The SuperStar Project - No. 5

Baseball's first (or second) Superstar

We tend to assume that the things we have forgotten were not important, which would not be a problem except we forget so many things.

Do you trust me? Cool. Swear to God I didn't rig this…

So, I Googled famous forgotten and one of the first hits was an Ancestry.com blog post, “Once Famous: Forgotten American Celebrities.” Five wildly-famous-but-now-forgotten Americans are listed, and I know absolutely nothing about four of them:

• Eva Tanguay, Vaudeville Star

• Dan Rice, Clown

• Dorothy Kelly, Actress

• Lewis R. Redmond, Outlaw

Do you recognize any of those names? Maybe! Probably not. All four of them have been almost completely forgotten, just as nearly all of today's celebrities will be forgotten a century and more from now. The fifth name, though? 

Hell yeah:

Mike Kelly, Baseball Player

In the early years of baseball, Mike “King” Kelly was the sport’s first star. Born in 1857 to Irish immigrants, he grew up in Paterson, New Jersey, and played with an amateur baseball club. He joined the majors at 19 and became a star player for the Chicago White Stockings.

With good looks, an intelligent game, and a genial personality, Kelly was popular among both players and fans. In the mid-1880s, he capitalized on his fame by making the leap to the stage, starring in plays in both Boston and California. He was the first baseball player to publish an autobiography.A vaudeville song, “Slide, Kelly, Slide,” was written about him and became a hit record. His visibility and broad appeal helped make baseball the country’s most popular sport. According to his death record on Ancestry, he died of pneumonia in 1894 at age 37 [sic].

Uh, hit record? In the 19th century? Sheet music, sure. But there weren't hit records way back then, were there?

There were.

And the reality is even more impressive than our Ancestry.com blogger says. Because “Slide, Kelly, Slide” wasn't just a hit record (or “recording”, if you want to get technical). It was the FIRST hit recording.

Sort of.

The song was reportedly written for Miss Maggie Cline, a top music hall performer of her time, with the sheet music published in 1889 with Kelly at the height of his fame. And that same year, the first wax cylinders carrying recorded sound were sold commercially.

In 1891, a recording artist named George Gaskin laid down “Slide, Kelly, Slide” on wax. Laid down many times, as the technology required one recording for every five cylinders. It's difficult to imagine how that business made sense, but as Kelly biographer Marty Appel writes, “by January 9, 1892, the song had become America's first ‘pop hit record’ – a song that was neither classical nor opera, patriotic nor religious. It was just a silly song that captivated the nation and helped make base ball more mainstream than it had been.”¹

Kelly added the song to his vaudeville act, but died in 1894 when still just 36. The song endured, though, with new recordings released as late as the 1920s. In 1927, there was a silent movie with the same name, featuring four actual baseball stars.

How does one define hit? No idea.

How many copies of Kelly's autobiography were sold? No idea.

How many people paid their nickel admission for one of the King’s vaudeville performances? No idea!

What seems clear, though, is that if we were to first allow for the possibility of baseball superstars in the 19th century, and then draw up a list of qualities we might see in a 19th century superstar, Mike Kelly would check many or most of those boxes. Shoot, maybe all of them.

In fact I have drawn up that list, and in fact Kelly does check most of the boxes. No, there weren't nearly as many boxes as there would be later. not quantifiably anyway. It was incredibly difficult to become widely famous in those days, as Marty Appel writes. But not impossible.

Appel:

It must be emphasized how difficult it was to achieve fame at that time, let alone be worthy of a book. Before radio became a force of American culture in the 1920s, and before national magazines like Collier’s and The Saturday Evening Post made their marks at the turn of the century, the idea of being a national celebrity really didn't exist. Yes, people knew the U.S. presidents and the names of Civil War generals, outlaw Cowboys and an inventor or two, but outside of that you had P. T. Barnum and Buffalo Bill as entertainers, John L Sullivan as a boxer – and not many others.

Baseball essentially produced three whose names were known outside of those homes where The Sporting News, Sporting Life, or The Police Gazette was read. One was Adrian “Cap” Anson, player-manager of the Chicago White Stockings, and another was his versatile and colorful star player, Mike Kelly. The third was the team's owner, Albert Spalding, largely through his sporting goods company.

Here, Appel was writing on the 125th anniversary of Kelly's 1888 book, Play Ball: Stories of the Ball Field. Which was, as Appel notes, the first book to carry a ballplayer's name. There would of course be many others in the following years. But Anson's book would not appear until 1900, Spalding’s in 1911; in both cases, years after their playing careers.

So, a couple of points here.

First, by any reasonable standard of his time, King Kelly was of course a superstar.

Second, any insistence that Babe Ruth (or Michael Jordan or Wayne Gretzky or Joe Namath or whoever) was the first real superstar – the sort of claim routinely made on book covers – says more about us than it says about the stars themselves.

Yes, it's wildly obvious that Ruth was the superest of stars to that point. For various reasons, no player before him had been so famous, endorsed so many products, played to so many crowds while barnstorming, etc.

But that's hardly the same as being the first superstar.

1. Appel’s excellent book about King Kelly earned the 1999 CASEY Award.