“his boom box of a voice” – Curt Smith
“that wonderful, unmistakable voice” – Dick Young
“the venerable Voice of Summer” – Sports Illustrated

He was the voice of the Yankees from 1939 through 1964 and became the most prominent sports broadcaster in America. His credits include twenty World Series, twenty-four All-Star Games, fourteen Rose Bowls, five Orange Bowls and two Sugar Bowls. During his prime years, it seemed that Allen was on the air for every major sports event; the presence of The Voice signified that the game was a major event.

He was born Melvin Israel in Birmingham, Alabama, on St. Valentine’s Day, 1913, the first of three children of Russian immigrants Julius and Anna (Leibowitz) Israel. (The family was living in Johns, Alabama, but the nearest hospital was in Birmingham.) Julius sold dry goods in several small Southern towns before settling his family in Tuscaloosa, Alabama.

Allen told broadcast historian Curt Smith he got his first exposure to baseball while sitting in an outhouse looking at pictures of bats and gloves in catalogs from Sears or Montgomery Ward. He saw his first Major League games when he visited an aunt in Detroit; Babe Ruth hit a home run in one of them.

Melvin advanced quickly through small-town schools and entered the University of Alabama at the age of fifteen. He tried out for football, but didn’t make the team; instead, he became an equipment manager.

He also served as public-address announcer for the Crimson Tide’s home games. When a Birmingham radio station asked coach Frank Thomas to recommend a play-by-play announcer, Thomas—apparently figuring play-by-play was just like PA announcing—named Melvin Israel. His radio career began on station WBRC in 1935. In addition to doing play-by-play for the Tide, Israel received both an undergraduate degree and a law degree from Alabama and passed the bar exam.

On vacation in New York in 1937, he auditioned for the CBS radio network. In later years he made it seem like a lark, as if he had just wandered in off the street. In fact, his Alabama football broadcasts had been noticed by Ted Husing, CBS’s top sports announcer, and by the entertainment newspaper Variety. Whether it was lark or design, he was offered a job at $45 a week.

Mel’s father was not pleased, thinking his son was wasting a good education. He was even less pleased when Melvin explained that CBS wanted to change his “Jewish” surname. Trying to placate his father, Mel took Julius’s middle name as his new last name. At CBS Allen announced variety shows starring Perry Como, Jo Stafford, and Harry James. He interrupted Kate Smith’s afternoon program with a news bulletin reporting the crash of the airship Hindenburg. He worked some college football games.

Allen particularly impressed his bosses with a long ad-lib description of the Vanderbilt Cup yacht race, broadcasting from an airplane overhead. That led to his first baseball assignment, as a color commentator on the 1938 World Series. (In those days there was no exclusive Series broadcast; all the major networks carried the games.)

When Allen arrived in New York, the Yankees, Giants, and Dodgers were the last holdouts against radio. Since all the other teams were broadcasting some of their games, the fear that radio would hurt attendance had been buried. But at least one of the New York clubs was always at home, so the teams agreed to a blackout to avoid competing with each other. Opening Day games were broadcast, along with an occasional important series. Local stations re-created highlights of some afternoon games in the evenings, and the Yankees permitted a New York station to carry the night games of their farm team in nearby Newark, New Jersey.

In 1938 the pioneering executive Larry MacPhail became general manager at Brooklyn. He notified the other teams that the Dodgers were going on the air in 1939, and he brought Red Barber from Cincinnati to handle the broadcasts. The Yankees and Giants decided to broadcast their home games, since they never played at home on the same day. Arch McDonald, an established play-by-play man in Washington, was hired as the principal announcer for both teams.

Wheaties, baseball’s primary sponsor, chose Allen to replace McDonald on the Washington Senators’ broadcasts. But Washington owner Clark Griffith signed his former pitcher, the Hall of Famer Walter Johnson, to go behind the mike, so Allen never became the voice of the Senators.

McDonald’s assistant, Garnett Marks, didn’t last long. He wasn’t fired when he delivered a commercial for Ivory Soap, and the words came out “Ovary Soap.” But when he did it again, he was gone. Allen replaced him in June.

Arch McDonald didn’t last long, either. His down-home style—low-key, with long pauses between pitches—didn’t play in New York. After one season he returned to Washington.

In 1940 Allen began his reign as Voice of the Yankees. He continued doing only home games of the Yanks and Giants. Allen often told of an encounter with Lou Gehrig during that season, when Gehrig was dying of the disease that now bears his name. On a rare visit to the Stadium, the Yankee legend said, “Mel, I never got a chance to listen to your games before because I was playing every day. But I want you to know they’re the only thing that keeps me going.” Allen said he left the dugout in tears.

The Yankees and Giants couldn’t find a sponsor for their broadcasts in 1941, so the teams were off the air. Accordingly, Allen never got a chance to chronicle Joe DiMaggio’s fifty-six-game hitting streak, although he later recorded a re-creation of the end of the streak.

Allen entered the Army in 1943 and was stationed at Fort Benning, Georgia. According to the Library of American Broadcasting at the University of Maryland, Sergeant Allen kept his hand in by calling a few Alabama football games while in the service.

When Allen was discharged early in 1946, both the Giants and Yankees wanted him, but the Yankees had an edge. MacPhail had taken over the Yankees by then, with co-owners Dan Topping and Del Webb. He announced another innovation: Yankees broadcasters would travel with the team. Until then, road games were re-created in a studio from a telegraphed play-by-play summary. Allen went with the Yankees. (Barber said MacPhail had offered him the Yankees’ job but he chose to stay in Brooklyn, where he was a civic institution.)

It was a marriage of The Voice and The Dynasty. Beginning in 1947, the Yanks played in fifteen of the next eighteen World Series. Broadcasters from the two league champions customarily handled network coverage of the Series, so Allen claimed the fall classic as his own stage.

His signature phrases entered the American language: A home run was “going, going, gone!” He punctuated any remarkable play with “How about that?” Although he is often credited with coining Joe DiMaggio’s nickname, the Yankee Clipper, David Halberstam says Arch McDonald deserves credit for that. Allen was the first to call DiMag Joltin’ Joe. He labeled Tommy Henrich Ol’ Reliable.

Allen’s style was exuberant; his rich voice conveyed excitement. He was constantly compared with Red Barber—inevitably, they became the first broadcasters honored by the Baseball Hall of Fame in 1978. Curt Smith described them this way: “The Ol’ Redhead was white wine, crepes suzette and bluegrass music; Mel, beer, hot dogs, and the United States Marine Band.” Jim Woods, who worked with both men, said, “One was a machine gun, the other a violin.” Nobody who heard them would have any difficulty discerning which was which.

In radio days a team’s principal broadcaster—usually hired by the sponsors—ruled the booth. He assigned innings to his assistants, decided who would read the commercials and parceled out pregame and postgame duties. Several of Allen’s assistants agreed with Curt Gowdy’s assessment: “It wasn’t very easy to work for him, but when it was all over, you were glad you did.” Gowdy and Jim Woods said they learned from his polish and professionalism but chafed under his high-handedness. As Woods put it, “Whatever Allen wanted, Allen got.”

Red Barber joined the Yankees’ broadcast team in 1954, after leaving Brooklyn over a dispute with owner Walter O’Malley. It was quite a comedown for a man who had commanded his own booth as principal broadcaster for twenty seasons. At first Barber worked only televised home games, handling pregame and postgame shows and two and one-half innings of play-by-play on TV.

Barber insisted in his autobiography that there was no friction between this pair of giant egos—”Mel accepted me as an equal”—but others said their relationship was cool. They were opposites: Barber was married, a homebody who disliked traveling, and a devout Christian; Allen, single, gregarious, a man-about-town, and a Jew. Barber’s career was going downhill; Allen was king of the hill. According to Jim Woods, who was dumped from the Yankees broadcasts in 1957 to make room for former shortstop Phil Rizzuto, Allen and Barber were united in their mutual loathing of the jock-in-the-booth. Allen and Barber resolved their differences enough that Allen, nearly eighty years old, traveled from New York to Florida in 1992 to attend Barber’s funeral.

Allen’s fame grew as television replaced radio as the primary mass entertainment. He switched to TV coverage of the World Series in 1951, the first time the Series was televised coast-to-coast.

Like most radio broadcasters who attempted that transition, Allen never fully mastered the new medium. Echoing a common complaint, Ben Gross of the New York Daily News wrote in 1954 that Mel “has frequently been castigated for talking too much during his baseball telecasts. Like so many others, he often seems unwilling to permit the camera to tell the story and, at times, attempts to gild the picture on the tube with excessive verbiage.”

Some accounts say Allen was the first to suggest the center-field camera shot that is now standard on baseball telecasts. Yankees General Manager George Weiss limited the use of the shot for fear that opposing teams, watching TV, would steal the catcher’s signs.

Since Allen was the Voice of the Yankees, he was accused of partisanship on the Series broadcasts. Allen acknowledged he was partisan, but also declared, “I never rooted.”

He was renowned, too, as a skillful pitchman for the sponsors. A home run was “a Ballantine blast,” after the beer sponsor, or “a White Owl wallop,” after the cigar sponsor. In addition to his work on network college-football broadcasts, Allen was the sports voice of Movietone newsreels and hosted boxing matches.

Allen moved his parents, brother, and sister to the New York area and continued living with his sister after their parents died. His brother, Larry, who also adopted the name Allen, became his statistician and assistant.

Allen was six-foot-one, slim, and dark-haired in his youth, but began balding at an early age. By the 1950s he usually wore a hat during his TV broadcasts. He never married, but was often seen in the company of beautiful Broadway showgirls. Red Barber wrote in The Broadcasters, “His job was his life … the wife and children he never had.”

“I never saw anyone love his work more than he did,” said Lindsey Nelson, a prominent football broadcaster of the 1950s and later the voice of the New York Mets.

In the fourth game of the 1963 World Series, the Dodgers were on their way to an unprecedented sweep of the Yankees. In midgame, Allen was suddenly unable to speak. He blamed a flareup of a “nasal condition,” but many commentators said he was struck speechless by the Yanks’ humiliation. Sportswriter Dick Young called it “psychosomatic laryngitis.”

As the 1964 season ended, Allen’s world came crashing down. The Yankees’ president, Dan Topping, summarily fired him. Rizzuto represented the team on World Series telecasts. Joe Garagiola replaced Allen on the 1965 broadcasts.

The Yankees never explained his dismissal, so the rumor mill percolated. “They said I was a lush or that I beat my relatives or that I’d had a breakdown or that I was taking so many medicines for my voice that I turned numb,” he told Curt Smith years later. None of the rumors appeared in print, so Allen never publicly denied them. He said Topping gave him no explanation, saying only, “It wasn’t anything you did, Mel, and it wasn’t CBS.” CBS had just bought the team; as soon as Allen was gone, the network brought in one of its executives to supervise the Yankee broadcasts. There would be no more principal broadcaster. Allen believed the Yankees’ primary sponsor, Ballantine Beer, wanted to shed his high salary.

Topping told Red Barber, “I’m tired of him popping off.” But Allen said, “If they had objected to my talking a lot, I’d have been fired long ago.” Larger issues were at play; Ballantine beer was losing market share and the Yankees, despite winning the 1964 pennant, had drawn fewer fans than the last-place Mets. CBS wanted to promote a new, friendlier image for the regal Bronx Bombers.

The true story of Allen’s sudden fall from the pinnacle remains a mystery. “He gave the Yankees his life,” Barber said, “and they broke his heart.” Adding insult to injury, NBC dropped him from its college football telecasts.

Only fifty-one years old, he wasn’t out of work for long. The Braves played their final season in Milwaukee in 1965, held hostage by a court order although they had already announced that they intended to move to Atlanta. An Atlanta TV station hired Mel to broadcast some of the team’s games to their soon-to-be home.

Allen and Atlanta seemed a natural match: the biggest of big league voices for the new big league city, and a Southerner, to boot. But he didn’t join the Braves in Atlanta. In 1968 he went to Cleveland to televise Indians’ games. During one dull evening in a losing season, he stunned his broadcast partner–and, no doubt, the audience–by reciting Longfellow’s “Song of Hiawatha.” He turned down an offer to broadcast the Athletics’ games when they moved to Oakland. Allen said his business interests, including a Canada Dry soft-drink dealership, kept him on the East Coast, but his sister, Esther Kaufman, told biographer Stephen Borelli he would not leave New York because that would be admitting defeat.

Allen made public appearances for Canada Dry, broadcast University of Miami football, and hosted local and network radio sports shows. One of his few baseball assignments was the 1966 Little League World Series for a Sacramento radio station. While other broadcasters routinely jumped from team to team, Allen vanished from big-time sports for eight years. “It was as if he had leprosy,” Sports Illustrated’s William Taafe wrote in a 1985 profile.

Allen returned to Yankee Stadium on June 8, 1969, to serve as master of ceremonies on Mickey Mantle Day. In 1976 WPIX, the Yankees’ flagship TV station, hired him to narrate a special program celebrating the opening of the refurbished Yankee Stadium.

By then CBS and Dan Topping were long gone; George Steinbrenner owned the franchise. When Steinbrenner was a young assistant football coach, he had sought Allen’s advice about getting into broadcasting and Allen spent forty-five minutes with him. Steinbrenner never forgot that kindness. On Opening Day in the new-old stadium, the Yankees recognized Allen’s place in their history. He stood on the field during pregame ceremonies alongside other symbols of the Yankee legacy: Bob Shawkey, who had thrown the first pitch in the Stadium in 1923; Pete Sheehy, the clubhouse manager since 1927; restaurant owner Toots Shor; and former Postmaster General James Farley, who was said to be “the longest-running season-ticket holder.”

The next year Allen was back on Yankee broadcasts, calling a few dozen games for the SportsChannel cable network. He continued in that role until 1985. Beginning in 1977, Allen said, “How about that?” to a new generation of fans across the country as narrator of Major League Baseball’s weekly highlight show, This Week in Baseball (known as TWIB). Joe Reichler, a former sportswriter working in the commissioner’s office, gave him the job. He was the program’s signature voice even after his death: TWIB created an animated figure, complete with microphone and fedora, to introduce each week’s show with his trademark greeting, “Hello, everybody. This is Mel Allen.”

In 1978 the Baseball Hall of Fame established the Ford C. Frick Award to honor broadcasters for “major contributions to baseball.” Allen and Barber were the first to be recognized. (Broadcasters are not considered members of the Hall of Fame; there is no “broadcasters’ wing,” either. The winners are honored in an exhibit near the Hall’s library.)

Marty Appel, a former Yankees publicist who was producing the team’s broadcasts on WPIX, brought Allen back one last time in 1990 so he could be the answer to a trivia question: the first man to broadcast a major league game in seven decades. His Yankee career stretched from Lou Gehrig to Don Mattingly.

Allen died on June 16, 1996, at his home in Greenwich, Connecticut. He had suffered from heart trouble for years. He was buried in Temple Beth El Cemetery in Stamford, Connecticut. His gravestone reads: “Mel Allen Beloved son brother – uncle.” More than a thousand people attended a memorial service in New York’s St. Patrick’s Cathedral sponsored by the Committee for Christian-Jewish Understanding. On July 25, 1998, a plaque commemorating his career was unveiled in Monument Park at Yankee Stadium.

Only two sports broadcasters have equaled Mel Allen’s fame: the pioneer radio announcer Graham McNamee and Howard Cosell, the man so many fans loved to hate. Like Allen, both dominated the big events of their time. In Allen’s time, more than half of the television sets in the United States would be tuned in to the World Series. There were just three national TV networks – ABC, CBS, and NBC – and no regional sports networks.

With fewer games on television and fewer sports competing for attention, the leading broadcasters – Allen on baseball, Lindsey Nelson on college football – were the voices and faces of American sports. As Allen acknowledged, his renown was partly an accident of time and place: in New York, when the Yankees were giants. His success was also a product of his unique, vibrant voice and the craftsmanship and showmanship that he achieved by hard work.

Later generations of broadcasters—Gowdy, Brent Musburger, and Joe Buck—enjoyed similar wide exposure on showcase events. None was ever called The Voice.

Sources

Appel, Marty. Now Pitching for the Yankees. Toronto: Sport Classic Books, 2001.

Barber, Red. The Broadcasters. New York: The Dial Press, 1970.

Barber, Red, and Robert Creamer. Rhubarb in the Catbird Seat. Garden City, New York: Doubleday and Company, 1968.

Borelli, Stephen. How About That! The Life of Mel Allen. Champaign, IL: Sports Publishing, 2005.

Gross, Ben. I Looked and I Listened. New York: Random House, 1954.

Halberstam, David. Summer of ’49. New York: William Morrow and Company, 1989.

Halberstam, David J. Sports on New York Radio: A Play-by-Play History. Lincolnwood, Illinois: Masters Press, 1999.

Patterson, Ted. The Golden Voices of Baseball. Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing LLC, 2002.

Smith, Curt. The Storytellers. New York: Macmillan, 1995. 

_________. Voices of the Game. South Bend, Indiana: Diamond Communications, 1987.

(Author unknown), Mel Allen obituary, The Associated Press, June 16, 1996. Hoffman, Roy. “The Late Mel Allen: Alabama’s Voice of the Yankees.” Mobile Register, July 6, 2003. Smith, Curt, “Buck known for effortless style, class.”

Websites

www.espn.com, June 21, 2002.
www.americansportscasters.com
www.anecdotage.com

Twenty-six years later, that same boy pitched in the Major Leagues for the New York Yankees. In a February 2010 interview, he was asked what brought his father to the United States, and he replied, “The man who owned the brickyard in Port Costa, he was from my home town and he invited a bunch of Italians over to come to America and have a job.”[fn]Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1939.[/fn]

In 1923 the family moved to San Francisco. Rinaldo had lost his mother two months after his sixth birthday to what he understands was double pneumonia. While living in San Francisco as a youngster, Rinaldo added the middle name Joseph—not Giuseppe; Joseph was a confirmation name. He thought he picked up his nickname around this time. “I was all by myself. My father was working and I was only six years old. I lived across the street from a playground and I used to go over there and play marbles and fool around and get in fights. Guys would chase me. We had a bunch of thistle back there that wasn’t cleared and I’d run into the thistle and they wouldn’t chase me. They’d say, ‘You’re a rugged little bugger.’ I also played rugby and I was a Rugger there.”[fn]Interview by Ed Attanasio on November 21, 2006. All quotations from Ardizoia are from this 2006 oral history unless otherwise noted.[/fn]

In 1931, the Catholic Youth Organization began a baseball team and Ardizoia played for St. Theresa’s Church CYO. Next came play in American Legion ball and at the High School of Commerce. He had favored football as a youngster, and was a third baseman when he first started playing baseball. It was only in his junior year at Commerce that he took up pitching. He threw two no-hitters in high school, and in one of them opposing pitcher Art Gigli also threw a no-hitter. The game had to be called off because it ran too long, neither team ever getting a base hit.

The day he graduated from high school in 1937, the seventeen-year-old signed a contract with the Mission Reds of the Pacific Coast League (the team represented San Francisco’s Mission district). Actually, he had signed while he was still in high school, six months before his graduation. Offered a scholarship to Stanford University, he had to turn it down because he had already turned professional.[fn]Los Angeles Times, June 3, 1939.[/fn]

Ardizoia’s father was working as a warehouseman in 1937, earning $25 a week. His son now was making $150 a month. “That’s when he quit,” Rugger said of his father. “He said, like an old Italian, ‘I supported you for seventeen years, now you support me, OK?’ … Money was pretty good and so when I turned twenty-one, I bought this house. … I’ve been in this house here sixty-five years.” On January 11, 1942, Ardizoia married a fellow Commerce student, Mary Castagnola, a twenty-one-year-old native of San Diego.

Ardizoia threw 24 2/3 innings in nine games with Mission, and had a remarkable first game. “We were in San Diego and they had [Jimmy] Reese and Ted Williams and a whole bunch of those old guys and Johnny Babich started and I relieved in the second inning and I pitched the next five innings of one-hit ball. That was my first game in professional ball. After that, look out!”

He fondly recalled those early days: “I had all these old guys around me and I was just a young guy and they all teased me and all that. We got along real good, though. That’s one thing about the old days. There was [sic] no individuals. They were a team. … In those days, you pitched. You didn’t count pitches. You didn’t count innings. You just got it on. You got the guy out. I went as high as eighteen innings complete.”

More than anyone else, some of the catchers he worked with taught the five-foot-eleven, 180-pound right-hander how to pitch. “I had a fastball. I had an overhand curve, a three-quarter curve, and a sidearmed curve—three different types—and some little sinker ball. Then later on when I started with Oakland I picked up a slider.”

Ardizoia posted a 5.84 ERA in 1937 but didn’t record a decision. It was in 1938, pitching for the Bellingham (Washington) Chinooks in the Western International League, that he first got in a full season of work, 224 innings, with a 12-13 record and a 3.05 earned-run average. During the offseason, he pitched in the San Francisco Winter League. He credited manager Ken Penner of Bellingham with teaching him how to hide his pitches better.

In 1939 and 1940 Ardizoia pitched for the Hollywood Stars of the PCL. He first became associated with the New York Yankees in December 1939. The New York World-Telegram reported that Yankees had acquired Ardizoia in exchange for pitchers Hiram Bithorn and Ivy Andrews. Ardizoia, described as the best pitching prospect in the Pacific Coast League, had finished the season 14-9 with a 3.98 ERA.

It was intended from the start that Rugger would spend 1940 with Hollywood. He won 14 and lost 20 that year, and his 145 strikeouts were fifth highest in the league. In August 1940 the Yankees officially purchased his contract and in the spring of 1941 he trained with the Major League club.

After spring training, the Yankees sent him to the Newark Bears of the International League, but early in the season a problem cropped up. The International League included two clubs from Canada, Montreal and Toronto. Ardizoia was 0-1 with Newark before the Bears general manager realized Ardizoia was not a U. S. citizen. A trip to Ellis Island affirmed that he was legal in the United States, but Canada wouldn’t let him into the country. They were at war with Italy, and that made Rugger an enemy alien. “So I got sent to Kansas City. In those days, you had to wait two years and go before a judge and all that stuff. In the meantime, I got trapped in World War II and even though I wasn’t a citizen, I accepted the induction (into the U.S. Army),” he said. Before being drafted, however, he got into twenty-seven games for the Kansas City Blues of the American Association, going 12-9. Back with the Blues in 1942, he won six and lost twelve.

Rugger served in the army air force from May 1943 until he was discharged in November 1945. After eight months at McClellan Field, near Sacramento, he was transferred to Honolulu on June 1, 1944. Rugger joined the 7th Air Force’s baseball team there, compiling, he recalled, a 12-0 record. In Hawaii he became a tow target operator, flying over a firing range towing a target with a cable that was from 250 to 2,500 feet long. Baseball may have saved him his life, he remembered with a bit of understatement: “One night that I was supposed to fly, I was relieved because we had a ballgame. The plane crashed. I was lucky.”

Ardizoia joined a team that took him to some of the islands in the Pacific—Tinian, Saipan, and Iwo Jima. Playing baseball on volcanic and coral islands that had recently seen vicious fighting wasn’t always the easiest of duty. There were still worries that a Japanese soldier would emerge from concealment and open fire. “There were so many zigzags there [in the tunnels], they didn’t know if they got them all. They were hiding in the hills. We’d play every day or two. In the meantime, we had KP and cleanup jobs and stuff like that,” Ardizoia recalled.[fn]Rugger Ardizoia interview, December 10, 2008.[/fn]

When Corporal Ardizoia was discharged from the service at Camp Peale, California, he spoke up and said, “Hey, I want to become a citizen.” The officer was a little stunned. “Aren’t you a citizen? What the heck are you doing in the Army?” “I volunteered because this is my country.”  He was told, “OK, stick around for a couple of days.”

“I said, ‘No way.’ My son was eighteen months old and I hadn’t seen my wife for three years. So I came home and then went down to the Federal Building and went before the judge. He had me raise my right hand and he says, ‘Do you solemnly (swear) to defend the United States . . . wait a minute, you just came out of the Army?’ I said, ‘Yessir.’ He says, ‘You‘re a citizen.’”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

In 1946 it was back to baseball, this time with the Oakland Oaks in the PCL. Rugger had an excellent year on an Oaks team that won 111 games for manager Casey Stengel. Rugger was 15-7 with a 2.83 ERA. The three seasons he lost during the war hadn’t hindered him. His only home run in pro ball came in 1947, against Seattle.

In 1947, Ardizoia went to spring training with the Yankees again. He stuck with the big-league team for a while and finally had his opportunity to play in a Major League game. It was the last day of April. The Yanks had just arrived in St. Louis for a game against the Browns. When Ardizoia was brought on to pitch the bottom of the seventh, St. Louis had a 13–4 lead. He got through the seventh, but former Iwo Jima teammate Walt Judnich hit a homer in the eighth, one of two runs Rugger gave up.

As Ardizoia said in the 2006 interview, “The guy that hit the home run off me was one of my boyhood idols, Walter Judnich. I more or less slid it in for him because we were so far behind anyway.” Johnny Lindell pinch-hit for Rugger in the ninth. It was Ardizoia’s only Major League appearance, but by doing so, he became one of only seven natives of Italy to play in the Major Leagues.

After another week of throwing batting practice, Rugger was sold to Hollywood on May 8 and played the rest of the season for the Stars, going 11-10. His time in the majors was over; the Yankees won the World Series that year but Ardizoia never received either a ring or a World Series share.

In 1948 Rugger was with Hollywood again. In January 1949 he was traded to the Seattle Rainiers. He began the 1950 season with the Rainiers, but got into only two games, spending most of the year with the Dallas Stars in the Texas League, where he went 10-10. He pitched a second season for Dallas in 1951, and was 8-3 with a 2.88 earned run average.

After that season he retired from the game. He said he had a bone chip in his throwing arm and wanted to spend more time with his two children in San Francisco. Ardizoia finished baseball with just that one brief Major League appearance, with the 1947 Yankees. In the minors, he pitched for twelve seasons and won 123 games against 115 defeats, with a 3.63 ERA.

Ardizoia had worked during the off-seasons for Owl Drug Company, a retail chain. Owl had a baseball team and he played winter ball for it in the Bay area, but also put in eight-hour days. He worked for Owl until it went out of business, and then took up work as a salesman for Galland Linen and then National Linen Service. He worked at selling rental linen for about thirty years. Baseball helped. “A lot of accounts, people knew that I played ball and in those days they still remembered.”

Rugger’s wife, Mary, died in April 1983. The couple had two children, both born in San Francisco: Bill, in June 1944, and Janet, in April 1947. Janet died in April 2010.

The Yankees kept in touch, sending Ardizoia their alumni mailings, Christmas and birthday cards, and a big bouquet of flowers on his 85th birthday. After the 2009 World Series win, they sent him a medallion celebrating their 27th world championship. In 2009 a journalist in Italy wrote a story about him. Ardizoia helped start and remained a member of the San Francisco Old Timer’s Baseball Association, a group mostly of semipro players, but open to anyone who played baseball.

Ardizoia remained active until the end of his life, working for a number of years with the Pacifica Beach Coalition and participating in their April 2015 Earth Day of Action and EcoFest event. In June, he attended a Giants game and presented a check for $1,000 to a graduating high school baseball player. He suffered a stroke on July 11 and died of complications eight days later, on the 19th, at his home in San Francisco.

This biography is included in the book “Bridging Two Dynasties: The 1947 New York Yankees” (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), edited by Lyle Spatz. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Sources

Oral history done by Ed Attanasio on November 21, 2006 was transcribed by Tom Hetrick in February 2007.

Interviews by Bill Nowlin on December 10, 2008 and February 6, 2010. Correspondence from Rugger Ardizoia on February 17, 2010.

In addition to the sources noted in this biography, the author also accessed the online SABR Encyclopedia, Retrosheet.org, and Baseball-Reference.com.

Many images come to mind when one hears the name Yogi Berra. One of the more obvious is that of a winner. Berra won three American League Most Valuable Player awards and appeared in 14 World Series as a player and another five as a manager or a coach. He won 13 championship rings and holds several Series records. Berra met with numerous roadblocks on his journey to fame, but he overcame them with grit and dedication and went on to become one of the more beloved figures in American sports history.

Berra’s father, Pietro, arrived in New York on October 18, 1909, at the age of 23. He had left Robecchetto, Italy, a town about 25 miles south of Milan, where he was a tenant farmer. Pietro left behind Paolina Lingori, a young girl whom he planned to marry after earning enough money to pay her way to the United States. Paolina Longoni (subsequently, Paulina) arrived on March 10, 1912, aged eighteen. Peter and Paulina married nine days later and settled in a largely Italian section of St. Louis called “The Hill.”

Their first child, Anthony, was born in 1914. The second child, Mario, was born in Malvaglio, Italy, as Paulina, pregnant and homesick, went back to her hometown in 1915 for a visit. While she was there, World War I escalated and mother and child did not return to the United States until September 3, 1919. The Berras had a third son, John, in 1922, and on May 12, 1925, Lorenzo Pietro came into the world. His parents’ desire to assimilate in their new homeland led them to the English translation of Lawrence Peter, which, due to their accent, they pronounced Lawdie.

Lawdie Berra and his family lived on 5447 Elizabeth Avenue, across the street from Giovanni Garagiola and his family; they had a boy named Joe who was Lawdie’s age. The two youngsters spent most of their time playing games with the other neighborhood boys and their favorite sport was baseball. Besides sports, the boys loved to go to the movies. One day they watched a feature that had a Hindu fakir, a snake charmer who sat with his legs crossed and wore a turban on his head. When the yogi got up, he waddled and one of the boys joked that he walked like Lawdie. From then on Berra was known as Yogi. Even his parents called him by his nickname.

As a youngster Berra displayed the stubbornness and determination that carried over to his playing days. This was no more in evidence than when he decided he was going to quit school after the eighth grade. Yogi had never been a very good student and he felt he was wasting his time in school. Pietro disapproved, and enlisted the aid of the school’s principal and the local parish priest to help keep his son in school. Yogi held firm, and eventually his father relented and Yogi went to work in a coal yard. He lost the job because he often left work early to play ball with his friends after they got out of school. Pietro, furious his son would lose a job that paid $25 a week, was able to get Yogi a job working on a Pepsi Cola truck that paid $27 a week. He was fired from that job as well. After much arguing, it was decided Yogi would find a job that would allow him to play ball in the afternoon.

Yogi and Joe Garagiola were stars on an American Legion team that made the playoffs two consecutive years. Garagiola was six feet tall, athletic, and handsome. By contrast Berra, at 5-feet-7 and 185 pounds, was short and dumpy and had an awkward swing in which he chopped at the ball. He would also swing at anything near the plate. The man who ran the team, Leo Browne, arranged a tryout with the St. Louis Cardinals for his star players. Garagiola did well and was offered a contract with a $500 bonus with the order to keep quiet about it until he turned sixteen (the boys were fifteen at the time).

Despite not having a particularly good tryout, Berra was offered a contract but no bonus. Berra knew he could not go home without the same bonus as Garagiola, so he refused the offer. Cardinals general manager Branch Rickey offered a $250 bonus and again Berra refused. Yogi later had a tryout with the St. Louis Browns and once more was offered a contract without a bonus; once more he turned it down.

Browne wrote to his old friend George Weiss, who was in charge of the New York Yankees’ farm system. He said all Yogi wanted was a $500 bonus and whatever he made a month was fine. Berra signed with the Yankees in October 1942 for the $500 bonus he so adamantly desired, plus a monthly salary of $90. Rickey, now with the Dodgers, sent Berra a telegram offering him a chance to sign with Brooklyn but Yogi never responded because he was the property of the Yankees. So Yogi Berra was off to Norfolk, Virginia, to begin his professional baseball career.

Berra batted .253 in 111 games for the Norfolk (Virginia) Tars in 1943, with seven home runs and 56 runs batted in. After the season Berra enlisted in the navy. He became a machine gunner and saw action on D-Day aboard a rocket boat deployed just off the Normandy coast before the soldiers assaulted the beach. Berra spent 10 days on the 36-foot boat before he finally returned to his ship, the USS Bayfield, an attack transport.

Before he was discharged, Berra was shipped to the submarine base at Groton, Connecticut. He played for the base’s baseball team, managed by Lieutenant Commander James Gleeson, a former big-league outfielder. Gleeson had a difficult time believing the squat, awkward-looking seaman was a professional ballplayer, much less property of the Yankees. But in a game between the sailors and the New York Giants, Berra went 3-for-4 and impressed Giants manager Mel Ott so much he called the Yankees and offered $50,000 for Berra. Yankees president Larry MacPhail turned Ott down. Years later MacPhail confessed he had never heard of Yogi, but if Ott thought he was worth that kind of money, then the Yankees should keep him.

In 1946 the Yankees assigned Berra to the Newark Bears of the Class Triple-A International League, managed by former Yankees All-Star George Selkirk. Like Gleeson before him, Selkirk was skeptical that this squat young man was a ballplayer or a Yankee. He forced Yogi to show him the telegram from MacPhail ordering him to report to Newark.

Berra played in 77 games and batted .314 with 15 home runs and 59 RBIs but displayed an erratic arm behind the plate. In the regular-season finale, Berra tied the game with a ninth-inning homer, a game that Newark eventually won. The victory put Newark in the playoffs for the 14th consecutive season, though the Bears lost to a Montreal Royals squad that included Jackie Robinson.

After the loss to Montreal, Berra was called up to the Yankees and made his major-league debut on September 22, 1946, against the Philadelphia Athletics. He went 2-for-4, with a home run off Jesse Flores in his second at-bat. His second home run came the next day.

At spring training in 1947, Berra played mostly in right field, where he showed little skill. He was, however, earning a reputation as a hitter, although one who would often hit pitches well out of the strike zone. Because of Berra’s erratic outfield play, he saw more time at catcher once the season began; this seemed to be the safest place for him to play.

On June 15 he made an unassisted double play in a game against St. Louis. A week later he hit his first grand slam in a win over Detroit, and when he homered again the next day, he had registered six RBIs in two games. On August 26, a group from “The Hill” organized Yogi Berra Night in St. Louis to honor their native son. Before the series in St. Louis, Berra had contracted strep throat in Cleveland and had to be hospitalized. When he arrived in town for his night, Yogi was very nervous about making an acceptance speech. That was the night he uttered the famous line, “I want to thank everyone for making this night necessary.”

Berra batted .280 in his rookie campaign, with 11 home runs and 54 RBIs in 83 games. The Yankees faced Brooklyn in the World Series, the first fall classic to be televised. Yogi went 0-for-7 in the first two games, but came off the bench in Game Three to hit the first pinch-hit home run in Series history. Overall, he was 3-for-19 as New York won in seven games.

Berra spent the offseason in St. Louis, where he met a pretty waitress named Carmen Short working at a restaurant co-owned by Stan Musial. Yogi and Carmen hit it off and six months later were engaged. They were married on January 26, 1949, and old pal Joe Garagiola served as best man.

In 1948, Berra had a strong year at the plate, batting .305 with 14 home runs and 98 RBIs while appearing in 125 games (71 as a catcher). The All-Star Game was played in St. Louis that year; Berra made the squad but did not play. The Yanks finished third behind Cleveland and Boston and entered the off-season in the market for a better defensive catcher. This changed when the Yankees surprised the baseball world by picking 58-year-old Casey Stengel as their manager; Stengel nixed any thought of replacing Berra behind the plate.

Casey took an immediate liking to Berra, calling him “my assistant manager.” Stengel had an idea Yogi was much more sensitive than he let on, and decided to act as a buffer against those who criticized or just made fun of his young catcher. He also assigned future Hall of Famer Bill Dickey to act as Berra’s personal tutor. Dickey spent hours working with his student to improve his mechanics behind the plate and teaching him to think ahead during games.

Despite the improvement in his defensive play, Berra had some trouble with Yankees pitchers, especially Vic Raschi and Allie Reynolds, who thought he smothered curve balls and stabbed at fastballs, and thus made it difficult to get close calls from umpires. For his part, Stengel did not yet completely trust Berra either. In some critical situations the manager would call the pitches from the dugout, infuriating the veteran pitchers. Finally, one day in a game against the Athletics, Reynolds had enough. Stengel began waving to Yogi to get his attention so he could call a pitch. Meanwhile, Allie warned his young catcher if he looked into the dugout he would cross him up intentionally.

Berra knew this was not an idle threat and ignored his manager at the risk of being fined. The incident proved to be a turning point in his relationship with the pitching staff; they now felt that they could trust Berra. The season ended with the Yankees sweeping a two-game series against the Red Sox to claim the pennant. Yogi was a disappointing 1-for-16 in the World Series, though the Yanks beat Brooklyn in five games.

By the next season, Berra had established himself not only as a legitimate big-league catcher but also as a rising star in the American League. He had a stellar season in 1950, batting .322 with 28 home runs and 124 RBIs as the Yanks swept the Philadelphia Phillies to win their second straight world championship. After finishing third in the 1950 AL MVP voting, Berra won his first Most Valuable Player Award in 1951, when he led New York to yet another World Series title, this time at the expense of the New York Giants.

The next two seasons were more of the same as the Yanks won their fourth and fifth consecutive titles with wins over Brooklyn. Berra continued to develop his reputation as a clutch hitter, driving home 98 runs in ’52 and 108 in ’53. He batted a robust .429 in the Yankees’ six-game World Series victory in ’53. A second MVP came in 1954 despite the Cleveland Indians temporarily interrupting the Yankees dynasty. That year Berra batted .307 with 22 homers and 125 RBIs.

Berra entered the 1955 season as the highest-paid Yankee, and he earned his $48,000 by winning his second consecutive MVP award and third overall. The season ended in disappointment, however, as the Dodgers were finally able to take a Series from the Yankees. Jackie Robinson stole home in Game One, and Berra argued the call vociferously while jumping up and down. He never stopped insisting Robinson was out and he even signed photos of the play, “He was out.” In the decisive seventh game, Yogi came to the plate in the sixth inning with two men aboard and hit a fly ball toward the left-field corner, but left fielder Sandy Amoros raced over, made a spectacular catch, and turned it into a double play.

The Yankees regained the world championship in 1956 — against the Dodgers — and Berra had a big Series with three home runs, including two off Don Newcombe in the decisive seventh game. Berra batted in 10 runs, yet the highlight of the Series for him was catching Don Larsen’s perfect game in Game Five. Larsen said he did not shake off Berra once during his masterpiece.

Berra slumped to a .251 average in 1957 but was still productive with 24 home runs and 82 RBIs. He followed that with a similarly productive 1958 with a .266 batting average, 22 homers, and 90 RBIs. In those two seasons the Yankees and Milwaukee Braves split the World Series; Milwaukee won in 1957, and New York won in 1958.

The 33-year-old Berra reached some milestones in 1959, including his 300th career home run. He also set records (since broken) for the most consecutive chances by a catcher without an error, and the most consecutive games without an error. The erratic catcher of the early years was now a distant memory.

Though the Yankees didn’t win the pennant in 1959, they did win in 1960, the tenth and final flag under Casey Stengel. Yogi played more in the outfield, appearing in only 63 of 120 games as a catcher. In the thrilling Game Seven against Pittsburgh he hit a three-run homer in the sixth inning that only served as backdrop to Bill Mazeroski’s Series-ending home run in the ninth inning. That fabled shot sailed over left-fielder Berra’s head.

Yogi played three more seasons before retiring after the 1963 World Series. He batted just once in the Series, a sweep at the hands of the Los Angeles Dodgers. Even with that loss, he finished with a 10 4 record in Series play. He was named an All-Star 18 times between 1948 and 1962 (including four years when two All-Star Games were played each summer). He started behind the plate for the American League 11 times.

Berra had a career batting average of.285, with 358 home runs. At the time of his retirement, his 306 homers as a catcher were the most ever at the position. He still holds several World Series records, including the most games played (75). In his 18-year career, he drew 704 walks against just 414 strikeouts — proof that this legendary bad-ball hitter indeed hit what he chased.

On October 24, 1963, Berra was named the Yankees’ manager to replace Ralph Houk after Houk became general manager. The Yankees offered Berra a two-year contract but he insisted on a one-year deal as he was not sure he could manage. He would later regret that decision. Berra had intended to keep pitching coach Johnny Sain on his staff, but Sain could not agree on a contract and Berra turned to old friend Whitey Ford to be a player coach. He always believed Ford was one of the more intelligent pitchers and thought he would be outstanding in handling young pitchers.

The 1964 Yankees were not an easy bunch to manage. Veterans Mickey Mantle and Ford were famous for their off-the-field drinking and carousing, and the young players wanted to follow along. Players like Jim Bouton and Joe Pepitone were brash, and the clubhouse was out of control.

The Yankees came out of the gate sluggish, but by early August, Berra somehow had them in first place. Yet they spent the rest of the month playing uninspired and inconsistent ball. The nadir came in mid-August with a four-game sweep at the hands of the Chicago White Sox that dropped them 4 1/2 games behind the first-place White Sox. After the series concluded, the team bus was stuck in traffic on the way to the airport and everyone was feeling impatient.

It was then that one of the more memorable incidents of Berra’s stewardship took place. Infielder Phil Linz pulled out his harmonica and began to play “Mary Had a Little Lamb.” Berra angrily yelled from the front of the bus for him to stop. There are different accounts of what happened next.

According to Mantle, Linz asked him what Berra had said. Mantle reportedly responded, “Play louder.” Linz obliged. When Yogi heard the harmonica again he stormed to the back of the bus, smacked the instrument away, and a heated argument ensued. When news of the confrontation came out, Houk told reporters he had no intention of speaking to Berra about the incident. With Berra’s job security already in danger, this appeared to make his firing a fait accompli.

The Yankees lost the next two games to Boston to fall six games behind but then came on with a rush. They finished August strongly and went 22 6 in September before clinching the pennant on October 3. Their opponent in the World Series was the St. Louis Cardinals, who had also rallied to claim a thrilling National League race.

It was a back-and-forth Series that came down to a seventh-game matchup between Cardinals ace Bob Gibson and 22-year-old Mel Stottlemyre. St. Louis broke through for three runs in the fourth inning with the aid of some sloppy New York defense and Gibson held on to clinch the Series.

Overall, Berra had done a good job with an aging team. Ford had a sore arm and Mantle’s bad legs were making it increasingly difficult for him to cover center field. It was Berra who pushed for Stottlemyre to be called up in mid-August, and the rookie came through with a 9 3 record. It is unlikely the Yankees would have won the pennant without the young right-hander. They had responded well after the Linz episode and Yogi had every intention of asking for a two-year extension. Instead, he was fired and offered a job as a scout.

Across town, the New York Mets had finished their third season of play and two former Yankees were running the show, general manager George Weiss and manager Casey Stengel. With wife Carmen advocating he break with the Yankees after their shabby treatment of him, Berra took Weiss’s offer and joined Stengel’s staff as a player-coach. He caught only two games and batted .222, playing his final game three days before his 40th birthday in May.

Berra stayed with the Mets even though he was passed over for manager on three occasions. The first was when Stengel retired after breaking his hip in August 1965 and the Mets — with Stengel’s input — chose Wes Westrum as his replacement. Salty Parker was tabbed as Westrum’s interim replacement when he resigned in the final week of the 1967 season. In October 1967 the Mets dealt for Senators manager Gil Hodges to replace Parker. Berra knew and respected Hodges and was not upset at being passed over in favor of his old Dodgers rival.

So Berra stayed on to coach under Hodges and won his 11th World Series ring in 1969 when the Miracle Mets upset the Baltimore Orioles. Berra’s opportunity to finally manage the Mets came under tragic circumstances. He replaced Hodges when the Mets manager died of a heart attack on April 2, 1972, after playing golf.

Although Berra had coached under Hodges for four years, he was a different type of manager. Hodges was a disciplinarian who took a more hands-on approach with his players. By contrast, Berra treated his players as adults and left the responsibility of being in shape to them, figuring that just being a ballplayer should be motivation enough to take your job seriously and be prepared. Unlike his predecessor, Berra did not platoon and kept the same lineup, a change the veterans found to their liking.

The Mets were 30-11 on June 1, but beset by injuries they staggered to a third-place finish. On a brighter note for Berra, that summer marked his induction into the Hall of Fame in Cooperstown.

In 1973 injuries slowed the Mets again and there were rumors that Yogi might not make it through the summer. The team was in fifth place at the end of August, but as players regained their health, the Mets closed the gap in the tightly-bunched National League East.

On September 21 the Mets reached .500 and first place at the same time. With a victory over the Cubs on October 1, the Mets completed their remarkable comeback, winning the division title with just eighty-two victories. They defeated the highly-favored Cincinnati Reds in the National League Championship Series, making Berra only the second manager to win a pennant in each league (Joe McCarthy was the first). In the World Series, the Mets lost to the Oakland A’s in seven games.

The Mets fell to fifth place in 1974 with a 71 91 record, the club’s worst mark since 1966. Simmering trouble between Berra and left fielder Cleon Jones deepened in 1975 and when Jones refused to enter a game as a pinch-hitter, matters came to a head. Yogi refused to let Jones back on the team and demanded he be released. Chairman of the board M. Donald Grant did not want to cut Jones, but Berra remained firm and soon thereafter Jones was waived. The team was struggling and when it suffered a five-game losing streak in early August — culminating with a doubleheader shutout at home at the hands of the last-place Expos — Yogi was fired. Coach Roy McMillan was picked to replace him.

After a 12-year absence, Yogi returned to the Yankees when old friend and teammate Billy Martin picked him to be on his staff in 1976. With Berra on board at the reopened Yankee Stadium in 1976, the Yanks won their first pennant since 1964. Though they were swept in the Series by the Reds, Berra added two more World Series rings with back-to-back titles in 1977 and 1978. Berra was a constant on the Yankees’ coaching staff through the 1983 season despite several managerial changes. He got one more chance to manage when he was named Yankees manager for 1984.

New York struggled early in the season and there was no catching the Detroit Tigers, who cruised to the division title. Prior to the ’85 season, rumors swirled that owner George M. Steinbrenner wanted to fire his manager, but as spring training came around he declared Berra safe for the year. This was a season Yogi looked forward to because the Yankees had acquired his son Dale from Pittsburgh. Not only did Berra not survive the season but he was fired before the end of April with a record of 6 10. Upset that Steinbrenner broke his promise to let him manage the entire year, Berra stayed away from Yankee Stadium until reconciliation in 1999.

While his managing days were now over, his coaching career was not. Houston Astros owner John McMullen offered Berra the Astros’ manager position just three days after he was fired but he turned it down. At the end of the season, he did accept a coaching job with Houston under rookie manager Hal Lanier. Yogi stayed with the Astros through the 1989 season, ending his long and illustrious career in uniform. He had spent seventeen years as a player, two years as a player-coach, eighteen years as a coach, and seven years as a manager.

Berra remained not only a Yankees legend but an American icon as well. A museum dedicated to him opened in Montclair, New Jersey, his and Carmen’s home for more than half a century. There they raised their three sons: Larry, a former minor-league catcher; Tim, who played in the NFL for the Baltimore Colts in 1974; and Dale, who spent the last couple of months of his 11-year career with his dad on the 1987 Astros.

Yogi promoted numerous products — most famously Yoo-Hoo, the chocolate soft drink, and even had a cartoon bear named after him. The former catcher’s Yogi-isms are known worldwide. As one of the oldest and most recognizable Hall of Famers, Yogi Berra maintained a connection back to what many consider the Golden Era of baseball.

He died at the age of 90 on September 22, 2015.

Sources

DeVito, Carlo. Yogi: The Life and Times of an American Original. Chicago: Triumph Books, 2008.

Lang, Jack, and Peter Simon. The New York Mets: Twenty-Five Years of Baseball Magic. New York: Henry Holt and Co., 1986.

Hernandez, Keith, and Matthew Silverman. Shea Good-bye: The Untold Story of the Historic 2008 Season. Chicago: Triumph Books, 2009.

Palmer, Pete, and Gary Gillette (editors). The 2005 ESPN Baseball Encyclopedia. New York: Sterling, 2005.

http://www.achievement.org/autodoc/page/ber0int-3

Author interview with Jerry Koosman, December 16, 2008.

Bill stood six-feet-three and weighed 215 pounds in his prime. In 1946 he was a key member of the Yankees rotation, second only to Spud Chandler. A season later, he was manager Bucky Harris’s starter in Game Four. A win would give the Yankees a commanding 3–1 lead in the Series, which was as important to Bill as the no-hitter. What no one else in the ballpark knew, at this point Bevens was pitching largely on guts and guile. He had hurt his arm earlier in the game and had lost some speed off his fastball. Still, he thought he could get one more out. It was not to be.

Floyd Clifford Bevens was born on October 21, 1916, in Hubbard, Oregon, a small farming town about twenty-five miles south of Portland.1 Floyd was born to John Ezra and Edna Elizabeth (Jones) Bevens. He had three older brothers (Roy, Ray, and Henry) and an older sister Ruby. Two other siblings had died before he was born. His family grew hops and berries, and kept some animals. They needed Floyd, his three brothers, and his sister to do chores and help run the farm. Reminiscing about his childhood to a reporter in 1947, Bevens called his part of Oregon “a grand country to live in. What with the chores, my schoolboy life was a busy one.”2

Bevens described how he started pitching. “I went to grade school and then high school in Hubbard. I was a ballplayer in high school. Third base. Our coach was a man named Silkie. He needed pitching badly. He saw that I could throw hard. Well, the inevitable happened.”3

After high school, Bevens went to work at a garage and then at a cannery. He also played junior American Legion Ball for two years with the Woodburn, Oregon post. His team reached the national semifinals before losing to a team from Chicago, whose star pitcher was future Chicago Cubs first baseman Phil Cavarretta. After Legion ball Bevens pitched for semipro teams in Oregon while working at a warehouse. He also courted and married Mildred Louise Hartman.

Bevens’s success as a semipro attracted the attention of professional scouts, like the Yankees’ Joe Devine, who signed him in 1936. The Yankees sent the twenty-year-old right-hander to El Paso in the Class D Arizona-Texas League. In his first year in the minors, Bevens won sixteen games and struck out 179 men in 242 innings. (Sixteen was the most games Bevens ever won in a season, in the majors or the minors.)

Bevens progressed steadily through the Yankees farm system during the late 1930s and early 1940s. He won fourteen games for the Class B Wenatchee (Washington) Chiefs in 1938 and 1939, pitching a no-hitter each year. In 1940 he won fourteen for the Binghamton (New York) Triplets, the Yankees entrant in the Class A Eastern League. Bevens appeared ready to advance further, but his career stalled.

In 1947 he told an interviewer, “In 1941 I just couldn’t get going and was demoted to Augusta (Georgia) in the Sally League.”4 Bevens was 6-5 with Augusta after starting the season 0-7 with the Triplets. When the U.S. entered World War II, the Yankees transferred Bevens to the higher-level Pacific Coast League so he’d be closer to home if he got drafted. He won four and lost eleven for Seattle and Hollywood in 1942, then went 7-8 for Kansas City of the American Association in 1943.

At age twenty-six and married, Bevens did not get drafted. The Yankees brought him to spring training in 1944 and then promoted him to their top Minor League affiliate, the Newark Bears, where, he said, “I began to get somewhere. I won 12 and lost 6. I was asked to report to the Yankees about midseason, and won 4 and lost 1 in the American League. Once with the Yankees I decided that it was a far superior life to working in the minors and decided to stick.”5

Bevens’s first Major League victory was against the Boston Red Sox in the heat of a pennant race. He also won a key game at the end of the ’44 season that put the Yankees in position to take the pennant if they could only win the last four games against the St. Louis Browns. The Yankees lost the first game and were eliminated as the Browns captured their only twentieth century flag.

Bevens attributed his success in the majors to his control. “I began to get somewhere in 1945 because I developed my control to the point at which I was able to keep my passes down.”6 He went 13-9 in 1945, and then 16-13 with a 2.23 ERA in 1946, walking only 78 men in 249 2/3 innings. Eight of Bevens’s thirteen losses in 1946 were by one run, including two 1–0 defeats.

Bevens prided himself on staying in shape by working out during the off-season. He refereed high school and college basketball games to keep his legs strong. His off-season job in the cannery also built up muscle. He threw a fastball, curve ball, and change-up but stayed away from more exotic pitches like the knuckle ball. Bevens told a reporter during the 1947 season, “I never have suffered from a sore arm. I throw hard every day. You cannot expect your arm to be strong if you do not exercise it.”7 Even though Bevens was in good shape, he suffered from poor run support and lost almost twice as many games as he won in 1947, finishing with a 7-13 record and a 3.82 ERA.

The Yankees went into Game Four of the 1947 World Series up two games to one, with a chance to take a commanding lead. While he had allowed no hits when he faced Lavagetto with two outs in the ninth inning, his ten walks broke a Series record set by the Philadelphia Athletics’ Jack Coombs thirty-seven years earlier. Brooklyn scored a run in the fifth inning on two walks, a sacrifice, and a ground out. Meanwhile, the Yankees managed two runs, which looked like enough for the win.

In the ninth inning the Dodgers came up for their last chance. Bevens got Bruce Edwards to ground out to start the inning. One down. Then he walked Carl Furillo. Spider Jorgensen popped up in foul territory for the second out. Al Gionfriddo, running for Furillo, stole second. Pete Reiser, unable to play in the field because of a leg injury, hobbled up to the plate to pinch hit. With first base open, Bevens pitched the dangerous Reiser carefully. When the count reached 3-1, Harris ordered an intentional walk to Reiser, violating the fundamental precept of putting the potential winning run on base. Eddie Miksis ran for Reiser. Dodgers manager Burt Shotton sent the right-handed-hitting Lavagetto up to bat for Eddie Stanky, also a right-handed hitter.

“The book said Lavagetto couldn’t handle hard stuff away,” Bevens said many years later. “That’s what I gave him.” The first pitch was on the corner for strike one. As it turned out, the book the Yankees had on Lavagetto was wrong. “Fast and tight was the way to handle me,” Lavagetto said.8

Bevens’s next pitch was in the same place, and Lavagetto lined it over Tommy Henrich’s head off the right-field wall. With two outs the runners were off at the crack of the bat, and Miksis scored all the way from first with the winning run. Bevens said the next day that after Lavagetto’s hit he “felt like a guy who had dropped ten stories in an elevator. My heart and my brains and everything was right down by my spikes.”9

While the Dodgers celebrated at home plate, Bevens turned and walked slowly to the clubhouse. The Yankees kept the door closed after the game for more than a half-hour while they tried to regroup. Afterward, they put the best face on it they could, praising Bill’s effort and vowing to win the World Series anyway.

Win it they did, and Bevens made a significant contribution in the seventh and deciding game. After Frank Shea gave up two runs to Brooklyn in the second inning, Bevens relieved him and pitched 2 2/3 scoreless innings before leaving for a pinch hitter. Joe Page pitched the last five innings and got the win. Bevens was able to pitch only because his wife Mildred stayed up the night before the game massaging his right arm.

Nothing could restore Bevens’s arm for the 1948 season. At the time it was reported that his struggles were caused by a leg injury he suffered while refereeing a basketball game during the off-season However, some years later, Bevens told reporter Tom Meany that his arm went dead during the World Series.

Bevens and the Yankees tried everything and anything to get his arm to come back. He even suffered a quack doctor injecting his arm with saline solution, but nothing worked. Bevens was sold to the White Sox on a conditional basis in January 1949 and then returned by the White Sox on March 28. He reported to Minor League spring training and then was released by the Yankees on April 18.

For several years after that, Bevens tried to pitch professionally. In 1950 he pitched for Sacramento in the Pacific Coast League but was released and went to San Diego. His arm had improved but his pitching hadn’t. Bevens said, “Although I couldn’t pitch winning ball, my arm no longer gave me any trouble.”10

In 1951 he pitched for the Salem (Oregon) Senators in the Western International League, going 20-12 with a 3.08 earned run average in this Class B minor league. He took comfort from pitching in his hometown, where Mildred and his three sons, Larry, Danny, and Bobbie, could watch him. As a former Major League pitcher, and only four years removed from his “almost” no-hitter, Bevens was a celebrity in the league and attracted reporters after every game.

Bevens’s success in Salem earned a trip to San Francisco in the PCL in 1952, where he was 6-12 with a 4.47 ERA in 155 innings. He tried again with Salem the next year, but the thirty-six-year-old Oregonian’s baseball career was at an end. He returned home to Salem to raise his family. Eventually he stopped working at the local cannery and worked his way up to manager of a trucking company.

Baseball fans remembered Bevens. Almost to the day he died, people would regularly ask Bevens about the almost no-hitter, said his son Larry. Bevens was never angry or regretful. “I don’t think he ever had any sense of ‘Gee whiz, what if,’” Larry said. “He didn’t toss or turn, or end up bemoaning Lavagetto’s hit.”11

Bevens died on October 26, 1991, from lymphoma, at the age of seventy-five. Every obituary led with mention of the fourth game of the 1947 World Series. So in the end Bevens did achieve baseball immortality, even if it was the “close-but-didn’t-quite-make-it” kind. He did make a significant contribution to a world championship team.

Bevens was survived by his wife Mildred, whom he married in 1936, his three sons, eight grandchildren, and six great-grandchildren. No doubt Bevens considered his marriage of more than a half-century, and the size of his extended family more than enough compensation for losing his no hitter.

In a piece on Bevens for Collier’s magazine in 1951, author Tom Meany wrote that a reporter asked Bevens, “How do you feel about being one out away from glory? When you think back about that game and realize that Lavagetto’s hit cheated you of something nobody else had ever done, what are your reactions?”

“Well,” answered Bevens, “I figure I was lucky to be up there in the first place.”12

This biography is included in the book “Bridging Two Dynasties: The 1947 New York Yankees” (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), edited by Lyle Spatz. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Notes

1. There are several unconfirmed version of how Bevens acquired the name Bill.

2. Daniel M. Daniel, “Bevens, Big Modest, Reticent Hombre Heads for Hurling Heights with Yanks” – Baseball Magazine, June 7, 1947, p. 227.

3. Ibid. p. 227.

4. Ibid. pp. 227-228.

5. Ibid. p. 228.

6. Ibid.,p. 228.

7. Ibid. p. 228.

8. Ibid. p. 229.

9. Bill Bevens as told to Jack Cuddy in New York, published in the Detroit News, October 4, 1947.

10. Tom Meany, “Hard Luck Keeps Bill Pitching,” Collier’s, July 28, 1951.

11. Sean Kirst, “Almost immortality: The Baseball Heartbreak of Bill Bevens,” Syracuse Post-Standard, October 14, 2010.

12. Tom Meany, “Hard Luck Keeps Bill Pitching,” Collier’s July 28, 1951.

Robert William “Bobby” Brown was born on October 25, 1924, in Seattle, Washington, to William and Myrtle (Berg) Brown. His father’s career caused several cross-country moves, but Bobby excelled at baseball everywhere they lived. His father had been a semi-pro of some note with the Meadowbrooks in Newark, New Jersey. Bill Brown had even played against Lou Gehrig, when the latter played by the name of Lou Long.1 Bobby always felt that his father wanted him to give baseball a whirl, if consistent with his college plans and medical hopes.

Young Bobby was only 10 when he drop-kicked 24 field goals in a contest for youngsters staged by a Seattle, Washington newspaper, which tested football kicking and throwing skills. At age 12, he was playing American Legion Junior Baseball; by the eighth grade, he went to the try-out camp at Ruppert Stadium in Newark for the International League Newark Bears; and at 18, he was a freshman sensation at Stanford University, receiving offers from several Major League teams.

Bobby attended San Francisco’s Galileo High School, the same school as Vince, Joe and Dom DiMaggio, and Hank Luisetti, who was once considered America’s greatest basketball star. Brown was a straight-A student and president of the student body.

In 1941, while a junior at Galileo, he was noticed by a Cincinnati Reds scout, who had seen the Galileo squad destroy the University of California freshman baseball team. After the game, the scout, who was also a professor at Berkeley, asked young Bobby if he would like to go to Cincinnati and work out with the Reds. Bobby, a shortstop, promptly agreed. That summer he took the train to Ohio and worked out for ten days with the Reds, followed by an additional three-day workout when the team went to Chicago. After graduation from high school, Bill Brown sent his son back east to work out with the Reds, the Detroit Tigers, the New York Yankees, the Brooklyn Dodgers, and the Philadelphia Athletics.

Brown entered Stanford in 1942 expecting to major in chemical engineering. While still at Stanford, he enlisted in the navy in 1943. Called up for duty on July 1, 1943, he was assigned to a naval unit at UCLA and given five semesters to finish his pre-med courses. Brown was at UCLA for one year, where he played baseball for the Bruins and was then assigned to San Diego Naval Hospital for temporary duty.

On December 1, 1944, Brown was assigned to Tulane Medical School and was given a midshipman’s uniform. He played a year at Tulane, the 1945 season. With Brown on the team, the Green Wave had its most successful season to that point, winning 21 of 27 games, including 12 in a row, and Brown batted .444.2 When he was mustered out of the navy in January 1946, the scouts came calling.

Brown convinced the dean of the medical school at Tulane that he could play ball and still go to medical school. On February 18, 1946, he signed a contract with the New York Yankees that stipulated he would receive $11,000 for 1946, $15,000 for 1947, $18,000 for 1948, as well as receiving a cash bonus of $10,000. According to Bobby, that was the second highest bonus awarded up to that time. His highest per-season salary while playing was $19,500 (both 1952 and 1954), which was more than the dean at his medical school earned.3

Bobby was at Tulane when the 1946 season began and with the Yankees when it ended. He spent most of the year with Newark, the Yanks’ top farm team, where he hit .341. Jackie Robinson hit .349 for Montreal, edging Brown for the batting title. Because of his great season for the Bears, Bobby was honored in January 1947 at the Newark Athletic Club as one of the top four outstanding New Jersey athletes of 1946.

Brown was called up to New York after the International League season ended. The six-foot-one, 180-pound youngster made his Major League debut on September 22, 1946, playing shortstop and batting third in the second game of a Yankee Stadium doubleheader against Philadelphia. He got his first big-league hit in that game, as did his roommate Yogi Berra, also making his debut. Bobby appeared in seven games, going 8-for-24.

In 1947 Bobby batted .300 in 69 games, and then played an important role in the Yankees seven-game World Series win against the Brooklyn Dodgers. The Yankees used the 22-year-old, left-handed hitting Brown as a pinch-hitter four times, and four times he came through: two doubles, a single, and a walk. His fourth inning double in Game Seven tied the score at 2–2 and sent the eventual series-winning run to third base.

In the 1949 World Series, Bobby had six hits in 12 at-bats, including a double and two triples, and he drove in five runs. Then in 1950, when the Yankees swept the Phillies in the Series, Bobby went 4-for-12, with a double and a triple. The next season brought a fourth trip to the World Series for Brown. In five games, he had five hits in 14 at-bats with two walks. He had also won four world championship rings by the age of 26.

Between 1948 and 1951, Bobby averaged 104 games played per season, platooning with Billy Johnson (1948 to 1950) and Gil McDougald (1951) at third base. He was a steady contributor to the Yankees line-up. During this four-year span, Brown collected 364 hits in his limited time, sporting a .281 batting average.

In 1951 Bobby and his future bride, Sara Kathryn French, set their wedding date for October 12, 1951, which was shortly after the scheduled end of the World Series. The Yankees were playing in the Series against the New York Giants, but after Game Three, there was a heavy downpour that threatened to continue for a few days. Bobby and his bride had not planned a huge wedding, inviting only family and close friends, so he called her and changed the date to the 16th of October, giving enough extra time in case the weather combined with possibly four more games extended past the 12th.

The Series lasted six games. Brown batted .357 and the Yankees won another title. Brown’s 439 (18-for-41) career batting average in World Series play is the highest for batters with more than 20 at-bats.

Bobby and Sara were married at the Northway Christian Church in Dallas, Texas. Brown likes to tell folks that his was the only marriage postponed by rain. Following the honeymoon, he served as an intern at Southern Pacific Hospital in San Francisco.

On April 24, 1951, Bobby was shagging fly balls when he was called to the Yankees clubhouse. He was asked to treat Casey Stengel, who was suddenly overcome with nausea. As it turned out, Casey had had a kidney stone.

When the Korean War broke out, Dr. Brown was eligible for the “Doctor’s Draft,” since he had not actually served overseas during World War II. Consequently, he was sent to Korea to serve with the 45th Division in the United States Army and was assigned to the 160th Field Artillery Battalion, heading the battalion aid station. After 19 months of military service in Korea and at Tokyo Army Hospital, Brown returned to the Yankees in May 1954. The Yankees had lost nine of their first 16 games, leading Casey Stengel to exclaim, “Boy, do we need a doctor!”4

While at Tokyo Army Hospital, Bobby joined Joe DiMaggio and Lefty O’Doul to give clinics to the Japanese teams who were in spring training. Joe had brought his bride Marilyn Monroe to Japan for his honeymoon. Joe told the press the only doctor who could treat Mrs. DiMaggio was Lieutenant Brown.

Bobby Brown retired from baseball in 1954 at the age of 29. He had spent parts of eight seasons in New York, but he felt the calling to become a full-time doctor, a decision he never regretted. In 1974, Dr. Brown wrote, “the only regret I might have is that I didn’t play ball exclusively for two or three years. I’d like to know how well I could have done if I’d concentrated exclusively on baseball for several years.”5 His response is akin to Burt Lancaster’s line in Field of Dreams, when Ray Kinsella asks Moonlight Graham if he ever regrets becoming a doctor and not playing baseball. Dr. Brown will tell you, “Not going to medical school would have been a tragedy.”

After trading the bat and glove for a stethoscope and lab coat, Dr. Brown served his residency in internal medicine at San Francisco County Hospital from 1954 through 1957 (he was chief resident the last year). He then served a Fellowship in Cardiology back at his alma mater, Tulane Medical School, from 1957 to 1958. Following that, he entered private practice in Fort Worth, Texas, on August 1, 1958.

In May 1974 Brown took a six-month leave of absence from his medical practice to become interim president of the Texas Rangers. Brad Corbett, a good friend, had purchased the team and needed Bobby’s help. Coincident with his appearance, the Rangers moved into first place. “Modesty keeps me from taking the credit,” Dr. Brown told the Los Angeles Times. “Modesty and Ferguson Jenkins and Billy Martin.”6

Brown knew he had his work cut out. “Texas is football country,” he once said. “We’ve got to get them interested in baseball.” The 1974 Rangers finished above .500 after two consecutive 100-loss seasons, but at the end of the ’74 season, Dr. Brown returned to his practice.

When Bowie Kuhn retired as Commissioner of Major League Baseball in 1984, the owners asked Bobby to interview for the job. However, the owners wanted a businessman to be the commissioner and offered Brown the job of president of the American League. It was a job he held for ten years, before Gene Budig replaced him on August 1, 1994. On August 10th, Bobby got on a plane to fly home to Texas. That was the same day the players went on strike, a strike that would end the season and cancel the World Series.

Brown visited the United States Military Academy in January 2007, meeting with cadets who were students in a sabermetrics course. He was very candid in his remarks. Regarding the state of baseball at that time, Dr. Brown said television is driving the huge amount of money being given to players. Attendance is higher than ever, and millions of people are subscribing to teams’ television networks.

He is amazed that the distances set up over 125 years ago have proven to be “just right”—ninety feet between bases and sixty feet, six inches to home plate from the mound. They’ve raised and lowered the height of the mound, but the horizontal distances are “just right.”7

The former American League President was proud of having very few controversies during his tenure, but a few incidents still stick in his mind. Dr. Brown’s toughest cases involved two marquee players. The first was when Roger Clemens was ejected in a playoff game against Oakland in 1990 for arguing balls and strikes. He received an eight-game suspension for the next season. The second involved Albert Belle, who was discovered to have used a corked bat on July 15, 1994. Belle received a seven-game suspension.

Brown believed steroids were a huge temptation for ballplayers to perform better. Cocaine was a major problem in baseball when he became American League president. In 1984, he had suggested testing for illegal drugs four or five times per season. His proposal called for random testing with no identifying names on the specimen bottles, to simply determine the extent of the problem. The players’ union refused.

Joe DiMaggio was the best all-around baseball player he ever saw, Brown said. Joe never gave inspirational talks, but he always played at 110 percent, so others played hard, too. In fact, Bobby recalled that no player on the Yankees gave big inspirational speeches. “We all got along. At the end of the day, everyone knew who had played well in a game.”8 It was an eight-team league in those days, but Bobby felt that nobody stood out like DiMaggio. From 1937 to 1973, it was 457 feet to left center field in Yankee Stadium. In any other ballpark, Joe might have hit well over 500 home runs. Having said that, Bobby said Ted Williams was the best pure hitter he ever saw.

In June 1949, The Sporting News interviewed Brown about his future in both medicine and baseball. He replied, “The basic truth is this: Just as long as baseball wants me, I will want baseball. Inevitably, there will be a day when I will have to say to myself, ‘The time has come. Hang up your spikes and your uniform, put away the bats, and get down to working out the Oath of Hippocrates.'”

The article ended with the following: “The day we talked with Brown, he was batting .333, and moving along impressively. A fine youngster, a credit to baseball, and he will be a credit to medicine. As he left to go out on the field, Bobby laughed, ‘Here are two more points. I will not wear a goatee as a doctor. And I am not engaged to be married.’ The future Dr. Brown pulled on his glove and walked out on the field to do a little laboratory work under the watchful eye of Prof. Casey Stengel.”9

Dr. Brown is a member of the Athletic Halls of Fame at Stanford, UCLA, and Tulane Universities, as well as those of Galileo High School, San Francisco Prep, and Greater New Orleans. He has received the Presidential Citation from the American Academy of Otolaryngology (1990), the Branch Rickey Award for Uncommon Service to Baseball (1992), and has been awarded three honorary doctorates (from Trinity College, the University of Massachusetts, and Hillsdale College). He was awarded the United States Coast Guard Silver Lifesaving Medal and served our country proudly during World War Two and the Korean War. He and Sara have three children and ten grandchildren.

Epilogue

Dr. Bobby Brown died at the age of 96 on March 25, 2021, in Fort Worth, Texas.

Related links

• Watch Dr. Bobby Brown’s panel discussion at the SABR 44 (2014) convention in Houston with Eddie Robinson and Bob Watson
• Listen to Dr. Bobby Brown’s SABR Oral History interview from 1994 with Tom Harris

Acknowledgements

The author expresses his sincere appreciation to Fr. Gabriel Costa, United States Military Academy, and Dr. John Saccoman, Seton Hall University, for their support in this project. Gabe and JT (both long-time SABR members) were instrumental in introducing the author to Dr. Brown and in offering advice with the biography.

Sources

Porter, David L., editor. Biographical Dictionary of American Sports: Baseball, Revised and Expanded Edition. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press, 2000.

Personal conversations with Dr. Brown, January 2007 through June 2007.

Sporting News, June 8, 1949.

Sporting News, October 19, 1949.

The New York Times, May 4, 1954.

The Los Angeles Times, May 9, 1974.

Various undated articles and newspaper clippings (including contract cards) in Robert W. Brown’s file at the A. Bartlett Giamatti Research Center, The National Baseball Hall of Fame & Museum, Cooperstown, New York, accessed May 2007.

Notes

Thomas Joseph Byrne was born in Baltimore, Maryland, on December 31, 1919, one of three sons of Joseph Thomas Byrne and Grace C. (Phenice) Byrne. The youngster’s favorite ballplayer was Babe Ruth, and he told friends he hoped some day to don the same pinstriped uniform of his hero.

Byrne first pitched for the Blessed Sacrament Elementary School team in the Baltimore Junior League. A neighbor, Philadelphia Athletics pitcher Eddie Rommel mentored Tommy on the finer points of pitching and instilled baseball savvy in the youngster that would stay with him throughout his career.

In his first year at City College high school, Byrne failed to make the freshman baseball team. In his second year, he made the junior-varsity squad, and was called up to the varsity late in the season to pitch in an exhibition game against the Naval Academy’s Plebe team. Tommy walked the first three batters and then settled down, leading his team to a 4–0 victory.

Finally installed on the varsity squad, Byrne dominated the Baltimore school baseball scene for the next two years. He helped guide City High to two undefeated seasons and a pair of Maryland Scholastic Association championships. During the summer months he hurled in the Baltimore amateur leagues with the Oriole Juniors and the Joe Cambria All Stars.

After graduating in 1937, Byrne had an opportunity to sign with the Detroit Tigers. He traveled with the club for part of the summer. The Tigers offered him a $4,000 signing bonus and a roster spot on their Texas League farm club in Beaumont. But Byrne, an excellent student, wanted to go to college and turned down the offer.

Duke University offered a scholarship that would have required him to work in the school cafeteria to defray some of his expenses. A friend in Baltimore, who had a connection with Wake Forest College, told Byrne he could get a scholarship there without having to work.

When Byrne got off the train in Wake Forest, North Carolina (the college had not yet moved to Winston-Salem and become a university), he was instantly smitten with the small-town atmosphere. He struck up an immediate friendship with baseball coach John Caddell. Byrne lived with the Caddell family during his stay at the school and as their bond grew, he eventually, came to know the coach and his wife as his adoptive parents.

Byrne was a mathematics major in the classroom and a standout pitcher on the Wake Forest baseball team for three seasons. He defeated Duke nine of the ten times he faced them. He also fanned seventeen in a game against Cornell. During the summers, Byrne played in the semiprofessional Tobacco State League. He was scouted by Yankees regional scout Gene McCann and signed with New York on July 4, 1940. He received a $10,000 signing bonus and a $650-a-month salary. The Philadelphia Athletics had offered Byrne more money, but he was determined to play on the same team as his boyhood idol, Babe Ruth.

The Yankees started Byrne with their top farm club, the Newark Bears of the International League. He struggled in his first season, winning two games and losing five. He did better in 1941 as the Bears won the first of two consecutive pennants, winning ten games and losing seven.

In 1942 Byrne hit his stride. He won seventeen games while losing just four, and while he gave up only 160 hits in 209 innings, he walked 145 batters. But Bears manager Billy Meyer said, “Wild or not, he is the best prospect in the International League, as his record shows. There is no reason he can’t get the ball over the plate in the majors.” At the plate, the left-handed hitting Byrne had ten doubles, two triples and two home runs while batting .328.

Byrne earned a spot on the Yankees’ 1943 roster, making his Major League debut on April 27, against the Boston Red Sox. He pitched only one inning, giving up no hits but a run on two walks. The rookie was with the Yankees for only a short time before enlisting in the navy. He won two games and lost one, but walked 35 batters in 31 2/3 innings. Byrne’s first major-league win came as a reliever in his second game, in Washington. To make the victory even sweeter, his mentor Eddie Rommel was umpiring at first base.

Byrne quickly grasped the Yankees tradition. “Part of the Yankee success lay in perpetuating the image,” he recalled in later years “From the moment you signed a contract with them they began instilling in you that Yankee tradition and they never stopped, not even when you were with the parent team. The attitude in those days was so great it was unreal. If we had a ballplayer on the Yankees who seemed to be doing things on his own, who didn’t appear to have had bred in him what it meant to play and win as a team, he wasn’t around too long . . . They just wouldn’t allow anyone, no matter how much ability he had, to tarnish that Yankee image. It meant too much, in ways that were as much practical as symbolic.”

Because Byrne was a college graduate with a degree in mathematics, the Yankees’ farm director, George Weiss, recommended him for Naval Officers Training School. Byrne was accepted and was commissioned an ensign in November 1943.

His first assignment was to the Norfolk (Virginia) Naval Base, where, like many ballplayers in uniform, he mostly played baseball. In the spring of 1944, Byrne posted a 16-2 record for the powerful base team, while playing in the outfield on the days he did not pitch.

Later, Byrne was assigned to the destroyer USS Ordronaux as the gunnery officer. In August 1944 he participated in the Allied invasion of the south coast of France, and was in charge of the ship’s guns as it shelled German shore defenses.

Discharged from the Navy in January 1946, Byrne rejoined the Yankees. But he made only four pitching appearances during the season, though he appeared in ten other games as a pinch hitter or pinch runner. Manager Joe McCarthy tried without success to get the six-foot-one, 182-pound Byrne to switch to first base. The highlight of the season for Byrne was probably Oldtimers Day at Yankee Stadium, when Babe Ruth asked to borrow his glove.

The emergence of rookie pitcher Frank Shea put Byrne’s 1947 roster spot in jeopardy. Byrne had pitched only four innings when on June 14 the Yankees sent him to the Kansas City Blues of the American Association. With the Blues Byrne won twelve and lost six, but gave up 106 walks in 149 innings.

Byrne was back with the Yankees in 1948 and finally started to find his groove in the majors, winning eight games and losing five. Still wild, he walked 101 in 133 innings and hit a league-leading nine batsmen. Coach Bill Dickey, who had been his first Major League catcher, taught Byrne a cut fastball, which curtailed the natural rising movement of his fastball. But the wildness remained. He led the American League in walks three years in a row (1949–1951) and hit batsmen in five seasons.

Even with his problems locating the strike zone, Byrne was considered a vital part of the Yankees squad, and got a raise in salary in each of three years he led the league in walks. “ … I never really believed in my own mind that I was so very wild,” he said in later years. “I didn’t think I was ‘losing’ wild, if you know what I mean. I used to feel that if they let me pitch I wasn’t going to give more than three or four runs a game, and I would get a couple back with my own bat, because I could hit.”

The Yankees had a new manager in 1949, Casey Stengel, and Byrne, with a 15-7 record had his best season to date. The Yankees defeated the Brooklyn Dodgers in the World Series. Byrne started the third game but was lifted in the fourth inning after giving up a home run to Pee Wee Reese and loading the bases on a hit and two walks.

Byrne was a methodical worker on the mound, taking an inordinate amount of time between pitches. He was a sociable fellow on the mound, too. He talked to players in the opposing dugouts and also to opposing batters, all in an effort to shake their concentration.

Despite leading the American League in walks and hit batters in 1950, Byrne won fifteen games for the pennant-winning Yankees and was selected to the All-Star team. On July 5, 1950, he hit four batters in the five innings he pitched, which tied an American League record for most batters hit in a game. He did not pitch as New York swept the Philadelphia Phillies in the World Series.

When Byrne came to work at Yankee Stadium on June 15, 1951, he found left-handed pitcher Stubby Overmire occupying his locker. Byrne was summoned to Stengel’s office and told he had been traded to the St. Louis Browns with $25,000 for Overmire.

Tommy did not fare well in St. Louis, winning eleven games while losing twenty-four during his year and a half with the club. “There was no greater tumble than going from the first-place Yankees to the last-place Browns,” Byrne said. But he enjoyed playing for the colorful Bill Veeck, who gave him a raise despite his 4-10 record for the tail-enders. Byrne tied another record for wildness on August 22, 1951, against Boston, when he walked sixteen batters in a game.

After posting a 7-14 record in 1952, the Browns traded Byrne to the Chicago White Sox with shortstop Joe DeMaestri for outfielder Hank Edwards and shortstop Willie Miranda. His tenure with the White Sox was brief, but he did have one shining moment. On May 16, White Sox manager Paul Richards summoned him from the bullpen to pinch-hit for infielder Vern Stephens with the bases loaded and two men out in the ninth inning. Right-handed pitcher Ewell Blackwell had just entered the game for New York.

Byrne recalled: “Richards asked me, ‘You ever hit this guy?’ ‘Yeah,’ I said, ‘about 11 years ago.’ ‘Well,’ said Richards, ‘How about going up and hitting one out of here?’ So I go up there and, after getting the count to 2-2, I don’t even remember swinging the bat, but I hit a line drive, 20 rows back in right field.” The grand slam won the game. During his career, Byrne batted .238 with 14 home runs, 98 RBIs, and a .378 slugging percentage.

Less than a month after the grand slam, Chicago sold Byrne to the Washington Senators. He appeared in six games for Washington in 1953, losing five, before being released on August 2 by owner Clark Griffith. “I had one day to go before becoming a 10-year man in the majors,” Byrne recalled. That annoyed him, but not as much as the reason Griffith gave for the move—they couldn’t understand what had happened to his hitting!

Byrne signed as a free agent with the White Sox, who sent him to the Charleston (West Virginia) Senators, their affiliate in the American Association. He was 1-6 with a 5.31 ERA for Charleston in the last two months of 1953. That December Chicago traded him to the Seattle Rainiers of the Pacific Coast League for first baseman Gordon Goldsberry.

During the winter, Byrne played for a team in Pastora, Venezuela, where he began to experiment with changing speeds on his pitches. “I was determined to work on a slider down there, and it was amazing what I did in the short time there,” he said.

When the Rainiers’ newest addition joined the team in the spring of 1954, he picked up right where he left off in winter ball. The seasoned southpaw pitched great all year, keeping the Pacific Coast League hitters off balance with a variety of off-speed offerings and his recently developed slider. “It turned out to be the perfect spot for me,” Byrne said. “[Jerry] Priddy was a first-year manager and he needed a veteran pitcher who could give him innings. I was ready and willing. I needed starts on a regular basis to work on my contract.”

When the season ended, Tommy had compiled a record of 20 wins and 10 losses, and a 3.15 ERA. His 199 strikeouts led the league, and for the first time, outnumbered his walks (118). He also played in fifty games as an outfielder, first baseman, or pinch-hitter and hit for a .295 batting average, with seven home runs, and 39 RBIs.

Byrne’s statistics impressed an opposing manager, Oakland’s Charlie Dressen. When his old pal, Casey Stengel, sought his opinion on PCL players, Dressen told him, “The only guy here who can help you is Byrne. I suggest you get him. He’s a different pitcher than when I saw him with the Yankees. He’s learned what this is about.” On September 3, 1954, the Yankees purchased Byrne’s contract from Seattle. Byrne started five games for New York during the last month of the season, winning three and losing two.

By 1955 the Yankees pitching staff had been revamped, and Stengel made Byrne his number three starter behind Whitey Ford and Bob Turley.

At the age of thirty-five, Byrne set his career high for victories, finishing 16-5, with a 3.15 earned-run average. His .762 winning percentage was the best in the league, and the Yankees won the pennant. “He beat the other first-division clubs, Cleveland, the White Sox, the Red Sox, when it was them or us,” Stengel said. “Without him, we don’t win.”

Byrne started Game Two of the World Series against the Dodgers, in Yankee Stadium. He held them to five hits and two runs, and rapped a two-run single as the Yankees won, 4–2.

Stengel had enough faith in his veteran pitcher to give him the start in Game Seven. Byrne pitched 5 2/3 innings and gave up just two runs, but Johnny Podres shut out the Yankees as the Dodgers won the game, and the World Series. After the Series Byrne was part of the Yankees squad that toured Japan.

In 1956 the starting rotation was retooled with the additionof youngsters Johnny Kucks and Tom Sturdivant. Byrne made only eight starts and posted a 7-3 record with six saves. He made one relief appearance in the World Series, giving up a home run to Duke Snider in Game Two.

The 1957 campaign was Byrne’s last in the Major Leagues. He made four starts but did most of his work out of the bullpen. His last two mound appearances came in the World Series against the Milwaukee Braves. One of the outings was the occasion of a memorable incident.

The Yankees took a one-run lead in Game Four with a run in the top of the 10th inning. Byrne was summoned to save the game, and his first pitch to pinch-hitter Nippy Jones skidded past catcher Yogi Berra and rolled back to the stands. Jones insisted the ball had hit him on the foot, proving his point by showing a shoe-polish scuff mark on the baseball. Home-plate umpire Augie Donatelli awarded Jones first base. Byrne was replaced by Bob Grim, and the Braves won three batters later on a two-run homer by Eddie Mathews. Byrne said that if Berra had thrown the ball back to him instead of holding onto it for Donatelli, Byrne would have marked it up so that nobody could spot the shoe polish.

After appearing in a mop-up role in Game Seven, Byrne hung up his spikes for good. He was finding it harder to separate himself from the peaceful times and friendly people of Wake Forest. He’d gotten into the oil business, owned a couple of farms, and even opened a clothing store in Algiers, near Wake Forest. “When I sent back my contract after the ’57 season,” Byrne said, “the Yankees called me and asked me to come to St. Petersburg for spring training anyway.”

There, General Manager George Weiss offered him a new contract and a $5,000 raise, with a catch: it involved trading Byrne to the St. Louis Cardinals. “I told him, ‘You don’t understand, if I’m gonna pitch, the only place it’s gonna ever be is for the New York Yankees.’ ”

The hard-throwing left-hander ended his career in the majors with a lifetime record of 85 wins, 69 losses and a 4.11 earned run average. In eleven seasons with the Yankees he was 72-40 and a 3.93 ERA. At the plate he finished with 14 home runs and a very respectable .238 batting average.

A few years later Byrne became a scout for the New York Mets. In May 1963 he took over the manager’s job with the Mets’ Class A affiliate in Raleigh, North Carolina, and piloted the club for the remainder of the season.

Byrne retired from all baseball activities after the 1963 season. He had been living in Wake Forest during the off-season and now would make the college town his permanent home. His many business interests during this time included successful forays in real estate, a clothing store, farm equipment, and the oil industry. Byrne was also a dedicated civil servant: He served as a town commissioner, Bureau of Recreation chairman, and two terms as mayor of Wake Forest, from 1973 to 1987.

Byrne’s accomplishments on the ball field earned him induction into the North Carolina Sports Hall of Fame, the Wake Forest College Hall of Fame, the Maryland Sports Hall of Fame, and the Baltimore City College Hall of Fame.

The town honored the former Yankee with two Tommy Byrne Days, in 1955 and 2007. He received numerous other accolades, including awards from the North Carolina governor and the Wake Forest Birthplace Society.

Byrne was a founding member of St. Catherine of Siena Catholic Church and a member of the Knights of Columbus. Beginning in 1957, the local high school gave an award in his name to the best athlete of the year.

Byrne died from congestive heart failure on December 20, 2007, at the age of eighty-seven. His wife of sixty-two years, Mary Susan (Nichols) Byrne, had died in 2002. Byrne was survived by three sons, Thomas, John, and Charles, and a daughter Susan, along with numerous grandchildren and great-grandchildren. Byrne is buried in Wake Forest Cemetery.

Sources

All quotes are from Madden, Bill. Pride of October: To Be Young and a Yankee. New York: Warner Books, 2003.

Forker, Dom. The Men of Autumn. Dallas: Taylor Publishing, 1989.

Frommer, Harvey. New York City Baseball. New York: Macmillan, 1980.

Golenbock, Peter. Dynasty. Englewood Cliffs, New Jersey: Prentice-Hall, 1975.

Halberstam, David. Summer of ’49. New York: Morrow, 1989.

Honig, Donald. The October Heroes. New York: Simon and Schuster, 1979.

Kahn, Roger. The Era: 1947-1957. New York: Houghton-Mifflin, 1993.

Lally, Richard. Bombers: An Oral History of the New York Yankees. New York: Three Rivers Press, 2002.

Madden, Bill. Pride of October: To Be Young and a Yankee. New York: Warner Books, 2003.

Rizzuto, Phil, and Tom Horton. The October Twelve: The Years of Yankee Glory, 1949-1953. New York: Forge, 1994.

Strauss, Frank. Dawn of a Dynasty. Lincoln, Nebraska: iUniverse, 2008.

Telephone interview with former professional baseball player Mike Kardash on February 5, 2010.

Telephone conversations between Thomas Bourke with Susan B. Gantt (Byrne’s daughter) on July 11, 2011, July 21, 2010, and August 15, 2011.

Anthony Salazar, former chairman of SABR’s Latino Committee.

John Benesch (information on Byrne’s 1953-54 season in Venezuela).

Ray Nemec (information on Byrne’s semipro career in North Carolina).

Frank Russo (information about Byrne playing in Oldtmers games at Yankee Stadium)

Baltimore Sun, December 23, 2007 (Tommy Byrne obituary)

Byrne obituary by Bryan Hoch, posted on thedeadballera.com.

The boy everyone called Spurge and later Spud (which he preferred) was born on September 12, 1907, in Commerce, Georgia, a Jackson County agricultural community about sixty miles northeast of Atlanta. When he was a boy, his parents, Leonard “Bud” Chandler and Olivia (Hix) Chandler moved the family to Franklin County, Georgia. As a teenager, Spurge played sports with a consuming passion that intimidated teammates and opponents alike. He did not mind the comparison to another Franklin County product, Ty Cobb. He said proudly throughout his life that he and Ty Cobb were the two most famous people to come from Franklin County.

In 1928 Chandler won a football scholarship to the University of Georgia, earned a spot on the team, and developed into a classic triple-threat (running, passing, kicking) back. Chandler also starred on the Georgia baseball team. The New York Giants and St. Louis Cardinals tempted him with contract offers in 1929, but he chose to stay in school. He was having too much fun being a football star. Besides, his favorite team was the Yankees. He would wait to hear from them.

In November 1931, the University Georgia football squad played New York University in front of 65,000 people at Yankee Stadium. Chandler was one of the stars in a 7–6 victory. After the game he walked out to the pitcher’s mound and began throwing footballs through the uprights. When teammates asked what he was doing, he responded that he wanted to get used to the place because he expected to be pitching there someday.

The following spring Chandler was the property of the Yankees. The Chicago Cubs actually had first crack at him, but a paperwork foul-up enabled New York scout Johnny Nee to swoop in and sign him. Chandler began his professional career at the Class B level with the Binghamton (New York) Triplets of the New York-Penn League. He went 8-1 for Binghamton and earned a promotion to the Class A Springfield (Massachusetts) Rifles of the Eastern League, where he was perfect in four decisions.

Chandler had a sinking fastball that worked best without a full follow-through. The pitch put undue stress on his right arm, already tender from a football injury. The resulting pain limited his availability and effectiveness for much of the 1930s.

Chandler was back in Binghamton to begin the 1933 season, as the New York-Penn League moved up to Class A status. He went 10-8 before finishing the season with the Newark Bears of the International League, the Yankees’ top farm team. Spud struggled against the better competition. He pitched for Newark again in 1934, and also did stints with the Minneapolis Millers and Syracuse Chiefs. Elbow pain all but ruined his season, as he won just two games and had an ERA over 6.00.

The Yankees shipped Chandler to the West Coast in 1935. He played for Oakland and Portland in the Pacific Coast League, pitching in thirty-four games as a starter and reliever. In 1936 the Yankees brought him back to Newark on the word of his manager at Oakland, Ossie Vitt, who was also hired as the Bears’ manager. Chandler went 14-13 for Newark with a fine 3.33 ERA.

He began the 1937 season with Newark, a club that featured young sluggers Joe Gordon and Charlie Keller. History would recall this team as perhaps the best ever assembled at the Minor League level, but Chandler wasn’t on the roster long. He was called up to the Bronx in early May and made his big-league debut on May 6 in Detroit. He entered the game in relief of Frank Makosky in the eighth inning.

Makosky had failed to record an out starting the frame and Spud did no better, giving up hits to both batters he faced. Three days later, manager Joe McCarthy started Chandler against the White Sox in Chicago. Spud had better luck this time, settling into a pitchers’ duel against Thornton Lee after allowing a first-inning run. The score was tied 1–1 in the seventh when he allowed a home run to Zeke Bonura that gave the White Sox a 2–1 win.

Chandler won his three remaining May starts, tossing shutouts against the White Sox and Cleveland Indians at Yankee Stadium, and also beating the Philadelphia Athletics at home. McCarthy used him as a spot starter until a sore shoulder sidelined him in early August. Chandler did not pitch again during the regular season, and was not on the World Series roster when the Yankees defeated their cross-river rivals, the Giants. Chandler finished 7-4 with a 2.84 earned run average in 82 1/3 innings.

The next season Chandler cracked the regular rotation, which was fronted by the trio of Red Ruffing, Lefty Gomez, and Monte Pearson. He made twenty-three starts and completed fourteen in 1938, despite battling aches and pains throughout the season. With a lineup featuring Joe DiMaggio, Bill Dickey, and Lou Gehrig, his primary responsibility was to keep the games close. Chandler won his 14th game on September 5 and pitched once more before a sore elbow ended his season. For the second year in a row, he sat out the World Series.

In 1939 Chandler fractured his ankle before the season started and was not back in uniform until the end of July. By then the Yankees were well on their way to a fourth consecutive pennant. Chandler was used out of the bullpen in August and September, making eleven appearances mostly in mop-up duty. For the third straight season, he picked up a World Series check but did not participate.

It’s difficult to say if Chandler’s injury problems were a matter of bad genes, bad luck, or bad judgment. Certainly, there were times when he acted more like a college running back than a big-league pitcher. When Chandler came to the plate, he swung with great ferocity. He was a decent hitter, with a lifetime average above .200 and occasional home run power. As a base runner, the six-foot, 181-pound Chandler had more than a little Ty Cobb in him; several times a season he would get into pileups breaking up double plays. He maintained that he could beat any pitcher in baseball in a footrace to first base—a claim he continued to make as a coach and scout in his forties.

Fielders thought twice about blocking a bag when Chandler was steaming toward them. Even the umpires weren’t safe. In a game against the White Sox, on June 27, 1942, Spud raced to back up a throw to third base and slammed into umpire Harry Geisel with such force that Geisel later had to retire.

Chandler reclaimed his spot in the Yankees’ rotation in 1940, starting twenty-four games. Detroit and Cleveland both had strong clubs, and the Yankees spent all year chasing them. In early September, New York came within a game of the lead, but lost seven of nine games in midmonth and finished third. Pitching with varying degrees of discomfort throughout the season, Chandler was as much a part of the problem as the solution. He won only eight games against seven losses, and his ERA rose steadily throughout the season, ending up at 4.60. One redeeming moment for Chandler in this disappointing campaign came on July 26, when he socked a pair of homers, including a grand slam.

The Yankees got back on track in 1941, winning the pennant by seventeen games over the Red Sox. Chandler took a while to get warm, performing as both a starter and reliever in the first three months. He did not record his first victory until July, but won ten games in eleven weeks and finished 10-4.

Chandler started Game Two of the 1941 World Series against the Brooklyn Dodgers. He gave himself a 1–0 lead in the bottom of the second inning with an infield hit that scored Charlie Keller, but he ended up the loser as the Dodgers came back to win, 3–2. The Yankees took the Series in five games to give Spud his fourth championship.

In 1942, Chandler finished 16-5 with a 2.38 ERA. He was selected to play in his first All-Star Game, held at the Polo Grounds. As the American League starter, he was the beneficiary of first-inning home runs by Lou Boudreau and Rudy York and was awarded the victory in a 3–1 win. He pitched four innings, allowing two hits and no runs.

In late July Chandler pitched back-to-back shutouts over the Tigers and Browns, the latter a three-hit masterpiece. The Yankees returned to the World Series, this time facing the St. Louis Cardinals. Ruffing, the Game One starter, entered the ninth inning with a 7–0 lead, but left after allowing a walk and four hits. McCarthy summoned Chandler to get the final out. Terry Moore and Enos Slaughter greeted him with singles to make the score 7–4 before young Stan Musial tapped a grounder in the hole that was gloved by Buddy Hassett. Chandler raced to the bag and took the throw from the first baseman to end the game.

The teams played four more close games and each time St. Louis won to take the World Series four games to one. Chandler was an effective starter in Game Three, limiting the Cardinals to three hits and a run in eight innings, but Ernie White was better, blanking the New Yorkers, 2–0.

The 1943 Yankees found themselves without the services of DiMaggio, Ruffing, Hassett, Phil Rizzuto, and Tommy Henrich. The talent drain of World War II had turned baseball topsy-turvy, but in the end it was the Yankees and Cardinals repeating as pennant winners. Chandler enjoyed another injury-free year and was the talk of baseball. Pitching against lineups made up of prospects and suspects, he mowed down American League hitters with frightening efficiency.

Chandler went 20-4, while allowing three or fewer earned runs in all but one of his defeats. Five of his league-leading wins were shutouts, and four more were 2–1 games. Win number twenty, the pennant-clincher, came in a 14-inning complete game. His 1.64 earned run average was the lowest for an American Leaguer since Walter Johnson in the Dead Ball Era. Never a strikeout pitcher, Chandler fanned 134 batters, equaling his 1941 and 1942 totals combined. He was The Sporting News’s Major League Player of the Year, and when the writers cast their votes for Most Valuable Player, Chandler’s name was atop twelve of the twenty-four ballots. He out-pointed batting champion Luke Appling of the White Sox by thirty-one votes.

Chandler started the World Series opener in a rematch with the Cardinals and twirled a complete-game, 4–2 victory. The Yankees had a 3–1 series lead when Chandler took the mound for Game Five in St. Louis. Time and again the Cardinals put runners on, but the Yankee ace escaped without allowing a run. Nine innings, ten hits, and two walks later, Chandler had a 2–0 shutout and the Yankees were champs.

Uncle Sam caught up with Chandler after the Series. He was classified 1–AL, which meant he would not see combat because of a permanent injury. Ironically, the Army listed this debilitating condition as limited movement of his right arm. Chandler attended spring training in Atlantic City, New Jersey, and pitched one regular season game before being called to active duty as an infantry private and shipped to Georgia for basic training.

Spud and his wife, the former Frances Willard, were expecting a child that spring. When she went into labor he was unable to be at her side. It was a difficult birth that required a c-section and the baby died a few hours later. The couple did have two sons, Frank, born in 1941, and Richard, born in 1945. Frances had been a stewardess for National Airlines and had first met Spud in Chicago when the Yankees were in town. They were married in Athens, Georgia in 1939.

Chandler trained at Camp Shelby in Mississippi. Because he was too old and injured to qualify for combat, he hoped he might spend the war playing ball and serving as a fitness instructor. Many other baseball stars had pulled this type of duty. Although he did launch a few fastballs for the camp baseball team, Chandler spent most of his time there firing weapons.

Although he never saw overseas action, Chandler missed almost two full seasons. He was discharged in early September 1945 and made four starts for the Yankees, winning two and losing one.

Chandler was among hundreds of returning veterans hoping to make Major League squads in 1946. Some had lost their edge, while others had gained strength and toughness during their time in the military. Chandler blanked the Athletics on Opening Day and didn’t lose a game until mid-May. He finished 20-8 for the third-place Yankees, with a 2.10 ERA and a career-high 257 1/3 innings pitched.

That October, Chandler joined the Bob Feller All-Stars, a barnstorming group made up of Yankees and Indians players. It was a chance to make a little extra cash and, as it turned out, do something he could brag about for years to come. Facing Satchel Paige’s All-Stars in a game at Youngstown, Ohio on October 1, he hit a home run against Paige.

Chandler had turned thirty-nine in September 1946. Although his statistics were impressive, his right elbow was getting more troublesome with each start. There were times when he left the clubhouse with his collar unbuttoned and no tie—he was in too much pain to dress. The agony he endured only added to his aura in the Yankees clubhouse. Known as an intense competitor (some said he was just plain mean) when he joined the club in the 1930s, by the late 1940s he would get so keyed up before starts that no one dared bother him. Milton Gross wrote a story for The Saturday Evening Post calling him the angry Yankee ace. Chandler always denied he was mean in the locker room, claiming he was just “determined.” On the mound, however, he made no apologies for his behavior. He referred to other teams as the enemy, and refused to give in to hitters. If he saw an opponent digging in, Chandler would likely sail a pitch at his chin.

After an operation in Atlanta to remove more than a dozen bone chips in his right elbow, Spud felt good enough to give it a go again in 1947. He started and lost the season opener in Yankee Stadium, yielding six runs to the Philadelphia A’s. Five days later, he avenged this defeat in Philadelphia. On April 27 Chandler hooked up with Sid Hudson of the Washington Senators in a thrilling pitching duel at Yankee Stadium. The two hurlers wriggled in and out of trouble but hung up zeroes inning after inning until Hudson singled in the eight and later scored on a hit by Buddy Lewis for the game’s only run. Hudson—who like Chandler lost key years to military service—later remembered this as his greatest game.

After five starts, Chandler’s record stood at a lackluster 1-3, albeit with a sub-3.00 ERA. This was unfamiliar territory for Chandler, who had yet to register a losing record as a Major Leaguer. Beginning with his next start, against the White Sox, he won eight of nine decisions. Pitching against the Tigers at Yankee Stadium on June 21, he fanned eleven batters, a career high.

On July 4 Chandler beat the Senators to raise his record to 9–4. He had already pitched 118 innings in the season as manager Bucky Harris was riding his starters hard. In his first start after the All-Star Game, Chandler faced the Browns in St. Louis. With one out in the seventh inning, after yielding the tying run in a 3–3 game, he could throw no more. He gave way to Joe Page, who finished the contest and hit a game-winning homer in the ninth inning. Lost in the postgame celebrating was the fact that Spud Chandler might be through.

Chandler did take the mound again twice more, but he was ineffective in two September appearances, one in relief and one in a start against Boston. His final regular-season line was 9-5 with a 2.46 ERA in 128 innings. Not a bad way to say goodbye. Alas, it was not quite goodbye. The Yankees were pennant winners again, and Chandler pitched two innings and allowed two runs to Brooklyn in Game Three of the World Series.

The Yankees officially handed him his release in April 1948. Twice a twenty-game winner, he won 109 games in all—twenty-six by shutout. He lost only forty-three, for a career winning percentage of .717, the best ever by a player with at least 100 victories.

Bill Dickey called it a pleasure to squat behind the plate with Spud on the mound. He claimed his teammate could spot seven different pitches—fastball, sinker, curve, slider, screwball, knuckler, and splitter—plus a couple more he never bothered to name. Chandler, Dickey insisted, was the best pitcher he ever caught.

In the years that followed, Chandler stayed busy as a scout for several teams, including the Yankees, Indians, and Minnesota Twins. He managed for two years in the Minor Leagues. In 1954 he piloted Cleveland’s Class D affiliate in Jacksonville Beach, Florida, and once put himself in a game as a pinch-hitter.

The following year Chandler managed the Class B Spartanburg (South Carolina) Peaches, another Cleveland farm team. He appeared in two games as a pitcher at the age of forty-seven. He later served two seasons as the Kansas City Athletics’ pitching coach.

Chandler retired from baseball for good in 1984, at the age of seventy-seven. In 1989 he fell and fractured his shoulder. Complications followed and he suffered a heart attack in 1990. He was eighty-two when died on January 9, 1990, near St. Petersburg, Florida. He was survived by Frances and his sons.

Sources

Freese, Mel R. Charmed Circle. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Co., 1997.

Gentile, Derek, ed. The Complete New York Yankees. New York: Black Dog & Leventhal, 2001.

Honig, Donald. Baseball When the Grass Was Real. New York: Coward, McCann, and Geoghegan, 1975.

James, Bill and Rob Neyer. The Neyer/James Guide to Pitchers. New York: Simon & Schuster, 2004.

Mead, William B. Baseball Goes to War. Washington, D.C.: Farragut Publishing, 1985.

Smith, Loran, ed. Between the Hedges: 100 Years of Georgia Football. Atlanta: Longstreet Press, 1992.

Peary, Danny, ed. Cult Baseball Players. New York: Simon & Schuster, 1990.

Westcott, Rich. Diamond Greats. Westport, Connecticut: Meckler Books, 1988

Baseball Digest

Baseball Magazine

The Saturday Evening Post

newgeorgiaencyclopedia.com

Clark would later meet one of Berra’s sons at the Yogi Berra Museum in Montclair, New Jersey, and would tell the unbelieving young man that he once pinch-hit for his father. “He said, ‘No one ever hit for my father,’ but then he found out it was true. The box scores don’t lie,” said Clark. “It was the biggest thrill I had in baseball. The seventh game, there was a lot on our shoulders. We had to win, it was scary.”1

The crowd in Yankee Stadium that day was 71,528, though Clark’s wife Frances, who had been his high-school sweetheart, was not among them. Allie had assumed she did not want to attend the game and gave away the free passes he was allowed. Soon after the game ended, Clark called Frances at their home in South Amboy, New Jersey, and told her to meet him at a victory celebration that night at the Biltmore Hotel in Manhattan. “The one thing I remember most was Joe DiMaggio walking in with two girls under each arm,” she said in a 1999 interview.2

Clark’s pinch-hit single came in the last at-bat he had as a Yankee. That winter, the Yankees traded the six-foot, 185-pound outfielder to the Cleveland Indians for pitcher Red Embree. Because no one from the Yankees called Clark, he heard about the trade on the radio. More than six decades later, he still bristled at the memory. Though Clark lamented the trade to Cleveland, when the Indians won the 1948 World Series he became the first player win back-to-back World Series titles with different teams.

To get to the World Series in 1948, Cleveland had to win a one-game playoff at Boston’s Fenway Park. When Clark arrived at the park that day, he noticed a first baseman’s glove had been placed in his locker. There had to be a mistake, he thought, as he had never played first base in his professional career. “I asked [manager Lou] Boudreau, ‘What the hell’s this for? He said, ‘You’re playing first base.’”3 Boudreau told the right-handed-hitting Clark he wanted him in the lineup to take aim at Fenway Park’s left-field wall.

The experiment lasted only three innings. After the Indians took a 5–1 lead in the top of the fourth, Boudreau replaced Clark with Eddie Robinson. Clark, hitless in two at bats, had handled five chances flawlessly. When the move to Robinson was made, Clark recalled, “I was the happiest guy in the ballpark.”4 He earned faint praise from Rud Rennie of the New York Herald Tribune: “Clark played the position as one might expect it to be played by a man who never played it before. He did not drop any ball, but he always looked as if he might.”5

The Indians defeated the Red Sox, 8–3, and remained in Boston where they opened the World Series two days later against the Boston Braves. Clark played only in the second game, batting second and playing right field. His fifth-inning sacrifice against Warren Spahn led to a run in a 4–1 Indians victory. Frances Clark, who attended the games in Cleveland, said her biggest thrill as the wife of a baseball player was riding in an open car on Euclid Avenue in the victory parade.

Alfred Aloysius “Allie” Clark was born in South Amboy on June 16, 1923, the oldest child of Alfred and Helen Clark. Aside from the time he served in World War II and the summers he was playing professional baseball, he never left South Amboy, a small town at the mouth of the Raritan River, linked to New York by commuter trains and ferryboats. He attended Saint Mary’s High School, whose former students had five World Series rings as of 2011: two for Clark, two for Tom Kelly, who managed the Minnesota Twins to titles in 1987 and 1991, and one for Jack McKeon, who managed the Florida Marlins in 2003.

“South Amboy was a baseball-crazy town,” said South Amboy native Johnny O’Brien, who played six seasons in the National League in the late 1950s. “Every park where we went to play, people would point to spots way beyond the outfield fences and say things like ‘Allie Clark hit one way out there.’ That’s all you ever heard, things like ‘Allie hit a home run here.’ ‘Allie made a great play over there.’ You couldn’t help but want to become the next Allie Clark.”6

“We all have Allie to thank,” said McKeon, “He set the stage for all of us who followed. We all wanted to make it because he made it, so we ate, drank and slept baseball every day of our lives. No girls, no cars, just baseball.”7

“All we wanted to do was play ball. We made baseballs out of golf balls, wrapping them in black tape. If someone had white tape we were in hog heaven,” said Johnny O’Brien.8 The youth sports complex in South Amboy is named for Allie Clark, and until his health declined in 2011 he was present when the baseball season opened every spring. He lamented, however, that the number of players has declined, and when it is hot in the summer, boys are apt to be indoors playing computer games. “Kids aren’t playing ball every day like we did back then,” he said in 1999. “That’s why you see so many players from Latin America. They play ball like we did, growing up.”9

Clark was signed by the Yankees in 1941, receiving a bonus of $250. He split that year with farm teams in Amsterdam, New York, and Easton, Maryland, hitting a combined 334. In 1942 he batted .328 in 129 games for the Norfolk (Virginia) Tars of the Class B Piedmont League. One game that did not count in his official statistics was an exhibition against a team stationed at the US Navy base in Norfolk, where he faced Bob Feller. “I think he struck about eighteen of us out. He got me once.”10

Clark began the 1943 season with the International League Newark Bears, the Yankees’ top farm team. But midway in the season, he recalled, “Uncle Sam took care of me.” He was drafted into the Army and served as a combat medic for three years before being discharged before the 1946 season. “I was lucky I came out without a scratch,” he said.11

Two weeks after Clark was discharged the Yankees sent him a letter telling him to report to a Minor League camp in Sebring, Florida, where he was joined by future teammates Bobby Brown and Yogi Berra. “They still had [Charlie] Keller and [Tommy] Henrich and DiMaggio in the outfield, so they sent me down,” he remembered. “They kept Bobby Brown and Yogi. Then (in 1947) DiMaggio got hurt a little with the heel and they called me up.”12

Clark had proved he could hit at the highest level of the minors. In 1946 he hit .344 in ninety-seven games at Newark, with fourteen home runs and seventy runs batted in. He was batting .334 with twenty-three home runs and eighty-six RBIs in 1947 before his August call-up.

His first game was on August 5 against the Athletics in Philadelphia. He batted cleanup and played left field while the regular left fielder, Johnny Lindell, replaced Joe DiMaggio in center field. With the bases loaded, two outs in the top of the ninth and the scored tied 5–5, Clark had an infield hit to drive in the eventual winning run. The single, his first big-league hit, came off Russ Christopher. The next day, hitting cleanup again, Clark hit his first Major League home run off the Athletics’ Bill McCahan.

Clark lived at home that summer, commuting first to Newark and then the Bronx. Bobby Brown, who was living at the Jersey Shore, routinely drove Clark to Yankee Stadium. He said his Yankees teammates treated him well during the less than three months he spent on the team. One teammate, DiMaggio, remained aloof. “He never associated too much with the ballplayers. But he was a great ballplayer,” Clark said.13

Cleveland drew a league-leading 2,620,627 fans to Municipal Stadium in 1948, a record for the team at the time. “That town was wild about the Indians that year,” Clark said.14 Moreover, his roommate was second baseman Joe Gordon, his boyhood idol who had starred for the Yankees while Clark was in high school.

The 298 plate appearances in 1948 were the most Clark had in a season in a Major League career that also included stints with the Athletics (1951–1953) and the Chicago White Sox (1953). After the White Sox released him in June 1953, Clark signed with the St. Louis Cardinals’ organization. For five seasons he was a regular with the Cardinals’ International League affiliate, the Rochester Red Wings. As of 2011 he was seventh on Rochester’s all-time RBI list and tenth in base hits. “Rochester was a great baseball town,” said Clark, who was inducted into the Red Wings Hall of Fame in 1998.15 In 1958, after splitting the season with Minor League teams in New Orleans, San Antonio, and Indianapolis, he retired.

The player who once pinch-hit for Yogi Berra allowed that his game had one weakness. “I didn’t have a great arm,” he said, pointing to a scar on the inside of his right arm, the result of an operation he had at Johns Hopkins Hospital in Baltimore after the 1946 season. “They loosened up some tissue. I never should have had it done. That’s why I was never a regular [in the Major Leagues]. I didn’t throw very well.”16

While Clark was playing professional baseball he spent his off-seasons working with Local 373 of the Iron Workers Union in Perth Amboy, New Jersey. “I had to make money outside [of baseball] or we couldn’t get by. You ask any old-time ballplayer and they had jobs, working in stores, driving trucks, stocking stuff in warehouses, anything to support their families,” said Clark, whose peak salary in baseball was $11,000.17

Clark proudly wore his 1947 World Series ring at social occasions and on the job as an ironworker. Over time the diamond was dislodged and the words on the ring were worn so much that it was hard to read the inscription. It was hard to impress Little Leaguers when the words were blurred, but the city of South Amboy came to the rescue. The police department helped raise $2,500 to have the ring replaced. They contacted the Balfour Company, which made the ring, and with permission from the Yankees, Balfour replicated the 1947 World Series ring for Clark.

What Clark did not have in his possession were any game-used No. 3 Yankees jerseys. At the end of the season players were required to turn in their uniforms. After Clark left the Yankees, outfielder Cliff Mapes wore the iconic No.3. The number was retired at a 1948 ceremony that honored the original wearer of No. 3, the dying Babe Ruth.

Clark said taking a jersey at the end of a season was simply not done during his playing career. In the 1990s he attended an Old Timers game and the Yankees gave him a uniform with the No. 2, which he was allowed to keep. Times had changed. “When I played we had to buy our own gloves and spikes.”18

After he retired from baseball, Clark returned to South Amboy to work full time as an ironworker. He said he was proud of his work, having helped erect scores of buildings in Central New Jersey. “It was good steady work, outdoors, and I always enjoyed it. I was a strong guy and it didn’t bother me,” he said.19 Decades later he would feel the effects of heavy lifting with arthritis in his joints. He also survived bypass heart surgery and cancer.

In the spring of 2011 he said he knew of only three other members of the 1947 Yankees who were still alive: Bobby Brown, Yogi Berra, and pitcher Don Johnson. (Contrary to Clark’s recollection, Rugger Ardizoia and Dick Starr were also still alive.) Allie Clark died in South Amboy on April 1, 2012. His wife Frances, whose memory was robbed by Alzheimer’s disease, was living in a nearby assisted living facility.

This biography is included in the book “Bridging Two Dynasties: The 1947 New York Yankees” (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), edited by Lyle Spatz. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Notes

1. Home News Tribune, East Brunswick, New Jersey, October 15, 1999.

2. Ibid.

3. Ibid.

4. Author interview with Allie Clark, May 17, 2011.

5. New York Herald Tribune, October 5, 1948.

6. New York Times, October 11, 2010.

7. New York Times, October 11, 2010.

8. Home News Tribune, East Brunswick, New Jersey, February 2, 2003.

9. Home News Tribune, East Brunswick, New Jersey, October 15, 1999.

10. Clark interview.

11. Clark interview.

12. Clark interview.

13. Clark interview.

14. Clark interview.

15. Clark interview.

16. Clark interview.

17. Allen, Maury. Yankees: Where Have You Gone? Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing LLC, 2004, pp. 106-107.

18. Allen, Maury. Yankees: Where Have You Gone? Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing LLC, 2004, pp. 106-107.

19. Clark interview.

On the mound stood a man who had endured more than nine months in German prisoner-of-war camps. At the plate stood a man who passed part of the war patrolling the outfield at Pittsburgh’s Forbes Field but had spent most of the previous season with the Newark Bears, where he made a solid contribution at the plate. He was eager to stick with the parent Yankees.

In this Opening Day showdown, the military veteran prevailed. Colman struck out. It was a suitable harbinger for a season of frustration for the twenty-nine-year-old batter.

Frank Lloyd Colman was born on March 2, 1918, in London, Ontario, to Frederick and Harriet Ann (Bartlett) Colman, both natives of England. He was the fifth of eight children in a farm family, though Frederick later owned a shoe-repair business. An older brother, Harold, pushed Frank onto the baseball diamond. Frank preferred hockey and won a scoring championship while skating for the London Technical and Commercial High School (renamed H.B. Beal High, after its founding principal, while Frank attended).

By the time he was eighteen, Frank was wearing the uniform of the hometown London Majors of the Intercounty League, an amateur circuit based in Ontario. The left-handed Colman starred on the mound and at the plate, winning the batting crown and earning Most Valuable Player honors while leading his squad to the league championship in 1936.

After a couple more seasons on local sandlots, the five-foot-eleven, 186-pound hurler made his professional debut with the Batavia (New York) Clippers in 1939, the inaugural season of the Pennsylvania-Ontario-New York League. He went 8-7 in the Class D circuit and 0-1 in a two-game call-up to the Cornwall (Ontario) Maple Leafs of the Class C Canadian-American League.

In April 1940 the Wilmington (Delaware) Blue Rocks, a Philadelphia Athletics affiliate in the Class B Interstate League, had such a terrible exhibition season, manager Chief Bender released eleven players. Among those he acquired in restocking the team was Colman, who went 10-4 as a starter while also playing forty-one games in the outfield. His .361 average was second best on the team.

The solid numbers earned Colman a promotion to Philadelphia’s top farm team, the Toronto Maple Leafs of the International League, the following year. The Leafs converted him into a full-time right fielder and he responded with a steady performance, hitting .294 and .300 in his first two seasons with the club. In September 1942 the Pittsburgh Pirates, who were then Toronto’s big league affiliate, called him up, but his introduction to Major League pitching was a harsh one. He managed just five hits in thirty-seven at-bats in ten games. Colman stuck with the Pirates for the first half of 1943, before being sent back to Toronto.

Meanwhile, Colman had married Anne Puchniak, whom he had met one off-season while working at General Steel Wares, a steel plant in London that produced housewares and appliances. She had asked a colleague for the time and Frank, eager to make her acquaintance, butted in with a quick reply. They eventually married and had two sons: Frank, born in 1943, and Jerry, born in 1947.

Colman also had to deal with military obligations. Canada had declared war on Nazi Germany in 1939, twenty-seven months before the attack on Pearl Harbor, but he was originally rejected for service because of an old leg injury. During spring training in 1944, Colman stayed home after announcing he had been called for a draft re-examination. Rejected a second time, he then reported to the Pirates spring-training camp in Muncie, Indiana.

After spending three months with the Pirates in 1943, Colman gained a regular spot in the lineup in 1944. He hit .270 in 252 at bats against war-depleted pitching rosters, knocking in fifty-three runs (including at least one RBI in eight consecutive games in August). In 1945, though, Colman played in only seventy-seven games and his average plunged to an anemic .209.

A quiet man with a broad forehead and a lopsided smile, Colman rarely spoke about his playing days. “My dad wasn’t a talker,” said his son, also named Frank Colman. “It was like digging for gold to get him to talk about his baseball career.” One story that gained currency while he was still playing involved a long-running dispute with Pirates manager Frankie Frisch. The Portland Oregonian published a story, reprinted by Baseball Digest magazine, about Colman demanding to be traded. In response, an angry Frisch sent the left-handed batter to the plate as a pinch hitter to face Harry “The Cat” Brecheen, one of the league’s top left-handers. Colman rapped out a double, called time and retreated to the dugout, where he told the manager: “Get a substitute — I’ve had enough of this club. And trade me quick, for I’ll never play for you again.” “Nor did he,” the story reported. Alas, whatever the tension between manager and platooned outfielder, the anecdote is apocryphal, as box scores do not show Colman getting a pinch-hit double off Brecheen in a regular-season game.

On June 17, 1946, the Pirates sold Colman to the Yankees. He spent the summer with the International League Newark Bears before making his Yankees debut as the right fielder in the second game of a doubleheader against Philadelphia on September 22. In his first at bat for his new team, Colman faced Marchildon, his compatriot from Ontario. The batter did better than the pitcher on this day. “Anyway, Frank enjoyed a perfect afternoon in the nightcap,” wrote Louis Effrat the next day in the New York Times. “He slammed a two-run homer in the second, singled and scored in the fourth, and walked and scored in the fifth.” The game was called because of darkness after 5 1/2 innings, the Yankees prevailing 7–4 to complete a sweep.

Colman was penciled into the lineup for five games through the end of the 1946 season, then saw spot duty in left field in the early part of the 1947 season. Manager Bucky Harris opted for Colman to stay with the club over the promising Allie Clark. For part of the season, Colman wore uniform number 3, Babe Ruth’s number, later retired, and a number also worn by George Selkirk, the Yankees’ all-star outfielder during the 1930s who also hailed from Ontario. A back injury limited Colman’s playing time and then he found himself on the bench as Johnny Lindell, the subject of trade rumors during spring training, thrived at the plate.

On July 20 the Yankees arrived in Detroit for a doubleheader against the second-place Tigers, over whom they held a daunting 11 1/2 game lead. A record crowd of 58,369 jammed every nook of Briggs Stadium. Between games about 120 fans from London made a presentation to their hometown hero. As it turned out, Colman did not play in either game, both of which the Yankees lost.

Two weeks later, the Yankees shipped Colman back to Newark and brought up Clark. Colman had been unable to crack an outfield featuring Tommy Henrich in right and Joe DiMaggio in center. With Lindell hitting and catcher Yogi Berra available for outfield duty as well, Colman became expendable.

The transfer did not go smoothly. With Newark in Toronto for a series, Colman refused to sign a contract, instead retreating to his home in London, declaring that he was prepared “to sit tight and see what happens.”[fn]“Yank Castoff Refuses to Join Bears,” St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, August 10, 1947.[/fn] The outfielder said he had no beef with the Yankees calling up Clark, as they needed a right-handed pinch hitter, but said he did not deserve a cut in pay. “Some of the boys told me I should get more than I was asking for,” he said. “In eight years in the big circuit this is the first time I’ve been what you might call a bad boy.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Newark said Colman was “liable to suspension.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] Colman demanded a guarantee of a full share of World Series proceeds due the Yankees players should they win the championship. An eleven-day holdout ended with Newark’s management announcing it had refused the outfielder’s salary demands.

In the end, after the Yankees won the World Series, the players voted Colman a three-quarters share, worth $4,372.52, a tidy sum for hitting .107 in twenty-two games. (He had smacked only three hits for the Yankees, but two of them were pinch-hit home runs.)

Colman played thirty-one games for Newark in ’47 and twenty-nine in 1948, but he never again played in the Major Leagues. He batted .320 for Seattle of the Pacific Coast League in 1949 and enjoyed the finest season of his career in 1950, at the age of thirty-two, when he had eighteen home runs, ninety-seven runs-batted in, and a batting average of .319.

Toronto signed Colman for 1951, along with first baseman Les Fleming, from San Francisco of the PCL. “Fleming and Colman give us the best one-two left-handed punch we’ve had in years in a league where a premium is placed on southpaw sluggers,” said Toronto business manager Gord Walker. Colman, who also saw spot duty at first base, had three solid campaigns with the Leafs.

When Toronto traded the thirty-five-year-old veteran to the Charleston (West Virginia) Senators after the 1953 season, he instead placed himself on the voluntary retired list. He returned home to Ontario, where he became player-manager of his old Intercounty League team for 1954. By Dominion Day (July 1) he was hitting a paltry .250. A late-season surge by Colman left him in third place in the batting race at .360.

Before the start of the 1955 season, Colman and his brother Jack bought the London franchise. Frank was a player-manager, on occasion even pitching in relief. London won the league title in 1956. The Colman brothers sold the team in 1959.

Frank worked in a sporting-goods store for many years until it went out of business. He then joined the maintenance department at the University of Western Ontario. After hours, he played cards, especially hearts, and was known to haunt the horse-racing tracks at Woodbine in Toronto and Fort Erie, Ontario. He died of cancer on February 19, 1983, aged sixty-four. He was buried at Woodland Cemetery in London. His wife Anne died in 1990 and is buried next to him.

In 1999 Colman was posthumously inducted into the Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame at St. Marys, about twenty-five miles north of his hometown. Yogi Berra sent a congratulatory letter for a late friend with whom he had roomed on the road.

“I made a lot of friends in baseball through the years,” he wrote, “but I’ll also remember Frank as one of the most decent and genuine people that I ever met.”

When he took over the amateur men’s club, Colman also helped co-found a youth league with local sportsman Gordon Berryhill and longtime Pittsburgh Pirates catcher George (Moon) Gibson. The Eager Beaver Baseball Association has thrived ever since. After his death the association’s annual all-star game was renamed Frank Colman Day. The budding stars play at Labatt Park, the same field on which a teenage Colman launched his own career in the Great Depression of the 1930s.

This biography is included in the book “Bridging Two Dynasties: The 1947 New York Yankees” (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), edited by Lyle Spatz. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Sources

Baseball Digest, September 1948, p. 54.

“Baseball Leafs Buy First-Sacker Fleming,” Toronto Globe and Mail, Ocober. 17, 1950.

“Colman is Daddy,” Toronto Globe and Mail, August 3, 1943. “Colman Signs With Bears; No Series Share Promised,” Sporting News, August 20, 1947.

Drebinger, John. “Marchildon Wins From Bomber, 6–1.” New York Times, April 16, 1947.

Effrat, Louis, “Yanks Defeat Athletics, 4–3, 7–4, Chandler Gaining 19th of Season.” New York Times, September 23, 1946.

Effrat, Louis, “Tigers Halt Bombers, 4–1, 12–11, Before 58,369, a Detroit Record,” New York Times, July 21, 1947.

“Reject Frank Colman,” Toronto Globe and Mail, March 20, 1944.

“Wilmington Drops 11 Players, and Acquires Five in Shakeup,” Sporting News, April 18, 1940.

“Yank Castoff Refuses to Join Bears,” St. Petersburg (Florida) Times, August 10, 1947.

Canadian Baseball Hall of Fame: baseballhalloffame.ca

Eager Beaver Baseball Association: www.ebba.ca

Intercounty League material in the 1950s: www.attheplate.com

Interview by author with Frank D. Colman, (Frank Colman’s son).

Two telephone conversations by Thomas Bourke with Mrs. Joan Fraser Frank Colman’s sister) on November 15, 2011.

The 1947 season was Corriden’s first as a Yankees coach. He was brought to New York by new manager Bucky Harris after a six-year stay as a Brooklyn Dodgers coach under Leo Durocher. His role tended to be something of a father confessor and he always encouraged the players, referring to everyone as “buddy boy.” As the first-base coach, his chatter was continuous. “Come on down to see me, buddy boy,” he would yell to the batter, “I ain’t mad at you. And when you get down here, please turn to your left. Nothing on your right but a lollypop stand.”1 Not surprisingly, the players affectionately called him Lollypop.

Corriden could, however, deliver a message rather directly when needed. Bobby Brown, a rookie with the ’47 Yankees, recalled that early in the year Corriden said to him, “Buddy boy, lay off that high pitch. All you’re doing is hitting fly balls to the warning track.” Brown did not take Corriden’s advice and about ten days later Corriden again approached him, saying, “You’re still hitting that high pitch. If you keep it up, you’ll be hitting it in Newark.”2 At that point, Brown got the message and started laying off the high ones.

Corriden was born on September 4, 1887, in Logansport, Indiana, where he was raised and attended elementary and high school. His parents were Michael B. and Catherine A. (Klein) Corriden. He grew up playing baseball and for a number of years had a paper route in Logansport, which included the parents of future baseball commissioner Kenesaw Mountain Landis. One Christmas Eve Landis’s mother summoned Red inside and stuffed his pockets with cookies and sweets and a snap-on bow tie. Corriden kept the tie for many years before presenting it back to Judge Landis’s brother Fred at a banquet in Logansport many years later.

In 1908 Corriden broke into professional baseball as a twenty-year-old third baseman with the Keokuk (Iowa) Indians in the Class D Central Association. He hit only .209 and committed forty errors in ninety-five games, but somehow he showed enough to be invited back for 1909. Corriden improved to .282 in 143 games, a good-enough performance for the St. Louis Browns to purchase his contract for 1910. The Browns farmed him to the Omaha Rourkes of the Class A Western League.

Corriden had an impressive season with Omaha, batting .308 and earning a call-up to the last-place Browns for the final month of the 1910 season. He hit only .155 in twenty-six games, but on October 9, the last day of the season, Corriden unwittingly found himself in the middle of a national firestorm. The Browns were playing the Cleveland Naps in St. Louis in a doubleheader. The games meant nothing in the standings, but the Naps namesake, Napoleon Lajoie, was in a tight race for the batting title with Ty Cobb, with the winner to receive a new Chalmers automobile.

Browns manager Jack O’Connor, who, with many, had enmity for Cobb, ordered his rookie third baseman Corriden to play back on the outfield grass behind third base, ostensibly to avoid injury from one of Lajoie’s vicious line drives. Lajoie slugged a triple over the head of rookie center-fielder Hub Northen in his first at bat, but on his succeeding eight plate appearances, Lajoie bunted the ball in the general direction of third base. Seven of the eight bunts went for base hits, with one bunt being ruled a fielder’s choice.

American League President Ban Johnson quickly investigated the suspicious affair and found Corriden not culpable because he was just following orders. He also declared Cobb the batting champion with a final average of .384944 to Lajoie’s .384084. The Chalmers Company magnanimously gave both Cobb and Lajoie new cars, but manager O’Connor lost his job and was effectively banned from Organized Baseball. In two years, Corriden would find himself a teammate of Cobb.

Corriden did not stick with the Browns for 1911 and signed with the Kansas City Blues of the American Association. He batted .247 in 137 games and committed sixty-four errors at shortstop. He was back with the Blues in 1912 and raised his average to a sparkling .318, attracting the attention of the Detroit Tigers, who purchased his contract late in the season. But Red could manage only a .203 batting average in 138 at bats for the Tigers.

After the season the Tigers sold Corriden to the Cincinnati Reds, who then sent him to the Chicago Cubs. In 1913 Corriden batted just .175 in forty-six games as a utility infielder for the Cubs. Nonetheless, when Al Bridwell, the Cubs starting shortstop, jumped to the Federal League in 1914, Corriden replaced him, batting .230 in 107 games. He also made forty-six errors in 432 chances at short for an .894 fielding percentage, lowest by twenty points among the National League regulars.

Red started the 1915 season with Chicago, but after only three at bats was sold to the Louisville Colonels of the American Association. Again he showed he could hit top-level Minor League pitching, batting a lusty .318 in 346 at bats. However, although he was only twenty-eight years old, Corriden’s Major League playing career was over. He had appeared in 223 games and had hit only .205 in 640 at bats. Defensively, he had ninety errors in 900 chances.

Corriden was back with the Colonels in 1916 and became a member of Louisville’s “Iron Man Infield.” With Red at third, Jay Kirke at first, Joe McCarthy (later to become the Yankees manager) at second, and Roxy Roach at shortstop, the infield played every inning of every game of a 168-game schedule.3 Corriden batted .277 as the Colonels swept to the American Association pennant.

After hitting .276 in 151 games for Louisville in 1917, Corriden played with St. Paul of the American Association in 1918 and 1919. He sat out the 1920 season, which he spent at home in Logansport working as a machinist, but returned to play in 1921 for the St. Joseph (Missouri) Saints in the Western League. At the age of thirty-three, Corriden experienced a resurgence, batting a hefty .336 in 143 games, all in the outfield. He returned to St. Joseph in 1922 and put together another stellar year, hitting .331 in 160 games.

The Des Moines Boosters, who had finished in the Western League basement in 1922, hired Corriden to be their player-manager for 1923. The club improved to fifth place in the eight-team league, with an 87-79 record. At thirty-five, Corriden could still play at that level. He penciled himself into the lineup every day and hammered out a .343 average. He returned to manage Des Moines in 1924, but the team slipped to seventh place, costing Red his job. He still had a terrific year at the plate, batting .338 in 126 games on 37 year-old legs.

In spite of his excellent year in 1924, Corriden never played another game in Organized Baseball. Thanks in part to his old Iron Man Infield mate Joe McCarthy, who was by 1926 managing the Chicago Cubs, Red spent a couple of years scouting in his native Indiana before joining the Indianapolis Indians of the American Association as a coach in 1928. He succeeded Bruno Betzel as manager in 1930, but the Indians finished dead last.

Rogers Hornsby had taken over from Joe McCarthy as manager of the Cubs at the tail end of the 1930 season, and hired Corriden as one of his coaches for 1932. That would begin a nine-year run for Corriden as a Cubs coach, during which he also served under Charlie Grimm and Gabby Hartnett. It was a most successful decade for the Cubs, as they won pennants in 1932, 1935, and 1938 and finished in the first division every year but 1940.4

Once during those years on a train trip between Chicago and New York, Corriden, upon boarding, told the porter to be sure to tell him when the train pulled into Indianapolis because he planned a quick visit with relatives there. He promptly fell asleep in his Pullman berth. Hartnett had overheard the conversation and when the train pulled into Englewood on Chicago’s south side, yelled, “Indianapolis!” Corriden shot out of his berth, yelling, “Why didn’t you give me more time?” He raced off the train, hailed a cab, and gave the Indianapolis address of his relatives. By the time he realized he was still in Chicago, the train was long gone.

When Hartnett was fired after the Cubs fifth-place finish in 1940, Corriden was canned as well. He was not out of a job long, however, as Leo Durocher quickly added him to his Brooklyn Dodgers coaching staff. Red was just in time to enjoy another pennant, but he remained without a World Series ring as the Dodgers lost to the Yankees in five games.

Corriden remained with Brooklyn for six tumultuous years under Durocher. In 1946 his son John was briefly with the Dodgers, appearing in one game as a pinch runner. Bucky Harris was hired to manage the Yankees in 1947, and Larry MacPhail, the former Dodgers executive and now co-owner of the Yankees, hired Corriden away from the Dodgers to be his first-base coach.

The 1947 World Series again matched the Yankees against the Dodgers, who had a rookie center fielder named Carl Furillo. After watching Furillo throw, Corriden advised against running on him, saying, “Furillo has a rifle hanging from his shoulder.” Furillo thus became ever known as the “Reading Rifle,” after his hometown and rifle-like arm. The Yankees beat Furillo’s Dodgers in seven games to finally give Corriden his World Series ring.

Red remained with the Yankees through the 1948 season, continuing as first-base coach. Although he was very popular with the Yankees players, he could occasionally rub them the wrong way. Fellow coach Charlie Dressen and Corriden were prone to go on about how they did things in the National League, where both had spent many years, implying that the National League was somehow superior. Bobby Brown remembers Joe DiMaggio remarking to him after one such episode, “Yeah, and we beat their asses every fall.”5

When the Yankees slipped to third place in 1948, they fired Bucky Harris and replaced him with Casey Stengel. Harris moved to the Pacific Coast League in 1949 to manage the San Diego Padres and took Corriden with him.

Corriden was back in the big leagues in 1950, hired as a coach by Chicago White Sox manager Jack Onslow. Following a May 26 loss to the Cleveland Indians, the White Sox were in last place with only eight wins in their first thirty games. New general manager Frank Lane fired Onslow and named the sixty-two-year-old Corriden to his first and only big league managing job. The club responded by winning its first game under Red, 6–1 behind the young southpaw Billy Pierce. The team was not a good one, however, and finished the season in sixth place, thirty-eight games behind the pennant-winning Yankees.

Under Corriden the club won fifty-two games and lost seventy-two. It was not enough to gain Red another year, and Lane brought in Paul Richards to manage for the 1951 season. Eddie Robinson, the first baseman on the 1950 White Sox, remembered that when Corriden would come to the mound to take a pitcher out of the game, he would inevitably say, “Buddy Boy, let’s let somebody else try.” When the new pitcher arrived, Corriden’s advice was, “Buddy Boy, you’ve got to get this guy out.” In general, Robinson thought Corriden was too nice a guy to be an effective manager.6

Indeed, Corriden’s role in his many years as coach was as a a buffer between salty managers like Durocher, Hornsby, and Hartnett and the players. In fact, his players often called him Uncle John in addition to Lollypop, and a 1947 newspaper article about him was headlined “Corriden Is Good Will and Good Humor Man.”7

After his dismissal by the White Sox, Corriden became a scout for the Dodgers, a position he held until he retired from baseball after the 1958 season at the age of seventy-one.

One of the players Corriden had signed for the Dodgers during his scouting days was pitcher Larry Sherry. In the middle of the 1959 season, the Dodgers needed pitching help and Sherry was one of their prospects, pitching in St. Paul. Dodgers general manager Buzzy Bavasi reportedly called Corriden to ask whether he thought Sherry was ready for the majors. Corriden replied, “Lollypop, grab him fast.”

Bavasi followed Corriden’s advice and Sherry was superb, winning seven games while losing only two and compiling a sparkling 2.19 earned run average while helping to push the Dodgers to a tie with the Milwaukee Braves for the National League pennant.

Unfortunately, the story has a very sad ending. Red Corriden was stricken with a fatal heart attack at his home in Indianapolis on September 28, 1959, while watching Sherry pitch for the Dodgers in a playoff game against the Braves. Corriden was seventy-two years old. He was buried in Mount Hope Cemetery in Logansport. He was survived by his wife, the former Ethel Shuman, whom he married in 1911, sons John M. Jr., Richard, and Robert. John and Ethel’s first-born, a daughter Mary died on November 8, 1912, the day she was born. With John Corriden’s passing, baseball had lost one of its acclaimed good humor men and good will ambassadors.

This biography is included in the book “Bridging Two Dynasties: The 1947 New York Yankees” (University of Nebraska Press, 2013), edited by Lyle Spatz. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Sources

Alexander, Charles C., Ty Cobb. New York: Oxford University Press, 1984.

Bak, Richard, Peach – Ty Cobb in His Time and Ours. Ann Arbor: Sports Media Group, 2005.

Bartell, Dick, with Norman L. Macht, Rowdy Richard. Berkeley: North Atlantic Books, 1987.

Golenbock, Peter, The Spirit of St. Louis – A History of the St. Louis Cardinals and Browns. New York: Avon Books, Inc., 2000.

Grimm, Charlie, with Ed Prell, Jolly Cholly’s Story – Baseball, I Love You! Chicago: Henry Regnery Company, 1968.

Gutteridge, Don, with Ronnie Joyner and Bill Bozman, From the Gas House Gang to the Go-Go Sox – My 50-plus Years in Big League Baseball. Dunkirk, Maryland: Pepperpot Productions, Inc., 2007.

Higbe, Kirby, with Martin Quigley, The High Hard One. New York: The Viking Press, Inc., 1967.

Johnson, Lloyd, and Miles Wolff, eds., The Encyclopedia of Minor League Baseball. Durham, North Carolina: Baseball America, second ed. 1997.

Jones, David, ed., Deadball Stars of the American League. Dulles, Virginia: Potomac Books, Inc., 2006.

Levy, Alan, Joe McCarthy – Architect of the Yankee Dynasty. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2005.

Lieb, Frederick C., The Detroit Tigers. New York: G.P. Putnam & Sons, 1946.

Reed, Ted, Carl Furillo – Brooklyn Dodger All-Star. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011.

Robinson, Eddie, and C. Paul Rogers III, Lucky Me – My Sixty-Five Years in Baseball. Dallas: SMU Press, 2011.

Skipper, John C., A Biographical Dictionary of Major League Managers. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2003.

Spatz, Lyle, Dixie Walker – A Life in Baseball. Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland & Company, Inc., 2011.

Stump, Al, Cobb – A Biography. Chapel Hill: Algonquin Books of Chapel Hill, 1994.

Murphy, J.M., “Napoleon Lajoie: Modern Baseball’s First Superstar,” The National Pastime, No.1, 1988.

The Baseball Register, 1941 edition (St. Louis: The Sporting News).

Corriden, Red, Clippings file, National Baseball Library, Cooperstown, New York.

Obituary, New York Times, September 30, 1959, page 29.

Telephone interview with Dr. Bobby Brown, June, 23, 2011.

Telephone interview with Eddie Robinson, June 23, 2011.

Notes

1. Epstein, Ben, Corriden is Good Will and Good Humor Man, undated clipping from Red Corriden file, National Baseball Library, Cooperstown, NY.

2. Telephone Interview with Dr. Bobby Brown, June 23, 2011.

3. References to the “Iron Man Infield” neglect the fact that Jay Kirke joined the Colonels that year in June in a trade from Milwaukee of the American Association. Corriden, McCarthy, and Roach did play every inning of every game and thus Kirke must have done the same once he joined the team.

4. Of course, as all Cubs fans know, the team failed to win the World Series all three pennant-winning years in the 1930s.

5. Telephone Interview with Dr. Bobby Brown, June 23, 2011.

6. Telephone Interview with Eddie Robinson, June 23, 2011.

7. Epstein, Ben, Corriden is Good Willl and Good Humor Man, undated clipping from Red Corriden file, National Baseball Library, Cooperstown, NY.