The Cleveland Guardians are a professional baseball team based in Cleveland, Ohio. They are in the Central Division of Major League Baseball's American League. Since 1994, they have played at Progressive Field. The franchise originated in 1896 in the minor Western League. After playing four years in Columbus and Grand Rapids, the team relocated to Cleveland for the 1900 season as the Lake Shores, when the league, renamed the American League (AL), was still officially a minor league. One of the AL's eight charter franchises, the major league incarnation of the club began in Cleveland in 1901.
1896–1946: Beginning to middle The Columbus Buckeyes were founded in Ohio in 1896 and were part of the Western League. In 1897 the team was known as the Columbus Senators. In the middle of the 1899 season, the Senators swapped cities with the Grand Rapids Furniture Makers (see Grand Rapids (baseball)) of the Interstate League. The Columbus Senators became the Grand Rapids Prodigals of the Western League, while the Grand Rapids Furniture Makers became the Columbus Senators and remained in the Interstate League. (This Prodigals franchise is often confused with the previous Western League team in Grand Rapids (1894-1897), which later moved to Omaha, Nebraska and St. Joseph, Missouri in 1898, before settling in Buffalo, New York in 1899.) The Grand Rapids Prodigals finished the 1899 season in the Western League and relocated to Cleveland the following season. In 1900 the team was called the Cleveland Lake Shores. Around the same time Ban Johnson changed the name of his minor league Western League to the American League, which in 1900 was still considered a minor league. In 1901, when the American League broke with the National Agreement of 1883 and declared itself a competing major league, the Cleveland franchise was among its eight charter members and was called the "Bluebirds" or "Blues".
The new team was owned by coal magnate Charles Somers and tailor Jack Kilfoyl. Somers, a wealthy industrialist and also co-owner of the Boston Americans, lent money to other team owners, including Connie Mack's Philadelphia Athletics, to keep them and the new league afloat. Players did not think the name "Bluebirds" was suitable for a baseball team. Writers frequently shortened it to "Blues" due to the players' all-blue uniforms, but the players did not like this name either. The players themselves tried to change the name to "Bronchos" in , but it never really caught on.
The Bluebirds suffered from financial problems in their first two seasons. This led Somers to seriously consider moving to either Pittsburgh or Cincinnati. Relief came in 1902 as a result of the conflict between the National and American Leagues. In 1901, Napoleon "Nap" Lajoie, the Philadelphia Phillies' star second baseman, jumped to the A's after his contract was capped at $2,400 per year—one of the highest-profile players to jump to the upstart AL. The Phillies subsequently filed an injunction to force Lajoie's return, which was granted by the Pennsylvania Supreme Court. The injunction appeared to doom any hopes of an early settlement between the warring leagues. However, a lawyer discovered that the injunction was only enforceable in the commonwealth of Pennsylvania. Mack, partly to thank Somers for his past financial support, agreed to trade Lajoie to the then-moribund Blues, who offered $25,000 salary over three years. Due to the injunction, however, Lajoie had to sit out any games played against the A's in Philadelphia. Lajoie arrived in Cleveland on June 4 and was an immediate hit, drawing 10,000 fans to League Park. Soon afterward, he was named team captain, and the team was called the "Naps" after a newspaper conducted a write-in contest.
Lajoie was named manager in , and the team's fortunes improved somewhat. They finished half a game short of the pennant in 1908. However, the success did not last and Lajoie resigned during the 1909 season as manager but remained on as a player.
After that, the team began to unravel, leading Kilfoyl to sell his share of the team to Somers. Cy Young, who returned to Cleveland in 1909, was ineffective for most of his three remaining years and Addie Joss died from tubercular meningitis prior to the season.
Despite a strong lineup anchored by the potent Lajoie and Shoeless Joe Jackson, poor pitching kept the team below third place for most of the next decade. One reporter referred to the team as the Napkins, "because they fold up so easily". The team hit bottom in 1914 and 1915, finishing in the cellar both years.
1915 brought significant changes to the team. Lajoie, nearly 40 years old, was no longer a top hitter in the league, batting only .258 in 1914. With Lajoie engaged in a feud with manager Joe Birmingham, the team sold Lajoie back to the A's.
With Lajoie gone, the club needed a new name. Somers asked the local baseball writers to come up with a new name, and based on their input, the team was renamed the Cleveland Indians."Baseball writes select 'Indians' as the best name to apply to the former Naps" The Plain Dealer January 17, 1915: 15 It is claimed that the nickname "Indians" references Cleveland Spiders baseball club during the time when Louis Sockalexis, a Native American, had played in Cleveland (1897–1899);"Looking Backwards" The Plain Dealer January 18, 1915: 8 however this is contested by sportswriter Joe Posnanski who argues "Why exactly would people in Cleveland—this in a time when Native Americans were generally viewed as subhuman in America—name their team after a relatively minor and certainly troubled outfielder?" Sockalexis played only 96 games over three seasons, compiling just 367 at bats in his career. Sockalexis also "had to deal with horrendous racism, terrible taunts, whoops from the crowd, and so on," according to Posnanski. According to history professor Jonathan Zimmerman, the franchise was named the Indians by local baseball writers not to honor Sockalexis, but as a reference to the "fun" that he would inspire in crowds and the fact that journalists jokingly referred to the club as the "Cleveland Indians", even though it was officially named the Spiders. "In place of the Naps, we'll have the Indians, on the warpath all the time, and eager for scalps to dangle at their belts," wrote an article in the Cleveland Leader of January 17, 1915.
At the same time as the team was renamed, Somers' business ventures began to fail, leaving him deeply in debt. With the Indians playing poorly, attendance and revenue suffered. Somers decided to trade Jackson midway through the 1915 season for two players and $31,500, one of the largest sums paid for a player at the time.
1916 to 1926: Ownership change and first World Series title By , Somers was at the end of his tether, and sold the team to a syndicate headed by Chicago railroad contractor James C. "Jack" Dunn. Manager Lee Fohl, who had taken over in early 1915, acquired two minor league pitchers, Stan Coveleski and Jim Bagby and traded for center fielder Tris Speaker, who was engaged in a salary dispute with the Red Sox. All three would ultimately become key players in bringing a championship to Cleveland.
Speaker took over the reins as player-manager in , and would lead the team to a championship in 1920. On August 16, the Indians were playing the Yankees at the Polo Grounds in New York. Shortstop Ray Chapman, who often crowded the plate, was batting against Carl Mays, who had an unusual underhand delivery. It was also late in the afternoon and the infield would have been in shadow with the center field area (the batters' background) bathed in sunlight. As well, at the time, "part of every pitcher's job was to dirty up a new ball the moment it was thrown onto the field. By turns, they smeared it with dirt, licorice, tobacco juice; it was deliberately scuffed, sandpapered, scarred, cut, even spiked. The result was a misshapen, earth-colored ball that traveled through the air erratically, tended to soften in the later innings, and as it came over the plate, was very hard to see."
In any case, Chapman did not move reflexively when Mays' pitch came his way. The pitch hit Chapman in the head, fracturing his skull. Chapman died the next day, becoming the only player to sustain a fatal injury from a pitched ball.Report of Chapman's Death, New York Times, 8/18/1920 The Indians, who at the time were locked in a tight three-way pennant race with the Yankees and White Sox, were not slowed down by the death of their teammate. Rookie Joe Sewell hit .329 after replacing Chapman in the lineup.
In September 1920, the Black Sox Scandal came to a boil. With just a few games left in the season, and Cleveland and Chicago neck-and-neck for first place at 94–54 and 95–56 respectively, the Chicago owner suspended eight players. The White Sox lost 2 of 3 in their final series, while Cleveland won 4 and lost 2 in their final two series. Cleveland finished 2 games ahead of Chicago and 3 games ahead of the Yankees to win its first pennant, led by Speaker's .388 hitting, Jim Bagby's 30 victories, and solid performances from Steve O'Neill and Stan Coveleski. Cleveland went on to defeat the Brooklyn Robins 5–2 in the World Series for their first title, winning four games in a row after the Robins took a 2–1 Series lead. The Series included three memorable "firsts", all of them in Game 5 at Cleveland, and all by the home team. In the first inning, right fielder Elmer Smith hit the first Series grand slam. In the fourth inning, Jim Bagby hit the first Series home run by a pitcher. And in the top of the fifth inning, second baseman Bill Wambsganss executed the first (and only, so far) unassisted triple play in World Series history, in fact the only Series triple play of any kind.
The team would not reach the heights of 1920 again for 28 years. Speaker and Coveleski were aging and the Yankees were rising with a new weapon: Babe Ruth and the home run. They managed two second-place finishes but spent much of the decade in the cellar. In winter of 1922, Dunn contracted influenza, which lingered for months, and eventually died at his home in Chicago on June 9. Accordingly, control of the team passed to his widow, Edith Dunn, and his estate; making Mrs. Dunn among the first women to own a major league baseball team.Lewis, op cit, p. 140 However, Mrs. Dunn had no interest in running the team, leaving the decision-making to Ernest Barnard, who served as general manager since 1903.
1927 to 1946: The Bradley Years to WWII In 1927, Edith, by then known as Mrs. George Pross, sold the team to a syndicate headed by Alva Bradley for $1 million. The Bradley group brought stability to a team that had a caretaker (Barnard) running it for five years. Bradley was a well-established businessman from a prominent Cleveland family, was president of the Cleveland Chamber of Commerce, the chairman of the Cleveland Builders Supply Company, and an avid baseball fan. Other members of the ownership group included his brother, Charles Bradley, with whom he invested $175,000, banker John Sherwin Sr. ($300,000), Percy Morgan ($200,000), former Cleveland mayor and U.S. Secretary of War Newton D. Baker ($25,000), along with this law partner attorney Joseph C. Hostetler ($25,000; and would later be legal counsel for the American League), and the railroad magnates Van Sweringen brothers ($250,000). While Bradley was the team's president, he was not the majority shareholder.