Bobby Lowe

On a Decoration Day afternoon in 1894, Bobby Lowe hit four home runs in a single game, the first man in major league history to do it, and the crowd showered the field with silver. He was the steady second baseman of the great Boston Beaneaters, a versatile, durable infielder on five pennant winners through the 1890s, and the big game made him briefly the most famous player in the country. They called him Link, short for the Lincoln in his name, and he played eighteen years, mentored a young Johnny Evers, and lived to 86. The four home runs are what the record books remember. The long, useful career around them deserves as much.

Link

Lowe was born Robert Lincoln Lowe on July 10, 1865, in Pittsburgh, and reached the major leagues with the Boston Beaneaters in 1890. He was small, generously listed at five foot ten and 150 pounds, but he played a hard, smart game that kept him in the lineup for the better part of two decades. His teammates called him Link, after the Lincoln in his name, and the nickname stuck for life. He could fill in almost anywhere in the infield and outfield in his early years before settling in at second base, the position he made his own. From the start he was the kind of player a winning team is built around without anyone quite noticing.

Four Home Runs

On May 30, 1894, at Boston's Congress Street Grounds, Lowe did something no major leaguer had ever done, hitting four home runs in a single game. He took Cincinnati's Elton Chamberlain deep four times, added a single for good measure, and finished the afternoon five for six with seventeen total bases as Boston won 20 to 11. The short left field fence at the temporary park helped, but four in one game was four in one game, and it had never happened before. The fans were so delighted they threw a pile of silver coins onto the grass, something near 160 dollars, a small fortune to a ballplayer of the day. No one matched him for nearly forty years, until Lou Gehrig did it in 1932.

The 1894 Season

The four homers were the peak of a season that was Lowe's best from start to finish. He batted .346 that year, scored 158 runs, drove in 115, and hit 17 home runs, second in the National League only to his teammate Hugh Duffy, who was busy hitting .440. It was a year of inflated offense across baseball, but even so Lowe's line stood among the best in the league, a full season from a man known mostly for his glove and his grit. He never hit quite like that again, and few players ever do. For one summer the steady infielder was a genuine star.

Selee's Second Baseman

For all the noise of the four home run game, Lowe's real value was his steadiness on a great team. He was the everyday second baseman for Frank Selee's Boston Beaneaters, the dominant National League club of the 1890s, and the team won pennants in 1891, 1892, 1893, 1897, and 1898 with Lowe anchoring the middle of the infield. He turned the double play, hit in the lower half of a deep order, and did the small things that win games over a long season. Selee, who had an eye for that kind of player, valued him as much as the stars around him. Five pennants in eight years is the truest measure of what Lowe gave Boston.

The Numbers

Lowe played eighteen seasons and built a quietly substantial record, a career batting average of .273 and somewhere near 1,930 hits, with close to 1,000 runs batted in and more than 1,100 scored. The counting stats reflect a man who showed up every day and produced, year after year, without ever leading the league in much. He was, by one historian's reckoning, the premier second baseman of the 1890s, the position's best all around player in a decade full of good ones. The numbers add up to a real and lasting career, the kind the four home run afternoon has long overshadowed. He was better, and for longer, than that one day suggests.

The Mentor

Lowe's influence outlasted his playing days, most visibly in the young second baseman he helped raise. When he finished in Boston he moved on to the Chicago Cubs, where he took a nervous rookie named Johnny Evers under his wing, the future Hall of Famer who credited Lowe with much of his early development. Evers said years later that Lowe had done more than anyone to help him make good, with kindly advice and a steady example. Lowe coached college baseball, managed in the minors, and scouted for Detroit once his own playing ended. The veteran who had quietly anchored a dynasty spent his later baseball years passing on what he knew.

A Long Life

Lowe lived a long time and stayed close to the game he had played so well. He worked for years as a street and sewer inspector for the city of Detroit, the town where he had finished his career, and he turned up at reunions of the old players as one of the last living links to the baseball of the 1890s. He was on hand at Briggs Stadium for the 1941 All Star Game, a relic of a vanished era, sharing his four home run record now with Lou Gehrig and the rest. He died in Detroit in 1951 at 86. The first man to hit four in a game had outlived nearly everyone who saw him do it.