Is it fair for kids to keep foul balls? A century ago, the Phillies didn’t think so.
Robert Cotter, a Philly kid, was arrested and brought before a judge. He won his case, got to keep the ball, and changed the rules on fans and foul balls for good.
How times have changed at the old ballgame over 102 years.
The Phillies welcome “guests” to keep balls hit into the seats, as long as they don’t interfere with balls in play. Plus, a rotating team of about 20 ball girls, each on two-year stints, hop off stools to adeptly snag foul grounders and usually hand them to delighted young fans gathered nearby.
The Phillies say they pay $133.18 for each box of 12 major league baseballs. Even at about $11 a ball, they can absorb the cost much easier than they could in 1923, when a baseball cost a princely $1.50, or about $28 in 2025 dollars. The Phillies, then a last-place team with a notoriously thrifty owner, wanted all foul balls returned to be used again (and again).
Then a neighborhood kid known as “Toughie Reds” helped change everything. Robert Cotter later became a mail carrier, a father of six, and grandfather to Kelly Anne Clark, a 58-year-old paralegal at a Center City law firm who lives in South Jersey and has four daughters and six grandchildren. But before that, he was a hustler — and, unwittingly, a trend setter.
Acting on the dying wishes of her late father, Michael Cotter, a police officer and lawyer who also was a big Phillies fan, Clark would love nothing more than to see the Phillies honor her grandfather’s fascinating place in baseball history with a plaque, perhaps in the right-field seats near a current ball girl’s station at Citizens Bank Park. She has not heard back from the team.
“And I, too, wish to carry on the legacy of our baseball history,” she said recently. “Many of my family members are avid Phillies fans, but I think my dad and I were the biggest.”
It may seem a little strange that Bob Cotter’s offspring became Phillies fans, considering the team had him thrown in jail overnight, at age 11, for daring to stuff a $1.50 foul ball in his rear pocket at a 1923 Phillies game and try to leave the ballpark with it. Bob Cotter became a cause célèbre who drew national attention after his caper.
“When Pop-Pop was little, he was teased a bit over the fuss by his big brothers, but it was all good-natured,” Clark said of her grandfather, a redhead who was the youngest of six children. “He would tell the story to anyone who listened that season, but then it died down. However, when his kids grew old enough, he would tell them the story of when he was little. My dad, again the bigger of the Phillies fans, loved the story, and, in turn, told it to his kids.”
On July 18, 1923, Toughie Reds left his house on North 15th Street and shinnied a rain spout to sneak with his brother, Raymond, into a Phillies game, apparently not for the first time, against Chicago at Baker Bowl, the ramshackle ballpark in North Philadelphia that was the Phillies’ home from 1887 to 1938. Robert Cotter then snagged a foul ball hit into the right-field bleachers, drawing applause for his “dexterity,” as The Inquirer later noted.
Fatefully, Robert Cotter tried to keep the ball, perhaps hoping he could sell it for a quarter to a fan on the sidewalk after the game. But he was apprehended by ballpark guards, known as “red caps.” Then he was dragged (tearfully, according to The Inquirer) to a police station, where he was arrested and taken to the House of Detention, where he spent the night, in part because his mother had arrived at the courthouse after it closed.
By the next morning, Judge Charles Lincoln Brown in Municipal Court had learned of the plight of Toughie Reds and demanded that the boy be brought into court, along with a representative from the Phillies, who tried to explain that Cotter had committed larceny. This was an epidemic that needed to be addressed and Toughie Reds was a test case, the Phillies said.
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Judge Brown was irritated — with the Phillies and their business manager, Bill Shettsline. The judge said Cotter had only “followed his natural impulses,” then discharged him, saying, “Why, I would have done the same thing myself if I had been in the boy’s place.”
Not only was Cotter free to go, but he got to keep the foul ball he’d caught — a sweet postscript for the article that ran at the bottom of Page 1 of The Inquirer on July 20, 1923. PHILLIES’ OFFICIALS FAIL TO JAIL BOY WHO POCKETED BALL, read the headline.
“All American and National League clubs are trying to cut down their losses from stolen baseballs,” Shettsline said later. “We were simply trying to protect our property. About 500 balls a year are lost by each league team, aggregating a loss in both leagues of 8,000 balls.
“I have not been severe with boys at the Phillies park. There isn’t a day when two or three lads are not caught climbing the fence. Nothing is done to them. But I do feel we have a right to protect our property.”
The story had legs: JUDGE FREES BOY HELD FOR STEALING FOUL IN PHILLIES’ BALL PARK, read a headline on a wire story that appeared the next day in the Chicago Tribune. Ballclubs did not share foul-ball policies: In 1916, Charles Weeghman, the Cubs’ owner, was the first to allow fans to keep foul balls at his 2-year-old ballpark, later known as Wrigley Field.
Weeghman said, “The charm of novelty, of possible gain, might lure far more spectators than enough to pay for the lost balls.”
But the New York Yankees had three fans arrested in one week that season for keeping foul balls or home runs hit at the Polo Grounds. Yankees’ co-owner Tillinghast L’Hommedieu Huston said, in counterpoint, “When people go to a restaurant, do they take the dishes or silverware home for souvenirs?”
Legal precedent, of sorts, had been established in 1921, when a New York Giants fan, Reuben Berman, was thrown out of the Polo Grounds when he caught a foul ball — and, when approached by ushers to give it up, threw it even deeper into the stands. Citing “humiliation before a large crowd,” Berman sued the Giants, and he won $100.
Many big league clubs, financially stretched thin, had figured out by that point that they stood to keep losing in court, so they relaxed their foul-ball policies. The Phillies were owned then by William Baker, a former New York City police commissioner who knew how to pinch pennies. Famously, he used sheep to trim the outfield grass at the ballpark.
(Labeling the National League Park the “Baker Bowl” for the first time in July 1923, one week before Cotter’s caper, was not Baker’s idea, but that of The Inquirer, which used it derisively.)
Not surprisingly, throwing an 11-year-old in jail overnight for filching a foul ball turned out to be lousy public relations. News of Cotter’s apprehension reached the South 44th Street home of Edythe Eby, who wrote Cotter to inform him that she’d give him a ball autographed by Yankees’ right-hander Bob Shawkey.
Moreover, she’d take him to a Yankees game at Shibe Park, the ballpark of the Philadelphia Athletics, six blocks from the Baker Bowl. Shettsline, it turned out, had gotten back the original pilfered ball.
“He can keep his ol’ ball now,” Cotter told an Inquirer reporter. “I don’t want it. Gee, whiz, won’t the other kids be sore when they see this ball with Bob Shawkey’s name on it?”
Asked what he’d do with the new ball, Cotter said, “Save it. It’s too good to play with. I’ll keep it until I get old, like the judge said.”
He added that he now planned on rooting for the Yankees. The Phillies were on their way to a 104-loss season, anyway. Eby did take him to a Yankees-A’s game, and it seems as if she had some clout: Among the players whom he met was the Yankees’ 28-year-old slugger, Babe Ruth. He also got a baseball signed by Ruth and other Yankees.
“He said, ‘Hiya, kid,’” Cotter said of Ruth in a 1998 interview with the Courier Post. “We shook hands. It was like meeting the King of England.”
The baseballs were kept on the mantelpiece of his home, two blocks from Baker Bowl, but times were tough, and baseballs were expensive. So much for the judge’s advice. After a month or so, the Cotter boys began playing with the baseballs at sandlots, and they fell apart.
That would seem to be the end of Toughie Reds’ cool story, but in 1998, Clark wrote to Larry Shenk, the head of public relations for the Phillies for 44 years, to remind him that 75 years had passed since the failed ball heist. Her grandfather was in poor health.
So Shenk arranged for the family, including his older brother, Raymond, to attend a Phillies game as guests at Veterans Stadium. The Phillies presented two autographed baseballs — one from the 1998 Phillies, the other from legendary former pitcher Robin Roberts.
Bob Cotter, age 88, died Feb. 23, 1999. Michael Cotter, one of his sons and Kelly Anne’s father, died in 2023. She wanted to keep the story alive, so she assembled a scrapbook, mostly for her grandchildren.
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“Now, it’s ingrained, part of the family history,” she said of her grandfather’s story.
Toughie Reds eventually became a Phillies fan, though he told USA Today in 1998 that he’d lost interest in grabbing foul balls to keep on the mantelpiece or sell for a quarter. “I duck if one comes my way,” he said.
Ah, but that was not always the case. In 1998, he said of the 1923 incident that made him famous: “I went home, and the whole neighborhood came around. I was the king of the castle for a month.”