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. Joe's
final reward for courageously enduring the eccentricities of his
father, his sister's polio, the 1926-27 baseball scandal, and the
loss of his beloved wife and a son was an honorary doctorate in
1985 from Yale and its president, Bart Giamatti.
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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