"A fool; a dolt. "Cy Falkenberg, who was a boob in 1912, but a star in 1913, won his ninth straight game thr Naps yesterday' (San Francisco Bulletin, May 30, 1913; Gerald L. Cohen). ETYMOLOGY. David Shulman (American Speech, Feb. 1951) noted that the term is not baseballese, but seems to earliest use that Shulman could find was in Christy Mathewson's Pitching in a Pinch (1912); 'There's a poor boob in the hospital now that stopped one with his head.' The term may have been inspired by the much older term 'booby,' for a fool."
Paul Dickson, The Dickson Baseball Dictionary
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