Cap Anson
(from 1887 Allen & Ginter tobacco card)
Cap Anson was a restless boy who couldn’t sit still in class. Teachers complained he was lazy with books but quick with a bat. By his teens, everyone in Marshalltown knew the boy could hit. When he connected, it didn’t sound like other kids hitting. It cracked like a pistol shot.
He was only nineteen when he jumped into professional ball. A Philadelphia newspaper called him “a lad of brawn and nerve, swinging a bat with the force of a smith’s hammer.” His teammates noticed something else: he liked to tell everyone what to do. They started calling him “Cap,” short for captain, and the name never left him.
He arrived in Chicago in 1876, and hit .300 every year, scooped throws at first base like it was nothing, and ran the club with a general’s bark. The Chicago Tribune gushed about his “commanding presence,” while the St. Louis papers grumbled about his “constant eruptions.” Either way, he was the center of attention.
Game day with Anson wasn’t just baseball—it was theater. He’d march his men out like soldiers, line them up, and then spend nine innings exploding at everything in sight. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch said, “Every inning brought another eruption from Anson’s corner. The umpires in terror, the spectators in delight.” Even his own teammates sometimes cracked jokes about his tantrums.
When he hit, the whole park leaned in. He had a heavy, chopping swing that sent line drives screaming into gaps. Fans swore they could hear the ball whistle. One New York writer said, “Anson’s bat is the surest thunder in the league.” In Chicago during a pennant chase, the Tribune described how “he strutted to the dish like a conquering warrior, the crowd hushed as if awaiting the crash of artillery.” The pitcher fired, the bat cracked, and two runs came rumbling home. “Anson’s bat boomed again.”
He invented hand signals, drilled his men in new strategies, banned drinking, and ran practices like a drill sergeant. Players cursed him under their breath, but they won, and that made it hard to argue.
He could be funny without meaning to. His mustache alone had a reputation. When he shaved it in 1895, the Chicago Tribune moaned, “The mustache that has terrorized the arbiters of the game is no more. What sarcasm it once concealed, what roars it once accompanied!”
He also had an ugly streak. In 1883, when his White Stockings were set to face Toledo, Anson refused to take the field because Moses Fleetwood Walker, a Black catcher, was in the lineup. He pulled the same stunt a few years later in Newark with George Stovey. Those incidents helped shut Black players out of organized baseball for six decades. Even the Cleveland Plain Dealer admitted, “The Captain has made himself the loud voice of prejudice.”
Off the diamond, Anson’s life was a series of side hustles gone wrong. He opened a glittering billiards and bowling palace in Chicago—with electric lights, music, everything. For a while it was packed. Then came labor strikes, debts, bankruptcy. “Cap Anson, who once commanded men on the field, could not command his creditors,” one reporter cracked.
He tried politics next, won a seat as city clerk, and filled his speeches with baseball slang. Papers mocked him as a sideshow. Then he tried vaudeville, hauling his daughters on stage and hitting papier-mâché balls into the crowd while singing. The Chicago Inter Ocean teased that “Pop Anson may no longer terrorize umpires, but he can still charm an audience.”
By the time he wrote his memoirs, he was in full boast mode. He bragged about every pennant, every batting title, every trick he’d invented. A reviewer sighed, “A book of boasts, but the boasts are mostly true.” He wasn’t modest, but then again, modesty wasn’t what fans wanted from him.
When he finally died in 1922 at sixty-nine, the obituaries sounded like farewells to a king.
He invented hand signals, drilled his men in new strategies, banned drinking, and ran practices like a drill sergeant. Players cursed him under their breath, but they won, and that made it hard to argue.
He could be funny without meaning to. His mustache alone had a reputation. When he shaved it in 1895, the Chicago Tribune moaned, “The mustache that has terrorized the arbiters of the game is no more. What sarcasm it once concealed, what roars it once accompanied!”
He also had an ugly streak. In 1883, when his White Stockings were set to face Toledo, Anson refused to take the field because Moses Fleetwood Walker, a Black catcher, was in the lineup. He pulled the same stunt a few years later in Newark with George Stovey. Those incidents helped shut Black players out of organized baseball for six decades. Even the Cleveland Plain Dealer admitted, “The Captain has made himself the loud voice of prejudice.”
Off the diamond, Anson’s life was a series of side hustles gone wrong. He opened a glittering billiards and bowling palace in Chicago—with electric lights, music, everything. For a while it was packed. Then came labor strikes, debts, bankruptcy. “Cap Anson, who once commanded men on the field, could not command his creditors,” one reporter cracked.
He tried politics next, won a seat as city clerk, and filled his speeches with baseball slang. Papers mocked him as a sideshow. Then he tried vaudeville, hauling his daughters on stage and hitting papier-mâché balls into the crowd while singing. The Chicago Inter Ocean teased that “Pop Anson may no longer terrorize umpires, but he can still charm an audience.”
By the time he wrote his memoirs, he was in full boast mode. He bragged about every pennant, every batting title, every trick he’d invented. A reviewer sighed, “A book of boasts, but the boasts are mostly true.” He wasn’t modest, but then again, modesty wasn’t what fans wanted from him.
When he finally died in 1922 at sixty-nine, the obituaries sounded like farewells to a king.
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