Bump Hadley

May 25, 1937. Yankee Stadium. Bump Hadley worked the count to 3-and-1 against Detroit's Mickey Cochrane, and the pitch that came next fractured a Hall of Famer's skull in three places and ended his playing career before the ball even stopped rolling. That's the moment most people know Hadley for, if they know him at all. It's a shame, honestly, because it buries a pretty good pitcher underneath one terrible afternoon.

Irving Darius Hadley -- "Bump" since grade school, when classmates decided he looked like a husky comic-strip character named Bumpus -- spent five seasons in pinstripes, from 1936 to 1940, and won three championship rings doing it. He was never the ace. He was the guy who started Game 3s and Game 4s while Red Ruffing and Lefty Gomez got the headlines, and then, when it mattered most, he was the guy who threw eight shutout-caliber innings of relief to help close out a World Series sweep.

Path to the Bronx

Hadley grew up in Lynn, Massachusetts, and got as far as Brown University before his grades caught up with him -- he left after his sophomore year to pitch for East Douglas in the independent Boston Twilight League. He went 17-2 there. A neighbor named Jack Chesbro, a Hall of Fame pitcher himself, noticed the live arm and tipped off his old teammate Clark Griffith, who ran the Washington Senators. Hadley debuted for Griffith's club on April 20, 1926, and spent the next decade bouncing around the league -- Washington, the White Sox, the Browns, Washington again -- compiling a reputation as a hard thrower who walked too many hitters and hit too many others.

By the time the Yankees traded for him -- Jan. 17, 1936, sending pitcher Jimmie DeShong and outfielder Jess Hill to Washington for Hadley and Roy Johnson -- he was 31 years old and mostly known for his wildness (10-15, 4.92 ERA, the year before). New York didn't care. They needed innings behind Ruffing and Gomez, and Hadley gave them exactly that. He also got assigned a rookie roommate that spring, a kid from San Francisco named Joe DiMaggio. They stayed friends for the rest of Hadley's life.

Yankees Career

His first year was his best by the numbers: 14-4 in 1936, a league-leading .778 winning percentage. He never matched that win total again, but he stuck around as a durable fourth or fifth starter who could also come out of the bullpen when McCarthy needed him there -- exactly what happened in 1938, when a slow start got him demoted before he pitched his way back into the rotation. By 1939 he'd found his best form since arriving, a 12-6 season with a 2.98 ERA that made him one of the most reliable arms on a Yankees staff that went 106-45.

The Cochrane Pitch

Hadley's darkest moment came in the fifth inning of a game against Detroit. Cochrane, the Tigers' player-manager and one of the best catchers of his generation, had already tied the score with a solo homer off Hadley in the third. His next time up, Hadley ran the count full-ish to 3-and-1 and threw a fastball that sailed up and in. It caught Cochrane above the right temple.

Cochrane went down immediately. He was hospitalized in critical condition with a triple skull fracture. He survived, but he never played another game -- one pitch closed out a career that had already earned him two MVP awards and a championship as a player-manager in Detroit. The injury, along with a similar beaning that same season, helped push baseball toward protective headgear; within a week, two American League clubs were testing batting helmets in actual games.

Hadley wasn't a headhunter (nobody who covered the game at the time said otherwise). He was, by every account, just wild -- the same command problems that had followed him since Washington finally caught up with the wrong batter on the wrong afternoon.

The 1939 World Series

Hadley's finest hour came two years later, in Game 3 of the 1939 World Series against Cincinnati. Gomez started and lasted one inning before a sore arm forced him out. Hadley came in and threw eight innings of relief, allowing two runs on seven hits, while Charlie Keller and Joe DiMaggio did the offensive damage in a 7-3 Yankees win. It remains the longest relief outing in Yankees postseason history, and it earned Hadley the win in a series the Yankees swept to complete their fourth straight championship.

He'd been here before. In Game 3 of the 1936 World Series, he outdueled the Giants' Freddie Fitzsimmons for eight innings, handed a 2-1 lead to Pat Malone in the ninth, and picked up the win after Frankie Crosetti drove in the go-ahead run in the eighth. A year later he took the ball in Game 4 of the 1937 Series and lost to Carl Hubbell -- the only postseason blemish on an otherwise clean ledger. Two wins, one loss, three rings. Not bad for a pitcher nobody ever confused with an ace.

Decline and Departure

The end came fast. Hadley slipped to 3-5 with a 5.74 ERA in 1940, and on December 31 of that year the Yankees sold him to the New York Giants on waivers -- reportedly the first direct transaction ever completed between the two rival New York clubs. It didn't last. The Yankees curiously bought his contract back that April, then flipped him to the Philadelphia Athletics a day later (a 24-hour tour of duty that must set some kind of record on its own). He went 4-6 for Philadelphia in 1941, his last season, and was released that fall.

Hadley later scouted for the Yankees organization. He died in his hometown of Lynn on February 15, 1963, at 58.

One bad pitch and one great October are both true at the same time. Hadley's line in the Yankees record book reads 49-31 and three rings. His line in baseball's larger memory reads differently, and there's nothing he could ever do about that after the count ran to 3-and-1.