Ed Cole

After spring training tryouts with the Philadelphia Athletics and Phillies and seven years in the minors, Ed Cole caught on with the St. Louis Browns in 1938. Pitching primarily in relief, Cole won his only big-league game that season in a grueling start against the Boston Red Sox at Fenway Park. The rubber-armed pitcher, however, had a long career in Organized Baseball, toiling for 16 seasons and retiring at the age of 42 with more than 2,700 innings to his credit.

Ed Cole was the simplified, Americanized name the child of immigrants began using at around the age of 20. His exact name and birth date raise some questions. According to his birth certificate, he was born on March 22, 1909, in Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania; however, his World War II military draft card dates his birth as April 25, and his application for military benefits dates it as March 31. His parents were Stanislaw Kiselauckas and Marion Romaukas, both born in Lithuania, then part of the Russian Empire. They married in Lithuania in about 1891, had their first child, Joseph, and then immigrated to the United States. By 1895 they had settled in Wilkes-Barre, a booming industrial city of 40,000 residents located in the heart of northeastern Pennsylvania’s coal region. Stanley, as he was known in the US, quickly found employment in the anthracite coal mines, notorious for their dangerous working conditions. Census and naturalization records provide a number of different spellings for the family’s surname (Kisielauckas, Kisoloskie, for example); however, Kisloski became the norm. Edward William Kisloski was the family’s ninth of 10 children born between approximately 1892 and 1913 (six boys and four girls). The family resided in the Georgetown neighborhood of south Wilkes-Barre. 

Little is known about young Ed’s introduction to baseball. It’s likely he learned to play ball on local sandlots and then graduated to a mill team. Like his brothers, he had little formal education and completed just one year of high school. By 1930 he was working in a silk mill, as his brothers did. Silk and textiles were thriving industries in Luzerne County, in the Wyoming Valley, formed by the Pocono Mountains to the east, the Endless Mountains to the north and west, and the Lehigh Valley to the south.

Cole’s professional career began with a brief stint with the Johnstown Johnnies in the Class-C Middle Atlantic League in 1931. The following season he hurled for the Stroudsburg Poconos in the Class-D Interstate League and won seven games before the league disbanded after about 26 games on June 20.1 Cole remained with the club, which was converted into a semipro team skippered by former big leaguer Eddie Murphy, who had started in right field on Connie Mack’s pennant-winning Philadelphia A’s in 1913 and 1914. On September 7, 1931, Cole took the mound against the A’s in an exhibition in Stroudsburg. Described by the Philadelphia Inquirer as a “star … with 23 wins and only 1 defeat,” Cole held the A’s scoreless through four innings and emerged victorious, 8-7 in a 10-inning tilt.2 Mack apparently signed Cole on the spot.3

Coming off a second-place finish (94-60), Mack invited Cole to the A’s spring training at Fort Myers, Florida, in 1933, but little was expected of the 24-year-old, 5-foot-11, 170-pound green recruit. Near the end of camp, Cole was assigned to the Wilkes-Barre Barons in the Class-A New York-Penn League. After logging 23 innings, Cole was released early in the season, and resumed playing semipro ball for Stroudsburg,4 as well as the Philadelphia All-Stars, managed by former big-league hurler Joe Bush.5

Cole’s wait for another shot on the big stage did not last long. Philadelphia native Jimmie Wilson, who returned to the Phillies as player-manager after six seasons with the St. Louis Cardinals, signed the 25-year-old right-hander and invited him to spring training in Winter Haven, Florida, in 1934.6

Ultimately assigned to Hazleton, located only 25 south miles from his hometown, Cole emerged as one of the New York-Penn League’s top hurlers in 1934. While the Mountaineers finished a half-game out of the cellar of the eight-team league, Cole won 18 games and logged 250 innings (the circuit’s fourth best totals in each category). In mid-August he was traded along with Don Maynard to the Galveston Buccaneers in the Class-A Texas League for Jim Bivin and Orville Jorgens, for delivery the next season. The popular pitcher was feted by friends and family on September 23 beginning with an impressive caravan of 50 automobiles departing Wilkes-Barre en route to the ballpark in Hazleton, where Cole tossed a four-hitter to beat Harrisburg, 2-1, on a two-run ninth-inning rally.7

Cole spent the next three seasons (1935-1937) with Galveston developing a reputation as a hard-throwing, innings-eating workhorse. On July 10, 1935, he made national headlines. With a “hopping fast ball and a curve that was breaking,” Cole tossed what was acknowledged as the first perfect game in Texas League history, fanning eight to beat Tulsa, 1-0, on Maggie McGee’s ninth-inning inside-the-park home run.8 That accomplishment provided Cole enough notoriety to serve as a pitchman for Huskies cereal, appearing in advertisements with nationally known figures like Ohio State University football coach Francis Schmidt and golfer Johnny Revolta, who had won the 1935 PGA championship.9 Cole finished the season with 15 wins and a league-most 19 defeats, and logged 264 innings with a 3.20 ERA.

Described as a “speedballer,”10 Cole was off to a fast start in 1936 and was leading the circuit in innings pitched by mid-July.11 He was selected to the league all-star game, but came down with arm pain (“nursing injuries,” reported The Sporting News) and did not play.12 He was shut down soon after the game with a season record of 9-11 and a 3.33 ERA in 165 innings.

In 1937 Cole put together the finest season in his 16-year career in Organized Baseball. He led the eight-team Texas League (which had been elevated to A1 status a year earlier) in innings pitched (313) and strikeouts (205) while posting a misleading 18-18 slate and 2.85 ERA for a sixth-place club (73-86), and earned another all-star berth.13

In a whirlwind series of transactions, Cole was the property of four different teams in less than six months. Galveston sold him to the St. Paul Saints of the American Association in September 1937.14 A month later, the Cleveland Indians chose him in the Rule 5 draft, but before the 1938 season began, he was traded along with Roy Hughes and Billy Sullivan to the St. Louis Browns on February 10, 1938, for their disgruntled All-Star catcher Rollie Hemsley.

Cole joined the Browns in spring training in San Antonio. Coming off a miserable season with the major leagues’ worst record (46-108), the Browns were in desperate of need of pitching, a seemingly annual conundrum. The staff’s ERA (6.00) was the majors’ highest for the third consecutive season. New manager Gabby Street, who had replaced Sunny Jim Bottomley, promised to instill discipline and teach fundamentally sound baseball. Demanding high expectations, Old Sarge, as Street was known, had skippered the Cardinals, the Browns’ tenants at Sportsman’s Park, to two pennants and a World Series title (1931) earlier in the decade.

Few expected Cole to make the Browns’ roster, but the 29-year-old right-hander proved to be a surprise. The St. Louis Post-Dispatch raved about his “snapping curve” and “breezing” heater.15 Street declared that he was “wholeheartedly sold on Cole’s style of delivery and rubber arm” and his willingness to pitch “low and inside.”16 By the end of camp, Gateway City sportswriter Sid Keener praised Cole as one of the nine best prospects on both the Browns and Cardinals, an impressive group that included future Redbird All-Stars Max Lanier and Enos Slaughter.17 On the Browns’ trip north to St. Louis, they stopped in Kansas City to play an exhibition against the Chicago Cubs on April 12. Cole tossed what beat reporter Ray J. Gillespie described as “by far the best pitching exhibition” during the Browns’ spring training, holding the Cubs hitless through five innings.18 Despite that outing, Cole was slated to start the season in the bullpen.

After toiling for seven seasons in the minors (1931-1937), Cole finally made his major-league debut on April 22 against the Chicago White Sox at Sportsman’s Park. Cole relieved starter Oral Hildebrand to start the eighth inning and tossed four scoreless frames, surrendering two hits and walking three in the Browns eventual 4-3 loss in 13 innings. Sportswriter W. Vernon Tietjen of the St. Louis Star and Times praised the debut as a “sleek” performance;19 while beat reporter Robert L. Burnes of the St. Louis Globe-Democrat declared it “brilliant relief hurling” and predicted that “Cole won himself a starting assignment.”20 It was Cole’s best outing as a big leaguer.

In his next appearance, Cole was clobbered as a starter, yielding eight hits and six runs to the Detroit Tigers on April 25 at Sportsman’s Park. Shuffled back to the bullpen, Cole spent the remainder of the season primarily hurling in mop-up, low-leverage situations. His 36 appearances trailed only starter Bobo Newsom’s 44. Cole pitched well in relief (3.62 ERA in 30 games), but struggled in his six starting assignments (8.47 ERA).

Cole picked up his first and only big-league win in a start against the Red Sox at Fenway Park on August 30. He labored through 6⅔ innings, surrendering 10 hits and walking five in the Browns’ 9-5 victory. Cole was relieved by 44-year-old Fred Johnson, a minor-league legend whom the Browns had purchased in late July. Johnson was in the midst of a brief return to the majors since last playing for the New York Giants in 1923.  In his next start, Cole went the distance for the first and only time in his career, losing to the White Sox, 8-2, at Comiskey Park.

It was another dismal season for the Browns (55-97), who replaced Old Sarge with Ski Melillo with nine games remaining, but squeaked out of the cellar by two games over the Athletics. The club batted a robust .281 (tied for the AL’s third best mark), but was once again doomed by a revolving carousel of scuffling hurlers, 10 of whom started at least four games, and who posted the majors’ highest team ERA (5.80). Cole finished the season with a 1-5 record and 5.18 ERA in 88⅔ innings. The Browns lost 29 of the 35 games in which he appeared.

Back with the Browns in 1939, Cole slogged through a rough spring training for new skipper Fred Haney, who had piloted the Browns’ affiliate in the American Association the previous four years. Haney’s biggest challenge was finding capable pitchers. After an especially atrocious performance by Cole in San Antonio, sportswriter W. Vernon Tietjen asserted that it “simply emphasized the Browns crying need for moundsmen.”21 Help would not come from Cole, who landed the last spot on the staff. Just days after a blockbuster 10-player trade with the Detroit Tigers, in which the Browns acquired three pitchers (George Gill, Vern Kennedy, and Roxie Lawson) among six total players on May 13, Cole was optioned to the San Antonio Missions in the Texas League. His demotion was no surprise: in four relief appearances, he had yielded five earned runs in 4⅔ innings and lost twice.

Flashing his heater and curve, Cole was one of the Texas circuit’s best hurlers. He posted a 16-10 slate with a 2.70 ERA in 257 innings, helping the Missions to a tie for second place. He earned a call-up to the Browns in late September. In his final two big-league appearances, Cole was charged with no runs in 1⅔ innings, but walked four, yielded two hits, and let three inherited runners score. The Browns, whose 52-year history (1902-1953) in St. Louis was filled with nadirs, finished with the majors’ worst record (43-111) and the worst winning percentage in franchise history (.279). [The 2018 Baltimore Orioles gave that team a run for that dubious mark, finishing with a 47-115 record and the second-lowest winning percentage (.290).

Cole never made it back to the majors, either in spring training or the regular season. Over the course of his next nine seasons in Organized Baseball (1940-1941; 1946-1951), interrupted by four years during World War II, Cole gradually worked his way down the minors, playing for eight different teams in seven leagues.

In January 1940, Cole and several other Browns players (notably Johnny Berardino and Joe Glenn) as well as other major leaguers, were involved in a controversy when it was revealed that they had applied for and received unemployment benefits amounting to $15 per week during the offseason.22 “The law was never meant to include baseball players,” said Donald Barnes, president of the Browns. “They may receive their compensation during only the active months of the baseball season, but they actually are not unemployed.”23 Nonetheless, Missouri state Attorney General E.C. Crowe upheld the players’ right to the benefit.

After splitting his time with Toledo and San Antonio and posting a combined 8-17 record in 1940, Cole was sold to the Seattle Rainiers (Pacific Coast League) for the 1941 season. A broken foot limited him to 123 innings, but he proved otherwise effective (11-6, 3.00 ERA).24

A bachelor with no dependents, Cole, by then in his 30s, enlisted in the US Army on March 31, 1942, at Fort Meade, Maryland.25 He was later stationed at Fort Riley in Kansas, where he hurled for the base team.26 He rose to the rank of tech 4. According to his application for World War II compensation, he saw action in the European Theater from April 1943 to September 1945, and was discharged from the Army in October 1945.

Almost four years removed from his previous appearance in Organized Baseball, the 37-year-old Cole returned to the Missions in 1946. He notched a robust 13-9 slate in 189 innings in the Texas League, which had been elevated to Double A in that season’s reorganization of minor league classifications with the introduction of Triple A. Cole enjoyed his biggest success with the Wichita Falls (Texas) Spudders in the Class-B Big State League in 1948 and 1949, winning 18 and 16 games, respectively. He concluded his 16-year professional career with the Port Arthur (Texas) Seahawks in the Class-B Gulf Coast League, retiring at the age of 42.

In parts of two seasons with the Browns, Cole went 1-7 with a 5.31 ERA in 95 innings. Though his minor-league records are not complete, the rubber-armed right-hander logged in excess of 2,600 innings and won at least 164 games.

Cole worked as a carpenter in his post-baseball life, eventually settling in Nashville, Tennessee. He died at the age of 90 on July 28, 1999, at the Windsor House nursing home. He had no survivors.27 There was no memorial service and he was buried at the Nashville National Cemetery, administered by the US Department of Veterans Affairs.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author accessed Retrosheet.org; Baseball-Reference.com; the SABR Minor Leagues Database, accessed online at Baseball-Reference.com; SABR.org; The Sporting News archive via Paper of Record; newspapers via Newspaper.com; and Ancestry.com.

Photo credit: Ed Cole, courtesy of St. Louis Browns Historical Society Archives.

Notes

1 Lloyd Johnson and Miles Wolff, The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball, 2nd edition (Durham, North Carolina: Baseball America, 1997), 274.

2 James C. Isaminger, “Stroudsburg Tops Mackmen in Tenth,” Philadelphia Inquirer, September 8, 1932: 16.

3 Isaminger.

4 “Northampton Books Stroudsburg Poconos,” Allentown (Pennsylvania), Morning Call, June 2, 1933: 24.

5 “Inside Stuff,” Morning Call, May 18, 1933: 16.

6 “Ed Cole Signed by Philadelphia Nats,” Altoona (Pennsylvania) Tribune, February 20, 1934: 10.

7 “Georgetown Fans to Honor Cole Tomorrow Afternoon,” Wilkes-Barre (Pennsylvania) Record, August 22, 1934: 15; “Hazleton Slugger Bats in Victory as Georgetown Homers Hurler,” Wilkes-Barre Record, August 24, 1934: 17.

8 “First Perfect Game of Ball in Texas League History Is Hurled by Ed Cole Wednesday,” Tyler (Texas) Morning Telegraph, July 11, 1935: 8.

9 An example of the printed advertisement is in the Longview (Texas) News Journal, March 13, 1936: 9.

10 Lorin McMullen, “Cats Have to Contend with That Stingy Cole Tonight,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 18, 1936: 13.

11 “Texas League Leaders,” Fort Worth Star-Telegram, July 9, 1936: 17.

12 Jimmy Byron, “Southern Stars of Texas League Eclipse Constellation of North,” The Sporting News, July 30, 1936: 2.

13 “Texas All-Stars Announced; Keesey, Severeid Rival Pilots,” The Sporting News, July 15, 1937: 3.

14 Associated Press, “Galveston Ace Sold,” Abilene (Texas) Register News, September 9, 1937: 14.

15 “Van Atta and Cole in Form as Browns Win in 11th,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 27, 1938: 11.

16 Maurice O. Shevlin,” Gabby Street Calls Off Catcher’s Battery Drill,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 12, 1938: 6.

17 Sid Keener, “Sid Keener’s Column,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 11, 1938: 20.

18 Ray J. Gillespie, “Browns’ Rookie Pitcher Hurls Five Hitless Innings Against Cubs,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 13, 1938: 21.

19 W. Vernon Tietjen, “Jack Knott Forgets Runner Moving to Third, Browns Lose,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 23, 1938: 6.

20 Robert L. Burnes, “6 Fielding Marks Fall as Browns Bow to Chisox in 13, 4-3,” St. Louis Globe-Democrat, April 23, 1938: 6-7.

21 W. Vernon Tietjen, “Ralph Kress Signs Contract with Browns After Long Holdout Siege; Don Heffner Fails to Reach Terms,” St. Louis Star and Times, April 5, 1939: 22.

22 “Breadon, Barnes Look to Legislature,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 29, 1940: 17; Sid Keener, “Sid Keener’s Column,” St. Louis Star and Times, January 31, 1940: 20.

23 “Browns Players Cut In on Unemployment Fund,” St. Louis Post-Dispatch, January 28, 1948: 41.

24 Gail Fowler, “Down Ye Old Sports Trail,” Oil City (Pennsylvania) Derrick, July 8, 1941: 8.

25 US Military Draft Card, Ancestry.com.

26 “Cole Is Pitching for Uncle Sam’s Team This Season,” Wilkes-Barre Times Leader, May 8, 1942: 23.

27 “Local News: Deaths,” (Nashville) Tennessean, July 29, 1999: 18.