Ed McKean

Ed McKean hit like no shortstop of his time, a slugging infielder for the Cleveland Spiders who drove in runs the way first basemen did and reached 2,000 hits before all but a handful of players. For a dozen years he held down shortstop in Cleveland, the right side of a celebrated double play combination with Cupid Childs, on a team that also carried Cy Young and Jesse Burkett. He batted .302 for his career and knocked in more than 1,100 runs, huge numbers from a position that usually cost a lineup offense. His glove was another matter, loose and prone to error in the rough fielding of the 1890s. The bat made him a star all the same, and a prototype of the slugging shortstop that Honus Wagner would soon perfect.

The Grafton Shortstop

McKean was born Edwin John McKean on June 6, 1864, in Grafton, Ohio, and reached the major leagues with the Cleveland club in 1887, when it played in the American Association. He stayed in Cleveland for the next dozen years, through the move to the National League and the rise of the team into the Spiders, a fixture at shortstop the whole way. He was a hitter with quick wrists and surprising power, built more like a second baseman than the rangy shortstops of a later age. From the start he hit, and hit hard, which mattered more to his teams than the balls that got past him. Cleveland had found the offensive shortstop almost no one else had.

The Slugging Shortstop

What set McKean apart was an offensive game no shortstop of his era could match. He batted .302 for his career and collected somewhere near 2,083 hits, becoming the eighth player in major league history to reach 2,000, and he drove in more than 1,100 runs from a position that rarely produced any. He topped 110 runs batted in four different seasons, unheard of for a shortstop in a time when the job was supposed to be all glove. His best year was 1894, when he hit .357, but the consistency was the thing, a decade of run production from the middle of the infield. He was the slugging shortstop before the type had a name, the rough draft of what Honus Wagner would become.

The Cleveland Double Play

For most of the 1890s, McKean and the second baseman Cupid Childs formed the keystone of the Spiders, a double play combination that held the middle of one of the best teams in the National League. Childs got on base and McKean drove him in, the two of them an offensive engine almost unheard of from a middle infield, and together they turned the rallies that won games. They were a contrast in styles, the patient Childs and the aggressive McKean, and they complemented each other perfectly. The pairing anchored Cleveland through its glory years. Few middle infields of the century hit the way those two did.

The Spiders

The Cleveland teams McKean anchored were among the best and rowdiest in baseball, a contender year after year. He played alongside the great Cy Young on the mound and the batting champion Jesse Burkett in the outfield, a lineup that pushed the mighty Baltimore Orioles all decade. The Spiders won the Temple Cup in 1895, beating Baltimore four games to one for what passed as the championship of the age, with McKean in the middle of it. They lost the rematch the next year, swept by the Orioles, but those Cleveland clubs were a power. McKean was a cornerstone of all of them.

The Line Drive

McKean's bat left one strange mark in the record, on the career of another man entirely. On August 14, 1887, McKean's rookie season, he hit a line drive back through the box that struck the St. Louis pitcher Dave Foutz squarely on the throwing hand, dislocating his thumb. Foutz, a star two way player in the middle of a brilliant run, was never the same pitcher again, the injury robbing his curveball of its bite and pushing him to first base for good. He went on for years as a hitter and a manager, but his days as a front line pitcher ended with that one swing of McKean's bat. It was an odd footnote to a long career, one slugger's line drive reshaping another star's.

The Errors

For all his hitting, McKean was no wizard with the glove, and the error columns told on him. He led the league in errors more than once and piled up bushels of them across his career, the loose fielding common to shortstops who played barehanded or with thin gloves on rough infields. By the standards of his own day he was passable, even decent in his prime, but he was never the slick fielder the position would later demand. His teams accepted the trade gladly, because a shortstop who drove in a hundred runs was worth a few extra errors. The bat paid for the glove many times over.

Cleveland

When the Spiders' owners gutted the team and shipped its talent to St. Louis in 1899, McKean went along, but his best days were behind him, his fielding slipping and his bat cooling. He played out the string, managed and played in the minor leagues for a few more years, and then settled back in Cleveland, the city he had starred in for so long. He ran a cigar store and a saloon, refereed wrestling matches, and lived among the people who remembered the Spiders. He died in Cleveland in 1919 at 55. The slugging shortstop who came before Wagner is one of the most overlooked stars of his decade, his bat preserved in the record books for whoever cares to look.