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Roger Connor of the Troy Trojans hits the first big league grand slam in 1880.
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In
the early years of big league baseball
home runs were hard to come by. Ball
parks were small, but the ball
was dead—much softer with a less elastic core then modern balls. Bats were heavy slowing down bat speed. Pitchers
had yet to perfect a 90 mile per hour fast ball. It took a dead eye, prodigious
strength, a bit of luck, and
usually a tail wind to get a ball over
the fences. Instead of waiting for big innings where sluggers clear
the bases, as in the modern game, it was small
ball—singles, doubles, stolen bases, daring slides
with sharpened spikes high, plus a
lot of walks and hit batsmen.
Before
there was a Babe Ruth, there was Roger
Connor, a towering first baseman—said
to be 6’3’’ in an age when men were generally much shorter—who started his
career with the Troy, New York Trojans in 1880 at the age of 22.
Then, as now, there were cash poor teams in small
markets who could not afford to pay the kind of stars playing on teams like
Chicago White Stockings and clubs in Boston, New York, and
Philadelphia. The Trojans were
one of them. They packed their teams
with promising amateurs like Conner, a kid who had played club ball
in his hometown of Waterbury, Connecticut.
On September 10, 1881 the Trojans were playing
another down-at-the-heels small city team, the Worcester
Ruby Legs. Down three runs
in the 9th inning, their cause looked hopeless.
But the plucky team managed to load the bases. With two outs Connor strode to the plate—and
blasted the first grand slam home run
in major league history.
The
thrilling storybook ending attracted
the attention of the mighty New York
Gothams. By the 1882 season Connor
was playing in the Big Apple for one
of the National League’s elite teams. Soon he was the star of the team not only hitting
for average and power, but
despite his size a lithe and speedy base runner. Sports
writers began to refer to the team as the Giants in his honor. The nickname stuck.
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Connor played first base barehanded in the era before fielding gloves.
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In
1886 Connor gained fame for being the first person to hit a homerun entirely
out of the Polo Grounds, a ball park
in which it was notoriously hard to hit homers.
In
1890 Connor was part of the revolt
against National League owners that
resulted in the short lived Players
League. As a member of a team made
up of rebellious Giants, he led the new league in home runs with 14, the only
time he ever held a single season home
run title. But he was consistent
over an 18 year career. He came in
second four times in the National League and amassed a total of career total of
138 homers—a record that stood until
Ruth broke it 23 years after Connor’s retirement in 1897.
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The towering 6'3" Connor inspired the new nickname for the New York City National League club--the Giants. He was the beau ideal of a Gilded Age baseball star.
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Ruth
actually thought he broke the record when he smashed homer number 132. Due to incomplete record keeping Connor was
then only credited with 131. Subsequent
research shows that the real total was 138.
By
the time Connor retired after
spending his last seasons with the Philadelphia
Phillies and St. Louis Browns,
he had racked up an impressive record:
233 triples (still No. 4 on the all-time list after all of these years),
244 stolen bases, National League batting crown in 1885 with a .371 average, in
the top ten for batting average 10 times, led the league in doubles ten times
and triples 7, batted in 1,321 runs, and had a career average of .317.
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Connor's Hall of Fame plaque.
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After
his retirement from the majors, Connor returned to his Waterbury where he managed minor league teams and basked
in the admiration of his home
town. He lived to see Ruth break his
career home run record. He died in
Waterbury in 1931 at the age of 73.
In
1976 the great left handed hitter was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans’ Committee—a fitting tribute for the onetime Home Run King.
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