Tris Speaker

Baseball Player

• Born: April 4, 1888
• Birthplace: Hubbard, Texas
• Died: December 8, 1958
• Place of death: Lake Whitney, Texas

Sport: Baseball

Early Life

Tristram E. Speaker spent his youth around Hubbard, Texas, where he was born on April 4, 1888. As a boy, Tris enjoyed both riding horses and playing baseball. Tris was right-handed but broke his right arm in a fall from his horse while in his teens. For the rest of his life, he batted and threw left-handed. After high school, where he was an all-around athlete, he worked as a cowpuncher and as a telegraph linesman. The death of his father left his mother to rear seven children. Tris was devoted to her his whole life. He was her youngest child and only son.

The Road to Excellence

In 1906, when Tris was seventeen, he broke into baseball as a pitcher and outfielder for Cleburne in the North Texas League. His average reached .314 the following season for Houston in the Texas League and gained him a Boston Red Sox contract. He hit only .158 for seven games, however. The next year, 1908, Tris paid his own way to the Red Sox training camp at Little Rock, Arkansas, and was left there as payment of the field rental fee.

Tris’s great self-confidence was not easy to deter. Tris proceeded to win the American Association batting title with an average of .350. That catapulted him into the majors for good. Self-confidence and studious knowledge of baseball were Tris’s strongest traits.

The Emerging Champion

Tris became more renowned for his fielding than for his hitting. In this area, he always gave credit to pitcher Cy Young, who “hit fungos to me by the hour. I got to … studying his fungo swing and … could start after the ball before he actually hit it.” That was not the whole story, however; those who saw both play say Tris was faster and more graceful than Joe DiMaggio.

From 1910 until he left the Red Sox in 1915, Tris was center fielder between Harry Hooper and “Duffy” Lewis. Many experts claim that this was the greatest defensive outfield in the history of baseball. Tris’s speed in the field and his prematurely gray hair produced his nickname, “the Gray Eagle.”

In the outfield, Tris Speaker created his own legend. He “had to be seen to be believed.” Tris played a dangerously shallow center field, a few yards behind second base. He was thus able to cover second base in bunt situations, to turn grounders through the middle into outs and even double plays, and to catch line drives that would normally be hits, often converting them into double plays as well. His speed and instincts, as well as the “dead” ball in use until the early 1920’s, allowed Tris to play shallow and still race backward to catch long balls. He always felt he saved more games by catching would-be singles than he lost by missing an occasional double or triple. His 448 assists and 139 double plays—including some unassisted—are major-league records for outfielders; his 6,791 putouts constitute a record second only to that of Willie Mays’s 7,095 putouts.

In terms of individual glory at the plate, Tris Speaker was unlucky to be playing at the same time as Ty Cobb and Babe Ruth, who joined Boston in the 1914 season. Tris was modest and businesslike, whereas Cobb and Ruth were flamboyant personalities both on and off the field.

In any other period, Tris’s five seasons at more than .380 would have won the headlines, but Cobb did it nine times, including three seasons at more than .400, and Ruth’s 50 to 60 home runs were already a legend after the era of the dead ball, when hitting even 15 homers was rare. In nineteen full seasons, mainly from 1909 to 1915 with Boston and from 1916 to 1926 with the Cleveland Indians, Tris batted more than .300 eighteen times. His remarkable lifetime average of .344, sixth highest among all hitters, was overshadowed by Cobb’s .367. In more than 10,200 times at bat, Tris struck out only 220 times. His 3,515 hits rank fifth.

In 1916, because of a contract dispute, Tris was traded to Cleveland. The threat of players jumping to the new Federal League had caused inflated salaries. When that league folded in 1915, there was a glut of players seeking jobs with established major-league teams. Boston owner Joe Lannin wanted to cut Tris’s salary from $15,000 plus a $5,000 bonus to $9,000 dollars. As a result, Tris was traded for two players and $50,000, the most ever paid for one player up to that time.

Continuing the Story

Tris Speaker’s teams were successful. The Red Sox won the pennant and World Series in 1912 and 1915, as did the Indians in 1920 with Tris as player-manager. In 1920, Tris, thirty-two years old, rushed in from the outfield after the final out, collected the game ball, and climbed into the stands to hug his mother. In all, Tris managed the Indians from 1919 to 1926 with a record of 616 wins and 520 losses for a .542 winning percentage.

Tris resigned after the 1926 season in the face of charges that he, Ty Cobb, and others had fixed a game in 1919. In that game, Cleveland lost to Detroit. In fact, on the day in question, Tris hit a single and two triples for Cleveland. It did not seem that he was “throwing” the game. He and Cobb were exonerated by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis and both returned to baseball, but from then on, they lived in the shadow of that scandal. Both ended their major-league careers in 1928, in the Philadelphia Athletics outfield.

Tris married Mary Frances Cudahy in 1925. After two years as player-manager of Newark of the International League, in 1929 and 1930, he became a radio broadcaster briefly. He died December 8, 1958, in Lake Whitney, Texas.

Summary

Tris Speaker was perhaps the greatest center fielder to play baseball. Joe DiMaggio, his chief rival for this title, held Tris as his model. Tris revolutionized the position by playing it more shallow than anyone else before him. Although DiMaggio hit more home runs, Tris surpassed him in every other category of batting and fielding.

Bibliography

Alexander, Charles C. Spoke: A Biography of Tris Speaker. Dallas, Tex.: Southern Methodist University Press, 2007.

Gay, Timothy M. Tris Speaker: The Rough-and-Tumble Life of a Baseball Legend. Guilford, Conn.: Lyons Press, 2007.

McMane, Fred. The Three Thousand Hit Club. Champaign, Ill.: Sports, 2000.

Rains, Rob. Rawlings Presents Big Stix: The Greatest Hitters in the History of the Major Leagues. Champaign, Ill.: Sports, 2004.