BALDWIN CITY, Kan. (KPR) — The MLB regular season will wrap up late next month. But before it does, Commentator Rex Buchanan wants to talk a little baseball. He recently visited a cemetery in southern Douglas County that became the final resting place for a talented Kansas man who played professional ball at the highest levels.
(Transcript)
Football season is almost here, which means most sports fans around here will move on from baseball. That's understandable, given the Royals' unfortunate season.
But before you forget about baseball, let's consider a Kansas ballplayer who made his major league debut in late August of 1900, almost exactly 126 years ago.
Luther Taylor grew up on a farm outside of Oskaloosa, just north of Lawrence. He played in the majors from 1900 to 1908, most of those years for the New York Giants. As a pitcher, he won 116 games and lost 106. In his first game against the Brooklyn Superbas, he appeared in relief and reportedly threw out five runners who were attempting to steal third base. The following year he led the majors in pitching appearances—he pitched in 45 of the Giants' 137 games--and in complete games. You could look it up.
In 1905, he was scheduled to pitch for the Giants in the third game of the World Series. But it rained. Christy Mathewson pitched the next game in his stead. The Giants won that World Series in five games. Taylor never got another chance to play in a World Series.
But here's something else that makes Taylor's story notable. He was deaf. One of the first deaf players in the majors. After he finished playing professional baseball—he made several minor league stops—he coached and taught at the Kansas School for the Deaf in Olathe, where he had been a student. The school's first gymnasium was later named for him.
He went on to coach at the Iowa School for the Deaf, and then at the Illinois School for the Deaf.
About 250 native-born Kansans have made it to the majors. Probably the best known is another pitcher, Walter "Big Train" Johnson, from Humboldt, who was in the first class inducted into the baseball Hall of Fame, along with Babe Ruth, Ty Cobb, and, yes, Christy Mathewson, the man who took Luther's place on the pitching mound in the 1905 Series.
Luther Taylor didn't play in the Series or make it to Cooperstown. But he deserves to be remembered. Nearly every account of his life mentions his perseverance, his sense of humor, how much he was loved by his teammates, who learned sign language to converse with him, and maybe even to use as signals on the ball field.
Taylor died in late August 1958, about the same time of year as he made that late-summer pitching debut.
He's buried in the Prairie City Cemetery on the western edge of Baldwin City, his grave sheltered by the branches of a sprawling sugar maple. A bench-like monument makes it easy to find. When we were there a few weeks ago, his resting place was decorated by a small cluster of faded blue flowers.
Somebody, it seems, remembers this little-town Kansan, who made it big in the majors. ###
Commentator Rex Buchanan is a writer, author and director emeritus of the Kansas Geological Survey. He lives in Lawrence.
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