The history of deaf baseball players
Can you hear me now?
Baseball is unusual compared to other sports. To excel in football, it helps to be big, strong, fast, and athletic. In basketball, being tall is a plus. You also need fast twitch muscles, great eye-hand coordination, and extreme athleticism. Tennis? You had best be athletic. Hockey? Those guys are athletic, strong and tough as nails with some endurance added in.
Baseball? Baseball takes players of all shapes and sizes. You have players like Frank Howard, Randy Johnson, or Aaron Judge, who are very tall and strong. You have had players like Freddie Patek and Jose Altuve who are more vertically challenged. There have been some players who were fantastic athletes. Bob Gibson, Willie Wilson, and Bo Jackson come to mind. Then you’ve had players who look like they play beer league softball. One of my all-time favorites, John Kruk, fits that description.
Baseball has also had a long history of deaf players. Not in quantity, as there have only been a handful of deaf players, but a history of many years. One of the first well-known deaf players was William “Dummy” Hoy, a star outfielder in the late 1800’s. When Hoy retired midway through the 1902 season, he held the major league record for games played in center field, career putouts, and chances as an outfielder. He ended his career second all-time in walks and eighth in career games played. He scored over 100 runs nine times and was one of only 29 men to have played in four different major leagues (Players, American Association, National, and American).
The problems first started appearing when I was 5 years old and apparently started with a bout with rubella at the age of 2. Schools used to have hearing and vision tests early in the school year and my hearing tests always ended with a call or visit to my parents. My first audiology exam would have been when I was 7. We drove from our home in Ness City to Salina. During the exam I started to figure out the patterns of the exam and would try to guess when the beeps would occur. I found out later that audiologists have a way of double-checking against this practice. When you’re seven, your mind doesn’t work that way, you just want to be normal, like your friends. Kids can be cruel, and no one wants to be different.
About the word dummy. In Hoy’s age, it was used to refer to deaf-mutes, not necessarily a label for someone who had a lower IQ. In today’s age, thankfully, a label like that would be totally off-limits. It’s been written that when someone addressed Hoy as William or Billy, he would correct them and point out that his name was Dummy. The funny thing about hearing loss is that it’s an often unnoticeable disability. If someone has a prosthetic leg or arm, you usually see that. If someone is blind, they often wear dark glasses and carry a white cane. If someone is hard of hearing or deaf, they tend to blend into society. I often wonder if the name Dummy was used so that people in society would know that they were interacting with a deaf person?
By the time I entered junior high I had been diagnosed with high frequency deafness. This affliction meant that I could hear most normal sounds and conversation, but higher frequency sounds were gone. I last remember hearing a bird chirp when I was eight. One time I sat in a lawn chair under a screaming bat, blissfully unaware until my mom appeared and calmly coaxed me away. Another time I had a run-in with a rattlesnake. I adjusted. Kids are resilient and adapt. The hearing loss never caused many problems in sports, other than I couldn’t hear the referee’s whistle during basketball games, so I’d constantly look at other players for visual cues. Occasionally, I’d continue to play after the whistle blew, which always drew some unusual looks. It was a slight benefit in that I was often able to play without being distracted by the crowd. The only time I heard the crowd was in a game at Sacred Heart, when my friend Dave and I got into it with their student section. I’m still hearing them. Those guys were brutal.
In 1902, his last season with Cincinnati, Hoy batted against Luther “Dummy” Taylor in what was the first and possibly only matchup in major league history between two deaf players. Taylor, who was born in Oskaloosa, Kansas, was an excellent pitcher for the New York Giants and Cleveland Bronchos from 1900 to 1908. Dummy Hoy was Taylor’s hero and role model. Hoy won that May of 1902 matchup, collecting two hits. Despite that, the Giants prevailed by the score of 5-to-3 in a game played at the wonderfully named Cincinnati stadium called Palace of the Fans.
Both men were considered role models and heroes to deaf and hearing-impaired Americans in the early 20th century. At the time, Taylor was the highest-paid deaf person in America.
The school I attended did me a solid starting when I was in Junior High. They brought in a teacher who taught me to lip-read. I hated it at first, but as I grew older came to appreciate her efforts and understand the important gift the teacher and the school had given me. I tried to find this teacher a few years ago, wanting to write her a thank you note, but privacy issues and time have so far stalled my efforts. From those days forward, I knew that eventually I’d lose my hearing, so I lived my life accordingly. I soaked in the sounds of my family, friends, and music and stored them in my memory bank. Unfortunately, my sister lost her hearing first, while in her late 20s. That was followed by my maternal aunt and two cousins losing their sight. In another cruel twist of genetic fate, it was determined that we carried a defective gene that resulted either in blindness or deafness. My sister and I decided that we got the better end of that deal.
There have been a few other deaf major league players over the years, the most recent being Curtis Pride. Pride lost his hearing near birth to rubella. He was an outstanding high school soccer player, basketball player, and baseball star at John F. Kennedy High in Silver Springs, Maryland. Pride attended The College of William and Mary on a basketball scholarship, where he was a four-year starter.
Pride was drafted by the New York Mets in the 10th round of the 1986 draft and made his debut in 1993 with the Montreal Expos. He played in the majors for 11 seasons with his best year coming in 1996 as a member of the Detroit Tigers. He appeared in a career-high of 96 games that season and slashed .300/.372/.513 with an OPS+ of 122. Because of our deafness link, Pride was always one of my favorite players during those years.
The last deaf major league player prior to Pride was outfielder Dick Sipek. Sipek had attended the Illinois School for the Deaf where his housefather was none other than Dummy Taylor. Taylor sent letters of recommendation to the New York Giants and the Cincinnati Reds, who later signed Sipek. Sipek got into 82 games for the 1945 Reds, hitting .244. Most of his career, which spanned from 1943 to 1951, was spent in the minor leagues. His last four years were spent with the Reidsville Luckies of the Carolina League. Reidsville is a pleasant burg located in northern North Carolina, a place I lived while in my early 20s.
Back in 2007, when my hearing loss was starting to accelerate, I was sitting in an airport and reading an interview with artist Chuck Close in Esquire magazine that changed my life. Close said, “Quadriplegics envy paraplegics. You think, man, they’ve got it made. There’s always somebody worse off than you are”. That quote blew me away. There’s always someone worse off than you are.
What little hearing I had finally disappeared eight years ago. Have you ever been swept over a waterfall? I haven’t, but that is what I likened this to, being swept downstream, knowing you were going over the edge and that there was nothing you could do to stop it. Shortly after, I went to the University of Iowa Hospitals Otolaryngology department and received my first cochlear implant. I picked up a second a few years later. The Otolaryngology department did a smart thing, intentionally or not I do not know. They placed their department next to the Oncology department. If you ever felt sorry for yourself all you had to do was look at the people coming and going from that unit, all who were suffering and some who would never leave. There’s a great quote from American writer Regina Brett that I’ve always remembered, “If we threw all of our problems into a pile and saw everyone else’s, we’d grab ours back”.
There’s always somebody worse off than you are.
The implants have worked wonders. I now hear things I haven’t heard in decades, like birds, and some things I’ve never heard before, like crickets and cicadas. A word about cicadas. OMG, how do you stand that racket? I understand that cicadas play a part of the ecosystem, but good lord, that must be the most irritating and obnoxious sound known to man. And have you noticed how advertisers crank up the volume on television commercials? Yeah, not cool.
It is, however, great to be able to hear the voices of my family and friends again. It’s great to hear the roar of a crowd at an athletic event. Even small things like the sound of bacon sizzling in a pan or cola fizzing in a glass of ice bring me unexpected joy. Unfortunately, with the implants I lost the ability to understand music. Anything that I haven’t heard before is just noise. The only music my brain can process is jazz, The Eagles, Steely Dan, and Bob Seger. Thankfully, those were four of my favorites. Everything else is just a jumble of noise. My audiologist says this phenomenon occurs in about 11% of implant recipients.
It helps to have a sense of humor about the situation. I’m a graduate of Lincoln High School, home of the Leopards, which makes me the original deaf Leopard.
The Cochlear implant community, where we are proudly known as Ci-borgs, is growing rapidly. Most people I see in the waiting room are very young children and older men. Men have long abused their hearing, through working in factories and with farm machinery, in the military, and by foolish things like standing near the stage at rock concerts. Newborns are being tested at early ages and given implants, which will allow them to live lives in the mainstream. I noticed recently that former Royals manager Whitey Herzog has an implant. I’d love to talk to him about his experiences. I continue to be amazed at the number of people who stop me on the street and ask about my implants and I’ve embraced being an advocate for the deaf and hard of hearing community.
Life has gotten better for the DHH community. Technology has been a wonderful thing, allowing us to caption our favorite television shows and there are also caption telephones. My I-phone streams directly into my implants. Movie theatres could do a better job of catering to the community. You’d think they could caption at least one showing a day, right? They do have captioning devices, but half the time they don’t work so you end up missing the first ten minutes of a movie exchanging it. It’s just easier to wait for the movie to hit the streaming services.
While at a basketball game at the University of Iowa last year, I noticed that the scoreboard was captioning the announcer’s call! Awesome! A couple of weeks ago I saw a television commercial with a deaf son signing to his father. They were at Yosemite and the son asked the father if he could feel the falls. This is the first TV commercial I can recall that catered to the DHH community. I was genuinely moved.
The Covid pandemic, with its mask mandate, was a tough time for the DHH community as many of us use lip reading as a supplement.
There have been a handful of deaf professional football players over the years, including most recently Kenny Walker of the Denver Broncos and Derrick Coleman of the Seattle Seahawks. Gallaudet University in Washington D. C. is the premier college for deaf and hard-of-hearing individuals. The Bison offer eight different sports for both male and female athletes. Curtis Pride has been the Bison’s head baseball coach since 2009. The Bison play on Hoy Field, named for Dummy Hoy. It’s crazy how this community is connected.
Like many things in life, we’ve come a long way, but there’s still a way to go. If you, or someone you know, is suffering in silence, there is a large community of deaf and hard-of-hearing people ready to help you. We’re starting to see the first generation of Ci-borg athletes appear in high school sports and I’m excited to see what the future holds for these pioneers.
If you, or anyone you know, is afflicted by hearing loss or deafness, there are many resources available to you, such as:
The National Association for the Deaf - https://www.nad.org/resources/
American Society for Deaf Children - https://deafchildren.org/
Hearing Loss Association of America – https://hearingloss.org