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The Double Life
Good evening. This is Dead Legends. We’re the kind of guys that never take ourselves too seriously.
Don’t forget baseball’s golden rule: Always have fun.
Let’s dive in.
Today’s story is about an influential ballplayer, his double life, and the speculations about what happened to him on his final day.
Arthur Irwin is an example of why we shouldn’t know the personal lives of our heroes.
Irwin played and managed from 1880-1899.
He is credited with popularizing the fielder’s baseball glove, and also invented an electric scoreboard for football.
They say necessity is the mother of all invention, and that was certainly the case for Arthur.
The only reason he started using a glove in 1883 was because this crazy son of a bitch was playing with two broken fingers and he needed extra protection.
Sporting goods company Draper & Maynard produced a model based on “the Irwin glove” and it became the dominant glove used amongst Major League players.
To be honest, this probably just inflated the guy’s ego even more - he was already known by his peers for his cockiness.
He was a bold and flamboyant dresser, sporting loud colors and strutting around town with a cane.
But the bastard was good!
He definitely knew baseball.
When he worked as a scout, Irwin discovered players like Ray Caldwell and Nap Lajoie before they were stars.
In 1921, Arthur started having digestive problems and dropped 60 pounds in two weeks.
The illness forced him to stop coaching and he was told he had stomach cancer that June.
The next month, he boarded a steam boat from New York to Boston, and told fellow passengers he was “going home to die.”
But he never made it to Boston.
During the trip Irwin was lost overboard in what many believe to be a suicide, but there have been other theories too.
Prior to boarding the ship, he sold the rights to his electronic scoreboard and pocketed $2,000 - about $70,000 in today’s money.
Some have speculated that he was been robbed and murdered, while others thought that he might have faked his death.
And his death wasn’t the only strange thing that came to the surface,
Irwin’s son, Harold, visited him in the hospital and that’s when he met his brother, Herbert, for the first time.
Turns out, Irwin had married a woman named Elizabeth in 1883, and they had Herbert and two other children; Elizabeth lived in Boston.
While coaching at Penn in the 1890s, Irwin met May.
They lived in New York as husband and wife, and also had a son - Harold.
May and Harold were Irwin's top priorities, and he devoted nearly all of his spare time and money to them.
Irwin made so few trips to Boston that no one in New York had any suspicions of his other life.
He sent $500 to Elizabeth and the rest of the scoreboard money went to May and Harold.
Sad thing is, Elizabeth never even realized he did her dirty.
“I feel confident and happy in the belief that, although he had this other woman in New York, he was on the way to see me when he died-that he knew he was dying and that he turned to me as the woman he really loved at the last. He wanted to die in my arms.”
Whether Irwin committed suicide, was murdered, or faked his death - one thing is certain - he’s definitely dead now.
Case closed.
GOD BLESS THE USA
There’s two things we know for sure - we love this game, and we love this country.
We’re forever grateful to the men and women who’ve served in our military and made huge sacrifices to keep us safe.
One way to show that gratitude is by wearing one of these lids from the new Armed Forces collection.
Major League Baseball directs 100% of its royalties from on-field Armed Forces Weekend socks and caps to MLB Charities, a 501(c)(3) nonprofit.
Those funds go to military organizations that support active service members, veterans and families in the areas of inclusivity, mental health and essential resources.
STRANGE NAMES
If you're just joining us, we play this game every day where we try to find the weirdest names throughout baseball history.
Why?
Don't ask us, it's just something we like to do.
If you've been rocking with us for awhile now, you know what time it is.
Today's winner is:
Castleman pitched for the New York Giants over six seasons.
He was a country boy from Tennessee, but his friends back home called him “Slick” because he transformed himself into a more stylish professional baseball player.
The Giants made it to the World Series twice with him on the team (‘36 & ‘37), but they couldn’t close the deal in either contest.
Injuries plagued Castleman and he retired at the age of 25.
THE DEAD LEGENDS ARCHIVE
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That's it for today. Tomorrow we're back at it like a bad habit. See ya!
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