Thomas Rathkamp - Happy Felsch: Banished Black Sox Center Fielder

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Jefferson, North Carolina

LIBRARY OF CONGRESS CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

BRITISH LIBRARY CATALOGUING DATA ARE AVAILABLE

e-ISBN: 978-1-4766-2323-8

2016 Tom Rathkamp. All rights reserved

No part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form or by any means, electronic or mechanical, including photocopying or recording, or by any information storage and retrieval system, without permission in writing from the publisher.

Front cover: Chicago White Sox center fielder Oscar Happy Felsch, 1920 (Library of Congress)

McFarland & Company, Inc., Publishers
Box 611, Jefferson, North Carolina 28640
www.mcfarlandpub.com

For Marilyn and Robert,
the most loving and selfless parents
an aspiring writer could ever have

Labors of love are rarely solitary acts. I am profoundly indebted to several gracious, generous souls. My lead-off hitter is Stuart Shea, a Chicago Society for American Baseball Research member. He provided integral research access, without which this project would have been difficult to complete. Milwaukee-area writer Jim Nitz, who wrote the excellent SABR BioProject piece on Felsch, spawned much of my interest in this project. Thanks, Jim!

Local libraries played a crucial role. Humble gratitude goes out to Emily Laws of our local Cedarburg, Wisconsin, library. Her prompt and courteous service calmed my nerves heading down the home stretch.

How did any baseball researcher survive before Retrosheet.org? Most of the statistics in this book came from this wonderful website. My thanks go to David Smith and the countless researchers who painstakingly plow through ancient newspapers and other primary sources to gather and share individual game accounts. Your influence on baseball research is immeasurable.

As a fellow member of the Society of American Baseball Research, I would like to thank the authors of earlier works on the 1919 Black Sox scandal and related subjects. One of the first was Eliot Asinofs book Eight Men Out. Although that book has been intensely scrutinized in other works about the scandal, a pleasant chat with the late authors son, Martin Asinof, confirmed for me that his fathers heart and love for the game was always genuine.

William Lamb, author of the more recent Black Sox in the Courtroom, has shed bright lights on the 1921 trial, which brought a lot of ugliness into focus. Many thanks to Gabriel Schechter at the National Baseball Hall of Fame for the materials gleaned from their treasure trove of baseball research.

My appreciation extends to Laura Laurishke, granddaughter of Oscar Felsch and daughter of Oscar Jr. The memories shared from when she was a young girl reminded me of how precious family loyalty can be.

I would like to thank the Society of American Baseball Research for the wealth of resources and support that my membership provides.

Last, but hardly least, I could not have sweated over the research, bitten nails over the computer, paced in the upstairs hallway, or anguished over where my next sentence would come from, without the loyal, loving support of my dear wife Sarah, son Andrew, and daughter Stephanie. Their patience and encouragement kept me focused and alleviated the guilt I felt when this book project made heavy demands of my time. I have much to catch up on in 2016 and beyond. You have my solemn promise.

Happy Felsch? I remember Happy Felsch. He used to ride past our house on his bicycle. Happy Felsch, yeah he was always around.

Dave Rathkamp (the authors uncle)

My uncle, his brother Robert (my dad) and other brother Bill lived close to Oscar Felsch when they were growing up on the predominantly German north side of Milwaukee. They even worshiped at the same church, Emmaus Lutheran on North 20th Street. Felsch was a generation older, and to my dad and his brothers, he was just another codger.

Felsch honed his baseball skills on Milwaukee playgrounds and vacant lots, preceding other of Milwaukees baseball luminaries, including Al Simmons (born Aloysius Szymanski), Joe Hauser, Ken Keltner, Tony Kubek, Bob Uecker, and Craig Counsell. Felschs fame hung in the balance amid the biggest debacle in baseball history, just as he was approaching stardom. As Milwaukee writer Jim Nitz penned succinctly, Felsch rose to the pinnacle of the baseball world only to be consigned forever to the sports hell.

He started life as most young boys of the time did: finishing his chores, staying out of trouble, and playing as much baseball as the daylight permitted. The north side of Milwaukee was a hotbed of diamond matches. The preponderance of amateur, sandlot, church, and company teams in the early twentieth century was startling. Every empty parcel was officially or unofficially reserved for baseball. Felsch plied his trade for several local teams, working his way up to AA before making his major league debut with the Chicago White Sox in 1915.

The 1919 Sox were reportedly severed into two distinct camps: the barely educated and the academically refined. In those days, a high school education was less necessary than college is today. On this team, the intellectual gap was remarkably clear-cut. On one side, you had cocky and confident Ivy Leaguer Eddie Collins, Shano Collins (no relation), Nemo Leibold, Red Faber, and Ray Schalk. In the school of hard knocks camp were Felsch, Eddie Cicotte, Joe Jackson, Swede Risberg, Arnold Chick Gandil, Buck Weaver, and part-timer Fred McMullin (the only one of this group to finish high school). The demeanor and behavior played parts, with the latter group sinking into repeated peril.

As polarizing as the two factions were, more so was their vivacious owner, Charles Comiskey. Extensive research revealed two types of people: those who loved him and those who despised him. Felsch seemed to be on both sides, depending on who asked, what year it was, or how much liquor he had consumed. The Old Roman, as he was called, was a pivotal figure in the sports history, both as player and owner.

The man they called Happy was a wonderfully athletic brute of a man who got sucked into a ring of greed, corruption, and stunted dreams. His cheerful, jocular personality complemented his single-minded passion for baseball, and he paid little attention to activities that involved the brain. His talents on the field earned raving endorsements by sportswriters at every level, and from the man himself, Babe Ruth. His parents were first-generation German immigrants who chose Milwaukee as their new home. The Brew City welcomed immigrants openly, particularly from the Germanic states that were collectively known as Prussia. Milwaukees growth surge, combined with the oppression and hopelessness of their homeland, made families such as the Felsches ripe for a cultural rebirth.

With his breakout year in 1920his final campaignFelsch was entering the peak of his career at age 28. How good would he have become? Did he have Hall of Fame talent? These questions are examined at the end of the book. Firsthand accounts by the shamed ballplayers are rare. Felsch talked the most publicly about the scandal, in three separate interviews. The first was immediately after the scandal, with his last, and arguably most contrite, coming 40 years later, not long before he died.

The preponderance of betting during the Dead Ball Era in general, and the 1919 World Series in particular, was no secret. Baseball and gambling were blood brothers long before the Black Sox scandal. These players were not dumb, writes Sean Deveney in his book about the 1918 Series. Game-fixing talk on team trains was nothing new. Sometimes it was idle chatter, other times not. Gambling and baseball were intricately linked. Wagering was seemingly as much a part of the game as bats, balls, and gloves, and in retrospect, 1919 should not have been a surprise. The pathological denial and systematic concealment muffled the obvious, and in many ways made it tragically easy to perpetuate.