The Chattanooga Lookouts & 100 Seasons of Scenic City Baseball

The Chattanooga Lookouts

& 100 Seasons of Scenic City Baseball

Stephen Martini

Copyright © 2005 Dry Ice Publishing

All rights reserved. No part of this publication may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted in any form or by any means electronic, mechanical, photocopying, recording or otherwise, without the prior written permission of the publisher.

If you purchase this book without a cover you should be aware that this book may have been stolen property and reported as unsold and destroyed to the publisher. In such case neither the author nor the publisher has received any payment for this stripped book.

Published by

Dry Ice Publishing

Cleveland, TN 37323

Visit our Web site at www.lulu.com/dryicepublishing

Printed by

Lulu Enterprises

3131 RDU Center Drive, Suite 210

Morrisville, NC 27560

Cover Photography and Layout

J. Guy Photography

Chattanooga, Tennessee

www.jguyphoto.com

On the Cover – (Front) Chattanooga Lookouts Infielder Gary Patchett takes a cut at a pitch in a game against the Carolina Mudcats August 4th, 2005. (Back) The scoreboard at BellSouth Park records a tied score of the same game in the bottom of the ninth, as the Lookouts face two outs and a full-count. The Lookouts won the game 7 to 6.

International Standard Book Number (ISBN): 978-0-557-27927-2

eISBN: 978-1-25722-936-9

Printed in the United States of America

First Paperback Printing: April 2006

This book is dedicated to Hillis Layne –

A legendary piece in the puzzle of the national pastime and

Chattanooga’s most famous unsung hero.

Acknowledgments

Writing a book like this – trying to piece together the events of the past 125 years and 100 seasons of Chattanooga baseball – is a huge undertaking that is summed up best by author Leo Rosten, who said, The only reason for being a professional writer is that you can’t help it.

I owe a debt of thanks to many people, likely more than I’ll remember to list. But here’s my shot at it:

First and foremost, God. He sees all; He knows all; and without Him I’m as effective as a sack of leaves on the curb in November.

Thank you to my wife, Tina, and son, Zachary, for loving a writer and spending your days, nights, weekends, and holidays reading about, talking about, and hearing about the Chattanooga Lookouts. I promise I’m done talking about my books … until the next one.

Thanks to my dad and mom, Tony and Tonya Martini, for encouraging a geeky first-grader to read and write … then making me go outside and play ball with my brother like a normal kid when all I wanted to do was shut myself in my room with my nose in a book.

Thanks, Hillis Layne and Roy Hawes, two true gems in Lookouts history, for their willingness to share their stories with me and their winning attitudes and abilities with Chattanooga.

Thanks, Frank Burke, for continuing to share the vision of Chattanooga Lookouts baseball – and mine.

Thanks, Jonathan Guy, for dominating the camera lens and producing such high quality photos for my words to rest between.

Thanks, Charlie Timmons, for giving 25 years as a firefighter with the city of Chattanooga protecting her citizens and 27 years to the fans of Lookouts baseball entertaining their ears.

Thanks, Bill Hull, curator at the Chattanooga Regional History Museum, and their crackerjack staff who work daily to preserve the heritage of the Scenic City.

Thanks to the staff at the Chattanooga Hamilton County Bicenntenial Library’s Local History Department for their knowledgeable assistance.

Thanks, Gary and Becky Adams, my in-laws, and Mitch Smith for production assistance.

Thanks, Kim Kinsey, Joyce Richey, Jason Jones (for purchasing the first copy) and the entire third shift crew at the Chattanooga Police Department’s dispatch center for technical assistance and pointers.

Thanks, Bill Lee, Arvin Reingold, Harmon Jolley, Woodrow W. Benefield, and Dan Creed for filling in the holes.

Thanks, Wirt Gammon, Jr., for pointing me in the right direction.

Thanks to the entire staff at BellSouth Park for being helpful each and every time I wandered through the door to the front office for yet another interview, or throughout the stadium in pursuit of the perfect picture. Further, I am eternally grateful and humbled you cleared some space on a shelf in your gift shop for my labor of love and consuming passion – this little book.

Whoever wants to know the heart and mind of America had better learn baseball.

- Jacques Barzun, historian

Preface

You won’t find the story of a minor league baseball team in statistics. The win-loss columns of the newspaper don’t tell the tales of legendary days at the park or outstanding promotions.

Rather, the story of minor league baseball lies within the fans that continue to support teams whose rosters change sometimes week-to-week.

It lies within the players, striving for years in the Bush Leagues for just one crack of the bat in the majors.

It lies within the hopes of every team owner, struggling to win the ongoing battle for America’s rapidly diminishing attention span. Competing against cable television, air conditioning, and days at the lake for but a few hours of time spent lavishing in the presence of our national pastime.

The story is in the hearts of every eight-year-old boy holding a hot dog, a Coke, a large foam finger, and a baseball cap donning the logo of the hometown team. In almost every city, the story is the same. The same game adored by the same type of people on the same sunny summer days that make you wish, in that fleeting moment, you were a child again.

I’ve watched the story unfold all my life. Sitting by my Dad, baseball glove in my hand eagerly watching the field for any chance at catching a fly ball while cheering the Triple-A Tacoma Tigers and Salt Lake City Buzz, and the Pioneer League Ogden Raptors. When I grew up and got married, I introduced my wife to the game as we rooted for the Single A Kinston Indians.

But the greatest story of the greatest game lies in the heart of Chattanooga, wound tightly within the fabric of one of the oldest baseball leagues in the nation.

Today, I take my own son to cheer the Lookouts at BellSouth Park. I cheer them today for where they’re going. I cheer them for where they’ve been because I know the story.

The story of one of the greatest baseball promoters in the history of the game.

The story of nine members of the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

The story of devoted fans, stunning upsets, saving graces, and unimaginable heartbreaks.

The story of empty stands and record crowds, golden ages and dark clouds, bench-clearing brawls and wedding bells, die-hard fans and championship seasons, and legendary players, both bragged on and banned.

I’ll tell you the story of the Chattanooga Lookouts – arguably one of the most significant ball clubs in the history of this nation – the way the Lookouts have always told their story. Not through statistics, wins and losses, batting or earned run averages.

Rather through their stories of one hundred seasons spent entertaining generations of fans in the same way they’ll continue to entertain in the Scenic City of the South for generations to come.

Grab a Coke and a hot dog, or some Crackerjacks. Find a seat down one of the baselines, just out of the sun and settle in; the game is about to begin.

Chapter One

In the Beginning …

Chattanooga.

The Scenic City of the South.

The South’s little big town straddling the Tennessee- Georgia state line has been home to tourism since the turn of the 20th century.

At the top of Lookout Mountain, hundreds of thousands have flocked to See Rock City – for decades, a phrase emblazoned on the roofs of barns across the Southeast and Midwest. From Missionary Ridge to Point Park, the city is steeped in military history, telling the struggles of a nation divided in the midst of the Civil War.

Year-round, tourists come to Chattanooga to ride the Incline Railway and tour the Tennessee Aquarium – the world’s largest freshwater aquatic exhibit.

The Scenic City of the South is the self-proclaimed home of miniature putt-putt golf – originally called gooney golf. In the 1940s, Glenn Miller immortalized the Chattanooga Choo Choo in a chart-topping song.

Tourists flow into Chattanooga as strong and wide as the winding Tennessee River. Within the currents of that timeless river has always been baseball.

Almost since the birth of the game as a professional sport, Chattanooga has been home to organized baseball.

As Chattanooga struggled to acclimate to the turbulent aftermath of the Civil War – seeing the rise of the Ku Klux Klan and Jim Crow laws – a nation turned its battered eyes on baseball.

In 1869, Cincinnati, Ohio formed the first professional baseball team – the Red Stockings. In 1871, other cities fielded

teams and joined with Cincinnati to form the first professional baseball league – the National Association.

By the end of the decade, semi-professional baseball swept downstream from Cincinnati and washed up on the shores of the Tennessee River along the banks of the Lookout Valley.

The seeds of the national pastime took root and semi- professional baseball budded in Chattanooga.

Baseball found a home with the Roane Iron Company in 1880, when the mill fielded an unbeatable team of employees called the Chattanooga Roanes. The Roanes were virtually unstoppable, routinely defeating the Mobile Pastimes, and teams in Nashville and

Knoxville. When at home, the Roanes played on a ball field found at the corner of Douglas and Vine streets, now in the heart of the University of Tennessee at Chattanooga campus, near MacLellan Gym.

Billy Hart

One of only two Lookouts pitchers in 1885, Hart started his career in Chattanooga. After that season, he played for the Philadelphia Athletics, then Cincinnati and Brooklyn. In 1910, he was playing with the minor league club in Little Rock when O.B.

Andrews bought the franchise and moved the club back to Chattanooga.

At the end of the 1910 season, Hart retired – ending his career with the same club with which he’d started 25 years earlier.

Many big league teams from further north used the field for spring training games.

For five years, the Roanes dominated semi-professional baseball, priming the pump for fans of Chattanooga baseball to support a professional ball club.

In 1885, Chattanoogans got that chance.

Atlanta, Nashville, Birmingham, and Memphis united to form a professional baseball league. Chattanooga eagerly jumped in – along with Augusta, Macon, and Columbus forming the Southern League. The league is now one of the oldest in the history of the game.

Henry W. Grady, managing editor of the Atlanta Constitution, was league president. Spearheading Chattanooga’s jump into professional baseball was a local banker and entrepreneur, John C. Stanton. In 1870, Stanton built a five-story extravagant hotel along what is now the 1400 block of Market Street. Construction costs mounted above $100,000 as did the amenities – indoor plumbing on every floor, billiard rooms, a barbershop, several balconies, a large dining room and a livery stable.

The Stanton House was a risky venture, built well east of

The Stanton House

the city’s growing downtown in an attempt to draw tourists to settle the area. Some feared Stanton’s decision to build so far from Chattanooga would

deter guests from staying at the hotel.

By 1885, after fifteen years in East

Chattanooga, Stanton likely shared those fears.

Surely, he saw the rising popularity of baseball and watched as Chattanoogans embraced the

This was the answer he sought! Baseball could bring fans to the Stanton House – fans he could convert into patrons of his hotel!

The banker built a baseball field behind his hotel, calling it Stanton Field. Players, barely paid but eager to play, came out to practice leaving behind their families and their other jobs for a few hours each day to chase a dream.

When the men took the field that spring, they faced a mountain of expectations. The Roanes were incredibly successful and the success of Stanton’s club relied on their ability to win games.

In their inaugural season, Chattanooga won just 30 of 89 games. The club blamed their losses on a variety of things – lousy umpiring, un-sportsmanlike conduct by opposing team’s fans, and some of their own players not performing to their potential.

Other teams wooed the Chattanooga ballplayers – Bentel, Ryan, and Seigle – with big salaries to throw the games.

The players have been notified they will be blacklisted if they do not play better, a reporter for the Chattanooga Times wrote. They will doubtless heed that warning.

Later, Bentel was suspended for being the ringleader of the scandal.

The Atlanta Crackers won the first Southern League pennant, while Chattanooga finished seventh of the eight teams – defeating only Birmingham.

Crowds came to Stanton Field but didn’t stay, which was the story all across the newly formed Southern League. By the end of the 1885 season, Columbus disbanded their club.

In July 1886, Chattanooga dropped out of the league, unable to keep players away from their families and jobs for months at a time. When the club dropped out, they’d fallen to the bottom of the Southern League, winning just twenty of fifty-four games.

The Atlanta Crackers claimed the league pennant for the second time.

In 1887 and 1888, Chattanooga didn’t rejoin the Southern League, unable to field a team. Still others – Mobile, Nashville, Atlanta, and Savannah – dropped out as well. In 1888, Chattanooga fielded a local semi-professional team called the Sullivans, but to no avail.

Refusing to quit, Stanton and the Chattanooga ballplayers rejoined the Southern League in 1889.

New Orleans, Atlanta, and Mobile jumped back into the league with Chattanooga, playing in front of budding fans for only a few months until the league suspended play in June to reorganize.

After a three-week lapse in play, the teams returned to the diamond ready to resume the season.

Calamity continued and the Southern League folded for a second time that season – little more than two weeks later on July 5th. Atlanta, Birmingham, and Memphis struggled to draw fans,

Samuel Strang Nicklin

Not only was Nicklin a former player and owner of the Chattanooga Lookouts, he also coached baseball at West Point Military Academy. Under his tutelage – Five-star General Omar Nelson Bradley and General Robert Neyland, the now famous head coach of University of Tennessee football and namesake of the team’s 104,079-capacity stadium on the banks of the Tennessee River.

dropping out of the league before July. Chattanooga played only thirty-eight games that season, winning just over half to finish third. New Orleans claimed the pennant.

For two years, the Southern League saw no action, players and fans opting to stay home and devote their time, money, and energy into their jobs and family. The game of baseball was simply that – a

game – and these men couldn’t afford to dedicate much of their sparse free time to play.

Regardless of what seemed to be a mountain of mounting obstacles, baseball promoters and owners pressed forward and, in 1892, the Southern League saw its third resurrection in eight years.

John Stanton let a contract to a Mr. Brown to build a better ball field for Chattanooga behind his hotel on what was then called Montgomery Avenue.

Chattanooga chose a team name – the Chatts – and manager, Ted Sullivan (no doubt the namesake of the city’s semi- pro 1888 club) rallied his troops to do battle.

In the first half of the season, the Chatts dominated, besting Montgomery, Mobile, New Orleans, Atlanta, Macon, and Memphis.

The Chatts won 52 of the 82 games they played and finished on top of the Southern League.

According to an article in the Chattanooga News, the crowds responded.

After a late-April victory put the Chatts back in control of the league pennant race, one reporter wrote, The crowd was tremendous. [The crowd of 3,500] seemed nearly twice as many as the opening game of the league … the edges of the left and right field were covered with vehicles. The roofs of the ticket and refreshment stands were covered with spectators.

At one point, the games drew such large crowds many climbed on top of nearby railroad cars to catch a free peek at the action and avoiding the dime admission charge to sit by the field.

Strong crowd attendance through July wasn’t enough to keep the Chatts winning. In the second half, they fell to last place in the league while Birmingham quickly stepped up, winning 30 of 41 games.

At the time, a champion was determined in a playoff series between the best team from the first and second halves. By season’s end, Birmingham and Chattanooga set to face off in a best- of-nine series.

Both clubs immediately called in new players for the championship game, eager to claim the title. The move was nothing new for the Chattanooga club, according to author Wirt Gammon. In his book, Your Lookouts Since 1885 he wrote, The personnel of the ‘Nooga club was constantly changing anyhow, because the players and their fiery skipper couldn’t get along for more than a change of the moon.

The first three games were fought in Birmingham, while the next three raged in Chattanooga. Game seven was played in Atlanta while Nashville hosted the final two games.

By the ninth game, each team claimed four wins and both teams played hard for the pennant in font of a huge crowd of Nashvillians. When the umpires called the ninth game on account of darkness and both teams were still scoreless, the officials decided the final game would be played out the next day.

The deciding battle never took place.

During the night, Birmingham departed its several ways, the members restless to be home after five months of absence, scattering to the north, south, east and west.

When Ted Sullivan woke up the next morning to the news that his opponent fled the battlefield under cover of darkness, he was outraged.

The officials awarded the Chatts their first Southern League pennant title by default but Sullivan was not satisfied. The fiery manager wasn’t content to win the title without winning a deciding game. He accused Birmingham of robbing Chattanooga of a legitimate pennant. Birmingham manager Mr. Manning replied only that his boys had business at home.

Chattanooga’s official claim to the contested title lasted only a few months. At an October 31st meeting of the Southern League, officials awarded the Southern League pennant to Birmingham, citing the club posted better numbers throughout the season than Chattanooga.

Chattanooga still recognizes the 1892 pennant as its first Southern League Championship victory.

Chapter Two

Tottering on the Raw Edge of Oblivion

Despite claiming their first pennant-winning season, averaging around 800 fans at the field per game, Chattanooga struggled with the rest of the nation to keep interest in the sport.

Wrote one Chattanooga Times reporter; Baseball is truly tottering on the raw edge of oblivion. Great towns in the North and East are drawing only 1,200 to games now, whereas three or four years ago crowds of 10,000 were not so remarkable.

Ever the optimist, Stanton continued investing in his club and the growing Chattanooga fan base. More work was done at the ball field in anticipation of even larger crowds. Three hundred seats with backs were added for ladies and their male escorts who found tobacco objectionable. Crews added hitching posts along the sides of the field for tying up previously unrestrained horses. In past years, horses left along the sides of the field would run onto the playing area when hit with a foul ball and the hitching posts brought a welcome end to the unwelcome interruption to the game.

Schoolwork took a back seat to baseball in 1893. Parents sent their boys to school with notes, asking their sons to be excused from their studies earlier than 3:30 p.m. so they can reach the park before the game started.

According to The Chattanooga Times, the superintendent of schools complied with each request, knowing fully that if he didn’t the boys would simply skip school that day all together.

Twelve teams took the field throughout the Southern League in 1893.