Bill Lange

Bill Lange might have been the finest player of the 1890s, and he walked away from the game at 28 to please his future wife's father. For seven seasons he was the rare giant who could fly, a center fielder of better than six feet and 200 pounds who hit .330, stole bases by the dozen, and ran down fly balls no man his size had any business reaching. The men who watched him reached for the biggest names they knew, calling him a Ty Cobb enlarged and the finest all around athlete the nineteenth century sent onto a ballfield. Then, at the height of it, he quit, trading the best years he had left for a marriage and a desk in San Francisco. The brevity is the only argument against him, a career too short for the Hall of Fame and too brilliant to forget.

The Big Man from San Francisco

Lange was born William Alexander Lange in San Francisco on June 6, 1871, and grew into a young man far too big for the position he would make his own. He stood better than six feet and carried 200 pounds and more, a build that should have parked him at first base, and instead he played center field and moved like a man half his weight. Teammates pinned the mocking nickname Little Eva on him, a joke about how a giant could glide with such ease. He came east to the Chicago Colts in 1893, a Californian of 21 with the frame of a blacksmith and the stride of a sprinter. The National League had never seen the combination he brought, and for seven years it could not get enough of it.

Anson's Center Fielder

For all seven of his major league seasons Lange played center field for Cap Anson's Chicago Colts, and he hit from the first day to the last. He batted .330 over those years, a startling figure for a man expected to live on his size and his legs, and he scored runs and drove them in near the top of Anson's order. The Colts of the 1890s were a good club that never quite broke through, and Lange was their brightest everyday star, the one player who pulled crowds wherever Chicago traveled. Anson, who praised almost no one, made an exception for him. The big center fielder handed the famous old captain a player worth bragging about.

Size, Speed, and Daring

What made Lange a wonder was the way the size and the speed lived in a single body. He stole 399 bases in seven seasons, a pace few small men could match, and once swiped five in one game against Louisville. He ran the bases with a recklessness that terrified infielders and thrilled the crowd, sliding hard, taking the extra base, forcing the throws that sailed away. In center field he covered ground that left writers grasping for words, and a romantic legend grew that he once crashed through a wooden fence to make a catch, a tale the record gently corrects. He never needed the embellishment. The plain truth of what a 200 pound man could do on a ballfield was astonishing enough.

The Peak

Lange's best season came in 1895, when he hit .389, the kind of mark that wins a batting title most years. He reached base at a .456 clip that summer, slugged .575, and piled up 186 hits, 120 runs, and ten home runs, a complete offensive season from a man built like a tackle. He cleared .300 in six of his seven years, the lone exception his rookie summer, and he led the National League in stolen bases in 1897. His totals never had the time to climb into the thousands, but the rate of them, season by season, stood with anyone's. For the stretch he played, few outfielders in the game were better.

Ty Cobb Enlarged

The men who watched Lange did not bother with modest comparisons. Clark Griffith, who pitched against him and managed for half a century, called him the toughest, roughest baserunner who ever strode the bases, the equal of any outfielder who ever lived. Connie Mack named him the greatest baserunner he had ever seen. Al Spink of The Sporting News set him down as a Ty Cobb enlarged, as fast and as skilled and simply bigger, and the historian Bill James, weighing the whole century, called him probably the greatest all around athlete to play major league baseball in the nineteenth. The praise came from hard men who did not give it away, and every word of it was meant.

Walking Away in His Prime

In the winter after the 1899 season, with Chicago offering him the highest salary in the league, Lange quit baseball at 28. He had fallen in love with Grace Giselman, the daughter of a San Francisco insurance and property man who refused to let her marry a ballplayer, and Lange chose the marriage over the game. He set down a career at its peak, the rarest thing a great player can do, and went home to the coast for good. The marriage that cost him baseball did not last, ending in divorce in 1915, which only sharpened the ache of what he had surrendered. He gave up the game with his best years still ahead of him, and the sport spent the next century wondering what the rest of them would have held.

The Businessman

Lange settled into the life his future father in law had wanted for him, building a prosperous career in San Francisco real estate and insurance. He stayed close to the game he had left, scouting on the West Coast and turning up at reunions of the old players, a big, genial man who had once been the talk of the league. He died in San Francisco in 1950 at 79, on the same coast that had pulled him home a half century before. His nephew George Kelly reached the Hall of Fame as a Giants first baseman, while the case for Lange rests, as it always has, on a career too brilliant to forget and too brief for Cooperstown.