This is the third of a three-part series chronicling the life and times of East Liverpool 19th century major league baseball player Curt Welch

It started early in his major league career.

As part of the Toledo Blue Stockings, Curt Welch did not let the constraints of his job get in the way of gulping down an ice cold beverage.

He was known to hide beer behind the outfield fence at Toledo’s League Park and sipped it during games.

This continued to be a theme. In an 1888 Fourth of July game as a member of the Philadelphia Athletics, he hid a keg behind the boards in a game in St. Louis.

For the most part early in his career, his abilities allowed managers and ownership to overlook his devotion to the drink.

Perhaps fueled by alcohol, he was able to take getting hit with pitches, run over second basemen in his way and make any sorts of daring catches in the outfield (perhaps without the use of a glove).

In 1887 while still with the Browns, he saw a violent streak get him into all sorts of trouble. In a game against the Philadelphia Athletics in June of that year, he had a basepath collision with Philadelphia pitcher Gus Weyhing. Charles Comiskey, the team’s manager, had to stick up for Welch to keep him out of further trouble. Welch was fined $400.

Just a week later while in Baltimore, he took out the Orioles’ second baseman while trying to steal. Players, fans and management rushed the field to get at Welch. Police later arrested Welch and he had to be bailed out of jail for $200 from Browns’ ownership. Discipline was handed out in the form of teammate Tip O’Neill “accidentally” striking Welch in the face with a bat while Welch was waiting in the on-deck circle.

There’s also a story of Welch attacking an umpire and accusing him of betting on an opponent. He was fined $200 for that incident.

On top of being unmanageable at times, Welch was also part of a separate shameful chapter in baseball history. Due to play an exhibition game in Sept. 1887 against the New York Cuban Giants, the first all-black professional baseball club, eight members of the St. Louis Browns sent a letter to ownership saying they would not play against a team of blacks. Welch was one of those eight.

The letter read: “Dear Sir, We, the undersigned members of the St. Louis Baseball Club, do not agree to play against the negros tomorrow. We will cheerfully play against white people at any time, and think, by refusing to play, we are only doing what is right, taking everything into consideration and the shape the team is in at the present.”

Welch had been on the other side of this just a few years earlier as he was a member of the Toledo club which included Moses Fleetwood Walker and Welby Walker, two of the first black ball players in the major leagues.

While the letter did not entirely create baseball’s color line, it was a notable moment in a year that cemented a policy that would last until 1947.

Welch’s drinking accelerated his decline by 1892 when he was unconditionally released by the Baltimore Orioles in July. He had showed up for games against the Pittsburgh Pirates and Cleveland Spiders in an inebriated state and management lost patience with him.

Welch’s widow claimed a bean ball to the jaw put him in the hospital for two months at the end of his Baltimore stint. While in the hospital he did not speak for six weeks.

Following Baltimore, Welch landed with the Cincinnati Reds for 25 games that season and then followed it up with a 14-game stint with the Louisville Colonels in 1893.

His career continued in the minors with stops in Syracuse, Hazelton (Pa.) and Carbondale (Pa.).

Once one of the most well-paid players in baseball, Welch found himself working in an East Liverpool pottery for $1.25 for a 10-hour work day following his major league career. This was reported by one publication in a mocking fashion.

Ill with tuberculosis in his final years, Welch was not confident he would beat it as he saw four brothers and a father die of the disease. He succumbed to it, possibly aided by his alcoholism, on Aug. 29, 1886. He was 34.

The other two players involved in Welch’s famous “$15,000 slide” in the 1886 World Series also met early deaths. King Kelly, the Chicago catcher, died of pneumonia in 1894. John Clarkson, the Chicago pitcher, battled severe mental illness in his final years and died of pneumonia in an asylum in 1909 at 47.

Another East Liverpool major league standout Win Mercer followed Welch into an early grave at the age of 28 in 1903. Mercer, a standout pitcher, is believed to have taken his own life on a barnstorming tour in San Francisco. Although the circumstances which drove him to death were never fully established, friends did say that he worried about contracting tuberculosis.