Original article written by Angelo
Louisa
Elmer Flick – Society for
American Baseball Research (sabr.org)
Researched and compiled by Carrie Birdsong
Best known as the player who would not trade for the young Ty
Cobb or as the man who won the American League batting title with the
lowest average before 1968, Elmer Flick was more than just an answer to a
trivia question. An underrated Hall of
Famer whose on-the-field accomplishments are nearly forgotten today, Flick was
a hard-hitting, fleet-footed outfielder who had his major league career
curtailed by a mysterious gastrointestinal ailment.Born in Bedford, Ohio, on January 11, 1876. Elmer Harrison
Flick was the third of five children – three sons and two daughters – of
Zachary Taylor and Mary (Caine) Flick.
Elmer’s father, an American Civil War veteran, was a farmer and skilled
mechanic who operated a chair-making shop in Bedford and gained a certain
degree of notoriety because of his failed attempt or attempts (the stories
vary) to fly without using an airplane.
A natural athlete, Elmer boxed, wrestled, and played
football, but his favorite sport was baseball, something that he first excelled
at as a slugging catcher on the Bedford High School team (though some locals
considered his younger brother, Cyrus, a better player). Then, sometime in 1891, the Bedford town team
was embarking on a trip to play a neighboring team when the manager noticed
that he had only eight players.
Unwilling to lose any games by forfeit, he began looking for someone
with baseball skills in the crowd that had gathered at the train station to
with the team well. And it just so
happened that a barefoot, 15-year-old Elmer Flick was among that crowd and was
invited to join the team, an offer that he eagerly accepted – despite not
having a uniform or any shoes. The
result was that Bedford lost both games of a doubleheader, but the unshod Elmer
made a name for himself with his good timing.
Flick continued to play for the Bedford team until he joined
the Youngstown Puddlers of the Inter-State League in 1896, the manager having
agreed to hire him sight unseen. Not
wanting to disappoint himself or his manager, Flick prepared for his sojourn
into the professional ranks by engaging in a two-part exercise program which
consisted of running and catching a ball after bouncing it off the side of a
building and by making his own bat on his father’s lathe, something he would do
more than once during his baseball career.
At Youngstown, Flick was moved to the outfield because the
Puddlers already had a catcher, but learning a new position was not easy for
him and his fielding percentage was an atrocious .826 for the 31 games in which
he saw action. His biggest difficulty
was judging the distance of fly balls.
However, the change did not affect his hitting, as he pounded the ball
for a .438 batting average with five doubles, nine triples, and six home runs
among his 57 hits. As Flick described
his Youngstown days to Brian Williams of the Cleveland Record in January of
1963, “The manager told me that as an outfielder, I wasn’t so hot…then he
added: ‘But you can sure sting that ball.’”
The following year, Flick took his talents to Dayton,
another member of the Inter-State League.
There, he became the team’s regular left fielder, raised his fielding
percentage to .921, and continued to hit the ball at a torrid pace, finishing
with 183 hits – including 42 doubles, 10 homers, and a league-leading 20
triples – and a .386 batting average.
Added to those figures, he stole 25 bases, scored an incredible 135 runs
in only 126 games, and ranked first in the league in total bases with 295. And because of his offensive exploits,
youngsters who came to see him perform would chant, “Elmer Flick, you are
slick/Hit a homer pretty quick.”
One of Flick’s performances with Dayton caught the eye of George
Stallings, then manager of the Philadelphia Phillies, who signed the gifted
slugger to a major league contract for the 1898 season. Stallings hoped to use Flick as the club’s
fourth outfielder, but when starting right fielder Sam Thompson was
sidelined with a back injury, Flick was pressed into service and became a
fixture in right field for four seasons.
During these seasons, Flick combined power with speed to
establish himself as one of the top offensive threats in the National League,
even though he was no taller than 5’8” or 5’9”, depending on the source, and
weighed between 160 and 168 pounds. In
his rookie year, he batted .302 and
finished fourth in the league in walks with 86 and in on-base percentage with a
.430 average. In 1899, he upped his
batting average to .342, scored 98 runs, and drove in another 98. But it was in 1900 that he put together his
best season with the Phillies, leading the league with 110 runs batted in and
placing second in home runs (11), extra-base hits (59), total bases (297),
batting average (.367), and slugging percentage (.545).
While in Philadelphia, Flick improved his defensive skills
and learned to take advantage of the short dimensions of National League
Park’s right field by playing shallow and getting several assists, some
by fielding would-be singles and then tossing the batters out before they
reached first base. It was also in
Philadelphia that Flick showed he had the toughness that it took to be a major
leaguer. For example, twice in a game in
1899, he got angry at Nap Lajoie for going back into shallow right to
catch fly balls that should have been his chances. Then, during a game in 1900, he and Lajoie
got into a fistfight over who owned a bat.
Despite giving away at least four inches and about 30 pounds to the
larger Lajoie, missing with a punch, stuck a grate, a wall, or a washstand (the
sources disagree) and broke his thumb.
With the arrival of the American League, Flick remained with
the Phillies in 1901, batting .333 and coming in second in the senior circuit
in triples with 17, third in extra-base hits with 57, and tied for first in
assists by an outfielder with 23.
However, the following year, he jumped to the Phillies’ intracity
rivals, the Athletics, with whom he saw action in only 11 games before joining
the Cleveland Blue/Bronchos (the club was known by both names during the 1902
season, though its official name was the Bluebirds). This latter change of scenery occurred
because Flick wanted to avoid the legal ramifications of the Phillies’ court
injunctions that prohibited three of his teammates who had jumped to the
Athletics the previous year from playing in Pennsylvania for any other team
except the Phillies. Flick was not named
in the injunctions, but the results affected him as well. The move cost Flick a chance to play on a
pennant winner with the Athletics, but Cleveland was glad to have a local boy
to boost attendance, and Flick was delighted to have his home field in a city
not far from where he was born.
Although his final batting average for 1902 dipped below
.300, Flick lived up to advance billing for Cleveland fans when he hit three
triples in a game against Chicago on July 6, establishing an American League
record that has since been tied but may never be broken. Other highlights for Flick that year included
walking five times in a game against Boston on July 18 and finishing sixth in
the league in triples with 12.
The next five seasons marked Flick’s heyday with the
Cleveland team now called the Naps.
Batting first or third in the majority of the games in which he
appeared, Flick led the American League three times in triples (consecutively),
twice in stolen bases (as co-champion both times), and once each in runs
scored batting average, and slugging percentage. Arguably Flick’s finest season offensively in
a Cleveland uniform was 1905 when he topped the league in triples (18),
slugging percentage (.462), and batting average (.308 which remained the lowest
mark for a batting champion until Carl Yastrzemski won the 1968 title
with a .301 mark) and came in second in on-base percentage (.383).
Another indication of Flick’s value occurred during spring
training in 1907. Hughie Jennings,
the manager of the Detroit Tigers, tired of his troublesome outfielder, Ty
Cobb, offered to trade the talented Georgian to Cleveland for Flick straight
up. But Charles Somers,
Cleveland’s president, refused, maintaining that he was quite satisfied to keep
the Ohio farm boy, though he was willing to give the Tigers William “Bunk”
Congalton, another outfielder, in exchange for the Georgia Peach – an
offer Jennings turned down.
Unfortunately for Flick, all his successes on the diamond
could not keep baseball life from beginning to take its toll on his physical
well-being. The Naps held their spring
training sites in the South and Flick developed a distaste for southern
cooking. Also, he hated the hot eastern
road trips that the Naps would make during the season.
However, it was not just southern cuisine and eastern travel
that was affecting the Cleveland star.
In a revealing article published in the July 22, 1907, issue of the
Cleveland Press, Flick disclosed that “playing the game day in and day out
[out] ruining his health,” that he was “on the verge of physical collapse,” and
that “the time of his retirement [was] not far distant.” Almost prophetically, less than eight months
later, Flick came down with a gastrointestinal illness that caused him to miss
most of the 1908 season and play in a total of only 90 games during the 1909
and 1910 seasons. He lost weight, his
power and speed declined, and the pain was so severe there were times when he
thought he would die. “My last three
years [with the Naps] … were awful,” Flick later admitted. “I shouldn’t have
played at all.” Initially, Flick’s
doctors were mystified by what was ailing him, and the exact cause of the
illness was never determined, but according to Flick, many of the physicians
said that it was acute gastritis, which resulted in Flick taking pills for the
rest of his life.
Whatever the cause of Flick’s misery, the ailment brought an
end to his major league career. From
1908 until mid-1910, Flick batted just .254 in 338 at-bats. Finally, in July 1910, the Naps released him
to Kansas City of the American Association – a move Flick negated by refusing
to report. Instead, he played part of
each of the next two seasons with another American Association team, Toledo,
before retiring from professional baseball and returning to Bedford. There, he farmed, hunted (Flick was an outstanding
shot with a rifle), raised trotting horses, built houses and office buildings,
and, in Flick’s own words, “dickered in real estate.” In addition, he scouted for the Cleveland
franchise and spent more time with his wife, Rose Ella (Gates), and their five
daughters.
Despite his short but highly productive career in the
majors, Flick remained largely forgotten by the baseball community in general
and the Hall of Fame voters in particular until Ty Cobb died in 1961. Some articles written about the Georgia Peach
mentioned the aborted 1907 trade and thus revived interest in who Flick was and
what made him worthy of being suggested in a trade for Cobb. The renewed attention, in turn, led to Flick
being voted into the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee in 1963, an honor
he treasured until he died from congestive heart failure at 8:25 A.M. on
January 9, 1971, only two days before his 95th birthday. Flick also suffered from mycosis fungoides, a
malignant lymphoma, which contributed to his death.
Buried in Crown Hill Cemetery in Twinsburg, Ohio, Flick was
posthumously inducted into the Greater Cleveland Sports Hall of Fame in 1977
and into the Ohio Baseball Hall of Fame 10 years later. Today, one of the baseball parks in Bedford
bears his name.
A different version of this article appeared in David Jones, ed., Deadball Stars of the American League (Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006).
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Full Name: Elmer Harrison Flick.
Born: January 11, 1876, Bedford, OH (USA)
Died: January 9, 1971 at Bedford, OH (USA)
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