Which Yankees catcher later became a member of the Supreme Court bar?

No, not Yogi Berra, though his oral arguments would certainly have been entertaining.

I’ll give you a clue. This catcher was involved in an infamous incident.

Answer below the fold.

While you’re pondering, I’ll mention that I had the pleasure one summer in law school of working for a small law firm in Los Angeles that had as one of its name partners a wonderful fellow who had once played first base for the Yankees. And when I say once, I mean it literally. Hank Workman played one game as a first baseman for the Yankees, on the very last day of the season in 1950, when the Yankees had already clinched the pennant. He had the remarkable distinction of batting clean-up—Joe DiMaggio’s usual spot—that day, and he had a single and scored a run.

This obituary of Workman also states that, according to Richard Ben Cramer’s biography of DiMaggio, “Workman had one odd duty while he was with the Yankees…. Workman said that he had to light a Chesterfield cigarette, take one puff, and leave it waiting for DiMaggio when he came in from center field.” (So much more to Workman’s amazing life, including taking batting practice in Cuba from a young student by the name of Fidel Castro, who, alas, didn’t have the stuff to pursue his dream of a career in baseball.)

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The answer is Muddy Ruel, whom we might instead nickname the “Ruel of Law.”

Ruel, whose full name was Herold Dominic Ruel, was the Yankees catcher from 1917 to 1920, including in the game in which a pitch from Yankees pitcher Carl Mays hit Indians shortstop Ray Chapman in the head, fractured his skull, and killed him. Over his two-decade career, Ruel played for five other American League teams. He was Walter Johnson’s favorite catcher and scored the winning run for the Senators in the 1924 World Series.

Ruel’s New York Times obituary states that he was admitted to the Supreme Court bar in 1929. It also says that he earned his law degree at Washington University law school “while playing for the old St. Louis Browns,” but that seems dubious. His first stint with the Browns was for a single season in 1915, when he was only 19 years old, and his second stint, also a single year, came in 1933, after he had already become a member of the Supreme Court bar. So it seems much more likely that this native of St. Louis spent his off-seasons in St. Louis while he was with other teams and earned his law degree during those off-seasons.

Addendum: According to this piece, Ruel received his law degree from Washington University in 1922 and was admitted to the Supreme Court bar in 1927 (not 1929). (Never trust the New York Times?) The piece, written in 2015, says that “Ruel remains the only major league player ever admitted to the High Court’s bar.” Here’s another excerpt from it about the remarkable Ruel:

Ruel’s intelligence and sophistication were widely recognized. Upon his return to Washington after his trade to the Red Sox, the fans held a day to honor him. The program for the event had on its cover a photo of him not in uniform, but in a coat and tie with a studious look on his face, and the caption, “Baseball Strategist – Lawyer – Gentleman.” In Boston, the mayor made him an honorary citizen and presented him with a volume of Longfellow’s poetry because, as [his son] Dennis Ruel noted, Muddy Ruel had the unusual habit of reading books.
Ruel loved baseball and made it his lifelong pursuit. As Dennis Ruel stated, “baseball made more sense to him than anything else in life,” and he regarded it as “the best mix of skill and fate, human talent and human error that we have ever been able to conceive.” After the brief interlude in the bank trust department, he became the pitching coach for the Chicago White Sox in 1935. He continued to surprise, revealing yet another dimension when the team was forced to train indoors, playing waltzes and classical music on the piano during an exercise session. In 1946, he became special assistant to the new commissioner of baseball, Happy Chandler.

According to his Wikipedia entry, the learned Ruel is credited with first referring to the catcher’s various pieces of equipment as “the tools of ignorance.”