Carl Mays
Carl Mays was not a well-liked man, but he was a tremendous pitcher and the game’s only “submariner” in 1918. He came up to Boston from Providence of the International League in 1915, with a fellow rookie named Babe Ruth. By 1916, Mays and Ruth had established themselves as the core of what figured to be a great pitching staff for years to come—Ruth was just 21, Mays was 24 and lefty Dutch Leonard was 24. Leonard was somewhat of a disappointment, but in 1917, Ruth and Mays established themselves as a devastating 1-2 punch at the top of the rotation, as Ruth finished 24-13 with a 2.01 ERA and Mays went 22-9 with a 1.74 ERA.
His lack of popularity, though, always bothered Mays, and it probably didn’t help that Ruth—despite being boorish and obnoxious—was such a big hit with fans.
Carl Mays and his family after leaving Boston and arriving in New York. (Photo courtesy of the Library of Congress.) Mays would bark and hold grudges against fielders who missed plays, he would throw inside at opposing batters and, as one teammate noted, he carried himself with the disposition of a man with a permanent toothache.
In a Baseball Magazine interview done in 1920, Mays said, “There is such a thing as popularity. We all know people who are popular without being able to explain why they should be. We also know people who are not popular, and yet they may be even more deserving of respect. Popularity does not necessarily rest on merit. Nor is unpopularity necessarily deserved.”
Popular or not, Mays was Boston’s most consistent starter for most of 1918. The Red Sox were loaded with good fastball pitchers, which made Mays’ unique submarine delivery—he would drop his hand down to his shoe and fling his pitches up at the hitter from there—all the more difficult to deal with. Baseball Magazine described his motion this way: “Carl slings the pill from his toes, has a weird looking wind-up and in action, looks like a cross between an octopus and a bowler. He shoots the ball in at the batter at such unexpected angles that his delivery is hard to find, generally, until along about 5 o’clock, when the hitters get accustomed to it—and when the game is about over.”
Mays was 17-7 by late July, and seemed well on his way to a second consecutive 20-win season, which would net him a bonus. But arm fatigue, and the persistence of shipyard league agents who tried to get him to jump from the Red Sox (he was Class 1A in the draft), caused Mays to hit a stretch in which he went just 2-6. He was stuck on 19 wins. But on August 30, Mays shook out of his slump. He won the first game of a double-header with Philadelphia by an easy 12-1 count, and manager Ed Barrow kept Mays in for the second game. He won that, too, 4-0, to finish the year with 21 wins—and his bonus.
The double-header wins got Mays back on target. In the 1918 World Series, Mays proved utterly unhittable to the Cubs, who hadn’t seen his submarine delivery before. He went 2-0 and, in 18 innings, allowed just 10 hits and two runs.
Mays did not become the rotation mainstay he appeared to be for the Red Sox. His career took bizarre twists from there. A bitter dispute with the team in 1919 led to his being sent to the Yankees in the middle of the season. In 1920, he became the only pitcher in baseball history to kill a batter with a pitched ball when an inside fastball struck Cleveland’s Ray Chapman in the head. Mays pitched for the Yankees for four years before he was sent to Cincinnati, and was later accused, according to baseball writer Fred Lieb, of throwing the World Series in 1920 and 1921. (The charges were never made formal or public). He closed out his career with the Reds, finishing with one season with the Giants. He compiled a 207-126 record and a 2.92 ERA over the course of his career.
