William A. Sunday Autographs, Memorabilia & Collectibles

Billy Sunday (1862-1935), born William Ashley Sunday, was a poor orphan before he joined major league baseball. He was an outfielder, mostly for the Chicago White Stockings and the Pittsburgh Alleghenys, from 1883 to 1890 and developed into a quick and popular player, batting .248 lifetime with 12 home runs and 170 RBIs and placing in the top 10 for stolen bases in three season (1888-1890). He became a born-again Christian and left baseball in 1891 to join the Chicago YMCA. In 1893, he became an assistant to traveling evangelical preacher John Wilbur Chapman. When Chapman gave up the evangelical circuit in 1896, Sunday set out on his own and, in the course of 300 revivals, preached to an estimated total audience of 100,000,000 (many of them repeat attendees). He was renowned for his fire-and-brimstone preaching style and his on-stage antics, which included leaping, shouting and howling in the pulpit - antics that led some to call him a sensationalist. Sunday was also a major advocate of prohibition and reached the peak of his popularity in the period of 1915 to 1917, just before the passage of the 18th Amendment, with revivals in major cities like New York City, Boston, Philadelphia and Detroit. He was ordained a Presbyterian minister in 1903 but was theologically a Fundamentalist Christian.