August 8, 1974: Richard Nixon’s resignation is broadcast during Triple-A game in Syracuse

Typically, baseball ground rules require the public-address system of a ballpark to be silenced during a game. But when the leader of the free world is resigning from office, exceptions can apparently be made.

The Syracuse (New York) Post-Standard reported that a portion of President Richard Nixon’s resignation speech on the night of August 8, 1974, was broadcast on the PA system at Syracuse’s MacArthur Stadium, but gameplay between the Syracuse Chiefs and Tidewater Tides of the Triple-A International League didn’t stop. Fans who weren’t there can only imagine a president making a speech of major national importance, punctuated by the pop of baseballs against gloves and the crack of foul tips off bats.1

As for the game, the Chiefs had a better night than the president. Led by star performances by three players from Nixon’s home state of California, the home team took the lead after two innings and cruised to a 6-3 win.

Despite the unprecedented event unfolding on television, the game drew a robust crowd of 6,457. The Chiefs operated under community ownership for many years,2 and the team had scheduled a barbecue for its shareholders on August 8, as well as a Navy Night promotion.3 The Chiefs weren’t the only IL team that unknowingly counterprogrammed a special event against the Nixon resignation. Along the New York State Thruway to the west, the Rochester Red Wings had booked August 8 for their annual exhibition against the parent Baltimore Orioles, drawing just shy of 10,000 fans.

The game in Syracuse represented a matchup by proxy of New York City’s two major-league teams: The Chiefs were affiliated with the Yankees, while the Tides were a Mets farm team. Syracuse entered the game in second place in the IL’s North Division with a 59-51 record, 11 games behind first-place Rochester. Tidewater sat fourth and last in the South Division at 43-64, 21½ games behind first-place Memphis.4 The Tides had swept a doubleheader from the Chiefs the previous night in front of about 2,200 fans.5

The rival skippers had very different careers. Syracuse manager Bobby Cox, a former Yankees third baseman, made the Hall of Fame on the strength of a big-league managing career that spanned 29 seasons and included 2,504 wins and one World Series title. Tidewater manager John Antonelli – not the former New York Giants pitching ace, but the former St. Louis Cardinals and Philadelphia Phillies infielder during World War II – managed 12 seasons in the minors but never managed or coached at the major-league level.

Similarly, the night’s starting pitchers were headed in opposite directions. Syracuse tapped 20-year-old lefty Scott McGregor, who’d been the Yankees’ first-round choice in the June 1972 amateur draft out of El Segundo (California) High School. McGregor had an 11-6 record coming into the game; he finished the season as the Chiefs’ top winner, going 13-10 with a 3.44 ERA in 27 games. He never reached the big leagues with the Yankees. But McGregor blossomed after being traded to the Orioles as part of a 10-player deal in June 1976,6 winning 138 regular-season games in 13 seasons. His Baltimore career included a 20-win campaign in 1980, an All-Star berth the following season, an 18-7 performance and a World Series-clinching shutout in 1983, and a 1990 induction into the team’s Hall of Fame.

Tidewater gave the start to 27-year-old righty Mike Wegener, who had risen quickly to the big leagues after being chosen by the Montreal Expos in the October 1968 expansion draft. Wegener pitched for the Expos for the full 1969 season and part of 1970, going 8-20 with a 4.73 ERA in 57 appearances. His career was notable mainly for wildness – in 1969 he ranked fifth in the National League in both walks and wild pitches – and for surrendering Willie Mays’ 3,000th hit on July 18, 1970. After his two seasons with the Expos, Wegener continued to pitch at the Triple-A level through 1977 but never returned to the majors. He entered the game with a 3-2 record. For the full 1974 season, he went 3-3 with a 4.50 ERA in 29 appearances, including six starts.

A local hero blasted Syracuse onto the scoreboard in the first inning. After second baseman M.L. Prince drew a walk, right fielder Rick Bladt drilled a Wegener pitch about 335 feet over the left-field fence for his third home run in as many games and his seventh of the season, handing Syracuse a 2-0 advantage. Bladt, a native of Santa Cruz, California, had played 10 games with the 1969 Chicago Cubs at age 22 and was traded to the Yankees the following January. The Yankees farmed him out to Syracuse, and 1974 marked Bladt’s fifth straight campaign with the Chiefs; he’d never been back to the majors.7 Third baseman Fernando González prolonged the rally with a two-out double but was thrown out trying to stretch it to a triple.8

McGregor admitted after the game that he’d been having “a lot of bad innings lately, innings where I give up runs in bunches.”9 The top of the second was one such frame, as Tidewater rebounded with three runs. The Tides mustered a single by first baseman Tom Hallums, a walk to left fielder Benny Ayala, and a single by center fielder Dave Schneck to load the bases. Catcher Ike Hampton’s double into the right-field corner scored two of the runs and moved Schneck to third. Wegener helped his own cause with a long fly to center field that brought home Schneck for a 3-2 Tides lead.

Wegener couldn’t hold the lead. In the bottom half, Syracuse first baseman Ken Bennett and shortstop Fred Stanley hit doubles to right field, tying the game.10 One out later, left fielder Jerry Kenney walked and Prince singled into right field, scoring Stanley for a 4-3 Syracuse lead.

As McGregor held the Tides off the board, the Chiefs salted the game away in the fifth. Bladt singled and stole second, bringing center fielder Terry Whitfield to the plate. A native of the small Southern California city of Blythe, Whitfield had been the Yankees’ first-round pick in the June 1971 amateur draft out of high school. He led the 1974 Chiefs with 17 homers and 71 RBIs. Here, he hit a no-doubt shot over the right-field fence for his 15th round-tripper of the season, giving Syracuse a 6-3 advantage. Antonelli yanked Wegener in favor of righty Wayne Kirby, who pitched two-hit shutout ball for Tidewater the rest of the way.

The most noteworthy event after Whitfield’s homer was Nixon’s resignation at about 9 P.M. Game accounts do not specify what was happening on the field at the time; the Norfolk, Virginia, newspaper mentioned only that the resignation happened after Wegener’s departure from the game. The announcement drew “the loudest roar of the night,” the story added.11 The announcement was likely not a surprise to most fans, as network television news programs had announced earlier that evening that Nixon would make a speech at 9 and was expected to resign.

McGregor went the distance, scattering seven hits and receiving outstanding fielding support from González and Whitfield.12 The game wrapped up at 6-3 in 1 hour and 58 minutes. Syracuse snapped a six-game losing streak against Tidewater.13

The teams ended the season in the same positions they’d held on August 8. Syracuse qualified for the Governor’s Cup postseason playoffs, beating the Richmond Braves in the first round before losing to Rochester in the finals.14

Syracuse’s Whitfield and Tidewater’s Ayala and Hampton celebrated their first call-ups to the major leagues at the tail end of the 1974 season. On August 27 Ayala homered in his first major-league at-bat off the Houston Astros’ Tom Griffin, making him the first Met and the first native of Puerto Rico to accomplish the feat.15 Ayala was also a teammate of McGregor on the 1983 champion Orioles.

Bladt returned for a sixth season with Syracuse in 1975, and his patience was rewarded on July 16, when the Yankees finally called him up.16 He spent the rest of the season in the majors, hitting .222 in 52 games. Bladt returned to Syracuse in 1976, then played a final season in Rochester in 1977.

And what of the former president? Nixon, a baseball and football enthusiast, adopted the California Angels as his “home team” and regularly attended their games in 1979. He joined the Angels’ clubhouse celebration on September 26 after they clinched the American League West Division title; newspapers the next day ran a photo of second baseman Bobby Grich dousing the beaming Nixon with a can of Budweiser.17 Nixon’s political disgrace lingered to some degree for the rest of his life. But as he took his beer shower, he was starting to put some distance between himself and the night when 6,457 Syracuse Chiefs fans applauded his resignation.18

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Ray Danner and copy-edited by Len Levin. The author thanks SABR member Gary Belleville for research assistance.

Sources and photo credit

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for general player, team and season data.

Neither Baseball-Reference nor Retrosheet provides box scores of minor-league games, but the August 9, 1974, editions of the Syracuse (New York) Post-Standard and the Norfolk (Virginia) Virginian-Pilot published box scores.

Image of 1976 SSPC card #444 (Rick Bladt) downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Ed Reddy, “Chiefs Win on Homers,” Syracuse Post-Standard, August 9, 1974: 13. Unfortunately, the story doesn’t specify how much of Nixon’s speech was carried over the PA system or what action was ongoing on the field during that time.

2 The Chiefs moved to community ownership in 1967 through a public stock sale. The New York Mets bought the team from its community owners 40 years later. Rick Moriarty, “Syracuse Chiefs GM: Baseball Team’s Survival Could Depend on Sale to Mets,” Syracuse.com, October 12, 2017, https://www.syracuse.com/business-news/2017/10/syracuse_chiefs_gm_baseball_teams_survival_could_depend_on_sale_to_mets.html; Andrew Graham, “Syracuse Chiefs Sold to New York Mets Organization,” Daily Orange (Syracuse, New York), posted October 9, 2017, https://dailyorange.com/2017/10/syracuse-chiefs-sold-new-york-mets-organization/.

3 Reddy, “Chiefs Win on Homers.”

4 IL standings from the Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle, August 8, 1974: 2D. The Memphis Blues were a Montreal Expos farm team.

5 Ed Reddy, “Tides Drop Chiefs Twice,” Syracuse Post-Standard, August 8, 1974: 13.

6 Full terms of the trade: McGregor, Rick Dempsey, Tippy Martinez, Rudy May, and Dave Pagan to the Orioles for Doyle Alexander, Jimmy Freeman, Elrod Hendricks, Ken Holtzman, and Grant Jackson.

7 Bladt was promoted to the Yankees’ 40-man roster in late October 1973, after the end of the regular season. However, he did not make the Yankees in spring training 1974. “Six Recalled by Yanks,” New York Daily News, October 24, 1973: 106.

8 All game action in this story is taken from Reddy, “Chiefs Win on Homers,” and George McClelland, “McGregor, Chiefs Scalp Tides,” Norfolk (Virginia) Virginian-Pilot, August 9, 1974: 35.

9 McClelland.

10 The Syracuse newspaper described the doubles as “consecutive,” but the box scores in both papers indicate that catcher Bill Stearns hit between Bennett and Stanley.

11 McClelland, “McGregor, Chiefs Scalp Tides.”

12 Reddy, “Chiefs Win on Homers.”

13 McClelland, “McGregor, Chiefs Scalp Tides.”

14 Jack Andrews, “Chiefs March into Playoff Final,” Syracuse Post-Standard, September 14, 1974: 13; Jack Andrews, “Proud of Chiefs,” Syracuse Post-Standard, September 25, 1974: 25.

15 Rory Costello, “Benny Ayala,” SABR Biography Project, accessed October 5, 2023.

16 The Yankees called up Bladt and Tippy Martinez after sending Whitfield back to Syracuse and placing Ron Blomberg on the disabled list. “Yanks Recall Reliever, Outfielder,” New York Daily News, July 17, 1975: 87.

17 One example: Fort Worth (Texas) Star-Telegram, September 27, 1979: F1. Coincidentally, Grich had spent the evening of August 8, 1974, playing second base for the Orioles in the Baltimore-Rochester exhibition game mentioned earlier in this story. Grich left Baltimore to sign with California as a free agent following the 1976 season.

18 For more on Nixon’s many connections to baseball, see Curt Smith, “1974 World Series: ‘The Twilight of the Gods,’” in Chip Greene, ed., Mustaches & Mayhem: Charlie O’s Three-Time World Champions, (Phoenix: Society for American Baseball Research, 2015), 564.