I first met Fred Raymer in 2020, the same way I met every other major leaguer I know—in a box score. But these box scores weren’t major league records. I was working, as I’ve written about before, on the 1910 Pacific Coast League for the Chadwick Project. Reading every box score of every game, typing each name and brief stat summary into text files, you get to know the most common names quickly. And Raymer was the everyday second baseman for the Sacramento Solons that season.
I never paid much attention to Raymer until Fred Snodgrass mentioned him to Larry Ritter. Born in 1875, Raymer was twelve years older than Snodgrass when the latter would shag flies with 1902 Los Angeles California League team (the Loo-loo’s). Snodgrass told Ritter that Raymer “was the only ballplayer who would talk to us boys”. Talking to Ritter sixty years later, Snodgrass still remembered Raymer’s kindness.
Born in eastern Kansas about 30 miles north of Kansas City, Fred Raymer’s early life is largely unknown to me, but he began getting modest press playing for the Albuquerque Browns in the mid-1890s. At 21 he was elected president of that ballclub and left the next year to play professionally in El Paso. He spent 1897 trying to stick somewhere with the Texas Association, a Class C league when the highest level in the minors was Class A. A couple years later in 1899 he signed with Kansas City of the Western Association, one level below the major leagues.
That year, Raymer met and married a recently-widowed woman, Nettie Kinney, who brought along a seven-year-old son, Lowell Smith, by her first husband. Raymer and Nettie weighed the uncertain life of a ballplayer against an opportunity to settle down. Stability won. In July, Raymer left the Kansas City team to accept a position as a “sanitary plumber”—responsible for installing water and sewage systems—working to help the US Army rebuild Fort Wingate after a fire gutted most of the base in 1896.
But Raymer never reported. In August he was playing for Oklahoma City in an independent league, and had returned to Kansas City, Nettie’s home, in late 1899. Connie Mack signed him to play in Milwaukee for the 1900 season, but sent him to Sioux City after a few weeks. Raymer played for four teams, caught and recovered from smallpox, and helped nurse his wife back to health before the end of the season. Nettie’s health would be on Fred’s mind as he moved from team to team for the rest of his playing days.
After one season in Chicago with the National League in 1901, Raymer moved his family to Los Angeles, where young Fred Snodgrass met him. He stuck with the Boston Nationals for 1904 and 1905, but Nettie’s health did not agree with New England, so Raymer took his career and family back to Los Angeles in early 1906. He was banned from the National League for failing to report to Boston that spring.
After a couple years at Class B elsewhere, Raymer landed a job with Sacramento in 1908 and stayed there for a few years, moving his family north to be with him. He was claimed by major league teams more than once but refused to report each time, his family and his wife’s health taking priority. But his Pacific Coast League years were solid statistically and he’s got quite a few nice cards in the T212 set.
In July, 1910, Raymer steps into what he expects to be a spitball and the fastball he never sees knocks him unconscious for a few minutes. He spends the next few weeks in a hospital and doesn’t finish the season. He played and managed the Victoria (British Columbia) team in the Northwestern League in 1911 before leaving the game for good.
Always happy and healthy in Southern California, Fred and Nettie established a duck hunting club in the Imperial Valley about 100 miles east of San Diego. Their business was successful there and they remained until Nettie died from a stroke in early 1923 in her mid-40s. Raymer would meet and marry three more women over the next fifteen years, but it’s unclear whether he ever found happiness at home again. Both his stepson and daughter married but neither had children. Raymer passed away in 1957 and has no descendants living today.
What is clear is that Raymer was wildly popular as a player among his teammates. Sportswriters and teammates wrote of “King Raymer” in more than one city where he played. His friendships reached even further in his years after the major leagues with his hunting clubs on the shores of the Salton Sea. By the time he was solidly established with Boston in the National League at 29 years of age, Raymer likely had five or more years ahead of him in the majors. But like many of his Pacific Coast League teammates a few years later, he chose the West Coast and his wife’s health instead.
Of all the ballplayers I’ve met in the box scores, Fred Raymer is one I wish it were possible to meet today. Something about him stuck with Fred Snodgrass for sixty years, and his choice of family over baseball fame elevates his up-and-down career to a greater accomplishment than his stat lines can convey alone.
–Jay Wigley, author of How Retrosheet Saved Baseball History
(Note: Don’t bother looking for that quote in Ritter’s The Glory of Their Times. Ritter didn’t transcribe that tidbit from Snodgrass, but thankfully the audio recording captured it, available on the CD version of the book (2008). While that version is out of print, you can listen to the Snodgrass audio interview here.)
