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Deaf Players in Major League Baseball: A History, 1883 to the Present
The first deaf baseball player joined the pro ranks in 1883. By 1901, four played in the major leagues, most notably outfielder William "Dummy" Hoy and pitcher Luther "Dummy" Taylor. Along the way, deaf players developed a distinctive approach, bringing visual acuity and sign language to the sport. They crossed paths with other pioneers, including Moses Fleetwood Walker and Jackie Robinson. This book recounts their great moments in the game, from the first all-deaf barnstorming team to the only meeting of a deaf batter and a deaf pitcher in a major league game. The true story--often dismissed as legend--of Hoy, together with umpire "Silk" O'Loughlin, bringing hand signals to baseball is told.
- GenresNonfiction
214 pages, Paperback
Published August 7, 2020
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Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews
June 21, 2021
Disability sport remains a significant gap in sports history, and while in recent years studies of disability sport have become more historically aware they are, for the most part, dominated by a focus on the Paralympics and related forms (including Dennis Frost’s excellent, recent,
More Than Medals
) and seem to emphasise mobility-related abilities, intellectual and less often visual abilities; deafness seems to have a fairly low profile in these sport studies projects. R. A. R. Edwards’ exploration of deaf major league baseball players is therefore a welcome addition to a barely present field. It also impressively and effectively locates the experiences of these deaf elite athletes in the wider US social history of deafness and in the conditions of their time.
Belying the myths of progress that often surround popular if not scholarly discussions of social issues that may be framed in a social justice outlook, Edwards identifies a cluster of deaf professional baseball players in the first decade of the 20th century with only two in the major leagues since the 1920s. This is a paradoxical aspect of the idea of ‘deaf gain’, a notion in disability studies that undercuts the sense of disability as loss. Yet this is not an individual gain, but a ‘gain’ based on the social history of deafness, where a tendency to provide education for the deaf through residential schools meant a strong deaf community existed, while ‘mainstreaming’ has weakened that community and with it some of the networks that facilitated deaf players access to upper echelons of the sport. But this an outcome of the exploration, not its beginning.
There is a widespread view in the deaf community that the origins of hand gestures in baseball to indicate umpires’ decisions lies in the long major league career of William Hoy in the 1890s and 1900s. This view, shared by Edwards, is generally rejected by non-deaf scholars. When asked by one of deaf students how, as an historian, Edwards knew he was right he seems to have concluded that the position that ‘I believe the deaf community’ needed more. He is cautious, as ‘believers’ should be when exploring the evidence underpinning our views, yet convincing that the evidence sustains the deaf community view: the origins of umpires’ hand signals seem to be linked to the presence of deaf players in the game. Yet this is not a book about an historical controversy, although it merits one chapter of six.
Edwards weaves together the presence and experience of the deaf athletes he discusses with a wider social history of American deafness, with the presence of a large and notable deaf community confronted by eugenic outlooks that see them as inferior, and tension between oralist and manual approaches to communication and teaching that ultimately led to mainstreaming in schools and the demise of a community of the deaf threatening deaf culture. The presence of these players in baseball Edwards links to other community institutions including media, churches and social clubs, schools and the like. At the heart of this culture and community, in this approach, are the schools as places where deaf children and young people find other deaf people and built links and networks.
The sport history project, then, is located within a discussion of a wider set of community identities and practices, often centred on residential schools as places where often otherwise isolated young deaf people find themselves introduced to team sports – and in one of the athletes Edwards discusses, as a direct conduit to professional baseball in a case where a former pro-player turned school coach build a ‘player pipeline’ in the jargon of contemporary talent identification. Edwards however takes us as readers as much as possible into the experience of deaf elite athletes, exploring their places in teams and relations with hearing team members (in all cases but one he is looking at these players as the only deaf team member) and finds indications of a strong sense of self-identification and advocacy, evidence of in some cases quite considerable adoption of signing among team members – alphabet spelling if not sign language (in fewer cases). In some cases he points to a further political sensibility in an affinity with African American communities, suggesting also that in part this may be related to the integrated nature of many of the residential schools for the deaf.
Edwards writes lucidly and fluidly and makes no assumptions about his readers’ knowledge of deaf communities or cultures, although I would have appreciated a little more exploration of the eugenicist basis of anti-deaf policies and practices. There is a sense in the analysis that eugenic policies and wider patterns of social discrimination are relatively independent, and in part they probably are, but they do not seem as distinct as his light treatment of the links might imply – especially in a US-setting where rising nativist consciousness from the latter 19th and early 20th centuries intensify rejections of difference, and where the dominant strand of eugenics emphasises exclusion if not eradication of the ‘inferior’. I have not read anything else by Edwards, but he seems elsewhere to have explored schooling and deaf community identity. Given the importance he attaches to this, and his seeming alignment the ‘manualists’, that is the implicit importance he attaches to the distinctiveness of American Sign Language as a linguistically distinct mode of communication beyond the explicit importance he grants to signing sport settings, I would also have appreciated some further explication this linguistic basis of deaf cultures – but recognise that might have made this a very different book.
Even noting that critique, this is a well-contextualised analysis of deaf players in elite baseball, grounded in a rich depiction of the complexities of American deafness, its cultures and communities that moves well beyond ‘recovery’ history to challenge some of baseball’s taken for granted assumptions. It is therefore an important and valuable contribution to sport studies and I suspect (it is a field I know less well) disability history also.
Belying the myths of progress that often surround popular if not scholarly discussions of social issues that may be framed in a social justice outlook, Edwards identifies a cluster of deaf professional baseball players in the first decade of the 20th century with only two in the major leagues since the 1920s. This is a paradoxical aspect of the idea of ‘deaf gain’, a notion in disability studies that undercuts the sense of disability as loss. Yet this is not an individual gain, but a ‘gain’ based on the social history of deafness, where a tendency to provide education for the deaf through residential schools meant a strong deaf community existed, while ‘mainstreaming’ has weakened that community and with it some of the networks that facilitated deaf players access to upper echelons of the sport. But this an outcome of the exploration, not its beginning.
There is a widespread view in the deaf community that the origins of hand gestures in baseball to indicate umpires’ decisions lies in the long major league career of William Hoy in the 1890s and 1900s. This view, shared by Edwards, is generally rejected by non-deaf scholars. When asked by one of deaf students how, as an historian, Edwards knew he was right he seems to have concluded that the position that ‘I believe the deaf community’ needed more. He is cautious, as ‘believers’ should be when exploring the evidence underpinning our views, yet convincing that the evidence sustains the deaf community view: the origins of umpires’ hand signals seem to be linked to the presence of deaf players in the game. Yet this is not a book about an historical controversy, although it merits one chapter of six.
Edwards weaves together the presence and experience of the deaf athletes he discusses with a wider social history of American deafness, with the presence of a large and notable deaf community confronted by eugenic outlooks that see them as inferior, and tension between oralist and manual approaches to communication and teaching that ultimately led to mainstreaming in schools and the demise of a community of the deaf threatening deaf culture. The presence of these players in baseball Edwards links to other community institutions including media, churches and social clubs, schools and the like. At the heart of this culture and community, in this approach, are the schools as places where deaf children and young people find other deaf people and built links and networks.
The sport history project, then, is located within a discussion of a wider set of community identities and practices, often centred on residential schools as places where often otherwise isolated young deaf people find themselves introduced to team sports – and in one of the athletes Edwards discusses, as a direct conduit to professional baseball in a case where a former pro-player turned school coach build a ‘player pipeline’ in the jargon of contemporary talent identification. Edwards however takes us as readers as much as possible into the experience of deaf elite athletes, exploring their places in teams and relations with hearing team members (in all cases but one he is looking at these players as the only deaf team member) and finds indications of a strong sense of self-identification and advocacy, evidence of in some cases quite considerable adoption of signing among team members – alphabet spelling if not sign language (in fewer cases). In some cases he points to a further political sensibility in an affinity with African American communities, suggesting also that in part this may be related to the integrated nature of many of the residential schools for the deaf.
Edwards writes lucidly and fluidly and makes no assumptions about his readers’ knowledge of deaf communities or cultures, although I would have appreciated a little more exploration of the eugenicist basis of anti-deaf policies and practices. There is a sense in the analysis that eugenic policies and wider patterns of social discrimination are relatively independent, and in part they probably are, but they do not seem as distinct as his light treatment of the links might imply – especially in a US-setting where rising nativist consciousness from the latter 19th and early 20th centuries intensify rejections of difference, and where the dominant strand of eugenics emphasises exclusion if not eradication of the ‘inferior’. I have not read anything else by Edwards, but he seems elsewhere to have explored schooling and deaf community identity. Given the importance he attaches to this, and his seeming alignment the ‘manualists’, that is the implicit importance he attaches to the distinctiveness of American Sign Language as a linguistically distinct mode of communication beyond the explicit importance he grants to signing sport settings, I would also have appreciated some further explication this linguistic basis of deaf cultures – but recognise that might have made this a very different book.
Even noting that critique, this is a well-contextualised analysis of deaf players in elite baseball, grounded in a rich depiction of the complexities of American deafness, its cultures and communities that moves well beyond ‘recovery’ history to challenge some of baseball’s taken for granted assumptions. It is therefore an important and valuable contribution to sport studies and I suspect (it is a field I know less well) disability history also.
April 29, 2021
This book left me with mixed feelings. On one hand, the author worked on it for 10 years, scouring newspaper account after newspaper account to debunk the debunked truth that William "Dummy" Hoy invented umpire hand signals as we know it. I appreciate and am impressed by this research -- because when you make a case to completely contradict the official statements about the Hall of Fame, you better have your facts straight. However, in some ways, this book seemed a vehicle to present that research -- he made sure to get the Hoy story right, but other parts of the book upend his credibility, in particular the section on Luther "Dummy" Taylor and the turn-of-the-century Giants, which is contains basic factual errors and inconsistencies: for instance, the repeated assertion that John McGraw managed the Giants in 1901 and was the impetus behind bringing Taylor back from Cleveland (he didn't); the notion that there were no deaf major leaguers between Taylor and Dick Sipek (in his own preface he refers to a Dummy Murphy who played for the Phillies in 1914); or why Cleveland was not friendly to deaf players while Taylor played for them when it's mentioned that George "Dummy" Leitner also was there the same year.
That said, I learned a lot about the deaf community, and I was glad he put it in context -- I did not know there was such controversy between sign language and oralism, or the way different schools for the deaf treated race matters. On the other hand, sometimes he repeats himself (I found literally whole paragraphs cut and pasted word for word from earlier passages), and sometimes his digressions feel like they're in the wrong place--the chapter on Curtis Pride, for instance, goes into a long discussion about the first Black deaf professional ballplayer who suited up one hundred years ago right in the middle of the narrative, and somehow segues into a discussion about modern "mainstreaming," and you start to wonder if there'll be any discussion of Pride at all. And considering Pride is still very much alive and accessible, though, it also seems a missed opportunity that the author didn't interview him. 3 ***1/2
That said, I learned a lot about the deaf community, and I was glad he put it in context -- I did not know there was such controversy between sign language and oralism, or the way different schools for the deaf treated race matters. On the other hand, sometimes he repeats himself (I found literally whole paragraphs cut and pasted word for word from earlier passages), and sometimes his digressions feel like they're in the wrong place--the chapter on Curtis Pride, for instance, goes into a long discussion about the first Black deaf professional ballplayer who suited up one hundred years ago right in the middle of the narrative, and somehow segues into a discussion about modern "mainstreaming," and you start to wonder if there'll be any discussion of Pride at all. And considering Pride is still very much alive and accessible, though, it also seems a missed opportunity that the author didn't interview him. 3 ***1/2
April 2, 2022
Episode 272: “Deaf Players in Major League Baseball” BASEBALL BY THE BOOK podcast SEP 7, 2020 ⋅ 1:01:19
Since the earliest of big league baseball, deaf players have been part of the National Pastime. Author R.A.R. Edwards joins us to share the stories of "Dummy" Hoy, "Dummy" Taylor, Curtis Pride and other hearing-impaired players who had an impact on the game both on and off the field
Since the earliest of big league baseball, deaf players have been part of the National Pastime. Author R.A.R. Edwards joins us to share the stories of "Dummy" Hoy, "Dummy" Taylor, Curtis Pride and other hearing-impaired players who had an impact on the game both on and off the field
June 22, 2021
An amazingly comprehensive look at Deaf players in the game from the 1800s to present. Where's my Curtis Pride book?
Displaying 1 - 4 of 4 reviews