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Tim Keefe

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.

Tim Keefe was born on Thursday, January 1, 1857, in Cambridge, Massachusetts. Keefe was 23 years old when he broke into the big leagues on August 6, 1880, with the Troy Trojans. His height is five feet ten and a half inches with a weight of 185 pounds. He played his first game in 1880 at the age of 23 and the last game in 1893. He was one of the iron-armed marvels of nineteenth century baseball. Scarcely a season went by without an impressive, league-leading performance in one statistical category or another. In 1880, though pitching only 12 games for Troy, he had an ERA, Earned Run Average of 0.86. In 1883, when the franchise collapsed and was moved to New York as Jim Mutrie's Metropolitans, he pitched 68 complete games in 68 starts for a total of 619 innings, won 41 and struck out 361.

Keefe threw a fastball, curve, and a change up. In 1886 Keefe had 62 complete games and won 42, his career high, although 1888, when the Giants achieved their first pennant, was his finest season. In post-season play he scored four more over the Saint Louis Browns of the American Association. He even designed and sold to the Giants their famous funeral uniforms of that year, all black with New York in white letters across the shirtfront.

His 1889 contract paid him 4,500 dollars, more than any other Giant. Yet for all his star status, Keefe fought actively for ballplayers' welfare. He helped his brother-in-law Monte Ward to establish the Players League and served as secretary for the Brotherhood. He protested player salary ceilings and was among those who won court tests of the reserve clause. He was a quiet, gentle man. In 1887 he had a nervous breakdown after skulling a batter with a fastball. Tim Keefe was an instant star and was a beautiful hitter with a classic swing.

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