By Susan DeFord
Washington Post Staff Writer
Thursday, March 18, 2004; Page DZ03

St. Patrick's Day is the usual time to celebrate the Irish with green beer, maybe some corned beef and cabbage, maybe some more green beer. But perhaps our deepest appreciation for the Irish should be reserved for opening day of the Major League Baseball season, April 4.

The sons of Irish immigrants shaped the national pastime with brains and brawn, showmanship and keen competitiveness more than a century ago, writes a local history professor in his new book. One of the greatest of them was Ed Delahanty, an Irish slugger from Cleveland, who's perhaps remembered more for his harrowing death during his second season with the Washington Senators than for his feats on the ballfield.

Jerrold Casway, who chairs the social sciences division at Howard Community College, said he set out to learn how the power hitter, who dominated the game at the age of 35 in 1903, could wind up at the bottom of Niagara Falls.

"Delahanty was just the first, a forewarning of the setbacks and hazards of celebrityhood," said Casway, whose book, "Ed Delahanty in the Emerald Age of Baseball," was recently published by the University of Notre Dame Press.

Casway's doctoral work years earlier at the University of Maryland drew him to Ireland of the 16th and 17th centuries, and he wrote a scholarly book about the island's doomed struggle against English domination. An early baseball picture book, given to him years ago by a friend, led Casway to a new Irish tale.

"I was taken aback that all these guys were Irish," said Casway, 61, who worked on his baseball biography for 11 years. "I had never thought of it before."

As a Philadelphia native and sports fan, Casway grew up hearing about Delahanty, who played 13 seasons with the Phillies until 1901.

"If you knew anything about the game, this was the greatest Phillie of them all," Casway said in the quick, punchy cadences of his hometown.

The teenage Delahanty donned his spikes and uniform in the late 1880s, a time when baseball had successfully staked its claim as the national pastime.

"Played on fields and on undeveloped and vacant lots in America's swelling cities -- Boston, Chicago, New York, Philadelphia, and Cleveland -- the baseball craze and the children of Irish immigrants came together," Casway wrote.

Irish Americans accounted for more than 40 percent of professional ballplayers in the last two decades of the 19th century, according to Casway's research. It was not unusual for whole families to pursue the sport; Delahanty had four brothers who played in the major leagues.

That's partly because choices were so few for the huge, impoverished class of immigrants, said Jim Gates, library director at the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, N.Y.

"The Irish became the first of several waves of ethnic groups to move into baseball and assimilate into the American culture," Gates said.

And the Irish made the game their own, playing to the "cranks," raucous fans in the 25-cent bleacher seats, with aggressive base running, sacrifice hitting, cutting off throws and relentless badgering of the game's sole umpire. For example, Baltimore Orioles third baseman John McGraw slowed opposing runners by grabbing their belts and pants, according to Casway's book.

In a game that at times displayed a vaudevillian rowdiness, Delahanty was the widely acknowledged "king of swat." Even in New York, exulted the Philadelphia Inquirer in 1899, Delahanty was a "royal favorite" with his "mighty cudgel." In 1899 he led National League hitters with an average of .408 for the Phillies.

In 1902 he repeated the feat among American League batters with an average of .376 in his first season with the young Washington Senators. At the time of his death the following year, he had a career batting average of .346, still the game's fourth highest.

"In any year, that makes a heck of a ballplayer," Gates said. The Hall of Fame added Delahanty to its ranks of the game's best players in 1945.

But Delahanty had his demons. He was a compulsive gambler and a binge drinker who squandered his $3,000 annual salary on a flashy lifestyle for himself, his wife and young daughter, according to Casway's book. During an era marked by labor-management strife, he felt underpaid.

Delahanty was the marquee attraction for the Senators, then a small, struggling club in the new American League. But it wasn't long before Delahanty, deep in debt from horse betting, thought about leaving the hapless Senators and jumping leagues again to play for the New York Giants. The news leaked out, but in April 1903, Delahanty was quoted in The Washington Post as declaring, "I have no more idea of deserting the Washington club than I have of jumping off the Washington Monument."

During a Senators road trip, Delahanty bought a train ticket on July 2 in Detroit to travel alone to New York City, possibly to meet with officials from the Giants, Casway wrote.

But on the train that night, he began drinking and became so disruptive that the conductors ejected him at a small train station next to a bridge over the Niagara River. He began walking across the single track bridge in the dark, apparently to reach Buffalo on the other side. Alerted to his presence, the bridge's watchman struggled to pull Delahanty off the side of the bridge, where he had climbed to avoid an oncoming train. Delahanty fell, and the watchman heard a splash and saw Delahanty below, calling for help in the swiftly flowing river about 26 miles upstream of the falls.

Delahanty never showed for the Senators' July 4 doubleheader at the club's Florida Avenue ballpark. On July 9, his decomposed body was found floating at the bottom of Niagara Falls. Flags in both the American and National leagues were flown at half-staff in mourning the loss of the "king of batters."