The Disabled Boys of Summer
In this image – Lou Brissie at the pitcher's mound, ca. 1950. Note his braced left leg.
You may know about Jim Abbott, the one-handed pitcher who brought glory to the Yankees and other teams, playing MLB, or Major League Baseball, from 1989 to 1999.
You may know of his unique technique of throwing a pitch then gloving his hand in time to field any ball hit near him. You may have marveled at his abilities. Perhaps you even took disability pride in him.
But Abbott is not alone as an MLB player with a disability.
More than twenty men with disabilities have played MLB over the past 130 years, both before and after Abbott. They are the Disabled “Boys of Summer.”
The earliest known pro baseball player with a disability is Hugh Daily. Active in the Majors from 1892 to 1898, like Abbott he was a one handed pitcher.
Daily was such a disagreeable character (he once slugged a catcher who threw to him too hard) that no team ever re-signed him for a second season, but the crowds loved him for bellowing at umpires and opponents.
I guess he was something like the John McEnroe of baseball. Like McEnroe, Daily was no slouch on the field—his unofficial record of twenty strikeout games has never been surpassed (though it has been tied a few times).
As remarkable as a pitcher missing a hand may be (and don’t forget Chad Bentz, who pitched Jim Abbott style in 2004-5), how about an outfielder missing a whole arm? That’s Pete Gray, who played 77 games for the St. Louis Browns in 1945.
And let’s not forget the baseball players with leg disabilities—Monty Stratton, Bert Shepard, and Lou Brissie. Shepard was a pitcher who lost his right leg during World War Two, but returned to the Majors for one game, on August 4, 1945. He allowed only three hits and one run, and struck out Catfish Metkovich. Monty Stratton attempted a comeback after losing a leg, and became the subject of a 1949 film, “The Stratton Story,” which starred Jimmy Stewart.
As for Brissie, he didn’t join the Majors until after a war injury that left him permanently using a full-length metal brace on his left leg. He pitched for the Philadelphia Athletics and the Cleveland Indians over six seasons from 1947 to 1953, made it to the All Stars in 1949, and it is said that in his prime he could throw the ball at close to 100 miles per hour.
Tom Sunkel played for the New York Giants, the Brooklyn Dodgers and St. Louis Cardinals from 1937 to 1944, pitching and batting with his head cocked sharply to the side, the result of blindness in one eye.
Some disabled players were more novelty acts than anything else, and none more so than Eddie Gaedel, a short person who stood 3 feet 7 inches. He was a World War Two riveter and a stuntman, but he came to bat in the second game of a doubleheader for the St. Louis Browns in 1951, wearing a jersey that bore the uniform number “1/8.”
Conversely, some disabled athletes played particularly important roles in America’s pastime. The resoundingly named Mordecai Peter Centennial Brown helped define the curveball while playing MLB from 1903 to 1916, turning two partially missing fingers into an advantage, and earning the name “Three Finger Brown.” He finished his career with a 239-130 record and 1,375 strikeouts, and was elected into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1949.
Likewise Luther Taylor, a deaf pitcher who played for the Cleveland Blues and New York Giants between 1900 and 1908, was one of the most important players on the Giants’ championship teams of 1904 and 1905.
Said to have been the highest paid deaf person in the United States, Taylor was the subject of the historical novel “Havana Heat,” published in 2000, which won the Dave Moore Award for the most important book about baseball.
Taylor was also known for clowning around, wearing a lit lantern to protest an umpire who refused to call a game on account of darkness. The umpire yelled at him to get off the field, but Taylor couldn’t hear him and simply went on playing, until the umpire finally gave in and called the game.
Then there’s William Ellsworth Hoy, who played for the Cincinnati Reds and other teams between 1888 and 1902. He compiled records for games played in centerfield (1,726), and a never-surpassed record in 1889 by throwing out three runners at home plate in one game.
Hoy is said to have developed the hand signals used by umpires to this day—a logical enough development for a deaf player with limited speaking ability. Nicknamed “Dummy,” as were many deaf people in his day, Hoy embraced his nickname and actually corrected people who referred to him as William.
There have been ten deaf MLB players, and most of them were known as “Dummy.” Along with Hoy and Taylor, they include Ed Dundon, Thomas Lynch, Reuben Stephenson, William Deegan, George Leitner, Herbert Murphy and Dick Sipek.
“Dummy” is, of course, completely unacceptable in our time. It seems symbolically fitting, then, that the most recent deaf MLB athlete, an outfielder who played from 1993 to 2006, was named Curtis Pride.
Note: A version of this entry appeared in Able News, https://ablenews.com/
DHNYC thanks Stuart Baron for his assistance in the preparation of this entry.
