Who hit the first ledger of the Modern Era?

We’ve come a long, long way in 123 years. Today baseball record keeping is both studious and ubiquitous. We have moved far beyond the box score in not only what baseball statistics, metrics, and measurements we track and analyze but what we can know the instant it happens. For example, I can tell you with 100% confidence that Royce Lewis hit the first ledger in the 2024 season because I follow an X account that does nothing but tell me when home runs are hit within seconds of the ball clearing the wall.

The same cannot be said of baseball in the earliest days of the Modern Era. We are lucky to have a great many box scores that are more-or-less accurate1. But specific accounts of games down to a complete play-by-play record are very hard to come by even into the middle of the century. So with these challenges in mind, is it even conceivable that we can say with certainty who hit the first ledger of the Modern Era?

Our chronicle will start on Thursday, April 18, 1901. The National League was set to open with a full slate of games while the American League would not start play until Wednesday, April 24. Unfortunately, the weather and resulting field conditions put a damper on Opening Day festivities in Boston, Cincinnati, and St. Louis. However, around 4,500 fans endured cold and wet conditions at Philadelphia’s Baker Bowl and watched the champion Brooklyn Superbas square off against the Phillies2.

That game ended up being a high scoring affair that finished with 19 runs, 29 hits, six doubles, and five triples (three of those belonging to Jimmy Sheckard) between the two teams. But not a home run was to be had. Our investigation is off to an easy start since you can’t have a ledger without a home run.

All four teams were set to try again the next day – Friday, April 19. The wet field conditions at League Park in Cincinnati had not improved, so the Pirates and Reds were postponed for the second straight day. The other three games would be held as scheduled, even if the weather wasn’t prime for baseball. The Boston Nationals played host to the New York Giants, the St. Louis Cardinals welcomed the Chicago Orphans, and the Phillies and Superbas would square off again except they’d be swapping venues and playing in Brooklyn.

The Boston Nationals quickly dispatched the Giants, shutting them out and holding them to only five hits in a game that lasted under ninety minutes. The Nationals scored seven runs, but only had two extra base hits in the form of a pair of doubles. So in a stroke of investigative luck, we can eliminate this game as a source for a ledger.

The Superbas improved their season record to 2-0 with a decisive win over the Phillies at Brooklyn’s Washington Park. The home team made the most of their eight hits and ten walks putting up ten runs to Philadelphia’s two. There were two home runs hit in the game, one per side.

The Cardinals and Orphans played a back-and-forth affair at Robison Field in St. Louis. The visiting Orphans prevailed by score of 8-7 with the teams combining for a whopping 32 hits, but only one was a home run. Our pool of potential ledgers stands at three.

Today we have access to a lot of pertinent information for our investigation, but there are still some puzzle pieces that need to fall into place. The first question we pose – in what order were the three home runs hit? That information is definitive for the Phillies-Superbas game. One home run was hit by a Brooklyn batsman in the bottom of the second inning and the Phillie hit his in the top of the ninth.

We also know the home run was hit in the bottom of the seventh inning in the Orphans-Cardinals game, but did it come before or after the home run hit in Brooklyn in the ninth inning?

We’ll get back to that. First, let’s take a moment to talk about primary and secondary sources. We know what inning these home runs were hit in because it is recorded in each player’s Home Run Log on Baseball Reference or noted on the box score on Retrosheet or in any other number of secondary source sites that culled information from primary sources from the time, namely newspapers. It’s relatively easy for us to find these primary sources today as many newspapers have been digitized and are searchable. However, the one piece of primary source material we most often lack is a play-by-play account of games.

Many newspaper accounts will list out the game highlights describing who hit what where, but rarely are they complete. They may say, “no damage was done in the fifth,” but does that mean nobody got a hit, or just there were no runs? There’s a lot of interpretation and logical deduction that could go into building out a fuller play-by-play account. For games of April 19, 1901, we are fortunate that writers in Brooklyn and St. Louis gave us quite a but in terms of game play.

Back to the question about the order of the day’s home runs. We know that umpire Coglan called the game at “3:30 sharp” in Brooklyn and the game lasted one hour and fifty-six minutes. Umpire Emslie also got the Orphans underway at 3:30 PM in St. Louis for a game that lasted two hours and seven minutes. Now, you may not be an expert on the history of time zones. I’m not, and that’s why I had to confirm if time zones were a thing in 1901. They were.

So we know the Brooklyn game had an hour of exclusive play, then the two games overlapped for 56 minutes, then the St. Louis game was exclusive for an hour and eleven minutes. Logically it feels like the home run hit by the Cardinal would have surely come after the Philadelphia home run in the ninth. But let’s try to confirm it.

As mentioned above, we were gifted two decent game accounts. One is from the night edition of The Evening World out of New York that had to have gone to press not long after the conclusion of the Superbas game (you can see how the descriptions get more terse and scattered as the game progressed) and the other is the April 20 edition of the St. Louis Republic.

From these accounts and the box scores we can piece together a rough timeline of the two games’ events.

The methodology here to was to look at the number of plate appearances each team had in their half inning, add in some time for switching sides on the field, then taking the total game time and dividing it by the number of events. For both games, each event averaged a meager time of about one minute and fifteen seconds3. We take the number of events in the inning multiplied by the average per event to get the length of each part of the bar.

Does it tell us exactly when something happened? Of course not. However, because these games are relatively short, this has to be decently close. And as our gut told us would be the case, the home run hit by the Cardinal came well after the one by Philadelphia.

With the order or home runs now as confirmed as we can get it, let’s take a look at the batter who hit the first home run. Around 3:47 pm eastern time, Tom McCreery, the center fielder for Brooklyn, “smashed a liner to right and got around to the plate by fast sprinting.” It was an inside-the-park home run and we can definitively say it was the first home run of baseball’s Modern Era.

But it wasn’t the first ledger.

McCreery debuted with the Louisville Colonels in 1895 and his first career home run came against the Philadelphia Phillies on May 14, 1896. No one, except probably myself, is embroiled in any controversy about the legitimacy of counting pre-Modern Era home runs hit by National League players towards ledgers. McCreery was a National League player hitting a home run against a National League team in 1896. That surely counts just the same as a home run hit in 1901. So, not a ledger.

We advance the clock to around 5:22 pm eastern time. Philadelphia is down to their last out and they need a nine-run tear to tie this game. Up steps future Hall of Famer Elmer Flick. Flick has already accounted for most of Philadelphia’s offense with a triple as one of their three hits. After knocking the ball to center, he too scampers around the bases for an inside-the-park home run.

But this also wasn’t the first ledger.

Flick debuted with the Philadelphia club in 1898. In 1900, he demolished Superbas pitching to the tune of five home runs. So, this wasn’t his first home run against the team from Brooklyn and therefore, not a ledger.

This leaves us with the home run in St. Louis. The home team found themselves down by two headed into the bottom of the seventh. Jack Powell took his place in the box and hit a “terrific boost which hit the bleachers in left field near the bulletin board.” A Chicago paper, The Inter Ocean, quipped “Powell opened with a home drive to left center, astonishing himself as much as he did the fans.” The score was now 7-8 in favor of the Orphans. Who was the pitcher that had allowed those eight runs? Jack Powell.

But was this the first ledger of the Modern Era?

Yes! The first Modern Era ledger home run belongs to a pitcher. Powell debuted with the National League’s Cleveland Spiders in 1897. He joined the St. Louis ball club in 1899 and in his time there had hit two home runs before 1901 – one against Boston and the other against Philadelphia. He would go on to hit five more home runs in his career, with seven of the total being ledgers.

Turns out Jack Powell has quite the statistical biography too. My favorite number of his is 244. Of the players that had more career losses than wins, he has the most wins (244-254 record). Read more in his SABR Bio and in the BR Bullpen.

I can’t leave you without just a little bit more trivia about the earliest modern era home runs. We also know definitively (and without much effort) who hit the second, third, and fourth ledgers of the Modern Era. The second ledger belongs to a player who debuted with the Spiders in 1898 and joined the Cardinals on the same day as Jack Powell4. That player was Emmet “Snags” Heidrick and he collected his ledger against the Orphans in the same series as Powell. And then for good measure, Heidrick ledgered against the Pirates four days later, making it the third ledger of the Modern Era. Finally, we got the fourth ledger of the Modern Era when Erve Beck homered against the Chicago White Stockings. This home run is more important than any of the others because it was the first home run in American League history.

Photo source: Old-Time Baseball Photos, @OTBaseballPhoto on X