Description
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Larry Doyle
Born: July 31, 1886 in Caseyville, Illinois
Died: March 1, 1974 (aged 87) in Saranac Lake, New York
Bats: Left
Throws: Right
Height: 5’10”
Weight: 165 lbs.
Position: Second Baseman
Played For:
New York Giants (1907–1916)
Chicago Cubs (1916–1917)
New York Giants (1918–1920)
Biography:
Nicknamed “Laughing Larry”, was an American second baseman in Major League Baseball from 1907 to 1920 who played almost his entire career for the New York Giants. The National League’s outstanding second baseman during the 1910s, he was awarded the 1912 Chalmers Awardas the league’s best player, and won the 1915 batting title with a .320 average.
The son of a coal miner, Lawrence Joseph Doyle was born on July 31, 1886, in Caseyville, Illinois. For five years Larry worked as a coal digger in the mines near Breese, Illinois, 39 miles east of St. Louis. “When you first go down into the earth there comes a sudden realization of what might happen to you,” he wrote in 1908. “Nowadays the mines can be lighted by electricity, and it’s comparatively simple to go through a mine. But when you get caught without a light in some deep labyrinth in the bowels of the earth, it’s no picnic.” Larry played semipro baseball on weekends, earning anywhere from nothing to $2 per game, depending on the size of the audience. In 1906 he quit mining to play professionally for Mattoon, Illinois, of the Kentucky-Illinois-Tennessee (Kitty) League. Larry undoubtedly gained a new appreciation for the relative safety of his new occupation when six miners of the Breese & Trenton Coal Company lost their lives on December 22 of that year in what came to be known in later years as the 1906 Breese Mining Disaster.
