Nobody has a more intriguing life story that is a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame than Sam Rice. You hadn’t met a guy who could keep a secret until you met Sam Rice, folks! Sam Rice was involved in one of the most controversial plays in World Series history, and would not let on about what really happened until after he was dead. But that was nothing compared to a secret Sam Rice carried around with him since he was a young man. Sam Rice led a life shrouded in mysteries, but as a ballplayer, he was no riddle. Sam Rice could flat out hit.
Let’s get to his career first, one that saw Sam Rice come painfully close to one of the most sought after milestones in the sport- the 3,000 hit club. Sam Rice began his career with the Washington Senators at the age of 25 in 1915, but it was as a pitcher that he tried to make his mark. Sam Rice was too accomplished a batter to keep out of the lineup though, and the Senators made him into an outfielder. Sam Rice had speed to burn, and he became a regular in the top ten of the American League in runs scored, base hits, stolen bases, and batting average for over a decade. Sam Rice hit over .300 in thirteen of his eighteen major league seasons. Slightly built at five-foot-nine and 160 pounds, he used to slap the balls to all fields. Of his 2,987 base hits, over 2,200 were singles. Sam Rice never hit more than six home runs in a campaign, but managed to knock in over one thousand lifetime runs. Sam Rice led the American League in hits twice, triples once, singles four times, had six 200 hit seasons, and led the circuit in stolen bases once with 62. He was much like a Rod Carew type of hitter, but was an outfielder rather than an infielder.
It was in the outfield that Sam Rice became involved in a play that would be wondered about for almost fifty years. The Senators had beaten the Giants in the 1924 World Series, and found themselves back in the Fall Classic in 1925 against the Pirates. In Game Three, with the score 4-3 in favor of Washington and the Series knotted at one game each, Pittsburgh catcher Earl Smtih hit a deep drive to right in the top of the eighth. Sam Rice, who had just been moved to right from centerfield that inning, sped after the ball, and as he leapt and backhanded it, he tumbled headfirst into the stands of Washington’s Griffith Stadium, apparently robbing Smith of a game tying homer. The umpires came out, as Sam Rice was being untangled, and ruled the batter out, despite Pirate protests that the ball must have been put back into Sam’s glove by the fans. The Senators won the game, but still lost the Series in seven, with Sam Rice hitting .364. Sam Rice refused to say whether or not he actually made the catch when questioned by reporters and teammates alike. He turned down offers from magazines and newspapers that wanted to print the story, and would not even tell his wife or daughter what had happened, saying he preferred the “mystery”.
Sam Rice played until he was 44 years old, having helped the Senators to their last World Series appearance, in 1933, which was a five game loss to the Giants. When he retired, he was short of the 3,000 hit mark by 13 base hits, but refused an invitation years later by the Senators’ owner, Clark Griffith, to come out of retirement and get the needed base knocks to make 3,000 and a certain election to the Hall of Fame that came with it. Sam Rice refused, saying that by that time (he was in his fifties) that he was too old, and finally, in 1963, the Veteran’s Committee saw fit to enshrine Sam Rice and his career .322 average in Cooperstown.
In 1929, Sam Rice married Mary Kendall, and together they had a daughter named Christine. After his retirement from baseball, Sam Rice stayed in the Washington area, moving to a D. C. suburb. One day, a man who hailed from Sam Rice’s home county back in Indiana bumped into him and recognized him at a restaurant, where Sam had taken his wife. The man offered Sam Rice his heartfelt condolences about “the storm”, and Sam Rice thanked him and hurried him on his way. But the cat was out of the bag, as his wife Mary pressed him for details about this storm. Incredibly, Sam Rice admitted that on April 12th, 1912, three days before the Titanic sank, that his parents and two younger sisters had been killed by a tornado that destroyed their home. But Sam Rice still had not told the full story. Some time later, as the whole truth was emerging, he admitted to Mary that he had married a woman, Beulah Stam, in 1908 at the age of eighteen, and that they had a boy and a girl together. These loved ones were also killed in the same farmhouse by that deadly twister that had ravaged Indiana and Illinois, while Sam Rice was away playing baseball for a minor league team. Devastated, Sam Rice left Indiana forever after the funerals and drifted from job to job. He worked in Kentucky and the Dakotas, joined the Navy and saw nineteen of his shipmates killed in Vera Cruz, Mexico, and then finally came back to baseball. Why Sam Rice kept all of this from the world was his business, but the details of his early life were so fantastic that it took exhaustive research by many parties before the Hall of Fame actually accepted them as true.
Had Sam Rice played in the majors during those “lost” years, he would have surely had more than enough hits to be recognized as one of the greatest batsmen ever. But his Hall of Fame odyssey did not end with his life story being dragged out into the open. The controversy of the 1925 World Series catch followed him for years, so that he finally penned a letter to the Hall of Fame, to be opened only upon his death. When Sam Rice passed away in October of 1974, Hall of Fame officials opened the letter that he had written years earlier. It told of the circumstances leading up to the play and ended thusly. “I remember trotting back towards the infield carrying the ball for about half way and then tossed it towards the pitchers mound. (How I wished many times I had kept it.) At no time did I lose possession of the ball.” Sam Rice had indeed made his famous catch, a secret he saw fit to reveal only when he had gone to his grave to join the family he had lost so many years before.
