baseball: origin of hand signals

Factual Questions
1

In Dear Abby today, one of her faithful readers offers the following bit of trivia:
Baseball hand signals originated when Luther H. “Dummy” Taylor (short biography), a deaf and dumb pitcher for the New York Giants in the early 1900s, started using sign language to communicate with his teammates. The Dear Abby correspondant says that manager John McGraw was under pressure to get rid of L. H. Taylor because Mr. Taylor made several mistakes, being unable to understand the directions/advice given to him; instead of firing Mr. Taylor Mr. McGraw required all of Mr. Taylor’s teammates to learn American Sign Language.

Is this the straight dope?

2

I don’t believe I heard that one. Taylor is often credited with requesting the umpire raise his hand when calling a strike (though I’ve seen that disputed). The Baseball Library says that McGraw learned signing to communicate with Taylor and I seriously doubt even McGraw could have forced his players to learn sign language.

3

There had been other deaf players before Taylor, most notably Dummy Hoy (very enlightened back then weren’t they?).

I believe Taylor’s career ended because he hurt his arm.

Hoy is the player, mistakenly though, credited with the institution of arm signals by umpires.

Most baseball historians credit umpire Cy Rigler with that innovation and he did not for the benefit of any deaf player, but for the benefit of all the outfielders.

The Baseball Hall of Fame plaque for Bill Klem, a famous umpire, gives Klem credit for umpire’s hand signals, but that is apparently untrue.

4

It would seem that Dummy Hoy has pretty good claims for having introduced umpires signals.

5

From reading the article at the link provided by don’t ask it seems that William Hoy would have a better claim to the invention of hand signals than Luther Taylor.

6

[HelloJohn below]

Don’t Ask’s link contains the statement:

“An ill-fated fly ball batted by Hoy in 1894 was responsible for the league-wide ban on uniform breast pockets—a ban still in effect.”

What does this mean? Did he hit a ball that plopped into the fielder’s pocket and was thus ruled an out?

7

The claim for Hoy is made by a website which is devoted to the induction of Hoy into Cooperstown, but it does have some good evidence.

The problem with crediting Hoy for introducing hand signals by umpires is that there isn’t much evidence that umpires did it for all games, but rather just for Hoy’s benefit.

And there is a lot of evidence from the early part of the 20th century, after Hoy had retired that umpire hand signals were being written about in the national press as a novelty.