1968, winning five Ivy League championships and twice reaching the national championship game (losing both, in 1947 and 1948). Future president George Herbert Walker Bush was his first baseman on those teams. Allen also wrote several highly respected baseball instructional books, including Major League Baseball (1938) and Baseball Play and Strategy (1964) and produced baseball instructional films.
He is best known, however, for creating Ethan Allen’s All-Star Baseball, the most popular baseball tabletop game of the post-War decades. First issued in 1941, the game featured paper disks filled with what looked like pie charts breaking into sectors each player’s percentages of getting a hit or making an out, which would be determined by a flick of a spinner. Though Allen designed it as a game for kids, many adults played it, too, even creating leagues with friends.
After retiring from Yale in 1968, Allen settled in North Carolina. In 1970, he was elected to the American Association of College Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame. He continued to refine his board game, adding new seasons of players, until his health began to decline. He then moved to Brookings, Oregon, to be near his son, and that’s where he died at the age of 89, having lived up to his heroic name.
LINWOOD “KING” BAILEY
NOVEMBER 1870–NOVEMBER 19, 1917
Major League Career
1895
Time as a Red
1895
Position
PITCHER
THE CONSUMMATE “CRAFTY LEFT-HANDER,” Linwood “King” Bailey posted an undefeated record for his hometown team. He pitched only one game for the Reds, on September 21, 1895, and he won it. The victory, however, didn’t earn him a contract with the team or even another chance to show what he could do.
Not much is known about his early life. According to multiple sources, he was born in Virginia in 1870, but the date and locale are unknown. We know that he was raised in Cincinnati and began playing baseball at an early age in the Bottoms section of town (roughly the riverfront up to Ft. Washington Way). Though once the gateway to the city before the Civil War, by the time Bailey lived there it had become a tough, seedy area of bars, fleabag hotels, and warehouses, captured in print by legendary journalist Lafcadio Hearn.
At the age of 20, he played his first professional ball for the Rockford (Illinois) Hustlers in the Illinois-Iowa League. That same year, he also appeared for the team in Jamestown, New York, in the New York-Pennsylvania League. He mostly rode the bench at both places and returned to Cincinnati until the following July, when he was contacted by the Macon, Georgia, team in the Southern League.
When he arrived, he was immediately made the struggling team’s starting pitcher. He won his first game 4–1, breaking Macon’s long losing streak, inspiring the fans to christen him “King.” He went on to lead the team in innings pitched that year with 382. Though a strapping six-footer, he didn’t throw especially hard, and a Sporting News article of the time noting that he had “hardly any speed.” He got by, instead, on control and deception, using what was then known as a “drop ball,” similar to what we call a sinker today. Though hardly the hurling “King” Maconians anticipated, he finished the season 22–20.
For the next couple of years, he bounced around among other minor league teams with middling success. When the 1895 Southern League season ended in September, Bailey headed home, where he ran into an old friend, Reds player-manager (and fellow local boy) Buck Ewing, who invited King to join the team for a trip to Louisville. After a great start to the season, the Reds suffered through injuries to key players; by late September, they were limping to the finish line, entrenched in ninth place in the 12-team National League, a game over .500. Louisville occupied the league’s cellar. Bailey, who was referred to as “Len” in the newspapers, agreed to tag along on the trip to Louisville, and the Enquirer felt he should be given a trial, given the team’s dearth of healthy pitchers. Though Bailey wasn’t formally under contract, Ewing asked if he wanted to pitch a game.
It was a heady offer for a 24-year-old kid used to sweating through summers in the far-less-glamorous Southern League. Bailey took the mound for the Reds, and not only did he win the game 19–8 (despite giving up 13 hits and eight runs, five earned), but he also went two for four at the plate with a double, an RBI, and a stolen base. The Enquirer reported, “There’s a few disgusted Bourbonites … for the boy from the Bottoms had a little greased lightning on the balls, which passed over the plate. He did not give up a base on balls, and only one wild pitch, due to natural nervousness from being up against a league team.” He also earned praise from his battery mate, fellow local boy Farmer Vaughn, who said he wished Bailey had joined the team sooner. In the cryptic patois of the day, Vaughn added, “The boy may be left [handed] when in-shooting balls, but he’s right on strikes.”
That game would be Bailey’s only major league appearance. He did pitch again for the Reds on a barnstorming trip through Indiana after the season, but if he had hopes of making the team in 1896, it didn’t happen. He played until 1903 for several Southern League teams, before retiring to run a pool hall in Selma, Alabama. But with baseball in his blood, he returned to coach in what was then called the Southern Association, as well as at Mercer and Sewanee universities. He was managing an insurance company in Macon when he died of blood poisoning at the age of 47. Though he played only one game for the Reds and mostly as a favor from (or maybe for) a friend, King Bailey made it count.
CLARENCE “KID” BALDWIN
NOVEMBER 1, 1864–JULY 10, 1897
Major League Career
1884–1890
Time as a Red
1885–1890
Position
CATCHER
BORN IN NEWPORT, KENTUCKY, Clarence “Kid” Baldwin was the son of a riverboat pilot. While Kid was still a kid, the family moved to St. Louis, where as a teenager he began playing baseball, making up for his runty size with a cocky, reckless attitude that didn’t make him popular with coaches and teammates. Society of American Baseball Researchers (SABR) historian David Ball writes that the nickname “Kid” was given frequently in that era “to scrappy, feisty little athletes, and Kid Baldwin certainly fit that description.” Listed at 5′6″ and 147 pounds, Kid probably was even lighter when he started playing professionally at 18.
A tough competitor with an outstanding arm, he established himself as an excellent catcher. In his first year, he made history by playing an official major league game (in the Union Association) for one team (Pittsburgh) while under contract to another major league team (Kansas City). On September 18, 1884, Pittsburgh’s only available catcher was injured during a game with Baltimore and Kid happened to be watching in the grandstand. He agreed to fill in.
He came to the Reds the following year, and though not a starter he was named the assistant team captain. With his brash attitude, he didn’t hesitate to give older—and bigger—veterans a piece of his mind. In his rookie year, he also played the outfield and third base and even worked four innings as a relief pitcher. But despite his skills on the field, during his first two seasons he became better known for his antics off of it, namely drinking and disobedience. He incurred so many fines that a teammate declared to reporters during the 1886 season that Kid had not yet cashed a full paycheck.
In 1887, new Reds’ president
