Sept/Oct 2023 (Volume 15, Issue 5)

 

By John Liepa

 

Discovering baseball talent can be a risky business, either by being overly optimistic, or setting one up for disappointment and failure. For Chicago Cubs manager Frank Chance and scout George Huff, who had watched Leonard “King” Cole, a six-foot two-inch right-hander, pitch for Bay City, Mich., a Class D team in the Southern Michigan League, there was no risk or doubt. They signed a great new talent in late 1909. 

 

By 1909, the Cubs had become one of baseball’s most powerful teams, winning three straight pennants and two World Championships from 1906 to 1908. Led by baseball’s most famous double play combination of “[Joe] Tinker to [Johnny] Evers to [Frank] Chance,” the Cubs featured an outstanding supporting cast including third baseman Harry Steinfeldt and pitcher Mordecai “Three Fingers” Brown. Adding “King” Cole to this formidable line-up only elevated expectations for the 1910 season and he would exceed them all. Ending up in Chicago, and playing with a world champion team had only been a dream for a young “Hi” Cole growing up in Iowa. 

 

Leonard Leslie Cole was born on April 15, 1886, to Hiram Henry Cole and Cora A. (Phillips) Cole in the east-central Iowa town of Toledo. Ironically, only 11 miles and four years separated Cole’s birth from that of Philadelphia Athletics Jack “Colby Jack” Coombs — born in LeGrand — and whom his Cubs would meet in the 1910 World Series. 

 

A troubled early family life led to Cole’s separation from his family. He attended Toledo Public Schools, and at the age of 14 was sent to the Industrial School for Boys in Eldora. He briefly attended Leander Clark College in Toledo. Throughout his early school years, Cole had taken to baseball and established quite a reputation as a talented pitcher playing for the Toledo town team.

 

In 1907, he decided to join the barnstorming “Bloomer Girls” baseball team. Women’s “Bloomer Girls” clubs barnstormed throughout the United States from the 1890s to the 1930s, playing against men’s town, semi-pro and minor league teams. The term “Bloomer” came from suffragette Adelaide Jenks Bloomer, and the term was used generically by a number of clubs in cities throughout the East and Midwest. To build attendance and make the games more competitive, teams usually hired one to three males to pitch or catch, referred to as “toppers,” because of the curly wigs they wore. Notable “toppers” included Hall of Famers Rogers “Rajah” Hornsby and Grover Cleveland Alexander, “Smoky Joe” Wood, and for a brief time in 1907, “King” Cole. One of the “Bloomer Girls” barnstorming trips had taken Cole to Bay City to pitch for the Bloomers in an exhibition game.

 

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