Charlie Murphy: The Iconoclastic Showman behind the Chicago Cubs by Jason Cannon

Abstract

Reviewed by: Charlie Murphy: The Iconoclastic Showman behind the Chicago Cubs by Jason Cannon James E. Overmyer Jason Cannon. Charlie Murphy: The Iconoclastic Showman behind the Chicago Cubs. Lincoln, NE: University of Nebraska Press, 2022. 400 pp. Cloth, $36.95. Within less than two years Charles Webb Murphy soared from being an assistant newspaper editor in Cincinnati to owning the Chicago Cubs. He was in charge for nine seasons that included the team’s most successful run, four National League pennants, and two World Series championships between 1906 and 1910. Murphy was intelligent, energetic, and forceful. But by 1914 he had been forced out of Major League Baseball by his fellow owners because sometimes you can be too forceful, particularly if you are also relentlessly critical of baseball’s other magnates. Due to his blackballing, Murphy has mostly vanished from MLB history despite overseeing those championship teams. Jason Cannon has fixed that, though, with his book Charlie Murphy: The Iconoclastic Showman behind the Chicago Cubs. One of the best things about Cannon’s book is how instead of meandering into his subject as authors tend to do in their introductions, he gets right down to it: “Murphy’s relentless public exposure of the underbelly of baseball’s business made him a target of the establishment’s wrath” (1). Cannon has gone deeper into the Murphy story, though, and sees him as “a complicated, brilliant human being immersed in the world of Organized Baseball during the Progressive Era” (6). Murphy was an admirable young man, working at age fifteen in his hometown of Wilmington, Ohio, to help support his family, then moving to nearby Cincinnati to become a newspaperman, including time as a sportswriter. Even then, though, Charlie demonstrated his lack of reverence for baseball leaders, leading an invasion by the reporters covering the National League’s owners meeting in December 1900 to demand some news— “I need some good stories for my paper . . . and you’re holding out,” as Cannon recounts it (35). Murphy’s hard- charging attitude caught the attention of New York Giants owner John T. Brush, who in 1904 hired him as the team’s press agent. But Charlie didn’t stay in Gotham for long. He learned that the Cubs were available [End Page 122] for a bargain price (the principal owner, a banker, was in financial hot water). Murphy’s last newspaper employer had been the CincinnatiTimes- Star, and he approached its owner, Charles P. Taft, for help in acquiring the team. Taft, future president William Howard Taft’s older half brother, had less charisma than his sibling, but he had a lot of money, some of which he lent to Murphy to buy a controlling interest in the Chicago club in July 1905. Club owners in baseball’s early days often took a direct hand in putting a team together. While Murphy’s field manager was the “Peerless Leader” Frank Chance, an all-around baseball man, Charlie himself gets a good part of the credit for the squad that won pennants in 1906– 8 and 1910 (“slumping” to second in 1909) and the Series in ’07 and ’08. Murphy, ordinarily hardly shy, deflected credit for the 1908 win: “I don’t consider myself any shrewder than the ordinary mortal— only luckier” (81). But he was still dedicated to keeping his Cubs, and baseball as a whole, in the headlines around the calendar, falling athwart of his more reserved fellow owners when he tore open the sport’s corporate veil to keep the newspaper stories coming. Problems for Murphy began to pile up beginning in 1908, and those in the baseball establishment were keeping score. The first mess involved tickets to Chicago’s home games in that year’s World Series. The Cubs won the pennant on the season’s last day, with the Series’ first Chicago game to be played only three days later. In the rush to print and sell tickets, many loyal fans were left empty- handed, while ticket scalpers acquired large blocks. This resulted in Murphy’s being censured by the majors’ National Commission. Even worse was Murphy’s fallout with Chance. A dispute that began over money was exacerbated by...