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Rube Waddell
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| Pitcher | Oakland/Kansas
City/Philadelphia Athletics
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Rube Waddell |
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Rube Waddell |
Waddell grew up on the farmlands around Bradford, PA. "He often missed school," said his sister, "but I could always find him playing ball, fishing or following a fire engine."
Waddell wrestled alligators in Florida, hung around in firehouses, married two women who then left him, and tended bar when he wasn't the saloon's best customer. He held up the start of games he was scheduled to pitch while he played marbles with children outside the park. He was once arrested for assaulting a fan who had criticized his pitching (on July 17, 1903), and had to flee the county of Lynn, Massachusetts, to avoid being charged with assaulting his wife's parents (on February 10, 1905).
There was a provision in Waddell's contract barring him from eating Animal Crackers in bed. In those days, two players had to share a double bed on the road, and Ossie Schreckengost was Waddell's catcher and roommate. "Schreck wouldn't sign unless he saw that clause in Waddell's contract," said Mack, "so I wrote it in there, and the Rube stuck to it."
He pitched for a college team for one year, and for town teams at $25 a game, before signing his first contract with Louisville (NL) in 1897. He was playing for Pittsburgh when, unhappy with the stern discipline of manager Fred Clarke, he jumped the club. Clarke, preferring not to have to deal with the flaky hurler, let him go.
Waddell went on to become one of the premier lefthanders in the game - next to Christy Mathewson and Mordecai "Three Finger" Brown, no one was as dominant in the early 1900s. He won 20 games or more from 1902 to 1905, a stretch in which he went 97-52 for Connie Mack's Athletics and had an ERA of 1.88 - this is one of the best four-year runs in major league history. He led the Athletics to pennants in 1902 and 1905; won two ERA titles (in 1900 and 1905) and runnered up twice more (1902 and 1904); led the league in strikeouts for six straight seasons, from 1902 to 1907; and set a single-season record for strikeouts with 349 in 1904 that would stand for more than two generations, until 1965, when Sandy Koufax broke it. (In 1946, Bob Feller appeared to break the record by striking out 348 batters, because Waddell had originally been credited with 347 strikeouts; later research, however, gives Waddell 349 victims. Waddell's old record of 347 was apparently based on the compilations of George Moreland, an early baseball historian, and listed in Little Red Book. The Sporting News researchers later revise Waddell's total to 349.)
Like the legendary Satchel Paige, Waddell occasionally enjoyed waving his teammates off the field and then striking out the side. Of course, league rules prohibit playing with fewer than nine men on the field in regulation play, so he would only do this in spring training - however, once, in a league game in Detroit, Waddell had his outfielders come in close and sit down on the grass. He struck out the side.
Once the stunt almost backfired. Pitching an exhibition in Memphis, he took the field alone with his catcher, Doc Powers, for the last three innings. With two out in the ninth, Powers dropped a third strike, allowing the batter to reach first. The next two hitters patted flies that fell behind the mound. Waddell ran himself ragged but finally fanned the last man.
Though Waddell was always a fan favorite, his erratic behavior and declining effectiveness strained the tolerance of his teammates. Some threatened not to report in the spring of 1908 unless Mack got rid of him. Waddell was shipped to the Browns. That July 29, he tied what was then the AL single-game strikeout record by fanning 16 of his former A's teammates.
By 1910 Waddell was back in the minors. He won 20 games for Joe Cantillon's Minneapolis (American Association) club in 1911. In the spring of 1912, he was staying at Cantillon's house in Hickman, Kentucky, when a nearby river flooded. Standing in icy water, Waddell helped pile sandbags on the embankments. The incident affected his health; though he went 12-6 that year, he collapsed while with Virginia (Northern League) in 1913 and landed in a sanatorium in San Antonio, Texas.
He was picked up in St. Louis, wandering around the streets and suffering from consumption, on November 17, 1913. Weakened by his heroic effort to help contain a winter flood in Kentucky, he died at 37 of tuberculosis, in the San Antonio sanitarium, in 1914 on April Fool's Day.
Picture from National Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum, Inc.
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