Jake Beckley

Jacob Peter Beckley played 20 seasons of major league baseball, all of them at first base, and compiled a .308 lifetime batting average with 2,930 hits. He held the record for games played at first base from his retirement in 1907 until Eddie Murray passed him in 1994, and he still holds the all-time record for putouts at the position. He batted .300 or better in 13 of his 20 seasons. He yelled "Chickazoola!" at opposing pitchers when he was on a hitting streak, bunted with the handle of his bat, and once cut straight across the diamond from second to home while the umpire wasn't looking. The Veterans Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1971, 53 years after his death.

Hannibal

Beckley was born on August 4, 1867, in Hannibal, Missouri, the Mississippi River town that Mark Twain had made famous. His parents were Bernhart and Rosina Neth Beckley. He played semipro baseball in the Hannibal area as a teenager and signed with the Leavenworth Soldiers in Kansas in 1886. He spent two seasons between Leavenworth and Lincoln, Nebraska, then moved to the St. Louis Whites of the Western Association in 1888. Pittsburgh purchased him and pitcher Harry Staley from the Whites for $4,500 that June.

He debuted on June 20, 1888, at age 20, and hit .343 in 71 games. The Alleghenys had found their first baseman. He followed with a .301 season in 1889, and by the time the Players' League formed in 1890, Beckley was established enough that the new league wanted him. He jumped, along with eight teammates and manager Ned Hanlon, to the Pittsburgh Burghers. "I'm only in this game for the money anyway," he said. The Players' League collapsed after one season, and Beckley returned to Pittsburgh, where he would stay through 1896.

Pittsburgh and the Players' League

The 1890 season with the Burghers was one of his best. He batted .324 with 22 triples (which led the league), 38 doubles, and 120 RBI. Back with Pittsburgh's National League club in 1891, he slumped to .292, then fell to .236 in 1892 after the death of his wife, Molly Murphy, who died of tuberculosis just seven months after their wedding. His grief showed in his numbers, but he recovered to hit .303 in 1893, .343 in 1894, and .328 in 1895.

Beckley stood 5-foot-10 and 200 pounds, with a thick mustache he wore throughout his career. He had quick reflexes, excellent range for a first baseman, and a throwing arm that everyone agreed was weak. Runners took extra bases on him regularly, and he compensated with creativity. On one occasion, rather than risk an errant throw, he simply chased a runner all the way to home plate and tagged him out himself.

He was famous for the hidden ball trick, which he attempted on nearly every rookie who reached first base. His methods varied. Sometimes he concealed the ball under his arm, sometimes beneath the base itself. The most memorable attempt involved Honus Wagner, then a young player with the Louisville Colonels visiting Cincinnati. Beckley smuggled an extra ball onto the field and positioned it under his armpit where Wagner could see it. When the umpire looked away, Wagner grabbed the visible ball and hurled it into the outfield, then sprinted for second. The pitcher, still holding the game ball, threw him out.

Cincinnati

Pittsburgh traded Beckley to the New York Giants on July 25, 1896, for Harry Davis and $1,000. He hit .302 in 46 games with New York but didn't stay long; the Giants released him in May 1897, and he signed with the Cincinnati Reds five days later. Cincinnati became his longest home. He played seven seasons there and batted .300 or better in six of them, including a .345 mark in his partial 1897 season, .333 in 1899, .341 in 1900, and .330 in 1902.

On September 26, 1897, he hit three home runs in a single game against St. Louis, a feat no other player matched until Ken Williams did it in 1922. On May 8, 1901, Christy Mathewson hit him in the head with a fastball and knocked him unconscious for more than five minutes. He missed two games and came back to finish the season at .307 for a Cincinnati team that finished last, which gives some idea of his durability.

Beckley also had one of baseball's stranger pitching lines. On October 4, 1902, Cincinnati manager Joe Kelley sent him to the mound for a meaningless October game in Pittsburgh. The Pirates had already clinched the pennant, and the Reds wanted no part of playing in the rain. Kelley put players at wrong positions throughout the lineup as a protest. Beckley allowed nine hits and eight runs in four innings. Catcher Rube Vickers, normally a pitcher himself, committed six passed balls in two innings and made no effort to chase the wild throws before Heinie Peitz replaced him behind the plate. Pittsburgh won 11-2, and the Pittsburgh owner refunded every admission ticket after the crowd expressed its opinion of the spectacle.

St. Louis and the End

Beckley moved to the St. Louis Cardinals in 1904 and hit .325 in his first season there, at age 36. He batted .286 in 1905 and .247 in 1906, when injuries limited him to 87 games and he served briefly as a National League umpire during his time away from the lineup. He played 32 games in 1907, hitting .209, and his major league career was over.

He never played on a pennant winner, and the closest he came was the 1893 Pirates, who finished second. Connie Mack called him "about the most popular player in Pittsburgh," but popular and victorious were different things in that era's Pittsburgh.

In 20 seasons he accumulated 2,386 games, 2,930 hits, 473 doubles, 243 triples (fourth all-time, behind Sam Crawford, Ty Cobb, and Honus Wagner), 86 home runs, 1,575 RBI, 315 stolen bases, and a .308 batting average. Francis Richter, in his 1914 history of baseball, named Beckley one of the greatest first basemen of the 1890s alongside Dan Brouthers.

After Baseball

Beckley kept playing after leaving the majors. He spent 1908 and 1909 as a player-manager for Kansas City in the American Association, 1910 with Bartlesville and Topeka, and 1911 back in Hannibal, where he managed the local team and batted .282 at age 44. He umpired in the Federal League in 1913 and coached baseball at William Jewell College in Liberty, Missouri. He also operated a grain business in Kansas City. When a credit bureau couldn't find him in Dun and Bradstreet's directory, he told them to look in the Spalding Baseball Guide for any of the last 20 years.

He suffered from heart disease in his later years and died on June 25, 1918, in Kansas City, at 50. He was buried in Riverside Cemetery in Hannibal.

The Veterans Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1971. The Cincinnati Reds added him to their own hall of fame in 2014. In 2016, the Hannibal Cavemen of the Prospect League installed the Jake Beckley .308 Gate at Clemens Field, a small tribute in the town where he grew up and where he came back to manage a ball club when nobody else would have him.