Bill Voiselle played an indirect role in creation of this site

By DEAN LOLLIS

Today is truly one of the saddest days that I've had in the time that I've been reporting the deaths of baseball players. This morning, I received an e-mail from a friend that Bill Voiselle had died.

In many ways, my interest for baseball research and this site goes back to one of the first assignments I had in my first full-time job in journalism. I spent an afternoon sitting at Mr. Voiselle house listening to stories of baseball from Bill and his brothers, Jim and Diz, who both pitched in the minor leagues.

HistoricBaseball.com wasn't born that afternoon, but the seeds of it were certainly planted that day and I developed an interest in textile league baseball and in the players from South Carolina.

For some, Bill's record of 74-84 might not have been overly impressive, but how many people ever get to say in life that they talked to a pitcher who took the mound in a World Series.

Voiselle pitched in two games in the 1948 World Series with the Boston Braves. The Braves lost to Cleveland, but the pitcher from Ninety Six pitched 10.2 innings in 2 games. He started, and lost, the sixth and final game of that series after allowing three runs in seven innings.

My interest in Voiselle and other players from South Carolina moved well beyond stats. I've always loved a good story and Voiselle and his contemporizes had plenty of those to go around.

A few years later, as the Internet opened up and I learned more about Web sites, I turned that interest into a single Web page that listed all of the players from the state of South Carolina. The site has grown today to include profiles of more than 900 players but Mr. Voiselle has always been one of those special profiles for me on the site.

Over the years, I visited Mr. Voiselle on a couple of occasions and I was able to take part in a special moment for Mr. Voiselle and myself.

Jim Klauber, who was the state representative at the time, was able to get a couple of resolutions passed through the legislature and one of those honored Mr. Voiselle.

Voiselle was honored that afternoon at Legion Field, prior to a Lander baseball game, and it was a special moment for me to look over and see Mr. Voiselle sitting in a dugout again and smiling from ear-to-ear just before the ceremony started.

The umpire of the game walked over to shake Mr. Voiselle's hand. The umpire had
been scheduled to call another game that afternoon but he had switched to be at
the Lander game because Mr. Voiselle was going to be there.

I also remember those "ohhs" and "ahhs"  from the Lander players when the resolution was read and Mr. Voiselle stastics were mentioned. In his rookie season, Voiselle finished with a 21-16 record and a 3.02 ERA in nearly 313 innings. He's the last rookie pitcher to ever pass the 300 inning mark in the major leagues.

After the game, Mr. Voiselle set in a golf cart at the top of the stadium and person after person stopped, just to shake Big Bill's hand.

Over the past two years, I have researched much of Mr. Voiselle's career by looking back through old copies of the local newspaper and online newspaper databases.

Unfortunately, I'll never get a chance to share that with him, but he will continue to share his baseball career with me through all those accounts of the past.

Over the years, I've had the opportunity to interview a number of baseball players. I owe that interest to that one afternoon when Bill, Jim and Claude Voiselle were kind enough to share moments of their lives with a young reporter for a local newspaper.