August 22, 1961: From Twilight Zone to strike zone: Rod Serling visits NY-Penn League game

It would have been fitting if Rod Serling had gone to a baseball game in Geneva, New York, on August 22, 1961, and found himself trapped in some kind of twist ending – hit in the head by a foul ball, perhaps, to wake up alone in a deserted ballpark.

After all, the danger of nostalgia and trying to revisit one’s youth was a recurring theme on The Twilight Zone, the TV series Serling conceived, narrated, produced, and sometimes wrote.1 And on that night in Geneva, Serling – by then a nationally known, Emmy-winning dramatist – was back in his home region of upstate New York watching minor-league baseball, just as he had done as a child.2

Thankfully, Serling evaded the kinds of existential snares he laid for his TV characters, suffering nothing worse at Geneva’s Shuron Park than the intrusive requests of autograph seekers.3 And he got to see the home team win the first half of a doubleheader. Powered by a home run by future Hall of Famer Tony Pérez, the Geneva Redlegs held off the Jamestown Tigers, 4-3, in a scheduled seven-inning matchup.4

In 1961 Geneva and Jamestown were members of the New York-Pennsylvania League at Class D, the lowest level of affiliated minor-league ball. The Redlegs had finished last in 1960 with a 54-75 record5 but dominated in 1961 under new manager and first baseman Karl Kuehl. Geneva entered the day in first place with a 67-42 record, 8½ games ahead of second-place Batavia.6

Pérez, Geneva’s 19-year-old third baseman, was one reason for their improvement. He’d hit a respectable .279 the previous year but erupted for a monster season in 1961, batting .348 with 160 hits, 27 home runs, and 132 RBIs.7 Catcher Greg Nash added 25 homers and Kuehl 19.

Twenty-one-year-old second baseman César Tovar was lighting up the league as well, finishing the season with a .338 average, 19 homers, 78 RBIs, a league-leading 134 runs scored, and a league-record 88 stolen bases.8 (Tovar stole more bases by himself than five of the New York-Penn’s teams.) Tovar was benched for the first game of the doubleheader, though, after arguments with Kuehl.9

Jamestown, playing its first season in the league as a Detroit Tigers affiliate,10 was managed by former Detroit infielder Al Federoff. The Tigers entered the doubleheader in sixth place with a 51-60 record, 17 games behind Geneva. They’d played the Redlegs close, though, winning seven of 15 matchups between the two teams to that point in the season.11

Two members of the Jamestown team went on to the majors, and both appeared in the first game on August 22. Relief pitcher Pat Jarvis, a right-hander out of Murray State University in Kentucky, entered the game in the fourth inning. For the season, he posted a 1-4 record with a 4.97 ERA at age 20 en route to eight seasons in the big leagues.

Starting in center field was 18-year-old Jim Rooker, playing his second pro season out of high school in Colorado. He hit .268 with 10 homers and 88 RBIs in 125 games, and tied Tovar for the league lead with 13 triples. Rooker, however, also struck out a league-leading 164 times. He began to transition to the pitching mound in 1964,12 reached the majors as a pitcher in 1968, and won 103 games in 13 major-league seasons.13

Geneva’s starting pitcher, Mike Thornton, was a left-hander from Southern California in his fourth pro season who’d pitched a seven-inning no-hitter nine days earlier against Olean.14 For the full season, Thornton went 13-8 with a 4.19 ERA in 26 games with Geneva, walking 126 batters and striking out 157 in 146 innings.15 Jamestown started 18-year-old rookie lefty Ken Magown, who made 48 appearances but only two starts that season. He finished 12-7 with a 3.24 ERA, the only Tigers pitcher to win in double digits.16

Serling, who joined about 900 other fans at Shuron Park, had incorporated both his upstate background and his fondness for baseball into his televised work. In June 1960 The Twilight Zone aired a comedic Serling-penned episode called “The Mighty Casey,” in which a pitching robot named Casey develops human emotions after receiving a heart transplant and refuses to ruin batters’ careers with his unhittable pitches.17

On a more personal level, Serling wrote the minor-league team he grew up watching, the Binghamton Triplets, into his script for “Bomber’s Moon,” a drama presented on CBS’s Playhouse 90 in May 1958. The main character, the hard-nosed commander of a World War II bomber group stationed in England, mentions the Triplets while telling his English girlfriend about his hometown of Endicott, New York.18   

Serling, who summered on Seneca Lake, had attended previous Geneva games unnoticed but was apparently introduced to the crowd on August 22.19 As he accommodated a crush of autograph hounds, he didn’t miss much in the way of offense. Magown and Thornton pitched shutout ball for the first three innings.

The Tigers collected their first hit and first run in the fourth. Second baseman Anselmo “Chico” Martínez drew a walk, one of six issued by Thornton. Shortstop Bob Pearson sacrificed Martínez to second base and a wild pitch allowed him to take third. Catcher and cleanup hitter Ray Caucci, whose 92 RBIs were second on the team that season, singled in Martínez for a 1-0 Jamestown lead.20

The lead vanished with the first batter of the bottom half, as Pérez crushed his 27th round-tripper to tie the game. Kuehl doubled and left fielder Sal Minetta’s single put runners on first and third. Magown walked second baseman Bruce Montgomery, playing in Tovar’s place, and center fielder Willie Kern to force in Geneva’s go-ahead run, and right fielder Dick Rowe’s two-run single brought the score to 4-1.21 Magown gave way to Jarvis with two outs in the inning; the starter gave up seven hits and four runs, all earned.

Caucci’s run-scoring single remained Jamestown’s only hit until the sixth, when Pearson and Caucci touched Thornton for back-to-back solo homers that tightened the score to 4-3.22 Kuehl stuck with Thornton, and he held off the Tigers without a hit or run the rest of the way, finishing a three-hit, complete-game 4-3 win in 1 hour and 51 minutes.

Magown took the loss. Jarvis pitched effectively in relief, surrendering one hit, two walks and no runs in 2⅓ innings while striking out two. In the second game, Jamestown broke a 2-2 tie with a four-run rally in the seventh, then held on for a 6-5 win. Kuehl hit his 19th home run in the nightcap.23

Geneva clinched the regular-season pennant on August 26.24 The Redlegs, however, were eliminated by eventual champions Olean in the first round of the four-team postseason playoffs.25 Jamestown finished the season in sixth place, 19½ games back, with a record of 58-68.

Federoff managed eight more seasons in the minors, mostly at the lower levels of the Detroit organization, but did not return to the majors as a manager or coach. Kuehl joined the Montreal Expos organization in 1972 and managed at the Double-A and Triple-A levels before being named the Expos’ manager in 1976. The Expos went 43-85 before he was fired in early September. Kuehl subsequently coached for six seasons with the Minnesota Twins but never managed in the majors again.

Pérez joined fellow Geneva alumnus Pete Rose in Cincinnati in 1964, and they became core members of the dynastic “Big Red Machine.” The Reds won National League championships in 1970 and 1972, an NL West Division title in 1973, and back-to-back World Series titles in 1975 and 1976.26 Rose, Pérez, and Big Red Machine vet Joe Morgan also teamed up for a final NL championship with the 1983 Philadelphia Phillies.27 Pérez was elected to the Baseball Hall of Fame in 2000, and was also named to the New York-Penn League Hall of Fame.28

Rooker pitched on three Pittsburgh Pirates teams that reached the postseason, winning a World Series in 1979. Tovar played on four league or division champions and Jarvis on one, though neither played on a World Series champion.29

Serling continued to burnish his reputation as a writer, teacher, and straight-shooting social commentator in ensuing years, while also remaining a baseball fan. His daughter Anne later recalled fond memories of driving through Los Angeles with her father, listening to Vin Scully call Dodgers games on the radio.30 An upstate New Yorker to the end, Serling died following open-heart surgery in Rochester on June 28, 1975.31 He is buried in the town of Interlaken, between Seneca and Cayuga Lakes, roughly a half-hour from Geneva.32

Acknowledgments

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

Sources and photo credit

In addition to the 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 23, 1961, editions of the Geneva (New York) Times and Jamestown (New York) Post-Journal published box scores.

Image of 2013 Panini Golden Age card #82 downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Twilight Zone episodes in which characters go awry while trying to revisit or recapture their pasts include “The Incredible World of Horace Ford,” “Of Late I Think of Cliffordville,” “Walking Distance,” and “Young Man’s Fancy.” Serling admitted that “Walking Distance,” in particular, was inspired by his own experiences of returning as an adult to Binghamton, New York, where he grew up. According to his daughter Jodi, it was his favorite Twilight Zone episode. “Paul Mandell Analyzes ‘Walking Distance,’” Rod Serling Memorial Foundation website, posted August 5, 2000, https://rodserling.com/paul-mandell-analyzes-walking-distance/; “Rod Serling’s Daughter Reveals His Favorite Twilight Zone Episodes,” SyFy.com, posted November 14, 2019, https://web.archive.org/web/20191114233455/https:/www.syfy.com/syfywire/rod-serlings-daughter-reveals-his-favorite-twilight-zone-episodes.

2 Serling was born in Syracuse, New York, about an hour from Geneva, in 1924. He grew up in Binghamton. Biographers have described him as a boyhood fan of Binghamton’s former minor-league baseball team, the Triplets, a New York Yankees farm team in the New York-Pennsylvania League and Eastern League during Serling’s youth. “Rod Serling,” Britannica.com, accessed May 2024, https://www.britannica.com/biography/Rod-Serling; Gordon F. Sander, Serling: The Rise and Twilight of Television’s Last Angry Man (New York: Dutton, 1992), 21.

3 “Serling Attends Redleg Contest,” Geneva (New York) Times, August 23, 1961: page number not reproduced on online copy.

4 For purposes of brevity, and to leave enough room to discuss Serling’s connections to upstate New York and baseball, the author of this story chose to focus on the first game, rather than fully recap both games. As will be mentioned in the story, Jamestown won the second game, 6-5. The first game was seven innings long and the second was nine, according to line scores published alongside Dave Rosenbloom, “Geneva Splits Bill with Jamestown,” Rochester (New York) Democrat and Chronicle, August 23, 1961: 27.

5 The short-season format with which the New York-Penn was later associated was adopted in 1967.

6 Standings as printed in the Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, August 22, 1961: 28. The league’s entire schedule had been rained out the previous night, including a scheduled game between Jamestown and Geneva.

7 Pérez led the league in batting average, hits, and RBIs and ranked third in home runs. His RBI performance, in particular, foreshadowed his major-league career: He drove in more than 100 RBIs in a season seven times, and as of May 2024, his 1,192 RBIs as a Cincinnati Red ranked him second in franchise history, behind only Johnny Bench’s 1,376.

8 Tovar had established a new league record on August 13, when he stole his 73rd and 74th bases against Olean. Dave Rosenbloom, “Genevan’s No-Hitter Sparks 2 Victories,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, August 14, 1961: 28. The league’s second-place base thief, Roberto Sanchez of Batavia, stole 27 bases.

9 He played in the second game, stealing his 80th base. Norm Jollow, “Dick Rowe Plays Hero, Goat Roles in Twin Bill,” Geneva Times, August 23, 1961: page number not reproduced on online copy; Rosenbloom, “Geneva Splits Bill with Jamestown.”

10 Jamestown had been in the league in 1957 as a Pittsburgh Pirates affiliate.

11 “Without Tigers, Pennant Race Would Be Over,” Jamestown (New York) Post-Journal, August 23, 1961: 37.

12 Rooker pitched three games in 1962 but none in 1963, playing exclusively as an outfielder that season.

13 As a major leaguer, Rooker appeared in five games as a pinch-hitter and one as a left fielder with the Kansas City Royals in 1969 and 1970.

14 Rosenbloom, “Genevan’s No-Hitter Sparks 2 Victories.”

15 Thornton also had no record and a 9.82 ERA in five games with Columbia of the Class A South Atlantic League that season. His 126 walks led the New York-Penn League’s pitchers. In second place with 117 walks was 19-year-old Steve Blass of Batavia, who pitched 10 seasons in the majors and was a key part of the Pittsburgh Pirates’ 1971 World Series championship team.

16 Magown, a native of Massachusetts, pitched five minor-league seasons in the Detroit organization and topped out at Double A.

17 “The Mighty Casey,” Internet Movie Database, accessed May 2024, https://www.imdb.com/title/tt0734661/; “Casey at the Mound,” NJBaseball.net, December 31, 2016, https://njbaseball.net/casey-at-the-mound/.

18 Neighboring Binghamton, Endicott, and Johnson City are collectively known as the Triple Cities. The Triplets, whose home ballpark was in Johnson City, took their name from the Triple Cities. “Shoes, Business Machines,” Endicott (New York) Daily Bulletin, May 24, 1958: 4, https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=tdb19580524-01.1.4&srpos=1&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN-endicott+triplets+business+shoes+serling———; Bob Clements, “13 Playhouse 90 Rebroadcasts Slated,” Endicott Daily Bulletin, July 1, 1959: 16, https://nyshistoricnewspapers.org/?a=d&d=tdb19590701-01.1.16&srpos=2&e=——-en-20–1–txt-txIN-%22bomber%27s+moon%22+endicott———.

19 “Serling Attends Redleg Contest.” Geneva is located at the northern end of Seneca Lake. (Watkins Glen, better known as an auto-racing destination, is at the lake’s southern end.)

20 Jollow, “Dick Rowe Plays Hero, Goat Roles in Twin Bill.” Right fielder Mike Cloutier led Jamestown in 1961 with 94 RBIs.

21 The game stories in the Geneva and Jamestown newspapers agree on the run-scoring plays of the game, but neither adds detail beyond the basics. (For instance, neither paper specifies which fields the home runs were hit to.) Jollow, “Dick Rowe Plays Hero, Goat Roles in Twin Bill”; “Without Tigers, Pennant Race Would Be Over.”

22 Rosenbloom, “Geneva Splits Bill with Jamestown.”

23 Jollow, “Dick Rowe Plays Hero, Goat Roles in Twin Bill.”

24 Jollow, “Dick Rowe Plays Hero, Goat Roles in Twin Bill”; Associated Press, “Geneva Wins First Flag in NY-P Loop,” Batavia (New York) Daily News, August 28, 1961: 8.

25 “Batavia, Olean Gain the Finals in NY-P Playoffs,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, September 5, 1961: 34; Associated Press, “Olean Sweeps Batavia,” Hazleton (Pennsylvania) Standard-Sentinel, September 7, 1961: 20. Olean was a Boston Red Sox affiliate that had finished in fourth place during the regular season with a 64-61 record.

26 The Reds won a final NL West title in 1979 but lost the NL Championship Series to Rooker’s Pittsburgh Pirates. Pérez was no longer in Cincinnati at that point, having been traded to the Montreal Expos in December 1976 – about three months after the Expos fired his old Geneva manager, Kuehl. Rose was also gone, having signed as a free agent with the Philadelphia Phillies in December 1978.

27 The Phillies lost to the Baltimore Orioles in the 1983 World Series.

28 “New York-Penn League Hall of Fame,” 2019 New York-Penn League media guide: 62.

29 In addition to the 1979 Pirates, Rooker also pitched for Pirates teams that lost the NL Championship Series in 1974 and 1975 – losing to Cincinnati in the latter year. Tovar’s 1969 and 1970 Minnesota Twins lost the American League Championship Series both years; he also played on the 1965 Minnesota Twins, who lost the World Series, and 1975 Oakland A’s that lost the ALCS. Jarvis pitched for the 1969 Atlanta Braves, who won the NL West Division in the inaugural season of division play but lost to the New York Mets in the NLCS.

30 Ben Walker (Associated Press), “Twilight Time: Long-Lost Rod Serling Baseball Comedy on Deck,” March 19, 2020, https://apnews.com/article/453f5b9da25f9ccf40125695a9437239.

31 “Serling’s Heart Gives Out,” Rochester Democrat and Chronicle, June 29, 1975: 1A.

32 Findagrave.com entry for Rod Serling, accessed May 2024, https://www.findagrave.com/memorial/1669/rod-serling.