An All-Time Ottawa All-Star Team

There are a number of approaches one could take to choosing an all-star team from the passing parade of professional ballplayers—some on their way up, some on their way down, most of them going nowhere in particular—who have represented an on-and-off minor-league city like Ottawa since the late 1800s.

What we’ve tried to do is to identify the best players to have worn Ottawa uniforms, based not on what they did during their typically brief, often statistically unrepresentative stopovers in the city, but on their overall professional careers. We considered a player’s major-league performance the primary criterion for selection, but we have also made allowances for those players whose careers were delayed, disrupted, or derailed by racial segregation and/or by military service. Longevity and a colorful personal backstory didn’t hurt, either.

Here then is a fickle baseball town’s all-time all-star team.

CATCHER

Wally Schang
Ottawa Senators, Can-Am League, 1939
Philadelphia Athletics, Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, St. Louis Browns, Detroit Tigers, 1913-31

Historian Bill James rates him the top catcher in baseball for the decade 1910-19 and the 20th-best catcher of all-time. In 19 years in the major leagues, from 1913 to 1931, the indestructible Schang batted .284/.393/.401 in 1842 games. A switch-hitter, he was the first player to homer from both sides of the plate in the same game. His on-base percentage (OBP) is second among major-league catchers all-time. Schang played on seven pennant winners and was a member of four World Series-winning teams.

In 1939 Schang came to Ottawa as playing manager of the Senators. It was the summer of his 50th birthday, and he batted .327/.484./.439. He last played professionally for Utica of the Eastern League in 1943. He was 53 years old.

FIRST BASE

Luke Easter
Ottawa A’s, International League, 1954
Homestead Grays, 1947-48; Cleveland Indians, 1949-54

“[T]hirty-four years for a rookie is starting with one foot in the grave.” — Bernard Malamud, The Natural1

A victim of baseball apartheid and a world war, the charismatic 6-foot-4, 240-to-250-pound Easter didn’t make his American League debut, with the Cleveland Indians, until August 11, 1949, a week after his 34th birthday. Still, in his first three full seasons, he whacked 86 homers and drove in 307 runs. In 1952 The Sporting News named him Most Outstanding Player in the American League. Easter, often hobbled due to a series of foot, ankle, and knee injuries, batted .276/.356/.481 with 104 home runs over eight major league seasons.

Bill James ranks Easter the second-best first baseman in Negro League history, behind only Buck Leonard. And this despite the fact Easter didn’t begin his Negro League career until 1947, when he was already 31. He played only two seasons, but it was enough to establish a near-mythical reputation as a Bunyanesque slugger.

In 1948, while with the pennant-winning Grays, he became the first player ever to hit a home run into the center-field bleachers at New York’s Polo Grounds. The drive was estimated at 490 feet. Wrote James, “If you could clone him and bring him back, you’d have the greatest power hitter in baseball today, if not ever.”2

In 1954, Easter – then 38 – played 66 games for Ottawa, batting .348/.448/.587, with 15 home runs. He went on to play Triple-A ball for another decade. All told, Easter played 18 seasons of professional baseball and hit 351 home runs. He retired in 1964, aged 48. In 1979, he was shot to death during a robbery in Euclid, Ohio.

SECOND BASE

Mark Grudzielanek
Ottawa Lynx, International League, 1995
Montreal Expos, Los Angeles Dodgers, Chicago Cubs, St. Louis Cardinals, Kansas City Royals, Cleveland Indians, 1995-2010

Grudzielanek batted .298 in 49 games at shortstop for the Lynx in 1995, earning him a call-up to the Expos. In his first full season, 1996, he was selected to the National League All-Star team en route to accumulating 201 hits, which places him behind only Vladimir Guerrero Sr. and Al Oliver on the Expos single-season hit list. In his second full season with the Expos, he knocked a major league-leading 54 doubles.

Five times during his 15-year major league career, Grudzielanek batted over .300, with a high of .326 for the Dodgers in 1999, when he set an NL record by hitting safely in 35 straight home games. In 2003 he slashed .314/.366/.416 for the Cubs and won an NL Silver Slugger Award for second basemen. At age 36 he was an AL Gold Glove winner at second base, for the Royals in 2006. During a 15-year career he batted .289 and was selected to the 1996 NL All-Star Team.

THIRD BASE

Bill “Wagon Tongue”Keister
Rochester Patriots-Ottawa Senators, Eastern League, 1898
Boston Beaneaters, St. Louis Cardinals, Baltimore Orioles (NL and AL), Washington Senators, Philadelphia Phillies. 1896, 1898-1903

The speedy fireplug (5-foot-5, 168 pounds) Keister was dubbed “Wagon Tongue”, not due to some anatomical anomaly, but from the practice in the 1800s of recycling the hard, seasoned wood of wagon tongues into baseball bats. So maybe the nickname was a nod to Keister’s undeniable talent for hitting a baseball. But the moniker may also have been a play on “waggin’ tongue” – signifying someone who had trouble keeping his mouth shut. That may have been a factor in Keister’s inability to stick with any team for more than one season, but the fact he was also a dreadful fielder probably trumped other considerations.3

He sure could hit, though. Playing mostly third base for the Ottawa (née Rochester) club in 1898, Keister batted a typical .322. In each of his five full seasons (1899-1903) in the majors, he hit .300 or better, and he made the top 10 in slugging three times. In 1901 with his hometown Orioles, he tied with teammate Jimmy Williams for the AL lead in triples, with 21. In 1902 while with Washington, he became the second player in American League history to homer in four straight games.

Keister’s major-league career ended in 1903 in rather puzzling fashion. Despite a .320 batting average he was not picked up for the following year. Overall, he batted .312/.349/.440.

SHORTSTOP

Orlando Cabrera
Ottawa Lynx, International League, 1997-1998, 2000
Montreal Expos, Boston Red Sox, Los Angeles Angels, Chicago White Sox, Oakland A’s, Minnesota Twins, Cincinnati Reds, Cleveland Indians, San Francisco Giants, 1997-2011

The Colombia-born Cabrera batted .248 with two home runs and 28 stolen bases over parts of three seasons with the Lynx. In 1999 he became the Expos regular shortstop, a position he held until being traded to the Red Sox in 2004. His best offensive season came with the Expos in 2003, when he slashed .297/.347/.460 with 17 home runs (the most ever by an Expos shortstop), 80 RBIs, and 24 stolen bases. In 2006 for the Angels he reached base in 63 consecutive games, the fourth longest streak in major-league history. But Cabrera’s biggest asset was his glove. He won Gold Gloves for the Expos in 2001 and the Angels in 2007. With the White Sox in 2008, he was named Defensive Player of the Year by mlb.com.

Cabrera appeared nine times in the postseason. He won his only World Series in 2004, as the Red Sox broke the “Curse of the Bambino” and swept the Cardinals. Over 15 major-league seasons, with nine teams, Cabrera batted .272/.317/.390 with 123 home runs, 854 RBIs, and 216 stolen bases.

OUTFIELD

Willard “Home Run” Brown
Ottawa Nationals, Border League, 1950
Kansas City Monarchs, 1937-1948; St. Louis Browns, 1947
National Baseball Hall of Fame, 2006

Buck O’Neil called the Louisiana-born Brown “the most natural ballplayer I ever saw.” Between 1937 and 1948, the Kansas City Monarchs star led the Negro American League in hits eight times, in RBIs seven times and in slugging six times. Brown and his fellow Monarchs—featuring Blackball greats like O’Neil, Satchel Paige, Double Duty Radcliffe, Bullet Rogan, Turkey Stearnes, and Elston Howard—captured eight pennants in his 11 seasons with the club. They also won the Negro Leagues World Series in 1942.

During those years he out-slugged the legendary Josh Gibson, the man who gave Brown his “Home Run” nickname. Brown captured the Negro American League batting crown with a .377 average in 1947. Three times he finished second. Eight times he led the league in RBI. His Negro Leagues batting line over 11 seasons, as per Baseball Reference, is .358/.407/.592 with an OPS+ of 185 (Ruth clocks in at 206, Ted Williams 191, and Barry Bonds 182).

On August 13, 1947, Brown became the first African American to hit a home run in the AL, an inside-the-park shot off future Hall of Famer Hal Newhouser. However, Brown, then 32, struggled to adapt to the newly-integrated environment and played just 21 games before being released and returning to the Monarchs.

Brown joined Ottawa for the 1950 pennant run and helped the club to its third Border League title in four years. In 30 games for the Nationals, the 35-year-old batted a typical .352. He continued playing minor-league ball until 1957, when he was 42. Brown died of Alzheimer’s in 1996, aged 81.

Tim Raines Sr.
Ottawa Lynx, International League, 2001
Montreal Expos, Chicago White Sox, New York Yankees, Oakland A’s, Baltimore Orioles, Florida Marlins, 1979-2002
National Baseball Hall of Fame, 2017

His connection with Ottawa is pretty tenuous, having played just two games with the Lynx, on a rehab stint in 2001. It was, however, a memorable experience for Raines, as it gave him an opportunity to play a doubleheader against 21-year-old Tim Raines Jr., of the Rochester Red Wings. (Later that season the Raineses played the outfield together for the Orioles in a game against the Red Sox, becoming, after the Ken Griffeys, the only father-son combo to play in the majors at the same time.)

Raines compiled a .294/.385/.425 batting line over 23 major-league seasons, with 170 home runs and 980 RBIs. He won the NL batting title in 1986 with a .334 average. The speedy switch-hitter was a seven-time All-Star and a four-time NL stolen base leader. His 808 stolen bases place him fifth on the all-time list, just behind Ty Cobb. He was a member of the Yankees Series-winning teams of 1996 and 1998.

Taft “Taffy” Wright
Ottawa A’s, International League, 1953-54
Washington Nationals, Chicago White Sox, Philadelphia Athletics, 1938-1942, 1946-49

As a 26-year-old rookie with Washington in 1938, Wright, a left-handed contact hitter, led the AL with a .350 batting average. The batting crown, however, was awarded to future Hall of Famer Jimmie Foxx of the Red Sox, who batted .349. Although Wright managed to meet the then-minimum requirement for a batting title, namely 100 games played, many of his appearances came as a pinch-hitter. Wright played only 60 games in the field, and under what became known as the “Taffy Wright Rule”, the league arbitrarily awarded the title to Foxx, the league MVP.

The ruling served, even in those pre-sabermetric days, to highlight the fundamental absurdity of crowning the player with the highest average but in limited action over a player who batted one percentage point less, but hit 50 home runs, drove in 175, and compiled a 1.166 OPS in 149 games—all in the field.

While Wright was no Jimmie Foxx, he was a consistent offensive threat. Despite losing more than three years to World War II in the middle of his career, he managed a .311 batting average over nine big-league seasons. Six times he hit over .300. Four times he finished in the AL top 10 for batting average. Three times he received MVP votes.

After 1949, Wright played and managed in the minors—and continued to hit. As a 41-year-old with the Ottawa A’s in 1953, he led the International League in batting with a .354 average. The next season he also managed the club, which featured Luke Easter. Wright’s final season came in 1956, when, as a 44-year-old, he again batted .354, this time for Orlando in the Florida State League. The man could always hit.

UTILITY PLAYER

Jamey Carroll
Ottawa Lynx, International League, 2000-2002
Montreal Expos, Washington Nationals, Colorado Rockies, Cleveland Indians, Los Angeles Dodgers, Minnesota Twins, Kansas City Royals, 2002-13

This is perhaps the most potentially fraught selection in a city with an abiding affection for baseball grinders in the mold of Héctor López, F.P. Santangelo, Geoff Blum, and Jamey Carroll. Santangelo and Carroll, in fact, are the only two Lynx players to have had their numbers retired. All are worthy candidates in the utility category, but based on the fact Carroll played every position except first base and catcher during his 12-year big-league career while cobbling together a 17.0 WAR, we’ve chosen him as our all-star utility man.

A former college All-American Carroll didn’t hit for much power—only 13 homers in the major leagues—but he was adept at getting on base, compiling a .349 career OBP. And in 2006 he led NL second basemen in fielding percentage and range factor. His best offensive years came in 2006, when he batted .300/.377/.404 in 136 games for the Rockies, and in 2010, when he got into 133 games for the Dodgers and batted .291/.379/.339. In 2007 he played on the Rockies’ team that lost the Series to the Red Sox. On October 3, 2004, Carroll scored the last-ever run for the Expos and was in the on-deck circle when Endy Chávez turned out the lights on the franchise.

Carroll played 291 games over three seasons for the Lynx, batting .269. For his major-league career, he batted .272/.349/.338.

DESIGNATED HITTER

Matt Stairs
Ottawa Lynx, International League, 1993
Montreal Expos, Boston Red Sox, Oakland A’s, Chicago Cubs, Milwaukee Brewers, Pittsburgh Pirates, Kansas City Royals, Texas Rangers, Detroit Tigers, Toronto Blue Jays, Philadelphia Phillies, San Diego Padres, 1992-2011

Matt Stairs is the best bench player of all time. Bill James said so.4 And he also said that if Stairs’s talent had been recognized earlier and managed properly, he might well have put up Hall of Fame numbers. Per at-bat, he hit more home runs and drove in more runs than Hall of Fame sluggers Orlando Cepeda, Billy Williams, and Eddie Murray, and more than power-hitting contemporaries like Jack Clark and Joe Carter. By James’s reckoning, Stairs’s career numbers are better than Roger Maris’s, comparable to those of Reggie Jackson, Frank Howard,Dale Murphy, and Luzinski.

Despite his potent bat the Saint John, New Brunswick-born Stairs didn’t get 400 at-bats in a major-league season until he was 30, and he only managed that four times in his career. His best season came in 1999, when the then-31-year-old slashed .258/.366/.533 with 38 home runs as designated hitter for Billy Beane’s “Moneyball” A’s. Part of Stairs’ chronic shortage of playing time is attributable to the fact he wasn’t a great defensive player. But a lot of it was no doubt an image problem. He just didn’t look the part. At 5-foot-9, 200-something pounds, Stairs looked more like a slo-pitch softballer than professional baseball player.

Instead of being remembered in elite baseball company Stairs has had to settle for the distinction of holding the major-league record for pinch-hit home runs—23—over a 19-year career, which lasted until he was 43. In 2008, a Stairs pinch-hit blast produced the winning runs for the eventual World Series champion Phillies in their NLCS win over the Dodgers. All told he hit 265 major-league home runs, 294 doubles, and drove in 899 runs.

For the Lynx in 1993, Stairs batted .280 with three homers in 34 games, before moving on to the Chunichi Dragons of the Japanese Central League, then finishing up the year in Montreal.

RIGHT-HANDED STARTER

Urban Shocker
Ottawa Senators, Canadian League, 1914-15
New York Yankees, St. Louis Browns, 1916-28

In April 1914 Senators center fielder/manager/part-owner Frank Shaughnessy embarked on one of his regular spring cross-border shopping trips and came back with a 23-year-old catcher-turned-pitcher with just 16 Class-D professional appearances under his belt and a tabloid headline for a name. He was Urban Shocker (born Urbain Jacques Shockcor, in Cleveland, Ohio), but in Ottawa everyone called him Herbie.

Ottawa marked a crucial stage in Shocker’s development as a pitcher. It was here he learned his go-to pitch – the spitball – from a fellow Senator. Shocker led the Senators with 20 wins in 1914, including a pennant-clinching victory on the final afternoon of the season. He won 19 more in 1915, as the Senators won their fourth consecutive title. That fall the Yankees shelled out $750 to draft him from the Senators.

Pitching for the Toronto Maple Leafs of the International League in 1916, Shocker pitched an 11-inning no-hitter. It came in the midst of a 54 1/3-inning scoreless streak (the major league record is 59, set by the Dodgers’ Orel Hershiser in 1988). In 1918 he was drafted again, this time into the U.S. Army, serving in France.

When the major leagues banned the spitter in 1920, Shocker and 16 others were grandfathered for the remainder of their careers. The ill-fated hurler turned out to be the best player the Canadian League (1912-15) ever produced. He would go on to win 187 big-league games for the Browns and the Yankees, including a tie for the major-league lead with 27 for the Browns in 1921. He won 20 games or more in four straight seasons, 1920-23. In 1927 he was 18-6 for the Murderers’ Row Yankees. A year later he was dead of a congenital heart ailment. He was 37.

LEFT-HANDED STARTER

Ted Lilly
Ottawa Lynx, International League, 1998-99
Montreal Expos, New York Yankees, Oakland A’s, Toronto Blue Jays, Chicago Cubs, Los Angeles Dodgers, 1999-2013

Our closest battle for a spot on the All-Time Ottawa All-Star team comes down to a choice between three eerily similar Lynx southpaws – Lilly, J.A. Happ (2007), and fan favorite Kirk Rueter (1993-96).

Lilly made 23 starts, Happ 24 for the Lynx. Both had 15-year big-league careers. Rueter by comparison made 31 Lynx starts and went on to pitch 13 years in the majors.

Rueter started 336 major-league games, Lilly 331, Happ 328. Lilly and Happ both averaged 35 games and 33 starts per 162 team games, Reuter 34 games and 34 starts.

Happ gave up 1822 career hits, Lilly 1827, Rueter 2092. Lilly and Happ surrendered an identical .421 slugging percentage, Rueter .435.

Happ won 133 major-league games, Rueter and Lilly 130. All three averaged 13 wins per 162 games played by their teams. For their careers, Happ had a 4.13 career ERA, Lilly 4.14, and Rueter 4.27.

It’s hardly surprising then that the most similar pitcher in major-league history to Ted Lilly, as ranked by Baseball Reference’s Bill James-inspired Similarity Scores, is none other than J.A. Happ. And Lilly and Happ, in turn, are two of the 10 most similar pitchers to Kirk Rueter. In statistical terms all three are virtually the same player.

To determine which one of these copycat southpaws ultimately deserves our all-star nod, we consulted some of the advanced sabermetrics intended to lessen statistical noise and produce context-neutral comparisons. By ERA+ Lilly, at 106, has a slight edge over Happ (100) and Rueter (97). In Wins Above Replacement (WAR), a measure of how many wins a particular player provides his team over some imaginary fringe major leaguer, Lilly is credited with 27.1, while Happ and Rueter lag behind at 21.1 and 16.0 respectively. By the Jaffe WAR Score (JAWS), which measures a player’s Hall of Fame worthiness by comparing him to the players at his position who are already in Cooperstown, Lilly scores 25.8, Happ 20.8, and Rueter 15.5. In Win Probability Added (WPA), Lilly is at 7.1, Happ 3.5, and Rueter 0.1.

By these metrics, Ted Lilly emerges by a slight margin as the best of the southpaw starters to have come through Ottawa. He was an All-Star in both major leagues, for the Blue Jays in 2004 and the Cubs in 2009. Four times he finished in the top 10 in his league in strikeouts per nine innings and in WHIP. Probably his best year came with the Cubs in 2008, when he started a league-leading 34 games and won 17. He pitched five times in the postseason, but failed to make it to the Series. In 2015 Lilly was convicted of insurance fraud in California related to a claim on a damaged RV.

SHORT RELIEF

Ugueth Urbina
Ottawa Lynx, International League, 1995-96
Montreal Expos, Boston Red Sox, Texas Rangers, Florida Marlins, Detroit Tigers, Philadelphia Phillies, 1995-2005

Strangely for a pitcher who led the NL with 41 saves in 1999 and recorded 237 during an 11-year big-league career, the memorably-monikered Ugueth Urtain Urbina, brother of Ulmer Ulysses Urbina, never recorded a save in the minors. Urbina, in fact, started 16 games for the Lynx over parts of two seasons, winning eight and losing two. He was part of the of the 1995 squad that won the city’s only Governor’s Cup. He started 17 games for the Expos in 1996, before becoming a full-time reliever the following year.

A two-time all-star, Urbina was the losing pitcher for the NL in the 1998 classic. In 2003, he appeared in 10 postseason games for the World Series-champion Florida Marlins, winning one and saving four more, including two in the final. In 2005, his final major-league season, he appeared in a career-high 81 games for the Tigers and Phils.

Urbina’s career came to an ignominious end when he was charged later that year in his native Venezuela with attempting to kill five farm laborers on his ranch. He was convicted and sentenced to 14 years in prison. He was released in 2012 after serving half of his sentence.

LONG RELIEF

Greg A. Harris
Ottawa Lynx, International League, 1995
New York Mets, Cincinnati Reds, Montreal Expos, San Diego Padres, Texas Rangers, Philadelphia Phillies, Boston Red Sox, New York Yankees, 1981-1995

Harris was 3-0 with a 1.06 ERA in 11 games for the ‘95 International League champions. A durable journeyman, he tossed 1,467 innings for eight teams over 15 major league seasons. In 1984 he threw a scoreless 5 1/3 innings for the Padres in their World Series loss to the Tigers. In 1993 he led the AL in games pitched, with 80.

But the ambidextrous Harris is perhaps best remembered for a switch-pitching performance—the first in the majors in baseball’s modern era—in 1995. The 40-year-old Harris, then the oldest player in the NL and in the penultimate game of his career, threw both right- and left-handed in a hitless ninth inning for the Expos against the Cincinnati Reds. His major-league totals: a 74-90 record with a 3.69 ERA and 54 saves in 1,467 innings of work.

CLOSER

Eric Gagné
Ottawa Champions, Can-Am League, 2016
Los Angeles Dodgers, Texas Rangers, Boston Red Sox, Milwaukee Brewers, 1999-2008

OK, so the 2003 NL Cy Young winner and three-time All-Star has an even flimsier connection with Ottawa than Tim Raines. Gagné’s came in 2016 as a late-season promotional stunt for the Champions: two hits and one run allowed over five innings of work as a starter. But these are our rules, so we’ll take both of them.

In three seasons between 2002 and 2004 the Montreal-born Gagné made 224 appearances and recorded 152 saves for the Dodgers, including a major-league-leading 55 in his Cy Young season. He made the NL All-Star team all three seasons during that stretch, as he recorded ERAs of 1.97, 1.20 and 2.19. But the heavy workload exacted a physical toll, and he threw only 15 1/3 innings for the Dodgers over the next two years.

Gagné had one more decent season in “The Show”, recording 16 saves in 54 games for Texas and Boston in 2007. That year he made his only World Series appearance, a hitless inning for the Red Sox as they swept the Rockies four games to none. Over his injury-shortened 10-year career Gagné totaled 187 saves and a 3.47 ERA.

Long-time SABR member DAVID McDONALD is a writer, filmmaker and broadcaster with a particular interest in Ottawa baseball history. He has contributed to a number of SABR publications, including Our Game Too, Boston’s First Nine: The 1871-75 Boston Red Stockings, and The Babe, as well as The Baseball Research Journal, The National Pastime, and SABR’s BioProject. Other baseball writings have appeared in the Ottawa Citizen, the Globe and Mail, and the Canadian anthology All I Dreamed About Was Baseball. He has also presented papers on left-handed catcher Jack Humphries and on communications guru Marshall McLuhan at the Canadian Baseball History Conference.

 

NOTES

1 Bernard Malamud. The Natural. (New York: Farrar, Straus and Giroux, 2003, 43.)

2 Bill James. The New Bill James Historical Baseball Abstract. (New York: Free Press, 2001, 181.)

3 How bad was he? Playing shortstop for Baltimore in 1901, Keister committed an AL-record 97 errors in 112 games and established the major-league record for lowest fielding average for a shortstop (minimum 100 games), .851. However, in equal time as a major-league second baseman Keister fared much better, managing a respectable career .936 fielding average.

4 Bill James, “The Greatest Bench Players of All Time.” https://www.billjamesonline.com/the_greatest_bench_players_of_all_time/, October 3, 2014.