Recently one of my Google Alerts coughed up an interesting article. The piece was a brief notice about the unmarked grave of John Lewis Dodge [1893-1916], who has an unfortunate connection with Mobile. Because he was a professional baseball player in 1912 and 1913, the Society for American Baseball Research had paid for a marker at the plot in Cave Hill Cemetery in Louisville, Kentucky, which was installed early in December 2021.
Some sources say Dodge was born in Tennessee in 1889, but the 1900 U.S. Census has him as seven years old and living with his family in Bolivar, Mississippi. His father, born in Louisville, was a physician who moved to Bolivar to set up his practice and met his mother Fannie. The census also lists a two year-old sister, Mary.
Fannie developed tuberculosis, and despite the family's move to Arizona she died in 1902. John's father died two years later, back in Mississippi, apparently from an overdose of chloroform he was using to self-medicate his headaches. What happened to John Jr. and Mary in the following few years is unknown, but by 1909 John was playing professional baseball in a minor league in Arkansas.
Over the next four seasons with various teams he batted well and played even better on defense at third and second bases and shortstop. Late in the 1912 season he was called up by the Philadelphia Phillies and made his major league debut on August 29. Even though he played in only 30 games, he managed to demonstrate his defensive skills in a number of plays noted by newspaper accounts.
Dodge was traded to the Cincinnati Reds on June 3, 1913, three games into the season and played his final game for them on October 5. His offense improved in the 94 games, but his defensive skills deteriorated--he made 27 errors at third base. During his major league career Dodge had a .215 batting average, made 90 hits, had four homers and 48 runs batted in, and scored 38 runs.
New management of the Reds sold Dodge's contract to a Louisville Class AA team, at the time the highest level of minor league play. Perhaps the Reds wanted a more consistent player. His defense and hitting improved, but apparently not enough; he was traded down to the Nashville Class A team on July 27 of the 1914 season.
Among Dodge's teammates was pitcher Tom Rogers; the two would have a fateful reunion of sorts in 1916. In the 1915 season Dodge started off hitting well, but soon tapered off as pitchers figured him out. He was released by the Nashville team and then played winter ball in New Orleans.
For the 1916 season Dodge signed with the Mobile Sea Gulls, where he probably felt he had a final chance to move back upward toward the majors. He was hitting well after 39 games, but then came a home contest against his former team, the Nashville Volunteers, on June 18.
In the seventh inning Dodge was hit with a fastball above his left eye. The Nashville pitcher was his friend and former teammate, Tom Rogers. At first the injury was not considered serious, but as a precaution Dodge was carried off the field and taken to the Inge-Bondurant Sanitarium, a private Mobile hospital. His condition worsened overnight and by the next morning Dodge was comatose. He died early that evening of internal hemorrhaging in the brain.
His only survivors were his sister Mary Elizabeth and a grandmother in Memphis. On August 15 Mobile and the Chattanooga Lookouts played an exhibition game that raised $1500 for Mary. The sister later married, had two daughters and died in Connecticut in 1975.
Dodge has been described as the first professional baseball player killed by a game pitch. In 1920 a shortstop for the Cleveland Indians, Ray Chapman became the first major league player to die in this way. These two men are certainly the best documented cases, although there may have been others in the early days of the game.
I am indebted to the article on Dodge written by Chris Betsch at the Society for American Baseball Research site and the entry on Dodge at BaseballReference.com You can find much more information there.
A general history that covers 1877-1973 is Robert Obojski's 1975 book, Bush League: A History of Minor League Baseball.
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