Ham Avery

Charles Hammond Avery (April 8, 1854 – January 3, 1927) was an American lawyer, in his youth a college baseball pitcher, and a professional baseball umpire.

Avery, son of Charles L'Hommedieu Avery and Martha (Bakewell) Avery,[1] was a prep school student in Cincinnati in 1870; the next year he enrolled at Yale, where he joined the baseball team in the spring of his sophomore year in 1873.[2] He was called (by Frank Blair) "the first man to pitch a curve-ball game", using the new pitch with success against Harvard.[3] When he graduated in 1875, he was offered the very large salary of $3,400 by Harry Wright to pitch for the Boston Red Stockings, an offer matched by the Hartford Dark Blues, but "Avery, a Skull & Bones Society blueblood, thought professional baseball beneath him, and demurred."[4] He went on to study at the Cincinnati Law School and in the office of Judge Alphonso Taft and was admitted to the Cincinnati bar in 1878, where he had a successful legal practice, representing "various well-known corporations." He married Nettie Barker in 1882; she died the following year, and in 1890 he married Alice Aiken, with whom he had a daughter and a son.[5]

Avery umpired 9 total National Association games in 1874 and 1875. all of them as the home plate umpire.[6]