Player in the Pulpit
He went from stealing bases to stealing souls.
Olde-tyme baseball by C. Philip Francis – August 1, 2005
Part 2
William Ashley “Billy” Sunday went from stealing bases for the Chicago White Stockings to converting souls. On a recommendation by his aunt, major league manager/player Cap Anson of the White Stockings, saw Billy play ball and signed him immediately for the White Stockings without ever playing in the minor leagues. Sunday played major league ball for eight years before leaving the game to become the most successful evangelist in the United States.
In 1886 Sunday and three of his Chicago White Stockings teammates had been drinking before deciding to rest on a downtown Chicago curb. Soon a “gospel wagon” stopped nearby and people began to sing and preach. Billy was so moved that he stood up and said, “I’m through. I ‘m going to Jesus Christ. We’ve come to the parting of the ways.” Bill Sunday went on to become one of the greatest evangelists of all time.
*
Sunday would often tell of how prayer was involved in his greatest baseball thrill. During a game in Detroit the White Stockings were ahead by one run in the bottom of the ninth. The Tiger catcher, Charlie Bennett, had a count of three and two when he smashed a drive over Sunday’s head. “I saw it coming out to right field like a shell out of a mortar, and it was now up to me. There were thousands of people in the field for the grandstand and bleachers had overflowed. I whirled and went with all of my speed. I was going so fast you couldn’t see me for dust. I yelled at the crowd, ‘Get out of my way!” and they opened like the Red Sea for the rod of Moses.
“As I ran I offered my first prayer, and it was something like this, ‘God, I’m in an awful hole. Please help me out. If you ever helped mortal man in your life, and you haven’t much time to make up Your time, this is the time.’”
That outfielder did catch the ball winning the game for Chicago, and later said, “I am sure that the Lord helped me win the game. It was my first experience in prayer.”
After leaving the game, Billy began attending prayer groups, and became a Presbyterian pastor in 1903. A popular evangelist of the time, J. Wilbur Chapman, asked Sunday to be his assistant, and soon made his preaching debut in Garner, Iowa. At a time when the average worker made $480 per year, Billy left a monthly baseball salary of $400 for a meager $84 a month in his ministry position. With his magnetic charm, athletic ability, and dramatic showmanship, the fiery orator began to give temperance lectures throughout the country making him a national idol. Hollywood even wanted to put Billy in the movies, but he had no interest.
Billy’s trademark was to run onto the stage, slide head-first towards home plate (heaven), and grasp around the base as if the sinner was reaching for salvation. In doing so he “roused the audiences with descriptions as to how he would punch, kick and bite the plague out of demon rum until old and fistless and footless and toothless…I would gum it to death until I go home to glory.” The emotional and demonstrative evangelist would break up furniture, and wind up as if a baseball pitcher, and throw fastballs at the devil while condemning sin and liquor. When Billy came to town liquor stores and bars often closed until he left, and Sunday also crusaded against the playing of ballgames on Sundays. As Billy said, “Whiskey and beer are all right in their place, but their place is in hell.”
A revival would usually be held in a tent or temporary structure hence the term “sawdust trail.” Billy’s advance men, however, would meet the local clergy and ask for a permanent building at the town’s expense as the evangelist’s presence would always guarantee a large crowd. Sunday was reported to have converted almost 100,000 people during an April, 1917 10-day revival in New York City, and reformed some one million people in his evangelistic years. He became a millionaire, and one of the well-known personalities of the early 20th century. And even without television, radio, and loud speakers Billy spoke to well over 100 million people in his many evangelistic campaigns.
At best Billy was a fair ballplayer, great on the base paths, but poor at the plate. It is reported that in one game he stole second base, then third, and home in consecutive pitches. In his first years as a big league ballplayer his fielding could be called questionable, yet by the end of his career it was often said to be “spectacular”. In 1888, he became the first major league outfielder to perform an unassisted double play.
Arlie Latham, a third baseman for the St. Louis Browns, was also a speedster on the bases. One day both Latham and Sunday, then still playing for Chicago, agreed to race in a 100-yard dash. When he realized that so much money was being bet on his race, Billy wanted out because he hated the gambling that was involved. After manager Cap Anson said that some of his teammates had bet their life savings on the contest Billy relented, and went on to beat Latham by 10 feet.
Yet in spite of his baseball capabilities, Billy Sunday found his real calling as a member of God’s Team. The New York Times called him “The Greatest high-pressure and mass-conversion Christian evangelist that America or the world has known.”
When prohibition, the 18th Amendment, was enacted in January, 1920, Sunday’s popularity began to decline, and he went back to small-town revivals. William Ashley Sunday died of a heart attack on November 6, 1935 in Chicago at the age of 72.
Today few people remember the baseball player turned evangelist, but if you listen to Frank Sinatra rendition of his famous “Chicago” one line goes something like this, “…the town Billy Sunday could not shut down…” And some still believe that the ice cream sundae was named for Billy Sunday.