Cap Anson 2: The Theatrical and Kingly Mike Kelly : U.S. Team Sport's First Media Sensation and Baseball's Original Casey at the Bat

This is both the definitive biography of a major 19th-century baseball Hall of Famer (Mike "King" Kelly) and the definitive presentation of a larger subject through 1900: the sport's colorful ties to the theatrical profession in the sport's first professional decades. Kelly's persona was legendary in Boston until emphasis on the modern-day Red Sox swamped memory of the city's old National League club. In the early 1950s, longtime Boston Globe columnist (and J.G. Taylor Spink Award winner) Harold Kaese recalled Kelly as "probably the most popular player in all of Boston baseball history." Despite being largely an afterthought in modern-day Boston, Kelly is still considered the sport's most colorful huge star before Babe Ruth. The happy-go-lucky Kelly provides an ideal backdrop to the theatrical theme, because he performed on stage and had an amusing way of carrying himself on and off the field. Detailed in the book are baseball-related activities of actors and musicians most closely identified with the sport up to 1900. Names that may be recognizable include De Wolf Hopper, the original stage performer of "Casey at the Bat;" John Philip Sousa; and Maurice Barrymore, great-grandfather of modern-day actress Drew Barrymore. Also described are Kelly's activities as a member of Boston Elks, a fraternal group with theatrical ties well into the 20th century. In featuring Kelly in relation to Cap Anson, his captain-manager for seven seasons in Chicago, Cap Anson 2 details their similar interests off the field, including in acting, hunting or trapshooting, and playing billiards. The book's lone appendix, betting on baseball up to 1900, made news in early 2004, in connection to Pete Rose's betting-on-baseball admission. Titled "Betting on Baseball," the appendix details more than 150 regular-season bets by players, managers and owners. Anson and, to a lesser degree, Kelly, were top bettors. Kelly stands out for being the most likely model, if any single player was, for the title character in Ernest Thayer's 1888 poem "Casey at the Bat." Cap Anson 2 provides compact and unusual insights on the case for a connection. In 1887, Kelly had become famous when Chicago sold him to Boston for a then-record price of $10,000, about $200,000 today. Kelly also bears the distinction of being the first baseball player to be the subject of a book-length biography. Cap Anson 2 is the first modern-day book to correctly identify the ghostwriter: John J. "Jack" Drohan. Accordingly, it highlights Drohan's newspaper reporting on Kelly, up to Drohan's death. Praise for Cap Anson 2: "Quirky and immensely readable, Mr. Rosenberg's book is a refreshing alternative to most that deal with Red Sox history and players. For one thing, there's not a single mention of the Yankees." - Allen Barra, the New York Sun. The next book in the series, Cap Anson 3: Muggsy John McGraw and the Tricksters: Baseball's Fun Age of Rule Bending (2005), is mainly not about Anson or Kelly. But it does contain a full accounting of their tricky and dirty play (Kelly's tricky play is legendary), and that by the Chicago National League team during Anson's captain-managing tenure.