“Everybody knows who Avila was in Mexico,” said former Los Angeles Dodgers great Fernando Valenzuela. “He was an inspiration, of course, for Mexican ballplayers to follow to the States and play in the major leagues. He did a good job. Everybody knows and recognizes what he did.”2

With the 1954 Indians, Avila played the best baseball of his 11-year major-league career.3 He led the American League in hitting (.341) and received The Sporting News American League player of the year award. His extraordinary 1954 performance made him the first Mexican-born player in history to lead the American League in batting.4

Roberto Francisco (Gonzales) Avila was born on April 2, 1924, in Veracruz, Mexico.5 He had four sisters and three older brothers. His father, a lawyer, wanted Bobby to also become a barrister. While at a preparatory school in Veracruz, Bobby excelled in many sports, including baseball, soccer, and basketball. When he was 14 a professional soccer team, Espana Club of Veracruz, offered him an opportunity to play left wing. For about $70 a month and with his father’s approval, Bobby joined the club and traveled throughout Mexico as a professional soccer player.6

Avila decided the following year to concentrate his athletic efforts on baseball and signed with the semipro Cordoba club. At the time baseball in Mexico suffered from a lack of good instructors and coaches. Fortunately for Bobby, an older brother, Pedro, played baseball, and taught him the game. Although he started as one of Cordoba’s pitchers, he switched to second base in order to get more playing time.

In 1943 the Mexican League offered Avila a contract to play for the Puebla club. He and his father remained at loggerheads over his future. He partly addressed his father’s concerns by agreeing to also enroll at the University of Mexico to study engineering. Avila signed with Puebla for 700 pesos a month.

In 1946 Avila emerged as one of the league’s top hitters, finishing with a .340 average. He also played Cuban baseball and performed well. Major-league scouts noticed and several made offers to him. Reportedly, the Brooklyn Dodgers even brought him to their spring-training camp to evaluate him.

Avila later said that most of the offers were in the $6,000-to-$10,000 area. Rather than jump at the offers, he decided to stay put. The following year Avila led the league in hitting, with a .347 average. The Indians’ Cy Slapnicka, who scouted and signed many great baseball stars over his career, extensively evaluated the 5-foot-11, 170-pound Avila. He recommended that the Indians offer Avila a $17,500 bonus to sign. With the full support of his once skeptical father, Bobby signed.7

Cleveland assigned Avila to its Baltimore affiliate in the Triple-A International League. In 1948 he played in 56 games for the Orioles and hit .220.8 At first his unfamiliarity with English significantly hampered his transition to American baseball. His first minor-league manager, Tommy Thomas, described Bobby as a “stranger in a strange land.”9

Avila went from Mexican stardom to American anonymity. He struggled both socially and professionally. His self-confidence plummeted. “[It] was very hard for me at first,” he said later. “Any Latin ballplayer who comes here must fight the language.” 10 To make matters worse, Avila also suffered a hernia, which had to be corrected with offseason surgery.11

Avila began with Cleveland in 1949 and roomed with pitcher Mike Garcia, US-born but of Mexican heritage. Garcia remembered, “At first, Bobby didn’t speak a lick of English. All he would do was point and say, ‘Como se llama eso?’ meaning ‘What’s that?’ ” On the major-league roster only because of major-league requirements related to his signing bonus, Avila used his time on the bench in 1949 to learn the English language and American customs.12 He appeared in 31 games, only one as a starter, had only 15 plate appearances, and finished with a .214 average.13

In 1950 Joe Gordon, the Indians’ hard-hitting and slick-fielding second baseman, suffered an injury and Avila made the most of his unexpected opportunity.14 Appearing in 80 games and getting 201 at-bats, he ended the year with a .299 average.15 Gordon was released after the season and Avila became Cleveland’s regular second baseman in 1951, playing in 141 games and hitting .304. 16 He had the best batting day of his career on June 20, 1951, hitting a single, a double, and three home runs (one inside the park) against five different Boston Red Sox pitchers.17

In a seemingly minor move, the Indians in 1952 obtained veteran utility infielder Hank Majeski from the Chicago White Sox. Cleveland assigned Majeski to room with Avila. The two quickly became good friends. “He (is) like a big brother to me,” Avila said. “He helps me more than anybody. He makes you think you can do it. Sure you have to have the ability, but he help(s) me all (of) the time.” 18 Avila responded positively to this new environment by hitting.300, scoring 102 runs, leading the league in triples (11), and making his first appearance in an All-Star Game.19 With his All-Star appearance, he became the first Mexican-born player to be picked for the honor. 20

Although Avila increasingly felt comfortable playing in Cleveland, he maintained his strong ties with his friends and family in Mexico. On his major-league salary, he supported his mother, his wife and two children, and his widowed sister and her son. In addition to his direct dependents, Bobby often received requests for financial help from other friends. According to Majeski, “In every town we go to people gather around him and he’s always picking up the tab. After every payday, you ought to see the number of money drafts he sends to Mexico.”21

Avila was now an international (US, Cuba, Mexico) baseball star. In Mexico and Cuba, he went by the popular nickname Beto, short for Roberto. “Beto” adorned all of his autographed baseball pictures and even his bats. Beto never caught on in the US, so he went with the nickname Bobby. He ended up with two sets of bats in Cleveland: his Bobby bats and his Beto bats.22

Avila suffered a slight drop in his hitting production in 1953. In 141 games he finished with his lowest batting average (.286) in four years.23 On the field, though, Avila led all American League Second Basemen with a fielding average of .986.24 Building on the footwork skills he used in soccer, he became very adept at turning the double play. He also used his soccer training to perfect the art of sliding into a base while simultaneously attempting to kick the baseball out of the fielder’s glove. This angered some opposing players, who threatened retaliation.25

Within the framework of the Indians’ spectacular 1954 season, Avila surged to the best year in his 11-year major-league career. He led the league in hitting with a batting average of .341, and was the only Indian regular to hit over .300. (Al Rosen hit exactly .300.)

Avila’s 1954 batting title has been the subject of some controversy, particularly among Boston Red Sox fans. During 1954 spring training, the legendary Ted Williams broke his collarbone diving for a ball and missed 37 games. In addition, opposing pitchers walked him 136 times. The missed games and walks combined to give Williams 386 official at-bats. Although he finished with a .345 average, to be eligible for a batting championship at the time, a player had to have 400 at-bats.26

However, Avila also had both a significant injury and a possible suspension to address. After his unusually good start with the bat, he suffered a broken thumb on June 2. He remembered, “Hank Bauer slid into second and broke my thumb.” At the time of his injury, Avila’s average was .392.27

Avila played five games after his injury before deciding to get his increasingly sore right thumb X-rayed. The film revealed a chip fracture near the joint. The doctor put a splint on the injury and told him not to play for at least a week. He also told Avila “not to shake hands” for a while.28

When Avila resumed playing, he found he couldn’t swing the bat as well as he had earlier. Over the next two months, his average dropped to .313. As the thumb got better, his average climbed and he finished at .341. Noting that confidence at the plate is a key factor in good hitting, Avila said that if he had not had the injury he could have hit for an even higher average. 29

In addition to his injury, on June 4 Avila made contact with home-plate umpire Bill Grieve while arguing a third-strike call. Umpire/player contact incidents required a ten-day suspension. Upon his review, however, Baseball Commissioner Ford Frick decided that the incident was minor and could have actually been accidental. Instead of a suspension, the commissioner gave Avila a warning and fined him $100.30

Avila also hit a career-high 15 home runs in 1954. Although that may seem modest, The Sporting News noted that 13 of the 15 either tied or won games in the late innings. 31 Avila played in his second All-Star game, which that year was played in Cleveland. He went 3-for-3 and drove in two runs in the American League’s 11-9 victory. 32 Avila also led the league in sacrifice hits (19) and scored a career-high 112 runs.33

Yogi Berra was voted the Most Valuable Player in the American League that year, but Avila received several postseason awards. The Sporting News selected him as its AL Player of the Year and Major League All-Star second baseman. The Cleveland Baseball Writers named him their Man of the Year.34

When the Indians won the pennant, Avila faced the daunting task of satisfying a huge number of World Series ticket requests from Mexico. The Sporting News reported that he even got a call from the president of Mexico, who wanted tickets for himself and all of his cabinet members.35

Avila hit only .133 (2-for-15) as the Indians were swept by the New York Giants in the World Series. The Sporting News said the poor hitting of Avila and teammate Lary Doby made them the “top patsies” of the Series.36 Reflecting on the Giants’ sweep of the heavily favored Indians, Avila said, “You know how it is in baseball. Most of the breaks went for them and they beat us.”37

In 1954 Avila, with the permission of General Manager Greenberg, became a part-owner of the Mexico City Reds of the Veracruz Winter League. After the World Series he received a hero’s welcome when he returned to Mexico to begin his player/owner duties.

Mexican officials met Avila in Nuevo Laredo at the U.S.-Mexican border and gave him a motorcycle escort all the way to Mexico City (900 miles).38 As the Reds were not doing well, Avila also took over as their manager.39

In 1955 Avila’s batting average dropped to .272, nearly 70 points below 1954. Several factors combined to produce these disappointing results. Before the season Avila held out for a salary increase from $20,000 (including bonus) to $32,000. On March 25 he became the last Indian holdout to sign. He ended up with $27,500 and additional bonus opportunities of $2,000. The heavily publicized holdout embarrassed the Indians, particularly Greenberg.40

The Indians’ trade of his roommate, mentor, and close friend Hank Majeski to Baltimore in early July had a negative effect on Avila’s hitting. Although the trade made sense for the Indians, Avila had always praised Majeski for helping him keep his hitting focus.41

Injuries also played a role in Avila’s slump. He suffered a sprained right toe early and missed several games.42 In mid-July he had a corneal cyst surgically removed from his right eye. The surgery was publicly characterized as minor. However, it wasn’t until mid-September that Avila acknowledged he felt comfortable at the plate again.43 44 Although his batting average tumbled, he was again selected to play on the AL All-Star squad. For the second year in a row, he led the league in sacrifice hits (18).45

When the season ended Avila returned to Mexico to play. This time his team won the Veracruz League pennant. Early in the winter season he signed teammates Early Wynn and Bob Lemon and White Sox outfielder Jim Rivera. Wynn and Lemon made only a few appearances, but Rivera played a full season.46

Avila again held out in the spring of 1956. He agreed via phone to a base salary of around $25,500 and reported three days after the Indians started their spring training. Greenberg took his frustrations with Bobby’s negotiating tactics public.47 Avila’s batting average again dropped sharply, from .272 to .224. The Indians requested that he try eyeglasses when hitting. He wore glasses the last week of the 1956 season but the results were inconclusive. He and the Indians agreed that he would have an eye exam during the winter.

The Indians began the 1957 season with a new manager, Kerby Farrell. Because of his poor 1956 hitting, Avila played no winter ball in Mexico. To the Indians’ surprise, he showed up at spring training without glasses. He said his doctor’s eye examination revealed he did not have any problems.

By the end of May Avila’s batting average stood at .211. Greenberg told him to see the Indians’ eye doctor, told him he was nearsighted and needed glasses. The first time he wore his new glasses Avila got three hits. Although he steadfastly refused to wear glasses on the field, he wore them while batting. He finished the year with a .268 batting average.48

In 1958 Frank “Trader” Lane succeeded Hank Greenberg as the Indians’ general manager, with Bobby Bragan as the manager. Lane said second base was one of the infield positions where the Indians needed to start a rebuilding effort. 49 Throughout the season, Lane frequently used Avila’s name when he spoke publicly about possible trades. Within this fluid framework, Avila ended up playing 82 games at second base and 33 games at third base. He ended the season with a .253 batting average and a .349 on-base percentage.50

After the season Lane traded Avila to the Baltimore Orioles for pitcher Russ Heman and $30,000. After playing in 20 games for the Orioles in 1959, he was sent to the Red Sox for the waiver price in mid-May. Avila played in 22 games for Boston and was put on waivers again. The Milwaukee Braves selected him to replace their ailing second baseman, Red Schoendienst. Bobby played in 51 games for the Braves, who were in a tight pennant race, which they lost to the Los Angeles Dodgers in a one-game playoff after the close of the regular season. For his three teams Avila played in 93 games and ended with a .227 season average and an OBP of .314.51

After the 1959 season Avila was the player-manager of the Jalapa team in Mexico. Recovering from a slow start, it lost the pennant on the last day of the season in a controversial game.52 53

The 1959 season was Avila’s last in the major leagues. At the start of 1960, the Braves optioned the 35-year-old Avila to their farm team in Louisville, which in turn optioned him to the Mexico City Tigers of the Mexican League.54 The Tigers won the pennant as Avila hit .333 and scored a record 125 runs.55 It was his last season as a player. During his 11 seasons in the major leagues, he played in 1,300 games, had 4,620 at-bats, produced 1,296 hits and registered a batting average of .281 and an on-base percentage of.359.56

In October 1960 Avila was named the president of the former Veracruz League, which in his honor was named the Roberto Avila League.57 In 1971 he was elected to the Mexican baseball hall of fame as a player.58 Two Mexican League Stadiums were named after him: Estadio Beto Avila (capacity 7,782) in Cancun and Parque Beto Avila (capacity 9,000) in Veracruz.59

In 1980 Avila began a new career, as a Mexican lawmaker. He was elected the mayor of Veracruz and then to the Mexican Congress, where he served two three-year terms. He also remained active as a businessman and busy grandparent. He had four children and ten grandchildren.60 On October 26, 2004, Avila died in his hometown Veracruz of complications from diabetes and lung disease. He was 80 years old.61

Avila may have summed up his baseball career best: “I loved the game. And I was real honest about my job. Nobody could ever say they saw Bobby Avila drunk or playing around. I was honest about my career and I gave it everything I had.”62

This biography is included in the book Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Joseph Wancho. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Notes

In an era when several of the major radio stations in Boston competed nightly for the attention of sports fans, the most listened-to program on the air was “Jim Britt’s Sports Roundup” from 6:15 to 6:30 on WNAC. It consisted of a mix of straight reporting, commentary, and in-studio interviews with newsmakers, and finished up with Jim’s signature expression at the end of his program, “Remember, if you can’t take part in a sport, be one anyway, will ya.” From today’s vantage point, that tagline sounds cornball but in the pre-television era it helped accelerate him into Boston’s No. 1 sports personality on the air in the 1940s.

Jim Britt was born in San Francisco in 1911. The well-to-do family (his father was chairman of the board of the Burroughs Corporation) moved to Detroit when Jim was 11. Jim received a bachelor of arts degree from the University of Detroit (where his brother, a priest, would later become president), majoring in English and philosophy with a co-minor in speech and history. After graduation, he earned a law degree at the University of Southern California but chose not to take the bar exam. Always interested in speech, singing, and sports, he returned to Detroit to teach public speaking and debating in local high schools.

His entry into radio was accidental, not in one of the many ways open to those interested in media jobs today. He accepted a dare from the university’s football coach to become better behind the mike than the current announcer, who Britt thought was horrendous and had declared emphatically as much to the coach.

Full-time radio work began in 1935 with Notre Dame football and basketball games. Then came two years of Buffalo Bisons baseball doing home games live and road games via telegraphic recreation with Leo Egan. A native Buffalonian, Egan came to Boston after the 1938 hurricane. He wrote for the Boston Herald and broadcast baseball and football for 30 years (many pigskin clashes being from atop Harvard Stadium). Ironically, Leo was the person who persuaded Jim to audition for an opening as sports director with WNAC and its Yankee Network. This network was a federation of radio stations from Maine to Connecticut and had nothing to do with the Bronx Bombers.

Britt got the job on November 10, 1939, and became Frankie Frisch’s replacement as the voice of New England baseball. During his one year at the mike, Frisch had proven unable to fill the shoes of immensely popular local broadcast legend Fred Hoey and eagerly accepted the chance to return to the diamond as manager of the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Britt began to broadcast home games of the Braves and Red Sox in 1940 with Tom Hussey as his sidekick. Few other baseball announcers have covered two teams at the same time. Their partnership continued until the 1942 All-Star break when Britt received his induction notice from the Navy. He served as an intelligence officer in the Pacific for the next 3 1/2 years, an assignment not without risk. At one point, the bomber in which he was flying suffered a mid-air collision with another American aircraft. Britt was one of eight survivors.

Britt’s return to civilian life allowed him to go back to cover Boston baseball games, now available on WHDH. Listeners welcomed the intelligent, smooth, and fluent sound of his voice again because play-by-play announcers assigned by the station in his absence were just not in his league. Reflecting back to when he was 13 years old, Sporting News columnist Wells Twombly reminisced, “Jim Britt…makes baseball sound better than red-haired girls with freckles.” Ken Coleman, who broadcast for Boston in later years, recalls it as a treat when Britt returned to the booth. “There’s no doubt in my mind that of all the broadcasters I’ve ever heard, and this includes network newspeople, no one had more of a command of the English language than Jim.”

Both Twombly and Coleman succeed in putting into words exactly what my own sentiments were. Jim Britt represented Braves baseball for me in the late 40s and early 50s. Thanks to him, I became such a devoted fan of the team that their move to Milwaukee in 1953 was like a death in the family. I still have vivid memories of hiding my portable radio underneath the covers at night listening to him describe yet another heroic comeback staged by the Braves during their victorious pennant chase of 1948. The losses piled up progressively from 1949-52, but the drama in his voice always gave me fresh hope that the outcome of tomorrow’s contest would be better.

Just a few months before what would become the final season of National League baseball in Boston, I wrote to Britt asking how best to pursue my lifelong dream. He took time from what must have been a busy schedule to offer me this advice during my sophomore year in high school: “Most important for either a sports broadcasting or sports writing career — get a good, well-rounded education. Go to college, if you can. There’s no possible substitute. Then make the rounds of the various small radio stations and/or newspapers to get a job. It may be hard to break in. But the job is interesting and well worth all the time and trouble to get started. Good luck in whatever you do, wherever you go.”

Boston’s first baseball telecast occurred on June 15, 1948, with Britt and Hussey calling a contest between the Braves and the Cubs on Massachusetts’ pioneer television station, WBZ-TV. Channel 4, as it was known then, had transmitted its inaugural program — a 15-minute newscast — a scant week before this historic event from Braves Field.

As the new medium grew, more games on the Braves (and soon the Red Sox) schedule were carried via television. The original broadcasting tandem remained intact through 1950, although Leo Egan and Bump Hadley also appeared from time to time. Hadley came from Lynn, Massachusetts and capped a 16-year pitching career with three World Series appearances for the New York Yankees in the late 1930s. His legacy forever will be tied to fracturing Mickey Cochrane’s skull with an errant pitch that ended the future Hall of Famer’s career. Years after this incident, Bump’s trademark closing to his popular sports show on WBZ was “heads up and keep pitching.”

When Tom Yawkey announced that his ball club planned to air road games in 1951, Britt could no longer broadcast for both the Braves and the Red Sox. He was given his option as to which team to broadcast. His decision to go with the Braves was criticized by many. Even Britt second-guessed himself. However, in hindsight it arguably was not a bad choice given the remarkable success the Braves would enjoy later in the ’50s and the hard times the Red Sox had during the same period.

Did Jim evaluate the young talent in the Braves farm system in 1950 (Mathews, Logan, Buhl, Bruton, Conley) and foresee that they would benefit the team in Boston over the next decade while the Red Sox had stars who were aging (Williams, DiMaggio, Doerr, Pesky, Stephens), making the American League outfit more likely to suffer decline? I think he did and, more important, there were upcoming threats to Britt’s physical and psychological well-being that renders the Braves vs. Red Sox dilemma inconsequential.

The counter view is that the poor judgment he exercised might have been somewhat attributable to erosion in his health, making the issue vital and far from inconsequential. Without knowing either Britt’s rationale to stick with Boston’s National League entry or what the aftermath would have been had he chosen the Red Sox, there is no way to tell for sure.

The Red Sox hired Curt Gowdy, who at the time was Mel Allen’s junior partner with the Yankees, and retained Tom Hussey. With Narragansett Brewery as their chief sponsor (“Hi neighbor, have a ’Gansett”), they continued to carry their games on WHDH, where they stayed until 1975.

As for the Braves, their 154-game schedule moved to WNAC and was sponsored by Ballantine (remember the three rings?). Britt’s backup during the Tribe’s final two seasons in the Hub was Les Smith, a journeyman news and special features host at the station. Their sister station, Channel 7, showed home games periodically. The Braves broadcast duo was joined there by an always unintentionally amusing and sometimes seemingly-inebriated Bump Hadley. Bump was that generation’s answer to Ralph Kiner with gaffes like “that ball is going, going…and caught by Sam Jethroe in short center field.” This is not to say that Britt was without his own shortcomings. Leo Egan saw Britt as “sort of a Felix Unger type — quirksome, picky.” He remembers one time when three times in the same game Britt miscalled fly balls as home runs. Egan characterized Britt as “very professional, very difficult. But, God, he was articulate.”

Britt was the first broadcaster associated with a local children’s cancer charity adopted by the Braves known as the Jimmy Fund, benefiting the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation (now Dana-Farber Cancer Institute). His tireless work to help eliminate childhood cancer established a tradition among Boston broadcasters that is followed to this day. Britt’s future broadcasting colleague in Cleveland, Ken Coleman, became an especially avid advocate for the Jimmy Fund upon his return to Boston. Ken later served as executive director of the Jimmy Fund from 1978 to 1984. Current Sox play-by-play man Joe Castiglione has carried on in the tradition as a spokesman for the Jimmy Fund since first partnering with Coleman in the mid-1980s, as has Joe’s former protégé Uri Berenguer-Ramos, the Spanish radio voice of the club. A cancer survivor and former Dana-Farber patient, Uri knows the importance of the Sox-Jimmy Fund partnership better than anyone.

The size of Britt’s audience increased in scope as he did the 1946, 1948, and 1950 World Series on radio, the 1949, 1950, and 1951 Series on television, the first nationally televised football game in 1949, seven All-Star baseball games, and several major college football bowl games during this time span. But his stardom fell as quickly as it rose, mirroring the fortunes of the team with which he was affiliated most closely during the postwar era before its abrupt shift to Milwaukee.

There were four years of Indians telecasts with Ken Coleman and then back to Boston as a news anchor and bowling program host prior to being fired by WHDH-TV. Drinking problems that led to arrest more than once, and a divorce took their toll, especially when these incidents were splashed across the front page of the Boston Daily Record tabloid. Most telling was an eye injury that ended his sportscasting career.

Progressively longer periods of unemployment ensued. He drifted from Boston to Detroit to St. Petersburg to Sarasota and finally to Monterey, California, where he was found dead in his apartment by the police on December 28, 1980, at the age of 70, with no known next of kin. His brother had predeceased him about two months earlier.

In Curt Smith’s latest opus, Voices of Summer, the author ranks Britt 78th among the 101 all-time best baseball announcers. That placement is just ahead of Joe Angel (San Francisco Giants and Orioles) and right behind Bob Starr (Angels and Red Sox). Joe Morgan and Russ Hodges represent more famous benchmarks, listed 60th and 51st respectively by Smith.

Shortly after Britt’s death, Ray Fitzgerald of the Boston Globe wrote that “life had turned its back on him a long time ago.” And maybe some of his detractors who called him arrogant, uncompromising, perfectionistic, thin-skinned, or unwilling to admit mistakes were secretly tickled that it had.

In his prime, Jim Britt was the king of New England sports radio and early television. He was bright, knowledgeable, and very articulate, took pride in his professionalism, and had a dry sense of humor. He once told radio/TV sports director and announcer Ted Patterson that his credo was “report the game, don’t play it.” And that he did so objectively, although there was a hard-to-pinpoint pro-Braves and pro-Red Sox quality to his voice that hometowners could sense.

Even during his off-peak years in Cleveland, he never let serious alcohol and marital problems color his description of the game.

A mostly forgotten figure today, the final truth of the matter is that there was an admirable strength of character that defined Jim Britt’s work, although not his life.

An updated version of this biography is included in the book  “Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Joseph Wancho. It originally appeared in “Spahn, Sain, and Teddy Ballgame: Boston’s (almost) Perfect Baseball Summer of 1948” (Rounder Books, 2008), edited by Bill Nowlin.

Sources

Bloomberg, Mort, “The Voice of the Braves” in Society for American Baseball Research (Paducah KY: Turner Publications, 2000).

Britt, Jim. Letter to Mort Bloomberg, January 1952.

Buchanan, William, “Jim Britt, 70, broadcast Boston baseball games.” Boston Globe, January 1981.

Fitzgerald, Ray, “Voice from Hub’s past is stilled,” Boston Globe, January 1981.

Patterson, Ted, The Golden Voices of Baseball (Champaign IL: Sports Publishing, 2002)

Patterson, Ted, The Golden Voices of Football (Champaign IL: Sports Publishing, 2004)

Redmount, Robert, The Red Sox Encyclopedia, 2nd edition (Champaign IL: Sports Publishing, 2002)

Smith, Curt, Voices of the Game (Lanham MD: Diamond Communications, 1987)

Smith, Curt, Voices of Summer (NY: Carroll & Graf, 2005)

Twombly, Wells, “Those ’48 Braves Were the Greatest”, The Sporting News, July 11, 1970.

Two of Eddie Pete’s older brothers were born in Greece, Bob said. Eddie Pete himself was born in Pittsburgh, where the family seems to have first settled after coming to the US in 1902. Eddie Pete’s father, Peter, worked in confectionery manufacturing.

Bob hadn’t played any organized baseball in Asheville, but played a lot of true sandlot ball. “We used to stitch corncob parts together to make balls,” he said adding that he also spent some time reading about Babe Ruth. (Not long before Ruth died, Bob was able to meet the Babe at a special event and shake his hand.)

Baseball became more interesting to Bob after the move. “When I moved to Dunn, I found that baseball was a big deal. I was talked into joining the Kneepants League (a competitor to Little League for children aged 10 to 12).” Bob told his son James that his interest grew when he saw his name posted on the stats sheet at the local barbershop. “Every week the baseball stats were prominently displayed for everyone to see. I was hitting so well I could get a free lollipop anytime I wanted.” Clearly, this was a rewarding sport.1

Bob (or Chick as he was known in childhood) played as a third baseman in Dunn, and also played American Legion ball, again at third – the position where the team had the greatest need. Then in the final game of the season, when the games began to pile up and the team needed an extra pitcher. Bob’s coach asked him to pitch. He did well, winning his first outing, and was told, “Next year, you’re our pitcher.” Before the next year rolled around, the Chakales family moved again – to Richmond, Virginia, where Eddie Pete went into the restaurant business in a Greek restaurant. Before they left Dunn, Eddie Pete’s leg was crushed when a co-worker on the railroad forgot to switch tracks properly. While laid up, he thought more about the war. Eddie Pete tried to enlist but the damaged leg kept him with 4-F status.

The family pronounces their last name “Shackles” – though the Greek pronunciation would be slightly different, more like SHACK-a-lees. [I don’t know how the Greek pronunication might be. It might well start with a “ch” sound, and in his nickname “Chick”.] Bob would occasionally boast light-heartedly, “First there was Hercules, then there was Socrates, but along came Chakales, the Greatest Greek of all!”2

The American Legion team at Dunn wanted Bob back so badly that the mayor himself, Herbert Taylor, called and offered him room and board to return for another season. Once Bob agreed to return to Dunn, the mayor drove to Richmond and chauffeured him in a new Chrysler Imperial, which at the time  was riding in style. Bob opened the American Legion season with a victory in an 18-strikeout performance. He wound up pitching Dunn into the state finals. He was named outstanding pitcher of the tournament.3

It wasn’t without the fright of his life, though, Bob told his son, James. The mayor owned a funeral home and that’s where Bob lodged. That was all well and good until a heavy downpour came. The funeral home had a tin roof and this was one of those storms “with raindrops so heavy you could weigh them.” It was during World War II, these heavy raindrops were pounding down on the roof so hard it sounded like bullets striking. He was upstairs and there were dead people laid out in the funeral home downstairs. Bob was so petrified he leapt out of bed, ran downstairs and saw one of the newly dead pop up from a table (this can happen with a combination of rigor mortis and post-mortem contraction of tissue and tendons.) Before Bob knew it, he just ran out of the funeral home, without a clear destination – just running across town during the rainstorm. Bob adds succinctly, “A funeral home is no place for a young person to spend their summer.”

Baseball wasn’t the only sport at which Bob excelled at the state level. James recalled, “Marble shooting was a big deal, especially in the South. I remember as a kid collecting marbles, and he would tell me, ‘Let me show you how you shoot marbles.’ Even then, he was 30 years older than me, he could lay a marble on the floor and he could fire a marble off his thumb and hit another marble every time.” When Bob was a youth, he went all the way to the top, winning the North Carolina state marble shooting contest. He might have gone further, but was too fearful of traveling out of state, so the runner-up was selected instead to represent North Carolina in later competitions.

While in Richmond, Bob met Granny Hamner, a fellow ballplayer his age and a future Philadelphia Phils Whiz Kid, who pushed for Bob to enroll at Benedictine High School, a small private boys’ Catholic school with strong sports programs. The headmaster, Father Dan, drove south to Dunn to scout Bob and decided Bob would be a great addition to Benedictine. Bob became the quarterback on the football team, and was named all-state in basketball and baseball. “We only had 16 in my graduating class and we competed against all the major high schools,” Bob said, “but we won a lot of state championships using kids from all four grade levels. Granny was a great friend and one heck of a ballplayer.”

It was a real boon to the family that Hamner had “recruited” Bob. His tuition was gratis – and even though it was a military school, Bob was not required to wear the military uniform. The sports uniforms were sufficient. The school apparently drew quite well, having good athletes on their teams. “Father Dan used to always say, ‘I am going to get my money out of you,’ which he did by assigning Bob menial tasks, and “when I was a senior he told me that he got all his money back.”

A news report in the Christian Science Monitor in 1944 said that Robert Chakales had struck out 99 batters in 69 innings for Benedictine High “despite a sore arm.”4 The following spring the Richmond News-Leader reported that a vote of coaches had named Chakales, a guard, as captain of the all-military-academy basketball team in Virginia.5 Bob was selected All-State in baseball, basketball, and football. On the ballfield that spring, he won eight games in a row, including a no-hitter, and led all Richmond batters in hitting with a .523 average.6

Young Chakales was offered scholarships to a wide variety of colleges across the South, but before accepting any he responded to a telegram from the Philadelphia Phillies, offering a tryout before general manager Herb Pennock at Shibe Park. He told Cleveland sportswriter Hal Lebovitz that Pennock had told him the Phillies would match any offer.

On June 4, 1945, an Associated Press dispatch reported that the Philadelphia Phillies had signed the 17-year-old to a contract with a reported $7,500 bonus and an additional $4,000 earmarked for his college education. There’s a good family story behind the signing. Bob’s son James tells it the way he heard it: “Connie Mack had come to Richmond from Philadelphia, and was in my grandfather’s home – my dad’s home – getting ready to sign Dad to a contract. He offered him $4,000, which at that time was still a lot of money. The phone rings, and Branch Rickey was on the other end. My grandfather answers the phone and says, ‘Mr. Rickey, hi.’ (Rickey) said, ‘We want to offer Bob a contract to play professional baseball for the Dodgers.’ (Branch Rickey wanted Bob for his hitting ability.). And he goes, ‘Well, that’s interesting. Connie Mack is here right now.’ Rickey replies, ‘He is? What’s he offering?’ The great Greek negotiator says, ‘He’s offered five thousand.’  ‘Just tell Bob to sign with us right now. $5,500.’ So my grandfather goes back and joins Connie Mack and my dad and says, ‘I’ve got Branch Rickey on the phone. He just offered $6,500 for Bob to sign with the Dodgers.’ And Connie Mack said, ‘Whoa. That’s a lot of money. I don’t think we can do that. I’ll tell you what, just sign right here and we’ll offer $7,000.’ My grandfather says, ‘OK, let me tell Mr. Rickey.’  He goes, ‘Mr. Rickey. Connie Mack just said $8,000.’ They went back and forth raising the signing bonus to $11,000 from the Athletics until Connie Mack sees what happening and says, ‘We are out of this business – you can sign with the Dodgers,’ and walked out the door. Then Branch Rickey felt his limit was reached so he backed out.” Bob ended up signing with the Phillies through representative Jocko Collins. Bob did get the money he wanted; $11,500, which at that time made Bob a huge bonus baby.7

It was most fortuitous that Rickey chose to call while Mack was in the home as Bob’s value was established. Although the Phillies provided Bob with college education money, he never did go to college: the college fund was, however, put to good use. The great Greek negotiator, Eddie Pete, used the $4,000 to pay off his mortgage. Bob told his dad he would earn that money back by playing ball. Instead of college, Bob went to Utica, New York. The Phillies first sent him to their Single-A affiliate, the Utica Blue Sox. He lost his first three games, though one was a 2-0 home loss to the visiting Hartford Senators. The powers that be decided to have the 17-year-old get his feet wet one level lower on the ladder and he went to Class B Wilmington, Delaware, where he pitched in the Interstate League for the Wilmington Blue Rocks. Bob posted a 13-5 record, despite a 5.06 ERA, and was one of the best batters on the team, hitting .327. He was listed as 6-feet-1 and 185 pounds. Between his high-school season and his first professional summer, Bob had 30 pitching decisions – a lot of pitching for someone who was still just 17 years old.

Despite all the innings he accumulated, Bob was booked for postseason baseball in October 1945, for the Richmond All-Stars against the touring Tommy Holmes major-league All-Stars team. His postseason didn’t last long. Though World War II was over, there was still a need to cycle in new soldiers, while letting those who had served come home, and on November 9, 1945, he passed his physical and was inducted into the Army. Fort Lee in Virginia was glad to have a pitcher going for its team, even though in his first outing, on April 10, 1946, Bob showed the rust from inactivity as he was pounded in a 10-1 loss to the Wilkes-Barre Barons, described in the press as “an ex-servicemen’s aggregation.” By early August, though, the Fort Lee Travelers had established themselves as state semipro champions and flew to the national semipro tournaments in Wichita. Chakales had been 7-3 with 119 strikeouts and was hitting well in the Army, too – .340. He was elected to the All-America semipro team. Branch Rickey hadn’t forgotten the young pitcher, but Philadelphia Phillies president Bob Carpenter declined a couple of offers Rickey made that December which were specifically aimed at acquiring Bob.

His service commitment complete, Chakales began pitching for Utica again in April 1947, first beating the Hartford Chiefs in May in the Connecticut state capital, 5-2. He shut out the Pioneers in Elmira, 1-0, with a three-hitter on June 3. Bob had mixed results throughout the season, but a highlight was the one-hitter he crafted against the Williamsport Tigers on September 5. Chakales later characterized the 1947 campaign to Hal Lebovitz: “Ah was as wild as a March Hare. Just wild. Ah don’ know what made me wild. I won seven and lost five.”8 His ERA was again over five runs a game, 5.36, and he walked 76 batters in 94 innings.

Chakales tried out with the Phillies in Clearwater during spring training 1948, and was again assigned to begin the season pitching for Utica, but hurt his arm trying to work a curveball. “I was trying to snap a curve and I snapped my arm. My arm was really sore. I told them about it and they said, ‘Keep throwing – it’ll work out.’ Instead it got sorer and sorer. I could hardly lift the ball.”9 The advice was not atypical for the day, and many pitchers found their careers cut short as a result. Chakales was 1-2 with Utica, but with a much-improved ERA of 3.71.

Once more, he was moved to a lower level and was sent to Maine, joining the New England League’s Portland Pilots in early June. A three-hit 12-0 shutout of the Lynn Red Sox on June 15 was noted by the AP.  The Sporting News reported on his winning both halves of a doubleheader against Manchester on August 27, the first a one-hitter and the second after coming on in relief.10 For Portland he was 12-7 with a 3.16 earned-run average.

A scout working for the Cleveland Indians, Latimer “Laddie” Placek, saw Bob pitch a game for Utica that stuck in his memory. “I liked what I saw,” Placek told the Tribe’s front office (Laddie was their head scout in the state of Ohio). “He’s fast, he’s worth a gamble.”11 So the Indians pounced and took Chakales in the minor-league draft on November 15, 1948. Chakales was taken by Oklahoma City, part of the Cleveland Indians system. (Phils owner Carpenter did get back $3,000 of his bonus money as a result.)

In 1949, Chakales played with the Single-A Wilkes-Barre Barons into May and was advanced via option to Oklahoma City of the Double-A Texas League on the 14th. Despite the move, Bob spent most of the season pitching for the Barons, right into the championship game against the Binghamton Triplets in the Governors Cup finals on September 25. He pitched one-hit relief in that game, but the damage had already been done and Whitey Ford won it for the Triplets. It really hadn’t been that successful a season for Chakales. For Wilkes-Barre he was 6-10 with a 5.25 ERA. He blamed it on the sore arm he’d developed in ‘48 and it left him with a poor disposition. He acted out. “Ah became a playboy,” he said in the Southern drawl Hal Lebowitz attributed to him. “I learned how in the Army. I got out of shape.” Placek wasn’t pleased; he contacted Bob over the wintertime. “Laddie wrote about how he believed in me an’ how I was lettin’ him down. He wrote that he had more confidence in me than I had in myself.”12

The arm got better, and perhaps Placek’s letter supplied a little more motivation. Chakales became the main moundsman for the Barons in 1950 and threw the Eastern League title-clinching game on September 1 with a 4-2 win over Hartford. He was an all-star that year with a 16-5 record and a superb league-leading 2.04 ERA. Nine days later, the Indians announced that they’d obtained him from their Wilkes-Barre affiliate. The Barons easily beat Binghamton four games to one in the Governors Cup. After the season Chakales was named the top pitcher in the Eastern League.

Chakales reported to Tucson for spring training in 1951 with the Indians. Hal Lebovitz of the Cleveland News was much taken with the young ballplayer, calling him “a likable rookie with a friendly smile … as colorful as Dizzy Dean … something like a character in a Ring Lardner yarn.” He brought 10 suits and 17 pairs of pants to camp, 25 shirts, and “at least 50 pair of socks.” Asked why he was lugging around so much clothing with him, he drawled, “Man, I didn’t come hear just for a visit. I came here to stay.” 13 He was touched up for a wind-blown double by Yankees rookie Mickey Mantle, in relief of Early Wynn during the exhibition season’s first game, but got his feet wet. At the end of March manager Al Lopez said he felt the Tribe bullpen could make a difference in 1951 and cited Al Olsen, George Zuverink, and Bob Chakales as joining the veterans Steve Gromek, Sam Zoldak, and Jess Flores.

Chakales debuted in Cleveland on April 21, 1951, giving up one hit in one inning of work, the third pitcher in a lost cause as Ned Garver of the Browns beat the Indians, 9-1. His first start came on May 6, a 4-2 win over the visiting Washington Senators. He’d started off a little wild, granting seven bases on balls in the first four frames, but settled down to win the game. On May 13 Bob had been added to the starting rotation as a fifth or sixth starter. He contributed with the bat with what proved to be his only big-league home run in a game against the White Sox that ended in a 4-4 tie when time ran out in the 10th inning, conforming to an agreement reached in advance that allowed the Indians to make their train. On Memorial Day he had his first complete-game win, despite giving up nine hits and six walks; he’d parceled them out judiciously. He drove in two runs as the Tribe took the Tigers, 3-1. Chakales was a good batter; over his four seasons with the Tribe, he hit .353 in 34 at-bats. After his seven seasons of major-league ball, he held a .271 average.

Bob’s best major-league pitching effort, a 2-0 four-hit shutout of Detroit, came on the same day that Bob Feller no-hit the Tigers in the first game of a doubleheader. Bob laughed as he told his son James that when he did something that was headline-worthy – Feller threw a no-hitter on the same day. The Tigers got some revenge five days later against the Tribe, rolling up 13 runs (more than they’d scored in their first 11 games of the season when facing the Tribe), including six hits and four runs off Chakales in relief of losing pitcher Bob Lemon.

Chakales’ last start of 1951 came on August 22, when he “blew up completely” in the seventh, allowing three more runs to the Senators, leaving a game down 5-2; the Indians won it in 14, 6-5. Had they made the World Series, he’d been on the eligible list, but the Indians finished second; after the season, he earned a full share of the second-place money. His name came up in trade talks over the winter – catcher Birdie Tebbetts raved about him – but on February 2, GM Hank Greenberg announced that Chakales and Lou Brissie had re-signed, both with increased pay. Greenberg had earlier assured Chakales that he would not be traded and would work every fifth day in the Tribe’s rotation. That still didn’t prevent the Indians from trying (in vain) to spring Sam Mele free from the Senators by dangling Chakales and Bob Kennedy in front of Washington in early March. A month later the Senators came back offering lefty Mickey Harris for Chakales. No go. During the offseason, Bob had worked as player-coach of the Dixie Containers basketball team in Richmond.

In spring training of ’52, Chakales told The Sporting News correspondent in Tucson that by his own assessment, he had improved 15 percent over the year before! He explained, “I did it with my mind.” Chakales went on to say that manager Al Lopez had told him he needed to work on his curveball if he wanted to guarantee his future with the Indians. He asked Tebbetts how to better his curveball, and Birdie answered with one word: “Think.” So, Bob said, “I’d lie in bed at night and just think about my curve. The trouble was I’d let it go too close to my chest. I kept thinking about releasing the ball at arm’s length and when I came out here for training I threw the curve just the way I thought about it.” Birdie had inspired success via visualization.14

Chakales had just one start for the Indians in 1952, winning the next to last game of the season. He’d spent most of the year in Indianapolis, playing for the Indians’ Triple-A club. The only drawback, he said, was that he’d planned to get married in Richmond the next time the Indians had visited Washington to take on the Senators. Now it was going to cost him extra to travel from Indianapolis to Richmond to keep the appointment. The marriage to Anne Mackenzie came off, on June 7, though manager Gene Desautels hit him with a fine for reporting back late.15 Chakales labored with a 5.18 ERA in Indianapolis. He was recalled nonetheless on September 2. His first game back was the following day, and he loaded the bases in the sixth. Lou Brissie relieved him, and Brissie’s first pitch was hit for a grand slam by Detroit’s Don Kolloway. In a season wrap-up, sportswriter Ed McAuley commented from Cleveland that Chakales was the youngster most likely to succeed in 1953. The Indians did broach a trade with Boston, a massive one involving Dale Mitchell, Ray Boone, Bobby Avila, and Chakales to the Red Sox for Dick Gernert, Dom DiMaggio, and Billy Goodman, but Red Sox general manager Joe Cronin replied, “I wouldn’t give Billy Goodman for the entire Cleveland team.”16

In 1953, Bob opened the season with the big-league ballclub and played most of the year with the Indians, though appearing in only seven games before he was optioned to Indianapolis on July 23, his record with Cleveland being 0-2 with a 2.67 ERA in 27 innings of work. He got into only 11 games with Indianapolis, and was 4-2 with a 3.91 ERA. He was recalled on September 9 but saw no further action. That winter he pitched for Gavilanes in the Venezuelan League.

The 1954 spring training season started off a little rocky, and in the second game of the exhibition season, Chakales saw his infielders commit errors on four consecutive balls. He summoned them to the mound, and then tried to lighten the mood by asking if the fix was in. The Indians won the game, 23-10, over the Giants.17 However, Bob was ready for the season.

Chakales opened the 1954 campaign in Cleveland, where he helped the Indians off to the best season in baseball history (111 victories in a 154-game season). He picked up his first decision of ’54 for the Indians on May 16, winning the first game of a doubleheader over the Athletics. He won again, beating the Red Sox on May 18.

Bob’s time with the Indians, highlighted by a 2-0 record and an ERA of 0.87, made him more marketable. The Indians went to the World Series in 1954, but without Chakales. On June 1 Cleveland traded their 26-year-old pitcher to the Baltimore Orioles for Vic Wertz, in a deal that has been considered the blockbuster trade of 1954.18 He left a first-place team for a team in last place at the time of the trade. Wertz reportedly had a strong dislike for batting in Baltimore, which pushed the Orioles into seeking a trade. Looking back on things, it seems like an uneven swap, but Chakales was considered an ambitious young pitcher with great potential. Orioles general manager Art Ehlers believed that Bob could become a regular in their starting rotation. He had not been able to get enough work with the Indians. They had too good a team. With such a superior staff (Wynn, Lemon, Garcia, Houtteman, and Feller), he just wasn’t going to have enough opportunity to break into Cleveland’s rotation. He felt a little regret 50 years after the fact: “I was never as sharp and I could be, since pitchers went the distance back then. When I pitched a lot, I was good; when I didn’t, I was not. I think I got out of shape for a while, too, just waiting for ‘the call.” 19 Indians manager Al Lopez knew how hard it had been since Chakales broke in for him to crack the rotation; the 1951 and 1952 teams had three 20-game winners on the staff. “With any other major-league team, he would be a starting pitcher,” Lopez allowed.20

Given a start for the Orioles on June 4, Chakales lasted but 2? innings, giving up four earned runs and losing to Philadelphia. He started six games for the Orioles and relieved in 32 others – winning in back-to-back extra-inning relief jobs on June 26 and 27. There was an odd occurrence in Detroit on July 11. Al Aber of the Tigers had a perfect game going and had set down 17 Orioles until Chakales singled in the sixth. When Cal Abrams followed with a double, Bob had scored – until he was ruled out for failing to touch second base in his haste. Inning over. The final was 2-1, Tigers. On August 6 Chakales faced Ted Williams at Baltimore’s Memorial Stadium with the score was tied in the top of the 10th. With two outs, Ted came to the plate. Bob’s son James recounted the story his father told him: “Ted was on a hot streak but Bob had gotten him out earlier. The manager called time and asked Bob if he wanted to walk Ted; of course he said no.  Bob had Ted 0-2 in the count with two fastballs. He threw a low inside slider as a waste pitch and Ted got under it and popped it up. Bob was walking off the mound and glanced back to see the right fielder drifting to the foul pole. The lazy popup went over the fence just out of the reach of the right fielder’s glove. Bob was so mad he chased Ted Williams around the bases calling him every name and expletive that came to mind – the one that could be printed was: “You lousy, cheap-shot artist, you lucky bum, you will never get another hit off me.” Later, when Dad was traded to the Red Sox, he asked Ted if he was mad at him for chasing him around the bases and for what he said. Ted just gave that smirky smile of his and said, he had forgotten all about it.”21 With Baltimore, Bob was 3-7 in 1954, though his 3.73 ERA was slightly better than the team average.

On December 6 he was packaged in a seven-player trade. He went from the Orioles to the Chicago White Sox with infielder Jim Brideweser and catcher Clint Courtney for pitchers Don Ferrarese and Don Johnson, catcher Matt Batts, and infielder Fred Marsh.

Chakales got very little work in the first part of 1955, and then he and Courtney packed their bags once more – on June 7 they were again traded as part of a threesome, this time joining outfielder Johnny Groth – all three packed off to Washington for one man: outfielder Jim Busby. In his short time with the White Sox, Bob had thrown 12? innings and given up 11 hits and six walks, but only two runs (1.46 ERA). After announcing the swap, Chicago general manager Frank “Trader” Lane enigmatically characterized Chakales as a “pitcher of parts.” 22 It was a big gamble for Lane.  For Chakales it was another trip down the standings. The White Sox spent some time in first place that summer, and the Senators spent time in the cellar. Chakales was hit hard on the left knee by an Enos Slaughter liner in mid-July but picked up his first win of the season, and was back in action a week later.

Washington manager Chuck Dressen made Bob his main man for relief, but he struggled. Over the wintertime, Bob explained to Washington Post writer Bob Addie that he’d felt tired throughout the summer of 1955. “My arm was dead,” he said, “and I felt as if I was a sleepwalker most of the time.” A thorough physical included a fluoroscope examination that revealed the cause. “I was oozing poison from my appendix. They cut it out and I began to feel like living again. I did a lot of throwing this winter to test the arm and it feels great.”23

Addie’s interview with Chakales wasn’t the only news the pitcher generated during 1956 Grapefruit League play in Orlando. A later column explained how Bob was driving an electric golf cart on the Dubsdread Country Club course when, negotiating a narrow wooden bridge near the eighth hole, the cart tipped over and dumped fellow right-hander Hal Griggs in the drink.24 Bob had fully recovered from the appendectomy but pulled a muscle in the springtime; nonetheless, he started the 1956 season well. Throwing an unanticipated 7? innings of scoreless three-hit relief against his old Chicago teammates on May 3 earned Bob his second win of the season, just four days after 5? innings of one-hit relief against his former Orioles mates gave him his first victory, on April 29. He was, at age 28, the second oldest on the Senators’ staff.

On May 8 Chakales stumbled, giving up five earned runs while recording only one out, but on the 11th there was another lengthy relief stint – six innings of two-hit ball against the Red Sox. His longest effort was 10 innings of five-hit relief in a 17-inning loss to Kansas City on May 23, but Bob was long gone before the denouement. By early June he was considered the “surprise performer” with a 1.94 ERA through his first 14 outings. He pulled a tendon in his elbow, however, and suffered a sore arm for much of the year. He soldiered through the season, however, appearing in a club-high 43 games.

Asked about what seemed to be an unusually high number of sore arms reported in the press, Chakales forthrightly admitted in 2009 that some of them may have been a little manufactured for popular consumption via the newspapers: “My junior year in high school, I probably over-pitched. Pitched a lot. I had one sore arm in the minor leagues, and had a couple after leaving the Indians. I didn’t have many sore arms in the big leagues. Let me tell you, I told a lot of people I had a sore arm when I was with Cleveland because I was young and embarrassed I wasn’t playing. I thought I should have been playing; I had to have a reason. I wasn’t going to tell them I wasn’t good enough, or whatever. I wasn’t going to say anything bad about the management. I just said my arm was sore.” These were still the days when there was always someone ready to take your place.

Over the wintertime, Bob opened his own restaurant in Richmond, called Blair’s. It was his second venture in the field, having owned and operated one on Maryland’s Eastern Shore in the winter of 1955. Another job Bob had done fairly early was – as he put it – to take an ax and “cut trees down in front of billboards. I thought it was the best way to work on my swing and keep my strength.” The work was for Ted Turner’s young company, Turner Outdoor Advertising. He also sold automobiles, as did a lot of ballplayers.

President Dwight D. Eisenhower threw out the ceremonial first pitch of the 1957 season, and Bob Chakales took over from there, pitching on Opening Day against Baltimore. He threw seven innings and gave up four runs, but left with the lead. He himself had driven in the fourth and fifth Senators runs with a two-out triple in the bottom of the fourth. The O’s beat the Senators’ Camilo Pascual in the 11th inning, and to his credit, Ike stayed for the whole game. Chakales didn’t quite last the month, though. On the 29th, the Senators sent him and pitcher Dean Stone to the Red Sox for infielder Milt Bolling, pitcher Russ Kemmerer, and outfielder Faye Throneberry.

Red Sox pitching coach Boo Ferriss was high on Chakales. “We were fortunate to add a pitcher of Chakales’ experience,” he told Ed Rumill of the Christian Science Monitor. “He has the stuff and he has a book on the hitters. He has that valuable know-how. He knows what he’s doing out there. The only real bad pitch on his record is that three-run homer by Frank House in the second game at Detroit last week. But I’ll tell you something about that pitch. It was a waste ball. The count was nothing and two and Bob threw one too high for a strike. House’s strength is a pitch at waist height or lower. But this time, for some reason, he went after the high pitch and hit it into the seats. It will probably never happen again.”25

Bob got to see part of Ted Williams’s amazing .388 season, in the year Ted turned 39, but not the whole of it. On the first of August, the Sox purchased 16-7 Murray Wall from Dallas and optioned Chakales to their San Francisco Seals farm club. There was one odd incident in Sacramento, when the umpire ordered Bob to change his pants during a game. It was in the midst of a three-hit shutout he was administering to the Solons and the Sacramento manager complained that Bob kept “going to his pants” as though there were a foreign substance there that he was using to benefit his pitching; Bob was deemed clean and finished the shutout. After the Coast League season ended, he was brought back to Boston, where he appeared in one final game, on September 17. Ted Williams pinch-hit a game-tying homer in the bottom of the eighth, Billy Klaus drove in the go-ahead run, and Chakales earned the save with a 1-2-3 top of the ninth. In what proved to be his final major-league appearance, Bob actually took Ted Williams’s place. Pinch-hitter Ted had homered (the 452nd of his career) deep into Fenway’s right-field seats, tying the game, and Chakales took his place in the batting order, throwing the ninth inning and setting down the three men he faced. During Bob’s year at Boston, he and Williams became close. Bob often stayed in the hotel room registered for Williams to shield Ted from the media. Bob and Ted continued to see each other after they had retired from baseball. During five straight years in the 1970s, Bob and Ted met during the Preakness horse race in Baltimore. At his death Bob still had a book Ted gave him, The Art of Pitching, with an inscription from Ted: “Bob, I always loved it when you were pitching … because I knew I’d get a hit, your friend Ted.” Bob often teased Ted about leaving the bases loaded twice against him. Before memorabilia was big, Ted signed his official Genuine Louisville Slugger with his name engraved and gave it to Bob. Not knowing the value of the bat, his son James broke the gift from Ted in a sandlot game. “All Dad said was, ‘I wish you did not do that, Ted gave me that bat.’ Nothing else was said again.”

On January 14, 1958, the Red Sox announced the outright sale of Chakales to Minneapolis, which had replaced San Francisco as Boston’s top farm club. After he gave up 13 earned runs in 17 innings, laboring under illness, Minneapolis had seen enough, and sent Chakales away – but for Bob it was a bit of a treat to find himself sent to his hometown team, the Richmond Virginians, part of the Yankees’ system, managed by Eddie Lopat. On June 8, just one Sandy Amoros single in the second inning deprived him of a no-hitter against Montreal, one of four shutouts by Bob during the season. He still hoped to return to the majors, and Lopat said there were several teams that could well use him. Chakales was only 30, and declared, “Lopat has taught me more about pitching than I ever knew.” He was telling Chakales to be more aggressive, in the strike zone, and not give the hitters a chance to relax. Though he said he felt the best he’d felt in three seasons, he served out the full year in the minor leagues.

That December Richmond sold him to the Toronto Maple Leafs. Chakales became involved in strike talk, as one of two player representatives for the International League. With seven seasons of major-league experience, he was selected to represent the IL players, who were angling for the implementation of a pension plan, and the 160 members of the International League Baseball Players’ Association were being urged to neither sign their 1959 contracts nor report to spring training unless the owners agreed to submit the proposal to arbitration or at least discuss it. Chakales was outspoken on the subject: “They say minor-league ball is deteriorating and no wonder. There is a great deal of discontentment in the league. All the players live for is the first and 15th of the month to collect their pay checks. Most of them don’t earn enough to support their families and are looking for outside jobs to supplement their income. Added to that, they have no security.” They were looking to create a pension that would entitle the players to collect $59 per month in their old age. “I thought I could benefit as well,” he said in 2009. “I went to New York with a lot of confidence and left knowing that Major League Baseball was a huge powerful organization and the minor leaguers had no chance. Too much money, power, and influence.” Asked if it might have hurt him to have been a leader, he felt it may have. “There was not a strike, but I left work to negotiate. In effect, I was the only one who went on strike. I still had a lot of good pitching ahead of me, but could not make it up again. I can’t say it hurt me; although I felt I was still better than some of the guys who were still pitching.” With 16 seasons of professional baseball under his belt, and the one year – 1946 – he spent in the Army, he admitted to being a little steamed. “I was mad then, but got over it after a while. I loved the sport and felt I never got to show I would have been a 20-year player.”

Chakales’ opportunities may have been limited but he wasn’t blackballed from baseball entirely, and he got in a fairly full season for the unaffiliated Toronto Maple Leafs in 1959 (13-10, 4.04). The Indians took on Toronto as their Triple-A affiliate in 1960, and Bob was back in the Cleveland system, going 9-3 (3.74). In 1961 he split the season, 3-1 for Toronto and then 4-3 for the Hawaii Islanders (in the Pacific Coast League, affiliated with the Kansas City Athletics.) The 1961 season was his last in professional baseball. His last time pitching against major leaguers was in an exhibition game in Toronto on July 14, 1961, when he pitched a 3-0 three-hit shutout against the American League California Angels.

In the minor leagues, Chakales was 113-73 with a 4.08 earned-run average. As in the major leagues, he’d been used more as a reliever than a starter, with 162 of his 295 appearances coming in relief roles, but most often in long relief (over his minor-league career, combining starts and relief roles, he averaged an impressive five-plus innings a game). In the majors, Bob was 15-25 (4.54 ERA), starting 23 of his 171 games and averaging just a little over 2? innings per appearance.

After baseball Bob sold insurance for a local agency in Richmond, Markel Insurance. The Markels, he said, were great sportsmen and very good businessmen. At the time he retired from playing ball, they owned part of the Richmond Virginians. Bob loved golf, and thought about going pro, “but my 1 handicap was nothing compared to those greats. I was in the beer league and they were playing for champagne.”

One of his uncles, Broaddus Wiggs, told him about a new golf course concept called Lighted Night Golf – Par 3. They contacted the United States Golf Association, found out how to register as a contractor and built a par-3 course in Richmond. A general contractor from Charlotte, Ray Costin, heard about the course and reached out to Chakales. The two formed a partnership and began to build par-3 courses. Then requests came for Bob to build championship courses; he started with a nine-hole championship course and then went on to build course after course, in the end building nearly 200 golf courses and becoming president of the Golf Course Builders Association of America. Chakales built the original TPC Sawgrass Course in Ponte Vedra Beach, Florida. Presumably, he designed wider bridges over water hazards than the one he’d failed to successfully negotiate in Orlando in the spring of 1956!

Golf course construction was a busy life, with a lot of travel. “I was gone more than I wanted to be. I was good at what I did, but fearful I would not get that next job – so fortunately I had many offers so I kept my plate full.” Like many busy men, Chakales had some regrets at missing a few too many family events, but considered himself blessed to have “five wonderful children (Sandra, Robert, James, Dabney, and Susan) and a patient and loving wife who is still as beautiful as the day I met her.”

Three of Bob and Anne’s five children continued with athletics after high school. Bob Jr. swam at the University of Alabama with Olympic Silver Medalist Jack Babashoff, Dabney played tennis and basketball at Meredith College, and James played baseball for Bobby Richardson at the University of South Carolina. James followed in his father’s footsteps and came close to playing professional ball as well. Bob recalled that Boston Red Sox scout Mace Brown was one of the scouts who wanted to sign James out of high school (he witnessed James throw a 12-inning, one-hit, 20-strikeout performance in the American Legion State Championships) but Bob said, “No. James is going to college – something I did not do.” James went on to throw a couple of no-hitters in American Legion ball and then played with Mookie Wilson and other All-Americans on teams that made it to the College World Series final game twice (1975 and 1977).

Bob Chakales died on February 18, 2010, in Richmond. He was 82 years old. He is buried in Westhampton Memorial Park in Richmond.

This biography is included in the book “Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Joseph Wancho. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Acknowledgements

Thanks to Bob Chakales, James Chakales, and to Debbie Matson of the Boston Red Sox.

Notes

Cleveland Municipal Stadium (1931-1996) housed millions of sports fans (boxing, baseball, football), music lovers (the Beatles, the Rolling Stones, Bruce Springsteen), a Shriners convention, the Cleveland Orchestra, religious events, and circuses. 

Known by Clevelanders as simply “the Stadium,” the steel and concrete behemoth enthused and impaled attendees for parts of seven decades. Its initial sporting event, on July 3, 1931, was a heavyweight championship match between defending champ Max Schmeling of Germany against William “Young” Stribling. The contender stayed on his feet until 14 seconds remained in the 15th round. The Schmeling-Stribling bout mirrored what would become the stadium’s history. If the champ was Cleveland’s weather, it threw punches at the contender (the Stadium) before reducing it to rubble.

Anyone who went to see the Stadium during the 1970s-1990s saw the wear and tear of standing alongside the windy, icy Lake Erie. Peeling paint, crumbling concrete, inoperable escalators and elevators, uncomfortable seats, flooded restrooms, misnamed luxury boxes, and obstructed views were a recipe for destruction. Thus it wasn’t a surprise, after the “original” Cleveland Browns moved to Baltimore following the 1995 NFL season, that the Stadium had outlived its use.

Open Sesame

At the first baseball game, a July 31, 1932, Sunday showdown against the Philadelphia Athletics attended by baseball royalty and 80,284 fans, baseball’s first commissioner, Judge Kenesaw Mountain Landis, commented, “This stadium is perfect. It is the only baseball park I know where the spectator can see clearly from any seat. Look at those people out there (he said pointing to the crowded center-field bleachers); they can watch every play.”1

Landis turned around in his box seat near the Indians dugout and swept the grandstands with his hand. “Not a barrier to block anyone’s view. Comfortable chairs. This is perfection.” Obviously, the Commish never saw a game from beyond the Fat Cats box seats.

John Heydler, the National League’s president, said, “Marvelous. It is the last word in baseball parks. A great thing for baseball. And one should not forget to give (Indians President) Mr. (Alva) Bradley credit, either.”2

And this from Thomas S. Shibe, Athletics president: “This was built for baseball. I wish we had this in Philadelphia for the last three World Series.”3 

Before the beginning

According to the October 1985 Inventory Nomination form for a listing on the National Register of Historic Places, “Cleveland Municipal Stadium was designed by the progressive city administration as a multipurpose structure to accommodate the great surge in attendance at baseball and football games and other public spectacles that occurred with the rise of the automobile.”4

The nomination form goes on to read, “Since then, in addition to baseball and football, the range of activities at the stadium has included religious convocations, the Metropolitan Opera, the Beatles, circuses, rodeos, big bands, tractor pulls, and polka festivals.”5

If you build it … who will come?

Constructed on a landfill that stretched the lakefront 200 feet farther into Lake Erie, the facility was completed in 370 days at a cost to taxpayers of $3,035,245. Although 21 percent over budget, the cost overruns were attributed to the addition of a scoreboard, sound system, and infrastructure around the facility, including bridges, railroads, and road work.

After their July 31, 1932 “opener” at the Stadium, the Indians played by Lake Erie for the remainder of 1932 and all of the 1933 season. But after attendance dipped in 1933 to 387,936 – nearly 100,000 less than the 483,027 they attracted in 1931 at their last full season at League Park, team owner Alva Bradley moved his club back to the significantly smaller League Park for all but one game during the 1934-36 seasons.

Under pressure from city leaders, unhappy at their 80,000-seat stadium standing vacant, Bradley agreed to play most doubleheaders and other games expected to draw larger crowds at the Stadium. The Tribe did not move downtown full time until 1947, after Bill Veeck purchased the club.

On July 16, 1945, the Cleveland Buckeyes of the Negro American League played their first regular-season game at the Stadium, defeating the Birmingham Black Barons, 6-2, in front of 12,733 fans. The Buckeyes won five regular-season games at the Stadium in 1945 and opened the 1945 Negro World Series against the Negro National League’s Homestead Grays on September 13. Cleveland’s 2-1 victory ignited a four-game championship sweep. The second game was at League Park and the final two contests were on the road (Washington and Philadelphia).

The Buckeyes’ only loss when playing at Cleveland Stadium in 1945 was a 2-0 postseason exhibition loss to the Homestead Grays on October 7.

Cleveland Buckeyes contests at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, 1945

• July 16: Cleveland Buckeyes 6, Birmingham Black Barons 2
• July 24: Cleveland Buckeyes 3, Kansas City Monarchs 2
• August 3: Cleveland Buckeyes 4, Chicago American Giants 1
• August 30: Cleveland Buckeyes 1, Memphis Red Sox 0 (first game of doubleheader)
• August 30: Cleveland Buckeyes 2, Memphis Red Sox 0 (second game of doubleheader)
• September 13: Cleveland Buckeyes 2, Homestead Grays 1 (Negro World Series Game One)
• October 13: Homestead Grays 2, Cleveland Buckeyes 0 (exhibition game)6

The Buckeyes played occasional other games there as well, in 1945, 1946, and 1947.

NF Hell

The National Football League in the 1930s was not the same league as in the twenty-first century. Major-league baseball was America’s national pastime while NFL was an afterthought. It was into this quagmire that the Cleveland Rams were born in 1936. They were initially a member of the American Football League in 1936, and joined the National Football League in 1937. Their first game drew 20,000 fans to Cleveland Stadium on September 10, 1937, a 28-0 loss to the Detroit Lions, Because the Stadium “was too big and the rent too high,” the Rams played their home games through 1945 at League Park.7 With a regular-season record of 9-1, the Rams advanced to the 1945 NFL championship game, hosting the Washington Redskins (8-2). The Rams held the championship game at Cleveland Stadium in anticipation of a larger crowd than League Park could accommodate.

According to Rams public relations director Nate Wallack, “Our season-ticket sale was nothing (in) those days. Maybe 200 at the most. We put the (1945) championship seats on sale and immediately we sold 30,000 and we had another week to go before the game. The weather was beautiful. It looked as though we’d sell out the Stadium. Then a blizzard. I mean an awful one. It ended our sales. Now Bill Johns, our business manager, was worried about the field. He wanted to keep it from freezing. He got in his car and set out toward Sandusky, stopping at every farm to buy hay. He wanted to cover the field with it. He bought over 1,000 bales.

“The day of the game the temperature dropped to zero. I sat in the press box and the windows got so steamed we couldn’t see. All the writers had to get out into the stands and freeze. Me too. A water pipe broke in the upper deck and cascading water turned to ice immediately – a frozen waterfall. The fans burned the hay and even the wooden bleacher seats to keep warm. One fan froze his feet and didn’t realize it until he started to walk home after the game. An ambulance had to be called. The game was so exciting, though, the fans stayed to the end. We sold about 35,000 tickets and 29,000 showed.”8

The Rams’ 15-14 victory over the Washington Redskins was the team’s last game in Cleveland. Mickey McBride, a Cleveland taxicab magnate, purchased a franchise for the new All-America Football Conference, to be named after its head coach, former Massillon and Ohio State head man Paul Brown. McBride signed a long-term lease to play home games at the Stadium. Typical of the doom that would frequent Cleveland professional sports teams, the Rams moved to Los Angeles after winning a league championship.

Home Sweet Home

The Stadium entered an unprecedented period of success after the Browns and Indians became its chief tenants beginning in 1946 and 1947 respectively. The Browns won every championship during the four-year history of the All America Football Conference, with three of those wins taking place on the Stadium’s turf. The Indians set a baseball attendance record in 1948, drawing 2,620,627 fans as they won Cleveland’s second – and as of 2024, last – World Series. The Tribe captured Games Three and Four at the Stadium before wrapping up the title at Braves Field in Boston. Noteworthy in the Game Five home loss was a then-World Series-record crowd of 86,288 who had hoped to see the Clevelanders wrap the Series at home.

While the ’50s remained kind to the Browns, the Indians began a slow descent that concluded with a remarkable tumble down the American League standings during the latter decades of the twentieth century. Despite posting a then American League best 111-43 record in 1954, the Indians were swept in the World Series by the New York Giants. The last World Series game played at Cleveland Stadium, on October 2, 1954, was witnessed by 78,102 disappointed fans. The final: New York Giants 7, Cleveland 4.

The Browns entered the NFL in 1950 and promptly captured that season’s title with a 30-28 Christmas Eve victory over the … Rams, who returned to the Stadium for the first time since leaving for Los Angeles five years before. Cleveland appeared in six of the next seven NFL title tilts (going 2-4), including a 1955 championship at the Stadium. The Browns’ 27-0 shutout over the Baltimore Colts at the Stadium on December 27, 1964, remains the last professional championship captured by the Cleveland Browns.

Cleveland Stadium spectacles

Whether it was sports or other events, the Stadium provided a backdrop for a multitude of memorable moments. Ted Williams hit his 500th home run there on June 17, 1960. The Indians’ Len Barker pitched the 10th perfect game in major-league history against the Toronto Blue Jays on May 15, 1981. Joe DiMaggio’s 56-game hitting streak ended there on July 17, 1941. Bob Feller whiffed a then-record 18 Detroit Tigers on October 2, 1938, from the Stadium’s mound. The first Monday Night Football game ever played pitted the Browns against Joe Namath’s Jets on September 21, 1970, from the Stadium. Four All-Star Games were played at the Stadium.

Cleveland Stadium was also home to 10-Cent Beer Night in 1974 and “The Drive” engineered by John Elway in 1987. During the 1986 AFC Championship game, the Browns had a 20-13 lead over the Denver Broncos with 5:32 left in the contest. Broncos quarterback John Elway drove Denver 98 yards in 15 plays, tying the game with 0:39 remaining. Cleveland lost in overtime on a Denver field goal kick that led the Broncos into the Super Bowl. “The Drive” was born. The Browns again ended up on the wrong end of another playoff game against the Oakland Raiders on January 4, 1981, after quarterback Brian Sipe had a pass intercepted at the east (open) end of the Stadium when a field goal would have won the game. That led to a joke: What do a Billy Graham Crusade and a Cleveland Browns game have in common? Answer: 80,000 fans leaving the Stadium murmuring “Jesus Christ!”

The End

Stadiums are public gathering places, usually for sporting events. What transpires within their walls brings fans together, be it in victory or defeat. Some fans have fond memories of the Cleveland Municipal Stadium. It represents their youth, possibly the site of their first concert, major league, or NFL game.

Over time, the Cleveland Municipal Stadium became known as the “Mistake by the Lake.” After its demolition, the old Stadium’s reinforced concrete was dumped in Lake Erie and used as a barrier reef for fishermen. Like Luca Brasi from The Godfather, it sleeps with the fishes.

Sources

Box scores for all the Cleveland Buckeyes games in 1945 are available on Retrosheet.org.

Notes

1 Al Silverman, “Landis Lauds Stadium as Perfect for Baseball,” Cleveland Plain Dealer, August 1, 1932: 17.

2 Silverman.

3 Silverman.

4 National Register of Historic Places Inventory – Nomination Form, October 1985, Accessed from the Cleveland Stadium Clip File at the National Baseball Hall of Fame.

5 Nomination Form.

6 “Defeat Bucks in Last Game, 2-0,” Cleveland Call and Post, October 13, 1945.

7 Hal Lebovitz, “Hal Asks: Remember the Cleveland Rams?” Cleveland Plain Dealer, January 20, 1980: 3-8.

8 Lebovitz.

Segue to another thrill, which might have surpassed even 1967’s for Ken, had Dave Stapleton entered 1986 World Series Game Six to replace injured Bill Buckner and caught a routine ground ball that even most Little Leaguers nab. Stapleton didn’t, since he was on the bench. Buckner didn’t, since he misplayed the ball. For Coleman, 1967 and 1986 became baseball’s both sides now, its Paradise and Lower Room, respectively. Each was sung by his silken and restrained voice, which never split an infinitive or dangled a participle – “a beautiful horn,” said Boston Bruins mikeman Bob Wilson, “and, oh, Ken played it well.” Despite that, Coleman could not listen to his call of Buckner’s error until 1989.

Ken’s score began shortly upon his April 22, 1925, birth in Quincy, a Boston suburb, 15 minutes from Fenway Park, his childhood icon Jimmie Foxx. At age 12, a BB accident cost an eye, Coleman trading heroes: Double X for the Red Sox and Boston Braves first daily Voice, ex-sportswriter Fred Hoey. From 1926-38, Hoey knit New England “giving the play-by-play of the home games of both Boston clubs,” said The Sporting News. “He has one of the biggest daily followings of any announcer” due to the number of affiliates — a major-league then-high 22. In 1931, Ken, six, heard WNAC Boston hail “the first to work on a network [Yankee a.k.a. Colonial] covering the game,” TSN said of Hoey “Day”. By September, he had aired a record number of broadcast hours: 1,920, including that year’s 320.

“Fred was known – this was something then — as ‘The Man Who Does the Games’,” said Ken, the 1954-63 Cleveland Indians and 1966-74 and 1979-89 Red Sox Man. Hoey found text ads easy. By contrast, extempore material “requires concentration on the subject … severe strain on the eyes [and] nerves.” Fred tried to help the latter. In 1933, CBS Radio gave him a first network gig – the Pirates-Senators World Series. Grateful, he reached the booth before Game One, gassed. By the fourth inning, Hoey, incoherent, was yanked off the Classic. Unhorsed, Fred came home a conqueror. “In Boston, where people knew about his drinking, all was forgiven,” said Ken. “He was The First, and as in love or anything else, the first, you don’t forget.”

Coleman wanted to be a sans spirits Hoey, “having to fight not to talk like him,” Fred said. Coleman knew his region. He was also old-shoe, wearable. “His phrase was, ‘He throws to first and gets his man,’ which he said constantly,” said Ken, “and I think I … picked it up because I’d listen to past tapes and I’ve said it.” The Braves and Red Sox Voice was Boston’s two-headed Janus, coining a style used by virtually every Hub baseball Voice: just the facts, ma’am, trumped a wild and crazy guy. He also knew how to vend – “Mention Fred,” said Coleman, “and people remember Kentucky Club pipe tobacco and Mobil’s Flying Red Horse” – and instill Euripidean concern. Boston’s First couldn’t believe he was gone, until he was.

In late 1938, Socony Oil and General Mills became each Hub club’s sponsor, wanting their Voice, not a broadcaster identified with other goods. Fred paused a lot, lacking gloss. “Plus,” said Coleman, “booze affected him over time.” In 1939 Frank Frisch briefly succeeded him. Childless, unmarried, Hoey began a decade of last things and final bows. “On the air he was Boston baseball,” Ken mused, “and it wasn’t the same without him.” In Death of a Salesman, Willie Loman says: “And that’s the wonder of this country, that a man can end [up] with diamonds on the bases of being liked.” Liked, Hoey ended up alone, dying in 1949.

By then, Coleman’s father, William, a military man turned night watchman, had died, six years earlier, of a heart attack in Ken’s high school senior year. His wife Frances was a housewife. After graduation their son, 18, joined the Army in 1943, served in Burma, and aired Indian rugby, cricket, and soccer on Armed Forces Radio, jibing, “You try performing with twelve thousand troops listening.” Released, Ken took Oratory at Curry College, worked at a 250-watt Worcester affiliate, and then did golf, bowling, basketball, Boston University, Ohio State, and Harvard football, and Vermont’s Northern Baseball League, still fighting the “urge to say, ‘He throws to first and gets his man!’”

In The Federalist, Madison noted “leaders ambitiously contending for pre-eminence.” In 1952, Coleman and Lindsey Nelson contended for Cleveland Browns radio play-by-play until Nelson abruptly joined NBC TV. Ken inherited a 125-station four-State network. In the next 14 years, he aired seven champions, did eight network title games, and called each pro touchdown (126) by the greatest runner to ever touch a ball. Ken is the only man to see Jim Brown’s every pro game (1957-65). “What stands out is how with minutes left, the Browns are up by seven, have the ball, and Jim runs out the clock,” said Coleman. Raised in Cleveland, Jack Buck liked how Ken made time stand still: “People identify him with baseball, but he’s the best football announcer I ever heard.”

Each week at Cleveland Municipal Stadium, 80,000 filled the city’s lakefront bowl, the Browns increasingly en famille. As a child, Ken’s son Casey was a summer training camp water boy. Later, he became a Cleveland sportscaster: WTAM morning host; WJM four-time Emmy sports anchor; Indians host; and Browns play-by-play man. “The fifties were a time of football’s growth, each year more people following it on regional, then network, TV,” Coleman fils said. Virtually each Browns and Indians game telecast aired on WXEL, Channel 8, by Carling Brewing Co., at a time when “one company could afford to sponsor most, if not all, your coverage.”

Carling’s commercial signature was a belle named Mabel. Tribesmen of that generation can still sing “Mabel! Mabel! Black Label! Carling Black Label Beer!” In 1995, Ken said, “People come up, see me with my wife, and bellow, ‘‘Hey, Mabel!’” (His then-wife’s name was Ellen.) Coleman grasped baseball’s episodic rhythm. He neither screamed nor patronized, believing in “not telling the audience what it already saw.” A rookie should not be faulted for his club peaking too soon. Ken’s first wed Mike Garcia, Early Wynn, and two Bobs, Feller and Lemon, going 78-29. Larry Doby had 32 homers and 126 runs batted in. In August, Cleveland won a league-record-tying 26 games, its 111-43 record topping Murderers Row’s prior A.L.-best 110-44. “It seemed so easy,” Coleman felt of ’54. On September 12, a big-league record 86,563 jammed the oval, the Indians beating New York twice. Each year but 1954 the 1951-56ers placed second to the Yankees.

Improbably, Coleman aired the 1954-57ers with the post-Hoey play-by-playman of his youth, Jim Britt, voicing the 1940-42 and 1946-50 Red Sox and 1940-42 and 1946-52 Braves. “During the war both teams used fill-ins,” said Ken. “Coming back, Britt seemed so erudite – the greatest command of language of any broadcaster I’ve heard” — commanding, but not hyperbolic.” At 13, future TSN columnist Wells Twombly recalled “[Britt making] baseball sound better than red-haired girls with freckles.” It seemed pitch-perfect: baseball’s grammarian, in the Athens of America, each day signing off, “Remember, if you can’t take part in a sport, be one anyway, will ya’?”

Britt telecast the 1954-57 Indians with Coleman by necessity, not necessarily choice. By 1950 Narragansett Beer – “the beer,” ads said, “with the seedless hops” – had sponsored each Hub team on WHDH since 1945. Late that year, P. Ballantine & Sons Brewery inked a Braves-only pact on the Yankee Network, making Britt pick one club or the other. Jim chose the Braves over the Red Sox of Ted Williams, Johnny Pesky, and Bobby Doerr – to Coleman, “a terrible misjudgment as to the popularity of the teams.” Sox owner Tom Yawkey countered by naming Curt Gowdy Britt’s successor and — “He wanted to do it anyway,” Ken said — making all, not just home, coverage live.

The Wyoming-born and -educated Gowdy spent 1949-50 as Mel Allen’s Yankees aide. He became Voice of the Red Sox, then network TV sports’ paradigm for a generation: 15 All-Star Games, 12 World Series, seven Olympics, and two decades of The American Sportsman. From 1966-75, Curt called virtually every network baseball game. To Ken, “Britt made the Sox opening – thus, Gowdy’s rise — possible. He never recovered from what he’d done.” In 1953, the Braves absconded for Milwaukee, deserting him. “When they left, there was nothing left for Britt. He stumbled around a year, then came to Cleveland,” which Jim felt slumming after his reign on the Charles.

Indians second baseman Bobby Avila was a 1950s example of Britt refusing to go along to get along. Local dialect pronounced the All-Star’s last name Ah-VEE-la. Britt preferred AH-vee-la. “We got every kind of calls and letters,” said Coleman. “People didn’t like it.”

Carling Brewing’s chairman said, “You know, Jim, in view of the local colloquialism, we should probably call him Ah-VEE-la, like most fans want.”

The chairman’s name was Ian Bowie, as in row. Britt said, “All right with me, Mr. Bowie,” as in boo. In 1958, Britt returned to WHDH “haunted by the Red Sox’ ‘what if,’” said Boston broadcaster Leo Egan. Axed again, Britt moved to Detroit, St. Petersburg, and Sarasota, braving a divorce, unemployment, and arrests for drunkenness. He died in 1980, less tragic than forgotten, at home in Monterey, California. “In truth,” Globe columnist Ray Fitzgerald wrote, “life had turned its back on him a long time ago.”

Ken called himself “less mercurial, more serene” than Britt. “But we had this in common. Our first year we win 111 games, then afterward not much to tell.” Reticence began with the 1954 World Series, originally thought a Cleveland cinch. Instead, in the one-out and -on eighth inning of the 2-all opener at the Polo Grounds, the Indians’ Vic Wertz hit 460 feet to deep center field, whereupon Willie Mays made a catch with his back toward the plate, over his shoulder, to save a tie and become possibly baseball’s all-time most replayed out. In the 10th, the Giants’ Dusty Rhodes pinch-hit a fly 200 feet shorter than Wertz’s down the right-field line for a homer: New York, 5-2. A day later Rhodes again homered: Giants, 3-1. In Cleveland, New York completed a 6-2 and 7-4 sweep. “In many ways,” said Coleman, “the franchise was never quite the same.”

To protect network exclusivity, baseball has banned local-team Series TV. Coleman watched 1954’s on NBC. He felt the opener a metaphor for baseball’s DNA — anticipation. “Anything can happen, and here did – a pee-wee homer, a long-distance out.” Anticipation topped result for the rest of Ken’s Cleveland stay. 1956: Herb Score won 20 games. Next May Gil McDougald’s liner careened off his right eye, wrecking Herb’s career. 1959: Rocky Colavito slammed 42 homers, Ken having not yet coined “They usually show movies on a flight [long blast] like that.” The Indians’ second place marked their last contention till 1995. 1960: GM Frank Lane traded Colavito for Detroit’s Harvey Kuenn. “I’m getting steak for hamburger,” he bragged, having burned Cleveland’s best filet since Lou Boudreau. In the 1960s, even anticipation died. The Tribe never drew a million people, missed the pennant by fewer than 15 games, or hinted that faith might last past June.

Hating the bogus, Coleman found humor in reverse. Once the now-Tiger Rocky retreated to the wall. “Back goes Wally against the rock,” Ken said, “For those of you interested in statistics, that was my eleventh fluff of the year. It puts me in third place in the American League.” Finally, tired of ghosts in the stands, Ken left to focus full-time on football, his timing still sure: In December 1964 the Browns won the N.F.L. title, jolting Baltimore, 27-0. His last Brownscast was Jim Brown’s farewell on January 2, 1966, in another championship game: Green Bay 23, Cleveland 12. Straightaway Brown retired to make films. At his peak as an institution, Coleman revisited points of his past. Succeeding Gowdy, the new Voice of NBC TV’s Game of the Week, the Red Sox chose the Quincy scion, who told himself, “you lucky stiff, going back to my roots, taking Britt’s and Hoey’s job.”

In March 1966, Coleman was introduced as Boston’s new Voice. Pain: no pitcher won more than 10 games for that year’s ninth-place Red Sox. Progress: The Yawkeys drew 158,971 more than in 1965, ending the season 14 games nearer first. Jim Lonborg soon a/k/a Gentleman Jim, a future dentist, led in strikeouts and innings. Joe Foy, Mike Andrews, and George Scott debuted at third, second, and first base, respectively. Tony Conigliaro led in five team-high categories, including homers (28) and RBIs (93). Next year began with new manager Dick Williams vowing to: a) “have only one chief. All the rest are Indians”; and b) win more than he lost. The home opener drew 8,324. “In terms of interest,” Ken said, “the bottom had fallen out.” Out of nowhere, 1967 reached the heart, unforgettably reviving baseball in the Fens. On April 14, a rookie began his bigs career at Yankee Stadium. “A kid pitcher from [Triple-A] Toronto,” Ken said later, like liturgy. “That’s where this story starts.”

In a one-out ninth, “Billy Rohr [was] on the threshold,” Ken said on WHDH TV. “Eight hits in the game – all of them belong to Boston … Fly ball to left field! Yastrzemski is going hard — way back — way back! And he dives – and makes a tremendous catch! One of the greatest catches I’ve ever seen by Yastrzemski in left field! … Everybody in Yankee Stadium on their feet roaring as Yastrzemski went back and came down with that ball!” Two batters later Elston Howard singled, Tony C. catching “it on the first hop. No chance.” In late 1967, Fleetwood Recording repackaged WHDH’s The Impossible Dream, from Broadway’s The Man from La Mancha, as a must-Christmas gift. Coleman said of Rohr, “The fans began to sense it. This year was not quite the same.”

That year riot seared nearly 130 cities. Protestors fought police. Viet Nam was a horror house. The Sox took a fractured time and briefly made it whole. Boston trailed by six games at the All-Star break. It preceded a 10-game road trip, the team returning to Logan Airport 10 and 0 to find 10,000 greeters. Said the pilot: “They seem happy with what you’ve done.” As luminous were pilots from the Hub to Nova Scotia tracing a West Coast game by light in homes below. “It is late on a … night in 1967,” wrote the Herald’s Kevin Convey. “The house is dark except for the flashlight beside my bed. It is quiet except for my transistor. Ken Coleman didn’t just call baseball games. He called my summers” – also spring and fall. Jose Tartabull lined a 15th-inning “base hit to right! Here comes Tony! Here comes George! And the Red Sox have won it, 1-0!” Another batter lashed a “line drive to Foy! Over to second! And on to first! A triple play!” When rookie Smith hit a scoreless 10th-inning triple, a listener “refused to enter the Sumner Tunnel until he heard the outcome.” Hundreds of drivers backed up, hearing, too. By August 13, 2 1/2 games divided five teams. One Friday in late August Conigliaro hit against Jack Hamilton, whose pitch caused a wound around Tony’s left eye, ending his year.

That Saturday Game of the Week visited the Fens, Gowdy wending from a “fine young lefthander [Ruth] known for hitting ability” via Williams’ “moaning about the east wind that would blow off” the Charles to Mel Parnell, “a left-hander who [preferred] Fenway” to the road. Boston won on last-out ballet: “A chopper. Over the mound. May be tough,” Martin said. “Charged by Petrocelli. Throws to first! The ball game is over! A clutch play by Rico Petrocelli ends it all … in a wild and woolly ball game in a twelve to eleven win by the Red Sox!” Next day they trailed the second game of a doubleheader, 8-0, leading Yaz to navigate the dugout. “‘We’re going to win this game!’ he told each of us,” said Rico. “Man, by now we believed!” In the eight-all eighth, a Boston infielder lofted a “fly ball deep into left-center field and it is … a home run!” Ken cried. “Jerry Adair has hit his second home run of the 1967 season and the Red Sox, who trailed, 8 to 0, are now leading in the eighth inning, 9 to 8!” Adair’s poke sired “a sound wave – one crescendo after another” – from 100,000 at Revere Beach, most listening to Sox radio. “Ken’s attitude was beautiful,” said Petrocelli. “To his death, he thought that reaction symbolized the year.”

A week later Boston led, 4-3, in the ninth inning at Chicago, Duane Josephson batting. “Berry, a fast man on third,” Martin said. “And there’s a little looper to right field.” TV’s Coleman continued. “Caught by Tartabull! Runner tags! Here’s the throw home! And he is out at home plate!” Before 1967, Jose would not have nabbed Aunt Maude. In September, you could throw a blanket over the Red and White Sox, Twins, and Tigers. Boston trailed, 5-4, in the ninth inning at Detroit. “There’s a drive to deep right,” blared Ken, “and it’s tied up!” – Yaz again, five-all. Next inning reserve Dalton Jones went deep: Sox, 6-5. No. 8 won the 1967 Triple Crown [.326, 44 homers, 121 RBIs] with 23 hits in his last 44 at-bats. “One week left!” Coleman cried. “Four teams within 1 and ½ games.” By Thursday, the Twins led by a game with Saturday and Sunday left at Fenway. Stores closed. Churches opened. Boston must sweep to win or force a playoff. In Saturday’s 2-all sixth inning, “Scott hits one deep into center field!” said Coleman. “This one is back! This one is gone!” – 3-2. The bleachers soon were scene and actor: “Deep to right field! Number 44!” – Yaz’s last regular-season homer: 6-2, Red Sox – final, 6-4. Seconds later Martin supplied a coda. “If you’ve just turned your radio on” – pause – “it’s happened again. Yastrzemski’s hit a three-run homer, and it’s now 6-2, Red Sox” — final, 6-4.

On Sunday, Detroit had to twice beat California to tie the Sox or Twins. Minnesota led, 2-0, as Lonborg bunted safely to lead off the sixth. After two hits filled the sacks, Yaz “lines a base hit to center-field!” said Ken. “One run in, Adair’s around third, he will score. Going to third is Jones. It’s tied, 2-2!” Ken Harrelson hit to shortstop Zoilo Versalles, who hesitated and was lost: “No chance at a throw to the plate. Safe! Jones scores! The Red Sox lead, 3-2!” Two more runs scored before “the Red Sox are out in the sixth,” said Coleman. “But what a sixth inning it was!” Detroit won its home opener. Meantime, Minnesota’s Bob Allison lined to the corner with two out in the eighth, Tony Oliva on first base, and Harmon Killebrew on second. Yaz threw to second base, nabbing Allison: Sox, 5-3. Next inning Rich Rollins batted with two out. “The pitch . . . is looped” toward shortstop,” Martin said. “Petrocelli’s back, he’s got it! The Red Sox win!” – but what? No one knew: Detroit had to lose. “And there’s pandemonium on the field!”– the most immortal line Ned ever spoke. “Listen!” As the ball settled in Rico’s glove, students and workingmen and housewives became a wave, hundreds of bodies rocking. “I was terrified,” said Lonborg: Petrocelli, too. “It’s a miracle I’m even here,” he said, in 2009 joining MLB Network radio, where ’67 seldom wanders far away.

“[Afterward Sunday] the players came in from the field,” Ken said, “some crying or yelling.” A radio lit the background: “no ESPN, Ipod, or Internet, just [Detroit’s] Ernie Harwell in the nightcap.” The Angels led, 8-5, in a two-on and one-out ninth. The Tigers’ Dick McAuliffe promptly hit into his second double play all year – uncorking Wakefield and Woonsocket and Brattleboro and Blue Hill. In the clubhouse, Rico saw tears in Yawkey’s eyes: “spent so much money, all those near-misses, drinking champagne, more fan than owner.” The next-day Boston Record American cover blared: “CHAMPS!” above a drawing of two red socks. It was crewel, not cruel. Coleman styled other upsets “child’s play compared to 1967.” It was unthinkable then to call a Series anticlimactic. This was. Through the mid-’70s local-team Voices did the Classic. In ideal symmetry, Gowdy and his Sox successor telecast each NBC Series game in Boston: Cards, in seven.

Save Yaz and Lonborg, Coleman became the person most affixed to 1967. It was his, even more than Britt’s 1948, Martin’s 1975, or Castiglione’s 2004. A eulogy by the Herald’s Convey invoked the flashlight beside his bed. “There will be other summers. And I will listen to other announcers. But I will never stop hearing Ken Coleman.”

In 1972, Coleman shifted exclusively to TV, tying caption to picture. In 1974, replacing WHDH as Sox video flagship, WBZ “told me they wanted a new cast.” Next year Ken revisited Ohio to televise the Reds, his penny as lucky as the 1954 Indians and 1967 Townies. “Wherever Ken goes, fortune follows,” Craig wrote. Cincinnati took the 1975-76 Series, Coleman bypassed as Reds Voice — radio’s Marty Brennaman got the nod – on each Fall Classic. Then, in 1979, released from a last year in Cincy, Ken returned to Fenway, many expecting him to man Red Sox television, vacated when ball and striker Dick Stockton joined CBS. Instead, Coleman replaced Martin on radio, Ned strangely joining TV, where literacy was superfluous v. being radio’s job one.

Back home, Coleman increasingly let his “kinder, gentler” side lighten a formal on-air presence. Befriending easily, Coleman urged 1980-82 wireless partner Jon Miller to develop his mimicry: “Ken said, ‘You have something not many people have, and you should do it on the air.’ I’d just been goofing around, and soon I’m invited to banquets because of Ken. He was incredibly giving, saying be expressive, mimic.” Then: “Ken’s why I went to Boston.” In the 1981 big-league split season, they called the end of professional baseball’s longest game. It began April 18 at 8:25 p.m.: Triple-A Pawtucket’s Bruce Hurst starts at home v. Rochester. Things adjourn 2-all at 4:07 a.m. – Easter – morning before 19 of an original 1,740 paid crowd. They resume June 23 – “Dale Koza – line drive, base hit, left field, [Marty] Barrett scores, and Pawtucket wins it, 3 to 0, in 33 innings!” said Ken. Game time: 8:25.

In 1979, Coleman called Yaz’s three thousandth hit. “A ground ball base hit into right field! Just out of reach of Willie Randolph!” In 1983, No. 8 played his major-league record 3,308th and final last game. In the seventh inning, “The crowd is on its feet, everyone aware that very possibly this will be the last time he will ever step into that batting box,” Ken mused. The din was insupportable. “Waving to them all, and they’re all on their feet.” Yastrzemski popped up, was replaced in the field, and “walked over to a little boy and tossed him his cap.” Organist John Kiley played auld lang syne. As executive director of the Jimmy Fund, the Sox official charity, Ken spurred the Children’s Cancer Research Foundation – now Dana-Farber Cancer Institute. Once he asked, “If you were paying your way today, who would you pay to see?” The Kid didn’t hesitate. “Reggie!” Williams boomed. Ken informed the object of No. 9’s respect. “‘The man said that about me?’ Jackson gaped. Later Reggie did a Jimmy Fund public service notice and gave “a considerable amount,” Ken said. “‘I know what the Jimmy Fund is about,’ he said, ‘and I want to put money where my money is.’”

Few people put money on the early-to-mid ’80s Sox, noting that their last world title preceded by 61 days the original Armistice Day ending World War I. In 1983, Joe Castiglione succeeded Miller, off to Baltimore. At Fenway, the ex-Colgate University student disc jockey found Coleman pining for big band dance music a quarter of a century earlier. On the field, the Sox were more fox trot than rock ’n’ roll; six place in 1983; little better in 1984-85. Once Cleveland scored twice in the eighth inning to lead, 3-2, Ken, almost asleep, saying, “Here comes the tying run and the winning run, and the Indians win!” Coleman then saw Bob Stanley pumping. “It was then that I realized that baseball is a nine-, not eight-, inning game.”

Thirteen times the Olde Towne Team lost a pennant or World Series on the next-to-last or final day from 1946 through 2003. All disproved the Law of Averages (things even out) and upheld Murphy’s Law (if things can go wrong, they will). Depending on your view, Johnny Pesky does or does not hold the ball. Luis Aparicio loses a division by falling down rounding third. Bucky Dent homers above the Monster. The worst was 1986’s Grounder Under Bill Buckner’s Glove. The Globe’s Peter Gammons had termed Yaz’s farewell “a two-day Easter celebration.” On Good Friday 1986, the parish team traded Mike “The Hit Man” Easler for 1979 A.L. Most Valuable Player Don Baylor – the first Sox-Yankees trade since reliever Sparky Lyle in 1972. “It was a great start to the season,” said Castiglione. Who knew its end would be so antipodal?

On April 7, Dwight Evans banged the year’s first pitch for a homer. Told no one had done it before, he jousted, “Big deal. We lost.” On April 29, 1986, Boston’s best mound prospect since World War II faced Seattle at home, setting a record for strikeouts in a game. “Strike three!” Ken gushed of Phil Bradley. “Roger Clemens has broken the major league record for strikeouts in one game! He has struck out twenty Mariners!” On May 15, the Sox took first place for good. Rocket began 14-0, not losing till July. Some baseball Voices don’t speak on or off the air. At Wrigley Field, locking a colleague out of the booth, Harry Caray once kept him off TV. By contrast, Ken, Ned, and Joe avoided spite or strife.

The night of Rocket’s launch, the Sox had just released their yearbook, listing players’ musicians. Soon each Mr. C. was perusing it, Ken thinking, Joe said, that music ended in 1953. “This is interesting. Roger’s favorite singer is Steve Nicks,” said Coleman. Joe paused, then said: “Ken, I believe that’s Stevie Nicks.” Ken was adamant: “Well, I know him well. I call him Steve.” Castiglione: “Uh, Ken, Stevie is a girl.” Next day Clemens sent a wall-sized Nicks poster to the booth. Till his death “Ken could break me up,” said Joe, “by saying, ‘Stevie is a girl.’” In 1967, Sox skipper Williams introduced Coleman and Martin to California’s Crescent – aka “Hard Bellies” – Beach, surf up, seals sunning. Later the Voices acquainted Joe, going daily when the Sox visited Anaheim: Ken snorkeling, Castiglione swimming, and Ned diving and taking pictures. A clubhouse manager said: “There they go – two sixty-year-olds and a forty-year-old, playing in the sand.”

On a flight, Ken read biography, planned a Jimmy Fund event, or heard pre-Bill Haley and the Comets. Ned put his Walkman on, used a headset plug, and channeled the Chairman of the Board. “He loved Sinatra,” said Joe. “Ken did, too, so he’d use the other plug – each listening to Ol’ Blue Eyes and breaking into song.” It was, he laughed, “not broadcast quality.” The Sinatra ballad “Summer Wind” took a lofter toward the Wall. If “Luck Be a Lady,” “Bewitched” was the Sox’s card. “It Was a Very Good Year” could mean 1912; “Fly Me to the Moon,” 1978. Liking “The Best Is Yet to Come,” the booth couldn’t know 1986’s worst lay just ahead. “That’s Life” was a favorite, the Sox having been a puppet, a pauper, a pirate, a poet, a pawn, but not since 1918 king.

On cue, the ’86ers slumped in July, one journal asking, “Poised for another El Foldo?” Instead, the Sox won 11 straight, traded for outfielder Dave Henderson and shortstop Spike Owen, and rebuilt its lead. A Boston TV Chronicle special hailed “Pennant Fever Grips Hub”: “Sox fans, knowing better, have put their skepticism on hold.” Baylor clubbed 31 homers. Buckner had 102 RBI – more irony: “fans,” Owen said, “loving how he gutted it out” — ankles hurt, taped, and gouged again. Clemens started the All-Star Game. Dennis (Oil Can) Boyd and Bruce Hurst finished 16-10 and 13-8, respectively. On September 28, Boston took its first title since 1975. “A high pop-up! Buckner is there! It’s all over! [Sox 12, Toronto 3]!” said Ned. The new divisional champion Townies hugged the man with the gimpy gait and high-topped shoes.

That fall, several friends in the Secret Service arranged lunch at the White House for a Red Sox party. “We’re told no photos, above all, recordings,” Joe smiled. “Someone forgot to tell Ken.” Vice-President George H.W. Bush entered to recount his good-field, no-hit time at Yale — “I batted eighth,” he said. “Second cleanup.” President Reagan then entered “at his theatrical best,” evoking the 1930s Cubs, re-creation, and film, especially 1952’s The Winning Team. Reagan had played the great epilectic and alcoholic pitcher Grover Cleveland Alexander; Doris Day, his wife; Walter Brennan, a reporter. “Knowing the script by heart,” said Castiglione, Coleman “had a recorder, determined to tape the Gipper.” At lunch questions start, and “Ken’s is a doozie.”

In The Winning Team, Coleman noted, “[St. Louis’s] Alex in relief strikes out the Yankees’ Tony Lazzeri to save Game Seven” of the 1926 Series. “Right,” says the President. Ken asked, “How did Doris Day take a cab all the way from mid-Manhattan to Yankee Stadium” – even then, a lengthy ride – “while Alex trudges from the pen?” “Well, ah,” Reagan says. Next question. Lunch soon adjourns. “It was amazing,” said Joe. “The Secret Service must have seen the recorder, but didn’t say anything.” That night the taped President guested on Ken’s pre-game show. “With security, it could never happen today.” What did astounds, even now.

The 1986 Red Sox, Angels, Mets, and Astros easily won their division, then began a month as the game had rarely been played before – “at its summit,” Newsweek’s Pete Axthelm wrote. “It leaves you breathless.” The now-best-of-seven L.C.S. began at Fenway, Clemens losing, 8-1. A day later Rice homered and Angels pitcher Kirk McCaskill lost a grounder in the sun: Sox, 9-2. Game Three: The Halos took a two-games-to-one playoff lead. Four: Clemens led by a 3-0 score – till Doug DeCinces homered and two batters singled to start the ninth inning. Reliever Calvin Schiraldi got a routine fly – till Rice lost it in the lights, another run scoring. Schiraldi went 1-2 to Brian Downing. Future reference: One strike would win the game. Instead, the next pitch hit him, tying the score: Angels win, 4-3, in 11, lead three games to one. Enthused ABC’s Al Michaels: “This series is getting interesting.”

Next day Boston led, 2-1 – until Bobby Grich drove to center field. Dave Henderson egressed, leapt, and knocked the ball over the wall for a two-run homer. In the ninth inning, despite Baylor’s two-run dinger, one out would win Game Five, 5-4 – and the Angels’ first pennant. Manager Gene Mauch inserted reliever Gary Lucas, his last hit batter 1982. Lucas plunked Rich Gedman, yielding to Donnie Moore, who worked Henderson to a 2-2 count — Boston one strike from elimination. At “2:47 Pacific Coast time,” said Coleman. Moore threw a forkball. “There’s a fly ball to left field! Downing is going back … back … back! It’s gone! It is gone! Dave Henderson has homered! And the Boston Red Sox have taken the lead! Boston has come up” – Ken’s exact verbiage from 1967’s last-day sixth-inning fivespot – “with four runs and has a 6 to 5 lead in the ninth!”

In their ninth, the Halos tied the score. After DeCinces and Grich failed with the bases full, Boston, reprieved, scored an eleventh-inning run. In the bottom half, “Schiraldi throws, and it’s popped up down the first-base side!” said Ken. “[Dave] Stapleton in – he’s got it! And the Red Sox have won it! One of the most incredible victories in the history of the Boston Red Sox, 7 to 6!” Pause: “Joseph [Castiglione], two days ago I became a grandfather [a girl]. This was her gift – truly an incredible baseball game.” Back in Boston, the Townies took Game Six, 10-4, over and out behind Boyd. Next evening Clemens led, 4-0, when Rice homered deep to left. Boston won, 8-1: its first triumph in a winner-take-all game with a division title, pennant, or World Series at stake since 1912, and first seventh-game postseason victory since 1903.

The Sox were a 2 ½-to-1 underdog v. the 108-54 regular-season Mets, but won the first two Shuttle Series games, 1-0 and 9-3. Boston flew home “sitting pretty,” said Joe. Games Three-Four were ugly: Mets, 7-1 and 6-2. Ted Williams first-pitched before Game Five. Hurst then won his second match, 4-2. Ahead: a game that proved the proverb “If you want to make God laugh, tell Him your plans.” At Shea Stadium, the Mets, behind, 2-0, in Game Six, tied on a single and double play. Barrett scored on a force attempt: 3-2. As omen, Rice was thrown out trying to score, a blister on Clemens’ pitching hand made Schiraldi relieve, and Buckner stranded eight runners. In the eighth inning, Gary Carter’s sacrifice fly retied the score. “Everything to decide,” Ken said, “and nothing decided.” Due to air the 10th, Joe deferred to his senior partner. At 11:59, Henderson’s drive struck Newsday’s billboard. He reached the dugout as the clock struck midnight. Boston scored again: 5-3 insurance, having paid a 68-year premium. With two Mets out, the scoreboard read, “Congratulations Boston Red Sox.” The Series trophy and 20 cases of Great Western champagne entered the visiting clubhouse. Again one out would win – the Classic.

All year Stapleton had replaced Buckner with Boston ahead. Inexplicably, skipper John McNamara kept Billy Bucks at first. After two singles, Ray Knight went to 0-2. A strike would end the famine. Knight singled, Gary Carter scored, and Kevin Mitchell took third: 5-4. “They’re going to do it,” a friend told Gammons. The Sox were going to lose in a way unimaginable for even them. Sans wild pitch all year, Stanley, relieving Schiraldi, threw six pitches to Mookie Wilson. “He throws the [seventh] pitch inside, it gets away from Gedman!” Coleman said: the inning’s 13th pitch to win the Series. “And the tying run is home! The tying run scores! And down to second base goes Knight – 55,078 fans go wild, as the Mets, with two outs and the bases empty, in the last of the tenth, have tied it up!” Wilson fouled off two more pitches. “Knight at second. Three and two,” Ken resumed. “The pitch, ground ball to first base! Buckner – it goes by him! And here comes the winning run! The Mets have won it, 6 to 5, on a ground ball to Buckner that went through him!” At his Wellesley home, Martin rued the local-TV Series ban.

In one moment, Gammons wrote, “Forty-one years of Red Sox baseball flashed in front of my eyes.” Speaker of the U.S. House of Representatives Thomas P. (Tip) O’Neill “didn’t sleep for three months. I’d wake up every night seeing that ball go through Buckner’s legs.” The wild pitch completed Stanley’s fall from 1970s comer to hard-luck oaf, a Hub driver trying to ram his car. Billy Bucks was threatened, Boston’s Zakim Bunker Hill Bridge a/k/a “Buckner Bridge” because cars passed through its Y-shaped “legs.” Released next year, Buckner said: “Things were good for me here until after the sixth game. After that, it just went down.” Finally, he moved to Idaho. Game Seven was postponed to Sunday, the Nation sensing what lay ahead. Monday night the Red Sox again led, 3-0. In the sixth inning, Keith Hernandez singled with the bases loaded to plate two Mets runs. As New York tied the score, reliever Sid Fernandez gleamed, and Knight hit in the seventh, the Sox faced a fourth straight seven-game Series loss.

“The pitch!” said CBS Radio’s Jack Buck. “Swing and a fly ball, left-center field, well-hit! May not be caught! It’s gone! It’s gone! Over the fence in left-center! A home run by Ray Knight to give the Mets their first lead of the evening, 4-3!” Final: 8-5. For the first time, the World Series final opposed ABC’s Monday Night Football, routing it in audience share (55 to 14 percent) and Nielsen ratings (38.9 to 8.8). In Los Angeles, New York, and Boston, the Series swaggered, 4-, 7-, and 19-to-1: “fourth-highest rating of all time for a World Series game,” said NBC sports research’s Greg Seamans, “and most-watched Series game of all time, with 34 million households.” The Classic averaged a 28.6 rating – about 25 million households per minute.

The Washington Post’s Shirley Povich hailed “baseball as Americans know and love it – a throbbing, good-God-what’s-next World Series.” Some recalled the Classic differently, like a car crash or a storm. Next season Clemens left training camp when his salary was renewed at $400,000 – half of Stanley’s. G.M. Lou Gorman said, “The sun will rise, the sun will set, and I’ll have lunch.” A year later the ’88ers took first place on Labor Day, lost six of the last seven, but won their second division or pennant in three years for the first time since World War I. Directly the L.C.S. went awry. Hurst dropped Game One, 2-1. Veteran Globe writer Clif Keane threw out next day’s first ball. “They’ve got to do it soon,” he said. “I’m running out of time.” Boston was, too, swept by the A’s. That offseason Ken had a heart attack, leaving Joe C. to do 1989 spring training radio alone. “Other teams’ announcers did an inning or two,” he said. “They got me through.”

In Florida, a Sox-Dodgers exhibition lasted 15 innings. “Before [1997] interleague play, you’d only see the other league’s guys at a Series or spring training,” said Joe. “Today Vin Scully called a couple innings, no airs.” Joe never forgot 1986’s Game Six, “feeling Shea shake.” Ken remembered, too. By 1989, he had founded the Bosox Club, was an eight-time Ohio Sportscaster of the Year and 12-time American Federation of Television and Radio Artists honoree, and hosted radio’s Ken’s Corner of poetry and inspiration. That year future Baseball Hall of Fame and Museum president Jeff Idelson was a Sox booth statistician intern. He left the Fens grasping why Voices become a beach bud, mountain messenger, and pillow pal: “A radio broadcaster has to remind you of sitting around a fire, hearing tales.” Ken did.

In mid-1989, Coleman announced his retirement, Fenway’s TV booth later named in his honor. He wrote variants of Take Me Out to the Ballgame, sung by Broadway’s and the Yankees’ Suzynn Waldman: “And if I can’t actually be there, then give me the action by Curt, Ned, and Ken.” He finished a fifth book — his favorite, The Impossible Dream – and again did Harvard football as he had 1968’s last-quarter Crimson miracle – “This, of course,” Coleman had marveled, “is The Play of The Game” – tying the score with seven seconds left. Half-an-hour later the student Crimson headlined: “Harvard Wins, 29 to 29.” In 2000, he made the Red Sox Hall of Fame.

Among those mourning Ken’s farewell was Pawtucket’s radio Voice Don Orsillo: born Melrose, Massachusetts, raised on a Madison, New Hampshire farm, watched the Sox on “one of our four TV stations, coverage not wall-to-wall like now,” and spent most nights by the kitchen radio, with Ken. “He was everywhere,” said Don of “1967, Clemens’ twenty-strikeout game, and Henderson’s playoff blast.” Growing up, Orsillo heard dad and mom insist he “reach for the stars.” At 12, he did, “vowing to air the Sox.” Ultimately, Don attended Northeastern University, majored in Communication Studies, took a class from Castiglione, and as an intern like Idelson also became Fens booth statistician, then 2001- Sox TV Voice.

In the late 1990s, Ken took special interest in Fenway Park. In 1925, it had become a teenager the very month that he was born. Now many increasingly deemed it old-timey: too few luxury boxes and concession stands, too little parking, above all, too small. Rebuilding would be prohibitive, some said. Suites couldn’t squeeze into a Wilsonian shoebox. The foundation was built to house one deck, not two. “Build a new park if you must. Get your new deck, loges, the better amenities,” Coleman said. “But keep the outfield exactly as it is from one pole to another. That’s how people know Fenway, what they see on the tube.”

In 2002, a new ownership group headed by John Henry, Tom Werner, and Larry Lucchino began saving baseball’s oldest park. The club kept the Green Monster, centerfield Triangle, and “field’s distance, look, feel,” said Coleman, exactly as they were. The real change came off the field, the Sox enlarging and renovating – staying put. Ken would have loved the decade-long preservation of “America’s Most Beloved Ballpark” to make it capable of remaining the Sox arcade, it was said, until at least near the new mid-century. Soon Fenway became baseball’s ATM machine.

On October 1, 1989, Coleman ended his final game behind the mike by thanking “the fans of New England for their support, their friendship, their patience and loyalty over the years” and for the Jimmy Fund, “which has been a most meaningful part of my professional life.” He concluded: “This is Ken Coleman, rounding third and heading home.” On August 21, 2003, Ken, 78, died, leaving sons Casey, since deceased, and William, daughters Kerry, Susan, and Kathleen, his wife Mary Sue, and former wife Ellen. He had long ago become “a most meaningful part” of Red Sox Nation’s life – manifestly, even now.

This biography is included in the book “Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Joseph Wancho. It is also included in “The 1986 Boston Red Sox: There Was More Than Game Six” (SABR, 2016), edited by Bill Nowlin and Leslie Heaphy.

Sources

I am indebted to several sources for the radio play-by-play and analysis contained herein: WEEI Radio executive sports producer Jon Albanese; noted major-league archivist John Miley; and Tom Shaer, former WITS Boston wireless reporter, now head, Tom Shaer Media in Chicago. Virtually all other material, including quotes, is derived from my books Voices of The Game: The Acclaimed Chronicle of Baseball Radio & Television Broadcasting – From 1921 to the Present (New York: Simon & Schuster, 1992); The Storytellers: From Mel Allen to Bob Costas: Sixty Years of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth (New York: Macmillan, 1995); Of Mikes and Men: From Ray Scott to Curt Gowdy: Broadcast Tales from the Pro Football Booth (South Bend, Indiana: Diamond Communications, 1998); Our House: A Tribute to Fenway Park (Chicago: NTC/Contemporary, 1999); Voices of Summer: Ranking Baseball’s 101 All-Time Best Announcers (New York: Carroll & Graf, 2005); The Voice: Mel Allen’s Untold Story (Guilford, Connecticut: The Lyons Press, 2007); A Talk in the Park: Nine Decades of Baseball Tales from the Broadcast Booth (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2011); and Mercy! A Celebration of Fenway Park’s Centennial Told Through Red Sox Radio and TV (Washington DC: Potomac Books, 2012).

Cuccinello had a fast start in 1945, keeping his average in the .380–.390 range for the first month. The heat of the Chicago summer eventually wore Tony down, however, and at what was then the advanced age (for a ballplayer) of 37, Cuccinello did not play every day, and in fact had to play more in September to achieve sufficient at-bats to qualify for the batting title. Stirnweiss edged out Cuccinello on the final day of the season, when a White Sox doubleheader was rained out and Stirnweiss went 3-for-5 against the Boston Red Sox. One of those hits, however, was scored an error initially, and then changed to a hit by the official scorer, who just happened to be a writer for the Bronx Home News. According to Cuccinello, he was told at the time that the official scorer only changed the call after he was informed that the White Sox had been rained out and Cuccinello’s season was over. Ironically, Cuccinello later coached Stirnweiss with the Cleveland Indians, and Snuffy confirmed the shenanigans when he told Cuccinello: “He (the writer) gave it to me.”

Anthony Francis (“Tony” or “Cootch”) Cuccinello was born November 8, 1907, in Long Island City, New York. Tony played in a semipro league in New York City and eventually signed a contract to play for the Syracuse Stars of the International League in 1926, while still a teenager. After two months Cuccinello was sent to the Class B Lawrence (Massachusetts) Merry Macks, where he spent the rest of 1926 and 1927, when he hit .310. In 1928 he was assigned to the Danville Veterans of the Three I League. After another season hitting .310, Cuccinello caught the attention of Branch Rickey, who saw him play and bought him for the Columbus Senators in the American Association. Cuccinello’s performance at Columbus (.358 batting average with 20 home runs and 111 runs batted in, and a league-leading 227 hits and 56 doubles) earned him a quick promotion to the major leagues, when the Reds purchased his contract after the 1929 season. Tony made his debut on Opening Day, April 15, 1930, playing third base in a losing effort against the Pittsburgh Pirates.

Cuccinello had a solid rookie season, batting .312 with 10 home runs and 78 RBIs. In 1931 the Reds shifted Tony to second base and he responded with a .315 average and 93 RBIs, a club record for second basemen until broken by Joe Morgan in 1975. In his best offensive performance that year he got hits in six consecutive at-bats, including two doubles and a triple. He led the league’s second basemen in putouts, assists, errors, and double plays.

Despite Cuccinello’s performances on the field, he refused to sign the contract the Reds tendered to him and found himself shipped to the Brooklyn Dodgers to begin the 1932 season. Tony played in all 154 games that year, turning in respectable offensive numbers for a second baseman (.281, 12 homers, 32 doubles, and 77 RBIs) but, more importantly, becoming a teammate of future Hall of Fame manager Al Lopez, with whom he would begin a lifelong friendship. That same year Cuccinello married Clara Caroselli (after the season, on October 29), and they produced three children: Anthony Jr. in 1936, Darlene Ann in 1938, and Alan Joseph on their 13th wedding anniversary in 1945. Cuccinello’s performance in ’32 earned him a spot on the roster of first All-Star Game in 1933 (the so-called “Game of the Century”), where he had the dubious distinction of pinch-hitting for Carl Hubbell in the top of the ninth and striking out to end the game.

In 1935, Cuccinello’s younger brother, Al, made his major league debut and played in 54 games with the New York Giants, the only major league experience Al would have. The brothers played against each other several times that year and both homered in the same game on July 5. Tony’s homer was a solo shot in the top of the eighth and Al’s a two-run blast in the bottom of the ninth inning of a game Brooklyn won 14–4. After four years with the Dodgers, Cuccinello was on the move again when Brooklyn traded him to the Boston Braves. In Boston in 1936, Cuccinello had one of his best offensive seasons, batting .308 and driving in 86 runs. Tony’s excellent defensive performances continued in Boston, as well, and he teamed with a player he later described as the finest of the shortstops he played with in his career, Eddie Miller.

In 1939 Cuccinello suffered a knee injury after Dick Bartell of the Chicago Cubs slid into him at second base, and surgery sidelined him for two months. His first game back after the surgery Cuccinello had 10 assists in a 22-inning game while playing second base. The knee never really improved despite the surgery, and Cuccinello was traded to the Giants midway through the 1940 season. At the end of that season Cuccinello retired for the first time, so that he could manage the Jersey City Giants in the International League. Jersey City finished fifth in the eight-team league in 1941, and Cuccinello was prepared to manage again in 1942, but instead was called by his former Brooklyn manager Casey Stengel, then with the Braves, who asked Cuccinello to join his staff as a player-coach. In 1942 Cuccinello threw batting practice, coached third base, and pinch-hit for Stengel, and in mid-season 1943 was released so that he could sign with the Chicago White Sox, a team desperately in need of players to replace those who enlisted in the military. Cuccinello, who suffered from chronic laryngitis, was not drafted into military service, and therefore was able to continue his career.

From mid-1943 through the 1944 season Cuccinello was a reserve infielder who appeared in fewer than 50 games each year, and he later said that but for the war he likely would have retired before the 1945 season. But in 1945 Cuccinello went to a northern spring training in French Lick, Indiana (later made famous by native son Larry Bird), where he had a mineral bath every day, followed by a rubdown and a nap, and entered the season feeling the best he had ever felt. Perhaps it was the mineral baths or the naps, but nevertheless after the Indiana spring training Cuccinello embarked on his near-title-winning year, and retired from playing for good at the end of that campaign.

Cuccinello was out of baseball in 1946, but managed the Tampa Smokers in the Florida International League to 104 wins and a second-place finish in 1947. The following year he reunited with Al Lopez in Indianapolis, where they coached the Indianapolis Indians of the American Association to a 100-win season and a online ranking among the 100 best minor league teams of the 20th century. In 1949 Cuccinello began a three-year stint as a coach with his first major league team, the Reds, and in 1952 he joined Al Lopez’s coaching staff on the Cleveland Indians, the first of several such positions he would hold. Coincidentally, 1952 was also the last year of former nemesis Snuffy Stirnweiss’s career, also with the Indians.

Cuccinello’s first postseason experience came as a coach with the Indians in the 1954 World Series, which the heavily favored Indians lost to the New York Giants. In 1957, Cuccinello followed Lopez to the Chicago White Sox, and in 1959, as third base coach, was involved in a controversial play that some said at the time led to the White Sox’ demise at the hands of the Los Angeles Dodgers in the 1959 World Series. In Game 2 of the Series, Sherm Lollar, the White Sox catcher, was on first base in the bottom of the eighth with nobody out, a man on second, and the score 4–2 in favor of the Dodgers. The next batter, Al Smith, doubled to left-center. The runner at second (Earl Torgeson, running for Ted Kluszewski) scored easily. Cuccinello waved Lollar home, where he was thrown out—by a good margin, by all accounts. When the Sox went on to lose the Series four games to two, Cuccinello immediately was awarded goat horns and tagged with the blame for the Series loss.

Lopez defended his friend and fellow coach, telling a Chicago Daily News reporter first, that in his opinion the play itself was fine, and more importantly, that the play was not the turning point of the Series, that the Sox’ inability to run in the Coliseum was what led to their demise.

Lopez repeated that opinion in an interview with The Sporting News, noting that it took a perfect play by the Dodgers’ defense to nail Lollar at the plate. One of the Dodgers involved in the play, outfielder Wally Moon, expressed the same opinion during the off-season after the World Series when he said that he also might have sent Lollar if he were in Cuccinello’s shoes, because the odds were against the Dodgers making the play.

In any event, Cuccinello survived the controversy and continued coaching in Chicago into Eddie Stanky’s managerial tenure, which started in 1966. In 1967 Cuccinello joined the staff of new Tigers manager Mayo Smith, and at the beginning of the season Cuccinello took on Dick McAuliffe as a private project, to help McAuliffe make the switch from shortstop to second base. At the time Cuccinello said McAuliffe had to work on slowing himself down, and in 1968 the work seemed to bear fruit, as McAuliffe’s defensive improvement was cited by both opposing manager Alvin Dark of the Cleveland Indians and Tigers coach Hal Naragon as a key factor in the Tigers’ success. Cuccinello enjoyed his first and only World Series championship in 1968 when the Tigers defeated the St. Louis Cardinals in seven games

Cuccinello left the Tigers in 1969 to reunite with Al Lopez, who managed the White Sox for 17 games that season. Cuccinello then retired to Tampa, Florida, where he worked as a Yankees scout in the area until retiring from baseball completely in 1985. Cuccinello passed away of congestive heart failure September 21, 1995, at a hospital in Tampa.

An updated version of this biography is included in the book “Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Joseph Wancho. It first appeared in “Sock It To ‘Em Tigers–The Incredible Story of the 1968 Tigers” (Maple Street Press, 2008), edited by Mark Pattison and David Raglin, and later in “Go-Go To Glory—The 1959 Chicago White Sox” (Acta, 2009), edited by Don Zminda.

Sources

Carmichael, J. “Lollar Play Not Series Key—Lopez.” Baseball Digest, Vol. 19 p. 71 (February 1960).

Chastain, B., “This Was the Closest Race Ever for a Batting Title.” Baseball Digest, Vol. 52, p. 63 (December. 1993).

Daniel, Dan. “Over the Fence: Two Big Breaks Influenced Outcome of Series.” The Sporting News, October 21, 1959, p. 10.

“‘Dodgers Reeled Off Perfect Play to Nail Lollar’—Lopez.” The Sporting News, January 20, 1960, p. 4.

Holmes, T. “Carey Experiments With Dodger Infield.” The Sporting News, March 31, 1932, p. 1.

“Majors’ All-Stars Meet In ‘Game of the Century.’” The Sporting News, July 6, 1933, p. 1.

Oates, B. “It Took Five Perfect Plays to Get Lollar at Plate!” Baseball Digest, vol. 19, p. 69 (February 1960).

Spoelstra, Watson. “Relaxed McAuliffe Gave Tigers Their Flag Spark.” The Sporting News, October 5, 1968, p. 33.

New York Times, September 23, 1995.

The Sporting News, October 21, 1959, p. 12. The play was also included in a summary of the worst coaching blunders in The Baseball Hall of Shame, written by Bruce Nash and Allan Zullo and published in 1985 by Pocket Books, New York.

Westcott, Rich, “Tony Cuccinello-A Great Way to Spend a Lifetime,” from Diamond Greats, Profiles and Interviews with 65 of Baseball’s History Makers, p. 94 (Westport, Conn.: Meckler Books, 1988).

http://web.minorleaguebaseball.com/milb/history/top_about.jsp for top 100 minor league teams (accessed September 16, 2007)

www.baseball-reference.com.

www.retrosheet.org stats

SABR Home Run Log, www.sabr.org

It was during his three-year Senators tenure from 1949 through 1951 that the slogan was first seen on a sign, but the prediction didn’t really come true until Dente was signed by the 1954 Cleveland Indians. His play as a utility infielder, ultimately taking over the starting shortstop job when regular George Strickland went down with a broken jaw, was a big part of the Indians’ 111-win season.

Dente, a 5-foot-11, 175-pound right-hander, was often called in the press a “good-field, no-hit” infielder. For only two seasons did he hold down a steady position with a major-league club. What kept him in the majors was a rifle arm combined with the athletic ability to play all of the infield positions well. In his prime, he was the ultimate utility infielder.

He was a fiery competitor, quick to anger – mostly at himself. He was a serial water-bucket kicker, often being fined for ruining a dugout water bucket after striking out.1 The practice eventually came to an end in one game when someone filled the water bucket with sand.2 But Dente was also the clubhouse comedian, keeping the locker-room mood light with his hijinks.3

Samuel Joseph Dente was born on April 26, 1922, in Harrison, New Jersey, to Italian immigrant parents Joseph, a railroad laborer, and Lena Dente. Both of his parents immigrated to the United States in the 1890s. Sam was the youngest of six children, with four sisters and a brother.4

Dente excelled at two sports as he grew up. He was a fine centre-half for the Kearny High School soccer team.5 He was so good that after high school, Dente played professionally in the American Soccer League for the Kearny Americans.6

But Dente also shined at baseball. He played shortstop for Kearny High and, in 1941, was a finalist in the New York World-Telegram’s Most Valuable Baseball Player contest for high-school players from New York and vicinity.7 More than 50 years later, the Newark Star-Ledger named Dente to its high-school baseball All-Century team for the 1940s.8 Dente also honed his skill in the American Legion junior ball program.9

Naturally, a player of Dente’s ability started to draw attention. The first person to talk to him was Jack Tighe, player-manager of the Muskegon Reds in the Detroit Tigers organization and a neighbor of Dente’s in Kearny. In 1941 Tigers general manager Jack Zeller offered Dente a bonus for signing and sent him to Newark and Jersey City, where he worked out with the Tigers’ International League team, the Buffalo Bisons.10

What happened next is up to dispute. In 1950 The Sporting News reported that the Tigers cut Dente after watching him bat against hard-throwing Virgil Trucks, who amassed four minor-league no-hitters before starting a 17-year major-league career. But Dente told Baseball Digest in 1954 that Bisons manager Al Vincent never allowed him to bat when he was with the team, yet Vincent reported to the Tigers that he wasn’t much of a hitter.11

Whatever happened, the Tigers weren’t interested in keeping Dente. The Red Sox jumped in. Their scout Jack Egan signed Dente to a contract and sent him off to the Owensboro Oilers of the Kentucky-Illinois-Tennessee League.12

Dente had little trouble adjusting to the Kitty League offensively, batting .273. But he struggled defensively playing shortstop for the Oilers. In 77 games, he committed 44 errors for a .901 fielding percentage.

But the Red Sox saw enough potential that they moved Dente to Greensboro in 1942. At Greensboro he improved his defense but struggled with the bat. Yet despite his hitting only .209, he found himself moved up another classification, this time to Scranton for the 1943 season.

In Scranton Dente again struggled with the bat, but World War II soon intervened. In February he was classified as 3-A(“men with dependents, not engaged in work essential to national defense”).13 On June 11 he enlisted in the Army at Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania.14

Unlike many other major and minor leaguers, Dente didn’t play baseball during the war.15 He was sent to Europe, where he manned an antiaircraft gun for much of the war. Because he bent over the firing piece, it cost him his hearing in his left ear.16 He was kept in the Army until March 1946.17

Dente managed to make it to training camp after his discharge and was placed back with Scranton for the 1946 season, as were many of his former 1943 teammates who had gone away to the war. As a result, Scranton was loaded with talent.

Instead of playing shortstop, Dente was moved to third base. He, and the Scranton Red Sox as a whole, had a tremendous season. Dente hit .289 in 134 games and proved an asset in the field.

Scranton easily won the Eastern League regular-season championship by 18½ games and then steamrolled through the playoffs to the EL championship. Dente’s teammate Sam Mele was named the EL Most Valuable Player. Dente finished eighth in the voting.18

After the season ended, the Red Sox swapped seven players to Louisville for seven players slated to be with Louisville in 1947. Dente was one of the latter group.19 The Sporting News proclaimed that he had “a fine minor league reputation” and was a “sure fielder and thrower and a fair hitter.”20 Boston Red Sox manager Joe Cronin called Dente “promising.”21 His career was definitely on the upswing. On January 22, 1947, Dente signed a contract to play for the Red Sox but not before the Red Sox told him in no uncertain terms to quit professional soccer.22

At camp, he found himself in a battle for the third-base job with Frank Shofner and Merrill Combs.23 The Sporting News wrote that Dente had the “strongest gun” of any infielder in the Red Sox camp.24 But his hitting held him back and Shofner soon had the inside track on the job as camp came to a close.25

According to The Sporting News, when the Red Sox broke camp and started barnstorming home, Dente was left behind at their camp in Sarasota, Florida, “until the situation became clearer.”26 Eventually, the Red Sox sent Dente and catcher Ed McGah to Louisville for the start of their season.27

Dente caught fire almost immediately at Louisville. By July 9 he was hitting .311. The Red Sox, on the other hand, were struggling to find an adequate third baseman.28 Shofner hadn’t panned out and, in their desperation, the Red Sox had tried five other players at third base. On July 10, 1947, Dente became the seventh to play the position.29

In his first game, Dente faced Detroit Tigers pitcher Hal Newhouser, a future Hall of Famer. He singled twice against Prince Hal and the press wrote that he had “played sensationally” at third base. Dente went on to start 42 straight games for the Red Sox at third base.30 He was seen as a stabilizing presence at third base after two years of a revolving door at the position.31

Cronin continued to praise his new third baseman for his defensive abilities, calling him the team’s best defensive third baseman since Cronin became the manager of the Red Sox in 1935.32

But Dente still was a liability with the bat. Sporting News correspondent Jack Malaney wrote, “It appears that Dente is not ready for Major League pitching.”33 By season’s end, Dente was hitting only .232. The Red Sox, who finished third in the American League, were looking to upgrade at several positions so on November 18, they traded Dente, pitcher Clem Dreisewerd, minor league infielder Bill Sommers, and $65,000 to the St. Louis Browns for pitcher Ellis Kinder and infielder Billy Hitchcock.

Meanwhile, the Browns were interested in Dente as primarily a shortstop. Dente, eager to win the starting job, went to camp early in San Bernardino, California.34

Despite the successful integration of baseball in 1947, Organized Baseball was still holding its collective breath, worried that an incident might occur on the field between a white and black player that would have racial implications. It was an incident involving Dente that proved that, as far as play on the field goes, it would be business as usual.

It occurred during a spring-training game between the Browns and the Cleveland Indians at Wrigley Field in Los Angeles. While Dente was playing shortstop, Larry Doby accidentally spiked him while stealing second. There was no altercation between the two players though Dente had to leave the game to be tended to.

While the spiking may not seem a big deal given today’s sensibilities, it warranted a full story in The Sporting News with the headline “Negro Spikes White Rival – and That’s the Whole Story.” The publication wrote of the incident, “Civilization’s stumbling progress toward true maturity passed at least a minor milestone at Wrigley Field.”35

While Dente didn’t crack the regular lineup at the start of the season, he still helped the Browns to a surprising winning record as June began. He batted over .300 in mostly pinch-hitting and utility roles.36 The Browns, however, soon fell into their normal pattern and finished the season 37 games back of the Cleveland Indians. Dente had a good season as a spot starter for regular shortstop Eddie Pellagrini. Dente started 57 games at shortstop and four at third base. He hit .270 in 98 games for the Browns.

But the Browns, always in the mood to trade a player especially when they received cash in return, traded Dente to the Washington Senators on October 4 in exchange for pitcher Tom Ferrick, infielder John Sullivan, and $25,000. Dente wasn’t sad to move from St. Louis to Washington. Years later he told author Eric Stone, “I wasn’t (in St. Louis) very long, thank God. We had some nice guys but absolutely no chemistry. Everybody went his way. No team unity. I was very happy to leave.”37

When the 1949 season started, Dente was the Senators’ starting shortstop. Despite the changes, the Senators got off to a bad start. After dropping a doubleheader to the Philadelphia Athletics, the Senators stood at 3-11 and in the midst of a 14-game road trip. Things looked bleak. But the Senators won nine straight games before dropping their last game of the road trip.

When the Senators arrived back in Washington, there was an auto parade waiting to take them to Griffith Stadium. Thousands of people lined the route.38 Along the parade route, people held various signs. One sign in particular was reported in the newspapers: “We’ll Win Plenty With Sam Dente.”

While the slogan didn’t exactly come true in 1949 for the Senators, it was Dente’s best season as a major leaguer. Playing in 153 games, he batted .273 and drove opposing teams crazy with his ability to get the bat on the ball. In addition, he cracked the first of his four major-league home runs, off the St. Louis Browns’ Red Embree on June 1.39

In July, Sporting News correspondent Shirley Povich wrote that Dente “is now recognized as the most valuable player on the club.”40 Povich later declared that getting Dente from the Browns was the “smartest trade” made by the Senators that year.41

Everything seemed to be going Dente’s way. His hometown of Harrison, New Jersey, presented him with a new car at Yankee Stadium between games of a doubleheader in August.42 And in a critical, must-win game for the Boston Red Sox at the end of the season, Dente played a superb game against his former team, handling 13 chances perfectly.43 At the end of the game, the Senators carried Dente off on their shoulders.44

While Dente had a good season with the bat, it wasn’t as good defensively. He led the league in errors. Yet despite Dente’s fielding, Senators owner Clark Griffith declared him “an untouchable” in the offseason.45 Right before spring training, Griffith raised Dente’s salary.46 Clearly, Dente was a popular player both with the fans and the Senators’ front office.

When the season began, Dente was the Senators’ starting second baseman. But at the end of May, the Senators obtained second baseman Cass Michaels in a trade with the White Sox. Michaels, who had hit .308 in 1949, would add another good hitter to the Senators’ lineup. So with Michaels penciled in at second, Dente moved back to shortstop. He struggled with the bat throughout 1950. He finished the season with a .239 average. These weren’t the numbers the Senators were looking for from Dente, who had started every game of the season. Shirley Povich wrote that he “was the biggest disappointment on the Senators.”47 And there were plenty of disappointments to go around as the Senators finished in fifth, 31 games behind the Yankees.

So going into the 1951 season, Dente would have to earn his position. The Senators brought in a couple of shortstops from the Southern Association, Atlanta’s Gene Verble and Chattanooga’s Willy Miranda, to challenge Dente in spring training.48 He didn’t handle the pressure well, going hitless in 18 straight games in spring training.49 Toward the end of spring training, he started hitting again and entered the season with optimism. But his hitting woes continued through the beginning of the season. Manager Bucky Harris replaced him with both Verble and Miranda but they hit even worse than Dente.50 By June 6 Dente was hitting a paltry .218. Harris was trying everything to shake up his Senators, who were second-to-last in team batting in the American League.

Finally, in late June, the Senators called up shortstop Pete Runnels from Chattanooga. Runnels was tearing up the Southern Association, batting .356.51 Dente went to the bench for much of the rest of the season as the Senators staggered toward a seventh-place finish. Only the lowly Browns kept them out of the cellar. Dente finished the season with a .238 batting average.

On November 27, 1951, Griffith and Harris gave up on Dente, trading him to the White Sox for shortstop Tom Upton. The White Sox had received Upton earlier in the day in a trade with the Browns.52 The White Sox brought Dente to spring training in Pasadena, California, to compete for their third-base job. They had played seven different third basemen in 1951 and were hoping to solidify the position in 1952. Vying for the job in training camp were Dente, Hector Rodriguez, Mel Hoderlein, Minnie Minoso, Rocky Krsnich, and Bob Dillinger, who had played 70 games at third for the White Sox in 1951.53

With all the third basemen in camp, rumors of trades swirled. Dente was reported to be headed to the Detroit Tigers.54 But in the end, Dente stuck with the White Sox, winning a utility infielder position helped by his .354 batting average in spring training.55 He filled in at every infield position as the White Sox battled in a pennant race. He even played six games in the outfield – by far the most versatile player in the American League that season.56 But he played in only 62 games and finished the season with a .221 batting average, easily his worst hitting season in the major leagues, as the White Sox finished in third, 14 games behind the Yankees.

After the season Dente worked at the Brooklyn Division of the American Baseball Academy, which was a baseball program aimed at juvenile delinquents.57 Teaching baseball would become a passion of his through the years. He often worked camps throughout the rest of his career and years beyond.

In 1953 Dente again made the Opening Day roster as a utility fielder and played in two games before the White Sox sold him to the Indianapolis Indians, a Cleveland Indians affiliate, on May 5.58 Dente thrived under Indianapolis manager George “Birdie” Tebbetts. By mid-June, he had already put together a 19-game hitting streak and a 37-game errorless streak at shortstop, nine games short of the American Association record In all, he had 219 chances without an error during the streak.59

When the Indians’ shortstop, Bobby Avila, was injured, rumors abounded that Cleveland general manager Hank Greenberg would call up Dente. But the Indians front office didn’t want to further weaken Indianapolis, which was in the midst of its own pennant race. Indianapolis, with Dente, eventually fell out of the pennant race but finished fourth and made the playoffs only to lose in the first round to eventual champion Kansas City. It wasn’t for lack of trying on Dente’s part. He hit .524 in the six-game series.60 After the season he was voted most popular player by the fans.61

The Cleveland Indians wasted little time in getting Dente onto their roster. They sent outfielder Mike Lutz and cash to Indianapolis for Dente and pitchers Marion Murszewski and Don Mossi.62 When Dente reported to spring training in 1954, he found he was in competition with Hank Majeski and Owen Friend for two utility infielder spots.63 Friend eventually lost the battle and Dente found himself back in the big leagues.

On April 2 the Cleveland Plain Dealer ran a story in its “Batting Around” column about Dente and the signs from his Senators day that read “Win plenty with Dente.”64 It would mark the resurrection of the slogan as the Indians magical 1954 season progressed.

Dente was forced into a starting role in June, when second baseman Bobby Avila went down with an injury.65 While starting, Dente struggled with the bat, then was hurt when he collided with teammate Dave Philley while chasing a pop fly. The injury put him on the shelf for ten days.66 After he rejoined the team, other than a few spot starts to relieve the slumping George Strickland, Dente was on the bench again.67 But the Indians were in the midst of the pennant race and Dente would play a big part in their success.

Dente’s personal life was on a high as well. He went home over the All-Star break to visit his newborn daughter, Patricia, for the first time.68 With the new addition to the family, he bought a home in Clifton, New Jersey.69

Then Dente’s big break came on July 23 when Strickland’s jaw was broken by a ball thrown by New York Yankees pitcher Marlin Stuart as Strickland slid into third base.70

With Dente playing shortstop and outfielder Vic Wertz stepping in at first base, Yankees manager Casey Stengel called the patchwork Indians’ infield the “lousiest” he had ever seen in the majors. “None of ’em can move five feet,” said Stengel.71 But even with a patchwork infield, the Indians played well. After Strickland went down, the Indians won ten of their next 14. Dente helped, batting .250 during that stretch.72 Despite being riddled with injuries, the Indians, behind their fine pitching staff, won 26 games in August.73

Even more remarkable was the fact that midway through August, Dente fractured his finger yet kept playing. The only people to know of the break were Cleveland manager Al Lopez and the team doctor and training staff.74 Even GM Hank Greenberg was in the dark on the injury.75 The team doctor told him playing couldn’t make it worse. “The finger hurt for about a week,” Dente told sportswriter Hal Lebovitz. After he broke his finger, the Indians went 20-6 and Dente batted .266.76

Dente played some of the best baseball of his career while replacing Strickland. On September 1 he was batting .276 and was second in the American League in fielding percentage at shortstop. To top it off, he hit his fourth (and last) major-league home run off the Yankees’ Whitey Ford.

After the Indians won the American League pennant, Greenberg, in Life magazine, wrote, “Sam Dente … did all the things our star, George Strickland, did before suffering the broken jaw.”77 Al Lopez was even more impressed. He said that Dente was “the fellow who gave us the greatest lift when we needed it the most.”78 In 68 games Sam batted .266 and drove in 19 runs.

With Strickland back at full strength, Dente sat the bench for most of the World Series against the New York Giants. He got into Game One as a defensive replacement for Strickland in the eighth inning and had a sacrifice bunt in the tenth inning in the Indians’ 5-2 loss. In Game Two he again was a defensive replacement in the eighth. He saw no action in Game Three.

In Game Four, with the Giants on the verge of a four-game sweep, Lopez started Dente for Strickland. Strickland had been hitless for the Series and Lopez needed a spark. Dente didn’t fare much better than Strickland, going 0-for-3 with a walk and a run scored as the Giants won, 7-4, and swept the Series.

In spring training in 1955, The Indians, looking to upgrade their utility-infielder positions, brought in veteran Eddie Joost to compete with Dente.79 Joost, who never signed a contract with the Indians, left halfway through camp to sign with the Red Sox.80 So Dente entered the 1955 regular season again as one of the Indians’ backup infielders.

By mid-May Dente was back in the starting lineup when Strickland was injured and out for three weeks.81 Meanwhile, the Indians, tired of Strickland and his injuries, attempted to deal Strickland, pitcher Art Houtteman and Dente to the White Sox for Chico Carrasquel. The White Sox nixed the deal, asking for Larry Doby instead.82 Dente was also rumored to be coveted by the Baltimore Orioles but nothing came of it.83

Unlike 1954, Dente didn’t play well in replacing Strickland in 1955. By June 22 his batting average stood at .210 in 40 games. After that, Dente played little, getting into 33 games the rest of the season. He did manage to pull his batting average up to .257 by season’s end but it was clear that the Indians, who had finished second, three games back of the Yankees and sixth in AL team batting, were looking to make changes in the infield.

On October 17 Dente was sold to the Indianapolis Indians.84 In November he told Hank Greenberg that he wouldn’t be going to Indianapolis. “I feel that I can help several major-league clubs,” he said.85 Dente also needed only 35 days of major-league service to become a ten-year man and improve his pension status.86

Dente’s hearing problems from his time in the Army became so bad that he underwent an ear operation.87 The operation left him with vertigo. “My sense of balance was affected,” he later remembered.88 On top of that, his wife, Marie, needed an expensive operation as well. They were forced to sell the family home to finance the operations.89 Dente did find work after the 1955 season as a salesman, working with the Yankees’ Joe Collins at a Newark clothing store.90

On February 16, 1956, the San Diego Padres of the Pacific Coast League purchased the rights to Dente.91 Padres GM Ralph Kiner, who was an old teammate of Dente’s, wanted Sam to replace Buddy Peterson, who had left to go to the White Sox.92

But in March, still plagued by issues following his ear operation, Dente announced his retirement.93 “I had to stay idle in 1956 while recovering from the operation,” he said a few years later.94 He subsequently had one more operation to correct his progressive deafness.95

By August he was feeling good enough to ask for his release from the Indians.96 It’s unclear whether the Indians granted him his release, but The Sporting News, said in September that Dente had informed Greenberg he would be making a comeback in 1957.97

The comeback never occurred. The Indians insisted on sending him first to the minors, while Dente wanted to be placed on the major-league roster.

Out of baseball, Dente become a salesman for various companies through the 1950s and 1960s. He worked for a construction firm in Clifton98 and a medical drug firm in Newark.99 In his spare time, he participated in baseball clinics.

In the late 1960s Dente began working at Merit Mailers, a direct-mailing house in Newark, where he became a vice president. He worked there until his retirement. Dente had moved to West Caldwell, New Jersey, after the 1955 season and remained there until his death on April 21, 2002, five days shy of his 80th birthday. He died at Mountainside Hospital in Montclair, New Jersey.

Dente was remembered a few years after his death when his grandson, Rick Porcello, was taken in the first round of the 2007 free-agent draft by the Detroit Tigers. Another grandson, Jake Porcello, was drafted in the 48th round by the Tigers in 2009. Jake decided to attend Seton Hall University instead.

To the end of his life, though he played on some terrible teams, Sam was best remembered for the catchphrase “Win plenty with Dente.” While reminiscing on his career in 1973, Dente told the Cleveland Plain Dealer, “I still hear the ‘Win plenty with Dente’ slogan quite often.”100 And in 1954, the Cleveland Indians certainly did.

This biography is included in the book Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Joseph Wancho. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Notes

Lawrence Eugene Doby was born on December 13, 1923, in Camden, South Carolina. Larry’s father, David, met his future wife, Etta, while playing baseball on the street in front of her home.3 Biographer Joseph Thomas Moore wrote that the Dobys were “one of the most prosperous Black families in Camden.”4

David Doby was a stable hand, grooming the horses of many wealthy New Jersey families. The marriage, however, was strained because of David’s frequent travel and Etta’s strong attachment to her own mother, leaving young Larry often in the care of his grandmother, Augusta Moore. She recounted how Doby said that Augusta “made me go to church with her all the time. I liked what I heard in the Twenty-Third Psalm and the Ten Commandments. Somehow I got the feeling that the church helped Black people to be themselves. I liked that feeling.”5

When Larry was eight years old, his father died in a tragic accident.6 David had gone fishing on a day off, and he drowned after falling from a boat while fishing on Lake Mohansic, in upstate New York.7 His death began a tumultuous time for Larry, during which he moved frequently and was cared for by his aunt and uncle.8 Four years after his father’s death, Larry and his mother left South Carolina and moved to Paterson, New Jersey.9

It wasn’t easy for Doby in Paterson. “I was lonely living alone,” he said. “But I just kept trying to be me.”10 In Paterson, Doby began following in the footsteps of his father, who had been a semipro ballplayer. He developed his skills playing sandlot baseball close to home, at the Newman Playground and on Twelfth Avenue. Doby lettered in baseball at Paterson Eastside High School, where he was one of about 25 Black students in the school. He won letters in three other sports, a total of 11 in all. Initially, Doby had thoughts of finishing high school and then becoming a physical education teacher or perhaps a coach.11

Doby was more introspective than demonstrative, and his personality could confuse his teammates. As recounted by biographer Moore, high-school teammate Al Kachuadurian never felt he could slap Doby on the back, and thought Doby kept his teammates at a distance.12 “I remember distinctly that if things didn’t go just right, he’d sulk. Deep down, he’s a warm-hearted guy. But you didn’t know if he was sulking at you personally, or whether he was sulking inwardly at himself.”13 Doby, however, later countered that he wasn’t sulking at all but had gotten accustomed to being alone based upon the circumstances in his life.14 In some sense, Doby’s self-reliance may have been mistaken for aloofness.

Even before graduating from high school, Doby began playing second base under the assumed name of Larry Walker in the Negro Leagues for the Newark Eagles.15 He was an immediate star, and team owners offered him $300 to play between high school and college.16 Although statistics from his first season are inexact, Doby believed he had batted around .400 during that summer.17

Doby enrolled at Long Island University. Part of his motivation was to play for renowned basketball coach Clair Bee. Another reason was to be able to visit Helyn Curvy, whom Doby had begun dating at Eastside High School when he was a sophomore.18 Curvy’s father had died, however, and responsibilities for taking care of her siblings prevented Curvy from attending any of Doby’s high-school baseball games.19 “But when I had a game,” Doby recalled, “I’d take her brother George to the game with me, then I’d bring him back to her house.”20

At the time, Doby had concern about being drafted into the military during World War II.21 He made the difficult decision to transfer from Long Island University to Virginia Union College, where he would play basketball for coach Henry Hucles.22 Doby believed he could transfer into an ROTC program there.23 Yet he was drafted into the Navy at the conclusion of the basketball season. The mandated racial segregation of the military at the time left a deep impression on him.24 He was assigned to Camp Robert Smalls, the Black division of the Great Lakes Naval Training Station, outside Chicago.25

Due in large part to his outstanding physical condition, Doby was able to become a physical education instructor there.26 He kept his baseball and basketball skills sharp by playing in the afternoons. Doby got to know future NFL Hall of Famer Marion Motley while on his tour of duty.27 Later, while stationed in the Pacific, Doby began what became a lifelong friendship with Washington Senators star Mickey Vernon.28 Vernon wrote to Senators owner Clark Griffith, touting Doby’s playing abilities. After their military service was done, “[Vernon] sent me a gift of some bats when I started the 1946 season with the [Newark] Eagles,” Doby recalled.29 “It was a gift I’ll never forget.”30

In 1945, general manager Branch Rickey of the Brooklyn Dodgers signed Jackie Robinson to a contract to play baseball in Montreal. The move made Doby reconsider his options, as playing baseball in the major leagues now seemed a possibility. “My main thing was to become a teacher and coach,” Doby said. “But when I heard about Jackie, I decided to concentrate on baseball. I forgot about going back to college.”31

Doby was honorably discharged from the military in January 1946. After playing two months of winter ball with the San Juan Senators for $500 a month at the invitation of Monte Irvin, a prewar teammate on the Newark Eagles, Doby subsequently rejoined the Eagles. Being close to home also allowed him to date Helyn again. “She told me if we didn’t get married that year, 1946, to forget it,” Doby said.32 “We got married on August 10, 1946, in Paterson.”33 The night of their wedding, the couple drove to Trenton, where Doby was scheduled to play.34 The game was rained out.35 A few days later, Doby played in a Negro Leagues All-Star game against a team including Josh Gibson.

The Eagles went on to win the Negro Leagues World Series in 1946. Doby batted .272 with one home run in that series against the Kansas City Monarchs of the Negro American League. He tagged a runner out at second base for the second out of the ninth inning of the seventh game, and he caught a popup for the final out of the series. “To play the Monarchs in the World Series!” Doby later exclaimed. “They had Satchel Paige and all those guys. That was a great team. To beat those guys, you were in the upper echelon of baseball.”36

With Doby’s notoriety high after the 1946 championship season, Bill Veeck, the owner of the Cleveland Indians, took notice. Veeck, who had long been eager to racially integrate the American League, hatched a plan for Doby to join Cleveland right after the 1947 All-Star break. Doby had played the first half of the season with the Eagles, and he had hit a home run in his final Newark at-bat. The Cleveland team quietly purchased Doby’s contract and brought him to Cleveland. A scoop by local writer Bob Whiting forced the team to move up Doby’s first game from July 10, which was the original intention, to July 5.37

Teammates, however, did not immediately welcome Doby, averting their eyes and not speaking to him as he made his entry to the clubhouse at Comiskey Park to meet with player-manager Lou Boudreau.38 “Shrug it off,” Boudreau reportedly said.39 Still, Doby in 2002 recalled, “I knew it was segregated times, but I had never seen anything like that in athletics. I was embarrassed. It was tough.” As Bill White later noted, Doby had to go to the Chicago clubhouse to get a first baseman’s glove since none of his Cleveland teammates offered him one.40

Pinch-hitting for Bryan Stephens against Earl Harrist of the White Sox, Doby struck out in his first American League at-bat. On July 6, in the second game of that day’s doubleheader, Doby made his only start of the season at first base. He got his first AL hit, a single off Orval Grove in the third inning that also gave him his first RBI.41 During that difficult first season, Doby batted only .156 in 29 games with two RBIs. “It was 11 weeks between the time Jackie Robinson and I came into the majors. I can’t see how things were any different for me than they were for him,” Doby said.42

He had to wait until the start of the 1948 season to win a starting job in Cleveland’s outfield. During his first full season, Doby hit 14 home runs and had 66 RBIs. That fall, Doby became the first Black player to hit a home run in the World Series when he connected off the Boston Braves’ Johnny Sain in Game Four. His blast helped lead Cleveland to a 2-1 win and a lead of three games to one in the Series. A photo taken after the game showing Doby embracing Cleveland pitcher Steve Gromek has become one of the most famous in baseball history, symbolizing an erosion of racial divisions and Doby’s acceptance as a member of his new team.

The 1948 season was the first of 10 consecutive years in which Doby hit at least 14 home runs and drove in at least 50 runs. He was selected to the All-Star team in every year between 1949 and 1955 and finished in the top 10 in the American League MVP voting in 1950 and 1954. Doby’s finest statistical season was 1952, when he led the American League in slugging percentage (.541), home runs (32), and runs scored (104). He hit for the cycle that year against Boston on June 4 at Fenway Park. The last time an American Leaguer accomplished that feat until Mickey Mantle did it in 1957.43

In 1954, Doby was Cleveland’s most dominant offensive player, leading the American League in home runs (32) and runs batted in (126). He also played a stellar center field, committing only two errors in 153 games while finishing second in the league in putouts. Doby’s regular season success that year, like that of many of his teammates, did not extend into the World Series, as he was able to manage only two singles in the four games against the New York Giants. Still, for his regular-season efforts, Doby finished second in the 1954 American League Most Valuable Player award voting to Yogi Berra.

After the 1955 season, during which Doby battled a wrist injury, he was traded to the Chicago White Sox for Jim Busby and Chico Carrasquel. At the time, Chicago manager Marty Marion said that Doby’s arrival was “the end of the search for a No. 4 hitter.”44 Marion later said, “This guy used to murder us when we played Cleveland. Last year, I definitely felt that, when we could get him out, we could handle the Indians. But we couldn’t — and the record shows that they had a season break on us, 12-10.”45

Doby immediately delivered with Chicago, hitting 24 home runs and knocking in 102 runs. During a nine-game winning streak in June 1956, Doby hit five home runs, leading White Sox owner Charles Comiskey to remark, “Larry Doby, he’s our guy. You know, when we dealt for Doby, we weren’t worried about Larry. We knew he’d come through.”46

Doby was involved in one of the bigger melees of the 1957 season. In a game on June 12, Art Ditmar of the Yankees threw a pitch inside, causing Doby to fall to his knees. Both benches emptied, and Doby knocked Ditmar down with a punch to his jaw. Doby also got into an on-field fight with Billy Martin after the umpires had restored order. Doby, teammate Walt Dropo, and the Yankees’ Enos Slaughter and Martin were all thrown out of the game. The Yankees, feeling that penalties against their players by the league were unjustified, paid all fines of their players assessed after the incident.47

After his power numbers faded a bit during the 1957 season, Doby was traded to Baltimore that December with Jack Harshman, Russ Heman, and Jim Marshall in return for Tito Francona, Ray Moore, and Billy Goodman. Manager Al Lopez explained the deal, saying, “We wouldn’t start another season with Doby because the fans are down on him.”48 A contemporary article noted that the fans often booed Doby at Comiskey Park, leading to resentment on Doby’s part.49 Doby never played with the Orioles, being traded again before the season began on April 1. This time he went back to the Cleveland Indians along with Don Ferrarese for Dick Williams, Gene Woodling, and Bud Daley.

By then, however, injuries had taken their toll, and Doby was a part-time player. In 1958, he hit 13 home runs and batted in 45 runs in only 89 games. Just before the 1959 season, Doby was traded to the Detroit Tigers for Tito Francona. Finally, on May 13, 1959, he was purchased from Detroit by the Chicago White Sox for $30,000.

Chicago was Doby’s last major-league stop as a player. By then 35 years old, he played in only 21 games, batting .241 with no home runs and only nine runs batted in. His final game in the major leagues was on July 26. Sent down to the White Sox’ San Diego farm team in the Pacific Coast League, Doby fractured an ankle sliding into third base on a triple on August 23.50 Doby finished his American League career with a .283 batting average, 243 doubles, 253 home runs, and 970 RBIs.

In 1960, Doby signed with the Toronto Maple Leafs of the International League, but because of the lingering effects of his ankle injury, he was released in May without getting into a game. In 1962 he played for the Nagoya Dragons in Japan. He went on to coach with Montreal, Cleveland, and the White Sox.51 He also owned a lounge and a liquor store in Newark, and he worked in the Essex County prosecutor’s office in New Jersey for three years.52

During that time, Doby wrote letters to major-league teams seeking the opportunity to be a major-league manager.53 In 1971, when he was a batting coach for the Montreal Expos, Doby spoke of the possibility of managing in the major leagues in an interview: “The Expos know what I want to do,” he said. “But they want me to work my way up. …They want me to wait. I don’t mind waiting because right now I’m learning. But I can’t wait for the rest of my life.”54  Doby remarked that he enjoyed working with kids in part because he had good training — he had five children of his own.

Doby received the chance to manage in 1978, becoming the second Black manager in major-league history when he took over the White Sox. He succeeded Bob Lemon, who was fired, but took over the Yankees and led them to the pennant. Doby’s time managing was filled with frustration, however, as he had a record of only 37-50 during the portion of the one season in which he managed during his career. Doby cited injuries for the team’s failures, saying, “When you have to use people you hope can play, rather than those you know can play, you are in a bad situation.”55

He also maintained strong feelings about why he had to wait until the age of 53 to receive the Chicago managerial job: “Why did it take this long? You tell me. I don’t mean to sound prejudiced, but you can look at the system and see that, until I was named (to replace Lemon on June 30), there was no Black manager in the major leagues.”56

After the 1978 season, Doby was fired as the team’s manager. “I can’t truly say what kind of manager I was or could’ve been because I didn’t have enough time,” he said.57 “I thought I could have been successful. I thought I had those intangibles.”58

After his managerial career was over, Doby remained active with baseball. He was an administrator for the Former Players Licensing Branch of Major League Baseball, helping to license people or companies that wanted to use players or their trademarks for card shows or speaking engagements.59 In 1995, Doby was named special assistant to American League president Gene Budig, who said at the time, “Few have done more for Major League Baseball than Larry Doby, and we are excited about having him associated with us.”60 Doby later was also named to the Baseball World board.61

In 1997, the Indians retired Doby’s number 14 on the 50th anniversary of his American League debut.62 He became the fifth Cleveland player to be so honored, joining Bob Feller, Earl Averill, Mel Harder, and Lou Boudreau.63 A banner was displayed in left field on July 5, 1997, at Jacobs Field, showing Doby and Jackie Robinson, saying “50 years: 1947-1997.”64 At the ceremony, Hank Aaron said to Doby, “I want to thank you for all that you went through, because if it had not been for you, I wouldn’t have been able to have the career that I had.”65 In 1998, Doby was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee.66

Doby’s health plagued him in retirement. He battled a cancerous tumor in 1997 and had to have a kidney removed.67 Helyn, his wife of 55 years, died in 2001 after a six-month battle with cancer.68 Larry Doby died of cancer in Montclair, New Jersey, on June 18, 2003. More than 300 mourners attended his funeral at Trinity Presbyterian Church.69 He is buried in Montclair. He was honored posthumously by appearing on a U.S. postage stamp released in July 2012.70

An updated version of this biography is included in the book “The Newark Eagles Take Flight: The Story of the 1946 Negro League Champions” (SABR, 2019), edited by Frederick C. Bush and Bill Nowlin. It also appears in SABR’s “Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians” (University of Nebraska Press, 2014) and “Go-Go To Glory — The 1959 Chicago White Sox” (ACTA, 2009).

Notes

“That 1954 team was not only the best I ever covered, it was also the best group of guys,” Dudley continued. “They did everything together, on and off the field. They won together and lost together, although they didn’t lose very often.  There were no cliques. The 1954 Indians were a fun-loving team, a loose team, which was either another reason why they were so good, or the result of their being so good.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] 

“Don’t forget, Al Rosen broke a finger, and George Strickland was out for six weeks with a fractured jaw. But Vic Wertz (at first base) and Rudy Regalado (at third base) stepped in for Rosen and did well and Sam Dente played the best ball of his career when Strickland was out.  It was a great team.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Even after the Tribe was swept in four games, Dudley said, there were no excuses: “…there were no alibis, which should tell you something else about that team.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] 

Dudley was the eyes and ears of Indians fans for 20 years.  His ability to intertwine the call of the game with storytelling was a unique gift that only the greatest of broadcasters can provide to their listeners.  Even though four decades have passed since Dudley called the action on the field, he is still revered as the greatest announcer the team ever had. And he is closely associated with the great Indians teams of the 1940s and 1950s.    

James R. Dudley was born on September 27, 1909, in Alexandria, Virginia.  He was the fifth child born to Mr. and Mrs. William Dudley.  William Dudley owned his own farm in Gills Creek, located in the Blue Ridge foothills of Virginia. Jimmy was a good, all-around athlete as a child. Later he competed in baseball, football, and basketball at the University of Virginia.  He graduated from college with a degree in chemistry, which landed him a job at duPont.                   

But boredom set in while Dudley was at duPont, and a friend suggested that with his voice he might want to give radio a try.  Dudley took his friend’s advice and started his broadcasting career in Charlottesville, Virginia, in 1937. From there he bounced around the East, making stops in Washington, Syracuse, and Pittsburgh. Eventually he made his way to Chicago, and went to work at powerhouse station WIND in 1942. “When he was a Cubs announcer in those days, I was Hal Totten’s briefcase carrier,” he told the author of a book on broadcasters. “I was sort of his ‘gopher’ – I’d do the odd jobs – and once in a while he’d let me do play-by-play, but for no more than an inning, tops.”[fn]Curt Smith. Voices of the Game (Dallas: Taylor Trade Publishing, 1987), 165.[/fn] It was valuable experience for Dudley, but with World War II on, he went into the US Air Force, putting his career on hold while he flew in India.

Dudley moved to Cleveland after the war to announce hockey games for WJW, which also happened to be the Indians’ flagship station.  Fate smiled on him in June 1947 when he was assigned to broadcast a sandlot game at Cleveland Stadium being broadcast by the station. George Creedon, the head of Standard Brewing Company, which had just acquired the rights to air the Indians’ games, was listening to the broadcast and was impressed by Dudley. He told Indians owner Bill Veeck that he wanted Dudley to do the Indians’ games. Veeck agreed, and Dudley became the play-by-play announcer for the Indians in 1948.   

Dudley’s first on-air partner was Jack Graney, who had been an outfielder for the Indians in the Deadball Era. Graney was a fine player and an excellent announcer.  He was a master at the “re-creation” of major-league games and was the first former ballplayer to make the transition from the field to the announcer’s booth. “Jack was my first air partner and the one that did the most to help me,” said Dudley. “He told me that 85 percent of people who listen to baseball broadcasts either know more about the game or think they know more about it than you do.  And I never forgot what he said.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

For Dudley, taking over the announcing in 1948, was as if he were in baseball heaven. The Indians won the world championship that year after a thrilling American League pennant race and a one-game playoff victory over Boston after the Red Sox and Indians ended the regular season tied.  The Indians then overpowered the Boston Braves in six games in the World Series. “It was like living a dream,” Dudley recalled. “Talk about being at the right place at the right time. It was so hard to believe – the crowds flocking to the ballpark each day, the pressure, the Red Sox and Yankees nipping at our heels.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Dudley married Angelyn Hendrick in 1950, and they were married for 49 years.  They had two children, Douglas and Barbara.  

The Indians competed for the first ten years of Dudley’s tenure, winning the pennant again in 1954. A winning, competitive team naturally breeds interest, and Dudley turned into a favorite of the Indians faithful as more fans tuned in to listen to the broadcasts.  His smooth delivery coupled with his slow, easy rhythm was suitable to the leisurely pace of a baseball game. Dudley believed that his success, and that of other Southern-born announcers, came from their voices. “I think our accents appealed to people – they were sort of graceful, they fit in with the game,” he said. “Dixie speaking is slow, leisurely, it sort of moves with the weather. And baseball is that kind of game.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn] He was often compared with other broadcasters who were also from the South, among them Lindsey Nelson, Red Barber, Mel Allen, and Ernie Harwell. 

Like many announcers at the height of their popularity, the phrases Dudley used to describe the action became everyday lexicon. Dudley would say “the string is out” when the batter had a full count.  His homer call was “Going … going … gone.”  And his call of a double play usually was “Over to second, one away… back to first, it’s a double play!”

In 1957 Dudley was joined in the radio booth by Bob Neal. Neal was a stark contrast to Dudley’s “aw shucks” style, having once aspired to be an opera singer.  He had done play-by-play for the Cleveland Browns in the early 1950s. The pair despised one another, each detesting the other’s style and personality. They alternated innings, rarely occupying the booth at the same time.  “There was a game when Dudley had a terrible case of the stomach flu,” recalled late Cleveland broadcaster Nev Chandler.  “Dudley did the first three innings, and then Neal did the middle three. Dudley was in the men’s room, very sick.  The old broadcaster’s code is that you don’t leave the booth until your partner comes back.  But after the sixth, Neal left.  Come the seventh inning, Dudley was still sick. For the first couple of batters in the inning, all you heard was crowd noise, the crack of the bat, and the vendors yelling, ‘peanuts, popcorn.’  Finally, Dudley dragged himself into the booth and finished the game with no help from Neal.”[fn]Terry Pluto. The Curse of Rocky Colavito (New York: Simon and Schuster, 1994), 182-183.[/fn]   

Cleveland radio personality Pete Franklin recalled:  “In my first night at the Stadium, I sat between Jimmy Dudley and Bob Neal, who were doing the radio broadcasts in the 1960s. I had been introduced to them individually and had made small talk before the game.  I sat between them for two innings, three innings, then four innings. They never spoke to each other.  They would talk to me, and I’d talk to them. But Dudley and Neal wouldn’t even look at each other.  I felt a chill. They loathed each other.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]    

Neal was moved to TV in 1962, but was reunited with Dudley for three years in 1965. Gabe Paul had come to Cleveland as general manager in 1961.  Neal developed a relationship with Paul, and used it as leverage to oust Dudley in January 1968. The timing was not lost on Dudley, who realized it would be too late to catch on with another team. “One of Jimmy’s mistakes was that he didn’t socialize with Gabe Paul, but Bob Neal did,” said Cleveland sportswriter Hal Lebovitz.[fn]Terry Pluto, Akron Beacon Journal, August 3, 1997, C7.[/fn]

Dudley caught on with the Seattle Pilots in 1969.  He was teamed with Bill Schonely for one year, until the franchise moved to Milwaukee.

Dudley resided in Tucson, Arizona, in the offseason during and after his major-league career.  After Seattle, his name was mentioned whenever an opening for a broadcaster appeared.  But he never broadcast another major-league game.  He did a lot of work for the University of Arizona and the Tucson Toros of the Pacific Coast League, and served as a pitchman for several products in the Cleveland area. 

On August 3, 1997, Dudley was awarded the Ford C. Frick Award Broadcast Award. “Jimmy Dudley provided tremendous insight to Cleveland Indians baseball for countless listeners,” said Baseball Hall of Fame President Donald C. Marr, Jr. “Baseball history evolves many wonderful stories. Jimmy’s soothing and docile delivery, combined with his keen ability to tell these stories, captivated his listening audience. His name is added to an impressive list of previous recipients of the prestigious Ford C. Frick Award.”[fn]Baseball Hall of Fame news release, February 13, 1997 [/fn]

Dudley’s son, Doug, accepted the award for him. A statement issued for him by the Hall of Fame said: “I’m very honored to be the recipient of this fine award. I’m proud of what I accomplished as a broadcaster and am thrilled to join such a prestigious group of former winners.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]

Jimmy Dudley died on February 12, 1999, after suffering a stroke. He was survived by his wife, Angie, his two children, and two grandchildren. Many listeners can still hear Jimmy sign off Tribe games with his signature line, “lotsa good luck, ya heah?”

This biography is included in the book Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Joseph Wancho. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.

Dyck, of German extraction, was born in Omaha, Nebraska, on February 3, 1922, the son of Cornelius (Connie) Dyck, a bank teller, and his wife, Mary Jane.[fn]Thanks are due Jim Dyck, Jr., who through e-mails and a lengthy phone interview on January 3, 2011, provided a great deal of information and insight into his father’s career and life.[/fn] Jim was the second of three brothers, Jack the oldest and Art. Jack died in a car accident at the age of 18. Art followed Jim into professional baseball.[fn]“Second Wreck Victim of Year,” Jefferson City (Missouri) Post-Tribune, August 28, 1936.[/fn]  When Jim was young the family moved to Jefferson City, Missouri, where his father opened Dyck’s Bowling Alley. The business complemented Connie’s talent for bowling, a skill passed on to Jim and Art, who each came to be excellent bowlers.[fn]Father’s and sons’ talent in local sports is reflected in various issues of the Jefferson City Post-Tribune from the late 1930s and early 1940s.[/fn]  

Both Jim and Art fared well in baseball and basketball during high school and junior college.

While Jim was attending Jefferson City Junior College, his performance with the state amateur champion Jefferson City Red Birds attracted the attention of major-league scouts.[fn]Baseball Hall of Fame, Player File.[/fn] 

In September 1940 after a New York Yankees tryout camp in Kansas City with over 300 hopefuls, Dyck was one of 12 offered a contract by Yankees scout Bill Essick, who negotiated with Dyck to pitch for Norfolk (Nebraska) in the Class D Western League the following April.[fn]“Jimmy Dyck Signs Contract to Play for Yankee Farm Club,” Jefferson City Post-Tribune, September 18, 1940.[/fn]  From there, it took Dyck ten years to make the majors, his progress impeded by military service in World War II. 

In 1941 Dyck put together a respectable 9-6 record at Norfolk and played a few games in the outfield. The next spring he reported to the Fond du Lac Panthers in the Class D Wisconsin State League. While the right-hander’s pitching fell off, he showed talent with the bat; of the 80 games he played in, only 20 were as a pitcher and 42 were at third base as he sported a non-pitcher-like .273 batting average.[fn]Minor league information from http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=dyck–001jam[/fn]  That year Dyck also met his future wife. One evening a Panthers fan took her friend to a ballgame. After the game, the friend introduced Charlotte Jane Holmes to Dyck and they hit it off immediately.[fn]James Dyck, Jr. e-mail, January 1, 2011.[/fn]       

Dyck might have continued to climb through the Yankees organization but 20-year-olds stood little chance of continuing to play baseball in the early 1940s. World War II was in full stride and Dyck, like hundreds of other ballplayers, was called into the service, joining the Navy Air Corps as did his brother Art.

Jim Dyck, Jr. recalled that his father’s baseball skills served him well in basic training: “One of his proudest moments was setting the record for the obstacle course. The first obstacle was a log that everyone crawled under. He told me he did a standup slide under the log and came up running. He never looked back and set the record.”  Dyck moved on to officer’s candidate school, was commissioned an ensign, and was assigned to flight school. After winning his wings he was assigned to the USS Windham Bay, a support carrier in the Pacific. Before shipping out, Dyck married Charlotte on October 25, 1944. Their marriage spanned 54 years and produced two children, James Jr. and a daughter, Jamey.[fn]James Dyck, Jr. e-mail, December 30, 2010.[/fn]     

On the Windham Bay, Dyck flew new Corsair fighters to the larger battle carriers and returned with planes in need of repair. Dyck and his fellow Windham Bay pilots had the right to turn down any plane determined not to be flyable, a decision often based on less than precise information. These return flights were not always routine. Dyck recalled several instances when a fellow pilot took off never to be seen again. 

Dyck’s combat experience was limited to several isolated strafing runs on enemy-held islands. Like so many other servicemen, he shared little of his experiences. Observing how this ultimately affected his father’s playing career, Jim Jr. said, “I always felt being in the service cost him those years in the majors, and a pension as well. He ended up just a few months short of the necessary time to qualify but he was never bitter about that. He always took things in stride. He was just that kind of guy.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]    

Discharged after the 1945 season, Dyck was assigned in 1946 to Joplin in the Class C Western Association, where he hit .364 and earned a late-season promotion to Quincy of the Class B Three-I League. He was now a third baseman; pitching was no longer in his future. (The career of Jim’s brother Art took the opposite path; in 1943 he played first base in Class D as a Yankees’ farmhand, but when he returned to baseball after the war, it was as a pitcher. Art advanced as high as Triple-A Syracuse before his career ended after eight seasons in 1953.)

For Jim, progress was slow through the loaded Yankees organization. By 1947 he had played for Kansas City and Newark teams, New York’s top farm teams, where his performance, while solid, was not outstanding enough to warrant promotion to the majors. Dyck was with one of the most talent-competitive organizations in baseball.

On December 5, 1949, Dyck caught a break. He was acquired by the St. Louis Browns in the minor-league draft. Dyck had gone from one of the top organizations in the majors to one of the poorest, but after two solid seasons with the Browns’ San Antonio farm club in the Texas League, batting .321 in 1950 and hitting 27 home runs in 1951, he made the major leagues. 

Dyck often played ball during the winter. After the season, he and Charlotte traveled to Venezuela, where he began play in the Venezuela League and became caught up in a politically turbulent situation. The Venezuelan president was assassinated in Caracas and within hours rumors swirled about the capital that foreigners staying at the Hotel Savoy were celebrating his death. A contingent of police swept down on the Savoy, gathered up 15 players, herded them into trucks and took them to the local police station. Along the way, as The Sporting News reported, they were, “punched, shoved, herded along with the flat side of a machete.”  The situation seemed ominous as the police were armed with pistols, rifles, and machine guns. At the station, once their identity as baseball players was verified they were returned to the hotel. Within days of the incident, most of the players left the country despite apologies from local government officials and “$500 to forget the incident.”[fn]“Venezuelan Cops Roughed U.S. Players, Says Hurler,” The Sporting News, December 13, 1950.[/fn]  Unlike most, Dyck let the incident pass. He explained, “They apologized for their mistake and I played in Caracas again. Can’t beat the climate, the pay and there is no travel.”[fn]“Dyck Gem in Browns’ ‘Jim-Dandy’ Garden,” The Sporting News, May 21, 1952.[/fn]     

Dyck started spring training with the Browns in 1951 but was sent back to the Missions. The team again made it into the postseason playoffs. Dyck was a major offensive force, leading the league with 127 RBIs, and was named the league’s Most Valuable Player. The 6-foot-2, 200-pound right-handed hitter slugged 27 home runs.         

Dyck got a call-up to the Browns after the season along with teammate Bob Turley, who had been named the league’s Pitcher of the Year. They made their major-league debuts in the last week of the season as the Browns were wrapping up a last-place finish. Dyck played his first game on September 27, starting at third base against the Detroit Tigers in front of just 560 fans. He went 0-for-4. Altogether he played in four games, getting one hit in 15 at-bats. At the age of 29, Dyck had reached the big leagues.     

Once again Dyck was invited to the Browns’ spring-training camp with an outside chance to make the team. While he had exhibited speed and hitting skill, there seemed to be a question about his fielding. His ability to make the team was enhanced when several outfielders, including Roy Sievers, were injured during exhibition games. Manager Rogers Hornsby shifted Dyck from third base to the outfield; he responded with timely hitting and ability in the field and made the Opening Day roster.

The Browns, long the doormat of the American League, were in dire financial straits at the time. Fewer than 300,000 fans had come to see them play in 1951. Thanks to owner Bill Veeck’s numerous promotional efforts, attendance improved in 1952 but not to a financially sustainable level. This and a seventh-place finish led to another poor season for the Browns. 

But Dyck had a decent rookie season. On May 2 he hit his first major-league home run, off Bill Henry of the Boston Red Sox. As the year progressed, Dyck was shifted to third as others were found wanting at the position. His play improved to the point that new manager Marty Marion called him “a standout,” who “gets better with every game.”[fn]“Coleman Joins Return Parade of Old Brownies,” The Sporting News, August 4, 1952.[/fn] In July and August he hit eight home runs, capped off by a two-homer game against Chicago on August 12. The first home run tied the game in the eighth, the second won in in the 11th.

Continuing to do well, Dyck was honored with a “Jim Dyck Day” on September 14 at Sportsman’s Park between games of a doubleheader with the Athletics. A contingent from Jefferson City, the state capital, including Missouri’s lieutenant governor, was on hand and Dyck was presented a red Buick and fishing gear. The Browns were swept by Chicago.[fn]“Car, Gifts for Jim Dyck – Jim Dykes Wins Twin Bill,” The Sporting News, September 24, 1952.[/fn] 

For the season Dyck hit .269. He was second on the team to Bob Nieman in home runs with 15 and his .450 slugging average placed him among the top 15 in the American League. Dyck was named to The Sporting News’ 1952 Rookie All-Star Team alongside such other notables as Eddie Mathews, Hoyt Wilhelm, and Dick Groat.

The Browns were satisfied with Dyck’s performance. Marion observed, “Dyck is one of those ‘naturals’ a baseball manager dreams about. He plays any position – and plays it well – and while he is not a bulldog type … Jim’s aggressive in his own way.”[fn]“Rookie Award to Courtney Lauded by Manager Marion,” The Sporting News, October 1, 1952.[/fn] Bill Veeck repeatedly described Dyck as one of his set players for the coming season. He backed up his praise with practical application. Dyck and seven other players were invited to Veeck’s office during the offseason for “lunch,” which turned into an impromptu contract-signing session, with Veeck, always the promoter, singing the praises of all concerned and arguing the Browns chances for the coming year.[fn]“Veeck Serves Contracts at Lunch; Seven Wield Pen at Mass Signing,” The Sporting News, January 14, 1953.[/fn]       

Dyck went into the 1953 season with an upbeat attitude: “I’ve come to the conclusion that next year I should do all right. After listening to the wise boys explain that it’s to a pitcher’s advantage to learn the league and know the men he’s facing, so that he can improve himself after, say, a year, I’ve decided that the same theory works in the case of the batters. What’s wrong with a batter studying the opposing pitchers and getting to know them better, so that he learns their style and knows how to hit against them after that first year.”[fn]“Veeck Beams Over Gains; Stresses Star Young Trio,” The Sporting News, October 8, 1952.[/fn]  While he planned to fish during the offseason, he also looked beyond his playing days, opening a billiard parlor with his father in Jefferson City.[fn]“Bill Veeck Claiming Post-Season Title for Adding Players,” The Sporting News, November 12, 1952.[/fn]     

All the encouraging offseason talk could not mask the inevitable truth that Veeck was no longer able to sustain the Browns if they remained in St. Louis. Word spread that he was actively trying to shift the franchise to Milwaukee or Baltimore. Stymied by the intransigence of American League owners, Veeck was forced to sell out – but not without enduring a lame-duck season as a target of ire for outraged Browns fans.

The 1953 season also was a disaster for Dyck. He got off to a slow start, and by early May was hitting in the .140’s with just one extra-base hit. On May 6 he was still mired in a slump when Marion gave lightly regarded reliever Bobo Holloman a start against the Philadelphia A’s. Holloman had an 0-1 record with an 8.44 ERA, but threw a no-hitter in his first major-league start, before 2,473 fans. While most of the defensive focus was on a nice fielding play by shortstop Billy Hunter in the eighth to snuff out a hit, Holloman didn’t forget an earlier play made while the game was still scoreless. When he said, “I owe it all to God, Hunter, and Dyck,” Holloman was referring to Dyck’s “leaping, twisting catch” at the left-field wall in the second inning of a ball off the bat of Gus Zernial.[fn]“Bobo Holloman Scheduled To Face A’s Again Tuesday,” Hartford Courant, May 8, 1953; “Holloman, Facing Axe, Hurls No-Hitter,” The Sporting News, May 13, 1953.[/fn](About two months later Holloman was out of the majors, his no-hitter the only complete game he ever threw in the big leagues.)

Dyck’s  performance failed to improve appreciably. Marion thought his poor hitting might have been related to not having played winter ball. “Last year he came to us after playing winter ball and he was real sharp. Maybe that has been the difference in his play,” the manager said.[fn]“New Third Sacker Ready for Browns – It’s Mr. Shortstop!” The Sporting News, June 17, 1953.[/fn]  By the end of May Dyck had been was replaced in the starting lineup and played sporadically thereafter. There was one highlight: On July 16, with only two home runs to his credit, Dyck came to bat against the Yankees at Sportsman’s Park. Clint Courtney and Dick Kryhoski had just hit back-to-back home runs. Dyck hit a third. The three homers in succession tied a major-league record that was not broken until the Milwaukee Braves hit four in a row in 1961.[fn]“Brownies Homer Binge Knots Two Major Marks,” The Sporting News, July 29, 1953.[/fn]  

One of Dyck’s teammates that season was the storied Satchel Paige. Paige, as Dyck recalled after his career, marched to his own beat, having just a passing knowledge of his teammates. Dyck was out of the lineup the day after he had had a particularly good day at the plate and happened to sit next to Paige in the bullpen. Paige said to nobody in particular, “Why aren’t they playing that boy who was in left yesterday?” Dyck responded. “Well, that was me.” “Then you ought to be out there today,” the blasé Paige advised.[fn]Phone interview with Jim Dyck, Jr. January 3, 2011.[/fn]   

The Browns stumbled through the ’53 season, at one point losing 14 games in a row. With their crowds frequently under 5,000, it became apparent that they were not long for St. Louis. On September 27, the last day of the season, with the team down 2-1 to Chicago and with two outs in the bottom of the 11th inning, Dyck came to bat and flied out to center field, thus becoming the last player to ever bat for the hapless team. As if to epitomize the futility of the franchise, the Browns had run out of baseballs during the game and had to use what was left of scuffed-up balls. The ball Dyck hit had a large cut in it from previous use. Fans who had booed the team all season long had to wait only two days to learn that the St. Louis Browns were no more. Under pressure from the rest of the league’s owners, Veeck sold out to a group that got permission from the owners to move east and become the Baltimore Orioles.

If the Browns finished on a dismal note, so did Dyck. After he had exhibited such promise the year before, his average had fallen off to .213, with just nine home runs. Under new manager Jimmie Dykes in Baltimore, his position was tenuous. The manager seemed to give Dyck short shrift, saying that “out of Don Lenhardt, Jim Dyck, and Dick Kokos and about 20 youngsters we’re bringing to camp [we] ought to come up with a good left fielder.”[fn]“Oriole Ducat Sale Given New Speed by Spieler Dykes,” The Sporting News, January 20, 1954.[/fn] The year before, Dyck had been counted a mainstay. One of 12 outfielders on the Orioles’ spring-training roster, Dyck found himself in a highly competitive environment. And he was the oldest.

The 1954 season was just four days old when Dyck was traded to Cleveland for infielder Bob Kennedy. While Indians manager Al Lopez indicated that he would use Dyck as insurance in the outfield and as a pinch-hitter, the likes of Larry Doby, Al Smith, and others made him expendable and he was sent to Richmond before getting into a game. Called up late in the season Dyck pinch-hit twice, drawing a walk once and singling against the Detroit Tigers.

Oddly enough, Dyck’s two appearances for Cleveland paid him more per at-bat than any other appearance in his professional career. By the time of his recall, Cleveland had clinched the pennant. For having been on the Indians, even though briefly, Dyck was awarded $1,500 from the players’ portion of the World Series revenue. For Dyck that translated to $750 per plate appearance with Cleveland.

As the 1955 season dawned, Dyck faced the same level of competition in the Cleveland outfield. He was again expendable, and was sold outright to the Indianapolis Indians of the American Association. Dyck proceeded to tear the league up in an effort to get back to the majors. He was leading the league in hitting in early July and Cleveland moved to recall him. The Indians were in the thick of another pennant race and needed pinch-hitting help. But Dyck found his path to Cleveland blocked by baseball bureaucracy. Commissioner Ford Frick voided the recall because a team could not sell a player’s contract to a minor-league affiliate and buy him back until other teams had a chance to obtain him in the draft. He had originally been sold to Indianapolis because he had already been optioned the maximum three times. Dyck pleaded his case with Frick, arguing that he was being deprived of a pay raise and a possible share of World Series money. Frick told Dyck that rules were rules and had to be enforced.[fn]“Feller Beats Drums Against Dyck Deal,” The Sporting News, July 13, 1955.[/fn] Indians general manager Hank Greenberg, embarrassed by his miscue, promised Dyck that he would try to sell him to another major-league team. Greenberg made good on his promise and arranged Dyck’s sale to his former team, now the Orioles. Dyck left the American Association with a .378 average – more than 40 points higher than the eventual batting champ. (Dyck had only 78 games and 317 plate appearances, not enough to qualify for the title.)The Orioles, in last place and in need of offensive help, immediately put him into the lineup.

Dyck picked up with the Orioles right where he left off with Indianapolis. He crafted a 13-game hitting streak, and by the end of July was hitting .359. Among the reasons for the resurgence he credited playing just one position, outfield, and hitting to all fields, instead of trying to pull the ball in every at-bat, his new approach becoming the proper one for the cavernous Memorial Stadium.[fn]“Triandos Betters Orioles’ Home Record With Nine,” The Sporting News, July 27, 1955.[/fn]  Eventually he cooled off and ended the season with a .279 batting average. On September 19 he hit a grand slam against the White Sox; it was the last home run of his major-league career.

Dyck led the Orioles in hitting during 1956 spring training, but was one of many vying for a position on the team. At 34, his age and lack of power worked against him. Manager Paul Richards, also the general manager, was on the lookout for young prospects and power hitters, and saw Dyck as expendable. Dyck later said, “I could see the handwriting on the wall in Baltimore.”[fn]“In the Clutch,” Jefferson City Post-Tribune, May 22, 1956.[/fn]       

Off to a slow start and playing sparingly during the first month of the season, Dyck was sold to the Cincinnati Redlegs. He welcomed the trade to a team that was contending for the pennant. “This club certainly has the potential to go all the way,” Dyck wrote to the Jefferson City Post-Tribune. He said Redlegs manager Birdie Tebbetts had advised that Dyck would be his number one pinch-hitter against left-handerd. Optimistically, he said, “If I can adjust myself to coming off the bench cold and get a few base hits in the clutch … I may be here until I am 40.”[fn]Ibid.[/fn]  

Not about to dent the starting outfield of Gus Bell, Wally Post, and Frank Robinson, Dyck had to adapt to being a bench player, a tough adjustment for one who had for the most part been a regular. It was an adjustment he could not make. After 11 at-bats and just one hit – as well as being thrown out at home three times, Dyck was sent to the Nashville Vols (Southern Association) as partial payment for infielder Tommy Brown. His last game in the majors came on July 22 as a pinch-hitter against the Pittsburgh Pirates. He struck out.

Dyck played only one game for the Vols. As his re-entry to the majors in 1955 had been marred by a bureaucratic mishap, so was his exit. When Brown reported to the Redlegs with a sore arm, the deal was nullified. It took the Redlegs two weeks to sort out the resultant muddle, and they eventually sent Dyck to the Seattle Rainiers in the Pacific Coast League.[fn]“Redlegs Finally Send Dyck to Minor Leagues,” Hartford Courant, July 26, 1956. [/fn]    

Dyck spent the rest of his playing career in the PCL, either for the Rainiers or the Vancouver Mounties. Jim Jr. recalled what his father said of those years: “My dad played because he loved the game. I don’t think he ever really grew up. He always said he never worked, he was paid to play a kids’ game. Back when he was playing, lots of players ended their careers playing in the PCL. They made good money in the PCL and the quality of the baseball was major league.”[fn]E-mail from Jim Dyck, Jr., January 1, 2011.[/fn] 

Dyck’s last season was with Vancouver in 1961. He was a player-coach under future Orioles manager Billy Hitchcock. At the age of 39, playing part-time, Dyck retired after the season. He had coaching offers, and the Dodgers organization considered him for the manager’s position with Spokane, but he turned them all down and happily retired to the bowling business. As much as he enjoyed playing, he shunned coaching, which he believed would require him to get into the political aspect of the game. Perhaps most importantly, he had two young children, James Jr. (born in 1953), and daughter Jamey (1954), and he felt that being absent on long road trips would not be conducive to their upbringing. For the Dycks it was the correct decision. His son recalled the many times he spent with his father bowling, fishing, or hunting, creating lifetime memories.[fn]Dyck phone interview, January 3, 2011.[/fn]            

While playing in the Pacific Coast League Dyck had gained an appreciation for the Northwest. He and his brother Art decided to move to Cheney, Washington, where they opened a bowling alley. Eventually Jim Jr. joined the business. Dyck’s running of Cheney Bowl was in keeping with his lifelong interest in bowling. As a young man he had won the Missouri all-state events when he was 17, and his skills never left him. In 1996 he was elected to the Spokane Bowling Hall of Fame. 

On January 11, 1999, at the age of 76, Dyck died of cancer. He was survived by his wife, Charlotte, and their two children.

Dyck was not a major-league star, but he loved and respected the game, and in 21 years he was never kicked out of a game for improper conduct. He served his country to the detriment of his playing career. And in a profession where ego often trumps personal obligations, Dyck placed family as the highest priority, leaving a legacy more powerful than any batting exploit.

This biography is included in the book Pitching to the Pennant: The 1954 Cleveland Indians (University of Nebraska Press, 2014), edited by Joseph Wancho. For more information, or to purchase the book from University of Nebraska Press, click here.