Top 101 Reds of all time: #49 - Will White

What do you mean, you've never heard of him? WHOOP-LA!

Jan 22, 2025

Some time ago, I began a little project to name the 101 best Cincinnati Reds players of all time. The Big 101, if you will. Click here to see the full countdown so far.

You can almost picture him there, can’t you? What, you’ve never heard of Will White?

Okay, picture this: a bespectacled right-hander on a dusty 19th-century mound, tipping his cap to fans who had never seen anything quite like him before. Will White, all 5-foot-9 and wire-rimmed glasses, was an anomaly, an innovator, and maybe a little bit of a magician with the baseball. He was so good that more than a century after his final pitch for Cincinnati, he remains one of the Reds’ most significant — and underappreciated — stars in team history.

Before the days of bright lights and rowdy scoreboard animations, fans cheered for their favorites in local newspapers. In the summer of 1878, the Cincinnati Enquirer famously emblazoned “WHOOP-LA, WILLIAM!” in a headline after White hurled a four-hitter. From that moment, the nickname stuck, and White became “Whoop-La.”

What made this so captivating is that, if you look at photographs of Will White (the precious few that still exist), the moniker and the man don’t exactly match. He looks more like your kindly neighborhood optician than a superstar athlete. Well, he was an optician eventually — he sold eyeglasses in Buffalo after his playing career. But on the diamond, all stooped shoulders and tinted lenses, the man was about as dominant as they came.

Baseball talent ran through the White household like water in the Ohio River. Will’s older brother, James “Deacon” White, is in the Hall of Fame. He was an extraordinary 19th-century catcher and corner infielder. But Deacon might have had the easier path — he didn’t pitch. Will handled that burden, and he shouldered it for clubs in Boston, in Buffalo, but most memorably (and ferociously) for Cincinnati.

By 1878, Will and Deacon both wore Reds uniforms (the second incarnation of the Reds in the National League). Deacon caught, Will pitched — forming the first brother battery in major league history. Will’s glasses and James’s stoic demeanor made them a curiosity, but the results were legit: Will won 30 games and posted a 1.79 ERA in that 1878 season.

This was a time when pitchers still flung the ball underhand (or some variation of a low-slung motion) and gutted out extraordinary pitch counts that modern arms could hardly fathom. Will White threw complete games the way people today drink coffee—every day, often twice on Sundays (except Will, who was a devout man and refused to pitch on the Sabbath).

Perhaps the most famous of his insane workloads came in 1879:

75 starts
75 complete games
680 innings
2,906 batters faced

All remain major league records. That’s more starts (and more complete starts) than many modern aces pile up over multiple seasons. And he still posted a 1.99 ERA with 43 wins. If there had been anything like a Cy Young Award or an All-Star Game in 1879, Will White would have been a runaway choice.

In 1880, White pitched another 62 complete games and racked up 517 innings. Yet that 1880 Reds squad struggled to score runs, a .224 team average dragging him down to an 18–42 record despite a tidy 2.14 ERA. The offense just wasn’t there, and neither, it turned out, was the National League’s tolerance for Cincinnati’s beer sales.

League president William Hulbert wanted all NL ballparks to halt the sale of alcohol. Cincinnati’s ownership balked. The Reds got the boot from the league, and the club promptly disbanded. Will White’s first run in the Queen City came to an abrupt halt.

In 1882, Cincinnati was reborn in a brand-new league: the American Association. These “Beer and Whiskey” Reds happily sold beer, played ball on Sundays, and introduced a raucous new brand of professional baseball. Naturally, they needed a workhorse pitcher. “Whoop-La” came home after a single season in Detroit.

Will White was every bit as good in the A.A. as he’d been in the National League — maybe even better. Forty wins in 1882, a microscopic 1.54 ERA, and the top spot in practically every pitching category you can name: wins, complete games, innings pitched. He led Cincinnati to its first pennant in that fledgling league. And for good measure, the next season (1883) he led the Association in both wins (43) and ERA (2.09).

At his best, White was comparable to the all-time greats, if you adjust for the era’s style (underhand deliveries, fair-foul bunts, no gloves to speak of, and so on). He was the kind of pitcher who threw strikes — in one early stretch, he was rumored to have walked only a handful of batters over more than 600 innings. He fielded his position well, too, setting a record for assists by a pitcher (223) that lasted until 1907.

The game was changing, though, and changing fast. By 1884, the American Association allowed sidearm pitching. By 1885, overhand deliveries were permitted. Will White tried to adapt, but intimidation — buzzing hitters inside with underhand or sidearm deliveries — had long been part of his arsenal. The new rules, which gave batters first base if hit by a pitch, drastically changed the game for him. Still, even in 1884, he won 34 games while also managing the Reds for part of the season. “Too easy a disposition” was how he explained stepping down from the skipper’s chair, but it’s remarkable he’d already guided them to a 44–27 mark.

By 1886, White’s rubber arm had finally run out of steam. He was only 31 but had piled up more innings in one year than many star pitchers accumulate in three or four. His final tally in five total seasons with Cincinnati? 136 wins, still sixth in Reds franchise history, and that’s before we get into his 19th-century league records that boggle the mind.

White wasn’t done working when he walked off the mound for the last time. He studied optical sciences, eventually partnering with Deacon in Buffalo to run the Buffalo Optical Company. I dunno, the idea of “Whoop-La” White adjusting someone’s eyeglasses is simply delightful to me.

He stayed in Buffalo for good, building up a successful business and pouring his energies into philanthropic endeavors, including establishing a local mission to help the poor. In 1911, while teaching his niece to swim at his summer place in Port Carling, Ontario, White suffered a heart attack in the water and drowned. He was just 56.

It took some time for Cincinnati to remember just how spectacular Will White had been. In 2004, the Reds Hall of Fame finally honored him with induction, a century and a quarter after he wore a Reds uniform for the last time. One might argue it was overdue recognition for a man who pitched the club to a championship in 1882, racked up staggering numbers that stand the test of time, and soldiered on through the most tumultuous shifts in baseball’s earliest decades.

In the pantheon of Reds pitching heroes — think Ewell Blackwell’s contortions, Johnny Vander Meer’s back-to-back no-hitters, Mario Soto’s deadly changeup, and the modern arms of guys like Tom Seaver (in his Cincinnati years) — Will White’s name still resonates. The bespectacled pitcher who once started 75 games in a single season, who led the city to glory in the Beer and Whiskey League, and who found time to run a tea shop and a mission, deserves to be more than a footnote.

Baseball historian Lee Allen once wrote: “Will White was one of the game's greats who never received his just desserts.” Perhaps that’s the best epitaph a pitcher of his magnitude could have.

I’m guessing this won’t be the most popular essay in this series on the top Reds of all time. I don’t care. As the fans in the stands shouted long ago, I’m going to say it today: “Whoop-La, William!”

(The next installment in The Big 101 will be a player you’ve heard of, I promise.)