"Murderer's Row" non-Yankee-1905

[Sam Clements]

Ha!  I speet on your Yankees!   They stole the term.

RHDAS has an 1858 cite, supposedly.

Dickson's Baseball Dictionary tells about that early cite, but I'm not sure
if it's real or not.

>From Ancestry.com, with a quick, down-and-dirty search, we get, from the
Washington Post, April 24, 1905, page 8, col. 6, the following:

     <<Yale's hitting in the last few years has been a cross between a crime
and a joke, but this year the cry is loud for hitters and Lush, a memember
of "Murderer's Row," as pitchers call the first six batters on the Cleveland
list, is there to teach the team the art. >>

So, Fred, there's your Yale connection.  Six degrees of separation from Fred
Shapiro.  :)

Of course, the player in question, assuming it was Billy Lush, played for
Cleveland in 1904(his last season) and had a lifetime batting average of
.249.  No doubt he should have been a memeber of "manslaughterer's row"
instead of full-bore murderer's row.