As a player, Amaro was known more for fielding than hitting. In 940 big-league games, he batted .234 with a slugging percentage of just .292, including eight home runs. Four of those homers came during the 1964 season, in which he also won a Gold Glove for his play at shortstop – even though he was sharing the position in Philadelphia with Bobby Wine.

Rubén Amaro Mora was one of the rare big-leaguers whose parents both played pro baseball – in fact, that distinction may be unique. Santos Amaro (1908-2001) played 14 winter seasons in Cuba from 1936-37 to 1949-50.1 He was in Mexico during the summers from the late 1920s through 1955.2 He was also a manager in both his native land and his adopted home and eventually became a member of the Baseball Hall of Fame in each nation.3 Santos Amaro was known as El Canguro – “The Kangaroo” – for his size and leaping ability. In Mexico, Rubén Amaro was sometimes called “Cangurito.” He too became a member of the Mexican Baseball Hall of Fame in 1986. Rubén and Santos became the first father-son duo to be so honored.

Santos had come to Mexico with a traveling Cuban ballclub as early as 1928. In 1929, he met a young woman named Josefina Mora (1910-2007), a member of the Vera Cruz Women’s Professional Baseball Club.4 They got married and had two sons. Mario was born in 1931 in Cuba. Rubén was born in Nuevo Laredo, Mexico on January 6, 1936.5

Santos Amaro was of Portuguese and Moorish descent – the resemblance between him and Rubén was marked. Though his facial features did not fit the “African” stereotype, his coffee-colored skin meant that Santos encountered racism while playing with a barnstorming team in the United States in 1932. By one account, he did not wish to return.6 “But in 1935, he went on an eighty-game, fourteen-state tour of the United States with. . .La Junta de Nuevo Laredo.”7 Santos was not allowed to play much while in Texas. The prejudice he faced in the U.S. apparently killed his desire to play in the Negro Leagues. Yet Afro-Cubans faced bias even at home – Mexico was a more welcoming environment. Several black Cuban players married Mexican women; one was Pedro Orta, whose son Jorge became a major-leaguer from 1972 to 1987.8

As Rubén told author Stuart Gustafson many years later, his parents were a study in contrasts. Santos was tall (1.92 meters, or roughly 6-feet-3½). Josefina was petite (5’1”) and fair (her grandparents on both sides were Spanish). Rubén and Mario wound up in between at 5-feet-10½. “Doña Pepa” was the one with whom the boys practiced their baseball skills, because Santos stressed education above all.9

The Amaro family traveled between Mexico and Cuba until settling permanently in Mexico in 1951. Rubén’s godfather was another great Cuban player, Hall of Famer Martín Dihigo. El Inmortal was a teammate of Santos Amaro’s in Mexico (and a fellow member of the Masons). While the boys were in Havana, their baseball playmates included two future big-league pitchers: the Pascual brothers, Carlos and Camilo. Mario Amaro was also a skillful player but focused instead on medicine. He remained in Cuba for some time after 1951 to continue his schooling.

Rubén – whose favorite player growing up was Roberto Ávila, the Mexican star of the Cleveland Indians – became a star for Mexico in national and international amateur competition. He took part in the Amateur World Series in Caracas, Venezuela in 1953. In March 1954, he helped his homeland win a silver medal at the Central American and Caribbean Games in Mexico City.10

Before the 1954 season, the St. Louis Cardinals signed Amaro as an amateur free agent. The scout was Tufie Hashem, who in 1949 had become general manager of the minor-league club in Mexicali, Baja California. “In 1954, when the Cardinals’ organization extended a working agreement to Mexicali, Hashem came up with his first find, Ruben Amaro.”11 Amaro also noted the involvement of Mexicali’s player-manager, Art Lilly.

“The Cardinals signed me not for my glove,” said Amaro, “but for my bat. I was about the same size as Bobby Ávila, and we both had pretty good power. I was originally an outfielder. I did not start playing shortstop until 1953, after our regular shortstop for the Mexican team broke his leg.”

Amaro began his pro career with Mexicali, which was then in the Arizona-Texas League (Class C). He played in only 93 games, though – “the manager for Bisbee took me out with a rolling slide and broke my fibula.” That summer, Amaro also got a brief taste of action with Veracruz in the Mexican League – where his father was player-manager. Rubén went 2 for 5 in four games but never returned to that league in future.12

Amaro rejoined Mexicali for the 1955 season, and his first cousin Mario Amaro Romay was one of his teammates. Rubén hit 18 homers – he never even approached double digits in any other season – while batting .309. His 1959 Topps baseball card observed, “In the first couple of years in pro ball, he had the tendency to overrun grounders due to his eagerness.” Over time, though, Amaro became known for his smooth, gliding movement in the field.

Amaro played winter ball in Mexico off and on during his career. After his first pro summer, he joined Hermosillo in La Liga de la Costa del Pacífico, but was traded to Mazatlán – “Hermosillo had too many shortstops,” he said. He returned to Mazatlán for three more seasons but rejected offers to play for the Veracruz Sharks in the 1958-59 season.13 Higher education was the reason: he studied business and accounting at La Academía Comercial Veracruz for three years.14 “The director of the school was a very strict and wonderful woman named Juanita Folgueras,” Amaro recalled. “The school is also known by her name. It was a four-year school, but I did not finish. I promised my father that I would, and I still may!”

Amaro spent the summers of 1956 and 1957 with Houston (Double A). Over half a century later, he recalled that he was ready to quit because of the racial and ethnic taunts of some Texas League fans – “the vituperation,” in his own words. Jim Crow laws were also humiliating (in fact, Shreveport didn’t even let black players take the field in 1957, under a Louisiana state law then in effect that banned interracial sports). But he stuck with it after Santos Amaro calmly reminded his son that he had originally let him leave school on the condition that he do whatever it took to reach the majors.15

For better and for worse, two former big-leaguers had a major impact on Amaro’s development in 1956. The first was Billy Jurges, who was a special infield instructor at the Cardinals’ advance camp that February.16 “He told me two things that stayed with me forever,” Amaro recalled. “One was that in the first three days of camp, I had to know all my pitchers by first and last names.” The bigger picture was to know the hurlers’ tendencies and be positioned accordingly. Gene Mauch, who later managed Amaro with the Phillies, viewed Rubén as one of the best shortstops he ever saw in this regard. “The other was that I had to know I was going to get the batter out at first.” In other words, he had to catalogue all the batters and how well they ran too.

During that advance camp, The Sporting News said of Amaro, “[He] has shown exceptional fielding skill at shortstop. He glides around the infield with speed and deftness. If he can hit he’ll be on some major league club before long.”17 That’s where the other influence came to bear – Houston manager Harry Walker. Throughout his long career as a skipper, “Harry the Hat” was known for his inveterate remolding of batters’ swings in his own spray-hitting style. It helped some players, but Amaro was not one of them. “Those two years in Houston changed me as a player,” he said. “I became a tremendous shortstop, but after working with Harry, I couldn’t hit a ball 250 feet.”

Still, Rubén moved up to Triple-A Rochester in 1958. Although he was hitting just .200 in the first few months of the season, the big club called him up to St. Louis in late June. “Eddie Kasko was not only down below .200 at bat but had slipped in the field.”18 Amaro became just the 12th player born in Mexico to reach the majors.

When the rookie set foot on the field at Busch Stadium for the first time on June 28, it became extra special – thanks to his teammate, the great Stan Musial. As author Milton Jamail wrote in 2001, “Ask Rubén Amaro Sr. for the highlight of his long career and he does not hesitate a second.”19 He had been issued uniform pants that were two sizes too big, and Musial asked the clubhouse man to find a proper pair. As George Vecsey added in his 2011 biography of Musial, “Stan the Man” also graciously made the rookie feel at home with memories of playing against Santos Amaro while barnstorming in Cuba years before.20

Over the rest of the ’58 season, Amaro appeared in 40 games for the Cardinals, hitting .224 in 76 at-bats. That December, St. Louis traded him to Philadelphia for Chuck Essegian. “We had just finished our tour of Japan,” said Amaro. “I think they traded me as soon as I got off the plane.” Roy Hamey, general manager of the Phillies, wanted to light a fire under his shortstop, Chico Fernández.21 Amaro spent the entire 1959 season at Triple-A Buffalo; meanwhile the Phillies used Joe Koppe ahead of Fernández at short.

In June 1960, however, Koppe got hurt and Philadelphia couldn’t swing a trade for another shortstop. So they called up Amaro and made him the regular.22 Upon joining the Phillies, Rubén became just the third native of Mexico to play for the club.23 He formed a double-play combo with Tony Taylor, the Cuban second baseman obtained in trade that May. Soon thereafter, Philadelphia beat writer Allen Lewis wrote in The Sporting News, “The addition of shortstop Ruben Amaro tightened the infield considerably. The Mexican was drawing raves from the Connie Mack Stadium fans for the finest shortstop play they had seen by a Phillies player in many years.”24

Amaro remained the primary shortstop for the Phillies in 1961, setting a big-league career high in games played (135). It was also his most productive season in terms of offense, featuring his best on-base percentage (.351) and OPS (.700). That April, Gene Mauch said, “There’s no shortstop in the league playing better ball defensively than Amaro. Ernie Banks might have better hands, but he isn’t a better shortstop.”25

On December 9, 1961, Amaro married Judith Herman. They had met at the gourmet cheese shop that Judy’s mother ran in Philadelphia’s Reading Terminal Market.26 In 2008, Judy also said, “My sister Marlene taught English to Pancho Herrera and Tony Taylor. Ruben would drive them to our house for the lessons.”27

Rubén and Judy had two sons, both of whom became baseball players. David was drafted in the 24th round by the Chicago Cubs in 1984. He played that summer in short-season Class A ball and eight games in the Mexican League in 1985. David’s sons Robert and Andrew were both drafted by the Phillies out of high school but chose college instead; Andrew played Class A ball for the Phillies in 2015.28 Rubén Jr. played in the major leagues from 1991 through 1998 and then moved into the front office of the Phillies. He became the club’s general manager in 2008 and remained in that position through September 2015. In an unusual move, he then joined the coaching staff of the Boston Red Sox.

In January 1962, the Associated Press wrote, “Amaro, a brilliant fielder, is the keystone of the Phillies infield.” Gene Mauch said, “Amaro must have been the most improved player in the majors last year. He moved in a couple of steps at short and became a star. He also became a tough hitter.”29

That May, Amaro (who had previously been in the Mexican Army) was recalled to service in the U.S. Army. The Phillies called up Bobby Wine, who had played four games for them in 1960, and made him the interim starter. Wine continued to play a lot after Amaro returned in late July. He performed well enough for the Phillies to consider trading Amaro during the offseason.30 Instead, Mauch juggled them for three years more.

Amaro returned to winter ball in Mexico for the 1962-63 season. He started with Jalapa of the Veracruz League, which was managed by his father. He also got his first taste of managing. “There was an all-star game between the young players and the veterans, and I got to lead the young guys.” But when the governor of Veracruz state withdrew financial support for the Jalapa franchise, it folded, and the league’s other three teams followed suit.31 Amaro thereupon joined the Yaquis of Ciudad Obregón in La Liga Invernal de Sonora.

Back with the Phillies in 1963, Amaro got off to a cold start with the bat, and his fielding was still not quite up to his brilliant standard of 1961. Therefore, Mauch gave Wine another shot.32 Wine hit well for a few weeks, and though he tailed off severely at the plate after that, he continued to get more shortstop duty than Amaro overall. During the four seasons that Wine and Amaro were teammates, from 1962 through 1965, they split the shortstop duties as follows:

Rubén Amaro and Bobby Wine: Selected Averages, 1962-65

Source: Baseball-Reference.com

It was an interesting pattern – not a true platoon in that both men were righthanded batters who didn’t contribute much with the stick. Both were excellent defenders who positioned themselves well, though Wine was known more for his stronger arm and Amaro for his greater range and quick release. Both also filled in at third base; Amaro also played a significant amount at first base, including seven starts during the 1964 season.

Going into spring training in 1964, Mauch called Wine the first-stringer and Amaro the backup.33 The following month, though, he was more ambivalent. He said, “They can both play in the field and, although they are different types, they are both among the best there is with the glove. We can’t lose anything there whichever one is the regular.” The skipper thought, however, that Wine had more upside with the bat.34

As it developed, Wine played 52% of the innings at short, Amaro 42%, and the scraps went to Cookie Rojas. In 1989, as part of his retrospective series on the ’64 Phillies, Stan Hochman of the Philadelphia Daily News offered a witty view of how the shortstop tandem was used that year. “When it was over, manager Gene Mauch had wrung eight homers and 68 RBI out of his shortstop(s), shuffling Amaro and Wine in and out of the lineup based on biorhythms only he detected, based on the opposing pitcher, the day of the week, the phases of the moon.”35

There was more to it than hunches, though. In late May, Mauch cited the need to give both Wine and Tony Taylor some rest. He said, “There’s more mental pressure on the second baseman and shortstop than on any other regular except the catcher. Taylor and Wine have played almost every inning since spring training.” Allen Lewis added, “Ruben Amaro, who can play any infield position expertly, has done everything Mauch asked of him and done it well.”36

Wine started 70 of the first 97 games at short, but then fell below the Mendoza Line, and Mauch turned more to Amaro as the summer wore on. Late in the season, Lewis wrote that Amaro was back in his top form of 1961 in the field and was hitting respectably too. Rubén himself credited being in a good rhythm with regular play. Oddly enough, he said that a spring wrist injury helped his swing.37

Amaro also made a unique contribution to how the history of the 1964 Philadelphia Phillies was recorded with the series of letters he wrote to his father and mother at their home in Veracruz. Those letters possessed a special spirit, but are lost to history because Doña Pepa threw them out while cleaning house in 1971. Amaro ordered $1,800 worth of World Series tickets for his family before the Phillies collapsed down the stretch. He never did get to a World Series as a player, though he was present as first-base coach when the Phillies finally triumphed in 1980. “We won and it was fabulous, extraordinary – but nothing ever is going to make up for our loss in 1964.” He drew a parallel with another team he served as coach, the 1984 Chicago Cubs, who won the first two games of the NL Championship Series that year but couldn’t close it out. “We had a banner year, but it was devastating at the end when we lost three games to San Diego and couldn’t go to the Series.” The good Catholic summed it up this way: “When the saints turn their back, there is simply no way you are going to win.”

After the sad ending to the season, Amaro received some consolation in the form of the National League Gold Glove award for shortstops. In those days, the players cast the ballots, and out of 251 total, Amaro got 59, edging Leo Cárdenas of Cincinnati, teammate Wine (the 1963 winner), and veteran Roy McMillan of the New York Mets. The Sporting News said, “The award was long overdue for Amaro.”38

There was renewed talk after the ’64 season that the Phillies might look to deal either Wine or Amaro to another team.39 That did not come to pass for another year, though. On November 29, 1965, Philadelphia traded Amaro to the New York Yankees for utility infielder Phil Linz. The Yankees thought Linz would not develop into a regular shortstop; the Phillies viewed him as a bench reinforcement who might become something more. Yankees manager Ralph Houk said, “We know Amaro isn’t much of a bet to win the batting title, but we know he is truly a first-class infielder.”40

“I did not play much winter ball after getting married,” Amaro said. “I worked for ADD Air Freight International and later for Freihofer’s bakery.” But because Amaro had not played much for Philadelphia in 1965, he wanted to return to Ciudad Obregón. Economics prevented it, however; “Mexican rules dictate[d] that a major league player must be paid at the same rate as in the United States. ‘My team couldn’t possibly pay me by league rules,’ Amaro explained. ‘The team’s entire budget for the season was 72,000 pesos, or approximately $6,000.’”41

Amaro was the main candidate to step into the shoes of a Yankee hero, Tony Kubek, who had retired in January 1966. Although he became the first Mexican to play in the majors for the Yankees, he got into just 14 games with New York that year. He injured his knee in the fifth game of the season, colliding with left fielder Tom Tresh on a blooper off the bat of Brooks Robinson. He underwent surgery and did not return until September. The Bronx Bombers finished in last place in the American League that year, one of the worst seasons in the proud franchise’s history.

Bobby Murcer (originally a shortstop for the Yankees) went into the Army for a two-year hitch in 1967. Amaro returned to play 130 games, overcoming the long layoff and some lingering mental concerns to earn some consideration as Comeback Player of the Year.42 Houk gave him a career high 470 plate appearances. In 1968, however, New York moved Tom Tresh to shortstop and Amaro became a seldom-used reserve. He came to the plate just 50 times in 47 games, getting just five hits.

Perhaps the most interesting news concerning him that year came off the field. The 1968 Summer Olympics were held in Mexico City, and Amaro took a principled stand, supporting a potential boycott of the Games if South Africa (then under apartheid) were allowed to participate. He came under fire in his homeland’s press but did not change his position.43 The International Olympic Committee eventually decided to continue its ban of South Africa, and the boycotts did not take place.

In November 1968, the California Angels purchased Amaro’s contract from the Yankees for $25,000. They wanted a capable veteran backup for Jim Fregosi, who had tired after the All-Star break.44 That winter, in need of action, Amaro got back to Ciudad Obregón.

During the 1969 season, Jim Bouton (a teammate with the Yankees from 1966-68) praised Amaro as he wrote his baseball diary, Ball Four. “He’s the kind of guy, well, there’s a dignity to him and everyone likes and respects him.” Again, however, Rubén’s playing time was scanty – just 36 plate appearances in 41 games. Yet he helped the ballclub in other ways – notably as mentor to a countryman, young Aurelio Rodríguez. In fact, Amaro and Rodríguez’s father had been on the same Mexican amateur team in 1953.45

A few weeks after the 1969 season ended, the Angels released Amaro. They offered him a job managing in their minor-league system, but he still wanted to be on the field. Thus he played winter ball again, this time with the Culiacán Tomateros.46 The following spring, he signed with the San Diego Padres. “If I made good, I wanted $25,000, but they didn’t agree. So I called Gene Mauch,” who was then managing the Montreal Expos. “Gene said if I made his team, I would earn whatever I made with the Angels.”

Amaro was an insurance policy at shortstop; the incumbent – none other than Bobby Wine – had an elbow problem that concerned the Expos.47 “He also had a neck problem,” Amaro added. Rubén wasn’t able to stick, though. “That winter, I fell on my shoulder in a rundown with Aurelio Rodríguez. I got to spring training and I couldn’t throw. The minute I left camp, I was okay.”

There was no job opening as a player-coach for the Expos at Triple-A.48 An opportunity arose in his homeland, but things turned out differently. “I had a two-year contract to manage the Mexico City Reds,” Amaro recalled. “I had a brand-new Ford station wagon, and it had temporary tags. I didn’t want to get to the border with those, so I went to Harrisburg to get plates. I started driving down and a highway patrolman stopped me. I wondered what I had done, and he told me that I had an urgent call from Mr. Paul Owens.” The Phillies’ farm director wanted Amaro to return to the organization. “So I drove to Eugene, Oregon instead of my country.”

Amaro played in 106 games in 1970 for Philadelphia’s top farm club. That July, he became a player-coach.49 He spent one last winter as a player in Mexico, again with Culiacán. During his final summer as a pro, 1971, he got into 17 games for Eugene and 11 with the Double-A affiliate, the Reading Phillies.

In 1970, Gene Mauch had called Amaro an excellent managing prospect, saying, “He’s got it up here” while tapping his forehead.50 “The owner in Eugene wanted me to be manager,” Amaro said. “They had guys like Greg Luzinski [1971] and Mike Schmidt [1972]. I might have become a major-league manager. But it was too early for me,” he added, referring to his ethnicity.

Rubén became a full-time manager for the first time in the winter of 1971-72 with Culiacán. He was celebrating the team’s victory in the first half of the season at the ranch of owner Juan Manuel Ley when he mounted a horse and the animal threw Amaro over its head.51 “I shattered and dislocated my ankle, and that was the end of my playing career.”

Since then, Amaro compiled the following résumé:

“When I first worked for the Phillies in 1972,” Amaro recalled, “there were only four people in the [farm director’s] office: Paul Owens, Dallas Green, I, and Bill Gargano, plus a couple of secretaries.” Amaro took great pride in having contributed to the renewed success of the franchise. In his view, the very high percentage of players who went to winter ball together was a major factor, helping with fundamentals and team cohesion.

“I never wanted to leave the Phillies – never,” Amaro continued. “The times I left, they were the biggest boo-boos of my life. Not so much the first time, though, because I joined Dallas Green with the Cubs and he built something, which I don’t think he gets enough credit for.”

Amaro never did get a chance to manage in the majors, although he was mentioned as a candidate to succeed Green with the Phillies after the 1981 season. He also got an interview with Philadelphia as late as 2000, following the firing of Terry Francona. “I was not only Latin, but my family was also a bit dark,” Amaro said in 2011. “My time came too early.”52 He also hoped to become assistant to his son when Rubén Jr. became GM, but internal politics prevented that – the Phillies instituted a rule against family connections.

Amaro and his first wife, Judy, got divorced in the 1980s. Rubén had a daughter named Alayna from a relationship with Mary Beth Allio. In 1988, he got married again, to Lilia Machado, a member of the family that owns Águilas del Zulia, Amaro’s Venezuelan club. Their two sons, Luis Alfredo and Rubén Andrés, also became ballplayers. Luis played short-season Class A ball for the Phillies in 2011.

After a battle with cancer, Rubén Amaro Mora died in Miami on March 31, 2017. His passing came just nine days after the death of his longtime colleague Dallas Green. When the news of Amaro’s death broke, there was a remarkable outpouring of affection for the man, emphasizing his personal warmth and grace. It echoed an observation from six years before about his standing in the game. During spring training 2011, Amaro visited the camp of the New York Mets, representing the Baseball Assistance Team (he had been a director for several years). Sportswriter Marty Noble observed, “Wherever he was, lines formed. Scouts, writers, club officials actually queued up to say hello and show reverence, appreciation and respect for the soft-spoken 75-year-old. He never was a star. . . But he is one of the game’s great gentlemen.”53

This biography is an expanded version of the one included in the book “The Year of the Blue Snow: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies” (SABR, 2013), edited by Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin. It includes some of the material from two sidebar articles, “What to Do with Two Gold Glove Shortstops?” and “The Amaro Chronicles”.

Sources

Grateful acknowledgment to Rubén Amaro Sr. for his memories. All Amaro quotes are from telephone interviews on October 18 and November 20, 2012, unless otherwise indicated. Thanks also to Steve Grande, Media Relations, Houston Astros, and to Dick Schofield Sr. for confirming information about the Cardinals’ advance camps.

Fellow researchers

Continued thanks to Alfonso Araujo in Mexico for various details of Rubén Amaro’s career in winter ball.

Books

Pedro Treto Cisneros, editor, Enciclopedia del Béisbol Mexicano, Mexico City: Revistas Deportivas, S.A. de C.V.: 11th edition, 2011.

The Sporting News Baseball Register, 1965 edition.

Internet resources

www.baseball-reference.com

www.retrosheet.org

www.checkoutmycards.com

Manuel de Jesús Sortillón Valenzuela, online history of La Liga de la Costa del Pacífico, www.historiadehermosillo.com/BASEBALL/Menuff.htm

Notes

Don Richard “Richie” Ashburn, a Hall of Fame outfielder, who made the most putouts of any outfielder in major-league baseball during the 1950s, started out as a catcher, which should not be surprising because throughout his long career in baseball, Richie Ashburn had always been his own man. His independent quality even emerged during his acceptance speech in Cooperstown. After waiting 28 years for induction, he expressed his opinion about the long wait: “They didn’t exactly carry me in here in a sedan chair with blazing and blaring trumpets.”1

Because of such candor and homespun humor, Ashburn became an iconic figure in fan-gritty Philadelphia during his careers with the Philadelphia Phillies — as a speedy center fielder for 12 years, and as a broadcaster for 34 years. He starred in center field and as a leadoff hitter for 12 seasons, including the pennant-winning Whiz Kids of 1950. Ashburn won two batting titles and earned four All-Star selections. After retiring from the field, he thrilled and amused not only Phillies fans but all baseball fans with his colorful, witty commentary of action on and off the field from 1963 until his sudden death shortly after he broadcast a Phillies-Mets game September 9, 1997.

A son of the Plains, Ashburn came into this world on March 19, 1927, in Tilden, Nebraska, as one of a pair of identical twins, Don and Donna, to his parents Neil and Genevieve “Tootie” Ashburn. Nicknames were common in the Ashburn household: Everyone called the male twin by his middle name, Richie, to further distinguish him from his sister; and Genevieve was called Tootie because of her tiny size at birth.2

Ashburn’s father, Neil, was a blacksmith and monument maker who played semipro baseball on the weekends. His brother Bob said he made more money playing baseball than at his trade. On some occasions the money was just enough to keep his family in food. Neil Ashburn had a very close relationship with his athletically-inclined son — he encouraged Richie in his boyhood activities and steered the boy throughout his developmental years.3

Ashburn tried to play all the sports — except football; his father ruled that out because of the threat of injury, but baseball and basketball were his favorites. He began playing baseball in 1935 as an 8-year-old in the Tilden Midget Baseball League under the tutelage of Hursel O’Banion. He played catcher because his father thought it would be the quickest way to get him to the major leagues, and he batted left-handed because his father said his speed would give him a better jump to first base from the port side.

The term “speed” would always be associated with Ashburn. His high-school basketball teammate Jim Kelly said that Ashburn could dribble down the court faster than the other players could run down it. In his 1948 major-league rookie year, one sportswriter said of the 21-year-old, “He’s no .300 hitter, he hits .100 and runs .200.”4 And even after his playing days ended, Ashburn challenged a young Dick Allen in a foot race and beat him.5

He played baseball and basketball for Tilden High School but the baseball season was short and his coach, Harold Mertz, suggested to Neil Ashburn that his boy needed more playing time. Neil agreed.

Ashburn graduated to American Legion baseball with the Neligh Junior Legion team and continued as a catcher. He was derided at first for his small stature, but he soon drew the admiration of his teammates with his speed and his concentration at the plate. He also played the outfield and it was during this time that Richie’s speed helped him in another way. His coach, Harold Cole, recognized that Ashburn lacked a strong throwing arm. He trained him to compensate for this deficiency by charging balls hit to him and throwing on the run. Ashburn later used this technique in the major leagues.6

It is difficult to imagine the Hall of Fame outfielder continuing on in baseball as a catcher because of his burning speed but, being a good son, Ashburn followed his father’s wish — despite advice to the contrary. As the state of Nebraska’s representative on the West team of Esquire Magazine’s American Legion Junior Baseball East/West All-Star game in 1944 at the Polo Grounds, Ashburn’s quality of play and his size caused Philadelphia Athletics manager Connie Mack to advise him to play another position.7

At his Legion games, baseball scouts quickly recognized Ashburn’s talent and began following him. In fact, he signed three contracts to play professional baseball. He signed first with the Cleveland Indians in 1943 at the age of 16, again in 1944 with the Chicago Cubs to play for their Nashville farm team, and in 1945 with the Phillies. Baseball Commissioner Kenesaw M. Landis voided the Cleveland contract because the rules then prohibited the signing of boys still in high school. He also nullified the Cubs contract because of an illegal clause that would have paid Ashburn if the Nashville franchise was sold while he was playing there. The two nullifications soured Ashburn’s opinion on the integrity of major-league baseball.8

The elder Ashburn shared Richie’s doubts and supported his son’s decision to go to college in 1944 even though 13 of the 16 major-league clubs had showed interest in his son. After one semester at Norfolk Junior College, the Phillies convinced the family that their intentions were honest, and Neil approved Richie’s signing with them. Delighted by this change of mind, Phillies scout Ed Krajnick said, “Something tells me this is about the most important deal I ever made.”9

Ashburn reported to the Utica Blue Sox of the Class A Eastern League in 1945 and it was there that his speed finally changed everyone’s mind about his future position in baseball. He utterly astounded them on one occasion when he beat the batter to first base and took the throw for a putout. His manager, future Whiz Kids pilot Eddie Sawyer, forthwith converted the speedster to a center fielder. According to teammate Putsy Caballero, Richie’s father initially disliked Sawyer’s decision and objected to the new direction. But Neil eventually agreed that Sawyer’s decision appeared right for his fleet-footed son. During his time in Utica the players started calling Ashburn Whitey because of his light blond hair. The new moniker stayed with him for the rest of his life.

Early in the season, Ashburn was drafted by the US Army. Fortunately for Ashburn, the allowed him to finish the season, in which the Blue Sox won the Eastern League pennant while Ashburn led the team in batting with a .312 average. The Blue Sox held a Richie Ashburn Day in August and fans passed the hat and collected $357 for him, an amount he likened then to a million dollars.10

The Army sent Ashburn to Alaska, about which he later quipped: “Sending a ballplayer to Alaska was like sending a dog sledder to the Sahara Desert.”11 He spent a year there and missed the 1946 season.

Ashburn returned to the Blue Sox in 1947, and his team again won the Eastern League championship. Ashburn set a league record for the most hits in a season with 191 in only 137 games. After this successful season he went back to school for a second semester at Norfolk Junior College, where he met his future wife, Herberta “Herbie” Cox.12

Ashburn made the 1948 Phillies team as a 21-year-old rookie and opened the season as the starting left fielder. He replaced veteran Harry “The Hat” Walker, the reigning NL batting champion, as the team’s leadoff hitter. He started the first 12 games in left field before replacing Walker as the regular center fielder.

Ashburn engineered an unusual living arrangement in the Philadelphia suburb of Bala Cynwyd — a home rental with fellow rookies Robin Roberts, Jack Mayo, Curt Simmons, and Charlie Bicknell, a move that saved everyone money, especially when Ashburn’s parents moved in in midseason. On the ballfield, he electrified the crowds at Shibe Park with his hitting, speed, and outfield play.

At the conclusion of a doubleheader with the Cubs in Chicago on June 5, Ashburn sported a .380 batting average and had a 23-game hitting streak. A local sportswriter said, “Richie Ashburn is the hottest thing to hit this town since the great Chicago blaze.”13

Ashburn was the only rookie chosen to the National League All-Star team. In the game held in Sportsman’s Park, St. Louis, won by the American League, 5-2, he hit two singles, garnered the only stolen base in the game, scored one of the NL runs and was named by sportswriters as the outstanding player on the losing side. It was there that Ted Williams bestowed Ashburn with another nickname, “Putt-Putt,” because, as Ashburn explained later, “I ran as if I had an outboard motor in the seat of my pants.”14

Ashburn’s season ended abruptly in August when he broke his finger. He started a total of 101 games in center field and 13 games in left field and finished the season with a .333 batting average. At season’s end The Sporting News named him its Rookie of the Year. In the selection process for Major League Baseball’s Rookie of the Year, he finished third behind Al Dark and Gene Bearden.

Whitey experienced a sophomore slump in 1949, finishing with a .284 average, although he continued to exhibit stellar fielding play, setting a major-league record for outfielders with 514 putouts. Some writers said his sensational catch of a Ralph Kiner liner on September 14 was the greatest catch they’d ever seen at Forbes Field.15

The next season Ashburn returned to the Phillies a married man. He was in top form as the youthful Phillies, known as the Whiz Kids, captured the NL pennant. Richie made a “veteran” adjustment borrowing one of teammate Del Ennis’s heavier bats to fool opposing teams that used a “creeping shift” to thwart the speedster’s infield hits. It worked. He started off at .370, weathered a slump in June, and finished at .303 while leading the National League in triples with 14.

Ashburn’s biggest contribution to the NL champs was a fielding play in the final game of the season, October 1 against the Brooklyn Dodgers in Ebbets Field. The play itself wasn’t extraordinary but its timing was. The Whiz Kids had squandered a six-game lead in first place and faced a tie with the Dodgers if they lost the game. With no outs in the bottom of the ninth inning and the score tied, 1-1, the Dodgers had men on first and second. Duke Snider hit a liner into center field and if the runner on second, Cal Abrams, could score, the Dodgers would force a one-game playoff for the pennant. Ashburn charged the ball, scooped it up, and uncorked a perfect running throw right into catcher Stan Lopata’s mitt in plenty of time to tag Abrams at the plate.

The Phillies won the pennant in the tenth inning when Dick Sisler hit a momentous three-run homer and Robin Roberts retired the Dodgers. Ashburn’s play is considered one of the most significant defensive plays in Phillies history.

Ashburn again led the NL in putouts with 405. He did not perform well in the World Series against the New York Yankees as the Phillies were swept in four games, though the games were close, with three being decided by a single run. He batted only .176 in the Series, 3-for-17, and his disappointment could be summed up with a comment he made as he turned down refreshment after the final game, “I couldn’t swallow a cornflake.”16

The Phillies would not appear in the Series again for many more years as they slid down in the NL standings during the 1950s, but Ashburn’s career did not suffer. He had great years from 1951 through 1954, averaging .318 while leading the NL twice in hits and being named an All-Star in 1951 and 1953. In 1954 he had a career-best 125 walks to lead the league in that category and in on-base percentage with .441.

In 1955 Ashburn received a new $30,000 contract. But before the season began he landed on the disabled list following a collision with Del Ennis that ruined his 731-consecutive-game streak. He recovered relatively quickly — starting in the third game of the season before missing nine games. He pinch-hit in the 13th game, and then resumed playing and went on to have a memorable season — with one exception. For the first time in seven seasons, he failed to lead the league in putouts — but he still posted an outstanding .983 fielding average. His batting excelled — by June he led the NL and had a 17-game hitting streak. He sported a .341 average in July, but incredibly, was not chosen for the NL All-Star team. He shrugged off that slight and finished the season with a .338 average and the NL batting title — his first.

The next three seasons the Phillies continued their slide, never leaving the second division. Ashburn’s play was steady though not stellar with .303 and .297 finishes in 1956 and 1957. The Phillies held a Richie Ashburn Day on August 14, 1956.

In 1958 Ashburn broke out and won his second batting title with a .350 average, edging his center-field rival of the San Francisco Giants, Willie Mays, on the last day of the season with a 3-for-4 effort. He led the league in hits, triples, walks, and on-base percentage. Teammate Robin Roberts remembered that Richie’s first hit that day came on a ball that bounced 50 feet in the air after hitting home plate. Roberts said Ashburn chortled loudly as he safely crossed first base. Richie had told Roberts before the game that for Mays to win the title he needed to get three hits while Whitey went hitless. The chortle erupted because that odd hit practically gave Whitey the title.17

Ashburn’s other accomplishments that year included an unusual double play when he backed up second base on an infield rundown. On June 12 he ran down a Los Angeles Dodgers runner, John Roseboro, who was caught off second base, unaware that Whitey had crept up behind him from center field, for an unusual shortstop-catcher-third base-center fielder double play. And at the end of the season he led the league in putouts, tying Max Carey for the most seasons leading the NL in that statistic. It was only the second time in his career up to that point that he did not finish with double-digit assist totals. Additionally, he served as Nebraska chairman of the American Cancer Society during the offseason.

Ashburn’s 1959 season was largely forgettable. All of his offensive stats fell: hits by 65, walks by 18, stolen bases by 21, and batting average by 84 points. Defensively, it was the same: putouts declined by 136, errors rose to 11, and outfield assists dropped to 4, while his fielding percentage fell 13 points. He suffered through the worst performance of his career.

Richie’s tenure with the Phillies ended when the team traded him to the Chicago Cubs in December 1959. In retrospect, it was a terrible trade for the team as Ashburn rebounded to have three good seasons — two with the Cubs and one with the Mets, although his speed had slowed and his outfield putouts declined all three years. The players the Phillies obtained for Ashburn performed horribly, contributing to their further decline. The Phillies finished last; the third of four straight bottom-of-the-heap finishes from 1958 through 1961. Ashburn’s replacement in center field hit just .237.

Ashburn’s time with the Cubs coincided with their “College of Coaches” experiment — a system of rotating a different coach to manage the Cubs each day, which didn’t work. Some of the coaches were rotated to the minors and back again. A visiting Philly sportswriter asked Ashburn how he was doing: “Not so good,” quipped Richie, “the guy who likes me is in Des Moines.”18

Ashburn’s last season spent as a player spawned a second career in baseball. After playing fairly well on one of the most unforgettable and bumbling teams in baseball history, the 1962 New York Mets (40-120), he sent back his contract offer unsigned — not to get more money, but with the thought that he didn’t want to go through another season like the one he had had with the lowly NL expansion team. His Mets tenure was a horrible season of improbable losses, unbelievable errors, and inept baseball manifested by the quintessential story Yo la tengo.

The story revolved around the antics of the Spanish-speaking shortstop for the Mets, Elio Chacon, and his penchant for frequent near-collisions with outfielders. This was especially true with Ashburn on short fly balls to center field. Ashburn realized that Chacon did not understand the English warning: “I have it,” so he went to a bilingual Mets player and was told that Chacon would understand the warning in Spanish, yo la tengo; that it meant the fly ball was the center fielder’s to catch. Soon enough a short fly ball was hit and a back-pedaling Chacon veered off, following Ashburn’s admonition in Spanish. What was unexpected was that onrushing, English-only left-fielder Frank Thomas completely flattened Ashburn. After pulling his center fielder from the ground, Thomas asked him “What’s a Yellow Tango?”19

Selected as a National League All-Star, he became the Mets’ Most Valuable Player with a batting average of .306. The award merited him the gift of a boat, of which he later said: “…to be voted the MVP on the worst team in the history of baseball is a dubious honor for sure. I was awarded a 24-foot boat equipped with a galley and sleeping facilities for six. After the season had ended, I docked the boat in Ocean City, New Jersey, and it sank.”20

Ashburn also dubbed the much-maligned first baseman for the Mets with his famous moniker, “Marvelous Marv” Throneberry.

He accepted a broadcasting job in 1963 with the Phillies to provide “color” to the regular broadcaster. When asked if he had been making more with the Mets, Ashburn said, “Much more.” And a query as to why he would quit such a good-paying job in a sport he loved and accept a much lower salary elicited a simple, “Well…” 21

Ashburn was not the only candidate for the broadcasting booth. The Phillies first offered it to Robin Roberts, who declined — he played baseball for four more seasons — but who suggested Ashburn to Les Qually, the Phillies official in charge of broadcasting. “The rest is history,” said Roberts.22

It turned out Ashburn had the gift of providing commentary during a broadcast and he parlayed this gift into a career that spanned 35 seasons. His career as a color man enabled his voice and his personality to touch more Phillies fans in the Delaware Valley than all of his on-field heroics at the Shibe Park/Connie Mack Stadium venue. Folks all over the area listened as he spoke with an infectious zest, corny humor, admirable candor, unflinching disbelief, and an understated outrageousness that endeared him to millions. He spoke his mind and fans loved it along with his wit and humor delivered in his trademark deadpan style. Soon, his aphorisms percolated throughout the Delaware Valley: “This fella on first looks runnerish,” “It’s a leadpipe cinch that they’ll bunt here,” and “Hard to believe, Harry,” among others.

Other, nonverbal, sounds tickled listeners’ ears as well. People recognized Ashburn lighting his pipe when they would hear a match being scratched while on the air. Or they heard him puff his pipe as he piped in with another comment on something odd or good or bad during a game.

Ashburn first teamed with Bill Campbell and By Saam but his true broadcast partner became Harry Kalas when Kalas joined the Phils on-air team in 1971. Kalas gave him another nickname that gave tribute to Ashburn’s unique status with Phillies fans, “His Whiteness.”

The team of Kalas and Ashburn clicked. They complemented each other so well that author Curt Smith said of their rapport and teamwork, “Where chemistry really works … at any time in any franchise was, of course, Harry Kalas and Whitey Ashburn.”23 The pair worked together for 27 seasons and their partnership became noted for Kalas’s smooth delivery of game action and Ashburn’s quips, insights, and critiques.

Besides his broadcasting, Ashburn wrote a regular column for the Philadelphia Bulletin and later for the Philadelphia Daily News. His columns were noted for his candor as well as his insights into sports and baseball.

Ashburn was so well liked that in one of his columns he noted that Cal Abrams — whom he had thrown out at home plate during the 1950 pennant-clincher — paid Richie a compliment: Abrams, wrote Richie, thanked him for throwing him out because that play bestowed more recognition upon Abrams than his short baseball career did. He also noted that Abrams saved all of his baseball cards — including Ashburn’s 1948 rookie card — and, in selling them, was making more money than he did as a player.24

Ashburn stayed married to his wife, Herberta Cox “Herbie” Ashburn, until the day he died. And he stayed true to his roots, returning to his Tilden home every offseason until 1964, when they moved to Gladwyne, a Philadelphia suburb. With Herbie he had six children; he missed every one of their births because all of them were born when he would be with the Phillies. “I was a miserable 0-for-6,” he would quip.25 But he made sure to make it up with them during the offseason and his children referred to him as a good dad.

However, although Whitey’s love for Herbie remained strong, their marriage was not. In 1977, after 28 years of living together, the two separated but did not divorce. The Ashburns lived apart for the rest of their lives but by dint of their unique natures they kept their children together and Whitey remained their father forever.

The Ashburns experienced tragedy when their daughter Jan died in an automobile crash in 1987. It is always a crushing blow when a parent has to bury a child and this loss hurts most. Richie’s grief remained with him and a year later, during a Phillies tribute to Ashburn at the Vet, he thanked the fans for the “thousands of cards and letters” that shared his family’s grief. His column allowed him to make that grief public with Jan’s eulogy in the Philadelphia Daily News of April 28, 1987.

Ashburn’s personality was often described as honest and open. It seemed to allow him to hang out with kings and janitors and everyone in between because he treated everyone the same way. It seems he had the moxie to present himself naturally to anyone, and folks accepted it– and forgave him for it. Stories abound about Richie and this unique quality.

He could be ribald, too. Once, after a lengthy discourse during a game by broadcaster Tim McCarver on the qualities of Mount St. Helen’s volcanic ash, Ashburn opined that “If you’ve seen one piece of ash, you’ve seen them all.”26 On another occasion he admitted that he slept with his bats when he was going good. “In fact, I’ve been in bed with a lot of old bats in my day,” he said.27 And he could be disarmingly charming, often referring to anyone within listening distance as the youngest of men. Once he took leave from some to go into the broadcasting booth, “Well, boys, I can’t be sitting around talking to fans.”28

Richie Ashburn’s induction into the National Baseball Hall of Fame in Cooperstown took some time. In his 15 years of eligibility his vote count did not engender continuation after 1982 and his status was relegated to the Veterans Committee. His candidacy stalled and then ended with the passing of the “60 percent rule” in 1991 that stated eligibility by the Veterans Committee for players whose careers began after 1946 was limited to those who garnered 60 percent of the ballot in previous elections.

Ashburn’s run up to his Hall of Fame induction included two fans who recognized his numbers and took up his banner: SABR member Steve Krevisky and superfan Jim Donahue. Krevisky would appear at every New England SABR gathering and expound on Ashburn’s qualities, especially educating attendees on his defensive statistics but also pointing out that Richie had the most hits of any major leaguer during the 1950s. Donahue organized his campaign around overturning the 60 percent rule, one time forwarding 55,000 postcards to the Hall of Fame. Both men’s efforts paid off and the rule was overturned in 1993. In the spring of 1995 the Veterans Committee voted Whitey into the Hall. The first person Ashburn called was his 91-year-old mother, Tootie, who wept.

The largest crowd in the history of the induction ceremony, more than 15,000 fans, showed up that summer to celebrate not only Ashburn’s induction but that of the greatest third baseman of all time, the Phillies’ Mike Schmidt. Several times during his acceptance speech, Whitey was overcome as he looked out onto a “sea of red clad” Phillies fans.29

It is generally considered that Ashburn’s defensive skills got him in. Although he finished with a .308 average which ranks 120th in major-league history, he hit only 29 home runs, and 82 percent of his hits were singles. However, he led the majors in putouts in nine of the ten years from 1949 through 1958. And he is the only outfielder in major-league history to record four seasons of 500-plus putouts. Despite his “weak” arm, he led NL outfielders in assists three times. Another factor was his durability. He possesses the seventh longest consecutive-game streak in National League history and missed only 20 games from 1948 through 1960.

And his fielding prowess was not limited to the can-of-corn variety. Some of Ashburn’s catches remain as the best in baseball. In addition to the aforementioned Kiner catch, Ashburn’s sensational outfield play at Forbes Field on June 20, 1951, led one famous fan in attendance to wonder. Hall of Famer George Sisler commented, “I’ve been around major-league baseball for 35 years. I’ve seen every great center fielder since [Tris] Speaker. I thought I had seen every sort of impossible catch. But that’s the greatest piece of center fielding I ever saw anywhere by any fielder. I still don’t believe it.”30

Richie’s competitive nature also kept his Hall of Fame candidacy alive. He especially would voice his own self-promotion, since he often mentioned it on air and during off-mike events. And he didn’t hesitate to use his especial candor. “You know, you can also get into the Hall of Fame as a writer or a broadcaster,” Ashburn once said. “I could be the first person in history to miss it in all three categories.”31

Ashburn sometimes kept to himself and he did so on a late summer evening in 1997 after calling a game in New York, telling friend and fellow broadcaster Kalas that he didn’t need any company. Later that night he reached out to a Phillies official, complaining that he didn’t feel well. At 5:30 A.M. on September 9, 1997, Ashburn was found dead in his hotel room.

The city of Philadelphia, Phillies fans, and team officials as well as other major-league teams and their cities descended into collective grief as news of Ashburn’s death percolated across telephone, teletype, audio, and video machines. His wake at Fairmount Park’s Memorial Hall drew thousands and his memorial service generated poignant remembrances as his family and myriad friends in the game sought solace through words, hugs, and tears.

Some years later, his son, Richard, spoke for thousands of us when he said of his father, “To this day some one will tell me a story about him every day. He just blew people away. And he didn’t even know he was doing it.”32

The Phillies have honored the memory of Whitey Ashburn in Citizens Bank Park, their much-admired ballyard off Broad Street in South Philadelphia. There is a long, concession-filled broad walk behind center field dubbed Ashburn Alley where an exciting statue of the former Whiz Kid is prominent. And the TV/radio booth has been named the Richie “Whitey” Ashburn Broadcast Booth. The Phillies also retired his playing number, 1, in 1979, the second number given that honor, and his plaque is featured on the Phillies’ Wall of Fame in Ashburn Alley.

This biography is included in the book “The Year of the Blue Snow: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies” (SABR, 2013), edited by Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin.

Sources

In addition to the sources cited in the Notes, the author also consulted:

http://articles.mcall.com/1995-07-28/sports/3052376_1_richie-ashburn-elmer-flick-consummate-leadoff-man

baseball-reference.com.

http://www.ultimatemets.com/profile.php?PlayerCode=0012&tabno=7

http://www.centerfieldmaz.com/2011/03/original-1962-mets-center-fielder-hall.html

Notes

1 Dan Stephenson, Richie Ashburn, A Baseball Life. DVD. Written and produced by Dan Stephenson, Narrated by Harry Kalas (New York: Arts Alliance America LLC, 2008).

2 Stephenson.

3 Stephenson.

4 Joe Archibald, Richie Ashburn (New York: Julian Messner, Inc., 1960), 47.

5 Stephenson.

6 Archibald, 25.

7 Archibald, 32.

8 Archibald, 29, 30.

9 Archibald, 33, 34.

10 Archibald, 38, 39.

11 Bill Conlin, “Missing Whitey 10-Fold,” Philly.com, September 7, 2007. http://articles.philly.com/2007-09-07/sports/24995587_1_radio-hall-tv.

12 Archibald, 42.

13 Archibald, 46.

14 Archibald, 49.

15 Archibald, 64-65.

16 Archibald, 87.

17 Robin Roberts and C. Paul Rogers, III. My Life in Baseball (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2003), 161.

18 Roberts, 252.

19 http://phillysportshistory.com/2011/05/21/richie-ashburn-is-the-inspiration-for-the-band-name-yo-la-tengo/.

20 http://www.centerfieldmaz.com/2011/03/original-1962-mets-center-fielder-hall.htm”

21 Jimmy Breslin, Can’t Anybody Here Play This Game (New York: Viking Press, 1963), 85.

22 Roberts, 252.

23 Stephenson.

24 Philadelphia Daily News, December 9, 1986.

25 Fran Zimniuch. Richie Ashburn Remembered (Chicago: Sports Publishing LLC, 2005), 83.

26 Zimniuch, 57.

27 Zimniuch, 53.

28 Zimniuch, 61.

29 Stephenson.

30 Frank Yeutter, “They Call Him Mister Putt-Putt,” Baseball Digest, October 1951.

31 Don Bostrom, “Richie Ashburn From Cornfield to Cooperstown,” The Morning Call (Allentown, Pennsylvania), July 28, 1995.

32 Zimniuch, 99.

Jack Edward Baldschun was born in the town of Greenville, Ohio, 95 miles north of Cincinnati, on October 16, 1936. There, around the turn of the century, Jack’s grandparents Franklin Baldschun and his wife, Louisa, began a farm. Their eldest child, Henry, worked for his father on the farm, and married Regina Krukeberg. The union produced two sons, Robert, born in 1932, and Jack.

If Henry was influential in his youngest son’s athletic development, Jack never said as much. Instead, the pitcher explained in the December 28, 1963, issue of The Sporting news, “My uncle brought me up as far as baseball was concerned.” Therein, however, lies a bit of speculation. In that interview Baldschun identified his “uncle” as a man named Maynard Wolf. The story noted that Wolf owned a fuel and coal company in Greenville. However, no one by that name appears in the genealogy of either of Baldschun’s parents, so whether or not Wolf was a blood relative is unclear. Regardless, Baldschun described Wolf as an “ex-semipro” player – who was a “good hitter and catcher but had a weak arm.” Wolf managed the sandlot team on which Baldschun played, and, Baldschun continued, “When I was no more than eight or nine … he took me around and he and I gave exhibitions before the games, with me pitching or shagging flies.”3

Baseball wasn’t the young man’s only athletic interest, however. In addition to baseball, Wolf also coached Baldschun in other sports, including golf. “When I was 16 years old I finished second in a Sealtest Dairy Company tournament with a 42 for nine holes,” and based on that performance, “I thought about taking golf up seriously.”4 It was a game that Baldschun thereafter played at every opportunity, usually posting scores between 85 and 90.

There was also another sporting activity that appealed to young Jack, and in this his father was central. “Harness racing interested me too,” Baldschun said. “My father owned some horses and he drove them in races in Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois. … I used to travel around with him during the summer.”5 Jack loved horses and harness racing, and served as a groom for his father. For a while he was undecided on whether to concentrate on baseball or become a harness racing driver.

Ultimately, Baldschun enjoyed baseball the most. At Greenville High School he played the sport for three years, while also lettering in basketball and track. During his junior year the school didn’t field a baseball team. Jack and some of his teammates got the principal to restore the program, with the football coach assuming baseball coaching duties as well.

By then Baldschun was already a known quantity in local baseball circles. “When I was about 11,” he remembered, “Tony Lucadello, who [signed 52 professional players,] was scouting for the Cubs at the time, saw me play in Greenville, and he wanted to take me to Chicago to be the Cubs’ batboy, but my parents refused. … Tony told me to let him know when I was a senior in high school. I did and he came down, but he never saw me play a decent game as we had a bad team. He wrote me before I went to college that there wasn’t anything he could do for me.”6 If Baldschun was disappointed by Lucadello’s rebuff we don’t know because soon other scouts were knocking on the right-hander’s door.

In the fall of 1954 Jack enrolled at Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, and joined the baseball team in his freshman year. Opportunities to play at a higher level came quickly. In the summer of 1955, after the collegiate season, Baldschun played sandlot ball, and found himself in Nashville, Tennessee. The president of the league in which he was playing recommended Jack to the owner of the Nashville Volunteers (Southern Association), Ted Murray. Murray wanted to sign him but Baldschun declined, explaining that he wanted to attend college.

Another team was also interested in the pitcher. When Baldschun returned from Nashville, “there was a letter from [the] Cincinnati Redlegs waiting for me, asking me to come over for a tryout.”7 At the tryout Baldschun threw just a few pitches before Reds farm director Bill McKechnie, Jr. offered to sign him. McKechnie, though, wasn’t the only person impressed by the 18-year-old. An independent scout named Herbert Stromer, who was affiliated with the Nashville club, had also watched Baldschun and recommended him to Murray.8 This time, Murray offered to sign Baldschun and allow him to continue college. (“That was the first time I thought about doing that,” Baldschun later related).9 So before the 1956 season, the right-hander signed a contract with the Volunteers.

For one season, things went according to plan. In 1956, while enrolled at the university, Baldschun debuted with the Thibodaux (Louisiana) Senators, Washington’s entry in the Class C Evangeline League (it’s unclear how he ended up with the Washington affiliate). Used almost exclusively as a starter, he proved to be a workhorse, leading the team in innings pitched on the way to ten wins (although he also led the league in hits allowed). It was a promising debut.

The next year, though, due to an unforeseeable event, everything changed. Baldschun spent the entire season with the Wausau (Wisconsin) Lumberjacks, Cincinnati’s entry in the Class C Northern League. While there, he later recalled for The Sporting News, “I met my wife, Charlotte Kolbe … so I completed only two years of college because I got married just before the start of the 1958 season.”10 Their marriage eventually lasted nearly 52 years and produced two children, Kim, born in 1960, and Brad, in 1965.

Now baseball had become Baldschun’s profession. Despite playing on a poor team that year (Wausau finished sixth in the eight-team Northern League), he again proved a valuable starter, leading the team in wins, innings pitched, and ERA. After just two full seasons, it appeared he was well on his way to success. Soon, though, his upward climb came to an abrupt halt. For the first time, he was hampered by injuries. In 1958, he later recalled, “I started out that year at Savannah, went to Albuquerque after two weeks, and there I came up with a sore arm. They sent me to Visalia (California) and told me to throw out the soreness in the hot weather, but the more I pitched, the worse it got.”11 So, “the next year I changed my style of pitching.”12

Until then Baldschun had delivered the ball side-arm. But In 1959, now pitching for Topeka in the Three-I League, he began to throw the ball overhand. “I found that really helped my curveball,” he said, “but I threw too many of them and popped a muscle in my forearm. … I was out for a month and a half and was just about ready to give it up.”13

Johnny Vander Meer convinced him otherwise. The legendary southpaw, the only major-league pitcher to throw consecutive no-hitters, was the manager at Topeka. As a result of Baldschun’s injury, Baldschun recalled in 1963, “Cincinnati wanted to release me, but Vandy wanted to keep me. If I’d been released, I doubt if I would have kept at it. …Vandy convinced me that I should try again, and I started out at Nashville.”14

It was a move that probably saved Baldschun’s career – and ultimately propelled him to the major leagues. At Double-A Nashville in 1960, Baldschun related two years later, “my arm had really gone bad” – so bad, in fact, that “my wife wanted me to quit baseball.”15 After just five appearances his earned-run average was 7.62, so management decided to demote him to Single-A Columbia (South Carolina). On his last night with Nashville before departing, while warming up in the bullpen, Baldschun began “messing around with a screwball.”16 The catcher, who’d never seen him throw the pitch before, said to him, “Stick that scroogie in your pocket, Jack – your fast ball drops just as much.” “Just to show him,” Baldschun recalled, “I really put some stuff on a screwball. It surprised me – it jumped all over the place.”17 And with that pitch, Baldschun revived his career.

At Columbia he became a reliever, and, he recalled in December 1963, “I found I could throw the screwball just about where I wanted to. … I got confidence, too, and I felt it didn’t matter who was up there, that I could get him out.”18

As the season wore on, Baldschun became Columbia’s stopper out of the bullpen. While just 2-4 as a starter, he crafted a 10-5 record in relief. Amazingly, the screwball, which carried a reputation of hurting a pitcher’s arm, actually seemed to strengthen Baldschun’s. At Columbia he began to get lots of work. Three years later, by then an established major leaguer, he explained, “The muscle gets hard when I pitch a lot. The only thing that softens it is not pitching, which I hate. … I know I’ve got a freak arm, because most pitchers think the screwball weakens and hurts them. It isn’t logical, but it makes me stronger. I had a terrible arm in the minors – torn muscles in the forearm for two years – until the screwball saved me.”19

Despite the pitcher’s newfound effectiveness, Cincinnati, much to the dismay of Baldschun’s manager at Columbia, Max Macon, failed to summon him to the majors. It was a slight that neither Macon nor his star reliever could understand. Several years later, Baldschun recalled, “I know Macon recommended me to Cincinnati, but they never gave me a shot and they needed pitching then, too.”20 Indeed, Macon had become Baldschun’s biggest fan, telling the press that “I’d stake my reputation that this guy can win in the majors.”21 So when Cincinnati balked at recalling Baldschun, Macon recommended him to an old friend, Phillies manager Gene Mauch, with whom Macon had once roomed when both were with the Brooklyn Dodgers. If the Reds couldn’t use Baldschun’s screwball in their bullpen, perhaps the Phillies could.

As the minor-league draft approached in the fall of 1960, the Reds left Baldschun unprotected. Fearful of losing him, however, they attempted to hide the pitcher by placing him on the roster of their Charleston (West Virginia) club. The Phillies, though, were not fooled. At the Rule 5 draft, the Phillies selected Baldschun for $25,000. 22 After five years and eight different minor-league stops, he was leaving the only professional organization he’d ever known.

On Opening Day of the 1961 season, 24-year-old Jack Baldschun was finally a major leaguer. Yet, as the season got under way, he may have questioned whether he truly belonged. During the spring Mauch had used him sparingly, hoping, the manager admitted a year later, “to spring his screwball on National League hitters like an exploding cigar.”23 Perhaps as a result of that inactivity, Baldschun began the year poorly. While his major-league debut on April 28 at St. Louis was successful (in one inning of work he faced five batters, allowed no runs and one hit, and walked one), by June 27 he had appeared in 20 games, pitched just 25? innings, and was 0-1 with a 7.11 ERA and no saves. Then something clicked. On June 29, at home against the Giants, Baldschun pitched a scoreless ninth inning, and from then until the end of the season his record was 5-2, with three saves and a 2.78 ERA. He had finally arrived, and for the next four years Baldschun was a regular, a fearsome presence in the Philadelphia bullpen.

Undoubtedly, the keys to Baldschun’s success were his durability and devastating screwball. It wasn’t the only pitch in his arsenal – he also possessed a sinking fastball, a curve, and a slider – but it was a one-of-a-kind pitch, and therefore kept hitters completely off balance. The secret to his screwball’s effectiveness, Baldschun contended, was in his delivery. “I throw my screwball different from most pitchers,” he said. “Most screwballs break on the same plane … like a slider. Mine drops … like a curveball thrown overhanded by a left-hander.”24

Moreover, he used a cutting motion that allowed the pitch to break in two directions. “Most righties break it so that it comes in on a right-handed hitter and away from a lefty,” Baldschun explained.” I also can throw it so that it breaks in the opposite direction.”25

“It’s not a curve,” Baldschun said. “It spins differently and breaks down like a scroogie.”26 Almost invariably he kept the pitch low in the strike zone, and by the time a batter recognized what it was, it was too late. “Batters have told me that they can’t pick up the spin, that the ball looks like a fastball up until five feet before it reaches the plate, (then) it sort of stops dead, then drops, sometimes as much as two feet.”27 The result was usually one groundball after another. “Not many guys can make you look as bad as Baldschun,” Stan Musial remarked. “It’s like swatting at a butterfly. He can humiliate you.”28

Beyond his signature pitch, Baldschun also thrived on work. When he arrived in Philadelphia the pitcher began a strenuous regimen of isometric exercises, and as his career progressed he remained diligent in their execution. He performed them before every game, and they kept his right forearm, which was thicker than his right biceps, strong and bulky, which Baldschun felt prevented injuries. “I think it helps me to come back day after day,” Baldschun said.29

“If this team needed it, I could pitch every day in relief, not going more than three innings. I think I could throw in over 100 games,” Baldschun said.30 For five years Mauch gave him ample opportunity to prove it. In 1961 Baldschun led the NL with 65 appearances; in 1962 and 1963, he was second to the Dodgers’ Ron Perranoski. Over his first three seasons Baldschun appeared in 197 games and set two league records (since broken); most relief appearances by a pitcher in his first three years, and most consecutive relief appearances over a three-year span.

The epitome of Baldschun’s endurance occurred in July 1961. On the 15th in Los Angeles, he had appeared in seven consecutive games; if he pitched against the Dodgers that night he would tie the record of eight straight, held by Elroy Face. The following spring, Baldschun remembered that night:

“If I tied Face’s record,” he said, “I’d get a national TV appearance. I mentioned it to Bob Lemon [Philadelphia’s pitching coach], who told Mauch. I think they wanted to use me. Chris Short was pitching – and you’d never figure a left-hander to last in that Coliseum. Three times he was in trouble. Three times I warmed up. Always a line drive or something got Chris off the hook, and he finished the game. Goodbye record.”31

In addition to his physical endurance, Baldschun was mentally tough. A week after the Los Angeles game he proved his mettle. On July 22 Baldschun’s father died, and the pitcher returned to Greenville for the burial. The day after the funeral Baldschun flew back to Philadelphia, tired, pale, and emotionally spent. That night he told Mauch, “You want me, Skip, I’m ready,” and that night Mauch once again called him from the bullpen.

On the mound Baldschun was fearless, and his confidence in his screwball was resolute. “Every moment “I have to think I’m better than the man with the bat in his hand,” he said. When a big hitter came to the plate, “You’re too busy thinking about how to get the hell out of the mess” to be worried about the outcome. “You don’t have time to scare.”32

A perfect example occurred on July 17, 1961. That day Baldschun faced the San Francisco Giants. In the seventh inning, protecting a 7-6 lead, he struck out Matty Alou, Willie Mays, and Orlando Cepeda. Afterwards he told the press, “My biggest thrill today was striking out Willie Mays and Orlando Cepeda. The screwball got Mays and I used it to fool Cepeda. I threw him two screwballs and then a fastball. He was expecting another screwball.”33 That was just the kind of makeup that compelled Mauch, in 1963, to call Baldschun “the best reliever in the business today.”34

As 1964 ushered in the first of Baldschun’s two final years with the Phillies, Mauch began to waver in that assessment. Although the manager continued to send him to the mound with regularity (that year of the Phillies’ infamous late-season collapse, Baldschun set career highs in games and saves), for the first time since establishing himself in the Phillies bullpen, it appeared his role as the number-one reliever might be in jeopardy. In 1963 young pitchers Dallas Green and John Boozer and veteran Johnny Klippstein had performed well in emergency roles, and Mauch used them in tight situations formerly reserved strictly for Baldschun. Then, in April 1964, the Phillies purchased veteran reliever Ed Roebuck from Washington, and he almost immediately became a sensation, at one point making 15 straight appearances without allowing a run. He too began to cut into clutch assignments that had previously been Baldschun’s domain.

By 1965 Baldschun’s final season in Philadelphia, the writing was on the wall for the right-hander. Not only did general manager John Quinn publicly question whether Baldschun could still perform at the pitcher’s customary level (“We have been concerned about Jack’s effectiveness in the National League. … He’s been around for five years and the batters know what to expect”), but Mauch had also begun to ask him to change the pitching style that had made him so successful.35

“I’ve always tried to make the batters hit my screwball,” Baldschun said in January 1966. “But a lot of time after getting two strikes on a batter, I’d come in with a fast ball or a slider. … You know, try to surprise ’em a little … [but] I had a couple of bad games last year, and then Mauch insisted I change. He wanted me to start batters off with fastballs and sliders … use my screwball as an ‘out pitch’… but my other pitches aren’t that good. The other team would have a few hits and few runs off me before I got a chance to throw my screwball. … Pretty soon I started to fight myself instead of the batter. When you do that, you might just as well walk off the mound.”36

Nevertheless, on June 7, 1965, in Philadelphia, versus Los Angeles, Mauch summoned Baldschun from the bullpen. It was the the 292nd relief appearance of Baldschun’s career, breaking the team record held by Jim Konstanty. It turned out to be the final highlight of Baldschun’s tenure in Philadelphia. Six months later, he was shipped to the American League, and shortly thereafter he became part of one of the most famous trades in baseball history.

It all came about because the Baltimore Orioles wanted Frank Robinson and the Cincinnati Reds wanted Baldschun. Talks had been brewing for a year. At the winter meetings in 1964, the Orioles and Reds had discussed scenarios in which Baltimore could acquire the Cincinnati superstar. One such deal involved the Phillies’ Baldschun; Cincinnati president Bill DeWitt cast covetous eyes on the pitcher, whom he’d tried to sign back in 1955. Accordingly, a year later a sequence of trades was made that satisfied both clubs – and the Phillies. First, on December 2, 1965, the Orioles traded first baseman Norm Siebern to the California Angels for outfielder Dick Simpson. Four days later the Phillies, who were seeking a right-handed hitter, traded Baldschun to the Orioles for outfielder Jackie Brandt and left-handed pitcher Darold Knowles. Three days later, the Orioles traded Baldschun, Simpson, and Pappas to Cincinnati for Robinson, and the deals were complete. Six years after being drafted away from the Cincinnati organization, Baldschun became a Red. (He wasn’t surprised to end up with Cincinnati. “After all,” he said, “I knew they had been trying to get me from the Phillies for two years.”37)

Baldschun had been an American Leaguer for just over 72 hours. Perhaps things might have worked out differently if he had stayed there. At the time of his trade to Cincinnati, in fact, he said, “When the Phils traded me to Baltimore, I figured I would have a fantastic year for them in ’66 … mainly because of my screwball. No one in the American League has seen it.”38 Instead, though, he stayed in the NL, where, as the Phillies had feared, his screwball was no longer a mystery.

As spring training got under way in 1966, Baldschun was 29 years old. If he had any inkling that his best days were behind him, he never voiced them. During the winter he and his family had remained in their home in Yeadon, Pennsylvania, where they’d lived for five years and he’d retained his offseason job as a salesman for a Philadelphia paper firm. Having added a few pounds over the years to what had been a 6-foot-1-inch, 175-pound frame, he had also worked out twice a week at the Philadelphia Athletic Club.

When he reported to the Reds for training camp, Baldschun was in good shape. His new teammates were impressed with his screwball, and glad they didn’t have to hit against him. But as things turned out, the season was a disaster for the veteran right-hander. In 42 games his record was 1-5 with a 5.49 ERA. Overnight, it appeared, Baldschun had lost his effectiveness.

The following season was even worse. When he arrived at training camp in 1967, Baldschun later recalled, “I got up one morning and found that my arm had locked on me.”39 That effectively signaled the end of his brief stay with Cincinnati. On April 2 Baldschun was sent to Buffalo, in the International League, to try to work out his problems. He performed well enough for a brief recall to the Reds in June. But the following year Baldschun hit rock bottom. It became apparent that Baldschun was no longer in Cincinnati’s plans, and the Reds assigned him outright to Indianapolis in the Pacific Coast League, where he remained for the entire season. Baldschun, naturally, was miserable.

“It was awful,” he recalled a year later. “I knew the Cincinnati club had no interest in me. I felt like a man serving time for a crime I didn’t commit. Detroit wanted me and I knew other clubs were interested but the Cincinnati people were embarrassed because I had been part of the trade when Frank Robinson went to Baltimore. They wouldn’t trade me because they were afraid of making another mistake, but they wouldn’t play me either. I’ve never been so frustrated.”40

By 1969 Baldschun appeared out of a job. Although he was still technically Cincinnati’s property, in February, at the request of the Oakland A’s, the Reds, who planned to release Baldschun, granted him a 30-day trial with Oakland; 1969 was an expansion year and the A’s had lost several pitchers to the new Seattle Pilots franchise, so Oakland was in desperate need of bullpen help.

In Arizona, despite pitching well for Oakland, Baldschun was the last player cut. Later, Oakland manager Hank Bauer, who’d been the Baltimore manager when Baldschun briefly became an Oriole, told the press that he’d wanted to keep Baldschun, but that owner Charlie Finley wanted to go with youth. On the afternoon of a spring-training game against San Diego, Bauer told Padres manager Preston Gomez that he was being forced to cut Baldschun, but that he thought the right-hander could help the Padres. So Gomez contacted Cincinnati, confirmed that Baldschun was available (he’d been released), and signed the veteran pitcher. The bargain-basement move was a boon for both Baldschun and San Diego, as he appeared in 61 games and won seven times for the expansion franchise.

It proved to be Baldschun’s last full major-league season. Although he went to spring training with the Padres, he was released on April 5, 1970, and sent to Salt Lake City as a player-coach. Still hopeful of making it back to the majors, he wrote to each AL club, but none showed interest. In July he was recalled to San Diego and appeared in his final 12 big-league games. Then, after making a lone appearance at Hawaii in 1971, the right-hander retired from the game for good.

After his baseball career ended, Baldschun moved with his family to Green Bay, Wisconsin, his wife’s hometown, and became a salesman for a lumber company. Charlotte died in January 2010 after a three-month battle with cancer. Their son Brad pitched for the Green Bay Blue Ribbons of the semipro Wisconsin State League. In 1986 he was a co-winner of the league’s Most Valuable Pitcher award.

This biography is included in the book “The Year of the Blue Snow: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies” (SABR, 2013), edited by Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin. For more information or to purchase the book in e-book or paperback form, click here.

Sources

Direct sources

Baldschun player file, National Baseball Hall of Fame, Cooperstown, NY

My sincerest appreciation to SABR members Bill Mortell for genealogical research and Rod Nelson for information pertaining to Baldschun’s signing.

Websites

http://www.baseball-reference.com/minors/player.cgi?id=baldsc001jac

http://www.baseball-reference.com/players/b/baldsja01.shtml

www.retrosheet.org

Newspapers

San Francisco Chronicle

Philadelphia Sunday Bulletin

Philadelphia Evening Bulletin

St. Louis Post Dispatch

The Sporting News

Los Angeles Herald Examiner

Atlanta Journal

San Diego Union

Notes

David Hans Bennett was born on November 7, 1945, in Berkeley California. Parents George and Ruth raised five boys and a girl, and moved to Yreka in Siskiyou County, up north by the famed redwood forests. George worked for the phone company, and the scenic environs allowed plenty of opportunity for his fishing and hunting passions. He started the Little League program in Yreka, then founded the Babe Ruth League program, and coached all his boys as they passed through. “I’ve always told my boys to get in all the ballplaying they could get,” said George, “and they never seem to get enough. We have one rule around the house. Whenever and wherever there is a game to play in, the boys always go.”2

By the time Dave reached Yreka High School, his brother Dennis had signed with the Phillies and was off pitching professionally, likely affording Dave some hope of doing likewise. In 1961 Dave pitched for the Eureka Babe Ruth League All-Stars who won the District 8 championship. Dennis had badly injured his knee that spring while pitching for Chattanooga, so he returned to Yreka and helped to coach Dave’s team. At Yreka High, Dave starred for the Miners in baseball, basketball, and football. In baseball, he had a record of 23-2 over four seasons and once struck out 20 in a seven-inning game.3

Scouts packed Dave’s high-school games, as he heard from 17 major-league teams. In May 1963, while a high-school senior, the 17-year-old Bennett traveled to San Francisco’s Candlestick Park to work out for the Philadelphia Phillies. He graduated from high school on May 30, and signed with the Phillies’ Eddie Bockman on May 31, receiving the $70,000 bonus. Asked about his family’s influence, Dave said, “[Dennis] just told me to get a good deal. Really, other teams offered me more than the Phils.” But he did allow that “my dad sorta liked the idea of me playing on the same team with Dennis.”4 He turned down several college basketball offers, and used half of his bonus to buy his parents a house.

The 6-foot-5, 195-pound Bennett spent the rest of the summer with Bakersfield in the California League. There he joined fellow 17-year-old pitcher Rick Wise, along with several other future major leaguers, including John Briggs, Grant Jackson, and Gary Wagner. Bennett pitched well (9-6, 3.56 ERA) in his professional debut. In September he spent a few weeks with the Phillies but did not see any action.

The next spring Bennett was optioned to Chattanooga in the Southern League. After just nine starts (2-3, 4.21) he was recalled to the Phillies because of a short-term pitching shortage. The 18-year-old Bennett made his major league debut on June 12, 1964, at Philadelphia’s Connie Mack Stadium against the New York Mets. The Phillies’ starter that day was brother Dennis Bennett, who allowed five runs in 2? innings. By the time Dave Bennett took the hill to start the top of the ninth, wearing number 59, the Mets were leading 10-3. Joe Christopher tripled to start the inning, but Hawk Taylor fouled out to third and Bennett struck out Charlie Smith for the second out. Christopher scored on a wild pitch and Roy McMillan doubled to left, before Bennett induced Chris Cannizarro to fly out to right field to end the inning. One inning, two hits, and one earned run was his pitching line for the day, and, it would turn out, his major-league career. The Phillies emergency was soon over.

Of the inevitable comparisons with his brother, Dave allowed, “I throw harder. I think Dennis will admit that. And I feel I am getting stronger every year.” Dennis agreed with Dave: “Listen, if the kid had my curve and I had the kid’s fastball, we’d be unbeatable.”5

A few days after his debut Dave was optioned to Eugene, Oregon, of the Northwest League. He pitched quite well in his half-season in the Northwest, tallying a 10-2 record and a 2.71 ERA. He spent the end of the season with the Phillies but did not get into another game. After the season the Phillies traded Dennis Bennett to the Red Sox, but Dave was still very much a part of their plans. “He’s just as much right-handed,” said Philadelphia manager Gene Mauch, “as his brother is left-handed. Dennis was predictably unpredictable, but Dave is predictable all the way.”6 Or, as one writer put it: “One is as pleasantly kooky as Cassius Clay, and one as politely taciturn as Herbert Hoover.”7

Nonetheless, the promising fireballer was optioned to Arkansas of the Pacific Coast League for the start of the 1965 season. After just five starts, he was sent back to Chattanooga where he finished the season. For the two clubs, he managed only a 6-9 record and a 4.44 ERA. Not a great season, but he still had not turned 20 years old. He was still on track for a big-league career.

Bennett spent the 1966 season with Macon (Southern League) and Bakersfield, where he had begun his career three years earlier. He battled arm problems and pitched just 47 innings, finishing 1-4 with a 5.34 ERA. After the season the Phillies removed Bennett from their 40-man roster, assigning his contract outright to San Diego of the Pacific Coast League.

For the next several years Bennett became a serviceable minor-league pitcher. He spent the 1967 and 1968 seasons with Tidewater (Portsmouth, Virginia) in the Carolina League, and won 11 games in each season. The following year he moved to Reading in the Eastern League and finished 6-7. After the 1969 season Bennett was traded to the Pittsburgh Pirates. This was a hopeful development, as the Phillies organization seemed to have forgotten about him. He was still just 24 years old, and the major leagues had just expanded from 20 to 24 teams, creating many more jobs.

Bennett pitched for Waterbury in the Eastern League in 1970, and pitched very well. For the year he was 12-7 with a league-leading 2.22 ERA for the league champions. The Pirates were an outstanding team in this period, with a deep pitching staff, so Bennett had to return to Waterbury in 1971. After winning four of his first six decisions with a 2.94 ERA, he was promoted to Charleston of the International League. He did not pitch well for the Charlies (5-5, 5.30), in what would be his last shot at Triple-A.

Over the next three seasons Bennett continued to toil in the middle levels of the Pirates farm system. He pitched in the Eastern League (Sherbrooke) in 1972 (10-8, 2.67), but spent the next two seasons as a relief pitcher for three teams. After the 1974 season, Bennett’s professional career was over. He pitched 12 seasons, ending with a minor-league record of 92-68, and a single major league inning. When he threw his final pitch, he was 28 years old.

Bennett had returned home to Yreka every fall throughout his career, and would continue to make his home there. He married Grace, with whom he had attended Yreka High School, and the couple raised three sons, who also attended Yreka High. One of their sons, Erik, spent 13 years pitching professionally, including stints in the major leagues with the Twins and Angels.

The Bennett family was well rooted in Yreka. Dave and his father, George, ran an informal fishing and hunting guide service for a few years. They did not specialize in any one kind of animal, but rather would guide you depending on what was available to fish or hunt at the time. As of 2012, Dave Bennett had worked for many years in construction in the town. Grace Bennett was a county supervisor, and both Dave and Grace had spent many years volunteering in the community, especially in youth sports.

Dave Bennett spent just a single inning in the big leagues, but that is more than most of us spend. He had a long career pitching professionally, and was one of the few major leaguers who had both a brother and a son who had their own big-league careers.

This biography is included in the book “The Year of the Blue Snow: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies” (SABR, 2013), edited by Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin. For more information or to purchase the book in e-book or paperback form, click here.

Notes

Dennis John Bennett was born in Oakland, California, on October 5, 1939, to parents George and Ruth, of German-Dutch descent. There were ultimately five boys and a girl in the Bennett family. The family moved to Yreka, a heavily wooded town in Northern California’s Siskiyou County, when Dennis was 10 years old. (His father liked to hunt and fish, and when a job with the phone company opened up nearer his beloved streams and forests, he took it.) The elder Bennett started the boys’ baseball program in Yreka, and Dennis soon became a star first baseman and hitter. He played Little League and Babe Ruth League baseball before entering high school.

At Yreka Union High School, Dennis lettered in baseball, basketball, track, and football. In his senior year, he won 15 of 16 decisions on the mound and hit .458, playing first base when not pitching. He was, however, not fond of rules. “I can’t remember a single season where I wasn’t suspended for at least one game,” he later recalled.1

Dennis’s off-the-field activities in his youth were atypical. Firefighting was a vital and lucrative occupation in his region, so he often skipped school to go off and join a fire crew (lying about his age). If that wasn’t dangerous enough, he and some friends made extra money in the summers traveling around Northern California to various rodeos, riding saddleback and bareback bronco events. He later recalled, “Sometimes I was hit over the head with bottles or cut up in a fight at a dance, but I was lucky. All those rodeos, I never got banged up.”2

Bennett did not throw particularly hard as a teenager, and few scouts showed any interest in watching the hurler. He garnered a partial scholarship to pitch for Mount Shasta Junior College, pitching a single season for its baseball team. At that point, Bennett was offered a contract by Eddie Taylor, a scout for the Philadelphia Phillies. He was no bonus baby– he would get $500 if he stayed in the organization for 90 days, and $250 a month.

Bennett’s professional career began in Johnson City, Tennessee, in the Appalachian League, where the 6-foot 3-inch, 192-pound left-hander finished 7-3 and led the league with three shutouts and a 1.52 earned-run average and struck out 92 in just 77 innings. The next year he finished 13-13 for Bakersfield in the California League, before spending the 1960 campaign with Asheville, North Carolina (South Atlantic League), where he finished 8-7.

He spent the start of 1961 in Chattanooga (4-2, 4.37) before tearing up his knee. The circumstances surrounding the injury typify the personality of Bennett, always a free spirit. “There was a big hill in right field in Nashville. A bunch of us were standing around, and I challenged John Boozer to a somersault race downhill. It was for $10 and a steak dinner.”3 He lost the bet and jammed the cartilage in his knee. An operation ended his season. He told his manager he got hurt jogging in the outfield.

The next spring Bennett was invited to major-league camp, likely because the Phillies wanted to see how his knee was. Not only was his knee fine, the rest had added several miles per hour to his fastball. He was sent to Triple-A Buffalo (International League), and started 3-1, 2.00 before his recall to Philadelphia in May.

Bennett’s first major-league appearance took place at Chicago’s Wrigley Field on May 12, 1962. The Phillies were leading 8-5 when he took the mound to start the bottom of the fourth inning. He walked his first batter, Lou Brock, before inducing a double-play groundball. After three scoreless innings, Bennett could not escape the seventh, allowing three hits and a walk before being relieved. (Bennett was charged with three earned runs. He was credited with a hold in the 9-8 loss. The pitcher who followed Bennett, Chris Short, was given a blown save.)

After three mediocre starts, Bennett’s first major-league victory was a four-hit shutout that snapped the Los Angeles Dodgers’ 13-game winning streak on June 2. He finished the season 9-9, leading the team with a 3.81 ERA and two shutouts. From August 12 to the end of the season, his ERA was 1.66, highlighted by three consecutive five-hit complete games. Bennett later recalled, “I figured I had a great career ahead of me. I knew I could throw. I wasn’t a complete pitcher or the smartest guy out there, but at that time if you threw hard enough you learned as you went. I was real happy the way everything was going at that point.”4

The Phillies sent Bennett to Arecibo, Puerto Rico, that winter to get ready for a big season. On January 7, 1963, returning to Arecibo from a team picnic, he was involved in a car accident that killed the driver. Bennett was thrown through the windshield, breaking his left ankle, pelvis, and left shoulder blade, and leaving severe lacerations all over his face. He had been sitting with his back against the door and leg up on the seat, talking to the people in the rear seat. According to Bennett, this was his fifth serious car accident and the third time he had been thrown through the windshield. This was the first time he was seriously hurt.

The Phillies were most concerned with Bennett’s ankle, but it was the shoulder injury that would linger, and cause problems throughout the remainder of his career. The doctor in Puerto Rico suggested he would never pitch again, and might not walk. After months in the hospital, Bennett was working out by the end of May and, miraculously, joined the Phillies in late June. By July he was in the rotation, and he pitched very well the rest of the season, finishing 9-5, with a 2.64 ERA. For his efforts he won a local award as the most courageous athlete on the team. The shoulder seemed fine—for now.

Bennett was cocky when assessing his chances for 1964: “There’s no way they can stop me from winning 20. I have always done real well early in the year, but my first two years in the big leagues I haven’t been out there.”5 He elaborated in a July profile Stan Hochman wrote for Sport: “You can’t go out there wondering whether you are going to win or lose. You can’t look at the hitter and say, ‘Geez, that’s Henry Aaron … or geez, that’s Willie Mays.’ Now, I don’t care who’s up there.”6

Bennett’s manager, Gene Mauch, was also unconcerned: “He’s got a big-league fastball and two breaking balls that are better than the average major leaguer. And he believes in himself about 130 percent.”7 Bennett later named Mauch as his favorite manager, a brilliant man that people loved playing for.

Dennis was beginning to acquire a reputation as a free spirit, who enjoyed the nightlife. He was single and spent his evenings doing what single men are wont to do. “You’ll never catch me out the night before I pitch. But I figure a pitcher has two nights to fool around.”8

Bennett started strong in 1964, winning eight of his first 12 decisions through June. His personal highlight took place on June 12 in a game in which he was knocked out of the box by the New York Mets in the third inning. Later in the game, his brother Dave Bennett made his major-league debut, pitching the ninth inning for the Phillies in what turned out to be an 11-3 loss. Dave was just 18 years old, a 6-foot-5 right-hander who possessed none of his older brother’s swagger or brashness. Alas, this was to be Dave’s only major-league appearance.

In the second half of the 1964 season, Dennis’s shoulder, and its still undiagnosed injury, started to bother him and the pain never really went away again. He managed just a 1-7 record in July and August, ironically as his team started pulling away in the pennant race. On September 7 he beat the Los Angeles Dodgers 5-1, and followed with a 1-0 victory over Juan Marichal and the San Francisco Giants. After he followed with a 1-0 victory over the Houston Astros on the 15th, the Phillies had a six-game lead over the St. Louis Cardinals with 17 games to go. Bennett started three more times, losing two, and the Phillies lost a heartbreaking pennant race. By season’s end the pain in his shoulder was constant and tremendous. Bennett finished 12-14, with a 3.68 ERA.

The 1964 Phillies are one of the more famous teams in Philadelphia history, and Bennett’s injury was likely the biggest cause of their collapse. He was the club’s Opening Day starter, and an ace hurler for the first half of the season before the sore shoulder took over. Bennett said he believed the team would have won the pennant “hands down” had his arm stayed healthy, and listed it among his biggest disappointments. He later recalled his shutout of the Giants in September as the best of his career, a game notable for his three strikeouts of Willie Mays. Mays hit just .111 (3-for-27) off Bennett in his career, and Willie McCovey was 0-for-8 with five strikeouts, while their teammate Jim Ray Hart, whom Bennett recalled decades later as a nemesis, managed a more robust .533 with three home runs.

On November 29, 1964, the Phillies dealt Bennett to the Boston Red Sox for slugger Dick Stuart. Bennett was angered by the deal because he felt the team had promised him he would be back with the club. More than that, he knew he was hurt and felt the Phillies knew it. Bennett was speaking at a banquet in Boston that winter and surprised the assembled media and team personnel when he casually mentioned that his sore arm might not be ready for the opening of the season. The Phillies offered to nullify the deal, but the Red Sox were happy to be rid of the enigmatic and controversial Stuart and left it alone.

As a left-hander moving to Fenway Park, Bennett acknowledged, the wall in left field “messed with my mind a little.”9 Balancing that, he believed there were far fewer tough outs in an American League lineup compared with his National League opponents. Bennett pitched adequately for the 1965 Red Sox, starting 18 games and relieving in 16 others, finishing 5-7 for a team that lost 100 games. He started the season on the disabled list, joining the club in early May. During his recuperation, he vowed to host a champagne party for the writers after his first victory, a promise he kept after topping the Kansas City Athletics at Fenway Park on May 31. The thankful writers allowed that they would return the favor after his first shutout.

Bennett’s reputation for zaniness grew. For one thing, he carried several guns with him on the road, and often on his person. He told the story of shooting off several rounds with a gun one quiet spring just over the head of Boston Globe writer Will McDonough, who had written a story Bennett did not like. “So me and Will didn’t see eye to eye for the rest of my time there,” he recalled.10 Then there was the time Bennett shot out the lights in his hotel room, to save getting up and turning the switch.

After the 1965 season Bennett finally underwent shoulder surgery, which kept him on the disabled list until mid-July. A doctor finally isolated the problem— calcium had built up in a crack in the shoulder blade caused by his 1963 accident. Bennett recalled that pitchers tended to throw through such problems back then, but the Red Sox supported his decision to have surgery. Upon his return, he was actually one of the more steady members of the rotation, finishing 3-3 with a 3.24 ERA in 13 starts for an improving club that played .500 ball in the second half.

The next spring Bennett was involved in an incident in Florida that was part of a sad lineage of race relations with the Red Sox. He entered a club in Lakeland with pitchers Dave Morehead and Earl Wilson. While Bennett and Morehead were asked for their drink orders, the bartender turned to Wilson, an African-American, and said, “We ain’t serving you. We don’t serve niggers here.”11 The players left, but word of the incident soon leaked out. The club did not strongly back Wilson, who was traded in June. He won 13 games in the latter half of the season for the Tigers, and 22 the next year.

Bennett later related to Peter Golenbock what these Red Sox teams were like: “You’d have four or five players and some girls, and you’d have a party. And it might go until six, seven in the morning, and maybe you had a day game that day. And the thing was, you’d get on the bus, and [manager] Billy Herman would be sitting in the front seat, and everybody would talk about the party the night before, and Billy would sit there hearing it all, but there wasn’t too much he could do about it because some of your stars were the ones doing the talking, and he didn’t have any control over the ballclub whatsoever.”12

The new manager for 1967, Dick Williams, was different. When Bennett and another pitcher showed up late one day in the spring, Williams publicly called them out and fined them. When Bennett blamed the hotel for failing to give him his wakeup call, Williams ridiculed the players, and Bennett never got out of the new skipper’s doghouse.

Dennis continued to pitch well early in the 1967 season. He started the fourth game of the season, following Billy Rohr’s one-hitter in Yankee Stadium with a five-hit, 1-0 loss to the same Yankees on April 15. On May 1 in Anaheim, he shut out the Angels with a six-hitter, and also hit a three-run home run off Angels starter Jorge Rubio. After surrendering the round-tripper, Rubio hit Reggie Smith with a pitch, then was removed from the game. This was his 10th major-league game, and his last. Bennett was doubly happy about the shutout, as the local writers had promised him a champagne party two years ago with his first such gem. They came through, holding it at the Playboy Club in Boston.

When Bennett beat the Indians’ Gary Bell on June 3, he brought his record to 4-1, with a 2.97 ERA. After a couple of rough starts, he fell to 4-3, and his relationship with Williams deteriorated further. On June 24 the Red Sox traded Bennett to the Mets for minor leaguer Al Yates, who would never pitch for the Red Sox. According to Bennett, Williams had not spoken to him in a few weeks prior to telling him he had been dealt. The pitcher expressed disappointment at the trade, telling the New York writers that he thought a good team was coming together in Boston.

Bennett split two decisions with the Mets, also spending time with their Jacksonville affiliate in the International League. After two appearances for Jacksonville in April 1968, he was sold to the Chicago Cubs organization, which placed him with Tacoma in the Pacific Coast League. He was 9-8 in 19 starts out west, and at the end of July was sold to the California Angels. He finished the season, and his big league career, by dropping all five of his decisions for the Angels.

But Bennett wasn’t through pitching just yet. He spent the next five years in the Pacific Coast League, much of it far removed from the continental United States. He played for Hawaii in 1969 and 1970, tying for the league lead each year in victories (13 and 18) and making two All-Star teams. These Hawaii clubs were great teams, filled with ex-major leaguers. The 1970 team finished 98-48, and was led by Bennett, Gary Bell, Juan Pizarro, and several other former big leaguers.

Bennett spent a year and a half with Salt Lake City before returning to Hawaii for parts of the 1972, and 1973 seasons. At the conclusion of the latter campaign, he finally walked away from the game.

Bennett married Terry, whom he had met in Boston, on January 3, 1970, and the two raised nine children. Having settled in Klamath Falls, Oregon, Bennett operated a restaurant and bar for a few years, worked for several years in a mill, operated another bar, and finally opened a more elaborate club with banquet rooms in 1998. In 2010 he and his wife owned a four-story commercial building in town that housed a boutique, an interior decorator shop, and a hall for banquets and parties.

In the 1990s Bennett was the victim of identity theft – a man in Texas successfully passed himself off as the former major-league pitcher, sticking the real Bennett with tens of thousands of dollars in bills, including $77,000 for open-heart surgery. As he later told researcher Todd Newville, “It caused me a lot of misery for several years. It’s all water under the bridge now, but for about five years, I couldn’t even buy a pack of gum on credit. That’s how bad that guy ruined it.”13

Klamath Falls is a small community when compared with the big metropolises in which Bennett spent his pitching career. His businesses and big family kept him at home most of the time, but he attended many reunions and fantasy camps over the years. He kept many dear friends from his playing days, including Gary Bell, Dave Morehead, Jim Lonborg (his roommate with the Red Sox), and Chris Short, his best friend on the Phillies, who died too young in 1991. He valued all his old baseball memories, and loved getting together with his old teammates and opponents. He returned to Fenway Park in 2007 for several events honoring the 1967 team.

“Baseball was the best time of my life,” Bennett later recalled. “I couldn’t throw without pain for most of the time after the wreck. If I hadn’t cracked my shoulder blade in the accident, I think I would have had one hell of a career.”14 Asked many years later to recount the highlight of his big-league career, he said simply, “Just being there was the highlight. Playing against all those great players.”15

Dennis Bennett passed away on March 24, 2012, at home in Klamath Falls, surrounded by friends and family.

Author’s Note

A version of this biography originally appeared in SABR’s The 1967 Impossible Dream Red Sox: Pandemonium on the Field (Rounder Books, 2007), edited by Bill Nowlin and Dan Desrochers. It was updated and included in The Year of the Blue Snow: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies (SABR, 2013), edited by Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin.

Notes

“Ball one,” home-plate umpire Ed Vargo exclaimed.

Phillies manager Gene Mauch rushed out to his pitcher’s defense. “What if he does it again?” Mauch inquired.

“I’ll call ball two,” Vargo answered.

“Do it,” Mauch commanded his charge.

Boozer dutifully went to his mouth again, and Vargo called another ball. Mauch instructed Boozer to go to his mouth again, and Vargo called ball three and ejected Boozer and Mauch from the game. Boozer had not even completed his warm-up pitches, much less faced a batter. The rest of the game went off without incident, and the next day National League President Warren Giles decreed that the rule prohibiting a pitcher from going to his mouth on the mound did not apply to warm-up pitches.1 This bizarre incident could not have happened to a more appropriate candidate than Boozer, a genuine eccentric who seemed to revel in his own quirks.

John Morgan Boozer, who spent the second half of the 1964 season working out of the Phillies’ bullpen, was born on July 6, 1938, in Columbia, South Carolina, to John G. Boozer, Jr. and Zela Caughman Boozer. John grew up with his parents and his brother, Thomas, in and around Columbia in an area known as Caughmanville, a community primarily made up of the Caughman family and those who married into it.

Enrolling at Wofford College in Spartanburg, South Carolina, Boozer led the baseball team with 90 strikeouts during his freshman campaign, 1957. After lettering again as a sophomore in 1958, the right-hander, deemed “a touch wild but fast” in a scouting report,2 signed a professional contract with scout A.C. Swails of Philadelphia Phillies in early July.

The 6-foot-3-inch, 205-pound 19-year-old reported to the Brunswick Phillies of the Class D Georgia-Florida League, where he went 3-4 with a 3.67 earned-run average in eight appearances, including five starts. In 1959 he was assigned to another Class D team, the Tampa Tarpons of the Florida State League. Taking the mound as a starter, Boozer posted a 12-15 record with a 3.33 ERA and led the team in starts (27) and innings pitched (208). A highlight for him came in late July when he shut out Palatka 1-0, and drove in the game’s only run.

Boozer went 15-9 for Des Moines of the Class B Three-I League in 1960, and then 1961 turned out to be his best season in professional baseball, 19-9 with a 2.61 ERA for Double-A Chattanooga. He pitched four shutouts in a seven-game win streak that earned him selection to the Southern Association All-Star Game.3 Boozer led Chattanooga in wins and innings pitched (207) as the Lookouts won the pennant (there were no playoffs). He was named the Southern Association’s Rookie of the Year, and was considered a prized prospect in the Philadelphia organization.4 He would never play another game below the Triple-A level.

This is not to say that once Boozer reached the Phillies in 1962 he would be there to stay. Throughout the rest of his career, which lasted until 1969, Boozer split time between Philadelphia and the minors, though he spent all of 1965 in Triple-A and all of 1968 with the Phillies.

In 1962 Boozer went to spring training with the Phillies for the first time. He did not make the club out of camp, and was assigned to Triple-A Buffalo, where he was 8-6. Called up in July, Boozer made his major-league debut on the 22nd, pitching three innings of one-run relief against the visiting Milwaukee Braves. Boozer made eight more appearances for the Phils in 1962 without a decision, and posted a 5.75 ERA.

After the 1962 season Boozer played winter ball in Puerto Rico for the Arecibo club. He earned a spot in the “Gleam Game,” an all-star game pitting imports against natives of Puerto Rico. Boozer struck out four in the final two innings to preserve a 4-1 victory for the imports. He spent most of the 1963 season with the Phillies, with six appearances for the Triple-A Arkansas Travelers (Little Rock). In mid-June, two days after pitching 5? innings in his third start of the season, Boozer made his first relief appearance of 1963 and recorded his first major-league save by throwing 2? innings of scoreless ball to close out the Cardinals in St. Louis. A month later, on July 18, he got his first major-league victory, a 5-1 three-hitter over the Houston Colt .45’s. He finished the season 3-4 with the one save, and posted a career-best ERA of 2.93.

Boozer went to big-league camp again in 1964, but stood in a long line of contenders for jobs on the pitching staff. He told an interviewer, “I’m not going to let it bother me. Except at night when I won’t sleep.”5 He wound up back at Little Rock, and early in the season he was offered as part of a package to the New York Mets in exchange for pitcher Al Jackson and outfielder Frank Thomas.6 The Mets declined that deal but they traded Thomas to the Phillies later in the season for pitcher Gary Kroll and infielder Wayne Graham.

After pitching briefly for the Phillies, Boozer was sent back to Little Rock but was recalled to start the second game of a doubleheader against Cincinnati on July 19. He won, allowing two earned runs in eight innings. Boozer made two more starts the rest of the season, appearing mostly in middle and short relief. He finished the season with a 5.07 ERA. He made four pitching appearances during the Phillies’ epic ten-game losing streak that cost the team the National League pennant. Boozer was the losing pitcher in game five of the losing streak, a 12-inning 7-5 loss to the Milwaukee Braves.

Boozer spent all of 1965 in the minors (9-13, 3.97 ERA for Arkansas), and he made only two big-league appearances in 1966 while going 4-9, 5.40 at San Diego, to which the Arkansas franchise had been moved.

The Phillies had hoped that Boozer, who had won 46 games in his last three seasons in the minors before his big-league debut, would become a major asset to their pitching staff, but it never happened. The big Southerner often seemed content just to be in the majors.7 As he progressed through his 20s, Boozer developed more of a reputation as a flake than as a reliable pitcher. His eccentricities reached far beyond normal baseball tricks such as chewing tobacco and throwing a spitball, both of which he was well known for.

A former teammate, Dick Hall, recalled that Boozer was “a real pen character. … He would bite grasshoppers in half, stick the back half under his tongue and let them hop out of his mouth. And he would eat moths and all kinds of insects. He was always spitting tobacco on the bullpen ceiling. He’d do lovely things. Boozer had a habit of wiping the rubber off with his fingers to get it clean, and then would go to his mouth to clean his fingers.”8

Baseball funnyman Bob Uecker, a teammate of Boozer’s for two years in the 1960s, remembered, “Anything you’d put up, he’d eat it. He’d pick up stuff and eat it. He liked to do it in front of people. It made them sick but it was a big kick for John.”9 Sparky Lyle recalled that Boozer would often spit out a big wad of tobacco and try to catch it in his mouth. Lyle also noted that Boozer would usually miss.10

Sent back to San Diego for the 1967 season, Boozer pitched well, posting a 2.59 ERA in nine starts by the end of May. Desperate for pitching help with newcomer Pedro Ramos and veteran Chris Short on the disabled list, the Phillies brought Boozer back from San Diego on May 31.

His first four appearances didn’t exactly inspire confidence. He started the first game of a doubleheader against the Chicago Cubs on June 6 and was knocked out in the third inning. He came back in relief in the second game and walked the only two batters he faced. He gave up seven runs in four innings of relief three days later against the Pirates, and then, in an appearance against the Atlanta Braves, both batters he faced reached base and scored. Through these four appearances Boozer had pitched six innings, allowed 18 hits and five walks, and owned a lusty 18.00 ERA.

Boozer’s season turned around, however. On June 25 Gene Mauch took a chance on him, pinch-hitting for starting pitcher Dick Ellsworth after three innings in a game against St. Louis. Boozer responded to his manager’s confidence by pitching six innings of one-run relief, striking out seven, and getting the victory, his first major-league win since August 15, 1964. Including the June 25 victory, Boozer went 5-4 with one save and a 2.88 ERA over the rest of the season. Much of his renaissance was due to the work of Larry Shepard, the Phillies pitching coach. Shepard, later the pitching coach for the Big Red Machine teams in Cincinnati, changed Boozer’s fastball grip to create more movement, and worked to change speeds on his curveball. Perhaps more importantly, Shepard urged Boozer to quit trying to be a clown and focus more on baseball.11

The renewed focus on baseball earned Boozer a role on the big-league club for the entire 1968 season, the only season of Boozer’s career in which he did not spend time in the minors. He made 38 appearances for the Phillies, all in relief, posting a 2-2 record with five saves and a 3.67 ERA. Invited to spring training as a nonroster invitee in 1969, Boozer spent April and May at Eugene, his fourth Triple-A club in the Phillies organization. He made his first appearance for the Phillies on June 1, and made 45 more, 44 in relief, before retiring at the end of the season at the age of 30.

With a degree from the University of South Carolina paid for out of his Phillies signing bonus, Boozer returned home to the Caughmanville area and became Lexington County’s first recreation director. He spent the next 15 years developing playgrounds and playing fields for the county.12 Diagnosed with Hodgkin’s disease in the early 1980s, Boozer continued to work at the development of the recreation system until late 1985, when his illness worsened. He died at the age of 47 on January 24, 1986, in Lexington. He was survived by his mother, brother, wife Ann, and sons Ian and Curt. He was buried at Pilgrim Lutheran Church Cemetery in Lexington.13 A recreation center in progress at the time of Boozer’s death was named in his honor.14

This biography is included in the book “The Year of the Blue Snow: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies” (SABR, 2013), edited by Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin. For more information or to purchase the book in e-book or paperback form, click here.

Notes

It was against this industrial backdrop that John Edward “Johnny” Briggs, a seldom used 20-year-old rookie with the 1964 Phillies, was born on March 10, 1944. The seventh of 10 children of Jessie and Nettie Briggs, Johnny was a multisport athlete.1 He made All-State in baseball, football, and basketball at Paterson’s Eastside High School. A powerfully built 6-foot-1, 190-pound athlete, Johnny was known for some long home-run clouts in his Eastside High career, and is in that school’s Sports Hall of Fame.

After graduating from Eastside in 1961, Briggs attended the now-extinct Paterson campus of Seton Hall University for several semesters, However, there is no record of his ever playing a game for the Seton Hall University baseball team in the yearbooks or archives from that time.

On September 12, 1962, Briggs signed with the Phillies. Their scout, Jocko Collins, got to the Briggses’ house just before New York Mets scouts arrived with their offer, and Briggs signed with the Phils for a bonus of $8,000.2 He was wistful about the missed opportunity to play for a hometown team. “I never found out the kind of offer the Mets had in mind for me. I sure would’ve liked to have known, because I know the Mets’ scout, Pete Gebrian, liked me a heck of a lot,” he said in 2011.3

The Phillies assigned Briggs to their Bakersfield affiliate in the Class A California League for 1963. He led the team with 234 total bases, had a .500 slugging percentage, and hit 21 home runs. Briggs reached that home-run total twice in his major-league career. He had ten errors in the outfield, but 16 assists as well. These numbers were good enough to get the youngster a look with the big club in 1964, and he was kept on the major-league roster for the entire season. (Eighteen-year-old Rick Wise was also kept on the roster for the full season. Both Briggs and Wise were kept on the roster because of new rules instituted by the major-league owners to keep down the cost of signing young players.4)

The season at Bakersfield turned out to be Briggs’ only minor-league campaign. Sadly for Johnny, his father, an avid baseball fan, died in 1963 before ever seeing his son play professional baseball.5

Living with an aunt just a few blocks from Connie Mack Stadium, Briggs was able to walk to work.6 He played in 61 games in his rookie year, 49 of them as a pinch-hitter or pinch-runner, plus a handful of games in the outfield. In his 11th game of the season, all as a pinch-hitter or pinch-runner, he got his first major-league hit, a pinch-single against the San Francisco Giants in the bottom of the 11th inning.

Briggs got his first start on June 14 against the New York Mets at home. Playing left field, he went 3-for-4 with two RBIs and two runs scored. His first big-league homer came on the 21st at Shea Stadium against the Mets. Starting in center field in the nightcap of a doubleheader, Briggs led off the game with a four-bagger off Frank Lary, but his effort was overshadowed by Jim Bunning’s perfect game in the opener. It was Briggs’s only homer of the 1964 season, and the first of 139 for his career.

Briggs had almost half of his at-bats for the season in June, 32, and batted .281 with a .343 on-base percentage and a .406 slugging percentage.

Perhaps Briggs’s biggest moment that season involved a late July game against the Giants. The Phils entered the action in first place, a half-game ahead of the Giants. The visiting Giants plated a run in the tenth for a 3-2 lead. In the bottom of the inning, young Gaylord Perry, primarily a relief pitcher until the following season, gave up a leadoff double to Johnny Callison. Perry drilled Tony Taylor with a pitch, and Dick Allen reached on an infield single to third. Briggs, who had pinch-run in the eighth and stayed in the game in left, was the next batter. Giants manager Alvin Dark brought in lefty Billy O’Dell to face Briggs.

Forty years later Briggs recalled, “I looked back at Mauch, thinking he’d yank me out of there, but he clapped his hands and said, ‘C’mon, kid, you can do it.’ I hit the ball off the tin wall in right to win the game.”7

For his part, Mauch seemed impressed by his rookie outfielder, saying, “There’s no telling how highly I regard Johnny. He goes out and works before a game. He plays seven or eight innings of outfield in batting practice. He doesn’t cut or slash in batting practice, trying to knock down the fences. The kid’s going to be a great ballplayer. He has talent to go with desire.” Briggs appreciated his manager’s confidence, saying, “Being a rookie, I was just happy to be in the major leagues. Just to have the prestige of being a major-league player, I had no reason to complain. It was a dream come true for me.”8

Johnny was physically gifted, and his manager tried to work on the cerebral side of his game as well. Briggs recalled Mauch advising him to “study pitchers’ motions to first base and home plate, and to try to steal coaches’ signals.” He also was told to watch opposing outfielders throw during batting practice to “see if they had sore arms.”9

Briggs started the 1965 season on the bench again. However, he became the starting center fielder in June, and for much of the rest of the season he batted leadoff. Over the last three months, he batted .263 and slugged .368. July of that season was one of the biggest months of Briggs’s early career. On the 17th at Cincinnati, he went 3-for-5, scoring two runs and driving in five. According to some accounts, he was also a principal in the controversial July 3 clubhouse fight at Philadelphia between Frank Thomas and Dick Allen. The New York Times account of the brawl indicated that there was no racial component to the fight, which occurred two hours before a Phillies-Reds game. Apparently, after some needling and an “exchange of words,” Allen hit Thomas in the mouth, Thomas retaliated with a baseball bat, and then Allen repeatedly punched Thomas, breaking his jaw, and requiring “seven or eight” teammates to separate the men.10

Other accounts say Thomas had been calling Briggs “boy” and Allen took exception, breaking Thomas’s jaw after he hit Allen with a baseball bat.11 In any case, Thomas was sold to the Houston Astros a week later.

In 1966 Briggs’ appeared in fewer games than he did in 1965, but had more plate appearances, 297. He had ten home runs, after totaling five in his first two seasons, and he posted career-best numbers in batting average (.282) and slugging percentage (.490).

Over the next four seasons, Briggs appeared in between 106 and 124 games. From 1967 through 1969 he was a fourth outfielder and part-time first baseman. On July 14, 1968, he hit two home runs, driving in three runs in a 9-2 Phillies victory over the Mets. On June 28, 1969, against the Montreal Expos, Johnny went 4-for-4 with five RBIs, leading the Phils to a 13-8 win. On July 11, 19169, he had another multiple-homer day, hitting two in a 7-5 win over the Cubs at Wrigley Field.

In 1970 Briggs was the starting left fielder for much of the season but spent part of May and June on the disabled list with a pulled leg muscle. On July 6, 1970, he homered twice and drove in four runs in the Phillies’ 7-5 loss to the Pirates. On April 22, 1971, Briggs was traded to the Milwaukee Brewers for first baseman/outfielder Pete Koegel and pitcher Ray Peters. The move to the American League resulted in some of the most productive seasons of his career, along with some MVP consideration in 1973. He wound up batting .251 for his Phillies career, but his Phils on-base percentage was .349, an impressive number not fully appreciated at the time.

Relocating to Milwaukee also was good for Briggs personally. He married a woman from Wisconsin, and their children and grandchildren still resided there in 2013. Recalling his time with the Brewers, Johnny said, “The fans were great. I always had a great rapport with the fans.”12

Milwaukee finally gave Briggs the opportunity to play every day, and he responded with 21 home runs and a sparkling .378 on-base percentage and a .467 slugging average in 1971. He split his starts almost equally between first base and the outfield, primarily left. He saved some of his finest offensive exploits of the season in games against his future team, the Minnesota Twins, drawing four walks (one intentional) in their June 27 contest and clubbing two home runs on September 21. Briggs hit two round-trippers (with five RBIs) on July 17 against the Red Sox.

Briggs held out before the 1972 season, and was the last Brewer to sign a contract for the year. When general manager Frank Lane implied that Briggs was overweight, the ballplayer replied,” I am working out at William Paterson State College here, where my brother Joe is on the basketball and baseball teams.”13 Lane also said that more than “100 hitters in the American League outhit him last year.”14 Lane may have been referring to batting average; however, Briggs had a respectable .830 OPS (on-base average plus slugging) in 1971.

In the course of negotiations, Lane offered Briggs a bizarre “negative bonus” of $1,000 if Johnny failed to duplicate his 21 home runs of 1971. Said Lane, “I would rather see him cut down on his swing.”15 The stalemate ended when Briggs signed his contract on March 11, having grown a beard during his holdout.16 If Lane’s gimmick of the “negative bonus” was actually included in the $32,000 contract for 1972, Briggs didn’t profit. 

Briggs again hit 21 home runs but had slightly lower on-base and slugging marks. He played less at first base and more in left field. He had a pair of two-homer days, on July 6 and 14 against the California Angels. The July 14 game was notable not only for his six RBIs, but also that they came at the expense of future Hall of Famer Nolan Ryan.

In 1973 Briggs had his best all-around campaign. He wound up with18 home runs, and his 15 stolen bases were his career high. He also reached career highs in runs scored (78) and walks (87), and he led the league in range factor (putouts + assists per game) for left fielders. Briggs saw some time at designated hitter in 1973, the first year of the DH.

The most impressive day of Briggs’s career occurred on August 4, 1973. Leading off (for the first time in ’73) and playing left field against the Indians in Cleveland, he started the game with a single and a run scored. In the second, he doubled and scored a run, and then he singled in the fourth and sixth innings, doubled in the eighth, and singled for the fourth time in the ninth, becoming one of only 67 major leaguers since 1901 to have six or more hits in a nine-inning game.17

The 1974 season represented Briggs’s best season for run production; he had his best RBI total (73) and second best runs scored total (72). He also had 55 extra-base hits, fifth in the American League, and ten assists from the outfield. He had two-homer games on May 25 and June 29, and he had two homers and four RBIs each time. May of 1974 was the hottest month of Johnny’s career: a.614 slugging average, 9 home runs, 20 RBIs, and 16 runs scored. At one point in the month he boasted a 16-game hitting streak.

Even though he was in Milwaukee for only 4½ years, Briggs was named the left fielder on the Brewers’ all-decade team for the 1970s.18

On June 14, 1975, Briggs was traded to the Minnesota Twins for Bobby Darwin in an exchange of outfielders. Briggs had missed about a month of the season because of injury, but he was batting .297 at the time of the trade. Even though his season average was .246, his on-base percentage was a career-high .388. He made what turned out to be his last appearance in major-league baseball on September 28, in the Twins’ last game of the 1975 season. He went 1-for-3 with a run scored in the Twins’ 6-4 loss to the Chicago White Sox. He doubled and scored in the seventh inning in what would turn out to be his last at-bat in the majors. Briggs was lifted for a pinch-hitter in the eighth. He earned $69,000 for the 1975 season, the most of his career.

In February 1976 Briggs requested his release from the Twins so that he could sign a contract to play in Japan.19 Briggs had been a solid major leaguer. His teams could count on him for an average of 16 home runs, 60 RBIs, and 71 runs scored per 162 games, with an OPS of .771 and 203 total bases. He was an above-average defensive left fielder. (Briggs’s move to Japan denied him a reunion with Gene Mauch, who was signed to manage the Minnesota club for the ’76 season. Johnny had fond memories of playing for Mauch. “I enjoyed playing for Gene Mauch,” he said in 2008. “To this day, I don’t think [the 1964 collapse] was all his fault.20)

Briggs signed a two-year contract to play for the Lotte Orions, a contract he would not complete. He became ill from food parasites and left the team early, never returning to play in Japan.21

After Japan, Briggs worked in Wilmington, Delaware, for three years and played semipro baseball. He then moved back to his hometown of Paterson and took a job in the Passaic County Sheriff’s Department. He worked as a corrections officer from 1982 until 2007. He continued his association with athletics, serving for two decades as a Paterson recreation supervisor, running baseball leagues, conducting clinics, and counseling youths.22

Briggs was remarried to Renvy, a detective in the Passaic County Sheriff’s Department. Their two sons, Jalen and Julian, could play their youth baseball games at Johnny Briggs Park (formerly Westside Park, but renamed in 2008). Briggs acknowledged the honor of having a field named after him in humble fashion. “It’s a nice tribute,” he said, “especially because we don’t have many fields in our city, but to have one named after me is an honor … way beyond anything I ever expected.”23

In 2008 the Paterson Little League’s 13-14-year-old division was named the Johnny Briggs Division. Bill LaSala of the Little League said, “Aside from Larry Doby, Johnny was the greatest athlete to come through Paterson. … He’s regarded very highly as a ballplayer and a person, probably more important as a person.”24

This biography is included in the book “The Year of the Blue Snow: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies” (SABR, 2013), edited by Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin. For more information or to purchase the book in e-book or paperback form, click here.

Sources

Kashatus, William C., September Swoon: Richie Allen, the ’64 Phillies, and Racial Integration (University Park, Pennsylvania: Pennsylvania State University Press, 2005).

Bangor (Maine) Daily News

Bergen Record (Hackensack, New Jersey)

Milwaukee Journal-Sentinel

Newburgh (New York) Evening News

New York Times

Philadelphia Tribune

Spokane (Washington) Spokesman Review

Baseball-reference.com

baseballalmanac.com

retrosheet.org

northjersey.com

Seton Hall University Archives and Library – thanks to Professors Alan Delozier and Anthony Lee.

Thanks also to Principal Zatiti Moody, Eastside High School, Paterson, New Jersey.

Notes

Jim Bunning was born in Saint Elizabeth’s Hospital in Covington, Kentucky, on October 23, 1931, to Gladys (Best) Bunning and Louis Bunning of Newport, Kentucky, which is situated across the Ohio River from Cincinnati. Louis owned a ladder-manufacturing factory. The family was a tightly knit one. Gladys and Louis encouraged their children in whatever endeavor they chose. Most important of all were their Catholic religion and attaining a good education. Bunning had an older brother, Louis, and a younger brother, Robert.

When Jim was 18 months old, the family moved to nearby Southgate, Kentucky. Jim attended St. Therese grammar school there. His first recollection of playing baseball was at a school picnic. Bunning recalled that he pitched all the time as a youngster because he had the only ball. His first outing in an organized league was in a knothole game. He pitched and played the outfield. With the knothole gang, Jim would go to the Cincinnati Reds games.

The players he admired most were pitchers – Paul Derringer and Bucky Walters. Walters took top priority. One time, with his family at a restaurant, young Jim saw Bucky Walters sitting at a table. Jim was too bashful to go over and ask for an autograph. Older brother Louis got up the courage and went over to Walters’ table. The result was that Jim got his autograph and also a picture taken with Walters. The picture-taking was delayed a moment as Walters – mindful of his image – removed a bottle of beer from the table before allowing the photo to be taken.

After finishing grade school, Jim went to St. Xavier High School in Cincinnati. As a freshman he played football and basketball, but not baseball. In his sophomore year he made the varsity football, basketball, and baseball teams. As a sophomore pitcher, he won six and lost two. As a junior, he won five and lost three. His senior year, with a poor team behind him, Bunning was 1-5.

Graduating from high school in 1949, Bunning was admitted to Xavier University in Cincinnati. In May of his freshman year, Detroit Tigers scout Bruce Connatser told Jim’s father that the Tigers were interested in signing Jim. The parents had no objection to his playing professional baseball, but they wanted him to finish college. The Tigers agreed to let Jim finish the spring semester before reporting for baseball – meaning he would miss spring training for the next three years. The club also agreed that his first minor-league team would be Richmond, Indiana, of the Class D Indiana-Ohio League, less than an hour from home. The Tigers gave Bunning a $4,000 signing bonus and a $150-a-month salary. With the bonus, he bought an engagement ring for Mary Theis, his childhood sweetheart. Now that he was under contract to a professional baseball team, his basketball scholarship at Xavier was canceled, and his parents paid for the balance of his college education.

Bunning got off to a great start at Richmond, winning his first five starts. “Boy, this is easy,” he must have thought. Then reality set in, and he lost his next seven and finished the year 7-8. He still had a lot to learn about pitching, but did well overall, allowing 120 hits in 123 innings, giving up 69 runs (44 earned), and compiling a 3.22 earned-run average. He struck out 83 and walked 68. After the season, Bunning returned to Xavier and increased his course load so he could graduate sooner.

For his second season in the minors, the Tigers moved Bunning up to Davenport, Iowa, in the Class B Three-I League. He was 8-10 with a 2.88 ERA for the last-place team, giving up only 110 hits in 150 innings and striking out 103, but walking 105. That winter, in January 1952, Jim and Mary were married.

As usual, Bunning missed spring training. After the spring semester ended, he reported to Williamsport, Pennsylvania, in the Class A Eastern League. Williamsport also finished in last place and Bunning was 5-9 (3.49 ERA). It was his worst season to date. Mary, pregnant with their first child, was back home. Discouraged after his dismal season, Bunning was determined to get back on track. He decided to forgo the overhand delivery the Tigers taught him in order to prevent him from falling off the mound at the end of his delivery, and enable him to field better. He reverted back to his three-quarter to side-arm delivery because he was comfortable with it.

In 1953 Bunning was now a college graduate with a bachelor’s degree in economics. It had taken 3½ years. A half-century later, he would remark that he had “better professors of economics at Xavier University than Alan Greenspan had at New York University.”1

That year Bunning attended his first spring-training camp, in Lakeland, Florida, and was assigned to Triple-A Buffalo. The Bisons had a veteran staff and Bunning was not getting much work, so he was sent to Little Rock in the Double-A Southern Association. There he pitched 158 innings, but was only 5-12 with a 4.56 ERA. Bunning began to question whether he had the talent to get to the major leagues, but after talking it over with his wife, decided to keep trying.

In 1954 Bunning was sent back to Little Rock, where he posted his first winning record, 13-11 in professional baseball. Manager Bill Norman had built up Bunning’s confidence by telling him that with his arm he should be a winning pitcher. Bunning realized that he did not have all the tools to make it to the big leagues – he needed a good breaking ball. He still relied on his fastball when he got behind in the count. His 1954 ERA was still high at 4.29, but knowing what he needed to do, he felt he was making progress.

The Tigers took Bunning to spring training in 1955, then sent him to Buffalo. In July, with an 8-5 record, he was called up by the Tigers. Bunning made his first start on the 20th, lasting 7 2/3 innings in a 6-3 loss to Baltimore. He started seven more games and relieved in seven over the rest of the season. His record was 3-5 in 51 innings, with a 6.35 earned-run average.

Jim, his wife, and their three children went to Mexico during the offseason so he could pitch in the Mexican winter league. He was determined to work on his breaking pitches. Manager Bobby Avila’s Mexico City Reds won the championship and Jim contributed a 9-4 record. He hoped to stick with the Tigers in 1956, but he had one option left, and the Tigers sent him to Triple-A Charleston. Bunning wrote later that he was unhappy with the way the Tigers handled sending players down. No one in the front office or the manager sat you down and talked to you. You found out when you went to your locker and your uniform wasn’t there.

When he found out he was being demoted, Jim pleaded his case with general manager Muddy Ruel, telling Ruel he would rather be traded than go back to the minors. Ruel advised him that if he proved he could win in Charleston, he would be called back up. Bunning dutifully complied and reported to Charleston manager Charlie Metro, a tough, dedicated baseball lifer. A possibly apocryphal story says the team lost the first game Bunning pitched, but Bunning had pitched well and was singing in the shower. Manager Metro was displeased. “Losers don`t sing,” he told Bunning, who replied, “Well, Mr. Metro, I did the best job I could,” and apologized. Rather than cause a rift, the exchange led to a bond between the two. Metro told Jim that his duty was to get him back to the major leagues, and Jim replied, “That’s the only reason I’m here.”2

Bunning won 9 and lost 11 at Charleston and ended up fourth in the league in strikeouts while toiling for a second-division team. The Tigers recalled him in July. He started against the Washington Senators in his first game and lost, 4-1. He won his next start and finished the season with a 5-1 record and a 3.71 ERA. Twelve of his 15 appearances were out of the bullpen.

Bunning decided he would give up the game if he didn’t make it this time. After the season ended, he pitched for the Marianao Tigers in Havana, Cuba. Returning to the Tigers for spring training in 1957, Bunning was in good spirits when manager Jack Tighe told him he would be a starter. Jim started the second game of the season, but after four straight singles in the first inning (two of them bloop hits), he was taken out of the game. He was relegated to the bullpen. Working in the pen helped Bunning become a much improved pitcher with a slider that he could consistently get over the plate. He became a pitcher, not just a thrower. He proved his mettle on May 16 when he finally got another start and pitched a five-hitter against the Boston Red Sox. The victory earned Bunning a place in the starting rotation. In his next start, against Baltimore, he pitched 13 innings until he left with the game tied, 1-1.

Named to the American League All-Star team, Bunning was the starting pitcher for the American League, retired all nine batters he faced, and was credited with the win. He ended the season with a league-leading 20 victories (he lost 8 games), led the league in innings pitched, was second in strikeouts, third in earned-run average, and fourth in complete games. The only blemish was his 33 home runs allowed, the most off a pitcher in a season in Detroit history. What Bunning felt was important was that he won five games (in four starts) in September, proving to himself that he had the stamina to pitch well into the last month of the season.

Bunning acquired a reputation for shrewdness in contract negotiations. Rick Ferrell, general manager of the Tigers from 1960 to 1962, said of the pitcher, “Bunning always thinks out his demands so carefully and considerately – as he sees it – that if it’s reasonable at all, we might as well sign him. Otherwise he’s prepared to discuss it forever. He’ll go over pitch by pitch of the entire season.”3 But despite his toughness in negotiations, Bunning was never a holdout, and he was the first Tiger to sign a contract for the 1958 season.

After the 1957 season the Tigers, seeking some rest for Bunning’s arm, talked him out of playing in Cuba again by paying him the amount he would have earned there. When Detroit assembled again in Lakeland in the spring of 1958, he was now an established big leaguer and did not have to impress anyone to earn a spot on the club. His pitching in camp did not impress, but on Opening Day he outdueled Billy Pierce of the Chicago White Sox during a 4-3 Tigers victory.

Winning on Opening Day was the last good thing to happen to Bunning for quite a while. The first month of the 1958 season was a nightmare for him. He was accused of throwing beanballs and was giving up too many homers. Topping off all those distractions was a rib injury he incurred in May. The homers were not as hurtful as the rib injury, as most of them were solo shots. The real problem with the homers was that they changed his demeanor on the mound. But Bunning eventually learned to live with the fact that since he threw strikes he was going to give up home runs.

After the All-Star break, things turned around for Bunning. On July 20 he pitched a no-hitter against the Boston Red Sox. That was a confidence-booster and Bunning ended the season with a 14-12 mark and an ERA of 3.52. After the season he sold insurance.

Again in 1959 Bunning had a mediocre spring training. But he finished the season with a 17-13 record, pitching 249 2/3 innings. During a relief appearance on August 8, Bunning became just the fifth AL pitcher to record three strikeouts in an inning on nine pitches. He led the league in strikeouts but set yet another Tigers record by surrendering 37 home runs.

In 1960, despite an 11-14 record for a sixth-place team with a woeful offense, Bunning felt he pitched the best baseball of his career. He led the league with 201 strikeouts (the second year in a row he led with the same 201 Ks). He walked only 64 batters in 252 innings. The Tigers finished 26 games behind the first-place Yankees. Bunning quit his postseason insurance job, and worked out and rested.

In 1961 the Tigers had a new manager, former catcher Bob Scheffing. Bunning and Scheffing had a confrontation early in the season. Bunning was unhappy when he was taken out of a close game because he felt that he could get on base as well as any of the Tigers’ pinch-hitters. Scheffing continued to pinch-hit for him in close games.

This was a good year for the Tigers; they were either in the lead or close to the lead most of the season, until they lost 11 of 14 games in a September stretch and the Yankees won 13 in a row. That cost the Tigers the pennant, despite their achieving 101 victories. Bunning won 17 of those games, and lost 11.

For Bunning, 1962 was also a good season as he won 19 and lost 10. Injuries to pitcher Frank Lary and outfielder Al Kaline damaged Detroit’s hopes. In 1963 the Tigers got off to a bad start, Scheffing was fired, and Chuck Dressen took the reins. Several times he held Bunning out of his normal rotation for an extra day or two, until Jim complained. Dressen took Bunning’s unhappiness to heart, and Jim won six of his last eight games. Dressen also wanted him to pitch with an overhand motion. Bunning refused, having already tried that without success. His outspokenness, being his teammates’ union representative, and the fact that he worked as a stockbroker in the offseason irked Tigers management. Bunning realized he might be traded.

Bunning’s feeling turned out to be correct. During the winter meetings he was traded to the Phillies along with catcher Gus Triandos for outfielder Don Demeter and pitcher Jack Hamilton. Philadelphia manager Gene Mauch was elated; he felt it gave the Phillies a big boost toward contending in 1964.

At spring training in Clearwater, Florida, the 32-year-old Bunning felt he had something to prove – that he could still win, and that he was capable of doing fine work in the National League. The Phillies let Jim get into shape his own way, and he had a productive spring, even though he was beaten badly by the Pirates in his last spring-training start. (Mauch had told him not to show the National League rivals too much.)

As he had in Detroit, Bunning assumed the role of player representative with the Phillies. He was one of the leaders in the search for a union chief. Almost immediately, he got the team to give the players free parking at the ballpark, and to allow players to bring their wives on some road trips.

The 1964 Phillies got off to a 10-2 start and were in either first place or second most of the season. Bunning won his first two starts, beating the Mets 4-1 and the Chicago Cubs 10-0, striking out 20 batters in the two games. He was 9-2 at the All-Star break.

On June 21, Father’s Day, Bunning was scheduled to pitch the first game of a doubleheader against the Mets at Shea Stadium in New York. He attended Mass at St. Patrick’s Cathedral and had a breakfast of sausage and eggs. Bunning felt nothing spectacular while warming up, but, Philadelphia sportswriter Larry Merchant wrote in Sport magazine, “Manager Mauch felt he saw something different in Bunning before anyone else.” Mauch said, “We knew when he was warming up that this was something special. The way he was throwing so live and as high as he was. Not high with his pitches. High himself.”4

Four innings of the game passed and Bunning had a perfect game going. There were no hard chances for the Philadelphia fielders. Sensing something special was happening, Mauch moved players around defensively. In the fifth inning he switched Cookie Rojas from shortstop to left field to replace Wes Covington and put Bobby Wine in at shortstop. Bunning came close to losing his perfect game in the fifth. Mets catcher Jesse Gonder smashed a line drive between second and first. Second sacker Tony Taylor lunged to his left, knocked the ball down, crawled on his knees to grab the ball, and nipped Gonder at first. That was the last play in the game that resembled a hit for the Mets. Bunning was not afraid to talk about his possible perfect game, but his teammates, fearing to jinx him, were silent. “Dive for the ball,” he told his infielders. “Don’t let anything fall in.”5

With one out in the ninth, Bunning called catcher Gus Triandos to the mound. He asked Triandos if he could tell him a joke to relax him. Triandos looked at Jim as if he were crazy, laughed, and went back behind the plate. Pinch-hitter George Altman slammed a long foul into the right-field seats. Then Bunning struck him out. The last batter was pinch-hitter John Stephenson and Bunning struck him out on a curve. Jim pounded his glove and his teammates rushed out to greet him. It was the fifth perfect game in major-league history, and the first in the regular season since Charlie Robertson of the Chicago White Sox hurled one on April 30, 1922. It was the first in the NL since 1880.

On September 20 the Phillies had a 6½-game lead with 12 games left to play. Cincinnati came to town and Chico Ruiz did the Phils in, 1-0, with a two-out steal of home. That started an epic collapse in which the Phillies lost ten games in a row. Three of the losses were charged to Bunning. The scores were 5-3 (Bunning gave up three runs in six innings), 14-8 (he surrendered seven runs in three innings, and 8-5 (he yielded six runs, five earned, in 3 1/3 innings). With two games remaining, Philadelphia still had a chance to tie for the flag and defeated the Reds twice, while the Mets surprisingly won twice against the Cardinals. But St. Louis defeated last-place New York on the final day of the season and won the pennant by one game over the Reds and the Phillies.

For weeks after the dismal September, Bunning felt sick and despondent. Philadelphia Evening Bulletin columnist Sandy Grady didn’t help, asking Bunning if he felt like putting on a false beard, wearing dark glasses, and pulling all the shades down in the house, à la Floyd Patterson when he lost the heavyweight title to Ingemar Johansson in 1959. After a few weeks the agony started to subside and Jim snapped out of his misery.

Many critics had put the blame on Mauch, saying he pitched Bunning and Chris Short too much in the last weeks of the season without proper rest. Bunning would have none of that; he blamed neither Mauch nor any one player for the lost pennant. He put the blame on the team as a whole, including himself.

Bunning spent three more seasons with the Phillies. Still pitching fine baseball, he was 19-9 in 1965 with an ERA of 2.60; 19-14 in 1966 (2.41 ERA, with a career-high 314 innings pitched); and 17-15 in 1967 (2.29 ERA, while leading the NL in innings pitched and strikeouts). During the 1966 and 1967 seasons, he led the National League in games started and shutouts. In December 1967, Bunning was 36 years old, and the Phillies had just finished fifth in the ten-team National League. In a rebuilding mode, they traded Bunning to Pittsburgh for four players, including pitcher Woodie Fryman. Bunning had an off year for the sixth-place Pirates, finishing 4-14 with an ERA of 3.88.

In August 1969 Bunning was 10-9 with the Pirates when, on August 15, he was sent to the Los Angeles Dodgers for two players and cash. He was 3-1 for the Dodgers and was released after the season. Bunning signed with the Phillies, by now wallowing in mediocrity. He was 10-15 in 1970 and 5-12 in 1971, after which, nearing the age of 40, he retired.

Bunning became a manager in the Phillies farm system, starting at Reading in 1972, and moving on to Eugene, Toledo, and Oklahoma City.

In Frank Dolson’s biography, Jim Bunning, Baseball and Beyond, Scott Reid, who coached for Bunning during the 1975 season at Toledo, offered this take on Bunning as a manager: “The year with Bunning at Toledo wasn’t easy. We had a terrible club. But as bad as the club was, working with Jim was a good experience.” Reid told players, “This is the best guy you could be playing for. Number one, if you can play he will get you to the big leagues. Number two, if you can’t, he will send you home and he’s doing you a favor. So just bust your ass. Go play for the man. Give him everything you’ve got and that’s all he’ll ask for. He’s not going to be your buddy. He’s not going to fraternize with you. He’s going to treat you like a man, and that’s all you can ask.”6

The Phillies dropped Bunning after the 1976 season. It dawned on them that they would have to contend with Bunning’s brutal honesty. He felt he’d been given false hope regarding the big-league manager’s slot and that farm director Dallas Green betrayed him. The two men had become close friends over the years. Their friendship abruptly ended.

Before Bunning finished with the Phillies, he had agreed to manage the Escogido Leones in the Dominican Winter League.

After that, Bunning tried to become a part-owner of the Houston Astros. When this failed, he returned home to Fort Thomas, Kentucky, and the brokerage business. He began representing some of his former players as their agent. By 1977 he had 30 players as clients. That year he was elected to the Fort Thomas City Council. In 1979 Bunning was elected to the Kentucky State Senate, and in 1983 he obliged the state Republican Party when they had difficulty finding a candidate and ran unsuccessfully for governor. In 1986 Bunning was elected to the US House of Representatives, and in 1998 he was elected to the US Senate. Meanwhile, in 1996 Bunning was elected to the Hall of Fame by the Veterans Committee. And in 2001 the Phillies retired his number 14.

During his re-election campaign in 2004, Bunning exhibited odd behavior. He said of his opponent, Frank Daniel Mongiardo, a second-generation Italian, that he “looked like one of Saddam Hussein’s sons.”7 Then he accused members of Mongiardo’s staff of assaulting his wife. Bunning was rescued by some damage control from the Republican Party and won the election by just 2 percentage points, while President George W. Bush carried Kentucky by 20 points.

By 2009 Bunning had lost the support of the powerful Kentucky Senator Mitch McConnell, effectively ending his political career. In March he apologized for a morbid remark he had made, saying he believed Supreme Court Judge Ruth Bader Ginsberg, “could die within a year from pancreatic cancer.”8 On July 27, 2009, Bunning said that “running for office is not just about the issues,” and “over the past year some Republican Party leaders in the Senate have done everything to dry up my fundraising.”9 He concluded by saying that he would not seek re-election in 2010.

Bunning’s long tenure in the minor leagues and his election to the Hall of Fame in 1996 are testaments to his toughness and hard work. His political career may be remembered best for its brusque statements. His perfect game in June 1964 will always be remembered.

Jim and Mary Bunning were married for more than 60 years. They had nine children, 35 grandchildren, and seven great-grandchildren.

Jim Bunning died at age 85 on May 26, 2017.

An earlier version of this biography is included in the book “The Year of the Blue Snow: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies” (SABR, 2013), edited by Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin.

Sources

Bunning, James and Ralph Bernstein, The Story of Jim Bunning (Philadelphia: J.B. Lippincott, 1965).

Clayton, Skip and Jeff Moeller, 50 Phabulous Phillies (Champaign, Illinois: Sports Publishing Inc., 2000).

Dolson, Frank, Jim Bunning, Baseball and Beyond (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1998).

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

Light, Jonathan Fraser, The Cultural Encyclopedia of Baseball (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland and Company, 1997).

Roberts, Robin and Paul C. Rogers, III. My Life in Baseball (Chicago: Triumph Books, 2003).

Crowley, Patrick, “Bunning Gunning for Greenspan,” Kentucky Enquirer, February 7, 2001.

Merchant, Larry, “Jim Bunning’s New Life,” Sport, November 1964.

Louisville Courier-Journal, February 23, 2009.

Time, April 14, 2006, July 29, 2009.

Washington Post, July 27, 2009.

USA Today, April 1, 2004.

Baseball-Almanac.com.

Wikipedia.org.

Notes

John Wesley Callison was born in Qualls, Oklahoma, on March 12, 1939, the son of Virgil (sometimes spelled Vergil) and Wilda (Faddis) Callison. The family supposedly had Native American roots. The Callisons were poor and his father worked odd jobs in and around Qualls in the dying days of the Great Depression. When Virgil joined the Army during World War II, Callison’s mother traveled the path of many “Okies” before her and in 1944 took young Johnny, his brother, and his two sisters and settled in Bakersfield, California.

The quiet and shy Callison discovered that he had exceptional athletic skills. One of his teachers noted that he could run faster backward than most of his classmates could run forward. Sports became his way out of a life of poverty and hardscrabble work. He said later in life that he “found my refuge in baseball” because only on the ballfield did he feel “worthy of measuring up.”2

Callison was a star athlete at East Bakersfield High School and especially stood out in baseball. The scouts were on his trail before he graduated from school, with the White Sox eventually signing him in 1957 for a bonus of $7,000 plus another $3,000 under the table. To ease his way into professional baseball, the White Sox assigned the 18-year-old Callison to his hometown team, the Bakersfield Bears of the Class C California League.

Callison made an impressive debut in 1957, hitting .340, rapping out 41 extra-base hits, and stealing 31 bases in just 86 games in a league that included such future major leaguers as third baseman Charlie Smith, pitcher Chuck Estrada, and outfielder Vada Pinson. Callison was named the league’s outstanding rookie. The White Sox brass believed they had a superstar in the making and the next season jumped him all the way to their Indianapolis Indians team in the fast-paced Triple-A American Association. At 19, Callison was one step from the majors.

Callison’s sophomore season saw the first comparison to his fellow Oklahoman, Mickey Mantle.3 While Callison’s average dipped to .283, he led the league with 29 home runs and drove in 93 runs while showing for the first time a cannon-like throwing arm. In September the White Sox brought Callison up for a taste of major-league life. He showed signs that he was ready for the big time by hitting .297 while driving in 12 runs in 18 games. The pitching-strong White Sox, who finished 10 games behind the Yankees in 1958, believed that they had a chance to win the pennant the next season. They brought Callison to spring training hoping that he would add some punch to their weak offense.

Callison made the team out of spring training but was a major disappointment, hitting just .173 with three homers in 49 games. He was sent back to Indianapolis in midseason. The always-competitive Callison was disgusted with himself and felt he had let the White Sox down. The White Sox brass decided that they needed to add offense to continue to compete with the Yankees; despite winning the pennant, they had finished last in the American League in home runs and sixth in batting in 1959. Callison became expendable.

In the offseason, the White Sox made two major trades to add power to their lineup. They got former home run champ Roy Sievers from Washington to play first base and exchanged Callison for third baseman Gene Freese, who had hit 23 home runs for the last-place Philadelphia Phillies.

The trade proved the making of Callison. Going to a developing team where there was no pressure to perform and especially coming under the tutelage of Gene Mauch, he blossomed into one of the premier players in the National League.

Callison’s best years were with the Phillies from 1960 to 1969. His first two seasons were a learning process. Mauch loved his potential and made him a special project. In some ways, Mauch saw Callison as the kind of ballplayer he would have liked to be. Callison was not only Mauch’s special project but also his pet. Mauch worked on smoothing out the 5-foot-10, 175-pound Callison’s left-handed swing and getting him to hit to left field. Mauch also encouraged the speedy Callison to occasionally drag bunt as a way to sharpen his batting eye and upset the defense. By 1961 Callison was showing signs of brilliance. One-third of his hits that season went for extra bases, including ten triples, the first of five consecutive years in which he reached double figures in that category. He led the league in triples with 16 in 1965. His 84 three-baggers for the Phillies rank him sixth in the team’s all-time list through 2012. He also ranked 12th in doubles and 12th in home runs in Phillies history.

Mauch tried Callison in left field but that didn’t make the best use of his great throwing arm. Beginning in 1962, Callison became the Phillies’ regular right fielder, quickly mastering the tricky bounces off Connie Mack Stadium’s 34-foot-high wall. From 1962 through 1965, Callison led all right fielders in the majors with 90 assists – quite a feat when you consider that the great Roberto Clemente, possessor of one of the strongest arms in the major leagues at the time, had 59.

The 1962 campaign proved Callison’s breakthrough season. He hit .300 for the first and only time in his career – Mauch benched him on the last day of the season to keep his average over the .300 mark. Callison hit 23 homers, tying the record for the most home runs by a Phillies left-handed hitter since the right-field wall in Connie Mack Stadium was raised in height. Then he broke that mark in each of the next three seasons. His 32 home runs in 1965 were the most for any left-hander in the history of Connie Mack Stadium. The 34-foot-high right-field wall probably cost the pull-hitting Callison a number of homers during his ten years with the Phillies.

Arguably, Callison’s greatest season came in 1964, the ill-fated season when the Phillies blew a 6½-game lead with 12 games to play and lost the pennant. Playing in all 162 games, Callison hit .274, scored 101 runs, and drove in 104 while banging out 31 homers. He won the All-Star Game with a dramatic ninth-inning, three-run homer off Dick Radatz. That home run became Callison’s most enduring memory. He said he was asked about that feat so many times that he felt like Bill Murray in the film Groundhog Day.4

During the Phillies’ ten-game losing streak, Callison, along with rookie sensation Dick Allen, was one of the few Phillies players to hold his own, hitting .275 with four home runs. Unlike some others, Callison didn’t blame Mauch for the team’s late-season collapse: “It wasn’t all Gene’s fault. We played!”5

Callison probably would have won the Most Valuable Player Award that season but for the Phillies’ pennant collapse. As it was, he finished second to Ken Boyer of the St. Louis Cardinals.

Callison twice hit three home runs in a game for the Phillies, the first against the Milwaukee Braves during the ten-game losing streak in 1964. The second time came a year later, June 6, 1965, against the Chicago Cubs.

Callison had another solid year for the Phillies in 1965, hitting 32 homers and driving in 101 runs. Then, beginning in 1966, his power numbers dropped precipitously. He hit just 11 home runs in 1966 and never hit more than 20 again. Beginning in 1966, Callison’s power numbers continued to decline. His slugging percentage reached a peak of .509 in 1965, but dropped over 100 points two years later.

At 27, Callison effectively was finished as a major-league power hitter. What happened to him isn’t clear. He claimed he suffered a number of nagging injuries – to his legs in particular – that destroyed his ability to play. In 1966 he complained of problems with his eyes. He tried wearing glasses and even adopted a vigorous exercise program that Carl Yastrzemski said benefited his own career. But nothing worked. In baseball circles it was believed that Callison had lost his self-confidence. Even at the height of his success in 1964, Callison had admitted that he was “the biggest worrier around” in an article in Sport magazine.6

After three more undistinguished years with the Phillies, Callison was traded to the Chicago Cubs after the 1969 season with pitcher Larry Colton for pitcher Dick Selma and outfielder Oscar Gamble. He loved playing with Cubs but couldn’t stand manager Leo Durocher, whom he blamed for some of his troubles, claiming that Durocher almost drove him out of baseball.7 Callison stayed with the Cubs for two seasons but clashed with Durocher over playing time. In July 1970, while Callison was in the midst of a good season, he wrote that Durocher “got a wild hair up his ass” and began platooning him. Callison found sitting on the bench “torture.”8 Despite playing in 147 games in the season, Callison got to bat only 477 times, an indication that Durocher was pinch-hitting for him at times. That was Callison’s last decent season; he hit.264 with 19 home runs while driving in 68 runs. After the 1971 season, he was traded to the New York Yankees, and he finished his career there in 1973.

After retiring, Callison worked in a variety of jobs including car salesman and bartender, none of which suited his talents. He longed to get back into baseball in some capacity but never found a place. For years he attended the Phillies’ fantasy camps in Florida, where he was popular with both the fantasy players and his former teammates.

Callison married his high-school sweetheart, Dianne Hammitt, while still in school. Along with their three daughters, Lori, Cindy, and Sherri, they resided for years in Glenside, a small town outside Philadelphia.

Callison’s health was poor after his retirement from baseball. He suffered from a serious case of ulcers, experienced a heart attack, and eventually died from cancer on October 12, 2006, at the age of 67.

Despite the decline of his careers with the Phillies after the 1965 season, Callison still has a significant place in the team’s records. Through 2012 he was among the top ten Phillies in games played in the outfield, triples, and extra-base hits. For five years, from 1962 through 1966, he was the idol of the city and easily the most popular player on the team. All in all, not a bad record to leave.

This biography is included in “The Year of the Blue Snow: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies” (SABR, 2013), edited by Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin. An earlier version originally appeared in SABR’s “Go-Go To Glory: The 1959 Chicago White Sox” (ACTA, 2009), edited by Don Zminda.

Sources

Bostrom, Don. “Johnny Callison’s Most Memorable Moment,” home.onemain.com.

Callison, John Wesley, with John Austin Sletten. The Johnny Callison Story (New York: Vantage Press, 1991).

Hochman, Stan. “The Survivors of ‘64’: Johnny Callison,” in Richard Orodenker, The Phillies Reader (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).

Rossi, John P. The 1964 Phillies: The Story of Baseball’s Most Memorable Collapse (Jefferson, North Carolina: McFarland, 2005).

Westcott, Rich and Frank Bilovsky, The New Phillies Encyclopedia (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1993).

Westcott, Rich. Philadelphia’s Old Ballparks (Philadelphia: Temple University Press, 1996).

Notes

Campbell called Wilt Chamberlain scoring 100 points – in one game in 1962. He broadcast a Philadelphia pro trifecta – the Phillies, football Eagles, and basketball ’76ers – “my favorite memory,” the Eagles’ last title in 1960. One night an elderly lady in New Jersey heard Bill’s baseball partner from Shibe Park, renamed Connie Mack Stadium in 1954: “Would you please talk a little louder?” she wrote baritone Byrum Saam. “My radio battery is getting weaker.” Some felt Campbell’s voice so strong you didn’t need a battery, merely open the window.

Bill brought to every sport the intensity of his youth: It became an oasis, something to retreat to. At 6, he and Dad attended fils’ first big-league game, at Shibe Park, Campbell loving the geometry of the diamond. He took brevity for granted: With Lefty Grove pitching, a game might take an hour and a half. He also shared pere’s zest for tale and tune. Bill Sr. loved to sing ballads, his hero Enrico Caruso. Jr.’s hero was Dad, who remarried, then divorced – rare, even shameful, in the 1930s. Alone, the teenager turned to radio. He loved how it let a listener hear players jabber and feel pressure creep.

In 1937, at Roman Catholic High in Philadelphia, Bill cracked announcing on a bare-boned 15-minute sports show. Major-league technology was slightly more chic. Most teams aired home games live. Away, line charges were pricier. Solution: wireless telegraphy, “[giving] play-by-play,” wrote The Sporting News, “within three seconds of the time it occurs.” An operator at the park sent code to a station: B1L meant ball one, low. An announcer could “re-create” a game unseen. Arch McDonald worked three blocks from the White House. Bill Dyer double-dipped the Philadelphia A’s and Phillies. Most used sound effects to mask being in studio. All helped broadcasting lodge in Campbell’s bones.

A stick on hollow wood simulated bat on ball. The sound track included background noise. Nothing was real. Reality: It didn’t matter. In 1940 Campbell, 17, still in high school, began at a station in Atlantic City. Bill started play-by-play at minor-league Lancaster, Pennsylvania,, moving to WIP in Philadelphia in 1942, the year he entered the Coast Guard and did convoy duty in the Atlantic. At war’s end, 56 million radio receivers dwarfed television’s 17,000. In 1946 and 1948, Campbell became WCAU Radio and TV sports director, respectively. Radio was an immovable object, selling 165,000 sets a month at peak. Slowly, TV grew into an irresistible force, vending 7 million in 1950.

Before long the 20-something was among first to telecast Big 5 basketball at Philadelphia’s Palestra, hosted a popular daily radio show, co-hosted a Saturday-morning radio show and video series with A’s owner, manager, and patriarch Connie Mack – “Baseball’s Grand Old Man,” said Campbell – and did another sports show in grainy black and white on Channel 3 with mentor Stoney McLinn, once Ty Cobb’s ghostwriter. The program was titled The Kid and the Old-Timer.

Campbell was “The Kid,” in 1946 starting play-by-play for the rookie Basketball Association of America Philadelphia Warriors – a league and team akin to pro wrestling, except that wrestling had a niche. (In 1949 the BAA and the National Basketball League merged to become the National Basketball Association.) In 2005 The Dean, 82, smiled, “[Now] I’m the old-timer.” With Jo and daughter Chris he drove to Springfield, Massachusetts, to get the Curt Gowdy Media Award from the Naismith Memorial Basketball Hall of Fame. “It never once entered my mind that I’d be eligible for a basketball award … but I think the Chamberlain thing probably helped a great deal.” How could it not – Wilt scoring 100 points – in a game?

In 1962 the NBA still wore remnants of its backlot youth. Many games weren’t available on radio. Even fewer graced TV. Some teams played regular-season games in “neutral” sites like Syracuse, Muncie – or Hershey, Pennsylvania: “anything,” said Campbell, airing the Warriors on WCAU, “to take interest to the hinterlands.” On March 2, 1962, the club bused two hours from Philly to Hershey. Arriving in the afternoon, it drove to the Hershey Sports Arena – no hotel to rest; no assistant coach; barely one roll of adhesive tape. Just 4,124 dotted the 9,000-seat Arena to see the New York Knicks vs. Wilt the Stilt: 7-foot-1, averaging 50 points, and making $100,000 – each unheard-of: to Campbell, “unlike the no-frills NBA, huge in every way.”

That night Chamberlain proceeded to make league history – and a large part of Bill’s career. No station telecast the game. Later WCAU accidentally recorded over its radiocast. Neither the NBA, Knicks, Warriors, nor Arena saved coverage. Campbell’s play-by-play exists only because Knicks fan Jim Trelease, a University of Massachusetts student, taped WCAU’s fourth-quarter replay. With 9 minutes and 24 seconds left, Campbell began conjuring a point total “as high as 100. Wouldn’t that be something?” Several minutes later: “If you know anybody not listening, call them up. A little history you are sitting in on tonight.”

By the 1:01 mark, Chamberlain had 98 points. “I’ll tell you, said Campbell, transported, “that’s a lot of points if you’re playing grammar-school kids, isn’t it?” In the final seconds: “In to Chamberlain. He’s got it! He’s got it! He’s got it! He made it! A dipper dunk! He made it! The fans are all over the floor! They’ve stopped the game! People are running all over the court! One hundred points for Wilt Chamberlain!” – basketball’s riposte to Russ Hodges’ “The Giants win the pennant!”

Clearly, there was nothing more for the Warriors to say, moving to San Francisco that summer. Staying put, Campbell managed a schedule that clung to him like vines around a trellis. At one time, he did 11 radio and three TV weekly shows, Warriors and Big 5 basketball, and University of Pennsylvania football at Franklin Field, its double-decked brick horseshoed home. Voice bobbing up and down, like a slip on the Schuylkill River, Campbell also aired America’s greatest rivalry.

During or back from war, more than a hundred thousand jammed Philadelphia’s Municipal Stadium to see each year’s Army-Navy football game – a day of pageantry and the epitome of “duty, honor, country.” Campbell covered it at high tide, trailing only the World Series as America’s midcentury divertissement. One highlight film observed, “Each autumn comes a day in this great land of ours when the wheels of industry turn a little slower … when the white-collar worker takes a little more time [at] lunch … when almost everyone is stricken with WORLD SERIES fever.” Especially in WWII, service academy football, wrote Robert Mayer, seemed “America’s sporting equivalent of war.” In 1944 General Douglas MacArthur wired victorious West Point coach Red Blaik: “We stopped the war to celebrate your magnificent success.”

For a long time Saturday was America’s football day. “When we grew up, pro football players were … a bunch of pot-bellied longshoremen,” Vin Scully said. Later it became a Sunday and Monday rite: same time and channel, the NFL live. Campbell aired the 1956-57 Eagles at Connie Mack Stadium. In 1958 they moved to Franklin Field, going 2-9-1. By contrast, that December 28 had everything: Yankee Stadium, 50 million network TV viewers, an epic Giants defense, and Baltimore quarterback John Unitas. Pro football got $200,000 for the title game. The Colts’ 23-17 sudden-death victory more than tripled the next pact. Vince Lombardi’s 1959-67 Green Bay Packers fueled the league’s rise, winning five titles, their only loss in a championship game to Campbell’s unsung 1960 Eagles – “as if,” wrote Larry Merchant, “Albania had licked NATO.”

The Eagles liked to throw, quarterback Norm Van Brocklin strong-armed and -willed and Campbell’s close friend. Pete Retzlaff was a grand receiver; another, a 5-foot-10 Okie. “Van Brocklin’s got it,” said Campbell vs. the Giants. “He throws into the corner. All alone [to Tommy McDonald]! Touchdown!” Chuck Bednarik was the last to play both offense (center) and defense (linebacker) — “amphibious,” Yogi Berra might say. Coach Buck Shaw intended to retire, Van Brocklin expecting to replace him. On Monday, December 26, 1960, the title game lured 67,352 to Franklin Field. “You can’t find a seat,” intoned Campbell, broadcasting on WCAU Radio, the telecast blacked out locally. By game’s end it was easy to see why.

Two Paul Hornung field goals gave the Packers a 6-0 lead. Van Brocklin then hit McDonald for a 35-yard touchdown. A Philly field goal made the score 10-6. By turn, Green Bay forged a fourth-quarter touchdown (13-10); the Eagles scored on Ted Dean’s five-yard run (17-13); and the last play saw “sixty-seven thousand people standing. Standing. What an electrifying finish to a great season and a great game,” said Campbell. The Pack was at the enemy 22-yard line. “[Bart] Starr’s up over the ball. This will be it! Starr back to throw. He takes time. He throws over the middle! It’s caught at the 15 [by Jim Taylor]. Running hard to the seven-yard line. And down at the 7” – tackled by Bednarik. The gun went off. “The game’s over! The game’s over! The Eagles are the champions of the world!” It is how millions remember Bill.

Shaw, Van Brocklin, and Bednarik retired. Surprisingly, Nick Skorich became coach. Campbell returned to his daily sports show at 6:10 P.M. and 6:40 P.M. on WCAU Radio and TV, respectively: already “an icon in Philadelphia broadcasting,” said Broadcast Pioneers of Philadelphia. Another icon was the station’s 1950s and early ’60s news anchor, John Facenda – then “the Walter Cronkite of Philadelphia newsmen,” said Steve Sabol. In 1962 Sabol’s father, Ed, founded Blair Motion Pictures, later sold it to the NFL, and as NFL Films won 35 Emmies, “transforming the NFL,” wrote SI.com, “from a near newsreel to near art.” In 1965 Sabol Sr. hired Facenda as NFL Films’ first voice-over, which he remained until his death in 1984. When a writer complimented him on reading a script, Facenda said, “You gave me a good horse to ride.” In 1963 Campbell turned to a sport which soon unhorsed Philadelphia.

Columnist Joseph Alsop once wrote, “If I feel that there were giants in the Roosevelt years, I claim the right to say so.” The early 1960s were a baseball time not of giants, but family. The two Jacks, Buck and Brickhouse. Bob Elson and Bob Prince. Dizzy Dean and Mel Allen. Harry Caray, Phil Rizzuto, and Earl Gillespie each claimed to have invented Holy Cow! All entranced, like Chuck Thompson and Lindsey Nelson, Curt Gowdy and Ernie Harwell – reciting tales around the fire. “Somewhere in a small town, when you talked about the team,” said ESPN’s Gary Thorne, “the broadcaster pictured the game for them night after night.”

When Harwell began in Brooklyn in 1948, “We didn’t have models,” he said. “Today guys train at radio school and college,” sounding robotically alike. His and Campbell’s age relied on the wireless. In video’s age, baseball faced greater competition. “You have to follow it from childhood,” said Bill, who had. Sam Carchidi, the author of the fine book Bill Campbell: The Voice of Philadelphia Sports, said, “[No sport] came close to his affection for baseball.” In 1963, Campbell, making $25,000 as WCAU sports director, took a $10,000 pay cut to air the Phils. Wife Jo said, “Baseball is what you’ve wanted to do your whole life. Follow your heart.”

Campbell had last called baseball re-creating the late-’40s A’s: “There’s a smash into the hole at short. Eddie Joost backhands, sets, throws – gets Rizzuto by a step!” He now joined Byrum Saam, in his 25th season, and rookie Richie Ashburn, on Phils’ radio/TV. Flagship WFIL 560 AM’s 22-station network was sponsored by P. Ballantine & Sons (beer), Atlantic Refining Co., R.J. Reynolds Tobacco Co., and Tastykakes, which also sponsored WFIL Channel 6’s three-station network, affiliates in Lancaster, Lebanon, and Scranton-Wilkes-Barre. Baseball’s slow pace can reveal a Voice’s ignorance. By contrast, as Campbell showed, lifelong study helped him make the game seem more riveting than it was.

Turning the dial, you heard Nelson hype Miss Rheingold; Elson, General Finance Co.’s Friendly Bob Adams; and Jimmy Dudley “Mabel, Black Label” beer! Among other things, the Dodgers’ Vin Scully sold Farmer John’s sausage. “It’s 3:30 A.M.,” the Giants’ Jon Miller later said. “Vin wakes up, puts his bathrobe on, and wanders toward the refrigerator. Does he always talk this way? ‘Good evening, wherever I am. Can’t wait for some Farmer John’s.’ ” A Phillies listener heard plugs for Ballantine beer’s “Hey, getcha cold beeh,” Tastykakes’ “All the good things wrapped up into one,” Phillies – what else? – cigars, and Atlantic Refining Company’s “Red Ball Service,” its aria “Atlantic Keeps Your Car on the Go.”

Campbell and Ashburn replaced Claude Haring and Frank Sims. “The Phils had finished seventh in ’62, which [after 1958-61’s cellar] seemed like Heaven,” said Saam. “They wanted to liven up the booth, too.” Bill and By did play-by-play, “Whitey” – Ashburn was a tow-head – analysis a.k.a. “color.” Through 1970, the Phillies televised from 52 to 61 games a year: home and road; almost all Saturday, Sunday, weekday, and holiday. Swapping jockstrap for jockocracy, Ashburn called the Phils till his death in 1997. The initial problem was that the silken player was a burlap Voice. “Boys, this game looks a lot easier from up here,” he said. It wasn’t, as Saam and Campbell knew: By, never making “enough waves to capsize a peanut shell,” barbed Philadelphia Daily News columnist Bill Conlin; Bill, pining to call baseball “with some flair and integrity.”1

By the early ’60s, Saam had forged a quarter-century of malapropisms. “And now for all you guys scoring in bed,” he observed one night from San Francisco. “By’d say the wrong thing,” said Whitey, “so innocent, then wonder why people laughed.” Saam’s all-time big-league loss total was less of a laughing matter: his 1938-54 Athletics and 1939-49 and 1951-75 Phillies, 3,239-4,395. By’s and Bill’s growing friction was no funnier. “The amazing thing is [how long they] co-existed,” Conlin wrote after Campbell was fired in 1970. Ashburn saving “the marriage more times than a neighborhood minister.” Saam was a company man; Campbell, good company. Whitey heard each complain about the other so often he “should have worn a striped shirt and a whistle.” Together, they endured the Phillies’ Gallipoli –1964.

In 1957 Sports Illustrated reviewed Connie Mack Stadium: “Park is clean, brightly painted. Easily accessible refreshment counters [specialty is box lunch with fried chicken]. No beer is sold. Lack of beer in park prompts some Philly fans to bring their own in, and they usually bring plenty. Last season this resulted in an at least one near riot when irate spectators (for some strange reason, sedate Philadelphia has the rowdiest clientele in major leagues, as any rabbit-eared lawyer will testify) started to pitch empty bottles on field.”2 That year infielder Gene Mauch hit .257 for the Red Sox. In 1961, as the Phillies sold nee Shibe Park to a New York realty firm and soon expected to open a new park, Mauch became manager. His most memorable year was 1964, so affixed to him that even non-Quakers grasped the spoken tone reserved for a drunken spouse or wayward child.

For 73 straight days the team held first place. Right fielder Johnny Callison had 31 homers and 104 runs batted in. Rookie-of-the-year third baseman Richie Allen made 41 errors, but wed 201 hits, 29 homers, 13 triples, 38 doubles, .318 batting average, and league-high 125 runs. “There’s a roof-top job,” Campbell roared of one pitch. “What a titanic shot by Allen!” he bayed of another. Left fielder Wes Covington hit .280. The Phils gleamed up the middle: Tony Taylor, Bobby Wine, and Tony Gonzalez at second base, shortstop, and center field, respectively. Jim Bunning side-armed a 19-8 record, 219 K’s, and 2.60 earned-run average, no-hitting the Mets on Father’s Day. “He gets it! He gets it! A perfect game!” Saam said on WFIL TV. (Memorial services for his mother, Margaret, kept Campbell from airing it on WFIL Radio and new flagship 102.1 FM.)

It is true that Chris Short finished 17-9, with Bunning forming the league’s best one-two rotation. It is also true they lacked what Orioles manager Earl Weaver later dubbed “deep depth.” Third and fourth starters Dennis Bennett and Art Mahaffey flopped: 12-14 and 12-9 and 3.68 and 4.52 ERA, respectively. For relief, Mauch relied on Ed Roebuck, fourth in league ranking. First baseman John Herrnstein hit .234. Catcher Clay Dalrymple batted .238. The Phillies were fourth in batting average (.258), homers (130), ERA (3.37), and errors (157). They were first in saves, ninth in complete games, and last in stolen bases – 30. Speed aside, “It was just great, great baseball every night,” Campbell said more than 40 years later. “Compared to what it is now, there’s no comparison.”

On September 20, 1964, Philadelphia led by 6½ games with 12 left to play. The Delaware Valley turned upside down. World Series tickets were printed. Store windows strutted player photos. A pennant – the Quakers’ first since 1950! Dream maker: Perhaps a Series title – the Phillies’ first! Callison, his three-run ninth-inning poke taking the All-Star Game, Allen, and Bunning stirred what that highlight film termed “WORLD SERIES fever.” Mauch’s fever differed: The regulars, especially pitchers, were exhausted. Out of nowhere the Phils began to ape a horse who, sans food and water, nears the finish line in shock and fear.

Mauch started Short and Bunning five times on two days’ rest in a ten-game losing streak. The skein began on September 21 as the Reds’ Chico Ruiz stole home in the sixth inning to beat Philly, 1-0. Said Campbell: “His steal came with Frank Robinson the batter. It made no sense,” nor did the nonpareil debacle. Two more losses to Cincinnati ensued, 9-2 and 6-4, at Connie Mack. A four-game shellacking by Milwaukee capped a toxic homestand. In St. Louis the Phils then fell 5-1, 4-2, and 8-5. Philadelphia linked pursed lips and tightened jaws.

Two games behind Cincy and St. Louis, the Phils rallied. By closing day – Sunday, October 4 – they trailed each by a game. “If we beat the Reds [at Crosley Field] and the Cardinals lose to the Mets, it’s a three-way playoff,” said Saam. “If we and St. Louis win, they get the flag.” The Cards cruised, 11-5, negating Philly’s 10-0 romp. Like pallbearers, 7,000 greeted By’s team at the International Airport. They would wait 16 years for a happier – saner – end: the Phillies’ first world title.

Campbell never complained, preferring to stress the Quakers’ first 150 games: “That team played the best baseball of any team I’ve ever seen,” he said after the ’64ers became the gold standard for late-year collapse. Saam aired NBC Radio’s 1959 and 1965 World Series. Had the ’64ers not folded, By would have telecast half of NBC’s Series – sport’s then-Everest play-by-play. In turn, Campbell, known largely for basketball and football, would likely have added NBC Radio baseball to his résumé.

Raised in suburban Wayne, outside Philadelphia, another man aired the 1975 Reds-Red Sox World Series for NBC. After the 1964 season, Sox Voice Ned Martin returned from a Boston road trip to find a message from his father.

“Baseball had been our bond,” said Martin, “as it was when I last saw him in early September in Wayne. He was thin, and had had several heart attacks.” Dad died after mailing a letter “predicting the Phillies’ collapse, which had now come to pass. ‘I don’t see how they can win,’ he said. ‘They pitch Short and Bunning on panic and no one else. I’m afraid they’re going to crash.’ ” They had, as Campbell never forgot. Baseball, said a writer, was not a matter of life and death in Philadelphia. The Phillies, he added, were.

The 1964 season had marked a Pickett’s Charge of pre-Mike Schmidt interest. Mauch was fired in 1968. The radio flagship became WCAU, anchoring a 25-outlet network. The Phillies on the air seemed to anchor the coming apart at the seams 1960s: Bill, By, and Whitey heard at the Jersey shore, in Amish country, returning from the Poconos. Above the field, same old seemed fine. On it, this was not true: The post-1964 Phils fell to seventh, then were fifth in 1969-70’s NL new six-team Eastern Division.

The area around Connie Mack turned seedy. The ’69ers drew only 518,414 vs. 1964’s record 1,425,891. On October 1, 1970, the grande dame hosted her final game. In the tenth inning, the home team scored the winning run, at which point Phillies fanatics began to take seats, turf, and a toilet bowl. On April 4, 1971, Veterans Stadium – “The Vet” – was dedicated six miles away. The 56,371-capacity park was rounded, but rectangular. Also new: Harry Kalas, replacing Campbell on Phils’ radio/TV, leaving Houston to find Philadelphia up in arms.

In December 1970 Campbell, arriving home, learned about his fate from Jo, who heard about the axing over WPEN Radio. It was, said his wife, “a shot in the heart. He didn’t even know it.” Team owner Bob Carpenter phoned to tell Bill no decision had been made, then called again to fire him. Daughter Chris Campbell recalls how dad began to cry. The Philadelphia Inquirer’s Frank Dolson bannered: “Firing of Voice Strikes Bad Chord.” Headlines raged: “Clumsy Ouster Widens Credibility Gap.” “Striking Out an Honest Voice.” Letters to the Daily News ran 13 to 1 for Campbell, a devout and gentle Catholic. Their tone was his antithesis: In the City of Brotherly Love, public rancor was the rule.

How could the Phils ax such a Voice? One explanation was Schmidt’s replacing Ballantine as team beer sponsor. “Bill’d been identified with Ballantine,” said Bill Giles, then vice president, business operations; ultimately, chairman. “Schmidt’s wanted its own guy.” The club also OK’d a $13.5 million deal – “enormous money at the time,” said author Randy Miller – to drop 21-year TV flagship WFIL for WPHL (Channel 17). Kalas was 34, Campbell 47. Did Giles – Houston’s promotions director and Kalas’s boss before joining the Phillies in 1969 – want a younger man for television? ”We knew each other well,” said Harry, “and in late ’70 [Giles] offered me a job,” not saying that it was Campbell’s. “Bill was very popular, and for several years my confidence level faltered.” In time, it returned.

Like Campbell, Kalas was the complete broadcast goods. His face belonged in the Vienna Boys Choir. The voice evoked a wrecker razing cars – to Bill Conlin, “a four-Marlboros into a three-martini-lunch baritone.” Ultimately, Harry’s “Long drive! … It’s outta’ here! Home run!” became outta’ sight, Kalas, a minister’s son, packing Philly radio/TV pews. Many wished Campbell still ministered, too. “I never had bitterness toward Harry,” said Bill. “We were good friends and went to some basketball games together. I’d have liked to have worked with him.” Instead, WCAU hired him the day that Carpenter pulled the trigger.

In 1971 Campbell was hired for road TV by the cross-state Pirates, soon finding he would rather be in Philadelphia. Next fall he began a nine-year stay with the NBA ’76ers: Paraphrasing the ’62 Mets’ Casey Stengel, no one on Philadelphia’s 9-73 1972-73 team could play this game. “It was the only year where I didn’t want to go to the arena,” Campbell said. Later learning that the Seattle SuperSonics had been trying to get coach Tom Nissalke fired, Campbell found the ’76ers “couldn’t even beat a team which was attempting to throw the game. They threw the ball all over the place and we still lost.” Bill also did 1978 PRISM cable play-by-play and 1981 pre- and post-game WCAU radio.

Later, Bill did talk radio on his first Philly stop, WIP – “truly full circle” – then voice-overs, weekly gigs, and thrice-weekly wildly popular KYW 1060 AM commentary. In 2009 Campbell joined the station’s Friday Reporters Roundup show. Awards lengthened like 1964’s losing streak: 1961-63, National Sports Broadcasters Association Broadcaster of the Year; 1987, Pennsylvania Sports Hall of Fame; 1989, Philadelphia Sportscasters Award, Outstanding Service; 2004, Philadelphia Sports Hall of Fame, Legacy of Excellence; 2005, Basketball Hall of Fame, Curt Gowdy Award; Philadelphia Broadcast Pioneers, Person of the Year, 2008.

Even so, what-if lingers. The New York Yankees’ 1953-56 Mel Allen, Red Barber, and Jim Woods are often called baseball’s best broadcast trio. What if, hiring Kalas for 1971, Giles had insisted that Harry join, not replace, Campbell? “That’s what I thought the job initially was,” said Kalas. Failing that, segué to Saam’s late 1975 retirement. What if the Phils had picked Bill, not Andy Musser, to replace him – forming a 1976-97 Magi of Kalas, Ashburn, and Campbell? Who would not dub that trifecta a peer of Allen, Red, and Woods?

Saying he would spurn sports today, Campbell made an exception: the pastime of his youth grown old – “If they asked me to go back and cover baseball, I’d go in a minute.” Someone wondered if he’d return to the Phils, if asked. “In a heartbeat,” Bill said, instantly. “A heartbeat.” Saam added, “Campbell didn’t do that much baseball, so people don’t think of him as baseball first. But what a voice he had, like Kalas” – or Saam himself, entering Cooperstown in 2002 and 1991, respectively. “Bill and Harry would have formed some team.”

After Kalas died in 2009 of a heart attack, Phillies’ Voice Scott Franzke received letters “from casual listeners to those who didn’t miss a game, so many hoping that their kids, growing up, would discover a ‘friend’ like Harry.” Nothing, Franzke said, beat baseball for “making small connections with fans, day after day.” Bill Campbell was that kind of man.

Postscript

Bill Campbell died at the age of 91 on October 6, 2014, in Camden, New Jersey.

This biography is included in the book “The Year of the Blue Snow: The 1964 Philadelphia Phillies” (SABR, 2013), edited by Mel Marmer and Bill Nowlin. For more information or to purchase the book in e-book or paperback form, click here.

Sources

Grateful appreciation is made to reprint quotes from Bill Campbell: The Voice of Philadelphia Sports, by Sam Carchidi (Middle Atlantic Press, 2006), and Harry The K: The Remarkable Life of Harry Kalas, by Randy Miller (Running Press, 2011). Virtually all material is derived from Curt Smith’s books Voices of The Game, Of Mikes and Men, Voices of Summer, The Voice, A Talk in the Park, and Mercy! A Celebration of Fenway Park’s Centennial Told Through Red Sox Radio and TV (Simon & Schuster 1992, Diamond Communications 1998, Carroll & Graf 2005, The Lyons Press 2007, Potomac Books 2011, and Potomac Books 2012, respectively).

Notes