Oakland Baseball in the 19th Century
An old Oakland baseball team was run by a charismatic, maverick owner who generated almost as much controversy as he did winning teams.
Charlie O. Finley of the Oakland A’s?
Try Colonel Tom Robinson of the Oakland Colonels. He led an Oakland squad during the late 19th Century, back when Bay Area professional baseball was still in its infancy.
Robinson, the Colonels’ owner/manager, was a “shameless promoter” and “fast-talking ringmaster,” according to a book titled, The Golden Game: The Story of California Baseball by Kevin Nelson. The short-lived team named after its owner’s military rank eventually folded along with the California League. But not before Robinson became the toast of Oakland when the Colonels won the California League title in 1889.
How rich is Oakland’s baseball history? The Colonels aren’t even the city’s oldest squad. That honor goes to the Live Oaks. That Oakland team played its first game in 1866, just a year after the Civil War ended, at the first Pacific Base Ball Convention in San Francisco. Two years later, 3,000 fans watched the Wide Awakes of Oakland battle the Eagles of San Francisco on Thanksgiving Day at San Francisco’s Recreation Grounds. It was “an early installment of what would develop into a 150-year-old baseball rivalry between Oakland and its larger, more glamorous neighbor,” Nelson wrote in The Golden Game.
In the late 1870s, Oakland ballparks briefly were the center of Bay Area baseball. The Pacific Base Ball League played its 1878 championship game at an Oakland racetrack. The California League re-started the following year, when its four teams played all its regular season games in a park built on west Oakland’s Center Street.
Meanwhile, 19th-century franchises continued to come and go. So did star players. One of them was Cal McVey, who had excelled in the big leagues for Chicago, Boston and the Cincinnati Red Stockings. But in the 1880s, he formed Oakland’s Bay Cities semipro club. McVey played until 1886, right around the time a new California League team formed in Oakland. They were called the G&M’s. The squad was named after Greenhood and Moran, an Oakland tailor and clothing shop. The G&M’s best player was George Van Haltren, a career .316 slugger who would join the Oakland squad each year after the major league schedule was complete.
Soon, however, the G&M’s would give way to Robinson’s Oakland Colonels. The Colonels’ uniforms have to be seen to be believed. They feature black pullover jerseys with large collars, contrasting sharply with bright white stitching of the word “Oakland” emblazoned on the front, along with a big matching white bow tie. The black pants are held up with oversized white belts, along with a striped cap that looks like something vintage prison inmates wore. But uniforms would become the least of Robinson’s worries. After the ’89 title, the Colonels played so badly in subsequent seasons that he burned the championship banner in a desperate attempt to bury the “jinx” that was hurting the team.
Scandal then ensnared Robinson. Investigative reporting from The Oakland Tribune newspaper questioned “Colonel Tom’s” military record, finding no federal military service at all. Robinson responded that he had served in the California National Guard, but the accusations sullied his reputation, according to The Golden Game. The 1893 season started disastrously for the “Colonel.” The players threatened to strike after Robinson failed to meet two payrolls and he was forced to sell the team.
Ironically, a future MLB owner played for the Colonels that year. Clark Griffith, who one day would own the Washington Senators, won 30 games for Oakland in 1893, according to Nuggets on the Diamond: Professional Baseball in the Bay Area from the Gold Rush to the Present by Dick Dobbins and Jon Twichell
The California League folded after the 1893 season. For the next four seasons, there was no organized pro baseball in the Bay Area. But that changed in 1898 when the new California League and the Pacific States League merged into one eight-team division. Teams from Los Angeles to the Bay Area competed against each other for the next five years, with Oakland winning the 1902 title. An Oakland baseball diamond frequently used by this and other “outlaw leagues” was Freeman’s Park, located at 55th Street and San Pablo Avenue, according to Nuggets on the Diamond.
In 1903, West Coast baseball owners tried forming a new league in this new century. It would be called the Pacific Coast League. And Oakland’s newest team, the Oaks, would feature a prominent, long-lasting role.
To be continued...