Samuel Leech Maskrey (February 11, 1854 – April 1, 1922) was an American

outfielder An outfielder is a person playing in one of the three defensive positions in baseball or softball, farthest from the batter. These defenders are the left fielder, the center fielder, and the right fielder. As an outfielder, their duty is to catch ...

Major League Baseball Major League Baseball (MLB) is a professional baseball league composed of 30 teams, divided equally between the National League (baseball), National League (NL) and the American League (AL), with 29 in the United States and 1 in Canada. MLB i ...

. He played five seasons in the majors, from 1882 to 1886, for the Louisville Eclipse/Colonels and

Cincinnati Red Stockings The Cincinnati Red Stockings of were baseball's first all-professional team, with ten salaried players. The Cincinnati Base Ball Club formed in 1866 and fielded competitive teams in the National Association of Base Ball Players (NABBP) 1867� ...

. His brother, Harry Maskrey, was his teammate on the 1882 Eclipse.

Biography

After spending the 1887 to 1889 seasons playing

minor league baseball Minor League Baseball (MiLB) is a professional baseball organization below Major League Baseball (MLB), constituted of teams affiliated with MLB clubs. It was founded on September 5, 1901, in response to the growing dominance of the National Le ...

, Maskrey was part of a contingent sent to England in 1890 by

Albert Spalding Albert Goodwill Spalding (September 2, 1849 – September 9, 1915) was an American pitcher, manager, and executive in the early years of professional baseball, and the co-founder of the Spalding sporting goods company. He was born and raised i ...

at the behest of the newly-formed professional National League of Baseball of Great Britain. He was signed by

Preston North End Baseball Club Preston North End Baseball Club were a short lived English professional baseball club, who played their home games at Deepdale, competing for the 1890 National League of Baseball of Great Britain. Preston North End Baseball Club Limited were for ...

as player-coach and was club captain. This organization had sent a letter to the American Spalding requesting help in establishing a league. They requested eight to ten players to coach and convert the existing players (whose primary game was usually

soccer Association football, more commonly known as football or soccer, is a team sport played between two teams of 11 Football player, players who almost exclusively use their feet to propel a Ball (association football), ball around a rectangular f ...

). Spalding sent a skilled manager, Jim Hart, along with players Maskrey, William J. Barr, Charles Bartlett, and J. E. Prior.Baseball Fiends and Flying Machines
Jerry Kuntz, p.47, accessed May 2010 Maskrey was the only one of the players who had played in the majors to that point, and he stayed there for one season as a player-manager of

Preston North End Preston North End Football Club, commonly referred to as Preston, North End or PNE, is a professional association football club in Preston, Lancashire, England. They currently play in the EFL Championship, the second level of the English footbal ...

. Following his time in England, Maskrey returned to the U.S. minor leagues in 1891, where he played for the Tacoma team in the Pacific Northwestern League. After spending the 1892 season with the Atlanta Firecrackers of the

Southern Association The Southern Association (SA) was a higher-level minor league in American organized baseball from 1901 through 1961. For most of its existence, the Southern Association was two steps below the Major Leagues; it was graded Class B (1902-19 ...

, part of which he spent as a player-manager, he retired and went into the hotel business with his brother Harry.

References

External links

* {{DEFAULTSORT:Maskrey, Leech 1854 births 1922 deaths 19th-century baseball players 19th-century American sportsmen Major League Baseball outfielders Louisville Eclipse players Louisville Colonels players Cincinnati Red Stockings (AA) players Topeka Capitals players Milwaukee Cream Citys players Milwaukee Brewers (minor league) players American expatriate baseball players in the United Kingdom Des Moines Prohibitionists players Atlanta Firecrackers players Baseball players from Mercer County, Pennsylvania People from Mercer, Pennsylvania