Baseball has been very very good to me. The Rube Waddell Story

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RUBE WADDELL: THE ULTIMATE ZANY​

“He had more stuff than any pitcher I ever saw”-Connie Mack

“When Waddell had control and some sleep, he was unbeatable.”-Branch Rickey




As a young man, he possessed the chiseled features of a matinee idol and developed a penchant for eating animal crackers in bed.

Biographer Alan Levy said: “He was a decidedly different sort of a child.” At the age of three, he wandered over to a local fire station and stayed there for several days (much to his parent’s consternation). Waddell once left in the middle of a baseball game to go fishing and would delay games to play marbles with kids.

When George Edward Waddell was born October 13, 1876, in Bradford, PA, the cosmos held its breath, with a sense that this was going to be no ordinary human being. He would grow to be powerfully constructed at 6’1”,196 pounds. A jumbo-sized athlete to be sure, when you consider the average male height in the late

nineteenth century was less than 5 feet 7 inches tall. George Edward toiled on mining and drilling sites as a kid, which helped his conditioning and arm strength. The nickname “Rube” was bestowed upon him as a natural consequence of his simply looking like a big old country boy.

According to SABR writer, Dan O’Brien,

“He entered this world on Friday the 13th and exited on April Fools Day. In the 37 intervening years, Rube Waddell struck out more batters, frustrated more managers, and attracted more fans than any pitcher of his era.”

He combined charisma, alcoholism, heroic qualities, child-like tendencies, and an extraordinary pitching talent. The Columbus Dispatch wrote,

“There was a delicious humor in many of his vagaries…an ingenuousness that made them attractive to the public.”

He did cartwheels off the mound in victory and once disappeared for months during an off-season, only to be discovered wrestling alligators in a circus. He tried out for the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1897 but was seated next to Manager Patsy Donovan during breakfast and was released immediately after the meal.

However, it was also his pitching talent that made Rube a fan favorite. He threw a heavy fastball and a curve that swooped and darted and may have been the best breaking pitch in the major leagues. Let’s look at the record: Over the course of 13 years (1897-1910), Waddell pitched for the Louisville Colonels (NL), Chicago Orphans, Philadelphia Athletics, and St. Louis Browns. The books show a won-lost record of 193-143, with a career ERA of 2.16 (eleventh all-time), 261 complete games, and 50 shutouts. He led the league in ERA twice (1900, 1905), had four consecutive years of 20 or more wins (1902-1905), topped the circuit in strikeouts an amazing six straight years (1902-1907); and in ’03 and ’04 was the only pitcher to compile consecutive 300-strikeout seasons until Sandy Koufax did it in 1965 and 1966. Waddell’s 349 K’s in 1904 represented the modern-era major league season record for more than 60 years (sixth on the all-time list) and is still the American League single-season mark for a left-handed pitcher. 1905 saw Waddell win the Triple Crown for pitching with 27 wins, 287 strikeouts and a minuscule 1.48 earned run average.

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