Interesting facts about Pre-War Players - share yours

[BillyCoxDodgers3B]

Al Moore's place of death is "Atlantic Ocean".

Sticking with Porray, he was a Vaudeville actor & professional musician. Not too many players found a full-time career in music. Connie Creeden was a professional drummer.

[chiprop]

I believe this is the only player in the t-206 set that has a mustache...

036CFB03-85CB-4D92-85EA-0E6BF9CFD059_1_201_a.jpg

Sam Barkley, the Grandfather of the name "Pittsburg Pirates"

[Rad_Hazard]

Paul Hines achieved the first Triple Crown in baseball history.

Excerpt from Fifty-Nine in '84: Old Hoss Radbourn, Barehanded Baseball, and the Greatest Season a Pitcher Ever Had by Edward Achorn:

Hines was a notorious character. Vain, competitive, and poorly educated, he was so deaf that he needed to hold a brass trumpet to his ear to hear what others were saying, and he often talked out loud to himself, as if such a conversation were as natural as any other. At one point that season, when umpire Billy McLean warned him that he would be fined if he kept sassing umpires in his audible monologues, Hines grumbled to himself, “If me was out of debt, me would not play ball another day.” He liked to boast to his teammates that he had been raised in an affluent Washington family, but when one actually looked up Hines’s “good Hibernian parents” one day, he was shocked to learn they lived in a shanty.

His honesty was suspect in other ways, too. Once he stole another man’s prized buckskin baseball shoes, and when the man asked Hines if he had seen them, he got no answer. “Paul is very deaf when he wants to be, and the shoes were carried off,” a Cleveland Herald reporter recounted. The next time Hines played against the man’s team, he did not dare to wear the stolen shoes, and went out on the field in his street shoes. Hines cost his team the game by slipping, trying to field a fly ball that soared over his head, prompting his manager to fine him for his poor performance—more than the stolen shoes were worth. On another occasion, a reporter had deposited at a hotel front desk his official score of a game, for use by a fellow newspaperman. Upon returning, “I found Paul at work on it, with a carpenter’s pencil as thick as a club, changing his single hit into two. He was at once so deaf as to be unable to hear my admonition against any future trick of the kind.” Even without the benefit of fraudulent scoring, he was a great hitter, and had twice led the National League in batting.

[ParisianJohn]

Rice.jpg

In 1912 when a 22 year-old Sam Rice was pitching for his minor league team on the road in Illinois his wife and their two little children went to stay with his parents in Indiana. At that time a tornado came through and destroyed Rice's parents' home and killed his wife, both of their kids, his parents and two of his sisters.

Rice is then said to have wandered around the US for a year before joining the US Navy. He even wound up being involved in the Battle of Veracruz down in Mexico before leaving the service and returning to baseball. Rice switched to the outfield and wound up making the Majors in 1915 at age 25 - not too old, but probably a bit older than he'd have been if life hadn't detour him. He played only 4 games that season and 58 the next season in 1916. After being a full-timer in 1917, he played only 7 games in 1918 before being recalled to military service due to World War I. After training, Rice was sent to France but never saw action as the war ended. At that time he was 28 and had only 247 hits.

Rice made up for it and played until he was 44 and racked up 2,987 hits when he retired in 1934. There was no Hall of Fame yet, and with less folks like us around to let him know, Rice said he had no clue he was so close to 3,000 hits. Despite a .322 lifetime average he wasn't a big power hitter and he missed that "magic number" of 3,000 hits, so he didn't get into the Hall until the Veterans Committee elected him in 1963 when he was 73 years-old.

Rice had remarried and two years later in 1965 he was being interviewed about his life in front of his wife and stepchildren. It was only during that interview that they learned about that 1912 tornado and his old family.

Above is my 1933 Goudey of Rice.

[ValKehl]

A couple of additions to John's post about Sam Rice. Rice told very few, if any, of his teammates about the tragedy that befell his family.

Rice actually came to the Senators as a pitcher in 1915. Clark Griffith acquired Rice from the Petersburg Goobers of the Virginia League in exchange for cancelling a debt of several hundred dollars owed to Griffith by the cash-strapped Goobers owner. Rice's MLB pitching record for 1915-16 is 1 win and 1 loss with a 2.52 ERA. It wasn't until July 1916 that Rice was converted to a full-time outfielder.

Sam Rice's SABR bio is an interesting read: https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Sam-Rice/

[ParisianJohn]

Originally Posted by ValKehl

A couple of additions to John's post about Sam Rice. Rice told very few, if any, of his teammates about the tragedy that befell his family.

Rice actually came to the Senators as a pitcher in 1915. Clark Griffith acquired Rice from the Petersburg Goobers of the Virginia League in exchange for cancelling a debt of several hundred dollars owed to Griffith by the cash-strapped Goobers owner. Rice's MLB pitching record for 1915-16 is 1 win and 1 loss with a 2.52 ERA. It wasn't until July 1916 that Rice was converted to a full-time outfielder.

Sam Rice's SABR bio is an interesting read: https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/Sam-Rice/

Thanks for that correction on when Rice switched to the outfield, thus making his career hit total more impressive.

In addition to his SABR bio Val posted, here is an article Sports Illustrated wrote about him in 1993. I read it as a teenager and was fascinated by the man, this his card was the first Goudey I ever bought (it does cover a lot of the same ground that the SABR bio has, but they don't totally overlap):

https://vault.si.com/vault/1993/07/1...re-was-nowhere