Before there were coneys, cars, paczkis or Jim Leyland, there was a championship pro baseball team in Detroit.
The Detroit Wolverines won the major-league title on Oct. 21, 1887, defeating the St. Louis Browns. It was the first of many professional sports championships for the city, and it ignited a citywide celebration that included a horse-and-buggy parade, a big dinner in a downtown hotel and demands from the players for more money.
Ned Hanlon, one of the Detroit stars, sounded like an engineer in praising the team’s discipline in outlasting the Browns.
“We laid out a system of rules which we have religiously followed, never departing form them,” he said. “System is everything, and we are system.”
One of the most popular players was Charlie Bennett, the catcher who wore with such a thin glove that his hand looked like liver. Playing for Boston in 1894, he fell under a train; doctors had to amputate his leg. Bennett later opened a cigar store in Detroit, and became the namesake of the first park at Michigan Trumbull.The Wolverines also included first baseman Dan Brouthers, right, one of the 19th Century’s greatest sluggers, and right fielder Sam Thompson, who hit .372 in 1887 and had 166 RBI’s. Hanlon, Brouthers and Thompson were later inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame.
To win the championship, the Wolverines, also known simply as the Detroits, beat the Browns in a 15-game series.
Yes, 15 games.
Baseball was different in 1887: Detroit played in the National League. The Wolverines' home field was Recreation Park, at Brush and Brady, a location that today would be inside the Medical Center near Mack Avenue.
Modern rules were a work in progress 125 years ago. A pitcher needed four strikes to retire a batter; a batter needed five balls to “walk” to first, and a base on balls was as good as a hit. Just like they tell you in Little League, a walk counted as a single and improved your batting average. Indeed, 11 National League hitters finished the year with averages higher than .400.
While the bases were 90 feet apart, like today, pitchers stood just 50 feet from the hitter, which is 10 feet, six inches closer than today. The thought of the Justin Verlander of 2012 pitching in 1887 boggles the mind.
With only 200,000 residents and many horses, and with the first automobile still nine years in the future, Detroit was also different in 1887, but it was beginning to take on the shape of the 20th Century’s industrial powerhouse. The city had factories that individually employed up to 800 workers, many of them immigrants, and they turned out such heavy metal products as stoves, boats, engines and railroad cars. The biggest union? The Iron Moulders.
A 21st Century Detroiter could have felt at home in 1887, too, by spending an afternoon at Belle Isle, drinking a Vernor’s and reading about the ball club in the Free Press or the News. The papers carried game stories, features, trade rumors and box scores, just like today.
Fans were called “cranks,” and their cheers sound positively weird to a fan today. “Fall dead, young fellow,” cranks yelled at opponents. “What size coffin so you want?”
Opening Day in 1887 was May 5. A band played Strauss and Verdi, and citizens presented the team with a large floral horseshoe, a tradition that has continued into modern times.
The Wolverines began the 1887 season with a 30-12 record and became the biggest story in baseball. They struggled throughout the summer with internal bickering and a power struggle between manager Bill Watkins and team owner Frederick Stearns, the heir to his father’s pharmaceutical business. But they finished 79-45 and won the National League pennant.
Said the Free Press: “Most cranks in this vicinity will be compelled to pinch themselves in order to be convinced that they are not dreaming.”
Post-season championship series had not been formalized in 1887, so Stearns challenged the Browns, of the rival American Association, to a series.
After negotiations and a settlement with the players for extra salary, the 15-game tournament was set to begin Oct. 10 in St. Louis, then travel to Detroit and other cities in the East and Midwest until it returned to St. Louis for the final contest Oct. 26.
The teams played perhaps the best of the 15 games at Recreation Park. The Wolverines tied the score in the eight inning and won in the 13th, when a St. Louis error allowed the winning run.
“The spectators set their teeth in the intensity of the excitement,” proclaimed the Free Press. “It was hand-to-hand, bitter, dogged combat.”
The Tigers clinched the series Oct. 21, in Baltimore.
“The Detroits are now champions of the world,” the Free Press announced.
Research for this story came from a variety of sources, including a story I wrote about the 1887 Wolverines for the Free Press in 1987.
