24 Facts About King Kelly

King Kelly spent the majority of his 16-season playing career with the Chicago White Stockings and the Boston Beaneaters.

King Kelly is often credited with helping to popularize various strategies as a player such as the hit and run, the hook slide, and the catcher's practice of backing up first base.

King Kelly became a vaudeville performer during his playing career, first performing in Boston where he would recite the now-famous baseball poem "Casey at the Bat", sometimes butchering it.

King Kelly was born in Troy, New York, to Michael King Kelly Sr.

The year after that, Kelly signed to play for the Cincinnati Reds, then known as the Red Stockings.

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King Kelly has been mad long enough now, and it is pretty near time somebody was getting mad at this end of the line.

King Kelly continued to play well and was a great box office draw, but Boston didn't win any pennants.

King Kelly managed and played for the Boston Reds in the year-lived Players' League in 1890, and the Reds won the only Players' League title.

In 1891, King Kelly returned to Cincinnati as the captain of a newly established American Association club there.

King Kelly spent just four games with the Reds before jumping back across town to the Beaneaters to finish out the season.

Unreliable record-keeping practices of the era prevent an accurate estimate of how many stolen bases King Kelly compiled over his career, but statistics kept during his later years indicate he regularly stole 50 or more bases in a season, including a high of 84 in 1887.

In 1894, Kelly signed with Albert L Johnson, the main benefactor of the 1890 Players' League, to play for his new minor league club in Allentown, Pa.

King Kelly knew enough to make money for others, but never could make anything for himself.

Song, "Slide, King Kelly, Slide" was America's first "pop hit" record, after its release by Edison Studios, and in 1927 inspired a film version of Slide, King Kelly, Slide.

King Kelly is considered to have been the first man to popularize autographing, as fans pursued him on his way to the ballpark for his signature in the 1890s.

Thayer, in a 1905 letter, singles out King Kelly as showing "impudence" in claiming to have written the poem.

King Kelly seems to have performed most just a few times and probably made a bigger mark with verbal trickery, while catcher or coacher at first or third base.

King Kelly was a rattling all-around man, but his cleverest work was done behind the plate [while catching].

King Kelly was full of tricks and was never so happy as when playing a practical joke.

Supposedly, King Kelly was not in the game when an opposing batter hit a foul fly.

Rosenberg could not find a contemporaneous account of King Kelly having done that, and it is possible he did so in an exhibition game.

King Kelly had taken a boat there from New York to appear at the Palace Theatre with the London Gaiety Girls.

King Kelly said Mike to her was "just an overgrown kid" and, in a reporter's paraphrase, "always eager to help a young fellow on the field [presumably a teammate], never pugnacious despite his marvelous build of 190 pounds and six feet in height [really 5'10"], and charitable to the extreme.

When King Kelly was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum in 1945, there were no immediate family members to mark the occasion, as his apparently lone child had died in 1894 – after living only an hour.