FLORIDA BUSINESS INSIGHT by  Jacquelyn Horkan, editor
	The Rube has a $2-million body and a ten-cent head. Cornelius Alexander “Connie” Mack, Manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, 1901-1950
You say you’ve never heard of The Rube? Charles Edward “Rube” Waddell spent 14 seasons pitching in the major leagues for five different teams. During his career, the lefthander with the blazing fastball and wicked curve amassed an ERA of 2.16, but his childlike nature and immature ways kept him from fulfilling the promise of his natural abilities, and also came close to single-handedly killing spring training in Florida . Baseball’s annual ritual got off to inauspicious start in 1888 when the National League’s Washington Capitals decided to get a head start on the season with four weeks of training in the sunshine. The Caps went on to finish 37 1 games out of the lead. Baseball players, being a superstitious lot, pronounced spring training anathema -- until 1903, when legendary manager Connie Mack decided to test fate and brought his Philadelphia Athletics to Jacksonville . Among his other antics, Rube tried to kill himself by jumping off a bridge after a local girl jilted him. He survived, but Florida again proved a jinx. The As finished 14 1/2 games behind the Boston Red Sox, who went on to win baseball’s first World Series.
By 1918, baseball’s grapefruit league was a flourishing business, but Rube never saw it. After spending 13 hours chest-deep in freezing water, stacking sandbags to stave off a flood in a small Kentucky town, he developed pneumonia, then tuberculosis. On April Fool’s Day 1914, the former pitcher, born 37 years earlier on Friday the 13th, succumbed to disease and was buried in an unmarked grave in San Antonio .	His friends later bought him a tombstone engraved with their own elegy to their former comrade: “Rube Waddell had only one priority: to have a good time.”

 

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