259. "Dummy Hoy " 7" x 10.5"

Size: 7 × 10.5 inches art print (not a comic book) Availability: Pre-order ends Sunday, October 11th at 3 PM PT / 6 PM ET Shipping: Expected to ship approximately 40–60 days after the purchase window closes. Estimated timeframe. Not guaranteed. From the Artist: His name was William Ellsworth Hoy, and when I started working on this piece, I wasn't going to call it Dummy Hoy. It didn't feel right. Then I started reading about him and realized that Hoy had been called "Dummy" for most of his life. It was what they called him in baseball, what he called himself, and, by one account, when people later tried to be polite and call him William, Hoy corrected them so I stopped trying to correct it for him. If he were here to collab on this with me, I'm fairly certain he'd want to call title it "Dummy". The nickname came from an old and ugly use of the word for someone who could not hear or speak. Hoy was born in 1862. The language belonged to his time, and so did he. He also happened to be one hell of a ballplayer. Hoy played major-league baseball from 1888 through 1902. He collected 2,048 hits, scored 1,429 runs, stole 596 bases and walked 1,006 times. He reached base at a .386 clip. When he retired, he ranked second in baseball history in walks and fourth in stolen bases, and nobody had played more games in center field. Baseball had to be seen by Hoy. Calls had to be communicated visually. Teammates learned signs. Coaches relayed information with their hands. Hoy carried those methods from club to club through 14 seasons in four major leagues, and his long association with visual signals became part of baseball history. Exactly how much credit he deserves for the hand signals eventually adopted by umpires is still debated to this day. The old story that Hoy simply invented them is probably too tidy to be true. The better story, I think, is what we know: Hoy found ways to make a game built around communication work visually, and in turn, work for others. There are thirteen hands on this Pop Fly & you get to figure out what they say.