King Kelly was baseball's first superstar personality and the greatest sports hero of the 1880's. As one of the game's earliest and most notorious drunks, he began a tradition that continues right up to the present day. But he could play the game. Kelly stayed sober enough to win the National League batting championship in 1884 (.354) and 1886 (.388). The following season - - the first year stolen bases were recorded - - he stole eighty-four. He once swiped six bases in a single game.

Kelly's trademark hook slide, a maneuver which few players had perfected before the turn of the century, was immortalized in the popular 1889 song "Slide, Kelly, Slide." Kelly was also said to have inspired the poem "Casey at the Bat." Playing in an era when the rules and structure of baseball were still taking shape, Kelly was known for being innovative and crafty. He was the first catcher to send signals to his pitcher. He also perfected, if not invented, the hit-and-run play.

He would wring every loophole out of the rulebook. The most oft-told Kelly story is the one about the time he was sitting out a game one day, probably with a hangover, when an opposing batter lofted a lazy foul ball toward the dugout. Seeing that his catcher had no chance to make the play, Kelly shouted, "KELLY, NOW CATCHING FOR BOSTON!" and stepped out of the dugout to snare the ball. A rule was quickly put into effect banning substitutions in mid-play.

A handsome man with a huge handlebar mustache, Kelly had a happy-go-lucky, uninhibited manner that shocked and thrilled the fans in the Victorian era. Today, we'd call him a hot dog. Whatever he did, he drew crowds. Mostly Kelly was known for consuming enormous quantities of booze. He considered it a point of honor to get smashed. He would drink before, after, and during ballgames. On one occasion a game had to be held up so that Kelly could finish hoisting a few with some fellows in the box seats.

Cap Anson, his manager in Chicago, said Kelly had "one enemy, that one being himself." The Chicago management grew increasingly exasperated with his drinking problem, and in 1887 sold him to the Boston "Beaneaters" for the then astonishing sum of $10,000. It was "the baseball story of the century," according to David Quentin Voight's history of the game, American Baseball.

He had a few good years with Boston, until the booze finally started to catch up with him. Quite often he had to be sent to a Turkish bath to sober up. He was a pathetic figure at the end, staggering under fly balls as an outfielder and falling flat on his face when his feet became tangled. During his last season (1893) he played just twenty games. He had never saved a dime when he was on top. Penniless, he tried a vaudeville act, and then opened a bar in New York. Neither was successful. He headed back to Boston in November 1894 and caught a cold that turned into pneumonia. Three days later he died at Boston Emergency Hospital. He had drunk himself to death at the age of thirty-six.

He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1945.