Most ejections meted out by umpires in Major League Baseball are ho-hum affairs; the manager runs out to complain about so and so call (although with instant replay, this is becoming a lost art), the manager says the magic word, and out comes the thumb.

Some ejections are bemusing and even downright hilarious. Pirates’ manager Lloyd McClendon comes to mind after he literally stole first base off the field and walked back to the dugout with the pilfered sack in tow. Braves minor league manager Phillip Wellman took the ejection to a new level with his 2007 heave-ho, featuring base-throwing, covering home plate with dirt, and crawling on his belly behind the pitchers mound and throwing the rosin bag at the umpire like a grenade. Wellman left the game to raucous applause after pulling off the most eccentric ejection performance in baseball history.

Or was it?

The 1957 season would be rather unremarkable for the Cincinnati Redlegs (now the Reds) and Chicago Cubs, with both teams finishing well out of contention. On April 24, 1957, however, the outcome of the campaign was still very much in doubt, with the Cubs coming to Crosley Field for the first game of a two-game set. Redlegs pitcher Joe Nuxhall was set to face Walt Drabowsky, with new Cubs pitcher Dick Drott enjoying his first week in the big leagues.

The game started off innocently enough – the Cubs got a hit in the first but didn’t bring anyone home to score, and the Redlegs went down in order. In the top of the second, the Cubs sandwiched two solo home runs between two outs, which brought Drabowski to the plate with two men gone.

Sometime during the at bat, Drabowski claimed he’d been hit in the foot by one of Nuxhall’s pitches. Home plate umpire Stan Landes wasn’t buying it and wanted the at bat to continue.

This is where things got weird.

Drott somehow got ahold of a wheelchair and brought it out to home plate with the idea of wheeling his mortally-wounded fellow pitcher down to first base. Landes wasn’t buying any of that either and tossed Drott out of the game.

You’d think something as bizarre as this incident would have merited a mention in the papers the next day, but neither the Chicago Daily Tribune nor the Cincinnati Enquirer felt the need to mention Drott’s wheelchair. The Retrosheet Boxscore for the game contains this terse entry:

“Moe Drabowsky claimed to be struck on the foot by a pitch; Dick Drott brought a wheelchair out to HP to give Drabowsky a ride to 1B; Drott ejected by HP umpire Stan Landes.”

Thankfully, “Baseball Hall of Shame™: The Best of Blooperstown” by Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo picks up the story from there.

Nash and Zullo report that Drabowski actually fouled a 2-2 pitch off his foot, and when Landes wouldn’t award him the base he crumpled to the ground “writhing” in “agony.” Drott, who was Drabowsky’s roommate, spotted a folded up wheelchair by the Cubs dugout and approached its owner, a woman who had apparently sung the national anthem before the game.

Drott asked the woman if he could borrow the wheelchair, took it before she could answer, and rolled it out to the plate. When Landes asked what he was doing, Drott replied he was only trying to help out his injured roommate. Landes ordered him off the field and made him take the wheelchair with him, the book says.

Later on in the game, Cubs pitchers set an unfortunate National League record by walking 9 Redlegs hitters in one inning. Five runs scored, and the Redlegs eventually won the game 9-5. Drott pitched the next day’s game and lost 6-3 behind four Cubs errors.

Despite the ejection and the pasting he received the next day, Drott had a stellar 1957 campaign that saw him strike out 15 Milwaukee Braves (the eventual World Series champions) on May 26. At the end of the season, he had compiled an impressive 15-11 record for the last place Cubs and earned third place in that year’s Rookie of the Year balloting.

Unfortunately, injuries derailed the rest of Drott’s career and he retired in 1963 with an overall record of 27–46. He died of stomach cancer in 1985.