In 1889, Mike Kelly – sometimes referred to as “The Only”, sometimes as “King” and among the first of America’s sportstars – was reported to the Chicago White Stockings owner Albert Spalding for carousing and drinking late at night.

The news was no surprise to Spalding, who had hired detectives to follow his wayward charge on his midnight cruises through the Chicago demimonde.

Kelly reacted angrily to the charges when they were read back to him.

“In that place where the detective reports me as taking lemonade at 3am, he’s off. It was straight whiskey: I never drank lemonade at that hour in my life.”

He wasn’t joking. Within four years he was out of baseball, relying on his fading fame and his talents in vaudeville for a living. He fell ill in Boston after contracting ‘Irish pneumonia’, a euphemism for alcoholic poisoning.

It was reported that while being transported to hospital, he somehow fell off the stretcher and declared, in falling: “This is me last slide”.

Batting champion

Kelly was only 36 when he died, having played for six different clubs and managed two. He finished as the national league’s batting champion in 1884 and 1888 and as its runs scored leader for three seasons. He achieved all this without ever compromising his prodigious appetite for alcohol and late night fun and was also the first baseball player to write his biography,

Play Ball

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Kelly was American-born to Irish parents and is one of the cast of extraordinary characters who make an appearance in Patrick Redmond's The Irish and the Making of American Sport. (McFarland , 2014).

In the late 1800s, the Irish were dominant in baseball, which had begun to stake its claim as the American pastime after the Civil War.

Even as Kelly was entering his decline in New York, a young Cleveland player named Ed Delahanty was beginning to shine as a terrific batter. Delahanty’s father came from Graiguenamanagh in Kilkenny. His mother was a Waterford woman.

Delahanty's battle with alcohol was so prominent that when an intervention of sorts was staged by a local priest and his family the Detroit Times carried the headline: 'Del Mighty Hitter, Signs Pledge: Confronted by his mother, wife and child here, Big Fellow decides to cut out the booze.'

The reprieve was temporary: as chronicled in Gerrald Casway's Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball, the star was humiliated by the story, boarded a train for New York and, after becoming drunk and unreasonable, was ordered off the train at Bridgeport, Ontario.

Much speculation

What happened afterwards has been the subject of much speculation but it is known that he either fell or jumped into the Niagara and drowned.

It was Casway who used the term ‘Emerald Age’ to define baseball in the late 1800s. It is hard to imagine now but the sport was once dominated by the Irish, as Redmond outlines in his research.

Andrew Jackson Leonard, born in Cavan, was the first Irishman to play major league baseball in 1871, the year the league started, and won two pennants with the Boston Red Stockings. At least 48 other Irish-born men went on to play major league baseball and within a generation, the Irish had a firm grip on the sport.

The Sporting News in St Louis noted: "The Irish surnames in the baseball profession represent one-third of all the players engaged by the 12 clubs in the league." The New York Herald, analysing a game card between Cleveland and New York, declared: "It all goes to show that as a nationality the Irish have a peculiar talent for ball playing and have since baseball became professional monopolised the best positions on the diamond and carried away the bulk of money paid out for salaries."

And it wasn’t just on the baseball diamond that the Irish excelled. Boxing was the other arena in which the Irish got a jump on other immigrant races.

Nat Fleisher, founder of the The Ring, reported in his 1949 book The Heavyweight Championship that "American ring history from the middle of the nineteenth century through the early part of the twentieth century is primarily a history of Irish supremacy. In every division, the headliners were, with few exceptions, either immigrants from the land of Erin, or native sons of Hibernian parents."

Headed west

Redmond has good fun charting the rise of John Morrissey, born in Templemore in 1831 but raised in Troy, New York. By the age of 20 he was headed west in the rush for California gold before finding fame in the epic prize-fighting contests which sprung up across the continent during that period.

Morrissey shook off repeated – and possibly justified – attempts to link him to the bar room murder of a former ring opponent and he broke into the world of New York politics and served two terms in Congress and was elected to the New York Senate in 1875.

He fought and lost an election to succeed Boss Tweed at Tammany Hall and when he died at just 47, he left $2 million and merited shining write-ups in the dailies, including the New York Times which described Morrissey's metamorphosis from gambler and ex-prize fighter to " honest, clear- headed, right-minded legislator". It seems safe to suggest that his life would have been less action-packed had his parents decided to stay put in Tipperary.

What makes Patrick Redmond’s book so fascinating is that it attempts to present a rounded view of how thoroughly the Irish infiltrated American sports during their years of explosive growth, from particiapation to ownership to management.

It was a brief reign and reflects the manic rate of industrial growth and population surge and the turbulent rush to create great cities and wealth and the sporting traditions which sprung up. By the 1920s, the Irish influence on baseball was beginning to wane.

Only one Irish-born player, Joe Cleary, made it to the majors after 1920 (ten played NFL after that date, six NHL and one, Pat Burke born in Dublin in 1973, made it to the NBA). Only one Irish-born baseball player, Patsy Donovan, has been inducted to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

Donovan was born in Cobh – then Queenstown – and made his debut with the Boston Beaneaters, his first of 17 seasons.

His particular case for Hall of Fame inclusion was supported by a letter from George H.W. Bush, whom Donovan had coached at Andover.

Redmond quotes Jim Murray’s noting in his 1951 article on Dale Murphy, that if a ball player “‘has an ‘O’ or an ‘M’ with a small ‘c’ in his name nowadays chances are he was born in Peurto Rico ...the shamrock is no longer the symbol of baseball, the canebrake is”.