Tommy Dowd (Baseball)

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For the former Meath Gaelic Footballer of the same name, see Tommy Dowd.

Tommy Dowd (April 20, 1869, Holyoke, Massachusetts - July 2, 1933, Holyoke), was a United States major-league baseball player. Nicknamed Buttermilk Tommy, Dowd was a star player at Brown University and played ten seasons in the major leagues, from 1891 to 1901.

According to an article in the Brown Alumni Magazine:

Nineteenth-century baseball authority Tim Murnane of the Boston Globe proclaimed Dowd the best center fielder he'd ever seen, especially for his skill at sprinting back on a ball over his head and then turning left or right for the catch. For years Dowd held the unofficial record time for circling the bases.

Dowd made his major-league debut on April 8, 1891, in the American Association. He later played with the Washington Senators, St. Louis Browns, Philadelphia Phillies and Cleveland Spiders in the National League and the Boston Americans in the new American League (1901). He was a right-handed batter with a career average of .271. He stole 366 bases in his major-league career. His final game was September 28, 1901.

After his career, he coached at Amherst College and Williams College, and managed in several minor and independent leagues. In 1908 he was managing at Hartford, and signed Chick Evans to a contract.

Dowd also studied law at Georgetown University.

He was given credit for discovering Rabbit Maranville.

His body was found in the Connecticut River in July 1933.

[edit] References

• This article is based on the article Tommy Dowd at the baseball-reference.com Bullpen, accessed October 20, 2006. The article is available under the GNU Free Documentation License.

[edit] External links

• His statistics at baseball-reference.com