Rube Waddell - Final Years

Final Years

After his major league career was over, Waddell pitched for parts of three more years in the minor leagues, including a 20-win season for the Minneapolis Millers in 1911. In addition to pitching for the Millers, he pitched for the Minneapolis Rough Riders and with Virginia (MN) in the Northern League in 1913. By that season, however, his health had declined to such an extent that he no longer resembled the muscular, long-limbed hero of the prior decade.

While in spring training with the Millers, Waddell helped save the city of Hickman, Kentucky from a devastating flood in the spring of 1912. Catching pneumonia, he lost much of the vitality that had sustained him; and a second flood in Hickman and another ensuing case of pneumonia in 1913 took the rest. While in Minneapolis in 1913, he was diagnosed with tuberculosis and was eventually sent to live with his sister in Texas. He never recovered, and was placed in a sanitarium in San Antonio until he died the next spring.

Rube Waddell died on April 1, 1914 in San Antonio, Texas at the age of 37.

He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946 by a veterans' committee that looked to enshrine a number of players from his era and the previous century who had contributed to the growth of the game. One of Waddell's contributions was that he was perhaps the greatest drawing card in the first decade of the century, a man whose unique talents and personality drew baseball fans around the country to ball parks.

In 1981, Lawrence Ritter and Donald Honig included him in their book The 100 Greatest Baseball Players of All Time. Under what they called "the Smoky Joe Wood Syndrome," they argued in favor of including players of truly exceptional talent whose career was curtailed by injury (or, in Waddell's case, substance abuse), despite not having had career statistics that would quantitatively rank them with the all-time greats.