The baseball – and Hollywood – star who’s been lost to history

Fame is achieved by the exceptional, by the accomplished, by the exceptionally accomplished … or by pure dumb luck (or lack thereof). Fame is bestowed upon humankind by humankind, which is to say, it is subjective. But for many, it is an objective, a social status synonymous with success, with achievement, with triumph. Others stumble into fame like a drunk into a door and don’t realize its repercussions until they sober up.

Fame, though, can be fleeting. Ask the one-hit wonders. Ask the child actors. Ask the internet stars who go viral, then go back to oblivion. Turns out, amid the phenomenon of reality TV and then social media, there might be something to that line about how “in the future, everyone will be world-famous for 15 minutes” (a line famously attributed to Andy Warhol, who himself was so famous that it doesn’t seem to matter that he might not have actually said it).

In that context, it is understandable how someone like Mike Donlin could be so famous in one era and so anonymous in another. “Turkey Mike,” as he was known in his time, died more than 91 years ago, which makes him one cold turkey. His fame came in a time when the world was not yet Technicolor.

But were you to be transported to the early 1900s, you would be astonished at the level of fame this ballplayer-turned-actor achieved. And by the same token, the denizens of the day would be astonished to know that Mike Donlin – a man who came of age right alongside the grand ol’ game, the vaudeville circuit and the Hollywood talkies and whose every exploit was dutifully documented by the press – is now a name largely lost to history.

“Virtually every kid in the first part of the 20th century knew who Mike Donlin was,” said baseball historian Steve Steinberg. “He was not overlooked at the time.”

Steinberg and his frequent collaborator and fellow Society for American Baseball Research (SABR) member Lyle Spatz have spent decades immersing themselves in the history of the game and have co-authored books that focus specifically on the early 20th century.

And yet, even they knew precious little about the depth and breadth of Donlin’s accomplishments until they began the research that led to their book, “Mike Donlin: A Rough and Rowdy Life from New York Baseball Idol to Stage and Screen,” which was published by the University of Nebraska Press last year.

“When I first joined SABR, there were older guys who would talk about players from the 1930s and 1920s,” Spatz says. “But even these guys who really knew their history never mentioned [Donlin].”

So Steinberg and Spatz set about what they considered a “spiritual journey” of bringing this important – and famous – figure back to life.

The resulting book is exceptionally well-researched (the notes and bibliography make up 57 of its 352 pages), and one of the many takeaways from the read is how much material about Donlin exists for those willing to do the digging. He was an athlete and actor who generated an enormous amount of attention, who thrived in the New York limelight and who made an unmistakable, albeit ultimately neglected, mark on the worlds of field and film. Donlin brought swagger and sex appeal to the city’s sports scene decades before Joe DiMaggio married Marilyn Monroe. Long before Juan Soto, Aaron Judge, Derek Jeter or even Babe Ruth, Donlin was considered “the baseball idol of Manhattan.”

No less an authority than the legendary journalist Damon Runyon once called Donlin “one of the greatest baseball players that ever wore a cleated shoe and one of the most picturesque characters ever produced by the old game.”

Donlin’s baseball bona fides include the 26th-best career batting average (.333) among anyone with at least 4,000 plate appearances – a mark he compiled entirely in the Dead Ball Era (1900-1919). And he was one of only 10 players in the Dead Ball Era to have that many plate appearances with an adjusted OPS+ of at least 144. Seven of the others – Ty Cobb, Tris Speaker, Honus Wagner, Nap Lajoie, Eddie Collins, Elmer Flick and Sam Crawford – are in the Hall of Fame.

Having ranked in the top 10 in his league in OPS in each of the five seasons in which he logged more than 80 games played, Donlin was clearly one of the most dominant offensive players of his time. Where he falls short of Hall status is in the important category of longevity.

But this was a matter of choice. And that’s what makes Donlin’s story so captivating. Unlike some other worthy potential Hall of Famers such as Tony Conigliaro, Don Mattingly or Johan Santana, the relative brevity of Donlin’s time in baseball is attributable not to the injury bug but the acting bug. He was baseball’s original bad boy – equal parts baller and brawler. It took a good woman to calm him down, and he followed her to the stage before migrating to the silver screen, where he starred in the first full-length baseball movie and hobnobbed with the legendary likes of John Barrymore and Buster Keaton.

The result was that Mike Donlin is one of the most famous people to ever be associated with MLB … even though that fame didn’t stand the test of time.

* * * * * * * *

Born on May 30, 1878, in Peoria, Ill., and raised in Erie, Pa., Donlin had a tragic childhood. His mother, Margaret, died when he was only 7 in a train accident, and his father, John, died when Mike was only 15, after an operation. Mike’s grandfather and one of his uncles also died in railroad accidents when he was quite young. His younger sister, Nellie, and a younger cousin both died of illness. His aunt died of pneumonia at age 34. Another uncle died from tuberculosis at 36.

All of this happened before Donlin turned 21. All of it likely contributed to the hot-headed behavior that would often get him into trouble.

A natural at baseball, Donlin migrated out west to play the sport at the semipro level. He joined his first professional teams in the California League in 1898, serving primarily as a pitcher but displaying all-around talent … and also a penchant to booze too much after victories. His stardom there led to him getting an offer from the St. Louis Perfectos in 1899 (the club was renamed the Cardinals the following year), bringing Donlin to the Major Leagues.

The story goes that when Donlin arrived in St. Louis, he did so touting himself as “the best ballplayer that ever came out of California” and, in a practice session, proceeded to take the club’s best pitcher deep with a couple of long shots to the bleachers.

That pitcher’s name was Cy Young.

“Donlin looks like an athlete,” the St. Louis Post-Dispatch reported. “He is muscled like an ox and is quick and graceful in his movements … and nothing gives him greater pleasure than a good round of applause from the grandstand.”

Though Donlin debuted as a pitcher, his wildness led to a move to shortstop, then first base, then center field. He primarily manned the outfield spots for the remainder of his career.

Donlin was quick to quarrel with opposing players, umpires and even teammates. He ruffled feathers with what was viewed as his disregard for the old guard. He would punch line drives and other human beings. And when he taunted some fellow patrons outside a St. Louis saloon in the early morning hours in the summer of 1900, he wound up getting slashed with a pocketknife.

“Two bad cuts across the throat,” the Sporting News reported, “one along the right side of his face, running vertically down his cheek close to his ear, one across his cheek under the eye, a slight gash across the nose, and the fingers of both hands are seriously slashed and cut.”

Though Donlin returned from his injuries in a week, a scar remained on his cheek for the rest of his life. It was a fitting feature of this pugnacious player.

Donlin was also unafraid to explore his worth. He threatened to spend 1901 in the California League if the Cardinals did not meet his salary demands. He wound up signing with former teammate John McGraw, as McGraw embarked upon playing for and managing the Baltimore Orioles of the newly formed American League, which poached many other NL players.

With a .340 batting average in 1901, Donlin finished second in the nascent AL. But the following spring, he went on a bender that resulted in a horrible incident outside a Baltimore theater.

Another man named Ernest M. Slayton said he saw Donlin following two women – actresses from the chorus of “Ben-Hur” – across the street and told Donlin to leave them alone. Donlin punched Slayton and then turned and hit one of the women, Mamie Fields. In the week between the incident and the trial, the Orioles released Donlin, who said in court that he had been far too drunk to even remember the affair. A teammate testified that the flailing, fighting Donlin likely did not even realize he was striking a woman. But the judge sentenced Donlin to six months in jail, putting the ballplayer’s career in jeopardy.

It says something about Donlin’s reputation as a player – and the NL’s tolerance for belligerence at the time – that he was given a second chance by the Cincinnati Reds. Not only did they sign Donlin, but they did so while he was still in the Baltimore City Jail. A member of the clergy represented the club during the negotiations.

With a month of his sentence shaved for good behavior, Donlin joined the Reds in August 1902.

“Donlin is battling to save himself,” the Sporting News reported. “He has always been his own worst enemy.”

But he sure could hit.

Donlin batted .287 in 34 games down the stretch in that first season in Cincinnati, then .351 the following year, second only to the .355 mark of a Pirates shortstop named Honus Wagner. Alas, his troubles with booze lingered. One July morning in 1904, Donlin was a no-show at the team hotel in St. Louis when it was time to head to the ballpark. He was found stumbling in the street and suspended for 30 days for drunkenness.

There were calls at that point to banish Donlin from baseball. Instead, a trade was engineered that sent Donlin to the New York Giants, where McGraw had taken residence.

Thus began Donlin’s star turn in the Big Apple. He instantly helped the Giants win their first NL pennant in that 1904 season (the team refused to play the pennant-winning Boston Americans from what they considered the inferior AL, so no World Series was held that year). Once again, Donlin’s batting average (.329, between Cincinnati and New York) was second only to Wagner’s.

The following year, 1905, was Donlin’s best. He slashed .356/.413/.495 and scored an MLB-high 124 runs. The Giants, who had taken on Donlin’s rowdy and instigating style, won another pennant, then the World Series over the Philadelphia Athletics.

By that point, people had begun calling Donlin “Turkey Mike” because of his strutting walk, which New York kids came to imitate. He wore his cap at an angle, had that scar on his face and perpetually had tobacco in his jaw.

In other words, he was a badass. Women loved him, men wanted to be him. James Bond stuff. Donlin loved to put on a show, and he hung out at the famous Hotel Metropole’s café with the Broadway types who did the same.

“Donlin was the life of the party,” sportswriter Harry Grayson once said, “held the center of the stage.”

It was around that time that he met a woman who could do the same. She would change his life and career.

* * * * * * * *

The same year that Mike Donlin joined the New York Giants, Mabel Hite joined the Broadway stage scene. As vaudeville’s popularity swept the country, Hite had toured it with performance companies and farce comedies. She was hailed not only as a natural actress but a gifted comedian with, as critic Amy Leslie put it, “an extraordinary sense of the ridiculous.”

She made her Broadway debut in May 1904 at the Knickerbocker Theater in the musical comedy “A Venetian Romance.” It was at some point around that period that her romance with Donlin bloomed. She had divorce in her past, he had death and disruption in his. Their broken pieces fit together.

Donlin and Hite were married on April 11, 1906, at the home of a New York alderman. It was a big story in the Big Apple.

“When Mike and Mable [sic] were married,” humorist Will Rogers wrote years later, “it was the most popular wedding New York ever had.”

The 1906 season began the next day, but it was a truncated one for Donlin. He appeared in only 37 games, thanks to fracturing his ankle in a stolen-base attempt in May.

Regardless, Donlin was still considered a top player and a top draw. With Hite’s encouragement, he made a new demand for 1907. Donlin asked the Giants for a salary of $3,300 plus, hilariously, a bonus of $600 if he stayed out of jail for the season. Ownership balked, but John McGraw was so hellbent on retaining his best player that he offered to pay the extra $600 out of his own pocket.

“There is no better nor more valuable player in the country,” McGraw told reporters.

Even though he had his manager’s backing, Donlin backed out of the deal. Hite admitted to the press that the contract dispute had been staged on their end in order to soften the blow of Donlin walking away from baseball.

“We decided that the best way was for Mike to ask for a big raise of pay, never thinking he would get it,” Hite said. “Then to our great surprise, they promised to give it to him.”

Rather than suit up for the Giants that season, Donlin spent his summer collecting large amounts of money to play weekend games for Chicago semipro teams, while Hite performed in “A Knight for a Day” in the city’s Whitney Opera House. It’s hard to relate to now, but, at that time, baseball-hungry fans flocked to such games. Baseball was so popular that the Chicago Intercity Association had almost 400 teams. Between what he could command on that circuit and Hite’s fame and finances, Donlin could afford to break ties with the NL.

But during Donlin’s break from the Giants, he nearly broke his marriage. His drinking (and fighting) continued. When one episode led to him quarreling with a cab driver and getting arrested for assault, Hite gave him an ultimatum: Quit the sauce or else.

Donlin checked into a rehab facility in Dwight, Ill. -- a novel and controversial approach at the time. Newly sober, he asked McGraw to have him back with the Giants. Not only did McGraw, who was eager for the help after his club finished 25 1/2 games back in 1907, take Donlin back for 1908, but he named him team captain and got him a salary north of $5,000.

Despite missing the vast majority of the 1906 season and spending 1907 on the Chicago lots, Donlin was instantly one of the best players in MLB when he returned in 1908. He slashed .334/.364/.452. The Giants didn’t reach the World Series, but they made a 16-game improvement in the win column to finish just a game behind the NL and world champion Cubs.

And then? Donlin left baseball. Again. Not to follow his wife to the next stop in her acting career but to actually join her on stage.

Donlin had hinted at his desire to act not long after he married Hite.

“I can act,” he told the Sporting News in 1906. “I’ll break the hearts of all the gals in the country.”

Shortly after the 1908 season ended, Donlin had his first acting turn in a one-act vaudeville sketch called “Stealing Home,” a headline act on the bill at Times Square’s Victoria Theatre. In it, he not-so-inventively played a ballplayer married to Hite’s character. The audience watched the two play fictionalized versions of themselves. Donlin’s character comes home after getting ejected from a game, and his wife gives him a hard time for getting fewer hits that day than Honus Wagner. They argue for a bit, then make up and close with a song and dance.

It sounds ludicrous, but that brief, 24-minute routine earned husband and wife $2,000 per week. Donlin earned some surprisingly positive reviews, and audiences gave the power couple a raucous reception.

Having proved himself on the stage, the issue of whether Donlin would continue with his acting career or suit up for the Giants in 1909 was a subject of intense scrutiny in the press.

“I’ll lose a lot of money if I stay in baseball, for this vaudeville stunt pays better than a Major League contract,” Donlin told a reporter. “Mrs. Donlin and I have some very nice offers -- nice in a monetary sense, you know, and very easy money at that.”

Donlin wanted $8,000, the Giants offered $6,000. A Giants fan, eager to see his favorite team overtake the reigning champion Cubs, offered to pay the difference, but the club refused.

So Donlin, at age 30, signed theatrical contracts instead. At the risk of alienating New York fans, he walked away from the game while still on top of his game (his 6.0 Baseball-Reference WAR in 1908 ranks as the second-best of his career) and while healthy.

It’s a move without a comparable in the MLB world (NFL running back Jim Brown retired at age 30 to pursue acting and activism), and it might have cost Donlin his chance to go down as one of baseball’s all-time greats.

“I am after one thing, and that is what everybody is after,” he said around this time. “The money.”

But there is evidence, from what Steinberg and Spatz demonstrated in their research, that Donlin was torn between his two worlds. He liked the money, but he missed playing ball. On the field, he was a dynamo, a major star. On the stage, he was just a supporting piece, albeit a well-compensated one.

By the time he did return to the Giants in 1911, Donlin, older and no longer in top baseball condition, was still a productive player (120 OPS+, or 20% better than league average) but not near his prior caliber. Midway through the year, the Giants shipped him to the last-place Boston Rustlers. Prior to the 1912 season, he was dealt to the Pirates, for whom he played just 77 games because of a major distraction.

Tragedy had intervened in Donlin’s life yet again. In June, Hite collapsed on stage during a performance in Harlem with what was initially thought to be appendicitis. She was rushed to the hospital, where a procedure was performed, possibly to remove cancerous tissue from her intestines. Within a day, her physicians announced she had little hope for recovery.

Mabel Hite died in October of that year. She, too, is a famous person whose story is largely lost to history.

“If [Donlin has] been forgotten, she’s been even more forgotten,” Steinberg says. “We were unable to find any clips of her. She died so young. She was such a unique mixture of Lucille Ball and Carol Burnett and Phyllis Diller. She also had a very sharp business mind. She was the one that managed Mike’s ability to say no to the Giants to be with her and earn money.”

Beyond those abilities, it is a testament to Hite’s impact on Donlin that the bad boy sobered up and mellowed out on her watch.

“Mike was a boozer, a bruiser and all-around champion bad actor in his day,” sportswriter Ed Wray once wrote. “In five or six years the change in Donlin was so marked as to be almost unbelievable.”

Donlin did not play in the Majors in 1913, though he did attempt a comeback with a Minor League team in Jersey City that summer and played well enough under McGraw’s watch on a postseason barnstorming tour that winter that McGraw gave him another opportunity with the Giants in 1914. But by then, a washed-up Donlin went just 5-for-31 to close out his playing career. When it was over, he was described by one paper as “one of the most picturesque, most written about and most likeable athletes that ever cut his mark on the big circuit.”

Most famous, in other words.

In the ensuing years, Donlin managed at the semipro level and in the Minor Leagues. He also found love again, marrying Rita Ross, the niece of a prominent vaudeville husband-and-wife duo.

Mostly, Donlin’s post-playing years were marked by the continuance of his acting career. And in 1915, he made history, of sorts.

“Right Off the Bat” is not a movie you’ll see cited alongside the likes of “The Natural,” “Bull Durham” or “A League of Their Own” in any discussion of influential baseball movies. It came before “talkies” and it came in a time when cellulose nitrate film prevented many cinematic entries from being properly preserved.

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But the film was the first of its kind -- a movie devoted to a sport that came to be celebrated by Hollywood more than any other. (Interestingly, for a movie version of “Stealing Home” years earlier, Donlin and Mabel Hite spoke their lines and did their singing for phonograph recordings, which were synced up with the start of the picture in theaters, making it technically one of the first pictures with sound.)

“Right off the Bat” was promised as a biopic about Donlin’s life because he was “undoubtedly the best known and most popular ball player in the world.” But liberties were taken with the story, to put it lightly. In the silent film, Donlin saves his sweetheart from drowning when her canoe almost goes over a dam, gets kidnapped by a gambler when he refuses to throw a championship game in the Connecticut League, then catches the eye of a Giants scout (played by John McGraw) when he steals home to win the title.

Still, the movie succeeded in holding the American athlete up as an idealistic figure. It’s a theme that would stand the test of time. That’s how we wound up with “Space Jam.”

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That was Donlin’s last starring role, but far from his last acting role. He continued to appear on Broadway and in movies. He befriended some heavyweights, including Barrymore (a member of the “Royal Family of Broadway,” which came to include his son John Drew Barrymore and granddaughter Drew Barrymore) and Keaton, the latter of whom gave Donlin a role as a Union general in his silent comedy “The General.”

Donlin had many such bit parts. Though his IMDb page credits him with 71 roles, he was often an uncredited extra. The authors Steinberg and Spatz estimate his movie total to be closer to 100.

In a rare surviving clip from Donlin’s film career – preserved on Turner Classic Movies’ web site – he can be seen mixing up drinks at the bar in the 1932 comedy “One Way Passage.”

“There you are, partner,” he tells a patron while handing him a cocktail that he spent a long time mixing. “You can tell your grandchildren about that one.”

The guy tries to take a sip but spills the drink when a woman bumps into him.

Donlin’s story similarly slipped away. He died young, suffering a heart attack in his sleep in his Hollywood home in 1933, at age 55. He did not play in MLB long enough to have his name among the legends, and his movie roles weren’t large enough to win him lasting acclaim from the film buffs.

“One of the things that jumps out to me in telling this story is the fleeting nature of fame and celebrity,” Steinberg says. “You’re top of the heap today and then, tomorrow, you’re forgotten.”

And so Mike Donlin is not in the National Baseball Hall of Fame or on the Hollywood Walk of Fame.

But there’s that word again. Fame. And in his time, Mike Donlin was as famous as can be.