June 2, 1971: Sore-armed Jon Warden’s last gasp helps Elmira Royals beat major-league parent

By the numbers, pitcher Jon Warden’s final professional season, 1971, looks unimpressive. Bouncing between three teams in three organizations at the Double-A and Triple-A levels, the 24-year-old lefty went 1-0 with a 6.43 ERA in nine games.1 In 14 innings he walked nine hitters and struck out only three.

His best performance of the season isn’t included in those statistics, though the almost 2,000 people who saw it were unlikely to forget it. On June 2 in Elmira, New York, Warden pitched seven innings of two-hit shutout ball against the Kansas City Royals, powering the Royals’ Double-A farm team, the Elmira Royals, to a surprising 3-0 win over their major-league parent in an exhibition game.

A few years earlier, the Royals considered Warden a promising prospect. The former University of Georgia pitcher went 4-1 with a 3.62 ERA and three saves in 28 games for the World Series champion Detroit Tigers in 1968, just two years after being selected in the January 1966 amateur draft. He was on the Tigers’ postseason roster but did not appear in the Series.2 Kansas City selected Warden as the 12th pick in the October 1968 American League expansion draft, choosing him ahead of veterans and prospects including Diego Segui, Tommy Davis, Lou Piniella, Rich Rollins, and Moe Drabowsky.3

Once with the Royals, Warden’s prospects turned for the worse. He tore the rotator cuff in his pitching arm during 1969 spring training. Shoulder issues dogged him for the rest of his career, and he never pitched in another major-league game.4 Warden was assigned to a six-week arm-strengthening program early in 1971.5 After it ended, Kansas City assigned Warden to Elmira of the Eastern League, and Elmira manager Harry Malmberg tapped Warden to start so the Royals’ brass could see him in action.6

Malmberg’s team was off to a slow start. Its record of 14-20 was the worst in the eight-team Eastern League and placed the team last in the American Division, 4½ games behind first-place Pittsfield. The day before the exhibition, Elmira dropped both games of a doubleheader to Quebec City by identical 4-0 scores, mustering only five hits in 14 innings. Malmberg was ejected from the nightcap after an argument with umpire Wayne Embree.7 A former Tigers second baseman, Malmberg was in his seventh season as a minor-league skipper.

Besides Warden, two other Elmira players in the exhibition reached the majors, and they split time in center field. Starter Keith Marshall, a month shy of 20 years old, played eight games with Kansas City in 1973. Scott Northey, who replaced Marshall, played 20 games with the Royals in 1969 and was trying unsuccessfully to return to the majors. Northey, the 58th pick in the October 1968 expansion draft, hit just .175 in 25 games with Elmira in 1971 before being optioned to the New York Mets’ organization in mid-June.8

Manager Bob Lemon’s Kansas City club was riding significantly higher than its Elmira affiliate. The Royals, in just their third season, stood in second place in the AL West with a 24-22 record, a few percentage points ahead of the two-time defending division champion Minnesota Twins and seven games behind the rising Oakland A’s. The Royals had a 7-3 record in their previous 10 games and were coming off a three-game sweep of Boston at Fenway Park in which they outscored the Red Sox, 20-9.

Second baseman Cookie Rojas, plucked off the scrap heap from St. Louis the year before, ranked third in the AL in batting with a .320 average as of June 2. Third baseman Paul Schaal was tied for the league lead with four triples, while center fielder Amos Otis’s 14 stolen bases ranked him second in the AL.9 On the pitching side of the ledger, Ted Abernathy led the AL with 10 saves.

Rojas and Abernathy got the day off,10 but Elmira fans got to see Kansas City’s other regulars, including shortstop Fred Patek, first baseman Bob Oliver, left fielder Piniella, and second baseman Bobby Knoop. For Piniella, the game was a tune-up. He hadn’t played since May 4, when Cleveland pitcher Steve Hargan broke his right thumb with a fastball.11 Piniella was still on the disabled list as of June 2;12 he returned to regular-season play on June 9. Piniella had played for Elmira in 1965, when the team was affiliated with the Baltimore Orioles. He hit .249 with 11 home runs, including three in one game at Dunn Field, making him the first Elmira player to accomplish that feat.13

One other soon-to-be-familiar face completed Kansas City’s lineup, as the Royals recalled pitcher Paul Splittorff from Omaha to make the start.14 The crafty, high-kicking lefty had pitched two games for Kansas City at the end of the 1970 season. He stayed with the Royals after the exhibition and got the start on June 8, collecting his first major-league win in a 4-2 decision over Washington. Splittorff remained a bedrock member of Kansas City’s pitching staff until 1984, then became a Royals broadcaster.

On an overcast, drizzly night, Lemon opted for a pitching-by-committee approach, and his staff rewarded him with effective, efficient outings. Splittorff worked two shutout innings, surrendering two hits. Veteran Wally Bunker replaced him for two innings, allowing one hit. Jim Rooker worked the fifth and sixth without a hit, though he walked two batters.15 And Al Fitzmorris worked a flawless seventh.16 Elmira left fielder Billy Wolff, playing his final pro season at age 28, collected two singles, making him the only player with multiple hits.

Warden, the sore-armed cipher, outpitched his Kansas City counterparts. He didn’t allow a hit until Otis singled in the fourth17 – and then picked him off base.18 Right fielder Dennis Paepke singled in the fifth inning but did not score. In Warden’s seven innings of work, those two singles and a hit batsman (Schaal) represented the whole of Kansas City’s offense. Patek, Oliver, Piniella, Knoop, and catcher Jerry May combined to go 0-for-15 over the course of the game. Reliever Chuck Murray, in his seventh pro season, spelled Warden in the eighth and threw a perfect inning.

An unlikely hero kick-started Elmira’s offense in the bottom of the eighth. Replacement catcher Emory Dunn, a 36th-round draft pick of the Royals in 1970, played 62 games over two seasons for Kansas City’s Rookie-level team in Kingsport, Tennessee, but never played a regular-season game for Elmira.19 Facing an experienced major-league pitcher in Fitzmorris, Dunn sliced a sinking line drive to left-center field. Piniella gave chase but could not hold the ball; the play was scored as a single.20

Shortstop Lloyd Lightfoot, described as a “good-field, no-hit gloveman,”21 tried to sacrifice, and he was safe when Dunn beat Fitzmorris’s throw to second. Pitcher Murray batted next. With two runners on, none out, and a pitcher hitting, a sacrifice might have seemed like the obvious play – but Murray beat it out, dropping “a perfect bunt” to the third-base side of the diamond to load the bases.22

One out later, Elmira third baseman Tom Joyce laid down the third bunt of the inning, a well-executed suicide squeeze that brought Dunn across the plate with the game’s first run. Right fielder Tom Crichton then drove a solid single into left-center field to bring home Lightfoot and Murray for a 3-0 Elmira lead.23

Murray gave up one harmless hit in the ninth, a single by Carl Taylor,24 but nailed down the final three outs for the win. The game ended in just under two hours. Lemon and Malmberg both praised Warden’s pitching: “He showed me a lot out there tonight,” Lemon said. “In spring training, he couldn’t crack a pane of glass with his fastball. He’s come a long way in the past couple of months.”25

The upset win lit a fire under the Elmira team, which won 19 of its next 23 games to claim a four-game division lead, then won 14 of 17 in August to hold its lead.26 Elmira finished the season at 78-61, nine games up on Pittsfield, then beat the National Division champion Trois-Rivieres Aigles in the playoffs.27 But that impressive run didn’t involve Warden, who was released by Kansas City on July 12 after just three appearances in Elmira.28 Subsequent stops in the farm systems of the St. Louis Cardinals and Milwaukee Brewers marked the end of his career.29

As a side note, one of the three umpires who worked the exhibition later reached the major leagues. Ken Kaiser – a native of Rochester, New York, about two hours north of Elmira – worked in the minors for more than a decade before becoming an AL ump from 1977 to 1999.30 Kaiser’s postseason assignments as a big-league ump included the 1980 AL Championship Series, in which Otis and Splittorff’s Royals swept Piniella’s New York Yankees in three games.

Acknowledgments

This story was fact-checked by Bruce Slutsky and copy-edited by Len Levin.

Sources

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 exhibition games, but the June 3, 1971, edition of the Elmira (New York) Star-Gazette published a box score.

Image of 1969 Topps card #632 downloaded from the Trading Card Database.

Notes

1 Warden made three appearances each for the Elmira Royals, the Double-A affiliate of the Kansas City Royals; the Arkansas Travelers, the Double-A farm team of the St. Louis Cardinals; and the Evansville Triplets, Triple-A farm team of the Milwaukee Brewers.

2 Dan Holmes, “Jon Warden,” SABR Biography Project. Accessed online March 21, 2022. The major leagues did not officially recognize saves as a statistic until 1969.

3 Segui, Davis, Piniella, and Rollins were chosen by the AL’s other expansion team, the Seattle Pilots. Seattle later traded Piniella to Kansas City, where he became the 1969 American League Rookie of the Year.

4 Holmes.

5 Sid Bordman, “Royals Shred A’s for a .500 Day,” Kansas City Times, May 17, 1971: 1C.

6 “KC-Elmira Play Exhibition Wednesday,” Elmira (New York) Sunday Telegram, May 30, 1971: 2D.

7 “Quebec Sweeps 2 from Royals,” Elmira Star-Gazette, June 2, 1971: 25. Eastern League standings as of June 2, 1971, taken from the same edition. Each game of the June 2 doubleheader was seven innings in length.

8 “Rain Throws Knockout Blow at Blues Again,” Memphis Commercial Appeal, June 18, 1971: 33. The Royals selected Northey from the Chicago White Sox in 1968.

9 Rojas trailed Minnesota’s Tony Oliva (.367) and the Yankees’ Bobby Murcer (.353). Schaal was tied with Washington’s Del Unser, while Otis trailed only Bert Campaneris of Oakland.

10 Neither player was injured. Rojas returned to the starting lineup on June 4, the Royals’ first game after the exhibition. Abernathy next pitched on June 5, earning a win against the Yankees.

11 Hank Kozloski, “Indians Fall to Royals, 2-0,” Mansfield (Ohio) News-Journal, May 5, 1971: 25. Coincidentally, Hargan suffered a hairline fracture of his right ankle later in the same game while covering first base on a grounder.

12 Al Mallette, “Royals (Elmira Variety) Stun Kansas City Big Brothers, 3-0,” Elmira Star-Gazette, June 3, 1971: 31.

13 Ed Weaver, “Kansas City, Elmira Clash in Exhibition,” Elmira Star-Gazette, June 2, 1971: 26. This article incorrectly places Piniella’s three-homer game in 1966; Piniella’s only season with Elmira was 1965.

14 “Royals (Elmira Variety) Stun Kansas City Big Brothers, 3-0.”

15 The box score in the Elmira newspaper makes no mention of any extra-base hits. So, assuming the box score is correct, the Elmira hits off Splittorff and Bunker were all singles.

16 Fitzmorris was yet another player chosen by the Royals in the October 1968 draft; he’d been the 40th pick, selected from the Chicago White Sox.

17 Paul O’Boynick, “Warden, Elmira Pin Shutout on Royals,” Kansas City Times, June 3, 1971: 1D.

18 Mallette, in “Royals (Elmira Variety) Stun Kansas City Big Brothers, 3-0,” says Warden picked Otis off base twice. The box score lists Otis’s batting line as 1-for-2. It’s not clear how he reached base the second time: Warden did not hit him with a pitch and did not walk a batter, and the box score in the Elmira paper does not mention any errors by either team.

19 An Elmira Star-Gazette story from early May indicated that Dunn would be joining the team at that time. Coverage of the Kansas City exhibition reported it was Dunn’s first action with Elmira; the paper did not explain why he had not appeared in a regular-season game. The Rookie-level Kingsport team began play in mid-June and Dunn was mentioned regularly in news coverage of that team.

20 “Royals (Elmira Variety) Stun Kansas City Big Brothers, 3-0.”

21 “Asheville Nips Local Royals, 4-2,” Elmira Star-Gazette, April 6, 1971: 14. Lightfoot hit .208 in 119 games with Elmira in 1971.

22 “Royals (Elmira Variety) Stun Kansas City Big Brothers, 3-0.”

23 “Royals (Elmira Variety) Stun Kansas City Big Brothers, 3-0.”

24 “Warden, Elmira Pin Shutout on Royals.”

25 “Royals (Elmira Variety) Stun Kansas City Big Brothers, 3-0.”

26 Al Mallette, “Diehr, Malmberg, Hurley Share Honor,” Elmira Star-Gazette, December 25, 1971: 10. The article noted that Malmberg’s team was 40-25 in one-run games and 8-4 in two-run games.

27 Ed Weaver, “Royals Capture EL Crown,” Elmira Star-Gazette, September 12, 1971: 1D. Trois-Rivieres, also referred to as the Three Rivers Eagles, was a Cincinnati Reds farm team.

28 “5-Run Burst Lifts Royals,” Elmira Star-Gazette, July 13, 1971: 12.

29 According to Warden’s SABR biography, he attempted a comeback in 1974 with the Chicago White Sox and pitched for several weeks in Mexico before tiring of the travel and living conditions.

30 The Sporting News umpire card for Ken Kaiser, accessed via Retrosheet March 21, 2022. Kaiser worked in the Eastern League in 1970 and 1971.