Tom Benjey's Weblog

I received a message from the great granddaughter of James Joseph Twin on my Facebook account. Because Facebook doesn’t send notices when messages are received and because I don’t check Facebook all that often, I didn’t become aware of the message for several days after it was sent. This is not the first time this has happened. If you want to get in touch with me, please email me at the address on this page.

Because Twin was a baseball player and, I think, the writer of a column for the Carlisle Indian School newspaper, I was aware of his name but don’t know much about him. Being away from my files at present, I can’t do much research on him but can do a little. I quickly found some baseball box scores from the spring of 1909 in which his name was listed. Twin was the Indians’ regular third baseman that year. In the first few games, he batted sixth but was soon moved up the order to the second spot. The reasons for that shift may have been because he seemed to have a propensity to get hit by pitchers and awarded a free base (perhaps he batted lefthanded) and also was successful at sacrificing–bunting one assumes.

Batting and fielding averages as of May 4 were printed in The Carlisle Arrow. Joe found himself with the ninth highest batting average at .209, which was among the lowest of the regulars. He also had a very low fielding average, but had few fielding chances for a regular. One would have expected a third baseman to have had more chances than he did. Perhaps pitchers William Garlow and Joseph Tarbell overpowered the hitters and kept them from pulling the ball down the third base line.

Jim Thorpe’s name wasn’t listed in the statistics because he didn’t join the baseball team until May 25, when he pitched a no-hitter against Eastern College of Front Royal, Virginia at Hagerstown, Maryland. Prior to that, he was occupied with track.

Significant time will be needed to learn more about Mr. Twin. My sense is that he was very much involved in school activities.

Tags: Carlisle baseball, Eastern College, Joe Tarbell, Joe Twin

This entry was posted on February 23, 2011 at 9:11 am and is filed under Carlisle Indian School, Jim Thorpe, William Garlow. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.