Oller: Pitcher Rube Waddell ranks as wackiest character to play for a Columbus team
Columbus has housed its share of coaches and athletes whose quirky personalities produced showtime shenanigans.
Woody Hayes immediately comes to mind. Legendary for throwing tantrums, attacking windmills of his own creation and wearing short sleeves in freezing cold, the “Old Man” remains the most famously outrageous of all Ohio State football coaches.
But not the most eccentric. That title belongs to Francis Schmidt, whose oddball antics included diagramming plays by moving coins across carpeted floors in a kind of strange and strategic shell game.
As for athletes, basketball hall of famer Jerry Lucas memorized phone books, while his former OSU teammate, Bob Knight, burned holes in those books with the blowtorch intensity of his stare. And don’t forget about former Buckeyes linebacker Anthony Schlegel, who as an Ohio State assistant strength coach body slammed a fan who dared run onto the field during a game.
Yet no other character comes close to matching the bizarre body of work turned in by pitcher George Edward “Rube” Waddell, whose brief stay with the Columbus Senators in 1899 puts him atop the central Ohio head-scratcher hall of fame.
Of course, an athlete as weird as Waddell never would be satisfied to simply lead a single city in baffling behavior. No, Rube’s reputation went well beyond the confines of Franklin County. George Will, who gets paid to pontificate about politics but whose passion is baseball, called Waddell “the strangest man ever to play baseball.”
But Will never saw Waddell play in person. Connie Mack did. The legendary baseball man managed Rube long enough with the Philadelphia Athletics to provide a solid description of his goofy, fun-loving left-hander.
“I have been in this business a couple of lifetimes,” Mack told reporters. “I have seen them all … I have seen Wild Bill This and Screwy Sam That, but in his heyday, the Rube made them all look like amateur night.”
Mack meant his comments as a compliment more than an indictment, but reserved his highest praise for Waddell’s work on the mound.
“I never suffered a dull moment when he was on my payroll,” Mack said. “But when he was right, I’ve never had another who could touch him.”
Mack’s words pinpoint why Waddell’s career was both amazingly remarkable and similarly sad. It is one thing to be known as a zany athlete; there have been plenty of those. But Rube also had, and arguably still has, the distinction of being the best pitcher in major league history.
None other than Cy Young called Waddell the best left-hander of all time. Feared ace Walter Johnson described his peer as having “more sheer pitching ability than any man I ever saw.”
Statistics? In 1903, Waddell struck out 301 batters while no other pitcher in the league topped 175. In 1904, he fanned 349, a record that stood until 1965. For all his power, the 6-foot-2, 225-pound native of Bradford, Pennsylvania, showed remarkable control, never walking 100 hitters in a season.
Not bad for a guy who most fans have never heard of.
Still, it was Waddell’s theatrics off the mound that made him famous in his time, turning him into, as author Alan Levy wrote in his biography on Waddell, “the first American athlete who was known for breaking all the conventions and had people loving him for it.”
As Levy further explained, “As with Babe Ruth, part of Rube’s appeal lay in the fact that people wanted to watch someone who had apparently tied one on the night before and yet was out there performing brilliantly the next day.”
Waddell’s drinking problem ultimately was his undoing. He died penniless in Texas at age 37, his Hall of Fame major league career cut to 13 years.
Who was the Rube? And how did he end up pitching for Columbus?
Growing up in western Pennsylvania, Waddell honed his pitching skills by throwing rocks at the crows trying to eat seeds as farmers planted them. As a boy, he loved to fish, a passion that played out in many instances when Rube would simply not show up for games because he heard the fish were biting. Once, he even left the mound during a game when a friend showed up with a fishing pole and asked if he wanted to catch some.
Rube was predictably unpredictable that way. Take fire trucks, for example. He loved them. There were many instances when one would whiz by the stadium and Waddell would leave the game to follow.
Or he would disappear under the stadium to play marbles with kids. Or he was scheduled to start but never showed up, only to be found playing or umpiring a game with kids on a vacant lot.
His antics during games were no less bizarre. Once he hit what clearly would have been a home run, but as he circled the bases he dropped to his knees just short of home plate and began praying the catcher would drop the throw. It was a comedy act that did not go over well with fans when the catcher tagged him out.
Rube’s vices were severe, heavy drinking being chief among them. But in his naivety he also hung out with the wrong crowd, most of his “friends” tempting him into mischief. The Philadelphia Record wrote: “He needs a guardian in every town of the AL circuit, for he has hosts of blood-suckers who call themselves friends in every city.”
Given how he was not to be trusted to show up on days he was to pitch, it is a wonder that his summer stint with the Senators went so well.
In April 1899, Columbus co-owner and manager Tom Loftus signed Waddell. The Senators skipper knew the risk but also knew Rube was an incredible talent.
Waddell made the starting lineup with ease and proceeded to shut down offenses with his blazing fastball. He shut out Buffalo in early May, then did the same to Detroit a few days later. Unlike previous seasons, he barely celebrated after wins, perhaps because he was too busy courting Florence Dunning of Georgia, who was living in Columbus. Within months she would become the first of Rube’s three wives.
Waddell's 20-4 record helped the Senators move up in the standings, but the team was moving down financially.
Levy wrote in “Rube Waddell, the zany brilliant life of a strikeout artist,” that Columbus was losing money at every home game played at Western Park, at the corner of Parsons and Jenkins Avenues. (The team moved in 1900 to Neil Park, located at the corner of Cleveland and Buckingham Avenues.)
“Late nineteenth-century Columbus was a working man’s town, without much of a leisure class who cared to attend ball games,” Levy wrote.
Western Park was 3 miles from Downtown, with only one horse-drawn trolley and no connections to the East Side, where the majority of the baseball-loving labor classes lived. Games began at 3 p.m., making it hard for working people to attend, except on Sundays.
Tracking revenues vs. expenditures, Loftus sealed a deal on July 12 to move the team to Grand Rapids, Michigan, where it became the Prodigals. The existing team in Grand Rapids moved to Columbus, keeping the Senators name but playing in the Interstate League.
And just like that, Waddell bid the Arch City farewell. He would return once or twice to visit Dunning, and in 1911 he passed through as a member of the minor league Minneapolis Millers, but history shows his time spent in Columbus as little more than a three-month shooting star across the summer sky.
Three years later he was gone, passing rather appropriately on April Fool’s Day, 1914. Baseball Magazine wrote, “He burned his life away when he should have been in his prime, a cruel April jest.”
Newspapers honored his achievements, including leading the league in strikeouts from 1902-07. Former teammates pointed out how Rube’s odd behavior hurt few but himself. The world noted his death and quickly moved on from the player who would enter the Hall of Fame in 1946. Who had a comic book published about him. Who was baseball’s first true drawing card, a celebrity who had teams of newspaper reporters following him. Whose popularity was such that crowds packed stadiums to overflowing, prompting an era of new ballpark construction.
Rube Waddell blew through Columbus quickly, but his title as this city’s craziest character still holds.
This article originally appeared on The Columbus Dispatch: Pitcher Rube Waddell ranks as zaniest athlete to play in Columbus
