Best of BP 2025: The Best Dick in Cincinnati

Look at you. The smirk. The glances. The snorting.

You hear the name “Dick Burns,” and for some reason you just can’t contain yourself. Like this is some sort of joke.

This man had a professional baseball career! And he knew that meant his name in the paper every day, leading countless instances of one person looking up from the newspaper and saying, “Who pitched last night?” and someone else responding, “Dick Burns,” and then that first person going, “oh … does it?” or something.

Yes, his name was “Dick Burns.” Yes, he was five-foot, seven inches tall. Yes, that meant they called him “‘Little’ Dick Burns,” obviously. And yes, he had a teammate in Cincinnati named Jack Glasscock. What’s that got to do with anything?

These men had lives! They dove and swung and threw and yelled! They fell in love and lost things dear to them! They lived the entire spectrum of the human experience, and you want to focus on their names?

You think the idea of a man playing ball with his penis on fire is some sort of joke? Well, it’s not. As far as we know, Dick Burns’ crotch was never aflame. So not only are you a crass, sophomoric child, but a liar as well. And if you are able to listen between barely-suppressed giggle fits, you may learn something.

Little Dick Burns, born 1,863 years and a day after Jesus, took his first looks at a town called Holyoke, Massachusetts. What’s that? No, I don’t think they “got his name by looking at some other patient’s chart.” Where did you hear that? It was 1863. Charts probably hadn’t even been invented yet.

The town was named after the nearby Mount Holyoke, which itself was named for the son-in-law of a local settler. Things were always just a layer too complex in Holyoke, but Burns looked around and liked it so much he decided he would die there one day, too.

Holyoke was undergoing an emergence of machines by the year of Little Dick’s rising, clanking and smashing and humming apparatuses that moved things and held things and made the world hot. Their turbines pumped water through the Holyoke canals and they used their shops to cast bronze doors for the U.S. Capitol Building. It was an era of great prosperity for Holyoke, and all it had taken was a hard New England work ethic, as well as the demand created by the blood-soaked fields of the American Civil War. As long as rifles were firing and cannons were blasting, there’d be something for machines to make in Holyoke.

In America, when we hear gunfire in the distance, what do we do? That’s right, we ignore it until it becomes our problem. And in Holyoke, they were playing baseball. Dick Burns certainly was, and it wasn’t long before Little Dick started to rise.

What.

WHAT.

When ballplayers were on the shorter side, they were often compared to other short players, like a collection of dolls. And if they excelled at anything, the coverage would take on an aura of delight, as though everyone had been waiting for Dick Burns to toddle toward the edge of a skyscraper or get a jar of mayonnaise stuck on his head and instead, he became a professional athlete.

But even that wasn’t enough to get them to stop calling him “Little Dick” in the paper. They compared Dick in size, stature, and movement to Hugh Nicol, the reckless base stealer from St. Louis who would eventually swipe 138 bags in one season. They thankfully did not compare Dick to the murderous bank robber at large who also happened to be named “Dick Burns,” participated in the Lawrence Massacre, may or may not have had his head split open with an axe, and perhaps most damningly, was of a more average size.

In 1884, as stories of the more violent and eventually headless Dick Burns splattered across the newspapers, Cincinnati snagged Little Dick from the Detroit Wolverines, for whom he had played the previous year, in doing so garnering himself a reputation as a young man who did not drink, smoke, chew, or swear. He arrived in Cincinnati small and ill, as sinful, unused impulses piled up inside him.

The Cincinnati manager in 1884, at first, was Dan O’Leary, a man who had just been let go from his last job with Indianapolis. Upon learning of his firing, O’Leary had refused to hand over the team’s schedule, putting the team in a tough spot, as it hadn’t been written down anywhere else. As they scrambled to regain that information from all of their opponents, O’Leary got a job managing Cincinnati, word of his cunning subterfuge not impactful to his hiring.^[1]

When Dick debuted in Cincinnati against Baltimore, several of his teammates were injured and two of them were missing. A pitcher was put at shortstop as he filled the “warm body” required for the position. Their first baseman’s thumb came out of its socket during warmups. “Trust your defense” was not an option for Dick Burns that day, and so he did his best with the bat, rapping two doubles, one with his manager O’Leary on base. Dick watched from third as O’Leary was gunned down at home on the following play. That first baseman with the unnaturally wobbling thumb managed to crush a home run somehow. But any success with the bats was undone by Cincinnati’s 14 errors in the field, and to a lesser extent, the Cincinnati runner who got doubled up to end the game, with all of the poorly executed action blanketed by a fine Baltimore drizzle all afternoon. ^[2]

Dick wasn’t blamed for the loss; for that everyone blamed the boners. Nor was he—stop it, why are you laughing—nor was he blamed for the next one, when he struck out nine batters. Reporters were quite clear that Dick would have come out on top, if not for the total letdown from behind.

This isn’t a funny story. A man is experiencing professional disappointment. I can certainly relate to him. One day you chuckleheads will too.

This time, Cincinnati went for quality over quantity and committed only four errors, each with their own particularly damning component, such as the last, which saw Cincinnati’s shortstop bumble a ground ball and whip a wickedly inaccurate throw across the diamond, leading the winning run to score. But finally, Cincinnati secured enough uninjured players for a game in which Dick was pitching, and he managed to secure a win over Boston, hitting a home run himself just to be safe. By this time, Dick was making a name for himself all around town. What do you mean, “Same”? Your name isn’t Dick. ^[3]

In fact, they did the opposite of laughing at Dick. Imagine waking up in the morning and seeing that the newspaper has a story on how you’re cool and popular; a friendly and cordial young man who everyone wants to kiss. “…a great favorite here,” the papers were pleased to report on the local 20-year-old. Dick’s play on the field, despite the actively imploding defense around him, had “made him a great many friends,” as being good at sports often does. ^[4]

The city’s love was rewarded as Dick led off and banged out three hits in his next game, including an RBI triple and a game-tying home run.^[5] Cincinnati wasn’t the only place you could find fans of Dick, either, as other teams had taken notice of his skill and were said to be headed to his location with pens and legal documents.

Dick, of course, was too honorable to break a contract, a quality of his so intense that the Cincinnati paper felt it appropriate to report it as fact. Now, should Dick do the unthinkable and choose to leave Ohio, there would be a written record that a once admirable young man had actually, in fact, been as disreputable as a common drinker, smoker, chewer, or swearer. ^[6]

But there was nothing to fear. Dick loved Cincinnati, and he loved the love that city had for him. There was love everywhere, flowing straight from Dick, all across the city. ^[7]

[Looks sternly over top of glasses].

But all this talk of love and towns may have made Little Dick think more about the place in which he’d been born; where he’d grown up among burgeoning mills, factories, and plants; where he’d been a young lad, perhaps an inch or two shorter than he was now as an adult.

As Cincinnati went up to play Boston in late June, Dick visited his hometown. Holyoke, in small ways, was largely the same. Dry corn fields had recently been blessed with a rain shower, quieting the farmers’ gripes. You could still get your horse’s teeth fixed at Jenks’ Stable on Maple Street every Monday. You could buy a bottle of Dr. De Geffe’s German Vegetable Water on High Street to cure any disease of the eye. Hell, you could buy a boys’ sailor suit for fifty cents at the Holyoke One Price Clothing Company—a steal of a deal for an outfit worth at least three times the price! ^[8]

Dick took in the sights and the sales. He saw people he knew and probably told stories of life in the wild city of Cincinnati, their faces scrunching upon his off-handed mention that none of the Union Association players had been paid yet. He likely considered the beginnings of things, and felt the pull of the past on the tail of his shirt. He could have thought of the war that had ended almost twenty years earlier, that had helped build Holyoke into its modern state, and the evidence of which that still lingered in local stories and wallets—recently a couple had found a wallet stuffed with hundred dollar bills and had ordered an expensive shawl and lost $36 betting on a ball game before they realized it was all Confederate money. ^{[9] [10]}

Dick, too, was one of Holyoke’s machines, upgraded to be more efficient in size. He may have only had 67 inches to work with, but soon, he would use each one to pitch the game of his life. Because he was one Dick they could measure by the foot.

Okay. Yeah. I heard that. I haven’t read this out loud to myself.

At a game in Baltimore in July, both teams noticed that the umpire hadn’t shown up. They got an exhibition going anyway with Dick serving as umpire, and Baltimore took a 2-0 lead. After the first inning, an umpire named Sullivan showed up and decided that the exhibition was now a real game because it had an umpire now. Dick and his teammates took issue with that, claiming that since Sullivan hadn’t been there at the game’s start time, he had no jurisdiction to call the game anything. Sullivan, truly not giving a shit, called the game for Baltimore, awarding them a score of 9-0.^[11]

Though Cincinnati played well, the season had hit its hottest slog. But with Dick around, everyone was in a better mood. They drew a little Dick pic for the paper to accompany a gush of flattery to close out July. It talked about how Cincinnati had yanked Dick out of Detroit’s hands, and upon his insertion to the roster, how swiftly he performed, how firmly he struck, and how strategically he played the field.

I’m lost again. What’s the joke?

The July heat was boiling umpires’ brains across the Union Association. Little Dick pitched hard against St. Louis near the end of the month, and while a pitchers’ duel broke out, the game was ultimately decided by an umpire who seemed to think every close play had to be called in St. Louis’ favor. The Cincinnati Enquirer felt so strongly about the official’s incompetence that they broke their company policy of taking it easy on umpires and called him a “dismal failure” before demanding the league fire him. There was a chance they took the calls personally, as they had come at the expense of Cincinnati’s best Dick. ^[12]

There were other Dicks around. That murderer named “Dick Burns” no one had caught yet, and  another “Dick Burns” working down at the shipping depot. There was Dick Plunkett, who had his throat slit for stealing a horse in Dayton.^[13] Dick Smith, a dog the Enquirer reported kept trying to kill himself. ^[14] And as always there were Dicks in politics, Dicks on the docks, Dicks in the factories, Dicks at the newspapers, Dicks in the slaughterhouses. Cincinnati was crawling with Dicks.

But none of them were ballsier than Little Dick. And if Cincinnati loved him now, well. He had one more dick up his sleeve. Trick. Sorry.

The sun in Kansas City rose through a shadow of gloom on Tuesday, August the 26th. The grass was slick with morning dew that overstayed into the afternoon hours. By the time Cincinnati and Kansas City were taking the field, low clouds layered the sky into a grey, pillowy eternity that stretched to the horizon. It was the kind of day when bad things happen. And all day, that bad thing was Little Dick.

Dick was happening all over Kansas City, up and down the lineup. Well, down it. Nobody goes “up” a lineup. It should really be called a linedown. Dick Burns was dicking down the linedown. What? What did I just say? The point is, nobody was getting Dick that day. He pitched around five errors by his defense—the teams combined for twelve on the day—and still the game was called “one of the most brilliant ever reported in the way of great fielding,” thanks to four double plays being turned and the miscues being credited to those low clouds.

Meanwhile, Little Dick was dealing. Some said he was aided greatly by the umpire’s inability to see the pitches, as the man failed to pick up the ball against the slate grey backdrop.^[15] But anyone watching Union Association baseball should have known that they were lucky he’d even shown up on time.

In the second Dick issued a walk but the runner was caught trying to steal. He bore down in the seventh with a man on second and struck out two straight batters to end the inning. He was saved in the eighth when his center fielder tracked down a deep fly, juggled it for a moment, then “made” the “catch” to everyone’s best estimation—low clouds—and then doubled up a fleeing runner to help escape a jam. And in the ninth, Dick committed an error of his own, putting a man on. The runner was sacrificed to second, but Dick doubled down, throwing a pitch so clearly off the plate that when the umpire called it a strike the batter never recovered mentally. A nice, easy ground-out sealed the deal: Kansas City couldn’t hit Dick.

Sometimes allowing no hits between twenty-seven outs is an act of intense skill, a mindless assault on the strike zone, as a pitcher’s jaw-clenching focus follows a catcher’s fingers. This time, it was a combination of pitching prowess, fortunate weather patterns, and an umpire trying to make pitch calls on pure vibes. Dick Burns had found twenty-seven outs without anybody hitting him hard.

The city of Cincinnati had been right. Dick was a thrilling young man, a hot talent, and a trustworthy young gentleman of whom they could be proud. In a world where one could easily find the wrong Dick, they’d been right about the one they’d gotten.

The next season, Dick Burns signed a deal to play for Milwaukee in the Union Association. His advance money cleared and then Dick slipped out of their hands. Two games into the season, he left town and headed for St. Louis, having signed a $1,000 deal to play for them instead.^[16]

Now. If you can contain yourselves, I’ll tell you about the time “Pebble” Jack Glasscock saved Sioux City, Iowa.

It is not funny.

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^[1] “Dan O’Leary Suspended,” Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 2, 4 March 1884

^[2] “Fun at the Union Park,” Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 2, 9 May 1884

^[3] “To-day’s Game,” Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 10, 18 May 1884

^[4] “Notes,” Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 8, 19 May 1884

^[5] “A Terrific Tussle,” Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 8, 26 May 1884

^[6] “Notes,” Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 10, 15 June 1884

^[7] “Notes,” Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 8, 23 June 1884

^[8] Transcript-Telegram (Holyoke, MA), p. 1, 27 June 1884

^[9] “Notes,” Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 2, 30 May 1884

^[10] “Lost and Found,” Fitchburg Sentinel, p. 2, 30 June 1884

^[11] “A Wrangle at Baltimore,” Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 2, 6 July 1884

^[12] “The Game This Afternoon,” p. 2, 25 July 1884

^[13] “Dayton,” Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 1, 5 October 1884

^[14] Cincinnati Enquirer, p. 4, 21 April 1884

^[15] “Battle of Batteries,” Kansas City Times, p. 2, 27 August 1884

^[16] “Diamond Dust,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, p. 10, 4 July 1885