The Pecan Park Eagle

Ed Delahanty: The 1903 death of this future Hall of Famer remains one of the great unsolved cold cases in baseball history.

As a matter of course in reading all kinds of ancient baseball history, enough of it, done continuously over time, and you eventually will form your own orbital-steady contact with the story of Ed Delahanty, the ancient Hall of Fame left fielder who died tragically in 1903 after being put off a train for being “drunk and disorderly” at Fort Erie, Canada, at the International Bridge near Niagara Falls that leads to Buffalo, New York.  Some said he was brandishing a knife on the train after having consumed several whiskies that night and threatening other passengers.

At any rate, after the ejection, “Big Ed” as he was often called, apparently decided to cross the expansive rail ridge on foot, but never made it. About a week later, they found his body a short distance downstream, but were never able to determine if Ed Delahanty slipped, jumped, or was pushed off the bridge into the waters below. One account from a later secondary witness suggests that he was last seen being followed by another mysterious figure who was never identified.

Since Delahanty’s body was found without the wallet and jewelry he was known to have had on him at the time of his disappearance, the cause heats up for robbery/murder, but that suspicion alone does not rule out the possibility that he was simply relieved of these personal valuables after his dead body was first discovered. The Ed Delahanty Death lives on as a cold case for the ages. Back then, they either could not, or did not try to determine his exact cause of death. Was it caused by the impact trauma of his fall? Was it the result of drowning? Or was there any evidence of prior trauma from an assailant that might lend credence to the possibility of murder? No one knows today because nothing was ever determined back then.

On July 2, 1903, an investigative writer named Mike Sowell published an investigative study of the Delahanty conundrum  in a work entitled “The Mysterious Death of Big Ed Delahanty.” It was published again by McMillan Publishing Company in 1992. The Sowell Study considers the evidence for all possibilities, but, as it stands to this day, nothing was ever determined that approaches certainty.

The death remains a big confirmation of one rule of wisdom that many people have to learn to survive the delusion of immortality and indestructibility that often accompanies the narcissistic vision of their young adult years. That is – that “being in the wrong place at the wrong time under the influence of drugs and/or alcohol can get you killed.”

Big Ed Delahanty didn’t make it. That’s all we know for sure.

Ed Delahanty was most deserving of his Hall of Fame induction in 1945. In sixteen seasons as a big leaguer (1888-1903), Ed batted over .400 on three occasions, winning two batting championships and finishing with a career lifetime batting average of .346. It’s just too bad, as always is the case, that his own vulnerability to cutting his life short won out over his talent for hitting a baseball.

Willis A (Papa) Teas
San Antonio, Texas
1938

I can never think of Ed Delahanty without thinking of an answer my maternal grandfather, Willis Teas,  once gave me to a question I asked him when I was about ten years old. We had just met “Pappa” at Union Station in downtown Houston on one of his train trips to visit us from San Antonio. He and I were walking ahead of Mom and Dad on the short trip from the track area to the same great depot hall that now serves as the grand foyer of Minute Maid Park.

“Papa,” I asked, “would a fall from the top of Union Station over there absolutely kill you every time?”

“No,” Papa said with a chuckle as he responded to my early life search for absolute answers with a sense of humor that often embarrassed me for asking  what then felt like a stupid question. “It wouldn’t kill you every time, just the first time. Remember, Billy, we only die once. Remember too, it isn’t the fall from a high place that kills the person falling. – It’s the sudden stop when the body hits the pavement that does him in.”

Papa Teas Reincarnate
Houston, Texas
2008

I loved Papa Teas, but it’s a small wonder that I didn’t grow up to be a smart ass too.