Wallet Card at a mysterious vintage Cubs reference in a Long Island town

The other day I was going for a walk in my town (Oceanside, NY). I noticed a Chance Drive, and then an Evans Lane. 

Sure enough there was a Tinker Drive close by.

This was clearly no coincidence, but a reference to the famous 1900s Cubs infield of "Tinker to Evers to Chance", immortalized in song and popular culture. (It was Groucho Marx's answer when asked what was his favorite play.)

I couldn't find a definitive answer but the research was interesting. It looks like the streets were planned in 1950, and the houses were built in 1951. The three streets make up a tiny neighborhood called "Brower Manor", as Brower is the larger street they branch off of. The land was previously unbuilt, and appears to have been marshy/swampy land.

On the lower half of the map you will see that the land belonged to a golf course; that same year taxpayers voted to annex half of the golf course, including this land, to build a new, larger high school. (The golf course built nine new holes on filled in beach and remains to this day.) I didn't see a builder name or anything that might indicate the origin of this particular development. In a 1976 newspaper I found a mention of residents of that neighborhood having a party to celebrate paying off their mortgages (I guess it was 25-year mortgages then). The article called it "Brower Manor, the Tinker-to-Evers-to-Chance streets". These days I doubt most residents even get the connection.

But why these names? Did the builder just like the sound of it? Or was there a deeper connection? The closest I could find sent me into a rabbit hole of semi-pro baseball on Long Island in the 1930s. There was a team called the Long Island Paragon which played their home games on the old high school field in Oceanside. That team was managed (owned?) by a local man named Ben Mulvey. According to some articles Mulvey had played for the minor league Providence Grays. (There was a 19th-century Grays star called Joe Mulvey, but I couldn't find any Ben Mulvey who played for them.)

In 1935, one of the big news stories in baseball was the saga of Alabama Pitts. Pitts was an ex-con (armed robbery) who proved to be a major-league-caliber talent on the Sing Sing prison baseball club. After his release from prison in 1935 he signed with the International League's Albany Senators, who were managed by the former Cubs star Johnny Evers. The President of the International League refused to approve Pitts's contract, so Pitts appealed to MLB commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Evers publicly declared he would quit if Pitts was not allowed to play.

While Pitts was awaiting Landis's decision, an article from the Nassau Daily Review, Ben Mulvey wired a contract offer to Pitts, via Mulvey's old friend, Johnny Evers. The offer was $30 a week to play for the Long Island Paragon. The columnist noted how unlikely Pitts would be to take the offer, as he could make double to play for the House of David traveling team, or take one of several Hollywood offers. Eventually Landis declared Pitts reformed and eligible to play. Pitts never made the majors but played for several minor league teams before being fatally stabbed in a bar fight in 1941.

So someone with Oceanside connections (Mulvey actually lived in nearby Freeport) was friends with Evers. That is the closest connection I could make. I don't know when Mulvey died but he was still living in Freeport in 1956. He seemed to be active in sports and entertaining but I saw no connection with him and homebuilding or real estate.

It's an interesting mystery, and led to some fun research. Also there was this old (replica?) Texaco gas pump in front of one of the houses on one of these streets. A 1950s Studebaker too, which for some reason the owner decided to paint a Deadpool joke on. Takes all kinds I guess.