St. Paddy's Day: Baseball HOF Great "Wee Willie" Keeler

One of baseball history’s most celebrated teams, the original 1890s Baltimore Orioles, were a collection of hardscrabble players, whose lineup reads more like an Irish mafia gang than a ball club. Bill “Boileryard” Clarke and Wilbert “Robbie” Robinson split the catching duties, “Dirty” Jack Doyle started at first, John J. “Mugsy” McGraw anchored the hot corner. “Handsome” Joe Kelley, rumored to have kept a comb and small mirror in the back pocket of his uniform pants, and “Wee” Willie Keeler, the skilled batsman whose motto was “hit ’em where they ain’t,” manned the outfield. “Duke” Esper, “Kid” Gleason, “Doc” Pond, and “Sadie” McMahon, who ran with an Irish gang as a youth, toed the slab. “Foxy” Ned Hanlon managed the team.

The Orioles gained their fame not only because their three straight 1894-1896 pennants made them one of the best teams of the era--some say one of the best of all time--- but because of their well-deserved reputation as the dirtiest team ever. Tripping, shoving, and blocking baserunners were commonplace. McGraw introduced the dubious art of impeding a runner’s progress around the bases by grabbing his belt and holding on. In baseball’s early era, only one umpire called the games; two arbitrators did not judge games until 1911. Whatever infraction that went unseen was fair play.

When running the bases themselves, the Orioles slid into bases with their spikes high and flashing. They intimidated both their opponents and the umpires. John Heydler, then an umpire and later National League president, told a sportswriter, “The Orioles were mean, vicious, ready at any time to maim a rival player or an umpire. … The things they would say to an umpire were unbelievably vile.”

Keeler was the Orioles’ spark plug. William Henry O’Kelleher was born on March 3, 1872, in Brooklyn. His father, also named William O'Kelleher, had left his Cork County, Ireland farm twelve years earlier. At age 26, he settled in Brooklyn and married another recent Irish immigrant, Mary Kiley.

Leading off for the Orioles, McGraw and Keeler, ably assisted by legendary groundskeeper Tom Murphy, perfected the long-lost Baltimore Chop, driving the ball into the infield dirt and beating out the resulting high hop. Murphy mixed Union Park’s infield soil with clay and water, and after he rolled it out, the turf became as hard as concrete. The batter would hit down on the ball so sharply that they could make it to first base before any infielder could make a play.

And while they didn’t invent the also long-forgotten hit and run, McGraw and Keeler perfected it. With his 29-ounce bat, just the right size for the 5’4”, 140-pound Keeler, Wee Willie was also an excellent bunter, possessed great bat control, and was a master at fouling off pitches with his tiny bat. “Keeler had the best batting eye I have ever seen,” McGraw said. “He held his bat away up in the middle with only about a foot of it extending beyond his hands and he could slap the ball to either field.”

Keeler slapped out at least 210 hits each year between 1894 and 1898. During that five-year span he batted .388, averaged 223 hits, 74 runs batted in, 48 steals, and 278 total bases. A master at reaching base and a wizard on the basepaths, he averaged 150 runs per year and finished second in the National League in that category four straight times. He also became an outfield asset. After Hanlon moved the reluctant Keeler from infield to right field, he became a fleet and instinctive defender. “He knew his territory like a child its ABC’s,” Orioles center fielder Steve Brodie remembered.

Whichever team Keeler played for, he excelled. Inexplicably discarded by both the New York Giants and the Brooklyn Superbas, for whom he hit .325 and .313 respectively, in 1892 and 1893, the Orioles recognized Willie’s Hall of Fame potential. Keeler’s bat skills, condensed into the phase always attached to his name, “hit ’em where they ain’t,” made him a tough out. Between his first full season in 1894 and 1904 Wee Willie made contact in 98.6 percent of his official at-bats. Through 1906, he never batted below .313 and won two batting titles. Keeler topped .360 annually between 1894 and 1900. He also recorded a hit in 45 consecutive games, a record which stood until 1941 when Joe DiMaggio connected in 56 games in a row.

When he retired in 1911, he had a .341 career average and a 54.3 WAR. Keeler’s life after baseball was marked by poor health and poverty. Although fans referred to Keeler as the “Brooklyn Millionaire,” an exaggeration, Willie’s investments failed, he contracted tuberculosis, and an existing heart condition worsened. Thirteen years after he got his last hit, and 16 years before his HOF induction, Keeler died penniless in a rooming house on New Year’s Day 1923 at age 50.

Joe Guzzardi is a nationally syndicated Society for American Baseball Research analyst. Contact him at guzzjoe@yahoo.com