Carol Gillespie Land was a tall righthander who starred for over twenty years in California semi-pro ball. A deaf mute, he started his career with the State Institute for the Deaf and Blind team and quickly became a sensation. In 1915, a man named Al Erle compared him to the major leaguer Luther (Dummy) Taylor in the San Francisco Chronicle, saying that in two years of pitching for the State Institute he had not lost a single game, and averaged 16 or 17 strikeouts a game.
Erle went on to say that "Carroll's arms reach almost down to his knees and you should see the stuff he puts on the ball. He is the greatest pitcher I ever saw in the bushes and I expect to see Land make a mark in professional baseball." He was 19 years old then, but never played professional baseball.
He didn't abandon the Institute for the Deaf and Blind, serving as its athletic director for many years, but continued his pitching career elsewhere.
While pitching for the Stars in 1915 he struck out 139 batters in 11 games. An article about his earlier career in the Oakland Tribune, 1916-1-16, says that he struck out 24 batters in one game against the Richmond High School . It gives a more conservative estimate of 14 to 15 strikeouts per game for his time with the State Institute team, and I'm sure all these eye-popping K figures weren't against top quality teams, but they're still very impressive.
In 1916 and 1917 he pitched for the Bertillion Hatters of the Oakland Commercial League, and averaged more than 12 strikeouts a game in 1916. The Bertillion Hatters were a young team, with an average age of 17 in 1916, but very good. Their star, Johnny Tonkin, played one game for the San Francisco Seals in 1916. He went 0 for 1, but still.
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| Probably from his time with the Bertillion Hatters, Land (right) and battery mate "Wild" Bill Keane |
From 1918 to 1924 he pitched with some of the best semi-pro teams in California like the Merced Bears, Vitt Grays, and Durant Motors. He wasn't striking out 10+ batters a game anymore, but part of that was from the stiffer competition.
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| 1922 Durant Motors. Land is second from left, front row. |
1925 to 1933 were pretty uneventful years for him, athletically. I've only found two notes of him pitching: with the Amaral Brothers of Alvarado in the 1927-28 season, and for Placerville in 1930. I don't know his exact birthdate, but he would have been about 34 in 1930 so it would have been reasonable to assume his career was over.
It was not. In 1934 he joined the Placerville Bartletts of the amateur Placer-Nevada League, and would pitch for them until 1941. The Placer-Nevada wasn't a great league, probably a step below the Sacramento Valley League, but it was competitive.
His year of glory in the league was 1935, when he was manager and pitcher of Placerville. With the help of a .528 average from former major leaguer Bevo LeBourveau , Placerville won the league championship, winning all seven games in the second half, and then defeating the Colfax Lions in a best-of-three playoff. Land won both games. At 40 years old, he was the league's leading pitcher, and sports editor Scoop Thurman put Land on his Placer-Nevada All-Star team.
He pitched for Placerville until 1941 (but pitched for Colfax in 1939), and though he never did quite as well as in 1935, pitching until you're 46 is still impressive.
He left for Washington D.C after 1941 for a job as a photographer in the Federal Works Agency, and as far as I know never pitched again.
