Mission Park Cemetery South

There are a handfull of cemeteries around the country that are the final resting place for more than one member of Baseball's Hall of Fame. One of those cemetaries is Mission Park Cemetery South in San Antonio, Texas, where you will find headstones for Ross Youngs and Rube Waddell.

That Youngs is buried there is no surprise. Youngs was born in Shiner, but raised in San Antonio, and after he was diagnosed with a rare - and fatal - kidney ailment during the 1926 season, he returned home for treatment before dying the next year at the age of 30.

Waddell is another story. Waddell was born in Bradford, Pennsylvania, and played his professional career in Louisville, Pittsburgh, Chicago, Philadelphia and St. Louis. Waddell was a brilliant pitcher, but he was also aloof, erratic and unreliable; traits attributed at times to alcoholism, retardation, mental illness, or just acute left-handedness. Waddell also died young - at the age of 37, four years after his final Major Leaug game. But how did he wind up in San Antonio? Here is how biographer Garrick H. S. Brown tells the story of Waddell's premature demise:

Rube's drinking continued to escalate, however, and culminated in a 1909 game against New York in which he passed out on the mound after giving up a home run. St. Louis released him in 1910, and Waddell briefly found himself pitching for the Eastern League's Newark franchise. When that didn't pan out, Rube moved to Minneapolis to play for Joe Cantillon's Millers. Though reduced to minor league ball, Waddell enjoyed his status as the big fish in a little pond, and developed a close friendship with his new manager.

Never quite able to look after himself, Rube soon moved in with Joe Cantillon's family. It is while living there in 1912 that a nearby dike broke and Waddell immediately volunteered to help stack sandbags to block the rushing stream. Standing armpit-deep in freezing waters for 13 hours, Waddell contracted a nasty case of pneumonia from which he never quite fully recovered. Plagued by constant illness, which was exacerbated by his incessant drinking, he pitched poorly for the Minneapolis Millers in 1913. Concerned by the drastic decline of "The Rube's" health, friend and manager Cantillon sent Waddell to a San Antonio tuberculosis sanitarium in early 1914. It was there, on April Fools Day 1914, that Charles Edward "Rube" Waddell died. Penniless, he was originally buried in an unmarked grave in a San Antonio potter's field. Within months, a number of Waddell's more well-to-do baseball friends passed the hat and provided him with a simple gravestone. Former teammate Ossie Schreckengoest provided the insightful epitaph for the headstone: "Rube Waddell had only one priority, to have a good time."

Here are the tombstones for Youngs and Waddell. These come from Stew Thornley's excellent site, Baseball Hall of Fame Gravesites.