Eddie Collins

Baseball Player

• Born: May 2, 1887
• Birthplace: Millerton, New York
• Died: March 25, 1951
• Place of death: Boston, Massachusetts

Sport: Baseball

Early Life

Edward Trowbridge Collins was born May 2, 1887, in Millerton, New York, to John Collins, a railroad freight executive, and Mary Trowbridge Collins. Eddie was brought up in nearby Tarrytown, a village southeast of New York City that had been made famous by the author Washington Irving as “Sleepy Hollow Country.”

Although he was of small stature—even as an adult, he grew to be only 5 feet 9 inches tall—Eddie was a natural athlete whose favorite sport was football. In 1903, he graduated from high school in Tarrytown at the age of sixteen, and he enrolled at Columbia University in New York City, where he became quarterback of the school’s football team. In order to earn tuition money, he played semiprofessional baseball in the summers. After Eddie’s junior year, a scout for the Philadelphia Athletics of the American League (AL) saw him play and recommended him to Connie Mack, Philadelphia’s owner and manager, as a fine professional prospect.

The Road to Excellence

In 1906, Eddie struck a deal with the Athletics. However, there was a hitch: He was still enrolled at Columbia, and he wanted to preserve his amateur standing so that he could continue to play college sports. Mack thus signed the young prospect to a contract under the name “Sullivan,” and Eddie used the pseudonym while he spent the final part of the 1906 season with the Athletics, playing in six games as an infielder and batting .235. When he returned to school for his senior year, he found that he had lost his college eligibility anyway; Mack’s ruse had been successful, but it had been discovered that Eddie had played semiprofessional ball in New England.

Although he could not play for Columbia, Eddie was appointed manager of the school’s baseball team, and after his graduation in 1907 he started playing professionally under his own name. He played four games with Newark in the Eastern League—the only minor-league games of his career—and spent fourteen more games with Philadelphia before the season’s end.

The Emerging Champion

In 1908, Eddie began his major-league career in earnest. He played in 102 games for the Athletics, shuttling between second base, shortstop, and the outfield and batting a respectable .273. The next season, he came into his own, batting .346, stealing 61 bases, and winning a job as the A’s regular second baseman. Before he retired, he had played more games at second than anyone else in major-league history.

In 1910, Eddie hit .322 and led the American League with 81 stolen bases; he also led AL second basemen in every fielding category, helping the Athletics into the World Series against the Chicago Cubs. He was brilliant in the series, batting .429 and setting a record with 9 hits—including 4 doubles—in Philadelphia’s five-game victory. The next season, he continued to be one of the game’s top stars, hitting .365 and leading AL second basemen in putouts as the Athletics cruised to a second consecutive pennant and World Series triumph. Together with star third baseman Frank “Home Run” Baker, first baseman Stuffy McGinnis, and shortstop Jack Barry, Eddie became famous as a member of the “$100,000 infield”—so called for its supposed cumulative value, which was staggering for the time.

In 1912, the Athletics slumped to third place in 1912, but Eddie was, if anything, even better, hitting.348, stealing 63 bases, and leading the league in runs scored for the first of three consecutive seasons. In 1913, Philadelphia won yet another pennant, and Eddie was again a major contributor, batting .345 in the regular season and .421 in the Athletics’ World Series defeat of the New York Giants.

Eddie earned the nickname “Cocky” for his hustling, aggressive style of play. If he were arrogant, he had good reason to be; there was little he could not do on a baseball field. He was a brilliant defensive player and a remarkable base runner, and he ranked among the league leaders in batting average and walks drawn year after year. He did not have much home-run power—but in the “dead-ball era” of pre-1920’s baseball, neither did anyone else. In 1914, his multiple talents were acknowledged with the Chalmers Award, the equivalent of the modern most valuable player award. That season, he led Philadelphia to a fourth pennant in five years, but the heavily favored Athletics lost the World Series to the Boston “Miracle Braves.”

Continuing the Story

With its great infield and star pitchers Eddie Plank and Chief Bender, Philadelphia had become a baseball dynasty. Under financial pressure exacerbated by the emergence of the upstart Federal League, however, Mack sold his stars to other teams. Eddie was sent to the Chicago White Sox in exchange for $50,000, and the decimated Athletics became the first team in major-league history to go from first place to last in consecutive seasons.

With the White Sox, Eddie joined another powerful team that included star pitchers Red Faber and Ed Cicotte, slugging first baseman Jacques Fournier, and the brilliant outfielder “Shoeless” Joe Jackson. Eddie hit .332 (second in the league to Ty Cobb), led the American League in bases on balls, and finished second in runs scored and third in stolen bases. The White Sox finished in third place, but the team was up-and-coming. In 1916 the White Sox climbed to second, and in 1917 Chicago took over the league, winning one hundred games and finishing nine games in front of the second-place Boston Red Sox. Eddie was again terrific in the World Series, hitting .409 and scoring the winning run on a dramatic play in the final game of Chicago’s victory over the New York Giants.

In 1918, Eddie played in only ninety-seven games, and his average dropped to .276. The White Sox slumped badly, finishing in sixth place. World War I was raging in Europe, and Eddie enlisted in the Marines, but the war ended before he could be sent overseas. The next season, though, Chicago and Eddie came roaring back. The White Sox edged Cleveland for the pennant, and Eddie batted .319 and led the league in steals. In the infamous World Series of 1919, he was one of the few key Chicago players who did not join Jackson, Cicotte, and the other “Black Sox” in throwing the contest to the underdog Cincinnati Reds.

In the 1920’s, Major League Baseball changed dramatically with the arrival of the “lively-ball era.” Led by the example of Babe Ruth, players began hitting home runs in unprecedented numbers, and the speed-and-singles style of play that Eddie had mastered became obsolete almost overnight. Eddie, though, remained one of the game’s great players, hitting more than .300 for nine of the decade’s ten seasons, with a high of .360 in 1923. He also led the league twice more in steals, the last time at the advanced baseball age of thirty-seven.

In 1925, the White Sox named Eddie the team’s player-manager, but although Eddie hit .346 that year and .344 the next, the team finished in fifth place both times. After the 1926 season, Chicago released Eddie, and he finished his twenty-five-year career with four seasons as a part-time player and coach for the Athletics, who displaced Ruth’s Yankees as the AL’s top franchise.

After coaching for Philadelphia through the 1932 season, Eddie took a series of front-office jobs with the Boston Red Sox. He was instrumental in acquiring the young Ted Williams for Boston, and he remained with the Red Sox until his death from heart failure in 1951, at the age of sixty-three. In 1939, he had been inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

Summary

Eddie Collins turned in one of the longest and most distinguished careers in major-league history. He was a brilliant offensive and defensive player for more than two decades, and his multiple skills and hustling on-field leadership made him a key part of several of the best teams of the early part of the twentieth century.

Bibliography

Huhn, Rick. Eddie Collins: A Baseball Biography. Jefferson, N.C.: McFarland, 2007.

Lindberg, Richard. Total White Sox: The Definitive Encyclopedia of the World Champion Franchise. Chicago: Triumph Books, 2006.

Neyer, Rob, and Eddie Epstein. Baseball Dynasties: The Greatest Teams of All Time. New York: Norton, 2000.

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