DUMMY HOY

Dummy Hoy chose baseball as a career in 1885 because, as an amateur playing for his hometown Findlay, Ohio, team, he got four hits against a professional pitcher. He figured playing ball for a living would be easy money.

Well, if you want to call $60 a month "easy money," it would have been. That is what the Northwestern League Milwaukee Brewers offered the barehanded catcher after he had impressed them in a try-out. Although Hoy had no pro experience, he had sufficient respect for his talents to consider the offer an insult.

He heard nearby Oshkosh needed an outfielder, so he asked for a try-out there. Center field was his natural position, and the Oshkosh people quickly saw that he was a quality player. Nearly as quickly, the Brewers saw their error and dispatched a representative to counter-offer the $75 a month Oshkosh had agreed to pay Hoy with one of $85.

One can imagine the young man from Ohio, sitting across the table from the Milwaukee representative pushing a note pad back and forth between them. "How about $85 a month?," the Brewers' man scribbled.

Hoy, grabbing the pad and pencil, answered "I wouldn't play for you for a million a month!"

The pad was necessary, you see, because Dummy Hoy got his nickname not because of his lack of intelligence. He had been profoundly deaf from, age 2, when he suffered spinal meningitis.

That first season with Oshkosh, Dummy was everything his employers had hoped he would be - on defense. Like Tris Speaker, who came along 20 years later, and Jimmy Piersall 50 years after that, Hoy played a shallow center field. His lightning speed and strong arm turned many base hits and extra bases into outs.

But at the plate he struggled. The man who retired in 1902 with a .288 lifetime batting average, dipped to a miserable .219 in '85, lowest of his career.

The reason? Pitchers learned to quick pitch Hoy as he glanced back after every pitch to read the umpire's lips and get the call.

Dummy may have been dumb in one sense but not in the other. The next season he told the third base coach to signal the call to him on each pitch. His BA zoomed to .367. The system worked out between coach and batter proved to be serendipitous. Umpires realized that here was a good way to let everybody know what was happening. From that time on the men in blue have been making obvious hand and arm gestures so that all players and fans can get each call.

It would not be fair to a great ballplayer for him to be known only by this footnote to his career. And the recent movement to have the Veterans Committee elect him to the Hall of Fame indicates that among baseball historians he is more than just, "Oh, yeah, the deaf guy."

One wonders what kind of a career William H. Hoy might have had if he had not lost his hearing to spinal meningitis in 1864. We are not talking about his baseball career. After he figured out a way to avoid the quick pitch, there is nothing to indicate that he was any less a player deaf than he would have been with normal hearing.

No, we are referring to what a normal William Hoy might have done rather than being a shoemaker turned ballplayer. He had a son who became a judge and a grandson who was an attorney. After his playing days were over he became a successful dairy farmer in his native Ohio. In 1924 he sold the farm and became personnel director for the Goodyear Rubber Co.

In 1961 the old ballplayer, then 99 years old, was asked to throw out the first ball before Game Three of the Yankees-Reds World Series. As it had been during his noteworthy career on the field, he could not hear the cheers of the crowd. Did they stand and wave their arms as fans of an earlier time had learned to do so that the swift outfielder who lived in a world of silence could know their appreciation?

We hope so, for it was truly Dummy Hoy's last hurrah. He did not make it to his 100th birthday. He died five months short of that event on December l5, 1961