Saturday, August 23, 2014

The way Ed Delahanty died.

A morbid topic, perhaps.

I made note of the Delahanty story a while back, then forgot to post it. During the course of doing so, I chanced upon this area at The Baseball Cube: Recent Player Deaths.

For every Tony Gwynn or Bob Welch, there's a Billy McCool or Tom Veryzer -- a player who may have graced one's baseball card collection (with multiple untradeable duplicates), or made a memorable play at a game witnessed decades ago. They too served, didn't they?

111 years ago today, baseball experienced one of its weirdest deaths, by Craig Calcaterra (Hardball Talk)

I’ve written about old Ed Delahanty before. The other time was when I named him “The Most 19th Century Player of All Time.” Part of the reason he won that title is because he starred in the 19th century, mostly, and because of the way he got his big league callup: he took the place of a Philadelphia Quakers second baseman who died of friggin’ typhoid fever. The only thing that would make that transaction more 19th century is if Delahanty himself was activated from the disabled list following a bout with dropsy.

But the other reason he was the most 19th century baseball player? The way he died.

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