Going back to the very beginnings of baseball history, there have been players who became so thoroughly dependent on drugs or alcohol that they couldn’t go nine innings without taking a hit. Curt Welch was a 19th-century center field glove man who in his best years was an above-average hitter without rising to the level of an MVP candidate; think of a Paul Blair or a Kevin Kiermaier. We know that such players, center fielders who aren’t Joe DiMaggio or Mike Trout but can cover a lot of grass and hit at an above-average level, are extremely valuable. Nevertheless, Welch, who reached the majors (as they were then constituted) with the 1884 Toledo Blue Stockings of the American Association, had a short career. The cause was his severe alcohol dependency.
For a long time, figures like Welch were not subjects for empathy, but rather a kind of smirking pity. His was the kind of extreme need that required him to conceal mugs of beer under loose boards in the outfield fence so he might take a draught between innings. That is, he couldn’t make it through a two-hour game without getting additional alcohol into his system. In this, he was similar to the better-remembered turn-of-the-20th century Giants pitcher Arthur Raymond, who would sit in the bullpen and trade spare baseballs for drinks.
Raymond’s story is sometimes told humorously, as if he were merely eccentric, but his habit wasn’t cute; it was sad, and it cost him both his career and his life. The Giants let him go because he couldn’t even try to achieve sobriety, and soon after someone kicked in his skull during a bar fight. Arthur is in the baseball encyclopedias as “Bugs,” like the later cartoon bunny, and John McGraw was subsequently portrayed as a kind of exasperated Elmer Fudd in having to manage him, but we know from our own observation of alcoholism or opioid dependency that there was nothing funny about it and no one was laughing.
Welch bounced from team to team because too frequently he just wasn’t in condition to play. In 1891 he had a strong season for the Baltimore Orioles (the National League version best remembered for the great teams managed by Ned Hanlon), hitting .268/.400/.368 (119 OPS+) with 50 stolen bases. Add in Welch’s defense and one can visualize a player with Brett Butler- or Brett Gardner-style value. “He is all over the territory,” wrote the Cincinnati Enquirer in 1892, “and takes difficult flies in such easy style that they are not appreciated.”
Welch also spiked his on-base percentage by doing a Don Baylor-style job of getting hit by pitches; he just stood there and let them hit him. He was so obvious in this that for a while, there was a rule informally called “The Welch Amendment,” which said that a batter struck on the hand or the forearm did not get to take his base; it lasted until batters with broken hands and arms were being told by umpires to shut up and sit down. In 1891, Welch was hit 36 times. As one writer suggested at the time, “Welch presents a new problem in baseball. He would rather get hit than hit the ball. He has apparently lost the sense of feeling.” Maybe the writer was referring to Welch’s drinking, maybe he wasn’t, but the second sentence is just a very light paraphrase away from, “He was feeling no pain.”
Welch lasted only another 63 games with the Orioles; Hanlon, who had just taken over the team, released him in mid-July because, “He persisted in getting intoxicated when his services were needed most and refused to obey the club rules… Welch went on the field when not in condition to play and was then warned. He repeated the offense…” The newspapers predicted Welch would land with his old St. Louis Browns (read: Cardinals) manager, Charles Comiskey, by then managing the Cincinnati Reds (read: still the Cincinnati Reds). This turned out to be true. In an act of seeming masochism, Comiskey signed Welch to take over for Pete Browning, another player who was, in the old circumlocution, a “problem drinker” and also on roughly his last chance.
Welch lasted 25 games. In short order he was evicted from his hotel after being “caught in a position that no married man or gentleman should be in,” which is to say he was thrown out on the street in the middle of the night; he had a loud argument with Comiskey about the incident prior to the next game and then sulked, at the very least misplaying a ball in the outfield; didn’t show up for the game after, instead going on a bender and dropping from sight; was released. That ended his 1892 season. Louisville (NL) gave him a brief trial in 1893, but he failed to stick for the usual reasons. His major-league career had ended at 31. He would die at 34, the official cause being something like, “tuberculosis and/or acute alcoholism, take your pick.”
For close to 100 years, our cultural habit was to look at someone like Welch and conclude that he was weak or self-indulgent or hadn’t found the right substitute for self-negation, be it religion or willpower or the 12-step program of his choice (none of which existed in his day). When I was younger, my own philosophy was that the easiest way to quit is never to start. The problem with that kind of thinking is that it’s antiquated, failing to account for both human neurology and the kinds of substances that have latterly been introduced into our communities. Addiction isn’t only—or even primarily—a question of willpower or abstinence, but rather a matter of a brain almost literally reprogrammed by the chemicals it has ingested so that it can’t get along without those chemicals.
To read Dopesick: Dealers, Doctors, and the Drug Company that Addicted America by Beth Macy (2018) is to be confronted by a litany of stories that go something like this: “I was 16, third in my high school class, sang in the Glee Club, and was captain of the track team. Then I tore my hamstring and my doctor gave me a bottle of Oxycontin and told me to take one every six hours without fail. Flash-forward eight weeks and I’ve got a severe dependence, I’ve been thrown out of school for stealing to support my habit, and now I’m selling my body on the side of the highway. Then the government withdrew its support for Oxy so my dealer switched to heroin laced with fentanyl. All my friends are dead and I’ll be joining them shortly.” Sometimes the main character in the story isn’t some feckless teen, but grandpa, pillar of the community until he developed back pain. It is an agonizing, moving read, and it makes judgment impossible, because none of these people did anything wrong except trusting their doctors.
To be sure, the book also contains several stories of teenagers who became addicted because they popped the wrong pill at a party, but to judge them is to omit three important, judgment-moderating details: (1) Short of saint-level powers of self-denial, almost everyone fails at total abstinence at some point in their life, whatever it is they’re trying to avoid, and kids are the least equipped to maintain that level of self-discipline in the face of boredom and curiosity; (2) myriad gatekeepers are equally culpable because they allowed these substances to become freely available throughout the country, and that could mean Oxy and that could mean Budweiser; (3) the question of who becomes addicted and who does not, who recovers and who becomes Curt Welch, is something of a biological lottery. One person can take a drink and walk away, another can’t. Neither knows which they will be until they uncork their first bottle.
Approximately a month ago in this space, on the occasion of Pete Rose’s passing, I reflected on the darkness underlying some of his greatest achievements. Subsequently, a reader took me to task—both in the comments and on Bluesky—for this passage:
The day in 1985 Rose broke Ty Cobb’s career hits record is in retrospect one of the most pathetic in baseball history, a player so far past his use-by date his bat should have worn mummy’s wraps claiming a counting stat at the expense of his team. The big moment came down to Rose versus San Diego Padres right-hander Eric Show—addict versus addict. Less than nine years later, Show would purposely or accidentally take his own life. Rose did the same thing, just metaphorically.
I initially pushed back—everyone pushes back when a stranger seems to be attacking you on social media—but it didn’t take me very long to realize that my (ultimately friendly) critic was correct. I thought my intention, to further highlight the falsity of a manufactured moment, was clear, but I had been glib and therefore reductive, both of which are too often the problem in discussing drug and alcohol dependency. In using a loaded term like “addict,” I had been economical in my description while failing at my real goal, which was to convey a tragic irony: not that the two men were no more than their illnesses, but rather that amidst the daily newspaper countdowns until Rose got his big hit, the hype, the hoopla, the cheering, at the center of this moment, like bleeding gladiators in a cracking coliseum, were two men who, whatever else was going on at that moment, were dealing with terrible illnesses which induced need so great it was tantamount to physical pain.
For Rose, that was, at minimum, his compulsive gambling. As for Show, it was both drugs and emotional problems that he didn’t live long enough to conquer or explicate. As Steve Wilstein wrote in 1994, “The real cause of Eric Show’s death will not appear on autopsy or toxicology reports. He snorted crystal methamphetamine… but he died of an inner torment not even his closest friends fully understood.” Inner torment in the pit of the sold-out stadium is one of the sadder ironies, up there with the famous “joke” that ends, “But doctor, I am Pagliacci.” It’s the thirst of Tantalus, it’s being stranded amidst plenty, it’s being alienated from yourself. It’s being completely deflected from who you were and what you planned to do because the substances that once ordered your mind have been replaced by the pill you took or the drink you swallowed.
As I said earlier, maybe there is some fault to be found there. It’s harder to feel the same sympathy for kids who got stoned at a pill party and suffered terrible consequences for it than it is for grandma, who only wanted to suppress the pain of her hip-replacement surgery but ended up with something much worse than a bad leg. Browning, mentioned above, was self-medicating a chronic medical condition and should be viewed as being in the same boat as that old lady. Judging them may be a reflex, but it’s also wrong. Baseball tells us that; Curt Welch tells us that. Hanlon, the manager who ushered him out of Baltimore, once said (paraphrasing) that drinking was so thoroughly part of baseball culture that you couldn’t fill out a good roster with sober players. Hanlon was talking about Welch and his contemporaries, but not all of those players ended as he did. Welch died at 34; some of them lasted to 94. They both picked up the same bottle, but they could put it down and he couldn’t.
Maybe that wasn’t the only difference between them, just as it might not be the difference between two people who tried Oxy, only one of whom went from the pill to heroin to the grave, but it’s a major one. There but for the genes of great-great-great-great-great10 grandma and grandpa go I—and maybe that was true for Pete Rose and $1,000 on the Reds to beat the Mets next Sunday, as well.
That’s not a moral failing, that’s biology. I regret if I suggested anything to the contrary. Empathy is in spectacularly short supply in America just now, and the last thing I want to do is subtract further from it with implied condemnation. Baseball teaches us again and again, whether in men like Rose and Show or Steve Howe and Alan Wiggins, or, on another spectrum altogether, the thousands of players who have come here from overseas seeking a better life, that need is not who you are, it’s what you’re seeking—whether your quest is for good or ill. You can condemn whatever aspects of it you like, but everyone involved would be much better off if you just tried to understand it.
Thank you for reading
This is a free article. If you enjoyed it, consider subscribing to Baseball Prospectus. Subscriptions support ongoing public baseball research and analysis in an increasingly proprietary environment.
Subscribe now