Youngstown Ohio Works - Formation and League Championship

Formation and League Championship

The Ohio Works team was organized in Youngstown, in 1902, under the sponsorship of Joseph A. McDonald, superintendent of the Ohio Works of the Carnegie Steel Company. In 1905, the club joined the Class C Division, Ohio-Pennsylvania League, which was founded that year in Akron, Ohio, by veteran ballplayer Charlie Morton. The league's Ohio members included clubs from Akron, Barberton, Bucyrus, Canton, Kent, Lima, Massillon, Mount Vernon, Newark, Niles, Steubenville, Washington, Wooster, Youngstown, and Zanesville, while Pennsylvania was initially represented by teams from Braddock, Butler, Homestead, and Sharon. Within the first two weeks of the season, clubs from Lancaster and McKeesport also joined the league. Only eight of the original 21 participating clubs finished the 1905 season, however. These included clubs from Akron, Homestead, Lancaster, Newark, Niles, Sharon, Youngstown, and Zanesville. The name, "Youngstown Ohio Works", became officially associated with the Youngstown team when it joined the Ohio–Pennsylvania League. From the outset, the Youngstown ball club was managed by ex-major leaguer Marty Hogan, a former outfielder for the Cincinnati Reds and St. Louis Browns.

The team opened the 1905 season with an unexpected 4–1 loss to the Canton Protectives, inspiring a local newspaper to comment that the Youngstown team made "as many errors as hits while Canton fielded almost perfectly and hit opportunely". The Ohio Works club gained steam, however, and began to win games. On May 11, 1905, the Youngstown team garnered controversy when The Akron Times-Democrat reported that the Ohio Works' sponsors provided player salaries that nearly doubled those offered by other clubs in the Ohio–Pennsylvania League. In a report on the outcry in Akron, The Youngstown Daily Vindicator warned that, "if the Youngstown backers keep adding and force the other clubs to add to the salaries, it is a question of only a short time until independent baseball will be an impossibility". The newspaper article concluded that the large salaries provided by the Ohio Works's sponsors placed a special burden on teams based in "smaller cities".

Competition among league participants was intense, and games were often raucous affairs. On July 16, 1905, a riot broke out during a contest with a team in neighboring Niles, Ohio. According to a newspaper account, the trouble began when two female fans became involved in a "hair-pulling fight". At one point, two "well-known men" were arrested for "taking an umbrella from a woman and breaking it after she had been annoying them with it". Finally, dozens of fans swarmed into the field, where they "pushed around the umpire and interfered with the defensive play of the Youngstown fielders".

In September 1905, the Youngstown Ohio Works won the first league championship, though sources disagree on the club's final record. This confusion may be due to the disorganized nature of the new league, with its sprawling roster of teams. According to the Spalding Guide (1906), "The failure to furnish official reports was probably due to the clubs being new to a league". Baseball researcher Jim Holl summarizes the varied accounts as follows: "The Reach Guide (1906) credits Youngstown with an 84–32 won–lost record where the Spalding Guide of the same year list a 90–35 record. The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball (1993) tells a third story, giving Youngstown an 88–35 mark". Despite this uncertainty over the club's record, its championship status was not in dispute, and the team became popularly known as "the Champs". This moniker, however, was not officially connected to a Youngstown-based ball club until 1907, when it became the legal name of the Ohio Works' local successors.