THE BROOKLYN DAILY EAGLE
JUNE 1921
The championship club in Brooklyn have secured a young ballplayer from the Pacific Coast whose arrival promises to stir Bromwich Park. John Dottridge of Alhambra, California — twice acclaimed the most valuable ballplayer in the collegiate ranks — joins the borough nine after being selected sixteenth and last in the opening round of the Legacy League’s annual summer draft.
Fifteen players were called before him. Fifteen names preceded his own. Dottridge has remarked, with a palpable firmness, that he does not intend to forget it. Brooklyn skipper Marques Williams informed this sportswriter that Dottridge has chosen to don #16 on his back in Brooklyn.
He comes to Brooklyn by way of Briarwood College, an institution long esteemed among the nation’s most reverent halls of learning. At Briarwood, beneath ivy-clad stone and the tolling of chapel bells, young scholars pursue Latin, logic, and moral philosophy with solemn devotion. Ball games at pastoral Cardinal Grounds are conducted before audiences in formal attire, applause polite and measured, the college hymn sung with classical dignity before rivalry contests.
Dottridge, by all accounts, was not fashioned in the customary Briarwood mold. Where rhetoric ruled the classroom, Dottridge delivered sermons of his own on the ballfield each time he delivered drives to the Grounds’ far hedge. A naturally fiery disposition, accompanied by the vigor of his strong constitution, was, critics whisper, readily overlooked. The faculty, stern dispassionate men, could hardly object to the antics of a batsman who struck the ball with such uncommon authority.
It was at Briarwood that he acquired his sobriquet.
During his first season, after depositing a fast ball clean into the right center gap, he lowered his shoulder on his way to second base to scatter an opposing first sacker, too lackadaisical in clearing the basepath, like tenpins. A teammate declared that Dottridge did not run the base paths so much as he “charged them like a bull loosed from the pen.” The name adhered. From that day forward, he was “Bull.” The name is not one for bluster, but representative of the blunt force of his approach. Pitchers learned quickly that there was little subtlety in his work; he sees the ball and he punishes it.
His final collegiate seasons’ figures in 1921 strain the imagination. In his last campaign, he batted .476, reached base at a .574 clip, and slugged .863. All are astonishing tallies. Of 97 hits, 24 were doubles, 11 triples, and 11 home runs. Nearly half of his batted balls traveled for extra bases. For the second consecutive year he carried off the league’s Most Valuable Player honors, leaving the quiet greens of Briarwood with little left to conquer.
Now he exchanges the shaded calm of Cardinal Grounds for the hallowed baseball grounds in Brooklyn, where applause is less restrained and expectations less forgiving. At five feet eleven inches and two hundred sturdy pounds, he presents a solid figure at first sack. Bull is broad of shoulder and square of jaw, with an expression suggesting that the business before him is unfinished.
If his professional bat speaks with anything approaching its collegiate authority, the fifteen clubs that passed him by may soon hear from the Bull in the language in which he is most persuasive–the crack of the bat.
Bull’s college teammate, Brooklyn catcher Eric Welburn, said to me. “Bull? I’m overjoyed Skip brought him in to play with us. If I am being honest, though, I am more grateful that Bull’s not against us.”