Fred Dunlap - Life After Baseball

Life After Baseball

When he retired from baseball, Dunlap was reported to have $100,000 in savings. He went into the building business in Philadelphia during the 1890s. He was also reported to have "owned considerable real estate in Philadelphia." The Sporting Life reported that Dunlap "dropped out of the game in 1892 to follow the racing game, at which he lost the respectable fortune he accumulated in base ball." Another account indicated that Dunlap lost everything on stock market investments. In July 1902, the Philadelphia Times reported that Dunlap was "clean broke."

In December 1902, Dunlap died penniless and alone at age 43. According to the Sporting Life, the "last two years of his life were spent in abject poverty and mental gloom." He reportedly lived in a "seedy Philadelphia rooming house," and died of "consumption of the bowels" at Philadelphia Hospital." According to several accounts, a policeman at the morgue saw the body and believed it to be Dunlap. Lave Cross was called to the morgue and confirmed that the body was Dunlap. His funeral was poorly attended by his former baseball colleagues, and one former player who did attend observed, "There were not enough friends of Dunlap at his funeral to bury him and we had to call on the hack drivers to make up the list of active pall-bearers." Following Dunlap's death, William A. Phelon, Jr., editor of Sporting Life wrote:

"So Fred Dunlap has passed into the great beyond, and the man whose salary figure marked the high-water limit of the long ago is gone! ... What a ball player this Dunlap was and what an artist in getting the fat salaries! ... Dunlap was a real infielder of the type so popular ten years ago -- one of the solid, bulky style through whom no grounder seemed able to pass, but who could nevertheless wave the hot ones goodbye with graceful ease when occasion demanded. With the gloves now in use to aid, Dunny would have been even a bigger wonder now than then."