Inductees

Carl Mays could do it all. By all accounts, the right-handed submariner who spent time with four Major League clubs was mixture of Cy Young, Gaylord Perry and Dan Quisenberry. Add in a little Ty Cobb and you’ve got a pretty good idea of what you were facing when Mays took the mound.

Born November 12, 1891 and growing up in the Mansfield / Ava area, Mays made his Major League debut on April 15^th for the Boston Red Sox, a team with which he would spend the next five seasons. Mays threw with a submarine motion, although it would be more accurate to say that he threw straight underhand. Carl was also a notorious spitball pitcher, not uncommon in those days as the pitch was considered a legal delivery.

Despite stellar career marks in pitching and even hitting Carl Mays will unfortunately be remembered as the only man in baseball history who killed another man with a pitched baseball.  The unfortunate incident occurred when Mays delivered a pitch that struck batter Ray Chapman in the head on August 16, 1920.  The Cleveland shortstop died the next day. While some in the crowd thought the pitch deliberate, Mays emphatically denied this. It was simply a pitch that got away.  The vast majority of baseball historians agree.  At the end of the 1920 campaign Major League baseball outlawed the spitball. Chapman’s death was in part responsible for the rule change.

In a 15-year career with the Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, Cincinnati Reds, and New York Giants, he compiled a 207-126 record with 29 shutouts, 862 strikeouts and a 2.92 earned run average when the league average was 3.48. Mays is the only Red Sox pitcher to toss two nine-inning complete game victories on the same day, as he bested the Philadelphia Athletics 12-0 and 4-1 on August 30, 1918. Carl enjoyed his best season in 1921, when he led the American League with 27 wins, 336.2 innings pitched, 49 games pitched, and a .750 winning percentage.

Mays was a complete ball player. Hitting from the left side of the plate, he was very adept with a bat, hitting five home runs, with 110 runs batted in, and a lifetime .268 batting average—an unusually high mark for a pitcher.

Why Carl Mays is not enshrined in Cooperstown is a mystery to many.  His numbers are comparable to some other pitchers who are. Even today, some 80 years after his retirement, Mays is cited by Major League Baseball as one of the top 50 greatest pitchers of all time. Some will cite the Chapman incident, while others will say that he displayed a temperament that few found agreeable.  There are even a handful that will accuse Carl of “fixing” the 1920 World Series, rumors which today remain unproven.

In August 2008, he was named as one of the ten former players who began their careers before 1943 to be considered by the Veterans Committee for induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in 2009. Unfortunately, Mays fell short of the necessary number of votes required for enshrinement. His next chance for Cooperstown will come on the 2014 ballot.

While a big league ball player through and through, Mays never forgot his roots in Douglas County, Missouri.  Stories are still told of the gentleman pitcher who would return home during the off season with his hip waders stuffed with baseballs which would soon find their way into the hands and mitts of the area children. Carl Mays died on April 4, 1971 at the age of 79.