"Ducky" Stewart: The Little Galoot

By Guest Author Scott Johnson

Every once in a while, after I read a baseball book I really enjoyed, I will contact the author to see if they’d like to be a guest on my website. When you find a guest author talking about their book on my site, you can be sure that I have not only read the book and enjoyed it enough to recommend it to you, but that I have purchased the book on my own – and I’m not some publisher’s shill. And that brings me to this guest author.

A few months ago, I went to Amazon to search for new books in baseball history. There was the usual smattering of stocking-stuffer trivia books, more of those ballpark picture coffee table tomes, and countless Ohtani bios, and I was about to give up on finding anything that piqued my interest when a book titled “Fort Dodge” caught my attention.

I knew nothing about Fort Dodge, so I clicked to learn more. The description looked pretty intriguing, but it was the subtitle that sold me: “The Bawling, Brawling, and Hard-Balling Iowa League.” And just when I thought it couldn’t get any better, further scrolling revealed that there was a companion volume “Rogues and Royalty of the Iowa League” that featured full bios of all the players in the first book. The author, Scott Johnson, was speaking my outsider baseball language - click, click – SOLD!

When the books arrived, I was not disappointed – in fact, I was incredibly impressed. Not only were the books well researched and the text written with a nice dash of snarkiness, but the books themselves were designed beautifully. besides the added features such as sidebars and even a chapter discussing the quality of photography depicted throughout the book, the author had one feature I had never seen before.

Now, we all know that new ideas in the way baseball history is presented are few and very far between, but author Scott Johnson created something called “career maps.” This unique graphic visually maps out each player’s path as he traveled from town to town playing ball. (Don’t worry, you’ll see an example in the story below). It’s a novel idea that shows just how far and wide some players journeyed to pursue their love of the game.

After spending a week with the books, I contacted Scott and asked if he’d like to be a guest author, and he said yes. Since there were so many great characters in his books to choose from, I was wondering who he’d choose: a star player? a guy who had some crazy back story? or maybe a baseball lifer, whose stop in Fort Dodge was just a brief part of a long, but forgotten career?

To my delight (and hopefully yours), he chose another route entirely. So now, Scott Johnson brings you the story of “Ducky” Stewart: The Little Galoot.”

You’ve probably never added “Backup catcher to the backup catcher of the Chicago White Sox” to the bullet points of your resume, have you? But when 19-year-old Charley Stewart turned up at the doorstep of the Fort Dodge White Sox of the brand new Iowa League in the spring of 1904, that’s just what he did. Stewart carried in his pocket a clipping from Sporting Life of September 12, 1903, that proclaimed:

“President Comiskey has a local player, a catcher named Stewart, at the south side grounds in case anything happens to [second stringer Jack] Slattery.”

Stewart announced to one and all that, as Charlie Comiskey’s emergency catcher the previous summer, he had appeared in nine games with the Chicago White Sox—one game under the threshold, he maintained, for being included in the official league records. The Fort Dodge Messenger swallowed it whole cloth.

In truth, he may well have planted that Sporting Life article himself. One thing is true: Charley Stewart never, ever saw a big league pitch, at least not from home plate. In any event, Fort Dodge manager Frank Boyle saw through the facade right away, but was scrambling to find any guy with a catcher’s mitt who could fill that most crucial of positions. Stewart proved just good enough to stick with the team until splitting his thumb in late July (“the flesh burst open like a ripped glove”), a malady that plagued catchers all too frequently back then. Boyle extended an offer to keep him on at reduced pay as he recuperated. Stewart indignantly declined, saying he had a standing offer from the rival team in Waterloo, which turned out to be yet another ducky white lie. He spent the summer back in the Chicago commercial leagues, but he sent a letter to the Messenger, fabricating that he was now catching for Comiskey… again.

Spring after spring, Stewart pulled out the same yellowed Sporting Life clipping, blew the same smoke, and landed a spot with one gullible manager after another. Short and dumpy, he looked like Lou Costello in a ballcap, a little galoot who by 1906 had been fondly tagged with the lovable nickname of “Ducky.” But he always hit between .190 and .220, never really got down the finer points of the game, and was ridden unmercifully by spectators. The Joplin Globe pled, “Stewart may be pretty much of a disappointment, but what’s the use of hammering away at him every minute of the game? He’s down and out, anyway.”

He was probably a little better than that suggests, because for over a decade Ducky consistently played across the upper Midwest, sometimes with three or four clubs in a year, always flashing the clipping. He would eventually split his thumb (it happened to him a lot) or “take ill”—which sounded better than “get canned”—and would never be invited back to that town again. In the end, he landed with Gladstone in a puny Upper Peninsula circuit that included the Michigan burgs of Escanaba, Ishpeming and Negaunee. There, he struggled with his fastball pitcher (“It was impossible for Ducky to hold him”), performed slapstick (“Stewart was away off color Sunday and had four passed balls in the first inning”), and sometimes didn’t know one end of the bat from the other (“Ducky Stewart, Gladstone’s clean-up man, never saw first except from home plate”).

One day, when the pitcher bounced a ball into the dirt with a man on first, the batter feigned being hit with the pitch and began casually jogging down the baseline. Ducky fell for it, and waddled back to the grandstand to lazily retrieve the ball. Meanwhile, the baserunner suddenly hit the gas and motored all the way around to score. The batter then grinned his way back to the plate and the gob-smacked Stewart. You get the feeling that, even after ten years of professional ball under his belt, this kind of stunt happened to him all the time. Yet the giddy and tipsy Yooper supporters took him under their wing, and either didn’t notice or didn’t care if Ducky was bumbly or fumbly.

After 1914, the old newspaper clipping having crumbled to dust, Stewart pretty much disappeared from professional ball, though he still tooled around in the city leagues of Chicago. On November 20, 1934, a snippet of his Tribune obituary appeared in newspapers across the continent:

Charles (Ducky) Stewart, 51, catcher for the Chicago White Sox in 1905-’06, died at his home here of a heart attack.

It was as if the 51-year-old galoot had pulled off one final act of majestic self-promotion from his deathbed in the toddlin’ town where, once upon a time, Charlie Comiskey took little Ducky under his wing as the White Sox Secret Weapon. To be opened only in case of catching emergency.

Or something like that.

You can read about the exploits of Ducky Stewart and his teammates in “Fort Dodge and the Bawling, Brawling, Hard-Balling Iowa League,” available on Amazon along with its biographical companion volume, “Rogues and Royalty of the Iowa League.” Author Scott Johnson accepts full responsibility for uncovering the stories of these quirky exponents of outsider baseball.

This is Gary C. again: After I read the two books, I contacted Scott. I found him to be a great guy to talk baseball history with. When he decided on Ducky Stewart as his guest author choice, I couldn’t have been more excited. I mean, as an artist, to be presented with two iconic reference photos like this, how can I not be:

Look, I know a book set on three seasons of baseball in Fort Dodge, Iowa, doesn’t hold the same general appeal that another Clemente book does with the majority of baseball fans. But since you read my work, I’m guessing you are already the curious type who enjoys learning more about the hidden and forgotten corners of history. So, if you are interested in something new, about a team, a time, and a place, you are not already familiar with, give these books a try.