The railway span connecting Buffalo and Fort Erie is a bridge over troubled water. Big Ed Delahanty, the best baseball player of his era, plunged from it 120 years ago. His death remains the greatest mystery in local sports history.
Delahanty’s bio on the website of the National Baseball Hall of Fame says that his life “came to a tragic end when he exited a train and fell off the International Railway Bridge over Niagara Falls.” It’s a sentence that’s a swing and a miss.
The bridge is almost 20 miles from Niagara Falls. And we don’t know for sure that Delahanty fell from it. A night guard said he jumped. Others suspected that the guard pushed him off in a scuffle. His brothers believed he was the victim of a murder-robbery by several men.
And though it’s true that Delahanty “exited a train,” the fact is he was ushered off for egregious drunken behavior. We can forgive the baseball hall for its strikeout of a sentence. The events of that terrible night – it will be 120 years to the day on Sunday – remain uncertain all these years later.
This much is sure: Big Ed Delahanty is the only man ever to win batting championships in both the National and American leagues. After switching from the NL to the AL, he was trying to switch back to the NL at the time he disappeared into the Niagara River.
Delahanty led the National League with a .408 average, for Philadelphia, in 1899, and led the American League with a .376 average, for Washington, in 1902. The Senators were playing in Detroit in 1903 when he booked a train to New York, where he apparently hoped to join the NL’s Giants.
He was 35 and had recently told a reporter: “I know I am getting along in years and won’t be able to last much longer in first-class baseball, therefore I am going to get all the money there is in sight.” He said he had made $3,000 a year in Philly, $4,000 in Washington, “and if I can get $5,000 no one can blame me for taking…
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