The Forgotten Heyday of Black Baseball in Springs Valley: A History of the French Lick Plutos and the West Baden Sprudels

An article I wrote while I was a newspaperman. Holds up ight...

With spring in the air and baseball season already here, it is the perfect time to revisit the once-proud history of our national pastime in Orange County at the dawn of the 20th century. Long before Larry Bird put French Lick on the map, Springs Valley was already a Negro League mecca with two highly regarded African American baseball teams: the French Lick Plutos and the West Baden Sprudels. 

This destination spot, which was in its original heyday just over 100 years ago, may seem an unlikely host to such Negro baseball talent, given that it is located in Southern Indiana, which is not exactly known for its racial tolerance. But business was booming between rival hotels—the French Lick Hotel Resort and the West Baden Inn—who needed service industry workers and recruited blacks from Louisville to fill those positions offering decent pay for the “menial” labor.

Just before the hotels started pushing for African American workers, textile manufacturer and owner of the West Baden Inn, Lee Sinclair, added a bicycle/pony racing track in 1888 that featured an electrically lit baseball diamond in its center. The lighted diamond drew several major league teams to the area for spring training which was a relatively easy trip for Midwestern clubs with the expansion of the Monon Railroad, which connected Louisville with Indianapolis and Chicago, to include French Lick/West Baden as a resort stop off of the main route.

Around the same time that Sinclair's West Baden Inn burned down and was rebuilt into what is now the West Baden Springs Hotel in 1901, three-term Indianapolis mayor and restauranteur (and eventual US Senator) Thomas Taggart saw the economic potential of the area's mineral springs and purchased the French Lick Hotel Resort. Looking to compete with Sinclair, by 1909 Taggart built his own state-of-the-art baseball park to cash in on the travel baseball clubs looking for places to work out and rest up.

The diamonds proved good for business as hotel guests enjoyed watching the games and placing bets on the outcomes. Pretty soon baseball was being played on a daily basis with the hotel scrambling to fill racially mixed (which soon became all-black) teams and even drew players from the less stable (at the time) Indianapolis ABCs.

Many players came and went throughout much of a typical baseball season since it wasn't uncommon for players to jump ship with a team willing to pay them more. Unless a player was a standout joining from another team, it was typical for the young men to sign on as a porter or waiter before moving to baseball full-time in the summer. Players made a higher-than-average wage of $30 to $40 a week while in play (average for the population at large was about $15 to $20) but the players would have to find steady work in the offseason.

Thus began the rivalry of the French Lick Plutos (briefly called the Hotel Men), named for the Roman king of the underworld Pluto, and the West Baden Sprudels, a gnome that according to folklore served as the guard to the Wiesbaden spring in Germany, which formed the Springs Valley League with the two teams playing nearly every day of the spring and summer of 1909.

In 1909, the Plutos won the “pennant” easily, besting the Sprudels 126 of the 146 meetings, and were declared state champs by the Freeman newspaper, a black publication out of Indianapolis.

The following year, however, would prove much more competitive after team captain and secretary (who was more or less responsible for promoting games) John Chenault, who played catcher for the Plutos, was killed by a wild pitch. It was July of 1909 with the Plutos playing a team from Evansville, who led by four runs with French Lick mounting a comeback when William Brannon hit Chenault in the chest with a pitch that stopped his heart. “He walked ten steps and fell over dead,” read the Freeman.

The 1910 season also saw legendary manager C.I. Taylor relocate from Birmingam, Alabama to Springs Valley for what he saw as a promised land of “baseball opportunity.” He also brought many talents with him to the area including players like submarine pitcher William “Dizzy” Dismukes and his brothers Ben, Candy Jim, and “Steel Arm” Johnny Taylor among others who went on to have long and storied careers in the negro leagues. In April and May of 1910, under C.I.'s leadership, the much improved Sprudels went 12-5-2 against their rival.

The 1911 season saw the Sprudels play 75 contests, going 53-22 on the year with several additions. The Sprudels were even given the opportunity to play against major leaguers when the Pittsburgh Pirates, which featured the year's batting title winner Honus Wagner (whose American Tobacco Company trading card is regarded as the rarest and most valuable card in existence [like the Gutenberg Bible of baseball cards]), came to town under dubious circumstances. While the Pirates played without Wagner, the Sprudels too were several players down. Regardless, the hosting West Baden managed a 2-1 victory with Dismukes at the mound, allowing only four hits in the contest.

In 1912 the Sprudels won the Springs Valley pennant for the third straight despite losing 12-of- 18 to start the season. That year saw both teams travel more and while one group went on the road, another was called in to play the team that stayed behind. In all, both teams played somewhere around 150 games that year, making them, according to Paul Debono's book “The Indianapolis ABCs”, de facto professional teams.

Some of the notable competition the Sprudels took on that year included the Chicago American Giants (in Chicago) in late July. “Steel Arm” Johnny, who now played for the Chicago team, jumped sides again to play alongside his actual brothers and pitched his way to a rare 7-6 victory over the American Giants. In the second game of the doubleheader, however, owner and manager Rube Foster, a Baseball Hall of Famer who most notably organized the first Negro National League which ran from 1920-31, held the Sprudels to five hits while he was on the mound, giving his squad a 7-1 victory.

In October of that year, the Sprudels also took on the Cincinnati Reds but came up short against the major league squad. No score was given in the Freeman paper.

The 1913 season saw the Plutos a much-improved squad with Taggart increasing his spending on the team to try to bring in talent that could win his squad the pennant once again. The most notable acquisition was one Bingo DeMoss who came out from an Oklahoma team. The second baseman DeMoss has been considered one of the finest fielding second basemen of the 1910s and 1920s Negro Leagues and was also said to have exceptional bat control.

Jelly Gardner, who batted ahead of DeMoss on the American Giants a few years later, said of his teammate, “If he thought you'd be out trying to steal, he'd foul off the pitch if he couldn't hit it well. He could hit 'em anywhere he wanted to.”

DeMoss and company won 8-of-9 against the Sprudels to start the 1913 season before leaving in mid-June for an extended road trip that would take them as far as North Dakota. In the meantime, the West Baden team stayed behind and took on a full schedule which included games with teams from Alexandria, Elwood, Kokomo, and Indianapolis, as well as out-of-state teams the Boston Bloomer Girls (a semi-infamous team comprised of six women and three men), the Nebraska Indians, and once again the Chicago American Giants.

Late in the summer, the Sprudels beat the ABCs in a best-of-five series that resulted in another Indiana championship though it may have been called a little early since the Plutos were still out of town—steamrolling their competition as it turns out, winning 60-of-67 games on their trip— wanting a shot at the crown. With both teams at the top of their respective games, the stage was set for an unheard-of 21-game series to decide the undisputed champion.

“It would seem foolish for a man to go to see the World's Series when he could get a chance to see the Sprudels and the Plutos in a battle royal for championship honors,” the Freeman said at the time. “The antagonism and enviousness that exist between these two teams make a game between them worth going miles to see.”

The series, however, proved anticlimactic as the Plutos ran away with it early. Overall, the Plutos went 108-33 in the 1913 season, beating the ABCs seven times in seven games and the American Giants once in seven tries.

The Sprudels, for their part, again managed games against major league teams after the season had come to an end. On October 6 of that year, the Reds came to town and bested West Baden in a game that was called at 7-4 due to darkness in the eighth inning. Sprudel Hall of Fame first baseman Ben Taylor led his team in the loss with a double and a crowd-pleasing home run off of pitcher Chief Johnson. The following day, pitcher Gene “Milo” Packard pitched a 9-0 shutout in favor of the Reds.

The 1913 season proved the end of the Negro League heyday in Springs Valley with C.I. Taylor and most of his players as well as several of the better Pluto players, including DeMoss, joining forces with the ABCs.

Though both teams filled rosters into the early 1930s, neither team pulled the talent they once had as the ABCs routinely drew the best players from the Sprudels and Plutos, effectively displacing both clubs.

The teams continued to play up until the early years of the Great Depression when the resort industry fell off dramatically at which point most African American workers at the resort lost their jobs. For several years after that, the teams merged into the Pluto Red Devils before folding completely.