The Cincinnati Reds Get Creative

/ Kimberly

In the fall of 1924, the Cincinnati Reds baseball team played in–or at least traveled through–Welch, West Virginia, which is in the Cumberland Mountains.

Welch is the county seat of McDowell County and it was a fairly prosperous place in 1924. It was coal mining country and had a growing population of over 68,500. Since the decline of the coal mining industry, McDowell County has come on hard times. By 2020, the population dipped below 20,000 and today the county is plagued with poverty and drug abuse.

Nevertheless, the team found themselves there on October 8, 1924. They lined up in their uniforms for an official team photograph. For reasons I was unable to discern, the players are all wearing holstered pistols on their belts! I know rules in sports have changed over time, but I’m pretty sure this was never standard.

From WVculture.org

Why would baseball players need to be armed? My best guess is they want to discourage any questionable calls from a West Virginia umpire. A little insurance!  What do you make of it?

I’m going to go out on a limb and say that packing heat during a competitive sports event seems like a bad idea.

14 thoughts on “The Cincinnati Reds Get Creative”

  1. Found this online. Thought it was interesting:

    The story that we believe is accurate is that there had been a series of incidents involving armed moonshiners in the area in advance of the Reds scheduled exhibition games. As a precaution, a security detail was called in to help ensure the safety of players and spectators. At some point, someone decided to get creative with the photo op and this image was the result. 

    Uniformed players in the image are (left to right):
    Ivey Wingo (Catcher), Bubbles Hargrave (Catcher), Pete Donohue (Pitcher), Pat Duncan (Outfielder), Rube Bressler (Outfielder), Sammy Bohne (Infielder), George Burns (Outfielder), Babe Pinelli (Outfielder), Rube Benton (Pitcher), Edd Roush (Outfielder) Hughie Critz (Second Baseman). 

    You might be interested to know that Hargrave, Donohue, Bressler, Roush and Critz are members of the Reds Hall of Fame and Roush is a member of the National Baseball Hall of Fame. 

    The non-uniformed individuals in the image are not known but appear to be part of the “security” detail that was in place for the game.”

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  2. That’s bizarre. At first I thought maybe it was some piece of needed equipment that simply looked like a holster. I waded through all kinds of 1920s team photos and saw nothing similar in any other team uniform. Maybe up in those West Virginia mountains there were bears a plenty and the team brought them because there was a bold and marauding bear in the area? I have no idea. It’s very strange.

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  3. The man fourth in from the right looks like he’s holding a pistol. There’s no way they could play baseball with a holster on their body. Can you imagine “sliding” into a base? Why so many pistols? It would seem one or two pistols would be sufficient to stop a wild animal and the men in dress suits should be the ones with the pistols. A real mystery.

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    • There is a plethora of information on “Coalfield Baseball” played in West Virginia and Virginia. By 1920, baseball had become an important part of American culture and a favorite pastime. Concurrently, by 1925, there were over 500 coal towns in Appalachia, many of which were desolate and isolate from the outside world. Each town was controlled by a coal company that operated a company stores and company housing for the mine workers. Their entire life revolved around coal mining. Most towns likely had a baseball team as an escape from the drudgery and dangers of working in the mines. There was such a fervor for baseball that by the 1940s the teams in Appalachia were organized into leagues.

      According to the September 2022 posting of Cardinal News – Servicing Southwest and Southside Virginia:

      “The region played host to barnstorming big-league clubs, some of which stopped to play games between the end of spring training and the start of the regular season. The Cincinnati Reds were fan favorites, especially because the team was one of the nearer big-league clubs to the coalfields, long before expansion brought major league baseball to the South.”

      “Sometimes, though, the publicity from hosting a major league team could be problematic, due to the rampant hillbilly stereotypes that pervaded newspaper coverage. Managers and umpires often told wild stories of menacing mountain people filing ballparks, threatening violence.”

      “In the early 1920s, when the Cincinnati Reds rolled through Appalachia to play exhibition games, the players posed for a photograph with pistols holstered on their hips, a comic show of self-protection from the wild hillbillies. Everybody expected the Hatfields and McCoys to battle it out in the bleachers, it seemed.”

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      • This one sure sounds familiar. Grandpa was a coal miner and the family shopped at the company store. There wasn’t any way out of the coal mining business once you were in it. I’ve got lots of family in the old “feud districts”—Harlan County and Bell County, specifically. Kentuckians might be the toughest people on earth. When I was researching Grievous Deeds, I found that people were genuinely afraid to travel there because it was really a lawless place. The mountains were a good hiding place and somewhere law enforcement was afraid to pursue fugitives because they could easily get ambushed. And people got shot over a trifle. It might be a comic show of self defense or maybe they really needed those guns!

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