Did you know?
There’s no better time to express my undying devotion to the Pittsburgh Pirates (at least until July).
But had I been alive 102 baseball seasons ago, the Pirates would have been the enemy.
They came to Uniontown and made minced-meat of the local Moose team by a score of 9-1 on Oct. 20, 1910.
The 2013 Major League baseball season is upon us.
It wasn’t close, and it wasn’t even fair. The Pirates had been the defending World Champions (of the whole world) that year. While “about 2,000 fans from almost every part of Fayette County,” witnessed the event at Cycle Park, the major leaguers benefited greatly because some of the Moose players suffered from a severe bout of “stage fright.”
The game’s account on the front page of the Uniontown Morning Herald indicated that “Moose players who were not guilty of errors since they were children (and I love this word) foozled and allowed the visitors to score when they should have been retired.”
Nobody could ever truly blame the local lads for being a bit “foozled.” Especially since the Pirates came armed with another local lad (sort of) who would later gain entrance into the hallowed ranks of the Baseball Hall of Fame.
The Pirates’ second baseman was a native of Wilkinsburg named Bill McKechnie.
“Bill McKechnie’s one hand stop and peg to first after Brady had sent the bulb past Phillippe like a comet on the war path was a feature. Bill scooped the ball on a dead run with one hand and got it to first ahead of Brady,” it was reported.
That certainly wouldn’t be the last time McKechnie excelled on a baseball diamond.
He would later become the first manager in Major League baseball history to win World Series for two different teams. (The Pittsburgh Pirates in 1925, and the Cincinnati Reds in 1940)
And if you happen to follow today’s Bucs during spring training down in Bradenton, Florida, they play their games at McKechnie Field which was named in honor of that second baseman-turned World Series winning manager who was instrumental in defeating that Moose team in Uniontown back in 1910.
Of course, in the past I’ve mentioned another Hall of Fame manager who once played in Uniontown.
Connie Mack, who would later become the longest-serving Major League manager in baseball history with the Philadelphia Athletics (50 seasons), had been a player for the Pittsburgh Pirates when he took the field in a game against a Uniontown team in 1893.
I’ve also written in the past that there have been a number of Hall of Fame baseball players who’ve visited Uniontown over the years.
Negro League icons Satchel Paige and Josh Gibson each played games in and around Uniontown; Honus Wagner paid a number of visits to Uniontown — in an out of baseball uniforms; on Sept. 6, 1943, Hall of Fame pitcher Dizzy Dean accompanied Wagner’s “Victory Bombers” to South Union High School Stadium, and played in a game; Hall of Famer Willie Stargell — along with pitcher Kent Tekulve gave a talk about drugs and drug abuse at the East End United Community Center in 1980; and Donora High School’s future baseball Hall of Fame inductee, Stan Musial, played in a basketball game at Lafayette Junior High School against Uniontown High School on Feb. 11, 1938.
Over the past few weeks, I’ve concentrated on many of the correspondences written by George Washington, that, for the most part, involved Fayette County. While researching those correspondences, I also found a couple more of them that had nothing to do with Washington, but are still quite interesting.
Meriwether Lewis, along with William Clark were the explorers who were appointed to explore the land comprising the Louisiana Purchase; to establish sovereignty over the Native American populations along the Missouri River; and to find a “direct and practicable water communication across this continent, for the purposes of commerce with Asia.”
Or, as we know it today, they conducted the Lewis and Clark Expedition.
The Lewis and Clark Expedition officially started at Camp Dubois in the Indiana Territory on May 4, 1804.
Yet in 1803, and some time after President Thomas Jefferson commissioned the Lewis and Clark Expedition, Meriwether Lewis needed to prepare for the two-year trek ahead.
On July 8, 1903, he sent a letter to Jefferson from Harper’s Ferry explaining that, “Yesterday I shot my guns and examined the several articles which had been manufactured for me at this place; they appear to be well executed.”
But it is the paragraph he’d written just before that one which I found quite interesting. “I shall set out myself in the course of an hour, taking the rout of Charlestown, Frankfort, Uniontown and Redstone old fort (Brownsville) to Pittsburg, at which place I shall most probably arrive on the 15th,” he wrote.
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