George Edward " Rube " Waddell (October 13, 1876 – April 1, 1914) was an American pitcher in Major League Baseball (MLB). A left-hander , he played for 13 years, with the Louisville Colonels , Pittsburgh Pirates , and Chicago Orphans in the National League , as well as the Philadelphia Athletics and St. Louis Browns in the American League . Born in Bradford, Pennsylvania , and raised in Prospect, Pennsylvania, Waddell was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1946 . Waddell is best remembered for his highly eccentric behavior, and for being a remarkably dominant strikeout pitcher in an era when batters were expert at making contact. He had an excellent fastball , a sharp-breaking curveball , a screwball , and superb control; his strikeout-to-walk ratio was almost 3-to-1, and he led the major leagues in strikeouts for six consecutive years.
