Baseball Rivalry-1907 Style, York County, South Carolina

BASEBALL RIVALRY - 1907 STYLE
By: Louise Pettus

In mid-July 1907 a trainload of Chester baseball fans unloaded in Rock Hill to cheer for the Chester team. Among the Chester people were some gamblers who had set up a “fix.”

According to plan, Rock Hill would easily win the Tuesday game. During the game it was to become widely known that Foster, Chester’s star pitcher, was called away and would not be able to pitch on Wednesday. This would greatly increase the odds that Rock Hill would win the Wednesday game. That part of the plan worked. Hundreds of dollars were wagered by Rock Hill partisans that Rock Hill would win the game.

Wednesday’s game was to have the largest audience in Rock Hill history. All of the stores in town were closed.

Sure enough, when the Wednesday game started, Foster was not on the mound. According to The Record, two automobiles had been sent to Edgemoor, south of Rock Hill, to get Foster off the train and rush him to Rock Hill (presumably the second car was backup insurance in case the first one broke down). Foster arrived at the field in time to start the fifth inning.

Then, according to the newspaper, “providence took a hand and sent a pouring rain.” The umpire, H. S. Baird of Darlington, was highly respected in the state and Rock Hill, expecting trouble, had paid him $45 (a very high sum at the time) to umpire the two games with Chester.

Both sides agreed on one point: after the game started at 5:15 Chester played slow ball until their pitcher got there, and then Rock Hill played slow ball while praying that the ominous rain clouds would burst before Chester got too far ahead. At the end of the fourth inning the score was Chester 4, Rock Hill 0. In the fifth inning Rock Hill had a man on first base, two out and two strikes on the batter. At that point the rain started pouring. People around the open field began searching for shelter (the rules allowed a game to be called under that circumstance).

Still, the umpire did not call the game until the batter fouled a pitch beyond first base. Baird wrote The State newspaper that he was personally “wet to the skin” and added that a Chester fan directed foul language at him and following him to his hotel.

Because it was a called game, all bets were off. Because the game had lasted more than three innings, no gate money was returned (the tickets were 25 cents to see the game).

The Record (which always put baseball games on the front page) reported that, “The Chester folks are certainly sore over the game being called, as they had loaded up to carry away hundreds of dollars of Rock Hill money . . . . “ The Chester folk were miserable, they had lost the game, lost their money and had to ride home in wet clothes. And, it should be added, most of them were not gamblers and were not in on the gambling scheme.

On the gambling, The Record editorialized, “The time has come to call a halt. It is not a matter of town against town playing their own boys as they used to for the fun that is in it, but it has simply gotten down to a gambling scheme and the ones that can hire the best professional players and soak the other crowd, why that is what they are going to do. Neither team playing here this week was any representative of either Rock Hill or Chester.”

The paper proposed a game between Rock Hill and Chester in which the teams were composed only of local players. Elsewhere in the paper were stories about bidding wars across the state for the services of professional baseball players.

And, within a few days the Rock Hill Base Ball Association was sponsoring a carnival at the baseball field to raise money in order to hire star players for the next season.