Win Mercer

Win Mercer was a two way star on baseball's worst teams, a workhorse pitcher and a fine hitter who carried the dreadful Washington clubs of the 1890s on his back, and one of the most popular players in the league. He won 25 games one year for a team that won only 58, hit .321 another, and played every position but catcher when his team needed him. Handsome and charming, he drew crowds of women to the ballpark and trouble to himself, a heavy gambler in a game full of them. After the 1902 season the Detroit Tigers named him their manager for 1903. He never managed a game, taking his own life that January at 28, a death that shocked the sport and cut short one of its brightest two way talents.

Win

Mercer was born George Barclay Mercer on June 20, 1874, in Chester, West Virginia, and the nickname Win, short for Winner, followed him into the major leagues with the Washington Senators in 1894. He was a slender pitcher with a good arm and an even better bat, and from the start Washington used him as much more than a pitcher. He could field any position and hit well enough to bat in the order on his off days, a genuine two way player decades before the term meant anything. He had charm to spare and an easy way with a crowd. Washington had found a star, which was more than the franchise usually managed.

Washington's Workhorse

Mercer pitched for some of the worst teams the National League ever assembled, and he was very good anyway. In 1896 he won 25 games, nine of them in a row, for a Washington club that won only 58 all year, a feat of pitching against the current if there ever was one. He won 21 the next season with an earned run average of 3.18 and led the league in starts and shutouts, throwing more than 300 innings without complaint. His career record of 131 and 164 looks ordinary until you remember the teams behind him, which lost far more often than they won. A better club would have made him a winner many times over. Washington just made him tired.

A Pitcher Who Could Hit

What set Mercer apart from the other workhorses was the bat. He hit .321 in 1898 with an on base mark near .370, a line most everyday players would have envied, and he topped .290 in several seasons. Washington played him in the outfield and the infield when he wasn't pitching, more than 200 games in the field over his career, because his bat was too good to leave out of the lineup. He was, in the truest sense, a two way player, valuable with his arm and his bat both. In an age that barely knew what to do with such a man, Mercer simply did everything his team asked.

The Heartthrob

Mercer was strikingly handsome, and he became one of the great gate attractions of the 1890s, especially among women. On a Ladies Day at Washington in September 1897, the umpire Bill Carpenter ejected Mercer from the game, and the crowd of women turned on the umpire afterward, mobbing him, tearing at his clothes, and wrecking part of the park before the police could drive them back. The team reportedly thought twice about scheduling another Ladies Day for years. The story sounds like invention, but it happened, a measure of how much the fans adored him. Mercer was the rare nineteenth century ballplayer who pulled people through the gates by charm alone.

The Gambler

The same appetite for excitement that made Mercer fun pulled him toward the racetrack, and gambling shadowed the back half of his short life. He bet heavily on horses, and on a barnstorming tour after the 1902 season he reportedly lost a great deal of money, by some accounts thousands of dollars, though the financial notes he left behind suggest he owed nothing to anyone. How deep the trouble ran is hard to say now, the accounts conflicting and the man long gone. What's certain is that gambling weighed on him, enough that he warned others against it at the end. The charm and the recklessness, it seems, were two sides of the same coin.

Detroit, 1903

Mercer finished the 1902 season with Detroit, posting the best earned run average of his career, and the Tigers rewarded him by naming him their manager for 1903. It was the job a popular veteran dreams of, a team of his own at 28. He never took it up. On the night of January 12, 1903, in a San Francisco hotel at the end of a postseason tour, Mercer took his own life. He left notes, one of them a warning to his friends to beware of women and a game of chance, the closest thing to an explanation he offered. The sport mourned a player it had loved and a two way talent that had years left in it. Win Mercer was 28 years old, and the manager's job he'd just been handed went to someone else.