64 Facts About Billy Sunday

William Ashley Sunday was an American evangelist and professional baseball outfielder.

Billy Sunday played for eight seasons in the National League before becoming the most influential American preacher during the first two decades of the 20th century.

Billy Sunday held widely reported campaigns in America's largest cities, and he attracted the largest crowds of any evangelist before the advent of electronic sound systems.

Billy Sunday was a strong supporter of Prohibition, and his preaching likely played a significant role in the adoption of the Eighteenth Amendment in 1919.

William Billy Sunday was a bricklayer who worked his way to Iowa, where he married Mary Jane Corey, daughter of "Squire" Martin Corey, a local farmer, miller, blacksmith, and wheelwright.

William Billy Sunday enlisted in the Iowa Twenty-Third Volunteer Infantry on August 14,1862.

Billy Sunday died four months later of pneumonia at an army camp in Patterson, Missouri, five weeks after the birth of his youngest son, William Ashley.

Mary Jane Sunday and her children moved in with her parents for a few years, and young Billy became close to his grandparents and especially his grandmother.

Mary Jane Billy Sunday later remarried, but her second husband soon deserted the family.

When Billy Sunday was ten years old, his impoverished mother sent him and an older brother to the Soldiers' Orphans Home in Glenwood, Iowa, and later to the Iowa Soldiers' Orphans' Home in Davenport, Iowa.

At the orphanage, Billy Sunday gained orderly habits, a decent primary education, and the realization that he was a good athlete.

In 1880, Billy Sunday relocated to Marshalltown, Iowa, where, because of his athleticism, he had been recruited for a fire brigade team.

In Marshalltown, Billy Sunday worked at odd jobs, competed in fire brigade tournaments, and played for the town baseball team.

Billy Sunday struck out four times in his first game, and there were seven more strikeouts and three more games before he got a hit.

Billy Sunday's speed was his greatest asset, and he displayed it both on the basepaths and in the outfield.

In 1887, when Kelly was sold to another team, Billy Sunday became Chicago's regular right fielder, but an injury limited his playing time to fifty games.

Billy Sunday was their starting center fielder, playing a full season for the first time in his career.

Billy Sunday was named team captain, and he was their star player, but the team suffered one of the worst seasons in baseball history.

In March 1891, Billy Sunday requested and was granted a release from his contract with the Philadelphia ball club.

Over his career, Billy Sunday was never much of a hitter: his batting average was.

Billy Sunday was best known as an exciting base-runner, regarded by his peers as one of the fastest in the game, even though he never placed better than third in the National League in stolen bases.

Billy Sunday gave interviews and opinions about baseball to the popular press; he frequently umpired minor league and amateur games in the cities where he held revivals; and he attended baseball games whenever he could, including a 1935 World Series game two months before he died.

Billy Sunday began attending the fashionable Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church, a congregation close to both the ball park and his rented room.

Shortly thereafter, Billy Sunday began speaking in churches and at YMCAs.

In 1886, Billy Sunday was introduced at Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church to Helen Amelia "Nell" Thompson, daughter of the owner of one of Chicago's largest dairy products businesses.

For three years Billy Sunday visited the sick, prayed with the troubled, counseled the suicidal, and visited saloons to invite patrons to evangelistic meetings.

In 1893, Sunday became the full-time assistant to J Wilbur Chapman, one of the best known evangelists in the United States at the time.

When Chapman unexpectedly returned to the pastorate in 1896, Billy Sunday struck out on his own, beginning with meetings in tiny Garner, Iowa.

Billy Sunday referred to these towns as the "kerosene circuit" because, unlike Chicago, most were not yet electrified.

Billy Sunday took advantage of his reputation as a baseball player to generate advertising for his meetings.

In 1907 in Fairfield, Iowa, Billy Sunday organized local businesses into two baseball teams and scheduled a game between them.

Billy Sunday came dressed in his professional uniform and played on both sides.

When Billy Sunday began to attract crowds larger than could be accommodated in rural churches or town halls, he pitched rented canvas tents.

Again, Billy Sunday did much of the physical work of putting them up, manipulating ropes during storms, and seeing to their security by sleeping in them at night.

Billy Sunday built rapport by participating in the process, and the tabernacles were a status symbol, because they had previously been built only for major evangelists such as Chapman.

Billy Sunday's ministry was expanding, and he needed an administrator.

When Billy Sunday felt the moment right, he would launch into his message.

Billy Sunday gyrated, stood on the pulpit, ran from one end of the platform to the other, and dove across the stage, pretending to slide into home plate.

Billy Sunday heard the famous sermons on amusements and booze.

Billy Sunday saw people carried out who had fainted under that awful definition of sensuality and depravity.

In 1907, journalist Lindsay Denison complained that Billy Sunday preached "the old, old doctrine of damnation".

Crowd noise, especially coughing and crying babies, was a significant impediment to Billy Sunday's preaching because the wooden tabernacles were so acoustically live.

Nurseries were always provided, infants forbidden, and Billy Sunday sometimes appeared rude in his haste to rid the hall of noisy children who had slipped through the ushers.

Billy Sunday was the subject of over sixty articles in major periodicals, and he was a staple of the religious press regardless of denomination.

Billy Sunday did not preach to a hundred million different individuals but to many of the same people repeatedly over the course of a campaign.

Large crowds and an efficient organization meant that Billy Sunday was netting hefty offerings.

Billy Sunday donated Chicago's offering of $58,000 to Pacific Garden Mission and the $120,500 New York offering to war charities.

Billy Sunday was welcomed into the circle of the social, economic, and political elite.

Billy Sunday counted among his neighbors and acquaintances several prominent businessmen.

Billy Sunday affirmed and preached the biblical inerrancy, the virgin birth of Jesus, the doctrine of substitutionary atonement, the bodily resurrection of Jesus, a literal devil and hell, and the imminent return of Jesus Christ.

Billy Sunday refused to hold meetings in cities where he was not welcomed by the vast majority of the Protestant churches and their clergy.

Billy Sunday was not a separationist as were many Protestants of his era.

Billy Sunday went out of his way to avoid criticizing the Roman Catholic Church and even met with Cardinal Gibbons during his 1916 Baltimore campaign.

Billy Sunday preached that individuals were, at least in part, responsible for their own salvation.

Billy Sunday never attended seminary and made no pretense of being a theologian or an intellectual, but he had a thorough knowledge of the Bible and was well read on religious and social issues of his day.

Billy Sunday's surviving Winona Lake library of six hundred books gives evidence of heavy use, including underscoring and reader's notes in his characteristic all-caps printing.

Some of Billy Sunday's books were even those of religious opponents.

Billy Sunday was once charged with plagiarizing a Decoration Day speech given by the noted agnostic Robert Ingersoll.

Billy Sunday was a lifelong Republican, and he espoused the mainstream political and social views of his native Midwest: individualism, competitiveness, personal discipline, and opposition to government regulation.

However, Billy Sunday regularly received contributions from members of the Second Ku Klux Klan during the 1920s.

Billy Sunday had been an ardent champion of temperance from his earliest days as an evangelist, and his ministry at the Chicago YMCA had given him first-hand experience with the destructive potential of alcohol.

Billy Sunday opposed eugenics, recent immigration from southern and eastern Europe, and the teaching of evolution.

Billy Sunday's popularity waned after World War I, when many people in his revival audiences were attracted to radio broadcasts and moving pictures instead.

Nevertheless, even as the crowds declined during the last 15 years of his life, Billy Sunday continued accepting preaching invitations and speaking with effect.