Like his father, Bert was called by his initials, and the nickname “B.W.” stuck with him throughout life. He had one sister, Pearl May, who was two years younger. The Abbey children attended the schoolhouse on East Road in Essex and played together since there were no other children living near the farm. Bert spent much of his childhood fishing and hunting. When he went to middle school at the Essex Classical Institute, his favorite subject, not surprisingly, was natural history. Bert’s interest in that subject continued: Initially he studied classical languages at the University of Vermont, but according to family legend, sometime in 1890 Bert stoked the fire with his Greek and Latin texts and enrolled in the natural-science course.

Not until the fall of 1886, when he arrived at Vermont Academy in Saxtons River, did Bert develop an interest in baseball. On September 27, 1886, he played his first organized game against the Putney town team. Though no records of the outcome are known to exist, the Vermont Academy lineup that day lists Abbey as starting pitcher, batting clean-up. One day that fall, after returning from a Vermont Academy game, Bert experimented with a curveball for the first time. He collected a bunch of baseballs and started snapping off curves at a marked target on a barn. “I finally got so I could curve a ball and still keep it under control,” he said. After leaving Vermont Academy in February 1887, Bert continued practicing back at the farm, recruiting his sister to serve as catcher.

Bert Abbey entered the University of Vermont in the fall of 1887 and formed the school’s first freshman baseball team. “That fall the varsity went to Dartmouth and got trounced,” he said. “When they returned we challenged them to a game. I pitched and struck out 16 men. (I really struck out 18, but in those days they didn’t count the first two fouls as strikes.) So we trounced the varsity, too, and they ended up taking five of us onto their team.”

By the spring of 1888 when Abbey joined the varsity, baseball had a long if not illustrious history at UVM. It was a club sport as early as 1866, and UVM’s first intercollegiate game, a 44-4 loss to Middlebury, took place on May 29, 1882. Playing home games at Athletic Park off Riverside Avenue, the current site of Charlebois Trucking, UVM competed in the Vermont Intercollegiate Baseball League against Middlebury and Norwich.

In 1889, with Abbey on the mound and a team composed mostly of “medics” (medical students, who composed a third of the student body, typically made up more than half the team), UVM dominated the VIBL, prompting a demand from the other two schools that only “academics” be eligible to play. UVM’s refusal caused the league to disband after the 1889 season, but by then UVM had outgrown the level of competition it could find within Vermont’s borders.

Bert Abbey also left Vermont that summer in search of tougher competition. He hooked on with the Shamrocks of St. Johns, New Brunswick, and rapidly earned a reputation as a “dazzler.” Between his “out curve” and his “lightning drop,” Abbey consistently racked up double-digit strikeouts. After one such performance, the St. Johns Daily Sun wrote: “The Shamrocks made a ten strike when they secured Abbey. He is a darling twirler and has excellent command of the ball. He has an easy delivery, throws quickly to bases and is as cool as a cucumber.”

Returning to college that fall, Abbey was named UVM’s coach and captain as a junior, and under his direction the team underwent its first “systematic training.” Abbey required players to exercise at the Burlington YMCA and held winter practices in a room under the university chapel in the basement of the Old Mill. The hard work paid off: “On Decoration Day, 1890, we beat Dartmouth at home for the first time,” Bert said. “This called for a night-shirt parade down Pearl and Church streets to celebrate.”

Bert led a campaign to keep the UVM varsity together as a summer team in 1890. After he convinced them that baseball was a benefit to the community, Burlington’s business leaders donated over $500 to cover travel expenses and salaries for the players. In what became a tradition over the next three summers, the UVM varsity played a heavy schedule against professional teams from all over the East Coast, including the John Morrills (headed by the popular ex-captain of the Boston Red Stockings) and the Cuban Giants (a great Negro barnstorming team).

Playing for pay during summers caused other colleges to complain that UVM’s players were no longer true amateurs. One member of those UVM teams, Dr. Lyman Allen, hardly denied the charge in the 1903 edition of UVM’s yearbook, Ariel:

During these years much was said about “professionalism” in this University by representatives of other colleges. While this criticism was to some degree just, still I know positively that other colleges were more blameworthy in the matter than we were, as can be proved by financial offers to many of our players to go to other colleges, which at the same time were pretending to be entirely free from professionalism, and were criticising us.

Whether professional or amateur, the UVM players were good. The 1891 team, with a record of 19-6, was Vermont’s best ever. By that time Abbey was joined on the mound by another Green Mountain Boy of Summer, Arlington Pond, and UVM was playing collegiate powerhouses like Harvard and Yale. After a game against Yale, Abbey received a lesson from one of the most influential men in sports history: “[T]he man who really taught me to use the curve with deception and speed was Alonzo Stagg, star Yale pitcher of his day and one of the greatest baseball and football coaches of all time. I got him aside in the basement [of the Old Mill] and he showed me how to pitch a curve that wouldn’t tip off the batter. That’s the only coaching in baseball I ever had.”

Because he still had not completed all of the courses necessary for graduation, Bert returned to UVM for a fifth year in 1892. That year the UVM players, not lacking in self-confidence, began calling themselves the “wonder team.” During Easter recess they took their first-ever southern trip, brazenly challenging even major league teams. UVM won all five of its games against collegiate and amateur competition, but how it fared against the major leaguers was a different story. The Philadelphia Phillies, with an outfield of Hall-of-Famers Ed Delahanty, Billy Hamilton and Sam Thompson, gave the precocious Vermonters a 24-3 drubbing. And on April 5, 1892, the Washington Senators shutout UVM 7-0 in front of a rain-soaked crowd of 550.

Even though it lost that game, the “wonder team” received high praise from the Senators. Second baseman Tommy Dowd called UVM the “best college team playing baseball.” Abbey was particularly impressive, scattering eight hits, striking out seven (the Washington pitcher struck out only five) and not allowing a single earned run. After the game Washington’s manager, Billy Barnie, told a reporter that Abbey and his catcher, Larry Kinsella, made up the best amateur battery he had ever seen. Abbey remembered the impression he had made on the Washington manager: “Somewhere along in the game he called me aside and asked if I had any ideas about professional ball. He said, ‘If you ever decide to play, telegraph me!’ All the rest of the trip I kept thinking of the offer and the chance to make some money — more than I would make teaching, anyhow. So I telegraphed him and was told to report at once.”

On June 11, 1892, Bert pitched his last game for UVM, a 6-5 loss to the town team from Northampton, Massachusetts. The loss dropped his record for his college career to 30-12. Three days later he was on the mound for Washington against the St. Louis Browns. Years later he recalled his debut:

I was disgusted with my pitching, or the umpiring anyhow! In college I never gave more than one or two bases on balls, but here the umpire called them a lot closer. They had just lengthened the pitching distance by five feet [1] and the catcher stood way back by the grandstand, except for [with two strikes]. When I challenged the umpire on his calls, he replied, “The rules say under both shoulders and over both knees. You’re putting the ball over the shoulder [on one pitch] and under the next. You’re doing the same with the knees!”

At some point in the game Bert evidently got the knack of pitching under the increased scrutiny; he won by a score of 12-7.

Abbey, who was called “Professor” by his unlearned teammates, compiled his best season in the majors as a Washington rookie in 1892. Though his record was 5-18 for the hapless Senators, he compiled a respectable 3.45 ERA. But in the spring of 1893 Washington sold Abbey’s contract to Pittsburgh. The Pirates assigned him to their farm club in Macon, Georgia, where he did some spectacular pitching. “There has been nothing seen here this season equal to Abbey’s out and down curve,” a New Orleans newspaper wrote after one performance. “It puzzled some of the best batters on the New Orleans team, some of them missing his out and down shoots at least two feet.”

Abbey enjoyed his stint in the Southern League immensely. The 5’11”, 175-lb. redhead became a fan favorite, especially with the southern belles who followed baseball. In an era when baseball players were notoriously uncouth, Abbey was also popular with the team’s management, which appreciated his steady, gentlemanly conduct; unlike many of his teammates, Abbey did not drink or smoke, and he constantly monitored his weight. As for fighting, he engaged in a scuffle only once: One night Abbey was jumped while walking back to his hotel, but he landed the more damaging blows. The next day, when he was asked to identify the suspected assailant, Bert examined the man’s battered face and said, “It’s kinda hard to tell, but I think it’s the guy.”

Abbey was basking in his success and popularity in Macon when he received shocking news: Pittsburgh had sold his contract to the Chicago Colts. Though this meant a return to the majors, Abbey was disappointed and threatened not to report, claiming the deal was a direct violation of his contract. National League president Nick Young informed him that he would be suspended if he did not report immediately, but still Abbey stood firm:

I had hoped that I would be allowed to get a full year in the Southern League and then begin a new season with either New York or Boston. I don’t want to go to Chicago now. The team is way in the hole and among the tailenders and to go with it this year will injure my chances for next season. One thing for sure, I will go on the bench before I will pitch for Chicago for less than $300 a month.

When Abbey decided to hold out, returning to the farm in Essex Center, the Colts sent a telegram to Vermont asking for his demands. “I didn’t want to go to Chicago so I wired a price I thought would scare ’em,” he recalled. “I said I’d finish the season for $1,000 and next year will cost $2,400. That was big money in baseball then.” Chicago answered almost immediately: “Join the club in Cleveland.” Abbey complied.

In hindsight the Colts must have regretted going to so much trouble. Abbey was 2-4 with a 5.46 ERA for the remainder of the 1893 season, then followed up that performance by going 2-7 with a 5.18 ERA in 1894. One can only speculate on how he got along with his manager, Hall-of-Famer Cap Anson. An infamous racist, Anson is often cited as a major force in the creation of baseball’s color line. Abbey, on the other hand, enjoyed playing in exhibitions against black players, and openly opposed the demeaning but common practice of throwing change on the floor of the hotel as a tip to the Negro porters. Instead he handed them the change, even though his teammates knocked him for doing it.

Following the 1894 season, Bert married Annie Isham on New Year’s Eve at her family’s home in Burlington. Though Annie was pregnant by the time Bert left for spring training, she accompanied him during most of the 1895 season. The newlywed Bert had pitched in only one game that year when Chicago traded him, appropriately enough, to the Brooklyn Bridegrooms. Pitching in only eight games for Brooklyn, Bert won five of seven decisions with a 4.33 ERA. One highlight was pitching in a game against the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds before 13,000 fans, at the time one of the largest crowds ever to see a major league game.

Meanwhile, back on the farm in Essex Center, P.C. Abbey was struggling to make ends meet. Clearly his heart was not in farming (he eventually realized his dream by becoming ordained at age 40), and when he questioned his ability to pay the mortgage, Bert lifted his spirits by saying, “If you keep praying and I keep playing ball, we’ll make the payments.” But Bert’s days in baseball were numbered. When his ERA soared to 5.15 in 1896, Brooklyn let him go.  He spent a few years in the minors, ending with Montreal in 1899. In an extra-inning game against Toronto, Abbey uncorked a high fastball and felt something pop in his right arm. At the age of 29, he knew at that moment that his career as a pitcher was over.

Bert Abbey had traveled considerably during his career in baseball, and he had a knack for taking things he had seen in other parts of the country — from tractors and harvesters to new strains of strawberries and blueberries — and introducing them in Vermont. Characteristically, he returned to Vermont after his retirement from baseball and founded Central Telephone Company, the first independent telephone company in the state, installing the telephones, wires, cables and switchboards himself. Bert sold the business to Northern Telephone Company in 1909, returning to farm the land where he had grown up.

Bert and Annie and their four children raised corn, oats, barley, cows, sheep, hens and pigs. Approximately 70 bee hives generated a modest inventory of white honey, and 600-plus maple trees in a good year produced 227 gallons of maple syrup (which at the time sold for 50 cents per gallon). Bert enjoyed collecting apples from the family orchard, though he suffered many bee stings in the process (the trees were near the apiary). In summer the family spent two weeks vacationing at Mallets Bay. To Bert, vacation meant one thing — fishing. But Annie, having grown up in the “big city” (at least by Vermont’s standards), never enjoyed life on the farm. On a few instances she left spontaneously to spend time with family and friends in Burlington. At Annie’s coaxing Bert sold the farm in 1921, by which time four generations of Abbeys had tackled its everyday challenges.

A passionate hunter, Bert managed to obtain an appointment as a game warden. “The family felt that B.W. got himself appointed game warden so he could go hunting whenever he desired,” Bert’s granddaughter Betty Royce said. A great shot with a pistol or rifle, Abbey displayed the same incredible quickness and pinpoint accuracy that helped him excel in baseball. When quail hunting he flushed birds and started shooting immediately after they came off the ground, blowing them apart before they got a chance to scatter.

The Abbeys eventually bought another farm, this one located in Shelburne. There Bert helped his son Fred operate a nursery and garden center called Gardenside Nurseries, Inc., which remains in business to this day. Bert studied ornamental horticulture and grew an incredible vegetable garden, as well as a large collection of grapes. In 1934 he gave politics a whirl, running on the Republican ticket for Chittenden County side judge, a quasi-judicial position that is unique to Vermont. It was a bad time to be a Republican and Abbey lost by a wide margin.

In the 1950s B.W. hunted regularly with his grandson Paul. Walking with a cane and stopping frequently to sit in the woods, Bert taught Paul to respect nature and appreciate the beauty of the outdoors. He spoke highly of the undeveloped Vermont countryside, pleased that the hunting territory in Chittenden County that he’d staked out as a young adult had not changed dramatically in a half-century. When interviewed 34 years after his grandfather’s death, Paul Abbey still had many fond memories:

He was someone you could look up to. It would always be uplifting to see him. I never saw him angry. He always had a good story, a new subject to discuss. B.W. seemed to enjoy the life of leisure — he didn’t want too many projects. Never complained about the cold weather. Always on time and expected others to be prompt. When the family got together, he was always the center of attention. Maybe a little too social conscious by today’s standards, but friendly and outgoing and open-minded. As a matter of fact, he was the perfect grandfather.

Bert was never afraid to voice an opinion, as another grandson found out: “I have a grandson named for me who wanted to be a better pitcher than I was,” Abbey said to a reporter. “I told him I’d shoot him if he played professional ball. Baseball’s okay in college, but no place for a man with brains!” Certainly a man with brains, Abbey was proud of having attended UVM, though his failure to receive a diploma had always bothered him. That shortcoming was rectified on July 21, 1941, when UVM’s trustees bestowed the honorary degree of bachelor of science on 71-year-old Bert Abbey. Six months later, Bert’s life went from that high point to a bitter low when Annie, his wife of 47 years, passed away at age 76.

Abbey remained interested in baseball right up until his final days. In one of his last letters he wrote, “[I] am listening to the Yankees again to win, hoping some team will break it up but see little hope unless Whitey Ford‘s arm gives out.” Less than a year after suffering a heart attack, Abbey finally succumbed at the age of 92 on June 11, 1962. Before his death he was thought to be the oldest living former major league baseball player. On October 10, 1969, seven years after his death, Bert Abbey became one of seven original inductees into UVM’s Athletic Hall of Fame, along with fellow Green Mountain Boys of Summer Ray Collins, Larry Gardner and Ralph Lapointe.

Note

[1] On this fact Abbey’s memory is a bit off; the distance from the pitchers’ mound to home plate was not lengthened to its present distance of 60 feet, six inches until the following year, 1893.

Sources

A version of this biography originally appeared in Green Mountain Boys of Summer: Vermonters in the Major Leagues 1882-1993, edited by Tom Simon (New England Press, 2000).

In researching this article, the author made use of the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, the Tom Shea Collection, the archives at the University of Vermont, and several local newspapers.

Elmari Wilhelm Bowman was born on March 19, 1897, in Proctor, Vermont, five miles northwest of Rutland. A company town then and now, Proctor is home to the Vermont Marble Company, one of the largest marble concerns in the world. It was founded by United States Senator Redfield Proctor, for whose family the town was named. Senator Proctor used his influence in Washington to obtain many federal contracts; for instance, Vermont marble was used to build both the Jefferson Memorial and the United States Supreme Court building.

The company had already grown to employ thousands by the time Elmer’s father, Oscar Bowman, went to work in the quarries in the 1890s. Both Oscar and his wife, Rose, had emigrated from Finland to Proctor, which was a perfect example of an American melting pot. By the time of the 1910 census, foreign-born and first-generation residents made up 2,146 of the town’s total population of 2,756. Swedes were most common, but there were sizable populations of Finns, Hungarians, Italians and Poles as well. To this day the Proctor Free Library contains an unusual collection of turn-of-the-century children’s books in a variety of languages.

The Bowmans and their four children (Elmer had a brother and twin sisters) lived in a modest house at 18 North Street. By the time Oscar was 55 he had worked his way up to a position as crane operator in the machine shop. Although the Vermont Marble Company was progressive for its era (it was, for example, the first business in the country to hire a company nurse), Oscar’s job was plenty hard and dangerous. In a 1921 survey in which foremen rated employees as Grade A (“physically fit, efficient, and entirely satisfactory”), Grade B (“less efficient than ‘A'”) or Grade C (“not worthy of permanent retention”), Oscar Bowman received a grade of “BX” — the “X” indicating that he suffered from “physical hardship due to illness or accident.”

Elmer Bowman was one of 12 students who graduated from Proctor High School in 1916. Like many first-generation Americans, Elmer gained acceptance by excelling in football and baseball, and it was undoubtedly his athletic prowess that sent him to the University of Vermont (rather than into military service). During summer vacations, though, he returned to Proctor and played baseball locally. “I used to play semi-pro ball in Rutland with Harry Shedd, who used to manage the Rutland team,” Bowman said. “They called them town teams in those days, and we played teams from Barre, Burlington and other places.”

Shortly after Elmer Bowman returned to Burlington for his senior year at UVM, Rutland manager Harry Shedd made a thrilling announcement: his team had booked an exhibition game at the Rutland fairgrounds against the Boston Red Sox. The Boston team had been booked to play in Providence, Rhode Island, but Shedd lured them to Rutland by promising half of the gate receipts and a guarantee of $1,500, reportedly one of the largest ever paid a baseball team in New England.

The chief reason for all the expense and excitement was the coming of Babe Ruth, whom the Rutland Herald described as “probably the greatest baseball attraction ever brought into Vermont.” In the season just ended, the Sultan of Swat’s record-breaking 29 home runs included blasts in each American League ballpark. The speculation in Rutland was whether he could hit one at the fairgrounds. “It is possible that this feat can be done,” stated the Herald, “but many people who have been followers of the teams of Rutland for the past 25 years maintain that this feat has never been accomplished.”

The game took place on Sunday, October 5, 1919, while Bowman was returning to Burlington with the UVM football team after a drubbing at Syracuse University the day before. An estimated 3,000 fans traveled to Rutland from all parts of Vermont and New York state, and they were well-rewarded for their journey. In batting practice Ruth knocked balls over the fences in center and left-center, then led the Red Sox to a 6-2 victory over the locals in the exhibition by smashing a double and a home run. “The latter was one of the highest hit balls ever made in the city and the Rutland outfielder lost sight of it,” the Herald reported. “The ball landed about two feet from the right field fence, which is an almost incredible distance to hit the ball.”

That home run in Rutland was one of Ruth’s last ever in a Red Sox uniform. Two days before the Rutland exhibition, a newspaper reported that Ruth had “torn up” his three-year contract with the Red Sox. That move proved to be the final straw for Boston owner Harry Frazee, who sold his star slugger to the New York Yankees for $125,000 on January 5, 1920.

During his four years at the University of Vermont, Elmer Bowman played first base under the tutelage of two former big league first basemen, Doc Hazelton and Clyde Engle. The Bowman era was the most successful for UVM baseball since the days of Ray Collins and Larry Gardner. During his junior and senior years the team won 26 and lost only ten. A right-handed hitter and thrower, Elmer typically batted cleanup and captained the team during his senior year. More than a half-century later, he was remembered as one of the few UVM players who could hit a ball over the centerfield fence at Centennial Field.

Bowman’s accomplishments on the gridiron rivaled his baseball exploits. Nicknamed “Big Bow” because of his size (6’1″, 196 lbs.), Elmer started at fullback as a freshman and earned a reputation as one of the toughest runners in UVM history. He was also the third-leading punter in the nation one season.

But at the time professional football was in its infancy, so the 23-year-old Bowman chose baseball as his career. He signed with Clark Griffith’s Washington Senators in the spring of 1920, just a few weeks short of graduation. “I didn’t get anything from them,” Bowman recalled. “In those days they didn’t do much of that. If you wanted to play ball, they gave you a contract, but there wasn’t any of that big money that there is nowadays.”

Bowman was sent to Minneapolis to begin the season with the Millers of the American Association. Even though he batted a meager .186 in 38 games, Griffith called him up to the majors on July 26, just as the Senators set out on a western road trip. Bowman would have been a teammate of Walter Johnson’s, but the Big Train was in Rochester seeking treatment for an arm ailment that had bothered him for most of the 1920 season.

With Joe Judge a fixture at first base, Bowman had no chance of cracking Washington’s starting lineup. He sat quietly on the bench and observed as the Senators started the road trip with a series in Cleveland, whose third baseman was fellow Vermont alumnus Larry Gardner. During the next series in Detroit Bowman caught his first glimpse of Ty Cobb, who during the 1950s owned a fishing home on Lake Bomoseen not far from Bowman’s birthplace. “I was rather surprised about [Cobb’s] stance,” Elmer remembered. “He just punched at the ball more or less. I always thought that he was a swinger, but he just punched at the ball and met it.”

The Senators returned to Cleveland’s League Park for a second series with the Indians. It was two weeks before Cleveland’s popular shortstop, Ray Chapman, was killed by a pitched ball, and the Indians were on their way to their first AL pennant. On Tuesday, August 3, 1920, after traveling with the club for a week, Bowman finally made his major-league debut. With the Senators trailing 10-5 in the top of the ninth inning, Griffith called on Big Bow to pinch hit for pitcher Jose Acosta. Facing Cleveland ace Jim Bagby, who was pitching his fourth inning in relief of starter Ray Caldwell, Bowman lofted a fly ball to center field that was caught by Tris Speaker. Bagby retired the Senators in order to record one of his league-leading 31 wins for Cleveland that season.

Bowman did not play as Washington lost five straight games in St. Louis, and the Senators had dropped to sixth place by the time they arrived at Comiskey Park to take on Shoeless Joe Jackson and the rest of the White Sox. This, of course, was the Black Sox team of Eight Men Out infamy, and Bowman was aware of the rumors that several Chicago players had thrown the previous year’s World Series. “When the Senators went to Chicago, I remember looking at all the players curiously, trying to figure out which ones did what,” Bowman recalled.

Soon he was staring at one of the culprits from a distance of 60 feet, six inches. In the second game of a doubleheader on Monday, August 9, Bowman made his second and final appearance in the major leagues, pinch hitting for pitcher Harry Courtney. Again it was the top of the ninth inning, but this time the Senators were losing by a single run, 5-4. The opposing pitcher was Lefty Williams, one of the eight Black Sox banned from baseball following the 1920 season. Bowman walked and was replaced by a pinch-runner, Fred Thomas, but the Senators again failed to score. (Most references credit Bowman with a run scored, but they appear to be in error.)

Before the Senators returned to Washington on August 14, Griffith sent Bowman and a large sum of cash to Reading in exchange for the International League’s leading hitter, Frank “Turkeyfoot” Brower. Known as “The Babe Ruth of the Bushes,” Brower batted .311 in 36 games for Washington but never produced Ruthian statistics in the majors (in 1923, his best year, he hit 16 homers for Cleveland). For his part, Bowman batted .296 in 35 games with Reading over the remainder of the season.

That Elmer Bowman never received a second chance in the majors is surprising in light of his minor-league accomplishments. With Norfolk in 1921, Bowman batted .356 and led the Virginia League in extra-base hits, slashing 42 doubles, 18 triples and nine homers. The following year, playing for New Haven, Elmer beat out the great Native American athlete Jim Thorpe for the batting title, setting an all-time Eastern League record with a .365 average. For that accomplishment, the Winchester Arms Company (coincidentally owned by Frank Olin, another former Vermont major leaguer) presented Bowman with a three-foot-high silver trophy, which he proudly displaced for the rest of his life.

Bowman’s Eastern League batting record stood for only one year, however, as he topped his previous mark by hitting .366 in 1923, only to finish second to Worcester’s Wade Lefler, who batted .369. Although he was primarily a line-drive hitter, Bowman also socked 19 home runs during his second year in New Haven. Moving up to the Pacific Coast League in 1924, he hit a solid .301 for Seattle using a bat he jokingly claimed was made of “iron.” The bat was given to him by the PCL’s leading hitter that year, Salt Lake City manager and former Boston Red Sox outfielder Duffy Lewis.

In 1925 Elmer was sent to Birmingham of the Southern League where his average slipped to .290. It was reported that “the tropical heat did not agree with him,” and that off-season he obtained his release from the Barons and re-joined New Haven. Bowman had his best season in 1926, smacking 15 homers and hitting .377 for the Profs to lead the Eastern League for a second time, again setting a new all-time league record (this time the record lasted for two seasons before it was broken). But his average for New Haven slipped to .282 in 1927, and by 1929 Bowman had retired from professional baseball.

In the mid-1920s Elmer Bowman spent his off-season with his wife’s family in Los Angeles. A friend from New Haven helped him obtain work as an electrician on the movie lots (his major had been electrical engineering at UVM), where he tended to the lighting of the sets used by famous silent screen stars like Bebe Daniels and Pola Negri. On Sundays he played winter baseball with the Pasadena team, which included Dick Cox, Fred Haney and other major leaguers.

During the winter of 1926-27 a New Haven newspaper reported that Elmer had signed for a “prominent role” in the silent screen version of “Casey at the Bat,” inspired by Ernest Thayer’s famous poem. Advertising a rare screening of the film 70 years after its release in 1927, a Southern California silent film society summarized its plot as follows:

Casey, the oversized junk dealer (Wallace Beery), and Putnam, the undersized barber (Sterling Holloway), compete for the charming hand of Camille (ZaSu Pitts). Shady baseball scout O’Dowd (Ford Sterling) turns romantic competition into a baseball free-for-all in this grand farce. Throw in Coney Island, the New York Giants and the Florodora Sextette and you have nine full innings of entertainment!

“I’ve arranged for a leave of absence from my electrical work for the duration of my work in the picture,” Bowman told the New Haven reporter, “and they have promised to take me back when it’s done.” When asked if he might consider future film roles, Bowman said, “If they find that I have a little ability before the screen and want me for something else when ‘Casey at the Bat’ is finished, then maybe I’ll quit fooling around with the electrical wires and switches and join the movie bunch.”

Apparently he showed little acting ability, as he failed to make the final cut of “Casey at the Bat.” “I did get into some movies as an extra,” Bowman told a reporter from the Rutland Herald in 1977. “In one movie MGM did, they needed over 1,000 extras for a prison yard scene. The union couldn’t get them, so some of us electricians had to serve as set extras. We just hung around. I’d get in a few mob scenes every now and then, but they didn’t amount to anything.”

Bowman worked for Warner Brothers Studios for 36 years before retiring in 1960. Over the years he returned to Vermont on many occasions to visit his brother, who operated Pullman’s garage in Proctor. The year he retired from Warner Brothers he was planning to return to UVM for his 40th reunion when heart trouble prevented him from traveling. After his recovery, he and his wife toured New England, Alaska and Canada. In a 1965 report to the UVM alumni magazine, Bowman wrote, “We sold our desert place, as it was just too hot half the year, and it was difficult to get someone to adequately water the palm trees. However, we often go to Palm Springs for visits, as it is less than two hours away without a stop light over the freeways.”

By the 1970s, more than 50 years had passed since Elmer Bowman had played baseball at the University of Vermont, but Burlington banker David Webster still remembered him:

When I was a kid, oh, 10 or 12 years old, we used to live on Fletcher Place, which was near Centennial Field, and we used to hang around the ballpark. And of course the UVM players were our heroes.

The field was much different then. It had a big wooden fence around it and a poke to center field was a home run in any league. Elmer Bowman was the only one who could ever hit the ball over the center-field fence. I never forgot about him.

Webster was a member of the University of Vermont Hall-of-Fame Committee. With the help of former UVM baseball player Ed Donnelly, he successfully pushed for Bowman’s induction. “I was really glad to get him in when he was still alive and could appreciate it,” Webster said.

Bowman was inducted on October 20, 1978. “It was something I never expected,” the 81-year-old Bowman said in a telephone interview from his home in Los Angeles. By that time injuries sustained during his football days at UVM had slowed him down considerably. “When you go to school, you don’t think of what is going to happen to you in later years,” he said. “You just have fun while you’re at it. I broke my ankle twice, I later developed varicose veins, had a double hernia, water on both knees — and you know how that is to an athlete.”

Despite the injuries and illnesses, Bowman remained active. “I still struggle along and do my own gardening. The only thing I have trouble with is driving — I have trouble telling whether a light is red or green.” He also followed baseball, watching it on television because “[i]t’s quite a chore to get to the ballpark. I read the sports page first — I have glaucoma, which makes it hard for me to read, I have to use a magnifying glass — and if I still feel good, I read the main section.”

Eight years after his induction into the UVM Hall of Fame, Elmer Bowman died in Los Angeles on December 17, 1985.

Sources

A version of this biography originally appeared in Green Mountain Boys of Summer: Vermonters in the Major Leagues 1882-1993, edited by Tom Simon (New England Press, 2000).

In researching this article, the author made use of the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, the Tom Shea Collection, the archives at the University of Vermont, and several local newspapers.

In the bottom of the sixth inning, the bullpen gate opens and the righthander heads for the mound. He’s a struggling rookie, still winless after eight major league appearances; now it’s the last game of the season, his last chance to pick up a victory. In the stands, his father takes in the moment, thinking about how the two of them used to come each summer to this very place, a mere three-hour drive from home.

Two innings later, Jim Rice is standing frozen at the plate and the righthander is sprinting off the field, afraid to look back. If he does, he’s sure the umpire will wave him back, tell him there’s been some sort of mistake; rookies aren’t supposed to get any breaks, especially when facing future Hall of Famers. But in this case the rookie threw the exact same pitch twice in a row — a nasty slider on the outside corner. The first time the umpire called it a ball, in deference to Rice. But not the second time.

In the top half of the inning, the Orioles scored twice on a Wayne Gross single to break a 3-3 deadlock and take the lead for good. Nate Snell and Sammy Stewart come on to finish the game for Baltimore, and the rookie’s pitching line in the box score that appears in the next week’s issue of The Sporting News reads: “Brown (W 1-2) 2 1 0 0 1 2.” As a souvenir, pitching coach Ray Miller gives Brown a game ball. Written between the stitches is the date, the score, the teams, the time and the glorious words “First Major League Win.”

There is something else significant about this game, something unwritten on the game ball and discoverable only in hind-sight. If you look up Brown in Total Baseball, you learn that his full name is Mark Anthony Brown, that he was born in Bellows Falls, Vermont, on July 13, 1959, and that this win at Fenway Park on the last day of the 1984 season proved to be the one and only win of his major league career.

If there had been a maternity ward in North Walpole, New Hampshire, Mark Brown would have been born there. That was not the case, however, so Mark Brown’s mother crossed the Connecticut River and gave birth to her second son in the hospital at Bellows Falls. Crossing the border between the Twin States would be a theme in the lives of all members of the Brown family. For example, Mark’s father, who worked his way up from mechanic to management with St. Johnsbury Trucking, commuted mainly to Vermont hubs like Bellows Falls and White River Junction. Mark went to school in New Hampshire but played organized sports in Vermont.

Mark Brown comes from a family that is well-known in local baseball circles. Some say his older brother, Frank, was a better pitcher than Mark. “I was always in his shadow,” says Mark, “and up there I probably always will be.” Dave, the youngest of the three brothers, was drafted in 1989 by the Baltimore Orioles, pitching one year in the New York-Penn League for Erie, where his pitching coach was Mark. “Dave was wild,” says the brother-cum-pitching coach. “When he came into the game, everybody would see me go for the Tums.” Mom was their number one fan and dad their first pitching coach (his philosophy was “grip it and rip it,” according to Mark). Even Mark’s uncles were involved in baseball, serving locally as umpires.

Before Mark Brown there was another baseball player with a similar pedigree — born in Bellows Falls, raised in New Hampshire. And in the small world that is Vermont baseball, it should come as no surprise that this other player has an unusual connection to Mark Brown. The other player? Carlton Fisk. The connection: while in grammar school Brown served as Fisk’s batboy.

In 1965 Fisk was the star player for the championship Bellows Falls American Legion team. Mark Brown’s uncles umpired his games. They brought Mark to the field with them, and the six-year-old was charged with retrieving the bats. Did the two future major leaguers ever speak? Brown doesn’t think so. “I was a little kid,” he says. “To me [Fisk] looked like a giant.”

Brown does credit Fisk for opening doors. He says Fisk was the one who brought scouts and fans to the area. “It all started with Pudge Fisk,” Brown says. “Here he was, some big old hick from the Twin States, playing for Bellows Falls Legion Post Five. Then he gets to the Vermont State Championship, and everyone saw the guy and said, ‘Wow! There are actually some guys who can play.'” As Brown relates this, a smile crosses his face. “That gave guys like myself an opportunity,” he says.

While it’s great that Brown pays his compliments years later when both players are retired, did the two Prides of Bellows Falls ever meet in the major leagues? Their careers overlapped chronologically, after all, and both were in the American League. The answer, as Brown tells it, is yes and no. Yes, Brown was with the Twins in 1985 when they played Fisk’s White Sox at Comiskey Park. And no, he couldn’t get up the courage to approach Fisk.

“Logistics got in the way,” Brown says. “[Fisk] wouldn’t come out of batting practice until late, so it was hard to see him.” Also, Brown says, “He was always kind of tough to approach — kind of standoffish and a very tough guy. A nice guy once you get a chance to know him, but he won’t let you in, that type of guy. A typical New Englander.”

Then, afraid he is sounding too harsh, Mark Brown backpedals a little. “I should have tried to break down the barrier and say hi,” the pitcher says. “I didn’t do it. I wanted to say hi to him, but I didn’t do it.”

It was clear from the start that Mark Brown would turn out to be an exceptional baseball player. While he was still a teenager his fastball was clocked at 88 miles per hour. During the first of his two seasons playing for American Legion Post Five (the same team he’d served as batboy), the team would have won a state championship, claims Mark, if his brother Frank hadn’t hurt his arm. After two years at Fall Mountain High School, Mark spent his junior and senior years at the prestigious Loomis Chaffee School in Windsor, Connecticut. In two seasons in the New England Prep School League, Brown pitched 80 innings, allowed 30 hits, struck out 157 batters and was 8-2 with a school record 1.35 ERA. He also pitched a no-hitter during his senior year of 1977.

Following his freshman year at the University of Massachusetts, Mark joined the semi-pro Saxtons River [Vermont] Pirates. In the midst of an extraordinary multi-year run, the Pirates compiled a 33-6 record in the Twin State League during the summer of 1978, then went 38-11 after jumping to the newly revived Northern League in 1979. A quick perusal of newspaper clippings shows that Brown pitched some gems: a no-hitter and 15 strikeouts against the Burlington A’s; a one-hitter against Hartford, New York; a 17-strikeout performance against the Burlington Expos; 18 more in a win over Essex; 17 k’s again, this time against the A’s. Two-thirds of the way through the 1978 season, Brown’s numbers were almost as impressive as his prep-school stats: a 7-2 record and 108 strikeouts in 55 innings pitched.

In Brown’s two losses he allowed a grand total of one earned run, and even that he did with style. The date was July 11, 1978, and the Pirates were taking on the Brattleboro Maples in a night game played at Brattleboro’s Stolte Field. Pitted against Brown was Dave Klenda, a former Tidewater Tide who had joined the Maples the previous week after seven years in the minors. Expectations were high, and for once the hype held up — for eight innings Brown and Klenda matched zeroes. Saxtons River had managed a couple of singles, but Brown was no-hitting the Maples. Three outs later, Klenda closed out his line: nine innings, two hits, zero runs, 12 strikeouts and four walks. In the bottom half of the inning, Brattleboro’s Pete Campbell stepped to the plate with one out and nobody on base. He hit a 365-foot, game-winning home run.

As time passed, the legend of that night grew, and so, according to Mark Brown, did its legacy: a revival of interest in the local hardball circuit. “It was such a big night for baseball,” Brown says. “[The fans] saw that it was really good baseball, not some beer league, with good pitching, good hitting and good fielding. And the game was such a thriller.” The Rutland Herald called Campbell’s game-winner a “story-book finish to a fine ball game.” Officially, the Brattleboro Reformer spoke in more muted prose, citing a “dramatic end to a well-played contest.” Off the record, though, reporter Ken Campbell took on a more excitable tone, according to Saxtons River coach Dave Moore. “He told me it was the best game he’d ever seen,” Moore says. Of course Campbell would say that — it was his own son who hit the home run!

All in all, the loss wasn’t really a loss as far as Mark Brown was concerned. “Even though I gave up the winning home run, I’ll never forget that night as the time baseball took off,” he says.

Besides that epic pitchers’ duel, Brown has many fond memories of life in Vermont’s summer leagues. Sometimes the stories are about baseball, but oftentimes they’re not. There was the time Saxtons River participated in a so-called “international” tournament at Centennial Field. “There were two teams from Canada that were supposed to be awesome,” Brown says. “Our guys, meanwhile, were hungover and drunk.” No matter. The Pirates took two out of three and a large chunk of the prize money. And what did they do with the loot? Give it to some charity? Perhaps use it to pay umpires? No, says Mark Brown with a big grin and a stage whisper: “We had a big party.”

Other Brown memories revolve around places. The man may have played in major league ballparks, but he still speaks reverently about Burlington’s Centennial Field, and the Brattleboro field where chickenwire screens protect the dugouts still makes him chuckle. Brown has also constructed a hypothetical ballpark in his mind, a catch-all place to capture memories of baseball in Vermont:

I remember, in the summer time, just playing. There’d be one piece of fence in center field, then there’d be a cow pasture in right, then where you warmed up off the bench there’d be another cow pasture, there’d be cow corn growing. Or, behind the backstop, if you lost the ball, it was probably in a tree pit.

All those fields, all those places. Everybody was into it. Even if there were 50 or 100 people and they had to pass the hat to pay the umpire, they were into it.

No matter if a man plays a ballgame at Fenway Park or at Yankee Stadium, hometown sandlots are hard to forget. “It was such a good time, such a good bunch of guys to play with,” Mark Brown says. “It would be neat to get all those old guys together, maybe play some old men’s softball.”

Consider the culture shock Mark Brown experienced during the spring and summer of 1980. He finished his junior year at UMass with a disappointing 4-6 season but still was drafted in the sixth round. He met with scouts at his home in North Walpole and took all of five minutes to accept Baltimore’s initial offer of $7,500. Then it was off to a rookie league team in Bluefield, West Virginia (a hick town, Brown remembers), and soon after that to Class-A ball in Miami, Florida.

The cost of living was high in South Florida, and so was Brown’s ERA. After 10 appearances, all starts, it stood at 4.73 — almost a full run higher than it would ever be at any other stop in his minor league career. The pitcher may have had an excuse: a bum shoulder, which the team physician first tried to treat with a cortisone shot. Eventually Brown returned to New Hampshire after the Orioles shut him down for the rest of the season. The injury — tendinitis, officially — was slow to heal, forcing him to miss the first part of the 1981 season. “It’s kind of a bummer,” Brown says, looking back. “You’re 21 years old, it’s your first full year of pro ball and you’re on the disabled list.”

Brown still hadn’t captured the confidence of the Orioles’ front office even when he returned to pitching, and only a trick of timing — good (his) and bad (a friend’s) — kept him from being released. Baltimore’s scouting director, Tom Giordano, had decided to waive Brown, but a scout convinced him to fly to Florida and give the New Englander one last chance. Brown remembers the game well: “It was against the Astros, a team from Daytona Beach,” he says. “Mike Alvarez started the game for us, and he was leading the league in ERA, but he got hit pretty good. In the third inning he came out and I came in and just threw really good — struck out a bunch of guys.” The end result was that Brown stayed and Alvarez, despite his league-leading ERA, was released.

Brown says his injury taught him to be a better all-around pitcher, even if it tempered his velocity. He also found himself in a new role — of his last 135 minor league appearances, 124 came out of the bullpen. His newfound knowledge helped him rise rapidly through the minors. Each time Brown received a midseason promotion, he lowered his ERA. The best example is 1982, when Brown went from A to AA to AAA while his ERA dipped from 3.10 to 2.09 to 1.42. By 1983 he had earned a spot on Baltimore’s 40-man roster and his first invitation to a major league spring training.

The good news was short-lived. Assigned to the Orioles’ top farm team in Rochester, New York, Brown suffered a more serious injury — a torn labrum — and missed parts of June, July and August. The only bright side was that he avoided surgery thanks to a rehabilitation program designed by Dr. Arthur Pappas, the famous sports orthopedist and part-owner of the Boston Red Sox. The next year Brown returned to Rochester and enjoyed an eventful summer. First he got engaged to Sheryl Schwartz. He also pitched well in 44 games. Then on August 9, 1984, Mark Anthony Brown became the 35th Vermonter to play in the major leagues.

The first big league batter Brown faced, Julio Franco, smashed a line drive off his knee. To add insult to injury, the hit went for an infield single, and, worst of all, it came on what Brown thought was a good pitch. “I threw him a real nasty slider on the outside corner and he took it right off my kneecap. [The ball] just trickled over to first base. I hobbled over there and just watched him run to first, and he was safe.” Brown pitched on and was hit hard. He gave up another hit, Cal Ripken made an error and a 4-4 tie was suddenly a 6-4 deficit. “I had my first appearance, my first loss and my first sore knee,” Brown says. “I finished the inning, then [manager] Joe Altobelli took me out. He thought I might hurt my knee more by throwing for another few innings.”

“It was alright, it wasn’t really hurt bad,” Brown says. “It was funny, I got to the clubhouse and I remember Mike Flanagan coming up to me, patting me on the back, saying, ‘Oh yeah, welcome to the big leagues, even the outs here are hard.'” Brown says those words from a fellow New Hampshire resident meant a lot to him, as did the treatment he received during each of his five summers in the Baltimore chain. “They were a great organization,” he says. “When I went well, they promoted me; when I was hurt, they put me on the disabled list; when I got to the big leagues they were good to me, they gave me a shot.”

Mark Brown pitched fairly well for Baltimore over the last couple months of the ’84 season. Appearing in nine games, he gave up fewer hits than innings pitched, struck out more batters than he walked and picked up his first big league win at Fenway Park on the last day of the season. Then Brown and his teammates set off on a three-week, 14-game barnstorming tour of Japan, playing five games against the Yomiuri Giants, another five against the Hiroshima Carp and four more in the southern part of the country against regional all-star teams.

Brown was looking forward to resting a sore shoulder, but the money was good — $20,000 plus expenses for three weeks of work. Still, he missed Sheryl. “All the guys had their wives with them. It would have been nice if we were married and had a chance to go over together,” Brown says. “It would have been like a honeymoon.” If he was homesick, at least he felt at home on some of the ballfields he played on. “In Japan we played on a couple of skin fields,” Brown says, referring to all-dirt, no-grass infields. “It was just like Vermont — you could pick up boulders.”

The following spring the Orioles, satisfied that they had seen what Brown could do and in need of more balance in their bullpen, traded him to the Minnesota Twins for lefthander Brad Havens. “It was sad to leave the Orioles,” he says, “but I thought, hey, it could be a great chance.” A great chance, indeed. Baltimore’s pitching staff was talented (second in the American League in ERA in 1984) and extravagantly deep, whereas Minnesota’s bullpen had a closer (Ron Davis) and a lot of problems. Best of all for Brown, the Twins’ new manager, Ray Miller, had been the Orioles’ pitching coach. It was a great chance for Brown to establish himself with an emerging team with good hitting, good defense and little pitching.

Brown pitched well at Triple-A Toledo, where he was first assigned by the Twins. The parent club, meanwhile, continued to get shelled. By late June, when Brown was called up, Minnesota’s team ERA was a league-worst 4.84. Brown drove all night to get to Minneapolis and the Twins’ infamous indoor stadium. “I couldn’t wait to get there,” he says. “‘Gotta get to the Metrodome,’ I kept saying.” This time the Bellows Falls native decided to take some serious stock of his situation. “It kind of struck me: small town boy makes it to the big leagues. Here I am again!”

Brown got bombed in his first outing, again versus Cleveland, and after two weeks his ERA had ballooned to 11.57. By August he had almost halved it to 6.89, but by then it was too late. Brown was sent back to Toledo, his roster spot taken by the talented but oft-suspended drug offender, Steve Howe. Back with the Mudhens, Brown was united with fellow Vermont-born Len Whitehouse, playing with him for the first time. To his credit, Brown pitched admirably. His ERA was 2.94, his walks-to-innings-pitched ratio at an all-time low and his arm felt great, but basically no one cared. Prematurely or not, fairly or unfairly, Brown’s major league career was over.

Of course, Brown didn’t know that yet. He went to spring training in 1986 hoping to get one more shot but was sent down immediately to Toledo. Mysteriously, he was converted into a starter, threw a couple of games and got released. Brown went home to Rochester to be with Sheryl, thinking, “Who’s going to pick up a 27-year-old reliever three weeks into the season?” The surprising answer was Baltimore. Brown played out the year at Double-A Charlotte, where he had pitched so well five years earlier as an up-and-coming prospect. Now he was heading the other direction. “My low point came when I got put on the disabled list and I wasn’t even hurt,” Brown says. “That’s when it really hit hard. Here I was, struggling in the minors, and the last two years I was in the big leagues.” Then Brown pauses — perhaps in a rare moment of regret. “It’s tough to get there,” the pitcher-turned-mechanic says, “but it’s even tougher to stay.”

Brown returned to Rochester and played in an adult baseball league for a couple of seasons, intending to play first base exclusively but eventually giving in and pitching a few games. He enjoyed playing with his brother Dave for the first time but ended up hurting his shoulder. Today he saves his throws for occasional paid tutoring sessions with local youngsters. Brown also talks to youth groups now and then, supplying baseball cards to increase his credibility. He talks about wanting to share his love for the game, and about how maybe he could help just one kid realize his dream, or better yet, get a better education thanks to sports.

In the end, Total Baseball shows that Mark Brown had but a single major league win. To some that may seem sad, but a dozen years later it did not seem to bother the man himself. “I only got a couple cups of coffee,” the Vermonter said, breaking into a wide smile. “But they were good cups.”

Sources

A version of this biography originally appeared in Green Mountain Boys of Summer: Vermonters in the Major Leagues 1882-1993, edited by Tom Simon (New England Press, 2000).

In researching this article, the author made use of the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, local newspapers, and an extensive interview with the subject.

What Putnam didn’t know was that he had another relative who had played pro ball, and this one had actually made it to the majors. His name was Harry J. Burrell.

According to Total Baseball, Burrell was born in Bethel, Vermont, on May 26, 1869; his death certificate is probably more reliable, however, and it indicates that he was born three years earlier. Harry’s father, Peter Burrelle (note the French spelling, which many family members still retain), was a lumberjack from Boucherville, Quebec, ten miles east of Montreal. “Peter Burrelle was a strong, rugged man and was very skillful in the use of axe and saw,” reported the Bethel Courier on January 30, 1902, “and had probably worked up more wood than any two men around here.”

Peter Burrelle had come to Vermont in the fall of 1863 to work a lumber job with his brother Lewis, and the following spring the brothers brought their families to Bethel to settle permanently. Peter’s family included his wife, Louise, and five children. By the time of Harry’s birth a couple years after their arrival, Louise had died and Peter had married another woman with the same given name. Harry was Peter’s first child with the second Louise.

Like many 19th-century athletes, Harry got his start playing for the hometown nine. He must have played well enough to earn promotion to a larger town, because by 1889 he was playing for Brattleboro. The following year Harry headed west to play for Dubuque, Iowa, and spent most of the next two seasons in western minor leagues.

After a stint in Joliet, Illinois, Harry Burrell won a job in the big time, entering the American Association during its last month of operation as a major league. Joining the roster of the St. Louis Browns, which included Hall-of-Famers Charlie Comiskey, Clark Griffith and Tommy McCarthy, the right-handed pitcher made his major league debut on September 13, 1891. Over the last month of the season Burrell pitched in seven games, going 4-2 with a 4.81 ERA as the Browns finished second, 8.5 games behind the Boston Reds. The day after his last appearance, teammate Ted Breitenstein pitched a no-hitter in his first major league start. Burrell also batted 22 times, gaining five hits, including two doubles, for a .222 batting average.

So much for the major league career of Harry Burrell of Bethel, Vermont. In the decade following his month in the majors, Burrell jumped from team to team, his life as an itinerant minor leaguer no doubt simplified by his bachelor status. If he were alive today, he would probably say his greatest thrill in baseball was leading Des Moines to a Western League championship in 1896. Or perhaps he would mention pitching for Taunton, Massachusetts, of the New England League when the great Christy Mathewson made his professional debut with that club in July 1899.

Following his retirement as a player after the 1900 season, Burrell returned in the midwest and kept up his ties with the game. A Vermont newspaper, the White River Herald and News, reported on April 25, 1901:

Harry Burrell, the Brattleboro ex-outfielder who afterwards developed into a pitcher, and who has been playing professionally since he left for the West a dozen years ago, … is now a promoter of the Iowa State League. Burrell, who is a Bethel boy, is teaching penmanship at an Iowa college.

Harry eventually settled in Omaha, where he died of toxemia on December 15, 1914. Sixty-three years later, his descendant Pat Putnam, another confirmed bachelor, carried on the family baseball tradition and became the second Bethel native to reach the majors.

Last revised: August 9, 2021 (zp)

Sources

A version of this biography originally appeared in Green Mountain Boys of Summer: Vermonters in the Major Leagues 1882-1993, edited by Tom Simon (New England Press, 2000).

In researching this article, the author made use of the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, the Tom Shea Collection, the archives at the University of Vermont, and several local newspapers. In addition, the authors wish to thanks Cappy Gagnon for his research assistance.

Though big for his time (6-feet-1, 185 pounds), the Colchester farmboy did not throw hard. “Ray Collins hasn’t a thing,” said Hall of Fame manager Clark Griffith at the height of the Vermonter’s career, “yet he is one of the best pitchers in the American League – one of the two or three best left-handed pitchers in the business.” Hugh Jennings, another Hall of Fame manager, concurred: “I class him as the best left-hander in the American League, with the possible exception of Eddie Plank.”

When Collins’s major-league career was cut short in 1915, he returned to his native Colchester and struggled to eke out an existence as a dairy farmer for 42 years. Though he never made it to Cooperstown, Ray Collins was an original inductee of the University of Vermont’s Hall of Fame on October 10, 1969, and the Vermont Department of Historic Preservation honored his memory with the erection of a roadside historical marker at the Collins farm on July 19, 1998.

Collins wasn’t kidding when he listed his nationality as “Yankee” on a Baseball Magazine survey he filled out in 1911. A ninth-generation descendant of William Bradford, second governor of Plymouth Colony, Collins was also the great-great-grandson of Captain John Collins, purportedly one of Ethan Allen’s Revolutionary War Green Mountain Boys. One of Burlington’s original settlers, Captain Collins arrived from Salisbury, Connecticut, on August 19, 1783, and built the first frame house in town. Ethan Allen stayed with the Collins family while building his own homestead.

The 375-acre Collins farm on Route 7 in Colchester, originally purchased by Charles Collins in 1835, was where Ray Williston Collins was born on February 11, 1887. His family moved around a lot when he was a youngster, renting farms in other parts of the state, but his father, Frank Collins, still owned the Colchester farm. It was small and wet so he rented it to others. Around 1894 the family returned to the Burlington area and purchased land in the Intervale, an area of rich farmland along the banks of the Winooski River. There, on one of the largest farms in Chittenden County, the Collinses raised a herd of Jersey cows. The brick farmhouse still stood in 2010, just down the embankment from the former site of Burlington’s Athletic Park.

For a while Ray had an idyllic childhood. “Played ball today” is by far the most common entry in the journal he kept during childhood. He also went to University of Vermont baseball games. But when Ray was 10 his father died of scarlet fever. Ray’s mother, Electa, was forced to sell the Intervale property and move into a house in Burlington.

Electa Collins not only survived but prospered, buying and improving lots and selling them at a profit. She rented out the farm in Colchester, where Ray helped with the haying when it didn’t interfere with his studies. Later he worked as a conductor on the trolley that ran from Burlington through Winooski and out to Fort Ethan Allen.

Ray’s best buddy growing up was Dwight Deyette. The pair once jumped off the railroad bridge over the Winooski River together. Both attended Pomeroy School and later Edmunds High School, where Ray was captain of the tennis, basketball, and baseball teams. He didn’t play football in high school because his mother wouldn’t let him, even though he was considerably larger than most boys his age.

Collins often recalled his time at the University of Vermont as the four greatest years of his life. Though he lived at home, Collie joined the Delta Psi fraternity and got involved in campus social life. Among other activities, he served as committee chairman of the Kake Walk, a midwinter minstrel show that was banished from campus in the 1960s when it fell out of step with changing racial values. Ray also put his wide-ranging athletic talents to use, playing center on the varsity basketball team as a freshman and varsity tennis as a sophomore.

Ray’s greatest accomplishments, of course, came on the baseball diamond. In Vermont’s home opener on April 17, 1906, the first baseball game ever played at Centennial Field, freshman Collins batted safely twice and pitched a complete game, allowing only one earned run.

The crowning achievement of Ray’s freshman year came against Williams at Centennial Field on May 19. The Williams squad entered the game with just one loss, having ruined their undefeated record at Dartmouth the day before. Larry Gardner drew a leadoff walk in the first inning and scored what turned out to be the game’s only run. Entering the ninth, Collins was pitching a no-hitter and had not walked a single batter. With two outs, a Williams batter singled cleanly to right field, but when the runner was thrown out stealing moments later, Ray was carried off the field on the shoulders of his schoolmates.

Gardner received many accolades for his role on a team that finished 9-8, but the real hero was Ray Collins. Drawing all of the tough pitching assignments, Collie finished with a 4-3 record and an ERA of 0.70, striking out 36 and giving up only 43 hits and 10 walks in 64 innings. He earned honorable mention on the Springfield (Mass.) Republican’s All Eastern and All New England teams.

During his sophomore year of 1907, the Vermont team improved its record to 11-6 and that year’s class yearbook, The Ariel, praised Ray’s performance as “second to that of no college player in the country.” By that time his prowess had attracted the notice of major-league scouts. The Boston Red Sox followed him throughout the season, and toward the end a New York Highlanders scout offered Collins $3,000 to play from July through October. According to the Burlington Free Press, “on the advice of older men, Collins has declined the tempting offer, believing that he is yet too young to take up base ball in the fastest league in the world.”

The previous summer Ray had played in the Adirondack Hotel League for a team sponsored by Paul Smith’s Hotel on Lower St. Regis Lake. A brochure found among his papers boasted that “[t]he Paul Smith’s Baseball nine have always been champion of the Adirondacks.” During the summer of 1907 he pitched for semipro teams in Massachusetts, then joined his university teammates in playing for Newport, New Hampshire, of the Interstate League. In one game he struck out 21 batters.

That July, through some odd twists and turns, Collins and his teammates played a brief but full-fledged professional baseball stint in the Class D Vermont State League. When several of the original clubs dropped out, the university nine stepped in as replacements. “Many have felt all along that the Vermont team was the one to uphold the Burlington end on any baseball proposition, made up as it is of so many local favorites,” the Free Press wrote. In his first minor-league start, Collins pitched a shutout against first-place Barre-Montpelier, snapping that club’s eight-game winning streak. “Nothing like the pitching of Collins has been seen at Intercity Park since the days of Reulbach,” wrote the Montpelier Evening Argus. The collegians fared well during their short stint in professional baseball, holding the second best record (4-3) when the league disbanded for good on July 27.

With still a month to play that summer, Collins joined the Bangor Cubs of the Maine State League. In his first game, on July 30, he pitched a four-hit shutout against a Portland club called Pine Tree. A Portland sportswriter wrote that Ray’s windup resembled an “explosion in a leg and arm factory,” while a Bangor scribe wrote:

Collins is a tall, slim young feller from Burlington, Vermont, and is first string man on the University of Vermont team. This university is famous for the ball players it turns out, among whom may be mentioned Reulbach of the Chicago Cubs, and Collins seems to ably sustain the reputation of the university. He has all kinds of speed, curves and shoots, change of pace, good control, and a corkscrew delivery which is enough to scare a batsman away from the plate. Added to these important details, he has all kinds of confidence and a snap that keeps a game a’going.

Ray finished out the season with Bangor and led the Cubs to the 1907 Maine State League pennant. In his last appearance of the season, at the Eastern Maine State Fair on August 30, he pitched both ends of a doubleheader, defeating Portland 11-2 and 5-4 in ten innings – a harbinger of his greatest day in the majors seven years later.

Vermont finished with a disappointing 9-7 record in 1908, the last year both Collins and Gardner played for the varsity. Still, the season had its share of highlights, like the time Collins beat Holy Cross 1-0 and drove in the game’s only run with a triple. Students celebrated the victory in traditional fashion by going downtown and staging a mini-riot:

Shortly after the game the chapel bell began to ring, summoning the faithful to gather on the campus. About 200 students responded to the call, most of them provided with the night shirt prescribed for such occasions. Forming in line in front of the mill, they marched to the president’s house, where continued cheering brought President Buckham out to make a short speech. The march was then taken up down Prospect Street and to Brookes avenue to the home of Collins, the successful pitcher. After giving rousing cheers, the students continued down town to the club rooms of the Eagles, where they [were] joined by the band. Pitcher Collins was captured and borne on the shoulders of the advance guard as far as the foot of Church Street. The line then marched down to the Van Ness house where the Holy Cross team was supposed to be. Upon finding that the team was being entertained by the Knights of Columbus, the boys marched up the street and gave lusty cheers in front of their club rooms. On the return march to the college, some little trouble was experienced with the police over possession of various signs that had taken a place in the line of march.

The students in their ardor crippled temporarily the trolley service of Pearl Street. The trolley pole on a car was pulled from the wire at the corner of Pearl and Church streets and in front of the Howard Relief hall an attempt was made to block an Essex car; but the motorman applied the juice and the students, deciding that they would be the worse for wear in the encounter with the moving car, cleared the track. The trolley pole on another Pearl street car coming down the hill from Winooski was pulled from the wire and in the mix-up a window was broken, the splintered glass cutting the conductor, George Rogers, although not seriously injuring him. On the march up Pearl Street, the large bill board at the corner of Prospect Street was taken down and borne in solemn procession by some 60 students to the campus. Here a number of tar barrels were added to the stock of combustibles and an old-fashioned bonfire and war dance took place. After the fire died down the students gradually dispersed.

Following the close of the season, Collins was elected captain for his senior year. Gardner decided to forgo his last season of eligibility, instead signing with the Boston Red Sox, but Ray shunned offers to turn professional. “The president of the Red Sox team of Boston worked hard to land Collins,” the Free Press reported, “but the college boy, who has one more year at Vermont, decided to pitch college ball for the team of which he was recently elected captain.”

Collins received a large increase in pay – reportedly $185 per month – to return to Bangor for a second summer in 1908. This time he brought with him his college catcher, Marcus Burrington of Pownal, Vermont. Combining with Ralph Good, a Colby College star who later pitched two games in the majors with the Boston Nationals in 1910, Ray led Bangor to its second straight Maine League pennant. In appointing him to its 1908 All-Maine team, one Maine newspaper called Collins the “premier twirler of the league this season, as he was the last.”

Despite returning only five veterans, the 1909 Vermont team survived and even improved without Larry Gardner, posting a record of 13-9. Captain Collins pitched well throughout the season, but never better than in his last game for Vermont, on June 18. Going out in a “blaze of glory,” according to the Free Press headline, Ray struck out 19 and beat a tough Penn State team, 4-1. It was a fitting end to an incredible college career in which he won 37 of the 50 games he started, surpassing Bert Abbey, Arlie Pond, and Ed Reulbach as the greatest pitcher in UVM history.

After the season Ray received offers from eight of the 16 major-league teams. He decided to follow in Gardner’s footsteps and, shortly after the Penn State game, went down to Boston and came to terms with Red Sox president John Taylor. “That day I saw my first major-league game,” he remembered years later. “The Red Sox were playing the Tigers and Ty Cobb stole second, third, and home.”

Collins returned to Burlington for Senior Week. He served as marshal at the baccalaureate sermon, then carried the class banner at commencement on June 30, leading a procession of 73 undergraduates (including Larry Gardner) down the aisle of Burlington’s Strand Theatre. After handing out the various degrees (Collins received a B.S. in economics, as did childhood friend Dwight Deyette), President Buckham called on Ray to close the ceremony with a speech on behalf of the graduating class.

As part of his deal with the Red Sox, Collins received permission to remain in Burlington and pitch an exhibition game commemorating the 300th anniversary of Samuel de Champlain’s 1609 discovery of Lake Champlain. The games were part of Tercentenary Week, which included Vermont’s first-ever marathon (104 times around the oval track surrounding Centennial Field), featuring 1908 Olympic champion Johnny Hayes; a wrestling match involving Burlington’s own Fritz Hanson, champion welterweight of the world; Colonel Francis Ferari’s trained wild animal arena and exposition shows; and a re-enactment of the Battle of Lake Champlain on a man-made island in Burlington Harbor, attended by President Taft and the French and English ambassadors to the United States. In the opening game, as 50,000 visitors flooded into Burlington, Collins held an independent team from Pittsfield, Massachusetts, scoreless for nine innings, but the opposing pitcher was equally stingy. Each team scored once in the tenth, but in the 13th Collins’s run-scoring single gave Burlington the 2-1 victory.

Ray Collins left Burlington on July 12, 1909. He first went to Boston, then caught up with the team on a road trip. On July 19, with the Red Sox down 4-0 to Cy Young after three innings at Cleveland, Boston manager Fred Lake figured it was as good a time as any to test out his acclaimed rookie. In five strong innings of relief, Ray yielded two unearned runs and even singled in his first big-league at-bat. This game is best remembered as the one in which Cleveland shortstop Neal Ball made the first unassisted triple play in major-league history. It may also be the only time three Green Mountain Boys of Summer played for the same team in a major-league game: In addition to Collins, both Amby McConnell and Larry Gardner appeared in the Red Sox lineup.

Four days later, on the 23rd, Ray was the starting pitcher against the hard-hitting Detroit Tigers. Though he lost 4-2, he twice struck out the dangerous Ty Cobb. Collins was given a second chance to beat the Tigers on July 25, 1909. Pitching on only one day’s rest, Ray tossed the first of his 19 shutouts in the majors. It was a three-hitter, and all three of the hits were made by Hall of Famer Sam Crawford. Collins pitched only sporadically during the rest of the 1909 season, going 4-3 with an ERA of 2.81, but he had proved that he was capable of competing in the majors without any minor-league apprenticeship. As if to prove the point, after the regular season Ray matched up against the great Christy Mathewson on October 13 and defeated him, 2-0, in an exhibition game against the New York Giants.

Collins became a regular in the Boston rotation in 1910. In his first full season in the majors, the 23-year-old pitched a one-hitter against the Chicago White Sox and compiled a 13-11 record, making him the second-winningest pitcher on the Red Sox. His ERA of 1.62 was sixth best in the American League. He became a fan favorite at the Huntington Avenue Grounds, as demonstrated by the following clipping from the Boston Evening Record’s Baseball Chit-Chat column:

Ray Collins is a star. He is the idol of all the lady fans, those bewitching young women, who coyly gaze from under piles of feathers and ribbons. Is it any wonder that he pitches wonderful ball when those brown and blue and gray and violet orbs are on him? Gee, it’s great to be a big, fine pitcher. If I ever have a son that’s him, a pitcher and of course he will be a dashing fine chap. Fond expectations.

In February 1911 Tim “The Silver King” Murnane, a jovial, white-haired ex-major leaguer of the 1870s who had become baseball editor of the Boston Globe, came to Burlington to visit Ray Collins in his hometown. The following is an excerpt from the column he wrote about that visit:

In looking over the list of Boston Red Sox players still in love with their surroundings, living within a day’s ride of Boston, I selected Mr. Collins as the player on whom to make a friendly call and wired the young man that I was coming up to see him. I had also intended calling on Larry Gardner, who winters at Enosburg Falls, about 50 miles farther north, but our signals became crossed and to my surprise Mr. Gardner was on hand to greet me on my arrival at Burlington, where he has many friends as the result of his student days at the University of Vermont, where he, like Collins, was a valuable member of the baseball team.

I was soon tucked away in a roomy sleigh and started for Mr. Collins’ home, 10 minutes ride from the business section of the city. “I would like to have you see mother” was all the comment that the ball player made as we went slipping over the snow. “This is my home,” he remarked as the team drew up in front of a pretty house on a residential street with a grade just right for fine sledding. Before entering the house the camera man snapped a picture of the player and the writer, and Ray pointed to a field close by, saying: “There is where I learned to play ball as a schoolboy. About all that is left to remind me of the old place now is that elm tree.”

I was introduced to Mr. Collins’ mother as “Mr. Murnane of the Boston Globe” and was informed by the lady that she always has read the Globe baseball news since Ray took up the game as a serious matter.

“Ray always loved to play baseball,” remarked Mrs. Collins. “When at the primary school he was captain of a team, later at the high school, and finally during his four years at college he kept up his enthusiasm for the game, so I was not surprised to find that he was willing to take a position with the Boston Americans. I never tried to influence my boy to give up the game that he seemed to love so much and his success in which made so many friends for him.

“Ray seldom talks baseball, however, but loves to bring home the pictures of young men he has played with.” This was very evident after a glance at his interesting den, where the green and gold colors of his alma mater were the principal decoration, with pictures of baseball parks and Red Sox players strewn around.

We then went for a sleighride around the city, with the ball player handling the ribbons. As we slipped through the main streets it was a continual “Hello, Ray.” Everyone in the place seemed to know the player. Collins simply recognized the salute with a “Hello” in each case.

That evening I sat down to supper with the good Mrs. Collins and the pride of her heart. For the first time Ray mentioned baseball. We chatted about the Red Sox players and about the splendid treatment the boys received on their visit to Vermont last fall. Mrs. Collins said she had enjoyed a call from Tris Speaker and other players of whom she had read and had a great desire to see.

The delightful simplicity of the woman, and the good taste displayed in the home, made it quite easy to understand why Ray Collins is modest at all times and deeply considerate of every man’s feelings.

It is said that in springtime a man’s thoughts turn to love and baseball. So it was that during spring training in 1911, while the Red Sox were working out in Redondo Beach, California, Ray Collins became smitten. Her name was Lillian Marie Lovely, and it is said that her surname suited her well. She was the 18-year-old sister of Jack Lovely, one of Ray’s fraternity brothers who later headed the Jones & Lampson Company, the largest gear factory in Springfield, Vermont. Jack’s family had recently moved from St. Albans to Los Angeles, and Jack insisted that Ray meet them while he was out there.

Ray apparently left his heart and his concentration in California. He was 3-6 at one point in the 1911 season, prompting rumors that he was soon to be released. “Ominous rumblings agitate the atmosphere,” wrote one poetic scribe. “The management holds, apparently, that a player who cannot pitch nine games and win, say, 15 or 20, is useless, dangerous and ought to be abolished.” But before management did anything rash, Ray turned his season around, finishing at 11-12 with a 2.40 ERA.

During the offseason Ray married Lillian in Los Angeles. In a congratulatory note, Red Sox president James McAleer wrote, “May you live long and prosper and have a million little Collinses. . . . I think you are due for a great year and Mrs. Collins will be proud of her big boy when the season is over.” The couple set out as though they were taking McAleer’s blessing of fertility at face value – their first daughter, Marjorie, was born in December 1912. Four more followed: Ray Jr. in 1914; Janet in 1916; Warren in 1919; and Dorothy in 1923.

During their first winter together Lillian may have made life too comfortable for her new husband. Ray was noticeably overweight when he reported for spring training at Hot Springs, Arkansas, and his problems were compounded when a spike wound resulted in an abscess on his knee. Collins missed the first two months of the 1912 season, during which time the Red Sox christened their new stadium, Fenway Park. Ray did not start a game until June 7, nor win one until June 22, but from that point on he was nearly invincible.

A half-century later, Ray’s fondest memory of that season was pitching the first-place Red Sox to two victories in three days over the second-place Athletics at Philadelphia’s Shibe Park. When he defeated the A’s 7-2 on July 3, the headline in the next day’s paper, over Ray’s photograph, read, “SURPRISED ATHLETICS, RED SOX AND PROBABLY HIMSELF.” Then on July 5 he surprised the A’s again, 5-3. Collins finished fifth in the American League in shutouts in 1912, but all four of them came in the second half of the season. By October his record stood at 13-8 and his ERA at 2.53, fifth-best in the American League. The team’s only left-hander, Collins was considered the second best pitcher on the staff behind Smoky Joe Wood (34-5) as the Red Sox walked away with the American League pennant.

Ray started Game Two of the World Series against New York Giants ace Christy Mathewson and led 4-2 after seven innings. Then in the eighth Collins was pulled with only one out after the Giants rallied for three runs. The game was called on account of darkness after 11 innings with the score tied 6-6 (which is why the Series went eight games). The Red Sox led the Series three games to one by the time it was Collins’s turn to pitch again in Game Six, but player-manager Jake Stahl surprised everyone by starting fireballer Buck O’Brien. O’Brien was no slouch, coming off a 20-13 season, but the Giants shelled him for five runs in the first inning. Collins took over in the second and pitched shutout ball for seven innings, but the Red Sox lost 5-2. “Things might have been a little different had Collins been sent in from the first,” Stahl admitted.

Game Six turned out to be Ray’s last appearance in a World Series, and though he ended up with no decisions, he did not walk a single batter in 14⅓ innings – quite possibly a World Series record. When a newspaperman pointed that out to him decades later, Ray responded, “Maybe I made them too good.”

Collins had his best season yet in 1913, finishing at 19-8, his .714 winning percentage the second-highest in the AL. A highlight was his performance on July 9, when he pitched a four-hitter and hit a home run in a 9-0 drubbing of the St. Louis Browns. Another characteristic outing was July 26 against the Chicago White Sox, when Collins pitched a five-hitter and hit a bases-loaded triple to give Boston a 4-1 victory. “This was simply keeping up the remarkable work that he has been doing this season, no one in the business showing better form,” was one Boston reporter’s comment.

On August 29 Collins pitched scoreless ball for 11 innings to defeat Walter Johnson, who entered with a 14-game winning streak. It was one of three times that Ray went head-to-head against the Big Train in 1913; each game was decided by a score of 1-0, with the Vermonter winning two of them.

During the 1913 season Collins became involved in the Base Ball Players’ Fraternity, an organization founded by Dave Fultz, a lawyer who had played seven years in the big leagues, 1898-1905, leading the AL in runs scored in 1903. A presage of his future leadership ability, Collins served as player representative for the Red Sox; later he was chosen as vice president for the American League and admitted to the BBPF’s board of directors and advisory board.

Coming off a fine season in 1913, Ray Collins expected his $3,600 salary to increase substantially for the 1914 season, and was sorely disappointed when the contract the Red Sox sent out on January 16 called for only $4,500. On January 23 he returned it unsigned to new Red Sox owner Joseph Lannin, prompting this response:

We have no intention of considering an increase in your case as the amount named in your contract is a very liberal one…. We have the signed contracts of most of the regular men and there is now only yours and one or two others of any importance that have not been received. We expect them, however, within a day or two. I thought you would like to know this as our prospects are very good for the coming season, with the team intact and with the addition of some promising youngsters.

In a typical year Collins would have had no choice but to accept Lannin’s terms, but 1914 was no typical year. That winter the Federal League was waging its war for baseball supremacy; players had options for the first time in years. Perhaps recognizing this, player-manager Bill Carrigan wrote the following note to Ray on February 14, enclosing another copy of the contract:

You can rest easy that you will stick with me as long as I stay with this club so don’t let anything trouble you and I will see that you get home when your wife needs you. I’ll do anything in my power to make you feel right, Ray, and hope that you will feel alright about this contract.

Ray phoned Carrigan and told him $4,500 was not enough, but that he would sign for $5,000. On February 16 Lannin wrote to Collins: “Enclosed please find contract calling for $5000.00 for the season of 1914, as per your understanding with Bill.”

On February 17, 1914, about the time he received Lannin’s letter, Collins also received a Western Union telegram from Youngstown, Ohio:

I had [Earl] Mosely [a former Red Sox teammate] wire you in regard to Federal League don’t sign or accept terms with Boston can go you more than they will pay you big money in sight three year contract money sure regardless of injury if you come here at my expense will wire you hundred before you leave answer my expense.
– Jack McAleese

McAleese, a former major leaguer, was working as a sort of bounty hunter for the Federal League, and his telegram obviously caught Ray in a receptive mood. The Vermonter sent the $5,000 contract back to Boston and raised his demand to $5,400, causing this response from Lannin:

I want to acknowledge receipt of your letter, and was very much surprised at the contents. Mr. Carrigan stated to Mr. John I. Taylor that you agreed to sign for the amount mentioned in the last contract we sent you, namely, $5000. I just talked with Mr. Carrigan on the phone, and he verified that statement to me.

We have accepted your terms, and we consider that a contract, and binding, and expect you to report at Hot Springs, as per instructions.

Collins did report to Hot Springs, but when he arrived at the Eastman Hotel he found his teammates up in arms. “They seemed to be money mad and claimed that their contracts were no good and that nothing could stop seven or eight from jumping at the Federal League money,” reported a Boston newspaper.

Most anxious to jump were pitcher Dutch Leonard and second baseman Steve Yerkes, but Federal League president James Gilmore sent the following telegram to McAleese, staying at the Arlington Hotel in Hot Springs under an assumed name: “Never mind the others; get Ray Collins by all means.” Newspapers reported that the Federal League had offered Collins a three-year contract at $5,000 per year, with a signing bonus of $7,500, and that he was slated to pitch for the Brooklyn Tip-Tops.

Ray sought advice from his older sister Genevieve’s husband, Dr. Frank Finney, a physician who lived in Burke, New York:

Since wrote letter to you Boston accepted terms of mine they once turned down. I didn’t write them between time. Does that constitute contract? Lannin comes Tuesday. Would you threaten to quit should Lannin refuse to give Federals’ terms? Wire.

Finney wired back on March 10: “You have made no contract, make Lannin meet Federal terms or satisfy you.” The next day he wired again: “No harm to Lillian, Genevieve talked with mother, all favor Feds.”

That same day Lannin arrived at Hot Springs, issuing a proclamation that Collins had 24 hours to sign with Boston or leave the team. “As late as 4 o’clock this afternoon Collins was called to the long-distance telephone and talked with President Gilmore of the Federal League, who is at Shreveport, La.,” one Boston paper reported. But Ray met with Lannin and Carrigan for an hour before dinner, and when they emerged they announced that Ray had signed a two-year contract.

That night, according to the Boston American, Ray walked around the lobby of the Eastman Hotel “as happy as a schoolboy starting a holiday.” He issued the following statement:

I am happy now that I have signed to play for the Red Sox for the next two years. I like Boston and its people and wouldn’t like to play in any other city, although I would probably have joined the Federal League if I had not signed with the Red Sox.

I will receive a much bigger salary with the Red Sox this year than I got in 1913. Just what my salary for the next two years will be I prefer to keep between Mr. Lannin and myself.

Though he refused to disclose exact terms, one Boston paper was probably correct in reporting that the contract called for $5,400 per year.

Ray’s signing was a tough blow for the Federal League. “Collins is nothing if not deliberate and shrewd,” reported one newspaper. “When the Sox saw him turn down a remarkably tempting offer from the Feds, involving the placing in his hand of a big bunch of advance coin, they suddenly lost confidence in the validity of the Feds.”

With the illness of Smoky Joe Wood, the Red Sox expected Ray Collins to step up and become the ace of their pitching staff in 1914, and that is exactly what he did. His six shutouts ranked fourth in the American League that season, and he was one of only three AL pitchers to reach the 20-win plateau. He picked up his 19th and 20th victories on September 22, 1914, by pitching complete games in both ends of a doubleheader at Detroit’s Navin Field. Collins won the first game, 5-3, and the nightcap, 5-0.

It’s no surprise that Ray’s incredible feat came against the Tigers; he seemed to own Ty Cobb, Detroit’s temperamental superstar. He once walked a batter intentionally to pitch to Cobb, and the tactic worked when Ty grounded weakly back to the mound. The Georgia Peach once said that Collins gave him as much trouble as any pitcher he ever faced. He attributed his difficulty to Ray’s peculiar windup, which caused hitters to “swing at his motion.”

Nonetheless, Collins and Cobb were friendly, and during one road trip to Detroit Ray and Larry Gardner were invited to Cobb’s home for dinner. “We went and had a nice time,” Ray remembered. The psychopathic Southerner had a genuine affection for the two educated Vermonters, whom he considered his social equals. In a rambling letter dated September 17, 1958, he wrote the following to Gardner:

Nothing would please me more than to have a few days with you and your friends in your home town amongst those real people up there that I know of and their history so well, you being such a true representative. I should tell you now though you must have for years known it so well that I liked you, also Ray, also your kind no matter where they lived. We were reared properly.

In 1915, because the Boston Red Sox were in the enviable position of having too many good pitchers, Collins was relegated to the bullpen. As early as June, newspapers began speculating that he was soon to retire; one even printed a false rumor that he had purchased a hotel in Rutland. When he pitched a two-hitter to beat Cleveland on July 14, the Red Sox players reportedly were pleased to see Ray return to his old form, but the performance turned out to be an aberration. Starting only nine games, the fewest since his rookie year, Ray finished at 4-7 with an abysmal 4.30 ERA.

What caused the sudden downturn in Ray Collins’s career? The newspapers make no mention of injury. Perhaps it was just a matter of the Red Sox having better (and younger) pitchers: Rube Foster (20-8), Ernie Shore (19-8), Dutch Leonard (14-7), and a 22-year-old lefty named Babe Ruth (18-6) made up the best rotation in baseball. (Incidentally, as an educated man of strong morals, Collins did not care for Ruth’s antics: “Ruth would drink to excess, party all night, get no sleep and arrive late for games,” Ray Jr. remembered his father telling him. Still, Ray Sr. was amazed by how well Ruth could play under those circumstances.)

Collins did not pitch a single inning in the 1915 World Series as Boston defeated the Philadelphia Phillies four games to one. After the season the Red Sox expected him to take a cut in pay to $3,500. Rather than suffer that humiliation, on January 3, 1916, Collins announced his retirement from professional baseball, stating simply that he was “discouraged by his failure to show old-time form.” He was only 29 years old.

After announcing his retirement Ray Collins was offered a position at a New York bank. With his college and baseball contacts, economics degree, and keen intellect, the job appeared to suit him well. Instead he chose to return to his family’s Colchester farm – “the worst move he ever made,” according to son Ray Jr., who was physician.

Located, ironically, just north of Poor Farm Road, the Collins Farm was hilly with marshy meadows better suited to growing rush-like swale grass than hay or corn. Because he didn’t own a tractor at first, Ray farmed in sweat-intensive, 19th-century fashion, walking behind a horse-drawn plow. For a long time the farmhouse lacked indoor plumbing; it had an outhouse and the family used the Sears catalogue as toilet paper. Lillian was not used to that sort of lifestyle, but she endured it without complaint. Nor did she raise a fuss when Ray’s mother moved back to the farm to live with the family for the next 22 years.

For years the Collinses lived without an automobile, and some still remember Ray’s forays into town on a horse-drawn wagon or sleigh: 95-year-old Walter Munson (grandson of Warren Munson, second-in-command of the Colchester Company that helped repel Pickett’s Charge at Gettysburg) remembered playing “rounders” in Colchester Village with a sawdust-filled ball when Collins, on his way to the creamery, pulled a brand-new American League baseball from his overalls and tossed it to the boys.

Not every minute was a struggle. On hot summer nights Ray took his children to Nourses Beach to go swimming. On Sundays the family went to Colchester’s United Church, then picnicked in the afternoon in upstate New York or at Lake Willoughby. They participated in community silo fillings, the men from local farms banding together to help one another fill their silos with corn, followed by a common supper in the barn-raising tradition. Sometimes Ray took his sons to University of Vermont basketball games, always arriving late after the evening milking. They stood in the back of the crowded gym until someone invariably recognized Ray and ushered them to courtside seats.

By the early 1920s the knack for pitching that had left Ray in 1915 started to come back. Larry Mayforth, a former Vermont catcher then working as athletic director at the college, used to come out to the farm a couple of nights each week. After supper Ray went out front of the farmhouse and pitched to him until dark. On weekends they drove up to the Montreal suburbs, where they received $100 per game to form a battery. Ray also pitched occasionally for local town teams and in university alumni games. Sometimes the competition was even tougher.

One such occasion was July 4, 1922, when 35-year-old Ray Collins took the mound at Centennial Field against the Brooklyn Royal Giants, a black team considered one of the finest of the era. Locked up in a pitchers’ duel with Jesse Hubbard, Ray held the Giants scoreless for 12 innings and did not walk a single batter, but in the 13th he finally gave up three runs. “Collins showed the fans that he has not lost the pitching arm, and the head to go with it, which made him at one time one of the most famous twirlers in the major leagues,” the Free Press wrote. After the game, several of the Royal Giants were boarding their bus when they saw Collins in the Centennial Field parking lot. Unaware that the man who had just pitched so effectively was a former major leaguer, they approached him and asked, “Man, where did you come from?”

Several local legends developed about the ex-Red Sox star. Colchester resident Harley Monta claimed that Collins would go into his barn on rainy days and pitch baseballs through a small hole in the wall. Eben Wolcott said he heard that Collins could stand at one end of Sunderland Hollow and throw a baseball to the other. Stories like that are flattering but untrue, said Ray Jr. But he did remember one true incident that occurred at the Champlain Valley Fair in 1924. In a cruel forerunner of the dunking stool, a midway booth advertised “Hit the Nigger, Win a Cigar.” An African-American man with his head stuck through a hole in the wall waited for someone to throw a medium-soft ball at his head. The crowd urged the former major leaguer with the famous control to take his shot, but Ray refused. Then a man holding real, hard baseballs prepared to throw at the African-American. Collins became enraged. He grabbed the man’s shirt with both hands, lifted him off the ground, looked him in the eye and said, “You leave him alone!”

After a couple of seasons as a part-time assistant, Collins took over as Vermont’s head baseball coach on January 19, 1925. Following a successful Southern swing, highlighted by a meeting with President Coolidge at the White House, the Green and Gold enjoyed a memorable season. Road victories over Syracuse and Colgate caused a bonfire celebration on campus for the first time in years, and on Decoration Day more than 6,000 people showed up at Centennial Field for a game against Dartmouth. At the age of 38, Collins appeared to have finally found a position that suited him. But the coaching position did not pay enough to make up for his time away from the farm, so after the 1926 season he gave up the job.

The harder Ray threw himself into farming, it seemed, the more his luck turned against him. He used some of the money he had earned in baseball to plant an apple orchard, but the trees failed to take. In 1927 a half-dozen of his cows tested positive for tuberculosis in the state’s mandatory testing program; only after Ray took the cows to St. Albans and had them butchered did he learn that the test results were false positives. Then on October 22, 1929, a spark from a blower blade ignited dry grass and Ray’s barn burned to the ground. The barn had been equipped with state-of-the-art milking machines and its loss was estimated at $15,000. Unfortunately, the fire occurred before Ray had a chance to buy sufficient insurance. He was forced to cash in his life insurance to build its replacement.

Ray Jr. remembered his father lying down on the couch after dinner; with a long career in medicine behind him, he could only guess at the pain his father silently endured. The stress and hard work gradually wore down the man who twice pitched and won both ends of a doubleheader. During the winter of 1929-30 Ray came down with a severe strep infection. His physicians identified the germ under their microscopes but couldn’t kill it because antibiotics hadn’t been invented. They told Ray that either his immune system would kill the germ or it would kill him. Months of weakness and delirium later, Ray won.

For more than two decades the Collins family managed to scrape by. To make ends meet, Ray and Lillian took in travelers in a precursor of today’s bed and breakfasts, serving meals and talking baseball with their guests. They also supplemented their income by operating a sugarbush, wresting sap from a stand of sugar maples a mile north of the farmhouse. Ray lugged the sap buckets, a hired man boiled the sap and Lillian made and sold a variety of maple products. Eventually the Collinses won an award from the Vermont Maple Sugar Industry.

During World War II Ray chaired the town draft board and the War Bond drive. Though he probably could have secured an agricultural exemption for one of his sons, both went into harm’s way, serving with distinction and then returning to successful professional careers. Ray Sr. couldn’t carry a rifle, but he could drive a tractor – barely, due to severe arthritis in his hip from years of strenuous labor, but well enough, especially since all the young men were gone – so he hayed and plowed his neighbors’ fields, often until midnight. What drove him to sit his nearly-crippled body onto a tractor night after night, after the sun had set? Money and neighborliness, to some degree, but one can’t help but imagine that he also felt a sense of obligation to the hundreds of young men his draft board sent into the armed forces. Ray Collins, Home Front Warrior, was quietly doing his bit, and then some.

Ray Jr. remembered his father lamenting bitterly about being “peons” and living like poor people. Almost all the clothing the family wore, like Ray himself, had seen better days. Yet neighbors had no idea that Ray Collins was struggling financially. To them he was a pillar in the community. His leadership credentials were impeccable: college-educated, well-traveled, well-connected in several levels of society, a star athlete, physically imposing. From 1922, when Winooski split off from Colchester, until the 1960s, when the IBM influx to the area occurred, an oligarchy of civic-minded Republican farmers represented Colchester in the state Legislature. Ray took his turn in the Legislature from 1943 to 1946, serving on the agriculture committee and as chairman of the highway traffic committee. Looking for better prices for his milk, he co-founded the Burlington milk cooperative creamery that later became H.P. Hood and served as chairman of the county agricultural stabilization board for many years.

In 1953 Ray was named Colchester’s first zoning administrator, which required lots of measuring property. Ray and Lillian were a team; he would get out of the car and hold up one end of the tape measure, while Lillian did the walking with the other end. He also served on the school and cemetery boards. For many years he was moderator of town meetings, and he was always the foreman during his frequent jury duty. Longtime Burlington attorney Joe Wool told Ray Jr. that he loved seeing Ray Sr. as foreman because he knew everything would be done right.

Finally the arthritis got so bad that Ray could no longer operate the family farm, so around 1960 he sold it to Ray Jr. By the time of Fenway Park’s 50th anniversary in 1962, Ray Collins needed two canes just to walk. But he had missed Fenway’s 1912 opening due to a knee injury, and this time he was intent on attending. “My legs aren’t what they used to be,” he told the Boston Globe weeks before the big day, “so I’ve been out to the airport finding out how I can climb the staircase to get into the plane. I’ve been kind of training for my trip to Boston and getting accustomed to going up the staircase is part of it.” On Saturday, April 21, 1962, Collins was one of nine members of the 1912 team to make it back for the celebration (the others were Larry Gardner, Bill Carrigan, Joe Wood, Harry Hooper, Duffy Lewis, Hugh Bedient, Steve Yerkes, and Olaf Henriksen). They saw Boston’s Don Schwall defeat the Detroit Tigers, 4-3, despite home runs by Norm Cash and Al Kaline.

Collins was an active alumnus of the University of Vermont. During the 1950s he served on UVM’s board of trustees, presiding over the school’s transition from private to public university. Every year during reunions Ray hosted a Sunday brunch for the Class of ’09, and 10 or so classmates made their way out to the farm to feast on fried eggs, ham, pancakes, and Ray’s famous maple syrup. It was during one of those breakfasts in 1969 that he suffered a minor stroke. His condition gradually worsened until he died at Fanny Allen Hospital at 4 p.m. on January 9, 1970. He was buried in the Village Cemetery in Colchester.

Respect for athletic success goes only so far, and many stars squander it. Ray Collins used it as capital to serve his town, county, and alma mater. Maybe returning to Colchester and taking over the family farm wasn’t such a bad move after all.

Sources

A version of this biography originally appeared in Green Mountain Boys of Summer: Vermonters in the Major Leagues 1882-1993, edited by Tom Simon (New England Press, 2000).

In researching this article, the author made use of the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, the Tom Shea Collection, the archives at the University of Vermont, and several local newspapers. In addition, the author wishes to thank Guy Page for his research assistance.

Edward Richard Doheny was born in Northfield, Vermont, on November 24, 1873. Both his father, James, and his mother, Mary, were Irish immigrants. Northfield land records indicate that James’ occupation was “laborer,” and the modest cottage on the east side of King Street where the Dohenys lived still stands at the foot of Turkey Hill. A sandlot star in his hometown at age 14, Ed soon outgrew the competition he could find in central Vermont.

Graduating to the minor leagues, Doheny crossed the Canadian border in 1894 and pitched for Farnham, Quebec. The next year he returned to Vermont and pitched for St. Albans. That year a Boston sportswriter earned $100 for putting the National League’s New York Giants on to Doheny. Major-league success seemed at hand for the 21-year-old Vermonter, whom the Boston Globe described as a “stonecutter”.

Making his big league debut on September 16, 1895, Ed started three games for the Giants that season and lost all three. In the 26 innings he pitched, Doheny gave up 37 hits, 19 walks, three hit batsmen and four wild pitches while watching 22 runs cross the plate. It was far from an impressive beginning, but still he showed potential. After his second outing, a 13-5 loss, the New York Times wrote, “Doheny, though slaughtered, showed the earmarks of a ballplayer.”

Ed steadily improved during the next two seasons, whittling his career ERA down to 3.08 despite a lifetime record of 10-14 to that point. Though his innings pitched were too few to qualify for the league title, Doheny sported an ERA of 2.12 in 1897 (teammate Amos Rusie, who pitched considerably more innings, led the league at 2.54). One reason he pitched so infrequently was his suspension from the team for “breaches of discipline.”

Whether that suspension was deserved is difficult to determine this far after the fact. On the one hand, as his later problems showed, Doheny’s behavior could be as wild as his pitching often was. On the other hand, it was his misfortune to join the Giants in their first year under Andrew Freedman, who has been called one of the most hated team owners in baseball history. According to his obituary in The Sporting News, Freedman “had an arbitrary disposition, a violent temper, and an ungovernable tongue in anger which was easily provoked, and he was disposed to be arbitrary to the point of tyranny with subordinates” — hardly an ideal boss for a man as unstable as Doheny.

Sometimes Doheny returned to Vermont during suspensions. On one such occasion he took the mound in his home state in a Northern League match-up against Norwood Gibson. A few years later, when Gibson was pitching for the Boston Pilgrims, H.L. Hindley of the Brattleboro Reformer recalled the game:

The good work that young Gibson, pony pitcher, is doing for the Boston Americans reminds me of Gibson’s last appearance in a Vermont league. He was pitching for Plattsburgh, and Mike Powers, now backstop for the Philadelphia Athletics, was behind the bat. St. Albans had Doheny, the famous Pittsburgh southpaw, who was then on New York’s suspended list and playing independent ball. Gibson had held St. Albans level for eight long innings, then Plattsburgh got a score in the ninth, St. Albans tying it in her half. It was up to Gibson for the tenth, as Doheny had blanked Plattsburgh and St. Albans needed only one to win. Then the little lad from Notre Dame got his.

I said it was a hard game, Gibson pitching against a National Leaguer, and, in that fatal tenth, Doheny went down to the coaching lines and opened up a Dad Clarke repertory of talk. He called attention to Gibson’s fatigue, to his lady-like delivery, to various points of interest in his personal appearance, while Mike Powers was too mad to talk. He merely knelt and prayed that the little lad would burn ’em over. Gibson did his best, but the strain was telling and pretty soon a little Texas Leaguer got a St. Albans man to first and Doheny was up to bat!

The big fellow with the larboard wing saw it was up to him to win the game and he grinned on Gibson with a sardonic smirk as he swung the willow experimentally and told the spectators what he would do. The pitcher wasn’t worrying much, for Doheny never could hit, but he carelessly sent over a fast, straight one and the man at bat just naturally banged it to deep right field, and, before the ball could be fielded in, darkness and all, the man on first was home and it was all off. And no disgrace to Gibson, either.

Actually Doheny was a lifetime .198 hitter, pretty good as pitchers went in the deadball era. He even batted .345 for New York during one half-season.

By 1898 Ed Doheny seemed to be back in favor with Freedman, and he was even named the Giants’ Opening Day pitcher. Finally Ed appeared to be on the verge of fulfilling the more positive hints he had displayed in his first three years. At times he did achieve some extraordinary feats. On August 15, 1899, for example, he made his own distinct mark in the baseball record book by striking out Louisville’s Pete Dowling five times in a single nine-inning game. And on May 25, 1899, he pitched a masterful four-hit game only to lose because the opposing pitcher, future teammate Deacon Phillippe, threw a no-hitter.

For the most part, however, the 1898-1900 seasons proved disastrous for Doheny: he lost 50 games while winning only 21, and each year his ERA increased, as did his wildness. His low point was 1900, when he went 4-14 with a 5.51 ERA, his highest since his rookie season.

In 1901 Doheny’s luck seemed to change, and so did the results of his pitching labors. He was traded in midseason from the Giants to the Pittsburgh Pirates, then the best team in the National League. For the first half of the season, pitching irregularly, Doheny went 2-5 for the Giants. But with his new team he was 6-2 for the rest of the 1901 season. Of course, pitching for a team that was running away with the National League pennant didn’t hurt his record any. The Giants never finished higher than seventh with Doheny, but the Pirates finished in first place each of Ed’s three seasons in the Steel City. He won more games in two and a half years in Pittsburgh than he had in six and a half in New York. Doheny became a mainstay in one of the N.L.’s best rotations, which also featured Phillippe, Jesse Tannehill and Hall-of-Famer Jack Chesbro.
Ed Doheny was 16-4 in 1902 and his .800 winning percentage was second-best in the National League. In 1903 he racked up another 16 victories and helped the Pittsburgh staff establish an N.L. record six consecutive shutouts. In fact, Doheny set the new record by recording the fourth shutout of the streak, a 9-0 defeat of the Boston Beaneaters.

Ed Doheny should have taken his success to even greater heights in Pittsburgh. He should have been part of an excellent Pirate staff for years to come, pitching for an owner, Barney Dreyfuss, considerably different from Andrew Freedman. He should have appeared in the first modern World Series and received a share of the proceeds. But lurking in his psyche was an illness that not only denied him more success but doomed him to disaster.

Off to a 12-6 start to the 1903 season, Doheny began exhibiting strange behavior, which was reportedly exacerbated by his consumption of alcohol. First he had a few unpleasant altercations with teammates. Later he started believing he was being followed by detectives. When he left the team without permission towards the end of July, the Pittsburg Post reported that act with a pitiless but starkly revealing headline: “HIS MIND IS THOUGHT TO BE DERANGED.”

After a few weeks of rest at his home in Andover, Massachusetts, Doheny returned to the Pirates in Boston during an August road trip. He pitched well, improving his record to 16-8, but another series of behavioral mishaps beset him, finally causing his sanity to be questioned. Granted a leave of absence by the Pirates, he was escorted home to Andover by his clergyman brother on September 22, 1903, and placed under the care of a physician.

Though he received daily medical care, Ed’s condition did not improve. Nothing seemed to help, not even a gift of his uniform from the Pirates, which Doheny interpreted as a rejection of his belief that he would someday return to the team. During the first modern World Series, while the A.L.’s Boston Pilgrims were upsetting his former teammates, Doheny suffered a breakdown that knocked him out of the game for good. On October 10 he threw his doctor head-first out the door of his home and warned him not to return; then in the early morning of October 11 he attacked and felled his male nurse, Oberlin Howarth, with a cast-iron stove leg. Howarth was seriously injured but eventually recovered.

Doheny’s wife hurried to the neighbors for assistance, but for more than an hour Ed held a score of neighbors and several policemen at bay, defying them and threatening to kill the first man who attempted to take him. Finally Chief of Police Frye and Officer Mills caught him off his guard and overpowered him, and after an examination by two physicians he was declared insane and committed to an asylum in Danvers, Massachusetts (the same place where Jimmy Piersall of the Boston Red Sox was institutionalized half a century later).

By 1905 his condition had worsened. A Lowell newspaper reported, “Mrs. Doheny writes that her husband — the pitcher — shows no sign of improvement at Danvers State Asylum and will never recover his reason. [He’s] not able to recognize anybody.” Though he lived 13 more tormented years, Ed Doheny never recuperated from his mental illness, never pitched again — and died in another Massachusetts institution, the Medfield State Asylum, on December 29, 1916.

Thus closed the stormy life of one of the most talented of Vermont ballplayers, tragically struck down just as he was overcoming his early problems and establishing himself as one of baseball’s winningest pitchers. Indeed, Doheny held a well-deserved spot in baseball’s best pitching rotation, and was still shy of his 30th birthday. Whatever dark demons controlled his troubled psyche, they turned his life upside down. What-might-have-been never was for Ed Doheny — instead of realizing his dreams of glory, he plunged into a nightmare from which he never awoke.

Sources

A version of this biography originally appeared in Green Mountain Boys of Summer: Vermonters in the Major Leagues 1882-1993, edited by Tom Simon (New England Press, 2000).

In researching this article, the author made use of the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, the Tom Shea Collection, the archives at the University of Vermont, and several local newspapers.

Before the turn of the century, the Dubuc family owned Granite Construction Company, an itinerant firm that specialized in building churches throughout the northeast. In the spring of 1887, Napoleon Dubuc relocated to Railroad Street in St. Johnsbury to start work on Notre Dame Church. That first summer, 150 carloads of Concord granite and thirty carloads of Isle la Motte stone were used to build the church’s exterior. In the summer of 1888, the interior was finished in ash, frescoed, and lighted with stained-glass windows–St. Patrick on one side for the Irish parishioners and St. John the Baptist on the other for the French-Canadians.

Later that summer–on September 15, 1888, to be exact–Napoleon and Mathilde Dubuc had a son (one of six she bore) whose given name at birth is variously reported as Jean Arthur, John Joseph, Jean Baptiste Arthur, and Jean Joseph Octave Arthur. As if those weren’t enough, somewhere along the line he picked up the nickname “Chauncey.” Despite his French-Canadian heritage, his first name was pronounced “Gene,” at least in American baseball circles, while his last name was pronounced like Dubuque, the city in Iowa.

When Jean was four, the Dubucs moved to Montpelier. The future major leaguer lived in Vermont’s capital city for seven years before his parents sent him to the Seminary of St. Theresa in Montreal, where he studied for the priesthood There, the Rutland Herald reported, Jean “was undefeated in high school games pitched in Canada.” As he entered adolescence, the family re-located yet again, this time to Fall River, Massachusetts, where Napoleon was the contractor in charge of building St. Ann’s Church. Dubuc relative Bob O’Leary recalls a story from his childhood about how the 15-year-old Jean first learned to control his pitches in Fall River: “Behind home plate at the sandlot was the exterior wall of a drug store. Jean was throwing so hard and wild that the catcher could not always catch the ball. When it struck the outside of the pharmacy, all the items displayed on the inside of that wall fell to the ground and broke. Jean learned to control his great arm so that they could keep playing.”

Jean attended the prep program at the College of the Holy Cross in Worcester for one year, 1904-05, studying electrical engineering. He went out for varsity baseball, but on the second day of practice school authorities informed the 15-year-old that he was too young to play. For the 1905-06 school year, Dubuc enrolled at St. Michael’s College in Winooski Park, Vermont. In only its second year of existence, St. Mike’s already had a winning baseball team. Jean pitched every game that season, compiling a 13-4 record and recording double-digit strikeouts routinely. His exploits at the plate were even more impressive. Batting third in the order, he hit .528 with an .843 slugging average. To put that in perspective, subtracting Dubuc’s contributions, the team’s batting average falls from .300 to .271, and its slugging average plummets from .375 to .316. A century later, Dubuc, a three-sport athlete, was inducted into the college’s Athletics Hall of Fame in September 2006.

The following fall, Jean headed west to South Bend, Indiana, and enrolled at the University of Notre Dame. Though his first athletic participation on campus was as starting forward on the varsity basketball team, Dubuc showcased his true athletic brilliance on the baseball diamond. In the spring of 1907, the 18-year-old Vermonter posted a 5-1 record as the Fighting Irish amassed 21 victories against only two losses. Notre Dame was 20-1 the following season, with Jean upping his contribution to 9-1. Aside from Dubuc, the 1908 squad featured no less than four future major leaguers: second baseman George Cutshaw, who played regularly for 11 seasons with Brooklyn, Pittsburgh, and Detroit; first baseman Bert Daniels, who patrolled the outfield with the New York Highlanders for four seasons; catcher Ed McDonough, who backstopped for the Phillies for a couple of years; and pitcher Frank Scanlan, who had a cup of coffee with the Phils.

Even in that fast company, Chauncey Dubuc glistened. His nine wins in 1908 stood as a school record until 1989, though later Notre Dame teams played much longer schedules. Of his 14 wins over two seasons, seven were shutouts, and even his two defeats were glorious. In 1907’s only loss, Dubuc gave up just one hit and one walk while striking out 16–and getting three hits of his own. And his 1908 defeat was one of the most interesting games in the annals of Vermont baseball history.

When Jean Dubuc pitched against UVM at Centennial Field during Notre Dame’s 1908 eastern trip, Vermont baseball enjoyed a banner day. The game featured three of history’s most distinguished Green Mountain Boys of Summer: Dubuc on the mound for the visitors, Ray Collins for the home nine, and Larry Gardner at shortstop.

In a hard-fought game in which Collins struck out 13, UVM handed the Fighting Irish — and Dubuc — their only loss of the season, 6-3. “[Notre Dame], the much heralded champions of the Middle West, came to Burlington with a series of 12 victories,” bragged UVM’s yearbook, The Ariel, “yet even with the far famed Dubuc in the box, they were unable to keep us from scoring six runs.”

Jean Dubuc intended to return to Notre Dame in the fall of 1908 but was forced to change plans when a semipro game in Chicago cost him his amateur status. Adopting the alias of “Williams,” Dubuc pitched a lackluster team called the White Rocks to a 2-1 victory over the powerful Gunthers, but the ruse was detected and reported in the Chicago Tribune. Without hesitation, Notre Dame authorities ruled their best pitcher ineligible for further collegiate competition.

Jean barely had time to peel off his White Rocks uniform before receiving offers from seven major league teams. He signed with the Cincinnati Reds, with whom the 19-year-old made his major league debut on June 25, 1908. In his first big league game, he was pulled in the fourth inning after severely wrenching his knee, an injury that plagued him for the rest of his career. He pitched only once more until September, when he returned to action as a regular starter. Dubuc ended up 5-6 with a solid 2.74 ERA. One of his victories was a two-hit shutout over the world-champion Chicago Cubs.

That fall, Jean won three of his four decisions on Cincinnati’s barnstorming tour of Cuba. It looked like 1909 might be a big year for the young Vermonter. But in spring training he contracted malaria, causing him to miss most of the season and reportedly still affecting his play badly the following year. In 1910, Reds manager Clark Griffith sent Dubuc to Buffalo of the Eastern League, but when the pitcher continued to struggle (his record was 0-6), Buffalo released him. Jean went home to Montreal, where his father had moved after Jean’s mother’s death.

For the French-speaking Dubuc, Montreal was the perfect place to turn around his sagging baseball fortunes. Jean joined the Royals, the local Eastern League club, and rebounded to 21-11 in 1911, thanks mainly to an effective change-up reportedly learned from his catcher, major league veteran Frank Roth. Jean was no slouch at the plate, either. The Dubuc scrapbooks reveal that in 26 pinch-hit at-bats in Montreal, Jean had an astounding 22 hits. Dubuc also opened a successful business, The Palace Bowling Alley and Pool Room at 282 St. Catherine Street, and bought stock in the Montreal Wanderers, one of two local National Hockey Association franchises. Of course, with 21 wins to his credit, Dubuc was eagerly wanted back in the majors–it was said that 15 big league scouts were in the stands for one of his starts. Montreal’s asking price was reportedly $10,000 and a couple of players, but in September the Royals accidentally exposed him to the major league draft. Ten of the 16 clubs put in claims, with the Detroit Tigers finally obtaining him for the bargain price of $1,500.

Detroit offered Dubuc a salary of $2,250 for 1912. Sitting pretty in Montreal, Jean played coy. In a letter to Tigers owner Frank Navin, he pointed out that $2,250 for seven months’ work contrasted poorly with his 1911 salary of $2,196.68 for five months, not to mention the need to hire a manager to run his business if he left Montreal. Dubuc countered with two options: Navin could raise him to $2,800 or allow him to buy out his own contract for $1,500. While that response may seem brazen for an unproven youngster, Dubuc’s letter, preserved to this day in his file at the National Baseball Library, is a model of courtesy.

Somehow the differences were resolved, and in 1912 Jean Dubuc began a five-year stint in Detroit (rooming with Ty Cobb on road trips) with a spectacular first season, beginning with a win in the first game ever played at Tiger (Navin/Briggs) Stadium. Though overshadowed by Walter Johnson’s and Smoky Joe Wood’s record 16-game winning streaks, Dubuc compiled an 11-game streak of his own en route to a 17-10 record, with two shutouts and an ERA of 2.77. In a feature article in Baseball Magazine, F. C. Lane called Dubuc “The Slow Ball Wizard.” Lane wrote that it was Roth who taught him the slow ball in Montreal in 1911, though others claim that Clark Griffith had shown it to him two years earlier. Another sportswriter dubbed him the “best pitching find of the season.” Hall of Fame umpire Billy Evans pronounced his change-up the best in the American League.

Over the next four seasons, amid repeated salary wrangles, Dubuc showed flashes of his original glitter but never put together an entire season of distinction. In 1914, for example, he started off in a blaze, winning his first five decisions — despite hurting his knee again on April 15 – and bringing forth headlines like “Looks Better Than Ever.” According to one newspaper, “Some of the diamond critics believe that he is destined to become the best pitcher in baseball.” But for the rest of that year his won-lost record was only 8-l4, his ERA for the season escalating to 3.46. He came back in 1915 with a 17-12 record, including a career-high five shutouts (one of them a one-hit, 1-0 triumph over the great Walter Johnson). But when his knee injury resurfaced in 1916, causing him to tail off to 10-10, the Tigers figured he wasn’t worth a big salary and sold him to Chattanooga.

Dubuc went 22-16 games for the Salt Lake City Bees in the Pacific Coast League in 1917, playing outfield often and pinch-hitting with some frequency. He suffered a serious automobile accident in late March 1918 but again pitched well for Salt Lake that season. In July he was one of 10 Bees ordered to show cause why they should not be designated 1-A in the draft. Dubuc told the Salt Lake papers that he wanted to join the war effort as a French interpreter, but when he was granted a deferment due to his bad knee, his appeal increased to major league teams seeking to restore depleted rosters. The Boston Red Sox purchased his contract and on July 25 he reported to the Red Sox on the road at Comiskey Park.

With the Red Sox Dubuc appeared in five games, but pitched in only two. The first was his debut on July 28; he allowed one run, throwing the last two innings of an 8-0 loss to Chicago, and was 1-for-1 with a single in his only at-bat. His second appearance was his only start, the second game of a double header in New York, which he lost in the bottom of the ninth, 4-3. Dubuc was 1-for-6 at the plate during the regular season. His only appearance in the World Series came when Barrow wanted a right-handed pinch hitter in the ninth inning of Game Two. The Red Sox were down 3-1 with men on first and third and one out. Dubuc struck out, then Schang popped up to end the game.

John McGraw’s New York Giants acquired Dubuc before the 1919 season. In an era when relief specialists were unheard of–Firpo Marberry, often credited for launching that role, didn’t appear until five seasons later–Dubuc pitched in 36 games, only five of them starts, leading the N.L. with 31 relief appearances. He won six, lost four, saved three (tied for second in the league in that category), and led the league in games finished (22), an early example of the “closer” in baseball. Dubuc compiled a 2.66 ERA and allowed only 119 hits in 132 innings as the Giants finished in second place.. He seemed to have found a niche.

Based on his stellar 1919 performance, Jean Dubuc appeared to have earned another shot at the majors. “He doubtless will festoon the Giant staff for some time to come,” was how one writer put it. But after the fall barnstorming tour, McGraw unexpectedly released Dubuc. The 31-year-old veteran hooked on with the Toledo Mud Hens, for whom he played all positions except catcher and middle infield in 1920. In the American Association, Dubuc proved his value by winning nine games on the mound with a 2.72 ERA, batting .292, serving as field captain, and even replacing Roger Bresnahan as manager at midseason.

Why did the sage McGraw exile Dubuc to Toledo, and why did he never again pitch in the major leagues? The answers to those questions became apparent only as the details of the Black Sox scandal unfolded. On September 24, 1920, pitcher Rube Benton, a former teammate of Dubuc’s with the Giants, testified before a grand jury in Chicago that he’d seen a telegram disclosing that the Series was fixed. “I don’t know who sent it,” Benton said, “but it came to Jean Dubuc, who was barnstorming with us. It simply said: ‘Bet on the Cincinnati team today.’ I suppose it came from Bill Burns, who had been close to Dubuc a few weeks before the Series when both were living at the Ansonia Hotel in New York City.” Benton didn’t mention another possible source: Chick Gandil, with whom Dubuc had been good friends since they played together in 1911.

Having his name come up in the baseball bribery investigation wasn’t a positive development for Dubuc, to say the least. In the aftermath of Benton’s testimony, The Sporting News published a piece in its issue of November 11, 1920, entitled “Why Dubuc Was Dropped.” The article quoted McGraw as saying that he released Dubuc because he “constantly associated” with Burns, a gambler who’d played with Jean on the 1912 Tigers. According to The Sporting News, McGraw suspected that Burns and Hal Chase, who’d also been mentioned in the Chicago hearings, might have caused the Giants to lose out to the Reds in the 1919 pennant race.

While Commissioner Landis was handing out banishments from baseball, Dubuc wisely made himself unobtrusive by leaving the country for the entire 1921 season. Others who were no more implicated in the scandal than Dubuc were banned for life, but Landis failed to notice the newly obscure pitcher in Montreal’s Atwater Park Twilight League. By 1922, Jean was back in the United States, pitching in the minors for the Syracuse Stars. The Sporting News lifted an offended eyebrow: “The astounding news comes from Syracuse that President Ernest Landgraf plans to take on Jean Dubuc, former major leaguer and later with Toledo, from which club he drew his walking papers because he was supposed to know too much about the throwing of the 1919 World’s Series.” Still Landis looked the other way, and Dubuc was allowed to carve out a modest living in the minors for the-next several years.

Dubuc played for Syracuse again in 1923, and was a player-manager for both Ottawa and Hull in 1924. He played for Manchester in 1926 and Nashua in 1929, where his brother Arthur owned the team. In 1927 Jean moved to Providence, Rhode Island, where he coached the Brown University baseball and hockey teams and founded the Rhode Island Reds of the American Hockey League. While in Rhode Island he scouted for the Detroit Tigers, signing Josh Billings, Gene Desautels, Birdie Tebbetts, and the great Hank Greenberg among others. New York Yankees scout Paul Krichell recalled spending the better part of a year visiting the Greenberg family and manfully eating Yiddish food, only to watch with dismay as “in stepped Jean Dubuc… who called at the Greenberg house, bringing along his own ham sandwich, and signed up Hank right under the very shadow of Yankee Stadium.”

In 1936 Dubuc returned to his native state as manager of the Northern League’s Burlington Cardinals, but the following year he left sports altogether. For the next two decades he worked as a printer’s ink salesman for the Braden-Sutphin Ink Co., eventually retiring to Florida. His wife, Lu, died in 1956. The couple had no children. Bob O’Leary’s grandmother cared for her uncle Jean after a stroke robbed him of mobility and speech; she reported that for the last months of his life, the only word he could say was “merde.” Following a three-year illness, Jean Dubuc passed away in Fort Myers on August 28, 1958. “He was a very dear friend of mine up to the time of his death, was a very fine baseball man, an excellent baseball instructor, and a fine gentleman,” said Birdie Tebbetts.

Sources

Buffalo Bisons Historical Page

Burlington Free Press, June 29, 2006 and online edition, October 19, 2006

Dubuc scrapbooks in the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, Cooperstown NY

“Flaws in the Diamond” University of Massachusetts, October 15, 1975

Lane. F. C. “Slow Ball Wizard”

Correspondence from Bob O’Leary, December 31, 2006

University of Notre Dame website

Thanks for research assistance by Cappy Gagnon and Bob O’Leary.

By 1901 baseball scouts were interested. That summer, the 24-year-old Dupee–passing himself off as 19, a common practice at the time and believable in his case because he was still a student–signed with Augusta, Maine, of the New England League. Joining the team three weeks into the season, Frank was the winning pitcher in his professional debut on June 7, 1901. He went on to win three of his four starts before the franchise moved to Lynn, Massachusetts, during the last week of June. Reluctant to leave Maine, Dupee hooked on with Portland and, according to Sporting Life, “was the star pitcher of the Portland team and the wonder of the New England League.” By August 17 Dupee had compiled a record of 10-6 and a 2.47 ERA when Portland sold his contract to the Chicago White Stockings. A bright future seemed assured.

What turned out to be Dupee’s 15 minutes of fame came one week later on Saturday, August 24, 1901, at Baltimore’s Oriole Park. It was the inaugural season of the American League, and the first-place White Stockings, clinging to a half-game lead over the Boston Americans, were in desperate need of pitching help. Player-manager Clark Griffith, the ace of the staff, had a broken finger, and the usually dependable Nixey Callahan was suffering from stomach trouble. To make matters worse, John Katoll was serving a suspension after throwing a baseball at umpire Jack Haskell three days earlier. That left Griffith with one reliable hurler, rookie Roy Patterson, who had pitched the day before. Under those circumstances, Griff felt he had no choice but to start his new acquisition against John McGraw’s feisty Orioles.

Dupee’s major league debut started off well enough, his teammates staking him to a 1-0 lead in the top of the first inning on two-out triples by Sandow Mertes and Fred Hartman. Then Dupee took to the mound and, according to the Chicago Tribune, “must have had an attack of stage fright or something, for he could not throw the ball anywhere near the plate.” The seminarian faced three .300 hitters, left fielder Mike Donlin (.341), right fielder Cy Seymour (.303) and second baseman Jimmy Williams (.317), and walked all three. That was enough for Griffith, who replaced Dupee with Callahan. Steve Brodie hit an infield fly, but Warren Hart and Roger Bresnahan both singled, knocking in all three of the runners Callahan had inherited from Dupee. The Orioles went on to win 10-4, with the loss charged to the rookie from Monkton.

On board the train to Philadelphia, where the White Stockings were to open a three-game series against the Athletics on Monday, Dupee explained to reporters that never in his life had he given up so many bases on balls. (That was not exactly true; in his last start in the New England League he had walked six, and Sporting Life acknowledged that “his only weakness is occasional lack of control.”) Despite the fit of wildness, Griffith indicated he would give the young pitcher another start. Surely he would get a second chance.

That chance never came. On Sunday, an off-day due to Pennsylvania’s restrictive Blue Laws, Griffith signed Wiley Piatt, a veteran lefthander who had just been released by the Athletics. Three days later Griffith returned Dupee on option to Portland. While the White Sox went on to win the AL’s first pennant, Dupee pitched in two more games back in the New England League, winning one and losing one to finish the season at 11-7.

Still another chance seemed to rise the next spring. Before the 1902 season the White Sox sold Dupee to the New York Giants. He went unbeaten in spring exhibition games, and the New York writers described him as the equal of Christy Mathewson, who had posted a 20-17 record the previous year as a rookie for the seventh-place Giants. Dupee was so impressive, in fact, that “Dirty Jack” Doyle, the Giants’ first baseman, dubbed him and Mathewson the “Heavenly Twins” (they were approximately the same height and build). Slated to begin the season as a regular in the New York rotation, surely Dupee was now ready to emerge.

Not so. Only days before the season opener, the hard luck hurler suffered an arm injury that never completely healed. Dupee pitched in the minor leagues another 13 seasons but never again got a chance to pitch in the majors.

Dupee’s frustrations continued after his retirement from baseball. He and his wife, the former Florence Etta Morgan, lived for over 50 years in West Falmouth, Maine, on a farm they inherited from Florence’s parents (currently the site of Falmouth High School). Frank struggled to make a living raising vegetables, supplementing his income by serving occasionally as a hunting and fishing guide and by selling the pelts of muskrats, foxes, skunks and raccoons he trapped in nearby swamps. It was not a happy life. His son Frederick, 88 years old at the time he was interviewed in 1996, stated that his father cheated on his mother and physically abused his children.

Frank Dupee died at the age of 79 on August 14, 1956. His obituary quoted John McGraw as telling sports writers that Dupee was the only pitcher he ever saw who had as much speed as the famed Walter Johnson. But instead of glory, his legacy amounts to this: by yielding three earned runs without recording a single out, Dupee is one of only 18 pitchers in all major league history with a lifetime ERA of infinity. Of those 18, only two gave up more earned runs than Dupee’s three. And that makes the once-promising lad from Monkton officially the third-worst pitcher in the history of major league baseball.

Sources

A version of this biography originally appeared in Green Mountain Boys of Summer: Vermonters in the Major Leagues 1882-1993, edited by Tom Simon (New England Press, 2000).

In researching this article, the author made use of the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, the Tom Shea Collection, the archives at the University of Vermont, and several local newspapers.

Charles Franklin Evans was born in Arlington on October 15, 1889. Somehow he acquired the nickname “Chick”; it may have been short for “Chickory,” as he was called by at least one sportswriter, but more likely it was just a common nickname for people named Charles. Evans grew up in North Bennington and attended Burr & Burton Seminary in Manchester, where he was the captain and star pitcher of the baseball team. The 1906 edition of the school’s yearbook, The Burtonian, gives an indication of Evans’ ability: “The battery work this year is such as has never before been exhibited on these grounds. Captain Evans has been a power in the box that all opposing teams found was not to be trifled with.”

Chick Evans’ high school career included at least two matchups against a pitcher named “Fisher” of Middlebury High School. Later a teammate of Chick’s at Hartford in 1908, “Fisher” of course was the great Ray Fisher, who won 100 big league games and outlived Evans by 66 years. In their first duel, which occurred at the fairgrounds in Manchester Center on May 6, 1905, Evans pitched a three-hitter and struck out 14 en route to a 7-1 victory. One month later, Fisher was the winner in a 10-inning, 4-3 contest at Middlebury College that the Rutland Herald described as “one of the fastest played on the college diamond for a long time.”

After graduating from Burr & Burton in 1907, Evans joined a semi-pro team in Hoosick Falls, New York, where he was spotted by “Buttermilk” Tommy Dowd. A Brown alumnus who also studied law at Georgetown, Dowd was a ten-year big league veteran who last appeared in the majors with the Boston Americans in 1901. Following his big league days, he played and managed in several minor and independent leagues (including a stint in Vermont’s Northern League with Burlington in 1904) and coached the college teams at Amherst and Williams.

Dowd was managing Hartford of the Connecticut League at the time, and he signed Evans to a contract for the 1908 season. The Vermonter won 13 games as an 18-year-old rookie, but his outing against Bridgeport on July 21, 1908, is what really made major league teams take notice. The following account appeared in the Hartford Times:

There was not a fly or a ground ball handled by the Hartford outfielders during the entire game. Only twenty-seven men faced Evans in the nine innings. Ten of these struck out. He fanned at least one man in eight of the nine innings, and in the sixth and ninth had two in each to his credit. Nearly all of the crowd of 1,500 stayed until the end, hoping that Chick would turn the trick. He fanned the last two in the ninth inning. After the game the crowd gathered around Evans and congratulated him on his great pitching feat.

After Evans won ten games by the halfway point of the 1909 season, Hartford sold him to the Boston Nationals on July 21. The Doves, as they were then known, stood at the bottom of the National League standings, but manager Harry Smith nonetheless kept Evans on the bench until September 19. He pitched in a total of only four games for Boston that season, finishing with a record of 0-3.

The 1910 season started on a much better note for Chick Evans. On opening day, April 14, Boston beat the New York Giants 3-2 in 11 innings, and Evans pitched one-hit ball over the last three innings to pick up the win. It was his only major league victory, even though Sporting Life credited Evans with additional wins on July 7 and July 20. For a while, in fact, Evans, with a record of 3-0, appeared in some newspapers at the top of the list of the leading pitchers in the National League (it was customary at the time to rank pitchers in order of winning percentage). Both The Baseball Encyclopedia and Total Baseball, however, list Evans’ record in 1910 as 1-1 (he lost his only start of the year on August 27). What happened to his two additional wins?

For that answer, we must turn to SABR member Frank Williams, the acknowledged expert on won-lost decisions prior to 1920. Williams writes:

Evans’ official record in 1910 is 1-1. The listing in Sporting Life, the New York Times, etc., for the most part gave the win to the pitcher who was pitching when his team took the lead in the game. The official scorers in the A.L. and the N.L. followed the practices set forth by Ban Johnson and Irwin M. Howe in the A.L., and John Heydler in the N.L.

These practices were basically the same for both leagues and were different than the ones used by Sporting Life, the New York Times, etc. They were official, however, and that is why all the record books show Evans at 1-1 in 1910.

Following the 1910 season, the Hoosick Falls council of the Knights of Columbus engaged Evans to pitch for an all-star aggregation of minor leaguers in a game on October 12 against the Bennington council. With Evans on the mound, Hoosick Falls must have felt confident that it would win the $100 prize wagered on the annual Columbus Day game.

Little did the New Yorkers know that the Bennington council had hired the Boston Red Sox, who had played an exhibition game in Burlington just two days earlier. With Smokey Joe Wood and Ray Collins splitting the mound duties, the “Bensox” won 11-1 in a game described by the Bennington Free Press as a “runaway for the Speed Boys.” The minor league all-stars “by comparison looked like a lot of children.” Evans was the losing pitcher, giving up nine runs in just four innings.

That game was an omen of things to come, for Evans’ baseball career and life were all downhill after 1910. He pitched briefly with Syracuse of the New York State League in 1911 and 1912. Newspaper reports indicate that he developed arm trouble. By 1916 he was living in Schenectady, New York, where he worked in the munitions department of the General Electric Company. He also played the outfield for the company baseball team.

Evans became ill later that year. He was hospitalized in Schenectady’s Ellis Hospital from the end of July until his death on September 2, 1916. The Schenectady Gazette reported that Evans “at times had given promise of recovery. For the next week and a half his condition had been very poor and his death was expected momentarily. During the last week he was unconscious most of the time.”

Death notices appeared in the Gazette, the Bennington Free Press and The Sporting News, all three giving slightly differing accounts of his life and career. Evans’ death certificate listed the cause of death as “general septicemia and acute gonorrheal endocarditis,” with a “cerebral embolism” listed as contributory. His funeral was held at his brother’s home in North Bennington, and he was laid to rest in Schenectedy on September 4, 1916.

Sources

A version of this biography originally appeared in Green Mountain Boys of Summer: Vermonters in the Major Leagues 1882-1993, edited by Tom Simon (New England Press, 2000).

In researching this article, the author made use of the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, the Tom Shea Collection, the archives at the University of Vermont, and several local newspapers.

Ray Fisher has been justly honored for his 38 seasons as head baseball coach at the University of Michigan. He was elected to Michigan’s Sports Hall of Fame in 1959, the American Association of College Baseball Coaches Hall of Fame in 1966, and the University of Michigan Hall of Honor in 1979. And on May 23, 1970, he received his greatest honor when the ballpark at the University of Michigan was renamed Ray Fisher Baseball Stadium.

Yet although his name is almost as revered in Ann Arbor as “Hail To The Victors,” Michigan’s famous fight song, Ray Fisher is nearly forgotten in his native Vermont. Even though Fisher spent each summer in a camp on Lake Champlain, few Vermonters remember the fine major-league pitcher who compiled a 2.82 ERA and won 100 games over ten seasons prior to his unjust banishment by Commissioner Landis in 1921.

Ray Lyle Fisher was born on a farm in Middlebury, Vermont, on October 4, 1887. His two oldest brothers worked their entire lives as farmers, and Ray appeared to be destined for a similar fate. “My parents only let me play sports if I kept up my share of the farm work,” he recalled.

Ray was a star pitcher for Middlebury High School, and following his graduation in 1906 he received an offer to play semi-pro baseball in Valleyfield, Quebec. Ray’s father expected him to work on the family farm, however, so Ray was allowed to play only on condition that he send enough money home to hire a farmhand. He did so and had plenty to spare, earning his room and board and $10 per week for pitching, and an additional $1.35 per day as a machinist’s assistant at the Dominion Textile Factory.

That fall Ray joined his older brother Harry as a student at Middlebury College. The youngest Fisher excelled in collegiate athletics, setting the school shot-put record and playing varsity football and baseball. “Pick” (short for “Pickerel”), as he was called by schoolmates, was an infielder at Middlebury until Cy Stackpole, an old minor leaguer who coached the varsity, turned him into a pitcher. Fisher remembered that day:

“Go out on the mound and throw me a few,” Cy said one day in practice. So I went out, tried a curve or two when Stackpole, standing in the box with a bat, told me to. Then I up and threw a fastball. It zipped pretty good. Stackpole just stood there looking at me for a long time with a half-smile on his lips. Finally he said, “How’d you like to pitch against Colgate tomorrow?” I said fine. Colgate, of course, was a major baseball power and was expecting to mop us up. But I had quite a day, fanned 18 and shut them out.

Before long scouts took notice of the 5’11”, 195 lb. right-hander. The summer between his sophomore and junior years at Middlebury Fisher signed with Hartford of the Class-B Connecticut State League. In his first partial season as a professional, he went 12-1 as a starter and reliever, and his .923 winning percentage stood as a minor-league record for over half a century.

In 1909 Ray returned to the Connecticut capital and registered one of the greatest minor-league pitching performances ever, going 24-5 with 243 strikeouts to lead Hartford to its first-ever pennant. By that point major-league teams were interested in his services. Ray signed a $1,500 contract with the New York Highlanders (later known as the Yankees) on condition that he be allowed to return to the Middlebury campus for his senior year. He signed with New York thinking he would not receive other offers, but shortly thereafter Ray Collins told him that the Boston Red Sox also wanted to sign him.

After graduating from Middlebury in 1910, 22-year-old Ray Fisher reported to New York carrying, to the amusement of his new teammates, a homemade bat he had whittled himself back at his Vermont farm. Despite his naivety, Fisher was unimpressed by his new surroundings. “They called it Hilltop Park,” he said, “and it wasn’t even a good college field. The foul lines were cockeyed and the outfield sloped downhill, so when the batter hit one out there it actually rolled toward the fences.”

New York manager George Stallings gave his new pitcher a start against the Chicago White Sox on July 2. Years later Fisher remembered one game during that first season:

My opponent was Ed Walsh, a great pitcher, and Stallings figured he was going to lose the game and didn’t want to waste one of his regular pitchers so he put me in. To be sure I wouldn’t hurt any of his regular catchers — I was a bit wild, no doubt — he brought out Lou Criger, who was the famous batterymate of Cy Young. I think my first game in the majors was his last.

Ray went on to trim the White Sox by a score of 2 to 1, and Stallings told him later that he never would’ve started him if he’d thought the Highlanders had a chance to beat Walsh that day.

Later in the 1910 season Stallings was replaced as manager by first baseman Hal Chase, one of the most unsavory characters in the history of the game. Fisher remembered Chase as a “wonderful fielder, wonderful ballplayer,” but he also thought the manager was a kleptomaniac. “If we were playing poker, he’d play,” Fisher said. “But if he weren’t playing, he’d sit right down next to you and see what you needed and he’d try to hand you the cards so you would cheat. Good fella, but just wanted to do things that weren’t right.”

Surprisingly, Fisher initially thought more highly of Chase than of Hall-of-Fame manager Frank Chance, who led the Yankees in 1913 and 1914. “He didn’t know any of us,” Fisher said, “but he had that book [containing statistics from previous seasons]. When you were working, he sized you up and then he would look in the book and see what you did and then he would decide the reason. He was a devil.”

Relations between Fisher and Chance were strained until an incident during the 1913 season. “At that time I was ready to fight back a little bit,” Fisher remembered.

One day I was pitching and they hit a ball back to me with a man on first and I hesitated on my play. I wasn’t sure if Peck or Hartzel was covering so I only got one man. They would have gotten me out of the inning.

[Chance] hollered something at me and I hollered something back. Then I saw him making room for me on the bench. And I’m telling you we had it out. People in the boxes were leaning all over and listening. In the meantime, the inning was going. He was so intent on me he forgot to have any pitcher warmed up to take my place.

When the inning was over he didn’t have any pitcher warmed up. He said, “Do you want to pitch?” And I said, “I don’t give a damn if I ever pitch another game.” He said, “Go out there and pitch.”

The argument actually improved Ray’s standing with his fiery manager:

[Chance’s] second year I reported [for spring training] in Houston and there was a boy who went to school with me in Middlebury who lived outside of Houston. They invited me out and I didn’t know whether I would be home in time [for curfew]. I said to him, “I’m going to so-and-so’s and I expect to be back in time, but I want you to know where I’ll be.”

And he said, “No rules for you this year,” and that was it. He decided I was an alright guy. Never said boo to me. If I didn’t come to the ballpark the day after I pitched, no questions asked. Never a better manager than Frank Chance, once we got to know each other.

Fisher responded to the freedom with his best season to that point — 10-12 and a 2.28 ERA in 209 innings for the sixth-place Yankees in 1914. The next year, after Chance was forced into retirement by ill health, Ray pitched even better, going 18-11 with a 2.11 ERA (fifth-best in the A.L.).

Until then Fisher had spent his off-seasons in Vermont, serving as athletic director at Middlebury College. He had also taught Latin, and for that reason sportswriters had dubbed him “The Vermont Schoolmaster.” During the 1912 off-season he had married Alice Seeley, another Middlebury native, and they remained happily married until Alice passed away in 1976.

But by 1915 Ray was so popular in New York City that the president of Middlebury College thought he could do more for the school by spending his winters in Gotham. The loyal alumnus agreed; and one might speculate that but for the president’s “wisdom,” Ray Fisher might have spent the next half-century at Middlebury rather than Michigan.

Ray Fisher pitched for the Yankees through the 1917 season when he came down with pleurisy, a disease related to tuberculosis. He suffered with pain, shortness of breath and a weakened overall condition that finally caused him to miss more than one month of the season. His opponent on the day he returned was Walter Johnson, perhaps the greatest pitcher of all-time.

“He threw a fastball by me and, I’ll tell ya, it looked to me like he just opened his hand and it went by me,” Fisher said. “Then he threw me a curveball and that was just right for me. And I got to second and the second baseman said, ‘What did he do, throw you a curveball?'” What Fisher omitted in telling that story is that he threw a shutout that day to beat Johnson, 2 to 0.

Ty Cobb is known primarily for the anger and violence with which he played the game of baseball, but Ray Fisher saw a sweeter side of the Georgia Peach:

Although they say a lot of things about him, I remember distinctly in Detroit that he swung at a ball towards first base and I had to go cover. The ball was real slow along the foul line and I was trying to get the bag and catch the ball at the same time. I ended up with my leg across the bag. He could have stepped on it, and had the perfect right to, but he jumped the bag! If his reputation were true, he would have stepped on it and cut my leg.

Cobb (as did Napoleon Lajoie) listed Fisher among the toughest pitchers he ever faced, and Ray remembered one particular relief appearance in New York when he tamed the Tigers:

It was the eighth inning and [Ray] Caldwell got hit with a liner and split his hand. They put me in there and [Detroit] had the top of the order up. I fooled around and gave a base on balls to Donie Bush, and then Vitt pushed him over. I had Cobb and Crawford coming up.

I could pitch [to Cobb] if I had my stuff, ’cause he stood right on the plate. I got two strikes on him — you couldn’t have shot them in any better. I had slippery elm in my mouth and when I saw that second one go by, I put that spit on there and he never knew it. No one ever told him. He swung for a fast one and missed. I could have lost the game then and people still would have been for me! I will always remember that as a highlight because they had the tying run on second base and I got [Cobb] with three pitches.

[Then] Crawford grounded out to short. I remember I came up to bat — the umpires in those days were really good fellas. I remember as I came to bat — you wouldn’t hear it now — that ump said to me, “Ray, you’ve got pretty good stuff out there today.” They wouldn’t say that now, or even think of it.

Ray Fisher missed the entire 1918 season when he was drafted into the army. At the time he felt his military service was a colossal waste of time, but years later he reflected that perhaps it saved his baseball career. Rather than spending April through October traveling the country in smoke-filled trains, eating poorly and getting little rest, Fisher regained his health under the watchful eye of army physicians at Fort Slocum outside New Rochelle, New York. Ray used his managerial skills to run the camp’s athletics program.

While he was in the service Fisher was acquired by the N.L.’s Cincinnati Reds, who lowered his salary from $6,500 to $3,500. To make things worse, switching leagues meant that he had to learn how to pitch to a whole new set of batters, including Hall-of-Famer Rogers Hornsby:

In the first game I pitched in the National League against St. Louis, I bumped into Hornsby. I looked at him and decided to keep it away from him. [My pitch] was up pretty near waist-high. If it had been a little lower, I don’t know that he would have hit it the same, but he hit that thing over Greasy Neale’s head and it went to the fence.

But Cliff Heathcote was on first. He could run, but he wasn’t very sharp baseball-wise. Heathcote went past the shortstop and about when he got there, something hit him and he decided the ball had been caught and he turned around. Hornsby was about two-thirds of the way to second base and he stood there holding his hat, cussing the guy. We got the ball and got a force out.

The Reds caught a lot of breaks in 1919, and in his return to professional baseball Fisher was 14-5 with a 2.17 ERA as the Reds won their first-ever N.L. pennant. Cincinnati had a strong team built around Heinie Groh and Hall-of-Famer Edd Roush, but their World Series victory over the Chicago White Sox will be forever tainted by the Black Sox scandal. Fisher, in fact, was the losing pitcher in the famous Game Three when “Honest” Dickey Kerr beat the Reds on a three-hit shutout.

“No, we didn’t know some of the White Sox players had agreed to throw the Series,” Fisher said, “but I am sure some of our men knew there was something wrong as the Series progressed.” The most famous of the conspirators was Shoeless Joe Jackson. Fisher said of Jackson:

He wasn’t educated and the guys used to pull tricks on him, especially his own guys. He couldn’t read or write and they used to read his wife’s letters for him and, of course, they made stuff up.

The two men had developed a friendship, visiting before ball games, and Ray always believed that Joe was just too simple and naïve a man to get involved in something as complicated as throwing a World Series.

Prior to the 1920 season the National Commission decided to ban the spitball. Fortunately for Ray, the leagues allowed pitchers who already used it to continue for the rest of their careers, and he was one of 17 who were exempted from the new rule. Ray returned to the Reds, embittered that the team did not raise his $3,500 salary despite his fine performance in 1919. Still he pitched well (2.73 ERA), though the Reds faltered and his won-lost record sank to 10-11.

By 1921 Fisher’s daughter, Janet, was nearing two years old. Ray was beginning to grow tired of the nomadic life of a baseball player. He decided it might be time to settle into a “real” job. What happened in the spring of 1921, however, is not entirely clear, even to the individuals involved. What is clear is that Fisher left the Cincinnati club that spring and never again played in the major leagues.

While returning from spring training in Texas in March 1921, Ray Fisher learned that Del Pratt, formerly of the Browns and the Yankees, had declined the position as baseball coach at the University of Michigan to return to the major leagues. The previous year St. Louis Cardinals general manager Branch Rickey, an influential alumnus of Michigan Law School, had recommended Fisher for the position.

Ray spoke to Reds manager Pat Moran about interviewing for the Michigan job. Cincinnati management was aware that the Vermonter was unhappy with his salary and did nothing to prevent him from leaving the club. After pitching the last five innings and driving in the winning run in the Reds’ final exhibition game in Indianapolis, Ray drove to Ann Arbor to interview. The press reported that Fisher had been given his release with the expectation that he would accept the coaching position at Michigan.

Michigan offered the job to Ray, but around the same time two of Cincinnati’s better pitchers were not performing well. Moran suddenly became interested in keeping Fisher; newspapers quoted him as saying, “Ray is pitching better than he ever has.” But Reds owner August Herrmann refused to offer Ray a multi-year contract, and Fisher turned down a one-year contract with a $1,000 raise. With the parties at an impasse, Ray picked up the phone on Herrman’s desk and called Michigan to say that he’d take the coaching position..

In late April 1921, Herrmann dashed off a letter to N.L. President John Heydler expressing his dismay that Fisher had quit the Reds despite a salary increase. More importantly, the owner noted that his recalcitrant pitcher had given only seven days’ notice of his intention to quit — not the proper ten days’ notice as required by his contract. Heydler placed Fisher on the Ineligible List.

Ray was shocked when he heard the news. When his Michigan team was in Chicago, he sought out Commissioner Landis for a face-to-face meeting to learn his true status. Landis contacted Cincinnati manager Pat Moran for a full report of the dealings between the Reds and Ray Fisher. Had Moran permitted Fisher to interview for the Michigan position?

Moran responded, “I positively refused to grant [such permission] and told him to take up the matter over long-distance telephone with President Herrmann, which I understand he did not do, but took it upon himself to leave the next day.” For 30 years Fisher remained ignorant of Moran’s response, which he vehemently contested.

In June 1921, Commissioner Landis sent Fisher a telegram informing him that he had joined baseball’s Permanent Ineligible List. He remained on that list for nearly 60 years.

At the University of Michigan Ray Fisher became the dean of college baseball coaches. In nearly 1,000 regular season games, 1921 to 1958, Fisher’s teams went 661-292 (.694), won 14 Big Ten titles and an NCAA championship in 1953, the year he was voted NCAA Coach of the Year. Nearly 20 of his players went on to the major leagues, including Dick Wakefield and Don Lund. Fisher was Michigan’s winningest coach in any sport for 70 years, 1930-2000, until softball coach Carol Hutchins got her 662nd win. (As of 2006, Hutchins’s record stood at 961-360-4 for a .727 winning percentage.

Like the major leagues, collegiate athletics had returned to segregation around the turn of the century, but Fisher integrated his Michigan team long before it became normal practice. He also played a role in popularizing baseball in Japan by taking teams to Tokyo in 1929 and 1932 to play exhibition games against Meiji University.

Returning to his family’s camp on Lake Champlain during summers, Ray became one of the driving forces behind semi-pro baseball in Vermont. Occasionally he pitched for the team from Long Point, where his camp was located, or for Vergennes, as on this occasion described in the September 10, 1934, edition of the Burlington Free Press:

Ray Fisher, a 47-year-old veteran of the majors, pitched himself into the local baseball hall of fame here this afternoon with a no-hit, no-run victory over the Queen City Blues team of Burlington…. [H]e leaves tonight to resume his coaching duties at the University of Michigan…. Today’s game was played in the remarkably short time of 55 minutes, so easily did Fisher dispose of the opposing batsmen.

But he is best-remembered as the fiery manager of the Twin City Trojans of Vermont’s famous Northern League. Ray Fisher stood up for the rights of college baseball players to further their skills and earn extra money by playing in summer leagues, especially in light of the numerous scholarships available to football and basketball players and the flexibility of the amateur status of track teams. Baseball players, he felt, were treated unfairly. To his frustration, the Big Nine had strict rules on player eligibility, and much of Ray’s final years in collegiate coaching were spent fighting with the NCAA.

With his national reputation, Fisher had little difficulty attracting top players to the Northern League, but the best player he ever coached was undoubtedly Robin Roberts. Though the future Hall-of-Famer pitched for rival Michigan State, Ray somehow convinced him to play for the Twin City Trojans in 1946 and 1947. Roberts has fond memories of his time in the Green Mountains, particularly the second season: “[W]e were really good then. I won 17 straight starts that year in Vermont, and that was the year the scouts became interested. I signed with the Phillies in September of that year and was in the big leagues the next June.”

To the chagrin of his coaches at Michigan State and Philadelphia, Robin Roberts consistently credited Ray Fisher for his success: “Ray taught me everything,” he said. “Everything I’ve been told by the Phillies coaches is just a repetition of what I learned in Vermont. Of course, it’s nice to be reminded, and don’t think I don’t appreciate the help I’ve received from fellows like [George] Earnshaw and [Schoolboy] Rowe. It is just that I feel I owe so much to Fisher.”

With players like Roberts, Fisher’s Montpelier-based Twin City Trojans were always the team to beat, and his rambunctious coaching style brought out the fans. While he was tough on umpires at Michigan, his school-year persona didn’t compare to the summer character known as “Angry Ray” (or “Rowdy Ray,” “Violent Fisher” or “Cry Baby Ray,” to mention a few of the nicknames he received from the Vermont press).

Ray was consistently tossed out of games and frequently required the assistance of police officers — not only to get him to leave the ballpark, but to protect him from rowdy fans once he got outside. Though sometimes his tirades were marked by equipment-tossing and protested games, Ray generally limited his actions to pointed verbal abuse — but never any expletives.

One story is recounted by R.W. Manville, a former Northern League player, in a letter written in May 1970:

One night, after a particularly harrowing series of umpires’ bad decisions, Ray managed (with a few “Lord-a-mighties!” thrown in) to get himself excused from the game in the fifth or sixth inning. In his easily recognizable yankee-spiced voice, he soon had everyone in the stands in arms over his comments wafting gently from somewhere behind the clubhouse. This ultimately led to disaster, and my final remembrance of that evening is Mother Fisher standing by her car, all four tires having been deflated by the crowd, asking the team to go rescue Ray from the clubhouse. As we surrounded him, bats in hand, on leaving the park, Ray couldn’t resist one more fling at the hostile crowd: “This is a five-cent town, three-cent team, and a penny’s worth of umpire!”

Much of that behavior was an act, as demonstrated in this excerpt from the Burlington Free Press:

[Ray] went striding out to the plate umpire at Centennial Field one day after a close play, his hands shoved into his pockets like Casey Stengel. He waved his arguing player into the dugout.

Then, with outthrust jaw, he harangued the umpire. Once in a while he waved an arm while the crowd hooted and yelled. He whirled and went back to the dugout, the umpire glaring at him. After the game, we asked the umpire what Ray had said and got this answer:

“In a quiet voice, despite his arm swinging, Ray said, ‘I want you fellows to come down to my camp and we’ll have a cookout. We can get some fishing in there.’ Then he turned and walked away.”

A huge uproar followed Fisher’s resignation as coach of the Twin City Trojans in the middle of the 1949 season. At the time Ray was feeling the pressure of coaching year-round, and at age 62 he was enjoying more and more the time he spent on Lake Champlain. Fisher and the local media, however, focused on an ongoing problem Ray was having with a particular umpire.

The umpire had ejected Fisher from three contests, even though the rules of baseball were on Ray’s side on at least two of those occasions. Finally, after his appeal to the league commissioner failed, Ray decided to call it quits in midseason, citing a conspiracy against him. A more subtle reading of his actions indicates that he was ready to retire at the end of the season and preferred to go out in controversy.

Fisher never returned to managing in the Northern League, though he did spend a few summers coaching a semi-pro team in Blacks Harbor, New Brunswick, Canada.

Ray Fisher coached at Michigan until 1958, when his age forced him into mandatory retirement. While he continued to provide guidance in an unofficial manner, that year marked the beginning of his slow departure from the game he loved. Ray spent much of his retirement fishing and relaxing at his camp on Lake Champlain. There were still plenty of chores, and a Saturday morning was as likely to find Ray on his roof repairing shingles as baiting another hook.

Two events transpired in Ray Fisher’s later years that brought closure to his life in baseball. Back in the ’30s he had received a Lifetime Pass from the major leagues, which he interpreted to mean that his banishment from Organized Baseball had been lifted. He probably never thought twice when he worked as a spring training instructor for the Detroit Tigers and Milwaukee Braves during the early ’60s.

In truth, however, he remained on baseball’s blacklist, a fact that became apparent to Fisher when University of Michigan history professor Don Proctor wrote a wonderfully complete and compelling analysis of his banishment. But when numerous letters were written on Ray’s behalf to the Baseball Commissioner’s Office (including one from President Gerald Ford, who had played freshman football under Ray at the University of Michigan), Bowie Kuhn responded that baseball considered Fisher a “retired player in good standing.”

Then in the summer of 1982, just short of his 95th birthday, Ray attended an Old Timers Game at Yankee Stadium even though by that point he was confined to a wheelchair. Ray’s grandson, John Leidy, remembered the occasion:

When we got there the first evening, there was a reception and I was taken aback by the sheer number of the old-time players who were there. Many Hall-of-Famers: Mickey Mantle, Joe DiMaggio, Whitey Ford, Lefty Gomez. As a bystander, I was a little disappointed that almost none of the others went out of their way to speak to my grandfather.

Of course, to be fair, almost none of them knew him. None of them had played with him. Next to my grandfather, the oldest player there was Joe Sewell and I believe he went back to the ’20s. Grandpa was the only person there who had played in the teens.

I may be reading into this, but I also felt that those guys had a hard time relating to someone who was as old and as crippled as he was. I felt that these athletes were proud of their physical conditions and maybe it was difficult to accept the fact that they would age themselves.

Lefty Gomez came across the room right away and Joe Sewell spoke to him, too. But I will be forever in debt to, and appreciative of, Joe DiMaggio. He was the only person who had not previously known my grandfather who came over and paid his respects.

When we first arrived at Yankee Stadium and stepped out of the limousine, all these youngsters came up wanting autographs. We were in the dugout and they introduced the players one at a time, out on the line, all suited up. Of course my grandfather couldn’t play, but they introduced him as the oldest living Yankee, and they wheeled him out onto the field. He waved to the crowd and they had a long, loud standing ovation, second only to DiMaggio. Grandpa began to break down as the crowd was cheering. I saw the look on his face as he began to get teary as the cheering increased.

We had a dinner Saturday after the game and my grandfather was seated at the head of our table. When the dinner was over, Joe DiMaggio got up to leave a bit ahead of everyone else. He walked to the head of our table and paid his respects to my grandfather before leaving.

A couple months later, when grandpa was ill, he said to me, “At least we made it to Yankee Stadium.”

Ray Fisher died in Ann Arbor on November 3, 1982, some three months after his trip to New York. In 2003, at the request of SABR, the state of Vermont erected a historic site marker near his birthplace in Middlebury.

Sources

A version of this biography originally appeared in Green Mountain Boys of Summer: Vermonters in the Major Leagues 1882-1993, edited by Tom Simon (New England Press, 2000).

In researching this article, the author made use of the subject’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame Library, the Tom Shea Collection, the archives at the University of Vermont, and several local newspapers. In addition, the author wishes to thanks John Leidy for his research assistance.