10/04/2026
I had always known the name Dummy Hoy. It's kinda just always been there. It's one of those names you come across if you spend enough time digging around old baseball. But I don't think I ever really stopped to look at the player attached to it.
He had 2,048 hits. He scored 1,429 runs. He walked 1,006 times, stole 596 bases and had a .386 on-base percentage. Most of this happened before 1900. When he retired in 1902, nobody in baseball history had played more games in center field.
And Hoy was deaf.
There's an easy version of his story to tell from there. Look at what this man was able to accomplish even though he couldn't hear. I thought about that version for a hot second and pretty quickly realized I wasn't interested in creating that piece. Hoy does not need our sympathy to make his baseball life remarkable. Look at those numbers again. He was a great ballplayer, full stop.
What I kept thinking about instead was what baseball must have looked like to him.
Baseball is a surprisingly noisy game. Teammates call to each other. Coaches yell instructions. Umpires make calls. Hoy couldn't rely on any of that, so communication had to become visual. He watched. His teammates used signs. Things that were communicated by sound for other players had to be communicated differently for him.
There's a wonderful old story that Hoy invented the hand signals umpires use for balls and strikes. Now whether it's true or not is debated (but I really do want it to be true) The history doesn't really support going that far to say he was solely responsible for it BUT Hoy's connection to visual communication in baseball is real, and once I started thinking about that I knew what this Pop Fly needed to be.
The name was another problem. There was NO WAY I was going to put DUMMY in giant letters at the top of a piece about a deaf person in 2026. I was going to call him William Hoy and be done with it. Except the more I read about him, the more I realized I was getting that wrong too. Dummy was the name Hoy himself used, and there's even an account of people later trying to be polite and calling him William and Hoy correcting them.
I sat with that for a bit, & realized I was trying to correct something for him that he apparently didn't want corrected. So Dummy Hoy it was.
And after spending the week reading about this guy and looking at his career, I'll say this too...I think Dummy Hoy belongs in the Baseball Hall of Fame. His baseball career, his place in the history of the game and the mark he left on baseball are enough to make that conversation worth having, not leaning on the it'd-make-a-story-ness of it at all.
And then there are the hands in this piece. Those aren't random illustrations I put there because they looked interesting. They're based on a one-handed spelling manual alphabet being used in America during Hoy's lifetime. I wanted part of this piece to communicate visually because that's the part of Hoy's story I couldn't stop thinking about.
And the hands do communicate something. They say something very specific, and there's a reason I chose exactly what they say.
But I think telling you would ruin the best part.
So I'm gonna let you figure that one out.
DUMMY HOY
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