In May of 1866 newspaper publisher Colonel Thomas Fitzgerald surprised the baseball world by resigning as president of the Athletics. Cofounded by Fitzgerald, the Athletics were the most successful baseball club in Philadelphia and a contender for the national championship. Readers of his newspaper, the City Item, soon learned why Fitzgerald had quit – he disapproved of the Athletics’ use of “hired men,” or mercenaries.

Nowadays, of course, the best baseball clubs are professional, and their players are all “hired men.” But baseball in 1866 was still an amateur sport. The first professional league opened five years later, in 1871. The term amateur carried cultural as well as regulatory meanings. Baseball club members were supposed to be bound to each other by mutual social obligation, not by economic considerations. Baseball’s national governing body strictly forbade clubs from paying players. For one club to poach a player from another club was considered unethical, even if done in a way that was technically legal. Clubs were also expected to enforce minimum standards of behavior and respectability. As the sport spread outward from New York City and Brooklyn (then independent cities) the stakes increased and the national baseball championship became more competitive. More and more clubs quietly recruited players based on athletic performance alone. Race remained a dealbreaker – even the best African American players were excluded from organized baseball until the late 19th century, well into the professional era -- but class barriers weakened.

Philadelphia publisher and baseball man Colonel Thomas Fitzgerald

The City Item accused Colonel Fitzgerald’s fellow Athletics officers of paying four players $20 a week. Under a cartoon caricature of a hired man appear the words, “They generally come from New York, with only one or two exceptions, and are about the hardest set we ever saw.” It did not name names, but thanks to the hint, the identities of two of the filthy four are obvious.

They are Patsy Dockney from Hoboken, New Jersey (across the Hudson River from New York City) and Lipman Pike from Brooklyn, New York. The brawling, hard-drinking Dockney and Pike are a good fit for “the hardest set we ever saw.” As Fitzgerald wrote, “The officers of the Athletic Club have done much to bring the game into contempt by employing men to play in their nine who have been repeatedly arrested and confined in the station house...on the charge of drunkenness and rioting. There was a time when a player would have been expelled from the club for drunkenness and rioting, but that day seems to have passed.” Dockney and Pike both left Philadelphia by the end of the year.

Until the very end of the Amateur Era the clear letter of baseball law prohibited clubs from paying or compensating players in any form, but as applied in the real world the prohibition was a bit more elastic. Some forms of player compensation came to be regarded as acceptable; others were not. Influential journalist and baseball rules committee member Henry Chadwick drew a partly class-based distinction between “hired men” – in it solely for the money -- and “those whose loss of time and necessary expenses are very properly paid.” “All clubs,” he wrote, “who have first class players in their nines whose positions in life are not surrounded with pecuniary advantages, or who are not, in fact, well off in the world, of course take care that their players are not sufferers from sacrificing their time to sustain the playing reputation of the club of which they are prominent players. But this style of thing is...very different from ‘hiring men,’ or paying them so much a week for their services, just as ‘professional’ cricketers are paid.” (This sounds almost as if it were tailored to rationalize the Brooklyn Excelsiors’ treatment of pitching great James Creighton. The avowedly amateur Excelsiors brought the teenage Creighton and his family from a New York City slum to suburban Brooklyn, provided them with an expensive house, and arranged no-show government jobs for Creighton and his father.)

One look at their careers, however, makes it obvious that Patsy Dockney and Lipman Pike were out and out mercenaries. Dockney played for the New York Gothams in 1864 and 1865; the Athletics in 1866; the Eurekas of Newark, New Jersey in 1867; and both the Cincinnati Buckeyes and the New York Mutuals in 1868. Lipman Pike came up through Brooklyn junior clubs under the control of the Atlantics, where he was playing when he jumped to the Philadelphia Athletics for the 1866 season. He went on to play in New York, Baltimore, Hartford, St. Louis, Cincinnati, and Providence.

Dockney was a power-hitting catcher who had been discovered on a New Jersey sandlot by Harry Wright, who was then a member of the Gothams. Dockney was exceptional among Amateur Era ballplayers in several respects: he was born in Ireland, emigrating to the U.S. as a four-year-old with his family; he was Catholic; and he had a working-class upbringing. He also drank too much and got into frequent trouble with the law. In April 1867, while a member of the Quaker City club, Dockney was charged with stealing a pocket watch. He was acquitted, but he seems to have had a special affection for timepieces; he was repeatedly arrested for similar crimes. In April of 1868 he was in Cincinnati, playing for the Buckeyes, when a newspaper reported that a certain Frank Robinson had been stabbed in the chest during a melee in a saloon at 256 Central Avenue. The real story soon came out. Frank Robinson was the anachronistically hilarious false name that Dockney gave the Cincinnati police; and the saloon was in fact a bordello. Embellished over the years and exaggerated beyond all recognition by sportswriters, this sordid episode was once a standard part of baseball lore. There are many versions, but the following 1919 newspaper story is typical:

“In 1870 the Athletics went to St. Louis to play a series with the star club of that city. On the night before the first game Dockney and some of his associates became involved in a fight in a St. Louis café and when it was all over it was found that Dockney had been slashed with a butcher knife across the chest. The wound ran from one shoulder to the other and blood streamed in torrents. Dockney, unconscious, was picked up, placed into an ambulance and hurried to the hospital. There physicians took something like fifty stitches in his chest and were compelled to place strips of plaster across to assist in holding all the torn parts together…[The next day, Dockney] escaped from the hospital and reported at the baseball grounds “ready for duty.”…Dockney caught the game that day without the use of a glove, mask or chest protector, which were practically unknown in that era…He endured until the last man was out and then collapsed utterly.”

It is hard to know where to start fact-checking this one. The actual incident took place in Cincinnati in 1868; a bordello bears little resemblance to a café; and Dockney was not a member of the Athletics at the time. Even though the story greatly exaggerates the size of Dockney’s chest wound – an 1871 prison record lists his principal scars but fails to mention any on his chest – whatever really happened to him kept him out of baseball action for a good three months.

Patsy Dockney resigned from the Buckeyes in 1868, moving on to the Mutuals, then several other clubs in 1869 and 1870. In 1871, at 26, he was convicted of larceny and sentenced to three and a half years in New York state prison. He was pardoned by the governor after serving three years. He spent the next several years playing as a paid ringer for amateur clubs in the New York City area, as well as working as a “fish butcher” in New York’s Washington Market. We do not know when and where he died; he last appears in the U.S. Census at age 32 living in Manhattan with wife Flora, 21, and a four-year-old son named Alexander.

Prison records contain one last illuminating detail about Patsy Dockney. His 1871 Sing-Sing prison records note that he had two crude blue dots on his left forearm and three more on his left hand. These are Victorian prison tats. Made by prisoners, they signify prison sentences. Sure enough, Patsy Dockney’s 1871 prison intake document states that he had served five previous jail terms.