high above him stand three Reds players, tall and proud among frothy clouds and shafts of sunlight. A romantic notion, no doubt, but one that has kept many a local boy up at night and helped many others to sleep.
Red Dooin
Jim Brosnan
Skeeter Barnes
Chris Sexton and Mike Bell
The Player Profiles
ETHAN ALLEN
JANUARY 1, 1904–SEPTEMBER 15, 1993
Major League Career
1926–1938
Time as a Red
1926–1930
Position
OUTFIELD
WITH A NAME LIKE “ETHAN ALLEN,” a boy has to meet pretty high expectations. And Ethan Allen (the ballplayer, not the Revolutionary War hero) did just that. Born in Cincinnati, he grew up on the east side of town, in the Mt. Washington area. He graduated from Withrow High School (called East High School at the time), where his outstanding athletic ability first began attracting the city’s attention. He then attended the University of Cincinnati, where his local fame quickly grew. Tall, handsome, and an excellent student, Allen would be tough to top if you were looking for an All-American Boy circa the 1920s. At UC, he starred in three sports—baseball, basketball, and track. In 1926, his senior year, he captained the baseball team and hit .473, which stood as the school record until, with the gradual addition of more games to the college season, his number of at-bats fell below the minimum required.
The Reds knew a local star when they saw one and signed him that summer (giving him, according to Lee Allen’s The Cincinnati Reds, a signing bonus of $8,598.43) and placed him immediately on the major league roster, obviously feeling he needed no minor league seasoning. The move wasn’t a desperate effort by a struggling team; the Reds spent 75 days in first place in a close pennant race with the Cardinals that year, eventually finishing second by two games. After the season, the team thought highly enough of Allen that they traded Hall of Fame centerfielder Edd Roush, who had been their biggest star for a decade, and gave Allen the job.
Though he lacked power, he quickly established himself as an excellent contact hitter and all-around polished player. Given his good looks, affable nature, and growing reputation as a smart player who rarely made mistakes, he became a fan favorite. Unfortunately, Reds owner Sidney Weil lost much of his fortune in the 1929 stock market crash, and had he to sell off or trade his best talent to pay the bills. He traded Allen and star pitcher Pete Donohue to the New York Giants for mediocre infielder Pat Crawford, who appeared in just 76 games for the Reds. Allen played eight more seasons, hitting an even .300 in a 13-year career. His lack of homerun power (he hit only 47) during that long-ball era kept him from being considered one of the top players in the game, but he was known as a tough out and often was slotted near the top of the batting order.
While a member of the Philadelphia Phillies, he came back to town to become the second player ever to bat in a major league night game, held at Crosley Field on May 24, 1935. After retiring in 1938, Allen became the National League’s Director of Motion Pictures. He then coached Yale University’s team from 1946 to 1968, winning five Ivy League championships and twice reaching the national championship game (losing both, in 1947 and 1948). Future president George Herbert Walker Bush was his first baseman on those teams. Allen also wrote several highly respected baseball instructional books, including Major League Baseball (1938) and Baseball Play and Strategy (1964) and produced baseball instructional films.
He is best known, however, for creating Ethan Allen’s All-Star Baseball, the most popular baseball tabletop game of the post-War decades. First issued in 1941, the game featured paper disks filled with what looked like pie charts breaking into sectors each player’s percentages of getting a hit or making an out, which would be determined by a flick of a spinner. Though Allen designed it as a game for kids, many adults played it, too, even creating leagues with friends.
After retiring from Yale in 1968, Allen settled in North Carolina. In 1970, he was elected to the American Association of College Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame. He continued to refine his board game, adding new seasons of players, until his health began to decline. He then moved to Brookings, Oregon, to be near his son, and that’s where he died at the age of 89, having lived up to his heroic name.
LINWOOD “KING” BAILEY
NOVEMBER 1870–NOVEMBER 19, 1917
Major League Career
1895
Time as a Red
1895
Position
PITCHER
THE CONSUMMATE “CRAFTY LEFT-HANDER,” Linwood “King” Bailey posted an undefeated record for his hometown team. He pitched only one game for the Reds, on September 21, 1895, and he won it. The victory, however, didn’t earn him a contract with the team or even another chance to show what he could do.
Not much is known about his early life. According to multiple sources, he was born in Virginia in 1870, but the date and locale are unknown. We know that he was raised in Cincinnati and began playing baseball at an early age in the Bottoms section of town (roughly the riverfront up to Ft. Washington Way). Though once the gateway to the city before the Civil War, by the time Bailey lived there it had become a tough, seedy area of bars, fleabag hotels, and warehouses, captured in print by legendary journalist Lafcadio Hearn.
At the age of 20, he played his first professional ball for the Rockford (Illinois) Hustlers in the Illinois-Iowa League. That same year, he also appeared for the team in Jamestown, New York, in the New York-Pennsylvania League. He mostly rode the bench at both places and returned to Cincinnati until the following July, when he was contacted by the Macon, Georgia, team in the Southern League.
When he arrived, he was immediately made the struggling team’s starting pitcher. He won his first game 4–1, breaking Macon’s long losing streak, inspiring the fans to christen him “King.” He went on to lead the team in innings pitched that year with 382. Though a strapping six-footer, he didn’t throw especially hard, and a Sporting News article of the time noting that he had “hardly any speed.” He got by, instead, on control and deception, using what was then known as a “drop ball,” similar to what we call a sinker today. Though hardly the hurling “King” Maconians anticipated, he finished the season 22–20.
For the next couple of years, he bounced around among other minor league teams with middling success. When the 1895 Southern League season ended in September, Bailey headed home, where he ran into an old friend, Reds player-manager (and fellow local boy) Buck Ewing, who invited King to join the team for a trip to Louisville. After a great start to the season, the Reds suffered through injuries to key players; by late September, they were limping to the finish line, entrenched in ninth place in the 12-team National League, a game over .500. Louisville occupied the league’s cellar. Bailey, who was referred to as “Len” in the newspapers, agreed