Date of game:June 24, 1886 vs. Detroit in Detroit Age: 22 Line score: 3 AB, 0 R, 0 H, 0 BB, 2 L, 4 PO
Louis Pelouze was a semipro baseball player in Detroit, with only 20 games of professinal experience the previous summer with the London (Ontario) club in the Canadian League, when he played for the St. Louis Maroons on June 24, 1886 in the place of Joe Quinn, who was injured. According to the Detroit Free Press, he "did it exceedingly well, capturing three difficult flies" and retiring the side in the third inning.
Game details are from an article in the Detroit Free Press from June 26, 1886.
He was not as successful at the plate, going 0-3 with two strikeouts. He did advance a runner, Patsy Cahill, from second to third with a groundout in the fifth. Cahill subsequently scored the Maroons second run of the inning when third baseman Deacon White threw high to Dan Brouthers at first base on a grounder by pitcher John Kirby. The Maroons lost 7-2, as they failed to do anything in any other inning of the game.
Louis Henri Pelouze III was well known in Detroit, but not just for his days as a ball player. The Pelouze family was a well-known family in the type founding industry in the late 19th century. Louis was born in 1863 as one of five children of Ellen Doolittle and General Louis Henri Pelouze II, a Civil War hero. General Pelouze was with Lincoln when the president died and was serving as an Assistant Adjutant General in the War Department in Washington D.C. when he died in 1878. Louis III and his two younger brothers (William and Frederick) all attended the Michigan Millitary Academy. William moved to Chicago, became a member of the Illinois National Guard (ultimately becoming a colonel), founded an internationally successful company maufacturing postal scales (which morphed into the Pelouze Maufacturing Company), and married Helen Thompson, daughter of Chicago real estate mogul William H. Thompson and sister to future (corrupt) Chicago mayor William "Big Bill" Thompson.
While William was becoming entrenched at the top of Chicago society, Louis III settled in Detroit. He was active in the Detroit Light Infantry (an early version of the National Guard in Michigan),
One of the nicknmes for this brigade was "The Tigers", from which the Detroit ballclub in the American League got its nickname.
and he played semipro baseball with the Cass Club in Detroit through most of the 1880s. On August 17, 1891 he married Helen Ward, daughter of David Ward, the richest man in Detroit. They eventually moved to New York. In 1913, Helen made the newspapers after she was fined $1000 for smuggling more than $1000 worth of furs, appareal and jewelry in from Europe. In levying the fine, the judge noted that "the offender paid her fine and then entered her automobile and motored uptown laughing at the Government and the court," but that in the future such women would face stricter sentences, including prison time.
The Evening World (New York, NY), November 25, 1913, Page 1.
David Nemec reports that Pelouze was a diamond dealer in New York, but some of the articles about this case indicated he was an electrical engineer. Louis and Helen and daughter Lucille lived in an apartment at 55 East 55th street. Louis Pelouze died in January 1939 at the age of 75.
Louis Pelouze was a semipro baseball player in Detroit, with only 20 games of professinal experience the previous summer with the London (Ontario) club in the Canadian League, when he played for the St. Louis Maroons on June 24, 1886 in the place of Joe Quinn, who was injured. According to the Detroit Free Press, he "did it exceedingly well, capturing three difficult flies" and retiring the side in the third inning.