Pure Baseball Hell: The Story of the 1899 Cleveland Spiders Baseball Club

Nearly 100 years ago in his Postmodern poetic masterpiece The Wasteland T.S. Eliot wrote, “April is the cruelest month”.  Little did he know how prophetic his words would become for all of us less than a full century later.

We face an April, as baseball fans, during which the baseball season has been indefinitely put on hold for the safety of the nation.  We, as Americans, face an April without our national game being played professionally for the first time since 1883.  We face the possibility of a long hot summer, a chilly darkening fall, and a barren stark and freezing winter all without baseball.

But take solace baseball fans because it could be worse.

I’m not talking about worse in the sense that a thermonuclear war, living through the Black Death of the 14th century or a War of the Worlds type extraterrestrial invasion could all be worse than the current Covid-19 pandemic that we are going through at present because, sadly, it remains to be seen how truly calamitous this pandemic and all of its subsequent economic fallout will be.  I only mean that it could be worse for all of us in a trivial and purely baseball sense.

If you’re a baseball fan like me then you’re probably thinking that there couldn’t possibly be anything worse than Opening Day not arriving on time.  Telling a baseball fan in March that Opening Day has been pushed back to July 1st is like telling an 8 year old child in November that Christmas morning has been moved back to sometime in the middle of February.

However, if you know anything at all about the 1899 Cleveland Spiders of the National League then you know that, as a baseball fan, there does exist a pure state of baseball Hell that is far worse than having no baseball at all.

Last season marked the 30th anniversary of the premier of the comedic baseball movie Major League.  In that perennially popular movie the Cleveland Indians of the American League are owned by greedy, maniacal and flirtatious owner Rachel Phelps.  In the movie, by signing a bunch of cast-offs, has-beens and oddballs she constructs what she believes will be in the worst team in the history of professional baseball.  She does this in the hopes that the team will go on to lose so many games that they will draw absolutely no fans which will in-turn enable her to move the franchise to a much more cosmopolitan city with a much more modern ballpark.

Well, as it turns out, that funny film Major League is much closer to reality than its creators may ever have imagined.  In many ways the real life Cleveland Spiders Baseball Club of 1899 were exactly the same as their fictitious Cleveland Indian counterparts of 1989, except for the fact that the Spiders’ season didn’t end in the playoffs--it ended with an all time high 130 losses.

That’s right: 130 losses.  Many baseball fans believe that the expansion 1962 New York Mets who finished their inaugural season with a record of 40 wins and 120 losses had the worst record in the history of Major League Baseball, and in a way, they’re right.  The 1962 Mets are the worst team in the history of the modern era of professional baseball which dates from 1903 the season when the first World Series was held between the National League and the then upstart American League.  It was the 1903 season which marked the formation of what we would consider “modern” Major League Baseball when team owners in the  American and National Leagues entered into a tenuous agreement to stop luring players away from the rival league with lucrative contracts and thereby entered into a form of cooperation by the name of Major League Baseball.

But in 1876 team owners from 8 cities: New York, Chicago, Providence, St. Louis, Cleveland, Pittsburgh, Hartford and Cincinnati banded together to form the National League of Professional Baseball.  The teams which began in 1876 in Cincinnati, Chicago and Pittsburgh exist to this day,  and it is the 1899 Cleveland Spiders who finished their final season with a record of 20 wins and 134 losses who should rightly be considered the worst professional baseball team in history.  Sorry Mets fans, but it would seem as if your team has even lost at losing.

The 1899 Cleveland Spiders were so bad that although a new American League franchise would form in the city in 1902, National League baseball would never again return to Cleveland.

But unlike their 20th century New York counterparts, the Mets, who would finish last or next to last for the first seven seasons of their existence, the Cleveland Spiders prior to 1899 had been one of the premier franchises in nascent professional baseball.  In 1888 the Spiders had won a league championship and only the year before in 1898 the Spiders finished with a respectable record of 81 wins and 68 losses.

Cleveland throughout the 1880’s and 90’s fielded a team filled with perennial all stars including two legendary Hall of Famers in Outfielder Jesse Burkett, a lifetime .340 hitter, and the incomparable Cy Young, quite possibly the greatest Pitcher of all time and the namesake for today’s award representing the best pitcher in each league.

Despite their track record of excellence the Spiders were constantly plagued throughout their existence by one insufferable problem: low attendance.  The Cleveland Spiders finished dead last in attendance each year that they played, never once drawing over 10,000 fans in an entire season.

Today’s average attendance at a Major League Baseball game hovers around 25,000 fans.  In the late 19th century the most popular, best and most profitable teams in baseball such as those in cities like St. Louis, Chicago, Boston, New York and Pittsburgh would typically draw anywhere between 2,000 and 3,000 fans per game.  In the course of an average season profitable owners would look to draw upwards of 150,000 fans and then pocket four-fifths of the gate receipts while using the other one-fifth to pay for incidentals such as player salaries and stadium up-keep.

Since the Spiders routinely played games in front of crowds (if one could even call them that) of fewer than 100 fans it isn’t hard to imagine why their stadium, League Park, soon fell into complete disrepair and ended up with an entirely dirt infield and with a grandstand consisting solely of warped wooden bleachers and standing room only.

Without a doubt, League Park, the home of the Cleveland Spiders, was definitely the single worst home ballpark in all of pre-modern professional baseball.  League Park was so bad that the Spiders were forced by the National League to play all of the aforementioned 1898 season on the road!

But other than having a decrepit ballpark; being named after a phobia inspiring arachnid and having a logo that seems more suitable for a Satanic cult than a baseball team,  it is  difficult to say why exactly the Spiders had such difficulty drawing fans throughout their time in the National League.  This is especially so since in 1902 the American League would go on to expand into Cleveland, with the addition of a team that would eventually become today’s Cleveland Indians.  Suffice it to say, however, that Cleveland’s awful climate for Fall baseball and depressed economy in the 1880’s and 90’s didn’t help matters any.

On the surface though the Spiders had one advantage that other teams did not.  It is an advantage that made it economically feasible for the Spiders to play an entire season of road games in 1898 and to pay for stars such as Burkett and Young.

The Cleveland Spiders were owned by the wealthy and almost maniacally greedy brothers Frank and Stanley Robinson.  In the late 1870’s Frank Robinson had gone into business with his father-in-law, Charles Hathaway, operating streetcars in Cleveland, Ohio.

At the time, streetcars running on tracks down the center of muddy city streets were an almost revolutionary technology, and prior to the popularization of mass produced automobiles during the second decade of the 20th century, commuting by streetcar was all the rage for America’s ever growing urban masses.

Being at the forefront of this transportation revolution enabled Frank Robinson to become one of Ohio’s wealthiest men and gain a virtual monopoly over Cleveland’s mass transport system by eventually forming the Cleveland City Railway Company in 1893.

Stanley Robinson, Frank’s brother, while not a transportation mogul or a businessman of any kind for that matter, was a middling sort of professional baseball player with an aptitude for coaching others.  Combine the profit minded railcar pioneer Frank with his baseball obsessed brother Stanley and in 1887 you get the birth of the Cleveland Spiders.

Stanley would coach and occasionally play the infield while Frank saw to the construction of League Park and the payroll of the team.  For almost ten years this partnership worked except for one problem: it didn’t make a dime and no one in Cleveland seemed to care if the Spider’s won, lost or didn’t play at all.

Heading into the 1899 season the team in Cleveland wasn’t making enough money to suit the business minded Frank’s desire for dollars or drawing enough attention to suit the baseball minded Stan’s desire for baseball glory and because of that what the Robinson brother’s did next would turn the 1899 Cleveland Spiders’ season into one of pure baseball Hell.

In February of 1899, a mere two months before the start of the baseball season, the Robinson brother’s bought the St. Louis Browns.  That’s right: they bought another baseball team not only in the same league but also in the same division as the other team that they owned!

As if that wasn’t bad enough, immediately after their purchase of the Browns, the Robsinson’s promptly changed the Browns’ name to either the St. Louis Perfectos or the St. Louis Superbas.  I have consulted several different sources for this article and none of them seem to be in agreement as to what exactly Frank and Stanley Robinson renamed the Browns in the year 1899, but it was one of either of those two horrid names--Superbas or Perfectos.  All this shows is that the Robinson’s were just as good judges of ethical behavior as they were of team nicknames.

Regardless of the team’s actual name, on March 29, 1899 less than three weeks prior to opening day, the Robinson’s simply moved all of their best players from the one team that they owned in Cleveland to the other team that they currently owned in St. Louis.  They then scoured sandlots, factories and local schools to find pseudo-professional ballplayers who would fill out the Cleveland Spiders roster as cheaply as possible.

One player named Frank Bates who would go on to be a starting pitcher for the Spiders that year was homeless and had just recently been released from jail after having been detained for a series of burglaries.  Bates would go on to have a record of 1 win and 18 losses with an earned run average of over 7.00 and he would walk 105 batters while striking out only 15 over the course of the entire season for Cleveland.  Bates is an illustrative example of how the Spiders in a baseball era of little offense could hit a little bit, they would score 530 runs over the course of 154 games, but they couldn’t pitch for sh...well, you know.

The Spiders would go on to give up 1252 over the course of the 1899 season--a record which stands to this day!

Anyway, after purchasing the Browns and renaming them either the Superbas or the Perfectos, the Robinson’s had decided that the team in Saint Louis would be the one which would draw more fans, make more money and win more baseball games and that is why they set about using the Cleveland Spiders as their own personal farm team for the club formerly known as the Browns.

And oddly enough, despite the ludicrously apparent conflict of interest inherent in what the Robinson’s were doing to our modern eyes, the brother’s were completely unabashed about the whole thing.

Stanley Robinson is on record as stating to the press that he planned to run the team in Cleveland as a, “sort of circus sideshow”.

After the Robinson-owned Cleveland Spiders lost to the Robinson-owned St. Louis Superbas/Perfectos on Opening Day 1899, in Cleveland no less, the local paper The Cleveland Plains Dealer ran the headline: “LET THE FARCE BEGIN”.

The Spiders would go on to start the season with 8 wins and 30 losses and things would only go downhill from there.  At no time during the season would the Spiders ever win more than two games in a row and they would have losing streaks as long as  twenty-four, seventeen and fifteen games respectively.  After starting the season with 8 wins and 30 losses the Spiders would finish it with 12 wins and 104 losses!

To put this in perspective note that Cleveland finished a full 86 games out of first place, won only one game in the entire month of September AND October combined, and despite being blanked by the opposition in 14 games never once shut out their opponents over the course of a 154 game season.  To add insult to injury, the Cleveland Spiders drew only 6,066 fans in total to all of their home games and as if that wasn’t bad enough the Spiders did not win a single game against their interstate rivals from Cincinnati (0-14) and won only one single game (1-13) against the team from St. Louis.  Frank and Stan Robinson did truly run the Cleveland Spiders as a sideshow.

If anything good could be said to have come out of the pure baseball hell that were the Cleveland Spiders of 1899 it could be the fact that owners around the National League took note of what the Robinson brothers had done and did not approve.

It is important to remember that in late 19th century American business, practices such as collusion, exploitation and even monopolizing an entire industry were not seen in any kind of negative light.  In fact these shady practices were not only tolerated they were actively encouraged.  Carnegie, Vanderbilt, Morgan, Ford, Chase even Edison and Westinghouse--The list goes on and on of the American titans of business, industry and banking who used methods just like Frank and Stanley Robinson to gain wealth and power in their chosen fields.

What is surprising is that in this age of unbridled laissez-faire capitalism the other owners of the other 10 teams in the National League took such a hardline stance against what Frank and Stanley Robinson did.

After the 1899 season the owners met and voted to disband the Cleveland Spiders altogether and contract the entire National League of Professional Baseball down from 12 teams to 8 by eliminating not only the Spiders, but also teams in Louisville, Hartford and Baltimore as well.

The other owners also voted to make it illegal for one owner, or ownership group, to have a controlling interest in more than one team at a time.  This was a very far reaching statute in it’s day for any organization and one which is still enforced today not only in Major League Baseball but also in every other major professional American team sport.

Paradoxically, though, the league did allow the Robinson brothers to continue to own the team in St. Louis.  This fact together with the fact that players were contractually bound to the same team for life due to the reserve clause and also the fact that they couldn’t be players at all unless their skin was white proves that even professional baseball in 1900 had a long, long way to go towards fairness and equality, but at least they were off to a good start.  Even Frank and Stanley Robinson came somewhat to their senses once the century turned and changed the team in St. Louis’ name from the Perfectos or Superbas or whatever back to the Browns.

So that as you sit inside with no baseball just remember that it could be worse.  You could have been stuck inside the pure baseball hell that was the Cleveland Spiders Baseball Club of 1899.