Tommy Connolly Marquee Hall of Fame 1953

The game logs name him behind the plate 2,240 times, from May 4, 1898 to May 27, 1929, across thirty-one seasons. That is fifth-most in this archive, and it is a floor rather than a total: it counts only the games he worked at the plate, and Retrosheet's coverage of the early years is incomplete.

He came to the United States from Manchester as a child and learned the game from a rulebook, which is a stranger route into umpiring than most. He began in the National League, moved to the American League when it was founded, and stayed in it, becoming its umpire-in-chief.

He never played professionally, so the statistical record here has nothing else of him. He was elected to the Hall of Fame in 1953, alive to hear it, in the first year umpires were considered, with Bill Klem. There is a different Tom Connolly in this archive, an outfielder who played fifty games in 1915, and he is not in the Hall of Fame.