August 1, 1959: Curt Simmons’ hometown win draws big minor-league crowd

Many decades later, it’s still a well-known piece of Eastern Pennsylvania sports lore. In June 1947 the Philadelphia Phillies played an off-day exhibition in the small Lehigh Valley village of Egypt, about 65 miles north of Philadelphia. The Phils agreed to play the game to court 18-year-old prospect Curt Simmons, who pitched a local team to a 4-4 tie against the big-leaguers.1 About 3½ months later, Simmons was in the major leagues with the Phillies.

Less remembered is the night, a dozen years later, when Simmons – by then a Phillies hero – revisited his home region while rehabilitating an injury in the minor leagues. A crowd of about 7,000 jammed a small ballpark near Allentown to watch Simmons pitch for the Williamsport Grays against the Allentown Red Sox in the Class A Eastern League.2 Once again Simmons went the distance, this time earning the win in a 10-3 victory for Williamsport.

Simmons had won 115 games going into the 1959 season, including 17 for the 1950 National League champions.3 He’d been named to three All-Star teams and tied for the NL and major-league lead with six shutouts in 1952.4

But a sore shoulder and elbow surgery limited him to seven relief appearances with the Phillies in 1959, his age-30 season.5 He returned to the minor leagues for the first time since 1947, and reportedly asked the Phillies to leave him in Williamsport for the rest of the season to regain his form – a request the team granted.6 In his second game for manager Frank Lucchesi’s Grays on July 27, Simmons pitched a complete-game five-hitter against Allentown in a 14-1 win.7

Simmons’ arrival conveniently gave Williamsport a veteran presence in a tight pennant race. On August 1, the night of his next start, the Grays led Allentown in the standings by two percentage points, .596 to .594.8 Allentown had stomped the Grays the previous night, 19-7.9

Twelve members of the 1959 Grays had either played in the big leagues or went on to do so. Besides Simmons, four other major leaguers were in the Williamsport lineup on August 1. They were right fielder Tony Curry (.313/23 homers/90 RBIs for the full season), left fielder Jacke Davis (.291/33/115), center fielder Fred Van Dusen (.272/14/65), and shortstop Bobby Wine (.209/5/33).10

Allentown skipper Sheriff Robinson also had 12 future or past big-leaguers pass through his roster in 1959. Three of them played on August 1 – first baseman Don Gile (.241/8/39 for the full season), center fielder Jerry Mallett (.278/19/72), and catcher Bob Tillman (.272/25/72).11 The start on the mound went to 24-year-old righty Ron Cote, who brought a 9-8 record into the game. He finished the season as Allentown’s second-leading winner with a 14-12 record and a 3.89 ERA in 36 games, mostly starts. His career peaked with two games in Triple A the following season.

Allentown’s home ballpark, Max Hess Stadium, was located in the neighboring suburb of Whitehall – making the game a literal homecoming for Simmons, a graduate of Whitehall High School.12 About 7,000 people packed the ballpark on August 1, with some sitting on the grass along the left-field foul line and others sitting atop the clubhouse building and grandstand. An account in the Allentown paper described the gathering as a “record crowd” and “one of the largest in Allentown’s baseball history.”13 Among those seated on the grandstand roof was William “Cy” Morgan, the scout who had signed Simmons for the Phillies a dozen years earlier.14

The on-field cast of characters included another person who eventually reached the major leagues, long after all the players on the field had retired. Veteran minor-league ump Tom Ravashiere is listed in the box score as half of the two-person umpiring team. He umpired seven American League games at age 58 in April and May 1979, while regular umpires were striking.15

Simmons’ young teammates handed him a lead in the first inning. Second baseman Wilbur Johnson singled, the first of his four hits in five at-bats. Cleanup hitter Curry drew a walk, and Davis brought them both home with a double for a 2-0 Williamsport advantage. Allentown cut the lead in half in the second inning when Mallett hit a breaking curve over the left-field fence for a solo homer.16

Williamsport took control of the game in the fourth inning, sending 11 hitters to the plate in a seven-run rally. It began with a walk to Van Dusen and a single by first baseman Fred Hopke. Catcher Owen Johnson doubled both runners home. One out later, Simmons drove in Johnson with a single and took second on the throw to the plate. That made the score 5-1, Williamsport, and chased Cote in favor of 25-year-old righty Al Antinelli. The relief appearance was rare for Antinelli, who started 33 of his 36 appearances that season and led the team with 17 wins.17

Antinelli retired the first batter he faced, but then the run-scoring hitters from the first inning returned to do more damage. Wilbur Johnson and Curry singled, and Davis bombed a three-run homer to make the score 9-1.

That was all the scoring that really mattered, though neither team was entirely done. Gile touched Simmons for a 400-foot solo homer in the bottom of the fourth, and Allentown pieced together one ninth-inning run on a single by Mallett and a triple by second baseman Andy Madalone. Williamsport notched a 10th run in the eighth inning on doubles by Wilbur Johnson and Curry.

The game ended at 10-3, Williamsport, in 2 hours and 20 minutes. Simmons threw 108 pitches and scattered 10 hits, walked one batter, and struck out four. After the game, he said his arm felt good, though perhaps not as good as it had in his previous start against Allentown. Red Sox hitters handed him some quick innings later in the game: Simmons threw just eight pitches in both the sixth and seventh innings, and only seven pitches in the eighth.

Cote took the loss, being charged with six hits and six runs, all earned, in 3⅓ innings. He walked three and struck out five. Antinelli went the rest of the way for the Red Sox. Fielding was not a factor: Allentown shortstop Matt Sczesny made the game’s only error, and the teams turned five double plays, including three by the Red Sox. (Sczesny went on to manage eight seasons in the Red Sox farm system between 1961 and 1970.)

In six games at Williamsport, Simmons went 4-1 with a 2.86 ERA. It was not enough to lift the Grays to the pennant, which went to the Springfield (Massachusetts) Giants. Allentown finished 3½ games back, while Williamsport was 4½ back. Allentown left the Eastern League after the 1960 season and didn’t regain an affiliated minor-league team until 2008.

Simmons returned to the majors in 1960, but the Phillies released him in May after four ineffective appearances. He signed with the St. Louis Cardinals and rejuvenated his career, winning 18 games and a long-awaited World Series championship with St. Louis in 1964. Simmons retired after the 1967 season, with 193 big-league wins to his credit. After 1959, he never again pitched in the minors.

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Gary Belleville and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources and photo credit

In addition to the specific sources cited in the Notes, the author consulted Baseball-Reference.com and Retrosheet.org for general player, team, and season data.

Neither Baseball-Reference nor Retrosheet provides box scores of minor-league games, but the August 2, 1959, edition of the Allentown (Pennsylvania) Morning Call published a box score.

Image of 1959 Topps card #382 downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 C. Paul Rogers III, “The Day the Phillies Went to Egypt,” SABR Baseball Research Journal, Vol. 39, No. 2 (2010). The author of this Games Project story also became familiar with the story while living in the Lehigh Valley of eastern Pennsylvania (the Allentown-Bethlehem-Easton area) between 2002 and 2016. The baseball field where the game took place is now named for Simmons, as is the short access road that leads to it.

2 The Eastern League became a Double-A circuit for the 1963 season, part of a wider reclassification of the minor leagues.

3 Simmons lost the entire 1951 season to military service.

4 Other major-league pitchers with six shutouts that season were Cleveland’s Mike Garcia, Cincinnati’s Ken Raffensberger, and the New York Yankees’ Allie Reynolds.

5 Edward Veit, “Curt Simmons,” SABR Biography Project, accessed July 26, 2022.

6 Associated Press, “Curt to Remain at Williamsport,” Allentown (Pennsylvania) Morning Call, July 31, 1959: 22.

7 Associated Press, “Curt Simmons Hurls Win,” Ithaca (New York) Journal, July 28, 1959: 10.

8 Eastern League standings as printed in the Allentown Morning Call, August 1, 1959: 13. Williamsport had a 59-40 record, while Allentown had a 60-41 record.

9 Joe McCarron, “A-Sox Wallop Williamsport, 19-7,” Allentown Morning Call, August 1, 1959: 13.

10 Other major leaguers who played for Williamsport in 1959 but did not appear in this game were Dave Baldwin, Mack Burk, John Easton, Ed Keegan, Angelo LiPetri, Art Mahaffey, and Al Neiger. Not all of them might have been on the roster on August 1.

11 Other big-leaguers appearing for Allentown that year included Galen Cisco, Marlan Coughtry, Arnold Earley, Bob Heffner, Hal Kolstad, Al Moran, Jay Ritchie, Ted Schreiber, and Tracy Stallard.

12 Egypt, Simmons’ home village, is one of a number of villages that are collectively incorporated together into Whitehall Township.

13 Joe McCarron, “Curt Beats A-Sox, 10-3, Before 7,000,” Allentown Morning Call, August 2, 1959: 33. The August 1, 1959, “record crowd” has been eclipsed since the 2008 arrival of the Lehigh Valley IronPigs of the Triple-A International League, whose ballpark – located in the city of Allentown – opened with a capacity of 10,000.

14 “Simmons Says Arm ‘Felt Good,’” Allentown Morning Call, August 2, 1959: 33.

15 Ravashiere’s Sporting News umpire card confirms that he was working in the Eastern League in 1959. His partner, Richard Lifrieri, reached Triple A in the International League but did not umpire in the majors.

16 All play-by-play description in this story is taken from “Curt Beats A-Sox, 10-3, Before 7,000”; “Simmons Says Arm ‘Felt Good’”; and Associated Press, “Curt Simmons Hurls Grays to Game Lead,” Grit (Williamsport, Pennsylvania), August 2, 1959: Sports: 1.

17 Antinelli’s career peaked in 1961 with 10 appearances for Triple-A Syracuse, then a Minnesota Twins farm team.