Back from vacation and ready to talk about Charley Jones! In my universe, Jones debuted with Keokuk in 1875 at age 23 and hit .254 in 13 games. That was good enough to get him a position with Cincinnati for 1876, and he hit .250 with the club last season. This year, he's had a bit of a breakout and is batting .392 with 12 extra-base hits in Cincinnati's first 17 games. So what was his story in reality?
First of all, he was most known to late 20th and early 21st century researchers as the most prominent player to simply disappear without a death date or any other known trace. His entry on bb-ref's Bullpen page in 2011 began, "Charley Jones is the best-known player for whom we have no death details. And we assume he's dead, because otherwise he would be over 150 years old." Similarly, Nemec, writing in 2011, said, "Jones's complete disappearance after 1909 from the face of the earth is as troubling to baseball mavens as Judge Crater's is to crime filberts."
But let's go back to the beginning. Jones was the first major league baseball player from North Carolina, but he was raised in Princeton, Indiana by a relative, possibly because his parents had both died. He played for a number of top amateur clubs in the west before ending up in Keokuk in 1875. That winter, after the Westerns disbanded, Nemec says:
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...the Boston Globe reported that Jones had first signed for 1876 with the Chicago NL entry but requested his release once he sized up the Second City team as too strong for there to be a place for him in its lineup and then signed with Cincinnati instead. A member of the lowest-paying team in the NL, Jones received a club-high $1,500. On May 2, 1876, he hit his first career home run off Chicago's Al Spalding. Asked to return to the Queen City for the 1877 season, Jones agreed, perhaps because by then he had already opened the thriving laundry business in Cincinnati that he would operate for a number of years...
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He was considered one of the top sluggers of his day, and was one of the first examples of a player being noted particularly for his power. Although he was banned from baseball for two years in the prime of his career for playing in an outlaw league, his play won wide renown. From 1876-80, he had the highest career OPS in the entire National League.
He was also one of baseball's biggest partiers. Many of his teammates talked about him as a player who was out almost every night and rarely got home before 2:00 a.m. He was involved in several tabloid-style love affairs, including one event where his common-law wife caught him in bed with another woman and threw cayenne pepper in his eyes, temporarily blinding him.
Perhaps because of this hard-partying lifestyle, he did not last that long after his baseball career ended. He was described in 1909 as being "weakened by age and infirmity," and that was the last anyone knew of him for over 100 years. According to his Bullpen page:
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The last piece of information that was known about him was that a benefit was held in his honor on Staten Island, NY on August 31, 1909, after he had fallen ill. However, there was no obituary for him, and given his very common first and last names, retracing his death details proved to be like looking for a needle in a haystack.
In late 2011, researcher Greg Perkins, who was interested in the Ludlow team from northern Kentucky on which Jones had been the star player in the early 1870s, took an interest in Jones's case. Digging through the file on Jones held by the Hall of Fame, he found a letter addressed to National Commission chairman Garry Herrmann in 1913 from a reporter from the Cincinnati Enquirer that mentioned he had written an article about Jones. Perkins found the article, in which it stated that Jones had died at Bellevue Hospital in New York City in July of 1911. That lead allowed Perkins to narrow his search in the New York City death index and to uncover a listing for a Charles W. Jones, who died on June 6th that year. The death certificate in the city archive had names for Charles' parents matching those in earlier census records, confirming that this person was the ballplayer. It also rectified Jones's year of birth [from 1850 to 1852].
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It's always nice when a great real-life player who doesn't necessarily start out as a star develops into a great player in OOTP as well. If Jones can sustain his improvement this season, he may be just such a player.