Joe Wilhoit and Ken Guettler: Minor League Hitting Record-Setters
This article was written by Bob Rives
This article was published in 2000 Baseball Research Journal
They were decades apart in time and hundreds of miles apart in where they played, but they had some things in common. Both were outfielders who set enduring records, one of them among the oldest in Organized Baseball. And both were involved in unusual incidents en route to their crowns.
What Joe Wilhoit did was set an all-time record by hitting safely in 69 successive games in 1919, a record apparently boosted by a polite—or “sportsmanlike”—third baseman in Omaha who held onto a bunt and kept the streak alive.
Ken Guettler in 1956 joined an exclusive list of players with 60 or more home runs in a season by hitting 62, and became the only player ever to lead minor leagues in home runs in eight different seasons. Yet he lost one home run to a questionable umpire’s call and, more important, lost his much-needed glasses, perhaps to the opposing ball club in Houston.
Of the two, Wilhoit had by far the more successful career. He played three major league seasons, and made a brief World Series appearance, before setting his record in 1919. And he joined the Red Sox for another try at the end of his record-setting summer.
Guettler never left the minor leagues, even though he was in an organization so short of outfielders that at one point it had moved a catcher there.
A great trade
Joe Wilhoit was a native Kansan from Hiawatha. He joined Wichita in 1919, the Western League’s comeback year after it suspended operations during World War 1.
The record he broke belonged to Jack Ness, who had hit safely in 45 successive games for Oakland. Joe DiMaggio in 1941 set the major league record of 56. But he had also hit safely in a remarkable 61 consecutive games while he was still in the Pacific Coast League, the most serious assault ever made on Wilhoit’s mark.
Wilhoit came to Wichita from Seattle in the Pacific Coast League. His career was in a free fall. The Braves, Pirates, and Giants had all given up on his big league potential. His three weeks in Seattle that spring had been disastrous. In seventeen games he hit only .165. That’s when Wichita club president Frank Isbell made what had to be one of his most successful trades.
Isbell was called “The Bald Eagle” during his own 1,119-game major league career, mostly with the White Sox, setting a World Series record for doubles that still stands. He moved to Kansas to run ball clubs after his playing time, and named his first Wichita team for himself, calling it the “Izzies.” He later changed that to the Witches. To get Wilhoit and pitcher Art Bowman, Isbell sent his own top pitcher, former Washington Senator Claude Thomas, to the Northwest.
No one was betting that Wilhoit would set a record when he was acquired. Wichita simply needed an outfielder. Western league rosters then had only fourteen slots—eight position players, five pitchers and a utility player. They earned an average of $185 a month. With outfielder Paul Maloan hospitalized after being hit in the head with a pitch, Isbell had put pitcher Thomas into the outfield. Then he made the trade for Wilhoit and Bowman.
The Wichita Eagle called Wilhoit a mediocre hitter: “Wilhoit is a finished ball player and one of the fastest outfielders in the game. While not a terrific hitter in the majors [he batted .255 overall in his big league seasons] his speed will earn him many a base hit in the Western.” Despite the kind words, Wilhoit started in Wichita much as he had in Seattle. After 25 games, he was batting .198.
That changed, starting June 14. Wichita was home against Oklahoma City when Joe started his streak. He hit over .500 during his next 69 games, raised his batting average to well over .400, and lifted his team out of last place and into title contention.
A little help from his friends
As with all streaks, his almost ended several times. In 19 of those 69 games, he had only one hit. The closest call came in Games 62 and 63, a doubleheader against the Packers in Omaha. In the first game, he didn’t get his hit until the eleventh, when he won the game with a home run.
In the second game, his only hit came this way, as outlined in the Wichita Eagle’s game account:
Three times and sent back without a hit, Wilhoit resorted to a bunt to reach first. He laid the ball to Bert Graham who had been called in from the field to play the hot corner after Larbeau had sprained his ankle.
Graham could have pegged his man at first, but with Omaha away to a big lead, he held the ball, giving Wilhoit his sixty-third game in a row in which he has hit safely. Graham’s sportsmanship drew forth the admiration of the crowd.
Joe hit safely in six more games before ending his record on August 19, at home against Tulsa. He batted four times that day: walk, strikeout, fly out, groundout. Elam Vangilder, who would later pitch eleven years in the major leagues, was Tulsa’s pitcher.
Still, it was a good day for Joe. The crowd at Island Park passed hats, collecting $600, almost doubling his summer’s pay. During the streak, another fan had offered him $5 a hit. That brought him another $100.
A regular Joe
Wilhoit’s 129 games in Wichita produced some of the best numbers ever recorded by any player in any league. In addition to his hitting streak, he led the Western League with a .422 batting average, was first in hits with 222, and scored an amazing 126 runs.
Yet his admirers thought batting was not his greatest skill. An Eagle sportswriter wrote:
The most outstanding thing about Wilhoit is his modesty and good nature. His great work has failed to swell his head. He is popular everywhere and papers all over the circuit have printed his picture and advertised him as the greatest player ever to perform in this league.
Not only in the Western has his work been noticed, but sport papers all over the country have given columns about his work. Wilhoit had a trial in the big show before but failed to hit consistently. There is no doubt that he has improved his weakness at bat and should go up to the American [League] next year. He is still young in baseball and has several years to prove a big star among the great ones in the majors.
At season’s end, Wilhoit did go to the Red Sox, hitting safely six times in eighteen tries. But he returned to the minor leagues the next year, playing four seasons at Toledo in the American Association and Salt Lake City of the Pacific Coast League. He hit over .300 each year. Seven years after retiring, only forty-five years old, he died in Santa Barbara, California.
Hitter’s year
It didn’t worry Ken Guettler that the 1956 Texas League season opened on a Friday the thirteenth. If there was bad luck that year, it was for pitchers. Three men, including Guettler, hit 60 or more home runs, the only year that ever happened. For hitters, it was the last time a minor leaguer ever recorded that many.
In fact, Guettler had overcome a lot of bad luck just to get into the Texas League. He learned to hit with a right arm several inches shorter than his left. A hockey accident at his boyhood home in Bay City, Michigan, left one arm so stiff it could not be straightened. He also had bad eyes. Without glasses, he couldn’t see a pitch more than thirty feet from home plate. Truly great hitters can see a bullet in flight. Ken had trouble with speeding watermelons.
Although he twice left briefly, Guettler spent half of his dozen professional years at Portsmouth, Virginia, in the Class B Piedmont League. He led the league in home runs four times, including 1955, when he hit 41 while also managing. On three other occasions before arriving in Shreveport he had claimed the home run crown in other leagues. He was a batting champ once, RBI champ four times, and a runs leader one time.
| Year | Team | League | League-Leading Production |
|---|---|---|---|
| 1945 | Kingsport | Appalachian | 13 HR |
| 1947 | Griffin | Georgia-Alabama | 25 HR, 103 RBI |
| 1948 | Montgomery-Gadsden | Southeastern | 24 HR |
| 1951 | Portsmouth | Piedmont | 30 HR, 142 G, 114 R, 116 RBI |
| 1952 | Portsmouth | Piedmont | 28 HR, 104 RBI, .334 BA |
| 1953 | Portsmouth | Piedmont | 30 HR |
| 1955 | Portsmouth | Piedmont | 41 HR, 113 RBI |
| 1956 | Shreveport | Texas | 62 HR, 115 R, 143 RBI |
On to Shreveport
Like many other minor leagues in the 1950s, the Piedmont was losing the battle to television. When it and four others folded after the 1955 season, Guettler was teamless, leagueless, and jobless. Fortunately, club owner Frank Lawrence was a friend of Bonneau Peters, president of the Shreveport Texas League club. Peters was a great wheeler-dealer, even for a used car lot owner. He had solved the problems of a World War II Texas League shutdown by selling his entire team to St. Paul of the American Association, for example. When Lawrence called to recommend Guettler, Peters wanted to meet him. At the interview, the two clicked.
Guettler hit .378 in spring games to become the Sports’ right fielder. Sportswriters had a hard time finding a nickname that fit the 5-foot-11, 190-pounder whose forearms bulged like Popeye’s. They tried “The Magnificent Blaster,” “Bespectacled Blaster,” “Mighty Ken,” and “The Bazooka.” The worst was “Kenneth the Menneth.”
The right name was important because it soon was in the paper every day. Ken homered twice in his second game and seven times in the first seventeen. Immediately he was seen as a threat to Clarence Kraft’s league record of 55 home runs set in 1924.
Kraft, known as “Big Boy,” was a Texas League legend. After a career that included three games with the Braves in 1914, Kraft joined the Cats in Fort Worth and played 1918-1924, hitting more than 30 home runs in four years and batting .349 and .352 in his most productive seasons.
His home run record came when Fort Worth civic leader Amon Carter, whose name is still worn by the city’s airport, offered $10,000 to anyone who could hit more home runs than Babe Ruth’s 59 in 1921. Kraft believed Carter had a grudge against Ruth, but did not know why. He only knew his own effort fell four short.
“I didn’t quite make it,” he recalled. Still, he cashed in by hitting a Bull Durham tobacco sign on the outfield wall three times, earning $50 each time he did. And missing the $10,000 might actually have helped him, he believes. “I wouldn’t have been able to quit,” he said.
“I had a fine business opportunity for an auto dealership in Fort Worth. We liked the city and I figured that we’d gotten about all out of baseball that we could. So I quit. And I made it stick. The Fort Worth club offered me what was a real good salary in those days to come back, but I couldn’t do that. I can’t say that I’ve ever been sorry.”
Good eye
By 1956 Kraft was sixty-nine and, as it turned out, had only one more season of baseball to see before his death. In watching Guettler’s efforts to take the title from him, Kraft saw a difference in their hitting styles. Kraft hit long, lofty fly balls. Guettler hit both fly balls and long, hard line drives. One hit a moving car on Gray street behind Shreveport’s park. Teammates envied him. “If others of us hit the ball like he does, we’d pop up. His go over the fence with that power,” one told the Shreveport paper.
Even losing his glasses barely slowed him.
Shreveport opened at home with two games against Houston, AA farm club of the St. Louis Cardinals. Then the two teams took buses to Houston for its home opener. On his first night there, Guettler hit a two-run homer.
That may have been enough for the Buffaloes. When the Sports returned to the park for the second game of the series, Guettler’s glasses were gone from the Shreveport locker room.
Ken’s glasses were special shatterproof sports models. When he damaged them in the Piedmont League, it took a New York doctor days to replace them. The Sports knew they could not afford to lose their hot power hitter for that long. The hunt for the glasses took on some urgency.
While he accused no one, Shreveport manager Mel McGaha said flatly the glasses disappeared from his team’s locker room in the Houston ball park. Guettler left them in his locker after the April 15 game. They were not there when he returned the next day.
The Shreveport Times quoted the manager as saying, “The glasses were taken from the clubhouse. They were under supervision all the time we were in the clubhouse and when we left, the place was locked.
“Yet the glasses were gone when we returned to the park on Monday and there was no evidence of a break-in. They had to be taken by someone who had access to the place and who knew where they were. I’m not accusing anybody,” McGaha continued, “but the circumstances are mighty suspicious.”
“It’s hardly conceivable that adult professionals would even be silent parties to such a bush-league caper as swiping an opponent’s specs, and the Sports aren’t saying that anybody on the Houston club did. But they’re not all that sure that adequate precautions were taken by the home team to see that someone else didn’t swipe ’em, somebody with an angle,” wrote Jack Fiser in his Times column.
Even without glasses, Guettler returned as a pinch-hitter the next night. McGaha said he felt a partially sighted Guettler was more likely to loft a needed fly ball and produce a run than someone else with full vision. But it didn’t work. “I never saw a pitch until it was halfway to the plate,” Guettler observed after the experiment.
Fortunately, a San Antonio optometrist was able to make up a new pair of glasses in only a day. The new specs seemed to spark Guettler even more. He promptly hit a record eight home runs in eight games, a feat that had not occurred since Jay Clarke smashed eight in one game during Corsicana’s remarkable 51-3 victory over Texarkana in 1902. While Guettler’s best day never approached Clarke’s, he tied another league record by twice hitting three home runs in a single game.
Power shift
If Guettler had a problem in 1956, it was his tendency to pull most balls he hit toward left field. A version of the Ted Williams shift was quickly put in place by defenders. But that simply hurt his average, not his homer output. He batted a respectable .293 for the year, becoming one of just two minor league players to hit 60 or more home runs while batting under .300.
Both opponents and he credited the glasses with his results. In a spring eye exam, he learned just how bad his eyes had become. “I just started being a good hitter then,” he said. “I know now that I hadn’t been seeing pitches until they were halfway to the plate.”
Bert Thiel, the 1956 Texas League pitcher of the year, agrees the glasses helped. Thiel had regularly faced Guettler in the Southeastern League in 1948, “He could hit then,” the pitcher recalled. “But he didn’t wear glasses and I’m sure that’s helped the guy.” Norm Sherry later caught five years in the National League, but opposed Guettler in 1956 and earlier. He credited experience with Guettler’s improvement. “We used to be able to get him out pretty good when we had to,” he explained. “With two strikes on him, we’d give him the curve ball low and away and he’d chase it right into the dirt.”
Actually, short of new glasses, most things that happened in 1956 did not help Guettler in his home run record quest. Shreveport is only 200 feet above sea level. Most 60-plus home run hitters played at higher altitudes where batted balls travel farther. Ken also spent part of the season not playing. In June, when he hit only seven of his home runs, he was benched. McGaha said he just needed a rest. “No, I don’t think pitchers around the league have Guettler figured out,” McGaha said. “Ken is simply off his timing and maybe sitting out a few games is the only way he’ll get it back.” In ten games he was used only as a pinch hitter. In midseason he was gone for three days because his wife was ill.
Even when he was playing, he didn’t always have free rein to swing for the fence. On the day he broke Kraft’s record, for example, he was ordered to bunt and successfully sacrificed.
And just as Bob Crues may have lost his bid to become baseball’s first 70-home run hitter (see my article in last year’s BRJ), Guettler also lost a homer to what might have been an umpire’s bad call.
In July Guettler hit a ball that appeared to bounce off the farther of two rows of signs surrounding the Fort Worth outfield. That was supposed to be a home run. Fort Worth center fielder Don Demeter was so certain the ball was gone that he made no effort to retrieve it when it bounced on the field. But umpire Bill Malesky did not agree. He ruled the ball hit an inner sign, giving Guettler the only triple he recorded that summer.
By August it was evident that Guettler had a clear shot at Kraft’s record, and newspaper sports pages introduced a “Guettlerometer.” It compared Ken’s progress with Kraft’s pace. As the possibility of Guettler recording at least 60 homers grew brighter, Babe Ruth’s 1927 pace was added. Then came Joe Bauman’s record for 1954, the year he hit 72 for Organized Baseball’s all-time high. In early August, Guettler led all three.
On August 10, Guettler hit a letter-high fastball thrown by Franklin Delano (Ted) Wieand of Houston to tie Kraft’s record. The next day, another Houston pitcher, Billy Muffet, repeated the mistake and Guettler had his record.
Kraft wired congratulations and said the new record holder had a chance to hit at least 65 home runs. Guettler took off in pursuit.
Actually, “took off” isn’t the best description. It was August 29, in Dallas, before he hit his number 61, and he had to leave that game because of illness. With six games remaining in the season, he hit number 62. He missed those last half dozen because of injury.
Honors rained. He was in the league All-Star game and on the season-ending All-Star team. He edged Oklahoma City’s 5-foot-5 Albie Pearson as player of the year, and San Antonio third baseman Brooks Robinson and Fort Worth’s Demeter as rookie of the year.
Afterwards
But it was no financial bonanza. Fans gave him $500 and the club $200. But “I made more the first year I played,” Guettler said later. At Kingsport, Tennessee, in his first season, fans gave him cash for home runs. Guettler made as much as $175 a game.
Fans believed he had earned a big league bid. “Whether he crashes the big show or not, Ken is a mortal cinch to be promoted to the Triple A classification—assuming, of course, he wants to play minor league ball anywhere but here,” Fiser wrote in the Times.
Over the winter the Braves bought his contract. So desperate was Milwaukee for outfielders in 1957 that they once put a catcher there. And their Triple A affiliate had to put a pitcher in the outfield. Guettler started that season with Wichita in the American Association but soon was back in Double A at Atlanta before returning to Wichita in August, a year to the day after he broke the Texas League home run mark.
The Wichita newspaper commented on his coming. “The hard-hitting outfielder who hit 62 home runs in the Texas League last year may be a valuable man here in a pinch-hitting role. It is doubtful if he can break in the outfield regularly, however, as he was never renowned as a fielder and Wichita will have Dale Talbott available before long as well as [Bob] Hazle, [Roy] Hawes, and [Ray] Shearer, the current three. At Atlanta he suffered from a bad ankle and played but seldom.”
“Played but seldom” was the story of the rest of his career. In his final three seasons, he played at Dallas in the Texas League, in Monterrey and Nuevo Laredo in the Mexican League, and Charlotte and Charleston in the Sally. In 525 times at bat, he hit only .206 and 24 home runs.
He had one great disappointment in baseball. “I never had the opportunity to play in the major leagues. In fact, I was never invited by a major league club to its spring training camp,” he said.
After the 1959 season he quietly left the game, the only player ever to lead minor leagues in home runs eight times and to be Texas League Player of the Year, Rookie of the Year and an All-Star in the same season. In 1956 he led the Texas League in home runs, runs scored and runs batted in as well. Retiring to Jacksonville, Florida, he finished life as a postal employee. When he died at age fifty, he left his wife and two children.
BOB RIVES is retired from business in Wichita, Kansas, and makes occasional trips to Kansas City to see his grandson, Patrick, play for the Royals—a 10-11-year-old team in Johnson County.