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Bob Rhoads

Born: October 4, 1879 in Wooster, Ohio
Died: February 12, 1967 (aged 87) in San Bernardino, California
Bats: Right
Throws: Right
Height: 6’1″
Weight: 215 lbs.
Position: Pitcher

Played For:

Chicago Orphans (1902)
St. Louis Cardinals (1903)
Cleveland Naps (1903–1909)

Biography:

In the midst of the 1908 pennant race, Sporting Life declared that “Robert S. Rhoads of Cleveland is one of the most dependable of modern pitchers. … His habits are good, his conduct exemplary, and in all ways is he a credit to his club and profession.” Embodied in this passage are two hallmarks of our subject’s career: a variant, one of many published, of the Rhoads name, and the almost universally favorable treatment that Rhoads received on the sports page. The good press, however, was not undeserved. For most of his eight-season major-league career, Rhoads was a dependable pitcher and occasionally an outstanding one. In 1906 he joined future Hall of Famer Addie Joss and lefty Otto Hess as the first 20-game winners to pitch for a Cleveland club in the American League. Two years later, he contributed 18 victories to a near-miss pennant run. Rhoads was also lively copy, an amiable, witty man whom sportswriters came to rely upon for an anecdote or amusing yarn on slow news days. At times Rhoads himself joined the Fourth Estate, first serving as World Series correspondent for the Cleveland Plain Dealer, and decades later becoming a general columnist for a California weekly. In the end, baseball was the centerpiece – but far from the only aspect of – a long and interesting life.

For the remainder of his long life, Bob Rhoads engaged in a variety of occupations. Among other things, he worked as a herdsman, a gifted (albeit unlicensed) large-animal veterinarian, a mail-truck driver, and a supply clerk at a military depot.35 In his leisure time, he fished and hunted, coached and umpired in local baseball leagues, and greeted old friends like Ty Cobb and Connie Mack when they visited Rhoads’ adopted hometown of Barstow, California. In 1938 Rhoads resumed a prior calling, penning a column called Dustin’ ’Em Off for the weekly Barstow Printer. As blunt and opinionated as decades before, he lambasted the “mechanical smile” flashed by Shirley Temple on a trip through town, and chided a local minister for fire-and-brimstone sermons, observing that “Christianity teaches the joy of living, rather than the fear of death.”

 

More info:

https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bob_Rhoads
https://www.baseball-reference.com/players/r/rhoadbo01.shtml
https://sabr.org/bioproj/person/da33e0cd