Despite baseball’s growing popularity at the end of the 1800s, players weren’t yet earning significant salaries. And unlike today, salaries fluctuated greatly from year to year. For example, according to the Society for American Baseball Research, the highest paid player in 1874 made $2,800, which went down to $1,800 in 1879 (equivalent to about $57,000 and $42,000 in 2017, respectively). In 1889, the highest paid player made $5,000 (around $126,000 today), before that number dropped back down to $1,800 in 1899 (around $50,000 today). After the playing season, which was much shorter then than it is now, many athletes took to the vaudeville stage rather than returning to their hometowns and getting blue-collar jobs. Catchers were especially sought out for vaudeville, because they had a reputation as raconteurs and were known for their banter with batters during games, David Soren, the Regents’ Professor of Anthropology and Classics at the University of Arizona, told me.

Soren is a former vaudevillian himself. Although he never worked with professional baseball players, he was as an opening act for the Philadelphia Eagles football team in the early 1950s. From the age of nine, Soren sang, danced, and did impressions as part of a children’s repertory company for CBS, performing on a show called The Horn and Hardart Children’s Hour on Sundays and then touring with different vaudeville units the rest of the week. He ultimately left show business in order to study archaeology at Harvard University. Today, Soren works on the extensive digital collection of the University of Arizona’s American Vaudeville Museum Archive, and teaches courses on forgotten vaudeville stars.

Starting as early as the 1860s, Soren said, baseball players started moonlighting as stage performers, telling amusing anecdotes and answering questions about their time in the big leagues, as well as doing skill demonstrations. If they had even the slightest bit of musical talent, they’d be brought onstage to sing, dance, or play a little piano—one of the most famous examples being Babe Ruth’s little ditty where he lists various baseball words while swinging his arms, accompanied by a band. Occasionally, promoters would hire joke writers for the players to keep the act sharp, but they were primarily left to their own devices in order to keep costs down. In one example, the eccentric pitcher Rube Waddell, who played in the majors between 1897 and 1910, also toured with the vaudeville melodrama The Stain of Guilt and wrestled with alligators during the Philadelphia Athletics’ 1903 spring training in Jacksonville.

Cap Anson—infamous for helping to establish racial segregation in baseball in the 1880s—also ended up on the stage when he wasn’t playing 27 consecutive seasons for teams like the Chicago White Stockings and Colts. He started acting during the 1888 off-season, making his stage debut in Charles Hale Hoyt’s play A Parlor Match, then appearing as himself in an 1895 Broadway play called A Runaway Colt. Anson retired from the game in 1897 and made his vaudeville debut in 1913, performing recitations, skits, and a short dance number, sometimes alongside his two daughters. He even went so far as to have personalized stationary printed with the inscription “A Greater Actor Than Any Ballplayer, a Greater Ballplayer Than Any Actor,” according to the book Cap Anson: The Grand Old Man of Baseball by David Fleitz.