A McCreachery Card Theory

[Joe_G.]

I'm not yet persuaded to see it your way but enjoy the conjecture.

I do have another request however, and that would be to change the title from "The Real Story of McCreachery" to "A McCreachery Card Theory".

[cyseymour]

Originally Posted by Joe_G.

I do have another request however, and that would be to change the title from "The Real Story of McCreachery" to "A McCreachery Card Theory".

Consider it done.

[Matthew H]

There's a lot of evidence pointing toward Joe'e theory. They used his only pose that showed his age and in street clothes, they switched him from player to manager, and Goodwin and Co had already issued other poses with humorous content, nothing malicious (unless you want to count Radbourn's middle finger).

It seems more likely that they got a stack of his photos from Fearnaught and thought that pose looked like the manager cards they were printing and made a joke. One interesting note is that the photographer was located in Indianapolis, I'm not sure what other connection Deacon White would have there, but I bet Joe would know.

The "creature" idea is pretty cool.

[RCMcKenzie]

His Christian, or given name, is James Laurie White. His parents and friends probably called him Jimmy, Jim, Jaime etc. Baseball players have a long-standing tradition of giving everyone a nickname. They called him "Deacon".

A Deacon in the Catholic church is a member of the congregation who is from the community. They are not formally trained like the priests, but they read from the bible and stand on the stage with the priests during the ceremony. Often, Deacons in a Catholic church are Bankers or Lawyers during the week and participate in the Mass on Sunday.

My thought is if they called him, "Deacon", they thought he was overly pious. And if he drank in his later years they may have called him McCreachery to make fun of his pious ways and beliefs (flat-earth) etc. At the same time, he was the manager and one of the winningest players of the era and so they respected him.

I am only speculating here, and preferred the title "story" to "theory" as I have very little fact to support my conjectures.

[Abravefan11]

Originally Posted by RCMcKenzie

My thought is if they called him, "Deacon", they thought he was overly pious.

From an 1878 article.

[cyseymour]

Interesting. Based on the article Tim posts, Deacon White was very unlikely to have been big drinker. Which goes back to the theory in my original post that it was somehow a joke about his religiosity and ideas of the world.

They lived in a time when there was a lot of discrimination against the Irish, so for the OJ producers to have intentionally given him a fake name with both an Irish prefix ("Mc") and suffix ("y") could hardly have been a coincidence or something haphazard or unintentional. People were very aware of the last names and what they meant, whether they were Irish or English, Jewish or German (i.e. "Germany Shafer", "Pretzel Getchen") etc. Seeing that Jim O"Rourke had removed the "O" before his name to make his name seem less Irish, clearly people were very conscious of last names and the different ethnic backgrounds they reflected.

So I definitely think that the fact he was given a faux-Irish name means that he was being called Irish. Whether to poke fun at his drinking, religion or ideas of the world, I am not 100% sure, but I still think a Mc-creature would be "creature of Irish descent". The name would be too much of a coincidence not to have been, especially considering the context of the rampant discrimination against the Irish in the 19th Cent, and people being very well aware of the different ethnic heritages deriving from names.

[novakjr]

With minimal reasearch. The word "creach" can be roughly translated to the Old English "Hyre", meaning a downfall, descent or ruin. Is there any chance that Creach, Creacher, or Creachery, could in reference to his association with the National Brotherhood of Professional Baseball Players, and their opposition to the reserve clause? Also maybe combined the Buffalo incident in late 1888, where he refused to report to Pittsburgh(whom he'd been traded to) because he wanted to play for Buffalo(a team that he had purchased)? Perhaps his actions were viewed as destructive to the game by some people? This could also possibly have led to the Mc being added in a derogatory manner.

The Buffalo incident is briefly discussed in this article..
http://research.sabr.org/journals/james-deacon-white