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Smoky Joe Wood

The Biography of a Baseball Legend

ebook
2 of 2 copies available
2 of 2 copies available

WINNER OF THE 2014 SEYMOUR MEDAL sponsored by the Society for American Baseball Research and finalist for 2014 SABR Larry Ritter Award

Though his pitching career lasted only a few seasons, Howard Ellsworth "Smoky Joe" Wood was one of the most dominating figures in baseball history—a man many consider the best baseball player who is not in the Hall of Fame. About his fastball, Hall of Fame pitcher Walter Johnson once said: "Listen, mister, no man alive can throw harder than Smoky Joe Wood."

Smoky Joe Wood chronicles the singular life befitting such a baseball legend. Wood got his start impersonating a female on the National Bloomer Girls team. A natural athlete, he pitched for the Boston Red Sox at eighteen, won twenty-one games and threw a no-hitter at twenty-one, and had a 34-5 record plus three wins in the 1912 World Series, for a 1.91 ERA, when he was just twenty-two. Then in 1913 Wood suffered devastating injuries to his right hand and shoulder that forced him to pitch in pain for two more years. After sitting out the 1916 season, he came back as a converted outfielder and played another five years for the Cleveland Indians before retiring to coach the Yale University baseball team.

With details culled from interviews and family archives, this biography, the first of this rugged player of the Deadball Era, brings to life one of the genuine characters of baseball history.

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    • Kirkus

      February 15, 2013
      In baseball's long history, only two men have started a World Series as a pitcher and as a position player: Babe Ruth and, easily, among the best players not in the Hall of Fame, Smoky Joe Wood (1889-1995), the subject of this biography. For eight years with the dead ball era Red Sox, Wood played with the future Hall of Fame outfield of Tris Speaker, Duffy Lewis and Harry Hooper, with the old Cy Young and the young Babe Ruth. He played against and was considered every bit the equal of Ty Cobb, Shoeless Joe Jackson and Christy Mathewson. His spectacular 1912 regular season (34-5, 1.91 ERA, 258 strikeouts) featured a classic duel with strikeout artist Walter Johnson, who once said of him, "there's no man alive that throws harder than Smoky Joe Wood." After injuring his arm, Wood followed up his remarkable pitching exploits with six more years as a Cleveland Indian outfielder, where he rated among the game's best hitters. The author never quite gets to the heart of the man--Wood's jack-of-all trades, peripatetic father emerges as the most interesting personality--but Wood's minor league beginnings (including a stint, believe it or not, with the Kansas City Bloomer Girls), his bifurcated major league career and his 20 seasons coaching baseball at Yale all receive exhaustive attention. Wood (English Emeritus/Carson-Newman Coll.; co-author: The Voice of an American Playwright: Interviews With Horton Foote, 2012, etc.) skips lightly over any negatives--his subject's role in the Catholic/Protestant divide among those 1908-1915 Sox teams, his part in a betting scandal featuring Speaker and Cobb--and he hurries through the retirement years. However, most readers will come for the baseball and the stories of this almost-mythic figure from the game's earliest days, the only man other than Cole Porter for whom Yale's president left the college grounds to award an honorary degree. A serviceable biography for hard-core fans of early baseball.

      COPYRIGHT(2013) Kirkus Reviews, ALL RIGHTS RESERVED.

    • Booklist

      April 15, 2013
      Howard Ellsworth Smoky Joe Wood has been called the best player not in the Hall of Fame. He was one of the game's most dominant pitchers in the years leading up to WWI. In 1912, he won 34 games and lost only 5 for the Boston Red Sox. Injuries plagued him thereafter, and following retirement in 1922, he became the head baseball coach at Yale. Author Wood (no relation) exhaustively researched Wood's early life. He includes detailed accounts of Wood's exploits in dozens of amateur games while he was helping support his family. Wood even played as a female for a bit on the National Bloomers Girls baseball team. There are great baseball anecdotes here and sparkling details of Wood's years as a standout pitcher with the Red Sox as well as his agonizing struggle to recover his pitching form post-injury and his determined return to the majors as a position player. Wood was a great ballplayer and an even more fascinating man. Excellent reading.(Reprinted with permission of Booklist, copyright 2013, American Library Association.)

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