[LansdowneSt]

Like the real estate business that he would later enter, success and failure during the career of late-19th century pitcher George Haddock was often a matter of location. When on the roster of bad clubs, Haddock regularly tasted defeat, losing a staggering 72 games over his first three full professional seasons. Yet once assigned to first-rate outfits, Haddock’s fortunes underwent an astonishing transformation. The season after he posted a 9-26 record for the hapless Buffalo Bisons of the 1890 Players League, our subject paced a talent-laden Boston Reds team to the American Association crown, going a scintillating 34-11. The following year, Haddock demonstrated that this performance was no fluke, winning 29 games for another competitive squad, the National League Brooklyn Bridegrooms, despite sitting out the first month of the season in a salary dispute.

[Given this is a post about his face, I'll let the SABR bio continue on...]

There are two intriguing aspects to the Haddock persona – one expressly (and quite often) mentioned on the sports pages, the other only hinted at. Tall (almost 6 feet) but slender (155 pounds), with wavy black hair, neatly trimmed mustache, and “deep, dark, unfathomable eyes like Edgar Allan Poe” (in the words of an overwrought Chicago sportswriter), George Haddock was a young man of striking good looks. He was often considered among the handsomest men in baseball, and friends reputedly called him “the Adonis.” But the frequent press mention of “Handsome George” Haddock’s appearance was not always couched in the fulsome, admiring language used for other ballplayers with matinée idol looks, such as Tony Mullane, Bill Lange, or Adonis Terry. Rather, sportswriters were often cutting, even antagonistic, when it came to describing Haddock, with demeaning, effeminate adjectives like pretty, immaculate, and beautiful suggesting something unmanly about the pitcher. Brooklyn sportswriter Donnelly, his disdain for Haddock ill-disguised, once maintained that “all want to know what ailed our pretty pitcher with the Hyperion ringlets” after a substandard Haddock outing against the Giants. At one point, Sporting Life called for a truce on “the newspaper joshing [of Haddock] because of his good looks and posing.” With unintended but regrettable irony, the baseball weekly then added that “it isn’t Haddock’s fault that he is handsome, nor is beauty of face or form any bar to first-class ballplaying.”

Anyway, here's my attempt at an alternative version of “Handsome George” Haddock.