The Con Artist Harry Decker — Toronto's First Star Baseball Catcher

Toronto was celebrating. The 1887 baseball season was over, and the city had just won its first championship. The team was packed with beloved stars, like the ace of the pitching staff, Ned "Cannonball" Crane, who led Toronto to victory in 16 straight games to finish the year. The names of the players who'd pulled off the feat would be revered in the city for decades to come. But one of them wasn't quite what he seemed.

In the midst of all those beloved heroes was one notorious villain. The man who crouched behind the plate all season was more than just a baseball player. He was a con artist — and his life was about to take a terrible turn. His name would soon appear in the papers under much more dismal circumstances: as the subject of manhunts and of courtroom dramas, locked away in prison cells and in lunatic asylums, earning a reputation as "one of the most dangerous men in the country."

Toronto's star catcher was a criminal.

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Harry Decker grew up in Chicago. As a teenager he was already among the most promising young prospects in the city. A catcher with "a good, strong, accurate arm... solid batting and capable defensive work," he signed his first professional contract before he turned 20 and quickly broke into the Major Leagues with the Indianapolis Hoosiers. His future seemed incredibly bright.

But it didn't take long for the first signs of trouble to appear. Decker seemed determined to squander all that promise.

He didn't even finish his first season with Indianapolis. He quit halfway through a game, when a couple of players from a new, rival league showed up. "Oh Deck!" they called out to him, "Over here" — quite literally waving a wad of dollar bills in the air.

They say it only took three or four innings for Decker to make his move. In the sixth, he let the ball hit him in the finger so he could claim he was injured and pull himself from the game, never to return. He raced off to Kansas City to play for a new team in the new league — leaving a pile of debts and unpaid bills behind him.

It was a costly decision. The new league quickly failed and Decker was blacklisted from the Majors for a season. The season after that, he was back in trouble again: suspected of throwing a game for gamblers. The crime was never proven, but he committed three errors and let himself get thrown out at the plate during the supposedly fixed contest — enough to make people very suspicious.

And so, as the 1887 season approached, Decker found himself looking for a job.

He got three offers: the teams in Washington, Rochester and Toronto all wanted him. So he said yes to all three. And then tried to cash all three of their cheques.

His scam didn't work — thanks to a mistake that was either breathtakingly dumb or breathtakingly brazen. He tried to cash two of the cheques at the same time, with the same banker. The banker caught on quickly: he'd been on the Board of Directors for the Washington team.

Still, Decker wasn't ready to give up yet. Next, he tried to cash three more cheques from three other teams by pretending to be three different catchers. This time, his fraud was uncovered because he gave a fake address for one of his alter-egos. When the team showed up at that address, they found nothing there but a vacant lot... and Harry Decker pacing up and down the street, waiting for his cheque to arrive in the mail.

Even then, he didn't admit his wrong-doing. His first line of defence was simple: no one, he claimed, could possibly be that stupid. When that failed, he concocted a new fraud, claiming that there were two Harry Deckers who were both catchers in the Major Leagues. That one didn't work either.

Suddenly, teams were getting cold feet. His offers were quickly drying up.

And so that's how he ended up in Toronto.

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1887. Toronto was booming. New railroads were bringing new Canadians into the city every day. The population was skyrocketing. New businesses and entertainment ventures were being opened constantly. And now, for the first time ever, they included a professional baseball team.

The Toronto Baseball Club had played their very first season the year before, in the city's first baseball stadium, which stood overlooking the Don Valley at the corner of Queen & Broadview — right across the street from the spot where the Broadview Hotel now stands.

It was originally known as the Toronto Baseball Grounds, but it would soon be nicknamed Sunlight Park in honour of the nearby Sunlight Soap Works factory. Spectators could walk in off Queen Street or ride up in their carriages and park their horses on the grounds. Admission was a quarter — plus an extra dime or two to sit in the best seats in the house. The sheltered grandstand had enough room for more than two thousand people, and there was standing room for another ten thousand beyond that. A sellout at Sunlight Park meant that about 10% of the entire population of Toronto was at the ballgame that day.

Baseball was still brand new back then. So new, in fact, that some of the rules were still being developed. That year, a pitcher needed four strikes to get a batter out. He could throw five balls before giving up a walk, and he was allowed to hit the batter too. Umpires could ask players and fans for advice. Sacrifice flies didn't exist. And for the very first time, every home plate would be made of rubber instead of marble.

The Toronto team played in one of the minor leagues: the International League. But they were still stacked with star players and memorable characters. 

There was outfielder Mike Slattery, fast as anything. He stole 112 bases that year, setting the International League record, which still stands to this day. And as if that wasn't impressive enough, he and another one of his teammates — August Alberts — both had a batting average over .350.

The backup catcher was George Stallings. He would go down in history as a Major League manager — "The Miracle Man" who led the hapless 1914 Boston Braves from last place to a stunning World Series sweep — and is credited with being the first manager to successfully use a platoon.

The star of the team was Cannonball Crane, the ace of the Toronto pitching staff; one of the game's first big power pitchers. His fastball was the fastest in the game. And he combined that blistering speed with a "deceptive drop ball" that baffled opposing hitters. It was a deadly combination.

With Decker behind the plate catching him, Cannonball carved up opposing hitters. He would win 33 games for Toronto that year — more than any other pitcher has ever won on any Toronto team — with a 2.49 ERA. And he was one of the best hitters in the league that year, too, finishing with a .428 batting average — still considered to be the best batting average by a pitcher in professional baseball history.

Together, they battled for first place all through the summer, neck and neck with the teams from Newark and Jersey City. The decisive day came on a Saturday afternoon in September: a double-header against their rivals from Newark. Cannonball pitched both games and hit the walkoff home run to win the second, propelling Toronto into first place. They would never relinquish that lead: they won every single game for the rest of the year. 16 in a row.

Harry Decker had helped to bring our city its first baseball championship.

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He would play even better the following season, hitting .313 as the Toronto Baseball Club finished in second place. But even after he'd established himself as a star in Toronto, it was his life off the field that made Harry Decker truly remarkable.

For one thing, he was an inventor. He came out of his time in Toronto having produced a design for a new kind of padded catcher's mitt — the same basic idea that is still being used today. He enlisted a business partner and together they applied for a patent, working in the offseason to prepare for production. It would prove to be an incredibly lucrative idea, but Decker was never a patient man. He nearly lost the patent entirely when he didn't bother to pay the necessary fees. And in the end, he sold off his interest in the new glove for $50. The rights were bought by Al Spalding's company: the sporting goods king who founded the National League would go on to manufacture the glove for years to come.

And that may not have been Decker's only sucessful invention. That same winter, he might have invented a new kind of turnstile, which quickly became the standard in ballparks, fairgrounds and racetracks across the country. But the details aren't clear. The New York Sporting Times accused Decker of ripping off the design: they claimed he stole a turnstile from the Philadelphia Phillies' ballpark, filed off the name of the original inventor, replaced it with his own, and then tried to sell the turnstile back to the Phillies as a completely new design.

And whether or not that story was true, it certainly wasn't out of character. Harry Decker was a con artist with an impressively long rap sheet.

Over the years, he faced criminal charges over and over again. He was arrested for stealing from teammates. And from his roommate. He was arrested for stealing a suit of clothes, and for stealing a bicycle, and for stealing a horse. He forged a cheque to pay his tailor, another to pay his grocer, a third to pay for a fancy hat for his mistress, and many more beyond that. He forged the signatures of Al Spalding and of the owners of the Phillies. He got caught counterfeiting money — and then forged the signature of the U.S. Marshal who arrested him for it.

As one Pinkerton detective put it, "I know it is customary in some circles to always describe a criminal as 'one of the most dangerous men in the country.' But this trite phrase well applies to him." The Chicago Tribune complained, "Decker's hallucination is that he owns the City of Chicago. He was in the habit of entering saloons and ordering wine for everybody present and then walking out with the belief that the place belonged to him and he could give away his own wares if he saw fit."

He used so many fake names that eventually the police admitted they didn't even know what his real name was anymore. All they knew for sure was that he grew up in a respected, wealthy family... in Pittsburgh. Which wasn't true at all.

Decker gave many explanations for his litany of crimes. He blamed some of them on getting hit in the head by a baseball. Others on getting kicked in the head by a horse. Some, he blamed on the stress of having a wife and a young child. Some, on insanity — the courts institutionalized him twice, but both times the doctors at the asylum found nothing wrong with him and released him back onto the streets again.

Once, Decker convinced a judge to send him to a particular prison of his own choosing by claiming he was dying of tuberculosis — which he miraculously recovered from as soon as the decision was handed down. On another occasion, when arrested for forging yet another cheque, he evaded jail time entirely by pointing out that when he signed the person's name, he'd spelled it wrong — so he couldn't possibly be guilty; he hadn't actually signed their name at all. At one point, he even seems to have had an operation to remove a cyst from his forehead — so it would be harder for witnesses to identify him.

On the occasions when he wasn't able to talk his way out of trouble, his rich parents were usually there to bail him out or to hire the best lawyers to defend him.

But his personal life, as you might imagine, did suffer.

Decker was married young, during the year he was blacklisted from the Major Leagues: to Annie Burns, a fifteen year-old girl he'd gotten pregnant. He had never been faithful to her: as his baseball teams toured from city to city, he quickly gained a reputation as a serial womanizer. The Philadelphia Inquirer called him "The Don Juan of the Diamond." And their marriage suffered another crushing blow when their two year-old daughter — who by all accounts, Decker was truly devoted to — died at the end of his last season in Toronto. Things seem to have gotten even worse after that. 

In 1891, Decker tried to marry a second woman under a fake name. But his fraud was quickly uncovered and he was charged with bigamy. It wasn't the last time he'd be caught trying to do something similar. And on another occasion, he was charged with statutory rape, having seduced an underage girl.

"I think I am a most unfortunate man," he once complained. "It seems to me that if I merely look at a girl she fancies me so much that a breach of promise suit is the result."

Annie divorced him in 1896. 

His baseball career was even shorter than his marriage. He played only two and a half seasons after leaving Toronto. His talent was undeniable and he got another shot at the Majors, but his actual results were usually mediocre and his teams' patience with his criminal behaviour quickly ran out. He was released by the New Haven Nutmegs halfway through the 1891 season — after he was arrested for the second time in just a few months. "If Decker had pursued a different course," an old manager once lamented, "he would now be in demand by the best clubs in the country." Instead, he would never play professional baseball again.

He did turn up on a diamond at least once more, though. In 1915, Sporting Life magazine stumbled across an interesting photo. It had been sent to the manager of the Los Angeles Angels as a thank you: the Angels had sent free uniforms to the team of prisoners who played baseball at San Quentin Prison. The autographed photo showed the full roster of inmates, and there among them was the star of the team: a catcher who looked awfully familiar. He was older now, and calling himself Earl Henry Davenport, but the face was unmistakable: it was Harry Decker. His life of crime had caught up with him yet again. He's thought to have spent a total of twelve years in prison.

But after that, he disappears from history. After being released from prison in October of that year, Harry Decker essentially vanished. Historians from the Society for American Baseball Research have spent decades trying to track him down, searching for any mention of him in the years after his stay at San Quentin. But it's not an easy job: Decker is thought to have used anywhere between fifteen to twenty aliases during his life; it was once said he "changes his name each time he boards a train." 

And so, no one knows how Harry Decker spent his final days, when he died, or where he is buried. It seems as if the ultimate fate of the one most notorious ballplayers in the history of Toronto will forever remain a mystery.

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Peter Morris' book, "Catcher: The Evolution of an American Folk Hero" has an absolutely fantastic chapter about Harry Decker. You can find it on Google Books here. I first learned about him in a passing mention in the awesome book "Baseball's Back In Town: From the Don to the Blue Jays A History of Baseball in Toronto" by Louis Cauz. You can buy it here or borrow it from the Toronto Public Library here.

I wrote more about Cannonball Crane here — and he gets a chapter in my Toronto Book of the Dead, too, which you can buy at your favourite Toronto bookseller (or from Amazon here). I also wrote about the 1887 championship team here.

"Bob Lemke's Blog" shares Decker's story here. He's also mentioned in "Big Sam Thompson: Baseball's Greatest Clutch Hitter" by Roy Kerr on Google Books here. And Sportsnet lists him as one of "The Greatest Mysteries in the History of Sport" here. Baseball History Daily has more about him here. And Goodwin & Co does here. His Baseball Reference stats page is here (though sadly, they don't have the numbers for that 1887 team). The Vintage Baseball Glove Forum has images of the glove he invented here.
 

Why Do We Celebrate Toronto's Birthday On A Day That Isn't Actually Toronto's Birthday?!

On March 6, we celebrated Toronto's 182nd birthday — which is weird, because Toronto isn't 182 years old, and it wasn't founded in March. Our city was founded 203 years ago, in the heat of July. But along the way, we've switched from celebrating the day Toronto was actually founded to the day it was officially incorporated as a "city." The reasons have a lot to do with Victorian whitewashing and there are allll kind of implications. And since it's always driven me nuts, I figured that this year I would mark the occasion with a Twitter rant.

(If you can't see the embedded tweets below, you can read them all on Storify here.)

The Tragic Tale of Toronto's First Big Baseball Star

The bases were loaded. It was the bottom of the eight. This was it: first place was on the line. Toronto and Newark headed into that Saturday afternoon battling for the lead in the International League — along with the team in Jersey City. With only a couple of weeks left in the 1887 season, every win was vitally important. And with only an inning left in their second game of the day, Toronto was losing to Newark by three runs.

That's when Ned "Cannonball" Crane came to the plate. He was the ace of the Toronto pitching staff; a giant of a man: big and tall and impossibly strong. He once threw a ball more than 400 feet — a world record; impressive even by today's standards — and he could throw a ball faster than anybody else could, either. He was one of the game's first big power pitchers. He combined the blistering speed of his fastball with a "deceptive drop ball" that baffled opposing hitters. It was a deadly combination. He won 33 games for Toronto that year — more than any other pitcher has ever won on any Toronto team.

And he could hit, too. Crane was one of the best hitters in the whole league that year. His .428 average is still considered to be the best batting average by a pitcher in professional baseball history. (If he'd hit that in the Majors, it would put him sixth on the all-time list for any position.) On the days when Crane wasn't pitching, he was in the outfield or at second base so they could keep his bat in the line-up.

On that Saturday afternoon in September, Crane had already done more than his fair share. Toronto and Newark were playing a double-header — two games at the Torontos' new stadium at Queen & Broadview, on a spot overlooking the Don Valley.

It was originally known as the Toronto Baseball Grounds, but it would soon be nicknamed Sunlight Park in honour of the nearby Sunlight Soap Works factory. Spectators could walk in off Queen Street or ride up in their carriages and park their horses on the grounds. Admission was a quarter — plus an extra dime or two to sit in the best seats in the house. The sheltered grandstand had enough room for more than 2,000 people, and there was standing room for another 10,000 — a capacity not that much smaller than a Leafs game at the Air Canada Centre today. But the stadium had never seen attendance like this. Those two games against Newark drew a record-setting crowd.

In the first game, Crane pitched all nine innings, keeping the Newark hitters at bay while the Toronto bats smashed their way to victory. The final score was 15-5.

But there was still one more game left to win. And now the Torontos had already used up their ace. The scheduled pitcher for the second game was a fellow by the name of Baker — and as the first pitch drew near, he was out on the field, getting ready just as everyone expected.

Sunlight Park (detail from an 1890s map)

And then, a surprise: as the Toronto team took the field to start the second game, Baker didn't head toward the pitcher's box. Instead, it was Cannonball Crane who came back to take his spot in the middle of the diamond.

A reporter from the Globe was there: "As soon as it was made clear that Crane was to pitch the second game, hundreds leaped to their feet and cheered frantically, a mighty whirl of enthusiasm took everybody within its embrace and an astounding volume of sound shook the stands and swept down toward the city and out over the grounds like the march of a tornado."

Cannonball Crane was going to pitch two games in one day.

Still, even with Crane in the pitcher's box, the second game didn't get off to a good start. Toronto fell behind and stayed there. It wasn't until the eighth inning — behind by three runs — that they rallied to load the bases, bringing Cannonball to the plate with a chance to play the hero.

And that's exactly what he did. The slugger hit a double, clearing the bases. Three runs scored. The game was tied. It would head to extra innings.

Crane kept pitching. He held Newark scoreless in the tenth. And then again in the eleventh. He had now pitched 20 innings in one afternoon.

In the bottom of the eleventh, Crane came to the plate with a chance to play the hero yet again. He crushed a pitch high into the sun above the Don Valley: deep, deeeep, gone. A walk-off home run. Toronto had won both games. According to the Globe, as Crane rounded the bases "the mighty audience arose and cheered and stamped and whistled and smashed hats... the frantic fans dashed on to the field and carried Crane aloft as his foot touched home."

The team's owner — a stock broker by the name of E. Strachan Cox — headed over to the scoreboard. He wrote a message for the crowd:

"CITIZENS, ARE YOU CONTENT? TORONTO LEADS THE LEAGUE."

The team had taken first place — and they would keep it for the rest of the season, winning every single game for the rest of the year. By the time it was all over, they'd won 16 in a row. Toronto had our first baseball championship.

But our hero wouldn't be back for the 1888 season. Instead, Crane signed with the New York Giants, helping them win the National League pennant and then the World's Series. He threw a no-hitter that year — and became one of the very first pitchers to ever wear a glove while fielding.

Sadly, that season was the beginning of the end. Things began to unravel for the pitcher almost as soon he left Toronto.

At the end of that first season with the Giants, Crane was invited to join Spalding's World Tour. The biggest stars in baseball signed up for a trip around the world, showcasing the sport to other countries. They played games in the shadow of the Sphinx, on the grounds of the Crystal Palace in London, outside the Villa Borghese in Rome... plus Australia, New Zealand, Ireland, Scotland, France, Samoa, Yemen, Ceylon...

Spalding's World Tour at the Villa Borghese

The problem was that when the players weren't on the field, they were partying. Crane had gone his entire life without ever having a single drink... right up until the days just before the tour began. "Crane," as one newspaper reported, "did not know what the taste of liquor was like until he made the trip around the world. He got his start drinking wine at the banquets tendered the American tourists."

And as Crane quickly discovered, he liked to drink. Far too much.

"Crane began drinking heavily from the moment he joined the tour in Colorado," according to the Society for American Baseball Research (SABR). "By the time the men reached San Francisco, he had missed several games due to drunkenness and being hung-over." They hadn't even left the United States yet and Crane was already a mess.

He spent much of the tour serving as a sluggish umpire with a headache and heatstroke instead of actually playing in the games. At some stops, he never even got off the ship — choosing instead to get drunk on board with his tiny, trouble-making pet monkey, entertaining his fellow passengers by breaking into song. At one point, he even had a stand-off with soldiers at the French-Italian border when they insisted he pay an extra fare for his simian companion.

The Giants repeated as World's Series champions the very next year. And Crane was back in the pitcher's box, serving as their ace, winning five games in the Series. He would go on to have a solid Major League career, finishing up with a 3.99 ERA over eight seasons. But as he continued to drink, his weight ballooned and he lost his effectiveness as a pitcher. His final year in the Majors was a disaster: a 6.98 ERA over twelve games. He was released by the Giants twice, signed by Brooklyn and then released by them, too. Things were spiraling out of control.

People in Toronto still loved him, though. In 1895, he returned to play for our city. But he wasn't the same. After an uninspiring beginning to the season, he was released for what the Toronto Evening Star called "alleged sulkiness on the field." The team across the lake in Rochester then signed him and gave him another shot, but Crane didn't even show up for his first game.

He made his final appearance at Sunlight Park in the summer of 1896. He was playing for Springfield now. The Toronto fans gave him a warm welcome as he came out onto the field overlooking the Don Valley, but it was a bittersweet reunion. By then, Crane weighed nearly 300 pounds. His glory days were far behind him. He was no match for the Toronto bats. They crushed him.

Once, as the Globe remembered, Crane's name "inspired dread among all other players... But that is but a hazy memory. The once mighty name has lost its magic. It no longer inspires dread and fear... He essayed to pitch for Springfield against Toronto over the Don yesterday afternoon, and he made a sorry exhibition of himself... It would be painful to go into the details of the game." Soon, Springfield gave up on him too.

Finished as a player, Crane tried to find work as an umpire. But even that was a failure. "Crane," the Globe reported, "is said to be a way off in his judgment on balls and strikes." The newspapers blamed it on whisky. At 34 years old, he was unemployed and alcoholic, his wife and child had left him, he was depressed.

Rochester in the 1890s

"Crane sank deeper into the bottle as his prospects and money quickly ran out," SABR recalls. "He became despondent, freely talking about his troubles and the grim outlook for his future wherever he went."

Cannonball Crane wouldn't live to see the end of that 1896 season. On a Saturday in mid-September — almost nine years to the day since his glorious double-header in Toronto — he spent the afternoon getting drunk in his room at the Congress Hall hotel in Rochester. He hadn't paid his bill in ages. When he went downstairs, the owner warned him that if he didn't fork over the $70 he owed, he would be forced to give up his room. Crane promised to settle his bill. And then he headed back upstairs.

There was a bottle of chloral waiting for him.

The next morning, the maid couldn't open the door. A bellboy climbed up to peer through the transom. Crane was laid out on his bed. Dead. The official coroner's report described it as an accidental overdose. But everyone assumed it was suicide.

The next morning, he was remembered on the front page of the Toronto newspapers. His life had come to a tragic end, but thanks to those two games in the thick of a pennant race one Saturday afternoon in September, Cannonball Crane had written his name into the history of our city. He'd become an indelible part of Toronto sports lore, mentioned over and over again in our newspapers over the course of the next century — remembered fondly for bringing our city our very first baseball championship.

Next summer — in 2016, nearly 130 years since the Torontos won that pennant — a new plaque will be unveiled on the spot where Sunlight Park once stood. It will include a photo of Cannonball Crane, an ace at the height of his powers. The name of our city's first big baseball star will live in glory on Queen Street once again.

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A version of this story will appear in The Toronto Book of the Dead Coming September 2017 Pre-order from Amazon, Indigo, or your favourite bookseller

You can read my full, illustrated history of baseball in Toronto here. I've also written more about the 1887 Toronto Baseball Club here, plus the greatest second baseman in Toronto (who isn't who you think it is) here, Babe Ruth's first home run here, and Joe Carter's World Series-winning dream here,

Chris Bateman tells the story of Cannonball Crane and the Torontos over at blogTO here — he's also how I know a new plaque is on the way. The Society for American Baseball Research shares Crane's story here. You can find his Major League stats on Baseball Reference here. 

You can learn a little more about Spalding's World Tour here and here, or read a whole book about it: find it at the Toronto Public Library here or buy it here. 

I've also stumbled across Charles Anthony Joyce's PhD thesis about sports and class in Toronto in the middle of the 1800s. I haven't read it yet, but you'll find it in PDF form here.

This post is related to dream 42 The Pennant Ned "Cannonball" Crane, 1887

Toronto's First Great Baseball Team — the old-timey Toronto Baseball Club of 1887

Today, the Blue Jays start yet another new season trying to capture their first World Series in more than 20 years. But those glory days of the early 1990s weren't the first time a Toronto baseball team won a championship. To find the city's first baseball heroes, you have to look back more than 125 years, to the star-studded old-timey Toronto Baseball Club of 1887.

Baseball was still brand new back then. So new, in fact, that some of the rules were still being sorted out. That year, a pitcher needed four strikes to get a batter out. He could throw five balls before giving up a walk. He was also allowed to hit the batter with a pitch — luckily the ball was softer back then. Umpires were still allowed to ask players and fans for their advice. Sacrifice flies didn't exist yet. For the very first time, every home plate would be made of rubber instead of marble. And the International League — which included the Toronto team along with 11 others — would become the very first professional baseball league to declare themselves as officially racist: halfway through the season, they introduced a new rule banning the signing of Black players.

The Torontos, as they were called, played in a beautiful brand new stadium on a spot overlooking the Don Valley. Spectators could walk in off Queen Street or ride up in their carriages and park their horses on the grounds. Admission was a quarter — or an extra ten cents to sit in the best seats in the house. The sheltered grandstand had enough room to seat more than 2,000 people. The stadium was originally known as the Toronto Baseball Grounds, but would soon be nicknamed Sunlight Park in honour of the nearby Sunlight Soap Works factory. When it opened in 1886, even the Lieutenant Governor came to see the first game. Someone in his entourage had their hat knocked off by a foul ball.

But 1887 was the season to remember. The International League might have only been a Minor League — it still is: the Blue Jays' AAA affiliate in Buffalo is one of the current teams — but the Torontos were stacked with star players and memorable characters. 

There was outfielder Mike Slattery. He was as fast as anything. He stole 112 bases that year, setting the International League Record. It still stands to this day. Only a handful of professional baseball players in any league at any level have ever stolen more. And as if that wasn't impressive enough, he and another one of his teammates — August Alberts — both hit for more than a .350 batting average that year. (John Olerud is the only Blue Jay to have ever pulled it off — back in that magical 1993 season.)

Then there was the catcher, Harry Decker. He's best remembered for inventing a new kind of catcher's mitt — some people still call them "deckers" — and also, for his life of crime. After a brief stint in the Major Leagues, including time with the Phillies, Pirates and Nationals, he popped up as a star player for San Quentin Prison.

The Torontos' other catcher was George Stallings. He would go down in history as a Major League manager — "The Miracle Man" who led the hapless 1914 Boston Braves from last place in July to a stunning World Series sweep of Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, a team filled with future Hall of Famers. Bill James (the man behind the modern "Moneyball" revolution in baseball statistics) gives Stallings credit for being the first manager to successfully use a platoon — realizing that left-handed hitters tend to do better against right-handed pitchers and righties better against lefties. Managers still use his technique to this day. After Stallings retired, he would come back to Canada and help bring the minor league Royals to Montreal.

But none of those players was as incredible or as memorable as Cannonball Crane.

They say he was a giant: big and tall and incredibly strong. He once threw a baseball farther than anyone else ever had before. And he threw it faster than just about anyone else too. In 1887, he was by far the best pitcher on Toronto's Baseball Club. He won 33 games that year — more than any other pitcher has ever won on any Toronto team. At one point, he won 16 in a row. His "deceptive drop ball" completely fooled opposing hitters — and not just for Toronto; he'd go on to have an excellent 3.80 career ERA in the Major Leagues.

That's not all he was good at, either. When Cannonball wasn't pitching, he was playing at second base or in the outfield, because he was also Toronto's best hitter. In fact, he was the best hitter in the entire league that year. He hit for a .428 average. It's still considered to be the best batting average by a pitcher in professional baseball history. (If he'd hit that in the Majors, it would put him 6th on the all-time list for any position.)

His greatest moment in Toronto came right at the end of the year. The race for the pennant came down to the very last weekend of the season. On Saturday, the Torontos played two games. Cannonball pitched in the first one and won it. Then, in the second one, he not only pitched but also drove in three runs with his bat and launched the game-winning home run. The next day, he came back to pitch again — and he won again. It was over. The Torontos had clinched the 1887 International League pennant and the city of Toronto celebrated our first baseball championship.

It would not, of course, be our last. For the next few decades, Toronto was a major hub for Minor League baseball. The Toronto Maple Leafs are listed five times on the official MLB list of the top 100 greatest Minor League teams ever. Some of the biggest stars in the history of the game played in the new stadiums that replaced Sunlight Park — three of them were built at Hanlan's Point over the years. Babe Ruth famously hit his first professional home run right into our harbour.

Toronto's last Minor League ballpark — the majestic Maple Leaf Stadium at the foot of Bathurst Street — was finally torn down in the 1960s, when the team was sold off and moved to Kentucky. But a decade later, the Blue Jays came to town. Twice they've been crowned as champions. And tonight, at what was once the futuristic SkyDome, the newest cast of star players and memorable characters will try to carry on the winning tradition that started on the banks of the Don River all those years ago.

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Image: Mike Slattery (left); Harry Decker (centre); Cannonball Crane (right); Yonge Street in 1885-1895 by Frank Micklethwaite (background) via the Wikimedia Commons and some liberal Photoshopping.

I first learned about this team thanks to the book Baseball's Back In Town: From the Don to the Blue Jays A History of Baseball in Toronto by Louis Cauz. You can buy it here or borrow it here.