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Rube Waddell

Baseball is an outdoor sport in which a pitcher pitches a hard, fist sized ball to the hitting area of a batter. The batter hits the hard ball with a tapered, smooth, cylindrical bat made up of wood or metal. The batsman scores by running counter-clockwise within the four markers called the bases arranged at the corners of a diamond. Baseball is sometimes called hardball to differentiate it from similar games such as softball.

Rube Waddell was born on October 13, 1876, in Bradford, Pennsylvania. Waddell was 20 years old when he broke into the big leagues on September 8, 1897, with the Louisville Colonels. His height was six foot one half inch with weight 196 pounds. He was died on 01 April 1914, in San Antonio, Texas. His great fastball was compared to that of Walter Johnson, and he threw a sharp breaking curve. He collected 50 career shutouts. His strikeout to walk ratio was almost 3 to 1.

Rube Waddell joined Mack's Philadelphia Athletics in 1902 and went 24-7, leading the AL in strikeouts for the first of six straight seasons. In 1904 he struck out 349 an AL record that stood for over 70 years until surpassed by Nolan Ryan. In 1905 he led the league with 26 wins, 8 relief wins, 46 appearances, 287 strikeouts, and a 1.48 ERA. It is believed Waddell never made more than 2,800 dollars a year, and he spent money as fast as he got it.

By 1910 Waddell was back in the minors. He won 20 games for Joe Cantillon's Minneapolis American Association club in 1911. In the spring of 1912, he was staying at Cantillon's house in Hickman, Kentucky, when a nearby river flooded. For several years there was no monument on Waddell's grave. The president of the San Antonio ballclub told Connie Mack and John McGraw, whose Giants trained there. They raised enough money to put up a six-foot granite marker. Waddell was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Committee on Baseball Veterans in 1946.

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