Jim Thorpe moves on

Jim Thorpe – yes, that Jim Thorpe – switches major league teams for the final time 105 years ago Tuesday as the Boston Braves claim the 31-year-old outfielder off waivers from the New York Giants for $1,500.

Thorpe – whose 13-year, on-again, off-again tour around pro baseball includes spending part of the 1915 minor league season on Harrisburg’s City Island – plays his final year in the majors in 1919 before spending three more seasons in the minors at such minor league exotic ports of call as Akron, Toledo, Hartford and Worcester.

Thorpe leaves the majors after the 1919 season at the age of 32 to join a new pro football league that eventually morphs into today’s NFL.

“I have always liked sport and only played or run races for the fun of the thing,” Thorpe, the star of the 1912 Olympics, later says.

Others are more succinct when describing Thorpe’s enormous abilities.

“He was the greatest athlete who ever lived,” says Abel Kiviat, the silver medalist in the 1,500-meter run in the 1912 Olympics who also is Thorpe’s teammate and roommate at those Summer Games in Stockholm.

“What he had was natural ability,” Kiviat says. “There wasn’t anything he couldn’t do. All he had to see is someone doing something and he tried it – and he’d do it better.”