Samuel Breadon (pronounced BRAY-din), one of eight children, was born on July 26, 1876, to William and Jane (Wilson) Breadon. “I was born in New York and grew up in the old Ninth Ward in old Greenwich Village,” recalled Sam. “Near the docks. Nothing fancy, a tough neighborhood. You had to be able to handle yourself, or you did not do so well.”1 His mother was Scottish, and his father an Irish drayman who died when Sam was a young boy. After finishing grammar school Sam dropped out to help his mother, and as a young adult he held a steady job as a bank clerk on Wall Street, earning $125 a month. In his youth he played basketball and football and boxed.

About 1902 Breadon moved to St. Louis to join two New York friends, brothers, who had gone west to open an automobile dealership and garage. It was somewhat of a risk, but young Breadon was attracted by the possibilities of the new industry. Within a year or two the brothers got wind that Breadon was looking to open his own shop, and they fired him. Some fast talking got him a concession to sell popcorn at the 1904 World’s Fair, held in St. Louis. This earned him enough money to open up his own garage. A wealthy customer, impressed with his work and honesty, offered him an executive position in the Western Automobile Company, and Breadon worked his way up to the very top, buying the business himself. By 1917 Breadon and a partner owned a distributorship of Pierce-Arrow automobiles, which he held for the next 20 years.2

Meanwhile, Breadon had become a rabid fan of the St. Louis Cardinals, a generally struggling club in the National League. He bought into the club in the mid-1910s, and gradually increased his stake to help the struggling ownership group. In early 1919 he was on the board of directors, and that fall he was named president. As a condition of accepting this position, he worked on his partners until he was able to purchase enough stock to get 51 percent of the club. He planned to run the team, not just the board. The Cardinals had joined the National League in 1892, but had finished as high as third place just twice in their first 29 years in the league. They were also heavily in debt. At the time of Breadon’s ascension, Rickey was the club’s president, while serving the club as both field manager and business manager, essentially also acting as what we now call a general manager. Breadon left Rickey in the latter two positions, while also offering him a piece of the club and naming him a vice president. After the club finished sixth in 1924 and started the next year 13-25, Breadon removed Rickey as manager, leaving him to run the club off the field. “In time, Branch, you will see that I am doing you a great favor,” Breadon told a disappointed Rickey. “You can now devote yourself fully to player development and scouting.”3

The two men worked together for more than two decades, turning a struggling club into one of the more successful in the game. Their relationship grew more contentious over the years, but there can be little doubt that they needed each other. As historian Lee Lowenfish wrote, “Under their arrangement, there was no doubt that Breadon was the boss who controlled the purse strings and Rickey was the employee who engineered the baseball transactions. However, unlike many baseball owners who get so intoxicated with their power that they think they understand the mechanics of the game itself, Breadon deferred completely to Branch Rickey on the nuts and bolts of player development.”4

Breadon’s first important decision after taking control in 1920 was to sign a lease to play in Sportsman’s Park, as a tenant of Phil Ball’s St. Louis Browns. Cardinals Park, formerly Robison Park, had been the Cardinals’ home since 1893 but was both a firetrap and in danger of collapsing. “The building inspector, who was a friend of mine, said he was afraid he couldn’t let us go another season with those stands. I couldn’t blame him,” Breadon said.5 He dismantled the ballpark, and sold the property and land for $275,000, which got the club out of debt and provided operating capital for the years ahead. “It was the most important move I ever made on the Cardinals,” Breadon later said. “It gave us money to clean up our debts, and something more to work with. Without it, we never could have purchased the minor-league clubs, which were the beginning of our farm system.”6

As the new Cardinals manager, Breadon named 29-year-old Rogers Hornsby, their great second baseman, who had been the best player in the National League for several years. Hornsby made Breadon look smart right away, as he rallied the club to a more respectable fourth-place showing, all the while hitting .403 and winning his second Triple Crown. The next year Hornsby led the club to a first-place showing, and a seven-game triumph over the Yankees in the World Series. It was the first championship for the Cardinals since their days in the American Association in the 1880s.

Late in the 1926 season, Breadon and Hornsby got into an argument about a series of in-season exhibition games Breadon had arranged, which Hornsby thought was more than his tired players needed. During a heated disagreement, Hornsby apparently used choice words to insult his boss. Not forgetting the slight, after the season Breadon traded his pennant-winning hero-manager to the New York Giants for star second baseman Frankie Frisch and pitcher Jimmy Ring. Though Cardinals fans were livid, they soon learned that Breadon and Rickey were generally willing to trade the team’s most popular players if they thought they were nearing the end of their peak years. After Hornsby, the Cardinals later dealt Dizzy Dean, Joe Medwick, Jim Bottomley, Chick Hafey, Johnny Mize, Mort Cooper, Walker Cooper, and many others. Rickey was able to find young replacements with their careers ahead of them, and the pennants piled up.

Though Breadon gave Rickey a fair amount of authority, he followed the team closely on a daily basis, and often left to himself the decision to hire and fire the Cardinals manager. In fact, he had a quick trigger in this area. Besides Hornsby, he replaced Bill McKechnie just a half season after he had won a pennant, and then Gabby Street a year and a half after Street’s team had won two more pennants. Not counting interim managers, Breadon presided over nine managerial changes in 27 years despite tremendous on-field success.

It was Rickey who first conceived of the idea of operating a farm system, but it was Breadon who paid for it. Rickey convinced his boss that the club could save money by signing and developing its own players on its own minor-league clubs rather than paying the high prices demanded from independent minor-league teams. And it was Breadon who had to fight for the right to operate the farm system in the major-league boardrooms, a fight that occasionally grew contentious since Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis was adamantly opposed to the idea.

By 1940 the Cardinals owned or had working agreements with 32 minor-league teams, controlling more than 600 players. One of the brilliant side effects of this extensive system was that Rickey could both sell the developed players the Cardinals did not need, and also sell Cardinals stars once they hit their early 30s, knowing he had other players ready to step in. Breadon and Rickey traded the 28-year-old Dean to the Cubs in 1938 for $185,000 and three players – Dean had hurt his arm the previous year after altering his pitching motion due to the foot injury he had suffered during the 1937 All-Star Game, and Rickey thought he might not return to his old self. Most importantly, Rickey had convinced Breadon that the system could produce new players. It always had, and it would again. During their long run of success from 1926 to 1949, when they finished first or second 18 times, the Cardinals never purchased a player from another organization.7

Rickey generally got all the credit for the moves that worked out well, but he also developed a reputation from his players and the press for being cheap or heartless. But Breadon, who gave little indication that he desired more attention for himself, deserves to share both the credit and the reputation – he set the salary budgets and approved the ballplayer sales Rickey was praised or derided for. “There was never a decision made in which I didn’t have the final say,” Breadon later said. “Many of Rickey’s moves I approved, others I rejected.”8

By the late 1930s, Breadon had sold his auto business, making the Cardinals his sole business interest. Coincidentally, after winning five pennants in nine years, in 1935 the Cardinals began a seven-year pennant drought. During this period Breadon began to meddle a bit more in the affairs of the team, including the firing of a few Rickey protégés in the farm system, causing a gradual deterioration of their relationship. In 1938 Commissioner Landis freed more than 70 Cardinals farmhands, claiming that the Cardinals controlled players on more than one team in some minor leagues, allowing the Cardinals to affect their pennant races. Breadon was apparently embarrassed by this decision, while Rickey was upset that Breadon did not fight it. In 1939 Breadon, who prided himself on maintaining great health and physical appearance, suffered a severe spinal injury when he was thrown from a horse. His recovery was difficult and slow, and Lowenfish opined that Breadon never completely recovered physically or emotionally from the accident.9

In February 1941, Breadon informed the board of directors, which included Rickey, that he would not be renewing Rickey’s contract after the 1942 season. His stated reason was that the current economic climate, including America’s possible entrance into a world war, made Rickey’s large salary ($50,000, plus large bonuses for his share of player sales) an unwanted burden. This was likely part of Breadon’s reasoning, but the two men’s deteriorating relationship and the club’s failure to win pennants for the previous six years were surely factors as well. The Cardinals lost a tough pennant race to the Dodgers in 1941, and then won the World Series in 1942, with Rickey still running the team. Rickey moved to Brooklyn to run the Dodgers, with more historic accomplishments ahead of him. In their remaining years as rival executives, the two men always spoke kindly of each other, at least publicly.

While the Cardinals were having another great year in 1943, Breadon fended off any attempts to mitigate Rickey’s previous contributions. “I don’t want to be placed in a position of ‘crowing’ about the way things are going in the wake of Rickey’s departure,” Breadon said. “After all, we had a good foundation built. But I’ve seen all angles of the game for the last quarter of a century and if I didn’t know something about running a ballclub now, I’d be pretty damned dumb.”10

Breadon’s reputation as a tight-fisted owner only grew once he became more the public face of the team. Brothers Mort (pitcher) and Walker (catcher) Cooper held out in 1945 before capitulating just before Opening Day. Walker was soon in the armed forces, but Breadon traded Mort to the Boston Braves in late May. When Jorge Pasquel of the Mexican League plucked several major-league players in 1946, in defiance of the long-held reserve clause, it was the disgruntled Cardinals who suffered the biggest losses – star pitcher Max Lanier, pitcher Fred Martin, and infielder Lou Klein.

The Cardinals finished the 1946 regular season tied with the Dodgers, forcing a three-game pennant playoff. At a banquet held after the final regular season game, Breadon was chided from the lectern by writer Roy Stockton. “It looks, Sam,” said Stockton, “as if you sliced the baloney too thin this time.”11 Breadon shrugged it off, and the Cardinals went on to beat the Dodgers and then the Red Sox in the World Series. It was Breadon’s sixth championship.

In November 1947 Breadon sold his majority share (75 percent) of the Cardinals to a group headed by his longtime friend Robert F. Hannegan and Fred Saigh, Jr. , a prominent St. Louis attorney. The price for Breadon’s shares was reported to be $3 million, the highest such figure in baseball history, and a pretty fair return on his initial $2,000 investment. “This is not a pleasant day for me,” Breadon said, “but every year I am less sufficient and at my age it is time to quit.”12 He later told Dan Daniel, “I am seventy years of age [actually 71]. I am in fine condition. As far as I know I might live to be ninety. But I felt that, in justice to my family, I should put my estate in order. This meant selling my stock in the Cardinals.”13

Despite his reputation as a tight-fisted owner, Breadon could be very generous. One of the stars of his first World Series team was the great pitcher Pete Alexander, whom the Cardinals got off waivers in June 1926 only to see him return to stardom for a few more years. Alexander had a difficult life after his career was over, and at the time of his death in 1950 it was revealed that the Cardinals (under Breadon) had for many years paid him $50 per month, which Alex thought was a pension, to allow him to live a little better.14 In 1948 Mort Cooper, having washed out of baseball soon after Breadon discarded him, was arrested for passing three bad checks. Breadon, who was retired, paid his bond, and later talked the Cubs’ Phil Wrigley into signing Cooper and giving him one last shot.15

Breadon’s marriage to Josephine in 1905 yielded a daughter, Frances. He married Rachel (Ray) Wilson in 1912, and the couple adopted their own daughter, Janet. Breadon was said to be the life of many parties in his younger days, and he earned the nickname “Singing Sam” because he often sang in barbershop quartets. Before his accident on his horse in 1939, he was an avid swimmer and horseman, and worked out by taking groundballs during the Cardinals’ spring-training season. By the time he reached middle age he was more interested in golf and retiring early so he could read in bed.16

Breadon succumbed to cancer on May 10, 1949, at age 72. He had been a patient at St. Joseph’s Hospital in St. Louis for several weeks. He was survived by his wife and daughters. At his request, there was no funeral service, and his ashes were dropped from a plane over the Mississippi River. Branch Rickey, who worked for Breadon for two decades, said he was “deeply grieved over the passing of one of the game’s finest sportsmen and outstanding businessmen. We always got along splendidly, even after I returned to Brooklyn.”17

In the ensuing decades, Breadon’s role as the head of one of baseball’s best organizations has been often overlooked. The most recent attempt to rectify this came in 2012 when Breadon was on the ballot considered by the Hall of Fame’s Veteran’s Committee, though he was not elected. The Cardinals have had much success in their history, and their 11 World Series victories are topped only by the New York Yankees. But it is worth remembering that their success began when Sam Breadon bought the club, and that six of the 11 titles came during his reign.

This biography is included in the book “The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals: The World Champion Gas House Gang” (SABR, 2014), edited by Charles Faber. 

Notes

As his nickname suggests, Carleton was a Texan. Born on August 19, 1906, in Comanche, a town southwest of the Dallas/Fort Worth complex, James Otto Carleton was the first of two children born to Ed Carleton, manager of a large ranch, and his wife, Annie. Otto, as his parents called him, and his younger brother, Scecil, grew up on the ranch. As a youngster Otto rode horses, herded cattle during the day, and milked cows in the morning and evening. When he was about 11 his family moved to Fort Worth, a fast-growing city of almost 100,000 where his father took a job in a rail yard. Otto played baseball in high school, seeing action as a catcher and infielder, then attended Texas Christian University in Fort Worth, where he played basketball, football, and baseball, and launched his career as pitcher.

Attracted to the pay and lifestyle playing semipro baseball in Newport, Arkansas, Carleton quit college after two years to sign with the Texarkana Twins in the Class D East Texas League in 1925. However, after a contract dispute he switched teams, moving to the Marshall Indians in the same league.1

The tall (6-feet-1) and lanky (180 pounds) Carleton won three of five decisions for Marshall, but also had a stroke of luck: Legendary scout Jack Ryan spotted him and recommended him to the St. Louis Cardinals, who were in the initial stages of building the first modern farm system. Reporting to the Cardinals’ spring-training site in San Antonio, Carleton was transferred to the Syracuse Stars in the International League, then was assigned to the Austin Senators in the Class D Texas Association to start the 1926 season. There the 19-year old Carleton pitched his first full season in Organized Baseball, winning 11 of 20 decisions and logging 202 innings.

Carleton pitched for the Houston Buffaloes in the Class A Texas League in 1927 and 1928, winning ten games each season as a starter and occasional reliever. The 1928 Buffaloes, sporting one of the best pitching staffs in minor-league history, boasted four 20-game winners (Frank Barnes, Bill Hallahan, Jim Lindsey, and Ken Penner), won 104 games (lost 54), and defeated the Birmingham Barons in the Dixie World Series. Carlton was promoted to the Cardinals’ top minor-league affiliate, the Rochester Red Wings in the International League, for the 1929 season.

At the Red Wings’ spring training camp in Plant City, Florida, Carleton struggled and appeared to be overwhelmed by more seasoned competition. However, when the season commenced, he settled down and won 13 consecutive decisions, including a no-hitter against Toronto on September 14, wining 3-1 (the sole run was the product of a walk and two errors). He and fellow 22-year-old Paul Derringer, dubbed the “$100,000 twins” because of their ability, led the team to the International League pennant.2 Named to the league all-star team, Carleton finished with an 18-7 record and a 2.71 earned-run average in 262 innings. He won two more games as Rochester lost to the Kansas City Blues in the Junior World Series, 5 games to 4.

Anticipating an invitation to the Cardinals’ spring-training camp in 1930 and eventual spot on the team, Carleton was sorely disappointed when he was bypassed in favor of seasoned veterans from the team’s deep farm system stacked with pitchers. The success of 1929 was soon covered by his rocky performance for Rochester in 1930. Suffering through a series of arm and hand ailments, Carleton slipped to 13-13 and his ERA rose to 5.01, which earned him a demotion back to Houston for 1931.

Carleton’s year with Houston was the turning point in his baseball career. The Buffaloes, powered by Carleton (20 wins and a 1.90 ERA) and 21-year-old phenom Dizzy Dean (26 wins and 1.57 ERA), won 108 games and the Texas League title before they were upset in the Dixie Series by Birmingham in seven games. From June 25 to August 13, Carleton won 13 consecutive starts before fracturing a finger on his pitching hand and missing the last five weeks of the season and the postseason. The Sporting News wrote before his injury that Carleton was “regarded by many as the equivalent of Dean” and on pace to win 30 games.3 In light of his success the previous seasons, Carleton acquired the nickname Tex from the well-known sportswriter Ernest J. Lanigan, nephew of the founders of The Sporting News, and the moniker remained with him the rest of his life.4 “Three New Cardinals Pitchers Won 66 Games. Dean, Carleton and Starr will Bolster Champs on Mound” read the headline in The Sporting News announcing St. Louis’s purchase of Tex’s contract for the 1932 season.5

Arriving at the Cardinals’ spring-training site in Bradenton, Florida, Carleton baffled teammates and opponents with his smooth side-arm delivery. Deceptive and with a low release point, he generated unexpected speed and reminded some players of the Deadball Era side-arm hurler and strikeout artist Cy Falkenberg.6 “He seems to have everything – speed, curves, poise, and self-confidence without being cocky,” The Sporting News wrote.7 On April 17 Carleton made his major-league debut by pitching six hitless innings against the Cubs, but issued a career-high nine walks in eight innings and lost the game, 4-1. Over the next two months he pitched mostly in relief, and didn’t get his first victory until a start on June 19 when he shut out the New York Giants on two hits. Carleton hurled a ten-inning complete-game 8-7 victory over the Boston Braves on August 20 in St. Louis, followed by a 3-0 shutout of the Braves just two days later. He finished the season with a 10-13 record and 4.08 ERA in 196? innings for the Cardinals, World Series champions in 1931 but a disappointing 72-82 in 1932.

With a dark complexion, closely cropped black hair, and steely blue-gray eyes, Carleton brooded over losses. Moody, he could be filled with good humor at one moment and then be snippy to teammates in the next. He was especially belligerent to coaches who voiced any criticism of his pitching. A confident yet cantankerous pitcher, he became increasing resentful of the attention Dizzy Dean received during their three years together on the Cardinals (1932-34) and felt Dizzy and his brother Paul were coddled by the organization. Distrustful of the Deans and insulted by their braggadocio, Carleton didn’t want to pitch in their shadow; consequently, he often feuded with teammates who questioned his ability. No doubt St. Louis fans were astonished when Carleton and teammate Joe Medwick got into a slugfest at home plate during batting practice on May 15, 1934, after an argument.8

Before the 1932 season Giants manager Bill Terry called Carleton one of the “hurling stars of the National League” and attempted to acquire him from the Cardinals, but St. Louis general manager Branch Rickey wasn’t listening.9 Carleton threw a two-hit shutout against the Cubs on April 22 to win his first start of the season, and won his first five decisions before losing to the Braves, 3-1, despite pitching a ten-inning complete game. He notched his league-leading 11th win on June 29 against the Giants, then, on two days’ rest, squared off with Giants ace Carl Hubbell in an epic battle on July 2. In front of an estimated 50,000 fans at the Polo Grounds, Carleton and Hubbell pitched scoreless ball through 16 innings. Jesse Haines relieved Carleton to start the 17th and surrendered a walk-off single to Hughie Critz in the bottom of the 18th. Hubbell went the distance, tossing an 18-inning, six-hit shutout. Carleton had held the Giants to eight hits (plus seven walks) in his 16 innings. Carleton went just 6-8 the rest of the season but finished with career highs in victories (17), innings pitched (277), games (44), and starts (33); he recorded a 3.38 ERA and tossed 15 complete games.

At the age of 21 while still in the minor leagues, Carleton had married Fannie Francis Major of New Orleans. In the offseason, they lived in Forth Worth, where Tex enjoyed hunting and fishing. He also played in exhibition games in Texas and throughout the South to earn extra income. Feisty and combative, Carleton took all games seriously. When he was on a barnstorming tour in Mexico City in the fall of 1934, he flattened the home-plate umpire after it was discovered that he had been betting on the games.

In an era when staff aces were expected to complete two-thirds of their starts, the high-strung Carleton had a reputation for lacking stamina, which may have been one of the reasons why Branch Rickey had been dilatory in promoting him to the major leagues. A worrier, Carleton reported to the Cardinals’ 1934 spring-training camp 15 pounds under his normal playing weight of 180. (To solve the problem in 1933, Dr. Robert Hyland, the Cardinals’ team physician, had recommended that Carleton have a few drinks to stimulate his appetite. “I used to get prescription whiskey – it still being Prohibition,” Carleton said, “and carry it with me on the road.”10 The constitutional amendment ending Prohibition went into effect at the end of 1933, and Carleton no longer needed a prescription.)

Despite his “frail” appearance, Carleton got off to a fast start in 1934, completing eight of his first ten starts, but his record stood at just 6-5 in early June owing to weak run support in three of his losses (and one loss in relief).11 After a poor June and media reports that he was “short winded,” Carleton was maddeningly inconsistent for the rest of the year, winning nine games (seven of them complete games) but surrendering at least five runs in each of his five losses. Finishing with 16 wins (third on the team behind Dizzy’s 30 and Paul’s 19) and 240? innings pitched, Carleton helped the Cardinals overcome a seven-game deficit to win the pennant in dramatic fashion on the last weekend of the season.

The Gas House Gang, one of baseball’s most memorable and enduring teams, beat the Detroit Tigers in seven games to win the 1934 World Series. Game Four pitted two side-arm hurlers against each other: Carleton and “Submarine” Elden Auker in his first full season. In his first start in almost two weeks, Carleton was chased in the third inning after surrendering four hits, two walks, and three runs, but was not charged with the loss. The following night Carleton relieved Dizzy Dean and pitched a scoreless frame in a 3-2 loss. It proved to be his last game as a member of the St. Louis Cardinals. In a surprise move, Rickey dealt Carleton to the Chicago Cubs for pitchers Bud Tinning and Dick Ward plus cash on November 21, a day better remembered for the Yankees’ acquisition of Joe DiMaggio.

Excited to leave St. Louis, Carleton joined a strong pitching staff in Chicago. “I just throw a little bit of everything when I’m out there on the mound and try to keep right on throwing,” Tex, known for his stylish haberdashery and Sunday cowboy boots, told his new fans in the Windy City.12 For most of the season, manager Charlie Grimm employed a five-man rotation headed by 20-game winners Lon Warneke and Bill Lee, and 17-game winner Larry French with the rest of the starts divided among Roy Henshaw (13 wins), 36-year-old Charlie Root (15 wins), and Carleton, who won 11. For the second consecutive year, Carleton was involved in a dramatic comeback. Down 2½ games on September 2, the Cubs reeled off 21 consecutive victories to capture the pennant in convincing fashion. Tex started just once during the historic winning streak, tossing a complete game against the Braves on September 9, triumphing 5-1. With the Cubs down two games to one, Carleton was given the start in Game Four of the World Series against the Tigers. Holding the vaunted Detroit offense to six hits, but walking seven in seven innings, Carleton surrendered just two runs (one earned); however, the Tigers General Crowder held the Cubs to one run in a complete-game victory. The Tigers finished off the Cubs two games later to capture the Series.

The Cubs were picked by most to win their second consecutive pennant in 1936. The pitching staff was nearly intact from the previous season other than newly acquired Curt Davis replacing the aging Root as a spot starter. On his way to a league-leading four shutouts, Carleton blanked the Reds on four hits for his first victory of the season on April 26. As an encore he tossed an 11-inning complete game to defeat the Dodgers 2-1 on short rest four days later. It appeared as though the Cubs were on their way to another pennant when Carleton threw a masterful 11-inning shutout against the Braves on August 1, surrendering just five hits and giving Chicago a two-game lead over the Cardinals. However, it was the Cubs’ last lead of the season as they lost their next five contests and played sub-.500 ball for the remainder of the season.

After an episode in June when he tried to go into the stands in Boston to confront a heckler, Carleton was involved in a fight with his old nemesis Dizzy Dean on August 10 in St. Louis. Dean left the mound in the top of the first inning after continued taunts and barbs from Carleton (who was not pitching that day and thus in the dugout) and a brawl ensued near the first-base line. Neither player was injured, and umpire Larry Goetz ejected both. In an odd twist of events, Cubs manager Charlie Grimm persuaded Goetz in the name of sportsmanship to allow Dean to remain in the game. Dean pitched a complete game for his 19th victory.13 For the season, Carleton had a 14-10 record and a 3.65 ERA in 197? innings as the Cubs finished a disappointing second to the New York Giants.

After the Cubs’ shocking four consecutive losses to the crosstown White Sox in the annual city series at the conclusion of the regular season, the 1936-37 offseason was a difficult one for Carleton. With rumors swirling that he’d be traded with Curt Davis to the Dodgers for pitcher Van Mungo, Carleton joined several teammates in a contract holdout when the Wrigley family, frustrated by the regular-season finish and embarrassed by the losses to the White Sox, vowed to cut salaries. The contract squabbles were resolved by mid-February. Bothered by elbow soreness in March and early April, Carleton was diagnosed with a chipped bone in his elbow, which required potentially career-threatening surgery. He opted for rest and a plaster cast, which sidelined him until he pitched in relief on May 11. On the 19th, with the season almost a month old, Carleton tossed a complete game against the Dodgers in his first start of the season, winning 3-1. Despite constant pain, Carleton enjoyed his best season, winning 16 games with 8 defeats, registering a career-low 3.15 ERA in 208? innings, notching a career-high 18 complete games in 27 starts and pitching four shutouts for the third time in his career. On August 8 he threw a one-hitter to beat the Boston Bees 3-0 in Chicago. Finishing with seven complete games in his last ten starts, Tex took revenge against the Cardinals on September 10 when he struck out a career-high 11 batters in a six-hit shutout. Still, the Cubs squandered a seven-game lead in August to finish in second place for the second consecutive year.

Forgoing elbow surgery again, Carleton was bothered by pain which worsened as the 1938 season progressed. After a complete-game 6-2 loss to Cincinnati in his first start, on April 21, he tossed a ten-inning complete game to defeat the Pittsburgh Pirates 5-3 on the 26th. Despite completing seven of his first 12 starts, Carleton was not able to pitch as often as he had in previous years and was surrendering more hits than he ever had. Consequently, when Gabby Hartnett replaced Grimm as player-manager on July 20, he relegated Carleton (whose ERA was hovering around 6.00) to the role of spot starter and long reliever. While the Cubs rolled to the pennant by playing 44-27 ball for Hartnett, Carleton limped to a 10-9 record with a career-high 5.42 ERA in 167? innings. He was relegated to mop-up duty in the Cubs’ four-game sweep by the New York Yankees in the World Series. Relieving Larry French in the eighth inning of Game Four with the Yankees leading 4-3 and two runners on base, Carleton faced three batters, walked two of them, uncorked two wild pitches, and surrendered a double before being relieved having given up two runs (on a double by Frank Crosetti off Carleton’s successor, Dizzy Dean) as the Yankees took a commanding 8-3 lead and sewed up the Series. In December, citing Carleton’s poor attitude and inadequate “zeal for work” the Cubs sent him outright to the Milwaukee Brewers, their affiliate in the American Association.14

The demotion was frustrating and disappointing for Carleton, who contemplated retiring. “I’ve been in the game 14 years and that is a long time,” he said. “I just can’t convince myself to keep on.”15 He finally reported, won 11 games, including a one-hitter on July 7 against the Louisville Colonels, and tossed a team-high 202 innings, but he was in pain all season.

Anticipating retirement in Fort Worth, Carleton was surprised when Brewers owner Henry Bendinger arranged a tryout with the Brooklyn Dodgers and sold his contract conditionally to Brooklyn. Carleton reported to the Dodgers’ spring training in Clearwater and impressed manager Leo Durocher, who unexpectedly named him to the starting rotation. Carleton tossed a complete game in his Dodgers debut, beating the Boston Bees 8-3 on April 23. In his next start, on April 30, Carleton, considered washed up after the 1939 season, extended the fairytale motif by pitching a 3-0 no-hitter against the reigning World Series champion Reds in Cincinnati, striking out four and walking two. Carleton was in trouble in each of the first four innings because of three Dodger errors and two walks, but he retired the final 17 batters he faced.16

Pitching on five or six days’ rest, Carleton pushed his record to 4-1 by tossing a three-hit complete game to defeat the Phillies 4-1 on July 2. It was his last victory as a starting pitcher in the big leagues. As his arm pain worsened, his effectiveness waned and he was forced into the bullpen by the end of the July. On September 23, in his last appearance in the major leagues, Carleton went out in a blaze of glory. He relieved Vito Tamulis with the score tied in the top of the ninth inning, intentionally walked the Giants’ Joe Moore to load the bases, and then completed an unassisted double play by catching Johnny McCarthy’s bunt attempt and racing to first base to retire Moore. The Dodgers scored a run in the bottom of the ninth to defeat New York 3-2 and give Carleton the victory, his sixth of the season and 100th and last in the major leagues.

With coaxing from Durocher, Carleton unexpectedly agreed to report to the Dodgers’ spring training in 1941 and made the Opening Day roster. But a week later, on April 23, he was optioned to the Montreal Royals. He won his debut, on May 4, but by midseason he was barely able to throw. He stayed on as an unofficial pitching coach, but before the end of the season he was released so he could pursue a career in radio in his hometown. Carleton retired with a 100-76 record and a 3.91 ERA in 1,607 innings in his eight-year major-league career. His statistics in nine seasons in the minor leagues are remarkably similar: 100 wins, 73 losses 1,625 innings, and a 3.00 ERA.

After retiring from baseball, Carleton engaged in various professions, working for Consolidated Aircraft in Fort Worth, operating sporting-goods stores, and owning an insurance agency. He died in Fort Worth on January 12, 1977, at the age of 70. He was buried at Oakwood Cemetery in Comanche.

This biography is included in “The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals The World Champion Gas House Gang” (SABR, 2014), edited by Charles F. Faber.

Sources

Ancestry.com

Baseball-Almanac.com

BaseballLibrary.com

Baseball-Reference.com

NYTimes.com

Retrosheet.com

The Sporting News

Notes

Collins was born in Altoona, Pennsylvania, on March 30, 1904. His father, William Collins, was of Irish and Scottish descent, while his mother, Elizabeth, traced her heritage back to Germany. At the recording of the 1920 census, James was 15; sister, Arietta, was 12, and his brother, William, was 2. Both young James and his dad listed coal miner as their profession; Jimmy started working in the mines at 13.

The Collins family moved to Johnstown, Pennsylvania, where young Jimmy attended nearby Nanty Glo Elementary. His father played semipro baseball and the first time Jimmy saw him crush a fastball, it became his goal to follow in his dad’s footsteps. During the cold, snowy Pennsylvania winters, Jimmy honed his skill, spending countless hours fielding grounders off a basement wall. When summer arrived he was on the ball field from sun-up to sundown.

Full-time school ended for Jimmy at the age of 14, when he took a job in the shipping department of the mine. Simultaneously, he attended night school — a common practice for boys his age in a coal-mining town. His dad, now a machinist, played ball on the company team. Jimmy joined the team and the father/son duo roamed left and center fields respectively. Jimmy originally threw left-handed and batted right-handed. The senior Collins, noting a short right-field fence at the company field, taught Jimmy to bat left and throw both left- and right-handed. Jimmy adapted to switch-hitting and continued to hit from both sides throughout his career. 

The nickname Ripper developed during an on-field incident that occurred when Jimmy was a young player. A ball rocketed off his bat and struck a nail protruding from the outfield fence; it caused the cover to partially tear. When asked who hit the ball, the retrieving outfielder saw the ball hanging and said, “It was the ripper.”2

In 1922 Jimmy married Helen Fasemeyer, also from Nanty Glo. At the time he was only 17 and couldn’t legally get a marriage license in Pennsylvania. The couple decided to elope and drove to Cumberland, Maryland, to have the ceremony performed. As a young married man, Jimmy not only worked hard in the mines — he played ball even harder, hoping a scout would notice. Marriage immediately affected Collins’s sense of responsibility: “From that day on, I knew I had to make the grade in baseball. Handicapped by my lack of education, I realized that if I failed as an athlete, my life would be a dull, pitiful existence as a coal miner.”3 The couple had a son (also Jimmy) in 1923; a daughter, Betty, arrived in 1925 and another son, Warren, in 1930.

The lack of a paycheck during a mine strike in 1922 resulted in Ripper’s signing his first professional contract, debuting in class C ball with York, Pennsylvania, of the New York-Penn League; he later shifted to Wilson, North Carolina, in the Virginia League, seeing only limited playing time at each stop before returning home to the mines.

In 1925 a lengthy strike put thousands of miners out work. Again with no paycheck and time on his hands, Collins approached the hometown Johnstown club of the Mid-Atlantic League for a tryout and impressed enough to be offered a $200 signing bonus — just about enough money to get the young family out of debt. Jimmy hit .327 in 99 games and suddenly scouts from higher classifications began to hover. George Stallings, then manager of the Rochester Red Wings and formerly a pretty fair minor-league ballplayer in his own right, saw Collins play and remarked: “I wouldn’t give $5.00 for him.”4 A dejected Rip went back to the mines and his father recommended that he forget baseball.

In 1926 Johnstown was in a tough pennant fight. This time Ripper’s .313 average in 102 games got him promoted to Double-A Rochester late in the season; the club was experiencing financial difficulties and players were not getting paid. Rip’s performance suffered and he again returned to the mines.

Farmed out to Savannah in 1927, Collins was recalled by Rochester at the end of the season. Subsequently, the troubled franchise was sold to the St. Louis Cardinals and housecleaning started, with almost the entire squad placed on waivers. Collins survived, but was demoted back to Class B, making stops in Savannah and Jacksonville before returning to Rochester at the end of the season, where a lackluster .246 average got him demoted to Danville, Illinois, of the Three-I League. At this point, Collins’s father wrote a long letter urging him to realize he wouldn’t make it and recommended that he resume working in the mines. Despite his father’s plea, Collins stayed in the Three-I league and ultimately led the loop with a .388 average in 1928, earning him a return trip to Rochester, where he posted an impressive .375 batting mark in 14 games. The Cardinals ordered Collins to report for spring training in 1929 with the parent club.

This time Collins’s mother urged him to report, saying she had a feeling it was going to be his big break. Sure enough, Cardinals manager Billy Southworth was impressed and recommended that Collins learn to play first base. Despite not being a prototypical build (5-feet-9, 165 pounds) for the position, he had cat-like reflexes, plus an uncanny ability to pull down errant throws and scoop low tosses out of the dirt.

Thanks to a cash infusion from the parent Cardinals, Rochester opened a brand-new stadium in 1929 and Ripper christened the ballpark on May 2, hitting the first home run in the Red Wings’ new home. All told, he hit .315 with 38 homers and 132 runs batted in. In 1930 he led the International League with a .376 average and an eyebrow-raising 40 home runs, while batting in a league record 180 runs. Collins was clearly instrumental in helping the Red Wings win pennants in 1928, 1929, and 1930 and blossomed into a definite major-league prospect.

Collins earned a promotion to the Cardinals and made his major-league debut in 1931, playing 89 games as a backup to Jim Bottomley. He posted a respectable .301 average, with 4 home runs and 59 RBIs, as a pinch-hitter and part-time first baseman/outfielder. Collins described to Arthur Daley of the New York Times how manager Frank Frisch once considered using him at third base when he was short an infielder; Collins was eager to play the position right-handed and said he regretted not having the opportunity.5

Collins’s playing time increased to 149 games in 1932 and his home run total rose to a healthy 21; in 81 games at first base, he had a .999 fielding average. So promising was Collins that the Cardinals traded Bottomley to Cincinnati after the season.

In late July 1933, Gabby Street was replaced as the Cardinals’ manager. Popular second baseman Frisch succeeded him. A fellow switch-hitter, Frisch worked with Collins and helped him become a more patient and disciplined hitter. He taught the stocky first baseman to choke the bat for better control and worked with him to improve his bunting skills from both sides of the plate. In general, Collins drove the ball for longer distances left-handed and stroked wicked line drives batting right-handed. According to author Rob Rains, Collins was “one (Cardinal) who knew how to play and when to be serious, Frisch’s type of guy, was the versatile Collins.”6. Collins contributed a .310 batting average with 10 home runs and 68 RBIs.

Collins enjoyed a breakout season in 1934, when his .333 average helped spark the Cardinals to the National League pennant and a World Series title. He became the first switch-hitter in the major leagues to hit 30 home runs in a season, winding up with 35 and tying for the league lead with the Giants’ Mel Ott. (This became the single-season standard for switch-hitters until Mickey Mantle surpassed Collins with 37 homers in 1955.) All but four of Collins’ home runs were hit left-handed; he had 200 hits, 40 doubles, 12 triples, 128 RBIs, and a league leading .615 slugging percentage. He led National League first basemen with 110 assists.

Along with Gas House Gang teammates Pepper Martin, Dizzy Dean, and Dazzy Vance, Collins sang on KMOX radio in St. Louis. They formed a washboard-style band called the Mississippi Mudcats and regularly performed in the team’s clubhouse and hotel. At the Bellevue-Stratford in Philadelphia in 1936, fun-loving Pepper Martin “noticed ladders, paint buckets, white overalls, and other painter’s paraphernalia in a corner of a service area. He rounded up Collins, Dizzy Dean, Heinie Schuble, and Bill DeLancey. They donned the overalls, took the equipment into a busy dining room and began painting the walls and ceiling, splattering paint on the customers, shouting instructions to one another à la the Marx brothers and promoting general chaos.”

During the hard-fought 1934 pennant race, Collins was approached to author a series of daily newspaper articles in St. Louis and also for his hometown Rochester Times Union. He reported the baseball news and added commentary from roommate Pepper Martin. Two dictionaries accompanied Ripper on road trips, but neither did him any good: “I’ve pondered through both of them, but I’ve never run across any of Frankie Frisch’s language. I now plan to write a ballplayers’ dictionary. I’ll gather all the pet words and answers from the players around the league. That book ought to be a best-seller.” One day after striking out, Collins was taken to task when frustrated manager Frisch remarked: “Next time, swing your typewriter.”8

The seventh and deciding game of the hard-fought 1934 World Series took place on October 9 at Navin Field in Detroit. The Cardinals supported winning pitcher Dizzy Dean with 11 runs to gain the victory. Batting fifth in the order, Collins led the offensive barrage with four hits. In the eighth inning he lost a potential fifth hit when his drive sent center fielder Jo-Jo White back to the 420-foot marker at the wall in right-center. White leaped, deflected the ball off his glove, and snagged it while lying on his back. Collins hit .367 for the Series.

On May 11, 1935, Collins took Philadelphia Phillies right-hander Euel Moore deep, hitting career home run 74, the major-league record at the time for switch-hitters. For the season Collins hit .313 with 23 round-trippers. On August 21 an unusual feat occurred when he played an entire game at first base without a putout. Collins placed in the top ten in several batting categories for the ’35 season.

The efficient Cardinals farm system produced hard-hitting Johnny Mize, who appeared in 126 games (99 at first base) in 1936 and made Collins expendable. After the season he was traded to the Chicago Cubs with pitcher Roy Parmelee for pitcher Lon Warneke.

Wearing a Cubs uniform in 1937, Collins on June 29 again played an entire game at first base without recording a putout; this time also without an assist. He jokingly offered to pay the price of one admission ticket because “I was strictly a spectator.”9

On August 9, 1937 the Cubs were leading the National League pennant race by six games when the team visited Cook County jail in Chicago. Collins thought it great fun to jokingly take a seat in the electric chair. Superstitious teammates chided him for doing what they considered to be an omen of bad luck. In the first inning the next day, Collins fractured his right ankle sliding into home plate. The Cubs lost the game to the Pittsburgh Pirates and nosedived to ultimately lose the National League flag to the New York Giants.10 Collins was never quite the same player, either at bat or in the field. All told in 1937,  he appeared in 115 games, with 16 homers, 71 RBIs and a .274 batting average.

In 1938 Collins’s playing time increased to 143 games. He hit.268 with 13 home runs and a league-leading fielding average of .996. Sparked by catcher-manager Gabby Hartnett’s memorable Homer in the Gloamin’, the Cubs edged the Pirates to win the National League flag. Prior to the start of the  World Series, Collins and teammate Billy Jurges visited 14-year-old Johnny English at Mercy Hospital in Chicago. An ardent Cubs fan, young Johnny was ill with cancer and wasn’t expected to live to the end of the season, let alone the World Series. Collins and Jurges brightened the boy’s spirits with the visit, accompanied by autographed baseballs signed by every member of the team.11 The Cubs were swept by a tough New York Yankees club. Commenting after being pummeled by the Bombers, the affable Collins remarked: “We came, we saw and we went home.”12

Collins was sold to the Pacific Coast League Los Angeles Angels on March 30, 1939; the media speculated that Hartnett was seeking to protect his job from a potential rival. Settling in as the Angels first baseman, Collins responded nicely by hitting .334 with 26 home runs in 172 games. Back for an encore season with the Angels in 1940, he hit .327 with 18 homers in 174 games.

Collins was back in the major leagues when he was purchased by the Pirates on March 25, 1941; the move reunited him with his former St. Louis manager Frankie Frisch. His acquisition was intended to ease the workload of first baseman Elbie Fletcher. Collins played in 49 games, hitting .210, in what became his last hurrah as a major-league player. He was released after the season. The move gave him his first opportunity to manage in professional baseball when he was installed as player-manager of the Class A Albany Senators of the Eastern League, a Pirates farm team. Attendance in Albany had been lagging for years and Collins was viewed as a potential draw, since he was a fan favorite in New York.13

The Collins family had resided in Rochester since Rip’s playing days; he managed a bowling alley in the city during the offseason. The Collins home was easily recognizable; Rip’s collection of broken bats surrounded it as a makeshift fence. His house stored his league-leading (estimated at over 10,000 items) collection of signed baseballs and bats. Collins, with boyish grin and tongue in cheek, defended the size of his collection by mentioning how neighborhood kids and deliverymen “kept his collection from getting too big.” A favorite bat in his collection was an ornate miniature given to Dizzy Dean by a Mexican fan to commemorate Dean’s fine 1934 season. Collins admired the bat to the point of “borrowing” it for his collection. Suspecting that Dean might become suspicious, Ripper had the bat carved to read: “To James Rip Collins — from Dizzy.” Collins estimated that he owned owning more than 3,000 autographed celebrity photos from many sports.14

A favorite glove in his collection was a “good luck” charm from the 1934 pennant race. Wild Bill Hallahan lost his glove during the stretch run and Rip loaned the lefty pitcher one of his well-worn four-fingered models. Hallahan proceeded to win every game he pitched wearing the borrowed glove. He asked Ripper if he could purchase the glove but Collins said no and the glove went back into his personal collection. Once asked how one man could collect so many baseball artifacts, Collins replied: “One man couldn’t. Darn every guy in the game knows it’s my hobby. When they see anything that looks good they pass it along.”15

In addition to serving as Albany’s skipper, Collins filled in at first base in 1942. He hit .276 in 118 games, but his home-run production fell to only 3 as the club finished first in the league but lost in the initial round of the playoffs. Remaining in Albany as player-manager in 1943, Collins batted .312 in 82 games with one home run as the club fell to 5th place. The wartime player shortage had Ripper back playing regularly at first base in 1944, seeing action in 100 games. At 40 years old he was named the outstanding minor-league player of 1944 by The Sporting News, hitting .396 for his second-place Albany Senators.

After five seasons, Collins resigned as Albany’s manager on November 27, 1946, to become manager of the Pacific Coast League San Diego Padres, where he replaced Pepper Martin. Albany owner Tom McCaffrey commented: “Ripper has been a splendid manager and I’m sorry to lose him. I have long known he deserves a promotion and I’m glad for his sake that he is going higher. He has been Albany’s most popular manager.”16

In 1947 San Diego finished dead last in the PCL. On August 3, 1948, after losing 13 of 17 games, Collins was ousted as manager. The move was unpopular with fans and the local media; Collins took the move in stride, citing player injuries as the source of his troubles. His next managerial slot was back in the Eastern League, with the Hartford (Connecticut) Chiefs for 1949 and 1950. Although he signed to run the club for a third year, he resigned to capitalize on an opportunity to go to Baltimore and become a color commentator in the new medium of television.

Still one to enjoy a laugh, Collins was up to his old tricks again when he couldn’t resist entertaining the crowd at a 1950 old-timer’s game in the Polo Grounds in New York with the old hidden-ball trick. The amused umpires investigated and found several baseballs in the pockets of many of the Cardinal players.17 

Collins was elected to the International League Hall of Fame in 1951. He went to work for Wilson’s Sporting Goods, for whom he authored a “how-to” manual for youngsters devoted to teaching proper baseball technique. He left Wilson to return to baseball as a roving minor-league instructor with the Chicago Cubs. During spring training 1961 Collins became a coach with the parent club and was part of the College of Coaches experiment initiated by owner Phil Wrigley. His last stint managing in the minor leagues was later in 1961 with San Antonio in the Texas League. Collins also worked in the Cubs’ public-relations office and hosted the Meet the Cubs radio show.

A model athlete on and off the field, Collins was accessible and liked mixing with fans during personal appearances. He thoroughly enjoyed pleasing people and believed players should always be considerate and thoughtful. He never failed to answer a fan letter and especially enjoyed personally writing to youngsters. He was polite, affable, and a non-swearing type — who simply enjoyed a little good-natured fun. He said, “Left-handers are not screwballs. … We have color.”19

Collins hit over .300 in four of his nine big-league seasons. His 135 home runs were tops among major-league switch-hitters until Mickey Mantle surpassed him. A clutch hitter, Collins referred to himself as “the All-American Louse,” a moniker he chose after breaking up four no-hitters during his major-league career. He was elected to the Rochester Red Wings Hall of Fame in 1989.

In the spring of 1969 Collins, scouting for the Cardinals, was hospitalized in Oswego, New York, after suffering a serious heart attack. On April 15, 1970, at the age of 66, Ripper had to a fatal attack in New Haven, New York. He is buried in Mexico Village Cemetery, Mexico New York.

Notes

1. Arthur Daley, “Sports of the Times,” New York Times, January 20, 1957.

2 Robert E. Hood, The Gashouse Gang (New York: William Morrow & Co. 1976).

3 Harry T. Brundidge, The Sporting News, March 9, 1933.

4 Ibid.

5 Arthur Daley, “Sports of the Times,” New York Times, January 20, 1957.

6 Rob Rains, The St. Louis Cardinals: 100th Anniversary History (New York: St. Martin’s Press. 1992).

7 The Sporting News, May 2, 1970.

8 “Rip the Writer Consults Dictionaries,” Raleigh Register (Beckley, West Virginia), June 25, 1936.

9 San Mateo (California) Times, March 9, 1959.

10 Life Magazine, September 9, 1937, 22.

11 “Boy Lives to See Cubs Win,” Arizona Republic (Phoenix, Arizona), October 6, 1938.

12 Helena (Montana) Daily Independent, October 10, 1938.

13 The Sporting News, November 27, 1941.

14 “Rip Collins is No.1 Collector of Broken Bats,” Oshkosh (Wisconsin) Northwestern, February 22, 1937.

15 (Ibid).

16 Dick Connors, “Collins Succeeds Old Roomie at San Diego,” The Sporting News,” November 27, 1946.

17 “Old Cards Pull Hidden Ball Trick on Giants,” Washington Post, July 31, 1950.

19 Gene Henschel, “Rotarians Hear Collins Describe Career,” Sheboygan (Wisconsin) Press, September 1, 1964.

Pat Crawford was a reluctant professional baseball player. A devout Christian with a passion for baseball, Crawford objected to playing on Sundays. When he graduated from college in 1923 and accepted a position as teacher and coach at a high school in North Carolina, he anticipated that a career in baseball would be impossible to reconcile with his personal convictions and school-related responsibilities. But Crawford was a thinking man and found the perfect solution in the Class B South Atlantic (Sally) League: Start the season late and end early to accommodate his teaching schedule. Among the league’s best hitters from 1924 to 1927, Crawford spurned offers from higher minor-league teams, refusing to change his principles. He ultimately compromised, signed with the New York Giants, and debuted with them in 1929. He abruptly retired after the 1930 season, but was lured by the St. Louis Cardinals to sign with them. After two seasons with the Columbus Red Birds (and an American Association MVP award in 1932), Crawford cemented his reputation as a versatile infielder and clutch pinch hitter in 1933 and 1934. His playing career came to a tragic halt when he developed a life-threatening blood infection in 1935, leaving him with a permanent limp.

Clifford Rankin “Pat” Crawford was born on January 28, 1902, in the bucolic town of Society Hill, Darlington County, in the northern part of South Carolina. His parents, James and Sallie (Ford) Crawford, were South Carolinians by birth and raised five children. Cliff, as his parents and friends called him, was followed by Alda, Lafon, Thomas, and William. His father, a salesman for a retail grocery company, moved the family to Dillon County and by 1915 to Sumter, a growing town of about 9,000 residents in the geographic central part of the state.  An athletic youngster, Pat attended Sumter High School, where he excelled in the classroom and on the athletic fields, starring in baseball, basketball, and football. After graduating in 1919, he attended Davidson College, a prestigious liberal-arts college about 20 miles north of Charlotte, North Carolina. Guided by his faith, Crawford was active in his institution’s YMCA and served as the vice president of his senior class. He forged an impressive athletic résumé, serving as captain of the basketball and baseball teams, and twice being named all-state as an infielder. He graduated with a B.A. in physical education.

Standing 5-feet-11 and weighing about 160 pounds in college, Crawford was quick and agile, and learned to play all infield positions. With his speed, natural instincts, and strong throwing arm, he was also an effective outfielder. Crawford’s foray into professional baseball began in 1922, when he was signed by owner-manager and former big-league pitcher George Suggs to play left field for the Kinston (North Carolina) Highwaymen in the independent Eastern Carolina Baseball Association, which existed outside the jurisdiction of Organized Baseball.1

Despite Crawford’s passion for baseball, he considered some aspects of professional ball distasteful, such as Sunday games, the hard living (drinking and carousing) of some players, and the time it took away from family. In the summer after he graduated from Davidson College, he returned to Kinston to serve as player-manager for a local semipro team in the Blue Ridge League. (The Highwaymen had disbanded after the 1922 season.) Not long after the season started, Crawford was offered a bonus of $150 by Dick Hoblitzell, manager of the Charlotte Hornets, to play in the Sally League; however, he had not yet decided if he wanted to a career in baseball.2  He filed the contract at home and finished the season with a semipro team in Lenoir.

Crawford accepted a job as a teacher and coach at Gastonia High School, about 20 miles east of Charlotte, believing that his active baseball career was over. From the fall of 1923 through the end of May 1927, he established a reputation as a “mentor and idol of high-school athletes” and led the Green Wave to a football championship and baseball prominence.3  During the spring baseball season in 1924, Crawford was surprised when Charlotte owner Felix Hayman inquired about his availability for the coming season. Crawford asked if he would be permitted to play for a semipro team in Abbeville, South Carolina. Hayman agreed with the stipulation that Crawford would report to the Hornets on a day’s notice. “I packed up and went to Abbeville, arriving there on a Friday,” Crawford said. “I worked out with the team Saturday and was all set to play Monday. Sunday I received a wire from Mr. Hayman telling me to report at once to take the place of the regular first baseman who had been injured. So without playing a single game with Abbeville, I boarded the train for Charlotte and began my professional baseball career on Monday at first base.”4  Crawford replaced injured future big leaguer Chick Tolson at first base and was later switched to third base. For the second-place Hornets, the 22-year-old left-handed hitting Crawford batted .303 (114-for-376).

Purchased after the season by the Louisville Colonels of the Double-A American Association, Crawford refused to report to the team, citing his objection to playing on Sundays. Further complicating matters was his insistence on finishing the baseball season as coach at Gastonia High School. Louisville loaned him to the Greenville (South Carolina) Spinners of the Sally League to start the 1925 season.5 About three weeks after reporting to his new team, Crawford replaced player-manager Zinn Beck, who had unexpectedly resigned, and was charged with “pull[ing] the slumping team together.”6 In an offensively-minded league, Crawford batted .343 (20 players with a minimum of 300 at-bats batted at least .340) in 89 games. As he did in subsequent years, he left the team early to return to his teaching and coaching duties in high school.

Nicknamed Peppery Patrick and Captain Pat for his feisty personality and leadership abilities, Crawford was described by local papers as one of the “finest characters in baseball” for his unwavering commitment to his high-school athletic program, exemplary behavior, and excellent play on the field.7 For the second consecutive season, he refused to report to his new, higher-level team (the Atlanta Crackers of the Class A Southern Association), which had acquired his contract in midseason, and claimed that he would quit baseball before he would turn his back on his teaching career. In his second of three seasons with Greenville, Crawford batted .328 (146-for-445), developed a home-run stroke, belting 21, and knocked in 93 runs. Behind the pitching heroics of 30-game winner Wilcey Moore, the Spinners won the league title and then defeated the Richmond Colts of the Virginia League for the Southern Championship.8

By the beginning of the 1927 season, there seemed to be a consensus that the coming year with Greenville will “probably be [Crawford’s] last in professional baseball” when Atlanta sold his contract to Greenville.9 Fueling the rumors of his imminent retirement from baseball was his resignation from Gastonia High School to accept a position as head coach and faculty member at Guilford College in Greensboro, North Carolina. Crawford was considered “one of the best infielders of the Sally League” who might have already been in the majors had he been willingly to play baseball on Sunday.10 Crawford reported to the Spinners in June, had his best season so far, and was named the league’s most valuable player.11 He hit .334 (148-for-443), knocked in 90 runs, and clubbed 24 home runs, the third most in the league, despite missing 30 games for player-manager (and owner) Frank Walker’s second consecutive (league and Southern) championship team.

John “Little Napoleon” McGraw, manager of the New York Giants, was not someone who accepted no for an answer. On scout Dick Kinsella’s advice, McGraw personally scouted Crawford in 1927. Making his best sales pitch to Crawford and Walker, McGraw persuaded Crawford to report to the Giants the following spring and purchased his contract for $10,000.12 The news hit the printing press on August 3 and its publication met with a thundering ovation in Greenville and Gastonia. “A more popular ball player has never been in the South Atlantic Association,” excitedly reported the Gastonia Daily Gazette.13

In Gastonia, Greenville, Charlotte, Sumter, and other areas where Crawford lived and worked, he was seen as more than just a ballplayer. He was humble, modest, and self-effacing, sincerely concerned about education, and seemed to harken back to another, less complicated era. He embodied the notion of sports as an ennobling undertaking. Newspapers predicted success in the major leagues because Crawford was a “natural, quick thinker” who “puts his whole soul” into baseball.14 In a rapidly changing society in which individuality and egoism were commended, Crawford possessed the “mental and moral fitness to be a star.”15

Crawford decided not to report to the Giants spring training in 1928, reiterating his commitment to Guilford College.16 Frank Walker of the Spinners voiced his disapproval, and McGraw, frustrated with Crawford’s obstinacy, claimed he didn’t need a player who did not want to play for the Giants. “[McGraw] is interested in [Crawford] and proposes to use him this season,” reported the Gastonia Daily Gazette near the end of the Giants’ spring camp.17 When the baseball season concluded at Guilford in late May, Crawford announced his resignation and willingness to play professional baseball on his terms.18

The Giants assigned Crawford to their top affiliate in the American Association, the Toledo Mud Hens, piloted by 37-year-old player-manager Casey Stengel. Crawford quickly adjusted to the jump from Class B to Double-A, then a notch below the big leagues. He batted .347 (tied for fifth) in the league among players with at least 400-at bats). He tailored his game to fit the large dimensions of Toledo’s Swayne Field by becoming a slap hitter known for his good eye at the plate, striking out just 15 times in 481 plate appearances. His fielding at first base was as impressive as his hitting. By the end of the season, The Sporting News considered Crawford and Joe Kuhel of the Kansas City Blues “easily the best first base prospects” in the AA.19 Crawford was a late-season call-up to the Giants when the rosters expanded in September, but he did not play.20

When Crawford reported to the Giants’ camp in San Antonio in February, 1929, it was the first time in his professional career that he had participated in spring training. McGraw was determined to whip his team in shape, driven by the still-fresh memory of a disappointing second-place finish, two games behind the pennant-winning St. Louis Cardinals. The Giants were a young team with established major leaguers at the infield positions where Crawford could play. Hitting sensation Bill Terry was one of the best first basemen in the league, and the third sacker, 23-year-old Freddie Lindstrom, was just beginning his Hall of Fame career.

Crawford secured a spot on the Giants roster with his hustle, determination, versatility, and studious approach to the game. He made his major-league debut in the team’s first game of the season, on April 18, when he unsuccessfully pinch-hit for Carl Hubbell in the Giants’ 11-9 victory over the Phillies in the Baker Bowl. On April 27 Crawford pinch-hit for “King Carl” again, and connected for his first big-league hit, a home run into the right-field stands at the Polo Grounds, in the Giants’ 5-4 loss to Boston. “Homer by Crawford Helps Giants Win,” read a headline from the New York Times on May 27.21 Crawford, pinch-hitting for reliever Dutch Henry in a slugfest with the Braves at the Polo Grounds, faced Socks Seibold with the bases full in the sixth inning. On a 3-1 count, Crawford launched an inside fastball over the right-field terrace for his first and only career grand slam to break the game open. Coincidentally, the Braves’ Les Bell blasted a pinch-hit grand slam in the seventh inning to make it the first time in major-league history that two pinch-hit grand slams were hit in the same game. Crawford’s third pinch-hit homer against the Phillies, on June 19, tied Ham Hyatt (1913) and Cy Williams (1928) for the most pinch-hit four-baggers in a season. (Brooklyn’s Johnny Frederick broke that record with six in 1932.)

With little chance to displace Terry or Lindstrom, Crawford carved his niche as a clutch pinch-hitter. He saw action in the field just eight times, including three starts at first base. Two of those starts occurred at the end of the season, when he connected for four hits in seven at-bats and drove in three in runs during inconsequential wins for the third-place Giants. Crawford finished the season with a remarkable 24 runs batted in on just 17 hits (including three doubles and three home runs), scored 13 times, batted. 298, and seemed to have a bright future.

Second base proved to be a problem for the Giants in 1929, when Andy Cohen and Andy Reese combined for 31 errors. Consequently, infield prospect Doc Marshall and Crawford, who had never played second base professionally, competed during 1930 spring training with the two veterans. Marshall won the job, but got off to a poor start, which paved the way for Crawford’s first start at second base, on April 26 in the first game of a doubleheader at Philadelphia (he went hitless in five at-bats). In 13 subsequent starts, Crawford played steady if not spectacular baseball. In seven of his starts, he had at least two hits and twice knocked in four runs. On May 22 the Giants made a stunning trade sending their workhorse right-handed pitcher Larry Benton to the Cincinnati Reds for a slick-fielding second baseman, 29-year-old Hughie Critz, who had finished second and fourth in the MVP voting in 1926 and 1928 respectively. Overnight, Crawford lost his job and was relegated to pinch-hitting duties, despite a .270 batting average and 16 runs batted in from just 20 hits. Six days after the acquisition of Critz, the Giants made another deal with the Reds, exchanging Crawford for outfielder Ethan Allen and pitcher Pete Donohue.

Crawford reported to manager Dan Howley’s Reds en route to a seventh-place finish. On a light-hitting team, he struggled in his first 33 games (which included five starts at first base and seven at second base), hitting just .243. After replacing Hod Ford at second base on August 16, Crawford proved his value by hitting safely in 13 of 14 games (.356 average). Crawford made a seamless transition to second base in 1930. His .968 fielding percentage was above the league average (.963) and just one percentage point lower than that of the Cardinals’ Frankie Frisch. From August 16 through the end of the season, Crawford batted .312, the third-best on the team, trailing only Bob Meusel’s .330 and rookie Tony Cuccinello’s .350.

On December 1, in a “surprising development,” the Reds traded Crawford and outfielder Marty Callaghan to the Hollywood Stars of the Pacific Coast League for first baseman Mickey Heath.22 Howley desperately wanted a slugger and was willing to sacrifice Crawford to acquire Heath who had launched 75 round-trippers the previous two years with the Stars. Crawford was disappointed by the trade and in a letter addressed to Stars president William F. Lane wrote, “I am retiring. … Please consider this final. Salary increases are of no interest to me.”23

The news of Crawford’s retirement did not surprise the local media in North Carolina. During his playing days in Kinston, North Carolina, Pat met local resident Sarah Edwards, whom he later married. After living in Gastonia and Charlotte, the couple relocated to Kinston when Crawford began his big-league career. In the offseasons, Crawford taught physical education at local schools, coached basketball, and refereed games. With close ties to his community, Crawford considered the time away from his wife a necessary evil in order to play baseball. Just days after he was officially traded to the Stars, the Crawfords welcomed their first child, Patricia. Pat’s perspective suddenly changed; he was not willing to live almost 2,700 miles away from his family.

Branch Rickey, general manager of the St. Louis Cardinals, sensed an opportunity to acquire a versatile player and orchestrated preliminary discussions among Crawford, Lane, and Larry MacPhail, president of the Columbus Red Birds of the American Association.24 Less than a week before Opening Day, Columbus purchased Crawford’s contract from Hollywood.25

Columbus was historically the weakest team in the American Association, had not enjoyed a winning record since the war-shortened season in 1918, and had finished in last place or next-to-last eight of the previous 12 years. But the team’s history did not matter to Crawford. He was a one-man wrecking crew. Playing his natural position of first base, Crawford led the league in home runs (28) and runs batted in (154), ranked second in hits (237), fifth in batting (.374), fourth in doubles (41), and sixth in triples (13), easily led the league with 388 total bases, and finished third with a .613 slugging percentage.26 Columbus finished in fourth place with an 84-82 record.  Despite his phenomenal season, Crawford’s ascendancy to the big-league club was blocked by 27-year-old rookie Ripper Collins, who gradually replaced longtime stalwart Jim Bottomley. Rickey bought Crawford’s contract at the end of the season, but the acquisition could not squelch the rumors that he would trade Crawford at the winter meetings.27

Crawford participated in the Cardinals’ spring training in Bradenton, Florida, but was optioned to Columbus for the start of the 1932 season. In leading the Red Birds to a second-place finish (88-77) and their most wins since 1913, the 30-year-old Crawford finished fourth in batting (.369) and second in home runs (30), runs batted in (140), and total bases (370), and was named The Sporting News Most Valuable Player of the league.

The Cardinals began spring training in 1933 coming off a disappointing sixth-place finish the previous season. Manager Gabby Street, under pressure from GM Rickey and club owner Sam Breadon to produce a winner, viewed Crawford as an ideal insurance policy to shore up an injury-prone infield from 1932. The 31-year-old Carolinian began the season as a pinch-hitter, but then had the opportunity at the end of April to be the regular first baseman when Collins suffered a knee injury. In his 17th consecutive start at first base, Crawford belted a bases-loaded, walk-off single in the tenth inning to defeat the Giants in Sportsman’s Park, 8-7, on May 19. Despite the heroics, he ceded the first-base job to Collins the next day. There was a widespread belief that Crawford would be optioned to Columbus at some time during the season, but the tough veteran proved too valuable.28 The “handy utility man” made 28 starts at first, nine at second base (spelling Frankie Frisch, who had injured his leg), and six at third base.29 He finished the season with a .268 average (60-for-224), but with little pop in his bat (no home runs among his ten extra-base hits) and drove in 21 runs.

Player-manager Frisch, who replaced Street during the previous season, guided the St. Louis Cardinals’ Gas House Gang to baseball immortality in 1934. The Cardinals benefited from an unusually healthy year from its starters (Collins, for example, played every inning of every game). “Crawford played an important part in the success of the Redbirds,” wrote The Sporting News several years after the team’s mythical season.30 An unassuming role-player, Crawford made only five starts all season, but continued to manifest his uncanny ability to hit in clutch situations. Batting .271 in 70 at-bats, Crawford amassed 16 runs batted in on just 19 hits (all singles save for two doubles). He explained that as a pinch-hitter his goal was to make contact and avoid strikeouts (he struck out just 29 times in 651 big-league at-bats).  He choked up on the bat in order to connect for a safe hit, and rarely took a full swing with all of his power.31

Crawford’s educated disposition did not cloud his competitive nature. “One of the quietest, most gentlemanly members of our team was Pat Crawford,” said the rough-and-tumble Pepper Martin. “It will probably be a surprise to hear that he turned out to be one of our great jockeys.”32 In the dugout Crawford acted like a coach, encouraging teammates and harassing opponents.

In the Cardinals’ exciting World Series triumph over the Detroit Tigers, Crawford made two pinch-hit appearances. He grounded out to second in Game Four and was retired on a fly ball to right field in Game Five. After those two losses, the Gas House Gang won Games Six and Seven to capture the title. Upon Crawford’s return home to North Carolina, he was feted as a celebrity.

Highly respected in the Cardinals organization, Crawford seemed prepared to transition into a coaching. When George “Specs” Toporcer because of failing eyesight abruptly quit as player-manager of the Rochester Red Wings, the Cardinals’ affiliate in the Double-A International League, team president Warren Giles selected Crawford over Burt Shotton and Ray Blades to lead the team.33

At almost the same time that Giles made the announcement of Crawford’s hiring on January 25, 1935, the 33-year-old jack-of-all-trades was being rushed to the hospital in Kinston. Several weeks earlier Crawford had undergone a routine hemorrhoid operation. He had developed septicemia, a life-threatening blood infection that localized in his liver. He required six blood transfusions and his entire body was inflamed, leading his physician to proclaim that he had only a “slight” chance to survive.34  Papers throughout the Carolinas reported daily on his illness and ultimate recovery. The Charlotte Observer wrote, “[Crawford] is a fine character, the sort that keeps baseball from degenerating to the low level it formerly occupied, [and an] upstanding, high-minded Christian gentleman.”35 Crawford spent weeks recuperating in Kinston Memorial Hospital, but as a result of the disease, he suffered a permanently stiff left hip and his career as a baseball player was tragically ended.36

In his four-year big-league career, Crawford batted .280 (182-for-651) and knocked in 104 runs. He batted .347 over 843 games in his seven-year minor-league career, including a phenomenal .365 average in three seasons in the American Association. Blessed with a positive outlook, Crawford never expressed bitterness or anger about his fate.

Crawford settled in Kinston with his wife, daughter, and son (Clifford, born in 1933) and dedicated the rest of his life to educating youngsters and coaching youth baseball. In 1936 he opened a baseball school and camp in Gastonia for the Cardinals. He scouted for the team and was credited with signing future Cardinals pitcher Ernie White. In Kinston Crawford helped found a recreation department, served as its director for many years, built public baseball diamonds, and organized local youth leagues. In 1937 he and his wife purchased a 20-acre site in Morehead City, North Carolina, about 70 miles southeast of Kinston on the southern edge of the Outer Banks. They established Camp Morehead by the Sea, a youth camp that they operated for many decades. Though he rarely spoke his accomplishments in the big leagues, Crawford proudly participated in reunions of the Gas House Gang. In 1983 he was an inaugural member of the Kinston Baseball Hall of Fame, along with George Suggs and Charlie Keller.

On January 25, 1994, three days shy of his 92nd birthday, Clifford Rankin “Pat” Crawford died in Morehead City and was buried in Westview Cemetery in Kinston. He was the last surviving player from the Gas House Gang. He was posthumously inducted into the Davidson College athletics hall of fame (1998) and the Kinston/Lenoir County Sports Hall of Fame (2012).

Sources

Newspapers

Gastonia News Gazette

New York Times

The Sporting News

Online sources

Ancestry.com

BaseballLibrary.com

Baseball-Reference.com

Retrosheet.com

Notes

1] Bryan C. Hanks, “Clifford was the city’s first recreation director,” Kinston.com, October 10, 2012. kinston.com/sports/local/crawford-was-city-s-first-recreation-director-1.27151

2 H.D. Osteen, “Pat Crawford: A New Type of Big Leaguer,” Sumter (South Carolina) Daily Item, October 29, 1934.

3 “Pat Crawford Hits Homer in First game of Year,” Gastonia (North Carolina) Daily Gazette, May 16, 1927, 2.

4 H.D. Osteen, “Pat Crawford: A New Type of Big Leaguer.”

5 “Baseball Squibs,” Kingston (New York) Daily Freeman, May 13, 1925, 18.

6 The Sporting News, June 25, 1925, 1.

7 “Pat Crawford New Property Atlanta Southern Outfit,” Gastonia News Gazette, July 8, 1926, 2.

8 Marshall D. Wright, The South Atlantic League, 1904-1963: A Year-by-Year Statistical History (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2009), 124-25.

9 “Pat Crawford to Guilford College as Head Coach,” Gastonia Daily Gazette, May 28, 1927, 6.

10 “Pat Crawford Changes Mind About Playing Ball on Sundays,” Pittsburgh Press, August 7, 1927, 1.

11 “Fear Pat Crawford’s Playing Days Are Over“ (Associated Press), Gastonia Daily Gazette, March 28, 1935, 6.

12 “Pat Crawford Sold to New York Giants for $10,000,” Gastonia Daily Gazette, August 3, 1927, 6.

13 Ibid.

14 Ibid.

15 Ibid.

16 “McGraw Wants Pat Crawford,” Gastonia Daily Gazette (Gastonia, North Carolina), April 5, 1928, 6.

17 Ibid.

18 “Pat Crawford to Join New York Giants,” Gastonia Daily Gazette, May 24, 1918, 6.

19 The Sporting News, August 16, 1928, 4.

20 H.D. Osteen, “Pat Crawford: A New Type of Big Leaguer,” Sumter Daily Item, October 29, 1934.

21 “Homer by Crawford Helps Giants Win,“ New York Times, May 27, 1929, 31.

22 Alan Gould, “Sports Slants” (Associated Press), Havre (Montana) Daily News, December 19, 1930, 6.

23 The Sporting News, February 19, 1931, 1.

24 The Sporting News, April 9, 1931, 5.

25 “Red Birds Offer Youthful Lineup and Not Done Yet,” Zanesville (Ohio) Sunday Times Signal, April 12, 1931, 8.

26 Bill O’Neal, The American Association. A Baseball History 1902-1991 (Austin, Texas: Eakin Press, 1991).

27 The Sporting News, October 22, 1931, 1.

28 “Columbus Ordered to Cut Its Payroll” (United Press), Ames (Iowa) Daily Tribune-Times, June 5, 1933, 6.

29 “The Lookout,” Lowell (Massachusetts) Sun, July 19, 1933, 13.

30 The Sporting News, March 14, 1940, 3.

31 H.D. Osteen, “Pat Crawford: A New Type of Big Leaguer.”

32 Richard Peterson, The St. Louis Cardinals Baseball Reader (Columbia, Missouri: University of Missouri Press, 2006), 27-28.

33 Jim Mandelaro and Scott Pitoniak, Silver Season: The Story of the Rochester Red Wings (Syracuse, New York: Syracuse University Press, 1996), 59.

34 “Pat Crawford Has Only Slight Chance to Recover,” Gastonia Daily Gazette, January 26, 1935, 2.

35 “Pat Crawford,” from the Charlotte Observer, reprinted in the Gastonia Daily Gazette, February 1, 1936, 4.

36 “Fear Pat Crawford’s Playing Days Are Over” (Associated Press), Gastonia Daily Gazette, March 28, 1935, 6.

If the fates had been kinder to George “Kiddo” Davis, he would have had the opportunity to display his skills in five World Series during his eight major-league seasons.

In two Series with the New York Giants, 1933 and 1936, the center fielder complemented his outstanding defensive work with 8 hits in 21 at-bats, a robust .381 average — or 99 percentage points above his career regular-season average.

Davis also played for the 1934 St. Louis Cardinals and the 1937 Giants, both of whom went on to win National League pennants, and as a 24-year-old rookie he made one appearance with the pennant-bound 1926 New York Yankees.  A winning ballplayer? One would say yes.

George Willis “Kiddo” Davis was born in Bridgeport, Connecticut, on February 12, 1902, the youngest of eight children of George E. and Bessie E. James Davis. All of his siblings were born in Nanticoke, Pennsylvania, where George’s father worked in the coal mines, as did his father before him in Wales. His father’s new and far less dangerous job, as a brakeman on the New Haven Railroad, prompted the family’s move to the industrial city in southern Connecticut.

George was just a boy when he acquired the nickname that would forever be his trademark. As his son, 82-year-old George Jr., recalled in 2013: “He told me that when he was 9 or 10 years old, he was always playing with kids 11, 12, 13. When they’d choose up sides, they’d say, ‘I’ll take the kiddo.’ ”

George’s mother died of Bright’s disease when he was just 15, and his aunt, Edna Mary Waters, “kind of took over and watched over him,” according to his 90-year-old niece, Edna Miller.

At Bridgeport High School, Kiddo quickly developed into a star third baseman and, as a sophomore sparked  coach Fred Hunt’s Hilltoppers to the 1918 state championship.  The spring season was climaxed by Bridgeport’s 3-2 victory over Evander Childs High School of New York City, a game billed as the Eastern championship. Bridgeport High captured the state title the next season as well.

For reasons lost in time, Davis left school in 1920 and went to work for a local biscuit company. Realizing that he would require a high-school diploma to obtain a college athletic scholarship, he met with Bridgeport High’s principal and was allowed to re-enter the school. Because of his age, though, he was ineligible for baseball and worked part-time as a bookkeeper after school hours.

Eddie Reilly, the high school’s three-sport coach, was well aware of Davis’s baseball skills; he had coached the youngster in semipro competition. So he was able to place Davis in the lineup when Bridgeport High played a prep school or college freshman team.

Bill McCarthy, New York University’s well-respected varsity coach, was an interested spectator on the day when Bridgeport High traveled to Manhattan and defeated the Violet freshmen, 6-5. Davis led the way defensively and at the plate with a 4-for-5 performance, including a home run. A baseball scholarship to NYU soon followed.

Davis went on to earn a bachelor’s degree, with honors, in business administration. He also earned considerable accolades for his play on the baseball field, batting over .500 with the freshman squad and .501 and .486 as a member of the Violet varsity. As a senior he assembled a robust collection of extra-base hits (six home runs, seven triples, six doubles), and twice hit a pair of homers in a game.

The Yankees, mindful of other metropolitan colleges’ contributions to the big leagues — Columbia sent Lou Gehrig to the Yankees and Eddie Collins to the Philadelphia Athletics; Fordham sent Frank Frisch to the Giants — took note of Davis’s productivity at NYU, and scout Paul Krichell, who gained lasting fame for discovering Gehrig at Columbia, signed Davis to a Yankees contract after the Violets’ season ended.

The Yankees team that Davis joined in June of 1926 was a powerhouse, featuring no fewer than seven future Hall of Famers: right fielder Babe Ruth, first baseman Lou Gehrig, center fielder Earle Combs, second baseman Tony Lazzeri, pitchers Waite Hoyt and Herb Pennock, and manager Miller Huggins. The left fielder, Bob Meusel, was a career .309 hitter who had led the American League with 33 home runs and 138 runs batted in the previous season. The 1926 club would win the first of three straight American League pennants.

Davis accompanied New York on a two-week Western trip, but he got into only one game. At Cleveland’s Dunn Field, on June 5, he replaced Ruth in the bottom of the eighth inning in a game won by the Indians 15-3. The Babe had driven in all of the Yankees’ runs, two coming on his 19th home run of the season. Davis recorded no putouts nor did he get an at-bat on that Saturday afternoon as he became the first NYU alumnus to play in the big leagues.

Shortly thereafter, Davis was optioned to Newark of the International League, where he played regularly in the second half of the season and finished with a .290 batting average in 78 games.

On December 18, 1926, Davis married his high-school sweetheart, Myrtle Prout, the daughter of a former Bridgeport police captain. Four years later they became the parents of George Jr.

On the baseball front, this was the beginning of a frustrating five-year period for Kiddo Davis. He distinguished himself at minor-league waystops yet was unable to return to the majors. In 1927 he failed to hit well with Nashville of the Southern Association (.220) and Reading of the International League (.267), and was shipped to Hartford of the Eastern League. Playing center field for the Senators, he won the EL batting title with a .349 average. Presto. His contract was sold to St. Paul of the American Association.

Davis, who stood 5-feet-11 and weighed 178 pounds, developed into a star during the next four summers with the Double-A Saints, hitting above .300 each year (.310, .315, .366, .343) and fielding superbly. In the latter season he reached career highs in hits (214), runs scored (134), home runs (26), triples (15), total bases (358), and stolen bases (24). Finally, the Philadelphia Phillies took notice and purchased his contract.

The 1932 Phillies, managed by Burt Shotton, proved surprisingly competitive, finishing in fourth place — their highest finish in 15 years — with a 78-76 record. Davis was a perfect complement to sluggers Chuck Klein (.348, 38 homers, 137 RBIs), Don Hurst (.339, 24 homers, 143 RBIs) and Pinky Whitney (.298, 13 homers, 124 RBIs).

As a 30-year-old rookie, Davis put forth the finest of his eight major-league seasons. After a slow start, he wound up batting a career-best .309, amassed 178 hits, including 39 doubles, scored 100 runs and drove in 57. His 16 stolen bases placed fifth in the league.

Davis hit the first of his 19 home runs off Brooklyn Dodgers relief pitcher Fred Heimach, a left-hander, at Baker Bowl on April 29, 1932. The Phillies won handily, 13-6.

In the field Davis ranked second among National League outfielders in putouts (411) and fourth in assists (15), and tied with Cincinnati’s Babe Herman with six double plays. Veteran writers were labeling him the Phils’ finest center fielder since Dode Paskert, who starred on the club’s 1915 pennant winner.

On December 15, 1932, Davis was stunned to learn that he was a key component in a three-club, five-player deal that sent him to the Giants. New York parted with veteran outfielder Fred Lindstrom, who went to the Pittsburgh Pirates, and outfielder Chick Fullis, who became Phillies property.

The Giants’ new manager, first baseman Bill Terry, was delighted to have Davis’s defensive skills in center field; he was second among league outfielders with a .988 percentage. And although he batted just .258 (augmented by a personal-best seven homers) for the season, he was considered an important contributor as the club won the 1933 pennant.

The Chicago Cubs trailed the Giants by just 5½ games on September 15 when New York arrived in Wrigley Field for a four-game series. With superb pitching from Hal Schumacher and Hi Bell, the latter working in relief of Roy Parmelee, the Giants swept the pair, 5-1 and 4-0.

In the opener Davis contributed a pair of hits and a run scored in four at-bats before being ejected for decking Cubs reliever Pat Malone, a husky 200-pounder, in a fight in the eighth inning.

The disturbance had its genesis in the fourth inning when Malone’s high hard one sailed too close to Davis’s head. “Davis yelled that he would come out after Pat if he sent up another bean ball,” reported the next day’s New York Sun. “Davis then singled, and he got another single in the sixth, and this incensed Malone, and he said he would take a punch at Davis the next chance he got.

“In the eighth Davis grounded out to Bill Herman and Malone swaggered over to the first-base line as Davis ran for the bag. ‘Well, I got you that time,’ said Pat, ‘and I’ll get you again, and right now.’ And with that Malone threw down his glove at Davis’ feet and swung a right that just grazed Davis’ face. Davis feinted with his right and cleverly crossed his left to the button.”

Two stitches were needed to close the cut on Malone’s chin. Said Giants pitcher Fred Fitzsimmons: “I could hear Malone’s teeth rattle where I was sitting in the dugout.”1

New York Times columnist John Kieran, in praising Terry’s managerial expertise, wrote: “Just what particular charm he used on Hughey Critz, George Davis or Joe Moore is still a mystery, but it brought results. If a great stop was needed to save the day, one of them would make it. If a hit was required to win a ball game, the weakest hitter on a weak-hitting team would rap a rousing blow to safe territory.”2

In the Giants’ World Series victory over the Washington Senators in five games, Davis elevated his batting to all-star level. Hitting safely in each of the five games, the 31-year-old center fielder went 7-for-19 at the plate, a .368 average. He outhit all of his better-known teammates save Mel Ott, who checked in with a .389 average (7-for-18) Terry, a lifetime .341 hitter, batted just .273 in the Series.

Davis appeared in another World Series with the Giants, in 1936, but not before he wore the uniform of two other teams. Seeking better hitting in 1934, the world champs dispatched him to the Cardinals for another outfielder, George Watkins, just as spring training was winding down.

Davis got off to a .303 start as a part-time outfielder with the Redbirds, the rollicking bunch known as the Gas House Gang. With Dizzy Dean, Joe Medwick, Pepper Martin, Rip Collins, Leo Durocher, and player-manager Frankie Frisch, among others, St. Louis was stocked with colorful, outspoken characters who played hard and well. They nosed out the Giants by two games for the pennant and defeated the Detroit Tigers in the World Series.

With an outfield of Medwick, Jack Rothrock, and Ernie Orsatti, though, Davis was deemed expendable and, on June 15, he was traded back to the Phillies for Chick Fullis. He played in 100 games for the seventh-place Phils and batted .293. For the second straight year, Davis ranked second among league outfielders with a .988 fielding percentage.

Bill Terry realized that he had erred in trading Kiddo Davis away and admitted as much. “Trading Davis for Watkins was the worst boner I pulled as manager of the Giants,” he said.3 In late December the club reacquired the outfielder from the Phillies in exchange for Joe Bowman, a second-year pitcher, and cash.

“Of course I am tickled to be back in New York, which is the ballplayers’ paradise,” Dan Daniel quoted Davis as saying. “I’m in good shape right now. I work out nearly every day, never indoors. Right now I do a lot of ice skating. During the fall I played football — not the hard, tackling game but one suited for conditioning rather than injuries.”4

The Giants had supplemented their outfield of Ott and Jo-Jo Moore with a hard-hitting newcomer, Hank Leiber. A rookie of promise, Jimmy Ripple, joined the squad in 1936. So Davis was relegated to backup duty the next two seasons, often as a defensive replacement in the late innings. He batted .264 in 47 games for a third-place Giants team in 1935, and just .239 in a like number of games the following year, when Terry’s club held off charges from the Cardinals and Cubs and won the National League pennant by five games. Davis did, however, thump a pair of home runs as a pinch-hitter in 1935.

In the 1936 World Series, against the Yankees, Kiddo Davis made four appearances, twice as a pinch-hitter and twice as a pinch-runner. In Game Two he singled off Lefty Gomez and scored a run. But the Yanks won in a rout, 18-4. Davis entered the fourth game as a pinch-runner for Sam Leslie in the eighth inning and scored the Giants’ second run in a 5-2 Yankee triumph.

In the Series finale — and what would be his World Series coda — Davis flied out to left against Yankee reliever Johnny Murphy in the eighth inning as the Bronx Bombers wrapped up the fall classic in six games with a 13-5 victory at the Polo Grounds. When the 1937 season opened, he was 35 years old and still the Giants’ principal outfield backup behind Ott, Moore, and Ripple. The club would win yet another pennant, but Davis wasn’t present for the celebration. He refused to accept a demotion to Jersey City (International League) in late July, and the Giants sold him to the Cincinnati Reds, a last-place outfit, on August 4. Combined, he batted .259 in 96 games. Still, there were moments with the Reds when Davis provided a glimpse of past glories. In a 4-1 triumph over the Dodgers at Crosley Field on August 7, he took away a pair of extra-base hits from Heinie Manush, a lifetime .330 hitter later elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame.

“The first time, he went back to the base of the centerfield wall which is far enough from the home plate to be in another county and caught a prodigious poke,” Tommy Holmes wrote in the Brooklyn Eagle.  “On the second occasion, he executed a spinning, diving catch of a line drive that Heinie seemed to have safely propelled down the left center alley.”5

Davis began to have mixed feelings about continuing his baseball career; in fact, he announced — and then rescinded — his retirement during the Reds’ 1938 spring training. “A few days ago I thought I had enough of baseball. I thought I could not do justice to myself or my club as a utility player, and I believed the honest thing to do was quit,” he said an Associated Press dispatch. ”It was just one big mistake.”6

Davis eventually joined the Reds in early April, but appeared in just five games and batted .278. He concluded the summer with Jersey City, hitting just .202 against International League pitching before being released by Cincinnati on August 1.

“I was lucky to be allowed the privilege to play a game I loved and receive pay for it,” he later told columnist Edward J. Shugrue of the Bridgeport Sunday Post.7

Unlike so many of his peers, Davis was prepared for post-baseball life. Already a partner in an accounting firm in his native Bridgeport before his playing days ended, he earned a comfortable living as a certified public accountant for many years.

Although out of the limelight, Davis was well-remembered by his home state’s sports community. In 1962 he was presented the coveted Gold Key award at the Connecticut Sports Writers’ Alliance’s  annual dinner. Former Yankees pitcher Frank “Spec” Shea (Naugatuck) and Maurice Podoloff (New Haven), the founding president of the National Basketball Association, were the other recipients.

A decade later, Davis was inducted into the New York University Sports Hall of Fame along with basketball All-American Sid Tanenbaum and Emil Von Elling, who coached the Violets track teams for more than 40 years. He later was joined in the NYU Hall of Fame by three other major leaguers of note, Ralph Branca, Eddie Yost, and Sam Mele.

Kiddo Davis died at the age of 81 on March 4, 1983. He was survived by his wife and son; two grandchildren, Ellen and James; and several nieces and nephews.

Sources

The author is indebted to George W. Davis, Jr. and Edna Miller, Kiddo Davis’s niece, for sharing their memories of the late outfielder in interviews during the spring of 2013.

“A Great Player Leaves Our Midst,” Connecticut Elders, April 1983.

Ancestry.com.

Associated Press, “Repairs Among Median Line Helped Giants to Win National Loop Flag,” September 23, 1935.

The Baseball Encyclopedia,10th Edition (New York: Macmillan, Edition, 1996).

Baseball-Reference.com.

Bielawa, Michael J., Bridgeport Baseball (Charleston, South Carolina: Arcadia Publishing, 2003).

Burr, Harold C., “Young George Davis Looks Like Fixture in Phillies’ Garden,” New York Post, undated.

Burr, Harold C., “Davis New King of Giant Corps,” New York Post, April 4, 1936.

Cohen, Leonard, “Davis of N.Y.U. Batting Fame Joins Yankees,” New York Evening World, June 4, 1926.

Daniel, Dan, “Terry Gives Joe Bowman and Cash for Outfielder,” New York World-Telegram, December 13, 1934.

Daniel, Dan, “George Davis, Back with Giants, Hopes He’s Now Off that Baseball Carousel,” New York World-Telegram, January 5, 1935.

“Daniel’s Dope,” New York World-Telegram, April 9, 1932.

Davis, George “Kiddo,” Obituary. Bridgeport Post-Telegram, March 5, 1983.

Davis, George “Kiddo,” Obituary. New York Times, March 8, 1983.

“Davis Will Rejoin Reds; Decision to Quit ‘Mistake,’” New York Times, April 10, 1938.

Drebinger, John, “Davis, Outfield ‘Insurance Man,’ Accepts Contract with Giants,” New York Times, January 13, 1937.

“Frothy Facts,” New York World-Telegram, July 3, 1934.

George “Kiddo” Davis’s file at the National Baseball Hall of Fame library, Cooperstown, New York.

Graham, Frank, Lou Gehrig: A Quiet Hero (New York: G.P. Putnam’s Sons, 1942).

Holmes, Tommy, “Flock Tumbled To 7th Place in 4 to 1 Setback,” Brooklyn Eagle, August 8, 1937.

“Kiddo Davis Honored,” New York Times, March 6, 1971.

“Kiddo Davis Too Tough for Chicago Pitcher in Personal Battle,” New York Sun, September 16, 1933.

Kieran, John, “Sports of the Times: Black Magic,” New York Times, September (date unavailable), 1933.

McConnell, Bob, and David Vincent, eds., The Home Run Encyclopedia (New York: Macmillan, 1996).

“N.Y.U. Swatsmith Will Make Tour of West with Yankees,” New York American, June (date unavailable), 1926.

“N.Y.U. to Honor Tanenbaum, Davis and Von Elling,” New York Times, April 23, 1972.

Parker, Charles E., “Davis Defends Bartell,” New York World-Telegram, December 22, 1934.

Retrosheet.com.

Shugrue, Edward J., “Between Ourselves,” Bridgeport Sunday Post (date unavailable), 1946.

Smith, Ken, “Giants Capture Two From Cubs, 5-1, 4-0,” New York Daily Mirror, September 16, 1933.

Notes

1 New York Sun, September 16, 1933.

2 John Kieran, New York Times, September 1933. (Date unavailable)

3 Dan Daniel, New York World-Telegram, December 13, 1934.

4 Dan Daniel, New York World-Telegram, January 5, 1935.

5 Tommy Holmes, Brooklyn Eagle, August 8, 1937.

6 Associated Press, April 9, 1938.

7 Edward J. Shugrue, Bridgeport Sunday Post, 1946. (Date unavailable)

Suggesting that a player was not good enough to make the 1927 New York Yankees is hardly an insult. The original Murderers Row is widely considered the greatest club ever to take the field. Spud Davis’ first opportunity to break into the major leagues was with the ‘27 Yankees , and while he did not make that club he did go on to have a very good major-league career, including playing for a World Series winner with the St. Louis Cardinals.

Virgil Lawrence Davis was born December 20, 1904 in Birmingham, Alabama, the son of John and Kate Davis. According to the 1910 census, the Davis family lived in the household of Kate Davis’ mother Zillah Schwinn in the Jefferson neighborhood of Birmingham. The household listed ten different people (including Spud’s sister, Helen) with six different last names. By 1920 Virgil’s family lived in a different household in Jefferson as the step-son of George Hanlin, who by this time was married to Virgil’s mother. Whether John Davis passed away or was separated from Kate Davis is unknown.

Davis attended high school at Gulf Coast Military Academy in Gulfport, Mississippi, where he starred in the offensive backfield and defensive line for the football team that won the 1922 Mississippi state title. Davis broke into professional baseball in 1926, hitting .356 for the Gulfport Tarpons of the Class D Cotton States League. He split his time between catcher and third base. In September 1926 Davis’ contract was purchased from Gulfport by the New York Yankees, setting up a chance for Spud to make an impact upon perhaps the greatest baseball team of all time. The exact dollar figure that Yankees paid for his rights was not reported, but the sum “was said to be large.”1

Davis did not make the roster of the legendary team, but Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis ruled that the Yankees had too many players out on option. Landis then subjected a few of the players, including Davis, to waivers where they could be claimed by another team, and Davis was snagged by the St. Louis Cardinals.

Spud played the 1927 season for the Reading (PA) Keystones of the Class AA International League, an affiliate of the Chicago Cubs. Catching almost every day, Davis hit .308 for the season, his last minor-league action for 20 years.

Davis made his major-league debut on April 30, 1928 as the Cardinals played host to the Reds. He started behind the dish for the Redbirds, opposite Bill Sherdel on the hill. Davis went 0-2 at the plate before Ray Blades pinch hit for him. Davis’ next game on May 8 was a 15-4 shellacking of the Phillies in which Davis recorded his first hit, run, RBI, and walk in the major leagues.

After only those two games with the Cardinals, Davis was traded on May 11 to the Philadelphia Phillies with two other players for a package of three players highlighted by catcher Jimmie Wilson. While Davis left the pennant-winning Cardinals for the 43-109 Phillies, he didn’t mind the switch, saying many years later that he was happy to go anywhere that he could get a chance to play.2 Spud hit his first career home run on with the Phillies on June 8, taking Sheriff Blake of the Cubs deep for a game-winning three-run shot in the bottom of the eighth of the Phillies’ 6-5 win. Davis finished his rookie season hitting .280 with three home runs and 19 RBIs for the last-place Phillies, who finished 51 games behind the Cardinals squad he had begun the season with. Davis split the catching duties for the Phillies with fellow rookie backstop Walt Lerian.

Lerian and Davis again split time behind the plate for the Phillies in 1929. Spud appeared in 98 games, hitting .342, his first of seven straight seasons at or above .300 and ten seasons overall throughout his career.

Davis became the Phillies’ primary backstop in 1930, not so much because of his play but because of tragedy. Just weeks after the conclusion of the 1929 season, Walt Lerian was killed in Baltimore when a delivery truck jumped a curb at a trolley stop and caught him as it ran into a building.

From 1930-33, Davis was one of the best offensive catchers in baseball, averaging a .333 batting average with ten home runs and 63 RBIs. While the Phillies of this era struggled in the standings (finishing above .500 in 1932 for the only time between 1918 and 1948), the team routinely put up impressive offensive numbers, no doubt helped by playing their home games in the hitter-friendly confines of the Baker Bowl.

Davis had one of his best years in 1933. He hit .349 for the Phillies while playing in 141 of the team’s 152 games. Davis’ batting average was good enough for second in the National League and third in all of baseball, trailing only each league’s batting champ, teammate Chuck Klein in the National League and Jimmie Foxx of Philadelphia’s other major-league team. in the American League. Spud’s .395 on-base percentage was also second in the NL, again trailing only Klein.

Despite his tremendous success with the bat, Davis was not seen as an exceptional defender. He struggled with weight issues, thus making catching more difficult, and routinely ranked among the league leaders in stolen bases allowed. Likely because of how many runners attempted to steal against him, Davis also routinely ranked among leaders in runners caught stealing. He did lead the league’s catchers in fielding percentage with a .994 mark in 1931, committing only three errors and contributing 78 assists from behind the dish.

In November, the Phillies traded away the top two hitters in the National League, sending Chuck Klein to the Cubs and Davis back to the Cardinals, with Jimmie Wilson again serving as the primary player opposite Spud in a trade. Wilson became the Phillies’ player-manager, and Davis became the Cardinals’ primary catcher. In contrast to his excitement in joining the Phillies in 1928, Davis expressed greater joy in returning to the Cardinals, saying, “Who wouldn’t throw his arm off for this bunch after getting away from the Phillies?”3

The 1930’s era St. Louis Cardinals have gone down in history as the Gashouse Gang, the scrappy, unkempt squad known for its antics as much as its play. Colorful characters such as Pepper Martin, Dizzy Dean, and Leo Durocher filled the roster. The Gashouse Gang was not just colorful, however- it was really good. The Cardinals won the National League pennant in 1930, and won the World Series in 1931 and again in 1934.

In some respects, the 6-1 200 pound Alabaman did not fit in with the roughhouse image of the Gang. A contemporary writer referred to Spud as “the personification of the Southern Gentleman… He does not strut into hotel lobbies, on main thoroughfares, or on the ball field. The Spud does not poke his nose into an open conversation but is reserved and retiring. He does not hoard his money, dresses in the height of fashion, enjoys good shows and is fond of movies.” Davis also spoke with a heavy southern drawl.4

On the other hand, doesn’t a team like the Gashouse Gang need to have a catcher named Spud? The nickname was given to Davis by an uncle in his childhood. “I liked potatoes so much early in life that I was nicknamed Spud,” Davis explained. “But I loved baseball more than potatoes, so I cut them out.”5

Like many ballplayers, Davis was superstitious. For a few days in July of 1934 he asked pitcher Dazzy Vance to recite a Seminole prayer over his bat before going up to hit. One game when Vance was in the bullpen, Spud went hitless. For the next game, in Boston against the Braves, Vance performed the ritual for Davis before his at-bats in the second and fourth innings, and Davis got two hits. Vance was in the bullpen for Davis’ fifth-inning at-bat, and Davis grounded out with two runners on. Seeing that he was likely to come to the plate in the seventh, David begged reserve infielder Pat Crawford to take his bat to the bullpen for Vance to perform the ritual. “Much against his better judgment, (Crawford) carried the Davis war club out to the bullpen for the Vance Seminole medicine. Vance willingly quit warming up for a minute, stroked the bat affectionately and muttered the words of the Seminole chiefs. Crawford, feeling very foolish, carried the bat back to the dugout and the happy Davis strode to the plate with the bases filled and whacked a single through the box. Two runs scored on the base hit of the Seminole medicine.”6 Davis had three hits, two RBIs, and scored two runs in the 5-3 Cardinals victory.

Davis caught 94 games for the Cardinals in 1934 but made only two appearances in the seven-game World Series victory over the Tigers, both as a pinch hitter. He singled in both at bats, and following his hit in Game Four was pinch run for by Dizzy Dean. Dean was subsequently knocked unconscious when he was hit in the head by a throw by Detroit shortstop Billy Rogell. Dean eventually came to and started on the mound for the Cardinals the next day.

After the 1934 World Series championship season, Davis played two more seasons for the Cardinals. 1935 was the last of Spud’s seven consecutive seasons hitting above .300, notching a final tally of .317. While Davis may have been the perfect Southern gentleman, he wasn’t above getting into an altercation with a teammate. Davis was catching for Dizzy Dean one game against the Reds, and Dean felt that Davis didn’t try hard enough to catch a foul ball and requested of manager Frankie Frisch that Davis not catch Dean anymore. While teammates sided with Davis in the spat, Frisch bent to his star pitcher’s wishes.7

In December of ‘36 he was sold to the Cincinnati Reds along with infielder Charlie Gelbert. He would never again appear in as many as 100 games in a single season. Davis struggled with the Reds, seeing his average drop to a career-low .268 in 1937. Late in the season when manager Chuck Dressen and his coaching staff were relieved of their duties, Davis added the role of assistant coach to his primary role as the team’s backup catcher.8 He played in only 12 games for the Reds in 1938 before again being traded to the Phillies, where he remained through the end of the 1939 season. Davis witnessed the first of Johnny Vander Meer’s consecutive no-hitters, but his trade to the Phillies was completed between the two games.9

At the end of the 1939 season Davis was about to turn 35 years old and had not had a particularly successful season since the 1935 campaign in St. Louis. Around this time Frankie Frisch, Davis’ old teammate and manager with the Cardinals, took over as the skipper of the Pittsburgh Pirates. Frisch’s first move after taking the reins was to purchase Davis from the Phillies.

As a 12-year veteran of the major leagues, Davis had carved out a decent living for himself in Depression-Era America. His 1940 U.S. census record indicates that he earned greater than $5,000 for the year (around $85,000 in 2013 dollars) and that he had other sources of income than just playing baseball. Spud, his wife Helen, and son Virgil, also had a live-in housekeeper, another sign that the Depression was not as severe for the Davis clan as for many American families.

Davis spent two seasons with the Pirates, regaining his .300 form with (hitting for ; note-Davis hit .307 with the Phillies in 1939.) a .326 average in 99 games for Pittsburgh 1940. At the end of the 1941 season he was released from the active roster with the understanding that he would have a role in the organization, whether as a coach, minor-league manager, or scout.10 Two months after his October release Spud was named a coach on Frankie Frisch’s staff, a position he would hold through the 1943 season.

In 1944, with the U.S. involved in World War II across Europe and the Pacific, the supply of young men available to play major-league baseball was diminished. As such, the Pirates needed a catcher and found one on their own coaching staff, as Spud Davis strapped on the tools of ignorance once again and resumed his playing career at age 39 after a two-year absence. Appearing in 54 games as a backup to starting catcher Al Lopez, “Old Folks” (as Davis was referred to in the Pirate dugout) again hit over .300, logging a .301 average in 93 at-bats. 11 After one more season on the field during the similarly war-affected 1945, Davis retired back to coaching for the 1946 season. It proved to be his last with the Pirates, as Frisch was let go as manager late in the season and Davis served as the interim skipper for the Pirates’ last three games.

Spud was offered the job as the manager of the Class AA Birmingham Barons for the 1947 season, but he declined, preferring to stay with the Pirates organization that had employed him since 1940. No longer a coach, Davis served as a scout in 1947 while also finding time to play 120 games for the Class D Alexander City (AL) Millers of the Georgia-Alabama League. Davis played for Alexander City again in 1948 as a 43-year-old, but had given up his job as a scout for the Pirates to devote more time to a sheet metal business he owned in Birmingham.12

Davis made one more foray into major-league baseball, joining his old pal Frankie Frisch as an assistant coach when Frisch took over as the permanent manager of the Chicago Cubs for the 1950 season. He remained with the Cubs until the conclusion of the 1953 season, two years after Frisch’s departure.

After being let go by the Cubs, Davis retired to his hometown of Birmingham, living on his baseball pension and a bit of money he had saved from his career in the game.13 He was inducted into the Alabama Hall of Fame in 1977. He remained in Birmingham from the time he retired until his death on August 14, 1984 at the age of 79, after which he was buried at Birmingham’s Elmood Cemetery.

Sources

In addition to the sources listed, the author also consulted Ancestry.com and Baseball-Reference.com.

Notes

1 “Yanks Buy Third Baseman.” The New York Times, September 7, 1926, 29.

2 Paul Green. Forgotten Fields. (Waupaca, WI: Parker Publications, 1987), 165.

3 John Heidenry. The Gashouse Gang. (New York: Public Affairs, 2007), 126.

4 G.H. Fleming. The Dizziest Season. (New York: William Morrow, 1984), 89.

5 Michael Eisenbath. The Cardinals Encyclopedia. (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1999), 165.

6 Fleming, 178.

7 Eisenbath, 165.

8 Reading Eagle, September 14, 1937.

9 Green, 167.

10 “Pirates Drop Catcher Davis.” The New York Times, October 3, 1941, 33.

11 Chester Smith, “Davis Predicts Pirates Will Be Tough to Beat.” Pittsburgh Press, March 24, 1945, 8.

12 “Davis Quits Bucs For His Business.” Pittsburgh Press, January 20, 1948, 19.

13 “Gas Housers Best, Davis Claims.” Milwaukee Journal, May 1, 1959, 33.

To the surprise of many, Frisch named Bill Hallahan to take the ball in the deciding game. Hallahan had pitched well in Game Two, but had a no-decision for his effort. Durocher was stunned by the skipper’s choice.  “I don’t want Hallahan. I want Dean,” said the Lip.  “I was still $6,000 in debt, which is just about what the winner’s share is going to come to. The loser’s share, I’m not interested in.”1

Frisch let Dizzy in on the secret: Indeed Diz would be toeing the rubber in Game Seven, but he should keep it a secret to keep the Tigers off balance. Diz later recalled, “Frisch lets on that Hallahan is going to pitch, and the next day, when I come up through the Tigers dugout, which I have to do to get to ours, I set down, just for fun, and all the Detroit players holler at me to get out and go where I belong. So I laugh and start across the field and they holler after me, ‘It’s too bad you aren’t going to pitch today! We’d just love to get another crack at you!’”2

Dean was never at a loss for words, nor did he lack confidence in his ability.  He spotted Detroit slugger Hank Greenberg and said, “Hello Mose. What makes you so white? Boy, you’re shakin’ like a leaf. I get it; you done hear that Old Diz was goin’ to pitch.  Well, you’re right. It’ll all be over in a few minutes.  Old Diz is goin’ to pitch, and he’s goin’ to pin your ears back.”3

Elden Auker was pitching for the Tigers in the third inning of a scoreless tie. With one away, Dizzy came to the plate. He hit a popup foul, to the back of home. Detroit catcher and manager Mickey Cochrane did not give chase, and the foul nestled into the first row of seats. Dean then hit a blooper over third base.  Goose Goslin in left field was slow getting to the ball and Diz never let up, pulling into second base. Pepper Martin hit an infield single to first and Jack Rothrock followed with a walk to load the bases. Frisch doubled, clearing the bases.  After Dean scored, he turned to Cochrane and said, “You’re beat now, Mickey.”4 Indeed, the Cardinals scored seven runs in the frame on their way to an easy 11-0 win and the world championship.  The Dean boys carried the Series, each winning two games.  As it turned out, it may not have mattered whom Frisch chose to pitch on this day.            

Jay Hanna Dean was born on January 16, 1910, in Lucas, Arkansas, near the Arkansas Ozarks.  He was the fourth child born to Monroe and Alma Dean. The two oldest children, Charles and Sarah May, died in infancy. Jay had two brothers, Elmer and Paul. Monroe and Alma worked as sharecroppers, living rent-free and earning a share of the profits for tending to the crops of the landowner, Mrs. Hattie Blair. 

Alma Dean was stricken with tuberculosis and died when Jay was 7 years old. Monroe remarried, taking the widowed Cora Parham as his new wife.  She also had three children and the Dean household doubled in size. The clan moved to Chickalah, about 45 miles southeast of Lucas.  Monroe continued there as a sharecropper.

The Dean family was on the move again in 1925, this time relocating to Spaulding, Oklahoma.  During the harvest season, it was not uncommon for the family to look as far as southern Mississippi for work. Because of the Deans’ picking up stakes, Jay and his siblings did not receive much of a formal education. Tales differ about how long they actually attended school, for even at a young age, Jay would accompany his father to work in the cotton fields.

Another tale that had varying assumptions was why Jay changed his name to Jerome Herman. The most accepted truth is that he had a childhood friend who had died, and in an effort to possibly lessen the pain of the child’s mother, Jay took his friend’s name. Monroe consented to the name change.

Dean, his brothers, and Monroe played sandlot ball around town, in less than adequate conditions. Makeshift equipment was all the players had at their disposal. Nonetheless, the younger Dean boys stood out as superior players, even in their early teen years. 

As the Deans made their way through Texas looking for work, they came upon Fort Sam Houston, near San Antonio.  Jerome remembered how his stepbrothers, Claude and Herman, preached about the good lifestyle the Army provided. He believed that the Army would offer a better standard of living that what he was accustomed to picking cotton and moving around the Southern states like a gypsy. But but he had not yet reached the required age of 18. Monroe consented to Jerome’s wishes and vouched that his son was 18 years old and had an elementary-school education. Although it may have not seemed like the brightest idea at the time, Dean enlisted under his real name of Jay Hanna in 1926. He was assigned to the 3rd Wagon Company of the Quartermaster Corps as a private and for the most part was given menial tasks to complete around the camp.

It did not take Dean long to discover the base’s baseball diamonds. He was given a tryout and quickly gained recognition as one of the better players. He eventually was assigned to the 12th Field Artillery and was promoted to private first class. The news of the hard-throwing youngster spread throughout San Antonio, with many semipro teams vying for his services. But Master Sergeant James K. Brought kept Dean under wraps, and was often a tough disciplinarian with him. After one outing in which Dean struck out 11 batters in a two-hit shutout, Brought sat him down for a chat.  “You see, kid, there was a major-league scout out there today,” said Brought. “A scout from the St. Louis Cardinals. He came all the way down here to see you pitch. I told this scout that you are the clumsiest kid I ever seen going into a windup, but you can throw hard and you have a good curve.” After a pause, Brought added, “I also told him that you were the dizziest kid I ever had in my outfit.” 5

The appellation stuck, and Jay Hanna/Jerome Herman Dean would be known to the world as Dizzy Dean.    

Although the bird-dog scout liked what he saw of Dean, the pitcher was the property of the United States Army.  Over the next two years Dean pitched in barracks leagues on the base.  Just after New Year’s Day in 1929, he was approached about pitching for a semipro team in San Antonio. Since he had served just over two years, he could buy his way out of the Army for $100. Monroe, his father, helped raise the money and civilian Dean reported to work for the San Antonio Public Service Corp.  His day job may have been that of reading gas meters, but his real function was to pitch on the company baseball team. 

He was again spotted by a bird-dog scout, who contacted Don Curtis, a scout for the Cardinals.  Curtis signed Dean to a contract to pitch for the Houston Buffaloes of the Texas League beginning in 1930.  He was to be paid $100 a month.  But as spring training camp broke, he was assigned to St. Joseph (Missouri), a Cardinals affiliate in the Class A Western League.

By this time Branch Rickey had built a stout farm system. He is credited with creating the idea, remarking, “I could find prospects to become the next Hornsbys and Frisches. I would find them young. I would develop them. Pick them from the sandlots and keep them until they were ready for the Cardinals. All I needed was the place to train them.”6  By the time Dean reported to St, Joseph, Rickey’s farm empire stretched from Houston to Greensboro and up to Rochester, New York.       

Dean pitched extremely well for the Saints, considering it was his first year in Organized Baseball. He went 17-8 with a 3.69 earned-run average. “He was better than the rest of us, “said teammate Mace Brown.  “And to have control of his pitches like he did to go with all that speed and to be so young, well, that was rare for the time. You could tell that he was going to be great.”7

The term “Good Ol’ Country Boy” may have fit Dean, as he had a carefree, cavalier attitude about most matters.  His first car was a Ford roadster that he drove off a “U-Drive It” rental lot.  “I don’t think he ever paid for that car or even turned it in,” said teammate Peaches Davis.  “When he got tired of it, he’d park it somewhere and go get another one from somebody else, just like they were free.  We told him that’s not the way you did things, but he’d say sure, and do what he felt like doing. That’s the way he was.”8      

The Buffaloes were vying for the pennant in the Texas League, so Dean was sent to Houston to lend a hand.  He went 8-2 in 14 games, but the team fell short of the mark. He earned a call-up to St. Louis in September. 

When Dean and Houston teammate Tony Kaufman met the Cardinals, the team was at the Polo Grounds in New York in the midst of a pennant race of their own. St. Louis manager Gabby Street kept Dizzy idle until after the Redbirds clinched the flag, on September 26.  Diz made his major-league debut on the 28th against Pittsburgh at Sportsman’s Park.  He went the distance, striking out five Pirates in the 3-1 victory. He singled and scored a run.  “Dizzy and me were sitting side by side on the bench,” said pitcher Burleigh Grimes, whose spikes Dean borrowed because he had lost his own.  “He was as unconcerned as if he was tossing rocks at a mud turtle in the Meramec River.”9

As spring training approached, the Cardinals front office was dealing with another matter, and that was the excessive bills that Dean racked up, charging the purchases to the ballclub.  The figure was up to $2,700 and growing.  Rickey eventually put him on a restricted pay allowance equal to a dollar a day.  Dean was also getting on the nerves of Street, and his teammates. He was loud and incorrigible, broke team rules, and was generally viewed as a pest. Yet, wherever the club went, it was Dean whom the media and fans had the most interest in. This also grated on the veteran players.

Dean opened the 1931 season on the bench. It may have been a form of punishment for his actions, or because the starting rotation was pitching well. In any case he was sent to Houston, where he spent the rest of the season. Despite his grating personality, there was no denying his talent. Dean recorded a 26-10 record for Houston with 11 shutouts. He racked up 303 strikeouts in 304 innings pitched.  The Buffaloes, who played a split-season schedule, won the second-half pennant and Dean was named the league’s Most Valuable Player.

Despite Dean’s achievements, Houston manager Joe Schultz thought it could have been even better.  Dizzy would try to strike out all the good hitters, pitching to their strengths, and often letting up on the weaker hitters.  Schultz believed this was a case of overconfidence, something Dean surely did not lack.

Schultz and Dean went to eat at a diner, each ordering scrambled eggs and bacon. By mistake the kitchen substituted calves’ brains for the bacon. Dizzy, always a big eater, cleaned his plate. He asked the waitress what it was he had eaten and she informed him of the mistake. “What?” he said. “I didn’t order no brains.”  Schultz replied, “Be quiet, she knows what you need.”10

On June 15, 1931, Dean married Patricia Nash of Bond, Mississippi. She took control of Dizzy’s wild spending, and was really like a mother to him in many ways, teaching him manners and picking out his clothes. She was also his business manager, his banker, and his bookkeeper.  They were married for 43 years, and had no children.

Paul Dean had also signed with St. Louis and was making his way through the Cardinals’ minor-league chain.  He was not putting up the numbers Dizzy had, but was still a talented prospect.

In 1932 Dizzy reported to Bradenton, Florida, for spring training, looking for a spot on in the Cardinals rotation. The Redbirds were coming off back-to-back pennant-winning seasons under Street’s leadership. Gabby’s mound corps was stocked with talent, a nice blend of veterans and young arms. Dean was well aware that the Cardinals had won pennants without him.  He was not to be the cure-all for a team that was already winning. 

Pat Dean was ill back home in Mississippi during spring training and Dean made noise about leaving camp to tend to her. He made noise in the papers about how management frowned on young players having their wives accompany them to camp. He actually did leave the team for a while during the regular season, claiming the contract he signed with the Cardinals was invalid because he was underage at the time he signed it. He insisted that he was born in 1912, and that he was only 20 when he agreed to terms.  It was Dean’s way of trying to get more money out of the Cardinals.  But a meeting in Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis’s office set the record straight, as the front office produced a copy of his wedding license, showing that his birth year was indeed 1910.     

Despite his shenanigans, Dean won his last three starts of the season, including a five-hitter against the Reds, to finish the year at 18-15. He was a streaky pitcher, especially in the second half of the season. He lost four, won three, lost two, won four, lost three, and then won three to end the year.  He was by far the team leader in wins, and his 3.50 ERA was second only to Bill Hallahan’s 3.11.  His 191 strikeouts led the league. But as a team St. Louis sank to near the bottom of the standings, tying the New York Giants for sixth place with 72-82 records. 

The Cardinals were in the race in 1933, trailing league-leading New York by 5½ games at the All-Star break. (It was the year of the first All-Star Game.) But they went on a losing skid, dropping nine of 12 games over the next two weeks. They were 46-45 when Street was shown the door. Rickey replaced him with second baseman Frankie Frisch, in spite of Street’s having won two pennants and one world championship in his four years. Frisch, nicknamed the Fordham Flash from his days on the gridiron at Fordham University, had been acquired from the Giants for Rogers Hornsby after the 1926 season. The team played a bit better for Frisch but was never able to get back in the race and finished in fifth place.

Dean won 20 games and lost 18. It was the first of four straight seasons in which he won at least 20. He led the league in strikeouts again with 199. On July 30 against the Chicago Cubs, whiffed 17 batters and went 3-for-4 at the plate, doubling twice, driving in two runs, and scoring once. 

Dizzy summed up his final strikeout this way: “With me havin’ 16 strikeouts already, (Chicago manager) Charlie Grimm sends in Jim Mosolf as a pinch-hitter. As this Mosolf steps up to the plate (catcher Jimmie) Wilson gives him the needle. ‘Jim, you sure are in a tough spot. Ol’ Diz just hates pinch-hitters, and you better look out!’ While Wilson is poundin’ his fist in his big mitt right behind Mosolf’s ear, I just breeze three right across the plate for Strikeout No. 17.”11

Dizzy was a pitchman’s delight, endorsing Grape-Nuts cereal and Lucky Strike cigarettes among many other products. He also took to barnstorming, joining a major-league team that included teammate Pepper Martin, Paul Waner, and Glenn Wright.  J.L. Wilkinson, owner of the Negro Leagues’ Kansas City Monarchs, created a series between the two teams through Nebraska and Kansas. Satchel Paige, Bullet Rogan, and Buck O’Neil were the big stars for the Monarchs.  Paige and Dean stole the show, whipping the crowds into a frenzy.  It was an arrangement that would go on for years.    

Powered by a 22-7 record at Columbus, Paul Dean was invited to spring training in 1934.  “Me ’n Paul” became a favorite refrain of Dizzy’s — especially when he was predicting how many games the two pitchers would win during the season. Paul was quiet in contrast to his older brother.  Sportswriters had a difficult time finding the right nickname for Paul. At first they tried Harpo because he rarely spoke.  But they settled on Daffy, because they found it went better with Dizzy. 

Dizzy was never short on making predictions, either about the Cardinals or about how many games he might win. Before the 1934 season he predicted a pennant for the Redbirds. “How are they going to stop us?” he said. “Paul’s going to be a sensation. He’ll win 18 or 20 games. I’ll count 20 to 25 for myself.  I won 20 last season and I know I’ll pass that figure.”12  It may have surprised Dizzy how prophetic he was come October.

The 1934 Cardinals were basically the same team as the year before, except for the addition of Jack Rothrock in right field and Spud Davis at catcher. Frisch would be at the helm from the start of the year, giving fans optimism since the team had played close to .600 ball after he succeeded Street.

It was Paul who put together an 8-0 start to add stability to the rotation.  Dizzy, who suffered through a miserable April, righted the ship with a 5-0 record and a 1.45 ERA in May. From May 5 through August 5 he posted an 18-2 record. In spite of the fine pitching by the Dean boys, the Cardinals found themselves in third place on August 25, seven games behind front-running New York. 

The end of the season was not without drama. The Cardinals inched closer to the Giants, but with a week left in the season, they found themselves  2½ games out of first place. During spring training, New York skipper Bill Terry, giving his view of the pennant race to the press, had remarked of the Dodgers, “Brooklyn? Are they still in the league?”13  Now, with the pennant in their sights, the Giants closed the season against the rival Dodgers. Terry would have to eat his words, as his club dropped the last five games of the season, the final two to Brooklyn.

As the final week of the season commenced, shortstop Leo Durocher remembered the confidence that Dean was showing in a team meeting:  “I’ll pitch today, and if I get in trouble, Paul will relieve me.  And he’ll pitch tomorrow, and if he gets in trouble I’ll relieve him. And I’ll pitch the next day and Paul will pitch the day after that and I’ll pitch the last one.  Don’t worry, we’ll win five games straight.”14 St. Louis capitalized behind its star pitcher. In the final week of the season, Dean took the ball three times and won all three, going the distance each time. His last two starts were shutouts against Cincinnati. The last win gave him 30 victories; he remains as of 2014 the last pitcher to accomplish the feat in the National League. Paul Dean won the second-to-last game, a 6-1 triumph.  The victory gave him 19 wins, for a total of 49 for the brothers.  For the third straight year, Diz led the league in strikeouts (195). He had seven saves (retrospectively; saves were not a statistic in those days) and a 2.66 ERA. He was named the Most Valuable Player by both the Baseball Writers’ Association of America and The Sporting News. He was named to The Sporting News Major League All-Star team for the first of three straight years. The Cardinals finished two games ahead of New York to claim their fifth pennant.

Facing the Detroit Tigers in the World Series, the Cardinals dispatched the American League champs in seven games. The two teams’ Series rosters had eight future Hall of Famers.15 It was the Cardinals’ third world championship.           

It was not until the next year that the team was given the name the Gas House Gang.  There are varying versions of how and when the name came to be. The 1991 HBO documentary When It Was a Game, compiled largely from home movies taken by players and fans in the 1930s, described the Gas House Gang as “a collection of fast-talking, free-spirited players like Leo Durocher who never ducked a fight and always played hard,” the best team of the era and its most colorful. “Entertaining came naturally to the Gas House Gang, keeping clean, however, was a different matter.”16 New York Yankee Tommy Henrich said, “I saw Frankie Frisch in New Orleans in ’36 when they were the real Gas House Gang. They came around, most of them needed a shave, and every one of them had on a dirty uniform on. I said what a bunch of bums.  Now these are the real Gas House Gang.”17 Cardinals infielder Burgess Whitehead said, “The Gas House Gang was the greatest baseball club I ever saw.  They thought they could beat any ballclub and they just about could too. When they got on that ballfield, they played baseball, and they played it to the hilt too. When they slid, they slid hard. There was no good fellowship between them and the opposition. They were just good, tough ballplayers.”18

Dean was never one to be short on antagonizing the opponent.  He was in rare form after he pitched three innings of a spring-training game against the Giants in Miami. After his day’s work he strolled by the Giants dugout, asking if any of them could cash a check for $5,300.  Which was the winner’s share from the 1934 World Series. Rubbing it in just a bit more, Dean remarked, “I wanna thank you fellas for collapsin’ so we could make all that dough.”19

As good as the Dean bothers were, they were also short-tempered. Paul followed Dizzy at every turn, and it seemed as though every year Dizzy would threaten to hold out and take Paul with him. There was little doubt they were the class of the pitching staff, but they also had massive egos, and often blamed others when the going got tough.  In a game against the Phillies, Diz was getting shelled early and responded by “dusting” the Phillies batters.  He threw at one’s head and pelted another.  His ex-batterymate in St. Louis, Jimmie Wilson, was now a backstop in Philadelphia and a close friend.  “It’s getting so you can’t get a base hit off those Deans without getting beaned your next time up,” said Wilson. “They think they can get away with anything, but by God, the Phils have declared war on them.”20  

Dizzy’s response to Wilson’s charge? “You can tell that Wilson he can kiss my ass. Them Phillies can’t hurt anybody. None of ’em can hit a lick.”21

The frustration felt by Dean’s teammates toward him came to a head at Forbes Field in Pittsburgh on June 4, 1935. Staked to a 2-0 lead in the third inning, Dean was a victim of a lackluster defense as Pittsburgh answered back with four runs. All the runs were unearned and Dean was cursing his teammates on the mound. Reasoning that others were not trying, so why should he, Dean began to lob the baseball to the plate as if he were pitching batting practice.  The Pirates showered the field with hard smashes to all corners.  Dizzy started to spout off about the shoddy defense to his teammates in the fifth inning.  A heated exchange ensued between Rip Collins and Dean, with Joe Medwick and Paul Dean joining the fray. Pepper Martin and others interceded and calmed everyone down. 

St. Louis Post-Dispatch sportswriter J. Roy Stockton wrote that Dean’s lobbing the ball to the Pirate hitters was “one of the most unusual and disgraceful exhibitions of childish temper that the writer had ever seen on a baseball diamond.”22

“It was an unwarranted display of temper on Dean’s part,” said Frisch. “I told him if he ever failed again to give his best I’d fine him $5,000 and put him under suspension. That’s all.  It’s a closed incident.”23  Dean was contrite but as usual had to throw in a comment. “The best thing the Cardinals can do is trade me.  I’m not goin’ to stand for this stuff. As for Medwick, I’ll crack him on his Hungarian beezer.”24

Word of the incident reached home, and when Dean made his next start, five days later, he took the mound with not so much as a cheer from the 14,000 in attendance at Sportsman’s Park.  He breezed through the first two innings and when he came to bat in the bottom of the second frame, a cascade of boos greeted him.  A dozen or so lemons were thrown in his direction from the upper deck. Different accounts had Dean either crying or acting unfazed by the demonstration.

Nonetheless, Dean went on to have his second-best season with a record of 28-12 and a 3.04 ERA. Paul again was second on the team with 19 victories.  But it was not enough this time, with St. Louis finishing second to Chicago by four games.

Dean had another great year in 1936, going 24-13. He was sailing along the next season, 1937, winning his first five games. At the All-Star break he was 12-7 and was given the starting assignment for the National League in the midsummer classic. In the third inning Cleveland’s Earl Averill smashed a line drive back through the box. It hit Dean on the left foot and caromed to second base, where Billy Herman grabbed it and threw out Averill. The end result was a broken left toe that kept Dean out of the lineup for weeks.

On July 21 in Boston, Dean insisted that he was OK to pitch.  Frisch relented, and Dean went out and pitched well, but lost 2-1.  “I was unable to pivot my left foot because my toe hurt too much,” said Dean, “with the result I was pitchin’ entirely with my arm and puttin’ all the pressure on it and I felt a soreness in the ol’ flipper right away. I shouldn’ta been out there.”25

It was diagnosed as bursitis, and the treatment prescribed was rest. Dean made sporadic starts the remainder of the year, his last outing coming on September 8.

The next year, Dean was traded to the rival Cubs on April 16, just before Opening Day. The Cardinals got pitchers Curt Davis and Clyde Shoun, outfielder Tuck Stainback, and $185,000.  Dean was at a loss for words when he heard of the trade, after a Cardinals-Browns exhibition game at Sportsman’s Park.  “I’ll hate to leave the fellas, but I am glad to go to Chicago,” he said.26 Rickey, who had been talking to the Cubs about a possible trade, did not follow his own advice: Trade a player a year too early rather than a year too late.

Dean was used as a spot starter by the Cubs, a role in which he flourished.  His record was 7-1 with a 1.81 ERA, but he started only ten games. One of his early wins was against his old Cardinal mates, and he shut them out in a 5-0 victory.  Chicago was in the midst of a dogfight for the flag with Pittsburgh.  Manager Gabby Hartnett called on Dean to pitch a crucial game on September 27 against the Pirates at Wrigley Field.  Dean got the win in a 2-1 victory, pulling the Cubs to within a half-game of first place.  He went 8⅔ innings, striking out none. 

The victory was part of a ten-game winning streak for Chicago, which won the pennant by a slim two games. The Cubs met the New York Yankees in the World Series, and were swept in four games. Dean started the second game, losing to Lefty Gomez, 6-3.

Used similarly in 1939, Dean was 6-4 with a 3.36 ERA. He started the 1940 season in the Cubs’ rotation, but did not have much success.  At his request he was sent down to the Tulsa Oilers in early June so that he could work on a new side-arm delivery. He was 8-8 at Tulsa; his pitching ability brought mixed reviews. Dean returned to the mound for the Cubs on September 11 and won two of his four starts to finish at 3-3 for the season.

Diz toed the rubber on April 25, 1941 at Forbes Field.  He was the starting pitcher and surrendered three runs to the Pirates (two of them earned) in one inning of work. The pain in his arm was too severe, and he lamented that perhaps he should have given up the game four years earlier.  In a letter to Chicago general manager Jim Gallagher dated May 14; Dean asked to be placed on the voluntary retired list for the remainder of the season. The Cubs granted his request, but at the behest of Owner Philip K. Wrigley, Dean was offered a job as a first base coach, as well as to help out with the team’s young hurlers.  Dean jumped at the opportunity. He closed the book on his major-league career with a 150-83 record and a 3.02 ERA.  He had 1,163 strikeouts.  His number 17 was retired by the St. Louis Cardinals in 1974.    

While Diz was coaching in Chicago, the Falstaff Brewery Corporation of St. Louis reached out to him to broadcast Cardinals and Browns games over the radio.  Wrigley thought it was a wonderful idea and offered to help Dean with the financial details of the deal. On July 6, 1941, Dean’s brief coaching career came to a halt. The sponsor wanted a person with drawing power to team with local announcer Johnny O’Hara.  Where O’Hara was smooth, meticulous and had a command of proper grammar and pronunciation, Dean mangled it.

Many radio stations were reluctant to broadcast ballgames. They were difficult to program since the length of games was uncertain. At times other programming might be sacrificed.  Because stations were hesitant to air baseball games, Dean and O’Hara only broadcast home games. Forking over money for travel expenses was out of the question.  The games were split between WEW and WTMV radio stations.

 Dean hit the airwaves on July 10, 1941, broadcasting a Yankees-Browns game in his debut.  He was a fan favorite, even though he distorted the English language. Although some chalked it up to his lack of an education, others felt that he made mistakes on purpose to draw attention to himself.   “Diz always knew what he was doing,” said Mel Allen.  “The things he came up with — a guy sludding into third — they were professional. I’ll never forget:  He said ‘slid’ correctly, by mistake, and he corrected himself.  He wanted to goof up — it was a part of the vaudeville.”27 O’Hara was a perfect foil for Dean’s antics. Wrote J.G. Taylor Spink, editor of The Sporting News, “Contrary to the thought of some, Dizzy is no clown over the air.  True, he uses an informal, colorful style, establishing his own rules of grammar.  But this only adds to the interest of his broadcasts, which give listeners an accurate picture of what is transpiring on the diamond.”28  

In 1947, Dean and O’Hara were relegated to broadcasting Browns’ games exclusively.  Diz, never one to hold back an opinion, criticized the St. Louis pitching staff.  He asked what right they had to cash their paychecks when all they offered was shoddy pitching.  He claimed that he could throw just as well or even better than those currently on the roster.  The team’s hitters were also taken to task.  The Browns’ organization signed Dean to a one-game contract, as he was to start the final game of the year.  Undoubtedly their motive was to entice more folks through the turnstiles. The ploy worked as over 15,000 patrons attended the contest.  On September 28, 1947 against the White Sox, Dean started and pitched four scoreless innings.  He even managed a base hit in his only at bat.     

Dean also called games for the Yankees and Boston Braves. Later he moved over to the television side, calling the Game of the Week, first for ABC and then CBS. 

A movie about Dean’s life, The Pride of St. Louis premiered in 1952. Dan Dailey was cast in the lead role.

On July 27, 1953, Dean was inducted into the National Baseball Hall of Fame.  He called the enshrinement his “greatest honor” and ended his speech saying, “The Good Lord was good to me. He gave me a strong body, a good right arm and a weak mind.”29 Dizzy retired to Bond, Mississippi.  He died on July 17, 1974, as the result of a heart attack in Reno, Nevada. He was survived by Pat, and brother Paul.  

At the conclusion of the World Series in 1934, Tigers outfielder Goose Goslin, chatting with a reporter about the Series, said, “This Dizzy Dean they’re all talking about told the boys what he’s going to do to them, but after listening for a while I kind of liked the kid. There’s no real harm in him.”30

Right on, Goose.

Sources

(Other than those mentioned in the notes)

Fleming, G.H., The Dizziest Season {New York: Morrow, 1984).

Gay, Timothy M., Satch, Dizzy & Rapid Robert (New York: Simon & Schuster, 2010).

Golenbock, Peter, The Spirit of St. Louis (New York: Avon Books, 2000).

Peterson, Richard, The St. Louis Baseball Reader (Columbia: University of Missouri Press), 2006.

stlouis.cardinals.mlb.com/index.jsp?c_id=stl

baseball-reference.com/

retrosheet.org/

baseballhall.org/

Notes

1 Vince Staten, Ol’ Diz: A Biography of Dizzy Dean (New York: Harper Collins, 1992), 147.

2 Staten, 148.

3 Ibid.

4 Staten, 150.

5 John Heidenry, The Gashouse Gang (New York: Perseus Books, 2007), 37.

6 Robert Gregory, Diz: The Story of Dizzy Dean and Baseball During the Great Depression (New York: Viking, 1992), 39.

7 Gregory, 43.

8 Gregory, 44.

9 Gregory, 50

10 Gregory, 66.

11 Staten, 93.

12 Staten, 103

13 Gregory, 122.

14 Staten, 133.

15 National Baseball Hall of Fame (Hank Greenberg, Charlie Gehringer, Mickey Cochrane, Goose Goslin, Joe Medwick, Frankie Frisch, Leo Durocher, Dizzy Dean).

16 HBO Productions, When It Was a Game, 1991.

17 When It Was a Game.

18 When It Was a Gamne.

19 Gregory, 250.

20 Gregory, 256.

21 Ibid.

22 Staten, 165

23 Gregory, 257.

24 Ibid.

25 Gregory, 336.

26 Gregory, 343.

27 Curt Smith, Voices of the Game, (South Bend, Indiana: Diamond Communications, 1987), 102.

28 Gregory, 368.

29 Staten, 255.

30 Heidenry, 220.

The younger and less talkative brother of Dizzy Dean, Paul Dee “Daffy” Dean was born on August 14, 1913,1 to sharecroppers Albert Monroe “Ab” Dean and Alma Nelson Dean in Lucas, Logan County, Arkansas. Albert and Alma had five children, two of whom, Charles and Sarah May, died in infancy. Paul had two older brothers, Elmer, born in 1908, and Jay Hanna — to be known later as Dizzy — in 1910. Alma contracted tuberculosis and died in 1918, leaving Ab with three young sons. He later remarried.

The Dean family moved to Chickalah, Arkansas, then to Spaulding, Oklahoma, migrating to where they could find work. Their best annual profit from cotton-picking and sharecropping came to $155 in 1923.2

The sons learned baseball from their father, once a semipro ballplayer, but most who knew Alma said that the Dean brothers inherited much of their athletic ability from their mother, known as a “superb girl athlete with natural ability.”3

The Deans fashioned their baseballs out of yarn or socks wound around a rock, or tape around an apple core, and used an old broom or hoe handle for a bat. Not able to afford shoes, they played barefooted most of the time. They strengthened their arms and sharpened their aim by throwing at squirrels while working in the fields. Paul could usually pick about 500 pounds of cotton a day. Jay (Dizzy) never reached 400, and their dad usually did only 200 pounds, because he had to keep checking on Jay.4

The boys usually stayed home to work, and attended school sporadically. They made sure to go to class on Fridays, however, to play in the weekly baseball games, where Jay and Paul began to shine. At 12, Paul was the biggest boy in his class.

An often-told story relates a time when Elmer became separated from his father and brothers when they were driving in two vehicles. Driving the second vehicle, Elmer was cut off from the others by a long freight train. He was not reunited with his family until a couple of years later when he recognized his brothers in pictures in a Dallas newspaper.

At first Paul played shortstop and Dizzy pitched for a San Antonio semipro team, until Jay signed with the Cards. One day Paul came in to pitch when the regular pitcher was knocked out of the game. He stayed a pitcher from then on.5

At 16 Paul made a strong impression with an industrial team in San Antonio in 1930. After a tip from Jay, now called Dizzy, Don Curtis, a scout for the Cardinals, signed Paul to play for the Houston Buffs in the Cardinal farm system. Paul showed similarities to his older brother, but soon distinguished himself as “a serious youngster and not at all given to the horse-play” that characterized his brother.6

Paul moved quickly on to Columbus of the American Association, then spent the majority of his first year with Springfield of the Western Association. Promoted to Columbus in 1931, he pitched a no-hit game and led the league with 169 strikeouts.

Now standing 6-feet-3 (an inch taller than Dizzy) and weighing 189 pounds, the right-hander began to dominate at Columbus in 1933, winning 22 games, including another no-hitter, while losing seven. He placed third in the MVP voting for the American Association.

Cardinal fans anxiously awaited “Dizzy the Younger.”7 Cardinals manager Frankie Frisch said Paul could throw the “damnedest, heaviest sinker you ever saw,” adding, “When a batter hit one of those pitches, his hands stung as painfully in July as if he had swung an icicle in December.”8 The elder brother Dean made a famous brag at the beginning of the season that he and Paul would win a total of 45 games that year.9

At Dizzy’s insistence, Paul held out for a better salary before ever pitching for the Cardinals: “If Paul don’t get it, he’s goin’ back to Houston and work in a mill for some real money.”10 He said Paul would pitch for nothing until he won at least 15 games, then get $500 per win. General manager Branch Rickey threatened to charge Paul for postage if he continued to send back contracts. Afraid of being demoted back to the minors, Paul started the season on time.

Paul played in only three games in April, then got his first win on May 3, against the Philadelphia Phillies. In his next appearance, on May 11, he got a complete-game win against the New York Giants and Carl Hubbell.

Before his start against the Giants, while on a train back to St Louis from Pittsburgh, Paul shared a double porterhouse with Dizzy in the dining car. Frisch suspected that Paul was trying too hard to imitate his older brother. Frisch went through the Giants’ lineup, striking pose after pose in the aisle, but never mentioned Dizzy’s name. “I kept telling Paul he had the stuff to beat them. When I paid the check, he said his only words, ‘Thanks, Mr. Frisch.’”11

Paul also had a temper. Once he got “considerably nettled” because the Giants club would not give him the free passes for a Polo Grounds game that he had requested for a fellow who had given him a harmonica.12 Another time he got in a fight with Joe Medwick during a poker game on a train. Out of the hand, Paul took a quick look at Medwick’s hole card. Medwick took offense and slugged Dean, who then jumped on the Cardinal outfielder. “Medwick and me made up,” Paul said later. “We was good friends until the day he died.”13

Dizzy continued to push for a raise for Paul. On June 1, though it was his turn to pitch, Dizzy sat in the stands in Pittsburgh in civilian clothes in protest, proclaiming that neither he nor Paul would pitch again until the team met their demands. Paul dressed in uniform that day but agreed with his brother, saying, “What Dizzy says is right.”14 No raise came, and Dizzy returned to the team the next day with a complete-game win against the Pirates.

Baseball columnist Joe Williams hailed the one-day strike as a true breakthrough for the players, with little guys taking on the great moguls, and called for more of the same. “The hired hands of baseball ought to start a labor department and put the pitching Deans in charge. Dizzy and Nutsey indeed!” Williams wrote.15

By mid-July Paul had fared well. His first 21 games included 13 starts. He won ten and lost four, and had one save. Then a sprained ankle on July 12 in Philadelphia caused him to miss nearly two weeks.

One time Casey Stengel asked Dizzy if he had any more brothers. Diz replied, “We got another brother named Elmer, and Casey, you ought to grab him. He’s down at Houston, burnin’ up the league.” Stengel actually pursued the tip, until he learned that Elmer was a peanut vendor for the Texas League club.16 Dizzy arranged for the Cardinals to hire Elmer at Sportsman’s Park in St Louis, and the headline read “The Dean Brothers — Two Nuts and One Goober.” Embarrassed, Dizzy’s wife, Pat, insisted that Elmer go back to the minor leagues. When he got back to Houston, Elmer went on strike himself and asked for a raise.17

Both Deans lost on the same day in a doubleheader August 12 against the Chicago Cubs. The team had an exhibition game the next day in Detroit against the Tigers. Upset by their double loss, plus the burden of playing on a day off, the Dean boys rebelled. “I ain’t going,” insisted Dizzy. “Me, neither,” added Paul.18

When the Cards returned, on August 14, Paul’s 21st birthday, team owner Sam Breadon fined Dizzy $100 and Paul $50 for missing the game. Dizzy tore up his uniform in disgust and refused to pay the fines. “We’re quitting this club and goin’ to Florida to fish,” he said.19 Breadon suspended them both indefinitely, even though Dizzy had already won 21 games and Paul 12. The boys watched the game on August 15 from the grandstand.

In the midst of this brouhaha, Paul’s nickname, Daffy, first appeared on August 15, in a story in the Brooklyn Eagle, with no byline. He never embraced the term, and asked writers not to use it. Neither his teammates nor family members ever used the term to refer to him.20 Will Rogers even made a direct appeal on Paul’s behalf at a baseball writers dinner for them not to use the term.21 Yet scribes and fans alike seemed attached to the moniker, and the brothers were continually referred to as Dizzy and Daffy Dean. Sometimes his teammates called him Harpo, after the mute member of the Marx Brothers, due to Paul’s very quiet yet sometimes mischievous personality.22

People interviewed on the street were not sympathetic, referring to the brothers as selfish, ungrateful, spoiled brats.23 Paul relented and paid his $50 fine and $70 of lost salary. He returned to the team to earn his 13th win on August 17. Dizzy ended his revolt a few days later, after a hearing before Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis.

On September 21 Dizzy pitched a three-hit shutout in Brooklyn in the first game of a doubleheader. In the second game, Paul pitched a no-hitter against the Dodgers, not allowing a baserunner after a first-inning two-out walk. Dizzy remarked, “Shucks, Paul, you shoulda told me you was gonna pitch a no-hitter, then I woulda pitched one, too!”24 Paul later remembered that after the game, “Me ’n’ Diz went out to get our supper, and he says I did so good, I wouldn’t have to pay for his supper.”25

The Cardinals won 24 of their last 31 games to capture the pennant from the Cubs and the Giants. Dizzy and Paul won 14 of those games, while losing only four. Paul finished his rookie year with 19 wins and 11 losses. Diz won 30, more than fulfilling his promise to win 45 games between them.

Dizzy won the first game of the World Series, in Detroit on October 3, but the Tigers prevailed the next day. Back in St. Louis on October 5, Paul started the third game. Without sharp control — he walked five and gave up eight hits — he held the Tigers to one run, and the Cardinals won, 4-1.

Back in Detroit on October 8, Paul started Game Six, now an elimination game for the Cardinals, behind in the Series 3 games to 2. Schoolboy Rowe started for Detroit, in front of the 45,551 fans, the largest crowd of the Series. Paul’s single in the seventh inning broke a 3-3 tie, scoring Leo Durocher. The Cards went on to win, 4-3, and Paul earned his second victory of the Series. The Cardinals took Game Seven easily, 11-0, behind Dizzy’s shutout pitching, his second win of the series, making St Louis the 1934 world champions. The Dean boys were the stars of the Series, as they notched all four of the Cardinal victories, with Paul not suffering a loss. Two pitchers seldom dominate a World Series, and no two brothers ever have.

Reporters who covered the Cardinals often remarked on their rough style of baseball and their competitiveness in winning the championship. Dan Daniel, in the New York World-Telegram on October 9, described the outcome as the “gas house gang playing the nice boys from the right side of the tracks.”26

After the World Series the Deans started a barnstorming tour of the country, organized by Ray Doan. They teamed with local white semipro players and played most of their games against Satchel Paige and other prominent black teams, such as the Kansas Monarchs and the Pittsburgh Crawfords. The games often drew big crowds, many times the biggest the towns had ever seen, but “wreaked havoc with Jim Crow customs.”27

Every day for two weeks the tour carried the Deans to a different town, with stops in Oklahoma City, Kansas City, Wichita, Des Moines, Chicago, Milwaukee, Philadelphia, Brooklyn, Baltimore, Cleveland, Columbus, and Pittsburgh.

In Des Moines, Paul left a game early, complaining of soreness in his throwing arm. He had slipped while warming up in the outfield, perhaps “the beginning of arm woes that would hasten the end of Paul’s career at the too-young age of 27.”28

The rough travel schedule left no room for a good night’s rest and began to wear on Paul. Though the money began to roll in, he became very worried about his aching arm. He sat out some games, played outfield in others, and threw underhand if he had to pitch. Cardinals owner Breadon gave direct orders for Paul to stop the tour. Paul visited a doctor in Philadelphia, who prescribed rest.

More money came in as the boys moved on to vaudeville, from Broadway’s Roxy Theater to points as far west as Milwaukee. They signed a monthlong contract with the theatrical producers Fanchon and Marco, bringing in $5,000 a week. On stage, Dizzy did the talking, and Paul played the quiet, straight man.

They became movie stars, in Dizzy and Daffy, with Shemp Howard, later of Three Stooges fame. The movie, filmed in a high-school stadium, featured the two brothers as rookie hurlers called up from the “Farmers,” a minor-league team, to lead the Cardinals to the World Series. Howard got in lots of stunts as their half-blind pitching coach, and the film gave fans some actual footage of the Deans from the World Series. Dizzy’s wife, Pat, estimated that after finishing the vaudeville tour, they had earned at least $35,000.29

The brothers also joined Ray Doan, one of the main promoters of their exhibition tour, in his baseball school in Hot Springs, Arkansas. The city built a new field and commissioned it Dean Field.

The tag “Dizzy and Daffy” marketed well, earning the Deans endorsements for such things as table baseball games, sweatshirts, and cigarettes. Twice they won court battles against corporations using their names without permission. One man tried to trademark “Dizzee and Daffee” sweatshirts, and another developed the “Dizzy and Daffy Bar, Dean of Candy Bars.”30

Back home in Arkansas, Paul began dating Dorothy Sandusky, Miss Russellville of 1933. After a two-month courtship, they were married on December 21, 1934, beginning 47 years of married life. Asked what his older brother might think about his short courtship and wedding, Paul replied, “It’s none of his business, anyhow.”31

The 1935 season began with Paul again holding out for more pay, on Dizzy’s initiative. Dizzy wanted $25,000 for himself and $15,000 for Paul;32 he eventually signed for $18,500, still the highest for any National League pitcher. Still seeking as much as $10,000, Paul refused Cardinals offers that reached $8,500, but he finally settled for the $8,500, plus a $500 gift.

In early May, Paul got into a dispute over balls and strikes with umpire Dolly Stark. He threw a fit and stalked off the mound after walking three batters. “Gee whillikins, I wished I had a hun’red thousand dollars,” he said. “I’d walk right up to Stark and punch him square on the nose. Then I’d do the same to [Cy] Rigler. But I ain’t got the hun’red grand.” “Okay, Paul,” said Diz. “We’ll save up our money, get the 100 grand, and then we’ll both punch ’em on the nose.”33

Dizzy and Paul disliked playing exhibition games during the season. On July 5, 1935, the Cardinals headed to Minnesota to play the St. Paul Saints. Fans anxiously awaited the famous pair, but they both sat in the dugout and refused to take a bow. Dizzy had pitched the day before in Chicago, and Paul would start soon in St Louis. The busy schedule had begun to wear them both down.

The Cincinnati Reds installed lights at Crosley field that year, and scheduled seven night games, one against each of the other National League teams. Nearly 30,000 fans piled in to see the Cardinals face the Reds under the lights on July 31, Paul’s turn to pitch. The overflow crowd forced many of the spectators to find places on the playing field, mostly in foul territory. In the bottom of the eighth inning, Reds outfielder Babe Herman struggled his way through the mob to take his turn at the plate. Spectator Kitty Burke, a local nightclub entertainer wearing a pink dress, grabbed the bat from Herman and stepped into the batter’s box. Paul bluffed a few exaggerated windups, then she hit his underhand pitch back to him. He easily tagged her out. Cards manager Frisch protested, to no avail, that the out should count. Kitty appeared for weeks afterward in clubs around Cincinnati, billing herself as “The Only Girl Who Ever Batted in the National League.”34

Paul began to lose his focus on baseball by mid-August. According to Dick Farrington in The Sporting News, he was “not keenly interested in continuing his pitching career.” With much more money than he could have ever imagined, he seemed ready to drop back to his life on the farm. “Paul would like to break away from the spotlight and be himself — an Arkansas, or if you prefer, an Oklahoma lad without the worry of the diamond,” Farrington wrote.35

The Deans held the Cards in the 1935 pennant race almost by themselves. St Louis sat in first place from August 25 through September 13, but the Cubs won 21 games in a row and took the pennant from the Cardinals by four games. Together Paul and Dizzy logged 595 innings. Dizzy won 28 games and Paul won 19 again, repeating for the second year in a row the promise Diz had made in early 1934 that they would total 45 wins.

After the 1935 season, Paul bought a farm in Garland, Texas, just east of Dallas. He took some time out for more barnstorming, even with his arm bothering him again. He dropped out of the tour when his wife became hospitalized in St Louis with a serious illness. He later worked again with Dizzy and other pro ballplayers at Doan’s baseball academy and played some golf.

One time umpire Lee Ballanfant joined Paul on the links at Tennison Park in Dallas. Paul shot a 99, after an 83 just two days before, and blamed his poor play on Ballanfant, saying, “How could I do anything with a ‘tom’ looking over my shoulder on every shot?” He later played another nine holes with Ballanfant, at a dime a hole.36

When contract time came, Paul threatened to stay on his farm all summer if he did not get the $15,000 he wanted. His contract came back with $8,500, a repeat of his pay for the last season, and he and Dizzy began to sit out spring training.

Dizzy got the sportswriter J. Roy Stockton to write a letter for him to Branch Rickey in which he extolled his family’s loyalty to the club but also mentioned the many innings and wins that they had contributed the team. After a meeting with Rickey, Dizzy agreed to $22,800. Paul agreed to take $12,00037 and reported to camp on the last day of spring training. “I weighed 235 pounds and that was about 50 over my regular weight. I had trouble getting into shape,” he said.38 He blamed playing golf in Bradenton, Florida, during the offseason for the extra poundage. “I think that was the thing that hurt my arm. I had no looseness in throwing. I was always tightened up.”39

The 1936 season seemed like a split season, with a good start followed by horrible results. After missing a large part of camp, Paul started slowly with three starts in April, but had a solid May, with three complete-game victories and a 2.91 ERA.

On June 2, with only two days’ rest, Paul pitched a shutout for eight innings against Brooklyn, but allowed four runs (three earned) in the ninth. Two days later he pitched two innings in relief against Brooklyn, gave up three runs, and took the loss. He remembered feeling a little twinge in his shoulder that did not bother him at the time, “but when I went out the next day to get in a pepper game, I couldn’t hardly raise it.” He did not realize that he had torn a piece of cartilage. He tried resting, and even blamed his pain on a sore tooth.40 After X-rays ruled out a dental problem, Dr. Robert F. Hyland, the Cardinals’ physician, diagnosed a pulled tendon and prescribed “easy throwing for a few days.”41 Paul again felt like leaving baseball and returning to his farm.

He never dominated hitters in the big leagues again. After the day he felt pain in his arm, he pitched in only five more games that season, giving up 28 hits in 13⅓ innings, with a 13.50 ERA.

At the end of the 1936 season, Paul had won a total of 43 big-league games. He won only seven more. Although he attempted to come back several times, he posted only mediocre results the rest of his career. After 1936, he appeared in 54 games, with 13 starts, over parts of five seasons, and allowed 210 hits in 179 innings and a 4.32 ERA.

On August 25, 1936, Paul requested voluntary retirement status and retreated to his farm near Dallas to rest, hoping to return strong the next season. The Sporting News saw Paul’s problems in 1936 as “the prime reason why the Cardinals are not in first place by a comfortable margin.”42 Branch Rickey commented that Paul “was a complete loss [this season]. We would have been stronger if he never had played this season.”43 Paul “simply pitched himself into a collapse,” commented writer Kyle Crichton.44

Several factors contributed to Paul’s arm failure: barnstorming for two tours, the lack of immediate and proper care for his ailment, missing most of the spring work in 1936 and reporting several pounds heavier than usual, and the extra heavy work his first two years with the Cardinals, especially pitching without adequate rest between appearances. Yet Dizzy downplayed the seriousness of Paul’s ailment, saying, “There ain’t nothin’ wrong with Paul. It’s all in his head.” Replied Paul, “But my shoulder’s where it’s hurtin’, Diz.”45

Paul sought reinstatement in January 1937, and signed a contract that could potentially equal the previous year’s salary if he could repeat some of his earlier success. He assured Rickey that his arm felt as good as ever. His spring work, however, did not look promising, as he did not show the same zip on his fastball, and he again reported to camp overweight. He reported a “relapse of the arm trouble” and visited Lee Jensen, a Southern Association trainer, when the Cardinals were in Chattanooga, wrapping up their exhibition season. After some quick work with “muscle manipulator” Jensen, Paul returned to his team.46

The Cardinals used Paul in relief against the Cubs on April 24, but he gave up a hit and two walks without retiring a batter. He returned to Dr. Hyland for surgery to remove a piece of torn and ossified cartilage in his right shoulder.47 Several weeks later Hyland told him to go out and throw as hard as he could. Paul replied, “Doc, was I to do that, the arm would open up and everything would fall out.”48 Nevertheless, Paul did try to work out but never got his arm stretched into playing shape. The Cardinals asked waivers on him in midseason, but he did not pitch again that year.

Well rested after an offseason spent on the farm and playing golf in Florida, Paul returned to spring training in 1938, hoping for a new start. Wayne K. Otto of the Chicago Herald and Examiner predicted, “Few arms that were as bad as Daffy’s ever recover their normal strength.”49 The Cardinals re-assigned Paul to Houston, hoping he could regain some strength pitching for the Buffs. In an unusual move, Dean moved to another team in the same league, the Dallas Steers, owned by the Chicago White Sox but closer to his farm. He relied mostly on a side-arm curveball, throwing his true fastball only a few times each game.

The Cardinals recalled the rejuvenated Dean in September for five games, including four starts. He won three games and posted a 2.61 ERA in 31 innings. Paul pleaded with owner Breadon not to send him on trips to the north, thinking the cold weather would further hinder his arm’s recovery. “This sore-arm business has become an obsession with Paul,” commented sportswriter Dick Farrington.50

As spring training started in 1939, Paul continued with the Cardinals but began to distance himself from his older pitching brother. “Dizzy meant all right, but he’s responsible for my arm trouble,” he told Sid Keener of the St. Louis Star-Times. “He made me hold out in the spring of 1936.” Paul said he had a rare confrontation with his brother and told him “to go his way and I’d go my way. I wished him all the luck in the world, but from now on I was attending to my own affairs.”51

By mid-August Paul had appeared in only 16 games for 43 innings and a 6.07 ERA. The Cards sent him to Columbus of the American Association. After the season, the New York Giants claimed Paul in the Rule 5 draft, but he announced in February that he was retiring. He said he preferred not to go through another training season. (Paul’s wife, meanwhile, said he would be out only for the 1940 season.)

Then in March, Paul changed his mind and asked Giants manager Bill Terry to assign him to Dallas of the Texas League. In the end, he played for the Giants and had a fairly respectable season, pitching 99⅓ innings, with four wins and four losses and an ERA of 3.90.

Dean returned to the Giants in 1941 but pitched in only five early-season games, all in relief, with a 3.18 ERA, allowing five hits in 5⅔ innings. On May 14 the Giants sold him to the Sacramento Solons of the Pacific Coast League (property of the Cardinals, with Pepper Martin as manager). Paul never reported to Sacramento, however, claiming he would not play that far away from his home in Texas. Consequently, he found himself suspended from baseball.

In April 1942 Sacramento sent Paul to the Houston Buffs, where he successfully re-established his pitching skills. He won 19 games and lost 8, allowing 182 hits in 219 innings and posting a 2.05 ERA. Impressed, the Washington Senators arranged on October 1 to purchase his contract from the Cardinals.

Paul seriously contemplated skipping his assignment with the Senators in favor of staying with his defense job as a guard in an aircraft company plant near Dallas. The Senators meanwhile traded him to the St. Louis Browns for pitcher Elden Auker. When Auker decided to quit baseball and do defense work, the Browns bought Dean outright from the Senators.

Paul entered the 1943 season with excitement about his prospects to return to form. He had worked during the winter in Arkansas, operating a barrel-stave mill with his father-in-law, sawing and chopping though not a lot of throwing, and felt in prime physical condition. He pitched his final three major league games in May for the Browns, with 3.38 ERA in 13⅓ innings, then decided to return to the barrel-stave factory.

On the Browns’ retired list now, Paul passed an Army physical on February 25, 1944. As he awaited his call-up to military service, the Browns released him to play for Little Rock of the Southern Association. He worked an agreement with the team to play only in home games, to remain close to home and supervise at the stave mill. The Browns recalled him in August, simply to protect him from the baseball draft.

In October 1944 the 31-year-old father of three reported to Camp Chaffee, Arkansas, for induction into the Army. When he finished basic training at Fort Riley, Kansas, he was sent to the Fairfield-Suisun Army Air Base in California as a staff sergeant and managed the Air Transport Command’s baseball nine in a 50-game season.

After his discharge from the Army, Paul began workouts at his Texas farm in December 1945. For a while he had thoughts of pitching in the major leagues, but he did not want to pitch in day games, because “my trouble, they told me, was bursitis — and I can’t pitch effectively under a hot, humid sun.”52 He changed his mind and waived his protection under the GI Bill to return to his major-league job. He requested a transfer back to Little Rock and played briefly in the summer of 1946 for Sherman, Texas, in the Class C East Texas League.

Looking for a “name player,” the Ottawa Nationals of the Class C Border League grabbed Paul as their manager for the 1947 season. He even pitched a few innings. After winning the league championship, Paul abandoned the team amid local controversy. Editorials in the local sports pages protested that professional baseball did not fit in their stadium. Paul took offense. “You-all can’t run a ballclub with opposition like that on the editorial page,” he said as he vowed not to return the next year.53

The next several years, Paul spent most of his time in Little Rock. He operated the Purple Cow restaurant, contributed to Little Rock Junior College, and re-created major-league games from wire reports on a local radio station. He also traveled some as a scout for the Browns across Texas, Oklahoma, Louisiana, and Arkansas. He re-entered the baseball world in 1949 when he purchased the Clovis, New Mexico, team in the Class C West Texas-New Mexico League. In 1950 he served as president and manager of the team. In 1951 he shifted to operating the Lubbock Hubbers in the same league. The team fared well, with higher attendance than in any of the previous four years. Dizzy joined Paul as a silent partner in the Lubbock venture, each of them investing money they would make from Hollywood.

Controversy swirled around Paul when Twentieth Century-Fox decided to make a movie about Dizzy’s life. He first balked at the $15,000 offered by the producers for the use of his name. He wanted $25,000. He also insisted on approving the script. He feared that the movie would include “a lot of love stuff” instead of the true Dean family story54 — which he claimed would surely bring in much bigger crowds than any fictionalized accounts. “Tell a true story based on our lives, and if the public doesn’t come out in larger numbers the second night than the first, I’ll do it for nothing,” he said.55

The younger Dean perceived the elder Dizzy and his wife, Pat, attempting to twist his arm to get him to follow their plans. He was especially unhappy about a Saturday Evening Post article, “Dizzy Dean: He’s Not So Dumb,” by a Dallas News sportswriter, Frank X. Tolbert. Paul felt Tolbert used Dizzy’s words to denigrate their modest upbringing and their limited educational experiences. For example, Tolbert had written, “J.H. Dean [Dizzy] was easily the most backward and ornery scholar in the one-room schoolhouse at Chickalah, Arkansas,” and that he was “figured least likely to succeed.”56

Tolbert retorted that he had spent a full morning going over the article with Dizzy before it was published.57 Paul preferred to stay in the background, despite Dizzy’s talkative tendencies. “My wife Dorothy and I have three children, and we want them to lead a quiet, normal life,” he said. “If Diz doesn’t mind zany stories about himself, that’s okay by me. But because of my children, I wish he would leave me and all the rest of the Deans out of his stories.”58

Eventually Paul made peace with Dizzy and Pat and signed the movie contract. The Pride of St. Louis — the Story of Dizzy Dean premiered on April 11, 1952, with Dan Dailey as Dizzy and Joanne Dru as his wife, Pat. Richard Crenna moved up from radio to take the role of Paul.

In February 1953 Paul moved his family — now with four children — to El Paso to become general manager of the El Paso Texans of the Arizona-Texas League. He planned to step on the field as manager, too, if needed, and he intended to promote attendance by having Dizzy make personal appearances, as he had for the Lubbock team. He left the El Paso job in April 1953, but returned to baseball for the 1954 season as president, general and business manager, and field manager with Hot Springs of the Class C Cotton States League.

In 1955 Paul’s son, Paul Jr., impressive as a high-school pitcher in El Paso and Little Rodk, signed to play baseball for Southern Methodist University in Dallas. He registered for premedical studies, heading for a degree in dentistry.59 In his freshman season, however, he lacked control on the mound, as well as his share of self-confidence, surrendering a large number of home runs. Some felt he was trying too hard, striving to match the reputation of his famous pitching family.60 In 1957 the 18-year-old left baseball at SMU and signed with the Milwaukee Braves, who assigned him to Syracuse in the American Association. He also played with Lawton of the Sooner State League that season. He developed arm trouble of his own the next year, and left professional baseball in midseason of 1959.

Paul spent several years in various business ventures, including managing several service stations in the Dallas area and running Dizzy’s carpet business in Phoenix. He accepted a new challenge in April 1966 as baseball coach and athletic director at the new University of Plano, just north of Dallas. Now a grandfather of six, Paul began to set up programs for football and track and field, as well as for baseball. “I don’t know much about coaching football, but I know conditioning and fundamentals are important in any sport,” he said. Remembering his recent experience with minor-league teams, he remarked, “I was president, groundskeeper, clubhouse boy, and manager. I did it all. Yeah, I know I can coach baseball.”

In his later years Paul used his playing skills in several old-timer’s games, including reunions of the old Buffs teams in Houston, in which he and Dizzy were hailed as “the two most popular players in the entire Houston baseball history.”61 In 1973, at nearly 60 years old, he matched up once again with Satchel Paige, 67 years old himself, in an old-timer’s exhibition.62

Dizzy had heart problems in the summer of 1974, beginning with a heart attack on July 11. He had another severe one four days later. Paul joined his sister-in-law Pat at Dizzy’s side in Reno, Nevada, where his brother on died July 17.

On March 17, 1981, Paul died of a heart attack in Springdale, Arkansas. He is buried in Oakland Cemetery in Clarksville, Arkansas.

In their two healthy years together, the Dean brothers combined for a 96-42 won-loss record, with an ERA slightly over 3.00. They had similar pitching motions, and looked and talked alike. They enjoyed many of the same things: Jean Harlow and Mae West movies, hillbilly music, Lucky Strike cigarettes, FDR, golf in Florida, quail hunting, peanuts, cold milk, and beating the New York Giants. They lived in the same hotel on the same floor, and used the same barber, shoeshine boy, grocer, and mechanic. Each also believed his arm would last forever.63

As J. Roy Stockton told it, “Dizzy talked. Paul listened. Dizzy wisecracked. Paul laughed. Dizzy was a great comedian. Paul was his best audience. Each was the other’s hero.”64

Yet they had very different, if not opposite, personalities. After his first year with the Cardinals, reporters recognized that, as The Sporting News put it, Paul “does not have the color or the swaggering egotism of his older brother, nor the latter’s ready tongue or unconscious braggadocio that the public likes. Reticent, unassuming, and retiring, Paul is not the kind that the fan can slap on the back, or bandy wisecracks with, but Dizzy glories in all that. Paul never will fit into the showmanship role that Dizzy occupies, thought he younger Dean gives promise of equaling and even surpassing his older brother as a pitcher.65

Paul saw the world through the eyes of his simple country upbringing. After the 1934 World Series victory, Dizzy bought an airplane to celebrate. Paul bought a farm. He once remarked, when he heard what Bill Walker, the fashion plate of the Cardinals, had paid for a suit, that that was more than he had ever spent for all the clothes he had ever owned.66

He said it best in his own words: “Gee, we’re just a couple a natural pitchers and ordinary fellas, but God gave us perfect pitchin’ builds — long and loose like houn’ dogs. We never ate no special vittles or nothin’ like that to put speed in our soupbones, just lucky fellas to be born great pitchers.”67

This biography is included in the book “The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals: The World Champion Gas House Gang” (SABR, 2014), edited by Charles F. Faber. For more information or to purchase the book in e-book or paperback form, click here.

Notes

Born on November 28, 1911, in Greensboro, North Carolina, William Pinkney DeLancey was part of a large family of Irish background; he had seven brothers and six sisters. His father, William Pinkney DeLancey, was born in Guilford County, North Carolina.1 His mother, Rosa Ann Brame, was born in Rockingham County, North Carolina. He had at least two older brothers, Frank and James.

DeLancey played baseball as a child and starred in the sport for Bessemer High School in Greensboro before briefly playing as a semipro in the city.2 He began his professional career in 1930 when he signed with the Shawnee Robins of the Class C Western Association. The 18-year-old stood 5-feet-11 and weighed 185 pounds. A left-handed batter, he hit .297 in 192 at-bats for Shawnee.

After the season the Cardinals signed DeLancey and assigned him to the Danville Veterans of the Class B Illinois-Indiana-Iowa (Three-I) League.3 There he hit.260 in 97 games and showed extra-base power by hitting 13 doubles, 12 triples, and 7 home runs. He finished the year by playing 11 games for the Columbus Red Birds of the Double-A American Association.

With several catchers vying for playing time in Columbus in 1932, DeLancey was sent to Springfield of the Class C Western Association. He became the club’s primary backstop and one of the key offensive contributors as the team won the Western Association title. He led the team with a.329 batting average and .414 slugging percentage, hit 20 triples and swatted 18 home runs. He had 110 runs batted in and led the league with 108 runs scored. Recalled to Columbus after the Western Association season ended, DeLancey while driving from Springfield to Columbus stopped in St. Louis to visit Branch Rickey, who told him not to continue to Columbus but to head to New York to join the major-league club for the rest of the season.4

DeLancey made his major-league debut on September 11, 1932, as the starting catcher against the New York Giants at the Polo Grounds. DeLancey went 1-for-3 and got his first major-league hit off a future Hall of Famer when he singled off Carl Hubbell.

After the season DeLancey and Frances Yasaitis, a nursing student whom he had met while playing at Danville, were married. For the 1933 season the Cardinals sent him to Columbus, where he hit .285 with 21 home runs. Perhaps his finest game of the year came on August 27 against the Minneapolis Millers, when he went 4-for-6 with two doubles and two homers.5

For the 1934 season Branch Rickey pondered whether to bring DeLancey to the major leagues on a permanent basis. St. Louis had a new catcher, Spud Davis, but Rickey wasn’t sure if Davis was strong enough defensively to be an everyday catcher and he was worried about the club asking a rookie catcher, DeLancey, to do too much. Rickey ultimately decided that the club would indeed go with Davis and DeLancey.6

Manager Frankie Frisch was initially hesitant to play DeLancey, and by May 29 he had only 12 at-bats. On May 30 he got his first start of the season, against Cincinnati, and had one of the best games of his career, going 4-for-5 with a triple, a home run, and four RBIs. From that point on, DeLancey split the catching duties with Davis. He started 63 more games over the course of the season and the Cardinals had a .641 winning percentage when he started. DeLancey had a good batting eye and reached base four times in a game on several occasions.

The Cardinals won the National League pennant, finishing two games ahead of the Giants. DeLancey made several important contributions when the Cardinals played the Giants. On June 27 in St. Louis the Giants and Cardinals were tied in the ninth inning when DeLancey hit a home run off Dolf Luque to give St. Louis an 8-7 victory and a split of the four-game series, which kept the Cardinals two games behind New York.

When the Cardinals went to the Polo Grounds for a key series in mid-September, DeLancey figured in two St. Louis victories. On September 13 he drove in Joe Medwick in the 12th inning for the go-ahead run, and on the 16th his single sparked a four-run rally and a 5-3 St. Louis victory.7 On September 30 DeLancey went 3-for-4 and caught a Dizzy Dean shutout as St. Louis clinched a berth in the World Series.

The 22-year-old DeLancey posted a .316 batting average with a .414 on-base percentage and a .565 slugging percentage in 253 at-bats with 18 doubles and 13 home runs. He had his finest season defensively, throwing out 14 of 30 attempted basestealers, for a 47 percent caught-stealing mark, which was above league average.

The 1934 season was a happy time for DeLancey off the field. He and Frances became parents when Doris Ann DeLancey was born on August 29. On the diamond, though, DeLancey was a prickly and hard-nosed player who often complained at and swore at umpires.8 One sportswriter described him as a “spirited, fighting athlete who gives no ground at the plate and has more color than the average catcher.”9

An example of DeLancey’s feisty attitude came when Frisch told him to lay off the rising fastball during one game; DeLancey had been struggling to hit that pitch, always getting under the ball and popping it up. The next time he came to bat, DeLancey hit a high fastball onto the roof of Sportsman’s Park for a homer. When he got back to the dugout he snapped at Frisch, “That’s how much you know, you dumb Dutchman.”10

Although he was only 22, DeLancey assumed a leadership role on the field and in the clubhouse. Once he saw Dizzy Dean goofing around on the mound and went out to the pitcher and sternly said, “[I]f you ever make a joke of it again when I’m catching, I’ll knock your damned block off.” Reportedly, this display of fortitude impressed Dean so much that he asked Frisch if DeLancey could catch him regularly.11

By the end of the season the Cardinals were so impressed by DeLancey that he caught every single inning of the World Series. He hit only .172, but that included three doubles and a home run. DeLancey’s round-tripper accounted for St. Louis’s only run in Game Five. DeLancey became the second rookie catcher to hit a home run in the World Series; the first was Wally Schang of the 1913 Philadelphia Athletics.12 DeLancey contributed an RBI double during the key seven-run third inning in the Cardinals’ Game Seven victory. During the Series DeLancey was fined $50 by Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis for swearing at home-plate umpire Brick Owens.13

In 1935 DeLancey ended up splitting time with Davis behind the plate. The young catcher suffered from a nagging cough throughout the year and wasn’t able to claim the starting job on a permanent basis. DeLancey was a chain-smoker, but that didn’t seem to be the cause of his cough.14 He didn’t equal his rookie year at the plate, but still posted a strong .279 batting average, and the Cardinals were 52-25 in the games he started. The team finished second, four games behind the Chicago Cubs. For DeLancey the most memorable stretch of the season occurred over seven games between July 13 and 21, when he went 11-for-24 with four doubles, a triple, a home run, and nine RBIs as the Cardinals won six of the seven contests.

Although he often gained more attention for his offense, DeLancey was a strong defensive catcher and an intelligent student of the game. He possessed a strong throwing arm. He was respected by other ballplayers for his fearless nature. He didn’t back down to veterans and demonstrated his leadership with a stern gaze or a streak of curse words. Branch Rickey would call him “a master with his pitchers,” regardless of their age, and pitchers recognized this immediately.15 Still, away from the diamond DeLancey was one of the club’s best pranksters. Branch Rickey described him as “the most hardened practical joker in baseball that I ever knew, worse than Johnny Evers.”16

DeLancey’s health problems persisted throughout the season. A few days after the season ended he had a cyst removed from his right eye at St. Elizabeth’s Hospital in Danville. Two weeks later he was readmitted to the hospital with a lung infection. DeLancey was transferred to St. John’s Hospital in St. Louis, where the Cardinals team physician, Dr. Robert F. Hyland, diagnosed him with pleurisy with effusions.17

Dr. Hyland kept DeLancey in the hospital until he had regained his strength,18 then recommended that DeLancey go to the Southwest because the region’s dry air would assist his recovery, so Bill and Frances decided to move to Phoenix.19 Upon his release from the hospital, DeLancey was reportedly still so weak he had to be carried to the train on a stretcher. After arriving in Phoenix he was confined to bed rest for a further eight months, during the first four of which he was so weak that he could only sit upright for 30 minutes a day.20 Realizing he couldn’t play baseball in the immediate future, DeLancey voluntarily retired on February 12, 1936.

Initially DeLancey was depressed at the possible end of his baseball career, saying, “If I can’t play ball again, what’s the use?”21 However, his old friend Branch Rickey played an essential role in helping DeLancey recover through both his finances and his presence. Bill’s lungs had to be drained every 48 hours and the Cardinals paid the cost for specialized medical courses so Frances could learn how to perform this task.22 Rickey also came by the DeLanceys’ residence during the spring of 1936 and spent about five hours with Bill. His wife later described Rickey’s visit as a huge boost to her husband and recalled that he gained confidence and “no longer looked ahead despairingly.”23 Aside from their friendship, Rickey may have taken a particular interest in DeLancey’s health because he himself had also been a young catcher who had had to give up his playing career because of an injury and because he had managed two players on the 1922 Cardinals club, Bill “Pickles” Dillhoefer and Austin McHenry, who both died in their 20s during the season.24

Rickey’s visit helped improve DeLancey’s mood, but the key to lifting his spirits may have been the addition to the family of some four-legged friends. While he was recovering, Frances bought Bill a bulldog to keep him busy. The dog seemed to lift Bill right out of his depression and Frances said the dog, as well as her efforts to train it, got him smiling and laughing again.25 Soon the DeLanceys were the owners of two more dogs and Bill spent a great deal of time teaching the dogs tricks and, once he was no longer on bed rest, taking them on small walks.26

DeLancey’s recovery went so well that he returned to baseball in 1937. He hadn’t recovered enough to play, so the Cardinals made him the manager of their new Albuquerque farm club in the Class-D Arizona-Texas League. A primary reason behind the birth of the Albuquerque Cardinals was to give DeLancey a team to manage.27

Rickey said, “I believe DeLancey is going to make a wonderful manager. He’s a keen student of the game. … It was a tough blow to the Cardinals when we lost him as a catcher, just when he was reaching his peak, but I know he’s going to prove valuable to the organization as a manager. He knows baseball and he knows players as well.”28 He was proved right as DeLancey, despite being only 25 and having no managerial or coaching experience, managed Albuquerque to the league title.

DeLancey managed Albuquerque again in 1938, and took his first small steps toward resuming his playing career. He inserted himself into nine games as a pinch-hitter and got two hits. His first at-bat came during a 10-8 victory over El Paso on August 7. During Albuquerque’s five-run ninth inning DeLancey smacked the ball over the center fielder’s head to drive in two runs. It would have been a triple, but DeLancey was not at full health and stopped at first before lifting himself for a pinch-runner.29

Meanwhile, the DeLanceys were adapting well to life in Arizona. They owned a small ranch house and 2½ acres of land near Phoenix. They did a lot of riding in the desert.30 Doris Ann went to live with her maternal grandmother during the season and Frances split her time between returning to Westville when the Cardinals were on the road and staying with Bill when the club was back in Albuquerque.31

DeLancey managed Albuquerque for a third season in 1939 and made further small steps toward restarting his playing career, going 3-for-14 with two doubles. He led the team to its second title in three seasons, overcoming losses in the first two games of the playoffs.32 In late September it had been decided that DeLancey wouldn’t return to the club to manage the next season. The early speculation was that he would become a coach for St. Louis.33

DeLancey’s brief returns to the diamond hadn’t been a rousing success statistically, but they suggested to the catcher that he might be able to play major-league baseball again, even if he couldn’t return to his old heights. In 1940 DeLancey attended spring training with the parent club. At the end of spring training, he went to St. Louis for a physical examination, was declared fit to play for the Cardinals, and was signed by the club on March 20, 1940.34

The Cardinals planned to use DeLancey as a reserve catcher, pinch-hitter, and tutor for young Cardinals pitchers and catchers. One of his primary duties was to teach Mickey Owen (who was only four years younger than DeLancey) about being a major-league catcher. DeLancey was given a lot of credit for helping to turn Owen into a fine defensive catcher for the Cardinals and Dodgers.35

DeLancey played in only 15 games during the season, starting two of them. He got four singles in 18 at-bats and drove in two runs. It was clear that he wasn’t the player he used to be and that his health problems had had a permanent impact on his talents.36 DeLancey’s final major-league game came on September 8, 1940, against the Pittsburgh Pirates at Sportsman’s Park. He came into the game as a defensive replacement and didn’t register a plate appearance. His final major-league hit came as a pinch-hitter against the Brooklyn Dodgers. On September 11, 1940, eight years to the day after he made his major-league debut, DeLancey was released as a player. He signed as a coach the next day. After the season he was released37 and was named manager of the Pocatello Cardinals of the Class C Pioneer League. He played in 49 games, batting.277. DeLancey also made his only professional appearances as a pitcher, hurling ten innings over two games. He never played professional baseball again.

In 1942 DeLancey began the season as manager of the Asheville Tourists of the Class B Piedmont League. During the season he was succeeded by Ollie Vanek, and he left professional baseball. Whatever the reason – whether it was health-related, whether he had given up on playing in the majors again, or whether he was tired of managing and wanted to do something else – DeLancey retired to Arizona.

The following year, DeLancey worked as a sporting-goods salesman in Phoenix and served as commissioner of the Arizona Servicemen’s Baseball League. He watched semipro baseball when he had the time, hoping to unearth talent that he could recommend to his good friend Branch Rickey.38 Thoughts of playing again hadn’t left him completely and he entertained the idea of playing independent league baseball in Phoenix, although he never did, as he knew it was best not to for his health.39

After suffering only periodic sick spells for several years, DeLancey’s health worsened a few years after his retirement and he was forced to leave his sales job.40 His last public appearance in the baseball world came when he umpired an exhibition contest in Phoenix between the Chicago Cubs and St. Louis Browns.41 The effects of his tuberculosis often kept him on bed rest during the final year of his life and he spent his last six months almost entirely in bed.42

DeLancey died of pleurisy on November 28, 1946, his 35th birthday.43 He was survived by Frances; their two daughters, Doris, 12, and Mary Jane, 1; his father; four brothers; and six sisters.44 After a funeral at St. Frances Xavier Parish, he was buried in St. Francis Cemetery in Phoenix on December 2.45

Rickey later paid glowing tribute to DeLancey in his seminal work, The American Diamond. He said DeLancey and Roy Campanella were the two best catchers he had ever signed and named the two of them and Mickey Cochrane on his “All-Time Team” of 30 players.46 The only member of the team who wasn’t an established star, DeLancey was selected ahead of such luminaries as Bill Dickey, Yogi Berra, and Gabby Hartnett.

Writing about why he chose DeLancey for his squad, Rickey explained that many of the catcher’s best attributes weren’t apparent from looking at a box score or his statistics. Rickey wrote, “On the field, he knew everything. He knew movements of the baserunners backwards and forwards and learned hitting traits of batsmen overnight. He anticipated managerial tactics and acted on his judgment. He had a remarkable pitching sense.”47

Rickey described DeLancey as a master at reading a hitter’s mood and mindset. “He knew there’s a lingering hold on the consciousness of the last pitch that hasn’t passed by yet with the hitter. He’s still seeing it, he’s still thinking about it. It may be that you should throw that next pitch within five seconds,” while for other batters it might be better to let them stew about the past pitch and let self-doubt surface in their mind. Rickey noted that DeLancey also “knew the time to delay an anxious power hitter who could hardly wait for the next pitch. Let him exercise, let him exercise a lot. …”48

Rickey described DeLancey as an effective player of mind games, describing him as a great psychologist on the diamond with an innate talent for reading people.49 “He knew how to talk to a batter – and when to do it and when not to do it.”50

Rickey perhaps best summarized DeLancey in one short passage in the book when he wrote, “He was a natural student of what, how and when. And he could hit! And throw! And run! He was unafraid physically and morally. He was a hell raiser, but he was victory bound.”51 If it wasn’t for a terrible illness ending his career and then his life so prematurely, perhaps Rickey wouldn’t have needed to explain DeLancey’s virtues to his readers, as they would be much more widely recognized.

This biography is included in the book “The 1934 St. Louis Cardinals: The World Champion Gas House Gang” (SABR, 2014), edited by Charles F. Faber. For more information or to purchase the book in e-book or paperback form, click here.

Notes

“Come in.”

“Sir, you asked me keep an eye out for a boy in the ranks who looked like he had the makings of someone you could use around the office; a boy who can be trusted.”

“Yes.”

“Well, sir, I think I’ve found one. He’s a hard worker. Very ambitious, reliable, has a good head for math.”

“Yes, yes. Go on.”

“This boy is a real go-getter and he wants to work all summer. It can’t hurt that he’s a big baseball fan.”

“Well, Judas Priest! Send the boy in.”

Back in 1916 a teenager was working at Sportsman’s Park in St. Louis as a soda vendor to bring in extra money to help support his family. The concessions manager at the ballpark found the teenager to be a good worker and recommended him to the business manager of the St. Louis Browns. The teenager had a meeting with the business manager and he made a good impression on the executive. This good impression served as a steppingstone for the young man to move from the ranks of the concession workers at the ballpark and into a new job as an errand boy and switchboard operator in the front office of the Browns. This change in station for the ambitious young man led to lifelong employment in the business of baseball, a change that eventually led to the ownership of two major-league baseball teams.

The young soda vendor promoted to office boy in this real-life Horatio Alger story was William Orville DeWitt, Sr. and the business manager of the Browns was Branch Rickey.

DeWitt was born in St. Louis on August 3, 1902. His parents were William J. DeWitt, a butcher or grocer, and Lulu (Sowash) DeWitt. Young Bill had a brother, Charles (Charley), who was also a baseball fan. Charley and Bill grew up on the north side of the city and they were never far from the city’s two main ballparks (Robison Field and Sportsman’s Park). The brothers loved to play baseball growing up but as they got older their family needed the income two teenage boys could earn, so they went to work at the ballpark in order to be close the game they loved.1

It didn’t take Rickey long to see that Bill had “the right kind of fiber for development” as an office worker for the Browns. The Mahatma encouraged DeWitt to better himself through education. “There is no future in any business for a boy who lacks education,” Rickey told the young DeWitt. And so DeWitt, who did not complete high school because of his job, went to night school to further himself.2

In 1917, when Rickey had a falling-out with Browns’ owner Philip de Catesby Ball, he left the Browns to take a position with Sam Breadon in the Cardinals’ front office. The young DeWitt followed his mentor to the Cardinals.3

World War I was a time of uncertainty in professional baseball with many players being drafted by the military or enlisting. Rickey left to serve in the Army. While Rickey was away in the service, DeWitt found a job as an assistant cashier and stenographer for the J.I. Case Threshing Machine Company in St. Louis.4

After the war Rickey returned to the Cardinals and DeWitt went back to work with his mentor. With Rickey’s encouragement, he furthered his education, first at St. Louis University, then at Washington University, then back to St. Louis University Law School. In his final year at St. Louis University, DeWitt was elected president of the Student Conclave and was appointed to Alpha Sigma Nu, a Jesuit honor society, even though he was not a Catholic.5 (He passed the bar exam in 1931.)

In 1926 Sam Breadon, owner of the Cardinals, promoted Rickey’s “boy” to the post of treasurer. The Cardinals were coming into one of the most successful periods in the history of the team. Rickey’s farm system was beginning to pay big dividends and DeWitt had grown up with the system from the earliest days of its inception. The team won its first pennant in 1926 and defeated Babe Ruth and the New York Yankees in the World Series. The Cardinals won the pennant again in 1928, 1930, 1931, and 1934, with World Series wins in 1931 and 1934 — a very successful run with DeWitt in charge of the team’s wallet.

Looking back to his duties in the Cardinals’ first fall classic, DeWitt remembered in 1944, “Making arrangements and handling tickets in that Series was quite a job. The Cardinals have been in eight now and have a well-oiled machine. But in 1926, everything was new; we were new to World’s Series, and had a crazy town to deal with. But somehow we got by without disappointing too many persons.”6

In 1934 the Cardinals won the World Series in seven games over the Detroit Tigers with the colorful hurler Dizzy Dean emerging as a national celebrity on the famed Gas House Gang. His celebrity status turned into many lucrative product endorsements for Dean, a young man from humble beginnings in rural Arkansas. By this time DeWitt was well-established in the ways of law and business and he served as a booking agent for Dean’s postseason ventures, among them a barnstorming tour, product advertisements and a Hollywood contract for a B movie featuring Dizzy and his brother Paul (Dizzy and Daffy, Vitaphone Corporation, 1934). These ventures netted an estimated $13,000 for Dean during 1933 and 1934. (His salary from the Cardinals for the 1934 season was $7,500.) As Dean’s agent, DeWitt was supposed to receive 33 percent of the earnings. At some point there developed some ill feelings or bad blood over the business arrangement. DeWitt sued Dean to recover his fees. Commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis became involved in the dispute. Dean complained to Commissioner Landis that 33 percent was too high. Landis agreed and cut DeWitt’s proceeds to 10 percent.7

In 1936, after the death of longtime Browns owner Philip de Catesby Ball, Rickey helped Ball’s estate find a  buyer for the team, an ownership group headed by St. Louis financier Donald Barnes. Barnes hired DeWitt as his general manager. (For his help in putting the deal together, Rickey received a $25,000 fee.8) To help shore up revenues for the Browns, the new owners finalized a deal to install lights at Sportsman’s Park. DeWitt and the front office also worked to build a farm system.9

The Browns lived on a shoestring and struggled through the years. In 1941 DeWitt and Barnes hired Luke Sewell as manager, and the Browns began a long climb toward respectability that culminated in 1944 with the team’s first pennant. In an all-St. Louis World Series, the Browns lost to the Cardinals in six games. The Browns also suffered financially because Commissioner Landis decreed that half of the World Series receipts would go to the Army and Navy Relief Fund. It “really was a jolt to us financially, because … we needed that money,” Barnes said.10

DeWitt was named Executive of the Year by The Sporting News.11

The Browns were unable to repeat their success in 1945, finishing in third place. One of the Browns’ players in 1945 was Pete Gray, a one-armed outfielder. Some critics of the signing believed DeWitt intended Gray to serve as a drawing card. Gray appeared in 77 games for the Browns, batting only .218, and was released after the season.12

But the major development for the team that year was Donald Barnes’s sale of his interest in the team. DeWitt remained as vice president and general manager for the new majority owner, Richard “Dick” Muckerman, who owned ice and coal businesses.13

In 1946, with World War II over and front-line players returned from the service,  the Browns fell to seventh place. Sewell resigned shortly before the season ended. He was succeeded by Muddy Ruel, a former catcher and pitching coach who was a special assistant to Commissioner A.B. “Happy” Chandler.14 DeWitt had dealt away most of the stars from the 1944 pennant winners so Ruel was working with a new crop of players in 1947. Initially things appeared promising for Ruel and the Browns in 1947. By the end of the first half of the season, the Browns were mired in the American League cellar.        

In July 1947 Bill Veeck and the Cleveland Indians signed Larry Doby to integrate the American League. Less than two weeks later, DeWitt followed in the footsteps of his mentor, Brooklyn GM Branch Rickey, and signed two players from the Negro Leagues, Henry “Hank” Thompson and Willard “Home Run” Brown, both from the Kansas City Monarchs. The Browns also took a 30-day option to purchase Lorenzo “Piper” Davis from the Birmingham Black Barons. (A fourth African American player, Charles “Chuck” Harmon, was also signed by the Browns and assigned to the team’s Class C farm team in Gloversville-Johnstown, New York.) The event was newsworthy in a city with traditional ties to the South. The St. Louis Globe-Democrat reported the news at the very top of the front page with the bold headline: “Browns Sign 3 Negro Ballplayers.”15

By late August DeWitt’s bold move was not going well. Thompson and Brown got off to a slow start with the Browns. The clubhouse environment was not as welcoming as it could have been. One of the Browns’ regulars, Paul Lehner, a native of Alabama, skipped the team briefly and bristled at the prospects of playing on an integrated team.16 Thompson (batting .256) and Brown (.179) were released. The Browns finished the season in last place with a record of 59 wins and 95 losses and Ruel was fired.17

In 1948, under new manager Zack Taylor, the results were much the same as they were in 1947, 59 wins and 94 losses, though, thanks to the ineptitude of the White Sox and Senators, the Browns were able to move up to sixth place. The harsh economic reality of the expenses involved with being the majority owner of a losing team was setting in for Richard Muckerman, the ice and coal baron.

In early February 1949, Muckerman sold his interest in the Browns (56 percent of the stock in the team) and DeWitt and his brother Charley became the principal owners of the team. The deal cost the brothers about $1 million. The brothers who once sold soda and peanuts at Sportsman’s Park now owned the team and the ballpark.18

No matter the ownership, with the exceptional bright spot of the 1944 World Series year, the Browns’ troubles always seemed to follow a cycle of poor attendance, a poor finish in the league standings, and the trade or sale of good players during the offseason. During a time when a team’s revenue relied heavily on attendance, the Browns were always in a downward financial cycle. Of his many trades, DeWitt once said, “I always had someone knocking at my door to make a deal, which is fun, but when you’re forced to make a deal, that takes all the fun out of it.”19

The DeWitt brothers struggled as owners in a city that no longer had a population large enough (or willing enough) to support two baseball teams. In the early years of the 20th century, St. Louis had been the fourth largest US city in population. By 1950 it was the eighth largest. Under Rickey’s guidance the Cardinals had become the dominant team with the St. Louis fan base. The Cardinals won nine pennants in 20 years while the Browns won the pennant only once. It was only natural that the team with the most success on the field would have the most success in attracting fans to the ballpark. The Browns owned Sportsman’s Park and the Cardinals were tenants, beneficiaries of a low-rent lease dating back to Rickey’s days with the Cardinals in the early 1920s. The DeWitts went as far as trying to evict the Cardinals from Sportsman’s Park before the 1949 season, or to force a new, more beneficial lease. In the end, the Browns were unsuccessful.20

The brothers were forced to look for other ways to improve the Browns. Bill DeWitt was an early proponent of increasing the number of night games teams were allowed to play. He felt more night games league-wide would boost the Browns’ home attendance and earn them more of a share of road-game revenue. DeWitt also attempted to work out deals for regulating television rights to baseball games in two-team cities in a way that could benefit the Browns.21

During spring training in 1950, the team made headlines by hiring Dr. David Tracy to use hypnosis on the players to help them relax and become better ballplayers. Hypnosis was supposed to help players on a losing team feel like winners and lift the team out of the cellar. Though it is not clear to what extent Dr. Tracy and his techniques of hypnosis helped the team, the Browns finished in seventh place in 1950.22

Unable to turn the Browns around in their two years as owners, in June 1951 the DeWitts sold their interest in the team to an ownership group headed by the indefatigable showman Bill Veeck for $1.5 million. Bill DeWitt went from being president of the club to vice president under new team president Veeck.23

Despite much fanfare, promotions, and publicity stunts, even Veeck was unable to save the Browns. In 1953 he sold Sportsman’s Park to the Cardinals, who were now owned by August A. Busch, Jr. of the Anheuser-Busch beer empire. Veeck knew he could not match the financial resources of Busch and his brewery. Veeck explored his options for moving the Browns to another city, such as Milwaukee or Baltimore, but he was prevented from doing so due by the other team owners.24 Veeck sold his interest in the Browns at the end of the 1953 season, and the American League allowed the team to relocate to Baltimore. DeWitt stayed with the team during the transition period but the new owners hired Art Ehlers in October 1953 to be the new general manager.25

The resilient DeWitt was out of a job only a short time. In April 1954 the New York Yankees hired him to serve as assistant general manager under George Weiss. DeWitt was to assist Weiss in player contract negotiations and serve as a general troubleshooter. Some baseball observers speculated that DeWitt was being groomed as a successor to Weiss. The assumption was that Weiss would retire shortly and DeWitt would succeed him. But in 1956 Weiss signed a new contract, and DeWitt found another opportunity.26 He was named the coordinator of the commissioner’s Professional Baseball Fund Committee, which helped minor-league teams in economic peril. Then in September 1959 he became the president of the Detroit Tigers, who were in a tumultuous transitional period after the Briggs family sold the team. DeWitt became the fourth president of the team in three years.

In Detroit DeWitt left an indelible mark on baseball history by pulling off one of the game’s most unusual trades. In August 1960, he helped engineer a trade of managers with Cleveland Indians. The Tigers’ Jimmy Dykes was sent to Cleveland in exchange for Joe Gordon. Other important trades DeWitt made that had a lasting impact for the Tigers were sending Harvey Kuenn to Cleveland for slugger Rocky Colavito and acquiring Norm Cash from Cleveland in exchange for Steve Demeter.27 One of DeWitt’s unheralded but significant moves in Detroit was having the pay toilets removed from the women’s restrooms at the ballpark.

Despite some improvements in the team, and a fair amount of controversy over some of his work, after only one year on the job he was forced out as president in October 1960. John Fetzer, head of the majority ownership group of the Tigers, became the president of the team. DeWitt, who was working under a three-year contract, was to be demoted. Instead, DeWitt chose to leave under amicable terms after declining the opportunity to serve as Fetzer’s assistant.28

Once again, DeWitt was not out of a job for long. About two weeks later he became general manager of the Cincinnati Reds. With his jelp, the Reds won the National League pennant in 1961. They lost to the Yankees in the World Series. In March 1962 DeWitt purchased the Reds from the Crosley Foundation for $4.6 million. (Owner Powel Crosley, Jr. had died the previous March.) Soon after the sale a controversy developed. Ohio Attorney General Mark McElroy moved to reopen the sale of the team as part of an investigation involving the claim of Joseph F. Rippe, a Cincinnati realtor, and a group of prospective buyers who supposedly had offered $5.5 million for the Reds. Eventually the controversy died down and there was no change to DeWitt’s ownership of the team.29

In the years to come, DeWitt planted the seeds of a team that would grow into the Big Red Machine of the 1970s, signing Pete Rose and Johnny Bench. The Reds finished in third place in 1962, and in fifth place in 1963. The team came close to winning the pennant in 1964 but fell short in a tight four-team race that was won by the Cardinals on the final day of the season. The Reds and the Phillies tied for second place. During the season, the Reds’ cancer-stricken manager Fred Hutchinson, was replaced by Dick Sisler as interim manager. Hutchinson died on November 12, 1964. 30

In 1965 the Reds fell to fourth place and DeWitt began to trade away players. During the December 1965 baseball meetings, he made a deal that will be remembered by many Reds fans as one of the worst trades in the history of the team. DeWitt traded the former National League MVP and All-Star outfielder Frank Robinson to the Baltimore Orioles in exchange for pitchers Milt Pappas and Jack Baldschun and outfielder Dick Simpson. In 1966 the Reds fell to seventh place while Robinson won the Triple Crown and led the Orioles to the American League pennant and a World Series championship. After Robinson had been named American League MVP for 1966 and World Series MVP, Arthur Daley of the New York Times called DeWitt’s trade of Robbie to the Orioles “the most colossal trading blunder in history”

In December 1966 DeWitt sold the Reds to a local ownership group that included the Cincinnati Inquirer and Cincinnati Gas and Electric Company. (Another member of the ownership group was DeWitt’s son, Bill DeWitt, Jr.) A major factor in DeWitt’s decision to sell the team was the ongoing negotiations to build a new stadium downtown for football and baseball that would require the Reds to sign a 40-year lease. DeWitt later admitted he could not, in good faith, make such a long-term commitment in Cincinnati.31

DeWitt was out of a baseball for a short time, though he was not entirely out of sports. He and his son held a 40 percent share of the ownership of the Kentucky Colonels of the American Basketball Association. The two also headed a financial group that owned the Cincinnati Stingers of the World Hockey Association.32

During this time, DeWitt almost ended up in Seattle twice. After the expansion Seattle Pilots spent one season (1969) in Seattle, and then faced financial and legal troubles, it was proposed to the American League that DeWitt be brought in to run the team with $2 million in funds from the American League. The plan did not carry, partly because of DeWitt’s other financial and business obligations at the time. Then, in 1971, after the Pilots relocated to Milwaukee, DeWitt looked at Seattle again. This time he scouted out opportunities to place another team in Seattle. DeWitt and, his former associate with the St. Louis Browns, Rudy Schaffer, explored the possibility of making Seattle the home for a National League expansion team in two or three years. One aspect of this plan involved moving Eugene of the Pacific Coast League to Sicks’ Stadium in Seattle in the interim until Seattle could build a new stadium and secure a team in the National League. In the end, the DeWitt-Schaffer plan for Seattle never materialized.33

A few years later, in 1975, DeWitt was reunited with Bill Veeck. He was an investor and chairman of the Chicago White Sox from 1975 to 1981. DeWitt’s involvement with Veeck’s ownership group was instrumental in keeping the White Sox in Chicago at a time when the American League had approved moving the team to Seattle.

On March 3, 1982, DeWitt died in his adopted hometown of Cincinnati at the age of 81. His funeral was held in St. Louis and he is buried at Oak Grove Cemetery in suburban St. Louis County.34

Bill DeWitt was an important presence in major-league baseball for his entire adult life. He spent time in both leagues with six teams in a variety of positions. He was an owner and general manager and an executive for Organized Baseball. Teams DeWitt was involved with won nine pennants over the course of his career.

One of the hallmarks of DeWitt’s career was that he always found himself behind the eight ball financially and had to innovate in order to make ends meet. St. Louis sportswriter Bob Broeg summed it up: DeWitt “always suffered from the financial shorts, but maneuvered wisely and well to stay alive, selling off stars and picking a playing plum in the process.” Along the way he generally came out all right. He built a nice nest egg for himself with the sale of the Browns in 1951 and also with the sale of the Reds in 1966. In both cases, he bought the teams when the price was low and sold them for a higher price. DeWitt also must have been good at networking in the game because when one job fell through, he was never unemployed for long. From a poor boy in North St. Louis selling soda pop at the ballpark to help his family make ends meet, to a club owner wheeling and dealing in the millions, DeWitt worked himself up the corporate ladder in the world of sports with a lot of hard work and some guidance from his mentor Branch Rickey.35

A testament to DeWitt’s enduring legacy in the game is the fact that William O. DeWitt, Jr. and William O. DeWitt, III became the owners of the St. Louis Cardinals.

DeWitt was involved with or contributed to many charities including the Boys Club of Cincinnati, the 100 Club of Cincinnati, the Boy Scouts of America, and the St. Louis Society for the Blind. He was honored by the National Recreation and Park Association and the Hamilton County (Ohio) Hall of Fame for donating money to build youth baseball fields in the Cincinnati area.36

DeWitt once said, “I’m 100 percent baseball, I love the game. I’ve been in baseball since I was in knee pants, and don’t think I could be happy in anything else.” DeWitt lived those words over the course of his life, spending approximately 65 years working in the game.37

After DeWitt died, Bill Veeck summed up the career of his longtime friend and business partner: “Bill DeWitt was the most underrated operator in baseball. No man I can think of served longer in the game’s management end.”38

Notes

1U.S. Census; Missouri Birth Records; Gould’s City Directory for St. Louis; The Sporting News.

2 Arthur Mann, Branch Rickey: American in Action (New York: Riverside Press, 1957); Oral history interview with William O. DeWitt, Sr. for the A.B. Chandler Oral History Project of the University of Kentucky Library; The Sporting News, March 19, 1936.

3 The Sporting News, March 19, 1936.

4Ibid.

5The Sporting News, December 22, 1948, and February 9, 1949.

6The Sporting News, December 28, 1944.

7 Baseball-almanac.com/players/player.php?p=deandi01; Arthur Mann, Branch Rickey: American in Action (New York: Houghton Mifflin, 1957); Vince Staten,  Ol’ Diz: A Biography of Dizzy Dean (New York: Harper Collins, 1992); St. Louis Globe-Democrat, November 23, 1934; The Sporting News, November 29, 1936.

8Fred Lieb, The Baltimore Orioles (Carbondale, Illinois: Southern Illinois University Press, 2005); Arthur Mann, Branch Rickey; The Sporting News, November 19, 1936, and May 4, 1944.

9St. Louis Star-Times, November 13, 1936; The Sporting News, January 7, 1937.

10 University of Kentucky Oral History Interview

11The Sporting News, December 28, 1944.

12 The Sporting News, November 23, 1944; The Washington Post, November 21, 1945; retrosheet.org/boxesetc/G/Pgrayp101.htm

13 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, August 10, 1945; St. Louis Star-Times, August 10, 1945; The Sporting News, August 16, 1945.

14 Baseball Magazine, December 1946; New York Times, September 22, 1946, The Sporting News, September 25, 1946.

15 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, July 18, 1947.

16 Ibid.; St. Louis Post-Dispatch, July 18, 1947; St. Louis Star-Times, July 19, 1947.

17 St. Louis Post-Dispatch, November 4, 1947; The Sporting News, November 12, 1947.

18Chicago Daily Tribune, February 3, 1949; New York Times, February 3, 1949; St. Louis Star-Times, February 3, 1949.

19The Sporting News, March 20, 1982.

20 Chicago Daily Tribune, December 20 ,1949; New York Times, April 19, 1949; St. Louis Star-Times, December 7, 1948; The Sporting News, March 16, 1949.

21 Associated Press, February 5, 1949; The Sporting News, December 17, 1947, and December 22, 1948.

22Los Angeles Times, March 1, 1950; The Sporting News, March 15, 1950.

23Chicago Daily Tribune, June 22, 1951; New York Times, July 4, 1951.

24 Fred Nichols, The Final Season (St. Louis: The St. Louis Browns Historical Society, 1991); The Sporting News, March 4, 1953, April 15, 1953.

25The Sporting News, November 4, 1953.

26New York Times, April 28, 1954; The Sporting News, March 20, 1982.

27The Sporting News, April 20, 1960, April 27, 1960.

28Boston Globe, October 21, 1960; Chicago Daily Tribune, October 21, 1960; Detroit News, October 12, 1960.

29Boston Globe, March 24, 1962; Chicago Daily Tribune, March 21, 1962, June 4, 1962, Hartford Courant, March 24, 1962.

30 Frank Robinson, Extra Innings: The Grand Slam Response to Al Campanis’s Controversial Remarks about Blacks in Baseball (New York: McGraw-Hill, 1988); New York Times, November 13, 1965; The Sporting News, November 28, 1964.

31Boston Globe, October 14, 1964; Chicago Tribune, December 6, 1966, and March 7, 1982; Hartford Courant, December 6, 1966.

32The Sporting News, November 22, 1975.

33Chicago Daily Defender, August 18, 1971; Los Angeles Times, August 18, 1971; Seattle Times, August 17, 1971.

34 St. Louis Globe-Democrat, March 4, 1982.

35St. Louis Post-Dispatch, March 3, 1982.

36Bryan (Texas) Times, March 4, 1982, The Sporting News, May 16, 1970.

37The Sporting News, December 28, 1944.

38Chicago Tribune, March 7, 1982.