The Disabled Boys of Summer

by Warren Shaw

You may know about Jim Abbott, the one-handed pitcher who brought glory to the Yankees and other teams, playing Major League Baseball (MLB), 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 professional baseball player with a disability is Hugh Daily. Active in the Majors from 1892 to 1898, he was, like Abbott, 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 with one hand may be (and don’t forget Chad Bentz, who pitched in the style of Jim Abbott style from 2004-2005), there was outfielder Pete Gray, who had only one arm, and played 77 games for the St. Louis Browns in 1945.

And let’s not forget the baseball players with lower limb-related 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. 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 sustaining a war injury that meant he permanently needed to wear 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 and made it to the All Stars in 1949. It is said that in his prime he could throw the ball at close to 100 miles per hour.

Then there’s Tom Sunkel, who played for the New York Giants, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the 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 historically objectified as “novelty acts,” and none more so than Eddie Gaedel, a little 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 with the 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 to 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 most important book about baseball.

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 center field (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. Nicknamed “Dummy,” as many deaf people unfortunately were in his day, Hoy embraced his nickname and actually corrected people who referred to him as William.

In fact, there have been 10 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, a completely unacceptable term 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.