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1. Toronto won our first baseball championship in 1887. The club’s catcher was a shockingly brazen con artist who would eventually find himself playing for the team at San Quentin Prison. In honour of Opening Day, here’s a thread about the notorious Harry Decker… 
2. Decker grew up in Chicago as one of the city's most promising prospects: a catcher with "a good, strong, accurate arm... solid batting & capable defensive work." He signed his first contract before he turned 20 & quickly broke into the Majors with the Indianapolis Hoosiers.
3. But it didn't take long for the first signs of trouble to appear. He didn't even finish his first season with Indianapolis. He quit halfway through a game when players from a new rival league showed up. "Oh Deck!" they called out, waving a wad of dollar bills in the air.
4. They say it only took 3 or 4 innings for Decker to make his move. In the 6th, he let the ball hit him in the finger, claimed he was injured, left the game and raced off to Kansas City to play for the new league—leaving a pile of debts and unpaid bills behind him.
5. It was a costly decision. The new league failed. Decker was briefly blacklisted from the Majors & soon he was back in trouble: accused of throwing a game for gamblers. It was never proven but he made 3 errors & got thrown out at the plate—enough to make people very suspicious.
6. And so, as the 1887 season approached, Decker found himself looking for a new job. He got three offers: Washington, Rochester and Toronto all wanted him. So he said yes to all three. And then tried to cash all three of their cheques.
7. His scam didn't work — thanks to a mistake that was either breathtakingly dumb or breathtakingly bold. He tried to cash two of the cheques at the same time, with the same banker. The banker caught on quickly: he'd been on the Board of Directors for the Washington team.
8. Next, he tried to cash 3 *more* cheques from 3 *other* teams by pretending to be 3 *different* catchers. But he gave a fake address & when one team showed up, they found nothing but a vacant lot... and Harry Decker pacing up & down the street, waiting for his cheque to arrive.
9. Even then, he tried to get out of it. First, he claimed no one could possibly be that stupid. Then, that there were *two* Harry Deckers who were *both* catchers in the Majors. Suddenly, teams were getting cold feet, offers drying up. And so, that's how he ended up in Toronto.
10. The Toronto Baseball Club was Toronto’s first professional baseball team — in 1887 they were just a few years old, playing at the city’s first baseball stadium, Sunlight Park, which overlooked the Don Valley from Queen & Broadview.
11. They won the International League pennant thanks to a 16 game winning streak to end the year—led by Cannonball Crane, their ace pitcher & their best hitter… who would go on to become a notorious, monkey-owning drunk who I’ve written about before: torontodreamsproject.blogspot.com/2015/10/the-tr…
12. Decker would play even better the following season, hitting .313 as the Toronto Baseball Club finished in second place. But even after he'd established himself as a star in Toronto, it was still his life off the field that made Harry Decker truly remarkable.
13. For one thing, he was an inventor. He came out of his time in Toronto having created a new kind of padded catcher's mitt—the same basic idea used today. But he sold his interest in it for $50. The rights were bought by Al Spalding, who would make money off it for yrs to come.
14. That winter, he may have invented a new kind of turnstile... But the NY Sporting Times claimed it was a con: he stole a turnstile from the Phillies' ballpark, filed off the inventor's name, replaced it with his own, then tried to sell it back to the Phillies as a new design.
15. Over the years, he faced criminal charges over & over again. Arrested for stealing from teammates. And his roommate. For stealing a suit of clothes, a bicycle, even a horse. Forged a cheque to pay his tailor & his grocer & for a fancy hat for his mistress & more beyond that.
16. He forged the signatures of Al Spalding and of the owners of the Phillies. He got caught counterfeiting money — and then forged the signature of the U.S. Marshal who arrested him for it.
17. As one Pinkerton detective put it, "I know it is customary in some circles to always describe a criminal as 'one of the most dangerous men in the country.' But this trite phrase well applies to him."
18. The Chicago Tribune complained, "Decker's hallucination is that he owns the City of Chicago. He was in the habit of entering saloons & ordering wine for everybody present & then walking out with the belief that the place belonged to him & he could give away his own wares..."
19. Decker blamed some of his crimes on getting hit in the head by a baseball. Others on getting kicked by a horse, or the stress of having a wife and young child, or insanity — the courts institutionalized him twice: both times the doctors found nothing wrong and released him.
20. Once, when he was arrested for forging yet another cheque, he evaded jail time entirely by pointing out that when he signed the person's name, he'd spelled it wrong — he couldn't possibly be guilty; he hadn't *actually* signed their name at all.
21. When he couldn't talk his way out of trouble, his rich parents were usually there to bail him out or hire the best lawyers. At one point, he even seems to have had an operation to remove a cyst from his forehead — so it would be harder for witnesses to identify him.
22. But as you might imagine, his personal life did suffer. Decker married young, during the year he was blacklisted, to Annie Burns, a 15 year-old he'd gotten pregnant. He was never faithful to her. The Philadelphia Inquirer called him "The Don Juan of the Diamond."
23. In 1891, Decker tried to marry a second woman under a fake name. But his fraud was quickly uncovered: he was charged with bigamy. And it wasn't the last time he'd be caught trying to do something similar.
24. ”I think I am a most unfortunate man," he once complained. "It seems to me that if I merely look at a girl she fancies me so much that a breach of promise suit is the result." You’ll be shocked to learn that Annie divorced him in 1896.
25. His baseball career was even shorter than his marriage. He played only 3 seasons after leaving Toronto. His talent was undeniable & he got another shot at the Majors, but his actual results were usually mediocre & teams' patience with his criminal behaviour quickly ran out.
26. He was released by the New Haven Nutmegs halfway through the 1891 season — after he was arrested for the second time in just a few months.
27. ”If Decker had pursued a different course," an old manager once lamented, "he would now be in demand by the best clubs in the country." Instead, he would never play professional baseball again. Although, he did turn up on a diamond at least once more…
28. In 1915, Sporting Life stumbled across an interesting photo sent to the manager of the LA Angels as thanks for giving free uniforms to prisoners who played ball at San Quentin Prison. The pic showed the full roster of inmates—and there among them was the star of the team...
29. He was older now, and calling himself Earl Henry Davenport, but the face was unmistakable: it was Harry Decker. His life of crime had caught up with him yet again. He's thought to have spent a total of 12 years in prison.
30. But after that, he disappears. SABR historians have spent years searching for any trace of him after his stay at San Quentin—but it's not an easy job: he's thought to have used 15–20 aliases during his life; it was once said he "changes his name each time he boards a train."
31. And so, no one knows how Harry Decker spent his final days, when he died, or where he is buried. It seems as if the ultimate fate of the one most notorious ballplayers in Toronto history will forever remain a mystery.
