COLUMBUS, Ohio — Efforts to get an Ohio deaf baseball player into Major League Baseball’s Hall of Fame are underway with a new website.
The website, called Hoy For the Hall Fame, contains a time line of his baseball accomplishments and a form letter that fans can fill out and send to the Baseball Hall of Fame Historical Review Committee.
The website launched this month and includes a story 10TV did about a Hoy historian, Steve Sandy.
William Ellsworth Hoy was born in Houcktown, Ohio, on May 23, 1862. Contracting meningitis when he was 3 years old left him deaf and mute. He entered the Ohio School for the Deaf in Columbus in 1872, graduating in 1879 and going on to practice the trade he had learned there, shoemaking.
However, his instructor, Parley P. Pratt, began training the boys in baseball during the 1870s and would send many into professional ball.
Hoy was MLB’s third deaf player, possibly its first great one. Playing in MLB until he was 40, Hoy amassed more than 2,000 hits and, given his handicap, made a plausible case for a plaque in the Hall of Fame.
In 1961 Hoy, at 99 the longest-lived major leaguer to that time, threw out the ceremonial first pitch before Game 3 of the World Series between the Reds and the Yankees in Cincinnati. He died on December 15, 1961.
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