Dummy Taylor by Sean Lahman

A flamboyant pitcher with an unorthodox corkscrew delivery, Dummy Taylor first caught the attention of the New York Giants with his fastball, but he also had a good curve and developed what one Detroit sportswriter called "the best drop ball delivered across the plate by any pitcher." While many viewed his lack of hearing as a handicap, Taylor believed that all it did was heighten his other senses. The 6'1", 160 lb. pitcher was adept at stealing the opposing team's signs because of his keen eyesight, and he also believed that he could read a base runner's intentions by studying his facial expressions, helping the gangly right-hander give up relatively few stolen bases despite his quirky delivery. Dummy wasn't the first deaf player in the majors, nor the last, but he became the most visible because he played in New York for baseball's most glamorous team. "Wherever Taylor goes he will always be visited by scores of the silent fraternity among whom he is regarded as a prodigy," observed the Saturday Evening Post.

One of three deaf children of hearing parents, Luther Haden Taylor was born on February 21, 1875, in Oskaloosa, Kansas. Growing up on the family farm, Luther attended the Kansas School for the Deaf in the nearby town of Olathe from 1884 to 1895. At the time new inventions such as the telephone and phonograph were changing the world, but for the deaf those technological advances served only to isolate them further from those who could hear. Many turned to sports, a world where they could compete in ways that they couldn't off the field. Luther became an outstanding boxer but his father encouraged him to pursue his talent as a pitcher instead. When he finished high school in 1895, Taylor pitched for minor-league teams in Nevada, Missouri, and Winchester, Kansas. In subsequent years he played in Illinois and Georgia before making his major-league debut with the New York Giants on August 27, 1900. Pitching for a last-place team, Taylor went 4-3 with a 2.45 ERA.

The Giants didn't just add Taylor to their roster; they embraced him as a member of their family. Player-manager George Davis learned sign language and encouraged his players to do the same. John McGraw did likewise when he took over as Giants manager in July 1902. Taylor had "a genial, humorous spirit that covets companionship," according to the Saturday Evening Post, and his presence had a profound effect on his teammates. "We could all read and speak the deaf-and-dumb sign language, because Dummy Taylor took it as an affront if you didn't learn to converse with him," said Fred Snodgrass in The Glory of Their Times. "He wanted to be one of us, to be a full-fledged member of the team. If we went to the vaudeville show, he wanted to know what the joke was, and somebody had to tell him. So we all learned. We practiced all the time. We'd go by elevated train from the hotel to the Polo Grounds, and all during the ride, we'd be spelling out the advertising signs." The Giants even did away with conventional baseball signs and used sign language instead, at least until opponents caught on to what they were doing.

In 1901, their first full season in New York, 25-year-old Dummy Taylor and 20-year-old Christy Mathewson became the workhorses of a young pitching staff that was just starting to develop into one of baseball's best. Taylor led National League pitchers by making 45 appearances, finishing with 18 wins and a league-leading 27 for the seventh-place Giants. Interestingly, he wasn't the team's only deaf ballplayer: the pitching staff also briefly included Dummy Deegan and Dummy Leitner. The following year Taylor jumped to the American League for more money, but none of his Cleveland teammates knew sign language and he became depressed. After pitching just four games in two months, Dummy re-joined the Giants, now managed by McGraw, and went 7-15 down the stretch despite a 2.29 ERA. If he suffered from lack of run support in 1902, he enjoyed the opposite experience the following year, going 13-13 despite a horrible 4.23 ERA, the third-worst among NL pitchers with more than 200 innings.

As was the practice in those days, Taylor often served as first-base coach on days when he wasn't pitching. To the delight of the fans, he clowned around and made gestures behind the backs of the umpires. Dummy sometimes let loose a loud piercing noise—teammate Mike Donlin likened it to the "crazed shrieking of a jackass"—to rattle opposing pitchers or just to annoy the arbiters. Umpire Charlie Zimmer once got so irritated with the shrill sound that he ejected Taylor, perhaps the only instance of a deaf player being tossed for being too noisy. It wasn't the last time Dummy faced an umpire's wrath. One day it was pouring rain, but umpire Hank O'Day refused to call the game. Taylor ducked into the clubhouse and returned wearing huge rubber boots and twirling a bright yellow umbrella. O'Day yelled furiously at Dummy as he clowned around in the coach's box, but the deaf pitcher pretended not to notice. Taylor signed an unflattering description of the arbiter to McGraw, and was surprised when O'Day signed back, "You go clubhouse, pay $25." O'Day hadn't picked up everything that Taylor had called him, but having been raised by deaf parents, he knew enough to know that it wasn't flattering.

In 1904 Taylor and his fellow pitchers led the Giants to their first pennant in 15 years. It was by far the best season of Dummy's career, as he finished with a 21-15 record and 2.34 ERA. The Giants repeated as NL champions the following year, with Taylor posting a 16-9 record, and the deaf pitcher was scheduled to start Game Three of the 1905 World Series against the Philadelphia Athletics. Rain cancelled the contest, however, and McGraw opted to start Mathewson when the game was re-scheduled. Dummy continued to pitch well over the next three seasons, finishing with a winning record each year and remaining one of the most popular players on the Giants. He was the life of the camp at spring training, as is evident from this Sam Crane clipping from 1908: "Yesterday Taylor was more full of life, good nature and ginger than ever. Bresnahan began to spar with him, but Luther is pretty good with his hands and knocked off Bresnahan's dicer the first crack out of the box. This pleased the amiable Luther immensely, and then there was more finger lingo than could be furnished in a deaf and dumb asylum. All the old players are adept at the deaf and dumb language, especially Bresnahan. Needham tried to break in with it, but Luther looked at Tom's knotted digits and spelled out on his fingers: 'Another Bowerman; I'll bet he has a brogue.'"

The Giants released Taylor after the 1908 season. He was about to turn 34 and McGraw wanted to give his job to a young lefty named Rube Marquard. Dummy pitched in the minors for seven more seasons, mostly with teams near his Kansas home, ending his career with Topeka in 1915. By then he was also working at his alma mater, the Kansas School for the Deaf, coaching five different sports, including football, girls' basketball, and of course baseball. In 1923 Taylor moved on to a deaf school in Iowa, and later he spent nearly two decades as a coach, teacher, and administrator at the Illinois School for the Deaf. He was as an exceptional role model; several of his students went on to play minor-league baseball, and one, Dick Sipek, reached the majors with the Cincinnati Reds in 1945. After retiring in 1940, Taylor worked as a scout for the Giants and later opened a barbershop. Luther Taylor was married three times but didn't have any children. He died at age 82 on August 22, 1958, 11 days after suffering a heart attack.

Dummy Taylor's story reached a new audience in 2000 when SABR member Darryl Brock used him as the inspiration for his novel Havana Heat, a first-person account of Taylor's fictional attempt to impress McGraw and return to the majors on a 1911 barnstorming tour of Cuba.

Note: A slightly different version of this biography appeared in Tom Simon, ed., Deadball Stars of the National League (Washington, D.C.: Brassey's, Inc., 2004).

Sources

Baseball the Biographical Encyclopedia. Total Sports Publishing, 2000.

Brock, Darryl. Havana Heat. Plume, 2001.

Luther Taylor Research Collection of Darryl Brock

The New York Times Archives

Panara, Robert and David Moore. Great Deaf Americans. Deaf Life Press, 1996.

Ritter, Lawrence. The Glory of Their Times (Groh interview). Quill, 1984.

The Sporting News Archives

Total Baseball (6th edition). Total Sports Publishing, 2001.