Friday, August 10, 1883 promised excitement for baseball fans in Toledo. The Toledo team of the Northwest League played host to the three-time world champion Chicago White Stockings, and thousands jammed League Park at Monroe and 13th Streets to see the greatest team in baseball and their star player-manager, Cap Anson. What the crowd could not know was that this game would become one of the most critical in the history of baseball.
The White Stockings, following the custom of the day, played exhibition games against the better teams of the minor leagues on off days from National League play. The Toledos, who would not be called Mud Hens for another decade, qualified as worthy opponents. After losing 15 of their first 19 games the Toledos began to jell under manager Charles Morton and would win the pennant of the Northwest League.
The only storm cloud on the horizon involved a member of the Toledo team. Toledo's catcher, Moses Walker, was a fair hitter and a good fielder, a former Oberlin College student playing baseball to earn money for law school at the University of Michigan. He also happened to be one of the few black players in organized baseball at the time.
Anson, playing manager of the Chicago team, had made it known to the Toledo management that he objected to playing on the same field with blacks, and the locals planned to oblige Anson. Walker, suffering from a sore hand, had not been pencilled into the lineup anyway. The Chicago team arrived at Union Station on Friday morning and was informed that Walker would be kept on the bench. However, according to the Blade, "not content with this, the visitors during their perambulations of the forenoon declared with the swagger for which they are noted" that they would not step onto the field "with no damned n-----." Anson, further inflaming a situation that the Toledo management had thought resolved, loudly reiterated this demand upon arriving at League Park. Charles Morton was not pleased with the demeanor of the visitors. "The order was given, then and there, to play Walker and the beefy bluffer (Anson) was informed that he could play his team or go, just as he blank pleased," reported the Blade.
When Anson saw Walker in right field, he exploded. "Get that n----- off the field!" he shrieked to manager Morton. He threatened to go home to Chicago without playing the game, but soon relented after a period of confusion and the threat of forfeiture of the gate receipts. The Blade quoted Anson as saying, "We'll play this here game, but we won't play never no more with the n----- in."
The exhibition played in Toledo turned out to be one of the most important games in baseball history. From this game came the impetus for the systematic expulsion of blacks from the game, a ban that would last for 63 years.
Adrian Anson leaped into this controversy with both feet. Anson, the "beefy bluffer" in the Blade's words, dominated baseball for three decades. As "Baby" Anson he became a star as a teenager in 1871 and moved to Chicago when the National League was formed in 1876. As "Cap" Anson he became playing manager of the White Stockings in 1879 and held the post until, as "Pop" Anson, he retired as both player and manager in 1897. He was the first batter to reach 3,000 hits and win four batting championships, and the first manager to win five pennants. Loud, belligerent, and foul-mouthed, Anson also refined umpire intimidatio to a science. He is usually considered the greatest player of the 19th century, and was among the first group inducted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1939.
Unfortunately, Cap Anson was also a world-class bigot. His autobiography, written in 1900, made no mention of Moses Walker, but related in gleeful detail how the team treated its "mascot", a black man named Clarence Duval whom Anson described as a "coon" and "a no-account n-----." Historian Bill James says that "they treated Duval exactly as one would treat a dog." Anson made no secret about his feelings about sharing a field with blacks, repeating the statement "Gentlemen don't play baseball with n-----s" to anyone who would listen. People listened to Cap Anson, the towering figure of baseball in the 1880s.