Paddy Quinn

Who was Paddy Quinn?

Patrick "Paddy" Quinn was an American baseball player in the first professional league. He played catcher in five games for the 1871 Fort Wayne Kekiongas and he appeared in two other more major league seasons in the 1870s.

Quinn was a regular league player during only one season, with three teams in 1875, primarily as a catcher. He led the Keokuk Westerns in batting average with 14 hits, working 11 of 13 games before that club went out of business. He moved on to Hartford and Chicago, 33 games in all. In the National League two seasons later, he returned to the Chicago White Stockings for four games in the outfield.

Quinn was a Chicago native and he played there as an amateur at the dawn of the professional era. The National Association of Base Ball Players first permitted professional clubs in 1869 and the White Stockings were established as Chicago's first pro club one year later. Quinn played for Aetna of Chicago, a respectable member of the amateur class.

Jimmy Hallinan also played for the Aetnas of Chicago in 1870, when both Hallinan and Quinn turned 21 years old during the baseball season. In 1871 they both played a few games for the Kekiongas of Fort Wayne, Indiana, and the next league experience for both was at age 26 with the Westerns of Keokuk, Iowa in 1875. Little is known about baseball in the 1870s, outside the leagues, but it seems that many clubs such as the Aetnas and their amateur or semipro rivals continued to operate, and thus adult players outside the leagues, such as Hallinan and Quinn before 1875, continued to play competitively. According to one obituary, Hallinan played four season for Aetna beginning 1870.