1862.2

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The Death of Jim Creighton at 21

Salience Prominent
Tags Baseball Professionalism, Hazard
City/State/Country: Brooklyn, NY, United States
Game Base Ball
Immediacy of Report Retrospective
Age of Players Adult
Text

Excelsior star pitcher James Creighton, 21 years old, suffered some sort of injury during the middle innings of a game against the Union of Morrisania on October 14, 1862, and died four days later of a "strangulated intestine" associated with a hernia. (Other accounts cite a ruptured bladder - ouch.) One legend was that Creighton suffered the injury in the process of "hitting out a home run." Excelsior officials attributed the death to a cricket injury incurred in a prior cricket match.

Creighton was perhaps base ball's first superstar.

 

Sources

R. M. Gorman and D. Weeks, Death at the Ballpark (McFarland, 2009), pages 63-64.

Richard Bogovich, "The Martyrdom of Jim Creighton-- Excelsiors of Brooklyn vs. Unions", in Inventing Baseball: The 100 Greatest Games of the 19th Century (SABR, 2013), pp. 43-46

See Tom Gilbert's 3/4/2021 blog at https://howbaseballhappened.com/blog/how-baseball-killed-its-first-star-player.  Tom's How Baseball Happened (Godine, 2020) carries  Creighton's base ball career at p. 185ff, and his death is discussed on pp. 212-215.

Warning

Tom Gilbert, 3/5/2021-- "Creighton’s hernia did not “rupture”— it led to a strangulated intestine which became infected; the infection killed him. We know this because both Brooklyn Health Dept records and Green-Wood Cemetery records state the cause of death as “strangulated intestine.”

Comment

Tom Shieber, Hall of Fame curator who has studied Creighton extensively, believes the injury was an inguinal hernia which ruptured. In an article published on December 7, 1862, the New York Sunday Mercury recounts a conversation with Creighton before the Union game in which he states that he had injured himself in a recent cricket match. It is assumed that he received the hernia in the cricket match and that it ruptured during the Union game.

 

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Submitted by Bob Tholkes (2014) and Tom Gilbert (2021)
Submission Note Bob 19CBB comment - 4/3/2014; Tom's blog-3/4/2021



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