It would not be fair or correct to say that “Long Larry” McLean was nothing but trouble for the Cincinnati Reds. While the Reds put up with a lot of McLean’s shenanigans, he was a mainstay of the club for a half dozen years in the early 1900s.

To this day, McLean, at 6’ 5" holds the record as the tallest catcher in major league history. While he was with the Reds, he batted .266 and started more than 100 games a year. The other 50 games, he was suspended due to alcoholic binges, contract disputes or general disorderly conduct.

John Bannerman “Larry” McLean was Canadian born and came to the Reds via the minor league team out in Portland, Oregon. He almost didn’t accept Cincinnati’s invitation because he was holding out for more money, but was in uniform for the final weeks of the 1906 season.

The next six years saw McLean following a troublesome pattern: Each year began with great hopes until he was suspended for violating training rules, forgiven until he missed games, eventually invited back, all the while looking for another club to take him off Cincinnati’s hands. The problem was, most of the other teams passed on McLean, despite Cincinnati’s offer to sweeten the deal with $10,000 cash.In 1909 the Cincinnati Post ran a plea on the sports pages, begging “Larry’s friends” to stop plying him with alcohol.

“There isn’t a better fellow in the world than this same Larry when the men, who CLAIM THEY ARE HIS FRIENDS, KEEP THEIR HANDS OFF OF HIM. Why can’t Larry’s friends help him? Why can’t the men who think it is something worth bragging about to show a ballplayer a good time, exercise their influence in a different way and assist big Larry to reach the heights he would be able to attain if given the proper kind of encouragement?”

Despite his escapades and tirades, McLean was popular with the Reds fans and appeared on Cincinnati vaudeville stages in the off-season, regaling audiences at B.F. Keith’s Columbia theater with his “screaming sketch,” “Chased By The Umpire.” Keith’s also touted McLean’s “Eloquent Speech to Baseball Fans.”

It is true that McLean usually had a good story to tell. Like that time he was attacked by a dwarf in Key West. Let McLean tell the story via the Cincinnati Post [21 December 1908]:

“We were out sight-seeing and [Mike] Mitchell and I had stopped at the booth of a little fellow who claimed to be the smallest man on earth. He came up to about my knees. Mike almost went into a laughing fit when he saw the two of us standing side-by-side and the little man eyed both of us fiercely. Mitchell backed away while I was looking over some postcards the ‘smallest man’ had for sale and got his camera to working. Our diminutive friend turned around just as Mitchell snapped the picture and caught him in the act. I never saw anybody so sore in all my life. He growled like a wild animal and attacked me with such vigor that I was dismayed for a moment. He could reach only a short distance above my knees, but pounded away for dear life. I smiled down at him, good-naturedly, but he couldn’t see anything to laugh about and kept up his bombardment until Mike and I got tired of laughing and walked away.”

Later, McLean and John L. Sullivan, the boxer, traveled the circuit giving speeches in favor of Prohibition. The newspapers were a bit confused because neither was anything like a teetotaler, but assumed they were conversant in the evils of demon rum.

The local newspapers announced “Long Larry” was leaving in March 1910, but he stayed and had a stellar year, posting a .289 batting average. Trade rumors ran again in December 1911, but no other clubs would take him. An almost identical story ran in December 1912, but this time the rumors were true. McLean was shipped to St. Louis where his former Reds teammate, Miller Huggins, was just beginning a Hall of Fame managerial career.

Huggins had enough after one year and traded McLean to the New York Giants. McLean played only 122 games in total over three seasons with the Giants (including the 1913 World Series), and was finally dismissed mid-season in 1915 after getting into a drunken brawl with Giants Manager John McGraw and coach Dick Kinsella.

McLean took his vaudeville skills to the movies for a while and then ran a semi-professional baseball team in New York City before retiring to a farm in Massachusetts.

McLean was shot dead on March 14, 1921 in Boston by a bartender during a fight in a barroom. In a statement to the police, the bartender, one John J. Connor, declared that he fired in self-defense when McLean climbed the bar to attack him. The night before, in the same bar, Connor said, McLean had chased another bartender out of the saloon during a night of heavy drinking.

In 1937, McLean got one single vote on the Hall of Fame ballot, the only vote he ever received. And then “Long Larry” faded from memory.

