February is behind us, the Vernal Equinox is just two weeks away, the daffodil bulbs have pushed their shoots up through the mulch in my front yard, and the Pirates are playing Spring Training games in Florida. Never a better time for a baseball story. My brother mentioned Andy Oyler and the shortest home run in baseball history in a recent weekly newsletter, prompting his daughter Becky to send him a copy of a children’s book entitled “Mudball” which is loosely based on that story.
We have been aware of Andy Oyler for most of our lives, primarily because our father and his brothers spoke of the improbable story that earned Andy a place in “Ripley’s Believe It or Not”, but I never elected to investigate it till now. My investigation was helped by an article Joe found on the Society for American Baseball Research website entitled “Andy Oyler”, which documented his professional baseball career and his life outside of baseball. I also found the earliest newspaper article which reported the “hard-to-believe” story of his most famous exploit, as well as numerous newspaper articles chronicling his baseball career.
Let’s begin with the verbatim version of the home run tale as recounted in the Buffalo Enquirer on April 20, 1911. It attributed the following story to “a bunch of ballplayers talking baseball”. It proceeds, “The Minneapolis club had a little shortstop named Andy Oyler, who was a corking fielder, but wasn’t much on the heavy hitting …One day Minneapolis was playing St. Paul …It had rained the day before the game and the ground was sopping wet…Minneapolis needed one run when little Oyler came to bat…The pitcher let a hot one go straight for Oyler’s head…Andy ducked down, leaning his bat over his shoulder…The ball hit the bat a crack…Everyone in the park heard it (but) where the ball went no one knew…The catcher was gazing around the sky, wishing for a telescope…
Andy was going like a streak of lightning around the bases…Oyler rounded third and pulled up at home plate, scoring the winning run…Sure enough, there was the ball sticking deep in the mud in front of home plate.”
Is this a true story? A careful search of Minneapolis and St. Paul newspapers produced numerous articles and box scores of local games in the early 1900s, with no specific mention of this incident. The only home run credited to Andy in his long career with the Minneapolis Millers was a conventional one, hit in Milwaukee in 1904. Nonetheless, the story was much too interesting to die. It was copied by newspapers all over the country and referenced many times in articles years later. In 1990 Michael G. Bryson immortalized it in his book The Twenty-four Inch Home Run, a collection of short stories he had heard from his sports-writer father. In 2005 Candlewick Press published Mudball, by Matt Taveres, as part of a series of sports-related children’s books. In this version the bases were loaded when Andy came to bat, and his mighty smash was a grand-slam home run.
In 2020 Andy’s grandson Ted Oyler showed up on Antiques Roadshow with a muddy baseball that he claimed had been sent home by Andy and was proof of the credibility of the story. This claim was later refuted by Ted’s father.
At some point Joe wondered if we were related to Andy Oyler. The Society for American Baseball Research article mentioned that Andy’s parents were William Bashore Oyler and Sue Hursh Oyler, and that Andy had grown up in Newville, Pennsylvania, a few miles northeast of Shippensburg. The name “Bashore” rang a bell (softly) with me, so I decided to investigate our family tree. Sure enough, I was able to uncover a link. My great-great grandfather Andrew Oyler had three brothers; the four of them were well known for building stone-ended bank barns in the Cumberland Valley in the early 1800s. One of them, Philip, had a son named Andrew P. Oyler who married a woman named Lydia Besore. One of their children was William Besore Oyler; his wife was Sue Hursh. That is sufficient information for me to declare that Andy Oyler and I are third cousins once removed. I am happy to claim genetic connection as far as his athletic prowess is concerned, but a little uneasy about the possibility that my cousin and/or his descendants may have bent the truth a little. Perhaps I should be proud of their story-telling ability.
We also learned that Andy Oyler is a graduate of Washington and Jefferson College where he studied Civil Engineering and starred as a baseball player. He is listed on the W & J website as a famous athlete/alumnus; the website credits him with “the shortest home run in history”. Following his professional baseball career he coached baseball at Dickinson College. After World War I he worked for the Pennsylvania Department of Highways and the Turnpike Commission until his retirement in 1956. We wonder if he and my father crossed paths during the construction of the Turnpike.
It is indeed interesting to ponder the boundary between fiction produced by the oral story-telling tradition and history. The shortest home run tale is certainly a marvelous example of eloquent storytelling. Is there any historical basis for it? There certainly are other, equally far-fetched candidates for “the shortest home run in history”. One candidate has the ball hitting home plate so hard that the plate broke in two and the ball was wedged under it. Another has a mis-played high pop-up that spins out of control into the dugout. Another has the ball lodged in the pocket of a warm-up jacket discarded in foul territory. I don’t think any of them compare with Andy’s home run.