Who Was Harry Pattee?
The speedster that time forgot.
Who Was Harry Pattee?
No, this isn’t the story of a boy living in a cupboard at #4 Privet Drive — that’s the wrong Harry.
This is about Harry Pattee, the 1908 Brooklyn second baseman who played a single season in the major leagues and then vanished.
Who was he? What do we know about him? What happened to him?
Pattee
The first thing you need to understand about Harry Pattee is that he was fast. He was extremely fast. In fact, he was so fast that he started off his major league career as Brooklyn’s leadoff hitter:
Isn’t it strange that to see that from a player who only lasted a single season in the big leagues? I mean, these are Pattee’s career stats:
Why in the world would Brooklyn decide to start him leadoff? Yes, he stole quite a few bases — but he couldn’t get on base, nor could he slug the ball. That 74 OPS+ rating shows that he was a poor offensive player even by 1908 standards.
Pattee’s history is a bit mysterious. There’s not much information out there about him. There’s no SABR biography, sadly. There is this, from the Baseball Reference Bullpen:
Not exactly all that informative, is it? This is the site this short biography refers to:
I’m a bit surprised that the only people who seem to have bothered to look into Pattee’s career are the authors of a book on the T206 baseball card set. I once owned that book, have read it from cover to cover, and consider it to be pretty good. But there’s got to be more information out there.
And, as you can guess, there’s a huge story here that everybody seems to have forgotten about.
The Early Days
According to Baseball Reference, Pattee played in the minor leagues as early as 1901:
Sadly, I have absolutely no idea where in the world this information comes from. You’ll be hard pressed to find any information about the 1901 Northern New York League, as I could find no mention of it in major baseball guides of the time. As far as Haverhill in the New England League is concerned, the 1902 Reach Guide lists a player named Jones and another named O’Neil playing second base for Haverhill in 1901:
The Spalding Guide gives the same listing:
I haven’t been able to find any verification that either of those players was actually Pattee.
Brown
We do know that Pattee played for Brown University in 1902 and 1903. In fact, Pattee was involved in a huge scandal that year.
From the Brown University website:
The website goes on to say that Pattee, who later coached at Brown, played two years there as an undergraduate.
Now, it’s not all that easy to research this scandal. We can see that some Brown players played for minor league clubs:
There’s just not much more information than that, however.
I was able to find this interesting mention:
This blurb was repeated in several newspapers, but I’m not sure where it originated. Lynch, by the way, is Mike Lynch, a pitcher for the Pirates from 1904 to 1907 who had a brief stint with the Giants in 1907. There is no mention on his Baseball Reference minor league page of him playing for Newport.
It’s not unusual to read reports of “amateur” players in this era playing professionally on the side, especially in the summer. However, I get the feeling that Brown may have been quietly recruiting former minor league players during this era.
One rather obscure newspaper claims that Pattee had once played for Plattsburg:
I’ve been unable to confirm this report anywhere, though it certainly is possible. Assuming his Baseball Reference biography is correct, Pattee would have been 20 years old when he enrolled in Brown in 1902. It’s not unreasonable to think that he may have played professionally for a few years before that under an assumed name.
In the end, it wasn’t Pattee that brought on the scandal. It was Lynch:
It’s not stated outright here, but there’s a slight tone in this article of potential payment directly from the university to players — particularly Lynch, who was almost certainly a major league caliber pitcher in 1903.
Anyway, that statement alone didn’t solve much:
And it got worse:
In the end, Brown University had to change those rules and back down.
The sad ending was the resignation of Lynch:
Pattee soon resigned his spot on Brown’s board of athletics (and don’t ask me how he was on that; like I said, this is pretty muddled):
Pattee didn’t play with Brown in 1904. Little snippets like this indicate that he was looking to move back to professionalism:
And then there were rumors like this:
Sadly for Harry, nothing came of those rumors. He found himself adrift in the minor league seas.
Harrisburg
Let’s jump straight to 1907.
That small biography from the T206 project above noted that Pattee was signed by Brooklyn chiefly because of his stolen base record with Harrisburg.
I’m concerned about statements like that. Though advanced sabermetrics certainly weren’t a thing in 1908, we need to be careful before we arrogantly conclude that major league teams bought players based on a whim. There was actually a lot of scouting that went into these signings (most of the time), as we’ll soon see.
First of all, it’s not true that Brooklyn had never heard of Pattee before. Actually, Brooklyn signed him in 1906:
Keep that in mind the next time you play with a general management sim like OOTP. Those games are fun, but they do a poor job of simulating what general management was really like in the deadball era. Players like Pattee were often loaned out to minor league clubs after being signed — a practice much less formal than our current minor league system, resembling much more closely the loan system you see in soccer (and in games like Football Manager).
Pattee apparently showed signs of being a star:
And then there were reports that Pattee, who was apparently still studying at Brown, wasn’t going to leave school until his summer break (which reminds me of stories of Danny Ainge with the Blue Jays in 1979):
Now, the 1906 Brooklyn team wasn’t as good as W. J. Granger made it seem in that article (apologies for not posting the whole thing). As soon as June came around, Patsy Donovan went looking for Pattee:
In the end, though, Pattee decided not to show, giving a few lame excuses:
The “Briggs” listed above appears to be Buttons Briggs, an extremely obscure Chicago Cubs pitcher.
Because Pattee refused to pay his fine, Brooklyn put him on its “black list:”
Now, I went through this huge detour to explain how Pattee wound up in Harrisburg. Harrisburg simply bought him from Brooklyn:
Correct me if I’m wrong, but my read on this is that Brooklyn bought out the rest of Pattee’s contract for $2,000, and then sold him along to Harrisburg for $1,200. Not great business for a player who had yet to play a single out of major league ball!
Guess what? Pattee actually reported this time!
There’s no question that Pattee was fast. 61 stolen bases in 126 games is impressive, even for 1907. And then there are little gems like this strewn here and there in the old sports pages:
14 4/5 seconds to circle the bases isn’t far off from the world record, which was set in 1932 at 13.3 seconds. That’s fast.
Anyway, Pattee’s name comes up in Brooklyn newspapers again in late 1907, making me wonder whether Harrisburg actually “bought” him or not:
I’m not sure I’ll ever understand exactly what happened with that transaction.
Brooklyn
Finally, after all of that, Pattee wound up with Brooklyn in 1908.
The first thing he did was hold out for a better contract.
Pattee did sign in the end, and wound up reporting to spring training in 1908. And, by all accounts, he looked good:
Now, Pattee was actually a good fielder. He had a .964 fielding percentage in his 74 games in 1908, good enough to rank among the league leading starting second basemen. Baseball Reference gives him a 5.46 range factor per game, which is among the best second basemen in that category. I’ve got to assume that his natural speed had a lot to do with his ability to field.
Sadly, though, the major league dream started to come crashing down in late June.
Most articles about Washington Park in Brooklyn mention the putrid smell that came from the factories. Few of them, however, mention powder house cinders flying through the air and getting into the eyes of the infielders. I think I know why Pattee was so reluctant to join Brooklyn in 1906.
The Brooklyn Daily Eagle seems to indicate that this was part of some kind of explosion:
I don’t blame Ebbets for wanting to move out of that dump.
Pattee was ready again a few weeks later:
And come back he did. There were a few moments of brilliance where Harry showed off that excellent speed:
But then there were days when it didn’t work out so well:
But then it all went wrong. A 17-inning 1-0 loss in Pittsburgh saw Pattee injure his knee, which diminished his speed permanently.
And, well, that was pretty much it for Pattee. He did come back, but never played regularly for Brooklyn after that cinder incident — and certainly was no regular player after the knee injury.
The End
Now, what looking at the encyclopedias and the reference sites won’t tell you is that Pattee was with Brooklyn in spring 1909.
Don’t believe me? Here’s a photo:
Pattee even had time in spring training to fool around:
However, it seems that his injury was bothering him:
And, well, the end of Pattee’s major league dreams came just a few days later:
Pattee
And thus ends the magical journey of Harry Pattee, another obscure player that time has forgotten.
One thing all of this research has taught me is that we need to remember that these players were actual people. While we can represent their accomplishments and skills numerically, we really do them (and ourselves) a disservice when we ignore the stories behind the numbers.
Pattee might have had raw speed equal to Cobb, but he didn’t have the grit or determination. He also had the misfortune of playing second base for a poor team in a soot-covered park with hazards we can scarcely fathom today.
With all of that in mind, Pattee is a great fit among our other blog legends.
Continuing...When Harry Pattee stopped coaching baseball at Brown, he opened his own insurance company in Providence, bought a home in Barrington and began raising his family (2 girls, 3 boys). He had 7 grandchildren. The first did not survive infancy, the other six are still alive. He came to live with our family in Lynchburg, Virginia in 1964, where he lived until he passed away in 1972. Don North
Daniel,
Harry Pattee was my grandfather, my mother's father. I suspect he was an excellent athlete and had he not injured his knee might have played several years in the bigs. I attended college on a football scholarship, injured my knee in my freshman year and had surgery to remove the cartilage. He tore ligaments in his knee in the spring of 1908, and since knee surgery did not exist at the time, he wore a leather knee brace with whalebone struts in it the rest of his playing career. Gave him support but took away his greatest asset, his speed.
Don North