Last Frontier Tales
A cup of coffee in the Big Leagues
Hank Nuwer
The date was June 14, 1925. The Rheinlanders of Cincinnati showed up this Flag day to cheer their Reds against the Brooklyn Robins.
This was the first game for new Brooklyn player-manager Zack (Buck) Wheat. The Reds were directed by manager Jack Hendricks, replacing Pat Moran who died from Bright’s Disease.
Seated in the Reds dugout was a trim 19-year-old six-footer with a dimpled clean-shaven chin. Sportswriters reported that Thomas Brandon Sullivan, a right-handed outfielder and catcher, was born December 19, 1906, in Nome, the first Alaskan in a major league baseball game.
His parents, immigrants Michael and Abina Sullivan from the Irish Free State, moved to Alaska after fleeing creditors in Montana. On June 9, 1913, they sold their property in Nome and sailed to Seattle to start a new life operating a rooming house.
The sturdily built six-foot, 190-pounder Sullivan blistered the ball while playing high school ball. Now here he was playing before 20,000 fans without ever playing an inning in the minors.
On the mound for Brooklyn was veteran Charles (Dazzy) Vance, a future Hall of Famer. With Vance scattering eight hits in a complete game, Brooklyn scored eight runs in the fifth inning en route to a 12-3 slaughter of Cincinnati.
With the game hopelessly lost, Reds manager Hendricks gave the Alaska kid a shot as catcher in the seventh inning. Nervous, Sullivan failed to squeeze a pitch from Neal Brady. It escaped his mitt and dribbled behind him for a passed ball.
Sullivan had one trip to the plate in his three-inning stint. With one out in the ninth inning, Vance got the kid to hit a grasscutter grounder to “Hod” Ford at shortstop. Ford’s throw to Jack Fournier at first beat Sullivan to the bag.
Any dreams the youngster had of playing another game evaporated. He sat on the team’s wooden bench two weeks collecting splinters and was released June 29. That gained Sullivan the dubious distinction of joining the “Cup of Coffee Club,” made up of baseball players who participated in a single major league game.
Three years later, Sullivan won a second professional chance at age 21 with his hometown Seattle Indians of the Pacific Coast League. The team in 1928 was a ragtag bunch with even a gray-bearded player in his 40s.
Manager Jim Middleton played Sullivan sparingly in 55 games. Sullivan collected 38 hits in 172 at-bats for a .221 average. He posted six doubles, one triple, and three homeruns for the Indians.
The second-division team barely managed to draw a daily average of 1,000 fans to ancient Dugdale Field, a rundown stadium destined to burn in a 1932 fire.
Released after the season, the life of Mrs. Sullivan’s boy Tom began to fall apart.
On June 25, 1930, he was arrested and booked for being in the company of a 54-year-old fisherman petty thief and mugger named Charles Martin Peterson, aka “Sharkey.” The charge was disorderly conduct and Sullivan jumped bail.
Sullivan listed his occupation as “baseball player” on his mugshot. But his professional ballplaying indeed was over. His mugshot revealed he had ballooned to a puffy 198 pounds.
For the next decade, Sullivan and his brother John lived alone with their mother. Sullivan and John, a dredger, worked zero hours in 1939 and together had an income of $0, according to the 1940 U.S. Census. Their 68-year-old mother worked 52 weeks in ’39 and reported income from other sources such as renting to lodgers. Mrs. Abina Sullivan died at 71 on November 15, 1943.
At some point, Tom Sullivan tried to enlist in military service, but there is no record of him serving. Already burdened with a liver as leathery his catcher’s mitt, he likely failed his physical. He joined the American Legion where an unemployed man might find a free drink now and then at the bar.
Tom Sullivan died at age 38 in Seattle. A requiem mass attended by his brothers Michael and John was held August 24, 1944.
The coroner listed “acute alcoholism” as the cause of death on Sullivan’s
death certificate. The dead man’s occupation was “ballplayer.”