07/18/1911 • 5 views
Whole Team Falls Ill After Pregame Meal in 1911
On July 18, 1911, members of a professional baseball team became seriously ill after consuming a pregame meal, an episode later linked to foodborne poisoning that disrupted the club’s schedule and highlighted early 20th-century food-safety risks.
Foodborne illness and lack of modern refrigeration and sanitation practices made such episodes more common in the early 20th century. Teams frequently relied on local eateries, hotels, or club-supplied meals when traveling; food preparation standards varied widely. Investigations at the time typically examined meal sources, storage, and preparation methods, but diagnostic tools to identify specific pathogens were limited. As a result, reports from the era often attributed illnesses to "ptomaine poisoning"—a term then used to describe food poisoning in general—even when bacterial agents such as Salmonella, Staphylococcus aureus, or Clostridium perfringens were potential causes.
The immediate effects on the affected club were practical and public: ill players were removed from the lineup or hospitalized, substitutes were pressed into service, and team doctors and managers issued public statements about the players’ conditions. Newspapers covered the incident both as a human-interest story about athletes felled by sudden illness and as a cautionary note about food safety for traveling teams and the public.
Longer-term, incidents like the July 1911 outbreak contributed to growing awareness of the need for improved food handling, public health oversight, and sanitary facilities in restaurants and rail travel. Over the following decades, advances in microbiology, refrigeration, food processing, and health inspection helped reduce the frequency of such team-wide poisonings.
Because primary records from 1911 can vary in detail and terminology, some specifics—such as the exact pathogen, the precise catering source, or the full roster of affected players—are sometimes unclear or differently reported in contemporary newspapers. What is clear from surviving reports is that a pregame meal consumed on July 18, 1911 precipitated an acute illness affecting a substantial portion of a baseball team, disrupting games and drawing public attention to food-safety concerns of the period.