The Long Lost Home Run Trophy
Have you heard of the Hernsheim Cup?
I used to be a long-form guy. I wrote entire books before I ever wrote an article. In 2011 Baseball in the Garden of Eden was published, capping 28 years of research. In that year Major League Baseball named me its official historian. I ceased to write books and began this blog, Our Game.
I have become a short-form guy, if still too long for most attention spans. After eleven years of writing a story a week, sometimes two, totaling millions of words, I allowed myself a bit of a holiday from writing. This has permitted me to reflect.
I know I have been a lucky man — obliged to be neither reporter nor observer. I have not had to write about what others had in mind for me, and no one edits my words. I like what I like and I write what I write. Lucky.
Well, I’m back in the saddle again, refreshed — this time drawing your attention to a lost trophy that no one alive has seen (see above). Named for Home Run tobacco, long familiar in the hobby for its surviving cigarette packs and posters, the loving cup was to be awarded to the champions of the Texas League in 1897. It went on a tour of league cities in the spring, displayed in shop windows such as those of the Brown & Wolf store in Houston. Dallas papers described the method of trophy’s eventual capture: “the first two clubs on the percentage table at the close of the season will play a series of three games for it — that is, it will be contested for in the same manner as the famous Temple cup of the National league.”
Was it awarded? That is uncertain, as Houston, one of the Texas League clubs that had folded, laid claim to a winning percentage that would enable it to play in the postseason championship series. Waco did the same. The Galveston Pirates, who finished the season intact and atop the standings, put the matter before league officials at the end of August but the outcome is clouded. The trophy may have been mothballed until the campaign of 1898 … which was cut short when the Texas League disbanded in May, blaming the onset of the Spanish-American War.
In that year as well, a new loving cup, modeled on that of the Texas League, was created for “the Southern League Club winning the championship in any two seasons.” (After a game-fixing scandal emerged regarding the 1897 Temple Cup, its system, pitting the first- and second-place clubs, had become discredited.) But this new Southern circuit proved no sturdier than the Texas League had been, curtailing its season on July 4, 1898. For 1899 the Southern League reduced its membership from eight teams to four yet folded on May 1. In short, this starstruck trophy may never have been awarded, in either of its incarnations.
So, who were the Hernsheims, and what explains their attachment to baseball?
In 1857 18-year-old Simon Hernsheim established a tobacco company in New Orleans. His business, largely as an exporter to England and Germany, grew until the outbreak of the Civil War. Hernsheim enlisted in the Confederate army as a Louisiana volunteer.
At war’s end, Hernsheim returned to New Orleans and relaunched his business, welcoming younger brother Isidore into the firm. Extending from its exporting origin, the Hernsheims began to manufacture chewing tobaccos, cigars, and cigarettes. By the 1880s, with business exploding, the Hernsheims embraced another brother, Joseph, and sallied forth as Hernsheim Bros. & Co., with a fourth principal, the unrelated Sigmund Belmont.
By 1891, the Hernsheim cigar output was the largest in the nation. In 1898, following the death of Simon Hernsheim, the remaining partners decided to sell their cigarette business, including their factory building, to William Ratcliffe Irby of New Orleans, a tobacco manufacturer and an agent of the American Tobacco Company of New York. That gigantic tobacco trust is famous to this day not only for its having been dismantled by the government in 1911 but also for its gorgeous baseball cards. (Irby was responsible for the T211 Red Sun cards, also known as Green Borders, a minors-only issue featuring players from the Southern Association.)
Home Run cigarettes continued in production for decades thereafter — possibly as late as the 1980s — as a Liggett & Myers brand. Its cigarette packs are common at collectors’ shows and occasionally a poster will come up at auction.
What explained the Hernsheim Brothers’ attachment to baseball as a brand for cigarettes and pouch tobacco, as well as a marketing tool through its trophies for the Texas and then Southern Leagues? In the wake of the Civil War and Reconstruction, baseball was the one thing that all Americans could agree about.
