Jimmy Ryan

Jimmy Ryan played eighteen years in the major leagues, most of them in center field for Cap Anson's Chicago, and he left behind a stack of numbers that still argues he belongs in Cooperstown. He hit .308, collected roughly 2,500 hits, drove out 118 home runs when home runs were scarce, and ran and threw and even pitched when his team needed it. He hit for the cycle twice, once while taking the mound in the same game, and reached 100 career home runs before all but a handful of players in history. A hard, prickly competitor who punched the occasional reporter, he was as combative off the field as he was gifted on it. With Harry Stovey and George Van Haltren, he forms the trio of 1890s stars whose Cooperstown cases researchers keep pressing.

Pony Ryan from Clinton

Ryan was born in Clinton, Massachusetts, on February 11, 1863, and broke into professional baseball as a small, sturdy young man they took to calling Pony. He stood five foot nine and weighed a touch over 160 pounds, slight for a slugger, and he made up the difference with quickness and a short, hard swing. The Chicago White Stockings signed him in 1885, and he stepped into one of the great teams of the era, a club run by the towering Cap Anson. He could play almost anywhere, the outfield, shortstop, even the pitcher's box, and Anson used him everywhere those first seasons. The versatility marked him early as something more than an ordinary ballplayer.

Anson's Versatile Star

For most of eighteen seasons Ryan wore a Chicago uniform, through the White Stockings and the Players League and the Colts and Orphans that followed, the franchise that would one day be the Cubs. He settled into center field as his home, a fast, strong armed outfielder who set since broken records for games and assists at the position. In the early years, though, he went wherever Anson pointed him, pitching in a pinch, filling in at shortstop, doing the jobs a versatile man gets handed. He gave Chicago a player who could carry a lineup and plug a hole in the same week. Few men of his time were so complete.

The Hitter

Ryan hit, and he hit with a power few leadoff men of his day could match. He finished at .308 with roughly 2,500 hits, 451 doubles, 157 triples, and 118 home runs, a stout pile of extra bases for the dead ball age, along with more than 1,600 runs and 418 stolen bases. His 1888 season was a masterpiece, when he led the National League in hits with 182, in home runs with 16, in doubles, in slugging, and in total bases all at once. He carried the speed of a top of the order man and the pop of a middle of the order one, a blend the era rarely produced in a single player. His bat, more than anything, is what keeps his name in the Cooperstown argument.

The Cycle and the Mound

Ryan had a flair for the spectacular that the steady totals can hide. On July 28, 1888, he hit for the cycle against Detroit and pitched more than seven innings in the same game, the only player ever to do both on one afternoon. He hit for the cycle a second time three years later, reached 100 career home runs as just the seventh man in history to do it, and led off a game with a home run five times in 1889, a record that stood until Bobby Bonds broke it in 1973. The big moments came naturally to him. For a player remembered now as overlooked, he spent a great deal of his career doing things no one had done before.

A Prickly Man

Ryan was no easy teammate, and the fire that drove him made him a hard man to be around. He feuded openly with Anson, the two of them trading threats in the press that would empty a clubhouse today, and he settled more than one dispute with his fists, including scraps with sportswriters who crossed him. A run in with a train conductor in 1896 took Anson himself to break up. Three years earlier a railroad wreck had nearly ended his career and his life, leaving him battered enough to win a settlement from the line. The toughness served him on the field and cost him off it, the double edge of a combative man.

The Overlooked Trio

In the long argument over which nineteenth century stars Cooperstown missed, Ryan stands near the front. A poll of baseball's nineteenth century researchers once put him at the top of the overlooked list, tied with Harry Stovey and George Van Haltren, three players of nearly equal merit and identical fate. He reached the Hall of Fame ballot a dozen times across the years and never drew the votes, his case strong on the numbers and weak, somehow, on the memory of him. Only Pete Rose, among players outside the Hall, scored more runs in a career. His candidacy has always read better on paper than it has at the ballot box.

After Chicago

Ryan finally left Chicago after the 1900 season, managed a year in the minors, and came back for two final major league seasons with Washington in the new American League. He hung on into his forties in semipro ball, then took a steady job as a bailiff in the Cook County courts, a long way from the diamonds where he had starred. He died in Chicago in 1923 at 60, his grave unmarked for nearly a century until researchers who had championed his Hall of Fame case set a stone over it in 2022. The recognition came late and came quiet. It came, in the end, from the same people still arguing he belongs in Cooperstown.