful home opener, crowds quickly dwindled. The Blue Sox would leave Northern Kentucky for Kansas City in late June with the hopes of larger crowds there.
The team’s record when it departed for Kansas City was 21-20, according to Robert Wiggins’ 2009 book, “The Federal League of Base Ball Clubs: The History of an Outlaw Major League, 1914-15.” The team, renamed the Packers, ended the season 53-65, he said.
The Federal League started 1913 with teams in major-league cities. There were the Chicago Federals, who later became the Whales, and who in 1914 would play in Weeghman Park. It is known today as Wrigley Field.
Cleveland’s team, informally called the Green Sox because of its young players, was managed by hall-of-famer Cy Young, for whom the annual award for best pitcher in the American and National leagues is named.
There also were the Pittsburgh Rebels, St. Louis Terriers and Covington’s Blue Sox. Indianapolis had a team that lacked an official name but were alternately known as the Hoosiers, Hoosierfeds (because of the league affiliation) and the Indians.
The first-ever Federal League game was played May 3, 1913, between Covington and Cleveland in Cleveland’s Luna Park. The game was declared a 6-6 tie after 10 innings because of darkness.
While the Blue Sox played its first games on the road, building crews in Covington hurried to finish Federal Park, which originally was to hold 4,200 but was expanded during construction to seat 6,000.
William Reidlin, president of Covington’s Bavarian Brewery, and R.C. Stewart of the Stewart Iron Works, raised $12,500 for the ballpark, where construction started April 16 at Second and Scott streets.
Covington’s “twirler” (pitcher) was Walter “Smoke” Justus, eight years beyond his only big-league season with the Detroit Tigers in which he pitched three innings and had an 8.1 earned-run average. On Covington’s home opener, he shut out St. Louis 4-0.
Some criticized the playing field’s small dimensions – 194 feet from home plate to the wall in right field, 218 to left field and 267 feet to center.
Wiggins’ upcoming book, tentatively called “Deacon and the Schoolmaster,” due out in 2011, will report that a businessman affiliated with the Covington venture told a correspondent from the Sporting Life tabloid the club lost $12,000 before moving.
Sporting Life observed the Covington effort was doomed from the start because “No real lover of the game would go out often and see the sport massacred in a band-box. Curiosity would draw the elect once or twice, but there was no chance on the Covington field for real fast play.”
At one point, the Kentucky Post printed a letter begging fans to support the team, but to no avail.
In 1914, the Federal League started luring away players, some for double or more their earlier salaries, briefly escalating salaries.
One of the first notables was the Cincinnati Reds’ Joe Tinker, hired by the Chicago Feds as player-manager after the 1913 season. Several writers said that big jump in pay, followed by a drop after the Federal League shut down, set the economic stage for the “Black Sox” gambling scandal in which the Chicago White Sox threw games in the 1919 World Series to the Reds.
For fans of retro fashions, the Blue Sox logo was nothing special – just a line drawing of a batter with the blue initials “BS.”
A major remnant today of the Federal League was an anti-trust lawsuit filed by owners of the Baltimore Terrapins, who wanted a big-league team in their city after the owners of other Federal League teams were allowed to buy major-league clubs, according to www.baseball-reference.com.
The Baltimore owners sued the major leagues and their former Federal League colleagues, leading to the 1922 U.S. Supreme Court decision of Federal Baseball Club v. National League et al., in which the justices unanimously ruled Major League Baseball was exempt from the Sherman Antitrust Act because, despite the travel of teams and fans, baseball was not interstate commerce.
Reporter Mike Rutledge wrote this story on an obscure part of local baseball history. It originally appeared in the Cincinnati Enquirer, but since been deleted from their site.