Major League Baseball Player. Born to Irish immigrant parents in Providence, Rhode Island, he was first discovered as a tremendous pitching talent while a student at College of the Holy Cross in 1902. Connie Mack, then manager of the Philadelphia Athletics, needed pitching help in the drive towards the American League pennant, and so recruited the young player, who pitched three games that September under the name "Jack McAllister", so as to protect his amateur status. Coakley was eventually found out and banned from collegiate competition; he pitched for the Athletics intermittently over the next two seasons while attending college in the off season. In 1905, his first full season, he was 20-6 on a staff that included future baseball Hall of Famers Rube Waddell, Eddie Plank, and Chief Bender, as the Athletics again captured the pennant. When Waddell injured his arm in a playful scuffle with Coakley that fall, Coakley was pegged to start the third game of the World Series, but the Athletics were shut out 9-0 by the New York Giants' Christy Mathewson, and would lose the series that year. After a less-than-stellar 1906 (one of the few highlights being Coakley's discovery while on his honeymoon of future Hall of Famer Eddie Collins), Coakley was sold to the Cincinnati Reds that winter. He would mainly be a hard-luck pitcher for the next two seasons - pitching effectively, but losing more games than he won. He was traded to the Chicago Cubs in September 1908, and was on the roster when they won the World Series, despite not playing in the post season. Contract disputes over the next two seasons would relegate him to minor and independent league ball clubs; he would attempt a brief comeback with the New York Highlanders in 1911 before retiring. He coached baseball at Williams College from 1911 to 1913 before joining Columbia University as a pitching coach in 1914. Columbia hired him as head coach in 1915; he would remain there for all but one of the next 37 seasons, assembling championship teams for the Lions in 1916, 1933, 1934, and 1944. Among the students he coached was Lou Gehrig, who played one season (1923) at Columbia before embarking on a Hall of Fame career with the New York Yankees. Future NFL great Sid Luckman (who also played collegiate baseball) was another. Coakley retired from his post at Columbia in 1951, devoting himself full time to his already successful insurance business until suffering a stroke in 1963.