July 29, 1971: Jack Maloof’s 6-for-6 day leads to .402 season in New York-Penn League

When Jack Maloof walked down the street in Auburn, New York, people said, “There goes the greatest hitter who ever lived.”

OK, that’s an exaggeration. An outright fiction, in fact. But Maloof shares a rare distinction with Ted Williams, the man who famously wanted to be recognized in public as the greatest hitter of all time. Like Williams, who hit .406 in 1941, Maloof was a .400 hitter.

In 1971 the 21-year-old rookie hit .402 over a full season while playing for the Auburn Twins of the short-season Class A New York-Penn League. He was the first New York-Penn batter in 14 years to hit .400 over the course of a full campaign.1 He was also the last: The league folded in early 2021 without anyone else accomplishing the feat.2

Any season in which a hitter bats .400 is bound to be full of offensive highlights. The second game of a July 29 doubleheader against the Geneva (New York) Senators was one such high point for Maloof. Following up on a 3-for-3 performance in the first game, he went 3-for-3 again in the nightcap, with a run scored and an RBI, as his Twins beat the home Senators, 5-2. He had been named Topps’ Player of the Month for the New York Penn-League the day before.3

Manager Boyd Coffie’s Auburn team came into the doubleheader in second place at 19-12, 3½ games behind first-place Niagara Falls.4 As their name indicated, Auburn was a Minnesota Twins affiliate. The team had been league champion the season before, edging out the Oneonta (New York) Yankees.

Only one member of the Auburn team, first baseman Mike Poepping, later reached the majors. He hit cleanup for Auburn in both games. Poepping’s 18 home runs and 57 RBIs (in 70 games played) led the league – as did his 92 strikeouts. Another offensive weapon for the Twins was left fielder Avery Morris,5 who hit .321 in 54 games. Morris, a sixth-round draft pick in 1968, played seven minor-league seasons and peaked at Double A.

Maloof, meanwhile, came to Auburn as an unheralded6 27th-round draft pick from the University of La Verne in California in June 1971. A spray hitter and adept bunter,7 Maloof laid claim to a starting outfield job through the simplest means possible: He started hitting from his first chance and never stopped. He also showed a good eye at the plate, walking 52 times against 22 strikeouts. Power was not part of his game, though. He hit no home runs in 1971, and only eight in his eight-season minor-league career.8

Manager Frank Gable’s Geneva team, affiliated with the Washington Senators, entered the day with a 15-15 record, good for fourth place in the eight-team league. The Senators trailed Niagara Falls, a Pittsburgh Pirates farm team, by seven games. The Senators won the doubleheader’s first game in dramatic fashion, 4-3, when a pitch hit third baseman Ken “Buddy” Caldwell in the back with the bases loaded in the bottom of the seventh.9 (Doubleheaders in the New York-Penn League featured games of seven innings apiece.)

Four members of the Senators went on to play in the major leagues, and two started the second game – second baseman Greg Pryor and shortstop Mike Cubbage.10 Cubbage, drafted by the parent Senators in the secondary phase of the June 1971 draft, hit a robust .345 and led the Geneva team with 46 RBIs. Pryor, a sixth-round pick that year, hit .283 and also ranked among team leaders in several offensive categories. Caldwell, playing the first of three minor-league seasons, led Geneva that season with nine home runs.

William Coleman “Coley” Smith, a rookie left-hander, got the start for Auburn. For the full season, he went 7-5 with a 3.34 ERA in 16 games, including 11 starts. Cuban-born and Miami-raised righty Alberto Zamora started for Geneva. He went 3-4 with a 3.78 ERA in 20 games that year, mostly out of the bullpen.11

With 449 fans watching, Zamora threw only five pitches to three batters. Auburn second baseman Jim Shinn smacked a first-pitch single. Center fielder Maloof took a first-pitch ball, then rifled a double to score Shinn. Right fielder Ken Dempsey took another ball, then parked a no-doubt home run over the right-field scoreboard – one of seven he hit that season – for a 3-0 lead.12

Manager Gable turned the ball over to Mike Miller, a rookie who went 3-2 with a 4.50 ERA in 12 games with the Senators. Miller shut down the Twins without any further runs in the first – with help from Pryor, who made a great leaping catch of Morris’s line drive.13 In fact, in an admirable relief stint, Miller stifled the Twins almost completely for five innings. He allowed only three hits and a walk over that time, granting the Twins no runs and striking out three hitters. One of those three hits was a single by Maloof, his second hit of the night.

Auburn starter Smith was just about as good. Over the first six innings, he yielded no runs and only two hits, a double by right fielder Bob Spinner and a single by center fielder Charles Waymire, as well as three walks.14 It was a significant turnaround from earlier in the season: Smith had lost to the Senators on Opening Day in Geneva and was knocked around for six runs in less than two innings in a July 15 matchup that was washed out by rain.15

The Twins added runs in the sixth and seventh innings off 18-year-old David Spence, the third and final Geneva pitcher. In the sixth, two walks and a single by third baseman Jeff Kalish loaded the bases. Spence then wild-pitched a run home. In the seventh, Shinn reached base on an error by first baseman Bruce Cease, and Maloof bunted for his third hit. Dempsey’s fly moved Shinn to third, and Poepping’s single drove him in for a 5-0 lead.

The Senators almost broke through with two out in the sixth, loading the bases on a hit batsman, an error by Kalish, and a walk. Smith got Spinner to ground out to shortstop, ending the inning.16

The Senators – having won the first game in their final at-bat – seemed poised to repeat the performance in the second game. Cease, who collected only 13 hits all season en route to a .161 average, beat out a leadoff grounder for a hit. Pinch-hitter Tom Hayes grounded to Kalish, who made his second error of the night on an errant throw to second base. One out later, Pryor collected Geneva’s fourth and final hit of the game, scoring Cease.17

A walk loaded the bases. Caldwell, who homered in the first game, came to the plate representing the tying run. Caldwell hit a fly to Maloof in deep center, allowing Waymire to tag up and score from third. Catcher Rich Revta followed with another fly to Maloof for the third out, and the Twins held on for a 5-2 win.18 Smith improved to 3-2, while Zamora dropped to 1-4. The game took 2 hours and 10 minutes.

The Auburn and Geneva papers reported that Maloof’s perfect day had raised his average to .440. Even Ted Williams never ended a season that well, and as the season continued, the rookie’s average started to drop – although he continued to hit at a pace somewhere around .360 for the latter part of the season.

The Sporting News printed minor-league leader charts, but like their game writeups, the charts appear to have had several weeks of lag time built in. The “Bible of Baseball” listed Maloof’s average at .455 in its August 21 issue, which also featured minor-league game writeups from the last days of July. By the August 28 issue, his average was down to .419. In the September 18 issue – more than two weeks after the league’s season ended – Maloof was listed as .417. On August 28, with seven games to go in the season, the Auburn newspaper tracked him at an unofficial .413.19 The October 9 issue of The Sporting News gave Maloof’s final, official average as .402.20

Maloof was chosen as the league’s Rookie of the Year. He went on to hit .302 in nine professional seasons, including one in Japan, but never cracked the US big leagues as a player. He finally reached the majors as a hitting coach for three seasons and parts of two others with the Padres, Marlins, and Royals between 1990 and 2013.

Auburn finished the season in second place at 42-28, four games behind Oneonta. Geneva finished fifth at 34-36, 12 games back. The New York-Penn League did not hold postseason playoffs between 1969 and 1976.21

Acknowledgments

This article 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 July 30, 1971, edition of the Auburn (New York) Citizen-Advertiser published a box score.

Image of card #14 from the 1979 TCMA Japanese Pro Baseball set downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

The author thanks FultonHistory.com for making many of the cited articles available online.

Notes

1 The previous batter to hit .400 or better in a full season was Paul Owens of Olean, who hit .407 in 1957. Owens, a three-time league batting champion, later served as the Philadelphia Phillies’ manager and held front-office roles with the club.

2 New York-Penn League 2019 media guide, accessed online June 28, 2021: 67. This media guide does not include the league’s final season of play in 2019. According to milb.com, the loop’s leading hitter in its final season, Gilberto Jimenez of Lowell, hit .359. Like other US minor leagues, the New York-Penn’s 2020 season was canceled because of the global COVID-19 pandemic.

3 “Smith Wins Nightcap to Give Twins Split,” Auburn (New York) Citizen-Advertiser, July 30, 1971: 16.

4 New York-Penn League standings as printed in the Binghamton (New York) Press and Sun-Bulletin, July 29, 1971: 8C.

5 Baseball-Reference lists Morris’s primary position as catcher, but credits him with playing 406 pro games as an outfielder and only 29 as a catcher.

6 Leo Pinckney, longtime sports editor of the Auburn (New York) Citizen-Advertiser and later president of the New York-Penn League, retold Maloof’s story with minor variations in several 1970s columns. In the most frequent version, Maloof was nearly cut at the end of spring training in 1971, but was sent to Auburn when Twins management decided they needed more outfield depth there. In all versions, the gist of the story is the same – Maloof began as a spare part and ended as the league’s Rookie of the Year.

7 Description of Maloof’s hitting style from several sources, including Leo Pinckney, “In the Pink,” Auburn Citizen-Advertiser, November 12, 1971: 13; and Pinckney, “In the Pink,” Auburn Citizen-Advertiser, March 28, 1976: 9.

8 Interestingly, he hit 12 homers in his only season in Japan, with the Seibu Lions in 1979.

9 Norm Jollow, “Twins Stop Caldwell and Senators to Gain Split,” Geneva (New York) Times, July 30, 1971: 15.

10 The two future major leaguers who did not appear in the second game on July 29 were Dave Criscione and Stan Thomas.

11 The Auburn paper’s game story referred to the pitcher as Lou Zamora, while the Geneva paper called him Chi-Chi Zamora. Baseball-Reference uses the name Alberto Zamora.

12 “Smith Wins Nightcap to Give Twins Split.”

13 Jollow.

14 “Smith Wins Nightcap to Give Twins Split.”

15 Jollow.

16 Jollow.

17 “Smith Wins Nightcap to Give Twins Split.”

18 Jollow; “Smith Wins Nightcap to Give Twins Split.”

19 Leo Pinckney, “In the Pink,” Auburn Citizen-Advertiser, August 28, 1971: 9.

20 The Sporting News citations for Maloof’s averages are as follows: August 21, 1971: 43; August 28, 1971: 44; September 18, 1971: 45; “Caught on the Fly,” October 9, 1971: 35.

21 New York-Penn League 2019 media guide: 56.