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Michael Keedy’s “Mystery Player!”

Editor’s Update: Of course, it’s no “mystery” that Michael Keedy’s “Mystery Player” was none other than the great Dodger Hall of Famer, Dazzy Vance! See him in action with the great pic below!

(Today, Michael Keedy returns with the first of what we hope will be an ongoing series. He sends an interesting essay highlighting his first “Mystery Player.” As the name implies, we won’t reveal the name of the player right away. We’ll let you read through the hints Michael presents in the essay. Shouldn’t be too hard for our many “seasoned” readers.  Come back tomorrow for the identity of the player and our usual photo gallery tribute to go with it. Should be fun! In the featured photos above and below, we see the ballpark where our Mystery Player had most of his success-GL)

Baseball fans old and young are familiar with the careers of Hall of Famers and other coulda-shoulda icons who broke from the gate in spectacular fashion in their late teens or early twenties, threatening to re-write the record books of our national pastime by their mid-thirties at the latest.  Some, blessed with years of sound health and sustained excellence on the field, lived up to (or even exceeded) the intoxicating promise of youth and were ushered summarily into Cooperstown shortly after their retirement.  (See, for example, Cobb, Mays, Aaron, Musial, Wagner and Speaker, to name just a representative handful.)

Other, equally bright flames flickered out in mid-career or far earlier, prompting historians and statisticians to extrapolate the might-have-beens out of tragically aborted athletic careers.  (Think Dean, Cochrane, Conigliaro, Spooner, Bostock and Reiser – and we’re only scratching the surface here.)

But the most intriguing records of all belong to that rare and endangered species of ballplayer:  The future Hall-of-Famer whose early accomplishments in his professional career lay hidden so far beneath the sonar that not even the savviest scout, numbers guru or professional prognosticator could have imagined he was destined for eventual induction into the hallowed halls of Cooperstown.  Can you think of a couple?  One?

Back in the dim reaches of Twentieth Century America, a rookie, right-handed power pitcher with exactly zero major-league victories to his credit celebrated his thirty-first birthday.  (“Game over,” you say?)  A flame-throwing starter with a chronically and mysteriously bad arm, he had spent almost the entirety of his twenties and beyond mired in the low minors.  For purposes of this essay we shall call him “Charles,” for the very good reason that that was his given name.  (You know him, perhaps, by his far more recognizable nickname.)

In 1921, Charles found himself hurling for the New Orleans Pelicans, a celebrated club fondly remembered by several I am sure, right down to this day.  He was thirty years old, and still dreaming of his tantalizing and elusive first major-league win.  On an early morning at the beginning of a new season in the minors, Charles banged that sorry right arm of his against a card table somewhere in The Big Easy while anxiously raking in the spoils of a winning poker hand.  (“Fade to black”?)

More than 100 years later, we don’t know exactly what a treating physician in Louisiana did to that arm, but the odds and a pinch of hindsight from the budding world of sports medicine suggest he may have removed bone chips (not poker chips) from the ailing elbow of Sir Charles on this historic occasion.  His ticket-to-ride now successfully punched at any rate, Charles was able to notch his first twenty-win season since he was a fresh-faced 23-year-old, back in 1914.  He had posted 133 wins across ten promising but modest minor-league seasons and was now ready for The Show – not to mention middle age.

The Pelicans promptly sold Charles to the Brooklyn Robins for the ’22 season, and Charles promptly marked his 31st birthday, on March 4.  He was getting old in a hurry!  (It happens to us all.) Carrying the dismal baggage of an oh-and-4 won/loss record in the majors into what was officially his rookie year, Charles reeled off 18 wins for Brooklyn, leading the National League in strikeouts.  Next on his fabled agenda:  Birthday No. 32.

In his first four years in the major leagues, Charles rang up 86 wins.  In each of his first seven seasons, by the end of which he was pushing 38 years of age, he led the league in strikeouts.  Beating out Rogers Hornsby and his all-time best, .424 batting average in 1924, Charles rode his 28-and-6 record to the National League’s MVP award, leading the league in wins, ERA (2.16), strikeouts (262), and complete games (30).  Pitching’s Triple Crown, in other words, plus one additional category for good measure.

Through 1925, Charles did some other remarkable things as well.  He set the National League record for strikeouts in a nine-inning game (15) against the Cubs on August 23, 1924.  The next season he fanned 17 Cardinals over ten innings.  In September of ’24, he became the sixth big-leaguer in history to throw an “immaculate inning,” a phenomenon previously dissected by Dr. Gary Livacari on this very blog.  He no-hit the Phillies, in 1925.

As mentioned, Charles opened his major-league career by leading the league in strikeouts seven consecutive seasons, an all-time National league record.  He led the majors in wins in 1924 and ’25.  He was the league’s ERA leader in ’24, ’28, and ’30.

Genuine students of the game will attest that it’s one thing to beat out all comers in a major category, and quite another to leave one’s competitors in the dust; mere “afterthoughts” as it were.  (Think how the Mighty Babe annihilated his contemporaries’ home-run stats in the 1920s.)  In many ways, our late-blooming Charles was to big-league pitching in the Roaring Twenties what Ruth was to power-hitting in that star-studded era.

By the start of the 1934 World Series, at age 43, Charles had joined the Gas House Gang in St. Louis, where his odd nickname fit so well with those fabulous Dean Brothers, otherwise remembered as Dizzy and Daffy.  (Are you with me now?)…

Michael H. Keedy

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