William Hogan Chappelle
Wading through obscurity
Who Was Bill Chappelle?
I’m a neophyte to Twitter. I’m not a particularly proficient Twitter user (you can see my account here, if you’re curious). There’s a lot I don’t know how to do.
I do know a bit about doing research, however. And I love the challenge.
And so, as you can imagine, this post piqued my interest:
Chappelle doesn’t have a SABR biography, and his Baseball Reference Bullpen page is really sparse:
We don’t have too much to go off of here, right? We know when and where he was born, that he pitched a bit in the majors, that he pitched in the fastest game ever played in 1910, and that we think he joined the U.S. Cavalry in 1900 at age 19 or so.
We know that he pitched fairly well for the Boston Doves in 1908:
And, well, that’s about it.
I’m going to do this differently than I’ve been doing it in the past. Instead of trying to go forward through a biography, I’m going to work backwards.
All the newspaper sources I show below come from newspapers.com. I recommend looking into it if you haven’t yet. The site’s search tool is excellent, and you can find tons of information that is otherwise obscure or completely hidden.
Let’s see what we can find.
32 Minutes
Let’s start with the fun stuff.
We know from that Baseball Reference Bullpen page that Chappelle was pitching for Mobile in 1910 during that famous 32 minute game.
I was able to find a full section on this in the 1911 American League Reach Guide, which I’ve pasted below in full:
There’s a bit of a discrepancy here, as you can see. Baseball Reference lists the game as September 17; the Reach Guide lists it as September 19. It turns out that Baseball Reference was right:
I’d like to see somebody try to equal that one.
Boston
Let’s see if we can figure out when Chappelle joined Boston in 1908. First, let’s look at his game log:
Now, we can assume from this game log that he probably joined the Doves (or Beaneaters, or whatever) sometime in August 1908. It is true that teams in those days would occasionally leave young players on the roster without playing them; however, it’s extremely unusual to see somebody suddenly become a full-time player after sitting on the bench for half a season.
Fortunately, the newspapers show us what happened.
This is from August 16:
Baseball Reference lists Chappelle as 6’2”, which I suppose was large enough at the time to be considered a “giant.”
Of course, we know that he did join Boston — and that he seems to have lived up to the hype. If you want to find the exact date of the transaction, just look a few days forward:
That Chicago series started that very day, on August 19. If you wanted to make an accurate list of transactions, you’d probably want him to start with the club on August 20th to give him time to finish his train ride. And, as we saw above, that was his first game pitching for the big club.
Now let’s see if we can find him in Tennessee.
New Orleans
First off, it seems that his move to Boston caused some controversy:
Now, we know that Chappelle stayed with Boston in the end. Still, we can take a second to look into the New Orleans papers to see what they have to say.
This snippet is probably a bit too optimistic:
And this is where that storyline seems to end:
That’s the last word I could find on the issue, though I admittedly have only spent a few minutes looking into this.
Memphis
When we look back, we can see why New Orleans were so keen to sign Chappelle off waivers:
A glance at the standings will tell you how important this game was:
Remember, of course, that the minor leagues in those days didn’t have the farm systems of today (though there were secret arrangements based on interpersonal connections; more on that later). Minior league pennant races actually meant something in those days.
Moving backwards, we encounter games like this:
I’m starting to get the feeling that Chappelle might have been a bit taller than just 6’2”. And, yes, I included this full article because of the great descriptive language.
We also know that Chappelle pitched the home opener for Memphis in 1908. I’m only going to post part of this article in the interest of time:
I knew this because I came across this article from the day before:
Chappelle is listed here as 24 years old. That would make him born in 1884, not 1881: another mystery to keep in mind.
After some guessing, I was able to find Chappelle’s first start for Memphis in 1908. He didn’t pitch on opening day; rather, they saved him for the second game of the season:
We can go back further than that. For example, this might be the reason Boston was interested in the young giant:
Now this one was apparently Chappelle’s official Memphis debut:
That paper also included a picture of Chappelle:
Finally, we can trace Chappelle back to the day he made the cut for Memphis:
Note that Chappelle is listed here as 6’4”, which I think is likely closer to the truth than 6’2”.
That paper also includes yet another photograph of the young Chappelle:
The quality here probably isn’t good enough for Baseball Reference, but it’s still really cool to find. And, yes, he looks quite large in this photo: tall and brawny, like a tight end.
Pennsylvania
We can go back even further.
That article mentioned that Chappelle pitched for Johnstown in the Tri-State League in 1907.
At this point, instead of wildly looking through newspapers, I decided to go back to the baseball guides. I think I found our man.
According to the 1907 Reach Guide, it seems that Chappelle pitched that year for Harrisburg, Altoona, and then Lancaster:
Guess what? I found a picture of him as well. They missed the extra “p” in the caption:
And, yeah, he looks absolutely huge.
It wasn’t hard to find newspapers covering his playing in Harrisburg, either. In fact, I found that Chappelle started Harrisburg’s first game in 1906:
This paper also included a full play-by-play account of the game: pretty good for a 1906 Tri-State league game, eh? I decided not to screenshot that in the interest of time; let me know if you are interested.
Here’s another account:
Chappelle was a little bit wild, I suppose. He walked only 2, but he also hit 2 batters.
That Billie Biddle seemed to like Chappelle in the preseason. Here’s a clip from a few days earlier:
Now, this was likely Chappelle’s first season with Harrisburg, since he played with the Yanigans in a preseason warmup game (held for charity for victims of the San Francisco earthquake):
Here’s Chappelle pitching against the Philadelphia All-Stars (anybody know anything more about this team?):
And here’s the earliest mention I could find of him in Harrisburg in 1906, again from Billie Biddle:
Des Monies
Now, if we want to cheat, we can always look up his minor league stats in Baseball Reference:
And, yes, the thought of doing this didn’t occur to me until I got to this point in the process. But phooey on that: doing the research through primary sources is more fun anyway.
Now we know that Chappelle was on Des Moines in 1905, which makes the search a bit easier.
With a single search, I was able to find Chappelle’s first game:
Yeah, 4 walks and who knows how many hits and runs doesn’t make for a great debut.
The crazy thing here, though, is that Chappelle pitched again the next day:
There are a few other interesting things to note about Chappelle’s time in Des Moines. For example, he was hospitalized for a time in August 1905:
Chappelle did eventually pitch well enough to stay on with Des Moines, who won the Western League pennant and then eventually lost a post season exhibition series to the Milwaukee Brewers. Chappelle started game 4 of that 5 game series:
The existence of this series makes more sense when you consider this excerpt from the 1906 Spalding Guide:
After all that, here’s another early photo of Chappelle with his teammates during an early version of fan appreciation day:
For a more serious picture, this is from the 1906 Reach Guide:
Chappelle’s name is misspelled here again. However, this gives you an idea of what he looked like in his first professional season.
And here he is again from the Spalding Guide:
We’ve got the same misspelling here. Poor Bill.
Unfortunately, neither guide published individual pitching records for the 1905 Western League. I think there are many reasons to doubt the validity of those sketchy Baseball Reference statistics above, especially since Chappelle didn’t seem to start playing for the team until early June. Doing the research to figure out what his record likely was (not an easy task given what boxscores were like in those days) is a task far beyond the scope of this blog.
End of the Road
This is the end of the road for now.
I haven’t been able to figure out where Chappelle was before he joined Des Moines in 1905. I’ve got a feeling that he was playing semipro ball somewhere.
I spent some time looking for his name in old New York newspapers, but came up empty. Note, though, that newspapers.com doesn’t have the best selection of old New York newspapers. Many of those are locked behind the Proquest monopoly; more on that later. My guess is that he probably excelled at sports in high school, like so many other future baseball stars. If we had full searchable access to all newspapers, we’d probably eventually find his name associated with some high school or semipro game or two in the late 19th century.
I’m also guessing that they probably misspelled his last name in older sources. The Surname Database gives us many possible spelling alternatives:
I’m guessing his family probably originally emigrated from England, even though the spelling is clearly French in nature.
If I were to continue from here, I’d probably start going through the 1905 issues of The Sporting Life in search of additional boxscores and other potential leads. The Sporting News is another possibility, though those pages tend to be smudged and illegible.
Anyway, I think I’ve shown here that William Hogan Chappelle isn’t quite as obscure as some historians (well, okay, card collectors) seem to think. There’s a whole untapped wealth of information out there just waiting to be discovered.
And next time I’m going to set more definite limits on this research to prevent my post from ballooning like this!