Chief Bender

• Born: May 5, 1883
• Birthplace: Brainerd, Minnesota
• Died: May 22, 1954
• Place of death: Philadelphia, Pennsylvania

Sport: Baseball

Early Life

Charles Albert “Chief” Bender was born on May 5, 1883, near the White Earth Indian Reservation in northwestern Minnesota. His mother was a member of the Ojibwa (or Chippewa) nation of American Indians. His father was an immigrant from Germany. Albert, as he called himself, grew up at a time of poverty and hardship for American Indian people. The U.S. government forced the Ojibwas and other tribes to send their children away from the reservation to boarding schools. At the age of six, young Albert was sent to a boarding school in Philadelphia, twelve hundred miles away. For the next six years, he did not see his family.

The Road to Excellence

Albert continued his schooling at the Carlisle Indian School in Carlisle, Pennsylvania. He excelled at sports, playing football, under the famous coach Glenn “Pop” Warner, and baseball. In 1901, he enrolled in nearby Carlisle College. After his freshman year, he got a summer job pitching for a minor-league baseball team in Harrisburg, Pennsylvania. One day, in the summer of 1902, Connie Mack brought his American League (AL) Philadelphia Athletics to Harrisburg for an exhibition game with the Harrisburg minor leaguers. Albert threw a shutout against the big-league visitors, and Mack signed him to a contract for the 1903 season.

The Emerging Champion

Mack, the Athletics’ owner-manager, believed in winning games through good pitching and good defense. The young Ojibwa right-hander was added to the staff that already had future hall-of-famers George “Rube” Waddell and Eddie Plank. The trio combined to form the nucleus of a Philadelphia dynasty that dominated the AL for more than a decade.

When he took the mound in 1903, young Albert stood 6 feet 2 inches and weighed 185 pounds. Other players almost immediately named him “Chief.” Albert was not a hereditary Ojibwa chief, but that nickname was commonly given to American Indian baseball players. Albert’s dignity earned the respect of the Philadelphia fans. Fans in other AL cities often taunted Albert, however, making fun of his Ojibwa heritage. Albert gave back as good as he got. Once, when playing in Detroit against Ty Cobb’s Tigers, Albert stood along the third base line and told the fans to be quiet because they did not know anything about baseball. After all, he said, he was a Native American and they were “immigrants,” or “foreigners.”

Albert won seventeen games his first season on the mound for the Athletics, and after a slump in 1904, he helped pitch his team into the 1905 World Series. This was only the second series played between the established National League (NL) and the upstart American League. The champions of the National League were the New York Giants, led by Manager John McGraw, and star pitcher Christy Mathewson. Mathewson started game one and shut out the Athletics 3-0. Albert retaliated the next day, shutting out the Giants by the same score. The Giants won games three and four; Mathewson faced Bender in game five. The result was one of the greatest pitcher’s duels in World Series history, with the Giants prevailing 2-0.

Albert led his team back to the AL title and the World Series in 1910. He had a sensational season, with twenty-three wins and only five losses and a career low 1.58 earned run average. He capped off the season with an opening game victory in the series over the Chicago Cubs, and Philadelphia took its first world title in five games. In the 1911 World Series, Philadelphia gained a measure of revenge against McGraw’s Giants by winning the series in six games. Despite losing a 2-1 heartbreaker to Mathewson in the opener, Albert came back to win game four and the clinching game six. Two years later, Albert and his teammates again beat the Giants, this time in five games. Albert won two games without defeat in the 1913 World Series. Batters feared his excellent curveball, his outstanding location of pitches, and his pickoff move when runners were on base.

Continuing the Story

In 1914, the Athletics coasted to the AL title again. Albert had a fine season, winning seventeen games while losing only three. Philadelphia was heavily favored to win the World Series against the lightly regarded Boston Braves. Game one was a nightmare for Philadelphia and for Albert. The Braves hit him hard, scoring 6 runs in the first 5 innings. Mack yanked his ace pitcher, something the manager had never done in four previous World Series. To the shock of baseball fans, the NL Braves swept the Athletics in four straight. Mack was so distraught by the loss that he broke up his team through a series of trades and player sales.

In the aftermath of the 1914 World Series defeat, Albert jumped to the rival Federal League, but he had a miserable 4-16 record before his release near the end of the summer. In 1916, he was back in a Philadelphia uniform, but this time for the NL Phillies. He had two good seasons for the Phillies before leaving Major League Baseball during World War I for a job in a shipyard. In 1925, he made a brief one-inning pitching appearance as a player-coach for the Chicago White Sox but, in effect, never played Major League Baseball again after 1917.

In 1937, Connie Mack brought Albert back to the Athletics as a coach, and he stayed with the club until 1953. He was in demand as a speaker to young people, both in Philadelphia and among American Indian people throughout the country. Baseball fans across the country mourned his death from cancer in 1954, just after he was elected to the National Baseball Hall of Fame at Cooperstown, New York.

Summary

Connie Mack once said that, of all the pitchers he managed, Chief Bender was the one to which he turned first when the Athletics absolutely had to win a game. Albert played baseball at a time of considerable racial strife in American society. African American men were excluded entirely from Major League Baseball, and American Indian players were barely tolerated. Chief Bender showed that a man with personal dignity and a great right arm could overcome racial barriers and become a baseball hero.

Bibliography

Kashatus, William C. Money Pitcher: Chief Bender and the Tragedy of Indian Assimilation. University Park: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2007.

Porter, David L., ed. Biographical Dictionary of American Sports: Baseball. Westport, Conn.: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Powers-Beck, Jeffrey P. The American Indian Integration of Baseball. Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2004.

Shatzkin, Mike, Stephen Holtje, and Jane Charlton, eds. The Ballplayers: Baseball’s Ultimate Biographical Reference. New York: Ideal Logic Press, 1999.