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Home > Baseball > MLB Hall of Famers > Tommy McCarthy
Tommy McCarthy
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.
Tommy McCarthy was born on July 24, 1863, in Boston, Massachusetts and died on 5th August 1922. His height is five feet seven inch with weight 170 pounds. The Veterans Committee elected him to the Hall of Fame in 1946.
McCarthy's statistics are unimpressive for a Hall of Famer, but his creative innovations left an indelible mark on the game. He hit .300 only four times in 13 seasons and had a lifetime fielding percentage of .897, and was at his best from 1892 to 1895 when he and Hugh Duffy were the Heavenly Twins in the Boston outfield. McCarthy had played for manager Frank Selee's Oshkosh champions in the North Western League in 1887 and after four years in the American Association was reunited with Selee in Boston.
Selee encouraged innovative baseball and McCarthy is credited with perfecting, if not inventing, the hit-and-run; runner-to-batter signals; and an outfield trap, designed to freeze forced baserunners, where if the runner stayed on base McCarthy would trap the ball and get at least a forceout and possibly a double play. After retiring as a player, McCarthy scouted, coached several colleges and ran a bowling alley and saloon with Duffy.
Tommy McCarthy teamed with Hugh Duffy to form the Heavenly Twins duo in the Boston Beaneaters' outfield of the 1890s. In addition to being a fine hitter with exceptional speed, McCarthy was a clever, daring and intelligent player who originated many tricks, such as trapping fly balls to fool opposing baserunners. A lifetime 0.294 hitter, he stole 109 bases in 1888 to help the Saint Louis Browns capture the pennant.
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