One of the greatest pitchers in 19th-century major-league baseball, Tim Keefe won 342 games and still ranks among the top ten pitchers in lifetime victories. He was known for his change-of-pace pitch, which he used to establish a still-standing major-league record of 19 consecutive victories in 1888. “No more graceful, skillful and strategic pitcher ever tossed a ball over the plate to the bewilderment and dismay of opposing batsmen,” one writer wrote of Keefe in 1890. In addition to his pitching prowess, Keefe was also a leader in the Brotherhood of Professional Base Ball Players, which led a revolt of National League ballplayers to form the ill-fated Players League in 1890.
In 1928, Boston Globe sportswriter Ford Sawyer ran across Keefe at a Red Sox game at Fenway Park, where “the 70-year-old real estate owner is unknown to the vast majority of the thousands who are urging on their Boston favorites.” Keefe, who now regularly attended ballgames once a week, told Sawyer that baseball was “fundamentally the same old game” as back in the 1880s, and that he particularly liked to watch Ty Cobb. In 1936, at the time of the first BBWAA election for the Baseball Hall of Fame, Keefe’s pitching exploits for the New York Giants in the 1880s were largely forgotten, as he received just one vote on the 78 ballots cast for the 19th-century stars component of the initial Hall of Fame class.
Keefe was more famous in the 1930s as the mythical pitcher in “Casey at the Bat.” His name carried on in corrupted versions of the poem “Casey at the Bat” that first began appearing in about 1900 in a number of anthologies of humorous verse. These versions of Thayer’s poem substituted the line “He signaled the pitcher” with “He signaled to Sir Timothy,” and more specifically indicated Keefe through the change of the term “the writhing pitcher” to “the New York pitcher.”
In 1964 Keefe was enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee. Since he had no children, several nieces and nephews, the children of his younger sister Ellen, represented him at the induction ceremony. - SABR
Redid the facegen. @AESP, go ahead and ping me in this thread for a request or via DM. The other thread has so many posts in a single day, I don't always catch a request or call-out. It was only earlier tonight that I saw the Tim Keefe note from two days ago.
