100 years ago, a big-leaguer known as ‘Icicle’ died on Christmas. A Phillies fan keeps his memory alive.

In what is now a Yuletide tradition, Karen Penn dropped by Laurel Hill Cemetery on a cloudy and chilly Monday morning recently to pay her respects, laying fresh Christmas greenery at the grave of a second cousin, three times removed, whom she never met.

This is a special year, because that cousin, Weston Dickson Fisler, died on Dec. 25, 1922, 100 years ago. Wes Fisler was a special relative, because, as Penn discovered while researching her family roots, he’d been a 19th century professional baseball player of note.

And yet, for reasons Penn can’t quite pinpoint, his grave was unmarked until five years ago.

As she fastened the arrangement to the soggy ground, Penn, 72, a retired schoolteacher from West Chester who later was a hostess for the Phillies at Citizens Bank Park, said softly, “It’s just a way of remembering him, especially because he died on Christmas Day.”

Fisler, who died of pneumonia at the age of 81 at Presbyterian Hospital, was not just any 19th century professional baseball player, but a dapper and smooth-fielding first baseman known as “Icicle,” because, as legend had it, he never lost his composure on the diamond.

He never gave the umpires a hard time, even when they made bad calls. Fisler told The Philadelphia Press more than 40 years after he retired: “I was a cool sort of player and never saw the necessity of getting all messed up and covered with dirt. I never got excited about anything.”

Fisler, 5-foot-6 and 137 pounds, was also known as “The Dandy of the Diamond.” As the Philadelphia Times reported after he played in an old-timers’ game in 1882, Fisler was “a great first baseman and would play an entire game wearing a little paper collar and come out at the end with the collar as fresh as when the game commenced.”

But with his style came a calm, Mike Schmidt-like efficiency. Tim Murnane wrote in Sporting Life in 1886 that Fisler was “one of the most graceful players that ever handled a ball.”

Plus, Wes Fisler was a part of baseball history. He played in the first game in the history of the National League on April 22, 1876, when Athletic (not Athletics) of Philadelphia lost, 6-5, to the Boston Red Caps before 3,000 at the Jefferson Street Grounds in North Philadelphia. It was the first NL game because the other games in the league that day were rained out.

The Boston catcher, Tim McGinley, was credited with scoring the first run in the game, which is regarded by Major League Baseball as the first game in its history. (In May 2021, Minnesota Twins third baseman Josh Donaldson scored the 2 millionth run in MLB history.)

Baseball, or base ball as it was called back then, was played without gloves, so there were 26 errors in that first game; thus, three of the 11 runs were earned. Penn, smiling, believes that it is possible that Icicle very well may have scored the first earned run in MLB history.

In any case, Fisler, then 29, played a central role in the first big-league game ever. He logged three hits, one run, a double play, and 13 putouts in the 2-hour, 5-minute contest, as reported by the Times the following Monday.

Despite his renown and contributions to the early growth of the sport in Philadelphia, Fisler lay in an unmarked grave at Laurel Hill Cemetery until Penn found out about him in 2017, some 95 years after his death. He was the well-educated son of a longtime mayor of Camden, Dr. Lorenzo F. Fisler, but he lived alone later in life and apparently had little money.

Icicle was not the main focus of her research. Years before she retired in 2009 after 34 years as a second-grade teacher at Coopertown Elementary School in Bryn Mawr, Penn had begun looking into how she and her family might be related to, yes, the William Penn who founded Pennsylvania in 1681.

That part of her project is ongoing. But she did discover that her grandmother, nee Susanna Fisler, was a descendant of an interesting branch of the family that settled in South Jersey. Clayton, in Gloucester County, used to be called Fislertown, or Fislerville.

In the spring of 2017, she discovered Lorenzo Fisler, the Camden mayor, then Wes, the youngest of his five children, who was a professional baseball player. This was an exciting side trip: She worked for the Phillies and remains an avid Phillies fan — she went to three playoff games in the team’s World Series run in 2022.

The Phillies were not established until 1883, seven years after Fisler’s last season with Athletic (though it has been reported that Wes Fisler, at the age of 42, tried out but failed to make that first Phillies team). But still, baseball in Philadelphia truly was in her blood.

“My father was a big Phillies fan,” Penn said. “I just inherited it from my dad.”

Then she learned that Wes Fisler was buried at Laurel Hill: Section 16, Plot 251. He’d kept a connection with the later ballclub known as the Athletics — he had a special seat in the left-field grandstand at Shibe Park — but Wes had never married and had no children.

A haberdasher and law clerk later in life (as well as an avid billiards player), Fisler lived in a rooming house on North Park Avenue, near the Temple University campus. Penn described him as “shy, unassuming, almost reclusive.” But he was important. Among other credentials, he went on an 1874 exhibition baseball tour of England with Philadelphia and Boston players.

Matt Albertson, 34, a Havertown resident who is the co-chair of the Society of Baseball Research (SABR) chapter in Philadelphia (and an occasional player of baseball games using 1864 rules), said of Fisler: “His career longevity needs to be highlighted.”

Albertson continued: “His baseball career begins in 1860, when the game is in its infancy, particularly in Philadelphia, and extends into the major-league era. In this 16-year period, baseball undergoes yearly rules changes. Teams were called clubs because they were literally social clubs whose members were interested in regular exercise.

“This changes by the end of the 1860s, when social clubs expand and also sponsor baseball teams. The Athletic club, for example, has many, many members beyond those on the field. In 1860, players were all amateurs, whereas at the end of the decade, top-quality clubs are either partially or fully professional.”

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Being a prodigious fielder alone was tough enough, considering that players did not wear gloves: “I can tell you from playing that if the ball comes at you quickly, it’s hard to handle,” Albertson said. But Fisler also batted .310 in his last six professional seasons. Athletic played from 1871 to 1875 in what was called the National Association, winning the title in 1871.

“Fisler maintained his high level of play throughout this tumultuous period,” Albertson said. “I can’t think of another player off the top of my head whose career began in 1860 and concluded in the major-league era.”

Thomas Eakins, the Philadelphia painter, immortalized Fisler, in a way, in an 1875 watercolor, Baseball Players Practicing, in which Fisler, with a bat, stands a little too close to a catcher and teammate, John Clapp, at the Jefferson Street Grounds in Brewerytown. A life-size replica of the painting is inside the recreation center at the site on Jefferson near 26th Street.

Albertson and SABR were vital in September 2017 in obtaining a state historical marker for the site. A year earlier, SABR had started a 19th Century Baseball Grave Marker Project, but Penn had already started working on buying gravestones at Laurel Hill for Wes Fisler and his niece, Anna, who died in 1884 at age 28 of tuberculosis.

She said she can’t remember the exact amount, but she says she spent about $3,000 for a new headstone for Wes and a replacement stone for Anna. Albertson was among those invited to a small dedication ceremony in the rain on Nov. 18, 2017. He brought a couple of bats and balls from the era and wore a replica of the kind of uniform the A’s wore in those days.

In a cemetery of majestic old monuments, it is a rather modest gray tombstone, with Fisler’s name, dates of birth and death, “Player for the Philadelphia Athletics, 1866-1876,” an etching of a ball and two bats, and the familiar A’s logo. But his grave is now marked.

A 2020 podcast about Laurel Hill Cemetery, “All Bones Considered,” mentioned the graves of Fisler and three other ballplayers who are buried there. Joe Lex, the host, said in the podcast of Fisler’s tombstone: “Unfortunately, it does not mention him being the Icicle.”

Well, there was only so much room. One hundred years on, with traffic humming past on West Hunting Park Avenue and a train whistling in the distance, Icicle surely would have been grateful to receive a regular repeat visitor, let alone a second cousin, three times removed.