19th CC Defensive Genius Jimmy McAleer

Jimmy McAleer was not much of a hitter, but this brilliant defensive outfielder was a smart, clever, and ambitious man who helped create two of the original eight franchises of the American League. In 1900 he became the first manager of the Cleveland franchise now known as the Indians, and two years later league president Ban Johnson chose McAleer to assemble and manage a new team in St. Louis in direct competition with the established Cardinals of the rival National League. McAleer's new club, the Browns, nearly won the pennant in its first year of operation. Though the Browns soon fell to the second division, McAleer led the team for eight years, winning more games than any manager in team history. He then moved on to manage the Washington Senators, where he started Walter Johnson on the road to stardom, and ultimately became president and part owner of the Boston Red Sox in 1912. His Red Sox won the World Series that year, but a series of disputes with his business partners drove him from the game and deprived the American League of one of its most talented leaders and organizers.

McAleer, who stood six feet tall and weighed 180 pounds, was the prototypical good-field, no-hit outfielder. One of the weakest batters in the National League (in 1898, 84 of his 87 hits were singles), his brilliance in the field more than compensated for his shortcomings at the plate, in the eyes of many of his contemporaries. He was considered the best defensive outfielder of the 1890s, and some say that McAleer was the first centerfielder to take his eyes off a fly ball, run to the spot where it would fall to earth, and catch it.

McAleer married at least three times, the first time by 1908; 1920 census records show McAleer with a wife six years his junior, Hannah B. McAleer. He later remarried a widowed Youngstown grocery clerk named Anna Durbin. He pursued business interests in Youngstown until becoming ill with cancer in the early 1930s. On April 28, 1931, four months after his second wife, Anna Durbin, passed away, and two months after remarrying singer Georgianna Rudge, Jimmy McAleer shot himself in the head with a handgun, and died the next day. He was 66 years old, and was buried at Oak Hill Cemetery in Youngstown.