"Shuffle Off to..."

Time to take a break from the mind-boggling breakdown of your New York Yankees, and enjoy a brief travelogue on the city where the Boys in Pinstripes will play games that count for the first time.




The last team considered "major-league" to play in "the City of Light," was the Federal League's Buffalo Blues, more commonly dubbed the "BufFeds."

(The one great thing about the Federal League was the often exotic nicknames of its teams, official or unofficial:  the Pittsburgh Stogies, the Newark Peppers, the Baltimore Terrapins, the Chicago Whales, and the Brooklyn Tip-Tops, among others.)

The BufFeds finished 4th in 1914, sixth in 1915, and promptly disbanded, along with their league.  Their outstanding player was the sinister ex-Yankee, Hal Chase, who batted .347 in half-a-season in 1914, then led the league in home runs with 17 the next year.  After that, Chase, who had already developed a notorious reputation for throwing games and being a general no-goodnik, was deemed major-league ready again, and he returned to New York just in time to help organize the 1919 Black Sox scandal.

Before the BufFeds there were the Bisons, one of the least imaginative team names of all time.

The Bisons put in 7 years in the NL, 1879-1885, without accomplishing much of note, good or bad.  At various times they did boast some of the best players of the 19th century, including pitcher James "Pud" Galvin, who won 46 games two years in a row, catcher and infielder Deacon White, and first baseman Dan Brouthers, one of the very best hitters of the era, maybe THE best.

For a year, they even had Old Hoss Radbourne, a pitcher especially dear to my heart for obvious reasons, who would go on to win an all-time, major-league record 60 games in 1884 for another, long-dead National League team, the Providence Grays.

Old Hoss had won 48 games the year before in Providence, and in 1884 he actually powered the Grays to their second and last pennant.  Providence went 84-28, swept the annual "Temple Cup" series from the New York Metropolitans of the American Association in three games—even in the 19th century, the Mets were losers—and then disbanded after Old Hoss finally gave out the next year and won a mere 28 games.

Put Old Hoss together with Pud, and you have a 19th century superteam.  But in Buffalo, Radbourne was just a utility infielder who reportedly hurt himself by practicing too hard, and was released (The more things change...)

Some of the old Bisons tried to get the band back together in the 1890 Players League, but the team finished dead last, and the league folded.

That was pretty typical for Buffalo, which was pretty much considered the can't-miss metropolis of the century (Call it the 19th-century Gary Sanchez).  With electricity coming in and Niagara Falls right there, Buffalo's population rose from almost 118,000 in 1870 to nearly 507,000 in 1920.

But that was pretty much it.  The president got shot there, and soon you could get electricity anywhere, they'd ship it right to your house, and Buffalo wasn't exactly the first place you thought of when somebody said, "the City of Light!"

The city reached its peak population just after the war, at 580,132 in 1950, but after that it was all downhill.   Fewer than half that many people live in Buffalo today, which is a crying shame because it looked like a very nice city indeed when I once went through it on a train.

Sadly, the Yanks will not be playing in the wonderfully gloomy old, War Memorial Stadium (see below), where they filmed The Natural, but the current, pleasant, generic minor-league park.

And so we bid a fond farewell to the plucky little city of Buffalo, still number two in New York, with this one remaining bit of trivia:

Did you know that the only major-league player NOT listed as having been born in any one place, played with the BufFeds?

It's true!  Edmund Joseph Porray, who went 0-1 with a 4.35 ERA, is officially listed as having been born "At sea, somewhere in the Atlantic Ocean."  Incredibly enough, Porray also died at sea, "somewhere in the Pacific Ocean," in 1954.

No, I made that up.  Portray actually died in a hairy little Pennsylvania town called Lackawaxen (get it?), and was buried in the Odd Fellows Cemetery there.