The Baseball War Across the Street: The 1903 Los Angeles Looloos

In the summer of 1903, two rival leagues put two Los Angeles ballclubs in ballparks directly across Washington Boulevard from each other, and only one survived August.

For two weeks in the summer of 1903, Los Angeles had more professional baseball than any city in America knew what to do with. Two teams, in two rival leagues, played their home games in two ballparks that stood directly across Washington Boulevard from one another: the Looloos at Chutes Park on the south side of the street, and the Los Angeles Nationals at Prager Park on the north. Starting August 18, both were home, playing at the same times, fighting for the same fans' quarters, and the Los Angeles Times sized up the battle with glee: the city would finally have "the old opposition ball in reality." It was a baseball war, fought at the turnstiles, and by the end of that month it would be over.

The team that won it had started as a joke. When Los Angeles rejoined professional baseball in 1901 in a four-team state league, the Times took to calling the club the Looloos, from "lulu," which was slang of the time for a dazzler, a knockout, something extraordinary, and for a while the paper used the name mostly as a joke. "The Los Angeles Looloos have again been loolooed," went one 1901 squib, wondering why fans should pay two bits to watch such poor work. But the name was too much fun to stay an insult. By 1902, the club was leading the California League with the great Rube Waddell in its rotation, and the papers were printing comic poems in its honor. "The Looloos" had become what it would remain for the next several years: the name of the team, spoken with a grin. It was never the only name, either. Across town the Herald was reaching for the angelic, calling the club "Morley's Seraphic Band." The Times' name won the moment. The Herald's instinct would last to the modern day. We'll discuss that later. 

The man assembling the Looloos team was one of the stranger builders in early baseball. James F. "Jim" Morley was a Los Angeles entrepreneur whose interests ran through billiards, bowling, prizefighting, and gemstones, and he had built both the ballclub and its home, Chutes Park; a diamond attached to an amusement park south of downtown. In December 1902, the coast's owners organized a grand new circuit, the Pacific Coast League, six teams from Los Angeles to Seattle, and they did it outside organized baseball's National Agreement, signing whoever they pleased, blacklisted men included. The National Association promptly branded the new league an outlaw operation.

Organized baseball's answer was invasion: its sanctioned circuit, the Pacific National League, planted teams directly in the outlaw league's cities, including a Los Angeles club installed at Prager Park for the express purpose of strangling Morley's team.

When the Looloos made their 1903 debut on March 15, in an exhibition against the Chicago National League club at Chutes Park, the Times reported the stakes plainly: this was the team "Morley expects to win the Pacific Coast pennant with."

He had underpromised. The Looloos won their first fifteen games of the season and never spent a day out of first place. The roster Morley and captain Frank Dillon put on the field reads today like a quiz answer: the right fielder was Gavvy Cravath, a young Californian who would go on to lead the National League in home runs six times in the majors; center field belonged to William "Dummy" Hoy, the celebrated deaf outfielder, then near the end of a famous career and one of the best-known players in the country; the pitching staff included Doc Newton, back from the National League. Dillon himself, the captain and first baseman, hit .364 and led the league with 274 hits. The long coast season served up delirious baseball almost weekly: a seventeen-inning 4-3 win over Portland in June, an 18-0 annihilation of San Francisco in September, one twelve-inning game against Oakland in which the Times narrated a fistfight between catcher Hurlburt and Oakland's Baxter round by round, like a prizefight, and an 11-8 error-filled mess of a game the paper called "a travesty on the game of baseball" against Seattle.

Then came the war's decisive battle, which turned out to be no battle at all. There was even a family quarrel folded inside it: the Nationals across the street were captained by Charlie Reilly, who had played third base for the Looloos themselves two seasons earlier. The head-to-head fortnight opened August 18, and the strangest thing about the coverage is how peaceable it reads. The sports pages rooted for everybody; the two parks advertised side by side in the same papers, games called at the same three o'clock, admission a quarter at either gate, dueling ladies' days on the same Wednesdays, Thursdays, and Fridays; and on the morning of August 21 the Times celebrated both clubs at once under the headline "Los Angeles Teams Won Both Games." Thursday, August 20, turned out to hold the Nationals' whole story in a single day. That morning the Herald carried their challenge: the players were so eager to meet Morley's team in a head-to-head series after the season that they would pay their own expenses and stay in town a month to do it, playing for a share of the gate, a series the fans had long wanted and the club's president pitched as the event of the season. That afternoon, they won their ballgame. And that evening, a telegram arrived from San Francisco.

The telegram came from Hart, the San Francisco capitalist who, it turned out, had been bankrolling both California ends of the invasion, and it ordered them shut: disband the Los Angeles club, bring the San Francisco club home on the overnight Owl train, wire the amounts owed each player and creditor, bills honored only through last night. Bentley, the Times later reported, knew that evening and kept it to himself. On Friday afternoon, fans stepping off the streetcar at Prager Park found the gates locked and a man posted to announce there would be no game, while across the street the Looloos played on. That morning's Herald was still carrying the Nationals' advertisement for Saturday's game at Prager Park, San Francisco vs. Los Angeles. It was never played. Twenty-eight ballplayers were out of work in a moment, and their traveling manager put the epitaph on the record himself: "since we reached Los Angeles there is nothing for us to play for." The Herald's post-mortem headline needed only three words, "'Angel' Hart Tired," an angel being the era's word for the man whose money keeps a show alive, and the Times reached for the same image, observing that the only question had ever been how long "the good angel would continue to shake the money out of his wings."

He folded them having lost close to $10,000, roughly $350,000 in today's money. In this town, even the enemy's banker turned out to be an angel. The Nationals died holding the best record in their league, a .607 winning percentage; the Post-Record's front page said flatly that rival ball had never paid in Los Angeles, not from the first day. The papers never printed the two parks' gate receipts side by side, so the war's exact financial score is lost; what survives is the outcome. The fans were across the street watching the Looloos. The war was never about baseball. It was about where Los Angeles wanted to spend its afternoons, and the showdown series the whole city wanted died with the team that proposed it.

How comfortable was the pennant race by then? Comfortable enough that in late August, with the season still running, captain Dillon left the team to get married and take his honeymoon. The Times, welcoming the club home from a road trip, noted that Dillon was "now believed to be safely married," as the paper had predicted he would be before the team returned. The captain of a first-place club honeymooned through a pennant race, and it cost nothing.

The finish was a coronation. In one October week the Looloos outscored San Francisco 53 to 9, and the Times headline gave up all pretense of suspense: "Looloos Cannot Lose the Pennant Now." The final accounting for the marathon 211-game inaugural season: 133 wins, 78 losses, first place by 27 and a half games, the only team in the league to finish above .500. In December the champions played a benefit against a picked team of touring eastern professionals at Chutes Park, and Dillon organized the boys to spend the winter barnstorming in Santa Barbara in their championship uniforms, so the up-coast fans could see a pennant winner in the flesh. The hot-stove columns even floated a rumor that Jake Beckley, the future Hall of Fame first baseman, might come west to play for the Looloos. Too good if true, the Times sighed, and it wasn't.

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The wreckage scattered fast. Reilly fielded a telegram from Seattle's owner asking him to carry his best men north to Spokane, and Morley, sitting in first place, declined to sign anybody, seeing no reason to add to a team already going to win, and noting that Coast League jobs were open only to men who had never jumped a Coast League contract. The talent scattered upward instead; within two weeks the Times noted that Pittsburgh's management had taken "a strong fancy to the lately celebrated Nationals," picking players off the wreckage, which is its own testimony to how good the team that lost the war had been. The peace was signed the following year, when organized baseball, having lost it too, invited the outlaws in: the coast league joined the National Agreement in 1904, its blacklist sins forgiven. The spoils eventually included the battlefield itself; by 1905 the record books list Prager Park among the champions' own home grounds, the conquered field across the boulevard absorbed. The verdict of history on the 1903 team has only grown kinder. A century later, a panel of experts named it the fifth-best team in the league's hundred-year history, and Minor League Baseball ranked it the 29th-greatest minor league team ever assembled.

The name did not last nearly as long as the glory. Search the Los Angeles papers and you can watch the Looloos fade in real time: dominant through 1903, thinning by 1905, a headline habit by 1907, and by 1908 down to a handful of nostalgic mentions as the club settled permanently into its other name, the Angels. The reference books have even garbled the timeline; one lists the club as "also known as the Looloos" in 1904 and 1905, which are precisely the years the name was dying. Its real reign was earlier, when it was young and half a joke and belonged to the best team anyone out west had ever seen.

The ballclub itself never died. It played on as the Los Angeles Angels for more than half a century, through fourteen pennants, until 1957, when the arrival of the Dodgers pushed the franchise out and up to Spokane. And when the American League expanded to Los Angeles in 1961, the new big-league club revived the old name. Every Los Angeles Angels game played today carries a faint, unacknowledged echo of the team the Times once taunted as the Looloos, the team that started as a joke but would become one of the 100 greatest minor league teams.

Our Los Angeles Looloos design puts the name's meaning on the shirt: a "lulu" of the era herself, a winking dazzler in a straw boater, bat over her shoulder, tipping her hat to the city that chose her. The date on the design, 1902, marks the season the name turned from insult to affection, the year before the joke won everything.