Missing your sports? Here’s a story dredged
up from deep within the vault of sports’ “ecstasy and agony.” You aren’t likely
to see anything about baseball player Billy Sunday on “The Sports Writers”
television show on ESPN. He goes way-way back.
Billy Sunday was born in Ames, Iowa, in
1862, but never got to meet his father. William Sunday went off to fight in the
Civil War; he caught pneumonia in a Union army camp and died about a month after
Billy was born.
An article by Wendy Knickerbocker of the
Society for American Baseball Research noted that Billy Sunday was a dual-sport
star growing up, excelling in track and baseball.
He was discovered as a teenager on a
local baseball diamond in Marshalltown, Iowa, by Adrian “Cap” Anson,
player-manager of the Chicago White Stockings of the National League. (Anson is
enshrined in Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame.) Anson signed Sunday in 1893
as a reserve outfielder.
As a rookie, “Sunday was an instant fan
favorite,” Knickerbocker wrote. “The crowds enjoyed watching him sprint after
fly balls in the outfield, but they cheered even louder for his daring steals
and legged-out hits.”
Sunday played eight seasons in the big
leagues, from 1883-90. His career batting average was a fair-to-middling .248.
Author William Ellis said Sunday was
“the speediest base runner and most daring base stealer of the entire baseball
fraternity.”
Thom Karmik of Baseball History Daily
reported that baseball’s Jake “Eagle Eye” Beckley once told the press in 1915:
“You can have your Ty Cobb (one of the best baseball players of all time)…I’ll
take Billy Sunday for my ball club right now, and I said the same thing back in
the nineties.”
Beckley and Cobb are also Hall of
Famers…and Sunday could have been, had he played longer.
(Sunday was the first player ever to
circle the bases in 14 seconds, and the modern-day record speed for an
inside-the-park-homerun is 13.85 seconds.)
People only “thought” Billy Sunday left
the game in 1891. Beckley said in his 1915 interview: “Billy’s running and
sliding every day in that pulpit, just as he did back in the old days.” Amen,
brother.
Billy Sunday chose a life of Christian
service in 1891, and he emerged as “the Baseball Evangelist,” Knickerbocker
wrote. “In the days before radio, Billy Sunday was the most successful
evangelist America had ever known.”
Sunday’s religious career blossomed in
1893 when John Wilbur Chapman, a popular Presbyterian evangelist, selected fellow
Presbyterian Billy Sunday to assist with a series of revivals throughout the
Midwest.
Later, when Chapman accepted a pastorate
in Philadelphia, Sunday went out on his own in 1896. He had but one dagnabbit sermon
at the time, so it was important he move about from place to place.
Sunday directed many of his messages to
men. He once said: “Many think a Christian has to be a sort of dish-rag…wishy-washy,
sissified sort of a galoot who lets everybody make a doormat out of him.”
“Let me tell you, the manliest man is
the man who will acknowledge Jesus Christ.”
“I don’t use much highfalutin language.
I learned a long time ago to put the cookies and jam on the lowest shelf,”
Sunday said.
“Going to church doesn’t make you a
Christian any more than going to a garage makes you an automobile.”
Billy Sunday wrote more sermons…and made
about 20,000 presentations before he died in 1935 at age 72.
Sunday had an influence on Mordecai Ham,
a Baptist evangelist. Ham, in turn, had an influence on a young man who
identified himself at a 1934 church meeting in Charlotte, N.C., as Billy Frank
Graham.
Outfielder Billy Sunday
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