Fred Dunlap

Fred Dunlap was the best second baseman of the early 1880s, a barehanded fielding wizard and the highest paid player in baseball, and he died penniless and forgotten in a Philadelphia boarding house at 43. For a decade he was the standard at his position, a sure handed infielder with a rifle arm that earned him the nickname Sure Shot, and in 1884 he produced one of the most dominant seasons any hitter has ever managed. He jumped leagues for money when jumping was a scandal, drove the hardest bargains in the game, and reportedly saved a fortune, only to lose all of it. The fall was as steep as the rise was high, and the game forgot him almost completely.

Sure Shot

Dunlap was born in Philadelphia on May 21, 1859, and had a hard, rootless start, orphaned around the age of ten and left with little schooling and less money. He found his way through baseball, the one thing he could do better than almost anyone, and reached the National League with the Cleveland Blues in 1880. He played second base with a flair the position had never seen, and his throwing arm, strong and dead accurate, gave him the nickname that stuck, Sure Shot. He had taught himself the game on the streets and the sandlots, and he played it with the hard edge of a man who had needed it to survive. From his first season he was a star.

The Best Glove at Second

What made Dunlap the best second baseman of his time was his glove, or his bare hands, in the years before fielders wore leather. He covered enormous ground, turned the double play as well as anyone alive, and threw out runners from positions other men could not reach, all of it without the padding that would later make the job survivable. He led his league's second basemen in the fielding categories again and again, the measurable proof of what the eye already saw. He reportedly refused to wear a glove even after they came into use, trusting his bare hands to the end. Al Spink, who founded The Sporting News, called him simply the greatest second baseman that ever lived.

The Cleveland Sensation

In the middle of the 1884 season Dunlap did the thing that defined his reputation and his era, he jumped. The new Union Association was offering money the established leagues would not, and Dunlap and his Cleveland teammate Jack Glasscock walked out on the National League club to take it, a defection the papers called the Cleveland sensation. It was a brazen, mercenary move in a game that still dressed its labor disputes in talk of loyalty, and Dunlap made no secret of his reasons. He had grown up with nothing and meant to be paid. The jump scandalized the baseball establishment and made Dunlap, for a season, the most talked about player in the country.

The Greatest Season in a Forgotten League

The 1884 season Dunlap put together for the St. Louis Maroons of the Union Association may be the most dominant individual year in the history of the major leagues. He hit .412, nearly sixty points higher than anyone else in any league that season, and led the Union Association in batting average, runs, hits, and home runs all at once. His Maroons ran away with the league's only pennant, Dunlap their best player by a distance. The catch, and it is a real one, is that the Union Association was a weak, one year major league, its rosters thin and its pitching thinner, so the .412 carries an asterisk the level of competition will always attach to it. Even discounted, it was a season of total command, the best player in a league laying waste to it.

The Highest Paid Man in Baseball

For several years in the middle 1880s, no player in baseball earned more than Fred Dunlap. He negotiated like a man who had been poor and never intended to be again, jumping to the Union Association for a rich contract and later commanding sums that made him the best paid player in the game from 1884 through the end of the decade. He was difficult, blunt about money, and impossible to push around, qualities that won him salaries and lost him friends. One manager who dealt with him, the pitcher Guy Hecker, called him the worst man to get along with he had ever met. Dunlap did not care. He had set out to be paid, and paid he was.

The Stonewall Infield

In St. Louis, Dunlap and Glasscock anchored an infield so good that the game gave it a name, the Stonewall infield, remembered as one of the finest defensive units of the nineteenth century. The two former Cleveland teammates formed its backbone, Dunlap at second and Glasscock at short, a pairing of the best fielders at their positions in all of baseball. Dunlap moved on to the Detroit Wolverines and shared in their 1887 championship, then to Pittsburgh and the end of the line. He managed here and there along the way, a respected if prickly baseball man. The Stonewall years were the peak, two great gloves turning the middle of the diamond into a wall.

Broke and Forgotten

The money that had driven Dunlap's whole career did not stay with him. He reportedly retired with as much as a hundred thousand dollars saved, a fortune for the time, and lost all of it to horse racing and bad speculation. By the summer of 1902 the Philadelphia papers described the former highest paid player in baseball as clean broke, and that December he died in a Philadelphia boarding house at 43, alone and all but forgotten. A former teammate identified the body. The greatest second baseman of his day, the man other clubs had once bid against each other to sign, left almost nothing behind, and the game that had paid him more than anyone forgot him almost entirely.