Charlie Keeler was leafing through a chest of drawers that belonged to his late father recently when he came across a trove of baseball memorabilia. The photos and programs that his dad, William, saved made his eyes grow wide, but not as wide as what he found laying beneath them.
His father was the nephew of "Wee" Willie Keeler, and on the bottom of the drawer lay dozens of letters that Keeler wrote in the summer of 1892, when he was barnstorming through the Northeast, beginning a journey that would end with him being enshrined in the Hall of Fame as one of the founders of modern baseball.
"My dad always used to talk about him," says Charlie, a retired 79-year-old banker from Rockville Centre, N.Y. (His dad was the son of Willie's older brother, Joe.) "Willie's parents wanted him to be an accountant because, you know, in those days baseball wasn't respectable. But he wanted to prove to them that he could be 5-4 and a great athlete. He ran around the bases faster than anyone. He hit the ball anywhere."
Charlie had those letters out again last week, when Ichiro Suzuki broke Wee Willie's record of 200 hits in nine straight seasons. It was the last of Keeler's records to fall. The lefty's 1896 streak of hitting in 44 straight games was bested in 1941, when Joe DiMaggio hit in 56 consecutive games. (Pete Rose tied the NL record in 1978.)
Still, there's plenty about Keeler that remains immortal, including the line that he introduced into the sport's lexicon: "Hit 'em where they ain't." And on the occasion of Keeler's call-up to the New York Giants 118 years ago this week, The File is posting the letters that Charlie found in his father's drawer.
Written in a purposeful and steady hand, they show a 20-year-old who was enjoying life to the fullest in the summer of 1892, while he was playing for the Eastern League in Binghamton, N.Y.
"I have seen more sights since I have been playing ball than I saw all the rest of my life," Willie wrote to Joe from the City Hotel in Providence after a game in Boston.
"This manager is a stinker," he observed in another dispatch from The Stafford Hotel in upstate New York. "We got to be in at 11 o'clock every night. Mike LeFrance, Mike Slattery, Billy Daley and myself was out looking at the sights the other night until about 12 o'clock. You ought to have seen the look he gave us when we came in."
The 140-pound Brooklyn native was certainly no stranger to the rough-and-tumble atmosphere of the day. Complaining about a teammate who exaggerated an arm injury to avoid a road trip, he wrote, "The games are for blood ... I would not be a bit surprised to see [the catcher] get it in the neck. Everybody on the team is down on him."
But perhaps most of all, they show that Keeler was homesick for Brooklyn and determined to prove his parents wrong about his ability to make a living playing the game he loved.
"The manager wanted me to sign for $110 [a month] this morning but I would not do it," he wrote on June 9. "Mike Lehane told me not to sign for any less that $150 but I will sign if he gives me $125."
Two weeks later, Keeler was in Troy, N.Y., and telling Joe, "I signed for $150-a-month. I got paid $50 last Thursday and we get paid every 1st and 15th. I will send $50 next pay day if you want to for you and [other brother] Tom."
On that kind of salary, Keeler could live like a king. "I have got a room about as big as our front room for $1.25 a week and I eat in a restaurant for $3.00," he boasted, begging Joe to join him on the road. "You ought to see how my room is furnished. It has four windows in it."
But Keeler was also learning the limits of his power as a star player. "I had another scrape with the manager," he continued on June 22. "... The way the scrape started was he wanted me to play third and I would not do it unless he would give me $175 a month but he would not do it so I had to cover third. Now I will stay there and won't go back to ss anymore."
Three months after that, Keeler was called up to the Giants as a third baseman. It wasn't until Orioles manager Ned Hanlon acquired him in 1894 that Willie blossomed into an outfielder.
Keeler played for Hanlon for five years in Baltimore, and another four in Brooklyn with the Superbas. Afterward, he wore the uniform of the New York Highlanders (later to become the Yankees) for six years, returning to the Giants for a farewell season in 1910.
Charlie's father was in his teens when his then-retired uncle, whom he was named after, took him on a tour of the Yankees locker room.
It was before a game, and the kid noticed a few of the Yankees sharpening their spikes. "Why are they doing that, Uncle Willie?" he asked.
Willie turned and shook his head.
"I don't know," he replied. "Gentlemen don't do that."
For Charlie, that captures the essence of his granduncle. "Above all, Willie was a gentleman," he says.
Special thanks to Brian Biegel and Marty Kirby.
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