RUBE WADDELL

www.rubewaddell-kingofthehallofflakes.com/#!home/mainPage

If you like baseball,  check out Will's blog:-

   lateinnings.blogspot.ca

Will was a consistent .300+ hitter while playing third base in a west Toronto men’s baseball league before joining Rick and John on the Hogtown Bombers.

In the early ’90s, he was hired by the Toronto Blue Jays to work at their Instructional Camp for Teenagers in the west end of Toronto.

Will received an Honours degree in history and taught middle school for twenty years before getting a Masters degree in Educational Administration and becoming a principal.

He recently retired, but has started a company called “Making Canadian History Fun” and now goes into schools to share fascinating anecdotes from history.

He also teaches the kids some inside baseball.

Will spends as much time reading about baseball as he does about history.

"You just got a raise to $12.50 a week so you decide to splurge and shell out a dollar to sit in the grandstand behind home plate. You know you're in for a treat. Rube Waddell, the most exciting twirler in baseball, will be in the pitcher's box. It turns out you've wasted your money. The phenom doesn't pitch. In fact, he's not even in the stadium. You later learn that he chose to play sandlot ball with some kids he passed on his walk from the hotel to the ballpark. You're delighted the next time you go to see him and Rube takes the mound. He's a bit late so you ask the booster sitting beside you what might have been the holdup. He tells you that Rube often soaks his pitching arm in cold water before the game to take some of the speed out of it, otherwise Rube says his shoots will burn up the catcher's mitt. He is absolutely overpowering. You wonder why hitters even bother going up to the plate. "Is there anything he can't do out there?" you ask the cranks around you. A man with a red handlebar moustache says, "Ya. Rube can't throw at batters to keep them off the plate like other twirlers do. He's afraid of killing somebody. And he refuses to throw spitters. Says it ain't sanitary."

As a boy, Will Braund's life revolved around playing baseball. He played every single afternoon and from 8 a.m. until 8 p.m. on weekends, with only short breaks for meals. He hung up his glove at 39 as the third baseman and manager of a men's league team but later worked as an instructor for the Toronto Blue Jays at their summer camp for teenagers. After earning an Honors degree in History he taught for several years, during which he was nominated for the Governor General's Award for Excellence in Teaching. After being promoted to principal he was elected Chair of the 1,100 member Toronto School Administrators' Association and later named to the Executive of the Ontario Principals' Council.

Will retired a few years ago but still fills in for principals a few days a month. He is living in Marmora with his beautiful wife Trudy and their son Tyler and close to their older son Matthew. When not at school Will reads voraciously about the history of baseball.

Along with two former teammates he started a blog called lateinningsblogspot.com to which he is the main contributor on the subject of baseball history. While interested by the biographies of a lot of players, Will has never not found anyone who had a more fascinating and even bizarre life and career than Rube Waddell. Not even Babe Ruth.

George Edward (Rube) Waddell (1876 – 1914) was an American southpaw pitcher in Major League Baseball (MLB). In his thirteen-year career he played for the Louisville Colonels (1897, 1899), Pittsburgh Pirates (1900–01) and Chicago Orphans (1901) in the National League, and the Philadelphia Athletics (1902–07) and St. Louis Browns (1908–10) in the American League. Born in Bradford, Pennsylvania, Waddell was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946.  (Wikipedia)