The Players

[Yankee4Life]

Luis Aparicio

 

 

The name Luis Aparicio is closely linked with Venezuela. Both Luis Aparicio Ortega (Ortega) and his son, Luis Aparicio Montiel (Aparicio), had a significant impact on bringing the game of baseball to new heights in Latin America. For that reason, many say that when talking about one, you can’t help but think of the other.

 

The younger Aparicio was much more than an outstanding baseball player whose endurance, defense, and speed during an 18-year old major-league career earned him a spot in baseball’s Hall of Fame. He was a symbol of the growth and development of the game of baseball in Latin America — specifically in Venezuela and in his hometown of Maracaibo. Aparicio’s place among the greatest players in baseball signified the climax of a cycle of progress for the game of baseball, which has become the national sport of Venezuela and an intrinsic part of its cultural heritage.

 

To fully understand the significance, impact, and legacy of Aparicio’s career, one needs to take a journey back into the first steps of the game in Maracaibo.

 

The emergence of baseball in Maracaibo began around the turn of the 20th century when an American businessman, William Phelps (who later became a media mogul and philanthropist), opened the first department store in town, the American Bazaar. While he imported baseball equipment from the United States, he also saw the need for educating local children about the game in order to sell his merchandise. Phelps became a baseball enthusiast and taught schoolkids the rules of the game, which they quickly understood. He served as the first umpire of documented games and built the first baseball field in the coastal city of Maracaibo.

 

Through the years, the region had a constant flow of American workers from oil companies who helped shape the identity of the city as well as the influence of American culture. Baseball was no exception. By 1926, a heated rivalry between Vuelvan Caras and Santa Marta was catching the attention of followers and local sports media. In fact, the first big hero of local professional baseball was a shortstop from Vuelvan Caras, Rafael “Anguito” Oliver. Early on, the media shone a spotlight on the role of the shortstop.

 

Oliver became an icon and two brothers were some of his biggest fans — Luis and Ernesto Aparicio Ortega. The Aparicio Ortega brothers (in the Latin American custom, they used their father’s and mother’s surname) were also natural athletes; Luis enjoyed soccer but ended up practicing baseball with Ernesto. Both became quality infielders. Luis, however, became the big star, the super athlete, while Ernesto, who had great playing tools, concentrated on learning the game as a science. He became a successful manager, coach, and team owner, transmitting his knowledge over generations.

 

Luis gained fame for his great plays and intelligence in the position of shortstop. He became a reference, a master, and a key player sought by many teams throughout the country. He played in both professional leagues in the country, in Caracas and Maracaibo. He became the first player “exported” from Venezuela when he signed with Tigres del Licey of the Dominican Republic in 1934.

 

Also in 1934, Ortega and his homemaker wife, Herminia Montiel, welcomed their son Luis Ernesto Aparicio Montiel. By the time Aparicio was born in Maracaibo on April 29, his father was shining as one of the first baseball superstars of Venezuela and Latin America. Ortega was an All-Star player and one the most famous players ever of Venezuelan baseball. “An artist in the shortstop position,” many called him.

 

Baseball was his life. Aparicio recalls his mother washing baseball uniforms for his team and talking about baseball all day. From the age of 12, when he played shortstop for a team called La Deportiva, Aparicio displayed the grace and elegance he learned from his father. From then on, Aparicio was a member of several teams in Maracaibo, Caracas, and Barquisimeto. He was constantly moving with his family, depending on the time of year and which team his father was playing for.

 

That was his life: baseball, the stardom of his father, the knowledge of his uncle and whatever the game brought to the family table.

 

In 1953, Caracas hosted the Baseball Amateur World Series, and Luis Aparicio, then 19 years old, was selected to represent Venezuela. It was his first big tournament, and he played shortstop, third base, and left field. Although Cuba won the tournament, Aparicio was recognized both in the stands and in newspapers as the most electrifying player, who made great plays and showed security and maturity in all positions. Fans waved white handkerchiefs during this tournament, praising the teenager with great speed and a solid glove. All eyes were on him for the first time, but the name of his famous father would always be on his shoulders if he chose to be a professional player.

 

Soon after the Amateur World Series, the day arrived. Aparicio had to tell his parents he was quitting school to become a professional baseball player. His mother was not happy with the decision. His father, on the other hand, told him something that would stand out in his mind for the rest of his career. “Son, if you are going to play baseball for a living, you will have to be the number one always,” said his father. “You will never be a number two of anybody, always be the number one.”

 

That winter, the best four teams in Venezuela played in the country’s first national tournament. The teams — Gavilanes and Pastora from Maracaibo, and Caracas and Magallanes from Caracas — rotated their games in four cities and it was the first tournament played under the umbrella of major-league baseball.

 

Aparicio signed with Gavilanes and his debut was scheduled for November 17, 1953, in Maracaibo. That day it rained, and his debut was postponed until the next day, November 18, which is a special holiday in Maracaibo. The city celebrates the day of its lady patron, the Virgin of Chiquinquirá, and festivities are held all around. Among them is the special baseball game between the crosstown rivals Pastora and Gavilanes.

 

Aparicio’s father, Ortega, who also played for Gavilanes, led off the game against Pastora’s Howie Fox, a major-league veteran. After the first pitch, Ortega went back to the dugout and pointed to his son with his bat, signaling it was time for Luis to take his father’s bat and replace him at home plate for his first official at-bat.

 

The crowd of 7,000 gave a 15-minute standing ovation to this simple but magical gesture. They were recognizing Ortega — known as “The Great of Maracaibo” — for his outstanding career, his talent as the best shortstop in Venezuelan baseball, for his dedication on the field, and for more than 20 years of contributing to the development of the game in Maracaibo. At the same time, people were showing Luis the huge burden he had on his shoulders for carrying his father’s name, and for the responsibility he had on the field from that moment.

 

Aparicio ended up being named the best shortstop of the tournament. By December, the Cleveland Indians were negotiating with him. Gavilanes manager Red Kress, who was a coach for the Indians, spoke with general manager Hank Greenberg about signing Aparicio, but Greenberg replied that he thought Luis too small to play baseball. Chico Carrasquel, who was playing for Caracas and Chicago at the time, talked to Chicago White Sox general manager Frank Lane and told him about Luis, asking him to sign the youngster before someone else did. Caracas’s manager, Luman Harris, also talked to Lane. Soon after, Lane sent an offer and a contract for Aparicio with a $10,000 check. Young Luis became a member of the White Sox.

 

In October 1955, the White Sox traded Chico Carrasquel to the Cleveland Indians, leaving the door open for Aparicio. When Lane announced the trade, a Chicago journalist said: “You are trading your All-Star shortstop? You will need a machine to replace Chico.” Lane replied, “Yes, that’s precisely what we have — a machine, and his name is Luis Aparicio.”

 

Aparicio was named the American League Rookie of the Year in 1956. He was the first Latin American player to win the award. He finished with a .266 batting average and a league-leading 21 stolen bases, and also led the league in sacrifice hits. The stolen base as a strategy was becoming less and less used in baseball in those years. Aparicio revived the essence of the stolen base from the moment he reached the majors. He injected the White Sox with the game of speed, the Caribbean game, where speed is a key. He was praised for his defense but during his first season had 35 errors.

 

Luis needed work on his throw. Venezuelan journalist Juan Vené, who covered Aparicio’s entire career, recalled, “Fans were afraid to sit behind first base and they were really aware of the throw every time Aparicio was fielding a grounder because the ball often ended into the stands.”

 

In 1958, Aparicio won his first Gold Glove, was named to his first All-Star Game, hit .266, and led the league in stolen bases for the third consecutive year, with 29. Chicago ended up in second place for the second year in a row behind the Yankees. The situation in the American League was tough. The Chicago White Sox was an outstanding club but the Yankees were the Yankees, and in those years they simply dominated baseball. There were no playoffs. To go to the World Series they just needed to finish first in the American League. The White Sox needed to reach one more step, and they did it in 1959.

 

That season, the White Sox won 94 games and finally won the pennant. Among the keys to their success were Aparicio’s base-stealing skills and his defense along with his double play partner and close friend, Nellie Fox. Aparicio ended up second to his double-play partner Fox in the voting for the American League’s Most Valuable Player. He stole a career-high 56 bases that year. He realized no one in baseball was better than him at stealing. His speed was a key to victory. He led the team in runs with 98.

 

After their great season, the White Sox lost the World Series to the Dodgers in six games. Aparicio hit .308 (8-for-26), and although he was thrilled to participate in the fall classic, he was deeply frustrated in not winning the Series. “ Hoping to return to the World Series in 1960, the White Sox instead slipped to third place. They fell to fourth place in 1961 and fifth in 1962. The Sox wanted to rebuild their team, and in January of 1963, Aparicio and veteran outfielder Al Smith were traded to the Baltimore Orioles for Ron Hansen, Pete Ward, Dave Nicholson, and Hoyt Wilhelm.

 

The trade was a jolt to Luis, but he was moving to a contending team built around a foundation of power and pitching. Aparicio added speed to the Baltimore lineup, winning two more stolen base titles in 1963-64 to give him nine consecutive seasons as the American League stolen base champion, an all-time record. More importantly, he helped solidify the Oriole defense. Luis and future Hall of Famer Brooks Robinson formed one of the best shortstop-third base combinations of all time.

 

In 1966, the Orioles won the American League pennant, and Aparicio once again faced the Dodgers in the World Series. Although his offense was not as solid as it was in 1959, he still contributed with four hits and great defense during the series, which the Orioles swept in four games. It was first and only championship ring of his career. He came back to Maracaibo as a hero, dedicating his part of the title to his parents, who were his biggest supporters.

 

In November of 1967, Luis was traded back to the White Sox. As a veteran player, he became the team leader and mentor. During his second stint in Chicago, his glove was still his great tool, though his speed was not the same. He worked on his offense and in 1970, at the age of 36, batted a career-high .313.

 

Before the 1971 season, Aparicio was traded to the Boston Red Sox and played with them for three more seasons. In two of them was he was selected to the All-Star Game. In 1973, at the age of 39, he batted .271 in 132 games and stole 13 bases in 14 attempts.

 

On March 26, 1974 Aparicio was in the Red Sox spring camp when he got the notice that he was being released. He wanted to play one more season; he was 40 and still felt he had it. When he went back to the hotel he had a letter from Yankees owner George Steinbrenner. It was an open contract that had a note saying: “You put in the amount to play for the New York Yankees.”

 

Aparicio sent the envelope back with a note that said: “Dear Mr. Steinbrenner, thank you very much for your offer but I just get released once in my lifetime.” That was the end of Aparicio’s playing career. He went back to Maracaibo that day with his family.

 

From 1956 to 1973, no other shortstop was more dominant in his position than Luis Aparicio, who won nine Gold Gloves. He was a profound influence on the game during his era with his speed, helping to revive the stolen base as an offensive weapon. He was selected to 10 All-Star teams. He played in two World Series and won one, and he set the most significant personal record for himself: No player had played more games at his beloved position in the major leagues than he (2,583). (The record has since been broken by Omar Vizquel.) He finished his career with 2,677 hits, a .262 batting average and 506 stolen bases.

 

After 10 years of eligibility and a huge crusade by many Hispanic journalists pushing his candidacy for the Hall of Fame, he was elected to the Hall in 1984, becoming the first Venezuelan to ever receive this form of baseball immortality. “This is a triumph of Venezuela for all Venezuelans,” said Aparicio when he heard of his election.

 

After his election to the National Baseball Hall of Fame, Aparicio’s status of celebrity increased greatly. He became known as the most important and influential Venezuelan athlete of all time, the most revered and followed. He also made several trips a year to the US to participate in autograph sessions, fan festivals and former player activities. He was a constant supporter of Hall of Fame gatherings, including All-Star games and Cooperstown induction weekends.

 

Aparicio has since become an active baseball follower and his voice is present through his social media accounts, where he has provided opinions and personals perspective of issues around baseball. Most notably in 2017 he was invited to participate in a ceremony honoring the Latino members of the Baseball Hall of Fame prior to the 2017 All-Star Game in Miami, Florida. Aparicio respectfully declined the invitation and publicly stated: “Thank you for the honor @mlb, but I cannot celebrate while the young people of my country are dying while fighting for freedom”

 

Maracaibo still remembers every November 18 as part of the festivities around the Virgin holiday, the anniversary of Luis Aparicio’s debut. At the Aguilas del Zulia game, Aparicio has made the ceremonial first pitch. Every year the Luis Aparicio Award is given to the best Venezuelan player of the major-league baseball season. It was a tribute to his career and to the memory of his father.

 

Much more than a great player, Aparicio was recognized as a great human being. Most people knew Luis for his playing feats, but ignored his great heart and family values. During his career the integrity he brought to the game was one of his strongest assets. He gave everything he had to win and help his teams. He played simultaneously for 19 years in Venezuelan baseball, doubling the amount of work year round. As a major-league player he played fewer than 130 games in a season only once.

 

Maybe his greater value was how he embraced and understood his position and his significance on and off the field for the people of Venezuela, a country filled with social problems that universally celebrates the achievements of its people. He was much more than an icon.

 

People always expected the best from him, and he gave nothing but the best both as a player and as a human being, working hard enough and using his abilities to be among the greatest players of all time. He had huge shoes to fill under the shadow of his father and he never let this issue pressure him during his life. Luis Aparicio assumed a social responsibility and went beyond expectations.

 

 

[Yankee4Life]

Tommy Holmes

 

 

A severe sinus condition kept Tommy Holmes out of the service during World War II, but the chances are that if he had been drafted and sent into harm’s way, several hundred fans from one particular portion of Braves Field would have been willing to follow him into action.

 

Holmes was among the most popular performers in Boston baseball history, and during his career with the Braves, from 1942 to 1952, nobody enjoyed the type of unabashed love he received from the denizens of the 1,500-seat, stand-alone bleachers situated behind his right-field playing spot. Dubbed the Jury Box by a sportswriter who once counted just 12 fans seated there in leaner times, the section with its wooden benches was filled during the club’s contending years with a crew of regulars who developed a friendly give-and-take with their hero. “How many hits you gonna get today, Tommy?” a patron might yell, and Holmes would shout back a reply or hold up however many fingers he deemed appropriate. There is no record of his accuracy in forecasting, but the Pride of the Jury Box had plenty of clutch blows at the ballpark — none bigger than his eighth-inning single off Bob Feller that gave the Braves a 1-0 victory in the opening game of the 1948 World Series.

 

A .302 lifetime hitter who set a then-National League record with a 37-game hitting streak in 1945 and was one of the toughest men in history to strike out, Thomas Francis Holmes was born on March 29, 1917, in the Borough Park neighborhood of Brooklyn.

 

Brooklyn had two semipro teams that drew the attention of major-league scouts, the Bay Parkways and the Bushwicks. After graduating from high school, Holmes went seeking a job with the Bay Parkways. “Harry Hess, the manager, told me I was just a kid, but then one day a guy didn’t show up and he said, ‘Can you play left field?’ I said sure, even though I had never played left field in my life. I was a first baseman. Well, I got a couple hits, and the next Tuesday night an owner of the Bushwicks — there were two brothers, Joe and Max Rosner, who owned both clubs — he called and asked me if I would play at Dexter Park for him against Josh Gibson, Satchel Paige, and all of those great Negro League players. I told him sure. I batted against Satchel Paige; I didn’t know who he was, but I got a couple of hits.”

 

Watching the games in which Holmes suited up against Gibson and Paige’s Pittsburgh Crawfords team was Yankees scout Paul Krichell. He called Tommy’s father, and as Holmes recalled, “There were no negotiations. We got together, Krichell said ‘We’d like to sign your son,’ and they gave me a few bucks — not much. I don’t even remember what my bonus was. My father just said, ‘Sure, sounds good.’ I stayed out of the financial end of it. The average, I think, was $500 for a kid like me coming out of high school, and maybe $1,000 or a little more for a college kid with three or four more years’ experience.”

 

It was the late 1930s, and the Yankee dynasty started by Babe Ruth and Lou Gehrig was continuing with Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Bill Dickey, and Co. New York would win four consecutive World Series from 1936 to 1939, and the club oozed with confidence. “The Yankees always won, and they had no signs,” Holmes said. “When I went to spring training with them, I asked what the signs were, and guys would say ‘Signs? Just swing the goddamn bat!’ I’d say, ‘Well, what about….’ and they would yell, ‘Just swing the bat! If we can hold the opposition to four runs, we’ll score seven.’ That was the Yankees — bang-bang-bang. They had the power, and they could beat the hell out of you.

 

“I was told by George Weiss, then the Yankees’ farm director, that their philosophy was that hopefully you had three years of playing Triple A ball, or at least two years. I could have come up earlier, but with DiMaggio, [Charlie] Keller, and later [Tommy] Henrich in the outfield, it was tough. Weiss said to me, ‘Tommy, don’t you sit around. You go out and play.’ Holmes did as he was told, and put up great numbers. During his first professional season at Norfolk, in the summer of ’37, the center fielder batted .320 with 25 homers and 111 RBIs. He made the All-Star team that year, then followed it up with an MVP campaign in ’38 when he led the Eastern League with a .368 average, 200 hits, 41 doubles, and 110 runs for the Binghamton Triplets.

 

This prompted a promotion to the Yankees’ top farm club, the Newark Bears — a team then considered to be the equal of many major league squads. All Holmes did there was bat .339 with 10 triples in 1939. His power numbers were down (he had just four homers, and topped 13 just once more as a pro), but it was clear that he was a first-rate hitter. Things progressed further in 1940, as Tommy topped the International League with 211 hits and 126 runs scored while batting .317. He was even better in the playoffs, setting a circuit mark for postseason hits and helping lead Newark to the Little World Series title. On September 13 of that year, the Associated Press reported that Dodgers president Larry MacPhail had supposedly offered the Yankees $40,000 for the hometown hero, but this was never substantiated and Holmes stayed put.

 

By the end of spring training in 1941, having just turned 24 and married his sweetheart, Lillian Helen Pettersen, Holmes was already a veteran of four minor-league seasons, who had shown the talent that normally warranted a promotion to the majors. But Keller, DiMaggio, and Henrich were still manning the outfield for the Bronx Bombers — with reigning AL batting champ DiMaggio in Tommy’s position of center — and that left little room for a rookie lacking home run prowess. So after a look-see in spring training, Yanks manager Joe McCarthy sent the youngster back to Newark yet again with a promise: If New York couldn’t find a space for him on its roster during the regular season, club management would make every attempt to grant his wish and send him to another big-league organization.

 

McCarthy was true to his word. Holmes hit .302 with a league-best 190 hits in his third season for the Bears in ’41, but with the Yankees’ outfield contingent seemingly set for years to come, the organization decided to trade off its still-valuable prospect. Two days after the Pearl Harbor attack, on December 9, 1941, Holmes was sold to the Braves for undisclosed cash and players to be named. The Yanks received first baseman Buddy Hassett a week later as part of the deal, and on February 5, 1942, Boston outfielder Gene Moore was sent Bronx-bound to complete it. The trade still ranks as one of the finest in Braves history; while Hassett played just one more season in the majors and Moore three subpar campaigns, Holmes was among the NL’s top hitters for much of the next decade. “I always said it took the best ballplayer in the world — Joe DiMaggio — to run me out of New York,” Tommy said, and while he was kidding, there was much truth to the statement.

 

With a tight budget, a no-frills ballpark, and a club mired deep in the second division, the Braves were the polar opposites of the aristocratic Yankees. Boston was coming off a 62-92 season and a third straight year in seventh place under manager Casey Stengel, and Tommy instantly found himself with a starting center-field job for 1942. Later he recalled that when he asked Stengel, “Who in God’s name brought me here?” Casey said simply, “I did. Someday I want to build a whole ballclub around you.” Holmes called going from the Yankees organization to the Braves like “living at the Waldorf, then going to live in Povertyville down at the Bowery.”

 

Pearl Harbor and America’s entry into World War II made for a long winter, but Holmes was still all smiles come spring. When the Braves started their season at Philadelphia on April 14, Tommy donned jersey No. 1 (which he’d wear his entire career) and batted leadoff in his major-league debut — going 2-for-5 against future teammate Si Johnson in a 2-1 Boston victory. And although the Braves wound up seventh yet again under Stengel, there were two future Hall of Famers on the playing roster all year for the rookie to learn from. Slow-footed catcher Ernie Lombardi hit .330 to capture the league batting title, and former Pirates great Paul “Big Poison” Waner played alongside Holmes in right field. Just a .258 hitter at age 39, Waner still had the knowledge of a man with three batting titles and a lifetime average of .330-plus under his belt.

 

For Holmes, Waner was nothing short of a revelation. Big Poison preached pulling the ball to right field, and in this curious rookie he had an apt pupil. “One day in ’42, I took an 0-for-9 in a doubleheader,” Tommy recalled nearly 60 years later. “I was in the clubhouse moping around, and there was Paul Waner, who liked his sauce, having a beer. He says, ‘What’s the matter, kid?’ I say, ‘Paul, I was 0-for-9 today.’ He says, ‘Don’t worry about that. Just come out in the morning.’ This was the beginning of my hitting life. I was a line-drive hitter, same as Paul. He says, ‘See that foul line over there? I’m going to show you how to hit it. Never hit the ball where three guys can catch it, not with that wind blowing in at Braves Field. Shoot for the foul lines. If a few go out of play, don’t worry about it. You don’t pay for the balls.’” (Although Holmes credited Stengel with similar batting tips at the time, he always cited Waner as his chief tutor in later interviews.)

 

The rookie learned his lessons well. Batting leadoff most of the year, Holmes hit .278, second only to Lombardi among Boston’s regulars, and struck out just 10 times in 558 at-bats. He went 10-for-19 in one August stretch against the Dodgers and Giants, broke up two no-hit attempts, and compiled a .990 fielding average to tie for second best in the league. Having not gotten his first big-league shot until he was 25 years old, he was making up for lost time. Even when he dipped a bit to .270 in his sophomore season, he led the league with 629 at-bats and collected 33 doubles and 10 triples. He was above .300 much of the season, often batted third, and later claimed that focusing on learning to pull the ball cost him 50 points in his batting average. It proved a worthwhile sacrifice.

 

Of course Tommy’s mind was likely on more than baseball that summer. With the war in Europe and Japan heating up, married players like Holmes were starting to be drafted, and he got a call in March 1944 to leave spring training and report to Brooklyn for his Navy physical. Although it was widely reported that he had passed and would be reporting for duty that summer, the call never came. Later, Holmes described an induction scene where examining doctors determined him unfit for duty due to lifelong sinus problems that they feared could be life-threatening in the European climate.

 

One of a dwindling number of strong young ballplayers left on big-league rosters, and fresh off a winter spent working in the Brooklyn shipyards, Holmes posted his first super season in 1944. Third in the NL with 195 hits, 93 runs scored, and 42 doubles, he also finished 10th in hitting at .309 after staying near the top (and above .330) into late summer.

 

Making the feat more impressive was the ballpark Tommy called home. Braves Field was a cavernous park built during the inside baseball era of 1915, just before Babe Ruth ushered in the home run age. Its center-field fence was originally built 550 feet from home plate, and with the wind blowing in off the Charles River just beyond its walls, few on the club had ever managed even 20 homers. Now, seeing that Holmes had some pop in his bat, Braves management brought the 345-foot right-field fences in by 20 feet midway through the ’44 campaign to give him an easier target.

 

Even with this move, what transpired next took the most optimistic of fans by surprise. Holmes got off to a hot start in 1945 that never let up, and Paul Waner’s star pupil reached his peak. Although the Braves stumbled to yet another second-division finish, Tommy astonished the baseball world by leading the major leagues with 28 homers, 224 hits, 47 doubles, a .577 slugging percentage, 81 extra-base hits, and 367 total bases. He batted .352 — finishing second in the NL to Phil Cavarretta of the Cubs in a race that went down to the final day — and was also runner-up (to Brooklyn’s Dixie Walker) with 117 RBIs. His 125 runs scored placed him third in that department, and he even stole 15 bases (fourth most in the NL) for good measure.

 

Making this dominant showing all the more impressive was what Holmes did in the middle of it — establishing a new NL record with a 37-game hitting streak. He started the stretch in scorching fashion with 10 total hits in back-to-back doubleheaders on June 6-7, and kept up the torrid pace into July. He tied and broke Rogers Hornsby’s old mark of 33 straight games against the Pirates in another doubleheader that featured rainy, hurricane-like conditions at Braves Field and a homer, single, and four doubles by the man of the hour.

 

The hits kept coming right up until the All-Star break (which he entered with a major-league-best .401 average), but in his first game after the three-day layoff, Holmes was stopped by Hank Wyse of the Cubs on July 12 at Wrigley Field. All told, he batted .433 during the streak, which lasted as a record for 33 years before being broken by Pete Rose. Even today, while Tommy’s breakthrough season has been largely (and unfairly) forgotten by all but fervent baseball historians, his hitting streak still stands as the ninth longest in big-league annals.

 

Perhaps the most amazing stat of all is that Holmes stepped to the plate on more than 700 occasions in 1945 (636 official at-bats plus 70 walks), and left it a strikeout victim just nine times (once swinging). This gave him the distinction of being the first man ever to lead the majors in most homers and fewest strikeouts in the same season, an incredible display of contact hitting in keeping with his career averages. Holmes never struck out more than 20 times in a season, and had more homers than strikeouts on a record-tying four occasions (Ernie Lombardi, Lefty O’Doul, and Ted Williams also accomplished this feat). In fact, Holmes’ 122 lifetime strikeouts in 4,992 career at-bats are fewer than many current major leaguers notch in just one season of less than 600 at-bats.

 

With Holmes established as a top star by the end of ’45, new Braves president Lou Perini and his ownership group began following through on Stengel’s dream of surrounding Tommy with a strong team. Ace manager Billy Southworth (a three-time pennant winner) was brought in from the St. Louis Cardinals, and the war’s end along with blockbuster trades brought many new faces onto the 1946 roster, including Warren Spahn, Johnny Sain, and Johnny Hopp. The result was a leap to third place, and Holmes had another standout season with a .310 average, 35 doubles, and a 20-game hit streak. The Jury Box crowd so adored him that when Tommy swapped positions with left fielder Johnny Barrett for one day that year, fans showered Barrett with so many boos and insults that he claimed at game’s end, “I’ll never go out there again.” There was one problem, however. “The owners had doubled my salary to around $30,000 [after ’45],” Holmes recalled later, “but then they went and moved the fences back out!” Despite Tommy’s 28 home runs and teammate Chuck Workman’s 25 during 1945, team statisticians saw that more opponents than Braves sluggers had been taking advantage of the closer right-field target.

 

Everything came together for the Braves in 1948, and Holmes was a big factor as leadoff man for the NL champions. He placed third in the league with a .325 average (his fifth straight year in the top 10), was second with 190 hits, and made his second All-Star team. The Three Troubadours, a trio of musicians who serenaded players at Braves Field on trombone, trumpet, and clarinet, played the Irish tune “Has Anybody Here Seen Kelly?” when Holmes stepped to the plate. The answer was more folks than ever, as the Braves set an all-time attendance mark of 1,455,439 that summer even as the Red Sox were drawing 1,558,798 of their own while battling for an American League pennant down the road.

 

And although Holmes batted just .192 in the World Series against Cleveland, he had arguably the biggest hit of the fall classic. With Johnny Sain and Bob Feller locked up in a scoreless pitchers’ duel in the eighth inning of Game One at Braves Field, Tommy’s roommate, Phil Masi, appeared to be caught snoozing off second base when Feller and Cleveland shortstop Lou Boudreau pulled a pickoff play they had been practicing. It was clear in still photographs taken at a variety of angles that Boudreau had indeed tagged Masi on the shoulder before he could slide back into the bag, but umpire Bill Stewart (a Fitchburg, Mass., native) saw it differently and called Masi safe. Sain lined out, but then Holmes hit a ball past Ken Keltner at third to drive in Masi with the game’s only run and send the chilly home crowd of 40,135 into a frenzy. Feller wound up a 1-0 loser despite his two-hitter, and the Braves had a quick edge in the World Series. It was a heady time for the underdogs, but it was short-lived. Boston went on to drop four of the next five games and the series, with Holmes ending the 4-3, Game Six finale at Braves Field with a fly out. As if this wasn’t bad enough, Tommy had to head to the hospital the next day for an appendectomy. Then it was back to Brooklyn for his newest offseason job — selling televisions.

 

Braves management was confident that their team could contend for years to come, but in 1949 the Braves quickly fell back to fourth place. Talk of dissension rocked the club starting in spring training, as players reportedly grumbled about Southworth driving them too hard and seeking too much credit for the previous year’s accomplishments. Players later said the disharmony was largely a figment of the press, but there was no denying the dramatic decline in performance by many on the club. Holmes was among them; he batted less than .300 for the first time in six years (dropping all the way to .266), and began getting platooned on a semi-regular basis. He got his average back up to .298 in 1950, when the Braves again contended much of the season, but by then Tommy was practically splitting time with Willard Marshall. Even though Holmes showed a bit of his 1945 pop with nine homers in just 322 at-bats, his playing career was winding down. The organization had other things in mind for him.

 

As a player Holmes was popular with his teammates, the coaching staff, fans, and reporters, so it seemed only natural that he might make a success as a manager. He was asked to take over the Braves’ farm club at Hartford as player-manager for the 1951 season, and he enthusiastically accepted the challenge. By midway through the year Billy Southworth’s health and the big league team’s record were both floundering, and with Southworth’s stunning resignation on June 19, another request came Holmes’ way: How would he like to manage in Boston? He had likely thought it would be years before such an opportunity came, so it was no surprise that Tommy again said yes.

 

In many ways, his appointment — which also cost Hartford Holmes’ .319 bat — was an experiment doomed to fail. Suddenly the youngest skipper in the big leagues at just 34, Tommy took over an underachieving club mixed with veterans like Elliott, Spahn, and Earl Torgeson who had been his teammates the previous year, and raw youngsters like Johnny Logan and Chet Nichols who were getting their first taste of the majors. It was hard for him to establish authority under such circumstances, and his mild-mannered approach and lack of training didn’t help. While there were some high points, including a 9-0 victory by Spahn over the Cubs in Holmes’ managerial debut and a midsummer stretch in which the club won 14 of 18 games, by year’s end his record was a mediocre 48-47 for a team that finished 76-78 overall.

 

The worst was yet to come. In 1952 the Braves got off to a poor start, and Tommy (cover boy on the first edition of the team scorebook that season) became a convenient scapegoat. On May 31st, with the club in seventh place at 13-22, he was fired in favor of Charlie Grimm — whose managerial résumé already included 13 big-league seasons and three pennants. General manager John Quinn said Holmes simply needed more experience to be a successful skipper, an odd comment considering that he now had a year more of it than when they had given him the job. Perhaps more than any other player, Holmes personified the underdog, determined Boston Braves. And despite how his career with the team ended, his numbers still shine through. He averaged 185 hits, 36 doubles, and 86 runs scored during his nine seasons as a regular, and ranked among baseball’s Top 10 during the 1940s in hits and doubles.

 

His playing career in the majors now finished once and for all, Holmes embarked on a minor-league managerial odyssey during the next several seasons. His travels finally stopped in 1959. He was named director of the New York Journal-American’s sandlot baseball program, which was later renamed the New York Sandlot Baseball Alliance.

 

Starting in 1973, Holmes took on an additional role as director of amateur baseball relations for the New York Mets. He became a familiar figure around Shea Stadium during three decades on the job, but likely never would have risen from relative obscurity outside Flushing Meadows had not Pete Rose gotten on a hot streak during the summer of 1978. Once Rose had hit in 30 straight games and was nearing Holmes’s record 37-game skein, Tommy’s name started appearing in newspaper stories throughout the country for the first time in a quarter-century. “I wish [Rose] luck,” Holmes joked to a reporter. “Heck, until two weeks ago nobody knew I was alive.”

 

As fate would have it, the Reds were playing at Shea against the Mets when Rose reached game No. 38 of his streak on July 25. The game was stopped momentarily to honor the achievement, and a teary-eyed Holmes stepped on the field to shake the new record-holder’s hand. The gesture impressed Rose, who said of his predecessor, “I only hope I show as much class as Tommy Holmes did when somebody breaks my record. He thanked me for making him a big leaguer again.” (Rose eventually made it to 44 games before he was stopped, ironically, by the Atlanta Braves.)

 

Ten years later, when the ’48 Braves were invited back to Boston for a 40th reunion, one of the most popular guests was a still-trim Holmes — sporting his 1986 World Series championship ring earned with the Mets at the expense of the Red Sox. He and his beloved Lillian also made the drive up from their home in Woodbury, Long Island, each year throughout the 1990s to attend the annual events hosted by the Boston Braves Historical Association.

 

When ill health prompted Tommy’s retirement from the Mets and stopped his pilgrimages to the Hub around 2002, it was if the Braves diehards who remained were losing their hero all over again. Holmes no doubt felt the same way. He always said it was not the batting streak or his hit off Feller that provided him with his greatest Boston memories; those were reserved for his love affair with the 1,500 bleacherites in right field. “Williams, DiMaggio, Musial — they never had what I did,” he often recounted proudly. “The other 29,000 fans, if they wanted to give me a boo or two, go ahead. But not if you sat behind me in the Jury Box, I’ll tell you that. They were always hollering at me, ‘Keep your eye on the ball, Tommy!’ ‘Try and wait for a good one, Tommy!’ Tommy this, and Tommy that.

 

The Pride of the Jury Box still had his original Boston Braves uniform, socks, and cap when he died of natural causes on April 14, 2008, at the age of 91. His passing in Boca Raton, Florida, left Al Dark as the last regular from the 1948 National League championship club still alive, as fellow teammates Sain, Spahn, Eddie Stanky, and Bill Voiselle had all died in recent years. Tommy had also been the last living Boston Braves manager for quite some time, owing to the young age at which he held the position.

 

Holmes retired with a .302 lifetime batting average with 88 home runs and 581 RBIs in his 1,320-game, eleven-year major league career. He posted a fine .989 fielding percentage in the majors, executing more double plays (37) than errors (33).

 

 

 

[Yankee4Life]

Alejandro Carrasquel

 

 

Alejandro Carrasquel was the first native Venezuelan to play in the major leagues. When the 27-year-old trailblazer joined the Washington Senators in 1939 he was already a seasoned veteran, having pitched for years in countries throughout the Caribbean basin. The Senators that spring were housing an international contingent of players never quite seen before in major league baseball. The camp had three Cuban players and a French Canadian–born pitcher named Joe Krakauskas. Senators owner Clark Griffith partially assessed his team, after a walk around camp, by saying, “The way things are now we sound like a row in the League of Nations."

 

Carrasquel had gained the Senators’ notice with his pitching over the previous winter in Cuba, when the right-hander had been named MVP of the Cuban winter league season. Team Cuba’s manager José Rodríguez, former major league player with the New York Giants, alerted Washington to the pitching prospect. The Senators sent scout Joe Cambria to investigate. Cambria, in an often retold account, “trailed him from the Havana park one day and got his name on a Washington contract while they were sitting on a park bench, with an interpreter between.”

 

From the mound, Carrasquel showed right off that he was a polished pitcher. He could field his position, hold runners on, and commanded a variety of pitches. Carrasquel easily made the Washington staff. There was an imposed proviso with it, however. The Senators modified Carrasquel’s name to a more fan friendly–sounding “Alex Alexandra.” Alejandro was nicknamed “Patón” [“big-footed”] in Venezuela for his purported size 18 shoes. Former teammate José Zardón said it began one day when Carrasquel accidentally grabbed one of Zardón’s shoes. “Hey, this shoe doesn’t fit. I think it must be yours,” Carrasquel said. “Of course it’s mine,” Zardón replied. “How do you expect my shoe to fit that patón you have?”

 

Carrasquel made his first appearance on April 23, 1939, against the New York Yankees at Griffith Stadium. He relieved starter Ken Chase with two outs in the fourth inning and a man on first base. The first three batters he faced were future Hall of Famers Joe DiMaggio, Lou Gehrig, and Bill Dickey. He retired them all, but the Yankees, ahead 6–3 when Carrasquel entered the game, won 7–4.

 

The game marked the first appearance in the major leagues by a native of Venezuela. Alejandro Eloy Carrasquel was born in Parroquia La Candelaria, a municipality of Caracas, on July 24, 1912. He was the youngest of four children born to Alejo Carrasquero and Emilia María Aparicio, following two brothers and a sister. (Emilia María was not related to the ball-playing Aparicio family eventually rooted in Maracaibo.)

 

Alejandro was signed as an 18-year-old by his country’s Royal Criollos team in 1930 and pitched his first professional game for the club the following spring. Over the next few years, Carrasquel played for several other teams in his homeland, and traveled to pitch in other baseball countries as he gained experience on the mound. Invited by Cuban great Martín Dihigo to join the Cuban winter league in 1938, he made the most of the opportunity, sporting an 11–6 record, with 10 complete games, and caught the eye of the Senators.

 

In his second major league game, on April 30, Carrasquel picked up his first save. At Yankee Stadium he was called in to relieve in the eighth inning, with two outs and the bases loaded, and Washington clinging to a 3–2 lead. Staying composed, the pitcher coaxed a fly out from Yankees second baseman Joe Gordon, and then retired the side in order in the ninth to preserve the victory.

 

Three days later, May 3, in another relief role, Carrasquel picked up his first win and the first by a Venezuelan pitcher in the major leagues. The historic victory occurred over the St. Louis Browns at Sportsman’s Park. The Senators rallied from a six-run deficit, scoring seven runs over the final three innings of the game, to pull out an 11–10 road triumph. Hurling scoreless eighth and ninth innings, Carrasquel secured the special win.

 

The solid relief pitching of the rookie earned him his first big league start on May 14. It came at home against Lefty Grove and the Boston Red Sox. Carrasquel came out on the losing end of a 5–4 score in a strenuous 12-inning battle. Tied at two after nine innings, the Red Sox reached the Washington hurler for three runs in the 12th, and the Nationals’ rally in the bottom of the inning against Grove and two relievers fell one run short. Earlier in the game, Carrasquel recorded the first hit by a Venezuelan player in the major leagues when he singled off Grove. In absorbing his first pitching loss, Carrasquel hung an 0-for-5 on heralded Red Sox rookie left fielder Ted Williams. Incidentally, the Red Sox starting lineup that day had five future Hall of Famers: Grove, Jimmie Foxx, Joe Cronin, Bobby Doerr, and Williams.

 

Four years later Shirley Povich recalled Carrasquel’s amazing composure as a rookie. “I don’t know where he learned it,” Senators manager Bucky Harris told him back in 1939, “but this big fellow is smoother than any rookie who ever broke in under me.” The impressed Harris gave the “big fellow,” who was 6’1” tall — and weighed somewhat more than his listed 182 pounds — three successive starts after the locked-horns effort against Grove. Carrasquel won two of them. All three starts were complete game endeavors.

 

On May 25, Carrasquel three-hit the Browns, 4–1, at Griffith Stadium. The pitcher gained high praise from Povich with the effort. “Certainly, Alex Alexandra is the most sensational rookie to flash across the big league scene since Bobby Feller appeared in 1936,” wrote the Washington Post’s best-known sportswriter. “That he is no flash in the pan is well established. One only has to look at his past three performances.”

 

Not long afterwards, Senators owner Clark Griffith stepped in and ended the name charade. Stripping Carrasquel of his foisted-upon Alexandra alias, Griffin announced to the press that “when a fellow comes that far, I think it’s no more than right that he get all the credit that’s coming to him under his own name.”

 

The sole loss in that three-game span for Carrasquel was a 3–1 defeat to the Philadelphia Athletics on May 30. Allowing only four hits and two earned runs, the Caracas-born pitcher supplied his team’s only run with a long ball. At Griffith Stadium, Carrasquel tagged Athletics starter Nels Potter to register the first home run hit by a Venezuelan player in the major leagues. Following the 3–1 loss to the A’s, Carrasquel plodded through several rough outings, winning only once in six more starting appearances.

 

Carrasquel was honored by a delegation of Venezuelans between games of a doubleheader at Yankee Stadium on the Fourth of July. Dr. Tomás Pacanins, consul general of Venezuela, introduced him and presented several gifts and a diploma from the Venezuelan Baseball Association. Alex made a speech – in Spanish – but his part in the occasion has been lost in history because the vast majority of the 61,808 fans had turned out for “Lou Gehrig Appreciation Day,” and Gehrig’s speech and its immortal line, “Today I consider myself the luckiest man on the face of this earth,” overshadowed everything else.

 

Carrasquel started the second game of the doubleheader, but lasted only three innings, giving up six hits and five earned runs in the Yankees 11–1 victory. His record had been 3–2, with a 2.64 ERA, following the loss to the Athletics on May 30, but his performance declined the rest of the season. He finished with a record of 5–9 and an ERA of 4.69 in 40 games. His 159 1/3 innings pitched, 17 starts, and seven complete games would prove to be career highs, and it was his only losing record in eight major-league seasons.

 

As a result of his second half decline, Carrasquel needed to prove himself again to the Senators in 1940. His job wasn’t made easier when he reported late to training camp. “Alejandro explained that as steamship service from South America to Cuba is irregular, because of the war, he had to take a boat from his native Venezuela to New York, a longer journey.” He made the opening day roster, but faltered in early relief appearances and was optioned to Jersey City of the International League on May 25. He was recalled in the first week of July, and turned things around over the second half of the season. Used exclusively in relief, he pitched only 48 innings in 28 games, and posted an overall 6–2 record, with a 4.88 ERA.

 

The Washington team Carrasquel reported to in 1941 was distinctively different to the one he had encountered two years earlier. On the year, Carrasquel duplicated his 6–2 record from the prior season and was an overall steady force working primarily out of the Senators’ bullpen. His 3.44 ERA was the best of any of the club’s bullpen specialists, in 96 2/3 innings of work. He started five games late in the season, his first since 1939.

 

In 1942, Carrasquel’s fourth year in the league, he had a 7–7 record in 35 appearances. Bucky Harris increased his workload and gave him 15 starts. He finished with a 3.43 ERA in 152 1/3 innings of work. On July 18, the husky pitcher tossed his first major league shutout – the first in the majors by a Venezuelan — blanking the St. Louis Browns 3–0 on five hits and no walks at Griffith Stadium. The pride of Caracas also registered two ten-inning complete game victories during the campaign: a 3–2 win against Detroit at Briggs Stadium on June 21, and a 4–3 home win against Cleveland on September 1.

 

The Senators made a startling improvement under Bluege, finishing in second place with an 84–69 record – 13 ½ games behind the Yankees – compared to seventh place and 62–89 in 1942. The improvement began, as it usually does, with the pitching staff. Carrasquel was one of five hurlers with 11 or more wins. He started 13 games, compiling an 11–7 record, with a 3.68 ERA in 144 1/3 innings pitched. He led the team with 39 appearances, and his 11 wins were a career best. His best performance came early in the year, with a two-hit, 5–0, shutout over the Athletics on April 25.

 

In 1944, Bluege’s team lost 90 games and dropped all the way down to the cellar of the American League. Carrasquel managed a respectable 8–7 record — though limited to only seven starts – with a 3.43 ERA in 134 innings pitched, and once again led all team hurlers with 43 appearances. His best performance as a starter came on September 10 when he pitched a complete game to defeat the Athletics 8–2, at Griffith Stadium.

 

Washington was back in a pennant race once again in 1945. At the end of July the Senators were in third place at 45–41, 5 ½ games behind Detroit and only 1 ½ games behind the second-place Yankees. Carrasquel had been used sparingly, pitching only 49 1/3 innings in 20 appearances, and had lost his only start back on May 13. His record stood at 2–3, but he had a fine 2.10 ERA.

 

However, Carrasquel’s pitching gave Washington a much-needed boost in the final two months of the pennant race. He started six games and relieved in nine others during this stretch. The first four starts were complete-game wins, including two shutouts. He lost to St. Louis 4–3 in a 10-inning complete-game start on September 5, giving up a game-tying homerun to the Browns’ Lou Finney with two outs in the top of the ninth. His final start was a seven-inning no-decision against the White Sox on September 9. Carrasquel finished the season with 7–5 record and a 2.71 ERA in 122 2/3 innings pitched.

 

Carrasquel was sold to the White Sox on January 2, 1946 for the $7,500 waiver price. It is probable that Griffith saw 1945 as his last best chance to win a pennant since all drafted players would be returning from the war in time for the 1946 season, and viewed the Carrasquel-Finney game as one particularly squandered. But it is difficult to see how Griffith could really blame Carrasquel for losing the pennant. The club went 14–8 after the September 5 game, to finish 11/2 games behind Detroit, who were 14–10 over the same span. Actually, the Senators really blew their chances when they lost three of five games to the Tigers in Washington from September 15-18, and followed up by losing three of five games to the Yankees and Athletics to close out the season.

 

On January 12, 1946 –less than two weeks after his waiver sale — Alejandro was pitching in Caracas for the Magallanes Navigators. He defeated Cervecería Caracas, 5–2, in the inaugural game of the Venezuelan winter league.

 

In mid-February he signed a three-year deal to play in Mexico for Jorge Pasquel’s upstart Mexican League. “Pasquel paid me $3,000 cash [bonus], to sign a three-year contract calling for $10,000 a year,” Carrasquel said, in an interview three years later. “I took it, for in addition to the $33,000 I was to receive in Mexico, I also was free to pitch winter baseball.” However, Carrasquel and others who cast their lot with Mexico at that time, were punished with lifetime suspensions by Major League Baseball, and were not permitted to play in Organized Baseball–backed winter leagues.

 

The league in Mexico had the option of moving a player from team to team for attempted parity purposes, and Carrasquel wound up pitching for several squads over the next three summers. From 1946–48, he pitched for Veracruz, Mexico City, and Monterrey, respectively, with an overall 44–27 record.

 

When the “jumpers” ban was lifted in the summer of 1949 by Major League Commissioner Happy Chandler, Carrasquel reported to the Chicago White Sox in early July, but the veteran’s return to the big time was a short one. On August 5, after seeing action in only three games out of the bullpen, Alex was traded to the Detroit Tigers for pitcher Luis Aloma. The next day Detroit optioned the 37-year-old to the Buffalo Bisons of the International League. The move ended his eight-year major league career. The vanguard pitcher compiled a lifetime record of 50–39 with a 3.73 ERA in 861 innings pitched. He appeared in 258 games, recording 30 complete games in 64 starts, along with 16 saves.

 

With the lifting of his organized baseball suspension, Carrasquel was able to return to the Venezuelan winter league for the 1949–50 season. After pitching two seasons for Cerveceria Caracas, the 40-year-old moundsman rejoined his original club, Magallanes, but pitched very sparingly. In 1953–54, the fading hurler made two appearances with Gavilanes of Venezuela’s Occidental league. These efforts closed out his post–Major League winter pitching career in his homeland. His record of 12–20 in those five years reflected a pitcher past his prime.

 

Carrasquel bounced around in the minor leagues in the early 1950s and stretched out his pitching tenure until 1956. After his final season with Mexico City in the Class AA Mexican League, Carrasquel returned to the Venezuelan winter league and became a coach with the Caracas Lions. In 1958–59 he was appointed manager of the Pampero Juicers. While guiding the Pampero club to lackluster results during the 1959–60 campaign, he was involved in a serious fight with a team executive. “League officials voted a two-year suspension against Alex Carrasquel who started the season as manager of Pampero,” read the winter league report of the incident. “The ban was imposed because Carrasquel allegedly slugged Eddy Moncada, breaking his jaw in two places, in a dispute which followed Carrasquel’s ouster as pilot.”17 The suspension led to a players’ strike, which caused a shutdown of the entire league. (The vacated season forced Venezuelan officials to send the Occidental league champion as the country’s representative to the Caribbean Series for the first time.)

 

Carrasquel never managed in the winter league again. However, he had a personal relationship with Rómulo Betancourt, president of Venezuela, and Carrsaquel returned to the diamond in the 1960s when Betancourt asked him to become the manager of the Vigilantes de Tránsito, an amateur league team. He managed the Tránsito club until shortly before his death.

 

The first Venezuelan major leaguer to win a game, throw a shutout, record a save, hit safely, and stroke a homerun, died from diabetic complications in Caracas in 1969 at the relatively young age of 57. Two years later, the major league trailblazer was inducted into the Venezuelan Sports Hall of Fame. In 2003 Alejandro was among a group of 14 – 11 players, one owner, one umpire, and one sportswriter – selected in the inaugural class for the newly-created Venezuelan Baseball Hall of Fame.

 

[Yankee4Life]

Dave Concepcion

 

 

It’s called the fall classic, and the 1975 World Series was indeed a “classic.” The Series waged between the Cincinnati Reds and the Boston Red Sox was one of the more memorable championship battles, as a single run decided five of the seven games. Cincinnati shortstop Dave Concepcion entered the Series hoping that the old saying “third time is a charm” would prove true. He had been to two other World Series, losing out both times: first to Baltimore in 1970 and then to Oakland in 1972.

 

In 1975 Boston won Game One at Fenway Park, shutting out the Reds by a 6-0 score, and the Reds were looking to balance the ledger before the Series headed to the Queen City. It was a rainy day in Boston on October 12 for Game Two. But the inclement weather did not hinder Boston starter Bill Lee. He held the Reds to one run and was clinging to a 2-1 lead entering the ninth inning. But after Johnny Bench’s leadoff double chased Lee from the game, Dick Drago and his blazing fastball moved to the hill.

 

After Drago retired Tony Perez on a groundout to shortstop with Bench taking third and George Foster flied to short left field, Concepcion came to bat with two outs and the tying run 90 feet away. Concepcion hit a 1-and-1 fastball into the dirt and the ball bounced high toward second base. Boston’s Denny Doyle raced to his right and backhanded the ball, but it was too late for the second baseman to make a play. Bench scored the tying run, and Concepcion was on first. Red Sox fans in the Fenway Park crowd fell silent. Concepcion stole second base, sliding past the bag but getting back safely. Ken Griffey then doubled him home, and the Reds won 3-2 to even the Series. “I was just looking to make contact,” Concepcion said later. “That’s all you can do in a situation like that against a fastball pitcher like Drago. I knew it was a hit once I got it past the pitcher.”

 

David Ismael (Benitez) Concepcion was born on June 17, 1948, Ocumare de la Costa, Aragua, Venezuela. His father, a truck driver, was against young Dave’s pursuing a career in baseball, instead hoping that he would make a living as perhaps a lawyer, banker, or doctor. After attending Agustin Codazzi High School, Dave worked as a bank teller and played for a local amateur baseball team. His coach, Wilfredo Calvino, was a scout for the Reds, and despite his father’s wishes, young Concepcion signed a contract with Calvino in September 1967 and joined Tampa in the Class-A Florida State League in 1968.

 

Concepcion’s time in the Reds’ minor-league chain was brief; by the end of the 1969 season he was playing for Triple-A Indianapolis. The 21-year-old hit .341 for the Indians in 167 at-bats, and showed a high aptitude on the basepaths. “Concepcion has the best baserunning instincts I’ve ever seen in a youngster,” said Indians manager Vern Rapp. “He stole 11 bases in 12 attempts and he was only with us about a month.”

 

Concepcion was promoted to the Reds for the 1970 season, but he faced veteran competition at shortstop in Woody Woodward and Darrel Chaney. When Concepcion showed up at camp, standing 6-feet-2 and weighing just 155 pounds, Pete Rose joked that he wouldn’t be in danger of pulling a muscle in his legs, that instead it would have to be a pulled bone. But Rose also acknowledged, “They tell me that the kid can play shortstop with a pair of pliers.”

 

Reds rookie manager Sparky Anderson took a liking to the youngster, as did hitting instructor Ted Kluszewski. Anderson made Concepcion the starter, mostly for his defensive ability. Anderson didn’t expect much offense from his young shortstop. But when Concepcion’s batting average rose to .270 in May, Kluszewski commented, “I’ve been saying all along that the kid’s gonna be a pretty good hitter.”

 

Concepcion’s unexpectedly good hitting could not keep him in the starting lineup. He made 14 errors through mid-June, and Anderson replaced him with the dependable Woodward. Woodward was a valuable commodity for the Reds, able to play every infield position and play them well. He solidified the position for a while, but by the time the second half of the season began, Concepcion was back in the lineup. He made only eight more errors and batted a respectable .260 for the season. The Reds steamrolled through the National League West Division and had little trouble sweeping Pittsburgh in the NLCS, holding the Pirates to three runs in the three games. They were not as fortunate in the World Series, losing in five games to the Baltimore Orioles.

 

Concepcion missed most of the 1971 exhibition season with a badly sprained right thumb, and when he returned to the team in late April, he was used as a utilityman, playing second base, third base, and the outfield. He got his shortstop job back in early May but struggled at the plate that season and in 1972 with .205 and .209 batting averages.

 

Concepcion was his own worst critic, and at times his being hard on himself caused subpar play to further spiral downward. Sparky Anderson decided that he needed a big-brother influence, and asked veteran Tony Perez to room with the youngster and mentor him. “He cannot stand 0-4 day. It kill him. I tell him very simple thing. ‘Don’t get your head down.’… ‘If you don’t hit now, you will next time.’… Things like this. Always I try to pick him up.” Perez also felt that marriage helped Concepcion settle down. (Dave and his bride, Delia, were married in 1972.)

 

Whatever the reason, Concepcion emerged as a top-flight player in 1973. He was named to the All-Star team for the first time. He batted.287 and provided some punch at the bottom of the Reds’ lineup. He posted the first five-hit performance of his career against San Francisco on July 5 – hit number five, in the bottom of the ninth inning, driving in the winning run.

 

Unfortunately for Concepcion and the Reds, his season was curtailed by an injury. On July 22 the Reds were breezing to a 6-0 victory over Montreal at home. Concepcion was having a fine afternoon with three hits and two runs scored. On first base in the seventh inning, he took off as Denis Menke hit a smash to Expos shortstop Larry Lintz. As Lintz threw Menke out at first base, Concepcion never stopped and raced to third base. As he slid into the base his left leg folded underneath him. The fibula, a long bone between the knee and ankle, was broken and his ankle was dislocated. His season was over. “It probably cost us the league championship,” said Rose. The Reds won the NL West, but lost to the New York Mets in the NLCS without their All-Star shortstop.

 

Concepcion rehabbed while playing winter ball in Venezuela. He came back healthy and began a string of four years (1974-77) in which he won a Gold Glove. In 1974 he had his first big offensive season, smacking 14 home runs and driving in 82 runs, while batting mostly sixth or seventh in the lineup. Concepcion brought another dimension to the Reds in addition to his offensive and defensive skills. Beginning in 1973 he stole 20 or more bases in six consecutive seasons, pilfering 41 in 1974.

 

The Reds finally reached the summit in 1975 and 1976, winning back-to-back World Series. In 1975 Concepcion hit .455 in the NLCS against the Pirates but, only .179 in the tense and gripping World Series against the Red Sox. The next year he hit .357 in the Series against the Yankees with a triple and three RBIs. On a team filled with All-Stars and future Hall of Famers, Concepcion was playing at a high level at the apex of his career. Former Brooklyn Dodgers great Pee Wee Reese, a Hall of Fame shortstop himself, offered a synthesis of Concepcion as a shortstop: “Mark Belanger may be a little smoother then Concepcion. Larry Bowa is very quick. Rick Burleson is a leader type. Bill Russell has an accurate arm. But no one does everything as well as Concepcion. It’s possible that no one ever has.”

 

Reds third-base coach Alex Grammas agreed with Reese’s assessment. Grammas had worked with Concepcion since Dave was a rookie, helping him to hone his craft. “There are some mighty good shortstops in the league today,” said Grammas. “But Concepcion is a notch ahead of them all in all-around ability because his bat is stronger and his range in the field is greater.”

 

Concepcion also famously used Riverfront Stadium’s artificial surface to his advantage. He started to develop a pain in his throwing arm, and perfected the art of throwing the ball on a bounce off the artificial turf to the first baseman. It was extremely helpful to him on groundballs hit in the hole between shortstop and third base. “I didn’t invent that throw,” Concepcion said. “I saw another fellow do it. I saw Brooks Robinson do it to Lee May here in 1970. Then when my arm hurt, I decided, ‘Why not try it?’”

 

After a couple of second-place finishes, in 1979 the Reds won the NL West to cap off the decade of the 1970s, but lost the NLCS in a three game sweep to Pittsburgh. By that time, many of the cogs in the Big Red Machine had moved on. “The other people move away, and all of a sudden you notice the antique work of art in the corner,” Bench said of Concepcion. Concepcion posted career highs in home runs (16) and RBIs (84) in 1979. He also claimed his fifth and final Gold Glove Award.

 

Concepcion remained the Reds’ regular shortstop through the 1985 season and made the last of his eight All-Star teams in 1982. In that season’s All-Star Game, in Montreal’s Olympic Stadium, he hit a two-run homer off Boston’s Dennis Eckersley, and was named the game’s Most Valuable Player. Before he hit his second-inning homer, he spoke with All-Star teammate and fellow Venezuelan Manny Trillo of the Philadelphia Phillies, “I told Manny, ‘I got a feeling I’m going to hit one out of the ballpark.’ He kidded me, but I said, ‘I’m gonna do it.’” And he did.

 

Concepcion retired after the 1988 season, having played his entire major-league career with the Reds. His successor at shortstop, Barry Larkin, began his own 19-year career in 1986, and eventually was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame. Concepcion was inducted into the Cincinnati Reds’ Hall of Fame in 2000, and his number 13 was retired by the Reds on August 25, 2007. Said Joe Morgan, “He’s the greatest shortstop I’ve ever played with or I’ve ever seen.” His final totals showed a .267 lifetime average with 2, 326 hits, 101 home runs, 950 runs batted in and 321 stolen bases.

 

In retirement, Concepcion returned to his native Venezuela, and later managed his hometown Aragua Tigers. Later, he became an executive in a trucking business.

 

Concepcion continued a fine lineage of shortstops from Venezuela. He grew up idolizing Chico Carrasquel and Luis Aparicio and trying to emulate them in the field. Later, countrymen Ozzie Guillen and Omar Vizquel grew up fantasizing about playing baseball in the major leagues like their hero, Dave Concepcion. Vizquel paid homage to his boyhood icon by wearing the number 13, saying Concepcion was “the one that I liked, the one that I looked up to.”

 

[laroquece]

Thanks Y4L, as a Venezuelan I thank you for reviewing Aparicio, Carrasquel and Concepción 👍🏻

[Yankee4Life]

4 hours ago, laroquece said:

Thanks Y4L, as a Venezuelan I thank you for reviewing Aparicio, Carrasquel and Concepción 👍🏻

 

You are welcome but it to be completely truthful with you it is me who should be thanking you because I learned about a guy (Alejandro Carrasquel) that I never heard of and I learned that he had an impressive career. And while I was familiar with Aparicio and Concepcion I certainly learned a lot from reading about them. Thank you again for telling me about these great Venezuelan ballplayers. I am sure that all the fans down there hold them in high regard.

[Yankee4Life]

My apologies for not updating this thread since April but the FTP area here was having some problems and I could not store my photos. Fortunately Trues figured out what the issue was and he fixed it. I sincerely thank him for what he did.

 

 

Frank Baker

 

 

In an era characterized by urbanization and rapid industrial growth, Frank “Home Run” Baker epitomized the rustic virtues that were becoming essential to baseball’s emerging bucolic mythology. Born and raised in a tiny farming community on Maryland’s Eastern Shore, Baker developed his powerful back, arms, and hands by working long hours on his father’s farm. Like the rugged president who defined the century’s first decade, the taciturn Baker spoke softly but carried a big stick — a 52-ounce slab of wood that he held down at the handle and swung with all the force he could muster. One of the Deadball Era’s greatest sluggers, Baker led the American League or tied for the lead in home runs every year from 1911 to 1914, and earned his famous nickname with two timely round-trippers against the New York Giants in the 1911 World Series. Baker later insisted that his hard-swinging mentality came from his country roots. “The farmer doesn’t care for the pitchers’ battle that resolves itself into a checkers game,” he once declared. “The farmer loves the dramatic, and slugging is more dramatic than even the cleverest pitching.”

 

John Franklin Baker was born on March 13, 1886, the second son of Franklin A. and Mary C. Baker, on a farm just outside Trappe, Md., a tiny community located just a few miles east of the Chesapeake Bay. In 1905, Baker’s exploits with a local amateur team caught the eye of Trappe native Preston Day, who recommended the youngster to future major leaguer Buck Herzog, then managing a semipro outfit in nearby Ridgely. After looking Baker over, Herzog signed Frank to a $5 per week contract, and moved him to third base.

 

The following year, Baker earned $15 per week playing for the semipro Sparrows Point Club in Baltimore, and in 1907 he turned down an offer to play in the Texas League and instead signed with an independent club in Cambridge, Md. At the end of the season he received a tryout with Baltimore of the Eastern League, but after Baker collected just two singles in 15 at-bats, manager Jack Dunn concluded that he “could not hit” and released him. In 1908, Baker joined the Reading Pretzels of the Class B Tri-State League, where he batted .299 in 119 games. In September, Connie Mack, the manager of the Philadelphia Athletics who was looking for a third baseman to replace the aging Jimmy Collins, purchased his contract.

 

After batting .290 in 31 at-bats at the end of the 1908 season, Baker was handed the starting job at third base at the outset of the 1909 campaign. He was an instant success, supplying a much needed dose of offense to the middle of the Philadelphia attack. On May 29, Baker became the first man to hit a ball over the right field fence at the newly constructed Shibe Park, one of his four home runs for the season. For his rookie year, Baker finished with a .305 batting average and .447 slugging percentage, good for fourth best in the American League. His 85 RBI placed him third in the league, and his 19 triples led the circuit. The young slugger also proved himself to be a deft handler of the stick, finishing third in the American League with 34 sacrifices.

 

A left-handed batter (though he threw from the right side), Baker positioned himself with his left foot firmly planted on the back line of the batter’s box, and his feet 18 inches apart in a slightly closed stance. At 5’11”, 173 lbs., Baker did not cut an imposing figure at the plate, but the ease with which he handled his famed 52-ounce bat spoke volumes about his physical strength. Asked to explain Baker’s power, Jake Daubert commented, “Frank Baker doesn’t look so big, but he has big wrists.” Observers noted that when Baker swung, he seemed to give the ball an extra push by violently snapping his wrists at the point of contact.

 

Baker also acquitted himself well on the base paths and in the field, though, like Honus Wagner, he appeared clumsy in his movements. Bowlegged and husky, the lumbering Baker ran “like a soft-shell crab” according to one observer. Nonetheless, he stole 20 or more bases every year from 1909 to 1913, and in his rookie season he led all third basemen in putouts, an accomplishment he repeated six more times during his thirteen-year career.

 

Baker’s outstanding rookie campaign was a major factor in the Athletics’ surge in the standings. Winning 27 more games than they had in 1908, the Mackmen finished in second place, just 3½ games behind the Detroit Tigers. In late August, the upstart A’s had actually enjoyed a 1½ game lead in the standings, before dropping three straight at Detroit’s Bennett Park. It was in the first game of this pivotal series that Baker was involved in one of the most controversial plays of the era, when Detroit superstar Ty Cobb spiked him in the forearm as Baker was attempting to tag Cobb out at third base. Frank had the wound wrapped and was able to stay in the game, but the play infuriated Mack, who went so far as to call Cobb the dirtiest player in baseball history. But a few days later, a photograph of the play taken by William Kuenzel of the Detroit News showed Baker reaching across the bag to tag Cobb, who was sliding away from the third baseman. The photograph vindicated Cobb, and led the Detroit Free Press to declare that Baker was a “soft-fleshed darling” for complaining about the play.

 

Although he would continue to develop into one of the league’s best players, helping the Athletics win their first World Series in 1910 and batting .334 in 1911 with a league-leading 11 home runs, as a result of the Cobb spiking the mild-mannered Baker carried a reputation for being easily intimidated on the field. It was this alleged weakness that John McGraw and the New York Giants attempted to exploit in the 1911 World Series, with disastrous results.

 

In the bottom of the sixth inning of Game One, the Giants’ Fred Snodgrass was on second and saw a chance to take third when Fred Merkle struck out on a pitch in the dirt. Following a strong throw from the catcher, Baker was blocking the base with the ball when Snodgrass went into the bag hard, spikes high, severely gashing Baker’s left arm. Initially signaling an out, the umpire called the play safe when he saw the ball rolling on the ground. The trainer came out to patch up Baker’s wounds, and the Giants went on to win 2-1. But the tone had been set, and Baker took his revenge with his bat.

 

With the score tied 1-1 in the bottom of the sixth of Game Two, Baker came to bat with one man on base and two outs, facing Giants’ lefthander Rube Marquard. After running the count to 1-1, Marquard threw Baker an inside fastball, which the slugger blasted over the right field fence for a two-run home run. That proved the difference, as the A’s held on to win the game 3-1 and even the Series. The following afternoon, Giants’ ace Christy Mathewson carried a 1-0 lead into the top of the ninth inning, when Baker came to the plate and again smashed a home run to right field, tying the score.

 

When the game moved into extra innings, the Giants once again tried to intimidate Baker. In the bottom of the tenth, Snodgrass again tried to take third, this time on a passed ball. Again, Baker blocked the base with the ball as Snodgrass came into the bag hard, spikes high, cutting into the third baseman’s arm a second time. This time Baker held onto the ball. The A’s went on to win the game in eleven innings, with Baker’s infield hit contributing to the winning two-run rally. After the game, a Philadelphia reporter approached the “battle-scarred hero,” observing the odor emanating from the bandages on Baker’s wounds. When pressed, Baker finally broke his silence, and blurted out, “Yes, Snodgrass spiked me intentionally. He acted like a swell-headed busher.”

 

The A’s went on to win the series 4-2, with Baker leading his team with nine hits, five runs batted in, and a .375 average. His inspired play forever dispelled the notion that he could be intimidated on the diamond, but more importantly, Baker’s two dramatic home runs on consecutive days off two future Hall of Fame pitchers propelled him into the upper echelon of baseball legends. Henceforth, for the rest of his life and beyond, he would be known as “Home Run” Baker. The nickname would become something of a curiosity for future generations, weaned as they were on a version of the game where home runs were a routine occurrence. But in the context of Baker’s time, when it was only the rare slugger who could hit as many as 10 home runs in a season, the name connoted mythic power and strength.

 

Despite his newfound fame, Baker remained a rugged individualist, retiring to his Maryland farm every offseason where he kept in shape by chopping wood and hunting for quail. Sportswriters who managed to track him down for a hot stove feature soon learned that the quickest way to get Frank to open up was to go hunting with him. “Frank is the best shot in Talbot County, and he’s wild about duck shooting,” one friend explained. “Whenever you look at him he’s either just shot fifteen or twenty ducks or is just going to, and he’ll call you blessed if you save him the trouble of bringing up the subject. After that he’ll discuss anything under the sun with you.”

 

From 1912 to 1914, Baker continued to lead the league in home runs every season, and also collected his first RBI title in 1912, with a career high 130, and a second in 1913, when he drove in 117 runs. Continuing to rank among the league leaders in assists and putouts, Baker was also widely regarded as one of the game’s best fielding third basemen. His all-around superlative play helped the Athletics win two more AL pennants and another World Championship in 1913, with Baker once again torching the Giants with a .450 batting average, one home run, and 7 RBI in the five game Series. After the Boston Braves shut down Baker and the Athletics in the 1914 Series, Mack began selling off his championship team. Baker, locked into a three-year contract, attempted to renegotiate for a higher salary, but Mack refused.

 

Both were stubborn men of principle and would not budge from their respective positions. Baker announced he would be perfectly happy back on the farm, “batting a few out with the boys.” Twenty-nine years old and at the peak of a Hall of Fame career, that is exactly what he did. In 1915 he played for the Trappe town team, the Upland club in suburban Pennsylvania, Atlantic City, and the Easton (Maryland) club of the independent Peninsula League. Many local towns held Home Run Baker Days, presenting their hero with gifts in return for his services for the day’s game.

 

Under pressure from Ban Johnson, Connie Mack sold Baker’s contract to the Yankees for the 1916 season, ending the slugger’s lengthy holdout, but after a year’s absence from the major leagues Baker was no longer the dominant offensive force he had been just two years earlier. He put together four solid seasons for New York, but never led the league again in any significant offensive category. Despite his fading skills, Baker was admired by his teammates for his work ethic and imposing locker room presence. Though Baker never led the league in home runs while a Yankee, he still anchored an offensive attack dubbed “Murderer’s Row” before Ruth had even joined the team. In 1919, aided tremendously by the Polo Grounds, the Yankees smashed a major league-leading 47 home runs, 10 of which came from Baker’s heavy stick.

 

Following the 1919 season, during the winter that New York became intoxicated by the news that Babe Ruth had been purchased from the Boston Red Sox, Baker was humbled by personal tragedy. An outbreak of scarlet fever struck the Baker home, killing Frank’s wife, the former Ottilie Tschantre. His two infant daughters also caught the disease, though they eventually recovered. Quarantined, paralyzed by grief, and preoccupied with taking care of his family, Baker announced that he had lost interest in baseball and would not play in 1920. But within a few months Baker was itching for baseball again. He played a few games for his old Upland club, and after a trip to New York in August, agreed to return to the Yankees for the 1921 season.

 

The game was changing as Baker took on the role of a part time player, and his teammate, Babe Ruth, redefined the home run. Perhaps envious of Ruth’s fame, Baker bemoaned the “rabbit ball” that made the home run a more frequent occurrence. “I don’t like to cast aspersions,” Baker later confided to a reporter, “but a Little Leaguer today can hit the modern ball as far as grown men could hit the ball we played with.” Baker decided to hang up his major league spikes after playing in just 66 games during the 1922 season. He married Margaret Mitchell of Baltimore, and returned to his Maryland farms.

 

Though Baker was looking to devote more time to his passions of family, farming, and duck hunting, he was pressed into service as player-manager of the Easton Farmers of the Class D Eastern Shore League in 1924. It was there that he discovered Jimmie Foxx. After Baker sold Foxx to Connie Mack, Baker was unceremoniously sacked as manager during the 1925 season, partly due to the “paltry” price he had received for the young slugger.

 

Continuing to work the family farms while raising his four children, Baker also served his community on the Trappe Town Board, acted as tax collector, was director of the State Bank of Trappe, and was active in the volunteer fire department. He never lost his love for baseball and was an avid supporter of organized Little League when it began. Inexplicably, considering that for many years Baker’s record was the greatest of any third baseman in baseball history, enshrinement in the Hall of Fame eluded him. When finally selected by the Veterans Committee in 1955, the taciturn Baker responded, “It’s better to get a rosebud while you’re alive than a whole bouquet after you’re dead.” Humble as ever, in his later years the man who had first popularized the home run and helped his teams win three world championships told a reporter, “I hope I never do anything to hurt baseball.”

 

His final totals were thirteen big league seasons, a .307 batting average, 103 triples, 96 home runs, 991 runs batted in and three World Championships.

 

[Yankee4Life]

James "Hippo" Vaughn

 

 

Some ballplayers are defined by one moment. Jim “Hippo” Vaughn was such a player. Mentioning his name evokes a knee-jerk reaction from a knowledgeable fan: “Oh, yes, he threw the double no-hitter with Fred Toney in 1917.” This is unfortunate because that game is but one in the career of a pitcher whose overall performance was excellent. From 1914 to 1920, Vaughn was the best lefty in the National League if not in the game, but his short career leaves him just this side of the Hall of Fame.

 

He began pitching professionally with Temple in the Texas League in 1906. He spent 1907 at Corsicana in the North Texas League, then moved on to Hot Springs in the Arkansas State League, going 9-1 and getting a shot with the New York Highlanders. He debuted with New York on June 19, 1908. His work for 2⅓ innings in two games showed some wildness with five walks, and he finished the season with Scranton of the New York State League, his 2-4 record offset by six complete games, a shutout, and a fine 2.39 ERA.

 

Vaughn rejoined the Highlanders at spring training in 1910 and so impressed manager George Stallings that he gave Vaughn the opening day assignment. Lyle Spatz notes in New York Yankee Openers that at twenty-two Vaughn was, and remains, the youngest pitcher ever to start the opening game for the Yankees. He faced the Boston Red Sox and Eddie Cicotte on April 14 at Hilltop Park. After a rough start in which he gave up three runs in the first three innings and another in the fifth, Vaughn settled down, and he and Joe Wood (relieving Cicotte) pitched shutout ball until the game was called on account of darkness after 14 innings with the score tied 4-4. The game was an indication of good things to come. Overshadowed by Russ Ford‘s brilliant rookie season of 26-6 with a 1.65 ERA, Vaughn went 13-11 for the season with an excellent 1.83 ERA, 18 complete games, and five shutouts.

 

Hal Chase became manager of the Highlanders late in 1910 and returned for the full 1911 season. Chase, like Stallings before him, was impressed with Vaughn and selected him for the April 12 opener in Philadelphia against Chief Bender. Both men pitched beautifully, with Vaughn winning a 2-1 decision and helping himself with a single. The rest of the season was a disappointment as Vaughn finished up 8-10 with a 4.39 ERA.

 

Vaughn got into the opener in New York on April 12, 1912, against Boston and Joe Wood, recording the last two outs in the ninth inning after Ray Caldwell surrendered four runs, giving Boston a 5-3 win. From that point on, Vaughn was 2-8 with an ERA of 5.14 and a shutout, until June 26, when New York sold him to Washington for the waiver price. He did better in Washington, going 4-3 with a 2.89 ERA.

 

Washington sold him to Kansas City of the American Association, where he finished the year weakly, 2-3 while giving up over five runs a game.

 

The 1913 season found Vaughn back in Kansas City, where he recovered his form with a record of 14-13 and an ERA of 2.05 along with a no-hitter against Toledo on June 23. The Chicago Cubs took a chance on him that paid off immediately. He finished the season 5-1 with six complete games, two shutouts, and an ERA of 1.45.

 

Sometimes a player, a team, and a city come together almost magically. Such was the case with Vaughn, the Cubs, and Chicago. He had found a home.

 

Vaughn’s 1914 season was pretty much what the next six seasons would be: 21-13 with a 2.05 ERA. Indeed, looking at Vaughn’s numbers during this period is like looking at Warren Spahn‘s career over any half-dozen years — 17 to 23 wins, a high percentage of complete games, 260 to 300 innings pitched, good control, a decent number of strikeouts, and an ERA below the league average. Of course, Spahn did it more than twice as long. Vaughn’s 1915 showing was a bit off, 20-12 but with an ERA of 2.87 that was the worst of his prime years and the only season that he had fewer complete games (18) than wins. He slipped to 17-15 in 1916 but brought his ERA down to 2.20. As further proof of his consistency, he pitched four shutouts each season.

 

Amid these good times, Vaughn married Edna Coburn DeBold on February 11, 1916. On a less happy note, sometime during these years he acquired the nickname “Hippo” that followed him all his life. Vaughn was a large man, about six-foot-four, with most references listing him between 215 and 230 pounds. There is some evidence that he weighed close to three hundred pounds later in his career, and his slow, side-to-side, lumbering gait didn’t help. What Vaughn thought of the nickname isn’t known.

From 1914 to 1916, Vaughn was a very fine pitcher. From 1917 to 1919, he was a great one. The only National League lefthanders to put together a better string of seasons would be Carl Hubbell from 1933 to 1937 and Sandy Koufax from 1962 to 1966.

In 1917 Vaughn established himself as a dominant pitcher. He started a career-high 38 games, completed 27 (also his best, equaling it in 1918), struck out 195 (career best), went 23-13, and topped it off with a sparkling 2.01 ERA.

 

The highlight of the year came at Weeghman Park on May 2, when he and Fred Toney of Cincinnati both threw no-hitters through nine innings. Vaughn faced the minimum 27 batters, one baserunner caught stealing and two others erased on double plays. He struck out ten while walking two and allowing only Greasy Neale to hit a ball out of the infield. It all unraveled in the tenth. With one out, Larry Kopf singled to right. Neale flied to center for the second out. Then, in a moment of irony that occurs only in baseball, Hal Chase hit a hard liner that Cy Williams couldn’t hold. Kopf moved to third on the play. Chase stole second. Jim Thorpe then hit a slow roller toward third that catcher Art Wilson and Vaughn both chased. Vaughn caught up with the ball and seeing that he couldn’t get Thorpe at first, threw home to Wilson to catch Kopf trying to score from third. Wilson still had his back turned, and Vaughn’s throw hit him on the shoulder. Kopf scored easily, and Chase, thinking the ball had bounced far enough away, tried to score, but Wilson recovered the ball and tagged him for the third out. That was the final score, 1-0, as Toney retired the Cubs in the bottom of the inning. Christy Mathewson, who was managing the Reds and knew a bit about pitching, called it the greatest pitching performance he’d ever seen. Vaughn, for understandable reasons, didn’t like to talk about the game.

 

The 1918 season began with Chicago in high hopes. The White Sox had beaten the Giants in the World Series the fall before, and Cubs fans figured it was their turn. They had good reason. Vaughn was coming off a great season, and the Cubs had acquired none other than Grover Cleveland Alexander from Philadelphia. Alexander started off well, but, as the Philadelphia front office cynically gambled would happen, was drafted into the army and lost for the season. Vaughn responded magnificently.

 

He started off by beating the Cardinals on April 18, helping himself with two hits and scoring two runs. On April 24 in the Cubs’ home opener, Vaughn pitched a 2-0, one-hit masterpiece against the same Cardinals (Rogers Hornsby got the only hit in the second inning), striking out six and walking just two while letting no one get to second base. He came down with the flu in June, but the setback was temporary. Vaughn beat the Cardinals, 1-0, on another one-hitter on June 26. He shut out Cincinnati, 2-0, on June 29, and made the day a doubleheader sweep, having welcomed James Leslie Vaughn Jr., the Vaughns’ only child, that morning. Vaughn was unbeatable for most of the season, another example being his 1-0 win over the Giants as he drove in the only run of the game with a single in the twelfth inning.

The season was shortened to 140 games and ended on September 2 as the government enacted a “Fight or Work” decree in support of the war effort. Vaughn tailed off a bit as the season wound down, but his exceptional work had propelled the Cubs to the pennant 10.5 games ahead of the Giants. Vaughn captured the pitchers’ Triple Crown, leading the National League in wins with 22 (against just 10 losses), strikeouts with 148, and ERA at 1.74. Equally impressive is his eight shutouts, which stood as the National League record for southpaws (tied with Lefty Leifield of Pittsburgh in 1906 and teammate Lefty Tyler in 1918) until Hubbell threw 10 in 1933.

 

Vaughn didn’t let up in the Series against the Red Sox, but he had little luck against three excellent pitchers. Fellow lefty Babe Ruth beat Vaughn, 1-0, in Game One. Carl Mays, who would win over two hundred games in his career, took Game Three from Vaughn, 2-1. Vaughn then shut out another two-hundred-game winner, Sad Sam Jones, 3-0, in Game Five. His brilliant work included three complete games, three earned runs, an ERA of 1.00 — and a 1-2 record. The Cubs lost the Series in six games.

 

Vaughn essentially duplicated his 1918 effort the next season, going 21-14 with 141 strikeouts, his usual four shutouts, and a 1.79 ERA. The Cubs, however, went 75-65 and slipped to third place. In hindsight, the 1920 season showed some signs that not all was well. The Cubs continued to decline, going 75-79 and finishing fifth, so Vaughn’s 19-16 record looked good in comparison. However, his ERA was a high (for him) 2.54, though near his career ERA of 2.49. His strikeouts fell to 131, slightly off his usual performance. What might have raised alarms was Vaughn’s giving up 301 hits in 301 innings, the first time he had surrendered a hit an inning since 1912. Nevertheless, no one thought the end was near.

 

The 1921 season was a flameout as Vaughn went 3-11 with an ERA of 6.01. His demise as a major league pitcher came in a 6-5 loss to the Giants at the Polo Grounds on July 9. In the bottom of the fourth inning with one out Giant catcher Frank (Pancho) Snyder rocked Vaughn for a grand slam home run. The next batter, pitcher Phil Douglas, applied the coup de grace with the first of his two major league homers. Manager Johnny Evers pulled Vaughn from the game, and that was the end.

 

What followed was a comedy of errors to all but the participants. The New York Times reported on July 11 that neither Evers nor anyone from the Cubs organization had seen Vaughn since the game, noting that he would draw a suspension if and when he returned to the club. Also in trouble was catcher Bob O’Farrell, who had been suspended for not following team rules. The Chicago Daily Tribune, having called Vaughn “A.W.O.L.” on July 11, noted on July 15 that he was back in Chicago. The Times followed up on July 20, saying that Cubs president William Veeck would trade Vaughn if he could get appropriate value for him.

 

On August 1, the Tribune reported that Vaughn, “under indefinite suspension for failure to keep in fighting trim,” would probably wind up pitching for the Beloit Fairies, a semi-pro team owned by the Fairbanks-Morse “company.” A week later, on August 8, the Tribune noted that Evers having been fired, new manager Bill Killefer and Cub president Veeck were ready to reinstate Vaughn pending approval from Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. Ignoring Killefer and Veeck, Landis suspended Vaughn for at least the remainder of the season. The Tribune of August 10 summarized Landis’ unique logic in suspending Vaughn, who had reason to believe he was finished as far the Cubs were concerned: “The judge in suspending the big pitcher declared Vaughn, after notification of his suspension by the Cubs, had signed a three year contract to pitch for the Fairbanks-Morse semi-pro nine of Beloit, Wis. . . . In so doing the judge declared Vaughn deliberately ignored his contract with the Cubs and aligned himself with an outlaw team which harbors ineligible players and plays outlaw clubs.” The Tribune summed matters up through understatement the next day: “The affair has been bungled.” And conveniently forgetting everything it had said on Evers’ behalf at Vaughn’s expense, The Sporting News on August 11 and 18 suggested that the Cubs’ fall was primarily Evers’ fault, that the players had had their fill of his “Old Crabbing Habits” (August 11) and were delighted to have Killefer at the helm!

 

Several explanations arise, but none has ever been confirmed. The most common is that Vaughn had a sore arm, tempting given his age and the possibility that his weight had caught up with him. Too, the Cubs fell precipitously, going 65-89 and landing in seventh place under their new manager, Johnny Evers. Evers’ manic personality had helped the Cubs enormously in the glory years from 1906 to 1910 and the Braves in 1914, but it didn’t sit well when he became a manager as the team went 41-55 under him. Vaughn, a quiet professional who went about his business, seems to have found Evers particularly annoying and left the team late in June, official reports saying he had a sore arm. As for the Cubs, they did no better under new manager Bill Killefer, Alexander’s catcher in Philadelphia, going 23-34.

The explanation that Vaughn had arm trouble loses a little credence in light of his performance with Beloit in the Midwest League-either an independent or even outlaw league, or most likely a semi-pro league-where he compiled an 11-1 record with 99 strikeouts against nine walks and an ERA approximated at 2.01. Of course, the Midwest League wasn’t the National League, so a pitcher with Vaughn’s skill and experience could likely have dominated over inferior talent even with a sore arm. In any case, reported the Tribune on January 13, 1922, the Beloit Fairies liked Vaughn well enough to give him a three-year contract. Vaughn would pitch in various minor and semi-pro leagues, mostly with Beloit, the Logan Squares of Chicago, and the Chicago Mills until 1937, when he was 49.

Altogether, Vaughn went 223-145 in minor league and semi-pro ball, most of those decisions coming after he left the Cubs. With his major league record of 178-137, Vaughn is one of the very few pitchers credited with four hundred or more wins. Cy Young and Walter Johnson, of course, got theirs in the majors. The others — Alexander, Joe McGinnity, Kid Nichols, and Spahn — while getting some wins outside the big leagues still got the majority in the majors. It’s still an exclusive club.

Vaughn considered making a comeback with the Cubs, but it never worked out. He pitched some batting practice, and that was it. Away from baseball, he was an assembler for a refrigeration products company. He spent his life in Chicago, dying May 29, 1966.

 

Vaughn is clearly the best lefthander the Cubs have ever had. He threw hard, had good control, gave up less than a hit an inning, and was stingy with runs. His 151 wins is miles ahead of Larry French‘s 95. He won twenty games five times in seven years. No other Cub southpaw did it more than twice (Jake Weimer in 1903 and 1904). No Cub lefty achieved it after Vaughn in 1919 until Dick Ellsworth did so in 1963. No one’s done it since. Vaughn was an excellent pitcher for seven years and a great one for some of that time, but except for one day in 1917, he’s pretty much forgotten.

 

[Yankee4Life]

Ken Williams

 

 

When a ballplayer leads the league in multiple offensive categories for only one season, it may be said that he had a “career year.” This term may take on even more significance if the player never comes close to duplicating the statistics he put up in his magical season. One might suggest that Ken Williams of the St. Louis Browns enjoyed such a year in 1922. The Browns had an explosive team that season, and Williams was their power hitter and an RBI machine. He led the American League in home runs (39) and RBIs (155).

 

The St. Louis left fielder was the first player in the major leagues to hit more than 30 home runs and steal 30 bases (37). He also became the first player to hit more home runs in a season (37) than he had strikeouts (31). Williams hit a homer in six consecutive games from July 28 through August 2. On August 7 he became the first American Leaguer to hit two home runs in one inning.

On a team that was known for annually finishing in the basement of the American League, the 1922 St. Louis Browns fielded an offensive juggernaut. Williams was a big part of it and helped keep the Browns in the pennant race all season. He became the first batter in the American League to hit three home runs in one game. He achieved that feat against the Chicago White Sox on April 22, 1922, at Sportsman’s Park. The onslaught propelled Williams to slug seven homers in nine games between April 22 and 29.

Kenneth Roy Williams was born on June 28, 1890, in Grants Pass, Oregon, to Britton and Carrie Williams. Britton worked as a real-estate agent. Williams did not attend school after the eighth grade, but worked in a box factory. He found time to play semipro ball around the state, showing enough promise that he signed a contract with Regina of the Western Canada League. Although he was a natural right-hander, Williams batted from the left side of the batter’s box. He showed his versatility, playing every position on the diamond, except catcher. A lean, gangly fellow at 6 feet tall, Williams looked out of place on a baseball field.

 

“I’ll never forget the first time I saw Kenny Williams in a ballgame,” remembered Portland Beavers manager Walter McCreedie. “It was on the Portland field in 1912. The Oakland Oaks had an outfielder on the sick list, and somebody suggested they send to Grants Pass to get Williams to fill in. What a big, gawky, overgrown kid he was! He didn’t even know how to wear a baseball uniform and he had a home-made pair of baseball shoes through which he had driven spikes. He was the funniest looking ballplayer I ever saw. But none of us laughed at him the first time he went to bat. All he did was to bust four balls on the nose in as many successive times at bat, every one of them a screeching line drive.”

McCreedie was not the only one to take notice of the youngster’s batting prowess. After hitting .340 through the first 79 games for Spokane of the Northwest League in 1915, he was picked up by the Cincinnati Reds. It was noted of Williams that he “is showing lots of speed for a big fellow … and is some hitter.” He also demonstrated a fine ability to lay down a bunt. He started 60 games in the outfield for the Reds, mostly in left field. He hit .242 for the year.

But Williams’s bright outlook was curtailed when his hitting went south and Reds manager Charley Herzog took issue with his fielding ability. The Reds also needed to get down to the 21-player limit by May 1, which made Williams expendable. Cincinnati had an optional agreement with Spokane, so he was returned to the minor-league club.

 

Ken returned to Spokane, but he was then purchased by Portland of the Pacific Coast League. He split the 1916 season between Spokane and Portland. He was with Portland again the following year, hitting a robust .313, which led the team, and he smacked an astounding 24 round-trippers. Against Vernon on June 3, Williams hit three homers, and also added a double to his day’s work at the plate.

 

The Browns’ business manager (general manager in today’s parlance), Bob Quinn, was a shrewd judge of talent. He signed Williams for the 1918 season, but like many players, Williams was called to active duty for the World War, and he missed much of the season.

 

By the time Williams found his way into the everyday lineup for the 1920 season, quite a team was being but together in the Gateway City. Starting with George Sisler at first base, the team was loaded with offensive firepower. Williams’s outfield mates, Baby Doll Jacobson in center field and Jack Tobin in right, were superior batsmen. Hank Severeid was a gifted receiver behind the plate. Urban Shocker led the mound corps.

The Browns finished a distant 21½ games behind pennant winner Cleveland in 1920. Yet their record of 76-77-1 placed them fourth in the standings. It was the first time the Browns found themselves in the first division since 1908. Williams batted .307 with 10 home runs and 72 RBIs.

 

Lee Fohl took the reins of the Browns in 1921, replacing Jimmy Burke. He had managed the Indians a decade before with limited success. Fohl was considered a good manager who knew baseball but might have been a little slow on the trigger. He had almost no rapport with the players. He led the Browns to a third-place finish, and the team appeared to be on the verge of competing for the pennant the following year. Fohl and Quinn both thought that some tinkering might be needed, but nothing major in the way of personnel changes.

 

After the 1921 World Series, won by the New York Giants over the Yankees, Bob Meusel and Babe Ruth took part in a barnstorming tour. This was a common practice among players of the day to earn some extra money during the offseason. However, the National Commission, which was then the governing body of baseball, forbade members of the teams that played in the World Series to barnstorm. Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis fined Meusel and Ruth $3,362 apiece, which equaled the players’ shares from the World Series. In addition, each player was suspended for the first six weeks of the 1922 season.

 

It is important to note that Ruth was idle until May 20. In that period, Williams knocked 11 home runs out of ballparks across the American League. He ended with 39 home runs to Ruth’s 35. Williams also drove in more runs than Babe, 155 to 99. He had 179 more at-bats than Ruth. Comparisons between the two players began to appear from writers’ pens in national magazines. But Williams refused to buy into the debate. “I have never made any claim that I could equal Babe Ruth as a home-run hitter,” he said. “On the other hand, I know I am not his equal. No player in the game could hope to match Ruth over a full season’s course. I have done my best. But I have never had in mind trying to beat Babe for I know it can’t be done.”

Williams attributed his success at the plate to the growing confidence he had in his ability. He used a 48-ounce bat, saying, “… I always favor a heavy one because when you connect with the ball with every ounce of strength in your frame, the weight of the bat is going to help the ball to travel. That’s my theory anyway and it seems to work.”

 

On July 23 the Yankees acquired third baseman Joe Dugan from the Boston Red Sox. Much to the dismay of owners and managers around the league, the addition of Dugan was a boon for the Yankees. After the trade, they faced off against the Browns in a four-game series. After Urban Shocker won the first game 8-0 on a six-hitter, the Yankees won the next three to leave St. Louis with a half-game lead. Dugan collected five hits and walked twice, and the value of his addition to the Yankees lineup was immediately evident.

The Browns, although compiling a 93-61 record on the year, finished in second place to the Yankees by 1½ games. They dominated all their opponents except the Yankees; they were 8-14 against New York. Although the Browns won the American League pennant in 1944, it was during the war years and many of the first-line players around baseball were serving in World War II. The 1922 edition was generally thought of as the greatest Browns team of all time. Sisler hit an astounding .420, leading the league in triples (18), hits (246), and runs (134). Shocker led the league with 149 strikeouts.

 

Williams’s power came in spurts during the season. He hit a homer in six consecutive games between July 28 and August 2, and also smacked five homers between September 4 and September 9.

 

The heart and soul of the Browns, George Sisler, was sidelined for the entire 1923 season. He was diagnosed with sinusitis. His optic nerves became infected, and at times he would see double. Williams summed up his own thoughts, as well of those of all Browns fans, by saying, “If Sisler can’t play, we’re ruined. We can fill any other gaps that exist, but there/s no other Sisler.” Although Williams’s power numbers dipped a bit in 1923, he still managed to knock out 29 homers and drive in 91 runs. He set career highs in batting average (.357), doubles (37), and hits (198). Despite Williams’s best efforts to pick up the slack, the Browns finished in the middle of the pack in the league.

Ken Williams suffered a season-ending injury on August 14, 1925. The slugger stepped in against Cleveland pitcher By Speece in the eighth inning. Speece had thrown three wide ones to Williams, but the fourth offering from the right-hander smashed into Williams’s head, just behind his right ear. He was knocked unconscious, but quickly regained his senses. Williams decided to take a shower and make his way back to the team hotel. At that instant, Indians second baseman Chick Fewster wandered into the clubhouse to check on Williams. Fewster had suffered the same type of injury, and almost lost his life. He warned Williams to bypass the shower. Ken heeded the advice. X-rays revealed a concussion. Williams read later in the year about a player in the minor leagues who suffered a similar injury, took a cold shower, and died, possibly of shock.

 

Williams spent ten days in the hospital before returning to Oregon to recuperate. The Browns finished in third place in 1925. Browns fans were left to wonder what might have been if Williams had stayed healthy for the whole season.

 

Bob Quinn and some partners purchased the Boston Red Sox for $125,000 in 1923. The Red Sox were wallowing in the depths of the American League, finishing in either seventh or eighth place every season since 1922. Figuring that he would need an infusion of leadership, and some talent, Quinn dealt for both Williams and Browns shortstop Wally Gerber before the 1928 season.

 

“These two timers seem to play the game for the pure joy of it,” wrote one scribe. “They show more spirit than the players half their age. I imagine some day we will have to carry them off the field.” The statement was indeed prophetic. On August 8, 1929, Gerber, playing second base, went back on a ball as Williams came charging in for it from center field. Neither heard the other calling for the catch. They collided, each cracking their skulls. Both players were carried from the field, effectively ending their major-league careers.

 

Williams compiled a .319 batting average for his career, stroked 196 home runs, and drove in 916 runs. He also smacked 285 doubles over his 14-year career.

Though his major-league career was over, Williams returned to the Pacific Coast League in 1930, with the Portland Beavers, batting .350 with 14 home runs in 148 games. He appeared in only 20 games the following season before retiring from baseball for good. He retired to his hometown, Grants Pass, Oregon. Williams worked as a policeman and owned the Owl Billiard Parlor in Grants Pass. He died on January 22, 1959, as the result of a heart condition that he had suffered from for many years.

 

Ken Williams indeed lived in anonymity when compared to Babe Ruth, or even with some of his teammates on the Browns. The baseball correspondent who covered the St. Louis clubs for The Sporting News illustrated the point with the following anecdote: “A photographer was told to go out and get a picture of Ken Williams swinging at the plate – and the well meaning camera artist proceeded to shoot Bill Jacobson. … Imagine the text and illustration that would have been incident to Babe Ruth hitting three home runs in one ball game! Sporting editors would have wired every syndicate in operation to rush story and photographs. But Ken hits three of them and a photographer on the ground doesn’t even know which is Ken or Bill Jacobson. …”

 

 

[Yankee4Life]

Vean Gregg

 

 

At 6′ 2″ and 180 lbs, Vean Gregg was a lanky, loose-jointed southpaw who had a world of confidence, a wicked curve ball, and a roller-coaster career hampered by arm injuries. As a 26-year-old rookie for the 1911 Cleveland Naps, Gregg was only three years removed from pitching in the deepest bush of the remote Pacific Northwest when he won 23 games and led the American League with a 1.80 ERA. Both Ty Cobb and Eddie Collins called him the best left-hander in the league, and Hall of Fame umpire Billy Evans said Gregg was “one of the greatest southpaws I ever called balls and strikes for.” The only twentieth-century pitcher to win at least 20 games in his first three years in the major leagues, Gregg is Cleveland’s career won-lost percentage leader (with a minimum of 100 decisions). Traded by the Naps in 1914 to the Boston Red Sox, where he floundered and was eventually demoted to the minors, Gregg retired after pitching for the Philadelphia Athletics in 1918. Out of the game for three years, he staged a comeback, and after a six-year absence made a miraculous return to the American League at the age of 40. A legendary minor league pitcher, Gregg won 224 games in 15 seasons of organized professional baseball.

Gregg initially made a name for himself as a pitcher by winning amateur and semi-pro games in the Palouse region of eastern Washington. By the time he was 23 years old, he was a sandlot star, a hired gun pitching for numerous town, semi-pro and college teams. (He remains the only major leaguer to have pitched for South Dakota State University.) An obvious candidate for organized professional baseball, Gregg delayed pursuing it because he felt he could earn more money plastering during the week and pitching for $25 a game on weekends. “I did not go into professional baseball any sooner because I could make more money outside than I could inside,” Gregg later explained. “In my semi-pro days I played baseball all over Washington, Montana and Idaho. On these barn-storming tours a player can often make more money than he could as a member of a regular league.”

 

In March 1908 Gregg relented and attended a tryout with the Spokane Indians Northwestern League team. He impressed the Indians’ management, but apparently did not care for the team’s offer. After pitching a few early-season games for an industrial league team in Spokane, Gregg finally made his organized professional baseball debut in the short-lived Class D Inland Empire League in June. Pitching for the Baker City (Oregon) Nuggets, Gregg won seven of eight games, dominating a circuit which included the likes of future major leaguers Jack Fournier, Pete Standridge, Les “Tug” Wilson, and Tracy Baker.

 

In 1909 Spokane manager Bob Brown was able to sign Gregg for $185 a month. In a season when the Spokane team won 100 games and finished 34 games over .500, Gregg’s won-lost record was a mysterious 6-13. He had a knack for losing close contests, but mainly was ineffective due to arm problems suffered from “practicing too much.” However, after watching two of Gregg’s better games, Cleveland scout Jim “Deacon” McGuire, outbidding Pittsburgh and Detroit, bought Gregg from Spokane for $4,500 and two players. This was reportedly the largest amount ever paid for a player from the West Coast. At the time his contract was purchased on July 8, 1909, Gregg’s record was just 3-6 but he had struck out 82 batters over his past eight games.

 

Seeming a bit indignant and unappreciative of an opportunity, Gregg refused to sign a $250 a month contract offered by Cleveland for 1910. Sold on option to Portland, Gregg had a breakout, historic season. He won 32 games, including a record 14 shutouts, struck out 379 batters in 387 innings, and hurled four one-hitters and a no-hitter. His best game came on August 16 against Portland’s main pennant rival, the Oakland Oaks, when Gregg struck out 16 batters in a twelve-inning, one-hit shutout. In the no-hitter at Portland’s Vaughn Street Ballpark on September 2, Gregg won 2-0 and struck out 14 Los Angeles Angels, including eight men in a row, only one of whom managed even to foul a pitch. Behind the strong arm of Gregg, the Beavers won the Pacific Coast League championship. Years later, whenever old West Coast sportswriters or ballplayers were asked to pick their all-time PCL teams, inevitably they would include Vean Gregg based upon his dominating 1910 season. Even the local census taker was impressed; that year he listed Gregg’s occupation as “star pitcher.”

 

In 1911 Gregg joined a “disorganized” Cleveland team that included a very old Cy Young, an aging but still productive Napoleon Lajoie, and a 23-year-old Joe Jackson, who hit an astounding .408 that year. Finishing under .500 and in the second division the year before, the Naps lost revered right-hander Addie Joss when he took ill and died on April 14. However, the team overcame that setback and improved under interim manager George Stovall, finishing the season with a winning record and in third place.

One day shy of his 26th birthday, Gregg came out of the bullpen and made his major league debut on April 12, 1911, at St. Louis, giving up three runs in four relief innings while also hitting a double. After striking out Detroit’s Sam Crawford twice in a second relief appearance six days later, Gregg moved into the starting rotation and won his first start, 5-2, against Chicago. By mid-July he was the talk of the American League. When he beat Philadelphia on July 27, he won his tenth consecutive game and ran his record to 18-3. After winning a July game against New York, Hal Chase called Gregg “the leading pitcher of the league, and in my opinion, the most marvelous southpaw I have ever looked at.”

 

Gregg’s pitching motion was described as “a free and easy delivery, and his wind-up is a graceful sweep above the head that bothers the batters not a little.” In addition to throwing overhand, he would mix in “an under-hand toss and cross-fire for variety.” While his fastball was described as “good,” he was known for his curve ball, a pitch that “drops between three and four feet in a space of eight or ten feet, possibly less.” Gregg had such good control of his curve ball that he would not hesitate to throw it with the bases loaded and a full count on the batter.

Whether it was the strain of throwing too many curve balls, or “practicing too much,” or throwing too many innings for Portland, Gregg experienced recurring arm pain over the years. He would have periods where the arm “never felt better,” but would also suffer through entire seasons where he was a shadow of his former self. With a good arm, he was very, very good. With a bad arm, he sat on the bench and lost opportunities.

 

Gregg’s arm was sore the latter part of his rookie season, and after beating Chicago 9-2 on September 4 he did not pitch again. He went home to Clarkston in early October, missing the Naps postseason series with Cincinnati. In addition to leading the league in ERA, Gregg also led the circuit in fewest hits per nine innings. He was especially adept at beating Chicago, besting the White Sox seven times without a loss during the 1911 campaign, including three wins where he matched up against Sox ace Ed Walsh. Named in The Sporting News as a member of the “all-American League” team, Gregg received a $500 bonus from the Naps, bringing his total 1911 salary to $2,600. “Unless something unexpected happens,” the Chicago Tribune wrote, “he promises to take a place among the great left-handers of baseball history.”

Gregg had his last outstanding season in the major leagues in 1913. He started the season off underweight, the result of illness during spring training, but by June he had regained his strength and ran off 32 consecutive scoreless innings, beating Boston, Philadelphia, Washington and Detroit during the streak. When Gregg beat the league-leading A’s and Chief Bender on August 17 in front of the largest crowd in League Park history, the Naps were in second place, only 5½ games back of Philadelphia. However, arm soreness again crept its way into Gregg’s season. He struck out Ty Cobb three times on September 4, only to lose when Cobb drove in Sam Crawford with the game winner in the twelfth inning. With his arm growing lamer as the season entered its final stages, Gregg became a 20-game winner for the third time on October 1, beating the Tigers 8-1. But it was too little, too late, and the Naps ultimately faded to a third-place finish under new manager Joe Birmingham.

 

That fall, in a postseason series with Pittsburgh, Gregg’s arm came back to life. He beat the Pirates in the second game, 2-1, in eleven innings, striking out nine. Then, on October 13 at Forbes Field, he may have pitched the best game of his career. In a pitcher’s duel with Claude Hendrix that went 13 innings and tied the best-of-seven series at three games apiece, Gregg scattered five singles, struck out the unheard of total of 19, including Honus Wagner twice, and doubled and scored the game’s only run. Cleveland manager Birmingham and former manager Lajoie called it the greatest game a Cleveland pitcher had ever thrown, including Joss’s perfect game and Bob Rhoads‘s no-hitter. Home plate umpire Bob Emslie said, “I have seen all of the great ones; Rusie, Radbourne, Mathewson; but I am confident that I never saw any pitcher show the stuff that Gregg had.” Dots Miller, the Pirates’ first baseman said, “I can’t understand how anyone ever hits that fellow.”

In the spring of 1914 the Federal League war wreaked havoc on the diminishing finances of Cleveland owner Charles Somers. Losing ace right-hander Cy Falkenberg to the Feds, Somers did not want to lose Gregg, too, and signed him in March to a reported three-year $8,000 contract. When Gregg’s balky left arm reared its head and his disposition turned surly playing for a poor team, Somers decided to reduce his risk and on July 28 traded Gregg to the Boston Red Sox for three players. On a last-place team which had won only 30 of 91 games, the sore-armed Gregg had still managed a 9-3 record.

 

Gregg, while well paid, spent the next two and a half seasons dealing with his sore arm and stewing on the Red Sox bench. He won a total of nine games for Boston during that time and was an afterthought on a team that won the World Series in both 1915 and 1916. In 1917 Gregg was optioned to Providence, where he had one of the finest seasons in International League history, winning 21 games and leading the league in ERA and strikeouts.

In one of Connie Mack‘s infamous sell-offs, Gregg, who had been brought back to Boston after the 1917 season, was traded with two players and $60,000 cash to the Philadelphia A’s for Joe Bush, Wally Schang, and Amos Strunk. Making his first comeback to the majors, Gregg suffered along with a poor A’s team in 1918, posting a 9-14 record. When the season was cut short by the World War I work-or-fight order, Gregg, who was too old to serve, went to the Alberta, Canada, ranch he had purchased in 1912 and dropped out of the game for three years.

 

When crop prices hit rock bottom in 1921, Gregg abandoned the farm and decided to get back into baseball, returning to the league where he never failed. Pitching for the Seattle Indians he solidified his esteemed standing in Pacific Coast League history when he won 19 games in 1922, led the league in ERA in 1923, and in 1924 won 25 games to lead Seattle to its first-ever PCL championship. Pitching as he had for Cleveland over ten years earlier, the 39-year-old Gregg became the object of a bidding war. Clark Griffith and the Washington Senators won, paying $10,000 and giving three players to Seattle. In a repeat performance from his halcyon days with Cleveland, Gregg was a holdout in the spring of 1925.

Gregg was described as “attempting an experiment that is absolutely original. No other hurler ever attempted a major league comeback – his second at that – at such an advanced age.” Working mostly out of the bullpen for Griffith’s Senators in 1925, Gregg pitched in 26 games for the repeat pennant-winners, winning two, losing two, and saving two games. Although he performed admirably in the role he was assigned, Gregg was optioned to the New Orleans Pelicans of the Southern Association before the end of the season and did not participate in the 1925 World Series against Pittsburgh. In nine games at New Orleans, Gregg won three and lost three.

Traded to Birmingham for the 1926 season, Gregg chose to retire rather than play for the Barons. Except for a brief comeback in the spring of 1927 with the Sacramento Senators of the PCL, the remainder of his pitching career, which lasted until 1931, took place in his home state of Washington in the highly competitive semi-pro Timber League.

 

Gregg's major league career record was 92–63 with a lifetime 2.70 ERA in 1,393 innings pitched with 720 strikeouts. All this with a chronic sore arm.

 

[Yankee4Life]

Ben Chapman

 

 

More than anything, Ben Chapman is remembered these days for the vitriol he heaped on Jackie Robinson in April of Robinson’s first year in the majors. Chapman was the Phillies’ manager that day in 1947 and “decided to make Robinson’s color an issue and encouraged at least three of his men to do the same.” The verbal assault unnerved Robinson, but had the effect of bringing Robinson’s teammates more fully behind him. Dodgers GM Branch Rickey later said, “Chapman did more than anybody to unite the Dodgers. When he poured out that string of unconscionable abuse, he solidified and unified thirty men … Chapman made Jackie a real member of the Dodgers.”

He was a competitive player even in high school. Phillips High won the Alabama state championship in 1927, and Chapman pitched as well as played infield. He told the New York Post in April 1935 that he’d won the game against Warrior High, 32-2, and that earlier in the season he’d thrown a one-hitter while striking out 19. Part of the reason for his success was his competitiveness. “All a pitcher has to do in high school ball … is to throw the ball at the batter’s head and then feed him a wide curve on the outside for him to go fishing.” Asked if that’s how he engineered the one-hitter, he replied, “What do you think? I hit four batters.”

 

Chapman was offered a contract by a scout for the New York Yankees, but then it was his mother who stepped in and pushed for him to go to Purdue, where he had been offered a football scholarship. He did go to Purdue, but left after about a month to play professional baseball. Chapman was 6-feet tall and listed at 190 pounds.

Ben became a very good ballplayer, with a .302 lifetime average over the course of 15 major-league seasons and 1,717 games. Chapman was primarily an outfielder, though he played 153 games as an infielder (every position but first base), and he even pitched in 25 games – with a winning record at that.

He managed the Phillies for the latter half of 1945, all of 1946 and 1947, and the first half of 1948.

Chapman was initially signed by Johnny Nee of the Yankees, in 1927, while Ben was still a junior in high school. Being a minor at the time, his father had to sign the contract for him. The spring following his graduation in January 1928, the Yankees had him report to Asheville in the South Atlantic (SALLY) League. He appeared in 147 games, batting .336 with seven homers for the Class-B Tourists, who won the pennant with ease — by 18 games over the second-place Macon Peaches. Chapman was the shortstop on that year’s league All-Star team. He was clearly good on offense, but committed a league-leading 67 errors.

 

He bumped up to Double A in 1929, and hit for exactly the same average: .336, for the St. Paul Saints (American Association), but this time with 31 homers and 137 RBIs. He moved from shortstop to third base, but the penchant for errors continued; he chalked up 43 of them.

 

This was a ballplayer ready for the majors, though, and the Yankees brought him up in 1930. Even before spring training began, it was thought he would make the team. Manager Bob Shawkey announced Chapman as his third baseman six weeks before the season began. He played 91 games at third base and 45 games at second, and he hit 10 home runs contributing toward his .316 average. His average remained very consistent all year long. Playing with Lou Gehrig and Babe Ruth in the same lineup no doubt helped. Chapman’s 24 errors at third base led the league; three leagues, three times he’d committed the most errors.

In his second year in the majors, Chapman was moved to the outfield, where his strong throwing arm and his speed could perhaps better be utilized. In part the move was because Earle Combs got injured, but it was a position for which he was better suited. Manager Joe McCarthy explained: “He didn’t get the ball away quickly enough for an infielder and lost too many double plays. He had a full arm action instead of a snap throw. This was an asset in the outfield but a handicap in the infield. There wasn’t any question that he belonged in the outfield.”

 

He played 137 games (with only 11, all at second base, in the infield.) He played left field primarily but a substantial number in right field, too. His average held steady, dipping just one point – to .315. His homers jumped from ten to 17, and where he had driven in 81 runs in 1930, he drove in 122 in 1931. Only five American Leaguers drove in more.

 

Chapman was fast on the basepaths, too. He led the league with 61 stolen bases in 1931, the first of four years he led in thefts, including three years in a row: 1931, 1932, and 1933. (It should be noted that he also led the league all three years in times caught stealing, too.) Both in 1928 and 1929, he’d also led the league in stolen bases in the minors, with 30 stolen bases and 26, respectively. Dubbed the “Dixie Flyer” and the “Alabama Flash,” there were a few times when he competed against other players in pregame sprints on the field. In 1931, the Christian Science Monitor reported that Chapman had run 100 yards in 10.5 seconds, on grass at Comiskey Park.

 

His 1932 saw him again surpass 100 RBIs and 100 runs scored (107 and 101, respectively), tailing off just a bit in batting average, too, to .299. Though he topped 100 runs scored four more times, the closest he came to driving in 100 was in 1933, when he fell two short (98). In 1933 and 1934, his average climbed back over .300.

 

The year 1933 was the first of four years in a row when Chapman was voted an All-Star (he couldn’t have been earlier, because 1933 was the first year that Major League Baseball held an All-Star Game.) Batting leadoff, he was the first American League player ever to bat in an All-Star Game. He grounded out. In the game, he was 1-for-5, a bunt single to third base.

 

Chapman’s only appearance in a World Series came in 1932 (from 1929 through 1935, it was the only year the Yankees won the pennant.) His outfield play presented some interesting moments; working center field in 1935, he led the American League again in errors (15) but also in outfield assists (25).

 

The Yankees finished in first place again in 1936, but Chapman was no longer with the team after midseason. He’d caught a really bad cold in early May and never quite got right. He was traded to Washington on June 14, 1936, for Jake Powell. In part, the Yanks were making way for an up-and-coming center fielder: Joe DiMaggio. Chapman was called the Yankees’ “biggest disappointment” that year. The trade was said to be a case of “giving up Chapman’s defensive ability for a heftier hitter.” One could say that Chapman was moved twice—once by the Yankees to make room for DiMaggio, and once a very few years later to make room on the Red Sox for Ted Williams.

Chapman’s average over the seven seasons in which he appeared for the Yankees was .305. He was with Washington for two season halves – the second half of 1936 and the first half of 1937. On June 11, 1937, just a few days short of the anniversary of his arrival in D.C., he was traded by the Senators (along with Bobo Newsom) to the Boston Red Sox for Mel Almada and the two Ferrell brothers, pitcher Wes and catcher Rick. It was kind of a trade of temperamental titans, with Chapman, Wes Ferrell, and Newsom all ranking among some of the top contenders for that honor in baseball history. He’d appeared in 132 games for the Senators and been remarkably consistent with his batting average — .300.

 

The Red Sox found a very productive right fielder; Chapman hit .324 in his two seasons with Boston. He had hit .307 in the second part of 1937, but in 1938, with a full season playing for the Red Sox, he hit .340, with 80 RBIs and 92 runs scored. One might think that the last thing a team would do was let a 29-year-old batter with that sort of production go—but on December 15, 1938, he was traded to the Cleveland Indians for Denny Galehouse and Tommy Irwin. Boston believed they had a replacement waiting in the wings, a player who had won the Triple Crown in the American Association that year playing for the Minneapolis Millers—Ted Williams.

The Indians were glad to get him, though there was some thought he might be traded on to St. Louis to help secure a second baseman, the team’s greatest need. That didn’t happen, and Chapman performed well for manager Ossie Vitt and the Indians in 1939. His average was .290, but he had a .390 on-base percentage. More importantly, he drove in 82 runs, third most on the club, and he led the team in runs scored with 101. He felt he could have been more productive but for the huge outfield in League Park. “I figure I lost at least 20 hits” compared to playing in Fenway Park. He did tie a major-league record with three triples in one game, on July 3, but oddly that was in the relatively small Briggs Stadium in Detroit.

 

There was a dropoff in 1940. Though he played only six fewer games (143 in 1940), his RBI total dropped to 50 and his runs scored to 82 – though his average was almost the same and his OBP wasn’t off by much. During the course of the season, he experimented with wearing eyeglasses. The Indians scored less than 90% of the runs they’d scored in 1939, but much of Chapman’s decline was his own. This was the year of the notorious player mutiny against manager Vitt, the players later dubbed the “Crybabies” because of their complaints against their skipper. Chapman was said to be one of the ringleaders. It may have paved the way for his departure from Cleveland. He later expressed regret for his involvement, telling Vitt, “I don’t know what got into us. It was all so silly.”

Chapman was with three ballclubs in the next six months. The day before Christmas in 1940, the Indians traded him to the Washington Senators for left-handed pitcher Joe Krakauskas. In his second stint working for the Senators, he played in 28 early-season games, mostly in left field, but was only hitting .255 and had only knocked in ten runs. The Senators were well-enough set with outfielders, and they simply released him on May 26, 1941. Chapman was heard to say it was to get out from under his high $12,000 salary.

 

It was back to the minor leagues again in 1942, as player/manager for the Richmond Colts in the Piedmont League. Chapman would have played for Richmond in 1943, too, but for his fiery temper. In baseball, it’s frowned upon when a player or manager hits an umpire. In the final game of the playoff series against Portsmouth, on September 16, Chapman was called out at first base by umpire I. H. Case. Fellow umpire James B. Clegg, working that game behind the plate, told The Sporting News what transpired. “As he prolonged the argument, I walked out from my plate position just as Case ordered Chapman from the field. ‘Chapman said, ‘If you say I’m out of the game, I’m going to let you have it.’ Case then said, ‘You’re out.’ Chapman swung and struck umpire Case in the face, whereupon Tony Lazzeri ran out and grabbed Chapman. A policeman quickly appeared and escorted Ben from the field.” The league suspended Chapman from Organized Baseball for a full year.

As a manager, Chapman was perhaps even more competitive than he had been as a player. Dan Albaugh said he used to berate his own players a lot—the very reason the Indians had mutinied against Vitt—and that he fought constantly with umpires, a favorite tactic being to “give the men in blue a Nazi salute.”

 

Chapman served his suspension for all of 1943. He was classified 1-A for the World War II draft, and was called for a physical; he received two letters in the mail on February 24, 1944. One contained his contract as manager for Richmond, and the other directed him to report for induction on March 1. But the war was coming to an end, and he had a trick knee. Ultimately, he was declared 4-F and was never inducted into military service.

He was hired by Richmond again for 1944, and Chapman combined three jobs once more – pitching, playing outfield, and managing. He hit .303 in 57 games, pitching in 21 of them and recording 13 wins against only six defeats. His ERA for ’44 was 2.21. In early August, he was brought up to the Brooklyn Dodgers (traded by Richmond for Clyde King and some cash) and appeared in 20 big-league games, ten in August and ten in September. He hit for a .368 average in 44 plate appearances with 11 runs scored and 11 RBIs.

 

In 1945 he began the year with Brooklyn, and worked three games in April, five in May, and two in June – reflecting his role as a pitcher. He was hitting for a .136 average in 24 plate appearances, with a 3-3 mark as a moundsman (with a 5.53 ERA), until he was traded to the Phillies for catcher Johnny Peacock on June 15. He threw seven innings for the Phillies in 1945 and 1 1/3 in 1946, without any decisions either year and with a combined 6.48 ERA. He only appeared in one game in 1946, the May 12 game. On June 11, the Phillies released him.

 

But that was deceiving. They released him as a player. He remained the manager. Chapman had taken over as Phillies manager after 69 games in 1945 (Freddie Fitzsimmons had the team 18-51 at that point, and it’s not surprising there was a change made. It was reported that Fitzsimmons resigned.) Chapman’s first game as manager was June 30, 15 days after arriving in the Peacock trade. His first edict, supposedly, was to tell everyone on the team that if they so much as mentioned last place, they would be sent forthwith to the minors.

 

In 1946, Chapman said his team was the best-trained team in the majors and he predicted they would surprise. GM Herb Pennock said of Chapman, “Ben has gotten the Phils over their last place complex, and from here on in we’re moving.” He was still a fiery personality, ejected four times in 1946. The formerly Futile Phils moved up to fifth place (69-85), and they set new attendance records, more than doubling any previous attendance in franchise history save for the 1916 team (and they were only several thousand short of doubling that mark.) In 1945, they’d drawn 285,057 but it 1946 they drew 1,045,247. It was a good move of Chapman’s to have asked for a bonus clause for attendance in his contract, for any totals exceeding 400,000. He reportedly made more ($15,000) through the bonus than his $12,500 salary.

 

In 1947 — the year in which Chapman taunted Jackie Robinson so viciously — they dropped back to eighth place and attendance dipped to 907,332, still well over the 400,000 bonus threshold.

 

Bench jockeying was an established practice in baseball, the intent often being to get under the skin of opposing players. At the time, it wasn’t uncommon to bring up opponent’s ethnicity, but Chapman went well over the line more than once — and he had a history of it. He remembered the way he’d been taunted when he first came up. “The first words I remember hearing when I was a rookie with the Yankees were, ‘Hey, you redneck so-and-so, go back to Alabama where you belong.”

 

As to Robinson, Dodgers traveling secretary Harold Parrott wrote “Chapman mentioned everything from thick lips to the supposedly extra-thick Negro skull, which he said restricted brain growth to almost animal level when compared to white folk. The Dodger players had told him privately, he said, that they wished that the black man would go back into the South where he belonged. Commissioner of Baseball Happy Chandler had to intercede and demand that Chapman stop.

So did National League president Ford Frick. They didn’t waste any time. They realized the P.R. problem. Nationally syndicated columnist Walter Winchell asked the question in print: “If the baseball player insults the ump he can be thrown out of the game. Why, then, can’t bigoted ball players (who insult Americans) be thrown out of baseball?”

 

As early as May 8, Frick had already made it clear: “I told Ben and the Philadelphia club that such language was not becoming from any National League bench and I warned them not to do it any more. They agreed to abide by my directive.” Chapman and Robinson were asked to pose for a photograph together, to try and counter the negative publicity. It had to be very uncomfortable for both, but they did it. The photo ran in many papers on May 12. Dodgers officials said they took Chapman at his word that he knew he had erred, and believed he was sincere. Robinson himself, wrote about the photo shoot at the time in the African American newspaper, the Pittsburgh Courier. He said, “I was glad to cooperate and when we got over to the Phillies’ dugout, Chapman came out to shake my hand. We said hello to each other and he smiled when the picture was snapped. Chapman impressed me as a nice fellow and I don’t really think he meant the things he was shouting at me the first time we played Philadelphia.”

 

Years later, Chapman still bridled at the memory of bearing the brunt of the charge of racism. He said, “I’m no bigot. I believe that every man, be he black, or white or whatever, is entitled to equal opportunity. The pigment of a man’s skin is God’s doing.” He also said, “I had already managed five black players. People have told me that was the reason I was fired at Philadelphia. I don’t believe that… I remember three black writers coming into my office in Philadelphia. They wanted to ask me some questions. I told them I wanted to ask them … questions first. ‘Do you want this guy to make the big leagues like all the other guys did? Do you want him treated like all the other players?’ They said that’s what they wanted. That’s the way they wrote it, that I was treating Jackie like Gehrig was treated, like Dixie was treated. That’s the way it should have been.” At the time he had said, “Robinson is just another ballplayer to us… We’ll ride anybody if it’ll help us win.”

 

He was the first of three Phillies managers in 1948, gone a little more than halfway through the season (37-42). The team was in seventh place at the time. Did he resign, or was he fired? It depends on who one asked. The newspaper headlines all said he was dismissed, and quoted owner Bob Carpenter as saying he had informed Chapman it was time for a change.

 

For several years, stories ran from time to time that Chapman had never been told why he was fired. In 1953, Frederick Lieb and Stan Baumgartner’s book The Philadelphia Phillies suggested that he was fired “as a way of showing that he (Carpenter) was taking charge of the front office following the death of Herb Pennock.”

Chapman’s last involvement in baseball was as a coach for the Cincinnati Reds in 1952, though he resigned on August 1 when he learned that incoming manager Rogers Hornsby himself planned to work the third-base coaching box.

 

Around 1992, a year or so before he died, Chapman told author Ray Robinson, speaking of Jackie Robinson (the two Robinsons were not related): “A man learns about things and mellows as he grows older. I think that maybe I’ve changed a bit. Maybe I went too far in those days. But I always went along with the bench jockeying, which has always been part of the game. Maybe I was rougher at it than some players. I thought that you could use it to upset and weaken the other team. It might give you an advantage.” He then paused, and added, “The world changes.

 

[Yankee4Life]

George Pipgras

 

 

 

In the 146 years of professional baseball, no team has come close to attaining the legendary status of the 1927 New York Yankees. They were, and are, the symbol of greatness, both individually and as a team. As the prominent baseball historian Donald Honig said, “Never before or since has there been in the game such a coalescence of talent, such a fusion of lusty hitting and sharp pitching, and all of it torrentially consistent, dismembering the League with a meat cleaver, losing just 44 of their 154 games, setting records … with a near-homicidal attack….”  Whether one is a Yankee lover or hater, the names are forever part of baseball lore — Ruth, Gehrig, Lazzeri, Meusel, Combs, Pennock, Hoyt, Pipgras … et al.

 

 

“When we got to the ball park,” George Pipgras said, “we knew we were going to win. That’s all there was to it. We weren’t cocky. I wouldn’t call it confidence either. We just knew. Like when you go to sleep you know the sun is going to come up in the morning.”

 

 

Although not as well-known as the superstar batters, it was the pitching staff who provided the balance and strength, leading the league in earned-run average (3.20); and having four of the league’s seven pitchers with E.R.A.s of 3.00 or less. On that staff was an Iowa-born, Minnesota-raised farm boy, whose only prior major-league experience was a two-season “stop in for a cup of coffee” resulting in a 1-4 record with a nearly 6.00 E.R.A. average. So how was it that George Pipgras came to be a key link in the Yankees’ rotation from 1927-1933; an undefeated World Series pitcher; and whom Hall-of-Famer “Goose” Goslin in 1928 called “the best pitcher in the American League.”

George Pipgras was born into a baseball-loving family on December 20, 1899 in Ida Grove, Iowa. His father William was a farmer who played baseball before gloves were used, umpired local games occasionally, and raised five sons — all over six feet tall — four pitchers and a catcher. Pipgras’ early life was filled with farm chores beginning at 4:30 a.m. — milking cows, feeding sheep, currying horses — followed by work in his father’s butcher shop in Anton, Iowa. In between were the demands of schoolwork, including forming the battery for his Schleswig, Iowa high school baseball team with his brother Herman. His family moved to a farm in Slayton, Minnesota, where “Pip” continued to pitch for the high school team.

 

 

America entered World War I in 1917 and Pipgras, lying about his age, enlisted in Sioux City, Iowa with the U.S. Army 60th Engineers serving for a year and a half in France, England, and Germany. Unfortunately, after 18 months in Europe, he became a victim of the influenza epidemic of 1918. Returning to Minnesota in 1919, he went back to work on the farm, and to playing baseball for the local town team. It was when pitching a game for Woodstock, Minnesota with eight other farm boys as teammates that he attracted the attention of Frank Flynn, a railroad conductor and volunteer scout for a number of minor-league clubs. Ralph Works, a former American League pitcher, scouting for the White Sox, dropped in and tried to sign him for Chicago. Pipgras wanted to accept, but he had already accepted terms with Jimmy Hamilton, manager of the Joplin, Missouri team. He played for Joplin in 1921, but was so wild, they almost immediately farmed him out to Saginaw, Michigan where in a game against the London, Ontario Club, he walked 15 men in five innings, lasted one game, and was given a ticket back to Minnesota.

 

 

Down on his luck, nearly broke, and stranded back in Worthington, Minnesota, “Pip” spent 35 cents on a breakfast and with 15 cents in his pocket, wondered if his dream of the big leagues was over. His choices were limited. On the one hand, the farm and the corn fields beckoned. On the other, Minnesota’s harsh hobo laws threatened, because Pipgras was convinced he’d end up a hobo if he couldn’t get a job pitching somewhere. Playing a hunch, he placed a five-cent phone call to a baseball savvy friend to see if any midwestern teams were looking for a pitcher.

“Sure,” said the friend. “Hop over to Madison, South, Dakota, and tell the manager I sent you. The South Dakota League season is opening today and he needs a pitcher.” He got there just in time to pitch the opening game of the season. He stayed, pitching in 24 games with Madison and finishing with a 12-6 record while his team finished in the second division.

 

The Boston Red Sox secured Pipgras in the Spring of 1922 for $1,000 before the season started and sent him to Charleston in the South Atlantic League. He pitched 42 games for Charleston, winning 19 and losing 9 and was a key factor in Charleston’s winning the league title. His record led to his recall by Boston; interest by Bob Connery, the New York Yankees’ head scout; and on January 3, 1923, he was traded with outfielder Harvey Hendrick to the Yankees for the 1923-24 seasons. As the Yanks won their third pennant and their first World Series in a row in 1923, Pipgras warmed the bench, while finishing with an anemic 1-3 record. That was followed by an even more disappointing 1924 record of 0-1.

Pipgras was fast, but wild, so Huggins sent him down to work on his control. “Two years in the minor leagues will cure him,” Huggins said — and he was right. In 1925, he was farmed out to Nashville and Atlanta of the Southern League, where he had a 19-15 record. The next season, the Yankees sent Pipgras to St. Paul where he established a very respectable 23-18 record. In 1927, he was called back up to the Yankees and became a regular.

 

After coaching from Shawkey and Pennock, and Miller Huggins’ patience and faith in Pipgras, he was asked to pitch a game in July 1927 for a sick “Dutch” Ruether against the Detroit Tigers. He responded by pitching a three-hitter. His time had arrived. Now a complete pitcher, he had a fastball with good control, and a curve, courtesy of future Hall-of-Famer Herb Pennock. Now he was the fifth starter for the 1927 club, and finished the season with a 10-3 record. In control all the way, he beat the Pittsburgh Pirates, 6-2, with an impressive “seven hitter” in the second game of the World Series — which the Yankees swept in four games. Manager Miller Huggins was the first to congratulate him, “You pitched a wonderful game, and I’m proud of you.”

He went on to a notable career and was one of the Yankees’ key pitchers from 1928-30. In 1928, he was the Yankees’ ace, with a 24-13 record and after that he never had a losing season until his last, when he was 0-1 with Boston. His 93-64 record in nine years with the Yankees established him as a key link in those years of Yankee domination. Mike Gazella, a Yankee substitute infielder said he heard Babe Ruth say that Pipgras “with his fast ball he couldn’t be beaten.” Since 1928, no right-handed Yankee pitcher has since won more games than Pipgras’ 24. After a relatively dismal 7-6, 1931 season, Pipgras roared back with a 16-9 record and he was a main factor in the Yankees’ winning that year’s World Series.

 

 

After the 1932 season, the Yankees traded Pipgras and infielder Billy Werber to the Red Sox. Although he recorded a respectable 11-10 record in 1933, he broke his arm in a freak accident while pitching against Detroit, accelerating a premature end to his baseball career. Pipgras finished with an anemic 0-0 record in two games in 1934 followed by a 0-1 record in five games in 1935. Forced to retire from baseball, he wanted to stay involved with the game he loved. His former boss, Tom Yawkey of Boston, invited him to join him, Eddie Collins, and a few others for a weekend of duck hunting at South Island Plantation near Georgetown, South Carolina. Yawkey suggested umpiring and arranged for Pipgras to umpire in the old NY-PA League (now known as the Eastern League), a job he held from 1936-38.

 

American League President Will Harridge, who had helped Pipgras get his initial umpiring job in the NY-PA League, had kept tabs on him and was so satisfied with his progress that he appointed him to the American League regular staff in 1939. Including training games, he umpired in 192 contests in 1939. He umpired until 1945, including officiating All-Star games and World Series and earning a reputation as one of the game’s best umpires. “Yes, I like umpiring,” reflected Pipgras. “It is pleasant work. Perhaps you don’t get the thrill out of umpiring a game in which there have been no kicks as you do over pitching a low-hit shut-out, but you’re still in baseball, and in quite an important department of the game.” He had the distinction of both having played and umpiring in World Series games. He finished his baseball career supervising umpires from 1946-49 and working as a scout for the Boston Red Sox.

In his 11-year career Pipgras had a 102 - 73 record with a 4.09 earned run average. He struck out 714 and pitched sixteen shutouts.

 

 

[Yankee4Life]

Lou Finney

 

 

Lou Finney was a tough man to strike out. A fast, feisty left-handed hitter with line-drive power, Finney made contact often enough and was versatile enough in the field to play an important role first for Connie Mack’s Depression-era Philadelphia Athletics and later for Joe Cronin’s World War II-era Boston Red Sox.

A scrappy, curly-haired Alabaman who spoke with a Southern drawl, Finney stood 6 feet tall and weighed 180 pounds; batted from the left side; and threw from the right. He spent 15 years in the major leagues between 1931 and 1947, and fanned just 186 times in 4,631 at-bats, or only once for every 24.9 official turns, one of the 50 best ratios in major-league history.

 

 

A .287 career hitter who hustled whenever he was on the field, the fiery Finney slugged just 31 big-league home runs, but hit 203 doubles and 85 triples. Although he could scamper around the bases, he was not a strong basestealer and swiped just 39 sacks in 84 tries. A top-of-the-order slap hitter, Finney scored 643 runs and drove in 494. He collected 1,329 career hits and walked 329 times to post a .336 on-base percentage.

 

At his best in his natural position, right field, Finney also played first base for Mack and Cronin. “What almost clinches a post for Finney is the fact that he can play first base like a regular,” James Isaminger wrote for The Sporting News.  “He is great on ground balls and handles all kinds of throws. He really is an artistic first sacker. A man who can play both first and the outfield as Finney does is too good to be turned loose.” Most often a reserve, Finney still appeared in 100 or more big-league games in seven seasons.

 

He was highly competitive – Jimmie Foxx once said, “He’s a guy that’ll cut your heart out to win a ballgame” — and loved to needle opponents. Sporting News editor J.G. Taylor Spink recalled in a story about player superstitions, “Bobo Newsom, the garrulous Senator slinger, also has an allergy for small pieces of paper. It was worked to the limit one day by Lou Finney, who, along with the rest of the Athletics, was being mesmerized by Bobo’s fast ball. As he took the field one inning, Finney stuffed a newspaper in his pocket. Out in right field, he tore the thing to little bits, and spilled them all over the mound as he came into the dugout after the third out. Newsom went into a tantrum; park attendants had to be called to clean up the wind-blown bits before Buck would agree to pitch again. By that time he was well cooled out again and the A’s hitters knocked him out of the box.”

 

Finney played semipro baseball at Akron, Ohio, in 1929, but when the 1930 Census reached the Five Points Hamburg Region of Chambers County in April, he was back on the family farm and at work at a rubber plant. Legend suggests that he was seated behind two mules in late June 1930, when a neighbor informed him that the Carrollton (Georgia) Champs of the Class D Georgia-Alabama League needed an outfielder. Finney answered the call. Just 19 years old, he launched a barrage on the league in his first season in organized baseball. He batted .389 with 17 doubles and 7 home runs before Carrollton and Talladega, the league’s cellar dwellers, disbanded on August 14.

 

By that time, he had been spotted by Ira Thomas, a scout for Connie Mack’s Athletics. Philadelphia purchased Finney’s contract after the 1930 season and assigned him to the Harrisburg (Pennsylvania) Senators of the Class B New York-Pennsylvania League for 1931. However, he failed to impress the Harrisburg manager and was transferred to the York (Pennsylvania) White Roses in the same league. At York, he resumed his assault on minor-league pitchers. He batted .347 for manager Jack Bentley and earned The Sporting News’ All-NYP honors.

 

Mack purchased the young Alabaman’s contract for the season’s final weeks. Just a month past his 21st birthday, Finney made his big-league debut for the Tall Tactician on September 12, 1931, against the St. Louis Browns. The Athletics were in the midst of a 19-game home stand, and Finney appeared in nine games – all at Shibe Park – and rapped out nine hits, including a triple, in 24 at-bats. He scored seven runs and drove in three in his three-week stint.

 

Finney spent the 1932 season with the Portland Beavers of the highly competitive Pacific Coast League. Often called the Third Major League, the PCL boasted a number of future and former major leaguers. Two of the best in 1932 were Finney and fellow Philadelphia farmhand Michael Franklin “Pinky” Higgins, both of whom made The Sporting News’ All-PCL team. One or the other was among the league leaders in every offensive category to propel Portland to the PCL pennant with a 111-78 record. Finney slapped 268 hits and batted .351 with 7 triples, all team highs, and finished third in the league’s Most Valuable Player voting. Sporting News correspondent “Beaver-Duck” reported that “Lou Finney is just about the sensation of the league in right field. In batting, fielding, and throwing, but above all in pepper and hustling spirit, this 22-year-old looks like a certain major leaguer. He loves to play, does his best work in the pinches, and does it with the eager enthusiasm of a youth to whom winning the game for his team means much more than base hits for his individual average.”

 

Still 22 years old, Finney rejoined the Athletics and his Portland teammate Higgins, who was Philadelphia’s third baseman in 1933. Finney enjoyed a splendid spring training and was viewed as a replacement for Al Simmons, one of baseball’s all-time great outfielders, whom Mack had traded to Chicago before the season. Finney was “emulating Ty Cobb of a quarter-century ago with his base-running,” Bill Dooley gushed in The Sporting News.

“I think Finney will not be long in making Mack forget Simmons,” Dooley wrote. “Not a slugger like the great Milwaukeean, Finney is none the less a sharp hitter and a lot faster than Simmons. Here is a lad whose baserunning will open a lot of eyes. He is not only fast on the basepaths, but alert and daring. Any fielder who loafs in returning one of Finney’s hits to the infield will find him taking an extra base.”

 

Dooley was also impressed by the “Alabama flychaser’s” desire to improve. “Finney didn’t know how to slide into a bag when he reported to the Athletics this spring. One of the first requests he made of the coaching staff was a sliding pit. He practiced in it day after day until he learned.” When the regular season started, Finney was still hot. But he was nervous and quickly cooled off, and Mack sold his contract with the right to recall the outfielder on 24 hours’ notice, to Montreal of the Double A International League. There, Finney hit .298 with 23 extra-base hits in 65 games. His second home run for the Royals came on his last at-bat, on August 15, after Mack notified Montreal to return Finney to Philly. The sudden recall derailed the Royals’ playoff hopes and created friction between Montreal and Mack. Back in Philadelphia, Finney continued to hit well.

 

For the season, he played 63 games as an outfielder, appeared in 11 additional games as a pinch hitter, and batted .267 with 12 doubles and 3 home runs in 240 at-bats.

 

Between seasons, there were rumors that Mack would trade the youngster to Boston, but when the 1934 season opened; he was Philadelphia’s fourth outfielder behind Indian Bob Johnson, Doc Cramer, and Ed Coleman, and sometimes spelled slugger Jimmie Foxx at first base, roles he reprised the next year. Finney played in 201 games in 1934 and 1935, batted .276, and though he hit just one homer in the two seasons, he smacked 22 doubles.

Mack continued to feel the effects of the Depression and declining attendance at Shibe Park, and dealt the powerful Foxx to Boston before the 1936 season for players and cash. Rookie Alfred “Chubby” Dean (77 games) shared the first-base duties with Finney, who also played the outfield in 73 games. Playing nearly every day for the first time, he batted .302 in 151 games and collected 37 extra-base hits, though just one was a home run – an inside-the-park effort. The AL leader in at-bats with 653, he scored a career high 100 runs and drove in 41. On July 27, he collected five hits in a 15-8 win over the White Sox. Finney’s fifth hit came in the ninth when the Athletics scored seven runs off two Chicago pitchers.

 

Despite Finney’s fine season, he and Dean split the first base duties in 1937. (Dean, a lifetime .274 hitter, later unwisely moved to the mound and compiled a 30-46 record and a 5.08 ERA as pitcher.) Finney did play 50 games at first in 1937, made the only appearance of his career at second base, where he recorded an assist, and played 39 games in the outfield. Bouncing around the lineup and battling an ailment he picked up in Mexico in spring training, a hernia, a chronic sinus infection, and later, appendicitis, he saw his average slip to .251. He hit another round-tripper, again inside the park, his sixth home run in six major-league seasons. With 10 days left in the regular season, Finney, with Mack’s consent, returned home to Alabama and underwent surgery on his sinuses, had a hernia repaired, had the inflamed appendix that had bothered him for months extracted, and had his tonsils removed.

Healthy in 1938, the 27-year-old “Alabama Assassin” enjoyed a power surge when he slugged 10 home runs – with nine of them clearing the fences. He finished fourth in the AL with 12 triples and smacked 21 doubles. He split time at first base with Dick Siebert, Nick Etten, and others, served as a fourth outfielder behind Johnson, Moses, and Sam Chapman, and played in a total of 122 games.

 

In 1939 Siebert started at first base and Finney batted just .136 in nine games before Mack sold him to Boston on May 9. Detroit and Boston had both claimed Finney on waivers; Mack dealt him to the Red Sox, who paid $2,500 more than the $7,500 waiver price. He joined a Boston team that boasted former teammates Jimmie Foxx, Doc Cramer, and Lefty Grove, along with 20-year-old Ted Williams, who had made his big-league debut 18 days earlier. The Alabaman enjoyed great success as a pinch-hitter – he led the AL with 13 pinch hits in 40 at-bats — then finished the season at first base after Foxx underwent an appendectomy.

 

For the Red Sox, Finney flourished under manager Joe Cronin and veteran scout and hitting instructor Hugh Duffy. He credited Duffy, the legendary New Englander, for teaching him to snap his wrist. The results were immediate. Finney batted .325 in 249 at-bats in his 95 games with Boston, with 22 extra-base hits, including a pinch-hit home run at Sportsman’s Park. The next spring, he praised Duffy to the Boston Traveler’s John Drohan, among others: “I was with the Red Sox for a week or so when Hughie Duffy, who led the National League in batting way back in 1894, asked me if I were willing to take some advice from a 76-year-old man (Duffy was actually 72 at the time). As I realized I was not going anywhere, I told him I was more than willing. Consequently, Hughie, who was one of the Red Sox coaches and batted grounders in the infield practice despite his age, converted me from a choke hitter into a batsman who grabbed his bat way down at the end and swung from the hip. He also changed my stance in the batter’s box, spreading my feet a trifle further apart. He also told me to put more wrist into my swing like Ted Williams. Well, I was not hitting my weight when I left the Athletics and I wound up the 1939 season with a mark of .310, the best I ever had.” The Red Sox posted an 89-62 record and finished second to the Joe DiMaggio-led Yankees, who methodically captured their fourth straight AL pennant despite the loss of Lou Gehrig to the illness that would tragically cut short his life.

 

In spite of a broken finger in spring training, courtesy of Cincinnati’s Johnny Vander Meer, and a nagging cold, Finney enjoyed another fine season in Boston in 1940. He played in the outfield in place of the injured Dom DiMaggio, and hit so well that the Red Sox postponed DiMaggio’s return, before Finney himself suffered a leg injury. When he came back, he moved to first when Foxx injured his knee in a collision. When Double-X returned, Cronin asked his team captain to play catcher for the injured Gene Desautels, which allowed the Boston manager to keep both Finney and DiMaggio in the lineup. In either position, Finney hit well. He was the first major-league player to record 100 hits that season, ranked among the league batting leaders through the summer, and finished with a .320 average, ninth best in the AL. Finney and New York’s Charlie “King Kong” Keller tied for second in the league with 15 triples, four behind league leader Barney McCosky of Detroit. The 15 triples were a career best for Finney, who also achieved personal highs with 31 doubles and 73 runs batted in. He scored 73 times and was the AL’s toughest man to strike out, fanning just once per 41.1 at-bats, well ahead of runner-up Charlie Gehringer of Detroit, who struck out once every 30.2 AB’s. “Finney has been tremendous for us,” Cronin said in June. “His hitting has won him the right-field job and I’m going down the line with him. He’s a great team player. Never squawks and does a great job every day.”

 

Finney continued to credit Duffy, and attributed some of his success to a trip to the Louisville Slugger factory. “I never had a bat I liked in my life,” Finney told United Press writer George Kirksey. “So last May when the Red Sox played an exhibition game in Louisville, I went out to the bat factory to get the kind of stick I wanted. I saw some old Max Bishop models stuck away and I picked up one of them. I liked the feel of them so I had a model made up with a few minor changes. Right away I began to hit better. Then I began to watch Ted Williams and with coaching from Hughie Duffy, I learned to copy Ted’s wrist action and follow-through.” Duffy was somewhat modest. “Finney goes around telling everybody I made a batter out of him, but he’s exaggerating,” Duffy told the Traveler’s Jack Broudy. “ It’s true I saw several things he was doing wrong when he came to the Red Sox and we worked on them together until he straightened them out, but that doesn’t mean I should get the credit for it. Lou is a fine boy and very appreciative.” Duffy told another writer, “Sure I told him about the bat swing, but he worked hard in changing his style and it was by his own perseverance that he improved.”

 

In July, Finney made his only All-Star Game appearance, and coaxed a walk from Carl Hubbell in the NL’s 4-0 win. On May 11, he hit one of his two career grand slams, off Marius Russo at Yankee Stadium, to help Boston send New York to a defeat, the Bronx Bombers’ eighth straight. Though never again an All-Star, he continued to provide valuable depth for the Red Sox the next two years. In 1941, Finney banged out 24 more doubles and 4 home runs, and batted .288. In 1942, he hit .285 in 113 games for the Red Sox at the age of 31. He was particularly adept in night games, collecting 14 hits in 35 after-dark at-bats between 1939 and 1941 — a .400 average, even better than the .324 mark Williams posted in 34 at-bats.

 

By 1942, World War II was changing the face of baseball. Players began to leave the game to enter the military or to work in industries vital to the war. After the season, Ted Williams entered the Navy, where he served as a fighter pilot. Finney, who had applied for a chief specialist rating in the Navy at one point, returned home to the 171-acre cotton farm near White Plains, Alabama, that he and his wife, the former Margie Griffin, owned in Chambers County. Finney, who was 32 years old and had no children, had received his draft notice, and had to choose between entering military service and staying on his farm to grow food, an occupation deemed critical to the war effort. On January 11, 1943, the New York World Telegram reported, “Lou Finney, Red Sox outfielder, was told by his Alabama draft board to remain on his farm or be inducted.” He voluntarily retired from the game and sat out the entire 1943 season and the first months of the 1944 campaign.

 

While Finney farmed through the first half of the 1945 season, the Allied nations subdued Germany in May, and moved closer to victory in the Pacific over Japan. Once again, Finney journeyed north to rejoin the Red Sox. Cronin, who broke a leg on April 19 and hadn’t played since, inactivated himself to open a roster spot for Finney on July 15, but used the Alabaman just twice, both times as a pinch hitter, before the Red Sox sold his contract to the defending American League champion St. Louis Browns on July 27, 1945. Finney spent time at first base and in the outfield, though Pete Gray, who had lost an arm in a childhood accident, served as the fourth outfielder for manager Luke Sewell. Finney also played one game at third base, and handled one of two chances successfully. In 58 games, he collected 59 hits, including 8 doubles, in 213 at-bats, a .277 average. On August 1, he smacked a grand slam off Dizzy Trout at Briggs Field (later called Tiger Stadium), and on September 9, he scampered around the bases for the final home run of his major league career, an inside-the-park circuit clout against Washington’s Alex Carrasquel at Griffith Stadium.

 

At 35, he returned to the Browns at the start of the 1946 season. But the war had ended the previous year, and many of the veterans had started to return to organized baseball. And though Finney collected nine singles in 30 at-bats, a .300 average, the Browns released him on May 29.

 

Finney took one more shot at the brass ring when he pinch-hit unsuccessfully four times for the Philadelphia Phillies, his only at-bats in the National League, before the Phillies released him on May 13, 1947, at the age of 36. 

 

Less than a week later, with his major-league career done, Finney returned to the minors, this time with St. Petersburg in the Class C Florida International League. With the Saints floundering in last place and 17 games behind in the standings, his old teammate Jimmie Foxx was fired on May 17. Finney took over a few days later as a player-manager and guided St. Pete to a 71-80 record, good for fifth in the eight-team league. Primarily a first baseman, he continued to spray the ball around. He hit .308 with 26 doubles, 9 triples, and 2 home runs.

The Saints posted a 78-73 record in 1948 and improved to fourth with a full season under Finney. St. Petersburg’s attendance of nearly 137,947 was more than 23,000 better than the year before, the second best in the league behind league champion Havana. Finney played first base and in the outfield. He hit .314, with 27 doubles, 4 triples, and 8 homers. The fiery Finney not only drew fans to the park, he got them fired up. After a 1948 doubleheader, The Sporting News reported, “The fans’ ire was fanned when manager Lou Finney was tossed out of both contests. The umpires were given a police escort to their quarters, but some 500 gathered outside and refused to leave. Finally, the arbiters rode out in a police car, while policemen made way with a flying wedge through the crowd."

 

At the baseball meetings after the season in Minneapolis, wealthy new West Palm Beach owner Lucius B. Ordway lured Finney away from St. Petersburg, which then slumped to seventh under four different managers in 1949. Finney piloted West Palm Beach to a fifth-place finish in the league, which had moved up to Class B. The Indians posted a 74-78 record, 4½ games better than the previous year, and enjoyed an attendance increase of 8,000.

 

Despite his success, when Ordway entered into a working agreement with Philadelphia, the Athletics picked a new manager for West Palm Beach for 1950. The Indians finished seven games worse than in 1949 and attendance fell by more than 24,000. Finney managed to catch on with Temple (Texas) of the Class B Big State League. Temple had finished last the year before, and Finney again turned things around on the field and at the gate. The Eagles improved by 17 2/3 games, to 74-70 in 1950 and attendance leapt up to 105,081, nearly 32,000 more than the year before and the best in the league. Finney batted .345 in 68 games for the fourth-place Eagles, who lost in the playoffs to regular-season champion Texarkana.

 

In December 1950, Finney was appointed to manage the Raleigh Capitals of the Carolina League, but resigned in February 1951 to devote time to his business in Chambers County and was replaced by Joe Medwick.

Two years later, Finney left Alabama to manage the Lincoln (Nebraska) Chiefs, a Milwaukee Braves farm team in the Class A Western League. The Chiefs managed nine more wins than they had the previous year and drew 26,000 more fans, but in the final month of the season, Finney resigned in order to again to join his brother Hal in the family feed and grain business, and was replaced by Walter Linden.

 

With that, Finney’s baseball career came to an end. Lou ran the family firm for the remainder of his life with his brother Hal. Like Lou, Hal broke into the major leagues in 1931. That year he played 10 games; six at catcher and four as a pinch-hitter, for the Pirates. He played 31 games the next year, and 56 in 1933, when he hit his lone homer and drove in 18 runs. He played in five games in 1934, spent the rest of that season in the minors with the Albany (New York) Senators in the International League, missed the 1935 season because of a fractured skull and an eye injury suffered in a tractor accident and started the 1936 season without a hit in 35 at-bats before the Pirates released him.

 

 

 

 

 

[Yankee4Life]

Luis Tiant

 

 

Luis Clemente Tiant y Vega, a charismatic right-handed pitcher whom Reggie Jackson called “the Fred Astaire of baseball,” won 229 games over parts of 19 seasons in the major leagues. His midcareer comeback, dramatic family reunion, and World Series heroics inspired a region, likely leaving him one of the most beloved men ever to play for the Boston Red Sox.

 

Tiant was born in Marianao, Cuba, the son of Luis and Isabel. His father, Luis Eleuterio Tiant, was a legendary left-handed pitcher who starred in the Cuban Leagues and the American Negro Leagues for 20 years. The elder Tiant was famous for a variety of outstanding pitches (including a screwball, spitball, and knuckleball), a tremendous pickoff move, and an exaggerated pirouette pitching motion. As late as 1947, at the age of 41, Luis put together a 10-0 record for the New York Cubans and pitched in the East-West All-Star Game. Monte Irvin claimed that Luis would have been a “great, great star” had he been able to play in the major leagues.

 

The younger Tiant was an only child, and grew up in a baseball-mad country. He was a star on various local youth teams, and as a 16-year-old played on an all-star club that traveled to Mexico City for an international tournament. His father did not encourage him to make a career of the game, believing there was little chance of a black man being successful in baseball, but his mother was more supportive and carried the day.

After failing a tryout with the Havana team of the International League, Luis started his professional career in 1959, at age 18, with the Mexico City Tigers. His first year was quite poor (5-19, 5.92 ERA), but he followed this up with 17 wins in 1960 and 12 more the next year, after being delayed for two months trying to leave his homeland. At the end of the 1961 season, the Cleveland Indians purchased his contract for $35,000.

 

During these three seasons, Luis spent his summers living in Mexico City, and then returning to Havana for the offseason to play winter ball and be with his family. In 1961 he met Maria del Refugio Navarro, a native of Mexico City, at a ballpark – she was playing for her office softball team. After a short courtship, Luis and Maria married in August 1961. At the close of the season they were planning to return to Luis’s home in Marianao. But the political embarrassment and potential economic hardship of massive Cuban emigration led Fidel Castro’s government to ban all outside travel. Accordingly, upon the advice of his father, Luis did not return home to Cuba in 1961, not knowing when or if he would see his parents again.

 

Now the property of the Indians, Luis pitched for Charleston in the Eastern League in 1962 and had a respectable year (7-8, 3.63) considering that he was living in an English-speaking country for the first time. In 1963, for Burlington, he was likely the best pitcher in the Carolina League, finishing 14-9, including a no-hitter, with a 2.56 ERA, leading the league in complete games, strikeouts, and shutouts. He was 22 years old, and presumably one of the prizes of the Cleveland farm system.

 

The following winter Tiant was left off the Indians’ 40-man roster, but no team risked the $12,000 it would have taken to claim him. Despite a good spring in 1964, the Indians first sent him back to Burlington, but an injury to a pitcher on their Triple-A Portland team in the Pacific Coast League brought Tiant to Oregon for the 1964 season.

 

He was outstanding in Portland. The Indians finally called him up on July 17. Tiant finished 15-1 (a PCL record .938 winning percentage) with a 2.04 ERA, completing 13 of his 15 starts.

 

Tiant joined the Indians in New York on Saturday morning, July 18, and was asked by his manager, Birdie Tebbetts, if he was ready to pitch. When advised that he was, Tebbetts told him he was pitching the next day against Whitey Ford. Tiant responded with a four-hit shutout, striking out 11. Luis finished 10-4 for the Tribe with a 2.83 ERA. His total line for 1964: a 25-5 record and 2.42 ERA in 264 innings.

 

Luis was afflicted with a sore pitching arm in 1965, finishing 11-11, and showed up the next spring having lost 20 pounds on the advice of his father. He started the 1966 season with three consecutive shutouts, a streak that ended in Baltimore when Frank Robinson hit a ball completely out of Memorial Stadium, the only time that was ever done. Luis hit a rough spell in May and June and spent most of the last half of the season in the bullpen, notching eight saves in 30 relief appearances. Despite only 16 starts, his five shutouts topped the American League. His ERAs in 1966 and 1967 were 2.79 and 2.74, respectively, more than adequate, but not enough to win more than 12 games each year.

 

In 1968 Tiant became a star, finishing 21-9 and posting a league-leading 1.60 ERA. Luis also led the league with nine shutouts, including four in succession (one short of the then-record set by the White Sox’ Doc White in 1904). He pitched his best game on July 3 in Cleveland when he recorded 19 strikeouts in 10 innings against the Twins. In the top of the 10th, the Twins got runners on first and third with no one out but Luis responded by striking out the side. The Indians pushed across a run in the bottom on the 10th to give him a 1-0 victory.

 

The Indians finished 1969 with the worst record in the American League, and their worst winning percentage in 54 years. Luis fell to 9-20, and posted an ERA of 3.71. It was not really as bad as it seemed – changes to the strike zone and mound sent the league ERA up to 3.62. Nonetheless, Luis was an average American League pitcher, which was quite a step down from 1968.

 

In December of 1969, Tiant was traded to the Minnesota Twins in a six-player deal that brought Dean Chance and Graig Nettles to the Indians. In 1970 he won his first six decisions for a very strong Minnesota team, but left during his sixth victory with a sore shoulder that had been bothering him since the spring. Luis went to see a specialist, who found a crack in a bone in his right shoulder and prescribed only rest. He sat down for just 10 weeks, and returned to lose three of four decisions in the final weeks of the 1970 season.

 

By spring training of 1971, Tiant claimed to be fully recovered, but soon pulled a muscle in his rib cage, missed two weeks, and was otherwise ineffective in only eight innings. On March 31 the Twins gave him his unconditional release. Calvin Griffith believed that Tiant was finished at age 30. Suitably devastated, Luis believed the move was intended only to save money.

 

THE ROAD TO BOSTON:

The sole team willing to give Tiant a shot was the Atlanta Braves, who signed him to a 30-day trial with their Triple-A Richmond team. After limited work, the Braves were unwilling to promote him at the end of the trial period, so he signed with Louisville, the Red Sox’ Triple-A affiliate. He pitched very well in 31 innings for Louisville – 29 strikeouts and a 2.61 ERA – and was summoned to Boston on June 3.

He was not an immediate success with the Red Sox. After his first appearance, on June 11, resulted in five runs in only one inning, Clif Keane wrote in the Boston Globe: “The latest investment by the Red Sox looked about as sound as taking a bagful of money and throwing it off Pier 4 into the Atlantic.” Tiant remained in the rotation, but he dropped his first six decisions as a starter. After one loss, Keane led a game story with, “Enough is enough.”

 

Nonetheless, manager Eddie Kasko believed there were signs that Tiant could become a quality pitcher again. He threw seven very good innings against the Yankees but lost 2-1 on a two-run home run by Roy White. He threw 10 shutout innings, and 154 pitches, against the Twins, but did not figure in the decision. Kasko finally took him out of the rotation in early August. He was better in the bullpen, finishing 1-1 with a 1.80 ERA in that role. After his four-month audition, many in the media were surprised that Tiant was still on the 40-man roster in the spring.

 

On March 22, 1972, the Red Sox traded Sparky Lyle to the Yankees for Danny Cater and Mario Guerrero, a trade that ranks among the worst that the Red Sox ever made, but which likely saved Luis’s spot on the team.

 

On August 5 at Fenway Park, Tiant started for just the seventh time and beat the Orioles. One week later, in Baltimore, he beat the O’s again, pitching six no-hit innings before settling for a three-hitter. After a relief appearance, he pitched a two-hitter in Chicago’s Comiskey Park on August 19, losing a no-hitter with two outs in the seventh. After this game Kasko finally announced that Luis was in the rotation to stay.

 

Surprisingly, the Red Sox had climbed into a fierce four-team pennant race with the Yankees, Orioles, and Tigers. Even more surprisingly, Luis Tiant had become their best player. Over a period of 10 starts, beginning with the game in Chicago, Luis furnished a record of 9-1 with six shutouts and a 0.82 ERA, all nine victories being complete games. He began with four straight shutouts, his streak of 40 scoreless innings ending during a four-hit victory over the Yankees at Fenway Park on September 8. After a loss in Yankee Stadium, Luis blanked the Indians back home on the 16th.

 

Before the second game of a twi-night doubleheader against the Orioles on September 20, the fans rose to their feet as Luis walked to the bullpen to warm up and gave him such an ovation that his teammates joined in. The crowd spent most of the evening chanting “Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee,” as their hero recorded out after out. When he came up to bat in the bottom on the eighth on his way to another shutout, the crowd again rose to give him an ovation that continued throughout his at-bat, the break between innings, and the entire top of the ninth. Larry Claflin, the veteran Boston Herald sportswriter, wrote that he had never heard a sound like it at a game, unless it was “the last time Joe DiMaggio went to bat in Boston.” Carl Yastrzemski, who had had one of baseball’s most famous Septembers only five years earlier, said, “I’ve never heard anything like that in my life. But I’ll tell you one thing: Tiant deserved every bit of it.”

 

Though he was essentially a relief pitcher for the first four months of the season, Luis finished 15-6 and won his second ERA title (1.91) and the Comeback Player of the Year award. By leading the Red Sox into an unexpected race for the pennant, Tiant won the hearts of the Red Sox fans. He would never lose them.

 

 

He capped his comeback by winning 20 for the second time in 1973, while the Red Sox again finished second. The next year Luis won his 20th by August 23 to give his team a seemingly safe seven-game lead. But the Red Sox went into a horrific teamwide batting slump that was responsible for a disastrous fade – they were 8-20 during one stretch – and consigned them to a third-place finish, seven games behind Baltimore.

 

Luis struggled for most of the 1975 season. While the Red Sox took over the division lead for good in late June, 34-year-old Tiant was seen more and more as an aging back-of-the-rotation starter. He may have had a reason for his struggles: His heart and mind were occupied with a long-overdue family reunion.

 

Though his mother had visited Mexico City to visit Luis and his family in 1968 (his father was reportedly jailed, with his release only assured on her return), Luis had not seen his father in 14 years. A renowned jokester, his mood darkened when he thought of his homeland and his parents. In December 1974 he told Boston Herald reporter Joe Fitzgerald: “My father is going to be 70 years old soon, and I don’t know how many years he has left. He’s working down there at a garage, serving gas, and I can’t even send him a dime for a cup of coffee on Christmas.” Luis spoke of his parents often, and had been led to believe many times over the years that a reunion could be arranged. When asked about his namesake, Luis would say, “I am nowhere near the pitcher my father was.”

 

In May 1975 US Sen. George McGovern (D-South Dakota) made an unofficial visit to Cuba to see Fidel Castro. While it was not the reason for his trip, he carried with him a letter from his Senate colleague, Edward Brooke III (R-Massachusetts), making a personal plea that Luis’s parents be allowed to visit their son in Boston. The letter suggested that “Luis’ career as a major league pitcher is in its latter years” and “he is hopeful that his parents will be able to visit him during this current baseball season.” The very next day, Castro approved the request and put the diplomatic wheels in motion for a visit.

 

After several delays and postponements, Isabel and the elder Luis touched down in Boston’s Logan Airport on August 21. Their son, with his wife, Maria, his three children, and dozens of reporters and cameramen, greeted them. As witnessed in homes all over New England, Luis embraced his father and shamelessly wept. Isabel told her son, “I’m so happy I don’t care if I die now.”

 

On August 26 the Red Sox arranged for Luis’s parents to be introduced to the crowd and for his father to throw out a ceremonial first pitch. After a prolonged ovation, the 69-year-old Tiant, standing on the Fenway Park mound adorned in a brown suit and Red Sox cap, took off his coat and handed it to his son. He went into his full windup and fired a fastball to catcher Tim Blackwell – alas, low and away. Looking vaguely annoyed, he asked for the ball back. Once more he used his full windup, and floated a knuckleball across the heart of the plate. The fans roared as he left the field. His son later commented, “He told me he was ready to go four or five innings anytime.”

The younger Tiant was hit hard that night and again four days later. The whispers in the press box included the lament that it was a shame that his parents had not gotten here a year earlier, when Luis was still an effective pitcher. At this point, Luis (with a record of 15-13 and an ERA of 4.36) took 10 days off to rest his aching back.

 

On September 11 manager Darrell Johnson decided to give Luis one last chance to get it going, against the Tigers. The Red Sox lead, once as high as nine games, was now five. Luis responded with 7⅔ innings of no-hit ball before allowing a run and three hits. When asked about the hit by Aurelio Rodriguez that ruined the no-hitter, Luis’s father responded, “Don’t talk about a lucky hit. The man hit the ball pretty good.”

Luis’s next start, on September 16, was the biggest game of the year and one of the legendary games in the history of Fenway Park. The hard charging Orioles, now 4½ games out, were in town and Jim Palmer faced Tiant. Many observers claim that there were well over 40,000 people in the park that night, several thousand over its official capacity. Predictably, Tiant pitched his first shutout of the year, a 2-0 five-hitter, and the crowd chanted all evening (“Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee, Loo-Eee”).

 

After these remarkable performances, Tiant was the obvious choice to start the first game of the divisional playoffs. He three-hit the Athletics to spark a Red Sox sweep. One week later he began the 1975 World Series with a five-hit shutout of the Cincinnati Reds. In Game Four, in perhaps the quintessential performance of his career, Luis threw 163 pitches, worked out of jams in nearly every inning, and recorded a complete-game 5-4 win. He could not hold a 3-0 lead in Game Six, and was finally removed trailing 6-3 before Bernie Carbo and Carlton Fisk bailed him out with legendary home runs. Alas, the Red Sox lost the seventh game to the Reds the next evening.

 

The 1975 postseason marked the zenith of Tiant’s career, as his family story, his charm and charisma, his unique pitching style, and, finally, his talent made him a national star. At age 34, he was said to have thrown six pitches (fastball, curve, slider, slow curve, palm ball, and knuckleball) – from three different release points (over the top, three-quarters, and side-arm). His windup and motion seemed to vary on a whim. Roger Angell, writing in The New Yorker, once tried to put a name to each of his motions, including “Call the Osteopath,” “Out of the Woodshed,” and “The Runaway Taxi.” It was said that over the course of the game Luis’s deliveries allowed him to look each patron in the eye at least once.

 

With all of his loved ones nearby, Tiant won 21 games for a struggling Red Sox team in 1976. His parents never returned to Havana. They stayed with Luis for 15 months, until his father died of a long illness in December 1976. Two days later, while resting for the next day’s memorial service, Luis’ mother, Isabel, died in her chair, although she had not been ill. The two were buried together near Luis’s home in Milton, Massachusetts.

 

After watching several of his teammates reap the rewards of the new free-agency era, Luis had a protracted holdout in the spring of 1977. He came to terms, but managed only 12 and 13 wins the next two years. Tiant’s relationship with the team’s management was strained from this point forward.

 

After their stunning slump late in the 1978 season, the Red Sox had crawled back to within two games of the Yankees with eight remaining. Prior to the subsequent contest in Toronto, Luis said, “If we lose today, it will be over my dead body. They’ll have to leave me face down on the mound.” He won, and the Red Sox went on to win their last eight games, including two more victories from Tiant on three days’ rest. On the final day of the season, the Red Sox needed a win and a Yankee loss to force a playoff game. Catfish Hunter and the Yankees lost in Cleveland and Tiant dazzled the Fenway crowd yet again with a two-hitter against the Blue Jays.

In the offseason, the Red Sox offered the 38-year-old Tiant only a one-year contract, allowing Luis to sign with the New York Yankees for two years, plus a 10-year deal as a scout. Dwight Evans was devastated at management’s ignorance of what Luis meant to the team. Carl Yastrzemski says he cried when he heard the news: “They tore out our heart and soul.” Heart and soul aside, Tiant’s September-October record for the Red Sox was 31-12. The Red Sox would not be in another pennant race for several years.

 

Luis won 13 games in 1979, including a 3-2 victory over the Red Sox in September, before falling to 8-9 in 1980. After the season, the Yankees let him go. He signed with Pittsburgh in 1981, but spent most of the season with his old team in Portland. He excelled again for the Beavers – 13-7, 3.82, including a no-hitter – but struggled with the Pirates and was released at the end of the season. He finished up his major-league career with six games for the 1982 Angels, with his final win coming against the Red Sox on August 17.

Tiant compiled a 229–172 record with 2,416 strikeouts, a 3.30 earned run average, 187 complete games, and 49 shutouts in 3,486 1⁄3 innings. He was an All-Star for three seasons and 20-game winner for four seasons. He was inducted to the Boston Red Sox Hall of Fame in 1997.

 

Luis Tiant was one of the most respected and revered players of his time, with his teammates, opponents, the media, and his fans. His career was one of streaks, but his best streaks – in the pennant races of 1972, 1975, and 1978, and in the 1975 postseason – occurred when his team needed him most. He was believed to be finished in the middle of his career but came back to have most of his best seasons and to become, for a few weeks in 1975, the center of the baseball world.

 

 

I have included a bonus photo this time. This is a photo of the Casa Ayus magazine in 1946 in Havana, Cuba that shows the champion Cienfuegos. Players such as Alejandro Crespo, Luis Tiant, Silvio Garcia, Adolfo Luque and Martin Dihigo are on the cover.