Researching Bill Crowley

Born in Philadelphia to Irish immigrant parents, Crowley worked for a print factory in Gloucester, New Jersey, before beginning his professional baseball career with the Philadelphia White Stockings in 1875. He was the youngest player in the National Association that year, having turned 18 just days before his debut.

Crowley threw out four men from the outfield during a May 1880 game with the Buffalo Bisons, and he did it again in August of that year.

In 1881, Crowley was one of several players blacklisted from the National League by the league president, William Hulbert. The bans were thought to take aim at drunkenness, rowdy behavior and game fixing among the league's players, but all of the blacklisting was lumped under a broad category: "general dissipation and insubordination." Crowley was reinstated in 1883.

On June 7, 1884, while Crowley was playing for the Boston Beaneaters, Providence Grays pitcher Charlie Sweeney struck out Crowley to end the game and to set a single-game major league strikeout record (19 strikeouts). That record was tied several times before Roger Clemens struck out 20 batters in a 1986 game. The rest of the 1884 season was better for Crowley, as he set career highs in games played, at bats, hits and runs batted in.

Crowley's last season in the major leagues was an unpredictable one. He played 92 games for the 1885 Buffalo Bisons, a team that finished with a 38–74 win-loss record. In mid-September, the team was bought out by the Detroit Wolverines. Two days later, four of Crowley's teammates appeared in uniform for the Wolverines, but they did not play after the league threatened the Wolverines with a forfeit. The team's purchase was later reversed by the league. In the last three weeks of the season, the Bisons finished with no wins, sixteen losses and one tie.

From 1886 to 1888, Crowley appeared with four minor league teams before leaving professional baseball. He died at the age of 34 of Bright's disease in Gloucester, New Jersey, and is interred at St. Mary's Cemetery in Bellmawr, New Jersey.

Crowley called New York Yankees games from 1951-1952, often paired with Dizzy Dean on the team's telecasts, and Boston Red Sox games from 1958–1960. A World War 2 bomber pilot with the U.S. 8th Air Force division, he served as a sports reporter for the Dayton Journal-Herald, switching to Dayton radio station WONE in 1949. A year later he became the play-by-play announcer of the Dayton Indians of the Central League before leaping to Yankee Stadium in 1951. In between his time with the Yankees and Red Sox, Crowley worked at Holy Cross, where starting in the autumn of 1952 he was a radio announcer for Crusaders football and basketball games, economics professor, and was named Athletics Publicity Director in August, 1953. In 1961, Crowley left the Red Sox broadcast team to become the Boston Red Sox public relations director, a position he held until his retirement in 1985. He died on December 1, 1996 from liver cancer.