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1890–1976 · South Bend, 1909–1910
Maximilian George Carnarius was born January 11, 1890, in Terre Haute, Indiana, and was a pre-ministerial student — Concordia College in Fort Wayne, then Concordia Seminary in St. Louis — when baseball took him. In the summer of 1909, at a Central League game in Terre Haute, he talked South Bend's manager Aggie Grant into a tryout; he had a school track medal to show, and South Bend had just sold its shortstop. To protect his amateur standing he played under a new name — "Carney or Carey or something like that," in Grant's coinage, which settled as Max Carey. The first summer was a failure on its face: a .158 average and 24 errors in 48 games at shortstop, and he went back to the seminary in the fall.
The second summer made him. South Bend's club, renamed the Bronchos, had a shortstop in 1910 — Alex McCarthy — so Carey moved to left field, and there the speed that defined him took over: a .298 average with 86 stolen bases and 25 outfield assists in 96 games, on the SABR biography's figures; the Baseball-Reference Bullpen prints his average a few points lower, at .294. The Pittsburgh Pirates bought Carey and McCarthy together from South Bend on August 15, 1910, on the Central League president's recommendation, and Carey debuted in the majors on October 3 of that year.
What followed was a Hall of Fame career built on the skill South Bend watched first. Carey played for Pittsburgh from 1910 to 1926 and Brooklyn from 1926 to 1929: 2,665 hits, a .285 average, and 738 stolen bases, a National League record, leading the league in steals ten times. In 1922 he stole 51 bases in 53 tries, 31 of them in a row. In the 1925 World Series he hit .458 with eleven hits and three steals, and in Game 7 he had four hits — three of them doubles — off Walter Johnson, having spotted the great man's tipped curveball. In 1926 he led the players' resolution to bar Fred Clarke from the Pittsburgh bench, and the club suspended and then waived its captain in the affair remembered as the great Pirate mutiny. He managed Brooklyn in 1932–33, when the club took back the Dodgers name under him; his mother sewed the sliding pad he patented, and a liniment patent paid him for years. The thread runs back to this city's other diamond record, too: Carey managed the Milwaukee Chicks to the 1944 pennant in the All-American Girls Professional Baseball League — the Blue Sox' league — and served as that league's president through 1950. He was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1961, and died May 30, 1976, in Miami Beach. The name on the plaque was invented in South Bend.
Sources
- John Bennett, SABR biography of Max Carey — the seminary years, the 1909 tryout and the borrowed name, the 1909 and 1910 South Bend seasons, the sale to Pittsburgh, the career, the 1925 Series and the 1926 mutiny, the Brooklyn managership and the AAGPBL years.
- National Baseball Hall of Fame — the 1961 election and career line; Baseball-Reference Bullpen — the .294 variant for 1910 against SABR's .298.