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Home > Baseball > MLB Hall of Famers > Zack Wheat
Zack Wheat
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.
Zack Wheat was born on 23rd May 1888, in Hamilton, Missouri and died on 11th March 1972 in Sedalia, Missouri. His height is five feet ten inch with weight 170 pounds. He was inducted with the Hall of Fame in 1959.
Wheat was a graceful, lefthanded, line drive hitter who could handle the curveball so well that Giants manager John McGraw forbade his pitchers to throw him any. Wheat topped the 0.320 mark only once during the dead-ball era in 1918, when he had a 26-game hitting streak and won the batting title with a 0.335 average. He was 32 when the ball was made livelier, and his production soared. He batted 0.320 or betters each year from 1920 through 1925, with .375 marks in both 1923 when he played just 98 games after a long holdout and 1924, and a 0.359 mark in '25. He had averaged about five home runs a year through 1919 from '20 through 25, he averaged more than 12 a season.
Wheat signed with the Athletics. He batted 0.324 his final season, pinch hitting and playing 62 games in the outfield for a Philadelphia team that had ten 0.300 hitters, including Ty Cobb 0.357 and Al Simmons 0.392. He finished his career in the American Association in 1928. After retiring to his native Missouri, he was nearly killed in an automobile crash, and was hospitalized for five months. The all-time leader in games played in left field, he was named to the Hall of Fame by the Committee on Baseball Veterans in 1959.
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