William Ellsworth Hoy stood at home plate in a game built around sound.
The crack of the bat, the roar of the crowd, teammates yelling, and an umpire barking "ball" or "strike."
Hoy heard none of it.
Spinal meningitis left him deaf when he was a small child. He attended the Ohio School for the Deaf, became its valedictorian, worked as a shoemaker, and somehow decided professional baseball was where he belonged.
He was right.
Hoy reached the major leagues in 1888 and spent 14 seasons there. He finished with 2,048 hits, 1,429 runs, 596 stolen bases, and a .386 on-base percentage. When he retired, he ranked second all-time in walks and fourth in stolen bases.
Hoy's 14-year major league career took him across several teams and four different major leagues. He began with the Washington Nationals in 1888 and 1889, then played for the Buffalo Bisons in 1890 and the St. Louis Browns in 1891. He returned to Washington with the Senators for 1892 and 1893 before spending four seasons with the Cincinnati Reds from 1894 through 1897. Hoy then played for the Louisville Colonels in 1898 and 1899, joined the Chicago White Sox in 1901, and finished his career back in Cincinnati with the Reds in 1902.
From the Society for American Baseball Research:
In May, members of SABR submitted their votes for the 2018 Overlooked 19th Century Base Ball Legend — a 19th-century player, manager, executive or other baseball personality not yet inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown, New York.
Previous Overlooked Legends were Pete Browning in 2009, Deacon White in 2010, Harry Stovey in 2011, Bill Dahlen in 2012, Ross Barnes in 2013, Doc Adams in 2014, Tony Mullane in 2015, Jack Glasscock in 2016, and Bob Caruthers last year. White became the first Overlooked Legend to be inducted into the Hall of Fame in 2013.
His deafness presented a problem baseball hadn't really solved. Hoy couldn't hear an umpire's call. Early in his career, he would turn to learn whether the pitch had been called a ball or strike. Pitchers discovered they could hurry the next pitch while he was trying to determine the count.
Hoy found another way.
His third-base coach, Frank Selee, began signaling the calls with his hands. Contemporary evidence shows the system traveled with Hoy as he moved through professional baseball. An 1888 description explained that a coach near third base signaled the umpire's decisions to him by raising his fingers.
Baseball history gets murky when people claim Hoy "invented" modern umpire signals. Deaf players had used visual communication before him, and Hall of Fame umpire Bill Klem later received official credit for introducing arm signals.
But Hoy's fingerprints are unquestioned on the story.
In 1906, four years after Hoy's final major league game, newspaper accounts described an umpire using what they called "Dummy Hoy's mute signal code" during the World Series. The visual system that had helped one deaf player understand the game was becoming useful to everybody watching it.
There's something wonderfully American about Hoy's life.
He didn't ask baseball to feel sorry for him. He made baseball figure out how to communicate with him, then spent more than a decade proving he belonged on the field.
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Even the nickname needs historical context. "Dummy" was commonly used for deaf people who didn't speak during Hoy's era. Hoy himself accepted the name, and historical accounts say he wasn't insulted by it.
Different times, different people, amirite?
Hoy lived until 1961, reaching 99 years old. He survived long enough to throw out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 3 of the 1961 World Series in Cincinnati, nearly three-quarters of a century after he reached the majors.
He never made Cooperstown.
A new campaign hopes to change that. Albert Pujols, actor Troy Kotsur, and others are supporting an effort to place Hoy before the Hall of Fame's Classic Baseball Era Committee. The committee votes next in December 2027 for the Class of 2028.
Maybe the best argument for Hoy isn't found on the back of a baseball card. Watch an umpire tonight.
Strike! Safe! Out!
Baseball still speaks with its hands, and William Hoy would understand every word.
