He died four months later of pneumonia at an army camp in Patterson, Missouri, five weeks after the birth of his youngest son, William Ashley.

In Nevada, Iowa, he worked for Colonel John Scott, a former lieutenant governor, tending Shetland ponies and doing other farm chores.

In 1887, when Kelly was sold to another team, Sunday became Chicago's regular right fielder, but an injury limited his playing time to fifty games.

[13] The Philadelphia team had an opportunity to win the National League pennant, and the owners hoped that adding Sunday to the roster would improve their chances.

In the days before outfielders wore gloves, Sunday was noted for thrilling catches featuring long sprints and athletic dives, but he also committed a great many errors.

[20] In 1886, Sunday was introduced at Jefferson Park Presbyterian Church to Helen Amelia "Nell" Thompson, daughter of the owner of one of Chicago's largest dairy products businesses.

[21] Furthermore, Nell Thompson had grown to maturity in a much more privileged environment than had Sunday, and her father strongly discouraged the courtship, viewing all professional baseball players as "transient ne'er-do-wells who were unstable and destined to be misfits once they were too old to play.

Sunday's job as Chapman's advance man was to precede the evangelist to cities in which he was scheduled to preach, organize prayer meetings and choirs, and in general take care of necessary details.

Further, Chapman encouraged Sunday's theological development, especially by emphasizing the importance of prayer and by helping to "reinforce Billy's commitment to conservative biblical Christianity.

[29] When Sunday began to attract crowds larger than could be accommodated in rural churches or town halls, he pitched rented canvas tents.

[30] In 1906, an October snowstorm in Salida, Colorado, destroyed Sunday's tent – a special disaster because revivalists were typically paid with a freewill offering at the end of their meetings.

At least at first, raising tabernacles provided good public relations for the coming meetings as townspeople joined in what was effectively a giant barnraising.

For her part, Nell found it increasingly difficult to handle household responsibilities, the needs of four children (including a newborn), and the long-distance emotional welfare of her husband.

There were musicians, custodians, and advance men; but the Sundays also hired Bible teachers of both genders, who among other responsibilities, held daytime meetings at schools and shops and encouraged their audiences to attend the main tabernacle services in the evenings.

Typically, Homer Rodeheaver would first warm up the crowd with congregational singing that alternated with numbers from gigantic choirs and music performed by the staff.

Denison wrote, "In spite of his conviction that the truly religious man should take his religion joyfully, he gets his results by inspiring fear and gloom in the hearts of sinners.

The fear of death, with torment beyond it—intensified by examples of the frightful deathbeds of those who have carelessly or obdurately put off salvation until it is too late—it is with this mighty menace that he drives sinners into the fold.

Nurseries were always provided, infants forbidden, and Sunday sometimes appeared rude in his haste to rid the hall of noisy children who had slipped through the ushers.

Sunday dined with numerous politicians, including Presidents Theodore Roosevelt and Woodrow Wilson, and counted both Herbert Hoover and John D. Rockefeller Jr. as friends.

In 1911, the Sundays moved to Winona Lake, Indiana, and built an American Craftsman-style bungalow, which they called "Mount Hood", probably as a reminder of their Oregon vacation cabin.

The bungalow, furnished in the popular Arts and Crafts style, had two porches and a terraced garden but only nine rooms, 2,500 square feet (230 m2) of living space, and no garage.

Also, cards filled out by "trail hitters" were faithfully returned to the church or denomination that the writers had indicated as their choice, including Catholic and Unitarian.

"[58] Sunday never attended seminary and made no pretense of being a theologian or an intellectual, but he had a thorough knowledge of the Bible and was well read on religious and social issues of his day.

His surviving Winona Lake library of six hundred books gives evidence of heavy use, including underscoring and reader's notes in his characteristic all-caps printing.

"[60] Sunday claimed to be "an old-fashioned preacher of the old-time religion"[61] and his uncomplicated sermons spoke of a personal God, salvation through Jesus Christ, and following the moral lessons of the Bible.

[62] Sunday was a lifelong Republican, and he espoused the mainstream political and social views of his native Midwest: individualism, competitiveness, personal discipline, and opposition to government regulation.

[63] Writers such as Sinclair Lewis,[64] Henry M. Tichenor,[65] and John Reed attacked Sunday as a tool of big business, and poet Carl Sandburg called him a "four-flusher" and a "bunkshooter.

[71] In another instance, in 1927, in Bangor, Maine, Sunday's partner and music director, Homer Rodeheaver, told Klansmen who briefly interrupted the service that "he did not believe that any organization that marched behind the Cross of Christ and the American Flag could be anything but a power for good.

[75] Sunday had been an ardent champion of temperance from his earliest days as an evangelist, and his ministry at the Chicago YMCA had given him first-hand experience with the destructive potential of alcohol.

Sunday's most famous sermon was "Get on the Water Wagon", which he preached on countless occasions with both histrionic emotion and a "mountain of economic and moral evidence."