Wee Willie Keeler, a diminutive Baltimore Orioles right fielder measuring 5’4″ and 140 pounds, declared of his success, “Keep your eye on the ball and hit ’em where they ain’t!” In 1897, he did it 239 times for a .424 batting average. Both stats led the major leagues—he repeated this achievement in 1898 with 216 hits and a .385 batting average.
1897 was, indeed, a career season for Keeler, whose seasonal achievements at the plate also included:
- Tied career high in doubles (27)
- 2nd highest number of triples (19)
- 4th highest number of RBI (74)
- Career high .464 on-base percentage
- Career high .539 slugging percentage
- Career high 1.003 on-base plus slugging percentage
- 44-game hitting streak (National League record tied by Pete Rose in 1978
Among Keeler’s skills, power was absent—he had zero home runs in 1897.
In addition to Keeler, Baltimore’s 1897 squad burst with supremacy at the plate.
- Jack Doyle, First Baseman (.354)
- Hughie Jennings, Shorstop (.355)
- John McGraw (Third Baseman (.325)
- Joe Kelley, Left Fielder (.362)
- Jake Stenzel, Right Fielder (.353)
Because the Orioles’ lineup overflowed with skilled batsmen, Keeler’s prowess, though formidable, may not be easily discerned. “The chief obstacle for evaluators of the Keeler legacy is that his prime years came with a juggernaut that was stocked with too many good hitters for pitchers to pitch around him and in an era that afforded him advantages that players who followed him as little as ten years later no longer enjoyed,” wrote baseball historian David Nemec in Volume 2 of his 2011 tome Major League Baseball Profiles: 1871-1900.
Keeler began his career in 1892 and, as Nemec points out, benefited from the allowance to “tap or chop pitches foul without having them counted against him as strikes” during his first seven seasons.
Sporting a 90-40 record, Baltimore’s 1897 team finished 2nd in the National League. Despite the team’s success in the 1890s, conflict resonated, especially between McGraw and Keeler. “McGraw, always needing a target, liked to pick on Willie Keeler, the only Oriole littler than he was,” wrote Burt Solomon in his 1999 book Where They Ain’t: The Fabled Life and Untimely Death of the Original Baltimore Orioles, the Team That Gave Birth to Modern Baseball. “Willie was a city boy and a happy one. Mac, raised an hour and a half by rail from Syracuse, had grown up hard. Mac had a talent for manipulation, even a need for it, and a knack for not letting it trouble him any. Willie cared nothing about things like that. He wanted to do his job as well as he could and to have fun, not necessarily in that order. Sharpening his spikes, he believed, was something a gentleman did not do,” continued Solomon.
Keeler died on New Year’s Day in 1923; his Orioles teammates went to Brooklyn’s Church of Our Lady of Good Counsel for a requiem mass—a former tormentor was among those in attendance. “Tears stood in the eyes of John McGraw, manager of the world’s champion Giants and a team mate [sic] of Keeler’s on the famous Orioles of the 90s, as he viewed his old body,” reported the Washington Post.
Keeler played for the Giants, the Bridegrooms, the Orioles, and the Yankees in his 19-year career. 2,932 hits, .341 batting average, and .415 slugging percentage boosted him to Cooperstown—the Baseball Hall of Fame inducted Keeler in 1939. On his plaque, below the name and the visage, stands Keeler’s famous quote “Hit ’em where they ain’t!”
A version of this article appeared on www.thesportspost.com on April 8, 2016.