|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 24, 2024 17:58:04 GMT -5
Tom Greenwade:
Browns, Dodgers and Yankees MLB ScoutThis article was written by Jim Kreuz, Edited by Clipper
 Can He Play Book Cover: Mickey Mantle and Tom Greenwade
Each scout is typically associated with his top signee, that marquee player no one else took note of but him. For Tom Greenwade that player was Mickey Mantle. How the 2 became forever linked has been retold many times, but the most accurate recollection can be found in an October 1952 letter from Greenwade to "The Sporting News" Publisher, J. G. Taylor Spink, reprinted in 1995.
To the best of my knowledge and memory, the 1st person to talk to me about Mantle was his Manager, Barney Barnett, in the Ban Johnson League. All the Midwestern scouts know Barney and drop by to see him. This must have been in the early part of the 1948 season for I went to Alba, Mo., about August 1948 to see Mantle and other players that I had heard of on both clubs. Mantle, who at that time was referred to as “Little Mickey Mantle,” was small and played shortstop. He pitched a couple of innings in this game. I wasn’t overly impressed, but bear in mind he was only 16.
The following spring an umpire in the B.J. League, Kenny Magness, told me about a game the night before in which Mantle played and he was very high on him. I caught the Baxter club at Parsons to see Mantle again. This was early in May, 1949. Mantle looked better and must have put on 20 pounds since the past August and I became interested in a hurry for that was when I discovered he could really run, but wasn’t hitting too much. So I inquired from other sources, probably Barney, when Mickey would graduate. It was to be the last Thursday in May, 1949 from the Commerce, Okla. H.S.
On Friday I drove to Commerce, and this is the 1st time the Mantles ever knew there was such a person as Tom Greenwade. I found out the graduation exercises had been postponed till that night for some reason. Since I had no desire to violate the H.S. tampering rule, I was careful not to mention contract or pro ball either, but I had understood Mickey was to play in Coffeyville that night and I wanted to see him play and I didn’t mention that I had seen him play before. Well, they talked things over with the coach and superintendent and decided to pass on the exercises since Mickey already had his HS diploma and go to Coffeyville, instead.
Of course, I was there. Mickey looked better at bat, hitting left handed. I still don’t know he switches since the only pitching I have seen him against is right handed. After the game Mr. Mantle tells me Mickey will play Sunday in Baxter Springs. I told him I would be at his house Sunday morning and go to the game with them. I was there about 11 A.M. I was scared to death for fear some scout had been there Saturday. I asked Mr. Mantle if anyone had been there. He said “no.” I was relieved.
We all went to Baxter Springs, and for the 1st time, I see Mickey hit right-handed. Mickey racked the pitcher for 4 “clothes lines,” and I started looking all around for scouts, but none were there.
When the last out was made, Mr. Mantle, Mickey and I got in my car behind the grandstand and in 15 minutes the contract was signed. We agreed on $1,500 for the remainder of the season and the contract (Independence of the K.O.M.) was drawn calling for a salary of $140 per month. Mickey reported to Manager Harry Craft at Independence. He was slow to get started and as late as July 10th was hitting only .225, but finished the season over .300. The following year at Joplin, he hit .383, I believe. You know the rest.
Our scout was born on August 21,1904 in Willard, Missouri and lived there his entire life. His 1st money in baseball came when Jim Austin, a traveling salesman from a cookie company, saw him pitching in Willard and offered him $25 a Sunday to pitch for the town team in Clinton. He began his professional baseball career in 1923 as a pitcher with the Portsmouth, Arkansas, club managed by former Detroit Tigers catcher Charley Schmidt. He was sold in 1924 to Denver in the Western League and was optioned to Muskogee under Gabby Street. Greenwade was sold to St. Paul Saints that year and the St. Louis Browns had purchased his contract. He was sold to Tulsa in 1925 and he found himself with the Springfield, Missouri club in 1926.
Disappointed with his playing time, Greenwade quit Organized Ball and opted to play independent ball in Trinidad, Colorado for $75 a week, later moving to Casper, Wyoming and going 22-2 in 1926. The following year, still in independent ball, he pitched his Phoenix, Arizona, club to the Denver tourney championship. He was reinstated in organized baseball in 1928, reporting to the Waco, Texas club. The 1929 season found him pitching for and managing the Palestine club in the East Texas League, going 19-2 and leading his club to the league title. While with Atlanta in the Southern Association in 1930, Greenwade had a fine year in the outfield, hitting .315 as well as pitching. Typhoid fever kept him out of baseball for the next 2 years and after recovering, he hooked up with the western branch of the House of David.
Tom Greenwade took a break from baseball and worked for the Internal Revenue Service in Kansas City until 1937, when he returned to the game, working as a coach and scout for the Browns following 2 years. In 1940, while he was managing the Class D Paragould Browns in the Northeast Arkansas League; the Brooklyn Dodgers made him an offer to come scout for them and he jumped at the opportunity. There he became Brooklyn’s and later Branch Rickey’s top MLB scout.
Major-league players, he is credited with signing include George Kell, Loy Hanning, Rex Barney, Leroy Jarvis, Cal McLish, Tom Warren, Red Barkley, Red Durrett, Monty Basgall, Bill Virdon, Pee Wee Reese, Gil Hodges, Hank Bauer, Tom Sturdivant, Elston Howard, Ralph Terry, Bobby Murcer and 1 you’ll learn more about later on, Jackie Robinson.
Like any fisherman of ballplayers, you don’t land them all. Some get away. For example, the St. Louis Browns had refused to sign a player Tom saw playing in a national semipro tournament, for $1,500, but the Red Sox didn’t and Johnny Pesky later became a fixture at Fenway Park. But this didn’t happen often to Greenwade.
He would occasionally make a recommendation to trade for an established player. Few know that he was the man who suggested the Yankees trade for a young Kansas City Athletics outfielder named Roger Maris after the 1959 season and it didn’t take long to prove Greenwade’s genius. The new Yankees right fielder won back-to-back MVP awards in 1960 and 1961 and broke Babe Ruth’s single-season HR record in the latter season.
One of Greenwade’s traits was his desire to not just befriend his signees, but stay in close contact with them throughout their careers. When a slumping Mickey Mantle was sent down to Kansas City in 1951, he sought out his scout for some consolation before meeting with his father, Mutt Mantle. The Yankees organization recognized this bond as well. In a November 30,1954, letter to Mantle, George Weiss, the Yankees General Manager, passed on suggestions from Manager Casey Stengel that Mickey work on his drag-bunting during the offseason, as well as eliminate a lift in his swing and thereby produce more ground balls. Tom Greenwade was copied on the letter.
Silvio Garcia, not Jackie Robinson, Was Dodgers’ 1st Choice
Every baseball fan knows that Jackie Robinson was the Brooklyn Dodgers’ choice as the player to break the color barrier. But the man they 1st set their sights on was Cuban shortstop Silvio Garcia, and Tom Greenwade made an attempt to sign him to a contract 2 years, before Jackie was signed.
It’s been quite a while since Jackie Robinson 1st set foot on a major-league playing field in 1947. The select few who were privy to the details leading up to this event have all since passed away, and one would assume their story as well. Robert Redford’s plan for a motion picture in 2009 titled “The Scouting of Jackie Robinson” was scrapped when he discovered baseball experts had no information on the subject. Not even a morsel. So how is it that the story behind this monumental event that not only changed the game of baseball but life in America as well has been kept quiet, until now? That’s an easy one, the Dodgers brass knew how to keep a secret.
1943 – The ‘Colored’ Scouting Begins
The 1st thing Club President Branch Rickey did after moving over from the St. Louis Cardinals organization was gain approval from the Brooklyn Dodgers Owners in early 1943 to begin signing “colored” ballplayers. The war had depleted not only the Dodgers’ roster, but their farm clubs’ talent as well, and Rickey saw this as a way to rearm the organization as well as “righting a wrong.”
With the Owners’ blessing, the Dodgers President rushed to set up a secret meeting with his top scout, Tom Greenwade at the Biltmore Hotel in Kansas City to relay his plans. This took place more than 2½ years before the signing of Jackie Robinson. Rickey was so intent on keeping their meeting a secret that he signed the hotel registry as “Tom Greenwade,” which threw the real Greenwade for a loop.
Greenwade described their undercover rendezvous in an article in the Springfield (Missouri) Leader in 1953: “All that secrecy had me buffaloed. And I got more curious after he sat and talked to me about things that had happened in his life. He told me 1 story about the time a hotel refused to allow the catcher of his Ohio Wesleyan team to have a room. The catcher was a Negro and I began to get the idea.”
Rickey directed Greenwade to go to Mexico in May 1943 to look for “colored” talent for the Dodgers’ farm system and in particular to examine Silvio Garcia, a dark-skinned Cuban shortstop, who was playing in the Mexican League that year.
The scout only had 2 issues with this trip. One, he didn’t want to keep it a secret from his wife, Florence; and 2, he didn’t speak Spanish. Rickey quickly dispatched both issues by suggesting that he take his wife and that a translator accompany them. Florence made it to Mexico, but the translator did not. It seems he went on a drinking binge in San Antonio, Tx. and he was left behind. Their secret session at the Biltmore Hotel was to be their only face-to-face meeting before the scout’s trip south. All correspondence that followed consisted of secret memos signed by Rickey giving detailed information and directions to Greenwade. These memos were provided to the author by Tom Greenwade’s daughter and son, Angeline Greenwade McCroskey and Bunch Greenwade.
The 1st was sent on April 24,1943, in the form of an Inter-Club Communication from Rickey’s office in Brooklyn to Greenwade’s home in Willard, Missouri, and was titled, “PERSONAL AND CONFIDENTIAL.”
“Dear Tom: I am enclosing some very confidential material. In the newspaper you will see averages. I don’t believe you can afford to show these to Tuero. You will have to work them out for yourself.” Tuero is probably Oscar Tuero, a Cuban pitcher who had played with the St Louis Cardinals from 1918 to 1920.
The 2nd confidential memo, dated April 29,1943, underscores the secrecy of Greenwade’s mission in Mexico: “I am very sure that his (Tuero’s) services will not be required more than 2-4 weeks and not that long if you find that you can get along very nicely without him. Of course, at no time now or in the future will he know anything about part of the objective of your trip. …” Rickey later added, “Tuero is not at all above chiseling. He was a chiseler as a ball player, so far as that is concerned, and if he shows very decided tendencies to do the chiseling act with us, I am inclined to have you go on down on your health seeking job without him. … As a matter of fact, I don’t trust him. …” OK, we get the picture, Branch.
The scouting trip could have been run under the guise of a new Brooklyn Black Dodgers club that would join the established Negro Leagues and I’m sure that is what they had hoped Oscar Tuero would conclude. Why was he needed? Tom Greenwade was adept at evaluating a man’s baseball talent, but did not have the resources in Mexico to evaluate his character. Tuero was someone, who could provide that information.
In this memo Rickey wrote that he was “hoping that we will be able to get several of them signed to Durham or Olean contracts, or even Montreal if we can find 1 good enough.” Jackie Robinson spent his 1st year with the Dodgers top minor-league club in Montreal in 1946. Greenwade knew from his Kansas City hotel meeting that “them” meant “colored.”
A 3-page background check provided to Greenwade along with 2 photos of Silvio Garcia leave no doubt that the Cuban shortstop, playing in the Mexican League and considered to be one of the best ballplayers from his country, was “colored.” It’s also plain to see that Rickey did not want to “steal” a player from the Negro Leagues which would have potentially caused an uproar with the league’s owners and opted instead to search in Mexico.
Greenwade would beat the bushes for the Dodgers until December 1945, when he signed on with the New York Yankees. He had conferred with Rickey before making the move and Rickey chose not to hold him back, knowing the Yankees would make him the highest-paid scout in baseball, which they did. His annual salary leaped from $3,600 to over $11,000 (including an annual bonus).
The Dodgers’ interest in Cuban shortstop Silvio Garcia began when Brooklyn Manager Leo Durocher witnessed his diamond exploits in Mexico during the previous winter, and was impressed, so much so he told Rickey that Joe DiMaggio couldn’t carry Garcia’s glove. But why all the secrecy? That’s simple, Americans as a whole were still racists and may not have been agreeable to a “colored” major leaguer.
Norman Macht provided a perspective of Americans’ stance on blacks in a presentation at the Society for American Baseball Research 2007 National Convention titled “Does Baseball Deserve Its Black Eye?” He noted that Franklin D. Roosevelt from 1933 to 1945 never proposed any civil-rights legislation and did nothing to eliminate the lynching of blacks, yet no one labeled FDR as a racist. At the height of World War II, 10,000 union members shut down the city of Philadelphia for a week when 8 Negroes in the transit system were promoted to drivers, until then a “whites only” position. Fans today point the finger at Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis for prolonging baseball segregation, but he never restricted the signing of blacks. Macht’s point was, don’t judge Judge Landis or the baseball owners negatively for barring Negroes unless you, too, lived during that time period.
Scouting in Mexico
By May 10,1943, Tom Greenwade was receiving transmittals in Mexico City from Rickey in Brooklyn. You can feel his enthusiasm knowing his plan is unfolding as he wrote:
“Dear Tom,
“I am enclosing some information herewith. Write me fully airmail and mark it personal and confidential on the outside of your envelope and give me all the dope on players. We can certainly use some good Mexican boys right now at both Durham and Olean. The Durham Club is terrible. I don’t believe you should try to sign any boys until you get a full report on everybody and know exactly what you want to do with everybody before you start to work on anybody. I hope you will be able to work quietly without any newspaper publicity whatever.
“If you run into anything especially good, I will send help to you or I might even come myself.”
Judging by this memo, Rickey was attempting to sign not just 1 “colored” ballplayer, but several, and didn’t want to begin signing them until the Dodgers had made up their minds which ones’ they were interested in.
Silvio Garcia – The 1st Failed Attempt at Signing
A 1946 Springfield Leader article gives details on Greenwade’s attempt to sign Cuban shortstop Silvio Garcia, when he broached the subject with Mexican League President Jorge Pasquel: “About 2 years ago the Dodgers sent Greenwade to Mexico City to scout an infielder and it was there he had contacted the Pasquels. Memory of the 1st interview lingers with Greenwade, because when he interviewed Don Jorge (Pasquel), the latter unholstered a pistol and laid it on the desk between them. Meanwhile, another brother, Alfonso, paraded the room wearing a gun strapped to his belt. Greenwade took no players from the Mexican League.” The obvious conclusion from this was that the Pasquel brothers did not want the Dodgers to sign infielder Silvio Garcia because he was a popular player that filled their stadiums and therefore put pesos in their pockets, and conveyed their feelings not with words but with a show of force.” It would have convinced me as well.
The 1st published account of Greenwade’s interest in Garcia is found in the 1953 Leader article cited earlier: “Rickey wanted to send a close-mouthed scout to Mexico to inspect a Negro shortstop named Silvio Garcia. ‘They say DiMaggio can’t carry his glove,’ Rickey told him. All manner of cloak and dagger strategy were used. Rather than have to tell Mrs. Greenwade. where he was going and leave word behind, Rickey sent her on the trip. A bank account had been set up for them in Mexico City.
An attorney had been retained, and Greenwade set out. As it developed, Garcia never did make it. Greenwade turned him down, but he did recommend a squat 19 yearold Negro, who caught for the Monterrey team. His name was Roy Campanella.”
Both Leader articles give the year these events took place as 1944, but Campanella was playing for the Baltimore Elite Giants of the Negro League at that time. He did play the entire season for Monterrey, Mexico, in 1943 (at age 21). Another indication that 1943 was the correct year is that our batch of secret transmittals from the Greenwade family were all from 1943 and they include information on a bank account being set up in Mexico for Greenwade.
Greenwade gave another account of his mission to Mexico in an October 3,1956, article in The Sporting News by Harold Rosenthal.
“The man Greenwade was 1st sent to scout was Silvio Garcia, a shortstop from Cuba, playing in the winter league in Mexico.
“The war was on at the time, and Branch Rickey, Sr., who had succeeded Larry MacPhail as the Brooklyn boss, made an elaborate cloak and dagger production of it, swearing Greenwade to secrecy, ordering him to communicate by cable in code.
“On Greenwade’s say-so, the Dodgers steered away from Garcia, who never made it anywhere in the majors, but is still playing. ‘He couldn’t pull the ball,’ Greenwade said of Garcia. ‘He was a right-handed hitter everything went to right field.’”
I’m convinced that Tom was not in favor of signing Silvio, but Rickey was, based on Leo Durocher’s evaluation. In addition, he didn’t want to tarnish Jackie Robinson’s accomplishments by mentioning in this interview that the Dodgers had tried to sign Garcia 1st.
The Second Attempt at Signing Silvio Garcia
In a Los Angeles Times interview with Walter O’Malley, written by Braven Dyer, we find the 2nd attempt by the Dodgers to sign Garcia. “O’Malley (and not Rickey) almost became the man to sign the 1st (sic) Negro for major league baseball. Early in his affiliation with the Dodgers O’Malley went to Havana, Cuba, to sign a Negro shortstop named Silvio Garcia. On arrival he discovered Garcia with 49 other Cuban Army conscripts in a pup tent encampment.
“As a big sports hero, Garcia was the 1st man tapped by the military. Not hankering to tangle with the whole Cuban army, O’Malley staged a strategic retreat and Garcia never appeared in a major league line-up.“
According to Murray Polner’s 1982 biography of Branch Rickey, “Walter O’Malley…went to Cuba in 1944 with a letter of credit for $25,000 with instructions from Rickey to sign Silvio Garcia, a black player, only to learn that Garcia had been drafted into the Cuban army.” I spoke to Polner by phone from his home in New York and he recounted the O’Malley interview. The author could find no other living source in the early 1980s who could corroborate O’Malley’s story, yet portions are backed up by the background check on Garcia provided by the Greenwade family, which mentions that he might be redrafted soon back into the Cuban army.
I quizzed the only living Dodgers employee from that era, Buzzie Bavasi, and he had no recollection of this event. He thought that O’Malley was simply on 1 of his numerous vacation trips to Cuba and nothing else. But I believe Walter O’Malley, because his story makes sense. Greenwade tried to sign Garcia in Mexico, but Jorge Pasquel would have nothing of the sort, so Branch Rickey sent the Dodgers’ legal counsel, Walter O’Malley, to Cuba after the conclusion of the Mexican season to handle the signing. O’Malley was familiar with Cuba from his frequent vacations there, was one of the few who was already in on the secret, and was not a known baseball personality. Therefore, he could travel about the country without standing out. Lastly, his story again matches what is in Garcia’s background check, that he was about to be redrafted into the Cuban army.
It’s interesting that O’Malley and Greenwade both at times mention 1944 as the year they were linked to Silvio Garcia. Were they in error, or trying to cover up the true date of 1943? I’m convinced they both simply forgot what year it was when telling their story. The clincher is below, the 1st published interview with O’Malley concerning our secret signing, and he got the year correct – 1943.
I’ve saved the best for last.
Writer Milt Gross wrote about his conversations with O’Malley, who described his trip to Havana in the fall of 1943 to sign Silvio Garcia. On the plane from Miami to Havana, he caught sight of former New York Mayor Jimmy Walker, who was rumored to be trying to buy a piece of the New York Giants. He had called the Dodgers office and was told, “Duck him if you can, but get to Garcia before him. We understand he’s trying to sign Garcia for the Giants.”
O’Malley got to Garcia’s house and was told that the Cuban conscription had just begun and 20 people were called up; Silvio was number 3. Gross wrote, “When Walter told me the story recently there was still some doubt in his mind. I was never certain if Stoneham also was after him.”
New York Giants Also Tried to Sign Silvio Garcia
“The next day, I questioned Horace Stoneham, the Giants owner. He admitted trying to sign a Negro 3 years before Rickey had signed Robinson. Why, I asked, hadn’t you mentioned this before? ‘I wanted a baseball player,’ Horace said simply, ‘not a sideshow. Would I have mentioned it if he were white? Did it make me a bigger man because he was a Negro? I was trying to help my team, not myself.’ ”
I had hoped to uncover more proof on the Garcia signing from Roberto Echevarria’s book "The Pride of Havana," but it wasn’t to be. The author states that Garcia was generally considered to be the greatest shortstop in Cuban baseball history and mentions the Dodgers’ attempt at signing him. “Legend has it that Silvio Garcia was seriously considered by Branch Rickey to be the man to break the color barrier in the United States, but that when asked what he would do if a rival hurled racial slurs at him, the Cuban answered: ‘I would kill him.’ This ended his chances.”
Garcia had died in 1978, so there is no way we can substantiate this story. When Roberto Echevarria mentioned to me that Garcia has a son living in Miami but did not know what his 1st name was, I was tempted to try to locate him. But after realizing the magnitude of the task (how many Garcias are there in Miami?) and the fact that neither Tom Greenwade nor Walter O’Malley ever actually approached his father (therefore the family would have no knowledge of his attempted signing), I gave up. The ballplayer thought to be the best shortstop in Cuban baseball history won 2 Mexican League batting titles and was considered a superb fielder, so he had the talent to possibly play in the major leagues. He spent 4 years in Organized Baseball, 3 with Sherbrooke in the Class C Provincial League (1949-1951) and 1 with the Havana Cubans, the Class B affiliate of the Senators in 1952. He also spent time in the US playing in the Negro Leagues.
It’s amazing how fate works in everyday life, the Pasquel brothers and the Cuban army kept Silvio Garcia from a shot at breaking MLB’s color barrier. And if you pay attention during the 1950 movie “The Jackie Robinson Story” you’ll hear the actor playing Branch Rickey telling Jackie during their 1st meeting that the Dodgers looked all over the United States, Mexico and Cuba for the right player.
On a side note, Hall of Famer Monte Irvin told the author he played against Garcia in the Cuban Winter League (1948-1949) and would have won the Triple Crown that season had it not been for Garcia beating him out for the RBI title by 2 RBIs. He added that the Cuban star was a fine ballplayer and a gentleman and was well liked by everyone.
The Scouting of Jackie Robinson
Branch Rickey obviously had second thoughts about proceeding with his plan to sign a black ballplayer by his actions to delay any further progress until the American public was overcome with euphoria after the Japanese surrender to end World War II on August 15,1945. Two weeks later, on August 28th, he met privately with Jackie Robinson to discuss the breaking of the color barrier. Before this date, very little was known about the actual scouting of Robinson, until now.
John Thorn and Jules Tygiel penned an excellent piece titled “Jackie Robinson’s Signing: The Real, Untold Story,” yet the earliest evidence pertaining to the Dodgers scouting of Robinson that they could uncover was dated April 1945. The document, a hand-written memo found in the Rickey Papers, gives instructions to Dodgers scouts to “cover Negro teams for possible major league talent.” The memo was signed “Chas. D. Clark.” No one knows who this man was. It could have been a fictitious name. That’s as far back in time as baseball historians were able to go.
Jackie’s Scout – Tom Greenwade (and no one else)
In the 1956 Sporting News article, Harold Rosenthal wrote, “In Brooklyn, Greenwade played a vital role in one of the game’s greatest dramas, the cracking of the color line. He was the only scout used on the Jackie Robinson job; he was also the man entrusted with the Mexican mission when the Dodgers sought to crack ancient prejudices with an earlier Negro of possibly major league proportions.” This statement was also repeated to me by Greenwade’s son and daughter that their father was the only Dodgers scout looking for black ballplayers.
Greenwade had this to say about Jackie’s arm: “When I scouted Robinson, I told Mr. Rickey that he didn’t have a shortstop’s arm. It wasn’t strong and he needed to dance a step and a half before cutting loose. Maybe he’d make a 1st baseman or 2nd baseman, but never a shortstop, I told Mr. Rickey.” Jackie had played shortstop for the Kansas City Monarchs, but played 1st base 1 season before switching to 2nd base for the Dodgers, just as Greenwade had predicted.
“I saw Jackie play about 20 times … but I never spoke to him once. When I finally did speak to him, he had already made the Dodgers and I was scouting for the Yankees. John Griffin, the Brooklyn clubhouse man, introduced us in St Louis.” Greenwade must not have mentioned to Robinson during this meeting that he was the scout who recommended him because in a 2007 interview, Robinson’s wife, Rachel, told me she had never heard her husband bring up Greenwade’s name. She did appreciate knowing who the scout was that recommended her husband.
Greenwade added in the Rosenthal article, “ ‘The war was still on, there wasn’t much transportation available, and the Monarchs (Kansas City’s Negro League team) got around by bus. Most of the time I chased them.’ … ‘I want to make it very clear that I was the only scout used on Robinson. The only time Clyde Sukeforth went to see him it rained and they didn’t play.’ In various published stories and motion picture scenarios on Robinson’s life, Sukeforth has been depicted as the scout, who followed Robinson.”
My impressions of Tom Greenwade are that he was a very modest man, and did not go around bragging about his exploits, but wanted to keep the facts straight. Keep in mind that if his recommendation of Robinson had resulted in a bust, Greenwade’s reputation would have been scarred. He had quite a bit riding on this and therefore should receive due credit.
Clyde Sukeforth: Robinson Recommendation
Clyde Sukeforth has at times been given credit as the scout, who recommended Jackie Robinson, yet we now know he was used as a checker by the Dodgers to confirm Tom Greenwade’s recommendation. In a November 28,1993, phone conversation, Sukeforth described his involvement in this process.
“I didn’t see him play before we signed him. (Rickey) knew a lot about Robinson. He just sent me down there to check out his arm. (Robinson) naturally couldn’t understand (why Sukeforth was there), was very interested in why Rickey was interested in his arm and it developed that he had fallen on his shoulder the night before and was out of the lineup for a couple of days, maybe more.
“So, I asked him to meet me down at my hotel, and he did. He kept asking me (why), and I just told him, ‘I just work here. I can’t tell you anything but I do know there is a lot of interest in you.’ There was a colored (baseball) club in Brooklyn not affiliated with the Dodgers, but you had a right to assume that it was. So, I told him, ‘Mr. Rickey can answer your questions, why don’t you come on back to Brooklyn with me?’ ” Rickey and Robinson met soon after, on August 28,1945, and the rest is history.
Tom Greenwade’s Final Chapter
Greenwade went on to sign a number of ballplayers for the Yankees, his most notable being Mickey Mantle, but the player he was most proud of recommending was Jackie Robinson. His uncanny ability to evaluate a ballplayer led him to believe early on that he could not have chosen a better person or player to have broken the color barrier. And he was dead-on right. Jackie won the Rookie of the Year award in 1947, the National League MVP award in 1949, retired in 1956, and was voted into the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1962. He died in 1972 at the age of 53.
In 1964 Tom Greenwade had left the Yankees and his MLB scouting career to live out the rest of his life in his home town of Willard, Missouri. He died in 1986 at the age of 81. If Tom Greenwade isn’t the best baseball scout who ever lived, you could probably fit those deemed better in the front seat of his Cadillac next to him.
|
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 24, 2024 18:32:37 GMT -5
Joe Devine
Yankees MLB Scout 1932-1951This article was written by Dwayne Kling, Edited Clipper
 Joe Devine, Manager Photo with the 1932 Missions
Joseph “Joe” Devine was born in Oakland, California, on March 3,1892, son of Patrick and Ellen O’Sullivan Devine. He grew up playing sandlot baseball and played 2 games with Oakland (Pacific Coast League) in 1915. When World War I started, he was working in a Seattle shipyard and became the manager of the shipyard’s baseball team. When the war ended, Devine took a job as a scout for the Seattle Indians, a member of the Pacific Coast League and managed Tacoma of the Northwest International League in 1919. In 1920 and 1921, he would manage Calgary of the Western Canada League, then he would coach in Albuquerque and in 1924, he became a scout for the Pittsburgh Pirates. In 1932, he would begin scouting for the New York Yankees.
Devine in his MLB scouting career signed or recommended 36 players who became major leaguers, including 4 players, who are enshrined in the Baseball Hall of Fame: Joe Cronin, Paul Waner, Lloyd Waner, and Joe DiMaggio.
While he was scouting for Pittsburgh, Devine 1st gained a reputation as an astute judge of baseball talent. In 1925, young Joe Cronin from San Francisco was spending the summer playing semipro baseball for a team in Napa, California, when Devine signed him to a Pittsburgh contract. One year later Cronin was playing in the majors.
Also in 1925, Paul Waner was playing with the AA San Francisco Seals (PCL) and Devine saw the potential of the 125-pound outfielder. The Pittsburgh management felt that Waner was too small to ever play major-league baseball, but after the 1925 season, when Waner had batted .401 and had 280 hits (in 174 games), they made the decision to purchase both Waner and infielder Hal Rhyne.
In 1927, Waner batted a league-leading .380 and joining him on that 1927 Pirates team was his brother Lloyd, who had also been recommended to the Pirates by Devine. The 1927 Pirates, with the Waner brothers leading the way, won the National League pennant, but they were swept by the Yankees in the World Series.
Devine also had signed Dick Bartell and Ray Kremer to Pittsburgh contracts and in 1929, he had recommended that the Pirates purchase Gus Suhr from the AA San Francisco Seals (PCL).
In 1931, Joe Baerwald, owner of the Mission Reds of the Pacific Coast League, hired Devine as an assistant to Manager George Burns. Halfway through the season the Reds were in last place and Baerwald hadfired Burns and replaced him with Devine. Devine couldn’t get the Reds on a winning track either and they would finish the season in last place. In 1932, Baerwald had ordered Devine and his assistant, Bobby Coltrin, to sign some local players in hopes that even if they didn’t win a few more games, they would draw fans through the turnstiles.
Devine and Coltrin went to spring training with 17 local players, including future major leaguers Ellsworth “Babe” Dahlgren, Italo Chelini and Al Wright. They did help the attendance figures, but the Reds did not move up in the standings and after they finished in the basement for the 2nd consecutive year, Devine and Coltrin were both fired by the team. The firing proved to be a blessing for Devine; in November, he was hired to scout for the New York Yankees and remained with the Yankees for the rest of his life.
Though Devine would covered Northern California, the Pacific Northwest and part of the Southwest, most of his signed prospects came from Northern California, notably San Francisco and the San Francisco Bay Area. Bobby Coltrin, Devine’s assistant, worked with him in the San Francisco area and in Southern California. Bill Essick and his assistant, Dan Crowley, often worked with Devine. Essick and Devine worked together on the signings of Joe Gordon and Joe DiMaggio.
Joe DiMaggio San Francisco Seals Photo
Making Joe DiMaggio a Yankee was undoubtedly the highlight of Devine’s career. At the end of the 1933 season, after hitting in 61 consecutive games for the AA San Francisco Seals, DiMaggio was the most sought-after minor-league player in the United States. However, in May 1934, he had injured his knee and almost overnight the price to acquire him dropped from an estimated $75,000 to $25,000, if in fact any major-league team would purchase him for any price because of his injured knee.
There has always been conjecture as to how big a role Essick played in the recommendation of DiMaggio to the Yankees. Even DiMaggio himself expressed doubt that Devine recommended him, believing that Essick had been the main force behind his sale to the Yankees. However, Dick Dobbins in his book The Grand Minor League, wrote that he had acquired Devine’s papers from his estate, “and they make it clear Devine had aggressively followed DiMaggio’s career both before and after the accident and had not lost interest because of the injury.”
In August 1935, Devine wrote to Yankees General Manager Ed Barrow, “DiMaggio is easily the best prospect in the league. DiMaggio can do everything, run, throw, hit, field and has a very good temperament, as well as plenty of guts and hustle. There is nothing wrong with DiMaggio’s leg, am sure you have one of the very best prospects that has been in the minor leagues for years.”
However, no one is perfect. Probably Devine’s biggest error in judgment came in 1937, when he had evaluated Ted Williams. who was playing for AA San Diego Padres. His report to Barrow, according to Dobbins’ book, was, “(H)e shows promise as a hitter, but good pitching so far has stopped him cold. I am positive that there isn’t 1 player in the Pacific Coast League that would help the Yankees next year.”
Often a scout is remembered for only 1 player he signed: Tom Greenwade for Mickey Mantle, Cy Slapnicka for signing Bob Feller. If Joe Devine were to be remembered for only 1 player, it would be DiMaggio, but in fact he will also be remembered for many others. Although DiMaggio was by far the greatest that he had signed, he wasn’t, by far, the last. Throughout the 1930s and 1940s he continued to send players to the Yankees, among them Bobby Brown, Andy Carey, Jerry Coleman and Charlie Silvera.
In a spring-training exhibition game in 1951 in San Francisco, Yankees Manager Casey Stengel started a lineup composed almost entirely of players from California: Charlie Silvera, catcher; Tom Morgan, pitcher; Fenton Mole, 1st base; Jerry Coleman, 2nd base; Billy Martin, shortstop; Gil McDougald, 3rd base and Joe DiMaggio, Gene Woodling and Jackie Jensen in the outfield. Andy Carey, Bobby Brown, and John Lindell were on the bench and Frank Crosetti was the 3rd-base coach. Eight of those Yankees had been signed by or recommended by Devine. During the late 1940s and early 1950s it was not uncommon for the Yankees to field a team with 4 or more starters, who had been signed by Devine.
In Devine’s day it was common for scouts to establish a relationship with the prospects and even though it wasn’t legal to make an offer or sign a player until he was out of high school, to find many ways to ingratiate themselves with the prospect and his family. Devine was an expert when it came to establishing a relationship with a player and his family.
In the 1930s and 1940s many players played for a semipro team organized by Devine and known as the Kanely Yankees. It was just another way of keeping in touch with his prospects; future Yankees such as Silvera, Brown and Coleman were playing on the team even before they were out of high school.
Not all of the prospects were happy about signing with Devine. Len Gabrielson, who was signed by Devine in 1934, told Dick Dobbins, “(Signing with) the Yankees was a mistake. If I had signed with some other club, I could have had a better chance, but I liked Joe Devine. I played in the winter league because of him. When I would go to spring training with the Yankees with my brother-in-law Bill Matheson (a shortstop), he’d see Crosetti and I’d see Lou Gehrig and we’d say, ‘What the hell are we doing here?’ ”
Even when they had some doubts about making the Yankees, prospects would sign with them (and Joe Devine). Dick Dobbins’ book The Grand Minor League quoted Duane Pillette as saying, “When you sign with the Yankees you sign with the best club in baseball. So, I signed with Yankee Scout Joe Devine.” And Harvey Frommer’s book A Yankee Century quoted Andy Carey as saying, “It didn’t occur to me that (signing with the Yankees) wasn’t the smartest move on my part to join a team with all that talent.”
While Devine was covering the West Coast, especially the San Francisco Bay area. He was most noted in the signing of young Joe DiMaggio. Also, Devine is credited with signing the following MLB players: Infielders: Joe Gordon, Frank Crosetti, Johnny Lindell, Bobby Brown, Andy Carey, Jerry Coleman, Ed Bahr, Catcher Lou Berberet, P Milo Candini, Bernie DeViveiros, Bud Hafey, Tom Hafey, Bob Joyce, Frank Lucchesi (MLB Manager), Woody Main, INF Gil McDougald, INF Fenton Mole, OF Bill Renna, Hal Rhyne, Pitchers: Art Schallock, Bill Wight, Rugger Ardizoia, Tiny Bonham, Outfielders Wally Judnich and Frankie Kelleher, Catchers Gus Triandos and Charlie Silvera, OF Jackie Jensen and INF/OF Woodie Held.
Devine once said, “You can’t scout desire. There is no man alive who can say just how any player is going to develop.” But he did have guidelines he used to evaluate the potential Yankees. First, he rated their physical characteristics and their speed. He rated mechanical skills below physical characteristics because he felt that skills could be taught. Then he judged a player’s character, disposition, personal habits and diet. He wasn’t always right in his judgment, but his success can be judged by the number of players he signed who made the major leagues.
Joe Devine had died on September 21,1951, in a San Francisco hospital at the age of 56. The previous July, he had fallen and broken his arm, while getting into a car and complications produced internal bleeding. He would recover somewhat, but then he had suffered a relapse. At the time of the accident, he was on a trip to visit the Yankee farm team in Twin Falls, Idaho. Even after his death his legacy endured for many years, as several of his players were in the major leagues in the late 1960s. One of them, Charlie Silvera, was still scouting at the age of 80 for the Chicago Cubs and still telling stories of Joe Devine and the role Devine played during the Yankee dynasty days.
|
|
|
|
Post by inger on Feb 24, 2024 18:38:16 GMT -5
I just when to the current and recent This Week in Yankees threads that I have posted and made some font changes. I used a Arial Font Size 12 on My iMac in MS Word This Week in Yankees History title is Font Size 14 The body of the thread is Arial size 14 I also did some of the articles in this thread using the same approach. Please let me know if this helps you out. Clipper Thanks for thinking of us! The easier they are to read the more good you’re doing for the group!… |
|
|
|
Post by inger on Feb 24, 2024 18:40:51 GMT -5
I just when to the current and recent This Week in Yankees threads that I have posted and made some font changes. I used a Arial Font Size 12 on My iMac in MS Word This Week in Yankees History title is Font Size 14 The body of the thread is Arial size 14 I also did some of the articles in this thread using the same approach. Please let me know if this helps you out. Clipper Thanks for thinking of us! The easier they are to read the more good you’re doing for the group!… * I just looked them over. It’s an improvement, but o think if you could drop it kne more size it would be fine. An 11 if your word processor offers that, 10 if it doesn’t have the 11. That’s my recommendation… Thanks! |
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 24, 2024 18:46:58 GMT -5
I can try out the font size 11 font on next week's history thread.
|
|
|
|
Post by inger on Feb 24, 2024 18:59:31 GMT -5
I can try out the font size 11 font on next week's history thread. Thanks! I appreciate all the work you put in on these… |
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 25, 2024 15:19:28 GMT -5
The 1953 Eddie Lopat All-Stars’ Tour of Japan
This article was written by C. Paul Rogers III, Edited by Clipper
This article was published in Nichibei Yakyu: US Tours of Japan, 1907-1958
1953 Eddie Lopat All-Stars (Rob Fitts Collection)
Eddie Lopat was a fine, soft-tossing southpaw during a 12-year MLB career with the Chicago White Sox and most famously the New York Yankees.He was called "the Junkman" because of his assortment of off-speed pitches, Lopat was also something of a baseball entrepreneur. He not only ran a winter baseball school in Florida, but, after barnstorming in Japan with Lefty O’Doul’s All-Stars following the 1951 major-league season, was very receptive to Frank Scott’s plan to put together a star-studded assemblage of major leaguers to again tour Japan after the 1953 season. Scott, a former Traveling Secretary of the Yankees, who had since become a promoter, proposed calling the team the Eddie Lopat All-Stars. By 1953, after O’Doul’s 1949 breakthrough overseas trip to Japan with his San Francisco Seals of the Pacific Coast League, postseason tours to the Land of the Rising Sun had become more common. In fact, in 1953 the New York Giants also barnstormed in Japan at the same time as did Lopat’s team. For the Lopat tour, Scott had secured the Mainichi Newspapers, Owners of the Mainichi Orions of Japan’s Pacific League, as the official tour sponsor.
Lopat and Scott spent much of the 1953 regular season recruiting players for the tour, including a somewhat reluctant Yogi Berra. Unbeknownst to Yogi, he was already a legend among Japanese baseball fans. At the All-Star Game in Cincinnati, a Japanese sportswriter who was helping Lopat and Scott with their recruiting was aware of Berra’s reputation as a chowhound and told Yogi about the exotic foods he would be able to consume in Japan. Yogi was skeptical, however, and wondered if bread was available in Japan. When the writer and Lopat both assured Yogi that Japan did indeed have bread, he signed on for the tour.
Under the prevailing major-league rules, barnstorming “all-star teams” were limited to 3 players from any 1 team. With that constraint, a stellar lineup of major leaguers signed on for the tour including, in addition to Berra, future Hall of Famers Mickey Mantle, Robin Roberts, Eddie Mathews, Bob Lemon, Nellie Fox, and Enos Slaughter. All-Star-caliber players like Eddie Robinson, Curt Simmons, Mike Garcia, Harvey Kuenn (the 1953 American League Rookie of the Year), Jackie Jensen, and Hank Sauer committed as well, as did Gus Niarhos, who was added to serve as a 2nd catcher behind Berra. Whether a slight exaggeration or not, they were billed as “the greatest array of major league stars ever to visit Japan.”
Lopat and his Yankees teammates Mantle and Berra were fresh off a tense 6-game World Series win over the Brooklyn Dodgers in which all had played pivotal roles. Lopat had won Game 2 thanks to a 2-run 8th-inning HR by Mantle, while Berra had batted .429 for the Series. A casualty to the tour because of the long season and World Series, however, was the 21-year-old Mantle, who, after battling injuries to both knees during the year, needed surgery and was a late scratch. Lopat quickly added his Yankees teammate Billy Martin, who had hit .500 with 12 hits and 8 RBIs in the Series to win the Baseball Writers’ MVP Award.
The Lopat All-Stars were to 1st play 4 exhibition games in Colorado and began gathering at the famous Broadmoor Hotel in Colorado Springs on October 6th. Baseball had a no-fraternizing rule then and many of the players looked forward to getting to know ballplayers from other teams and from the other league. The Phillies’ Robin Roberts, who was known for his great control on the mound, remembered spotting fellow hurler Bob Lemon of the Cleveland Indians in the bar at the Broadmoor and going over to introduce himself. Lemon asked Roberts what he wanted to drink and Roberts said, “I’ll have a 7-Up.”
Lemon didn’t say anything, but pulled out a pack of cigarettes and offered Roberts one. Roberts said, “No, thanks, I don’t smoke.”
Lemon chuckled and said, “No wonder you don’t walk anyone.”
The Lopat team’s opposition in Colorado was a squad of major leaguers put together by White Sox Manager Paul Richards and highlighted by pitchers Billy Pierce and Mel Parnell, infielders Pete Runnels and Randy Jackson and outfielders Dave Philley and Dale Mitchell.
The big-league sluggers quickly took to the rarefied Colorado air as the teams combined for 9 HRs in the 1st contest, a 13-8 victory for the Lopat All-Stars over the Richards group on October 8th in Pueblo. The 21-year-old Mathews, coming off a gargantuan 47 HR, 135 RBIs season with the Braves, slugged 2 circuit shots (including 1 that traveled 500 feet), as did the Cubs’ 36-year-old Hank Sauer, the Cardinals’ 37-year-old Enos Slaughter and, for the Richards team, Detroit Catcher Matt Batts. Two days later, the Lopats’ would blast the Richards team 18-7 in Colorado Springs before the 4-game series shifted to Bears Stadium in Denver for the final 2 contests. The results were the same, however, as the Lopat team won in the Mile-High City 8-4 and 14-8, the latter before a record crowd of 13,852, as 4-time American League All-Star Eddie Robinson of the Philadelphia A’s and Mathews both homered off of Billy Pierce and drove in 4 runs apiece. Mathews went 7-for-8 in the 2 Denver contests and posted Little League-like numbers for the whole Colorado series, driving in 17 runs in the 4 games, while the veteran Slaughter had 12 hits, including 2 HRs, 2 triples and 3 doubles.
The Lopat All-Stars then flew to Honolulu for more exhibition games after a brief stopover in San Francisco. On October 12th and 13th, they had played a pair of games in Honolulu against a local team called the Rural Red Sox and it did not take long for disaster to strike. In the 1st inning of the 1st game before a jammed-in crowd of 10,500, Mike Garcia of the Indians was struck in the ankle by a line drive, after delivering a pitch. Garcia, who had won 20, 22, and 18 games the previous 3 seasons, was unable to push off from the mound after the injury and had to leave the game. Although Garcia stayed with the team for most of the tour, he was able to pitch only sparingly in Japan.
Despite the loss of Garcia, the major leaguers clobbered the locals 10-2 and 15-0. After the 2nd game, 1st baseman Robinson, who had homered in the rout, was stricken with a kidney-stone attack and was briefly hospitalized. He would quickly recover and resumed the tour for the All-Stars, who had brought along only 11 position players.
On October 14th, the Lopat squad flew to Kauai, where they pounded out 22 hits and defeated the Kauai All-Stars, 12-3 on a makeshift diamond fashioned from a football field. World Series MVP Martin was honored before the game and given a number of gifts, including an aloha shirt and a calabash bowl. He celebrated by smashing a long HR in his 1st time at bat and later adding a double and a single. The HRr sailed through goalposts situated beyond left field, leading Robin Roberts to quip that it should have counted for 3 runs.
The big leaguers next flew to Hilo on the Big Island, where on October 17th, 5,000 fans saw them defeat a local all-star-team, 8-3, in a game benefiting the local Little League. But much more serious opposition awaited them back in Honolulu in the form of a 3-game series against the Roy Campanella All-Stars, a team of African American major leaguers headed by Campanella, the reigning National League MVP and including stellar players like Larry Doby, Don Newcombe, Billy Bruton, Joe Black, Junior Gilliam, George Crowe, Harry “Suitcase” Simpson, Bob Boyd, Dave Hoskins, Connie Johnson and Jim Pendleton.
The Lopats won the 1st game, 7-1 on the afternoon of October 18th over an obviously weary Campanella team that had flown in from Atlanta the previous day, with a plane change in Los Angeles. Jackie Jensen, then with the Washington Senators, was the hitting star with 2 HRs, while the Phillies’ Curt Simmons allowed only a single run in 8 innings of mound work. By the next night, Campy’s squad was in much better shape and defeated the Lopat team 4-3 in 10 innings behind his Dodgers teammate starter Joe Black.
Roberts had pitched the 1st 9 innings for the Lopats with Yogi Berra behind the plate. In 1 at-bat, Campanella hit a towering foul ball behind the plate. Campy actually knocked the glove off Yogi’s hand on the follow-through of his swing. Berra looked down at his glove on the ground and then went back and caught the foul ball barehanded.
Roberts picked up Yogi’s glove and handed it to him, asking him if he was okay. Yogi said, “That friggin’ ball hurt like hell.”Over the years Roberts wondered if he had somehow made that story up, since he never again saw a bat knock the glove off a catcher’s hand. Over 30 years later, he saw Berra at an Old-Timers game in Wrigley Field in Chicago and asked him about it. Yogi said, “That friggin’ ball hurt like hell,” the exact thing he had said in 1953.
On October 20th, Campanella’s squad won the rubber game, 7-1, behind the 3-hit pitching of Don Newcombe. Nellie Fox displayed rare power by homering for the Lopats’ only run, while George Crowe would hit 2 HRs and Junior Gilliam hit a solo HR for the Campanellas.
The Lopat team would stayed at the famous Royal Hawaiian Hotel on Waikiki Beach and had such a great time in Hawaii that many didn’t want to leave. Many of the players had brought their wives, but some like Eddie Mathews, Billy Martin, and Eddie Robinson were single and so enjoyed the Honolulu nightlife. Not surprisingly given his before and after history, Martin got into a dispute with a guard at a performance of hula dancers attended by the entire team and sucker-punched him. Fortunately for Martin, no charges appear to have been brought.
The Lopat squad did have a schedule to keep and flew on a Pan American Stratocruiser to Tokyo’s Haneda Airport, arriving at 1:05 P.M. on October 22nd. They could scarcely have anticipated the frenzied reception they received. Although the New York Giants had been in the country for a week and had played 5 games, thousands of Japanese greeted the plane. After being officially greeted by executives from the trip sponsor, Mainichi, and receiving gifts from beautiful young Japanese women, the ballplayers climbed into convertibles, 1 player per car, to travel to the Nikkatsu Hotel, which would be their headquarters. The trip, which would normally take about 30 minutes, took almost 3 hours because of the throngs of fans lining the route and pressing against the cars as Japanese mounted and foot police were overwhelmed. Eddie Mathews likened it to the pope in a motorcade without police or security while it reminded Robin Roberts of a ticker-tape parade in New York City.
That evening the Americans were guests at a gigantic pep rally in their honor at the Nichigeki Theater, where Hawaiian-born Japanese crooner Katsuhiko Haida introduced each player. American Ambassador John M. Allison, also hosted a reception at the US Embassy for both the Lopats and the New York Giants, who had just returned to Tokyo from Sendai.
Eddie Lopat All-Stars vs. Mainichi Orions, October 23, 1953 (Rob Fitts Collection)
The Lopat squad’s 1st game was the following afternoon, October 23rd against the Mainichi Orions in Korakuen Stadium before 27,000 fans. The Orions, who had finished 5th out of 7 teams in Japan’s Pacific League, had the honor of playing the initial game due to its ownership by the Mainichi newspapers. Jackie Jensen won a HR-hitting contest before the game by smacking 6 out of the yard, followed by Futoshi Nakanishi of the Nishitetsu Lions with 3 and then Berra, Mathews, and Hank Sauer with 2 each. Bobby Brown, who was stationed in Tokyo as a US Army doctor, was seen visiting in the dugout with his Yankee teammates Lopat, Berra, and Martin before the contest.
The US and Japanese Army bands played after the HR-hitting contest, followed by helicopters dropping bouquets of flowers to both managers. Another helicopter hovered low over the field and dropped the 1st ball but stirred up so much dust from the all-dirt infield that the start of the game was delayed.
The game finally began with Curt Simmons on the mound for the Americans against southpaw Atsushi Aramaki. The visitors plated a run in the top of the 2nd on a single by Sauer, a double by Robinson, and an error, but the Orions immediately rallied for 3 runs in the bottom half on 3 bunt singles and Kazuhiro Yamauchi’s double. The Orions led 4-1 heading into the top of the 9th, but the Lopats staged a thrilling rally to tie the score behind a walk to Mathews, a 2-run HR by Sauer, and Robinson’s game-tying circuit clout.
Garcia, who had relieved Simmons in the 7th inning, was still pitching in the 10th, but after allowing a single, reaggravated the leg injury suffered in Hawaii. He was forced to leave the game with the count of 1 and 1 against the Orions’ Charlie Hood, who was a minor-league player in the Phillies organization. (Hood was in the military stationed in Japan and had played 25 games for Mainichi during the season.) When Garcia had to depart, Lopat asked for volunteers to pitch. Roberts, sitting in the dugout, said he would and went out to the mound to warm up.
During the game Roberts had told Bob Lemon next to him that he was familiar with Hood from Phillies spring training and that he was a really good low-ball hitter. Then, on his 1st pitch, Roberts threw Hood a low fastball which he ripped down the right-field line for a game-winning double. Lemon ribbed Roberts for the rest of the trip about his throwing a low fastball to a low-fastball hitter. In one of baseball’s little coincidences, Roberts and Lemon would both be elected to the Hall of Fame on the same day in 1976, 23 years later.
The Lopat squad’s loss in the opener was only the 3rd ever suffered by an American team of major leaguers in a postseason tour of Japan. The All-Stars were certainly embarrassed by losing to a mediocre team and afterward Roberts told the Japanese press, “Look, it’s a goodwill trip and so this was some of our goodwill. You won the 1st game, but you won’t win anymore.”
It turned out Roberts was right. The major leaguers turned the tables quickly the next day, October 24th, against an All-Pacific League team, winning by the score of 13-7. Before the game, the press brought over the starting pitcher for the Japanese, Tokuji Kawasaki, for some photos with Roberts, who was starting for the Americans. Kawasaki could understand some English, so Roberts asked him, “How many games did you win this year?”
Kawasaki said, “24. 1 more than you, huh?”
Of course, he was correct, Roberts had won “only” 23 games for the Phillies in 1953, but Roberts quickly got even as his team pounded out 17 hits, of which 7 were HRs, including 3 by Sauer and 2 by Berra. Little Nellie Fox hit solo HR as did Roberts himself as he coasted to the victory. It was more of the same the next day against the same opponent. The Lopats won 10-3 as Sauer hit another HR out of the park, as did Mathews, Jensen and Lemon before a record 40,000 fans.
The teams headed north to Sendai for a rematch the next day, October 26th, before a near-capacity crowd of 25,000. Curt Simmons took the slab for the Americans and through 5 innings the game remained a scoreless tie. In the 6th, Slaughter’s triple led to the game’s 1st run. The Lopat squad then plated 2 more in the 7th to extend the lead to 3-0 on an error, singles by Kuenn and Slaughter, a walk, and a sacrifice fly. That was the final tally as Simmons scattered 5 hits in tossing a complete-game shutout.
The teams traveled south to Fukuoka for the 5th game of the tour on October 28th; they would drew a sellout crowd of about 30,000 fans. Behind the pitching of Bob Lemon, the Americans would breezed to a 9-4 win. Although the foul lines of the ballpark were only 300 feet, only Sauer managed a HR, and he hit 1 in the 1st inning and 1 in the 9th, to give him 7 HRs in the 5 games played in Japan. Sauer had won the National League MVP Award in 1952, while playing for the Chicago Cubs with 37 HRs and 121 RBIs before battling injuries in 1953, that had limited him to 19 HRs. Sauer had belted 2 more HRs 2 days later in Shimonoseki, making 9 HRs in 6 games, as the Americans had 13 hits in a 6-2 win over the Pacific All-Stars. Mathews broke out of a slump with a HR, double and single, while Berra would slugged the 4th HR of the day for the Lopat squad. On the mound, Roberts coasted through the game and used his fastball sparingly, according to 1 report. The Japanese were not used to the arm strength of the Americans, whether from the mound or the field, and for the 3rd game in a row had a man thrown out at home plate, in this case by Slaughter from center field.
The Americans moved to Osaka next for 3 games in the area and visited 3 Army hospitals before their 1st matchup against the Nankai Hawks, champions of the Pacific League. The Hawks, however, seemed overawed by their opposition, committing 5 errors and for the most part flailing at Lopat’s off-speed assortment from the mound. The final score was 15-1 as Kuenn and Jensen smacked HRs and Mathews had 4 hits and 4 RBIs.
The most excitement occurred in bottom of the 5th inning with the score 10-0. Yogi Berra vociferously objected to consecutive pitch calls by Umpire Johnny Stevens and got himself ejected. The Japanese fans seemed stunned, “as though witnessing a terrible tragedy.” But since Stevens was part of the Lopat travel party, some wondered whether it was “a bit of pre-arranged buffoonery.” In any event, Berra took to the press box after his ouster and continued to heckle Stevens, to the entertainment of the Japanese press corps. At least backup Catcher Gus Niarhos got to catch a few innings.
The venue then shifted to Nishinomiya Stadium, halfway between Osaka and Kobe, for an October 31st contest against the Hankyu Braves, who had finished 2nd in the Pacific League, 4 games behind the Hawks. Before 30,000 partisan fans, the Braves put up a much sterner fight and took a 3-2 lead into the 7th. It was the 1st time the Americans had trailed since the opening game. But after a single by Curt Simmons and a walk to Kuenn, Enos Slaughter blasted a 3-run HR, his 2nd of the day to forge a 5-3 lead. In the 8th, Berra’s double, Jensen’s single and a double by Billy Martin closed out the 7-3 victory as Simmons went all the way on the mound.
In spite of the string of defeats, Japanese enthusiasm for the tour did not wane. The next day, the Lopat squad would faced the Pacific League All-Stars in the same venue before an overflow crowd of 50,000. The result was all too similar for the home squad, an 8-2 defeat as the Americans would crack 4 HRs among their 13 hits. Mathews would hit 2 over the fence, while Jensen and Sauer each hit 1. Lemon, relying primarily on his curveball, allowed only 2 hits and a 1 in 6 innings of work.
Eighteen-year-old Sadao Nishimura, who had been loaned to the Lopats by the Nishitetsu Lions of Fukuoka, a few days earlier to compensate for Garcia’s general unavailability, pitched the final 3 innings for the visitors, allowing only a single run. Lopat and Berra were so enthralled with Nishimura, that they hoped to interest the Yankees in signing him. Roberts took a particular interest in working with Nishimura and it may have paid off as the 19-year-old went 22-5 with a 1.77 ERA for the Lions in 1954.
Another young Japanese pitcher impressed the Americans during the tour. Lefty Masaichi Kaneda was only 20 years old, but had just completed his 4th season for the Kokutetsu Swallows of the Central League. He displayed a major-league-caliber fastball and a sharp-breaking curveball. In 2 appearances spanning 8 innings, however, the Lopat squad touched him for 5 runs. Kaneda, despite pitching most of his 20-year career for the habitually weak Swallows, went on to win 400 games and become Japan’s “God of pitching.”
Nagoya was the next stop for the Lopat crew, where the opposition was the Central League All-Stars for the only time on the tour. The Central Leaguers had given the New York Giants some tough games on their tour, but on this day, they surrendered 7 runs in the 2nd inning and by the 5h trailed 9-0 before rallying for 6 late runs to make the final score 9-6. Homers by Kuenn, Sauer, and Berra knocked in 6 of the runs. The 26-year-old Jensen, who hadn’t pitched since his college days at the University of California, threw 7 innings and allowed only 3 runs.
Back to Tokyo for the final 2 games of the Japanese portion of the tour, the Lopats finished with a flourish by defeating the Pacific All-Stars, 10-0 and then All-Japan, 16-2. Robinson, Mathews, and Berra swatted HRs in the 1st game while in the finale the Americans smashed a hard-to-believe 9 HRs. Sauer’s 12th homer in 12 games traveled an estimated 500 feet and sailed completely out of Korakuen Stadium. For that feat, Sauer was awarded a motorcycle at home plate. Sauer’s blast disappointed Lopat, who had negotiated with the sponsor that he would get the motorcycle, if no one actually hit a ball that carried out of the ballpark. Whether Sauer managed to get it back to the States remains an open question.
After winning 11 of 12 in Japan and playing 12 games in 13 days, the Lopat All-Stars were not done yet. They still had 2 games to play in Okinawa and 2 in Manila before heading home. At the 1st stop, at the Camp Kue baseball diamond in Okinawa, the Lopats defeated the Okinawa All-Stars, a team of Army and Air Force personnel, 14-1 and 6-0 behind Roberts and Jensen.
The team’s flight to Manila after the game was delayed 17 hours when a truck clipped a wing of their plane, while it was sitting on the tarmac. The Lopats would arrived at Manila’s Rizal Memorial Field an hour late, but still had no difficulty defeating the Canlubang Sugar Barons, the champions of the Manila Bay League, 17-0 behind Roberts’s 3-hitter.
The opposition for the tour finale on November 8th was much tougher, as the Mainichi Orions, the only team to defeat the Lopat squad in Japan, had flown into Manila to start their own mini-tour. The Lopats eked out a narrow 1-0 win before 11,000 cheering fans, with the only run scoring in the 7th on a single by Kuenn that drove in Martin from 2nd. The weather was so oppressively hot and humid that Lemon, pitching a shutout, was unable to continue after 5 innings and was replaced by Lopat.
With the final victory, the Lopat All-Stars would finished with an overall 24-3 record, with 2 of the losses coming to the Campanella All-Stars in Hawaii. After the loss in their 1st game in Japan, the Americans reeled off 15 straight victories to finish the tour.
The long trip home for the exhausted All-Stars was not without incident. Their Pan American Clipper developed an oil leak, which resulted in a 4-hour unscheduled delay in Guam for repairs, causing the team to miss their connection in Honolulu. The delays undoubtedly bothered Jackie Jensen, whose fear of flying eventually led to his early retirement from baseball. On the flight home, he used a sleeping mask and managed to fall sound asleep. Billy Martin, who had earlier been Jensen’s teammate with the Yankees and the Oakland Oaks, grabbed an oxygen mask and a captain’s cap and shook Jensen awake, yelling, “Put on your Mae West, we’re going down! We’re going down!” Gallows humor aside, the Lopat tour was by any measure a great success. It drew 365,000 fans for the 12 games while the Giants tour had drew 338,000 as the Japanese had a seemingly unquenchable thirst for major-league baseball. Mathews, Berra, and Sauer were particular favorites because of their penchant for the long ball. The Japanese fans also loved little Nellie Fox because of his “booming infield chatter.”
1953 Eddie Lopat All-Stars Welcoming Parade (Rob Fitts Collection)
The Americans were lavished with gifts at every turn and, combined with their own shopping, had to send most of their belongings home by ship. In turn, the major leaguers appear to have been amiable guests, signing endless autographs, even for the many fans, who invaded their dugout. They also little complained about their arduous schedule in which they often arose at 5 A.M. to travel to their next destination to play a game that same day. In the more remote locales, their accommodations were less than luxurious and the playing fields were sometimes made of volcanic ash, which tended to stick to their spikes.
The Japanese loved HRs and the Americans accommodated them, smashing 42 HRs in the 12 games. Sauer’s 12 round-trippers are still the 2nd-most HRs hit by a player during a trip to Japan. (Babe Ruth holds the Japanese tour record with 13 HRs in 18 games.) Mathews and Berra each popped 6 balls out of the park in Japan. The Americans soon got used to the Japanese infielders bowing to them as they circled the bases after a HR. In Tokyo, at least, HRs hitters were greeted at home plate by young girls with boxes of candy, which the major leaguers would donated to Japanese orphanages.
The Lopat team hit .325 for the tour, led by Fox’s .435 and Sauer’s .423, Slaughter’s .393 and Berra’s .386. The pitchers had a $5 sweepstakes for the top-hitting mounds-man, which Bob Lemon won handily by going 3-for-7. In contrast, the Japanese collectively batted .238 and poled only 3 HRs. Twenty-year-old future Japan Baseball Hall of Famer Futoshi Nakanishi of the Nishitetsu Lions batted .313 in 32 at-bats to lead the hosts. Nakanishi had led the Pacific League with 36 HR clouts and had just missed the Triple Crown. Although he did not homer against the Americans, he did raise eyebrows by defeating Mathews in a pregame HR-hitting contest in Tokyo, 6 to 5.
Overall, the contrast in playing styles was dramatic, with the Americans’ swing-from-the-heels approach and the Japanese playing small ball and bunting at any time, even when several runs down. According to Curt Simmons, Japanese players were motivated by being paid 10,000 yen for every run they scored against the foreign visitors. Even the Japanese press acknowledged that Japanese baseball players had a long way to go to match the strength and skill of the major leaguers. But there was room for hope for an eventual World Series between Japan and the United States, fueled by several close games against both the Lopat All-Stars and the New York Giants.
The Lopat All-Stars arrived back in San Francisco on November 12th; nearly 5 weeks, after they had gathered in Colorado for the start of the tour. In the interim, they had traveled almost 30,000 miles. Each pocketed $4,000 for the trip and all regarded it as one of the best times of their lives. The players especially enjoyed the royal treatment from the Japanese fans and, as an added bonus, they made friendships and connections among themselves that endured. The trip was lauded by the US State Department as a huge diplomatic success. Army officials agreed, telling Lopat that the 2 postseason tours that year had created more goodwill in Japan than the Army had been able to stir up in 5 years.
C. PAUL ROGERS III is the co-author or co-editor of several baseball books including The Whiz Kids and the 1950 Pennant Race (Temple University Press, 1996) with boyhood hero Robin Roberts and Lucky Me: My 65 Years in Baseball (SMU Press, 2011) with Eddie Robinson. Paul is president of the Ernie Banks-Bobby Bragan DFW Chapter of SABR and a frequent contributor to the SABR BioProject, but his real job is as a Law Professor at the SMU Dedman School of Law, where he served as Dean for 9 years. He has also served as SMU’s faculty athletic representative for 35 years and counting.
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
The author thanks Greg Ivy, Skipper Steele, Frank Jackson, and Rob Fitts for their ready help with the research of this article.
|
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 25, 2024 19:30:43 GMT -5
Yankees INF/OF Chick Fewster
View Attachment
This article was written by Bill Nowlin, SABR
Re-edited by Clipper
Just 5 months before Cleveland’s Ray Chapman was hit on the head and killed by a pitch, Yankees INF Chick Fewster had his own brush with death. It was during spring training, in March of 1920. He was in his 4th season with the New York Yankees, still hoping to become a regular but coming off a 1919 season where he’d played in 81 games (both infield and outfield) and had batted .283. Manager Miller Huggins had raved, “Chick has everything. I have never seen a greater prospect.”
The Yankees were hosting the Brooklyn Robins in Jacksonville in a March 25th exhibition game. Two players had been hurt before the game, during batting practice. Both Wally Pipp of the Yanks and Clarence Mitchell of the Brooklyns had been knocked out, by a thrown ball to 1st base in Pipp’s case and a batted ball from a teammate in Mitchell’s. It was already a rough day.
Carl Mays was pitching for the Yankees and retired Brooklyn in the top of the 1st. Fewster, playing 3rd base, was the leadoff batter in the bottom of the 1st, facing Big Jeff Pfeffer. With the count 2-1, Pfeffer’s 4th pitch struck Fewster on the temple. “The impact sounded like a cocoanut shell cracking,” The New York Times reported, “and Fewster went down like an ox felled by an axe. He was on the ground unconscious for about 10 minutes before Trainer Woods and a bunch of assistants could bring him.” [New York Times, March 26, 1920] There was immediate worry that he might become gun-shy in future at-bats.
A day later, it was clear that he’d been much more seriously injured than 1st thought. He lost his power of speech at 1st and it was clear that the bruising was far deeper than it had seemed. The Sporting News said that his “life hung in the balance for about 3 days” with a fractured skull and a concussion. [The Sporting News, April 26, 1945] A doctor accompanied him as he was moved to Union Protestant Infirmary in Baltimore and 3 days later doctors said he was slowly recovering his speech. It was 6 days later before it was fully determined that his skull had indeed been fractured and he was bleeding from a hemorrhage. He underwent an operation at Johns Hopkins Hospital on March 31st to remove a piece of his skull about the size of a silver dollar and remove a blood clot at the same time. A silver plate was placed in his skull. [Notes by Ford Sawyer contained in Fewster’s player file at the Hall of Fame.] A report the next day was headlined, “Fewster Not Likely to Play Ball Again.” [Washington Post, April 2, 1920]
Recuperation progressed more rapidly than expected, and by April 9th, he was able to sit up in bed and speak with some degree of coherency. By April 17th, he was reported to be “feeling so well now that he is anxious to get out and play ball again.” [Chicago Tribune, April 18, 1920]
His optimism was not just hollow hope. He rejoined the team and got into his 1st games on July 5th, playing both halves of a doubleheader in Washington. He was hit by a pitch the very next day, but he hung in there. The Yankees had had a special batting helmet made for him, but he declined to wear it. “But something had gone out of his play; the great prospect of the 1920 training season became just an ordinary player.” [The Sporting News, April 26, 1945]
He saw action in 21 games before the end of the season, with 36 plate appearances. He would hit for a .286 average and scored 8 runs, though only driving in 1. He was walked 7 times, perhaps an indication that pitchers were hesitant to pitch too closely to him.
Though widely known as Chick, he was born as Wilson Lloyd Fewster in Baltimore on November 10, 1895. His father was a Marylander, James Fewster, a carpenter by trade. His mother Elizabeth was a native of Ireland who had arrived in the United States in 1884. Wilson was the 3rd of 4 boys in the family. The eldest, James, was 5 years older than he, followed 2 years later by Walter, and then Stanley was born a year after Wilson. By 1910, James was no longer in the picture – perhaps due to death – and Elizabeth was listed as head of household in that year’s census. Her son James was working as a clerk in a grocery store. Two more sons, Russell and Leslie, had both joined the family. Stanley played at least briefly with Portsmouth in the Virginia League, according to the April 26, 1945, Sporting News.
Chick learned baseball on the sandlots of Baltimore, where the trainer of the Richmond Climbers saw him at a tryout and signed him. [Notes by Ford Sawyer contained in Fewster’s player file at the Hall of Fame.] He broke into organized baseball playing 2nd base at Double A with Richmond (International League) in 1915, a team owned by Jack Dunn of Baltimore Orioles, who had moved the team there (and sold Babe Ruth to the Boston Red Sox) while facing competition from the Federal League team in Baltimore. Fewster would hit .253, while playing 2nd base in 48 games. The next 2 seasons he played for the Orioles (Dunn had moved the team back home after the Federal League had collapsed), though only for 18 games (.184) in 1916, at shortstop. Much of the year he had played with the Worcester Busters, in the Eastern League, hitting .233 in 88 games. In 1917, after 22 games with Worcester he was back with Baltimore at 2nd base. He got into 97 games and hit .299 and was brought up to the Yankees in time to debut on September 19th. In 11 late-season games, he hit .222, driving in just 1 run and scoring twice. He played 2nd for the Yankees, a right-hander who stood 5-feet-11 and weighed 160 pounds.
In 1918, he was with the Yankees throughout the season but used only sparingly in 5 games, going 1 for 2 at the plate. As noted above, he hit .283 in 1919, collecting his 1st HR (his drive into the left-field bleachers at the Polo Grounds won the game against the Tigers on August 1) and scoring 38 times while driving in 15 runs. He would played 41 games in the Outfield and divided his other work in the infield between Shortstop, 2nd base, and 3rd base – though he committed 12 errors in 24 games at short.
The year after his injury, Fewster hit a steady .280 in 1921, covering center field much more than any other position, until Elmer Miller took over most of the duties in early August. He was hit by 6 pitches (when he’d faced Pfeffer at Shreveport in spring training, he reportedly slammed a triple off him). And he appeared in the World Series, taking over for Babe Ruth late in Game 3 after Ruth wrenched his knee. Fewster played in 4 games, with a 2-run HR in Game 6 off of Jesse Barnes of the Giants (in 11 seasons of regular-season play, he only hit 6 HRs). In 13 plate appearances, he got 2 hits and walked 3 times, scoring thrice. The Giants would win the best-of-9 World Series, 5 games to 3.
It’s of some interest to note that while still with New York, he’d run into a couple of rough spots on back-to-back days, being fined $11 on April 14, 1922 for driving an automobile without a license and then – more seriously – been faced with a lawsuit seeking $50,000. The suit was filed on April 15 by a contractor in Baltimore, Joseph T. Byrne, who alleged that Chick was guilty of alienation of the affections of his wife, Grace C. Byrne. She had kept a boarding house for Chick and 2 of his brothers some years earlier. When Commissioner Landis was asked if the case came under his jurisdiction as a case involving a stolen car would, he simply said, “Don’t that beat the devil!” [The Sporting News, May 11, 1922] How the suit was resolved is today unknown.
Chick was sent from New York to Boston on July 23rd in a big trade. Miller joined him, as did Lefty O’Doul, Johnny Mitchell, and $50,000. In exchange, Harry Frazee sent the Yankees 3B Jumpin’ Joe Dugan and OF Elmer Smith. They became the 11th and 12th Red Sox players traded or sold to New York, and the Yankees ballclub was now largely made up of former Red Sox players. Fewster had been hitting .242 for New York through 44 games, his 1 HR, a game-winning inside-the-park grand slam on May 12th. It was the loss of Dugan that upset Boston fans the most. The Boston Herald called it a “disgusting trade” and even charged that Miller, Mitchell, and Fewster were all “tossed in to Boston for camouflage purposes.” Frazee said he thought the trade would strengthen his team, adding for emphasis, “I wish I had 6 more players with the ‘guts’ and fight of Chick Fewster.” [New York Times, July 25,1922] About a year later, the Washington Post noted that after Fewster’s recovery, “instead of showing timidity at the bat, he seemed over daring and the pitchers were almost afraid of him. His heart surely was there, and his courage never had been weakened, but the injury left him physically weak and he was unable to play in hot weather” due to dizzy spells when the sun beat down on him. [Washington Post, June 18, 1923]
Chick would joined the Red Sox and Manager Hugh Duffy in Connellsville, Pennsylvania, where the team played an exhibition game. Continuing his work as a utility player, Chick hit .289 in 83 at-bats.
Boston had a new manager in the spring of 1923 and Boston Globe sportswriter Mel Webb said that Fewster was “the most aggressive player Frank Chance has in his baseball caravan.” [Boston Globe, April 10, 1923] He showed some spunk on the bench, too, trading punches with teammate Val Picinich on the bench during the 5th inning of the July 27 home game in an argument over a throw from Catcher Picinich. On August 9th, Fewster had wrenched his back so badly chasing down a fly ball that he had to be carried from the field. He was out of action for 2 weeks. His 90 games in 1923 was his most to date, but his BA fell to .236. Early in 1924 (on January 7th), he was traded to the Indians for Dan Boone, Joe Connolly, Steve O’Neill, and Bill Wambsganss. Accompanying him to Cleveland were George Burns and Roxy Walters.
Fewster would played 2 years in Cleveland, appearing in 101 and 93 games respectively, hitting .267 in 1924 and .248 in 1925. Manager Tris Speaker told him that the 2nd base job was his for 1925, and he played more there than anyone else, but was still limited to just 83 games at 2nd and 10 at 3rd.
In another January deal, he was sold to Brooklyn Robins in 1926. It wasn’t quite that straightforward, however; the Indians had outrighted him to AA Kansas City Blues over the winter, but he said he would refuse to report. So something was worked out and Kansas City would sell him to Brooklyn on April 8th. At first, it again looked like he might have landed a regular job at 2nd base, though he didn’t play quite as much as the season progressed. Nonetheless, he reached a career-high with 105 games, hitting for a .243 average. The Robins brought him back in 1927, but only in pinch roles and not for long. He appeared only 4 times before he was outright to AA Jersey City of the International League on May 5th. On the 7th he rang up some pairs in an 11-7 win over Syracuse, walking twice, singling twice, scoring 2 runs, stealing 2 bases and taking part in 2 double plays. His 6th-inning steal of home in a game against Baltimore on July 21st won the game.
Jersey City would passed him on to Baltimore Orioles before the end of the season, and he would hit .296 in 422 at-bats for both teams. Moving on to Montreal Royals in 1928, he would hit .251 in 338 at bats before he was released in August. Montreal Manager George Stallings, who was ill, reportedly recommended Fewster as his replacement. When Eddie Holly was given the job instead, there was “trouble” between the 2 and Fewster was released. [Atlanta Constitution, August 28, 1928]
In 1929, back in Jersey City with the Skeeters, he would hit .233 in 275 at-bats. That was his last season as an active player. He played 2nd base throughout his 3 later years in minor league ball. The Skeeters would released him on September 7th. On October 10th, he announced his retirement to enter the brokerage business. It wasn’t good timing; on October 25, the stock market collapsed as “Black Friday” kicked off the Great Depression.
Apparently beginning sometime in the late 1930s, Fewster operated his own baseball academy in Brooklyn. His obituary in the New York Times says that shortly after Pearl Harbor, he had joined the Merchant Marine at the age of 46 and participated in the supplying for the African invasion, even surviving the sinking of his ship in the Persian Gulf on one trip. His death came unexpectedly – he was only 49 – of coronary occlusion on April 16, 1945, in Baltimore. He was survived by his wife Annie and 18-year-old son Wilson Jr., who later became lacrosse coach at Johns Hopkins.
|
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 26, 2024 19:32:43 GMT -5
Ball Four at 50 and the Legacy of Jim Bouton
This article was written by Robert Elias - Peter Dreier, Edited by Clipper
This article was published in Fall 2021 Baseball Research Journal
Amidst the current upsurge of social activism among professional athletes, it is worth recalling the enormous contribution of Jim Bouton, one of the most politically outspoken sports figures in American history. Among professional team sports, baseball may be the most conservative and tradition-bound, but throughout its history, rebels and mavericks have emerged to challenge the status quo in baseball and the wider society, none more so than Bouton. During his playing days, Bouton spoke out against the Vietnam War, South African apartheid, the exploitation of players by greedy owners, and the casual racism of the teams and his fellow players. When his MLB baseball career HAD ended, he continued to use his celebrity as a platform against social injustice.
Bouton’s baseball memoir, “Ball Four”-published in 1970-may be the most influential sports book ever written. It was the only sports book to make the New York Public Library’s 1996 list of Books of the Century. Time magazine lists “Ball Four” as 1of the 100 greatest non-fiction books of all time.
But the baseball establishment ignored the 50th anniversary of this revolutionary book. Even after the COVID-19-shortened 2020 season, neither the Hall of Fame nor Major League Baseball planned any celebration.
Bouton, who had died in 2019 at age 80-wrote “Ball Four” after his best days as a hard-throwing All-Star pitcher with the New York Yankees were over and he was trying to make a comeback as a knuckleball pitcher. He wanted athletes to speak out for themselves, to refuse to conform, and to defy complacency. Following his own advice, he was an early supporter of anti-Vietnam War presidential candidate Eugene McCarthy in 1968. He served as a Democratic Party convention delegate for anti-war presidential candidate George McGovern in 1972.
In “Ball Four,” Bouton accused organized baseball of hypocrisy: portraying a squeaky-clean image while ignoring burning social issues. Bouton condemned baseball’s support for the Vietnam War. He attacked icons such as the Reverend Billy Graham, disputing his claim that communists had organized anti-war protests. While Baseball Commissioner Bowie Kuhn said he couldn’t remember any players being ostracized for anti-war statements, Bouton recounted being repeatedly heckled for his anti-war views by players and fans: “They wanted to know if I was working for Ho Chi Minh.”
“Ball Four”-funny, honest, and well-written-revealed aspects of major league baseball that sportswriters and previous ballplayer memoirs had ignored. Bouton expressed his outrage at owners who exploited players and at players who showed disrespect for the game he loved. He didn’t hold back naming names or describing the lives and antics of ballplayers both on and off the field. It portrayed laudable characters and accomplishments, but also aspects of players’ heavy drinking, crass language and behavior, pep pills and drug use, conservative political views, questionable baseball smarts, anti-intellectualism, womanizing, voyeurism and extramarital affairs. It described boys being boys: human, fun-loving, vulnerable and sometimes immature. That is, ballplayers were normal young men, with some special skills, but otherwise not necessarily idealistic heroes, as they had been portrayed by most sports reporters. Exposing what had always been under wraps generated a firestorm of protest from players, management, and sportswriters.
“Ball Four” is ostensibly a diary of Bouton’s 1969 season as a pitcher with the lowly Seattle Pilots and the Houston Astros, but the most memorable and controversial parts of the book deal with his years with the Yankees. Decades before baseball was rocked by scandal over PEDs, Bouton disclosed players’ widespread use of amphetamines (aka “greenies.”). One of the most controversial parts of the book was his revelation that his Yankees teammate Mickey Mantle, whom sportswriters viewed as baseball’s golden boy, was an alcoholic, who often blasted towering HRs, while nursing a hangover. As Bouton told Fresh Air host Terry Gross during a 1986 radio interview, his portrayal of Mantle “wasn’t really even so much as a put-down of Mickey Mantle as it was a story of what a great athlete he was.”
Since the book’s original publication in 1970, Ball Four has been updated, expanded, reprinted and republished numerous times.
Bouton acknowledged with candor that he was a participant, not just an onlooker, in these activities. And he described his clashes with his coaches and team executives, over salary disputes and his desire to use his knuckleball as his main pitch, as well as his outspoken views about politics. “Baseball, football— they’ve always felt the need to be patriotic,” Bouton observed, “to be on the side of America and might, supporting wars no matter what, and so going against that conservative bent, to have a break in their ranks: This was a little too much for them.”
In the past half-century since “Ball Four’s” publication, many athletes and writers have sought to outdo each other with “tell-all” books highlighting tales of drugs and sex among pro athletes, but they lack Bouton’s skills as a sociological observer and political renegade. Bouton was not above recounting juvenile hijinks among himself and fellow players, but he reserved most of his outrage for major league baseball and America’s, corporate and political establishment.
Even before he gained notoriety for “Ball Four,” Bouton was not the typical ballplayer. In his free time, he painted watercolors and made costume jewelry. He and his 1st wife adopted a Korean mixed-race child at a time when few couples did so. Bouton not only complained about his own salary, he was also a “clubhouse lawyer” and stood up for fellow players, if management cheated them. In the book, Bouton claimed that he “wanted to nail those guys [management] because they stole money from the players.” By illuminating his own salary battles with the Yankees and their dirty tricks in dealing with him and other players, Bouton revealed baseball’s unfair labor conditions.
As a white professional athlete in the late 1950s and 1960s, he was unusually curious about the world around him and the burgeoning movements for social change. In the book, Bouton described a visit he and fellow ballplayer Gary Bell made to the Univ. of California campus in Berkeley.
They: …walked around and listened to speeches Arab kids arguing about the Arab-Israeli war, Black Panthers talking about Huey Newton and the usual little old ladies in tennis shoes talking about God. Compared with the way everybody was dressed Gary and I must have looked like a couple of narcs.
So, some of these people look odd, but…anybody who goes through life thinking only of himself with the kinds of things that are going on in this country…well, he’s the odd one. Gary and I are really the crazy ones…We’re concerned about getting the Oakland Athletics out…about making money in real estate, and about ourselves and our families. These kids, though, are genuinely concerned about…Vietnam, poor people, black people…and they’re trying to change them. What are Gary and I doing besides watching?
I wanted to tell everybody, Look, I’m with you, baby. I understand. Underneath my haircut, I really understand that you’re doing the right thing.’
By today’s standards, the book is quite tame. But at the time, it was shocking. As Mitchell Nathanson explains in his biography, “Bouton: The Life of a Baseball Original,” Bouton’s fellow ball players were outraged that he had broken the code by revealing stories from the locker rooms and hotel rooms. Many fans were upset by Bouton’s revelations about the private lives of their favorite players. Bouton was excoriated by baseball officials, including Commissioner Kuhn, who called it “detrimental to baseball” and tried to force Bouton to sign a statement saying that the book was a total fiction. Bouton was attacked by sportswriters, who viewed their job as protecting the integrity of the game and the private lives of the players, whom they relied on for interviews and stories.
Through extensive interviews with Bouton, as well as his family, friends, ballplayers, political activists and others, Nathanson shows why and how Bouton was unique among the thousands of pro athletes who came before him. Today, we are less shocked when athletes speak out about social and political issues. The Trump era triggered an upsurge of activism and outrage among pro athletes, led by players like NFL quarterback Colin Kaepernick, MLB relief pitcher Sean Doolittle, NBA star LeBron James, soccer great Megan Rapinoe, tennis star Naomi Osaka and many others. Some have been successful at raising consciousness and engendering debate while being shut out of their sports or dropped from teams like Kaepernick and the NFL’s Chris Kluwe, while others have maintained their status as stars. James raised millions of dollars to ensure voting rights leading up to the November 2020 election. Players on championship NFL, NBA, and MLB teams, as well as the World Cup-winning women’s soccer team, refused invitations to celebrate their victories with Trump at the White House. Pro athletes responded to the murder of George Floyd and the police shooting in Kenosha, Wisconsin, of Jacob Blake. NBA, WNBA, and MLB teams refused to play scheduled games to protest the Blake shooting.
In his time, Bouton was not alone in his views, but the many other celebrated athletes who shared his beliefs kept them to themselves. The handful of exceptions included basketball stars Bill Russell and Elgin Baylor, boxer Muhammed Ali, tennis great Arthur Ashe, baseball star Roberto Clemente and Olympic track stars John Carlos and Tommie Smith. But Bouton was rare in two respects. He was white and, except for a few spectacular years with the Yankees, he was not a major star.
“Ball Four” revolutionized sports writing, forever changing how journalists cover sports and how fans think about their favorite teams and players. The book’s critics focused on how it assaulted the sanctity of the locker room. But for MLB owners, Bouton’s real threat was challenging their economic power and, more broadly, America’s unequal economic system and the undue influence of big corporations. Bouton loved baseball, but not the baseball establishment which, he believed, took advantage of powerless, unorganized, and under-educated athletes. In a clubhouse discussion 1 day when Bouton was still with the Yankees, his teammates claimed a fair minimum salary should range between $7,000 and $12,000. Bouton was scolded when he proposed $25,000, but he pointed out that: “…everyone in this room has a PhD in hitting or pitching. We’re in the top 600 in the world at what we do. In an industry that makes millions of dollars and we have to sign whatever contract they give us? That’s insane.”
Playing before the ascendancy of the Major League Baseball Players Association, Bouton revealed that major leaguers led lives with little financial or professional security. The owners cared about nothing except their profits. They kept salaries indecently low, and traded or demoted even the most loyal players. At the time, under major league contract terms, ballplayers were little more than indentured servants, with no ability to negotiate with their team owners for better salaries, benefits, or working conditions. Salary negotiations were a farce, and most players couldn’t make a living on their baseball pay, despite generating millions in profits for owners. Except for the superstars, ballplayers led a vagabond, insecure existence. By disclosing these conditions, Bouton thought fellow ballplayers would appreciate him blowing the whistle. Instead, they complained about him violating their privacy and tarnishing their reputations.
By the late 1960s, however, the Major League Baseball Players Association (MLBPA) was beginning its assault on their peonage. In 1968, 2 years after Marvin Miller joined the union as Executive Director, the MLBPA negotiated the 1st-ever collective-bargaining agreement in professional sports. Minimum salaries increased from $6,000 to $10,000. Two years later, the MLBPA established players’ rights to binding arbitration over salaries and grievances. Most importantly, Bouton helped overturn the renewal clause that prevented players from offering their services to the highest bidder. In 1970, with union support, outfielder Curt Flood filed a lawsuit against Major League Baseball for trading him without his consent, which he claimed violated federal antitrust laws. “Marvin Miller called me up,” Bouton recalled, “and said, ‘We’d like to have you put Ball Four in testimony against the owners.’” The union had been accumulating “stories about ballplayers being taken advantage of by the owners.” Miller claimed that Ball Four “played a significant role in the removal of baseball’s reserve clause.”
In 1972, the US Supreme Court had ruled against Flood, but in 1975, Miller had persuaded pitchers Andy Messersmith and Dave McNally to play that season without a contract and then file a grievance arbitration. The arbitrator ruled in their favor, paving the way to free agency, which allows players to choose which team they want to work for, veto proposed trades, and bargain for the best contract. By then Bouton was out of the majors, but it was part of his legacy. While Bouton’s book became a bestseller, he paid dearly in baseball, temporarily blacklisted from playing and excluded from ballparks such as Yankee Stadium.
Jim Bouton was born in Newark, New Jersey in 1939. Bouton had attracted attention as a pitcher, after moving to the Chicago suburbs in his teens. He had studied painting briefly at the Art Institute of Chicago, attended Western Michigan University for a year and signed a contract with the New York Yankees in 1958. After 3 years in the minor leagues, he would make the Yankees MLB roster in 1962. In 36 appearances, including 16 starts, he went 7–7 with a 3.99 ERA and got a World Series ring, when the Yankees beat the San Francisco Giants in the Fall Classic.
Bouton’s agitations for fair treatment by management began years before the idea of writing a book began to flicker. After earning the MLB minimum ($7,000 according to “Ball Four”, though other sources list the minimum at $5,000) as a rookie, Bouton asked for a raise. He was offered a tiny bump, if he “made the team.” Bouton was incredulous: “What do you mean if I make the team?” he asked Yankees Executive Dan Topping. “I was with the team the whole year; why wouldn’t I make it? Why would you even want to plant that kind of doubt in the mind of a rookie pitcher?”
Resorting to the usual ploy, Topping reminded Bouton that he’d be making more money in October since the Yankees always made the World Series. Bouton said: “Fine, I’ll sign a contract that guarantees me $10,000 more at the end of the season, if we don’t win the pennant.” Instead, Topping offered the same contract, regardless, whether Bouton made the team and Bouton again refused. Yankees General Manager Roy Hamey called Bouton, yelling that he’d be making the biggest mistake of his life if he didn’t sign. Bouton hung up on him. Topping tried again, and they settled for a bigger, but still meager raise.
In 1963, a 6-month hitch in the Army kept Bouton out of the rotation until mid-May, but he nevertheless had a sensational season, going 21–7 with a 2.53 ERA plus 10 relief appearances. He emerged as one of baseball’s top young pitchers and appeared in that season’s MLB All-Star Game. The Los Angeles Dodgers would beat the Yankees in the World Series by winning 4 straight games. Bouton pitched superbly in game 3, giving up only 4 hits and 1 run in 7 innings, but he was bested by Dodger hurler Don Drysdale, who had threw a 3-hit shutout.
After that season, Bouton claimed he deserved a much bigger raise, but again the Yankees stonewalled. Bouton asked the Yankees to double his salary to $21,000. GM Ralph Houk refused, offering $18,500 instead. Bouton told The New York Times, “Right now I wouldn’t even say we were in the same neighborhood.” Houk threatened to reduce his salary by $100 each day he held out and report to spring training camp. With few alternatives, Bouton would signed for $18,500. He might not have even gotten that had he not broken the taboo against discussing one’s salary with teammates and the press.
He told the angry Houk that he talked to reporters to “let them know I’m being reasonable” in his salary requests. Many writers began to take his side.
Bouton would repeat his pitching success in 1964, finishing with a 18-13 record with a 3.02 ERA. He led the league in starts and won 2 World Series games. But besides his salary demands, Bouton began speaking out on social issues and his teammates and Yankees management began regarding him as a flake. They found him too intelligent and outspoken for his own good, an outside agitator disturbing the status quo. He typically sat at the back of the team bus, reading! He was considered a free thinker, “which in those days was 1 step away from being a Communist, to conservative sports minds,” observed sportswriter Ron Kaplan.
The Yankees would tolerated this until Bouton suddenly became a marginal performer in 1965. Probably from overuse the previous 2 years, Bouton began to having pitching arm problems. He would slip to 4-15 record with a 4.82 ERA, as the Yankees had dropped to 6th place. His ERA bounced back in 1966 to 2.69, but poor run support held his won-loss record to 3-8 mark.
Bouton and his liberal opinions had become expendable. After opening the 1967 season with the Yankees, the club would demoted him to their AAA Syracuse farm team, where he posted a 3.36 ERA, but only a 2–8 record. He made it back to the majors in August, pitching much better and made the Yankees roster again the next year.
His tenure with the Yankees was already in jeopardy when the South African Non-Racial Olympic Committee (SAROC) approached him in early 1968 to sign a petition protesting the ban on non-white athletes on that country’s team, scheduled to play in the Olympic Games in Mexico City. In a country that was 80% black, the team was 100% white. Bouton became friendly with SANROC’s executive secretary-South African anti-apartheid activist Dennis Brutus-who Bouton called “the greatest man I ever met.”
“We need fellow athletes to stand up for us and change this injustice,” Bouton argued. Signing the petition, he thought, was a “no brainer.” Bouton believed his would be 1 of 100’s of signatures from major leaguers, but only a few, including his teammate Ruben Amaro, signed. The poor response appalled Bouton. A planned press conference was canceled, but the 2 ballplayers traveled to Mexico City anyway, only to be rebuffed by the Olympic Committee. “They knew all about the discrimination against the black South African athletes,” Bouton observed, “and they simply didn’t care. They were a bunch of pompous racists. It was sickening.” He wrote about the issue and his ordeal for Sport magazine later that year.
After his 1962 rookie year, and years before he ever considered writing a book, Bouton made waves by asking for better contract terms from the New York Yankees. The Yankees did not accede. Photo:(NATIONAL BASEBALL HALL OF FAME LIBRARY)
The Yankees had sold Bouton mid-season to the expansion Seattle Pilots, a team that wouldn’t begin play until 1969. Bouton would finished out the 1968 season with the Triple-A Seattle Angels (Pacific Coast League), teaching himself how to throw a knuckleball because, because he had lost the velocity on his fast ball.
During his time with the Yankees, Bouton had taken notes. Bouton had befriended sportswriter Leonard Shecter, who encouraged him to keep it up while playing for the Pilots (and later, the Astros). When the Pilots played in New York, Bouton would visit Shecter’s apartment and the 2 men would look over Bouton’s notes, which he wrote on envelopes, toilet paper, hotel stationery, and airplane airsick bags. (Bouton’s notes are now housed at the Library of Congress). These notes and sessions ultimately produced “Ball Four.”
Shecter was Bouton’s collaborator and co-author, not his ghost-writer. Bouton was busy trying to make his baseball comeback, but, as Nathanson notes, he was already glimpsing the possibility of a 2nd career as a writer and journalist. Overall, Bouton had pitched in 80 games that season, almost all in relief. He had reason to believe he’d resurrected his career.
In 1969, Bouton had supported students protesting the war and signed anti-war petitions. He spoke against the Vietnam War at a rally in New York’s Central Park. Eager to participate and recruit other athletes, Bouton observed: “What I’m doing now, with the Moratorium group, is no major concerted effort. I’m just feeling some players out. But it is not like Jim Bouton is trying to rouse guys. A lot of them feel the same way I do, about the war and about other types of involvement. And there are many who want to express these feelings.” He added, “We’re always being used for telling kids to stay in school, to brush their teeth. Why can’t we tell them how we feel about things like the Vietnam War? And athletes do have influence.”
Bouton was also bothered by his teammates’ racism and the institutional racism of the teams and the leagues. He was repulsed by the segregation in spring training (mostly held in Florida) and during the season in Southern cities. He was angered watching Emmett Ashford-who in 1966 became the 1st black MLB umpire-being repeatedly ridiculed by his white colleagues. More than a decade after Jackie Robinson broke baseball’s color line in 1947, Bouton witnessed his teammates subject Elston Howard, the Yankees’ 1st black player, to endless humiliations.
A handful of baseball players did use their celebrity to express their political views. For example, following Martin Luther King’s assassination in April 1968, Pittsburgh Pirates stars Roberto Clemente and Maury Wills urged their teammates to refuse to play on Opening Day and the following day, when America would be watching or listening to King’s funeral. At a team meeting, the players unanimously endorsed the idea and persuaded the Houston Astros players, whom they were scheduled to play, to join them. Players on other teams followed their lead. Commissioner William Eckert, his back against the wall, reluctantly moved all Opening Day games to April 10th. But such rebellions were rare, especially among white players.
Bouton was part of Houston’s starting rotation through May, making his last start on May 24th. “Ball Four” came out in June 1970. Bouton struggled to regain his place in the rotation, but the backlash against the book didn’t help.
A few ballplayers had defended Bouton’s book. Cy Young Award winner Mike Marshall said, “I thought it was a celebration. I thought it was funny, and made us look far better than we were. It made us look human, and vulnerable, and struggling, all the things we were.”
But most players didn’t see it that way. They viewed Bouton as a “rat,” revealing their foibles, weaknesses, and indiscretions. Bouton wasn’t the very first to write a candid diary, but he may as well have been. He was following in the footsteps of another pitcher-turned-writer, Jim Brosnan, who published “The Long Season” in 1960. Chronicling his experience of splitting the 1959 season between the St. Louis Cardinals and the Cincinnati Reds, Brosnan avoided the usual, sanitized portrayal, addressing some issues normally confined to the clubhouse. Although former major leaguer and sports broadcaster Joe Garagiola called the strait-laced Brosnan a “kooky beatnik,” “ offered relatively tame revelations. While Brosnan broke ground and began lifting the veil, Bouton’s book was more irreverent and forthright, and engendered a stronger backlash.
When Bouton faced the Cincinnati Reds, Pete Rose shouted: “Fuck you, Shakespeare.” In 3 successive anti-Bouton articles, New York Daily News sportswriter Dick Young portrayed Bouton as a “social leper” and a “commie in baseball stirrups.” To him, Bouton had committed the cardinal sin: he tarnished baseball icon Mickey Mantle, by suggesting that maybe it wasn’t Mantle’s injuries that shortened his career but rather his drinking problem and skirt-chasing until all hours of the morning.
The Houston Astros management forbade their Radio and TV announcers from mentioning the book. American League President Joe Cronin called " Ball Four“ unforgivable.”
Commissioner Kuhn demanded a meeting with Bouton. Before that meeting, however, Bouton got a boost from a positive book review by New York Times sportswriter Robert Lipsyte: “Bouton should be given baseball’s most valuable salesman of the year award. His anecdotes and insights are enlightening, hilarious, and most important, unavailable elsewhere. They breathe new life into a game choked by pontificating statisticians, image-conscious officials, and scared ballplayers.”
Not all fans turned against Bouton. On the day of the meeting with Kuhn, 2 college freshmen, Steve Bergen and Richard Feuer, appeared outside Kuhn’s office, protesting with placards reading: “Jim Bouton is a Real Hero,” “No Punishment for Exposing the Truth,” and “Kuhn: Stop Repression and Harassment.”
Like other young antiwar activists and students of the time, they viewed Kuhn as an example of the establishment trying to shut up their generation. According to Bergen: “…[Dick] Young’s comments smacked of the same authoritarian putdown of kids growing up in the ‘60s. Bouton was a hero for being willing to tell the truth about an aspect of society… the whole ‘60s movement was about questioning authority.”
Players Union Executive Director Marvin Miller, Union Attorney Richard Moss and Shecter joined Bouton at the meeting with Kuhn. The commissioner claimed that Bouton was undermining baseball, but Bouton responded: “You’re wrong… People will be more interested in baseball, not less… People are turned off by the phony goody-goody image.” Kuhn said Bouton owed “it to the game because it gave you what you have,” but Bouton protested: “I always gave baseball everything I had. Besides, baseball didn’t give me anything. I earned it.”
Kuhn ordered Bouton to release a statement saying he falsified or exaggerated his stories, but Bouton refused. When Kuhn told him to regard the meeting as a warning, Miller shot back: “A warning against what…against writing about baseball?… You can’t subject someone to future penalties on such vague criteria.” Kuhn told Bouton that he was going to issue a statement threatening players with punishment for any further writing like “Ball Four.” He told Bouton that he should remain silent. Again, Bouton refused. The controversy helped turn the book into a bestseller. Also the Commissioner had Hank Aaron come out with a negative statement about the book, despite the fact Hank had never read Bouton's book.
New York Congressman Richard Ottinger claimed the Commissioner’s actions were “part of a growing mood of repression in the country” that indicated “an intolerable arrogance [by] the official baseball establishment.” Ottinger threatened to approach the House Judiciary Committee about Kuhn’s denial of individual rights.
Meanwhile, Bouton’s pitching was not improving. After being demoted to the Oklahoma City minor league team, he had 2 more bad starts in Triple A and had decided to retire from playing, but the far-reaching effects of “Ball Four” were just beginning.
Bouton’s book helped change sports writing. While the old-timers condemned Bouton, younger people who read “Ball Four” became sportswriters because of the book. A new wave of writers abandoned the deification of ballplayers and instead looked for unconventional angles. In The New Yorker, Roger Angell would described the book as “a rare view of a highly complex public profession seen from the innermost inside, along with an even more rewarding inside view of an ironic and courageous mind.”
According to Stephen Jay Gould, a Harvard paleontologist and baseball writer, “Ball Four” inaugurated a “post-modern Boutonian revolution,” revealing that “heroes were not always what they were thought to be, questioning the masculine ideal in the professional game, and encouraging the reader to look beyond the media’s interpretations.” George Foster of the Boston Globe called the book a “revolutionary manifesto.” New York Times writer David Halberstam had observed that Bouton “has written… a book deep in the American vein, so deep in fact that it is by no means a sports book comparable insider’s book about, say, the Congress of the United States, the Ford Motor Company, or the Joint Chiefs of Staff would be equally welcome.”
As MLB historian John Thorn later observed, “Ball Four” was “a political work, and a milestone in the generational divide that characterized the 1960s. It is the product of a widespread rebellion against both authority and received wisdom.” According to writer Nathan Rabin: “The times were changing outside the ballpark, but the major-league mindset seemed stuck somewhere in the mid-’50s. The old guard still ruled with crew cuts, knee-jerk patriotism, reactionary politics, and a near-religious belief in… maintaining the status quo.”
MLB officials pressured, if not required, players to wear their hair short to counter the hippies of the period. According to Bouton: “If the choice for a pinch hitter or a relief pitcher was between a long-haired guy and a short-haired guy, the [latter] would get into the game.” But, Bouton explained, in the broader society, everything was being called into question. “All the assumptions…rules…ways of doing things, [the era] tossed them all up in the air, and forced people to take another look.…I don’t think it occurred to me that, ‘Gee, all these other people are kicking up a fuss, maybe I should write a book that does the same thing.’ ut you are a part of your environment.”
According to sociologist Elizabeth O’Connell, “Ball Four” may have advanced the cause of women by challenging America’s masculine ideal. Previous sports books were hagiographies, “reinforcing Horatio Alger myths of self-made men who through dedication and determination were able to rise above their circumstances and become American heroes.” Instead, “Ball Four” portrays many players as adolescent adults who never matured: what psychologists call the “Peter Pan Syndrome.” “It’s an emasculating text, presenting players as boys who never grew up,” according to O’Connell. “By opening the clubhouse doors to the public and allowing the reader to see the reality of ballplayers’ lives, Bouton contradicted the concept of the male athletic body symbolizing strength of character.”
With his baseball career apparently ended in 1970, Bouton would become a television sportscaster in New York for WABC-TV and then WCBS-TV. Not surprisingly, he was also regarded as a maverick in his new profession. He refused to waste time reading the scores of games during his newscasts, recognizing that fans could get those in the newspaper. Rather than catering to the high-profile professional teams, he would focused instead on lower level and lesser-known sports and didn’t just report but also he would participate, such as in roller derby matches or rodeo events. He would urged people to play sports rather than merely watch them.
In 1971, Bouton would published a 2nd book, “I’m Glad You Didn’t Take It Personally,” mostly describing the reaction to “Ball Four.” Bouton made no apologies and expressed his view that sports should be part of ongoing consciousness-raising: “thletes and entertainers have a special obligation to take a stand on issues of the day. In our profession, we tend to be tranquillizers for a whole nation. We contribute to a false feeling of well-being [when instead] we have a responsibility to let people know that, even though we are playing games, we are also aware of problems outside the ball fields.”
Bouton kept pitching in various adult leagues in New Jersey in the early 1970s, while continuing his journalism career. Then, in 1973, he got a phone call from actor Elliott Gould, with whom he had become friends after they met at an anti-war rally in New York and played pick-up basketball games together. Gould told him that he’d persuaded director Robert Altman to give Bouton the part in the film “The Long Goodbye” that Stacy Keach had been slated to play before he got sick. Bouton got respectful reviews for his acting debut. (The film was also noteworthy for an uncredited appearance by an unknown body-builder named Arnold Schwarzenegger). In 1976, Bouton also starred in a CBS-TV sitcom called “Ball Four,” playing a ballplayer named “Jim Barton” who was also a writer with a preoccupation with his teammates’ personal lives. The show was canceled after only 5 episodes.
But Bouton gave up his lucrative television career and budding acting career to pursue a baseball comeback. “I decided that my day-to-day happiness is more important,” he explained at the time. In 1975, he would join the Portland Mavericks in the independent Northwest League, earning $400 a month, the same as his teammates. He went 4-1 with a 2.20 ERA.
The Knoxville Sox in the Southern League had signed Bouton in 1977, but things didn’t go well. His pitching improved, when he moved to Durango in the Mexican League and he finished the year back with the Portland Mavericks, compiling a 5-1 record. That success brought him back to the Southern League in 1978, this time with the Savannah Braves. He would pitch well, going 11–9 with a 2.82 ERA.
Bouton pitched so well that the Atlanta Braves called him up later in the 1978 season and at age 38, his comeback was complete, 8 years after his initial retirement. He had started 5 games and was 1–3 with a 4.97 ERA. Bouton could have returned with Atlanta in 1979, but he retired instead, having nothing left to prove to himself. In 10 major league seasons, he was 62–63 with a 3.57 ERA. He continued pitching competitively into his fifties.
When Bouton pitched for Portland in 1977, players were chewing tobacco and getting sick. One of his teammates, Rob Nelson, observed: “Too bad there isn’t something that looks like tobacco but tastes good like gum.” Bouton responded: “Hey, that’s a great idea. Shredded gum in a pouch, call it Big League Chew and sell it to every ballplayer in America.” Bouton didn’t think any more about it, but after returning home at the end of the season, he remembered it and called up Nelson. Bouton put in the start-up money, contacted an attorney, and sold the idea to the Wrigley Chewing Gum Company. A big hit, the company has sold more than 800 million pouches since 1980 and it won a health and safety award from Collegiate Baseball Magazine for creating the 1st healthful alternative to chewing tobacco, no doubt sparing many ballplayers from mouth cancer. Bouton also coauthored a baseball murder mystery, Strike Zone. He would go on to update ”Ball Four” 3 times, publishing new editions in 1981, 1990 and 2001, each time adding to his story.
Over the years, Bouton tried several times to make peace with Mickey Mantle, but not until Bouton sent a condolence note after Mantle’s son Billy died of cancer in 1994, did Mantle contact him. The 2 former teammates reconciled not long before Mantle’s death in 1995. For almost 30 years, the Yankees had barred Bouton from participating in their annual Old Timers games.A couple of weeks before the 1998 Old Timers Day game, Bouton's son had written a op-ed piece in the New York Times, why his Dad should take part in the game. In return to the response to the article, the Yankees would invite Jim Bouton to 1998 Old Timers Day, ending their long 30 year boycott. On the advice of former teammate Pitcher Mel Stottlemyre, Jim would recreate his old style of throwing with his hat coming off as he released his pitch. Bouton would pitched 1 inning, enjoying an emotional reunion with fans and some old Yankee teammates.
But Bouton wasn’t finished protesting. In 2000, a Cuban boy, Elian Gonzalez, and his mother shipwrecked trying to enter the US from Cuba, and she had drowned. The Clinton administration took custody of Gonzalez, intending to return him to his father, who wanted his son back with him in Cuba. But right-wing Cubans in Miami-a powerful political force-wanted him kept in the US as a rebuke of Fidel Castro. Several Cuban ballplayers launched a 1-day walkout to oppose the return and Commissioner Bud Selig backed the move. Having previously rejected political activism by ballplayers, MLB was suddenly claiming its support was a matter of “social responsibility.
Bouton called out MLB’s hypocrisy. MLB had consistently refused to speak out against injustices such as the Vietnam War and South African apartheid and was now pretending to take a stand. The players were “once again exhibiting typically sheeplike behavior,” Bouton observed. “Cuban players are not acting from political courage but from fear of reprisal from their own community.”
In 2001, Bouton learned that an old ballpark in Pittsfield, near his home in western Massachusetts, would be abandoned in favor of a new field, to be built in the city’s downtown. Wahconah Park wasn’t just any ballfield. It was (and still is) one of the oldest minor league ballparks in the US and among the few remaining wooden grandstand fields. Although the ballpark was built in 1919, ballgames had been played on that spot as far back as 1892. Bouton decided to step in to save the stadium, and renovate it not with public money but by selling shares to ensure ownership by local fans of the team. The plan generated strong public support, but local media, politicians, and business leaders wanted taxpayers to fund a new ballpark on the site of an abandoned General Electric factory that the federal government had determined was a toxic waste dump.
Pursuing his campaign, Bouton discovered that in the previous 15 years, $16-billion dollars of taxpayer money had been spent on new stadiums, replacing more than 100 older, beloved ballparks, “because baseball’s powers-that-be can get away with it. They have a monopoly, granted by the federal government, and they use it to bludgeon local governments to bid against each other for the right to teams.”
“These owners are capitalists who don’t want capitalism,” Bouton explained. “When sports owners don’t have to use their own money to build stadiums and make enormous profits, when American taxpayers subsidize these wealthy owners, it’s massive corporate welfare.”
To address not only his Wahconah Park experience but also these broader ballpark issues in the US, Bouton turned his extensive notes into a book, “Foul Ball: My Life and Hard Times Trying to Save An Old Ballpark.” He had a contract with a publisher, PublicAffairs and was ready to launch a 16-city tour to promote the book in 2002. Before publication, however, the publisher told Bouton he would have to delete his discussion of General Electric or the book would be dead. Shocked at the publisher’s complicity, Bouton instead created his own publishing company, Bulldog Press and released the book on his own in 2003 at a considerable cost to himself. Lyons Press published an updated version in 2005.
Local political and business leaders in Pittsfield undermined Bouton’s restoration and public ownership plan. The town ultimately lost minor league baseball, but he still fought to keep the game alive at the old ballpark. From baseball historian John Thorn, Bouton learned that Pittsfield had the additional attraction of having been one of the oldest places, where baseball was known to have been played in the US, dating back to 1791.
In response, Bouton helped create the Vintage Base Ball Federation, bringing 19th century baseball rules, uniforms, and atmosphere to cities and towns across the nation. Bouton arranged a vintage baseball game at Wahconah Park on July 3, 2004, when a record crowd of 5,000 fans watched a contest between the Pittsfield Hillies and the Hartford Senators. ESPN Classic telecast the game live for over 4 hours, billing it as “America’s Pastime: Vintage Baseball Live.” The network commentators included baseball historians John Thorn and David Pietrusza, Bull Durham actor Tim Robbins, as well as Bouton and former major league pitcher Bill “Spaceman” Lee. Bouton and Lee each pitched an inning in the game.
Despite his setback in Pittsfield, Bouton remained active on the stadium issue. After the Montreal Expos became the Washington Nationals in 2005, the new owners persuaded Washington city officials to subsidize construction of a new stadium, Nationals Park. Bouton was outraged, claiming it was bad enough that a profitable ball club would rip off the public but it was even more appalling in an economically troubled city: “How anyone could walk through the public schools of Washington, DC, and then say that paying for a new professional baseball stadium should be that city’s priority, amazes me.”
In 2004, Bouton would appeared in Brooklyn to support the Prospect Heights Action Coalition in its efforts to block another taxpayer-funded stadium proposal that would destroy historic buildings. With the support of New York City’s political establishment, including Mayor Michael Bloomberg, billionaire developer Bruce Ratner’s company Forest City Ratner sought to bulldoze homes and small businesses belonging to hundreds of families to make way for what eventually became the Atlantic Yards project, which included Barclays Center, an indoor arena that is now the home to the NBA’s Nets, the New York Islanders of the National Hockey League and the New York Liberty of the Women’s National Basketball Association.
Calling the proposal’s tax abatement provision “corporate welfare,” Bouton decried the same “fuzzy financing” and “secret meetings” he had encountered in Pittsfield. “You’re not alone, this is an issue nationwide,” Bouton told the crowd. “If this stadium gets built, 20 years from now you’ll hear: ‘These [celebrity architect] Frank Gehry stadiums are out of date. So, we’re going to be leaving Brooklyn for another place with a [post-9/11 World Trade Center architect, Daniel] Libeskind stadium.’ Don’t let it happen.”
The same year, after the US launched an illegal, preemptive attack on Iraq, Bouton spoke out against the war. “I opposed it,” recalled Bouton, “because although the US had the means to be successful militarily…[ w]e didn’t have nearly enough understanding of that country’s language and culture, just like in Vietnam. In the US, our rocket science is way ahead of our social science.”
Handicapped by a stroke in 2012, Bouton had announced in 2017 that he had cerebral amyloid angiopathy, a brain disease. He died 2 years later at age 80 at his home in western Massachusetts.
Bouton did not set out to be a literary or political revolutionary. As he recalled, he grew up as a “conservative kid” and viewed himself as an “old fashioned guy.” He ended “Ball Four “ observing: “You spend a good piece of your life gripping a baseball and in the end, it turns out that it was the other way around all the time.”
PETER DREIER teaches politics at Occidental College. ROBERT ELIAS teaches politics at the University of San Francisco. Their books, Baseball Rebels (University of Nebraska Press) and Major League Rebels (Rowman & Littlefield), will be published in April 2022.
|
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 27, 2024 12:35:18 GMT -5
The First Game at Yankee Stadium, April 18,1923
This article was written by Arthur O. Schott, Edited by Clipper
This article was originally published in 1973 Baseball Research Journal
Yankee Stadium 1923 Opening Day Photo It was 50 years ago on April 18,1923 that Yankee Stadium was opened for major league baseball. In the historic 1st game, the New York Yankees would defeated the Boston Red Sox 4-1. It was historic because the Yankees were the American League champions, they had the leading gate attraction in Babe Ruth and the new stadium had by far the largest seating capacity of all Big-League parks.
The game moved slowly until the 3rd inning, when Ruth broke it open with a 3-run HR off of Boston Starter Howard Ehmke. The crowd of 74,000, largest in baseball history up to that time, went crazy with delight. The Babe beamed from ear to ear and waved his cap to his many admirers as he jogged down the home stretch. No wonder they called it the “House that Ruth Built.”
With 2 out in the 9th, the game was held up as the crowd swarmed on the field, around Ruth and others. Umpire Tom Connally finally let the game proceed and Red Sox batter George Burns fanned for the final out.
A dozen of the 20 players in that game have passed on. Among the 8 survivors are the rival pitchers, Howard Ehmke and Bob Shawkey, who won the 1st game in Yankee Stadium and scored the 1st run; Joe Dugan, who knocked in the 1st run; Bob Meusel, who hit the 1st double; and Red Sox 1st sacker Burns, who collected the 1st hit and made the 1st error.
 
Babe Ruth leading the Yankees, Red Sox and Yankees Managers shaking hands before the game.
Here’s that Historic Box Score:
BOX SCORE OF THE FIRST GAME AT YANKEE STADIUM
APRIL 18, 1923
BOSTON AB R H P0 A NEW YORK AB R H P0 A
Fewster, SS 3 0 0 2 6 Witt, CF 3 1 1 3 0 Collins, RF 4 0 0 2 1 Dugan, 3B 4 1 1 1 1 Skinner, CF 4 0 0 0 0 Ruth, RF 2 1 1 3 0 Harris, LF 4 0 0 0 0 Pipp, 1B 3 0 0 12 0 Burns, 1B 3 1 1 9 2 Meusel, LF 4 0 1 0 0 McMillan, 2B 2 0 1 2 0 Schang, C 4 0 0 4 2 Shanks, 3B 3 0 0 3 0 Ward, 2B 3 0 1 3 5 DeVormer, C 3 0 0 6 2 Scott, SS 2 0 1 1 4 Ehmke, P 2 0 1 0 4 Shawkey,P 3 1 1 0 0 * Menosky 1 0 0 0 0 Totals 28 4 7 27 12 Fullerton, P 0 0 0 0 0 Totals 29 1 3 24 15 * Grounded out for Ehmke in 8th
Score by innings: R H E
Boston 000 000 100 – 1 3 1
New York 004 000 00x – 4 7 1
Game Summary: RBIs- Dugan, Ruth 3, McMillan. 2-base hits-Meusel, Scott. 3-base hit – McMillan. HR-Ruth. Sacrifice-Scott. DP- Scott to Ward to Pipp (Collins). LOB- New York 5, Boston 4. Struck out by Shawkey 5 (Collins, Burns 2, Shanks 2), Ehmke 4 (Witt, Dugan, Ward, Shawkey), Fullerton 1 (Schang). BB off: Shawkey: 2 (Burns, McMillan), Emhke 3 (Witt, Ruth, Pipp), Fullerton 1 (Ruth). Runs scored off: Shawkey 1 (ER), Ehmke 4 (ER). Hits off: Ehmke 7 in 7, Fullerton 0 in 1. HP Shawkey (Fewster). 1st base on errors – New York 0, Boston 1 (Harris). Time of Game: 2:05. WP- Shawkey LP- Ehmke. Game Attendance: 74,200. Umpires- Connolly, Evans and Holmes.
|
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 27, 2024 14:05:41 GMT -5
Horace Clarke
Yankees 2B/Shortstop 1965-1974
This article was written by Rory Costello, Edited by Clipper
1967 Topps Baseball Card
He was a leadoff man. He played all through the eclipse of baseball’s greatest franchise. So, mainly for worse he came to symbolize an era. Alas, Horace Meredith Clarke was never a star, but he was a pesky hitter with speed and a good glove. Perverse as it may be, his durability and visibility made Horace the undeserving scapegoat for the Roman Empire-like dry rot of the Yankees after 1964. This descent was exposed through the neglect of the CBS ownership. The criticism of sportswriters and fans, many of whom had a sense of entitlement, bothered him at the time. “But now that I’m through playing,” said Clarke in 1999, “my conscience is clear.”
Horace was the 5th of 16 men (as of 2020) from the U.S. Virgin Islands to make the major leagues. He was born to Dennis and Vivian Woods Clarke in Frederiksted, St. Croix, on June 2,1939. During his career, his published year of birth was 1940, but the 1940 census shows him in Frederiksted with his age listed as 1.
“Harry”-as he remained known at home-was the youngest of 6 children. There was 1 brother named Verne and 4sisters named Dina, Holly, Annette, and Letty.
Dennis Clarke was a cricketer. He saw a curveball for the 1st time from a Navy sailor, but decided he “was too old to learn a new game.” He also played the violin, and his son inherited the musical inclinations. “I don’t know whether baseball gained or music lost,” said Horace in 1969.
At the time, there were no Little Leagues on St. Croix, so the boy’s introduction to the game came via softball. At age 13 or so, he remembered seeing Navy ship’s teams playing hardball against the locals at Frederiksted’s Paul E. Joseph Stadium. “As kids we formed teams and played wherever we could, usually on Saturdays. If the older players were using the ballpark, we were relegated to a small area by the ocean.”
“Almost all of us were right-handed. And since we were strong enough to hit the ball into the water, we switched sides at the plate, and everybody batted left-handed, so we wouldn’t lose the ball.”
Horace would joined the Braves, a local team in the St. Croix Baseball League, which was made up mainly of teenagers with some adults. He played there for 5 years, also representing Christiansted High School in inter-island school meets against St. Thomas (whose teams featured future Orioles catcher Elrod Hendricks). His coach was math teacher David C. Canegata, for whom the other main ballpark on St. Croix is named.
Clarke remembered attending the 1957 tryout camp where Pittsburgh Super-scout Howie Haak signed his fellow Frederiksted native, future Pirate Elmo Plaskett. As he noted in 1999, though, “it just wasn’t my time yet.” But the next year, he turned pro at the age of 18. Yankees scout José “Pepe” Seda, who contributed to the Puerto Rican Winter League on many levels, signed him that January. It was at that time that Clarke shaved a year off his age, on Seda’s advice.
The young Crucian made his professional baseball debut in 1958 with Class D Kearney Yankees of the Nebraska State League. It took a season to adjust – to playing night ball, among other things. Clarke had batted just .225 in 187 at-bats, with 2 HRs and 20 RBIs. However, he showed off his most valuable attribute-speed-with 27 stolen bases.
Clarke’s marks then picked up to 5-58-.292 for Class D St. Petersburg Saints in the Florida State League in 1959. He added 34 steals. In 1960, he followed with 2-40-.307 for the Class C Fargo Twins in the Northern League, swiping 22 bases. He made the circuit’s All-Star team at shortstop and moved up to Single-A Binghamton Triplets in Eastern League for a game at the end of that year. Staying with Binghamton in 1961, he led the Eastern League with 40 steals (3-38-.278).
As it did for so many players, including other men from the Virgin Islands, the Puerto Rican Winter League spurred Clarke’s development. He felt that hitting against pitchers such as Bob Gibson, Earl Wilson, and Denny McLain really sharpened his skills on the way to the big leagues. Clarke began his winter ball career in the winter of 1959-1960 with the San Juan Senadores. His father asked José Seda to arrange this opportunity. As a backup to Jerry Adair and local favorite Ronnie Samford (a Texan who played on the great Santurce Crabbers teams in the mid-fifties), he hit .247 over his 1st 3 seasons.
The oceanside sandlot training from Frederiksted also reasserted itself. “It was the winter of 1960 when I began to fool around as a switch-hitter in Puerto Rico. I did pretty well with it, so [with the support of Manager Jimmy Gleeson] I kept doing it in Binghamton…and have been switching ever since.”
Clarke roomed for a couple of winters at the San Juan YMCA with his friendly rival from St. Thomas, Ellie Hendricks. Although they were rarely around at the same time, owing to the schedule, they still became close. Hendricks recalled that musical Horace, “who hardly said anything,” played vibraphone and xylophone.
During the 1962-1963 season, at Elmo Plaskett’s urging, the Ponce Leones traded for the infielder. Either Al McBean from St. Thomas or Clarke formed a Virgin Islands tandem with Plaskett for several winters in Ponce. However- mainly because Pittsburgh had McBean sit out that PRWL season and the next - the whole trio was on the field together just briefly, in 1964 before Plaskett suffered a broken leg.
Clarke also benefited from the Puerto Rican culture. He had grown up hearing a lot of Spanish spoken on St. Croix, but had never picked up more than a few words. But like Plaskett, McBean and Joe Christopher, he met his wife in Puerto Rico, and so he had a reason to learn. A San Juan girl, Hilda Robles was a little put out with Elmo- even though she was very fond of him- for making her ride 2 hours to Ponce! Horace and Hilda eventually got married in October 1966.
Back stateside, the unsung Yankees farmhand continued his steady progression in the minors, hitting .300 with 9 HRs, 50 RBIs and 17 stolen bases for Double-A Amarillo Gold Sox (Texas League) in 1962. Earning promotion to Triple-A Richmond (International League) the next year, his totals dipped to 4-26-.249, with a mere 6 steals. However, he had lifted that to 5-44-.299 in 1964, back with AAA Richmond, also rebounding to 20 stolen bases. After starting the year at AAA Toledo Mud Hens (which had replaced Richmond as the Yankees’ Triple-A affiliate) in 1965, he broke in with the Yankees that May as a utility infielder. He had singled off of Dave Morehead in his MLB player debut at Fenway Park on May 13th; while pinch-hitting for Hal Reniff.
Clarke spent the months of May and June with the Bombers and then he would return to AAA Toledo for the next 2 months, before being recalled in September. Overall, he had finished 2-32-.301 in 89 games for the AAA Mud Hens and 1-9-.259 in 51 games for the Yankees. A special highlight came at Yankee Stadium on September 21st: his 1st MLB HR, off Cleveland’s Floyd Weaver, was a Grand Slam HR.
When the wheels came off in 1966, with the Yankee franchise finishing last for the 1st time since the 1912 Highlanders, starting in July, Clarke got a chance to play every day. “Rubén Amaro had a major injury and they were looking for shortstops within the troops. Ralph Houk said, ‘You’re going to be the shortstop the rest of the year. Bobby Richardson is going to retire in the coming year or so and you’re going to be the 2nd baseman, we hope. So, I want to see how you handle the bat.’”
With Richardson’s player retirement after the 1966 AL season, The Major did in fact install Clarke as the regular pivotman in 1967. On March 31st that year, he enjoyed a celebration at Paul Joseph Stadium as the Yankees beat the Red Sox in the 1st MLB exhibition game ever in the Virgin Islands. The man who set up the event was the 1st big-leaguer from the territory, Valmy Thomas, then a sports consultant with the St. Croix Bureau of Recreation.
Clarke went on to record what would be a pretty typical season for him: 160 hits in 588 at-bats (.272) over 143 games, with 21 steals. A note of interest: his 2nd MLB HR (at Kansas City on July 16th) was also a Grand Slam HR. However, the winter of 1967-1968 would be his last playing in Puerto Rico- the Yankees had asked him to stop playing there for fear of injury or overwork.
“At first, I said, ‘Well, wait a minute now. That’s my winter earnings that’s going down the drain there, will you consider subsidizing me for not playing?’ The 1st year they did, but after that, I guess getting that year off, somehow or the other I might have liked it, because I never went back. And I had lodged a part-time job on St. Croix giving clinics, after-school sessions which I got a couple of bucks for.”
Clarke had been a starter with Ponce for 5 years, batting .281 overall and leading the league in triples and runs scored as an All-Star in 1965-1966. He was an All-Star again the next winter- at shortstop. Over his 10 seasons in Puerto Rico (1958-59 through 1967-1968), Horace had recorded 12 HRs, 140 RBIs and a .270 average in 1,835 at-bats. He added 52 steals and 25 triples.
1971 Topps Baseball Card
But perhaps the Yankees were right to save his legs. “Hoss” was a durable fixture for 7 years in the majors, averaging 151 games. His fielding was at its best the 1st 2 seasons. When Mickey Mantle’s legs forced him to move to 1st base at the tail end of his career, he told Clarke, “Take anything you can reach!” Yet even arriving on the scene when he did, Clarke said, “You could imagine what Mickey was like when he was able to run full-tilt.”
After an off year in 1968 (.230 with just 9 extra-base hits), Clarke’s strongest offensive season came in 1969. He hit a career-high .285 with an on-base percentage (OBP) of .339 and 33 steals. The next year, also had some MLB career moments. On April 19, 1970, Clarke enjoyed a 5-hit day in the nightcap of a doubleheader at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium. In the span of a month, he also had broken up 3 possible no-hitters in the 9th inning, foiling Jim Rooker on June 4th, Sonny Siebert on June 19th and Joe Niekro on July 2nd.
Fellow Yankees teammate Bobby Mercer describes him as “A 100% player. He wanted to play every day.” Horace had led the AL 2B in assists for 6 straight seasons (1967-1972). In 1967, he had led the AL 2B in fielding. Horace would lead the AL in bats in 1969 and 1970 AL seasons
It’s worth noting that the New York Yankees of this era were not always bad. The 1970 Yankees had won a very healthy 93 ballgames, but they were simply outclassed by the Orioles, who had finished 15 games ahead. In addition, the 1972 club was 1 of 4 AL East contenders into mid-September before falling out of the race.
But in 1974, the 2nd year of George Steinbrenner’s team ownership, Yankees General Manager Gabe Paul continued to clean house. On May 31,1974, Horace Clarke was dealt to San Diego Padres in May for $25,000 in cash. He had lost his 2B job to Gene Michael. As it turned out, the bridge to Willie Randolph at 2nd base was a former double-play partner in Ponce, Sandy Alomar Sr.-who would later do the Clarke family a good turn. Horace would play in 42 games for the Padres and retired after that season. His final MLB career totals were 27 HRs, 304 RBIs and a .256 batting average, plus 151 stolen bases.
In summary, Clarke’s career may not have been stellar, but it was quite admirable. He appeared in the most major-league games (1,272) of any player from the Virgin Islands, though his career on-base percentage of .308 was less than ideal in the leadoff slot. As a contact hitter and deft bunter, perhaps he would have been best off hitting 2nd.
A sounder choice at the top of the lineup would have been Roy White-.360 career OBP, consistently ranging from .380-.400 from 1969-1972, and also a good base stealer (though Clarke’s 72% lifetime success rate was better than the left fielder’s 67%). Ralph Houk recognized this, but argued, “I can’t spare [White] up there because he’s my big RBI man.”
Years later, The Major remarked, “I know I got a lot of criticism for playing Horace Clarke as much as I did, but he was a lot better ballplayer than anyone gave him credit for. He did a lot of things good but nothing great, and that was his problem. . .besides, I didn’t have anyone else.”
Clarke made a similar comment in 1999. “I was just 1 little infielder, 1 of 25 guys, not any Superman.” But he added, “After all the negative ink, after I got out of the game, I said, ‘Let me see what my accomplishments were.’” In retrospect, he regarded himself as an underrated defensive player.
There was 1 big knock on him in the field, though. It wasn’t so much that he wore his helmet- he would not turn the double play with runners barreling in. Nobody ever took out Clarke with a slide, but he held the ball after leaping. Several members of the sinker-balling Yankees staff, “who lived and died on ground balls. . .confronted their teammate. ‘It was a sore subject with him,’ says [Reliever Jack] Aker, ‘and he became upset.’” The late New York sportswriter Dick Young, curmudgeon par excellence, also took Clarke to task for this shortcoming in his usual brusque manner.
But another NYC columnist, Phil Pepe, was a more generous sportsman. When Clarke left the Bronx, Pepe wrote, “You know what, there are a lot of good things to say about Horace Clarke. And the more I poked around, the more-good things I found to say about him. If you went to him with a fair question, he’d give you an honest answer, and if you met him in a hotel lobby, he’d nod or say hello even if you’ve been knocking his brains out for years. It takes a man to do that.” Thirty years later, Pepe again rose in support of Horace in a piece called “Enough of the Clarke bashing”.
Cecil Harris, who became the 1st Black beat writer to cover the Yankees in the 1990s, sounded the same theme. Harris, whose parents came from Barbados, grew attached to the Virgin Islander as a young fan. He chose as his hero “a guy in whom I saw a semblance of myself.” Over several pages in his book on the Bombers, he too made a spirited defense of his boyhood favorite. Harris even argued that the gulf between Clarke and Willie Randolph was not so great, and that the 1977-1978 champions could just as well have won with Hoss.
Perhaps even more noteworthy was how Horace’s conduct under the critics’ barrage formed future Yankee Captain Thurman Munson’s avoidance of the press. Munson added a curious footnote on team history. “Polite and humble Clarke was a hard-working family man, the last club member, according to Thurman, to make his residence in the direct vicinity of Yankee Stadium.”
Horace Clarke’s 2 sons each played in the minors. Jeff Clarke (2B/SS) signed as a free agent with the Royals in 1991. After 2 years of A ball, he was derailed by injuries, though he was considered as a replacement player by Kansas City in 1995. Jason (J.D.) Clarke, also a middle infielder, enjoyed a successful college career at St. Thomas Univ. in Miami, Florida. He was named Florida Sun Conference Player of the Year in 1998. The Cubs signed him as a free agent on the recommendation of Scout Sandy Alomar Sr. and J.D. played 1999 and part of 2000 in Single-A.
After his playing career was over, Clarke returned to St. Croix, teaming with Elmo Plaskett as a government-paid instructor in the local baseball programs. They reported to Valmy Thomas, who’d risen to Deputy Commissioner in the Recreation department. Another colleague was Alfonso Gerard, St. Croix’s pioneer in the PRWL and Negro Leagues. “Piggy” - who was Horace and Elmo’s sporting hero and Valmy’s longtime teammate was in charge of field development and maintenance. It was hard, hot work, but they did it for love of the sport and their desire to see young people do well. Their star pupils were Jerry Browne, who went on to play from 1986 through 1995 in the majors, and Midre Cummings (1993-2001; 2004-05).
For several years in the early 1980s, Clarke was an associate MLB scout with the Kansas City Royals, after meeting 1 of their people at a tournament in Panama for the 13-15 age group. “It’s now a fancy name for a bird dog,” he said. “You can make a reference or recommend, but you’re very limited in signing a player.” Clarke had entertained the idea of getting back into the majors as a coach, but found that attending minor-league camp with the Royals was quite satisfying because the young players were keen to hear his advice. He was also interested to see how much training methods had changed since his time.
Clarke took an early retirement package in 1997. The Virgin Islands haven’t been producing as many major-leaguers as they used to, and while there are many reasons - basketball, immigration, politics, television- the absence of Clarke and Plaskett (who passed away in 1998) made a difference at the grassroots.
The key issue - anywhere, not just the V.I. - is what happens to players, once they hit their teens. Clarke called it “the real test, the real keeping of the nose to the grindstone. There’s practice, there’s regimentation. When that kid gets about 13 or 14 years, he says, ‘Man, I’m tired of this crap. I could go to the beach, I could go fishing, and have more fun than to have somebody bawling down my ears.’ And let’s face it, baseball is supposed to be a game and to be fun. It doesn’t come to be fun when you got a manager saying, ‘You gotta do this, you gotta do that’- but you gotta do it!”
Clarke in Retirement in the Virgin Islands
Yet still, Clarke believed there will always be a select few from the Virgin Islands who are willing to work and do what it takes. He took a quiet pride in his homeland and its baseball tradition.
In his late sixties, Horace underwent several operations (heart, hip, knee), but it helped that there still wasn’t one excess pound on his frame. He enjoyed the quiet life in Frederikste- unlike chatty Al McBean, he didn’t even have a phone. He liked to rise early and practice his music, playing vibes in a local jazz combo. He also went back to Yankee Stadium for quite a few Old Timers’ Games over the years, most recently in 2013. When asked after the 2002 edition why he didn’t play, the old 2nd baseman replied, tongue firmly in cheek, “It’s time to give way to another generation!”
On September 5, 2007, the Yankees had invited Horace up once more for a special on-field appearance as part of a co-promotion with the Virgin Islands government to boost tourism in the islands. Many fans and writers would do well to emulate the organization’s quiet and enduring loyalty to this player. Indeed, there was a shift in the tone of stories about Clarke from the new millennium onward, especially toward the end of his life.
Owing to complications from Alzheimer’s disease, Horace Clarke had died at age age of 81 on August 5, 2020, at the home of his son Jeff in Laurel, Maryland. His passing prompted an outpouring of warm memories in the media and from many friends.
Acknowledgments
This biography originally appeared on the now-defunct website Baseball in the Virgin Islands, from which it was adapted. Grateful acknowledgment to Horace Clarke for providing his memories (personal interview on St. Croix, 1999), to his late wife Hilda, and to his son J.D.
All Clarke quotes come from the 1999 interview, unless otherwise indicated.
|
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 27, 2024 15:09:01 GMT -5
Bill Virdon Yankees MLB Manager 1974-1975
Yankees Minor League OF 1950-1954This article was written by Gregory H. Wolf for SCABR, Edited by Clipper
From 1955 to 1965 Bill Virdon established his reputation as one of the finest and fastest center fielders of his generation, and was known for his accurate throws from the deep center-field power alleys in spacious Forbes Field in Pittsburgh. Ironically, one of his throws that inadvertently hit his manager may have led to his biggest break in baseball.
Having toiled in the New York Yankees farm system since 1950, Virdon was at his 1st Yankees spring training in 1954, but his prospects seemed dim. “I could see that I was going to have a problem breaking in on the Yankees,” Virdon said. “They had the best outfield in baseball.” Indeed, the Yankees, coming off 5 consecutive World Series championships, had Hank Bauer and Gene Woodling in RF and LF respectively and Mickey Mantle in center. Like Mantle, Virdon was 23 years old; however, Virdon was fighting for his professional career.
Near the end of camp, he was in the outfield with Bauer, Woodling and Mantle practicing. “I fielded a fly ball and fired away,” Virdon remembered. “Somehow Mr. Stengel got between me and the relay man and I proceeded to hit him in the back with my strongest throw and knocked him down. The other outfielders were laughing and pointing to me: ‘He did it.’ Mr. Stengel got up, shook himself and hollered, ‘If you guys throw like that in a game, you might throw someone out.’ ” With a chuckle, Virdon added, “Two weeks later I was traded.”
The trade sent him to the St. Louis Cardinals and the next year, he was named the National League Rookie of the Year for 1955. “The trade came somewhat as a surprise,” Virdon said, “but at that point it was probably the biggest break I got in baseball.”
William Charles Virdon was born on June 9, 1931, in Hazel Park, Michigan, to Charles and Bertha Virdon, who had migrated from southern Missouri during the Depression to find work in the automobile factories around Detroit. When Virdon was 12, when his family returned to Missouri and settled in West Plains, near Springfield. An avid softball player, his father ran a country store and his mother was a homemaker.
Quick and agile, Bill was an excellent athlete at West Plains High School, where he excelled in track, basketball and football; the school did not field a baseball team. Although he played in informal leagues, his 1st opportunity to play organized baseball came in the summer of 1948, after his junior year. Persuaded by his friend Gene Richmond to travel almost 300 miles to Clay City, Kansas, to try out for the local AABC (American Amateur Baseball Congress) team, Virdon made the team as a shortstop and was then moved to center field because of his athleticism.
Though Virdon was far from home for the 50-game season, his parents were supportive. “I went to a tryout camp for the Yankees in Branson, Missouri, following my senior year,” Virdon remembered. “And after that I went back out to play ball in Kansas.” When the season ended, Virdon returned to Branson and Yankees Scout Tom Greenwade, who had signed Mantle a year earlier, signed Virdon for a $1,800 bonus.
Virdon began his professional career with the Class D Independence (Kansas) Yankees (Kansas-Oklahoma-Missouri (KOM) League) in 1950, where he was managed by Malcolm “Bunny” Mick. Virdon called Mick “one of the big influences in my career,” adding, “He was an outfielder and knew all about playing. He pushed me.” Still learning to play center field, Virdon was promoted after the season to the Yankees’ Triple A team, the Kansas City Blues (American Association) and hit .341 in 14 games. “The reason I was promoted was Bunny Mick,” he said. “He got fired in Independence at the end of the year and ended up going to Kansas City to play. He told them about me and they brought me up.”
Despite Virdon’s light hitting and lack of power in 1951 with the Class B Norfolk Tars (Piedmont League) and in 1952 with the Class A Binghamton Triplets (Eastern League) hitting .286 and .261 respectively, the Yankees were impressed enough by his fielding to invite him to the Yankees’ pre-camp in Arizona in 1953, where he had the chance to work with the team’s top prospects and then promoted him again to the AAA Kansas City Blues (American Association) in 1953.This team was loaded with future major-league talent, including Bob Cerv, Elston Howard, Vic Power and Bill Skowron, all of whom played or could play the outfield. Though Virdon excelled in the field, but he had struggled at the plate, hitting just .233 and he was demoted to the AA Birmingham Barons of the Southern Association. “I was disappointed about the demotion but that is part of the business,” Virdon said. “I went down and I actually finished the season with a pretty good record.” Indeed, he did. Rooming with future Pirate Hal Smith, Virdon had batted .317 in 42 games. His success at the plate may have been due to a different approach. “He started improving his hitting,” Smith said, “because he wasn’t trying to hit a HR and learned how to hit line drives to all fields.”
After being dispatched to the St.Louis Cardinals with other 2 Minor League players in a trade for All-Star OF Enos Slaughter in the spring of 1954, Virdon was sent to St. Louis’s Triple-A team, the Rochester Red Wings (International League.) He got off to a torrid start and in mid-June The Sporting News wrote that “Virdon now appears to be the best bargain since Manhattan Island.” H woulde finished with 22 HRs and a league-leading .333 BA and was 2nd in the International League’s MVP voting behind his former Yankees Minor-League teammate Elston Howard. “That was the best year I ever had,” Virdon said. He was considered the 2nd-best prospect in all of minor-league baseball behind Howard. Throughout his MLB playing career, one of Virdon’s defining characteristics was his round, wire-rimmed eyeglasses, which he credited for his improved hitting in 1953 and 1954.
After the 1954 season, Virdon continued his hot hitting for the Havana Lions in the Cuban League, the only time he ever played winter ball. Lions Manager Dolf Luque was impressed with his hitting and Cardinals Cuban League Scout Gus Mancuso declared, “This kid Virdon does amazing things in center field”; by January 1955, Cardinals Manager Eddie Stanky already had ideas to move Stan Musial from the outfield to 1st Base in order to make room for Virdon in the starting lineup. Finishing the season with a .340 BA and as a Cuban League All-Star, Virdon commented, “I felt like playing in Cuba was one of the best things I ever did in baseball. It was just a time to develop. I got to face excellent pitching and it was the easiest league I ever played in because you did not travel.”
Given Country Slaughter’s number 9, Virdon followed a poor spring with a hot start to the season. Cardinals Manager Stanky rearranged his outfield by moving Wally Moon, the 1954 NL Rookie of the Year, from CF to RF and Virdon was given CF. Stan Musial was moved from RF to 1st Base. Longtime Cardinals beat reporter Bob Broeg wrote “[Virdon] is a solid ballplayer with no apparent weakness.” Though the Cardinals floundered and finished 7th, ahead of only the Pirates, Virdon was named Rookie of the Year for his all-around performance: He hit well (.281) and fielded exceptionally. Club President August Busch Jr. called the trade for Virdon “one of the best deals we ever made.”
Busch wanted immediate success and brought in Frank “Trader” Lane as the new General Manager at the end of the 1955 NL season. Lane had made his reputation with the White Sox over the previous decade and was known for his propensity to trade players. Even after another slow spring, in which he batted below .200, Virdon was undeterred, saying, “A year up here gives you confidence and I believe in myself.”
However, his slump continued into the season and that was all that Lane needed. Claiming he had too many left-hand hitters and “Bill wasn’t hitting the ball that hard,” Lane had traded Virdon to the Pirates on May 17th for light-hitting CF Bobby Del Greco and journeyman Pitcher Dick Littlefield. “I was a Missouri and Cardinals guy,” Virdon said, “and I hated to go.” Two months later it was clear that the trade was a phenomenal success for the Pirates. The trade for Virdon was the 1st deal for the new Pirates General Manager Joe L. Brown, who had joined the Bucs’ front office in November 1955 and succeeded Branch Rickey, when he stepped down as General Manager. The Pirates had long coveted Virdon and in 1954, Rickey had offered the Yankees Pitchers Vern Law and Max Surkont in exchange for him, but was rebuffed by the Yankees front office.
In 1956, Virdon arrived on a team defined by a culture of failure. The Bucs had not had a winning record since 1948 and had finished in last place 4 consecutive years and 5 of the last 6. “It wasn’t the brightest thing in the world,” Virdon said of his trade. “Pittsburgh had been losing for years.” But he noticed more than just losing: “I could see that Pittsburgh had some talent.”
The Pirates were a young team: Shortstop Dick Groat was 25; Rookie 2nd Baseman Bill Mazeroski was 19, and in the outfield Roberto Clemente just 21 and Virdon 25.
On June 16th the Corsairs won their 30th game (against 21 defeats), the earliest they had reached 30 wins since 1945. The Sporting News ran the headline “The Bucs Turn Pittsburgh Into Boom Town” as fans flocked to Forbes Field. Though the Bucs ultimately finished in 7th place, but the hot start revealed the team’s potential. After his trade, Virdon hit at a .334 clip and had battled Hank Aaron for the NL Batting title, finishing 2nd with a .319 average, the only time in his MLB playing career, that he had hit over. 300.
Because of Virdon’s many soft infield bloop hits, Pirates Radio Announcer Bob Prince tabbed him “Quail,” a nickname that stayed with him his entire playing career. Virdon exceeded expectations and was lauded as the “brightest star” and “best all-around player of the team,” while the outfield trio of Virdon, Clemente, and Lee Walls was judged the best in baseball.
With the team floundering with a 36-67 record in 1957, General Manager Joe L. Brown made a move that profoundly impacted the Pirates’ and Virdon’s future: he had hired Danny Murtaugh as Manager, who then skippered the Bucs to a 26-25 record to close out the season. “Murtaugh knew when to talk, when to correct, and when to discipline,” Virdon recalled. “He just seemed to know the right thing to do for a winning ballclub.” Murtaugh changed the culture in Pittsburgh and stressed fundamentals. “He pushed me,” Virdon said, “and made sure that I got all of the instruction that I should get.”
Virdon had an inclination to teach baseball (he operated his 1st baseball school in the 1956 off-season) and Murtaugh encouraged him to follow his coaching passion. Virdon first coached in the Arizona Instructional League after the 1962 season then in the Florida Instructional League in 1964, at which time he was already being touted by The Sporting News as “the best managerial talent” on the Pirates.
Patrolling center field in Forbes Field for 10 seasons (1956-1965), Virdon was durable, never suffered a debilitating injury; he was never placed on the disabled list. After hitting .319 in 1956, his 2nd year in the major leagues, Virdon remained a consistent .260s-hitter the rest of his career. Forbes Field no doubt affected his power; after hitting 17 HRs as a rookie, he tallied just 74 more in his career. In the late 1950s, the left-handed-hitting Virdon was considered with Mickey Mantle and Bill White one of the fastest players from home to 1st base while batting (3.5 seconds) or bunting (3.4 seconds).
Batting leadoff for much of his career, Virdon used his speed and the dimensions of Forbes Field to rack up triples, leading the league once. When Murtaugh was asked if he was concerned about Virdon’s career-low .243 batting average in 1964, he answered emphatically, “I count the hits he takes away from others as part of his batting average.” His cerebral approach to baseball meant that Virdon’s value to the Pirates could not be reduced to batting statistics.
“He’s an underrated player,” Roberto Clemente said of Virdon. “He doesn’t get the headlines because he makes everything look easy. He’s kept a few of our pitchers in the majors with his glove and hitting.” Virdon had a quiet and reserved demeanor, didn’t seek headlines, and was overshadowed playing center field in a league that featured perhaps the greatest center fielder of all time in Willie Mays and playing next to perhaps the best right fielder of all time in Clemente.
“Virdon wasn’t as flashy as Willie Mays,” said teammate Pitcher Bob Friend. “Forbes Field was a big ballpark and Virdon could play short and cover everything. There wasn’t a better center fielder in my era.”
He was regularly among the league leaders in putouts and assists, leading the league in 1959 with 16. Bill James’s “range factor,” a metric used to evaluate the quality of defensive play, underscores that Virdon was easily one of the best outfielders of his generation; he led the league twice (1959 and 1961) in the statistic. At the age of 31 Virdon won his 1st and only Gold Glove award in 1962, a year after voting was revamped to award the top three outfielders instead of a position-specific format (RF, CF, LF).
“Bill has made amazing fielding plays so common in Forbes Field,” Dick Groat wrote, “that Pirate fans are inclined to be disappointed if he doesn’t catch everything hit to the outfield.” Virdon studied hitters’ habits and tendencies and used his speed to neutralize the enormous power alleys at Forbes Field. “Virdon got such great jumps on the ball,” teammate Hal Smith said. “He knew exactly where the ball was going.”
“It was the biggest in baseball,” Virdon said about Forbes Field. “I didn’t have to worry about running into the fences.” With its irregular shape, Forbes Field was 435 FT to the CF wall, 457 to LCF, and 419 to RCF which played to Virdon’s strengths: speed and arm strength. The field was so big that “the batting cage was in left-center field,” Virdon remembered. “There was a big light pole that sat inside the ballpark and it had a fence around it. The batting cage was next to this fence. It wasn’t really that obvious. The ballpark was so big that I played in it for 10 years and I don’t think the batting cage came into play more than 3 or 4 times.”
The 1960 NL season was a magical one for the Pirates, but it began with concern and lingering doubts. After Murtaugh guided the team to 84 wins and a surprising 2nd-place finish in 1958, the Bucs slipped to 4th in 1959. The team sold Forbes Field to the Univ. of Pittsburgh in 1959 and Team President John Galbreath had to squash rumors that the franchise would relocate as the Brooklyn Dodgers and New York Giants had done 2 years earlier. To add to the core players such as Clemente, Groat, Mazeroski, Virdon, Bob Skinner, Dick Stuart along with Pitchers Elroy Face, Vern Law and Bob Friend, Brown made wise trades for Catcher Smoky Burgess, Pitcher Harvey Haddix, 3B Don Hoak and 1B Rocky Nelson in 1959 and for OF Gino Cimoli, P Vinegar Bend Mizell and C Hal Smith in 1960. But 1 trade Brown attempted failed: He had offered the Kansas City Athletics, CF Bill Virdon, Shortstop Dick Groat and P Ronnie Kline for Slugger Roger Maris. Bucs Manager Murtaugh had objected to the idea of trading shortstop Dick Groat, that would kill the trade. Then the A's would trade Roger Maris to the Yankees.
“We all played for a pennant,” Virdon said of the 1960 season, “and we thought we had a chance to do it.” Virdon’s optimism was tempered by the public perception of the Pirates; in national polls, sportswriters and players picked the Pirates to come in no better than 4th, behind the Braves, Dodgers and the Giants.
“The 1960 season was unbelievable,” Virdon said. “It seemed like every time we needed a run in a crucial situation, we got it.” The team was known for manufacturing runs and playing “small ball” in an era of home runs. The Pirates led the league in hitting, runs, and OPS (on-base average plus slugging average), and ranked 2nd in slugging, while hitting only 120 HRs (6th in the NL). “We were scramblers” said Virdon, who was platooned with Cimoli. In 1960, Murtaugh would rested Virdon against left-handed pitchers; thus, he started only 98 games in center field.
The 1960 World Series will forever be defined by Bill Mazeroski’s Series-winning HR, but Bill Virdon’s inspired fielding, his speed, and his uncanny knack for timely hitting were keys to the Pirates’ victory. “Virdon was the guy who really hurt the Yankees,” Friend said, and it started in the bottom of the 1st inning of Game 1. Virdon and his roommate, Groat, who were considered among the best at the hit-and run, had a chance to execute their specialty when Virdon walked to lead off the game.
“When I got to 1st base, I looked to Groat for the hit-and-run” Virdon said, “and he put it on. Dick didn’t realize that he had put the hit-and-run on by mistake and tried to take it off, but I didn’t bother to look at him again.” Virdon took off and Groat took [Art] Ditmar’s pitch. “Yogi saw that I was running” Virdon recollected, “and threw the ball to 2nd, but nobody was covering. So, I moved on to 3rd.” The Pirates went on to score 3 runs and ultimately won, but more importantly that 1st inning set the tone for the Series.
1961 Topps World Series Baseball Card
Virdon’s fielding, hailed as “brilliant,” choked Yankee rallies throughout the series. With Law struggling in Game 1, Berra hit a deep shot to RFCF with 2 on in the 4th inning. Virdon chased down the ball and made a tremendous catch at the 407-FT marker while colliding with Clemente and saved 2 runs.
The fielding highlight of the Series may have been Virdon’s acrobatic catch of Bob Cerv’s deep fly ball in the 7th inning of Game 4 with 2 men on and the momentum shifting in favor of the Yankees. “I thought I was closer to the fence than I really was,” Virdon said. “I wanted to make sure I caught the ball before I hit the fence so I jumped.” Dan Daniel wrote afterward, “He [Virdon] won the opener with his fielding and hitting, and he did it again in the 4th game.”
In the bottom of the 8th inning of Game 7, Virdon was involved in one of the most famous “what if?” plays in professional sports. With the Pirates trailing 7-4 and Gino Cimoli on 1st, Virdon hit what appeared to be a routine double-play ball to shortstop Tony Kubek. Forbes Field had a notoriously hard infield (Bucs Announcer Bob Prince called it the “House of Thrills” because of the odd hops).
“When I hit the ball,” Virdon said, “I knew it was a double play all the way. The ball took a bad hop and hit Tony in the throat.” Kubek was taken to the hospital. Instead of 2 outs and the bases empty, there were 2 on with no outs and the Bucs rallied with 5 runs, culminating with Hal Smith’s 3-run HR. The Yankees tied it in the 9th and the rest is history. Despite going only 7-for-30 in the Series, Virdon was one of the heroes of the Pirates’ unlikely championship.
Though the Pirates played sub-.500 ball in 3 of the next 4 years, Virdon remained an excellent fielder and an integral part of the team. But after the 1964 season, he said, “I could feel myself slipping a little. . . . As you get older, playing every day is a mental problem.” His reaction probably referred to a few uncharacteristic lapses in concentration in the field but also pointed to his intention to start coaching. “I planned on quitting in 1965,” he said, “and told the Pirates it would be my last year.”
Virdon, who always held himself to the highest standards, put the Pirates’ concern before his own, and with little fanfare he retired after the 1965 season. “I could probably hang on for a few years,” he said. “But I don’t want to be a hanger-on.” The “Quail” finished with 1,596 hits, 735 runs and a .267 BA in 1,583 games, but also as one of the most underrated players of his generation.
Virdon’s Managerial career began just weeks after his unconditional release and retirement on November 22, 1965, but not the way he had envisioned. “I was encouraged by Murtaugh to go into coaching,” he said. “I decided to stay in baseball and I had an opportunity to manage in the Pirate organization. But at that point the pay for managing in the minor leagues was not too good. So, I shopped around and found a job in the Mets organization.” After managing for 2 years in the Mets organization, Virdon would return to the Pirates under new Manager Larry Shepard. While an MLB Coach for the Bucs in 1968, he was placed on the active roster due to the military service of many players. He had played in 6 games and his only hit was a 2-run HR, the last hit of his MLB playing career.
When Larry Shepard was fired with 5 games left in the 1969 season, many assumed Virdon would get his 1st shot to manage, but he was bypassed in favor of Alex Grammas and then passed over again to start the 1970 NL season, when Murtaugh came back for his 3rd stint with the Bucs. Though he thought he was ready to be a Major-League Manager, Virdon refused to criticize General Manager Joe Brown or the Pirates organization for any perceived slight. After the Pirates had won the World Series in 1971, Murtaugh had retired for the 3rd time, Virdon finally got his chance to manage the team.
After managing the San Juan Senators in the Puerto Rican League following the 1971 NL season, Virdon would guide the Pirates to a 1st-place finish in 1972, only to lose a heartbreaking Game 5 to Cincinnati in the NLCS, when Bob Moose threw a wild pitch that allowed George Foster to score the winning run in the bottom of the 9th. Virdon was fired with 26 games to play the next season, even though the Pirates were just 3 games out of 1st place (though they had a losing record).
Under bizarre circumstances, Bill Virdon was hired by Team Owner George Steinbrenner to manage the New York Yankees in 1974, just 2 months before the 1974 AL season began after Oakland A’s Owner Charlie Finley had refused to allow Dick Williams out of his contract to manage the Yankees. Virdon kept the light-hitting Bronx Bombers in the fight for the American League Eastern crown all season and they finished just 2 games behind the Baltimore Orioles. In 1974, he had moved long-time Yankees CF Bobby Mercer to Right Field, while Elliot Maddox took over Centerfield for the team. Having led the Yankees to their closes AL pennant race since 1964 season, Bill Virdon would win his 1st of 2 Sporting News Manager of the Year Awards.
Despite his self-effacing personality and calm demeanor, Virdon was a competitive, no-nonsense manager who stressed fundamentals and demanded that his players put the team above individual reward. This led to high-profile confrontations with Pirates hurler Dock Ellis, and INF Richie Hebner and Yankees OF Bobby Murcer. “I just tried to be honest and fair and made sure that everyone played hard,” Virdon said of his coaching philosophy. “I did not put up with too much, to some extent but without being offensive.”
In 1975, the Yankees had failed to match their success of the previous year due to injuries to key players, Virdon was fired by the team with a 53-51 record, while being replaced by Billy Martin. Weeks later the Houston Astros would hire him. Virdon would managed in Houston until 1982. He would win his 2nd Manager of the Year Award, after leading the Astros to their 1st postseason berth and to the brink of the World Series in 1980, only to lose another gut-wrenching Game 5 of the NLCS, this time in extra innings. His managerial career concluded in 1984, after a 2-year stint with the Montreal Expos. Despite his winning record (995-921) and rumors of being the next manager for a number of teams, he never skippered MLB team again. From 1985 until his retirement after the 2001 season, Virdon was a coach for the Pirates under Jim Leyland and Lloyd McClendon, as well as a Minor-League Instructor. He also would coached for the Astros and in the Cardinals Minor-League system.
With Shirley, his wife of almost 60 years, Virdon still resided in southern Missouri in his final years. A baseball lifer, Virdon would remained active with the Pittsburgh Pirates. “The best part of my career,” he said before departing for the Pirates’ spring-training camp in 2012, “is that I have not missed a spring training in 62 years!” Bill Virdon would pass away at the age of 90 on November 23, 2021.
Attachments:
|
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 29, 2024 13:30:10 GMT -5
Johnny "GrandMa" Murphy- 1930'sYankees Closer, MLB Baseball ExecutiveThis article was written by John Vorperian, Edited by Clipper Johnny Murphy Yankees Color Photo
Johnny Murphy was an ace relief pitcher for the 1930s New York Yankees, who spent 18 years playing professional baseball. Murphy spent even longer in the front office, 1st with New England’s obsession, the Boston Red Sox, serving as a Scout and then he ran the team’s minor league operations. Moving onto New York’s National League expansion franchise, the Mets, Murphy oversaw scouting activities and became the General Manager of the 1969 Miracle Mets.
John Joseph Murphy was born July 14,1908 in New York City. He had attended Our Lady of Mercy elementary school and Fordham Prep, located in the Bronx. While in high school, Murphy was noticed by legendary New York Yankees Scout, Paul Krichell. He followed Murphy at Fordham University and signed Murphy on the eve of his final college baseball game. Fordham University was Murphy’s school of choice and a highly-regarded baseball program that had produced Frankie Frisch a decade earlier. On March 13, 1927, the Times opined at outdoor practices in the Bronx, “Johnny Murphy, a sophomore, is one of the best of last year’s freshman team and may take a turn on the mound in some of the minor games.” On May 5th, the 3rd game of Fordham’s 1927 season, Murphy started and allowed 7 hits against the Univ. of Virginia, including a 2-run HR that handed him the loss. However, 5 days later, the right-hander fared better in relief of starter Joe Harrington in a 1-sided game against the Univ. of Delaware. Roger Hanlon permitted the Blue Hens their only tally of the day in a 19-1 rout. Among the few hundred spectators to see the conquest was the Fordham Flash himself, Frankie Frisch.
By 1928, Murphy was a key component to Coach Jack Coffey’s club. The 6-foot-2, 190-pound, lantern-jawed junior’s highlight was a 3-hit shutout over Georgetown. His senior year would leave a mark on the Fordham record book and push him into professional baseball. On April 23, 1929, Murphy had fanned 16 Columbia batsmen and scored the game winning run on a passed ball to beat the Lions, 1-0. He set the single-season school record with a 1.47 ERA that stood for 56 years until future Mets hurler Pete Harnisch had topped it. Murphy had a chance to match the record set by teammate Bob Cooney with 3 shutouts in a season, when he was scheduled to start on May 25, 1929 against Boston College. He never took the hill against the Eagles. Coffey would announce to the press that his pitcher was now ineligible as he had inked a professional baseball contract and was now property of the New York Yankees.
Murphy was initially sent to their Class A Albany farm club in Eastern League and later on to the AA St. Paul Saints in American Association, where he had won 16 and threw 256 innings in his 2nd year with the Saints in 1931. On December 31,1931, Murphy would, wed Elizabeth Havern. Their 48-year marriage produced 2 sons, John Jr. and Tom.
On March 30, 1932, Murphy had pitched the final game of that year’s Grapefruit League season for the Yankees in St. Petersburg, Florida. His opposition was baseball’s storied bearded, religious sect, the barnstorming team of Benton Harbor, Michigan: the House of David. Babe Ruth was not in the Yankees line-up, due to a reported stiff neck. Murphy contributed at the plate with a hit and scored a run off of Lefty Moose Swaney. Murphy’s 3-hit shutout helped earn him a trip north with the parent club.
Johnny Murphy would debuted in the major leagues on May 19th, finishing up a 12-7 loss to the Washington Senators. He pitched once more before the Yankees sent him to the International League’s AA Newark Bears. When the Yankees voted on how to distribute their 1932 World Series shares, that being the year of Ruth’s “Called Shot” and a sweep of the Cubs, Murphy was voted $500 share. He’d earn a larger chunk of the pie later.
After another year in AA Newark, making 36 of his 40 appearances in relief and having his best ERA to date as professional (2.97), Murphy came north again with the Yankees in 1934. This time, he never went back. Murphy had started 20 games for New York-completing 10-but he had tossed another 20 in relief and going 14-10 with a 3.12 ERA. He made only 20 more starts the rest of his MLB pitching career and he never again approached the 202 2/3 innings he had as a rookie.
 Johnny Murphy Yankees PhotoManager Joe McCarthy’s decision to put Murphy in the bullpen paid dividends for the finesse pitcher and his club. At the time, relievers were usually pitchers who were past their prime or deemed not good enough to start; if teams needed a reliever at a crucial point late in a game, they often turned to starters who were in between starts. Though Yankees starters still completed the majority of their games, McCarthy utilized the young pitcher’s masterful curveball out of the pen in tight situations. Murphy’s reliability to finish close games earned him the trust of his manager and teammates. When perennial All-Star Lefty Gomez was asked to predict how many games he would win 1 season, the wry Yankees pin-striper had retorted, “Ask Murphy.”
The save was years away from becoming an official statistic, but applying it retroactively, Murphy had led the American League in that category 4 times in 5 seasons. His 19 saves in 1939 were the 2nd highest total in baseball history, trailing only Firpo Marberry’s 22 for the 1926 Washington Senators. Two years earlier in 1937, Murphy had notched 12 wins in relief; he matched that number again in 1943.
Murphy would make the AL All-Star team 3 consecutive years from 1937 to 1939. The Fireman was in 6 World Series, winning them all. (The year the Yankees won the pennant and Murphy did not appear in the World Series, the Yankees lost to the Cardinals, in 1942.) His postseason numbers totaled a 2-0 record, 1.10 ERA and 4 saves in 8 games. In 4 separate World Series, Murphy allowed no runs. He pitched once in each World Series from 1936 to 1939, earning 3 saves and a win.
His best season was 1941 where he had posted an 8-3 mark with a 1.98 ERA and 15 saves. On October 5th that year, Murphy had entered Game 4 of the World Series in Brooklyn in the 8th inning. Murphy wound up getting the win after Dodgers Catcher Mickey Owen’s missed 3rd strike set the stage for a 4-run rally in the Yankees 9th. He had set down all 6 Dodgers batters that he faced. He would throw 6 scoreless innings overall in 1941, as the Yankees won the World Series in 5 games.
The most popular nickname attached to Johnny was “Grandma.” Many tales attribute the moniker to his rocking motion on the hill. A more plausible explanation is given by “ A Legend in the Making” author Richard Tofel. He would claim that “Grandma” came from 1935-1937 Yankees teammate veteran Pitcher Pat Malone, who had tired of Murphy’s “incessant complaining about meals and accommodations.”
Murphy had orderly and fastidious traits on the field and off. He enjoyed the better things in life. He liked fine French cooking and wine. As a front-office exec, he sipped vino at lunch in the Mets press room from his own special bottle. At his 1st press luncheon as Mets General Manager, there was French wine for all.
Part of the greatest generation, Murphy voluntarily left baseball in 1944 and worked on a special defense project. On March 7, 1946, fans read the curveballer was re-upping with Joe McCarthy and crew. The Washington Post reported, “Baseball’s Bronx Bombers will have an atomic specialist in their ranks this year…Johnny Murphy had come to terms…on the retired list the past 2 seasons, while he worked on the atomic bomb project at Oak Ridge, Tennessee.”
Murphy had 1 more solid season for the Yankees, garnering a 4-2 mark with a 3.40 ERA and 7 saves. The 1946 Yankees had failed to win the pennant for the 3rd straight year and Joe McCarthy was replaced by veteran Manager Bucky Harris and Murphy’s role and nickname of “Fireman” was taken over on the Yankees by a young Joe Page. Three days after Murphy’s player release, the Boston Red Sox would signed him on April 15, 1947.
He had pitched 54 2/3 innings and had a 2.80 ERA for the defending 1946 AL champion Red Sox. Murphy had 3 saves and finished games in 16 of his 32 appearances. That gave him a MLB pitching career mark of 93-53 in 415 games with a 3.50 ERA and 107 unofficial saves in 1,045 innings.
Though Boston had released him on October 20, 1947, Joe Cronin, Field Manager was elevated to Red Sox General Manager, made 1 of his 1st moves the hiring of Murphy as an MLB Team Scout.
Four months later, Murphy’s opinion on the business of baseball would echo throughout the State Capitol.
In January 1948, the Massachusetts Legislature was considering a bill to outlaw the reserve clause in contracts between players and clubs. Murphy went on record to say, “The reserve clause is essential for the players’ protection as well as the owners’ and should be included as an integral part of the contract.” Another player who testified to the Bay State solons and felt the same way was Fred “Dixie” Walker of the Pittsburgh Pirates. (Like Murphy, Walker was at the end of his career and soon to enter the management end of the equation.)
Murphy steadily climbed the team’s organizational ladder. He was made Vice President and Director of Minor League systems. When Cronin was chosen as American League President in late 1958, Bucky Harris became Boston General Manager. Murphy worked under the man who had released him in New York, but 20 months later, both men were sent packing by the team owner Yawkey.
Two days after slugging superstar Ted Williams revealed his retirement as an active player in September 1960, Boston Owner Tom Yawkey shook up the front office and fired both the GM and Farm Director. Hub sports writers alluded that possibly Teddy Ballgame would soon put on a business suit for the franchise, but he never served in the Red Sox front office in a daily capacity.
Murphy would depart the American League, but not baseball. On April 2,1961, Murphy signed with the New York Baseball Club of the National League as Supervisor of Scouting Activities. The position reunited him with, George Weiss, who had built up the Yankees farm system during Murphy’s playing career and later took over as GM. Sent packing by the Yankees after 3 decades along with Manager Casey Stengel, Weiss was the President of New York’s yet-to-be named NL club. He had assigned Murphy’s scouting territory as the New York City area and New England, the 2 areas that he obviously knew well.
One of the perks of the job was to watch his son play and call it work. At Yale Field, it was reported that Murphy “sat in the stands and watched his son, John Jr., take over in the 5th inning and ease Yale to a 10-1 victory over Connecticut in a manner reminiscent of his old man.” The Bulldogs roster, led by former major leaguer Ethan Allen, also featured 3rd baseman/Pitcher Ruly Carpenter, son of Philadelphia Phillies Owner Bob Carpenter.
On May 8,1961, the new NL team held its christening party at New York’s Savoy Hotel. Forgoing Continentals, Burros, Skyliners, Skyscrapers, Bees, Rebels, NYBS, Avengers and Jets, the public selected the team’s official nickname as the Mets. Of the 23 scouts employed by the fledgling club, Murphy was 1 of 6 at the shindig. When asked what he looked for in a young player before offering a bonus or signing him to a contract, answers touched every base: Rogers Hornsby, “Throwing…”; Babe Herman, “The arm…”; Billy Jurges, “The legs…”; Gil McDougald “Look for everything.” Murphy, the lone pitcher among those surveyed, responded, “Batting. The 1st thing I want to know about a prospect is: ‘Can he swing a bat?’”
Murphy’s approach in business dealings could be aptly described as “taking the 1st pitch.” He was a cautious, company man. At a time when bonuses for amateur players were hitting 6 figures, New York Times writer Arthur Daley alerted readers about Murphy spotting a talented ballplayer and being told by the athlete’s father, “Make your bid in writing. The price starts at $50,000.” With Casey Stengel officially named Manager shortly before the expansion draft in October 1961, Daley assessed that “the Mets brain trusters—meaning…Weiss…Stengel…and Murphy tried to direct their player procurement toward men whose styles were tailored along certain lines…In the Polo Grounds scheme of things it isn’t important that the center fielder be able to hit the long ball as to catch it.” New York had picked Richie Ashburn from the Cubs. When asked whether the 35-year-old Ashburn had lost his speed, Murphy said, “We know that Ashburn is not as fast as he once was, but he still is faster that most players in the National League. When [Mets Coach] Solly Hemus, who had managed the Cardinals last season, he got a good look at him and Solly told us that Richie can still play an awful lot of center field.”
Murphy was promoted to Eastern Administrative Assistant to Weiss in late 1962. The famed reliever proved a good # 2 man to Weiss. In the 1962 Annual Draft of Minor League Players, the Mets would spend a record for $695,000. Expected to select a pitcher Al Worthington of Indianapolis, they surprisingly plucked Ted Schreiber, a .277-hitting 2nd baseman from the Red Sox farm in Seattle. As Boston’s Minor League Director in 1957, Murphy had signed the St. John’s Univ. lad from Brooklyn and had continued to monitor the infielder’s upward progress.
In fiscal transactions with fledgling Mets players, Murphy did right by ownership. When 1st baseman Marv Throneberry sought a pay hike from Weiss and Murphy, Marvelous Marv highlighted to the duo his recent Good Guy Award from the baseball writers.
“Don’t forget that I brought a lot of people to the ball park,” Throneberry said.
“Yes,” replied Murphy, “and you also drove a lot away.”
In November 1963, the Mets had acquired OF George Altman and P Bill Wakefield from the Cardinals for veteran hurler Roger Craig, who had endured 18 straight losses that year and a 15-46 record in 2 seasons as a Met. Murphy’s 1st words to the veteran hurler: “I have good news for you. You’ve been traded.” Subsequently, Craig commented, “I was relieved and gratified when Murphy told me where I was going…I was praying it wouldn’t be to another 2nd division club. I felt I suffered enough.” Craig would pitch in the World Series the next year, though not before the Mets nearly kept St. Louis from clinching during a tense final weekend.
As Personnel Director, Murphy represented the Mets at the 1963 Minor League convention. The Mets soon elevated him to Vice President; former Brooklyn Dodger and New York Giant Eddie Stanky took his place as Personal Director. Murphy got another former Brooklyn Dodger, Duke Snider, to accept a renewed salary contract at $32,000, a $6,000 pay cut from the previous season and then sold him to San Francisco Giants on Opening Day (Snider wanted to go to a competitive team). The basement-dwelling Mets drew 1,732,597 to brand-new Shea Stadium in 1964, far better attendance then the AL-flag winning Bronx Bombers.
The 1965 Grapefruit League sports news buzz focused on outfielder Joe Christopher’s pay haggle with Murphy. The battle was termed by Joe Durso in the New York Times as the team’s “biggest financial headache of the season.” Wanting a bigger share of that 1964 cash flow, Christopher, who had batted .300 with 16 HRs and had led the Mets in doubles, triples, total bases, slugging percentage, walks and RBIs, argued with Murphy for days upon days. The 2 sides finally settled, but Christopher did not match his former year’s numbers. He was traded to the Boston Red Sox after the season, then he was dispatched to Detroit and then out of the big leagues all together.
Murphy handled the negotiations that wound up changing the future of the franchise. He was sent to Washington, D. C. to try to bring back Gil Hodges to manage the Mets. The Senators had him under a long-term contract and weren’t presupposed to let him go, but Mets Board Chairman M. Donald Grant was adamant that Hodges should manage the Mets. Murphy had been a teammate and 1-time Yankees roommate of Washington Senators GM George Selkirk. The 2 old friends eventually worked out the deal: the Mets would trade Pitcher Bill Denehey and $100,000 cash for the Gil Hodges. The Mets had a manager, but soon lost their General Manager, when Bing Devine had left the Mets to take the same post in his native St. Louis. On December 27, 1967, Johnny Murphy was named the 3rd General Manager in Mets history. Mets Manager Gil Hodges and GM Johnny Murphy at Mets MLB Spring Training Camp, St. Petersburg, Fla.At spring training in 1968, the former Yankees fireman and the long-time Brooklyn 1st baseman made Mets activities uniform and established priorities. Practice sessions were regimented. The team ceased repeatedly rotating players between the farm system and the parent club. GM Murphy worked closely with Director of Player Development Whitey Herzog. The main objective was pitching…something the Mets so happened to have a bumper crop of in 1968.
These organizational maneuvers perpetuated by Murphy came to fruition in the storied 1969 season. The Miracle Mets pitching staff, a significant key to the pennant and World Series was primarily comprised of club developed talent, namely Tom Seaver, Jerry Koosman, Gary Gentry, Nolan Ryan, Jim McAndrew, and Tug McGraw. The team needed hitting, an area the 1969 Mets did not excel in outside of homegrown Cleon Jones and his .340 average, but Murphy grabbed young 3rd baseman Wayne Garrett from the Braves in the MLB Rule 5 Player Draft and when the Mets were surprisingly in contention in June, he had acquired veteran slugger Donn Clendenon from Montreal. Though many of the players who starred for the 1969 team had been signed and developed by others in the organization, it was Murphy who worked out the trade for the manager who made it happen and acquired the veteran big bat in Clendenon without sacrificing the club’s top prospects: OF Amos Otis and Pitcher Nolan Ryan, both of whom the Braves had asked for in a proposed swap for veteran Joe Torre during spring training.
Murphy did trade Otis and pitcher Bob Johnson in December in a regrettable trade with the expansion Kansas City Royals for troubled 3rd baseman Joe Foy. Murphy had his reasons, though. Veteran 3rd baseman Ed Charles had been released and the Mets didn’t think Garrett could play the position regularly. Many gave Murphy the benefit of the doubt when the trade was made. He had, after all, helped turn the game’s biggest loser into world champions, the 1st expansion team to ever win the World Series. Would he get them to repeat? The answer, tragically, was no.
On December 30, 1969, Murphy was felled by a heart attack at his home in Yonkers, New York. He was taken to New York’s Roosevelt Hospital, where he died on January 14, 1970, following another massive heart attack. He was buried at Woodlawn Cemetery in the Bronx. He was 61 years old.
The New York Mets still honor their former GM by annually handing out the Johnny Murphy Award to the top rookie in spring training, a tradition that dates to 1972. The Mets would induct Johnny Murphy into the team’s Hall of Fame in 1983.
|
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Feb 29, 2024 21:47:52 GMT -5
Jerry Kenney INF/OF 1967,1969-1972Written by David Reamer Jr. Edited by Clipper
 Jerry Kenney Yankees Photo
Like many New York Yankees from their late 1960s and early 1970s nadir, Jerry Kenney suffered from the curse of expectations that media and fans had for the once dominant franchise. Winning 29 pennants and 20 World Series in 44 years, from 1921 to 1964 inclusive, was proof to many fans that winning was an entitlement. However, the team swiftly declined with 3 straight losing-record seasons from 1965 through 1967 seasons and was barely above .500 in 1968. This set the stage for 1969, when Kenney would begin his 1st full season in the major leagues with a particular burden of expectations that would turn quickly to mockery.
Jerry Kenney was born on June 30,1945, in St. Louis, Kenney spent the majority of his youth in Beloit, a Wisconsin town northwest of Chicago. Growing up there, his primary sport was basketball, winning All-State honors in his senior year of high school. However, Kenney chose to pursue the opportunities of professional baseball. He was signed by the New York Yankees as an MLB Amateur Free Agent before the 1964 AL season, Kenney advanced steadily through the Yankees minor league system as a shortstop with a skill set based on contact hitting, speed and fielding that was undercut by minimal power. After a successful cup of coffee with the Yankees at the end of 1967, an OPS+ of 146 in 20 games, team expectations were for Kenney to open camp the next year as the presumptive starter at shortstop. During that offseason, Kenney was rated as the Yankees’ “best player in the minor leagues,” meaning the team was all the more dismayed to learn in November that he would have to serve 2 years in the Navy to meet his military service obligations during the Vietnam War. However, in November of 1968, just as the team was denying reports of Mickey Mantle’s player retirement, it was announced that Kenney was being released early from military service. These simultaneous press releases were a 1st coincidental link between Jerry Kenney and Mickey Mantle.
Attempts to directly link Kenney with Mantle, and the accompanying legacy of DiMaggio and Combs, would begin early in 1969. Commencing in January within The Sporting News, “In any discussion of the 1969 Yankees, the most prominent names are Bobby Murcer and Jerry Kenney. By February, it was public knowledge that the Yankees were preparing to move Kenney from shortstop to the outfield. Manager Ralph Houk praised Kenney and Murcer as the “fastest runners the Yankees ever had.” To this point in time, the public perception operated on the assumption that Kenney was simply joining a team with Mantle on it, rather than replacing him.
On March 1,1969, Mickey Mantle had officially announced his player retirement at opening of the Yankees spring training camp. Mantle’s delay since the end of the prior season was in accordance with the wishes of both Marvin Miller, Executive Director of the Players’ Union and the Yankees. The hype of Kenney, who had not played a regular season game in the major or minor leagues since 1967, intensified. George Vecsey of the New York Times proposed that the presence of Kenney among the “fine young prospects” on the Yankees lessened the need for Mantle in the lineup. Within a couple of days, an Associated Press article began making the rounds of the nation’s sports pages. The author, Mike Rathet, emphasized the connection between Kenney and the departing Mantle, noting that both transitioned from shortstop to center field upon entering the majors. As newspaper editors around the country varyingly titled the article, the suggestions became more blatant. The least leading, without a titular reference to Mantle, was the relatively simple take of the Beacon (New York) Evening News: “Jerry Kenney Gets Chance for Yanks Center Field Job.” “Jerry Kenney Groomed for Mantle’s Job” was how the article encouragingly ran in Oswego, New York
The upstate New York Leader-Herald ran the article under the title of “Yanks to Give Kenney Short at Retired Mantle’s Outfield Job.” In Nashua, New Hampshire, the title suggested the sanction of experts with “Jerry Kenney Seen as Mantle’s Replacement.”
Finally, the Gettysburg (Pennsylvania) Times opted for the blunt “Jerry Kenney to Replace Mantle in Center Field.” The connection between Mantle and Kenney was manifest. Although Mantle primarily played 1st base in his final 2 seasons, the article titles indicate that the popular conceptualization of Mantle was still as the center fielder he had been in his prime.
More original articles followed. According to the Cleveland Plain Dealer, the Yankees’ problem that year was in finding who could fill the hole left by the departing Mantle: “They hope the someone could be Kenney.”
The Reading (Pennsylvania) Eagle reminded its readers of the obvious parallel between Mantle’s shift to 1st base 2 years prior and Kenney’s move to center field. Two and a half weeks before the season, Kenney’s name was among the other Yankee youngsters as having been given a “shot in center field, the old stamping ground of Mantle and DiMaggio” and more specifically, the opportunity to “someday be as known as Mantle.” For a young player, who had missed the entirety of the previous season and had only a month in the major leagues before that, articles like these would form the basis of public knowledge regarding Kenney.
For the Yankees, center field was the position of glory for Hall of Famers Mantle, Joe DiMaggio and Earle Combs, a lineage that stretched back to 1924. Moreover, Kenney would be the 1st to play center field after Mantle’s retirement. Far from being the only Yankees player burdened with high expectations, Jerry Kenney was 1 in a series of attempts by the team and its media at presenting new players as connections to the team’s prior success. Among Yankees prospects from the 1960s and apart from Kenney, Ron Blomberg, Bobby Murcer, Joe Pactwa, Joe Pepitone, Roger Repoz, Bill Robinson, Tom Tresh, Steve Whitaker and Roy White, all were posited as heirs to Mantle. When then-Manager Bill Virdon moved him from center to right field in 1974, Bobby Murcer maintained his anger over the seeming demotion for years. Though the lineage of Hall of Famers at the position ended with Mantle, there are continued efforts by the press to propose more modern links to this aspect of Yankees history. As Johnny Damon in 2005, Brett Gardner in 2008, and Curtis Granderson in 2012 experienced, the passage of decades did not preclude attempts to associate players with their forebears on the team.
In his early returns, Kenney did not disappoint. A strong training-camp performance won him a share, along with Pitcher Bill Burbach of the James P. Dawson Award, given to the best performance by a Yankee rookie in his 1st major-league spring training camp.
Yankees Player Photo
On Opening Day, Kenney continued his strong spring training by hitting a HR and double to lead the Yankees to a win in Washington with President Nixon in attendance. Just a few days after that, Kenney was noted as part of “possibly the best young outfield in the majors.” This moment, early in the 1969 AL season, would constitute the peak for Kenney in New York.
Kenney’s hot start would not continue. A last highlight before the oncoming realization of his limitations came on May 3rd. The thousands of children on hand for the annual free-cap day cheered as Kenney made a leaping catch in deep center to steal an opposing base hit. The New York Times noted the rare sight of a Yankee center fielder performing acrobatics in the field –given the latter-day “weak legged” Mantle and the inability of his replacements before Kenney. Despite Kenney’s defensive highlight, the Yankees lost. Further, Kenney had only 1 hit, which was yet sufficient to raise his season batting average to an anemic .206. The comparison between the fielding prowess of a young Kenney versus that of the aged and injured Mantle would be the final instance of the 2 sharing a context.
For the Yankees’ May 13th game against the expansion Seattle Pilots, Manager Ralph Houk shifted his defensive alignment, swapping Kenney to 3rd base and Bobby Murcer to center field. Though he was hitting well at the time, Murcer was disastrous at 3rd, having already committed 14 fielding errors in only 32 games played. In contrast, Kenney fielded his position competently, but hit worse than expected. Notably lacking in Kenney’s performance was any semblance of power. He slugged only .311 for the season, well below that year’s American League .369 average or the .398 that even a diminished Mantle managed the season prior. Also contributing to Houk’s willingness to reassign positions on the team was the fact that the Yankees were in the midst of losing 5 straight games and 14 of their last 16 games. Despite the shift in alignment, the team’s trajectory did not alter as the Yankees fell to the Pilots again. At this point, the Yankees were 12-21 and 9½ games back of the division-leading and eventual American League pennant winner Baltimore Orioles. Notably, the inaugural Pilots had 1 more win than the Yankees despite 3 fewer opportunities.
Jerry Kenney’s trial in center field was concluded; he would play the vast majority of the rest of his Yankee tenure at 3rd base and not another inning in the outfield after 1969. There would be no more articles in the papers mentioning Kenney and Mantle together. It was only 116 days since the 1st hyping Sporting News article, 74 days since Mantle had retired and 72 days since the 1st article directly describing Kenney as a replacement for Mantle and link to the Yankee legacy of center fielders.
To be fair, Kenney situation was not advantageous. His release from military service was in December of 1968. Thus, Kenney had went 18 months without playing in a regular-season game: October 1,1967, to April 7,1969. Kenney was also required, after his extended absence from the diamond, to switch positions. Asked in 1969 about his performance in center field, he replied, “I don’t know if I did well as an outfielder because I never had done it before.” Kenney began the 1969 AL regular season with few favors granted.
After the 1969 AL season, the Yankees still held some hope for Kenney as a useful major leaguer. Manager Ralph Houk would praise the younger Yankees, “particularly impressed by the improvement and promise shown by such relatively new players” like Kenney. However, the tenor that post-hype coverage would take for Kenney was revealed by his absence among those Leonard Koppett of the New York Times titled as the Yankees’ “Stars in the Making.” Then Kenney’s performance plummeted in 1970 to a dismal .193/.284/.282 line. That batting average set a still-standing team record for hitting futility over as many games as Kenney had played. In another season lowlight, Kenney would go hitless over 8 at-bats in an 18-inning loss to the Washington Senators on April 22nd, tying a team record for failure at the plate in a single game. A change in batting style helped Kenney to rebound at the plate after that year, but his playing time began to dwindle from a peak in 1970 of 140 games played to 120 in 1971 and only 50 games in 1972. In the Yankees’ final game of 1972, Kenney was one of the “mess of mediocrity” to take the field in the last Yankees game before George Steinbrenner bought the team in early 1973. He would play in 460 games for the club, finishing his Yankees career with a .237 BA with 7 HRs and 101 RBIs.
Kenney Tribe Player Photo
On November 27,1972, the Yankees had traded OF Charley Spikes,1B/Catcher John Ellis, OF Rusty Torres and INF Jerry Kenney to the Cleveland Indians for 3B Graig Nettles and Catcher Jerry Moses. Primarily, the trade was centered on the Yankees’ acquisition of Nettles, who would be a 5-time All-Star and 2-time Gold Glove winner in New York. Reaction in Cleveland was mostly negative with Kenney separately described as a “journeyman” and a “throw-in.” Hal Lebovitz, in an article headlined “Four Guys Named Who?” noted fan disapproval of the trade running at 82%. Though not in response to fans’ initial disapproval, Kenney’s stint with the Indians would be a short one.
Having not been offered a salary increase by the Indians, as was customary for traded players, Kenney refused to sign and planned to play the 1973 season without a contract. His intent after the season was to sue for free agency – a challenge to baseball’s reserve clause that allowed teams, from their perspective, to retain the rights to players indefinitely. As with every other attempt before Dave McNally and Andy Messersmith’s successful pursuit of free agency after the 1975 season, this particular ploy was defeated by the teams. On May 4th, after appearing in only 5 games with the Indians hitting .250, Kenney was placed on waivers. Publicly, the Indians maintained that the timing was due to an impending deadline that, if passed, would have guaranteed Kenney’s salary for the entire season. Russell Schneider of the Plain Dealer, in his coverage of Kenney’s professional passing, acknowledged that the intention to test the reserve clause was “another motive in the Indians’ desire to release Kenney at this time.”
With that release, Kenney’s major-league playing career was over at age 27, only 460 big-league games played for a possible Mickey Mantle replacement. For comparison, Mantle, with a history of lingering injuries, had played in 2,401 games in his 18-season MLB career. Kenney would find himself back with the Yankees organization later that summer, though only with their Triple-A Syracuse affiliate. “I know I can play in the majors,” said Kenney before 1974’s spring training. However, once in camp he was simply “retread Jerry Kenney” among other more promising players. Kenney would play out the entirety of the 1974 and 1975 seasons at AAA Syracuse (International League) with his final player release coming in 1976 when he was, due to his more expensive veteran status, released to make room for future major leaguer INF Mickey Klutts. Kenney’s playing career ended in the way most professional baseball careers end, not in the major leagues before a battery of cameras and an announcement to be carried in the newspapers, but with a personal decision aided by the realities of dwindling opportunities and team indifference.
After Kenney had left baseball, the brief moments of hope that accompanied the dawn of his career were forgotten, so that he could become a label for an underwhelming period of team history. Three years, after he had last played for the Yankees, Kenney was described, among other Yankees players of the era, as occasioning “derisive belly laughs.” The New York Times included the failures of Yankees prospects like Kenney as 1 of 50 reasons that would enable fans of other teams to understand the “unhappiness that even a Yankee fan must sometimes endure.”
In 1981, George Vecsey, who reported on the team during and after Kenney’s tenure in New York, would say that he never fell for Yankees President Mike Burke’s attempts to sell Kenney’s abilities to the press. The 1989 edition of the Yankees struggled against their expectations and would be called out for bearing a “greater resemblance to the Yankees of the “Horace Clarke-Jerry Kenney” days than to the Yankees of Babe Ruth, Lou Gehrig, Joe DiMaggio, Mickey Mantle and Reggie Jackson.”
When he was promoted from radio to television coverage, Michael Kay proved his credibility as a Yankees fan by managing to “stay loyal even through the team’s Jerry Kenney era.”
Similarly, Kenney would also serve as a benchmark, a touchstone for when other, later Yankees were underperforming against expectations. In 2011 a New York Post article advised Yankees outfielder Curtis Granderson to find a middle ground of performance between Kenney, among other listed failed Yankees center fielders and Mantle. In 2012, Joel Sherman suggested that Yankees Catcher Russell Martin was weakening his position in the coming free-agent market due to the “danger of making history and not the kind any player wants to make”; the particular danger was how close Martin was to surpassing Kenney’s mark for the lowest batting average by a Yankees regular. Martin would pull his average up from .173 to .211 by season’s end and therefore avoid the ignominy of hitting as poorly as Kenney.
If he had managed to survive and succeed in center field, Jerry Kenney would have provided another chain in the link of Yankees history that traveled back from Mantle to DiMaggio to Gehrig to Ruth. Though he failed to thrive, he was generally considered a genial, talkative fellow for whom baseball was not the sum total of his existence. Even when cut by the Indians, he acknowledged their motives but claimed to feel no hostility. Similarly, when pressed on the possibility that his career might be over, that no team might be willing to pick him up, Kenney managed to be philosophical – “well, if nobody does, it won’t be the end of my life.” After his exit from baseball, he returned to New York to work in the recording industry and eventually retired to Beloit in the late 1980s. Since then, his connections to baseball have consisted of coaching an American Legion team and the occasional appearance at games of the local Beloit Snappers. Kenney’s failure, such as it was for a man who worked his way to his profession’s pinnacle for several years, was his inability to meet the labels and expectations prescribed by others.
|
|
|
|
Post by fwclipper51 on Mar 1, 2024 14:50:21 GMT -5
Bill Robinson Former Yankees OF 1967-1969, AAA Minor League Hitting Coach 1999-2001
Written by Alan Cohen, Edited by Clipper  Bill Robinson 1965 Braves Photo
It was 1 week into the 1977 season. Jim Kaplan of Sports Illustrated alluded to 34-year-old Bill Robinson’s frustrations in his 10th major-league season:
“No matter where he is playing be it Cincinnati or New York or Los Angeles, he is sure to hear it. ‘Weaser,’ someone will call to him from the stands. ‘Hey, Weaser.’ And Bill Robinson of the Pirates will know someone from his hometown of Elizabeth, Pa., just outside Pittsburgh, is on hand. Why was he given the name? Robinson doesn’t know. What does Weaser mean? That’s also a mystery. The nickname is downright befuddling, which makes it especially appropriate for Robinson, a .300 hitter with power and a good glove who, confoundingly enough, cannot get a regular job. ‘I am the No. 1 utility man in baseball,’ he says joylessly.”
“But in the Panglossian (excessively optimistic) world of Pittsburgh’s new Manager, Chuck Tanner, Robinson occupies the best of all possible positions. “ ‘People call him a super-sub,’ says Tanner. ‘I call him a super-regular. He’s more valuable than most regulars, because he can play so many positions.”
“Robinson’s pre-batting ritual includes a quick Lord’s Prayer, while he crosses himself several times. Then he rubs his forehead from eyebrows to hairline with the middle and index fingers of his right hand, a relaxation technique he picked up from a kinesiologist. Finally, Robinson assumes an upright stance made all the more menacing by his 6′ 3″, 200-pound frame and lashes downward at the ball with a whippy 33-ounce bat. ‘I try to make the top of the ball mine,’ he says. ‘I swing for grounders and line drives. After all, how often does a guy drop a fly? But the big thing is, I’ve learned to relax and meet the ball instead of trying to overpower it. I’ve eliminated the word “pressure” from my vocabulary.’”
“ ‘His attitude has changed completely,’ says Del Unser of the Expos, a close friend and former teammate of Robinson’s in Philadelphia. ‘He was very high-strung with the Yankees [1967-1969] and at times with the Phillies [1972-1974]. Now, he can wait out a pitcher and hit breaking stuff. I think if he hadn’t had to break in as a Yankee, he’d have been where he is now 5 years ago.’”
William Henry Robinson Jr., the 1st-base Coach and hitting instructor for the 1986 New York Mets was born on June 26,1943, in McKeesport, Pennsylvania. His father, Bill Sr., was a steelworker. His mother, Millie Mae, was a cook in a restaurant, and when the scouts visited during Bill’s senior year of high school, she made sure they were well fed.
Robinson starred in baseball (as a Pitcher/Outfielder) and basketball at Elizabeth-Forward High School in McKeesport and had a basketball scholarship offer from Bradley University. He would chose baseball and was signed in June 1961, when he graduated from high school by John O’Neil of the Milwaukee Braves for a figure between $12,000 and $16,000.
Robinson’s pro career got off to a less than resounding start. His travels began in 1961 at Wellsville in the Class D New York-Penn League. Although, he batted only .239, he had 15 doubles in 67 games and was off to Dublin in the Georgia-Florida League for the 1962 season. While there, he experienced the racial segregation that was inherent in the South in those years, but did not let it affect his play on the field. From there, Robinson headed up the ladder. He would hit .304 at Dublin and followed that up with a .316 at Waycross in the Class A Georgia-Florida League the following season. At Waycross, he had 10 HRs, a league-leading 132 hits and 10 triples, 62 RBIs, and 29 stolen bases. He topped the league with a .478 slugging percentage. The 1964 season found him at Yakima in the Class A Northwest League, where he had his best season so far, banging 24 doubles and 18 HRs with 81 RBIs en route to a .348 batting average in 104 games.
Robinson had married his childhood sweetheart, Mary Alice Moore, in December 1963. Bill III came along in 1964 and Kelly was born in 1969. The Robinsons eventually settled in Washington Township, New Jersey. Bill was active in his community and received the George Washington Carver Award for community service in 1978.
Despite his achievements, Robinson gained the reputation as a worrier, as noted in a small piece in The Sporting News in 1965. Robinson spent all of the 1965 season with the Atlanta Crackers, the Braves’ Triple-A farm team (International League). He got off to a great start with 3 hits in his 1st game and went 7-for-16 in his 1st 4 games. The accolades were flowing and Toledo’s Manager, Frank Verdi, considered him to be “the best-looking rookie I have seen in the league this year.” For the season, he would hit .268. In 1966, the Milwaukee Braves would move to Atlanta and the Braves had moved their Triple-A team to Richmond. Robinson responded to the move with a .312 batting average and career highs of 20 HRs and 79 RBIs. He was named to the International League All-Star team.
Robinson, then 23, was called up to the Atlanta Braves at the end of the 1966 NL season and saw his 1st MLB action on September 20th. He ran for Henry Aaron and finished the game in right field. His 1st MLB hit came on September 25th. Starting the game in left field, he singled in the 8th inning off of Pittsburgh’s Al McBean, driving in a run. He was given another start in the season finale against Cincinnati and went 2-for-4, including his 1st MLB extra-base hit, an RBI triple. In his 6 MLB games with the Braves, he went 3-for-11.
But the Braves were fully stocked with outfielders and they had traded Robinson to the New York Yankees for veteran 3B Clete Boyer. The aging Yankees had fallen on hard times, falling to 6th in 1965 and 10th in 1966. Former 2-time AL MVP Roger Maris had been traded to St. Louis Cardinals and it was expected that Robinson would take over in right field.
1967 New York Yankees Player Photo
Robinson was counted on to save the franchise and things started off fairly well. As Robinson remembered it, “(W)e opened in Washington (on April 10th), and I hit a HR run my 1st time up in an 8-1 win. They said ‘God’s here.’” The score was actually 8-0, with the win going to Mel Stottlemyre, who had limited the Senators to 2 hits.
As Marty Appel notes in Pinstripe Empire, “Robinson was a personal favorite of (Team President Mike) Burke’s. He wanted him to succeed badly. He was tall and rangy, he was black, and he seemed like a good statement for a team ‘moving in new directions.’” Burke was alluding to the fact that since Jackie Robinson entered baseball in 1947, the Yankees had been very slow to integrate, with only 1 black player of note, Elston Howard (1955), playing for the club during the 1st 20 years of integration.
But the rest of the 1967 AL season for Bill Robinson was a disappointment. He had suffered a shoulder injury, which he tried to hide. The fans were tough on him. “The boos really tore me up when I was with the Yankees,” he said in 1974. “All ballplayers hear them and I couldn’t take it. I’d be across the George Washington Bridge and heading home (to New Jersey) before the people even got to the clubhouse. I just couldn’t face it anymore.” He batted only .196 with 7 HRs and 29 RBIs in 116 games, as the Yankees placed 9th for their 3rd consecutive lower division finish. Robinson couldn’t not relax, while playing in the Bronx, despite his fellow Yankees teammate Mickey Mantle’s encouragement. Looking back on his season, Robinson said, “I was pressing too hard. Every time I came up, I wanted to hit a HR to impress people. Finally, it got to the point where I was holding the bat so tightly, I couldn’t even hit the ball.”
His Postseason shoulder surgery had repaired the shoulder injury, but Robinson would continue to struggle. He would hit .240 in 1968 and .171 in 1969. In 1970, he was sent down by the Yankees to Triple-A Syracuse Chiefs (International League.) Robinson would batted .258 with 13 HRs. In 310 games for the New York Yankees, Bill would hit just .206 with 16 HRs. In December of 1970, the Yankees would trade OF Bill Robinson to the Chicago White Sox for Pitcher Barry Moore. Appel noted, “It would forever be a mystery as to what went wrong with Bill Robinson in New York, and why that promise was never fulfilled” (until he shined for Philadelphia and Pittsburgh).
The White Sox would send Robinson to their Triple-A Tucson club (Pacific Coast League), where he would hit .275 with 14 HRs and 81 RBIs in 1971. Frustration set in when he was not called up to the White Sox and he even thought about quitting. His hopes were renewed, when Chicago would trade him to the Philadelphia Phillies for Minor-League Catcher Jerry Rodriguez.
In 1972, Robinson was still in the PCL, this time with the Phillies AAA Eugene club; he would bat .304 with 20 HRs and 66 RBIs in 66 games. That earned him a call-up to Philadelphia in June, he would see his 1st action with the Phillies on June 24th, doubling against the Expos in a pinch-hitting role. During his days in the minor leagues, he learned of what he came to call the Willie Davis theory, which goes as follows: “It’s not my life, and it’s not my wife, so why worry about it.” Basically, he learned not to dwell over everything and only worry about items of the utmost personal importance. The theory stood him well as he embarked on the most productive years of his career. There would be bumps along the way, but, for the most part, Robinson took things in stride and learned to relax.
Robinson got into 82 games with the Phillies in 1972, batting .239, but was in the majors to stay. Actually, when he came to spring training in 1973, he was still 52 days short of qualifying for the MLB pension plan. Job number 1 was just to make the team. He exceeded all expectations. New manager Danny Ozark inserted Bill into the lineup more regularly and he would hit .288 with 25 HRs and 65 RBIs in 124 games. It appeared as though Robinson had it made. Manager Ozark remarked, “He gave it his all and produced. I understood the problems he had in New York. He wasn’t sure of himself. Now he’d got the confidence. If he could go back 10 years, he would be another Aaron or Mays.”
No sooner was Robinson a regular than his bad luck returned. He had offseason surgery for bone chips in his left elbow and found that, despite his fine performance, he came to spring training in 1974 without a regular job. A somewhat overblown dispute with Ozark would ultimately result in his leaving the Phillies.
“I saw the lineup card without my name on it and took a swipe at it, not meaning to touch it,” Robinson recalled. “But it came off, and Ozark was watching. He called me into his office, which he had a perfect right to do, and we both let off a lot of steam. When I was leaving, I tried to close the door gently, but there was a breeze and it slammed.”
Robinson got into only 100 games with Philadelphia in 1974 and his average dropped to .236 with only 5 HRs and 21 RBIs. After the season, he was traded to Pittsburgh for pitcher Wayne Simpson and with the Pirates, he would blossom.
Bill Robinson Topps Pirates Photo
Robinson would joined the Pittsburgh Pirates in 1975 at the none-too-tender age of 32 and was the 4th outfielder behind Richie Zisk, Al Oliver and Dave Parker. He would bat .280 with 6 HRs and 33 RBIs. He had started 41 games for the Pirates and had 16 multiple-hit games. The Pirates won the National League East title before being swept by Cincinnati in the League Championship Series. Robinson went hitless in 2 at-bats in the LCS.
The following season, Robinson saw more action, with 416 at-bats in 121 games. His batting average soared to .303, his 1st time above 300. He was the Pirates’ leading right-handed slugger and the team’s most valuable player. He received the Roberto Clemente Memorial Award from the Pittsburgh sportswriters. He performed at 5 different positions and pinch-hit .455. His power numbers were solid (21 HRs, 64 RBIs) and the best was yet to come. Off this showing, Robinson was slated for 3rd base in 1977, but once again he would be denied. The Pirates had traded for Phil Garner. Instead of blowing up as he had in Philadelphia, he calmly talked out his disappointment with 2 friends from his minor-league days and his father. “They all told me the same things,” Robinson said, “that I still had a job and that things could be worse. So, I didn’t do anything rash, and I’m glad. We got a heck of a third baseman in the deal, and because I had thought I would start, I had gotten into the best shape of my life mentally and physically.”
“It’s true we led Bill to believe he’d be starting at 3rd this season,” said General Manager Pete Peterson, “but we couldn’t resist picking up Phil Garner from the A’s. He (Garner) plays 3rd, and Willie Stargell plays 1st. We want to stick with Al Oliver in left and Dave Parker in right, and we feel Omar Moreno in center gives us the kind of outfield defense we haven’t had since Roberto Clemente. Not that Bill isn’t good defensively. He is, and he’s our top sub at all 5 positions. He may not get 400 at bats, but he’ll get plenty with his versatility.”
It wasn’t long before Robinson saw action, filling in for injured Pirates in the outfield and at 1st base. It was early on that the Pirate injury list started to grow and Robinson was a disgruntled bench warmer for just the 1st 4 innings of the season. When Al Oliver was sidelined because the pain from a mouth ulcer became too acute, Robinson moved into the outfield. Two games later, Stargell began suffering, 1st from a strained right knee, then from dizzy spells and Robinson was moved to 1st base. Through the 1st 7 games of the season, he was hitting .348 and leading the Bucs with 8 runs batted in. There was even talk in Pittsburgh that the Pirates would trade one of their regulars so that Robinson can have a spot to call his own in the lineup.
Despite this early activity, he was hampered by muscle pulls in his legs and started only 19 games during the 1st 2 months of the season. Everyone seemed to have suggestions to get him going and, at the suggestion of teammate Rich Gossage, he took to wearing pantyhose beneath his uniform pants. He took more than his share of kidding, but he went onto start 32 consecutive games between May 31st and July 2nd, batting .339 over that stretch.
It got better. From July 21st through August 2nd, Robinson had a power surge. He had 5 HRs, including Grand Slams on July 28th and July 30th, and batted in 21 runs. His batting average during the 13 games was .390 and his slugging percentage was a hefty .712. But he did not forget that it had not always been so easy. He could relate to “the guys sitting on the bench, because I have been in their spot for a long, long time. The toughest part of coming off the bench is that you know eventually you’re going back to the bench. That’s tough for any athlete to take.”
On August 15th of that season, the Pirates issued a press release which highlighted his exploits from June 24th through August 2nd, a period during which he had 8 game winning hits. It was also noted that through August 14th, he had come to the plate 24 times with a runner on 3rd with less than 2 out and driven in the runner on 22 of those occasions.
For the record, Bill Robinson in 1977, despite not being a “regular”, had played in 137 games, 127 as a starter. The versatile Robinson started 79 games at 1st base, 11 games at 3rd base, 36 games in LF and 1 game in CF. He came to the plate 544 times. He set career highs, batting .304 with 26 HRs and 104 RBIs.
During the offseason, Al Oliver was traded by the Pirates and Bill Robinson at age 35, became the everyday left fielder in 1978. However, his numbers dropped off significantly. He batted only .246 with 14 HRs and 80 RBIs. A thumb injury early in the season set him back and as he continued to fail to produce, he began to press. Manager Chuck Tanner and his teammates were in his corner. Tanner said, “You don’t give up on his type. He’s giving it all he has and 1 day he’ll get it all back and he’ll win plenty of games for us.”
Robinson didn’t let his off year at the plate affect his fielding as he led National League left fielders with a .989 fielding percentage. He stole a career high 14 bases. He did have his moments during the season, with a pair of 2-HR games against the Cubs at Wrigley Field.
And then came 1979. Robinson got his HR swing back and slammed 24 HRs along with 75 RBIs as the “We Are Family” Pirates won their division for the 6th time in 10 years, and the 1st time since 1975. Robinson appeared in a career record 148 games for Pittsburgh, again without a regular position or place in the lineup. He was platooned with John Milner and when Willie Stargell needed a rest, the Pirates would play both Robinson and Milner and they were up to the task.
Actually, the Pirates got off to a slow start in 1979. They were 6 games under .500 on May 16th before taking 16 of 21 games to move into 3rd place, 3 games out of 1st. During that stretch, Robinson batted .322 with 7 HRs and 19 RBIs, including 2 HRs of putting it together. We know we have the talent here. We know we can win. We have all the ingredients of a winner and many of us are tired of finishing in 2nd place.” But then, the team treaded water.
As late as July 8th, they were in 4th place, 7 games behind the league leaders. Then they took off. They would win 16 of 21 to move into 1st place for the 1st time on July 28th. It became a 2-team race between the Pirates and the surprising Montreal Expos the rest of the season.
On the decisive last day of the campaign, the Pirates would host the Chicago Cubs. Robinson came off the bench in the top of the 6th inning to replace Milner in left field. His 1st and only, plate appearance was in the bottom of the 7th inning. He came to the plate with the bases loaded and 2 outs. He delivered a single, driving in 2 runs to give the Bucs a 5-2 lead. The final score was 5-3 and the victorious Pirates advanced to the postseason. They would defeat the Reds in the NLCS to advance to the World Series against Baltimore. After going 0-for-3 in the LCS, Robinson went 5-for-19 in the World Series as the Pirates would defeat the Orioles in 7 games. Robinson had his 1st World Series ring and a full World Series share worth $28,236.87.
During the offseason, the Pirates, looking to shore up their pitching, offered Robinson as trade bait, but there were no nibbles. Injuries plagued Robinson in 1980 and he played in only 100 games, 74 as a starter. He batted .287 with 12 HRs and 36 RBIs. The following season, he saw even less action, batting .216 and playing in only 39 games. The Pirates would finish 3rd in 1980 with an 83-79 record and in the strike-shortened 1981 season, they were 46-56. By 1982, the Pirates were showing their age. Although they finished with a winning record of 84-78, some of their players, most notably Robinson (39) and Willie Stargell (42) were getting old. On June 15, 1982, Robinson and his .239 batting average were traded to the Phillies for Reserve INF/OF Wayne Nordhagen. As Robinson parted with the Pirates, Stargell said, “Bill Robinson is one helluva man, nothing but a plus in anybody’s life. He is a caring, concerned man.
In the remaining months of 1982 NL season, Robinson would played in 35 games for the Phillies, batting .261 (18-for-69). He saw his last action in 1983, getting into only 10 games and was released on May 23rd. Teammate Mike Schmidt remembered back to 1972 when he was at Eugene, Oregon, his last stop in the minors and was teamed with Robinson. Schmidt remembered that Robinson “respected me as a player, and knowing that made me feel good. He kind of took me under his wing. … (J)ust a good friend, a guy that had been there before. … Robbie is a credit to the game of baseball. I don’t know how to put it any other way.” Robinson finished his 16-year MLB playing career with a .258 batting average, 166 HRs and 641 RBIs.
In his last weeks with the Phillies, Robinson took the time to counsel rookie pitcher Charles Hudson on the importance of relaxing and learning to “alleviate pressure.” He would spend the better part of his remaining years instilling that lesson on a new generation of players.
In 1984, Robinson would join the New York Mets as Hitting Instructor and 1st-base Coach and “Uncle Bill” was with the Mets for 6 years during which time the team never finished lower than 2nd place. Robinson got his 2nd World Series ring in 1986 and was a valued instructor working with the likes of Darryl Strawberry, who became his special project.
Ron Darling was in his 1st full season with the Mets in 1984, and on August 7th pitched against the Cubs at Wrigley Field. By day’s end, he would know 1st-hand the value of Bill Robinson to the New York Mets. Darling was pulled from the game not long after hitting Dave Owen of Chicago in the 5th inning. An irate Cubs fan threw a cup of beer at Darling as he left the field. Darling was about to go back on the field and pursue his attacker, when Robinson grabbed hold of him and set him down. Robinson, of course, could display his temper and was about to pursue the fan. He backed off when the fan was escorted from the premises by security guards. When Robinson returned to the dugout, he shot a knowing glance in Darling’s direction, which the young pitcher took as a much-needed sign of encouragement.
Robinson looked for every edge for his players, and was quick to accuse Pirates Pitcher Rick Rhoden of doctoring the ball in a game against the Mets on July 6,1986 in Pittsburgh. He confronted Rhoden after the pitcher struck out Gary Carter to end the 5th inning. A shoving match ensued and, before long, the both benches were cleared. Robinson was fined $500, but his players knew where he stood
During the stretch drive in 1986, Robinson made it a point to put a picture in Strawberry’s locker of Darryl hitting a line drive, just to remind his star pupil how he looked when swinging well. During the last 11 games of the regular season, Strawberry batted .306 with 6 HRs and 15 RBIs. During his 6 years working with Robinson, Strawberry averaged over 30 HRs per season.
During the 1986 World Series, Robinson spoke of the challenges he faced with the Mets and the approach he had taken. “I think that with these young kids, you’ve got to be more than a hitting instructor. I’m not their father but you’ve got to give them fatherly street advice. It certainly helps me, not only being black, but talking to all the guys it helps a lot that I have a son who is the same age as most of these guys. I respect them all and think they respect me. They’re trying to get where I’ve been.” Bill’s son at the time became very close with Strawberry and Dwight Gooden. Every time, Gooden had an issue, he was able to come to Robinson, who was much more than a hitting instructor.
And on that magical (for the Mets) evening in October, Bill Robinson was standing in the 1st-base coaching box when, in that fateful bottom of the 10th inning of Game 6 of the World Series, every player got the low 2, when he arrived at 1st base. The rallying cry was “Don’t make the last out!” And then, Mookie Wilson hit a groundball in the direction of first base. “It made three nice bounces. Bounce … bounce … bounce. And then it hit something and didn’t come up again. That 4th bounce. It was just our year.” Wilson remembered that during that fateful bottom of the 10th inning, each of the Mets involved in the rally told Robinson that they were not determined to make the last out.
The Mets were unable to build on the success of 1986 and in 1989 after finishing in 2nd place, 6 games behind the division-winning Cubs, Robinson was fired. After spending 2 years with ESPN, in 1992, he took a managing job at Shreveport in the Double-A Texas League and led the Giants affiliate to the championship with a 77-59 record. He was frustrated at not being given an opportunity to rise higher, as he aspired to eventually get a major-league managing position. He did feel that race had something to do with his not moving higher, stating: “If (becoming a big-league manager) doesn’t happen, it won’t surprise me. Whether it’s prejudice, whether it’s timing, or whatever, it’s always excuses.”
Robinson’s next stop was back with the Phillies, as a Minor League Hitting Instructor in 1994, and as Manager at AA Reading in the Eastern League in 1996. The following season, he moved up to Triple-A Scranton-Wilkes-Barre as Hitting Instructor and was inducted into the Pennsylvania Baseball Sports Hall of Fame.
Robinson was doing what he loved. In 1998, he said, “It’s been fun, gratifying to help young kids. I had delusions of being a major-league manager, but I know that’s not going to happen. Baseball doesn’t owe me a thing. As long as I have a uniform on, I’m grateful. I’ve been successful. Maybe not in a material way, but I have the Lord on my side and my family. What more could a man ask?”
In 1999, Bill Robinson was back in the New York Yankees organization, working with the hitters at Triple-A Columbus Clippers (International League.) He was rewarded for his efforts with a World Series ring, when the Yankees had won the World Championship that year. He would stay with Columbus for 3 years, before returning to the majors as the Hitting Instructor for the Montreal Expos in 2001.
Robinson was ecstatic about returning to the big leagues as a coach. “I had waited 12 years to get back to the major leagues. After I accepted (the offer from Expos Manager Jeff Torborg), I walked out on Madison Avenue (in New York), raised my hands to the sky, and said, ‘Thank God.’”
In 2003, Robinson was with the Florida Marlins and returned to the World Series, facing the Yankees and winning his 4th World Series ring as the Marlins defeated the Yankees. George Vecsey of the New York Times perhaps summed things up the best: “Whether (the Marlins) know it or not, their paternal hitting coach is an inspiration for athletes or anybody else who has a bad day or a bad couple of years. You can come back. You can go from failure to the World Series.” Later, Bill was selected out of all the hitting coaches in MLB to coach the series with the MLB All-Stars against Japanese All-Stars played in Japan.
Bill Robinson would pass away suddenly on July 29, 2007 in Las Vegas, while working as a Minor-League Hitting Coordinator for the Los Angeles Dodgers AAA team located in Las Vegas, Nv. He was survived by his wife, Mary Alice and their 2 children. William III had played 3 years of Minor-League Baseball before moving into broadcasting and Kelley had worked in the fashion industry.
|
|
