Carl Mays: An unpleasant man and his unpleasant pitch
There’s an often-reproduced photograph of a pitcher taken at the end of his career – he’s hunched over, perched on one leg, his torso coiled around so that his back is showing, his face hidden except for one eye leering at the viewer. It’s a striking image, and if not for his being in a baseball uniform, you might mistake him for some evil character preparing to unleash something diabolical and dangerous. Its subject is Carl Mays, and no better photograph exists that perfectly captures this unpleasant man and his unpleasant pitch.
CARL MAYS had an unpleasant childhood. His father, William Mays, was a traveling Methodist minister whose work took him from the Green River Valley of Kentucky, where Carl was born in 1891, to the Missouri Ozarks town of Mansfield. The children were subjected to a strict religious upbringing, taught to eschew all vices and keep the Sabbath. Times were tough for the Mays family, and they only got harder after William passed away in 1905. His mother Louisa was stuck with running the family farm on top of caring for the eight Mays children. Carl was forced to leave school and labor on the farm full-time. The work forged the rugged physique he maintained throughout his baseball career, but his lack of a formal education may have contributed to the surly personality he later became known for.
Mays cousin Paul Buchanan recalled that the family relied on young Carl’s hunting skills to put food on the table — the problem was, they were too poor to own a rifle. According to Buchanan, Carl “carried a pocketful of rocks, and he’d kill squirrels. He got so good he’d hit them in the head because he didn’t want to bruise the meat.”
The rock-slinging story may be apocryphal, but it illustrates the dire straits in which the Mays family found itself at the time. Soon after William passed, Louisa moved the family to Kingfisher, Oklahoma, where she had relatives. The move proved beneficial for young Carl, as it was his Oklahoma cousin, John Long, who introduced him to baseball.
BY THE TIME Mays was seventeen, he was pitching Kingfisher’s baseball nine. After outpitching a team from the larger town of Hennessey, Mays was enticed to join them, receiving $25 plus room and board for his services. In a fall semipro tournament in Enid, Oklahoma, Mays threw a no-hitter and won a second game as Hennessey placed second.
With his baseball mercenary bona fides established, Carl Mays packed up his glove, promised his mother not to play ball on Sundays, and went looking for work. The spring of 1911 found him slinging for the Mulvane Grays in Nebraska. In July, Mays, accompanied by fellow ballplayer-for-hire Jesse Myers, suited up for the Protection, Kansas team. A month later, the pair were off again, this time hopping a freight train west in the hope of being signed by a professional team.
The duo made it as far as Price, Utah. The local sheriff hauled the two off the train for trespassing, but when he found they were ballplayers, he shanghaied them into playing for his town’s team in lieu of a fine or jail. Mays won all five games he pitched, including a no-hitter and a 20-strikeout masterpiece.
After playing a few games for Price in the Spring of 1912, Mays and Myers, accompanied by catcher Milt Miller, hit the road again in search of a job in professional baseball. In Boise, Iowa, they were given a look-over by the Irrigators of the Class D Western Tri-State League. Myers and Miller didn’t make the cut, but Mays did, signing his first professional contract for $90 a month.
Pitching for the first time on a pro level, Mays was spectacular, going 22-9 with a 2.08 ERA for the Irrigators. The rookie’s impressive record enabled him to skip a minor league rung when he was drafted by the Class B Portland Colts of the Northwestern League for 1913.
Mays kicked up quite a ruckus in Portland baseball circles when he refused to sign a contract unless he was given $110 more a month than his Boise salary. The local newspaper noted the pitcher’s “egotistic attitude” and labeled him a “recalcitrant” (definition: having an obstinately uncooperative attitude, especially toward authority).
Ultimately, Mays settled for a $ 60-a-month increase and reported to spring training. Then, just as it looked like his career was starting to take off, disaster struck.
On his second day of spring training with the Colts, Carl Mays threw his arm out. He tried resting the arm, but the pain returned every time he tried to pitch. Fortunately, Mays’ excellent hitting kept him on the team as he desperately sought a solution to save his pitching career.
HIS EPIPHANY came after watching “Iron Man” Joe McGinnity pitch against his team. McGinnity had been a star pitcher in the majors at the turn of the century and was now wrapping up his Hall of Fame career as player-manager of the Tacoma Tigers. What caught Mays’ attention was McGinnity’s unusual underhand delivery. He gave it a try and found that throwing the ball underhand did not cause him pain. Through hard work, Mays mastered the new style and customized it into his own distinctive style.
The end product was a bewildering series of gesticulating movements that somehow worked: Mays would contort himself on the mound, rocking back on his right leg, twisting his torso behind him as his gloved hand loosely dangled straight down while his pitching arm with the ball swung back behind him, almost out of sight to the batter. As his arm whipped around, Mays dropped it so low to the ground that his knuckles sometimes scraped the dirt. To an opposing batter, the ball looked like it was being shot at him from under the third base bag. As the ball came towards the plate, it rose from the ground level instead of from slightly above the waist as a conventional pitch did. And the lower he dropped his arm, the more movement Mays had on his pitches. One of his catchers later said his pitches took “remarkable shoots, jumps and twists.” If a batter didn’t know what to expect when he faced Carl Mays, he was in for a frightful and disorienting experience.
A contemporary magazine described Carl Mays’ unusual delivery as “a cross between an octopus and a bowler” and that “He shoots the ball in at the batter at such unexpected angles that his delivery is hard to find.”
Based on the low angle from which the ball started, the delivery became known as a “submarine” pitch, aptly named after the new kind of naval vessel that rose from beneath the seas, ready to strike any unsuspecting victim that crossed its path.
BEFORE GOING any further, we need to talk about Carl Mays’ personality. I bring it up now because I think his childhood and early baseball experiences contributed in no small part to the pitcher’s later reputation for being surly and standoffish. Surely growing up poor in the Ozarks gave the young man a hardened outlook on life and finances. And hopping freight trains, trying to make a buck playing ball, left him with a feeling of desperation. Being arrested as a vagabond fosters distrust of authority. A whole town forcing him to pitch ball in exchange for his freedom makes it hard for one to find goodness in his fellow man. And then there was the arm injury. Hollywood might be able to gin up a feel-good storyline about reinvention and redemption, but in reality, Mays must have been wracked with terrifying anxiety as he tried everything he could to work his way back from an injury that would have been the end for most aspiring ballplayers.
Carl Mays recognized early on how his abrasive personality affected his interactions with his peers, telling Baseball Magazine, “When I first broke into baseball, I discovered that there seemed to be a feeling against me, even from the players on my own team. When I was with Boise, Idaho, I didn’t have a pal on the Club until the season was half over.”
TOWARDS THE END of the Portland Colts season, Fielder Jones, the player-manager of the World Champion 1906 Chicago White Sox and now a timber dealer in Portland, tipped off the Detroit Tigers about Mays and his teammate, Harry Heilmann. However, Jones’ recommendation was for the Tigers to sign Mays as an outfielder, not a pitcher. The reason being that Carl Mays had led the Northwest League in batting with a .364 average, besting future Hall of Famer Harry Heilmann by 59 points.
The Tigers opted to sign Heilmann but passed on Mays. The pitcher entered the annual draft, where he was selected by an unnamed American Association team.
At the time, three leagues were operating just below the majors: the Pacific Coast League on the West Coast, the American Association in the Midwest, and the International League in the East.
Ultimately, it was announced that Mays’ contract was shifted to the Providence Grays of the International League, a team owned in part by Tigers owner Frank Navin. And, once again, Carl Mays figured out a way to get under the skin of management before throwing a pitch. Instead of mouthing the standard ballplayer quote along the lines of, “I’m just happy to be here, hope I can help the ballclub,” the pitcher told sportswriters, “I’d rather play in the American Association because I live at Kansas City. But I guess Providence is a good team to play for.”
ONCE THE SEASON began, Carl Mays had no problem adjusting to the higher level of talent. Mays led the league with 24 wins as he and the young Babe Ruth pitched Providence to the 1914 International League pennant.
It should have been a joyous season, yet it was anything but for Carl Mays. In contrast to Babe Ruth’s outgoing, jovial nature, Mays showed no interest in socializing with his teammates. Whether Mays intended it or not, the other players interpreted his lack of camaraderie as aloofness. At one point, someone took Mays’ bat, sawed off the handle, and glued it back in place. The first time Mays made contact, the bat fell apart in his hands, robbing him of a hit and humiliating him in front of the entire ballpark. Mays later told Baseball Magazine, “My fellow players on the Providence team didn’t seem to like me and I wondered why. I always have wondered why I have encountered this antipathy from so many people wherever I have been.”
Mays later recalled how his teammates’ animosity almost drove him out of the game: “I did get genuinely discouraged at Providence and, of course, feeling as I did, was unable to do good work. In fact I lost all interest in my work. I wrote to my Uncle telling him I had about decided to give up baseball. He is no doubt responsible for my being identified with the game at present, for he replied with a mighty stiff letter in which he handled things straight from the shoulder and without gloves. In brief, he told me if I failed to make good, he would consider me a quitter and that is a word I never liked to take from any man. So I decided to brace up and see what could be done.”
ALTHOUGH THE Providence Grays had initially been part of the Detroit Tigers organization, the Boston Red Sox now owned the club, a move allegedly made to acquire Carl Mays. As such, Carl Mays and Babe Ruth were called up to Beantown at the tail end of the 1914 season. While Mays did not get into a game, he did make the big club’s roster for 1915.
But before he even pitched an inning, Mays made waves with the team’s front office by haggling over his contract. The upstart Federal League had lured many players away from the National and American League teams in 1914, and now they were offering Carl Mays good money to do the same. In February, some newspapers even reported that he had inked a two-year contract with the outlaw league. The pre-rookie used the Federal League fear as leverage in his negotiations, asking for $3,600 and eventually signing for around $3,000. The February 18, 1915, Boston Globe declared that “The signing of Mays gives the Red Sox the greatest pitching staff ever known.” No mention was made of Babe Ruth.
Coming out of spring training, Red Sox manager Bill Carrigan had Carl Mays penciled in as his fifth starter; however, an leg injury sustained while sliding into home plate sidelined him for three weeks. In the meantime, Babe Ruth stepped in to fill the number five slot.
FOR THE REST of the season, Mays was used as the team’s closer, finishing 27 games and earning seven saves — both tops in the AL. In 1916, Carl Mays replaced Smokey Joe Wood in the starting rotation. He posted seasons of 18, 22, and 21 wins and helped pitch the Sox to two World Championships. In the 1918 Series against the Cubs, he and Ruth each won two games, establishing themselves as the best righty-lefty combo in baseball.
Off the field, Mays courted Marjorie Fredricka Madden, a pretty graduate of the New England Conservatory of Music. The pitcher had met “Freddie” as a rookie, and the pair married after the 1918 World Series. With his share of World Series winnings, Mays began construction on a large home for his mother and Freddie in Mansfield, Missouri. One would think that success in both baseball and his personal life would take the edge off Carl Mays’ abrasive personality.
It didn’t.
Carl Mays’ success on the mound came at the expense of opposing American League batters. Standing at the plate against his unusual submarine style was unnerving. It went against tradition and made players angry. Early on, he began to get a reputation as a “headhunter.” Whether this was warranted or not is debatable; Mays did have a high number of hit batters, including a league-leading 14 in 1917. However, Walter Johnson also hit 14 batters that season, and teammates Ernie Shore and Babe Ruth beaned 12 and 11 batters, respectively.
He didn’t do himself any favors by getting on the wrong side of baseball’s bad boy, Ty Cobb. It all began during a game in 1915 when Mays threw two pitches that Cobb considered too close to his head. Words were exchanged, and Cobb threw his bat at the pitcher. When he stepped back in the box, Mays drilled Cobb with a fastball to the wrist. After a running feud of brushbacks and counter threats, Cobb finally succeeded in spiking his nemesis, leaving a terrifying wound in Mays’ leg. To the end of his life, the pitcher proudly showed it off, proof he could take as good as he could give.
And of course, there was his usual problem with his teammates. As Mays told Baseball Magazine, “Unfortunately for me, I have never seemed to make friends easily and many people with whom I come in contact have developed a dislike for me. This is partially due, no doubt, to a certain independence on my part. I have never put myself forward or tried to ingratiate myself with people. It has been my disposition to be a little backward and no doubt this has been mistaken by many people for some-thing quite different. Ever since I have been a ball player, I have tried to mind my own business and not interfere with others. I have never been considered a good fellow in the popular acceptance of that term for I have never had any fondness for drinking or late hours. I have been told I lack tact, which is probably true. But that is no crime.”
He didn’t win any friends by berating his teammates for what he considered shoddy play. While he wasn’t afraid to back up his words with his fists, his solid farmer’s physique and perpetual bad mood made teammates steer clear of Carl Mays.
Shortly after marrying Freddie in 1918, Mays received his draft notice. And again, Carl Mays found a way to rub people the wrong way. When a reporter caught up with Mays peeling potatoes at his army camp, the pitcher couldn’t hide his disdain for his current position. “This is some sweet job. For my day’s work I will receive $1. All I had to do is rise at 5.30 and continue until 7.30. With the Red Sox I pitched one game in four days, two hours of work, and I received nearly enough to pay off this entire unit.” People reading that in the morning paper must have wondered if Mays would rather be in a trench somewhere in France.
Carl Mays never did make it overseas. Throughout the fall of 1918, the Spanish Flu had decimated American army bases. Of the eighteen men who were processed into the army alongside Mays, ten were soon dead from the flu. The Armistice ending the fighting was signed on November 11, and Carl Mays was discharged before Christmas.
Now things went from bad to worse. First, Red Sox owner Harry Frazee began selling off his stars to reduce payroll. Starting pitchers Ernie Shore and Dutch Leonard were gone, as was slugger Duffy Lewis. Any hopes of repeating as World Champions went with them. So was the substantial raise Mays was hoping for. Negotiations were ongoing when the submariner was dealt yet another blow.
The home he had just built in Mansfield had burned to the ground, along with all his and Freddie’s personal mementos. Mays suspected arson, a plausible conclusion when he learned several of his mules had been shot and some chickens stolen. The whole situation got even more catastrophic when it was found that the house had been drastically under-insured. Facing financial ruin, Mays was forced to accept the Red Sox offer of $3,000 a year for three years.
CARL MAYS entered the 1919 season seething with discontent, and the team’s mediocre play shifted his anger into overdrive. Everything boiled over during a July game against the White Sox in Chicago. Eddie Collins was on first base, and suddenly made a break to steal second. Catcher Wally Schang tried to throw him out and inadvertently drilled Mays in the head. Mays finished the inning, walked off the field, into the clubhouse, changed into his street clothes, and caught the first train back to Boston. He let anyone who would listen know that he would not pitch a single game unless he was traded. What followed almost brought down the entire American League.
League president Ban Johnson suspended the wayward pitcher and forbade any team from trading for him. The eight team owners were already broken into pro-Johnson (Cleveland, Detroit, Washington, St. Louis, and Philadelphia) and anti-Johnson (New York, Chicago, and Boston) factions. The Yankees defied Johnson and completed a trade for Mays. As if this insurrection wasn’t enough, word leaked out that the three anti-Johnson clubs were holding meetings with the National League to discuss a new 12-team circuit. With the existence of the American League in the balance, Ban Johnson backed down, and Carl Mays became a Yankee.
On paper, Carl Mays thrived in New York. The Yankees were an up-and-coming club, bolstered the following year by the arrival of Babe Ruth. Mays’ performance on the mound that summer was nothing short of amazing, going 10-2, with his two losses both coming in no-hit games, one by Eddie Plank and the other by Slim Caldwell.
Then came Monday, August 16, 1920.
The Cleveland Indians were in the Polo Grounds to play the Yanks. Carl Mays was on the mound as Ray Chapman led off the fifth inning. The afternoon was dark and overcast. The ball had become darkened from use over too many innings.
Interestingly, both men were born in Kentucky, but the similarities end there. Unlike Carl Mays, Ray Chapman was one of the most well-liked players in the league and was only playing the 1920 season as a favor to his teammates — he had just gotten married, had a child on the way, and planned to leave baseball to go into business with his father-in-law.
Mays went into his unnerving windup and whipped the ball towards the plate. The pitch was high and inside — standard protocol when pitching against Chapman. In a 1957 Baseball Digest article, Mays recalled that Chapman “was very fast and would push the ball towards first base. No pitcher could throw him out if he pushed a ball fair. The only way you could break up the play was to keep the ball high and inside so he would either miss it or pop it up. In his hurry to get a jump on the pitcher, he ran into a pitch that would have been a strike if he had stayed in the batter’s box.”
The pitch struck Chapman with such force that upon hearing the “crack,” Mays fielded the ball and threw to first for the out.
Back at home plate, Ray Chapman slowly crumpled to his knees. Umpire Tommy Connolly saw blood flowing from Chapman’s ear and yelled for a doctor. Carl Mays stood on the infield grass and watched as several teammates helped the stricken ballplayer into the dugout.
Chapman was rushed to a hospital, where it was determined that his skull was fractured. Emergency surgery failed to help, and Ray Chapman was pronounced dead at 4:40 in the morning.
Carl Mays became an instant villain. The odds are the submariner wasn’t trying to hit Chapman, let alone kill him. Heck, even fellow ballplayers remarked at the time how Chapman regularly crowded the plate. Any other pitcher would have been exonerated for the incident, but because Mays was such a disagreeable person, he was flayed alive. Listening to the bad advice not to pay a visit to Chapman’s widow made him look heartless. A few teams threatened to strike if he pitched against them. In response to Chapman’s death, umpires were instructed to replace misshapen and dirty balls with new ones, and all “trick” pitches, such as the spitter and the shine ball, were prohibited.
THE SEASON AFTER Chapman’s death was Mays’ finest, winning 27 games as the Yankees captured their first American League pennant. As a nod to his place as the best pitcher on his staff, Yankees manager Miller Huggins tapped Mays to start the opening game of the best-of-nine World Series against the Giants. True to form, he tossed a 3-0 shutout. The Yanks took the second game as well, and after dropping a game to the Giants, Huggins sent Mays to the mound again in Game 4.
Mays cruised through seven innings, giving up only two hits to the Giants and leading 1-0. Emil “Irish” Meusel led off the eighth inning for the Giants. From the dugout, Miller Huggins signaled Mays to throw a fastball. Instead, the submariner threw a slow-breaking curve, which Meusel bounced off the outfield wall for a triple. After the game, Mays told reporters he had disregarded Huggins’ instructions because he’d gotten Meusel out earlier with the same slow curve.
A single by Johnny Rawlings scored Meusel and evened the score. Frank Snyder bunted back to the mound, but instead of an easy out, Mays fell down, and all the runners were safe. Phil Douglas tried another bunt, but this time Mays fielded the ball and got him at first. But now he had two runners in scoring position, the score tied, and one out. George Burns smashed a double, scoring both runners, and just like that, the Giants were up 3-1. Mays got out of the inning, but the Giants scored another run off him in the ninth, and the game ended in a 4-2 Yankees defeat.
Enter Fred Lieb. The veteran New York Telegram reporter was president of the Baseball Writers Association and one of the most respected writers in the country. After the game, Lieb claimed he was approached by a “well-known Broadway actor” who told him an intriguing tale. The actor, who was a gambling man, had been tipped off that the Yankees ace had been approached by gamblers to throw any close game he was involved in. The way it was to go down was that a man would approach Mays’ wife, Freddie, and slip her a packet of cash. With the payoff in hand, she was supposed to signal her husband that the fix was in. The actor claimed that Freddie Mays had waved her handkerchief at her husband as he took the mound in the eighth inning that afternoon. A few minutes later, Meusel was standing on third with a triple.
These accusations were grave. The stain of the Black Sox scandal was still fresh, and the future of the game was precarious. Another World Series scandal could be the knock-out blow that would forever damage the fans’ faith in the sport. Fred Lieb took the actor to see Yankees owner Colonel Huston and Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. The new czar of baseball took the charges seriously and instructed Lieb to keep a lid on the story until he finished looking into it.
Meanwhile, the Yankees won Game 5 to regain the series lead, but the Giants drew even again by winning Game 6. With the series knotted up at three games apiece, Carl Mays took the mound once again for the Yankees. Game 7 was a tight pitcher’s duel between Mays and Phil Douglas, but an unearned run gave the Giants the edge in the 2-1 Yankees loss. The Giants would take the Series the following afternoon, beating the Yankees 1-0.
According to Fred Lieb, the Landis investigation of Mays found nothing questionable, but rumors still swirled around the unpopular pitcher.
THE FOLLOWING SEASON was one of Mays’ worst. He uncharacteristically went 13-14 for the pennant-winning Yanks, and after the World Series, was put on waivers. However, when 1923 rolled around, Carl Mays was still a Yankee. Miller Huggins essentially refused to pitch the submariner, despite the pitcher’s complaints to the press. The manager’s dislike of Mays came to a head when he finally started him in a July game against, of all teams, the Cleveland Indians. The underworked pitcher got pounded, yet despite giving up 13 runs, Huggins left him in for the entire game. After the drubbing was finally over, sportswriters asked the Yankees skipper why he didn’t lift Mays for a reliever. “He told me he needed lots of work,” Huggins quipped, “so I gave it to him.”
The next season, Carl Mays was traded off to the Cincinnati Reds. In the new surroundings, Mays won 20 games. He had an off year in 1925 but rebounded with 19 wins in 1926. That would be his last good season as a major leaguer. Mays retired after the 1929 season and settled in Portland, where he and Freddie planned to raise their two children. But when the stock market crashed, Carl Mays lost his hard-won nest egg. Facing financial ruin for a second time, Mays was forced to go back to baseball to make a living. At the age of 38, he joined the Portland Beavers of the Pacific Coast League for the 1930 season.
True to form, Carl Mays didn’t have any luck making friends on his way down the baseball ladder as he had on his way up it. Right from the start, his new teammates disliked him for “big leaguing” them. According to one, “Mays has been a troublemaker all season. He tried that old big league racket on all the gang. Carl couldn’t forget he wasn’t in the big show and the Coast League was tougher than he figured.” Another player put it this way: “He’s just plain mean. Nobody can get along with him.” When there was talk of Mays becoming the team’s next manager, the players secretly agreed to strike.
Despite all his bluster, Carl Mays got hit hard by the Pacific Coast League batters. By mid-season, he was a sad 5-9 with a fat 4.75 ERA. Instead of being humbled by his poor showing, Mays dealt with the embarrassment by taking his frustration out on his teammates, especially Portland’s ace, Johnny “Junk” Walters. At the end of July, their long-awaited showdown erupted in the locker room before a night game. “The two hurlers stood toe to toe and slugged away for 20 minutes,” read the Los Angeles Evening Citizen News play-by-play, “finally ending up in a rough and tumble and forced to quit from sheer exhaustion.” Walters reportedly received a sore jaw and split lip, but Mays got the worst of it – a broken nose, some cracked ribs, and his 38-year-old body (and ego) covered in bruises.
The league quickly suspended Mays indefinitely without pay. Portland management had had enough of the troublesome pitcher, and on August 4th, the Beavers handed Mays his release and transferred his contract to the Toledo Mud Hens of the American Association.
Carl Mays spent the rest of 1930 and the beginning of 1931 with Toledo, then was shipped to Louisville to finish his career.
Life didn’t get any smoother for Carl Mays – his mother Louisa passed away, followed not long after by his wife Freddie. To make a living, Mays operated his own baseball school and scouted for the Milwaukee Braves, Kansas City Royals – and in a strange twist of fate – the Cleveland Indians.
AS HE AGED, Mays became even more embittered as he watched contemporaries he considered less talented than he were voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. And he wasn’t wrong: Yankees teammate Waite Hoyt got the nod to the Hall, and his winning percentage was a mediocre .566. Other peers were ushered in with similar stats: Dazzy Vance’s winning percentage was .585, Herb Pennock’s was .598, Burleigh Grimes posted .560, and the final slap in the face: Eppa Rixey had a truly unremarkable .515 winning percentage, and even he got a plaque in the Hall. Carl Mays’ winning percentage of .623 beat all those guys. The old submariner was convinced that the Chapman incident kept him out, and while that could have been true, there may have been a darker reason for his exclusion from the Hall.
The rumors of a 1921 World Series fix never went away. Fred Lieb related that sometime in 1928, Yankees owner Colonel Huston got drunk and told Lieb that Yankee pitchers had thrown World Series games in 1921 and 1922. Lieb asked if Carl Mays was one of them, and Huston said yes.
Miller Huggins’ animosity for Mays never mellowed. Telling Fred Lieb that he’d lend a financial hand to any of his former players, Huggins paused and said anyone except Carl Mays and Joe Bush. Bush was accused of not playing on the level in the 1922 World Series. To illustrate his point, Huggins got up out of his chair and said, “If they were in the gutter, I’d kick them!” slicing his leg through the air before the startled writer.
As for Carl Mays’ exclusion from Cooperstown, Fred Lieb, who was on the voting committee, stated that the Chapman incident never came up during the discussion of the vote. That he might have helped throw the 1921 World Series did, and that’s what stood between Mays and a plaque in the Hall.
While time soothed the enmity some players held for one another, it did nothing to abate the dislike of Mays. As an old man, former teammate Bob Shawkey called him “a stinker.” Ty Cobb, one player whose nasty reputation among his contemporaries had softened with the passing of time, remained convinced that his old nemesis had deliberately hit Chapman.
Carl Mays remarried in 1939 and finally retired. He spent his leisure time helping kids learn baseball. Each year, he would travel from Oregon to San Diego to help his foster son, Jerry, coach high school baseball. “I love working with kids, especially the pitchers,” Mays said. “I try to teach them everything. But the big thing I do is teach them safety in baseball.”
The old submariner passed in 1972, aged 79.
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So, was Carl Mays really an unpleasant man? Yeah, I guess so – but I do believe his early life had a big effect on how he interacted with others later in life. Plus, some people are just born with an abrasive personality. That said, do I think he deliberately try to hit Ray Chapman? No. Mays‘ unusual delivery, a dirty ball, and Chapman’s propensity to crowd the plate created a perfect storm. Did he throw a World Series game? Definitely not. If I were a gambler, Mays would be the last person I would entrust a scheme like that to.
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In addition to the usual contemporary newspaper sources and those credited in the story, several books and articles offered valuable insight. The definitive work on the Chapman incident is still Mike Sowell’s 1989 book, The Pitch That Killed, while “Remembering Carl Mays” by Kenneth D. Richard in the 2001 Baseball Research Journal is an excellent refresh of Carl Mays’ career. 1921: The Yankees, The Giants & the Battle for Baseball Supremacy in New York by Lyle Spatz and Steve Steinberg offers coverage of the gambling allegations against Mays. For his semipro years, there’s no source better than Mark E. Eberle’s excellent “Early Baseball Career of Carl Mays in Oklahoma, Kansas, and Utah, Revised (2025).” And finally, I’d like to thank John Thorn for providing me with a copy of a 1960s handwritten letter from Carl Mays to author Bob McGarigle regarding that fateful pitch.
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This story is Number 89 in a series of collectible booklets
