Bill Donovan

October 8, 1907. West Side Grounds, Chicago. Bill Donovan takes the mound for Detroit in Game 1 of the World Series and doesn't come off it for twelve innings, matching the Cubs pitch for pitch until the umpires call the game on account of darkness with the score tied 3-3 -- the first tie in World Series history. Donovan struck out twelve that afternoon. He'd gone 25-4 that season, the best winning percentage in the American League, and dragged Detroit to its first pennant. For one autumn, Wild Bill Donovan was one of the best pitchers alive.

Eight years later, he was managing a New York Yankees team that had never won anything at all. Three years after that, Jacob Ruppert fired him anyway, and called it the hardest thing he'd ever done.

The Kid Who Couldn't Find the Plate

William Edward Donovan was born October 13, 1876, in Lawrence, Massachusetts, a mill town north of Boston. He broke into pro ball as a right-hander with a live arm and no reliable idea where the ball was going, and he earned the nickname "Wild Bill" in the minor leagues before he ever threw a big-league pitch -- back when his fastball came with no guarantees attached. The command eventually caught up with the stuff. Donovan debuted with Washington in 1898, moved to Brooklyn the next year, and by 1901 he was leading the National League with 25 wins for the Superbas.

Three Pennants, No Rings

Donovan jumped to the American League's Detroit Tigers before the 1903 season, part of the wave of players who bolted the National League once the upstart league started paying real money. It was the best career decision he ever made. Detroit built a powerhouse around a young Ty Cobb and Donovan's arm, and 1907 was the best season of his life -- 25-4, a 2.19 ERA, and that twelve-inning tie against the Cubs to open the World Series. Detroit won the pennant again in 1908 and 1909. They lost the World Series all three times, twice to the Cubs and once to Pittsburgh. Donovan retired with a career line of 186-139 and a 2.69 ERA across parts of eighteen seasons. He never got the ring his stuff deserved.

It wouldn't be the last time.

The Manager Who Found Ruth

By 1913, Donovan was player-managing the Providence Grays of the International League, and in 1914 he turned a middling club into a pennant winner -- 95-59, the best record in the league. On August 18, 1914, the Boston Red Sox -- who had no room for him on their own roster yet -- optioned a nineteen-year-old left-hander down to Providence for the stretch run. His name was Babe Ruth, and he never forgot the manager who worked with him that summer. Donovan, Ruth said later, taught him how to pitch.

An Orphan Ballclub

Jacob Ruppert and Tillinghast Huston bought the Yankees in January 1915 and inherited, in Ruppert's own words, "an orphan ballclub" -- no stadium of their own, no stars, no winning season since 1910. They'd already hired Donovan that December (a franchise that had burned through leadership for years needed someone steady), betting his reputation could hold the thing together. He mostly delivered. The 1915 Yankees went 69-83, still bad but recognizably a team. The 1916 club broke through at 80-74, the franchise's first winning record in six years, with Wally Pipp and Home Run Baker finally giving the lineup some thump. It looked like the start of something.

Then 1917 happened. The Yankees fell back to 71-82, sixth place, undone by injuries, a thin pitching staff, and a country marching into World War I that had half of America's attention pointed somewhere other than baseball. Donovan couldn't pitch his way through it, and Ruppert -- who genuinely liked the man -- made the call anyway.

Miller Huggins got the job instead, an unheralded former infielder nobody expected much from. Twelve years and three championships later, that hire looked like the smartest decision Ruppert ever made. Donovan never got the chance to find out whether he could've done the same thing.

Chicago, Under Oath

Donovan didn't disappear after the Yankees let him go. He pitched one final major-league game for Detroit on the last day of the 1918 season -- and won it -- then spent two years managing the Jersey City Skeeters. In 1921, Phillies owner William Baker gave him one more shot at a big-league dugout. It went badly: Donovan's Phillies stumbled to a 25-62 start before the season got stranger than the record. That July, he was summoned to Chicago to testify at the Black Sox trial -- he'd played and managed against half the men accused of throwing the 1919 World Series, and prosecutors wanted whatever he knew. Nothing ever tied Donovan to the fix. Baker fired him anyway, unwilling to have his manager's name anywhere near the scandal, even as a witness.

Donovan went back to the minors for good after that. In 1922, his old Detroit teammate Ty Cobb recommended him to George Weiss, the young club president running the New Haven franchise in the Eastern League (the same George Weiss who'd go on to spend nearly three decades running the Yankees' farm system and front office). Donovan rewarded the faith with a pennant. He managed New Haven again in 1923, though the club finished behind a Hartford team built around a phenom first baseman named Lou Gehrig.

Forsyth, New York

On the night of December 8, 1923, Donovan boarded the Twentieth Century Limited in New York, heading to Chicago for baseball's winter meetings. He shared a sleeping car with George Weiss. Donovan took the lower berth. Weiss climbed into the upper.

At 1:30 the next morning, in fog and heavy rain near Forsyth, New York, the lead section of the train struck an abandoned car stalled at a grade crossing. A trailing section, unable to stop in time, rammed the wreckage before the tracks could clear. Nine people died. Donovan was one of them, killed instantly at 47 years old. Weiss survived with only minor injuries. William Baker -- the Phillies owner who'd fired Donovan two years earlier -- was riding that same train and walked away without a scratch.

Donovan took the lower berth. Weiss took the upper. Only one of them made it to Chicago.