Bill Joyce

Bill Joyce got on base more than almost anyone who ever played, and he did it mostly by refusing to swing. His career on base percentage of .435 ranks among the highest in the history of baseball, the product of a batting eye and a patience the box scores of his day barely valued. They called him Scrappy Bill, a fiery, combative third baseman who fought umpires and pitchers with equal zeal, and he hit for power too, leading the National League in home runs and once stroking four triples in a single game. He was the kind of player the old statistics undersold and the modern ones rescued. By the numbers that count most now, he belongs in the conversation with the best third basemen of his time.

Scrappy Bill

Joyce was born William Michael Joyce on September 22, 1867, in St. Louis, the son of Irish immigrants, and he came up the hard way, working in a rolling mill before baseball offered a way out. He earned the nickname Scrappy as a young man and wore it the rest of his life, a tough, relentless, prematurely gray player who treated every game like a fight. He broke into the majors with Brooklyn's Players League club in 1890 and bounced through the upheavals of the era, the Association and the rival leagues, before landing as a star third baseman with Washington and then the New York Giants. He was combative to a fault and popular all the same, a hustler who knew the game inside out. From the start, pitchers learned they would have to earn every out against him.

The Walk Machine

What made Joyce extraordinary was the thing his era counted least, his genius for reaching base. He drew walks at a rate among the highest the game has ever seen, behind only a handful of names in the decades before the lively ball, and he combined them with a .293 average to finish with a career on base percentage of .435. That figure ranks around seventh on the all time list, ahead of a long row of Hall of Famers, and it sat there largely unnoticed for a century because no one added up walks the way they counted hits. Joyce understood before the statisticians did that a base on balls was as good as a single. He took his walks without apology and scored runs by the hundred because of them.

Four Triples in a Game

On May 18, 1897, Joyce did something only one player before him had managed, hitting four triples in a single game. He drove four balls into the far corners of Pittsburgh's Exposition Park as his Giants won 11 to 5, tying a record George Strief had set in the American Association a dozen years earlier. Joyce was the first National League player to do it, and in the more than a century since, no major leaguer has matched the feat again. Four triples in nine innings asks for power and speed both, and Joyce, gray and grizzled at 29, had enough of each to pull it off. It stands among the strangest single game records in the books.

A Home Run Champion

Joyce hit for real power on top of all the walks, more than the modest slugging numbers of his era suggest. He clubbed 17 home runs in both 1894 and 1895, becoming the first major leaguer to reach 15 in back to back seasons, and in 1896 he led the National League outright with 13, splitting them between Washington and the Giants after a midseason trade. For a third baseman in the dead ball years, that was genuine thunder. The walks made him valuable, but the bat made him dangerous, and together they marked him as one of the best offensive players at his position in the 1890s. Few hitters of his day did as much damage in as many ways.

The Kicker

Joyce played the game at a constant boil, and his temper was as famous as his bat. He kicked at every call, rode umpires without mercy, and earned a reputation as one of the great complainers in a complaining age, drawing rebukes from the writers for what one called his pernicious habit of stupid kicking. He gave as good as he got and never backed down, but he insisted he was a thinking player, not a mere rowdy. "A scrappy ballplayer is not a rowdy or a fist fighter," he said, "he's a hustling, brainy fellow who knows the game coming and going, and is on the job every minute." The line was a fair description of Joyce himself.

Giants Manager

Joyce's intelligence and fire made him a natural leader, and in 1896 the New York Giants made him their manager while he was still their best hitter. He ran the club for parts of three seasons, a playing manager in the rough style of the day, finishing as high as third in the National League. He kept hitting all the while, posting that .435 on base mark and leading the league in homers in the middle of it. Running a nineteenth century clubhouse full of hard men was no easy job, and Joyce, who had always led by example and by volume both, was as suited to it as anyone. The Giants were a better team for having him at the corner and in the dugout.

The Saloon

Joyce wore out early, as the combustible ones often do, and he retired after the 1898 season at just 32, his legs and his weight no longer cooperating. He went home to St. Louis and opened a saloon, running it for a decade in partnership for a time with the old Cleveland firebrand Patsy Tebeau, two scrappers pouring drinks together. He scouted a little, inspected smoke for the city later on, and lived out a long retirement in the town where he'd started in the rolling mills. He died in St. Louis in 1941 at 73. The researchers who reread the 1890s have made him a cause, the prematurely gray kicker whose .435 on base mark the game took a hundred years to appreciate.