You may be aware of the Broadway play The Music Man, later turned into a movie. It goes like this. In 1912, con man Professor Harold Hill arrived in fictional River City, Iowa, to trick the citizens. A few traveling salesmen in the area have heard about Hill, known for a ploy in which he gets townspeople to pay to create boys’ marching bands, with Hill faking his musical expertise and skipping town once he has their money.
When I was writing about a Nashville ballplayer at the turn of the 20th Century, Hugh Hill, I don’t know what made me think of the play and movie about the other Hill. It could be because the last names were the same.
Hugh Hill was different from Harold Hill. He was no professor, just a man who wanted to play baseball. Harold Hill worked some magic in a small Indiana town, and Hugh Hill, the ballplayer, worked some magic in Nashville and the Southern Association.
First, let me introduce you to the ballplayer.
He was born on July 21, 1879, in Ringgold, Georgia, and signed with Newt Fisher’s 1901 Nashville baseball club in the inaugural season of the Southern Association. As a pitcher, he won six games while losing five, playing in 51 games because, you see, he was also an outfielder.
The ball club won the pennant that season, and when 1902 rolled around, Fisher had Hill on his club for another year. And what did he do in his second season?
Statistics for those early years could be more precise, depending on which source you are looking at. According to one source, Hill played in 96 games and batted .296. Another source says he played in 51 games and hit .327. In their booklet about the first 50 seasons of the Nashville Vols, Nashville Banner sportswriter George Leonard and Fred Russell write in Vols Feats, 1901-1950 (published in 1950) that Hill compiled the highest batting average ever by a Nashville player in 1902 when he hit .416 for 91 games.
Those same sources say he pitched and won 22 while losing 7; another says he won 21 and lost 9, and Leonard and Russell say he was 21 and 11. All three sources have different results.
The Nashville sportswriters ask when a baseball player has won over 20 games and batted over .400 in the same season. It is doubtful that anyone duplicated the feat in organized baseball history.
So here’s the rub: We have local writer Bill Traughber, who illuminates the discrepancies in an article he wrote about Hill in 2017.
Bill writes, “Ray Nemec searched the league records game-by-game and discovered that Hill’s .416 average was not correct. Nemec learned that Hill lost 37 hits and gained 21 at-bats to hit .296. He believes that Shreveport’s Frank Huelsman (.360) won the batting title for the second straight year.
Ray Nemec is very thorough, and one of the country’s most experienced baseball researchers who maintains the official record cannot be changed since the league has not existed for decades. Still, Hill remains in the history books.
Nemec told Traughber, “When checking for players’ records, it became apparent that the averages published for the 1902 Southern Association included players listed for the wrong teams. The averages were inconsistent with their game-by-game activities; some records were for fewer games than the player appeared in. It was a real mess.
“I used box scores from Sporting Life and various newspapers to compile averages for the players. Listing their span with the teams, adding extra-base hits for batters, games started and complete games for pitchers, etc. Since the league folded over 40 years ago, there is no one who would have an interest other than people doing books, etc. The records were put on file with the Minor League Baseball Museum.”
Now, I know that none of the sources credit Hugh Hill with winning the batting championship in 1902 with a .416 average. The argument is that he did not have enough at-bats to qualify.
But that is the final say if the league office published year-end results with Hill as batting champion. Several were published by the Southern Association league office and edited by the league president for league records. I often refer to several of these, with Les Fleming batting .414 in 1941 and needing only one more hit to reach .417, ending the argument completely. The third-highest batting average is Vols’ outfielder Phil Weintraub, who batted .401 in 1934.
So why don’t we see what Hill said in 1956 when he was 76 and a featured guest at the Nashville Old Timers Baseball banquet?
George Leonard wrote about him in the January 27 edition of the Nashville Banner:
“One of the distant past appeared the sill hale figure of Hugh Hill, all-time Southern Association batting champion (.416) with the 1902 pennant-winning Vols, came from his home in Cincinnati as a special guest for the occasion. He called Nashville his “favorite city.”
Leonard continued his article, noting that Hill took a few practice throws on the mound at Sulphur Dell.
“Hill, who has lived in Cincinnati for the past 40 years, said he was offered $90 a month in his first season, receiving a $10 monthly raise in 1902 when he accomplished his feat.”
“As I remember, I had to get six for six in the last game to win the batting championship,” said the lefthanded pitcher and righthanded hitter.”
He closed with a final memory about Sulphur Dell.
“Once, I remember, I hit two home runs in one game and the fans showered the field with money. The cops had to stop the game and shovel up the coins. Must have been $65. The fans here were always wonderful. I’ve never forgotten how grand they were.”
That’s a different story than Harold Hill would have told, as the professor was in it for a different reason than our Hugh Hill. Sure, it was about making money, but Harold Hill did it the underhanded way before the folks loved him for providing musical instruments for the town of River City.
Hugh Hill, who passed away a few years later at the age of 79 in Cincinnati, stood firm with his conviction that he had the highest batting average in the history of the Southern Association, which folded in 1961. To back him up, he had two of the most trustworthy sportswriters in the country, Fred Russell and George Leonard. I would never argue with anything either of them wrote, so my cap’s off to Hugh Hill’s magnificent accomplishment of batting .416 one season.
Note: The link to Bill Traughber’s story about Hugh Hill and his conversation with Ray Nemec previously posted at milb.com appears to have been deleted. Nemec is deceased; apologies to Bill for not being able to provide the link.
© 2024 by Skip Nipper. All Rights Reserved.
